New Army, New Kingdom

 

Over the past few months I have been working through a new army and have now reached the end - as much as any army ever really gets finished.

This one is a New Kingdom Egyptian of Ramesses III, the second pharaoh of the 20th Dynasty and the last great ruler of the New Kingdom period.

Read on to see what I have produced ...

New Kingdom Egyptian is one of the classic ancient wargames armies with numerous gamers have the army for numerous rule sets. Personally, I have generally preferred the Hittites myself, but in many ways the late Bronze Age armies of the major kingdoms are quite similar. Despite this I have always felt I ought to do a New Kingdom Egyptian army at some time.

The trigger for actually doing the army was seeing the 3d print figures available from STLs from Red Copper Miniatures. I don't have a 3d printer, but I have a friend who does (well a few actually) and who would be willing to do the printing for me. So I worked out what figures I wanted, including options, and some time later a box of figures came my way 😁

The figures partly attracted me because of the active poses many of them have of a sort you don't get with metal figures. There is a bit of a downside with some of them in that at the 15/18mm scale they are, some of them are more fragile than metal and there may well be some breakages along the way; I had a few whilst painting, however, they glue back together really easily so it wasn't really an issue for me. Will need to be a bit more careful whilst handling them in game than metal, but again that shouldn't really be an issue.

I was also pleased with the accuracy of the figures. Whilst they do contain some of what I'd call "fantasy" elements (seems to be a bit of a thing for 3d print figure designers), they were not egregious and in my view they look the part.

Most wargamers seem to go for the army of the 18th or 19th dynasties when doing a NKE (especially the 19th) presumably inspired by Thutmose III or Ramesses II - the Battle of Qadesh with its copious propaganda sculptures by the latter is an obvious inspiration. However, I decided that I'd go for a slightly later period, the 20th dynasty, under the leadership of the last great pharaoh of the New Kingdom, Ramesses III; certainly a greater commander than his earlier namesake and who also has left quite a lot of sculpture/reliefs at Medinet Habu about his campaigns.

By the time of Ramesses III substantial numbers of foreign troops were being used instead of native troops - Sea Peoples, especially Sherden, and Libyans were receiving land within Egypt as military settlers. This increased following Ramesses III's great victories over the Sea Peoples early in his reign when many more were settled.

Therefore, my army contains a large number of these troops. Here are some pictures which show the whole collection (plus a wide shot at the top of this blog piece).

The large number of foreign infantry does mean there are fewer chariots than many people like to take in an NKE army, but as my Hittites are chariot heavy this does mean this army is different from them (be a bit silly to do 2 armies that were basically the same).

In the pictures you can see the chariotry on the wings with some skirmisher archers in front of them (Nubians on the right, Egyptians on the left).

The first line of the infantry are all archers, again with a Nubian unit on the right of the line. In MeG these latter can be "Skilled Shooters" making them much more effective, but they are also "Tribal" so don't manoeuvre as well.

The second line of infantry has 2 Egyptian units in the centre with a unit of Sea Peoples/Sherden flanking them on either side.

The third line has 2 units of Libyans in the centre again flanked by Sea Peoples/Sherden.

The 4 single chariots bases are the generals, Ramesses III to the front of course 😎

For a normal MeG game about 75% of the figures would be used, the rest are providing alternative options.

I'm very pleased with how this army build has turned out and am looking forward to getting them in a competition in the not too far future - definitely one in July.

Finally, here are some pictures of individual units.