Black linothorax test figure

 I normaly don't so single test figures, but I had an idea and only a few hours to test it out. It started when I played rome 2 total war. The game is not historic at all, it's very gamey, but were els do you get to se thousands of people fight. I do play carthage and rome now and then, but I am and allways will be a pikeman. So I prefer to play the hellenic forces, mostly Macedonia, Selucids or Epirus. It's kinda cool watching 3000 pikemen marching is possision. Anyway the original game is not that good, so I play it with mods. and one of the mods I play with ads lots of new units. Most of them somewhat/totaly fancifull. I was playing a battle as Macidona and one of my units had black linothorax with gold trim. looked cool.

So a unit based on a not realistic mod for a none realistic game...
I highly doubt any unit looked anything like this. But they will be my pyrrhic royal guard.

 Black linothorax(painted with very dark gray)
Gold trim and gold plaited shield.

Also gold trim on the sword with black scabard.

Back to 28mm

 So I have painted sevral 100 6mm now, i have 256 phalangites done, 48 thorophorois, 36 cav and 6 elephants. But 6mm always leave me a little cold, while I do enjoy the mass, the lack of detail, and the factory feel to painting them, is a little much at times, so now i felt like painting 28mm again. I found a boks of macedonian royal gurds at the local store, most of them are plastic, but with metal heads and shields.

These are cool to paint, great models, lots of detial. but glueing the metal heads on plastic bodies is a pain in the ass. The shields are simple, silver with armor ink wash. the armor is a mix of white and leather, and all got purple shoulders. som armor are just white linen with purple shoulders, others got some leather here and there.

 The helmets are either bronze or blue with red "puff"
I wanted alot of color, so the tunics are, either green, red, grey or tan/brown.
The spears are actualy "horse tone rohan" so really a horse color, but feel it looks great as light wood, I have had problems with wood color before, while i had great dark wood/musket brown that woks for muskets, it does not work for pikes and other wood stuff, it's to dark, and the pikes/spears are to thin to highlight properly. i did try a more orangy color that works for ak wood, but dosn't work on pikes. but this color looks like "pike color"

 The box comes only with 24 figures and no command, thats kinda poor, the box cost the same as 40 regular phalangites, but you get 16 fewer figures in this box, aperantly metal shield and heads cost alot of money i guess, feel it is kinda cheap, they could atleast have thrown in a metal command for that price, isn't 16 fewer plastic figues worth atleat 2-3 metal command?

I'm not sure who to solve the command thing, they cost alot over at warlord, and dosn't really fit into the unit. I guess this unit dosn't get a command, to bad as it's supose to be an elite unit.

Hypaspists

 So first 10 out of 40 Hypaspits(whats with those greeks and hard to spell names on units)
All command figures done, so now it's just 30 rank and file,They take along time to paint, complex armor, lots of skins to paint, lots of bronze ect. With theise I paint from inside out, I start with the blue of the armor, then red, then the green cloth, then skin, the broze then weapon, then helmet tuffs and finnaly leather straps.

And now for something TOTALY COMPLETLY diffrent

 And I mean it, last post had assault rifles, granade lanuchers and Machineguns, and theise guys DON'T.
The need about 2200 years before they get to play with those toys. On the other hand, they are alot more colorfull. So this is 3 out of 4 command figures for my hypaspist.

I havn't done ancients in almost exacly a year, last post with ancients on this blog was june last year.
So why? Fuck you none of your business. Just kidding, Rome 2 Total war is comming out in september.
A game that lets you control about a dozen diffrent states, Romans ofcourse, the game starts in I think 325 BC, just after Alexander died, So rome isn't big yet, and Hellenic culture is the big thing, domenating the entire eastern medetaranain, and even influensing the Carthagenians. So take a hold of your state and counqure the known world. Unlike Rome 1, you don't have 1 gaul faction or one greek faction or one briton faction, the celts of western europe is devided into dozens of diffrent tribes, and if you play as one of the gaul tribes your first mission is to unite the other tribes, and not march on rome right away.

Same with Greeks, in Rome 1, you just had "greek city states" but now you have sevral diffrent factions, so a uniqe Athinian faction and an uniqe  spartan ect.

So this is why I paint theise, I'm warming up for rome 2, I knew that once I started to play I would get the urge to paint ancients again, so I just got a head start, since I would spend most of my time playing the game by then. This way I might get a unit of two done before that time.

Normaly when I get an ich to paint a period, I have to order figures and wait for 2-5 weeks to get them. But this time I had like 150-200 figures laying around unpainted, so that was nice. So now I'm watching Alexander final cut, and I'll watch it two more times(2 commentary tracks that a great to listen to as you paint, one by Stone and another by the historian Fox)

I also have plans of watching rome series while I paint my latin legions.

 So theise Hypaspist are part of my Pyrric Army, My project was and still is Pyrrhus vs Rome. So I need to fill out my Greek and Roman forces.

I have enough greeks for this unit, and horoporoi.
Then I need to think what more to do, I'm thinking one more elephant to keep
George kompany, and ofcourse heavy greek cav,
Mabye some more italian hoplites, I think my 2 big phalangites units is enough, or should I make a Third? I also think about some skrimsihes, slingers or archers

For the romans I have one legion of allied latins, thats 2 units of latin hastati, and 2 of princepes.

I need one more roman legion, and allied cav.

As always with my ancients I go with color themes. Since theise are supose to be elite, I did them complex, with light blue, strong red and dark green as the them.

More hoplites

 More scantely clad hoplites, I've only got the 3rd rank on each base left.

 I've added even more color, on this base I dropped the pruple and used light blue instead, I also dropped the dark blue, so this is white, green and light blue. I'll add back in the purple on the back rank, so each base gets atleast one figure with all the diffrent colors.

 I also glued the spears on better, in the first base, almost all of my spears pointed downwards, and thats fine for a few, but it was way to many, so on the second base I glued on the spears in a more horizontal way.

 Lots of diffrent shield designs.

That didn't take long

 So it used to be that I did a few random periods, then after a short time, I went back to Napoleonics, now I do some random periods, including Napoleonics, then prety soon I have to paint Ancients.

Right now I had a big package of some 80 hoplites, I've had then for quite a while, but I was in the prosses of doing other periods, but now I couldn't stop my self anymore. These are Tarentine hoplites, I did them very unarmord.

 Aperantly there weren't any broken bottles around back then as these are barefooted. This is my first propper none standardized unit, there are 4 diffrent colors on the clothes, purple, green, blue and white. Only thing they have standard is the dark green plumes.

 When you look at these, you just have to think FABULES!! how any new greeks were every born I don't know, as they all had to be randy assbandits.

 I wached QI and heard a great joke.
An Italian and Greek were arguing about who was best. The greek said, we have the parthement, the italian counters with, we have the coloseum. to which the greek said, we gave brith to advanced mathematics. But we buildt the roman empire, replied the Italian.

Finaly the greek comes up with the clencher, we invented sex. Thats true said the Italian, but we thought up having it with women. Just such a great joke. Anyway I like this unit, very colorfull, I also changed my wood color, I used to use dark brown musket color, but it was just so dark and boring compeard to the FABULES colors of the armor and clothes. So I used the "AK47 wood color" this is basicly the color of the laminated wood on the old AKs, it's very orangy. I did liven up the unit.

I also orderd 40 of each unit, but have deicded to downscale the unit to 30, as the hoplites rearly formed the very deep 16 rank phalanx of the phalangites. That means I'll have 10 left over for each unit, that should save me some money.

Photoshoot

It's that time of year again, and the first propper photoshoot of my ancients.
I wasn't planing on doing one, since I'm only one unit away from doing a game anyway. and then there would be lots of pictures, but George wanted me to take some more pictures of him, he is a real diva, so I needed an excuse so, a photoshoot is a prety good excuse.

First up My Greeks, With George there in the back, he ofcourse took the spot closest to the light so he would be easy to spot, like spotting a 3 meter elephant with a tower on it's back is hard.


But there is a new unit to showcase, other then George, I finished my second pike block, so now I got all 80 done.

I just need another unit of Thureporoi and I can do a test game.

I did a quick look at the HC army lists, and tryied to calculate the Points of each side, and the romans got like 40 points more, so it will be intersting so see how wins.

And here the Greeks square of against the romans.

As soon as George saw the roman cav he charge right at them. he is a precosious little guy.

80ish pikes, in the end, there will be 120 romans vs. 132 greeks and one elephant.

Meet George

This is George, my new pet elephant, he is not your avarge elephant, he is infact a good personal friend of Ganesha.


A small confesion, Elephants are my second favorite animal after the Redhead, that and my dog, but my dog isn't so much an animal as a Greek god, she is infact Ares in the shape of a fat little Dachshund.


But back to elephants, elephants are probebly top three smartest beeings on this planet, and that included humans.
Now granted all Mammals are in the grand scheam of things very smart, remember that out of the 1.6 million desribed animals, 1.3 million are insects, and well you won't find any Newtons among the flies.
So all of the ca. 5500 mammal species alive today are very smart among the animals, some mammals are not super smart, the Koala has a verry diminished brain, and so probebly won't unite the 4 fundemantal forces of nature anytime soon.
Generaly speaking carnivores and omnivorse are smarter the herbavores, because it's assumed that forageing and hunting for food takes more intelligence then just standing in a pasture and eating grass. But even a cow is a genious compeard to Frog or the salamander or even the crocodile.

There are 3 major groups of animals that are generaly thought of as the smartest of the smart.
1. Primates, that includes us. These animals have big brains, good eye sight, started it's history in the trees, and even today most primates still live mostly in the trees, with just a few species of monkey and ape that live mostly on the ground.
2. Cetaceans, spesificaly the toothed whales, with dolphines beeing the pick of the litter. The sperm whale got the biggest brain of any animal that we know have lived, with over 7.5 kilos, granted the damn thing weighs 50+ tons, so the brain/body weight ant't that good. But dolphines like the Orca and bottlenose are very clever animals.
3. Elephants, Concider that the sperm whale, an animal of 50 tones, has a brian of 7.5 kilo, the elephant, an animal of at minimin 3 tones as a brian of over 5kiloes. It has the biggest brain of any land animal, granted it's also the biggest land animal.
Just size dosn't cover it all, the anatonmi of the brain counts, what parts of the brian is enlarged ect. How dence it is.

There are many ways of determining inteligence, humans use the IQ thing, which is a very flawed way of looking at it. But compearing other animals to us or eachother is very hard.
We have divised ways to try and test them, the mirror test is one, how they use tools is another, any type of language, problem solving skills ect.
But we also must observe animals in the wild, and just in everyday life.

Of the 3 major groups posted above, the elephant, has been the closest to humans, while chimps and gorrilas are kidden away in the african rain forest, and dolphins are in the sea, the elephant has been close to humans for sevral thousand years, and even from the start, we knew this animal wasn't your regular thing, Aristotle said of the elephant: the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind. The fact that the elephant god ganesha is the god of wisdom, knowlage, science and arts, says it all.

The elephant has many qualities we thought were only human, they have a rich inner life, they MAY have a spiritual life, they are artistic, curious, they have death rites(something only humans and elephants have) The have the longest childhood of any non human animal at 15 years, 15 years the baby elehpant has to stay with it's mother and grandmother to learn how to live. This is commen with all long lived, highly inteligent animals, chimps to have a long childhood at 10+ years, humans have a childhood that just gets longer and longer, 500 years ago it might have been just 12 years, during the 18th centuary you have Midshipmen in the royal navy of just 12-13 years. Today the chilhood of humans some times go into the early 20s.

But at 15, the elephant has the second longset.

The elephant even have less nice human characteristics. it's seems to be the only other animal capable of premeditated revenge killings. back in the 70s, alot of elephants were just slaughterd, what happend was that young male elephants, started to gang together, and attack human villages, basicly going to war or as an act of revenge. This was not just mad elephants, they did it as a response to the killing of their kind. So even the darker sides of humanity are seen in these animals.


Anyway I've bored you enough, this is George, he was rather quick to do, I painted him late last night, and did the crew today. He looks ok, not great, but he is my pet elephant. I plan on nameing all my elephants, but I doub't I'll have that many.

Finished first pike block and my greeks so far.

YaY, finnaly finished my first pike block, these are a lot of hard work, first they are 40 strong, which is just alot of figures, second there is a lot to do, the armor is colorfull but alot of hard work to do, small stuff to paint, takes some concentration.



Then you got 40 shields that need shield transfers. They just take along time to do.

But damn do they look good, alle those pikes , a sea of pikes.

Here's the finished unit with half a unit of another pike block. Thats 60 soldiers.

And here are all my greeks so far, tarentine light cav, 60 pikes and 20 thuroporoi.

Next up I'm going to do my last principes unit, to finish the roman legion.

I still got plenty of figures to paint, I got 45 charthagenian spearmen left, I got 20 more thuroporoi, and 4 units of latin allies for the romans.