Keeping on the painting roll, I’ve primed another batch of figures including my first Ancients DBA army: Corvus Bellis 15mm Carthaginians. I’ve also dug up enough research (thanks in part to Phil from PitYak) to paint them in some reasonable approximation of historical accuracy.

Although of course there’s a lot of leeway in interpretation, since modern descriptions of armies that existed over two millenia ago largely rely on contemporary fragments of ancient statuary, pottery and books, many of which were created hundreds of years after the fact.

De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) requires your 15mm figures to be based quite close together, particularly Infantry elements like Blade and Spear, which also have quite shallow bases to represent their disciplined nature (it reduces the command distance). So for the first time I’ll have to resort to painting most of the 15mm figures prior to basing them which will be an interesting exercise. Hence you can see a lot of Infantry and Cavalry horses on iceblock sticks or with lengths of garden wire up their fundaments. Now they’re primed I have to say they don’t look that daunting. DBA is twelve bases per army, which is equivalent to say two full Infantry platoons in Flames of War. Surely they won’t take that long to paint!

I’ve also primed two more Flames of War British 6pdr Portees for my NZ force. My gaming group is starting a 600pt Flames of War campaign which I think we’re all using as an excuse to get a few more figures painted. Nothing motivates one more than a few games with unpainted units! I’ll be playing my primed DAK Germans, but figure I might as well knock a few NZers on the head first. Flames of War with 600pts a side is good fun by the way as you can play quite a challenging game to completion in around an hour and a half tops, even with foot sloggers involved.

Finally to the far left the last group of figures to get primed were the Westwind Cairo civilians which I need to get painted up for the next .45 Pulp Adventure campaign.