No posts for a while as I have been busy working on sixty-five elements of two hundred and sixty pikemen to complete a Ghurid army, the last of the quartet of my middle Eastern armies for DBMM, and because they are all the same figures I wanted to wait until they were all complete:
The Ghurid dynasty was another short-lived empire based in Afghanistan between 1149 and 1215 AD. They conquered the Ghaznavids and, like the Ghaznavids, pushed into India. There is therefore a fair bit of overlap between the Ghanavid and Ghurid army lists with the main difference being that the latter utilised mail-coated foot and were armed armed with a long spear, usually carrying a 'karwah' or pavise. Unfortunately no manufacturer makes a specifically Ghurid foot figure carrying a karwah, but Forged in Battle do a nice long-spear armed and chain-mail armoured Arab figure which ticks all the other boxes quite nicely:
There are six poses in each pack, and only four outside the two command figures, so by the time I got to figure two hundred and sixty I had seen a lot of the same poses:
These are however nice crisp castings so it was not as big a chore as it otherwise might have been:
There is an option in the army list to double-base the figures. This has the advantage of reducing the points cost of the second rank which can still lend support to the first, but a disadvantage in that if the first rank gets killed the second goes with it:
I opted to base forty-two of the elements on double bases:
And twenty-three on single bases. There was no way I was going to paint an additional couple of hundred figures to accommodate this variation and the double-based figures can still be nominated as single elements when required, with the single-based elements acting as loose change.
April also saw the completion of another fifty-two Daylami warriors to provide an additional thirteen elements to the thirty-three previously completed, just in case I ever need to field the maximum:
With the Arabs all now finalised I have commenced work on my remaining 15mm Forged in Battle army in the form of some 15mm Dark Ages Welsh, which I hope to complete over the next couple of months.
