Andy; With the recent release of Age of Caesar, as well as my Operation Sand Dune force over on my Vollyfire painting blog, very nearly completed, I’ve been revisiting my Early Imperial Roman collection. Granted these cover models of a later period than that in the new book, however my plan was always to finish this force and then move on to an earlier collection using the Caesarean plastic figures released a year or two ago…
Hail Caesar forces are organised into divisions, and each of these contains 3-4 units. Currently my plan is to have 2 divisions each with 3 blocks of legionaries, each containing 20 men. Backing these up each division will also feature a Scorpion artillery piece. As it stands I’ve got the majority of these men painted, and I’m saving the artillery as a reward once the bulk of the man power is completed. At the moment I just have another 20 legionaries to paint now…
These two divisions are intended to advance slowly up the field, with the scorpions helping to whittle down the opposition. Alternatively, they can also be a solid defensive core, forcing the barbarian scum to try and break my lines.
Tough as the legionaries are, in addition to these two large infantry divisions I’m going to be adding a third with a mix of auxiliary units, focusing on archers and auxiliary infantry. I suspect I’ll also add some artillery to this, specifically a Ballista as the model is so striking. This division will be used on one flank of my legion line, It should be tough enough to stand up to enemy flanking forces, but will also have some useful firepower to throw out and help slow down or weaken more numerous opposition.
To round out the force, I’ll be adding a small cavalry and Praetorian force, the cavalry are a tactically useful force, but the praetorians are simply there to be a fun modelling opportunity and add further colour to the force with some further colour variation through their shields.
Painting the Romans so far has proven a very interesting experience. Whilst the force looks large and intimidating to start with, now that I’m about half way through it’s actually proving relatively simple. The most important thing to constantly remember is that you are painting a block of troops rather than individual display pieces, so basing and shields take on a huge importance, and luckily transfers can make the work very quick and simple (For the shields, decals for basing sounds like some kind of witch craft).
Now where did I leave that box of legionaries…
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Tom Mecredy