Saga Irish

Another long overdue blog post, originally intended to be posted about six months ago when I finished painting my Saga Irish army. I've used the army a handful of times since then with mixed success. There are problems with the list, though - so that's a good place to start.

6 points of Irish for Saga, ready for battle

 The figures I have are as follows:

1 mounted Warlord

10 mounted Hearthguard

2 mounted Curaidh

8 dogs and handler (Warriors)

24 Levy slingers

I usually field this (6 points) as Warlord, 2 Curaidh, 1 unit of 10 Hearthguard, 1 unit of 8 dogs and 2 units of 12 Levy. This generates 6 Saga dice while keeping unit sizes large and providing a lot of shooting power. 24 Levy spearmen combined with the two Curaidh armed with javelins (the Hearthguard are not javelin armed) can provide a lot of harrassing power!

However, I have found this army tricky to handle to say the least. The problems I have are mainly in getting enough of the right dice to handle the two levy units as well as everything else, and make best use of the Battle Board (Sons of Dana in particular). In my experience this army is affected particularly badly if it doesn't roll enough stags, and in my experience you never have enough of them!

Warlord

The Irish Warlord

This is the mounted Brian Boru figure from Crusader Miniatures. The horse seems particularly tall at the front for some reason, but I suppose that makes him stand out. Curiously if you do have the Hero of the Viking Age Brian Boru in your Saga force, though, he is on foot, so it is just as well they provide a model of Brian on foot in the same pack. It's a great figure but mine isn't yet painted as I have wasted ages scratch-building him a chair (taking the text from the rulebook literally!)

Hearthguard

10 mounted Fianna

To get variety within a common theme, my mounted Hearthguard (and the Curaidh) are a mixture of Gripping Beast Irish, Welsh and Strathclyde mounted figures. These were a lot of fun to paint, and to start with a bit of a challenge as it has been ages since I have attempted to paint 28mm horses. To get the colours and patterns right, I took some photos of the horses at the riding school my daughter goes to from time to time! Initially I started using oil paints on a white undercoat as this has worked well for me in the past - but it just did not work at all this time, leaving very obvious brush marks and, not giving the richness of colour that I had expected. When they were dry I overpainted them in acrylics, effectively starting again, and that seems to have worked quite well.

To make it clear that these chaps were not armed with javelins, I equipped them all with what are probably over-long spears made from 1mm brass rod.

The men themselves warranted some detailed painting so several of them have detailed borders and all have very detailed Celtic-style shield designs, some of which I really went to town on, and am very pleased with. These shields are my own derivations of designs obtained by Internet searches for Celtic and Irish shield patterns.

Close-up of my favourite shield design (no, it's not a transfer)

 Curaidh #1

A heroic pose

Actually Gripping Beast's mounted Irish Warlord figure, but distinct enough to represent Curaidh as he is holding his sword aloft in a suitably heroic pose.

Curaidh #2

Anther fun to paint shield design on this one

This is really supposed to be a Welsh cavalryman, not that there's a lot of difference in the Dark Ages, but as he comes with cast-on javelins he is destined in this army to be Curaidh rather than Hearthguard. I painted his horse skewbald based on photos of the horse my eldest daughter was riding at the time.

Dogs

Woof

These are Gripping Beast's pack of seven dog figures and their handler. The dogs are excellent figures, the handler much less, so I enhanced him by painting a slightly fancy border to his cloak. The dogs were painted with a base coat of either dark brown or dark grey and highlighted with progressively lighter shades of brown, grey and white.

Levy

Crusader Irish levy

Gripping Beast Anglo-Danish levy slingers

These were made up of one pack of Gripping Beast Anglo-Danish levy slingers (which I could of course therefore also use in my Anglo-Danish army) and some packs of Irish slingers from Crusader Miniatures. These are great, with very poor-looking barefoot peasants including women and children. I painted them in very drab colours as befits filthy peasants.