The Persian Army - The Long process has begun

 As mentioned in my last post I have been focussing for the past few months on my Persian Army. Afterall I need somebody to take on the Greeks and Macedonians. My plan is very much to create a generic Persian Army that can fight across the period so it will consist of a large number of foot , a good number of cavalry plus of course Elephants, Chariots and other goodies. With this in mind I have now completed the the core of the Persian Infantry.

I started this haul back in March of last year when I acquired 10 boxes of Wargames Atlantic Persians and about 6 packs of Victrix. These figures are easily interchangeable and if funds allow any further acquisitions of foot will be from Victrix. There figures are glorious and perhaps more flexible in poses however their limited head options are a pain with just the cloth 'helmet'. Wargames Atlantic offer a lot more variations including helmets, animal heads, bare heads and alternative cloth hats. I have clipped off all the heads from the remaining sprues so options are there for later on.

All told I have about 450 foot now painted and a further 100 Immortals are now awaiting basing. Further foot will be used for command stands.

First out of the blocks were 32 stands of Persian Bowmen  - these will be used as skirmishers with three/four bases per Hail Caesar unit/ All my light troops across the Pwersians, Greeks and Macedonians are based this way.

For the regular infantry I did agonize over the basing of these chaps as I need flexibility for both different rulesets and for the composition of different units. Given most of the foot are mixed spears and bows  I decided to mount the Spear carrying Spara (Big Shields) on their own bases with the archers on separate larger bases. It also helps that these are more often than not are classified as medium infantry so they are not as densely packed as my Greek Foot. 

The Persian force also has a number of medium spear infantry (again these are all Wargames Atlantic). To differentiate these they have been given the crescent shaped wicker shields.

Each units footprint is 15cm x 8cm - consistent across the armies I have assembled.

Hope this is of interest and up next in a weeks time will be the Immortals !!

Happy New Year