I purchased this army four years ago, back in 2006, and I finally got the last base off my paint station a week ago. This is a DBA army and like all DBA armies, it consists of 12 bases of figures. That means I’ve painted this army at a rate of THREE 15mm bases per year which by any definition is a fairly relaxed painting schedule.

To be fair I have painted other things in the interim, and at the moment I’m just working to clear the odd figure off my paint station. In particular I desperately need to finish Griff’s Genestealers which have definitely been festering in my garage for far too long! Also, if you’re wondering, it was the General’s base to the right of the Elephant that I had to finish to complete the army.

We haven’t really played a lot of DBA for years either, although now I have one painted army, I’m tempted to just base up the Romans as well and try to lure Aaron into some more games. The few games we did play I quite enjoyed. DBA is a nice fast system and you can get a game over in an hour which means you can cram a couple of games into an evening week-night pretty easily. Daniel has been raving incoherently about Fields of Glory being a better system, but frankly with a three hour play time per game I’m not really that interested. I’m happy to sacrifice a level of detail for a considerably shorter play time. Feel free to weigh in with your DBA vs FOG comments below if you’re experienced with both systems.

In order to get 2009 off to a good start hobby-wise I’m determined to finish my Carthaginian DBA force this month. Aaron made a joke at our first gaming night of 2009 and damn it he’s right that it has taken me a long time to paint twelve small stands of 15mm Ancients figures.

So last week I finished off this cavalry base which leaves me two bases more to go: the General’s cavalry base and a final base of Carthaginian Spear and then I can start on the Polybian Romans. That’s a total of ten 15mm figures left to paint.

All six figures on this cavalry base were painted separately. The horses first, which were then based and left until the painted riders were added. This turned out to be something of a mistake so I’ll glue the primed horses and riders together for the General’s cavalry stand before painting.

I really should try and convince Aaron to play some more DBA this year as well, because the handful of games we had last year were certainly interesting…

I’ve painted two more bases of Infantry for my DBA Carthaginian force. This time it’s the first of three Corvus Belli Liby-Phonecian Spearmen, and the single base of Numidian Auxilia.

As I mentioned in my last Ancients post, these figures were all painted separately and then glued to their base which was built up and painted around them. This turned out to be less of a challenge that I thought it was going to be, thank goodness. Normally I base my figures and then paint them after I’ve done the ground work around them, but I guess plenty of people go the opposite way, so I don’t quite know what I was concerned about.

At any rate, the Liby-Phonecian spearmen turned out quite nicely I thought. I couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting to paint on the shields of this first unit, so went with a basic bronze finish. One of the advantages of playing Ancients is description of the forces and individuals involved often rely on tiny fragments of ancient text, or have been entirely lost to time. So you can often do whatever you want with the paint schemes.

I plan to paint the shields on each base the same, but vary the shield colours between each of the three bases for a bit of variety. Ideally I’d really like some 15mm round decals to apply to these curved shields for some really fine detail. However I haven’t really explored finding any suitable decal manufacturers in this scale – Veni Vidi Vici look interesting though. Can any of our fine visitors recommend a good supplier of 15mm round decals they’ve used in the past?

The Numidian Auxilia I’m not so happy with as I’ve always had difficulty in painting a darker skin tone. Largely this is because I typically do a couple of rounds of simple highlighting in 15mm, but for darker skin colours this just seems to end up looking muddy. Mind you this base was painted pretty quickly as I found them fairly uninteresting sculpts. Ah well, they are only Auxilia!

All that remains to complete my DBA Carthaginian army is two more bases of Liby-Phonecian Spearmen and two bases of Cavalry, one of which includes the General and his retinue. This next week I’ll probably focus on knocking off the next two bases of Spearmen before concentrating on the Cavalry, which is much more time consuming to paint because of the horses. Then I’m really looking forward to lining them all up and taking some shots of my entire Carthaginian army.

It’s been a wet and wild month in New Zealand, with the country encountering an almost record amount of rainfall for July. A month of awful weather has inspired me to get some painting done, and a desire to try some DBA means I’m focused on painting my two 15mm Corvus Belli Ancients armies. First up is the Carthaginians which I ordered in December 2006, primed in April 2007 and have since been languishing in the gaming cupboard.

As it’s been a while I’ve warmed up by painting the least interesting units in the army first, four elements of Baleric Slingers or Psiloi as DBA classes them. As a DBA army always has twelve elements, these four bases represent a third of the entire force! So it seems a pity it’s taken me so long to get around to painting them, particularly considering they’re only eight 15mm figures in total.

Ancient slingers were a force to be reckoned with apparently, and in DBA they evidently act as a nice supporting unit to front rank elements. Now they’re out of the way I can paint up some of the more interesting units in the Carthaginian force!