Did You Say You Want More Iberians?

I got a few more of my Ancient Iberians done during the week. These figures are taking me a bit longer than normal because of the shields. Choosing to do them by hand is really slowing me down and making the job of painting them a bit of a chore. I don't usually put a lot of detail in 15mm, I just do enough to make them look good en mass. I wish I had opted to go for decals but... In for a penny, in for a pound. I'm painting them and that's that!

I wasn't sure about the shields on these guys. I wasn't too keen on the cavalry using the scutum (large shield) as it seemed a bit off and I thought they'd be better with the lighter (caetra) shields. Unfortunately, there is very little information available online so I went back to my, somewhat vague, Osprey book.  Reading through that tome of wisdom once again, I read a passage where it stated that the caetra was the most popular shield for all cavalry. So, in my newly enlightened state, I decided to go 50/50 on the shields.

Once again, I decided to base them on 80x40mm bases. I'm not sure if this is a good move or not. I do like the look of them and I also like that they are less fiddly when handling them. But I don't know... Maybe I'm just stuck in the DBA/M mind set. I want them to be versatile for any set of rules and the DB[insert relative initial] style still seems the most prevalent way of basing ancients.

This is a commander. He's from the Iberian Nobles pack. The Standard Bearer set comes with standard bearers (shock!) but no actual standards. To get them I need to put in another order and wait for them to arrive from Scotland. I decided that a bit of greenstuff and some carefully selected swear words were the quicker option.

Because I'm basing the infantry 11 to a base I have left over figures. These come in handy. In To The Strongest you can attach Champions or Heroes (I can't remember what they're called) to some units. They give a unit a one off bonus. Off the top of my head I recall that you can use the champion to re-flip a card to give the unit a combat bonus or to get them motivated and moving. They might also do other things that I can't remember. In any games, I prefer to use single figures instead of tokens where I can. So here you go. A couple of Iberian champions.

So they're slowly coming along. I've doubled my cavalry and next I think I need to make a bit more infantry. We'll see what happens (no doubt I'll get distracted).