Tag: Victrix Limited

April 2023 Report

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Back from holiday we were into a multi command GNW game which saw two fairly evenly matched sides slug it out over a convivial afternoon of gaming.

The Russians deployed with half of their cavalry behind a stream on their right supported by a foot brigade and the rest in the centre hoping to use a patch of wooded scrub as an area where they could deploy their other cavalry dismounted to slow the Swedes. The Swedes themselves deployed all their horse on the left with the aim of smashing their way across the stream and thinly held the centre and right with their foot.

As always the Russians had the toughest job given the poor morale of their troops but the cautious advance of the Swedes rather played into their hands in the early moves.

On the Swedish left the massed cavalry attack was funnelled by the stream and marsh behind which the Russians were hiding and in the early moves they took losses from musketry fire but once they got going it was difficult for the Russians to hold on. The Swedish first wave were indeed repulsed but when the second wave crashed in the already weakened Russians collapsed and fled the scene which forced a morale test on the supporting infantry who decided that home suddenly sounded very appealing!

Across the Russian centre and left the plan of dismounting the dragoons worked and the Swedish advance in the wood slowed to a crawl but on the left where the village was located the Russian foot didn’t fare so well and after a stiff fight they gave up and fled.

All told, a strong Swedish victory. For those that are interested the bulk of the figures are Foundry with Old Glory in support.

Next up was another Successors game with the predominately Victrix collection, this time Eumenids v Antipatrid.

In this encounter Eumenes was significantly outflanked on his right so had to get on with it before the jaws closed.

Being superior in cavalry and elephants, as well as having the better quality infantry, Eumenes got a bit cocky and galloped his right wing cavalry across the face of his infantry in order to overwhelm the Antipatrid sole cavalry force on their right. Not surprisingly this was a fail, the cavalry got tangled up with the enemy foot resulting in the loss of the Xystophoroi and the slowing of the Eumenid infantry advance.

The Eumenid left wing cavalry did the job they were meant to do which was slow up the Antipatrid shock cavalry and in fact such was the accuracy of their volleys that they saw off the opposing Thessalians, although the nearby elephant might have been a bit of help 🤨

In the end, of course, it was the infantry centre that settled it and the better quality Eumenids burst through their opponents before the jaw could close about them although in reality this was more to do with over timid play by the commander of the Antipatrid left – problem of a Napoleonic player being more concerned about nice neat lines and not getting stuck in 😂🤣

After the intensity of a couple of big battles we changed the pace with a Franco Prussian skirmish game around two scouting parties coming to loot a monastery.

The rules were a set of amendments to an existing Napoleonic set held together by a rough narrative and making up stuff along the way that we hadn’t catered for – surprisingly it worked and both sides managed to get off with something although the French lost their officer and several troopers.

Although this was a bit of fun we reluctantly came to the conclusion that we just don’t get enough out of gaming this so the collection is going to have to be sold on. If you are interested then drop us a line on the site and we’ll get back to you with details and photos.

Another skirmish was next with a medieval away game which was a tourney to select those who would be sailing away on a campaign using the old Lamming rules. Nothing else to say really.

Final game of the month was an Ottoman v Swedes game circa early C17th.

The terrain was split by a stream which flowed between two large hills (on the Swedish deployment baseline) and had two formal crossing points (a pontoon bridge and a ford) although the stream could be crossed by anyone albeit at a reduced rate. A burnt out village and a wood anchored both flanks on the Ottoman baseline and a small village sat in the middle of the more open plain beyond the stream.

Both sides opted for the ‘smash through with all your cavalry strategy’ 😂 The Swedes deployed almost all their cavalry to the right of the big hill (where the two landskap regiments spent the whole game) comprising 3 units of Danes, 3 units of Swedes & 1 unit of Finns covered by a skirmish screen of Transylvanians; on the other side of the hill, ready to cross the stream via the ford were 2 units of German cavalry and a Scots brigade on the other hill. The Ottomans deployed their 6 units of Feudal Sipahi and 2 units of Sipahi of the Porte in the centre, just short of the stream, screened by 3 units of Azabs, the pontoon bridge on the left was held by the Voyniks and the right by 2 units of Tartars.

In the initial stages it was all about the skirmishers; the Transylvanians got the worst of the shooting from the Azabs who had waded across the stream and retired hurt, the Tartars got tied up with the Germans in a back and forth which eventually saw the Germans retiring having been unable to get up close enough to fully utilise the caracole.

Out on the Swedish right the Finns avoided what would later become death central further over and in a brief, but too late, affair drove the Voyniks back across the bridge in rout – this was the single success the Swedes enjoyed.

In the centre the Sipahi’s took longer to get over the stream than their general would have liked but the Swedes & Danes were held up by the over enthusiastic Swedes pushing through the Danes and disordering everyone and then realising that being disordered as the arrows started to fly in wasn’t such a good idea!

The early Swedish attacks went well, sending the Azabs scuttling back across the stream but by then the Sipahi’s had dried themselves off from the crossing and, after a volley of arrows, charged in and the rot started 😓

The repulse of the initial attack wasn’t the end of the world for the Swedes and the units that retired would soon rally but in order to keep the Sipahis back the cavalry general committed his Danes to the charge rather than shooting (carbine armed). This just didn’t work out well, a couple of the units refused to charge which meant that their opponents were able to get the jump on them next turn and the one that did charge just got mashed up. Suffice to say the Sipahis “got their dander up” and were all over the Danish cavalry who then retired into the the Swedes who off course couldn’t get organised quickly enough to repulse the following on Ottomans.

Realising all was lost the Swedish commander and his downcast cavalry general conceded. A crushing Ottoman victory.

In other news some more figures were added to the future wars project, cheers Mark.

Extras for the GNW collection were recruited, thank you Neil.

Additions to our Mexican bandits for the western gunfight project, thanks Vlad.

Iraqi command stand stand for the Iran Iran Cold War Commanders project.

More for the modern skirmish collection, wonder if they’ll actually get used? This is such a rabbit hole 😂

Well that’s it for the month, not a bad one, next month is Partizan and we’ll be taking the Successors on tour so if you’re going to be there find us and have a chat 😀

The Successors Project: Part Four

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So, we finally got to game the rules with real figures and a live opponent; just me and Dave to start, a group game will need us two to know what we’re talking about and to have fully fleshed armies.

At the moment we don’t have sufficient pike formations for a traditional battle, in fact we only have one, but we do have sufficient figures for something close enough to see what it looks and feels like.

Using the army lists I was able to create a Eumenid and Antigonid force at about 70% of my proposed typical army points value, so if the pikes and some more generals were available it looks like it might work.

Both armies had two blocks of mercenary hoplites each, four units of cavalry each, one of which was Xystophoroi and the others satrap units; the Antigonids had the one unit of pike, three elephants and sundry skirmishers, the Eumenids had only two elephants, three units of peltasts and also sundry skirmishers. Both sides had an Army General and two Commanders.

The Eumenids deployed with all their cavalry on the right wing under one of the commanders, satrap cavalry to the front and Xystophoroi behind, the hoplites were in the centre under the General covered by the skirmishers with the elephants on their left linking with the peltasts under the other commander.

The Antigonids deployed with the pikes in the centre, flanked either side by the hoplites and covered by the skirmishers, all commanded by the General, two elephants protected the right flank of the infantry block and one the left. On either flank were the cavalry, two units per command under a commander each, with the right wing being the stronger, quality wise, as it contained the Xystophoroi.

As it was our first game we were a bit slow; I thought I knew my own rules and I didn’t 🤣, Dave obviously hadn’t played at all and despite me going through the concepts at the beginning and having QRef sheets to hand we still managed to lapse into the techniques of other sets we play which was a bit of a distraction to say the least 😂🤣

The arc of the action isn’t as important as is what we learnt but here it is.

On the Eumenid right the weight of horse didn’t prove as decisive as was hoped for. One unit of Cappadocian cavalry got stuck into the opposing Median horse and eventually routed it and pursued toward the Antigonid camp. The other failed to charge (although so did it’s opponent) which rather created a road block to the other two units which wasn’t resolved until late into the battle. Deployment issues apart, one problem that did surface was that because ‘attack cavalry’ have to go their full distance you get the problem of them getting so close to each other that the eventual ‘charge’ isn’t really a charge but more of a trot and so no visual ‘crash of horse’. I think I know how to fix this, just need to have a bit of a play on my own. The actual melee’s (yes the other unit did finally get stuck in 😄) worked fairly well, low casualty rates and results more to do with morale failure than dead men; both sides threw in their commanders on this flank which led to some tense moments of die rolling for risks to the leaders and in fact the Antigonid commander bit the dust and that was the end of that wing.

On the Antigonid right wing their cavalry did a lot better (and so they should have!) against the peltasts, pretty soon one of the peltasts was in rout and the other in retreat, which turned into a rout when the pursuing cavalry caught up with them. The peltasts did manage to hang on for a bit and even used the reinforcement rule to make one melee last just a little bit longer, but finally that flank was on it’s way to the camp. From a rules perspective this worked well and the problem of cavalry not getting their charge bonus didn’t come up as the infantry couldn’t close the distance down before the cavalry charged.

The infantry took some time to get at each other finally meeting as their respective left flanks were collapsing although the slow speed of their advance did mean that the skirmishers could have some effect, shooting at each other and the respective elephants. This was all good, typically in ancient battles the flank cavalry are over and done prior to the decisive blow in the centre and in our encounter the cavalry were either busy pursuing or vainly trying to rally.

How well elephants would perform was a worry when I was writing and play testing the rules solo and so I was keen to see how we got on here. Overall I was pretty pleased; on the Antigonid left the single elephant acted as a disordering deterrent long enough for the left hoplites to turn and face and the javelin skirmishers to screen them; this elephant could in fact have charged and caused a bit of a mess but the afore mentioned distraction of lapsing into another rule set sequence briefly meant that the opportunity was lost 😥. On the Antigonid right the fun I wanted from the elephants paid off in full; both sides had an elephant go into panic due to the loss of the mahout from shooting, the Eumenid one careered about randomly as per the rules but the Antigonid one ran straight into it’s own hoplites who then spent the rest of the game trying to kill it – just what I wanted 😀. The other two elephants ended up in a melee when the Eumenid one charged home and they were still fighting when we called time.

Once the main infantry got stuck in we were at the end of our time but we did manage to see how well (or not) and infantry fight would go. The Antigonid phalanx charged home on the opposing mercenary hoplites who stood to receive but in two phases of melee they were undone and broke for the camp. This illustrated the advantage of impetus and ranks and from a rules perspective showed, more so than the cavalry, the advantage of gaining the initiative in the turn. If the hoplites had the initiative they could have stymied the advance of the phalanx and although the odds would be against them in the long term it would have slowed the Antigonid advance.

So our first real fight was over. How well did it go? As a game, an enjoyable session, mistakes were made, glory was had, a commander fell, worth continuing with. From a rules perspective, a bit of a relief, the game didn’t fall apart immediately, a novice player had got a grip by about half way through and most of the things I wanted to happen did so. The cavalry needs some work but not an insurmountable problem and some of the wording needs tightening up but again not a major issue. I think we’ve crossed the first hurdle so next step is get the pikes painted and on the table for a proper clash of the titans 😁

Keep safe everyone and enjoy your gaming wherever and whenever you can.

The Successors Project: Part One

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So, we were ‘Thinking About Successors’ now its a project!

In our original thinking it was going to be easy (cue gales of hysterical laughter), buy solely plastic figures from Victrix, paint ’em up, choose a set of rules from the many available and boom! project done. Oh how naïve we were.

In this post we’ll just talk figures, mainly because our journey was a classic example of fooling yourself into an easy project when like every other project any wargamer has ever done there is always more to it than meets the eye.

Having said ‘Victrix it is’, we thought “well maybe some samples would be a good idea, but probably not a whole box”. Dave did a search of eBay and a couple of sprues were bought and built up and along the way we got hold of a Warlord sprue for comparison – mainly because they were cheaper 🙂 The Victrix pikemen are really nice, good detail well realised, nice crisp mouldings, certainly a good choice; the cavalry though? well it’s not that they aren’t any good, the detail is just as good as the infantry but the horses are massive! Now admittedly you might say the Victrix are a little bit on the ‘heroic’ side but with the infantry that doesn’t seem to matter too much as they are all bunched together and most of the allies and enemies – Hoplites, Galatians, etc are in the same range so no problem. The riders are of the same proportions but stick them on the horses and they look way out of proportion, like some kind of bizarre optical illusion, and the horses are definitely overdone. We tried to rationalise this by saying “well they’re all from the same manufacturer and it isn’t like we’re going to be mixing metal and plastic” but the more we looked at them the more they just didn’t look right and by then I’d done enough research to know that even at the most basic level we were going to need more than just the standard box of Successor Heavy Cavalry to cover just the various iterations of ‘Companions’, never mind the allied Greek heavy cavalry, Seleucid cataphracts, satrap heavy cavalry, Asiatic light cavalry and Tarentine cavalry. The figures are multi part so with a bit of effort and imagination we could probably get past most of the issues we saw but the elephant in the room (couldn’t resist!) was the size of the horse, we just couldn’t get past it, which was a bit of a problem as, a) you can’t have Successors without cavalry, and b) part of our cost analysis was based on £2.25 per plastic cavalry piece against around £3.30 per metal cavalry piece (unless you want to be robbed by Foundry at £4.60 per cavalry piece!).

On the up side we realised that the Victrix and Warlord pikemen were compatible, not in the same unit (the Warlord figures are a slighter build than the Victrix), but as side by side units the difference is lost in the mass of pikes, which was a pleasant revelation because we had thought it would have to be one or the other based on comments on LAF and Twitter. Also on the upside was the availability of Hoplite mercenaries from Victrix, four boxes potentially, which became important when research revealed that mercenary hoplites were in virtually every army and in significant numbers. Also on the upside was the availability of those pesky skirmishers, again four boxes that would cover all our needs for slingers, bowmen, javelin men and peltasts. So, given that the infantry contingent is by far the most numerous, and a Victrix pikemen came out at 75p compared to around £1.30 for the metal counterpart and we were looking at about 200 infantry per side (based on our projection of what we thought it would look like), the maths was definitely favouring the plastics and the range of figures was supporting that – phew!

But what to do about the cavalry? Well it was looking like we were going to have to go the metal route but what ranges were out there? What spread was there within any given range? How well would any range scale up against the plastic infantry?

A shout out on LAF and a a swift google search revealed we didn’t need to worry much about availability. Some of the ranges were the older offerings that had been around for some time like, Foundry, Essex and Old Glory, some were ones we just didn’t realise like, Gripping Beast and 1st Corps and some were new (to us at least) like, Aventine and Armorum & Aquila. Samples were duly sent for unless we already had the odd figure lying around in our lead mountains or the pricing was extortionate (Foundry at £1.75 per figure) and I put together a cost comparison sheet to help us understand how much we could end up spending, which was quite revealing.

Of all the ranges the Aventine is without doubt the most exhaustive and if we had been doing the project in all metal with money being no object (remember this was a whim project) we would have absolutely gone for these, lovely detailed castings covering different armour types (6 for the infantry I think), different helmet styles, a plethora of cavalry castings covering Macedonian, Seleucid & Ptolemaic forces, early and late era, a virtual cornucopia. The only but (and of course there would be a but!) was the horses (again!), I thought they looked a little small, a bit like ponies (which is actually probably closer to history), in fairness Dave didn’t agree and against their own infantry it didn’t matter but against the plastic pikemen, even the Warlord it just didn’t quite work. A time wasting spin off from this was me then buying a pack of riders from them and then trying them out on different ‘bigger’ horses, a real blind alley I should never have gone up.

Ultimately it came down to either 1st Corps or or Gripping Beast that looked best against the pike, both did a fairly decent range with Gripping Beast edging it in terms of spread and theirs was the newer range but then we got into the cost and that was quite revealing, not just for these two but for all the ranges we considered.

Yes, I know cost isn’t everything, but when you are making a significant purchase in one go rather than dragging it out from one convention to the next I think it is. I wont bore you with the full analysis I put together but here are the highlights.

We looked at, Aventine, Essex, Armorum & Aquila, Old Glory, Foundry, Crusader, Gripping Beast and 1st Corps, and considered the depth of the range and the cost per figure. Where I use the phrase ‘cost per figure’ here I’m referring to horse and rider and comparing it to the baseline of £2.25 per figure for the Victrix Companion Cavalry and £15 for the elephant & crew.

As already stated the Aventine range is the most extensive plus it does various elephants but no scythed chariots. The cost per figure comes out at £3.23 and the elephants come in at £16.

The Essex range has a decent enough spread including Bactrians but this is an old range and to charge £3.75 per figure and £19.35 for the elephant is quite frankly a bit of a cheek.

Armorum & Aquila is a small range, not much bigger than the Victrix spread and the figures are a little bit on the smaller size; price per figure is £3.25 and no elephants.

Old Glory is a compact range, basically one of each of what you’d need and comes in at £3.20 per figure and £17.50 for the elephant.

The Foundry range is small so not a lot of use and at £4.60 per figure and £34 for an elephant they are just taking the piss.

Crusader is another small range with no elephant and rolls in at £3.30 per figure.

Gripping Beast is a nice range covering most of the bases and relatively new coming in at £3.30 per figure and £18.50 for the elephant.

1st Corps is again a decent enough range covering most of the bases although a little bit cataphract heavy which come in at £2.50 per figure or £2.25 if you go for the unit packs and £16.20 for the elephant and they also do a scythed chariot at £12.

As you can see 1st Corps absolutely aced it on price and even the slightly more expensive elephant beats most of the opposition and it’s part metal. We did a bit of working out using the unit packs and realised that two of their packs of 12 would give us three of our 8 man cavalry units and as we keep saying to ourselves ‘the cavalry are not the main ingredient’. We checked the samples again to make sure we were happy with the sizing and I reckon we’ve convinced ourselves it’ll be ok, so soon a couple of hundred quid order to 1st Corps will be sent off for at least the basic cavalry we’re going to need for most armies. We also mix and matched the other various sample figures we’d bought and sent out to be painted and reckon we can mix them in to flesh out the numbers so nothing wasted there.

So that’s the figure journey begun, some figures are being painted as we speak, we picked up some painted Warlord pikemen off eBay so that’s a bit of a start, what we really need is for Victrix to get their stock levels sorted so we can buy loads of pikes!!

Next post we’ll look at the quest for a set of rules – what a nightmare!

Thinking About Successors

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Back in the summer of 2019, when the world was young and we were in the casual days of post 1st lockdown Dave and I were sitting in the garden chatting nonsense, like most wargamers do in an idle moment, when Dave posed the inevitable question “is there any period you wish you’d done?” Somewhat taken aback because we’d agreed back in 2018 that we were not going to do any more big periods, just additions to existing ones, and put our efforts into contained skirmish efforts, I answered without hesitation, Successors.

Now Dave is an C18th & C19th man who has very willingly indulged my desires for early time frames such as Arthurian and Italian Wars so I readied myself to snobbishly prattle on about the post Alexandrian world but was stopped by Dave’s response, “Oh yeah, Seleucids and Ptolemaics, that could be interesting”. Serves me right for trying to be all superior – shame on me! The conversation then gathered pace as I waffled on about having started the period twice but given up because I couldn’t find a set of rules that worked for me, it was expensive in 28mm (even back in the day!) and reminded him that one of our group who was doing Romans to face off to the later Macedonians I was doing at the time, left in a huff over a perceived slight taking his Romans with him! Undaunted, Dave brushed aside my pessimism and lack of excitement (actually I was really excited but didn’t want a 3rd failed project on my hands) and hooked me with “but there are all these plastic ancients now, surely that could work?” And I was in, ready to get researching and costing the potential of such a project.

Macedonian Phalangites - Victrix Limited

As everyone knows we are unashamedly 28mm players and when it comes to ‘proper games’ (ie not skirmishes) we like it to be a significant visual spectacle, not a couple of units and that’s your ‘army’, so this was going to be quite an investment in figures which meant quite a financial investment too. Our agreed going in point was therefore plastics from the two main suppliers, Victrix (above example taken from Google Images) or Warlord Games; the Victrix range is an extensive broad brush Ancients offering while the Warlord range is more Roman centric. Both offer a clear economic advantage over that of their metal cousins but could it be enough? More of this later.

Before we got too excited though and dived headfirst into something that could easily turn into a quagmire I thought I better do a bit of research so that I could remind myself what it was all about and also give Dave some detail so that he could back out if it wasn’t quite what he expected – the rest of the group were in deep pandemic hiding so this really was going to be a two hander.

The research was great fun and really got me fired up; I dusted off my old classics like Bar Kochva’s ‘The Seleucid Army’ and Scullard’s ‘The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World’, got out all my old copies of Slingshot (even re-joined The Society of Ancients), and indulged myself in some newer works like Waterfield’s ‘Dividing the Spoils’ and Robert’s & Bennett’s ‘The Wars of Alexander’s Successors’. From these and others plus good old Wikipedia I was able to put together a three page document for Dave detailing the various kingdoms, the different armies and the campaigns & battles of the Diadochi – so many of these! I’d quite forgotten what a brilliant (and short) period it is, murder, betrayal, shifting alliances, highs and lows of ambition and a whole cast of characters, all in 50 odd years! Once all the original Successors are dead it’s not so exciting as it settles down into the main kingdoms but still with battles and campaigns to be fought and we do have Galatians and we always have elephants! It all gets a bit boring once the Romans start interfering so I suggested we cut it off before that.

The document served it’s purpose, I was completely fired up and Dave realised there was a lot more scope than just Seleucid v Ptolemaic and as he rightly pointed out we could do standard pike blocks and standard companion cavalry and then just mix and match for whatever armies we fancied doing plus a few exotics to round out the specific army; this approach would also mean it would be a true joint project, no need for one guy doing Seleucid and one guy doing Antigonid, if we were clever we could just build a joint collection that we could just choose from each time we played.

There was still a lot of work to do; what actual figures, size of units, rules, terrain, the painting of that many figures, and I hope to do a couple more posts on these (what turned out to be) bumpy roads, but for us to get started the costs needed to work. Time for some simple maths. A box of Victrix phalangites retailed at £19.95 for 27 figures so 74p a figure and the Warlord equivalent at £22 for 40 figures so 55p a figure compared to metal foot figures anywhere between £1.20 & £1.75 a figure. On the cavalry front the plastic guys come in at £2.25 (less for the lighter stuff) compared to anywhere up to £4.60 for the metal; foolishly I also looked at the cost of metal elephants, OMG! This had become a no brainer, plastic it was with Victrix becoming the primary brand, mainly because of the range of boxes, we reckoned we could use around 12 boxes and the more boxes you bought the bigger the discount which was particularly attractive in terms of the pike.

So a project was born and all from a casual conversation in the garden – bloody lockdown! We’ve moved on a bit since then but cautiously so I’ll do another post on the rest of the journey regarding figures, which has had a few twists and turns, and a post on choosing rules which really has been quite an eye opener!

Stay tuned.