Enyalios!

DBx Bases: 64 + 7
15mm Spears: 156
DBA Corps: 1
Saga Points: 8
DBx W/D/L: 2/0/6

What a nice nap…what d’ya mean its nearly spring again?

The last couple of months have been…busy. I’ve done a few other projects in the meanwhile – hoplites, Necromunda, a whole Roman SAGA force…

But lets get back on track for now. As I said last time, Horses and Tridents…so lets get the Tridents out of the way.

Ancient Naval warfare tended to be based around two main forms of offence – ramming and boarding actions. There were efforts to mount some artillery at times – stone throwers, bolt throwers etc, but ramming and boarding were the main forms of attacking. So the naval gameplay in AC: Odyssey where you use massed bowfire to sink enemy ships is basically wrong – I think they were trying to emulate the gameplay from Black Flag there. But the ramming….ooh yes.

As mentioned earlier, a Trireme’s crew consisted of ~170 rowers, two to three dozen deck crew and officers, and 10-20 marines (epibatai) – a dozen or so of which were equipped as Hoplites, the rest as archers. The Hoplites were the primary boarding force for the ship, as the rowers couldn’t really get out of their seats that easily, and had to rely on their own Marines to protect them.

In game terms, DBMM does have the option to include ships as part of your force, and those ship in turn carry troops for landing. I figured that the best way to represent these would be to model actual Marines as a visually different force. But would they also be needed in DBA scale?

For those of you who are unaware of how DBA army lists work, here is the list for II/5 Late Hoplite Greek variant b – Athenians:

II/5b Athenian Army 448-278 BC: 1 x General (Sp), 1 x Cavalry (Cv), 1 x Cavalry (LH), 4 x Hoplites (Sp), 3 x Sailors equipped as peltasts (Ps) or Hoplites (Sp), 1 x Hoplites (Sp) or peltasts (Ps), 1 x Archers (Ps or 3Bw)
Terrain Type: Littorial, Aggression: 2, Enemies:….

As you can see, 12 elements in the army. The notations after each unit is their troop type – Sp for Spears, Ps of Psiloi, LH are Light Horse, Cv are Cavalry, and 3Bw are Fast Bowmen (4Bw are Solid, and 8Bw are a special unit type). The list allows you have some choices in your force – mostly choosing between more hoplites (heavy infantry) or peltasts (light infantry). Mostly I go for more Hoplites as you need as long a line as possible for spears to work properly.

But when I first read this, the second last item caught me out – why put it like that? And then I realised that the option there was the perfect one to include as some Marines – either equipped as Hoplites or Peltasts.

Mortal Gods also has Marines for its Athenian force, complete with their own separate models. I figured it was probably a good idea to include a few…but I now realise I really went overboard. 21 models in one go – 9 spearmen, 6 javelinmen and 6 archers. I don’t think I’ve ever painted such a large batch before.

Its been said before that you really need to paint your models in batches – 5 is usually a good starting point as by the time you’ve finished with the last of the lot, the paint on the first one is pretty well dry, and you can get started on the next colour. But this tranche of models has shown me that that is not scalable past a certain point. There is nothing more stressful that finishing colours on 10 models and realising that you’ve got the same amount to go.

From now on, I’m keeping my batches to 10, max.