A project finished? - 10mm Punic Wars

I can't believe that it's Summer 2016 that I first started to look at collecting Punic Wars armies. Where does the time go? As usual I gathered some books and looked into the period. Sometimes this is as far as it goes but I was enthused and cracked on.


My first foray into 10mm, I  bought about 300 figures from Newline Designs in August 2016 and it took me until the end of 2018 to finish them.  True to my tangent ways I'd moved through multiple other interests and the little chaps were put away in the filing cabinet.

With the increase in spare time over the last year, my thoughts have returned to these forgotten legions. At the start of 2021 I starting organising and pointing up the armies for WAB using the Hannibal source book.

Inspired by the Minihammer ethos the infantry were based on 10mm x 10mm single or 10mm x 20mm double bases and the cavalry on 10mm x 20mm or 20mm x20mm doubles. However, this makes them very fiddly and was one of the reasons why I had never actually gamed with them.  How practical was it to use them for WAB with single figure removal? 

My reassessment coincided with Newline's winter sale, I bought a few cavalry units and once I started painting them I really enjoyed it again, finding that I could complete a cavalry unit in a week. I finished the last unit the other week and was mulling over what to do with them to make them usable in a game.

I dug out my copy of Warmaster Ancients which I'd never looked at too much and this is where my previous basing strategy came unstuck. A Warmaster unit consists of 3 bases each 40mm wide by 20mm deep.  There was no way I was going to rebase all these (especially after the FPW basathon ). The cavalry were fine being on either 20mm sq or 10mm by 20mm. Initially I was going to base them up on sabots of 3 bases as per WM with 2 ranks of 8 and have 6 figures over per unit. But when I checked I didn't have enough single bases to make this work.  Bugger. 

In the end I went with 2 sabots of 60mm by 20mm with 2 ranks of 6 and a command base of 2 ranks of 3. When in line formation you can't tell much difference only being a couple of cms wider. It's still a 3 stand unit as per WM. It didn't take long to cut the card and tape them on. Much easier to play with now. I'd better get on and have a game.                             

Carthaginians

Romans

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