Madaxeman's Wargames Blog

Battle Reports and Tourism from Nancy, 2026

In a veritable cornucopia of French-themed, hastily-published content I've somehow managed to throw stuff at the wall and discover that some of it has stuck following the Team CLWC trip to the Nancy ADLG event held only last weekend - and it is already posted on this website!

That currently includes:

A 4-hander military tourism video of our road trip to and from Nancy, featuring:

Reims Cathedral,
Fort de La Pompelle,
The Worlds Largest Pikelhaube Collection,
Hackenburg Maginot Line Fortress (and narrow gauge train),
Nancy,
Verdun,
An abandoned and destroyed village,
Vimy Ridge,
..and one of Frances top abandoned underground rocket-firing Nazi Megastructures, La Coupole!

There are also 5 Video Battle reports featuring the Feudal English army in totally impetuous action against:

There is a vague possibility that there may even be additional traditional-format text-based batreps in multiple languages to come, but that may depend on how effective various free AI platforms are at transcription (or how effective I am at generating instructions for them..).

Having said that, Le Emperor, my erstwhile Franco-Scottish opponent from game 4, has already published his own report of the game as well.

Enjoy!

First posted on 30 October 2026 | 6:08 pm

Alan Cavalry

The FiB Steppe Warrior fest continues with these Alan cavalry, who have shields and short(er) spears.

I believe they are Alan Cavalry, reference number WE-SA05 in the FiB Catalogue.

There are no shield transfers for this lot, so I had to do some old-school "painting of designs" - which is also what happened with many of the Byzantine cavalry I painted last year.

The patterns are mostly based on Alan symbols - it's not just random you know!

They've ended up as being quite jolly - originally I was considering just plain shields, but the combination of the high opacity of the newer Fanatic paints and a new brush seems to have allowed me to do some reasonably simple symbols and make them look better by adding lines and circles of dots around and across the shields - so they may get more game time than I was originally thinking!

First posted on 21 October 2026 | 8:43 pm

The Byzantines Sing the Theme Tune in Kegworth!

Last week (yoiks!) the now-annual Kegworth Codgers Midweek Challenge ADLG event took place in the now-legendary wargaming venue of Kegworth, with almost 40 players convening on a fine Tuesday morning to partake in 2 days of ADLG, one evening of team curry, and either 1 or 2 nights of real ale at a local hostelry.

Having set the theme myself, it surprisingly turned out to be one which could acommodate some of the 15mm Byzantine figures I've been painting over the last year - this time as part of a Thematic army in the year 874 AD.

As things turned out, one player's adverse reaction to the curry (or the beer..?) meant we ended up on odd numbers for day 2 of the event, and so I picked up the bye and played just the three games on Tuesday - but that did mean I was able to get these three, rather unsubtle battle reports out and into the wild in record time.

So, as usual, goggle at the poor military skills on display, boggle at the utterances of the poor troops forced to undertake my poorly thought out orders, and listen in slack-jawed amazement and horror at a Cockney Pub Knees-Up style song about the introduction of the Thematic System into the Byzantine military as the ever-chirpy Byzantine Commander not only writes the army's Theme Tune, he sings it as well !!

There is also the usual post-match analysis from Hannibal, and some glowing reviews of Mark "G." Fry's double-handed tomes covering the Medieval Khmer military machine.

All three reports are now posted on Madaxeman

First posted on 12 October 2026 | 5:03 pm

Yet more Sarmatian Lancers

I'm starting to think I may have bought too many of these - my half-hearted justification is to have a mix of figure types so I can field all sorts of combinations of Lancer, Bow-armed, Elite and Average, armoured and unarmoured Sarmatian, Gothic and Steppe nomad cavalry in the same list with different(ish) figures for each.

Anyways, enough of the post-hoc rationalisation, here's some lancers with bowmen sprinkled in as well.

First posted on 10 October 2026 | 3:44 pm

Sarmatian Medium Cavalry Bowmen

The FiB Sarmatian-fest continues with some "Medium" cavalry - aka "unarmoured", "standard", "generic" or whatever. I'm not even sure which packs they came from, but anyways, they are mostly armed with short spears held in their hands, no shield, and a bowcase and bow on their hips.

I'm not sure if this is a muted pallette or a bold one- there's quite a lot of GW Contrast Militarum Green in there, but also some pale blue "Frostheart" and the odd bit of normal painting going on as well.

I have - like the Skythian Nobles - also added some "spots within spots" to make them look a little more, erm Skythian.

Here you can start to see the bowcases - I have a good number of unarmoured cavalry firing bows, and two of them have made it into this set of 4 bases, but I prefer to use them on Light Horse bases if I can, so I didn't quite have enough to include one shooter per base in this lot.

Unusually I have gone for a pretty random mix of hair colours too - I always suspect there is a "right" mix of colouurs to aim for given the origins of troops like these, but that is probably "mostly black", which is a tad dull - and with many of these castings having bowl-style haircuts it can soon look like The Beatles are riding into battle - which is not a great look TBH.

They are now ready to go and confuse my enemies who will no doubt think they are armed with "light spear" instead of bows!

First posted on 30 September 2026 | 3:21 pm

Skythians (and a half!)

As you will probably already know, I've recently bought an all-options set of Steppe horsemen from Forged in Battle, allowing me to make up any number of horse archer/charging lancer armies from across the ages (as long as you don't mind pretending that the figures sold as "Sarmatians" are also appearing as Alans, Goths, Gepids and, in this particular case, Skythians as well).

One of the downsides of such a morph-tastic army is that you can end up with a lot of very similar figures from the same range, which counter-intuitively sometimes means they can all look a bit same-ey. My plan to avoid this pitfall was to pick up some odd packets from other ranges too and mix them into the mostly-Sarmatian army, and at the top of the list was a packet of 12 Skythian Nobles.

As it turned out, these chaps were actually very different to the FiB Sarmatians, with peculiar armour, shorter spears, and a unique set of horse castings with unusual armour as well - meaning my theory of mixing them into the Sarmatians for variety really wasn't going to work.

Instead I decided to go the opposite way - painting and basing all 12 of the Skythian Nobles up together - which in turn led into another challenge in that the very-unique horses in this pack also only came in a couple of very similar poses.

The solution? Add some Sarmatian horses and riders back into the set of a dozen Skythian nobles to give them more variety - and here are the results!

This had ended up giving me a more-than-needed 6 bases of Skythian-style Noble Cavalry, with the unarmoured horses being from the non-Skythian packs

The Skythian horses are slightly fatter across the back than the non-Skythian ones, which means in turn the pure-Skythian riders also have a wider stance than the Sarmatian ones - so a bit of leg bending has gone on to create this set!

The horses are as usual done with mostly contrasts, with Army Painter Hardened Leather used for the reins.

One not particularly ambitious experiment with this army has been to paint all of the saddle cloths in striped patterns, all of which are sort of different.

The overall effect is one my opponent won't benefit from I guess - but at least I get to see something better than a load of horses arses!

The Skythian Nobles are in this sort of strange blocky armour, which I chose to paint up as being leather scales, using GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes with a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone to really pick out the deep details on these FiB figures.

They are some of the nicest figures I have painted in recent years, making me suspect that Andy the FiB sculptor must have something of a "thing" for Skythians, as they seem to have had a lot more work put into them than perhaps some of the Sarmatian figures!

I've also added a number of "spots", usually in sets of three, but sometimes as edging or sleeve braiding to these guys as well in order to make them a bit more, well, "Skythian-ish".

It's a simple addition, made only slightly more difficult by the addition of a smaller dot of colour inside each white spot, but I feel it is really effective at giving the impression of me having added a lot more detail and made a lot more effort in painting than I have actually done!