Romans on parade

With all four of the heavy infantry units (plus a unit of skirmishing archers) using my old 1980s Minifigs figures complete, as well as an Illyrian cavalry unit and general complete, I thought it was a good time to take stock of what I have completed so far and look forward to what remainins to be done.

So far I have painted 104 infantry and 19 cavalry. 

I have a unit of heavy cavalry on the painting tray at the moment. I'm going to do 12 figures (4 bases) initially then add another 2 bases later. Like the Illyrian cavalry, these will be a mix of Minifigs and Asgard.

After that is a unit of cataphracts with mostly Asgard riders on Minifigs horses. I have enough of these for 4 bases of 4 figures each. I also have some clibanarii - again a Minifigs / Asgard mix plus a couple of Gladiator Miniatures figures. At the moment I'm thinking of doing these as two bases of 4 to give the option of fielding a combined cataphract / clibanarii or I could do a full 4 base unit if I accepted only 3 figures per base (MeG recommends 4 for these).

The last cavalry unit to consider is a unit of horse archers. I have a few old Asgard figures for these but I'm not sure whether to use these or buy some of the much nicer and more varied ones from Legio Heroica. Either way, at least 8 and maybe 12 more cavalry to paint.

I also have some old figures for a sub-general and make some alternate bases for the legionaries to depict integral archers and expand a couple of legionary units and the archers to 8 bases but those are really at the back of the painting queue. 

The rest of the army will be modern Legio Heroica figures: two units of Auxillia Palatina, two more sub-generals and three Ballista. I'm scratch building a watch tower for the camp, with a Baueda hog roast on the side - I do like roast pork!

That adds up to atleast (ignoring the extras to expand units or give options) 55 infantry and 59 cavalry

Looking back it has taken 18 months to get to this half-way stage, albeit with some 1/1250 diversions, so unless I can pick up the pace, I can look forward to completion around the end of 2021!

Late Roman skirmishing bowmen - Sagittarii Venatores, Auxilium Palatinum

This is definitely my last unit of old 1980s figures: a dozen auxiliary archers, based as skirmishers.

The archers are Minifigs, a mix of Z22 and Z23 and the draconarius is from Gladiator. It would have been nice to have more variety of pose in the archers but the Asgard archers don't match in very well so I went with just mixing the two Minifigs variants and filing the crests off some of the helmets.

Given that the figures only have tiny round shields, I wasn't going to bother with a historic shield pattern or assign a name to them but whilst browsing through Luke Ueda-Sarson's excellent website of Notitia Dignitatum shield designs, I saw that there were a number of Auxilia Palatina titled as Sagittarii, suggesting that they were archers or at least had some special association or excellence in that field. Unfortunately, the shield designs all looked a nightmare to paint, especially on such a small canvas. 

Happily all was not lost. Luke had identified a discrepancy in the document, suggesting some shields were mis-attributed. In particular, the rather complicated design for the Sagittarii Venatores was wrong and perhaps the shield attributed to the Sequani was the correct one. Whilst he makes a good case for this conclusion, the point that convinced me most was that the shield attributed to the Sequani was a lot simpler and would look OK on these tiny round shields: Sagittarii Venatores it must be!

As mentioned above, this is my last full unit of old Minifigs, Asgard and Gladiator Miniatures infantry figures. On to the cavalry now.

As mentioned in my first post on this Roman army, I originally misattributed the Gladiator Miniatures command figures as Museum Miniatures - I've gone through all the posts and corrected that now, I hope catching all such instances. My apologies for any confusion caused by this.