Saga Sunday: Poles Apart 3. A Useable Force
For a project that was meant to finish mid-October, I have some explaining to do. Alas, with these things life and sometimes massive hobby distractions get in the way. In this case, It was definitely the former, ripping the spare room out and starting from scratch. Now that’s out the way, I am finally able to sit down and finish the last few knights for my Poles.
The force below is a complete 6-point army that will be large enough to take part in any game for Saga: Age of Crusades. Now I just need my Brush and Boltgun buddies to finish their Crusades forces and we can have a barney!
The three infantry units were completed in time for the last post, around 1 month earlier, as were the knights who will be playing as warriors in the army.
As previously mentioned, using similar colours and designs has helped pull these together to look like part of a cohesive force, and I tried to continue this with the hearthguard knights, too.
The knights riding barded horses were even more of a challenge, as I had to replicate the heraldry on a much larger scale, I have never been particularly happy with freehand (Rob is a freehand God, see his article on Banners!), so I have tried to follow the old adage and KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). I have mainly gone for simple geometric shapes and small details to break up the large areas of cloth.
Using the same colours on multiple knights in the Hearthguard units has really helped speed things up: really helpful when spending so long adding detail once the base colours are down!
As you can see, the above are pretty simple, but when combined into units with the un-barded horses, they make a nice mix and do well enough for tabletop standard.
As an aside, these are not copies of, but inspired by, the heraldries displayed in the Osprey series Medieval Polish army books. These are a great place to gain inspiration, as you begin to see what colours did and didn’t go together, as well as repetitive patterns that can be used to make your force look suitable homogenous and authentic.
The two units of knights painted to date look like this:
When finally fielding the army, I will probably use it in the composition shown below. This gives me a grand total of seven Saga dice to play with (if you want to know more about why this is important and/or how Saga warks click here!): two units of Hearthguard (1 dice each), a unit of 10 foot warriors and six mounted warriors (one dice per unit), and two units of 12 levy (again one dice per unit). Then one of the Knights will masquerade as Warlord, yielding my final dice, until I can get round to painting another suitably imposing miniature.
This gives me a solid base of infantry from which my knights can sally forth to attack. Using the Polish ‘Squires’ to replace lost Hearthguard using warriors, and the Resilience and Shieldwall abilities the infantry can utilise to resist enemy attacks, I think this should work quite well. Only one thing left now, and that is to see how it fares on the battlefield!
Hopefully, the army being a month late and all freshly painted will not incur too much displeasure from the dice gods and Newly-Painted Model Syndrome (i.e. dying within the first five minutes of the game).
Przodu Rycerzy!
Thanks for reading, and if you have any thoughts please comment below. I’m particularly interested if you have Crusades armies for Saga, have any tips, or want to correct my dreadful Polish.
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