Macedonian Stickman

Morning,

Well, it is here. In, stink, a while ago, HaT brought out a set of Later Greek Hoplites and Macedonian Phalangites. Nice figures, all very well historically researched, well molded armor (for the front rankers, none for the back, which sounds about right)...in fact, why am I telling you all this, go have a look at the HaT site (look for 8045 and 8043 respectively), and the Plastic Soldier Review reviews (Hoplites and Phalangites).

Now the one thing that spoiled these figures for me was the fact that you could actually see so much of their armor. Why? Because they were holding their shields out to the side as if to say "Look at me!". Not really the kind of thing I would want to do when I'm about to engage in some close personal combat. So...




What I did was carefully cut around the back of their shields with a craft knife, being careful to slice up my thumb a good couple of times, and then bend the shields around to their front. With some I even applied a bit of glue to anchor the shields in front of them. For some I applied glue to re-attach their arms!

(Note, that Art element is simply a HaT Scorpion with a Greek Light javelin man and a Cart command figure (I think) with a head swap from a Revell Praetorian.)

With the Phalngites, this had the added advantage of being able to raise the angle of the front rankers, so that instead of their sarissa/pikes (1/32" brass rod) sticking out in front of them, they now had them pointing sufficiently vertical that I could have their element bases in front to front contact with an enemy element base.


OK, so the result is not very uniform (a phalanx would be pretty ineffective if they kept their sarrisa at different angles as mine have here!), but this exercise has meant that I have been able to use all of the poses on the sprue for my Alexandrian pike based DBA armies (such as II/12, /19, /20 and the others who I can't remember the number of...).

So, out of one HaT Macedonian Army box I have been able to pull together 6 Pk elements and 2 Sp. (As well as 2 4Ax, 2 Thracian 3Ax, 2 Ps, 1 Kn (with the help of one additional Zvezda horse and rider), 1 Mac Cv (again, with the help of one additional Zvezda horse and rider), 1 Thessilian Cv, 1 Allied Greek Cv and 1 LH, with a couple of Greek lights left over. Great value for money. So much so, that I've done this twice so that I've got two Successor armies or one Double DBA/Warmaster Ancients army. Cool stuff.

Now, if only I could get round to painting them...