Thursday, May 19, 2011

For Glory!

So, like every male ever, I loved the movie 300, the glory, the warrior spirit, the stabbing stuff with spears, and the fact that it was based (very loosely) on real events. In my defence of this bandwagon jumping I've loved ancient history since i was a kid, I should be playing historical wargames really.. but ive never found a model range that i really liked the quality of. That is to say untill i saw the crocodile miniature's spartan range. Daaammnn !



So I'd been staring at their website, at the spartan mini's for a fair while trying to work out what i could do with them. They basically only offer the straight up hoplite troop, spear, sheild and breastplate (yeh spartans didn't go to war with bare chests, no matter how manly that made you look).

To start off with i was thinking a high elf list maybe? But high elf spearmen are a bit flimsy, and the elite troops, well they could work, but since theres only 1 model type in the range(other than heros), i'd have to go with 1 elite troop type, or hmm, any way, the conclusion I came to was that I'd use them as a mortals of chaos army. The list i came up with had 2 big units of warriors with sheilds and halberds, and a big unit of chosen with sheild and halberd. Fighting in 2 ranks, thanks to 8th ed, I figured covered the spear/phalanx issue, and sheilds to survive missile fire (just like the movie !) The rest of the army consisted of some heros, a warshrine, some dogs, and a big unit of 40 marauders, for these i was thinking of finding greek auxiliary hoplites, for the historical rout, or persians, for the 300 "movie" theme army. Havent decided, so any tips or leads on mini's either way would rock.


This is a pic from the Croc games website of their phalanx.

So any way once I'd decided what I was gonna do with them, I immediatly put in a pretty sizeable order, including basically everything in the range, 1 of all the heros, the dead spartan and even the armour rack. I was pretty damn excited when they showed up







Here you can see 3 packs with 1 "phalanx" each, 2 more of the starter kit with a phalanx, command, and limited ed hero, 6 differnt hero sets, and the war altar.
Here's my first models, i was incredibly stoked with the quality of production on the mini's, minimum mould lines or anything i needed to clean up, and even the spears wernt really that bent. Im using plasticard as bases, carving a big sandstone slab effect into them, ive also picked up some ruined columns and other stuff to give them some detail.



Here's a unit of 21 (minus the champion) built and based, seriously good looking mini's!

The idea here is this will be one of the generic warrior units, for the chosen unit i'll sculpt plumes onto all the helmets, wich shouldn't be too hard, fingers crossed.

Here's my first test model, pretty simple bronze, red and flesh scheme, but I'm pretty happy with how the model turned out and i'll probably be going with this for the entire army, the base will be sandstone to counter the heavy bronze and dark red, in theory.

Any way this is to proove that I've actually been doing stuff! sadly these guys have gone on hold, and I've gone back to getting the pump ogres ready, so more on them next!


4 comments:

  1. That test model looks nice. Do another 299 "test models"...

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  2. absolutely love what your doing there, that range of miniatures is very appealing i have to say.

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  3. cheers lads, they're the next army up after the pump ogres get a bit more build time, im just worried they might be a bit boring to play, thinking about some fast cav, but gota find some suitable models for them. thinking about marauder cav with scibor spartan heads, but not sure, so any tips would be fantastic

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