Ostro, Visi, or Plain ?

My plan at this stage of the year was to be painting up some lovely Romans and Carthaginians for Clash of Spears but due to the closure of the UK that had to be put on hold so I had a chance to look at something I had vaguely been planning for next year. The thought was to create a cavalry based human army that could be used in Historical KOW games as well as the fantasy version. Why cavalry based I hear you cry ? For a couple of reasons, one to encourage me to paint more horses and to make them more diverse and interesting and secondly to have an army without the normal large amounts of infantry I field. I decided to use the Kingdoms of Men list as a starting point as they have access to three different types of cavalry and the historical lists play off the KoM as the basis for their units.

As we can see we have the options for heavily armoured Knights, lightly armoured Sergeants and unarmoured horse archers. The next step was to then find a range of preferably plastic models which could be used to build these units and Gripping Beast provided the ranges required. I had initially wanted to go down the Arabic/Muslim route but the lack of plastic armoured horse models ruled that out so the Goths stepped up to take the lead. Gripping Beast do nobles on armoured and unarmoured horses (same models for the riders the kits have different horses) and also a nice fit of generic dark age horsemen, but the horse archers are Roman auxiliary types and my quick internet searches suggested that a horse archer in a Goth force would more likely be Hunnic than Roman.

Fortunately they also sell bow-hands and quivers which could be used to convert the dark age cavalry into horse archers. The bows fitted onto the left arms of the cavalry with a little knife and glue work and then the quivers where added to the backs. I left the right arms wielding a weapon as this does offer some flexibility to add the bases to form the rear of melee units behind spear-wielding models.

So one box of the generic dark age horsemen converted with bows and three standard bearers added from the Goth Noble cavalry gave me enough men for five troops of Mounted Scouts. I went with just three models per troop base to make sure they looked like skirmishers, the aim being that more models will be added to each base as the weight of the troop-type increases.

The basing material is a mix of three different Geek Gaming products, Forest Path, Forest Ground cover and Pine Forest Ground cover. The photos wash out the differences unfortunately but the cover mixes are different enough to offer a variation of colour and texture across the bases to which I then added a sprinkling of grass tufts from WWS.

So that's fifteen horsemen down with a fair few more to go as I will be fielding Knights and Sergeants as well. 

I also painted up the first character for the fantasy army who is an assassin, very useful for taking out enemy characters. With the way the model is sculpted he could be equipped with the Wings of Honeymaze with increase the speed up to 10 inches and gives him fly at the expense of reducing defence down to a 3+. This still gives a fairly cheap hero with a bit of shooting who reliably deal out damage, especially to enemy individuals.

And to answer the original question, I think Ostro.