The Ultimate Historical Gaming Thread

We're quite obviously a fantasy gaming forum with a healthy dose of sci-fi interest, but I have noticed a significant amount of historical gaming interest on the forum too, so I feel it deserves its own thread. @Killer Angel once again I'd be grateful if you'd do the honours of pinning this.

As with my Middle-Earth thread, this is the place to discuss anything historical, any period, any scale, any ruleset. Feel free to post painted minis and units, share army lists, discuss conversion opportunities, post house rules, suggest alternative history settings (always fun to speculate!) and report on news from the historical gaming community.

I'd love to hear what everyone's been playing in the historical community. I know @Warden is a big fan of Samurai and Test of Honour (as well as dabbling in the Caribbean warfare game Blood and Plunder), @Lord-Marcus has a frakload of Persians from his support for Wargames Atlantic, @ChapterAquila92 has been getting involved with some WWII stuff and @Gauntlet has been playing around with a fantastic 'Fantasy Ancients' setting, yet I also look forward to hearing what others have to say about their favourite historical periods.

I'm currently getting into SPQR and am considering using my vast collection of 1:72 plastics for Hail Caesar at some point. I'm also interested in playing a Dark Ages ruleset, and am currently working on my own fan expansion of SPQR for that as no modifications would be required to the main ruleset for it, just some additional army lists (I did look at SAGA but I really don't like the points system for it, '1 point for a mob of six blokes' just looks and sounds unnatural to me). Also I'm getting into English Civil War gaming with my dad who's a massive fan of it, through a mixture of The Kingdom is Ours and his own old ruleset written by one George Gush in the 80s (and apparently still popular as of 2016).

Woe to the Vanquished! - Brennus of the Senones, 387BC

 

I'll start by discussing some upcoming releases that have caught my eye. First, Germanicus and Imperial Roman Legionaries for SPQR:


These were actually first teased at Christmas, but I only discovered them a lot more recently. Not only is SPQR getting more love which I'm always glad to see (especially when rumours were circulating that the game could be dropped due to a significant portion of the community were not as satisfied with the ruleset as they could be), but also these look like brand-new sculpts - there certainly has never been a Germanicus miniature in Warlord's Hail Caesar range, and the Legionary models definitely look more dynamic than the current plastics, with the intention of them looking more at home in a skirmish setting like SPQR. This is significant in that before all the SPQR sets released had been repacks of existing plastic kits in smaller numbers and recasts of metal character models in Warlord Resin, but the fact that Warlord are now actually making new sculpts shows they're arguably putting more money into the game, not less. This bodes very well for the game and leaves me hopeful for a good few more new models again in future - in particular a Caratacus model, especially given he's a fieldable named character in the game and has been overdue a model of his own for far too long.

There's no doubt Germanicus will be a Warlord Resin sculpt (which I don't think is a bad thing given it looks significantly better than Citadel Finecast), though I wonder whether the Legionaries will be a full-blown new and updated plastic kit or a set of resin sculpts to compliment the existing plastic set which is still decent. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing these released, and the best thing is that these will work in other Ancients games as well, so there's no real excuse for any budding Imperator of Rome not to pick these up. The thing I'm most impressed by is that as the result of a survey conducted by Warlord, these were in the top 3 most anticipated releases of their 12 Days of Christmas line-up, after the recently-released Slaine game and the pre-orderable WWII campaign set Combined Arms, so it's clear there is a significant SPQR following still willing the game to continue and grow.


Next we have sets of Dark Age Picts and Welsh from Gripping Beast:


These I'm less excited about, mainly because in a preview of the sprues, about 75% of each kit's sprue has been recycled from Gripping Beast's Dark Age Irish set released at the end of last year, presumably to combat the success of Wargames Atlantic's set (the circled area is the only part of the sprue that's different in each set):

I've never seen such blatant laziness from a wargames company before, and I think it's a real shame as these sets had real potential.

However, the effect of this isn't nearly as badly felt on the Picts kit, as the simply-dressed, oft-barefoot Irish bodies look better on the primitive Picts and the Pict bitz they've managed to pack into the remaining 25% of the sprue really bring the Pict look to the fore, with the unusual Pictish shield designs, a crossbow (I'd have preferred for there to be two to get more crossbowmen out of the set, but one per sprue is better than none) and hooded heads with cloaks, on full display in these example models:

Picts are one of the Dark Age factions most in need of a plastic kit, and those well-chosen extras rescue a big display of corporate laziness and turn it into a highly useful set. Indeed I'd say the sprue is much better off for making Picts than even Irish, for which Wargames Atlantic provide a much more characterful and unique set (though the Daneaxe and Norse-style helmets supplied in the Gripping Beast Irish set are useful if you're aiming to build an army of Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles, Isle of Man, Orkney, Shetland or Dublin).

The Welsh version of the set, on the other hand, doesn't do it for me. Whereas in the Pictish version they manage to cram that tiny bit of sprue full of unique extras that are full of Pictish character, in the Welsh version the only real highlight is a couple of cloaks worn in the Brythonic fashion of being wrapped mainly around the right shoulder with a brooch pinned to keep it together. Personally I've never been fond of Gripping Beast's designs for the Welsh as being largely barefooted and simply-clothed in the same manner as the Picts and Gaels, because I would have thought that, being the descendants of a mixture of the Celtic Britons, who possessed a significant degree of societal advancement over the Picts and Gaels, and the Romans, they would have been on par technologically with their English neighbours (who had more Celtic aspects than Scottish nationalists and English historians today like to think, due to intermixing and settlement among the Romano-British centuries before). However, there is a plastic kit that fits the bill a lot better, in the form of Oathmark's Human Infantry box:


These models fit the Dark Ages British (or at least my view of them) a lot better; still possessing the big Brythonic/Gallic moustaches (the only head I'd avoid would be the ones with the knight-style full helm and the big Russian cloth cap as they doesn't look particularly Dark Age), and are properly dressed in shoes, helmets and trousers - Trousers were a big thing among the Britons, Gauls and Germans, and were outlawed in the Roman Empire for being 'barbarian'. These miniatures do come with rather bulky swords and spears, some of the bodies wear studs on their leather armour which will have to be trimmed off and the shields could only ever be considered suitable for Dark Ages gaming if you're aiming to recreate The Last Kingdom (which gave the Saxons and Welsh rectangular shields purely to tell them apart from their Viking foes) down to the absolute letter, but it shouldn't be too hard to source more historically accurate alternatives. The sizes of the models also shouldn't look out-of-place with other Dark Age models if this comparison featuring Gripping Beast and Frostgrave models (second and third from left, respectively) are anything to go by:

As North Star makes both Frostgrave and Oathmark and I imagine they'd want their models to be of the same scale.

 

Between Black Seas, Bolt Action, Flames of War, Victory at Sea, and Warhammer Ancient Battles, I have a lot of ground to cover.

While Flames of War was technically first, so far the only two people in my group who at least have model kits for their armies are myself and the guy who suggested the idea (I bought my British paratroopers second-hand off of him). As such, Ancient Battles was the first of these that my local gaming group really got into about 2 years ago, with us primarily working on Roman-era armies - thus far, we've got Ancient Britons (me), Romans (the guy I mentioned earlier), and Gauls, with someone else wanting to do Persians or Carthaginians. It's even started branching into Medieval-era content as well, with Vikings and Visigoths having been collected (I intend on doing Byzantines for that one).

Since GW didn't sell any historical models anymore (unless you count much of the Empire and Bretonnian ranges as Renaissance HRE and Medieval Crusaders respectively, but even that can be a bit of a stretch), we turned to Victrix for our primary model source, with Warlord Games and Etsy being secondary. This is also how we really started branching off into the other Non-GW games.

As a side note, I have also played a game of Hail Caesar using my Britons, and suffice to say that for a game that's more focused on formations than individual models I would have still needed more models anyway to fill out those formations.

For my Ancient Britons, I typically field the following at 2500pts:

Characters
High Chieftain (161pts)
Chieftain on Light Chariot (151pts)
Chieftain (89pts)
Chieftain (89pts)
Standard Bearer (102pts)

Infantry
Warrior unit (27 Warriors, including champion, banner bearer, and musician) (285pts)
Warrior unit (27 Warriors, including champion, banner bearer, and musician) (285pts)
Warrior unit (27 Warriors, including champion, banner bearer, and musician) (285pts)
Warrior unit (49 Warriors, including champion, banner bearer, and musician) (505pts)

Skirmishers
Skirmisher unit (10 Skirmishers with Javelins) (60pts)
Skirmisher unit (8 Skirmishers with Javelins) (48pts)
Skirmisher unit (8 Skirmishers with Slings) (48pts)

Cavalry and Chariots
Chariot unit (6 Light Chariots, including champion, banner bearer, and musician) (387pts)

Total: 2495pts

This is all following the army composition limitations as described in Armies of Antiquity v2.0 under British Tribes:

Characters: up to 25%
Infantry: At least 50%
Cavalry and Chariots: Up to 50%
Skirmishers: Up to 10%
Allies: None
Additional: There may not be more than one Fanatic unit in the army, no Fanatic unit may be larger than the smallest Warrior unit, there may not be more Sling units than Javelin units, no Sling unit may be larger than the smallest Javelin unit in the army.

In many ways, I wouldn't mind seeing a homebrew of Age of Sigmar built around a point-based composition system like this, seeing as different armies in Ancient Battles had different composition limitations (Thematic and Tagmatic Byzantines for instance have a minimum requirement for Cavalry as opposed to a point cap).

Anyway, as befits their historical counterparts, Ancient Britons are kind of a Beastmen-like skirmish army in that their warriors are light troops that can spend the battle in either open formation (can move at full speed through difficult terrain, albeit without the ability to march or charge through it) or skirmish formation without counting composition-wise as Skirmishers (and they do carry their own javelins either way), and the same can be said of their light chariots as well. They generally don't hold up well when faced with heavy infantry like Roman Legionnaires and so rely a lot on flanking manoeuvres to get their way, particularly with the chariots. Thus far I've only had one instance where I've been damn close to a victory with them (outflanked and overran a ballista crew with the chariots, causing most of the nearby Roman army to panic, followed by the routing of two blocks of Roman Legionnaires as they got the hammer and anvil via chariot and the big block of warriors).

I may at some point relent and replace one of the smaller Warrior units with a block of 20 Fanatics (255pts) and bump up the Skirmisher units to 10-man units each for a grand total of 2489pts. I've been avoiding it because I'm not particularly interested in painting up 20 naked lunatics.

 

Work:

Currently engaged in historical research on several historicals kits.

Personal projects:

1. Active projects.
A.) Alternate history roman empire: Romans with sci fi gear, and their conscripted auxilary units with ww1/2 era personal and infantry weapons. Specialized units planned using the upcoming lorica squamata romans from wargames atlantic.
B.) Numas, The Scarab City: My Tomb kings army, the third iteration. In this list because there will eventually be human troops using Wargames Atlantic egyptians.

2. Sideline/back burner projects.
A Morval Fusiliers (Fusion of wargames atlantic ww1 french with sci fi parts)
B 1 to 1 Roman legion project. Not dead, just not actively working on it.
C Persian army for hail caesar. I batch paint this in groups of 20, and I have not felt the drive to batch paint a unit of persians in months.
D Stormcast - Haven't felt the pull to paint silver and purple.
E Painting commission - I have an ongoing painting commission client i do batch work for.

3. Upcoming planned projects or sub projects.
A Conquistadors and aztecs - I did the historical research, the least i can do is paint a small warband for each boxed set.
B Codename skypirates - Actually more like landscknects with heavy armor and airships. Using up parts of the bits box for this one, utilizing extras from the conquistador kit. basically don't want bitz to just sit on sprues.

 

I'd forgotten you had got into Ancient Britons! You should paint and post more of them on here so that I'm less likely to forget about them

I take it this is for WAB?

Certainly WAB did interest me back when it was around, but I missed out on the 2nd Edition books before Warhammer Historical conked out. I've managed to grab the PDF of the rulebook but can't find the 2nd Edition Armies of Antiquity anywhere.

Do you mean an Ancients version of Age of Sigmar (with point-based compositions), or just adding point-based composition systems into Age of Sigmar? Because if it's the former...

You don't need any extra models as you have plenty already (providing you have them individually based which you probably do), and it revolves around fast, furious skirmish gameplay and heroes leading the charge.

(It doesn't actually have an army composition limitation system, but you could easily port over the WAB ones with little to no amendments)

You can always stick loincloths on them (providing you have some as spares, I have plenty from Space Marine and Ork kits)

Any new ones you can spill the beans on here? In particular any developments on the Blood Oaths line?

Sounds interesting, what's the state of all the other Ancient races in your universe? What rules do you plan to use with your world?

Human Nehekharans FTW!

In fact the fantasy alternative history Ancients world I've been working on with @Gauntlet changes the Egyptians to being more like a combination of Bronze Age Egypt and Tomb Kings because Alexander the Great (or at least his empire) is retconned.

They're not historical, unless you plan to Romanise them with that Imperial purple...

Those are great models, what rules do you plan to use them with?

 

Yeah, I should... amid all the other projects on the go at least. Ancient Battles as a whole has been on the backburner for my gaming group since the start of COVID, and other games have been more demanding of my time getting armies/gangs/warbands built and painted for.

Eventually I'll get more than a partially-painted Boudicca model posted to this site. Don't you worry.

Yep!

I've got a downloaded copy of it floating around. I've also managed to find it on Scribd, so you may find it worth checking out there.

A bit of the latter, actually. I was thinking more along the lines of at least a partial alternative to the battalion system in Age of Sigmar, wherein each subfaction has its own composition set (AoS technically already has such a system in place, relevant to allied units - in 2000pt games at least, no more than 20% of the army may be allied, and in some Coalition-type armies like Cities you're generally limited to one unit from a specified faction army for every X number of units of your own). As this also borders on replacing the battlefield role mechanic currently in AoS, how it could be done effectively is up in the air of course (especially since battlefield roles, keywords, and what the battalion system considers to be each type of unit can be - and is - all over the place).

If we were to take Seraphon and its sub-factions as an example here, outside of a certain percent (likely 25-33%) of the total point value being available to purchase heroes and other characters (the most straightforward translation), a discussion might be had to determine what counts as infantry and what counts as skirmishers, since the ironically-named Skink Skirmisher warscroll can fulfill either role depending on load-out - clubs and shields fits an infantry cohort better than a skirmisher formation for instance. Same story with cavalry (I'll include flying cavalry like Terradons and Ripperdactyls in this category), monsters (not including hero mounts) and war machines (it's likely that the latter two might be limited to 1 per X points rather than a specific percentage, much like how elephants - when available - are usually limited in WHAB to 1 per 1000pts).

As such, you might see something like this for each of our subfactions:

Dracothion's Tail
Characters: Up to 33%
Infantry: Up to 33%
Cavalry: At least 25%
Skirmishers: Up to 20%
Monsters: 1 per 1000pts
Allies and Mercenaries: Up to 20%

Fangs of Sotek
Characters: Up to 25%
Infantry: Up to 50%
Cavalry: Up to 25%
Skirmishers: At least 25%
Monsters: 1 per 1000pts
Allies and Mercenaries: Up to 20%

Koatl's Claw
Characters: Up to 25%
Infantry: At least 50%
Cavalry: Up to 50%
Skirmishers: Up to 20%
Monsters: 1 per 1000pts
Allies and Mercenaries: Up to 20%

Thunder Lizard
Characters: Up to 33%
Infantry: At least 25%
Cavalry: Up to 25%
Skirmishers: Up to 20%
Monsters: Up to 50%
Allies and Mercenaries: Up to 20%

Just my thoughts on the matter, though this is better left to theorycrafting and playtesting elsewhere.

Given that the appeal of WHAB for me was the formation set-up to begin with, I suppose your mileage may vary.

 

And... you lost my interest as soon as you mentioned the Britons being under Roman rule still . I'll stick to the universe @Gauntlet and I are developing, thanks.

You'd have thought that with new advanced terminology the Romans would have been able to steamroller the primitive Picts and Germans even more quickly than the comparatively advanced Gauls and Britons, unless (as per actual history) it's the terrible weather in the Scottish highlands and Scandinavia that put them off doing just that...

I would have thought proto-Russian bear/land god worshippers would be fighting the Pact of Ragnarok in actual Russian territory as well.


In our universe Rome is still in its Republican stage, and failed to destroy Carthage in the Punic Wars, with the conflict ending in an uneasy truce, with Gauls, Britons, the various Greek states and Iberians still alive and well. Our universe is more fantastical than sci-fi, with technology still being equivalent to Iron Age, but with magic and other races including Dwarfs, Elves, Satyrs, Orcs, Draig (Dragonmen) and Lizardmen upping the fantasy content. Dwarfs and Elves are primarily integrated into human societies, Rome and Carthage both having a lot of them (though China is entirely Elven), Satyrs are a neo-Beastman faction that dwells in the wild places and includes Minotaurs and Cyclopes, Orcs are divided into two breeds (the bulky Mountain Orcs and the wiry Steppe Orcs), both of which are bigger than any of the other humanoid races, the Dragonmen were the original rulers of Albion (Great Britain) and now share it with the Britons, and the Lizardmen dwell in the African jungles south of Sahel (an ancient kingdom south of Libya). All these races are the Bronze Races, created by the collated pantheons of deities after the natural death of the noble Golden Race and the violent Silver Race had been presumed extinct (but were hiding in a few solitary enclaves underground).

I certainly hope so! Do you plan to base your British army on a particular tribe (presumably the Iceni)?

Worth a look, though I've always been unnerved at Scribd being one of those 'Free Trial' sites, meaning I'd only have 30 days to download everything I can find that's worth reading.

Certainly an interesting idea, but currently one that can only be really implemented to its fullest extent on more 'complete' armies like AoS Lizardmen and the more favoured ones like Lumineth and Soulblight - as a fan of the Dwarf factions I can't see it working quite as well for them, given that GW are determined to minimise the new models they get. Not to mention that such complex military terms as 'Infantry', 'Cavalry' and particularly 'Skirmishers' haven't yet found their way into AoS' vocabulary, even with Third Edition becoming more complicated in all the wrong ways.

WHAB does appeal to me, make no mistake, but the two things stopping me from getting into it are:

1. Lack of availability of the ruleset
2. I don't think I have the space to accommodate full-size WHAB armies given I have 6 WHFB and 6 WH40K armies in varying states of completion

I like SPQR as it is smaller-scale than most of the Warhammers while still simulating a lot of battlefield action and tactics. It's more on the level of AoS in terms of army size and scale.

 

Funnily enough I was looking up their free Dark Ages wargame, Ravenfeast, only yesterday in my search for a Dark Ages ruleset. It has a lot going for it - easy rules, a decent level of tactical play, a points system I am comfortable with, an IHMN-style open-points architecture allowing you to add new factions and even fantasy units easily, and I love the fact that everything is free, that really says a lot about the generosity of these lads. The only two things are that there is no reason not to take spears (swords and axes give no clear bonus while spears allow models to support in Shieldwalls, though this could be amended pretty easily - the SPQR mechanics for axes and an adaptation of the Parry rule for Swords could be introduced here) and it's more like the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game in that models operate as individuals, as opposed to units (which was more what I was looking for) as in SPQR, but it's still certainly on the table as a potential ruleset.

It actually doesn't look like much would be required to alter it to accommodate unit play, as models in Shieldwalls operate almost like units anyway (and even individual models also have a facing unlike in the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game), and the 1" unit coherency rule from SPQR can easily be imported into the ruleset. The only rule that appears to stand in the way of resolving combats as units is the -1 to Melee rating when attacked by multiple enemies, but perhaps this could be abstracted to apply when a unit is outnumbered, or attacked by multiple units? (EDIT: Shieldwalls don't suffer this penalty, so perhaps all units could adopt this part of the Shieldwall rules?) Additionally the Big Battle Ravenfeast rule explicitly refers to units, so it's clear that unit-unit combat is something they'd be happy to accommodate.

Between this and my fan-made SPQR expansion I have a couple of different rulesets to experiment with for the Dark Age period.

 

I myself can recommend this channel - a lot of rules discussion and unboxing videos for various Warlord games and products as well as GW stuff, particularly Ancients and WWII.

 

Great to see your collection of WWII minis, I am a big fan of the quad-50 CAL halftrack! Need to get me one of those.

~~~

It is true, I am a fan of Samurai miniatures from the Sengoku Period of Japanese history, and have painted a few... specifically as it pertains to the Battle of Sekigahara!



Shimazu Yoshihiro watching over some clan archers while the Western Army cavalry charges:



Massed ranks of the Tokugawa Clan ashigaru and their allies:



Honda Tadakatsu leading some charging cavalry of the Eastern Army:



Honda Tadakatsu under a cherry tree:



Tokugawa Ieyasu, leader of the Eastern Army and future Shogun of Japan:



What some would consider a FOOLISH SAMURAI WARRIOR WHO STEPPED FORTH to challenge two other samurai on the bridge:



I have many more pictures in my other hobby blog of course. Most of my samurai collection are Warlord Games plastic samurai range, but I have a few characters from other companies.

I am also a fan of Blood and Plunder, a historical pirate game that takes place during the Golden Age of Piracy. Don't have anything painted yet though

I also have some interest in Saga, though I haven't collected anything to play that game. I hear Fireforge Games has some great medieval knights which would be awesome, and they just came out with a range of Sengoku era plastic samurai too!



Looking forward to seeing more of what others are interested in!