15 mm Early Swiss Enfant Perdus

Early Swiss Enfant Perdus

The DBM/DBMM Early Swiss had eight Reg Ps I Enfant Perdus in the list. They are rock throwing children and I thought no one made them until I was directed to the Minifigs website under their Two Dragons range of Dark Age Peasants.

http://www.miniaturefigurines.co.uk/images/catalogue/DAP11.jpg

The figures are quite well sculpted and are ideal for these particular Swiss elements.

I only have one more Reg Bd X CinC element to paint to field the Early Swiss army which grew out of my Later Swiss and other suitable three to a base Halberdier elements in other armies.

They are finished off with my usual basing of magnetised MDF covered with Vallejo Earth Brown paste, gravel, tufts with the bases edged in Raw Umber.

This means that now I only have two more Canton Contingents to complete the Later Swiss army.

Gladiator FE020 Spearmen - Formerly Blackhat

Gladiator/Blackhat FE020 Spearmen Addition

I had a load of these codes that I painted up a while ago but I wasn't happy with the figure mix on each element. Luckily purchased at a huge batch of Blackhat castings at a huge discount as Vexillia are no longer selling them and were having a clearance sale. Blackhat have sold this range on to Fighting15's who are now selling them under their original name Gladiator Miniatures see  https://www.fighting15sshop.co.uk/gladiator-miniatures-1128-c.asp

They are lovely castings and its great news that they have found a secure future.

The original castings were painted a few years ago, luckily I managed to match paint the castings, see if you can spot the new castings? [Hint they are the eight in the centre] All the shields are hand painted. This will allow me to have a think about what figures I want to keep and probably result in my selling off some other figures.

Gladiator FE020 13th C Unarmoured Foot Spearmen 

Late T'ang Chinese - Part 5

Late T'ang Final Get Some Commanders

As part of my original EBay purchase the army only had two generals elements. Having made sure I had sufficient figures orders from Outpost I was disappointed when the figures turned up with only two horse poses. I had thought their generals horses would have been armoured. Luckily my Lead Mountain still has plenty of spare castings within it to provide me with suitable armoured horse castings to use instead. The castings were very well pised but the separate standard and flagstaff was so flimsy it wasn't worth the bother of using. I cut off the metal pole and hand carved a groove into the side of the metal flags and replaced them with steel lances. I have three reference books on the T'ang plus the Chinese Osprey books so I researched what their flags looked like. Since two of the flags were already done I repaired the damage I had done replacing the flagpoles and put them to one side and painted the other two flags. After what seemed like ages I finally got around to painting the actual horses and riders this week. None of the generals came with shields but since I knew I wanted to make them carry shields I had already ensured I had sufficient painted shields left over from when I completed the T'ang cavalry early this year.

There are four generals, one is the CinC, two sub-generals and an internal allied general. Each flag is different so it means I will be able to tell them apart quickly if necessary. The pictures are not of my usual standard due to my camera deciding to play up so I used my camera phone to take them.

The CinC

Outpost Wargames Code STC14 Mounted Command 

Sub-General No:1

Sub-General No:2

Allied General

Next up are some more T'ang Militia Infantry. This is the third batch of six I plan to do and since they are peasant troops I decided to give them a green uniform for variety. They are yet more Outpost Wargames castings just like the other two batches.

Outpost Wargames Codes STC7 Unarmoured Archers & STC18 Unarmoured Swordsmen 

The army also has a lot of Regular Trained Armoured Crossbowmen which is the staple core of most Chinese armies. Outpost of course make a suitable figure for these troops. The code STC11 Armoured Crossbowmen has two different poses. Thankfully they supplied the poses in even numbers of 32 each meaning I decided to make two batches of crossbowmen each of eight elements of 4 identical figures. I put aside the second batch for another time to concentrate on getting at least half of them completed. The castings were nice and clear with minimal flash and hardly any casting feed lines.

Armoured Crossbowmen - Pose 1

Outpost STC11 Armoured Crossbowmen Pose 1

I am finally getting to the stage that I can think about putting the army on the tabletop. Since I am modelling the Regular Army version I still need to complete the armoured swordsmen before I can use the army and that is the next thing on my painting table.

Finally once in a while EBay turns up a bargain listing. Part of my long term plan will be to be able to use this army using the Sui and Early T'ang army list which includes the option to field the Million Man Army that invaded Korea in 612 AD and was defeated by the Goguryeo at the Battle of Salsu. This battle is listed as being one of the most bloody battles of pre-industrial times with over 300,000 casualties. The Sui army requires 60 elements of Untrained Unwilling Soldiers classified as Hordes. The Late T'ang list has 24 elements of Horde within it and I noticed a Feudal Chinese lot on EBay consisting of 15 elements of Hd totalling 75 painted castings. The basing of the elements is pretty uninspired but for a purchase price of less than the cost of brand new unpainted metal from Essex Miniatures I ended up with 15 elements of Irr Hd O as a quick and cheap way of getting a large part of the Horde elements done. The painting is average but it means I don't have to worry about painting them. I have no idea what figure codes were used and they are a very mixed bag of castings and makes.

Angry Peasants - When That EBay Bargain Wasn't Such A Bargain!

That Sinking Feeling When That EBay Bargain Turns Up!

"Caveat Emptor"

When you spot that good deal on EBay and think that its only going to need a little tidying up to make them look OK on the table top.

The listing was totally honest and the pictures clear so I cannot claim I was misled in the slightest. They were well packed and arrived intact. Being second hand and fairly old I expected some damage and to my surprise only found two figures were broken, missing their weapons. I easily repaired these in 15 minutes so no harm there. I thought I could freshen up the bases but it turned out they were a mix of materials which had warped over time and were covered in old railway style flocking. So I ended up having to remove all 100 peasants from their 20 bases. The wagons were a different problem, they were fine out of the box except for the fact they were on very odd sized bases meaning that they were useless in their current form. So off with their bases for them too.

Here are the pictures taken from the EBay listing to give you an idea what I bought. For some players I am sure they would have been happy to use them as is and perhaps I was being too fussy.

So the refurbishing began in earnest, first up are the wagons. I must admit I had always intended to refresh the wagons and resell them on to offset some of my initial outlay. There were four wagons of an unknown make. One of the wagens is fully laden and too long to fit on a standard 40mm x 40mm baggage base so it ended up as a double sized baggage element. It OK on its new base, much to my surprise.

Each of the three smaller wagons were a perfect fit on a standard 40mm x 40mm baggage base and again the end result looks OK.

All of the wagons are now listed on EBay.

The 100 mixed peasants were a different problem. There were a few mixed makes in the lot and I knew that I had to be careful how I rebased them to make sure they didn't look odd. First thing I noticed was that I had nine shieldless javelinmen. I realised that these would be perfect to create three more Irr Ax X to go into my Welsh Army, so RESULT no harm done there and an easy win.

Three Welsh Irr Ax X elements 

Having culled nine castings from the original batch I knew I was now short of some figures to make up twenty Horde elements. I had four spare leftover painted peasants from when I had reused them to make up some Auxilia for use in my Catalan Company army. In the end I managed to create sixteen Irr Hd O elements using a total of 80+9 castings out of the 104 I eventually had available. This means I had 15 leftover castings which have gone into the spares draw along with some other peasant castings. Whilst I was rebasing the castings a mate from the club casually mentioned that he needed four elements of Irr Hd O for his Feudal English army, this was after I had part based all the figures. He normally bases his own figures so they all match and I was lucky enough to have been able to sell him these elements part based. I made four batches, each of four elements to ensure each batch had a decent figure mix.

Here are some pictures of each batch which will probably all end up back on EBay to enable me to recoup some of what I spent on buying them in the first place. Hopefully I might even make a profit?

Four x Irr Hd O elements [Batch 1]

Four x Irr Hd O elements [Batch 2]

Four x Irr Hd O elements [Batch 3]

Four x Irr Hd O elements [Batch 4]