Tuesday, March 9, 2010

New Numidian Minions






Evening I hope this finds you well, my frequent accomplice Ella came by and brought her camera and took a couple snaps of a nearly completed Battlegroup I was working on. Sure they are WIP but since I don't really own a camera, bear with me. And I made 8 bases, not sure where the other three went in her pics, but they exist, I swear. There are also 4 lights, (tehe).

I was in a hobby shop awhile ago, rummaging through the Old Glory 15s section, looking for well priced Carthaginians or Marian Romans. I didn't find any in the OG section ( I would assume this is also where Ice Cube is seated ) so I took a gander at the Corvus Belli selection. And they had tonnes of stuff I could use. Now people in the 15mm ancient wargaming circles hold Corvus Belli in very high regard, these little Spanish made wonders are very detailed and beautifully sculpted, the more you look at them the more details you see, and the paint jobs on their website.......wow. But my previous temptations have been tempered by the fact that alot of the models in their range are rather, well, thin. They seem slighter and narrower than other manufacturers, which I seem to notice more so then others. Add this to their rather high price and limited range, ( ie: their Marian Roman range lacks Command or Cavalry models), and I have been less then tempted, but sometimes a loud bar quiets, and the lights darken around all but one single angel, and you just know.

These models are beautiful, the tunics look great and painted better, they are thick armed tough nutters like they would have been, there is a total of 8 different poses out of 16 models, and most importantly a goodly number of them have beards. And in all honesty, making an BG out of 2 $5 dollar bags of minis is pretty cheap. My only complaints are there was a fair bit of flash on these bad boys (but it came off super easy, nice malleable alloy I would assume), and one of them suffered some sort of arm injure en route from Spain, but that I didn't mind so much as it forced me to use Green Stuff, which I hadn't done in years. I was pretty nervous about GSing in such a small scale, but now I can't even tell which of them I did it to. Which is likely what I was going for.

So just who are the Numidians? Well if you look at a map of the northern coast of Africa you will notice that across from Sicily there is a hump of land that sticks far into the Mediterranean. Numidia was basically that chunk all the way to Morocco, but aside from a name it doesn't appear to have ever been a particularly unified place. It seemed to have been a rather fluid collection of principalities within likely several highly mobile and nomadic societies. This internal tension and the tough life that they lived (desert nomads prior to the introduction of Camels was likely close to being a Fremen from Dune on the leisure scale), made these people some of the toughest and most respected skirmishers and light cavalry in the ancient world. They are referenced in Roman accounts of the Punic Wars happily engaging in close combat, something light troops where not even expected to do. These guys were so damn good at what they do that the Romans happily snapped up their services as mercenaries during their wars with Carthage and long after. Almost a hundred years later they are mentioned in Caesar's recount of the conquest of Gaul, during fighting in what is now Belgium.

Which brings me to my next point, I can and intend to use these bad boys in both my Carthaginian army and the Marian Roman one I intend to make immediately after. So it is with much pomp and ceremony that I induct these handsome chaps as the inaugural members of my "Multi-Army Model Pool", wherein they will be called to duty by the standards of many nations.

Welcome home boys, I will try and get some of your mounted countrymen next to you soon, and you can likely expect to meet some Thureophoroi, mercenary Hoplites, Gauls and Iberians too.

Have a good one.

1 comment:

  1. This is the camera wielding Ella - Sadly with the lighting and my wiggly camera grip the 8 base pics didnt turn out. I bear witness that there are 8.

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