Hail Caesar Action - been a while

 Yesterday a wandered over to Bren's shed to play a dark ages battle. Bren was fielding an Anglo-Saxon army and me and Stig the Picts. Stig arrived late so we started with out him, and more importantly his troops. So I was outnumbered about 4-3 at the start. In HC Picts are OK but all my troops were only as good as Bren's worse troops and he hada division's worth of better troops.

The battlefield. Hedges across the centre, a crossable river and a couple of roads. All of these were to be vitally important

I set up 2 divisions of Pict warriors on one side of the road and one on the far side. I had some javelin armed light cavalry on the road. I looked a little light on the left

Bren was tooled up on both flanks and stationed all his good troops in the centre. My last battle consisted of me rolling 1s for 5 hours and getting pummelled. Would this continue

Yip. THis was the 1st of 5 double 1s I rolled in the 1st 3 turns. Luckily in HC double 1 is a fantastic command roll so I got to move quickly and got to the hedge line and river 1st. THe plan was to hold there and let Bren feed his men into the meat grinder

He duly obliged in the centre and my Picts broke a unit of Huscarls in the 1st battle and forced his other elite units to retreat.

He tried crossing the river on my right and pretty much had the same fate. I had terrible break rolls all game and get pushed back a lot but I had spectacular melee dice and chopped him up enough that he couldn't exploit any retreat that I needed to make.

Bren also didn't occupy the road and my light cavalry had free reign here, peppering the troops either side. This basically kept his elite troops at bay and breaking up his charges. Meanwhile Stig failed to activate his division, when he finally arrived, then they activated and advanced, and then they blundered and retreated again. 

Finally they got forward to support my very thin line

Then his "mum" phoned and told him he had to go home and take his toys with him. So Stig's useless division was replaced with fewer units from the casulaties box. I advanced and forced Bren back from the road. 

At this point Bren's army was pretty much shattered and mine mainly intact so we called it. 1st time Bren has been beaten with the Saxons, and 1st time my Picts have actually fought as Picts. They won.

We got the rules wrong, to Bren's advantage, and we will play again.

Overall a good game and good to get back to winning ways.

Clearing out the painting desk

With the challenge about to start I thought I'd finish off some of the things that had been started, Dave has been doing this and it's a good way to get back into painting.
First up a couple of crappy elephants from ebay, the home of poorly sculpted miniatures. We have a large hail caesar battle coming up and these will be useful. Also my Pontic army will double as almost any successor army so these are a good option

These are different sizes and came in a pretty bashed up shape, had to add a trunk to one of them but they will do. Based up on 40x60 so can be used for Impetus or any other rule set

I have a minor WW2 addiction caused by James. I picked up a load of german infantry from him and have been looking at them for ages. I've just finished by 1st platoon. I'm using them as Normandy based Fusiliers, far too many SS and paratrooper units out there. It often seems to me that the entire of WW2 was fought only using elite troops.

These are 352 regiment and have a lot of MGs, each base is an MG Rifle section. I done a platoon with officer up graded to a Panzershrek . Also done the company commander and 2IC

More still to paint inc air landing artillery support