Dark Age Irish II

As promised, here are the next two six-man units of Dark Age Irish warriors. The box set gives a lot of variety that can be built into the warriors you need for your force. There are ten wolfhounds, and thirty warrior bodies which can be made up with a variety of weapon types and shields. As I had already built six javelinmen, I decided to create two further units of lightly armed troops.

First up are the swordsmen...

The shields seem overly large but, then again, if you are going into battle with no other protection, then a large shield would be most welcome; especially if you wind up in the front rank of a shield wall.

The swordsmen allow for close quarter combat to be fought, whereas the javelinmen are more support troops, along with the next batch of six who are a motley bunch of skirmishers with a variety of weapons (axes, slings and shillelaghs)...

These troops didn't go together as well as the other figures. Three of them seem to be posed nicely but the other three, especially the two with the axes, just seem out of kilter. Maybe I should have put a little more thought into the posing before sticking them together?

As mentioned in a previous post I am trying to standardise my basing and so on, so I asked my son how he would like his troops based. My son has requested 25mm flat round bases for his warriors - this system fits in nicely with my newly formed base sizing schema. I will build these up with wall filler as per my Rangers' bases and then undercoat them all in grey primer when the weather improves (six inches (15cms) of snow fell yesterday, with sub-zero temperatures not budging meaning that it remained where it fell).

Dark Age Irish

Swiftly following on from yesterday's post, here is what I have been working on this weekend for my son - a few items from the sprues in the Wargames Atlantic Dark Age Irish plastic box set.

Irish javelinmen...

My son said that he didn't really want any javelin armed troops, but as he left it with me last weekend to do what I could for him, I decided to put together a half-dozen lightly armed infantry. I sent him the photos yesterday afternoon and he loved what he saw, so it looks like I made a good decision after all. He has given me orders on how he wants his command to look, but I said that we would look into creating those troops when he comes over to mine next - he still has two sprues at his disposal to create his command group and to add to any of the units I am currently making for him - I have suggested he either gets each unit to eight warriors to enable play in Saga or to twelve to allow for Dragon Rampant and a host of other games. He also sent me pictures of a few metal figures he wanted to use as elites and commanders, so maybe he won't want to use this box set as anything but basic troop types?

Whilst completing the above chaps, I also made up the rest of the wolfhounds in the box. One observation with these - it would have been nice to have the two halves of each dog fit together with the two halves of the other dog, thus giving a few more variants...

Whilst writing this post, I am also working on the next two units of Irish warriors. Hopefully I can get those up onto the blog tomorrow?