Video Reports from Beachhead 2025

 This year's event at Beachhead 2025 L'Art de la Guerre 28mm competition allowed me to wheel out yet another Successor/Macedonian army from the collection, as this time my generic 28mm mostly-Victrix guys would be appearing as the Lysimachid Successors.

The event was a 5-game themed event in which everyone had to use at least 2 of Elephants, Camels or War Wagons - hence this rather odd AI-generated image of camels, elephants and a Victorian Bathing Machine seemingly converted into a War Wagon, posed by an English seaside resort pier!

Anyways, my choice was to take 2 Elephants, with some newly minted Victrix plastic kit elephants raring to get on table and a lack of either war wagons or camels in my 28mm collection also contributing significantly to my decision-making process.

I also wanted to use all 6 units of these 28mm Victrix Successor Pikemen figures I had gone through the effort and pain of assembling, and then painting - having only managed to field armies with 4 Pikemen units up until now. 

Add in a vague plan to use all of the different Successor armies at some point in time and I ended up with the Early Successor Lysimachid list from the Battle of Ipsos.

After surviving the trip down to Bournemouth, and also a night in a rather cheaper-than-we-had-hoped hotel, Beachhead 2025 played host to the Lysimachid Successors in 5 different battles against the Carthaginians (elephants), Italian Communes (war wagons), Phyrrus of Epirus (elephants), the Classical Indians (take a wild stab in the dark why don't you?) and the Hussites of Jan Zizka (war wagons again, of course)!

The full set of 5 YouTube Video Battle reports from this fiesta of 28mm action, plus an accompanying episode of the Madaxeman Podcast are now all posted online for you to watch and listen to in various formats:

• On YouTube as a "playlist" to watch all videos in sequence
• On Madaxeman.com, with all of the videos embedded in a single page

Enjoy reliving early February at the English seaside !

Forged in Battle Byzantine Infantry Skirmishers

 Now you're probably sick of seeing horses for my Byzantines, here are some pedestians! 

Yes, the Byzantine armies can often have a handful of foot slingers, archers, and javelinmen - including, in ADLG terms, some actual proper Medium Foot javelineers, and fortunately FiB do a pack of mixed javelins and slings to make up these chaps. 

The pack in question is WE-BE08 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Psiloi (Slingers (12) & Javelins (12), which has rather more slingers than is needed in ADLG, but fewer javelinmen. 

My solution was to base up a mix of Light Infantry with slings and javelins, and then to make up 3 bases of Medium Javelineers using 3 javelin figures and two slingers lurking behind them.

I've painted them in three distinct schemes, which I suspect will help as it seems likely that a slinger and a javelin light foot will be found in each of the three commands in my arm - when it gets on table eventually. 

I also didn't go with shield designs on these, partly as they are lower class troops so may not have invested as much time and effort in shield designs, but mainly as the shields ate pretty small, so it would have been too hard to do a decent design on them!

 

Newline Designs "Hittite" Chariots

Newline Designs make some of the best value (and actually, "best" by any criteria) 28mm Biblical figures out there IMO, and I have previously bought a near-full Later Assyrian army from them which has taken to the competitive tabletop on several occasions.

With a couple more events coming up this year where the Assyrians could potentially appear I have been looking at adding some 2-horse chariots to my army in order to repurpose it as an "Early" Assyrian force, getting some more usage out of the many infantry, cavalry and chariots who have done such sterling service as Later Assyrians/Sargonids over the last few years. 

Unfortunately Newline don't make "Assyrian" two horse chariots, and their 4-horse ones are so hefty that it's impossible to imagine two horses pulling them at all, never mind at speed over a battlefield... so a bit of morphing and imagination was needed as I bought a set of three "Hittite" chariots for the princely sum of just £24 to repurpose as Assyrians.

And here they are - well, almost.. 

As you can see I have used some "wallpaper" on the fronts of the cabs to make them look a bit more like my existing Assyrian troops. 

These chariots come with three crew, a driver and two spearmen. In ADLG the crew for Assyrian chariots are archers, so I have some Assyrian bowmen on order to slot into these cabs at a later date.

I elected to use Contrast paints for part of the colour scheme for these - my Assyrians are in block colours, but I do like the more washed out effect for wood grain which is cast onto the model - it reallt picks out the grain nicely.

Here you can just about see where I have magnetized the javelin-armed crew members either to the base of the chariot, or in some cases to the side walls.

The idea is to allow them to be swapped out for the Assyrian archers when they arrive, and also to use up some of the large number of rare earth mini magnets I seem to have acquired with no real plan as to how to use them over the years! 

Of course, doing it this way opens up the oppotyunity for these three to become the nucleus of a Hittite army in future as well.. which with Newline's annual sale knocking 25% off of these beasties, making them a ridiculous £6 each (compared to Foundry's eye-watering £18 per single chariot!) is a real possibility in future!

This slightly darker, more solid-paint model seems to have had some frosting on the wallpaper when the matt varnish was being sprayed, which I didn't notice as I rushed them to the lightbox. 

 

Another coat of brush-on matt varnish should hopefully fix it. 

Some very nice models indeed, and amazing value to boot!

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 6

 In this rather large batch of cavalry you will already have spotted a bit of mix-and-match going on in order to make up various types of lance and bow armed horsemen. 

That process, of maxing out the "cavalry", did still leave me with a handful of spare figures to create some actual "light cavalry" - with any shortfall I may need in army design terms being made up by repurposing some of my old Essex Late Roman horse archers if required.

So, here are the dregs, sorry, the Light Horse Skirmishers and Scouts for the Byzantines!

One of the bonuses of ADLG (or indeed any DBX set) is not having to paint up "units" of lots of identical figures, and so I have gone with 3 different uniforms for these chaps to allow them to be clearly identified as beelonging to different commands on-table.   

There are various figures from WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow), again using the same paints as in the first post in this set of 6. 

Hopefully these photos, and my witterings about painting them have been of use - if you want to look at more Byzantines these, and many other photos of other ranges, can be browsed in the 15mm Gallery on the Madaxeman website.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 5

 With teeny-tiny shields, and then slightly larger shields having been ticked off, its now time for the larger almost-Roman-era shields to appear in this ongoing series of Forged in Battle Byzantine cavalry. 

The lance-armed amongst the following chaps are from WE-BE03 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Lancers, with paints etc being done as per the information in the first post in this sequence. 

FiB tend to include more riders than horses in their packs, so typically you get 12 horses but 2-3 extra riders, in the shape of officer / commander types. This means a lot of included commanders !

This shield has come out pretty well IMO - it is a flat white base coat with Yanden Yellow sloshed all over it, and a red rim applied in real paint - possibly Vallejo Scarlet? The fairly half-hearted shield design was done using a red AK paint pen 

The archers are from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow

Pretty much all of the shield "patterns" were done with the AK paint pens - worth noting how well and how clearly the yellow design on a red background at the back left of this formation (as you look at them) has some out, as often yellows do fare away on a darker background.

The final trache of cavalry from this painting batch is up in a few days time. 

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 4

 In the 4th tranche of photos of my newly-minted Forged in Battle Byzantines come some even more bow-tastic horsemen, armed with more bows than lances this time.

The idea of basing them up as 2+1 in this way is to allow me to represent the lower quality units in the Byzantine military panoply - the more bows per base, the lower the quality of the unit. 

All paints etc as per the first post in this sequence.

As previously, the archers are from WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow), with lancers from WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Prokousatores (Lance & Bow Armed).

I didn't do anything design-wise with these shields - as they are meant to be lower quality troops they just get given a basic shield from the armoury (and the pose of the lancer figure in the centre of each base means you can hadly see the face of the shield anyway).

More to come soon.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 3

The third tranche of FiB cavalry now hits the screens, with some actual lance and bow armed riders this time to pad out the non-bow-armed "lance-and-bow" cavalry from earlier this week! 

These are a mix of two packs - WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Prokousatores (Lance & Bow Armed) for the lancers, and archers drawn from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow and WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow).

The shield designs (using the word "design" somewhat laughingly..) are hand-drawn using the AK paint pens. They have fairly soft fibre tips so even now, after fairly limited usage, I am unsure whether they will have retained enough sharpness in their nibs to allow me to recreate these rather lacklustre attempts at a Chi Rho design.

And here are the chaps with their sword-waving commanders as well. 

More cavalry incoming soon.

Forged in Battle Byzantine Cavalry - Part 2

This is the second tranche of new FiB Byzantine cavalry, following on from the set I posted last week. 

This handful of figures are a mix of sword-armed officers plucked at random from various packs, with the lancers being from the pack WE-BT07 Middle Byzantine Thematic Prokousatores which are listed as being "Lance & Bow Armed" on the FiB website. 

These lance-armed figures however don't actually seem to have bows!

With this mix of figures I envisage using these either as two distinctive units (with no actual "shooting"  bowmen) or as commanders for mixed bow/lance armed units equipped with the same sized shields.

Paints etc are the same as listed in the previous post, with the fairly unambitious shield designs being done by hand (as if you couldn't see that anyway!) 

More of these figures - this time with added bowmen - to come shortly.  

The Fleet Air Arm Museum - a Video Tour

On the way down to Brixham for the Devonian Classic last Deceember we popped into the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton and took a bundle of photos. 

Now, less than a mere three months later, I've combined them all into a couple of YouTube videos, one with me wittering along to attempt to describe the photos, and one that thankfully just has music as a soundtrack.

Video With Commentary:

Video Without Commentary:

Go ahead and have a look - it's all fine, even the steam catapult deck supervisor says it's all A-OK !