Romans from Warlord Games

Before I start publishing a deluge of WIP unit posts, I thought that it might be good to take a step back from the units themselves, and explain what all I have purchased, and what the general plan for all these minis is.

As you may recall from early posts, I wanted to add some Roman Empire-style minis to my army, to serve as my more defensive infantry (specifically the Shield Wall, Spear Phalanx, and Foot Guard). I ordered some minis made by Warlord Games, but found out that I did not do my homework; weapons in each kit aren't a 50/50 split of swords/spears, nor were they both complete sets for options. I had a ton of spear-like weapons (pila), but very few swords.

By the time I had finished up my test unit of Romans, I had noodled out a solution to my problems. I decided against weapon swaps from other sword-carrying lines of minis; against building my own swords out of plasticard; and against creating a plastic mold of a sword arm and then recreating the bit over and over with green stuff. Those all would take a ton of time, and my hobby time was rather limited these days. So I took the wimps approach, and just picked up a lot more tiny plastic soldiers. The packing peanuts have settled, and below is my current tally of purchases. All these are made by Warlord Games.

4 Boxes of Roman Legionaries - Fantastic basic kit, but only comes with 8 swords/box.
2 Boxes of Praetorian Guard - Fancier helmets, unique oval shields. They only had 4 swords/box.

2 Boxes of Roman Veterans - Essentially like the infantry from the Legionaries box, but this kit comes with 16 swords (and a bunch of banged-up shields).

For those familiar with the models, or who are following the links, each box has 20 figures, so that's 160 bodies in play... potentially a lot of units when you realize that I can multibase stuff for Kings of War.

Most of the new recruits, headless, but free of their sprue.

The last week I freed the second wave from their sprue, took a general inventory of all the bits I was interested in, transferred that data to Excel, and then spent much of the weekend figuring out what units I could create, and then hobbying, as I had a good amount of free time. Here is how everything shakes out right now:

3 Regiments of Foot Guard

4 Regiments of Spear Phalanx
2 Regiments of Shield Wall
1 Regiment of ???

As I expected, that's a lot of regiments! The unknown regiment is exactly that. I have a ton of bannerman/musician models left over. Their arm bits are different than a typical legionary fig, so I'm not sure what they'll be when all is said and done. They will probably by the last unit to be hobbied on...

In between updating my resume and tons of other boring adult things, I got a fair amount of hobby in on the remaining Spear Phalanx units. Hopefully I'll get a WIP post or something up about them later this week.