Salutations, gentlefolk !
Was visiting friends over this past weekend, we went to visit some of their friends. One of their friends had done big favor for me this past year - fixing laptop with burned-out screen backlight - and I had been thinking before Christmas that I really needed to do something to repay him. So we were there and he was showing some of new ships for the "Xia: Legends Of A Drift System" SF boardgame.
And I started telling him about DBA, and asked if I could acquire and paint up an army for him. He agreed. So, will be sending him the Gelidis rules outline, and a scan of the back pages of the DBA rulebook, and saying "Pick one".
Well, the worst that can happen, from what I thought up so far, is that he picks an army where the only 15mm figures are really expensive, or can only be ordered via aeropost from Ruritania, or that he picks something like late Medieval German - a period I ain't familiar with, where the landsknechts have these polychromatic 'slashed' outfits that'll be the devil to paint...
Anyway, gentlefolk, your opinions are invited. First, possible problems and complications that I haven't forseen. Second, advice for him on selecting an army. If you were in his situation, what would you pick ? What would you have picked when you began DBA ?
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- Armies with MANY options eg IV/73 Ming Chinese 1t least 19 elements by my count - more if you are sniffy about figure appearance rather than just troop types
- Armies which dismount en Masse eg my favorites III/54b Qaramita (requiring 21 elements)
- Armies with Heavy Chariots - expensive to buy & (I find) really tricky to paint
- I/56a Early Kyrenean which combines both the last two points - Heavy chariots dismounting as 4 spear thats a lot of work.
I wold pick Hussites as having just finished one Hussite Army i really couldn't face doing a second as a matched pair. That is quite a job assembling & painting War-wagons.
When first doing DBA I would have gone for Early Imperial Rome or Maybe Carthaginians possibly Alexandrian - I would want an army I had heard about and naively I might assume that the finest armies of the ancient world would be at an advantage in DBA