Enyalios!

DBx Bases: 0/176 + 0/18
15mm Spears: 0/448
DBA Corps: 0/16
Saga Points: 0

The origins of this project are a confluence of circumstances. Last year, I was introduced to the DBx series of games whilst visting a new games club. I’ve always been into historical gaming to an extent, being very interested in SAGA, but the more large-scale games have always been a bit…opaque in their ruleset. But the promise of being able to play a game large-scale battle with only 12 elements (so, max 50 minis – hey, similar to SAGA…), was very attractive, so I quickly started in the ruleset, DBA in particular. Multiple armies came to mind to build, but the Greeks were one that really caught my eye. Doubly so when I started looking around for minis to use and came across Xyston/Scottia Grendel – their minis in particular looked excellent, so a Greek force from them went on my to-do list.

And then Covid got serious.

Many things went off to the side as a result, and I moved to other projects – but the idea of making a Greek army for DBx remained in my mind. Then SAGA Age of Hannibal was released. And I finally got a hold of the Mortal Gods starter set. And I bought a bunch of Victrix hoplites for both.

Eventually I said “screw it” – although I was originally going to make the Ancient Egyptians from Essex my first major DBx force, I bit the bullet and bought [AMOUNT REDACTED TO MAINTAIN SANITY] of minis so I could build a large amount of 15mm Classical Greek forces. The last box of these from Xyston arrived recently, so I was able to get started.

So, how to paint them? Well, this is the concept art from Assassins Creed: Odyssey. I like blue as a colour for my armies (My favorite scheme is mid grey with blue highlights, and gold trim), and this Athenian art certainly gave me some inspiration on how to proceed.

What to build the forces as? Originally, I was planning on doing an entirely Athenian force (to match with my choice of faction in Mortal Gods), with a few Thracian allies, since some of the DBA Athenian lists have Thracian elements in them. But some of the guys in my group pointed out that, “Forces that are all Spears can get boring after a while.” That made sense, and after some reading of the lists, I saw that the Athenians had several additional options for allies, but it was the Thessalians that caught my eye – plenty of cavalry that could diversify my forces.

Additionally the mercenary hoplite, peltast and thureophoroi units can be used as part of of a future Macedonian and Successor force, which not only cuts down on stuff I have to buy and paint, but the minis are also available from Xyston.

After a bit of playing around with stuff on paper, I decided to track my progress through a combination of criterion. Firstly, I will track when a full 12-element DBA army has been completed – I’ll refer to each as a corps. Each corps will consist of the base elements, plus the options available for the force. Additionally, some of the corps overlap – the Athenians, for example, used Hoplites and Psioli in all their armies, with additional forces (cavalry, archers, theuropoli) making up the differences. I eventally settled on the following groups of blocks, split up by the available overlaps:

– 1 x Thracian (I/48)
– 1 x Bithynian (II/6)

– 2 x Early Thessalian (I/52c)
– 2 x Later Thessalian (II/5d)

– 2 x Early Athenian (I/52e,f)
– 2 x Later Athenian (II/5b)
– 3 x Hellenistic Thracian (II/31h)

– 1 x Early Mercenary Hoplites (I/52j)
– 1 x Later Mercenary Hoplites (II/5i,j)
– 1 x Syracuse (II/9a,b)

Three corps can be combined for a BBDBA game – So, if I wanted, I could go two Athenian Corps and one Thracian Corps, two Thessalians and one Mercenary, two Thessalians and one Athenian…basically, there’s a lot of options available for me if I went for one of the larger games.

I then added in how many SAGA points I had completed to monitor the 28mm model progress, and then the base count and spear count to show how many individual 15mm models I had completed (Although it mainly gave me multiple numbers to montior – I kinda like statistics). And whilst the numbers are big (176 bases required for the 15mm models, plus another 18 for the various camps!?!), its not like I’ve limited myself to a month to do this – I fully expect this project to go well into next year – which is good thing, really.

So, with 450 spears, I’m definitely not recreating the 300, but I am doing up a force worthy of kicking ass at Marathon…wait, I can sub some of these Merc Hoplites into the Later Achaemenid force (II/7) as well…ooh, possibilities…