6mm Trojan Allies

In assembling models for the the 6mm Trojan War project, I have given much consideration of how to interpret some of the more vague elements, but none has given me more to think about than the allies of Troy. Other than the Lucca and Anatolians there are the Amazons, Thracians and Ethiopians, all of which are psuedo-historical allies. The sketchy history of these allies allows much in the way of interpretation.

First of all, and easiest are the Thracians. The Thracians are described as savage warriors fighting with sword and spear led by a commander in a grand chariot. From what I have managed to leanr and pick up from various sources, there Thracians of this time would have been little different than their later brethren.

They would not likely have developed the Falx yet but would very likely have dressed in the same or a similar manner as they do in later centuries. In 6mm this is particularly easy to pull off and I think that I can pretty much use Baccuss or Irregular's Thracians directly. For their leader I was thinking that I could get by with maybe a Hitite leader on a chariot with a few clever minor modifications and paint.

Then there are the Amazons. For these ladies I was planning on using Scythians. At 6mm scale it's going ot be nearly impossible to tell male from female so it shouldn't matter much and their mode of dress and weapon mix would work well. I did consider throwing in some of Baccus' elven heroes from their fantasy line for some variety.

Ethiopians will be made from a combination of Kushite and Egyptian figures. Though it seems unlikely that the Ethiopians would have travelled so far, there were ties between some of the earlier Egyptian kingdoms and the region where Troy supposedly exsisted, so these soldiers make sense. They would have been chariot warriors, supported by troops armed with javelin and spear and an array of hand weapons.

The Lucca and Anatolians are already supported by miniatures appropriate for these peopless, so no adaptation or searching really needs to be done.

6mm Trojan War

The concept for my Trojan War project was a simple one - find a happy medium between the legendary and historical aspects of the conflict. Having decided this I had to decide which aspects I wanted to include. This too, was a simple choice as Homer's accounting provides a nice cross section of old and new making his accounting a nice "wargame-able" setting. The variety of Homer's "Iliad" is enhanced by the inclusion of elements from other stories such as the Amazon, African and Thracian ally contingents that comes to the aid of Troy.

So, I had figured out what I wanted to include -

1. Variety of tactics - old and new style units combining loose order spear and javelin warriors with long spear and tower shields.
2. Trojan allies.

A pretty simple list, but then again it was a pretty simple decission. The next thing to do was to figure out where to get all this stuff.

This was a challenge because Mycenaean Greece is notoriously under supported in the hobby. There are countless ranges for other Biblical era armies but you are lucky to find more than a hand full of Greek ranges for this era. Add to this the obscurity of 6mm and guess what...you've got like one line Irregular Miniatures.

Irregular is an oldy but a goody. Despite some issues with the way they base up their 6mm figs, they are nicely thought out and a HUGE range. There is also Baccus and, if you can find them, Heroics and Ross, but neither does anything dedicated to Mycenaean Greece. This does however lead me into the next step of the plan...