The Saga of Symbaroum

There are three tiers of troops in Saga, Levy, Warriors and Hearthguard.  In the Great Kingdoms faction archetype from Age of Magic warriors and Hearthguard can be mounted.  To represent mounted warriors I decided to go with mounted sergeants and light cavalry.  These have a similar appearance to the Levy, which is why I chose them.  Another of the features of Ambrian culture, as well as it’s militarism is its materialism.  All Ambrians purse “more” and/or “better”.  Whether that’s land, lifestyle or belongings, they are always looking to improve or increase what they have.  So having some light cavalry that is similar in appearance to the levy represents Ambrian commoners who have earned a little more wealth, enough to perhaps buy a horse and some better armour.  Like other warriors, a full unit requires 8 models but they won’t all fit in the photo booth.

To get the 8 models required for a unit, I started with 4 mounted Sergeants from the Barons War range by Footsore.  Now, I could have just bought another 4 and been done with it but as much as I absolutely love Footsore Miniatures, they are mono-pose and they only have 4 variants so I would have been buying the same Miniatures again, I didn’t really want any duplicates as it would be difficult to disguise them with colour scheme alone.  So I instead turned to 1st Corps and bought some of their early medieval knights, which can be made to look like sergeants by selecting different head options.  You also get a selection of weapons to arm them with including falchion, maces, flails, axes and swords.  Needless to say I’m now a big fan of 1st corps and I will likely be using them again in the future – I have already started eyeing up conversion bits to use on some of my barbarian forces.  I think 1st corps also scale really well with the Footsore Miniatures, which do tend towards the smaller end of the 28mm scale (unless you bought the Mortal Gods Argonauts, which a fahooking massive).  The Miniature at the front in the image below is from 1st Corps, the other three are Footsore so you can see the comparison.  The 1st corps are ever so slightly bigger, but that’s more to do with the horses than anything else.  I bought some foot knights as well (coming in a future article) and they’re virtually indistinguishable from the footsore ones in terms of height.  In addition, as a leader model, I have selected the Dante miniature from the Wargames Illustrated Giants In Miniature range, but that will have an article of its own.

These were an experiment in using the new Army Painter speedpaints.  The results were quite good, I think, although I did get a lot of reactivation, especially when trying to put a brown wash over them – I had to varnish them before adding the wash.