Big Crusade game, Hail Caesar

Ahh yes it was time for another great battle of Hail Caesar. The initial plan was to bring about every miniature we had to the table and Johan, Håkan and I ended with a rather big collection of miniatures on the table. The scenario was first meant to have the Westerners heavily outnumbered and having to block a Saracen breakthrough and being awarded points for units not braking trough but as it turned out I have been all to productive painting Westerners for my medieval Scandinavian project so the different in points wasn´t as big as we thought. So instead we went with the basic "brake enemy army" as the objective.


First some pre game pictures after the deployment.

And we are off. First turn and the attacking Saracens make a good push forward with only some brigades not moving as fast as we wanted.
And the enemy makes some moves in their turn.

My light horse Turcoman horsarchers manages to push an enemy knight unit back with their arrows.
Neat!

Light cavalry swarms the hill and starts to soften up enemy formations.

The westerners moves forward with some knights tanking the lead and some arrows...

The County of Tripoli Officer of the infantry brigade orders his infantry to form a line but with a blunder result on his command dice 3 units of heavy infantry and a small unit of Crusader veterans charges 3 actions right into the Saracen battle line that is forming up, catching it before they are fully prepared.

First line of Saracens are broken or pushed back. My Saharan brigade are now attacked.

In an attempt to move closer to the enemy and start furling javelins in their side the small light cavalry unit from the Saharan brigade blunders on the command roll and instead charges head on into a heavy cavalry unit of mounted sergeants... That was the last time anyone saw the light horses...

The knights have had some casualties because of the swarms of arrows from the light cavalry. A new line is formed to address this.

My Saharans not only managed to break two units of heavy infantry from the County of Tripoli but manages to catch the veteran crusaders in the side.

Duel between two leaders as both of them joins their units in the fight,

I managed to charge his heavy cavalry in the side with my light Turcoman unit, he chose to not act in charge response as you see here as a heavy cavalry unit of Mamluks supported by a Arabic heavy cavalry unit charges them from the front seconds later.
By first charge the enemy in the side I denied him the counter charge option and besides some extra dices from the Turcomans the enemy would also have harder to hit me in the ensuing close combat ( getting a -1 to hit).

Crusader knights charges right into two units of Saracen medium cavalry.

Crusader knights on the opposing flank are after a successfully start finally halted with a great deal of luck. My Saharan spearmen unit againg catches an enemy unit in the side...

The enemy knight unit have broken leaving the men pushing for the hill in a dangerous position of being outflanked.

Enemy mounted crossbowmen are pushed back after some casualties.

My infantry are about to get really smashed here... Two of my units are already shaken and disordered before the combat.

I sent this unit of Turcomans into the forest in an attempt to cross it and then being able outflank the enemy. During the hole game they only manages to get close to the edge of the forest.

And this brigade commander hardy managed to move his troops as this picture can tell. I thing I will have to talk with this commander about why he didn´t sent his troops forward and why he is still standing behind the ruins.


It was a really great game and with lots of fun stuff happening and funny blunder results like my light cavalry unit doing a extremely bad charge right into a heavy cavalry unit or when four of the enemy heavy infantry unit instead of following order charged right into the Saracens....
Deus Vult.
Håkan could just watch as they moved forward without the support of his cavalry.

I think I will have to award the Saharan officer for his brigades performance with some new recruits for him but Im not sure with what.

And finally my Mamluks managed to really shine, with that Turcoman attack in the flank my Mamluks really smashed the enemy center.
So maybe some more Turcomans could be in order also.

Thanks for reading.

New shields for Håkan and a tent

I have painted up another batch of shields for my friend Håkan and his force of cursed Westerners... ;P

I doubt the historical accuracy of some of them but he is free to skip some of them if he wants to. Buts its nice to have a little variation, to give the unit a little more life. It will be fun to see his units will these fine looking shields on.

And I have also done a little test piece of an tent. I made the designs on a coffeebrake on work and printed it and cut and glued it together.
I think it ended somewhat small and I somehow managed to glue to roof piece on rather tinted... But I thought it would be bad to waste it so I based it and flocked it and its now ready to be used.

So for future tent pieces I think I will do larger tents and add small threads to act as tent-rope or whatever the English word for it is.

Later I plan to also do some eastern design tents oppose this western design one.

But it was rather easy to glue together and I think a couple of these would be a nice way of representing an camp or be used as objective in a game.

Saracen commander

I still think I need more commanders to my force and if we manage to get our campaign games rolling I will need to have different commanders to choose from or if one bites the dust in the campaing and so on.

It was fun to give the models alittle extra time, more then I usually do. I know lots of stuff and details that I missed or skipped on these but it will sure do. The line of unpainted models are still long and in a strange way allways seems to grow even though I keep painting. That Is strange...

With the clothes on the commander i started with a dark gray, and used black to tone it down. I then used silver for the details in the fabrics and used a blue wash to give it a tone of blue on the silver details. I think I should have worked a little more on the lightning on the black/gray before aplying the silver details.

The banner is homemade, I used some pictures I found on the net with nice looking calagrafic writings but I see now that the original picture I used was to bad quality as you can easiy see the pixels. It turned out as a nice banner but it pulls the overall feeling of the command base down a little.

And by the same time I painted the command base I also painted a dismounted Mamluk. I tried to give him the same level of details as the command base. Its allways nice to have some miniatures with better details in a unit, to add to the units overall effect.
The dismounted Mamluk will act as a bodyguard or maybe be mixed into a unit until I can get a whole unit of them... To bad Perrys dont do nearly enought Muslim miniatures to my taste...

The miniatures are all Perrys, and as you might allready know they sure knows how to sculpt...
I think they makes the best Crusader era miniatures on the market and I think they are amongs the cheepest to... The only downside with Perry miniatures are the horrible casts, they are full of flashes and it takes some time to clean up the miniatures befor you can start paint them.

County of Tripoli shields

I painted these 16 shields for my friend Håkans County of Tripoli army, one of my opponents from our clubs Crusader project.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_of_Tripoli)

Main inspiration comes from the Kingdom of Heaven movie.

These are meant to supplement his already awesome looking  knights.