Khitans Completed - the rest of the Liao army
The original blog post can be found here for those who want to go back and read it.
As with the heavy cavalry I am not aware that anyone does a suitable figure for the tribal part of the Liao army. Coupled with that I would need figures that were compatible in size with the Khurasan figures I had used for the ordo cavalry. These are rather large for 15mm figures, getting close to 20mm if we're being honest.
As before I asked on the Society of Ancients forum for any advice on what figures could be suitable, with special reference to tribal horse archers. I had pretty much decided that for the (limited) infantry part of the army that I had planned that I would use Khurasan figures from their Song range - these are larger 15mm figures and quite chunky so would be a good fit.
Evidence for what the Liao tribal troops would look like is pretty limited, however, I found the following:
As you can see a small cap or bareheaded, but with a distinctive hair style appeared to be the order of the day. Otherwise they are fairly straightforward. I assumed that any armoured types would look like fairly typical eastern armoured horse archer types and so something Turkish-ish would be suitable.
Once again on figure suggestions Duncan Head came through with a good possibility. This was Outpost Wargames Services central Asiatic Turk range. These are large figures like the Khurasan ones so looked a good choice on that front.
The light horse archers have no hat but do come with pigtails somewhat like the above illustrations (albeit rather longer) - although not with the shaved head. However, as these are 15mm figures (well, 18mm) the shaved head can be done by just painting over the modelled hair as the Outpost figures do not have deep sculpting. You could do a bit of filing if you wanted but I thought it probably wasn't needed.
The same range has armoured figures which looked OK for armoured tribal types, and as I already had 18 bases of these I was sorted there.
So with the decision made that Outpost was the way to go the cavalry figures were ordered, along with infantry from Khurasan. The latter were some swordsmen, crossbowmen and civilian's with soldiers driving them towards the enemy to be used as human shields - not nice, but I think you have to do them if you're doing this army ...
Painting the cavalry was fairly straightforward; as you can see from the pictures above their dress appears to have been fairly plain and single coloured - blue appears to have been popular based on the figurines. I ended taking the easy route in approximating the hair styles by just painting the top of the heads in a flesh colour - it isn't perfect, but I think at gaming distance they look OK.
The armoured types I already had as mentioned, so no painting needed there.
I also bought figures to use as generals so that they were also of a compatible size. Outpost Turks again. Flags were from the 'net - they came from the Perry Miniatures site and are actually C16th Korean, but work nicely for the Liao as plain coloured flags are shown on the "Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute" scroll mentioned in the previous blog article.
The infantry painted up easily as well.
I am particularly pleased with how the hostage screen has come out.
So that is that as far as my Liao army in concerned - or at least until I come up with a tweak that needs a few extra figures, but that will not be too soon as the collection I have contains enough variety for various setups. Here are some shots of them all.
Superb army!
ReplyDeleteThanks :-)
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