Photos of Newline Designs 28mm Assyrians, for L'Art de la Guerre 2020

Cavalry

The Assyrian army is (in ADLG) a pokey mounted force, wit hteh Assyrians being one of the first biblical nationsl to really get the hand of this whole "riding horses" thing properly, and so the army inevitably has a decent amount of cavalry

I'm not especially skilled at painting horses, and tend to go just for a black undercoat, a variety of browns and greys painted all over to leave the black showing through, and then cross my fingers that Army Painter does the clever stuff and no-one really notices as they are looking at the riders.

This kinda works in 15mm, but is a bit harder to get away with in 25mm!

The army comes with a couple of Skythian horse archer units to enhance scouting - you can also field some light camelry, but they are a bit trickier to use and I also thought the Skythians might be usable in a Macedonian Successor army that I'm sure I'll buy one day.

With the figures being so, well, bigger than 15mm I took the plunge and did some vaguely fancy paterns on their tunics. There are "dot within dot" patterns and also some triple-stripe edging (a thick white stripe with a thinner blue stripe on top of it)

This all helps to get a bit of dramatic colour into the army

The Newline figures come with only one set of cavalry, but with three different poses in the pack, as well as separate shields and spears. To separate the Medium, Heavy and Heavy Elite cavalry involves different colour schemes - these are the medium cavalry, who I've also painted with leather strips as the skirting over their tunics. You may notice there are two different types of horse badring here - more of that later!

The figures are simple but effective, with useful poses that can be mixed well. The Medium Cavalry are all shooting bows here, but in the background you'll see a Heavy Cavalry with two of the spear-carrying figures as well.

These I painted as the 4 bases/units of Elites - again keeping the thematic colourscheme consistent with the rest of the army, where Elite troops are dressed in green.

These 12 horses are supposed to be pulling chariots - I made a mistake in mixing them all up on the undercoating table, and then compounded that mistake by mis-counting how many of each type of horse I actually had (18 "normal" ones and 16 "chariot pulling" ones). It does mean these guys have some serious armour around the neck of each horse though, which is probably a win for them

Everyone in the Assyrian armed forces has facial hair in abundance.

On the pale blue barded cavalry you can see the two "proper" cavalry figures flanking the "Chariot-horse" one. There are also some pretty serious heavy-duty tufts on the bases.

From the back you can see how almost everything save the tunic and horse barding colours are identical across the army. Having separate shields and spears does give a lot of options for subtly bringing variety to the figures as well. The platted tails on the horses are from the Chariot-pulling ones

And here are the 4 Elites, 1 Normal Heavy Cavalry (red barding, light blue shield) and the Medium Cavalry (Dark blue shield)

The shields are mostly slung over the horsemen's backs - makes it much easier for me to see the units, unless of course they are retreating!

And here they are again, advancing confidently across the biblical plain.

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