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My Carthaginian Army! also a review of PSC 15mm plastics range for ancients

 

I have spent much of the past month painting 15mm Carthaginians and their allies. The army is initially for playing Le Art De La Guerre, the latest hydra head from the DBM rules heritage. Further down the line I intend to use them for historical scenario pickup games, possibly using the Age of Hannibal or Hail Caesar rule sets.  

 

My forces are made of a mixture of miniatures. The bulk are from the Plastic Soldier Company (PSC) Mortem Et Gloriam ‘Pacto’ range. It would appear that PSC picked up older moulds from both Xyston and a range called Corvus Belli. They then retooled them to take a form of plastic they refer to as ‘Ultra Cast’ and spin out these box sets mostly to support their published rule set.

 

I went for them as they had fairly good reviews and were cheaper than the alternatives. Most companies in this area charge around £4.50-5 per pack, with a pack being 8 infantry or 3-4 cavalry. A couple of companies charge £15-16 for 24-30 infantry figures instead.

 


By my basic maths I paid around £0.43 per figure for infantry with most alternatives coming out between £0.50 to £0.65 per figure. Overall I probably saved around £10-15 on the total set of figures I bought. This is an appreciable saving, but was it worth it?

 

The good

 

The plastic takes paint well. They advertise it as not needing and undercoat. This may be true but it would likely lead to greyer looking miniatures. They don’t chip and the paint doesn’t rub off easily.

They are sort of bendy. If you press them hard they will break, but there is some give and spring. This should make them more survivable in a drop

They are light. This is sort of obvious compared with metal, but a base of 8 heavy infantry is lighter than two metal slingers from Xyston.

They scale well. They are about the same size as the Xystons I have, and also the minifigs and Matchlocks from my SYW set.



The sculpts are generally nice. There are some outliers here, but I particularly like the gauls and Carthaginian infantry. The horses are good too. The soldiers heads are slightly oversized and give them a bit of a gnomish look but generally they look good. More on this later.

The Carthaginian range has spears on the sculpts, so no need to fiddle around with wire. Their plastic spears are sometimes bent, but they won’t break easily making them low maintenance.

They have a good range of poses. Most units have 2-4 different sculpts/poses so the army looks dynamic.

 

The bad

The plastic does not take polystyrene cement well. At least not in my experience. I spent several hours trying to stick on shields with it and ended up resorting to super glue. Super glue does work fine.

Some of the sculpts (particularly the Spanish) have what my friend called ‘Trump faces’ and I agree. They also remind me of the fishmen in the Lovecraft short story Shadow over Innsmouth with their snub noses and big round eyes. It’s not a major factor at this scale but the faces are generally not great.



There were quite a few miscasts. Out of the 80 odd figures I bought perhaps 10 had noticeable casting errors. Either tips of spears missing or sliding of the sides of the face etc. For a massed unit this doesn’t matter that much as the whole effect is what you notice but I would not buy these for skirmishes.

For DBX type games the variation in troop equipment is a little awkward. For realism this is a non issue. In games we like units all carrying the same weapon and for some units such as pike blocks this is obviously important. However it is unlikely that all Gaul’s carried spears in one group and swords in another. The Gaul’s in particular were a mix of weapons and my army list calls for swordsmen. I should be able to just explain this to my opponent.

I’d give them a middling score on flash. They had more flash on than any of the metals I have bought so far but it wasn’t a major problem for a craft knife.




Overall I would consider buying again. They are good value for money. At some point I intend to build a Syracusian Greek force to oppose my Carthaginians and I may go with PSCs range. However their Greeks do require piano wire spears so I may be tempted by another range with spears on the sculpts.

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