15mm Raphia Project-Yes More Elephants

The herd keeps growing, this time 4 more, 2 for each side.....I decided to change up the Seleucid crew up slightly and give them only bowmen and Ptolemy with spearmen.

Nearly there...so close lol

Raphia, So Close!

Well these are the last of the line troops....two large pike phalanxes, Ptolemy guards pike and Seleucid Thorakites.

These are the Ptolemy elite pikes, the Basilikon.  They form, normal size pike units and not large phalanxes but there are three of them so I could put them together.

The last of the Ptolemy pike phalanxes, they have five of these unit..they will form a very solid wall in the battle line.

And the last of the Seleucid phalanxes, now there were a lot of these, nine infact, which is 288 figures for these alone.

Lastly the Greek mercenary thorakites, yes I know they should be armoured by Xyston do not do a mail wearing thorakite figure.  These are Hellenistic Thracians and do a wonderful job!

So that is it, the rank and file have been completed.  

There are commanders left to finish, they have been painted but need Army Painter Dark Tone and Matt Varnish to finish them off.

Also I have my final three elephants on the painting table, once these are done that will be all of my available miniatures for the Raphia project painted.I still need to buy 5 elephants for Ptolemy and 14 for Seleucid.

So the painting total, so far is 1234 foot, 148 mounted and 9 elephants.

Now all I have to do is base them and make the bases look nice, oh and I hate basing lol .  And there are only 156 bases to do!!!!!

Obviously as I complete the basing I will add more photos.

End of Rotation Rapha Batch

Here are are last few units for the Raphia project.  Now some of these still look a little shiney this is because I run out of Army Painter Dull Coat and had to use some Windsor and Newton Matt varnish, which obviously is not that matt! lol

Once I have based these guys I will respray them with AP matt varnish.

Hopefully my next posts will show some of the troops based up.

Seleucid Arab Bow, one and a half bases here., so now I have three bases painted up and one more to do.

These are Xyston Maccabean Jew figures

Ptolomy Guard Agema, known as Basilikon.  There are three units of these and I have used Macedonian Hypaspists figures. 

The 'casualty' figure is a broken model that I need to make up the numbers.

Selecuid Pike Phalanx, a mixture of armoured and unarmoured figures.

Tarentine Light Horse with shields, not sure how accurate but I do like the way they look!

Battle of Raphia....The First Batch for 2018

The first batch of painted figures of 2018, the year I will finish this project, honest lol

The first Seleucid phalanx of the year.

 The figures I have used for this phalanx are from the eastern edge of the empire and most are wearing trousers and have long sleeves.  There was no real reason for this other than those were the figures I bought lol  But I do like them.

Seleucid Hetairoi, heavy horse lance.  There are quite a few of these.

A second Ptolomy Elephant which means I can make up an elephant base to see how they will look two too a base.  I'm guessing awesome lol

I have ordered more bases from the Big Red Bat shop,

 https://bigredbatshop.co.uk

So I will basing up a large painted mountain when I am home later this month.  I will post pictures.

Raphia, more new figures painted...

I'm really liking the unit figure size of the Imputvs/To The Strongest bases. I painted 24 skirmish figures, Greek bow and slingers, that is 6 bases.  These troops were mainly used as escorts for the elephants employed by both armies.

Talking of elephants, there are 17 elephants bases used in the battle, that's a lot of Nellies!

As usual these are Xyston miniatures and are just great.

Side Tracked.......

As a follow on to the big re-basing project of the previous post I am away with work (

where I do most of my painting) and I happen to have a few Macedonian/Greeks/Persians by Xyston.  So I decided to paint up another pike phalanx.

The unit is 32 figures painted to represent a 'Silver Shields' elite phalanx.  Also I have a changed my painting style for my Macedonians by using my, now standard, block paint and Army Painter Dark Tone dip, applied with a brush of course.

These figures will be based on the new To The Strongest bases of my previous post.

I blame this diversion on Simon Miller of To The Strongest fame and his fantastic blog full of painted minis at his Big Red Bat blog,

http://bigredbat.blogspot.com/search/label/TotheStrongest!

Please do check his blog out!

ReBasing......

So in the aim of getting away from DBM/FOG restrictions I have started to rebase my Greek/Macedonian and Persians.  

I have decided to use some very funky bases produced by Simon Miller, To The Strongest writer and owner of 'http://bigredbat.blogspot.co.uk/', a great blog by the way!

The bases have a great uneven edge and predrilled holes for tiny earth magnets.  The pieces do fit together of you do the basing correctly.

They are slightly bigger at just under 10cm frontage for the standard base but with the rules i intend to use, Hail Caesar, Imputvs, To The Strongest, Sword and Spear even L'Art de la Guerre

 How they looked..just one of two boxes of figures that will be rebased...

 FOG A basing, the old way for the Thracians lol

 New look Thracians

 These are Thracian Light/Medium foot for Imputvs/Hail Caesar.  Each base base between 6 and 8 figures.

 Light/Medium both Thracian and Greek Thyreophori.  This basing scheme has at least doubled the number of table top elements that I have.

 To give the Thyreophori a Medium/Light feel I am placing 8 figures to a base.  For the true lights, Peltasts I will used 6 to a base.

 A trial light horse base, these are 4 to a base and the base is about 6cm deep.

 Those lights described as 'skirmishers' are based on a shallower depth with 4 figures per base.

 The heavies, loads of Hoplites and a Pezhetairos unit.  Now with these I have doubled the number of Hoplite units however the pikes uses the same number of figures.

 The pike unit footprint is 10cm x 10cm, it's big!  But once the basing has been done it should look quite nice.

 Spartan Hoplite, the first of 7 in total.  There are more to paint.

Genetic Greek Hoplites and there are lots more to come, even some Thebans!

So it's a start, I hope to finish more off when I'm back home.  For now it's off to work and lots of painting!!!