Project Lead Mountain Continues Its Weary Path!

Latest 15mm Ancients Added To My Collection

Project Lead Mountain started out as my grand plan to finally clear out all of my unpainted metal for my ancients that I have had hanging around for the last 20 years. As is always the case I had grand plans to create this and that army but they ended up languishing unstarted in six boxfiles. I now only have one boxfile of what is in effect DBx Book 2 scrap which are not worth bothering with at the moment. I never bothered with DBx Book 1 and I have finally cleared all of my DBx Book 3 metal apart from a bag of round shielded types which I will dispose of which just leaves my DBx Book 4 metal left for Project Lead Mountain. Though I must confess I still have a load of Indians left to paint which will become part of my Arab Muslim collection and possible even kick start a proper Muslim Indian army one day.

So onto Project Lead Mountain and the pictures of what I have managed in the last two weeks.

Roundway RKB11 Burgundian Petardiers

These excellent castings from Roundway are not really Petardiers as they are throwing clay pots overhead with incendiary devices. I could not find any other company that makes them and I had to buy a bag of eight figures. Its annoying really when they only appear in two DBx army lists, War of the Roses Yorkists and Later Burgundian and then each list uses just a single element of Irr Ps X. I painted them all up as Burgundians and will be selling off at least two of them as they are surplus to me needs.

Minifigs 482X Mercenary Pikeman

These were originally purchased as part of a 15mm Burgundian project that I gave up on about six months after buying them over 20 years ago.

Minifigs 481X Flemish/Ordonnance Pikemen

As with all of my purchases the label on the packet is only a guide and these are now part of my Swiss army and will be used as Imperialist or Mercenary pikemen or can be used for my Low Countries army if I require very late equipped figures.

Rebased Roundway Late Medieval Archers for use in my Condotta army Figure Code now long forgotten

Spare Old Minifigs Archers rebased as Psiloi as you can never have enough Later Ps

Rebased mixed Essex? archers

Rebased Minifigs archers codes unknown

Newly painted Minifigs archers inspired by the Livery of Jasper Tudor

 

Rebased Roundway English Longbowmen possibly code RKE08

 

Old Minifigs rebased together as they were all painted with English tabards.

Some of the figures above will be appearing on EBay in due course as they are surplus to requirements. 

Attalid Pergamene or Roman Special Baggage Element or BUA

Special Baggage Element

After looking for a long time I finally tracked down a suitable resin cast edifice for my Attalid Pergamene army. It is also suitable for the Romans I have. It is a fish tank ornament and I found it on EBay. Whilst it cost £11-48 including delivery it is perfect for what I wanted to portray. I have the structure a very weak brown wash to emphasis the cracks and crevices and apart from a little bit of cleaning up of excess resin flash and a couple of bubbles required very little preparation. It is on my usual basing style and the base is 12cm x 8 cm so covers six standard baggage elements. It will also allow me to use it as a Built Up Area should I require one and then be perfectly sized to deploy six gammage elements within it and even put temporary fortifications around it is I want to. If I am playing larger sized games I will need to add a pair of loose baggage elements to the end as necessary. It is of course for 15mm scale but there are larger ones on sale for 28mm.

Later Hungarians v Sui DBM v3.2 15mm 400 AP

The Sui Found Out They Do Not Like Paprika!

CinC and Royal Banderium Reg Kn S Naismith/Roundway Castings

After my marathon game against John on the 3rd I revised my Hungarian list to take account of how it interacted. The revised army list was organised as follows.

C1 - 13 E/13 EE/4.5 D [25%=3.5 EE] Reg CinC

C2 - 21 E/17 EE/6 D [25%=6 EE] Reg Sub

C3 - 21 E/17 EE/6 D [25%=6 EE] Reg Sub

C3 - 7 E/7 EE/3 D [25%=3 EE] Irr Sub [Szekler]

Army 62 E/54 EE/27 B

I have two mostly heavy foot commands and two mostly mounted commands which allows for maximum flexible deployment and mutual support. The list was written using the DBM army list book version and is v3.2 and v3.3 compliant. 

One of my regular gaming partners Bob M at Essex Warriors had finally completed his missing elements for his Sui army and wanted to try it out and suggested I bring along anything I fancied. As Bob and I are both playing in the club DBM tournament I decided to use an army that is very new to me.

Bob's army was organised as follows.

C1 - 18 E/18 EE/6 D [25%=5 EE] Reg CinC all mounted

C2 - 18 E/17 EE/6 D [25%=4.5 EE] Reg Sub mostly foot

C2 - 18 E/17 EE/6 D [25%=4.5"] Reg Sub mostly foot

Army 54 E/52 EE/26 B

At the set up dicing we both chose to invade in the Summer to try and minimise the impact of any weather effects. After two rounds of dicing I emerged as the defender and there was no weather effects as the difference was 1. Due to the lack of terrain options Bob decided to wait until I placed my terrain before choosing any terrain. I elected to place two 1.5 FE of Boggy RGo which fortunately fell fairly close to each other allowing me to anchor my army on them as I attacked. Much to my surprise Bob then chose no terrain.

I deployed L2R C4 - C3 - C2 with C1 behind and to the outside of C2. Bob deployed R2L C1 - C2 - C3. The idea was for my CinC to occupy the RGo with his archers whilst the fighting part of the command supported the Szeklers over on the far left if necessary depending on how Bob's commands were deployed as I had no idea exactly where he was going to place them or his element make up. As it turned out his two sub-generals commands were almost all archers apart from the general, a single cavalry element and a pair of Psiloi.

Bob's initial PIP rolls were quite low which hampered his advance and allowed me to react to his deployment. I pulled my Szeklers back in the face of the overwhelming numbers of Kn F, Cv O and LH F in the CinC's command [18 elements] whilst I columned up the CinC's mounted force and moved it over to my left flank along with the three sub-generals LH F from my right wing.

In the centre I quickly realised that my mounted forced would get overwhelmed unless I managed to delay them and threw as many spare PIP's as possible into the command to move over that left flank's command warwagon and a pair of spearmen and its Ps mitigator to shut down the open space a bit more.

Bob then moved his LH F opposite the side of my WWg O to prevent it from picking off his Kn F as it attempted to sneak past my open flank. Due to a quirk in the rules of DBM when an element is pinned by an enemy's elements front edge in what is called a Zone of Control this restricts what moved you are allowed to make. Luckily one of the moves allowed is to "Retire to its own initial rear", this meant I could continue to slide my WWg further over and in front of some of his Kn F whilst I slide over my spearmen in place of the WWg in front of his LH F.

Over on the far flank there was lots of inconsequential mutual glaring between his archers and my Clipieati and Armati infantry

Ist blood to the warwagon which shot some knights from the saddle.

Lots in shooting happened which resulted in a few recoils but no casualties.

Bob then used his high PIP dice to organise a double overlap against the warwagon which survived and recoiled the knight.

Eventually the luck ran out and the warwagon disappeared under the impact of a knight charge [6-1 dice roll!]

The loss of the warwagon left a looming gap and I forced the issue by throwing in the Szeklers and my CinC against the enemy knights and cavalry whilst I hit the supporting LH F in the flank with a pair of Royal Banderium.

Over on the other flank my heavy infantry were within striking distance of the enemy archers.

The CinC and a Szekler dispatched the two enemy Kn F in front of them whilst the other Szeklers recoiled the supporting cavalry leaving a lone cavalry element double overlapped and stuck in contact with my Szekler general.

It was at this time Bob again rolled really low with his PIP dice 1, 1, 2 which meant he was stuck in position with very few options. and on his right wing he threw in a lone Kn F against an isolated LH F. The knight promptly dies and my Szekler LH general took out the cavalry element that had stuck in combat the previous round.

I followed up this by throwing in a Banderium supported by a LH against another isolated Kn F and managed to get into contact with the archers with my left flank commands Armati and some of the right flank Clipieati and Armati.

My infantry proceed to tear huge gaps in the enemy archers.

In the picture below you can see the Banderium just about to destroy the last element at the top right to break the Sui CinC's command. Once the CinC's command broke, which was 18 EE when this was added to the losses that the archers had taken to 27 EE which broke his army.

Situation at the point Bob's army had broken.

The final score was 10 - 0 using the DBM score system. I had lost 4 EE which equalled 7.4% of my army which mean when converted to the BHGS score system meant I had a 31 - 1 victory.

I was very pleased with how my army had performed but still need a few more games to finalise its organisation as I am not sure if I want to revise it at the moment. Bob and I had a post match discussion about his army and I made a few suggestions about alternative compositions of the commands and perhaps taking fewer archers and using some spearmen in their place and taking more Ps. In fairness to Bob his game today had what appeared to be a lot of low dice rolls and mostly when he rolled high so did I !