The battle for next year’s Battle Day (13th April 2013) has been announced as Chalons (451AD) – the classic Huns vs Romans battle if it wasn’t that the Hunnic army was probably mainly Ostrogothic and the Roman army we certainly mainly Visigothic.
And probably is the big word here. We know that there were lots of Goths involved. And that there was a ridge that was key to the battle. We don’t know where the ridge was, relative to the Goths, or indeed where the Goths were, relative to the ridge. We do know that the battle started late in the day and went on into the night and that there was a fair bit of bed swapping going on – a Visigothic prince tried to kip down in the Hunnic camp but was kicked out, and Aetius spent the night in the Visigothic camp (he wasn’t kicked out).
The good thing is that I have just started on a Late Imperial Roman army; the bad thing is that there were very few Romans in the battle, although some of the local contingents sound like they might have been former garrisons that have become semi-independent principalities, so there might be a bunch of Bd(I) and Ax(O) pseudocomitatenses.
All this means that I need to paint more Gothic cavalry and infantry, which is good because I wanted to do that anyway. So far I think that I will try and use a mixture of Khurasan, Legio Heroica and Old Glory for the cavalry and Legio Heroica (when they come out), Buaeda and Old Glory for the infantry. The Romans are all Legio Heroica who are nicely sculpted, if rather static and chunky. But there is a lot of head variation and they have open hands, which I like. For regulars they look formed and drilled without being uniform.
Old Glory – http://www.timecastmodels.co.uk/og15ancients_3/og15ancients_3.html
VS1, VS2, VS3, VS4, VS5, VS6, VS7 all look good, plus SA2 and SA5.
Legio Heroica:
http://www.legio-heroica.com/Nemici%20di%20Roma-en.html
Only the cavalry are there at the moment, but I am told the infantry will be coming as well.
Buaeda (through Magister Militum)
Not sure about their cavalry as one piece castings – look a bit static.
BAULGN10 look nice though. Might mix in some BAUVIK03 as well. Not sure about the Vikings with axes though.