Tuesday, 3 December 2024

More Moors

The Moors are coming along nicely.  As usual I'm starting by building a DBA3 army but will probably extend to a small L'Arte De La Guerre (ADLG) army later.  In part this is because DBA and ADLG have different ways of depicting the different parts of the army.  

With DBA there is a standard army of 12 elements which depicts the General, and his bodyguard, as one of those 12 elements and defines him as being a standard DBA troop type (with a bonus in combat).  ADLG on the other hand has generals either as a separate base that can be attached and unattached from any unit of the army or as an attached general permanently linked to a single unit (pretty much as in DBA).  On top of which many ADLG infantry units consist of the equivalent of two DBA elements.  That makes it easier (and cheaper) to start with the DBA version of an army, which is why I started where I have.  Come on you all knew I was a cheapskate!  ADLG also uses an army selection points system with standard games having a 200 point budget. There is a version closer to DBA army size using 100 or 120 points.  That said even at the lower point values an ADLG army is likely to have between 30 to 40% more bases than the DBA equivalent because of the infantry basing system.

Anyway back to the moors (cries of Cathy...Heathcliff in a strange North African tongue should now be ringing in your ears, No? OK maybe that's just me then?).  The General's element is now completed along with the additional infantry.  After some thinking and a query to the hive mind on TMP I decided to use Late Roman Heavy Cavalry castings to differentiate the General from his underlings...er... I mean brave fighting men.  I removed the Draco standard from the command figure group and replaced it with one based upon the Infantry standard.  Which may be wrong but at least it's a standard.


All the army to date, but...wait for it...there is moor to come

When it comes to painting horses I rather like liver chestnut and bay horses as the mainstay of my cavalry. To my eye nothing says 'horse' as much as the black tail and manes of a bay. I do throw in some pure brown, black and greys for variety and the very occasional pure chestnut and roan. I rarely do units in 6mm with all the horses in the same coat colours as these are troops on campaign not the parade ground. If you do spot a unit all of one colour watch out, it will be something or someone a bit special and probably has more oomph than other cavalry formations.

The general's element for DBA

As a final thought I realise that I should have created a Moorish army years ago, honestly the scope for puns is huge!  For a start they are almost all bare headed, not a cap to be seen, although I doubt many have been to Ilkley Moor.  I will leave you to work that one out. 😉