Vagdavercustis - My roman project calculated

When I started my Roman project, I searched on the web to see what others are doing with these moulds and models. But surprisingly I did not find very much. 

The best example can be found on the blog of the Westerhope Wargames Group who field really big self casted armies. But I could not find another one making real use of it, only some who mentioned that they have used the moulds like on the DigginForVictoryBlog and Landofthelead. Of course there are others who use them, but it seems that nobody published anything about it.

How much to cast and/or paint?

The armies of the Westerhope club are too big for me to start with. These are self casted miniatures, I can increase the size if needed. And, unlike what most wargamers usually do, I want to create both sides of a complete playable setup.

Let's take the advertising picture shown above from the manufacturer Prince August as an impression. Looks great to me. What we see are two units of 12 legionnaires each in 3 rows of 4 men. And now imagine three times this amount and we have a pretty decent Roman army. 72 legionnaires plus extras. If we divide this number by the 6 different Roman soldiers that we can produce with the moulds, each legionnaire has to be made 12 times. Not so much.

The Germans or "Celts" should of course have about as many figures as the Romans. Here we have 8 different poses in 4 moulds. If I take the amount of 72 from above and divide it by 8 moulds I get 9 castings per pose. I go down to 8 to have an even number and get 64 figures in total. 

Now I just have to know how to group them to determine which figures I need and how much of them.

The Romans:

24 figures (like in the picture) I take as a "cohort" and each of them gets a standard bearer (signifier), a primate pilus and a tribune. I divide the cohort into two parts of 12 men and simply refer to that as a "centuria". Each has a centurion as a leader, an optio as a non-commissioned officer and a musician. Like in the picture above. The whole army of three cohorts is led by a commander on horseback and an eagle-bearer. 

This is, of course, arbitrary and has not much to do with historical formations. All quantities were chosen for practical reasons, not because historical units are correctly scaled down. There is also no connection to any set of rules. I have to admit : I don't know any of the rules for ancients. Something like 'Hail Caesar' seems to be very popular at the moment, is that right...?

The Germans/Celts:

There are of course no regiments, so I divide the miniatures into two 'tribes' of 32 men. Each tribe gets a group of 6 additional figures, i.e. a chief, druid, musician etc.

Total : 

• 72 self casted Roman soldiers
• 64 self casted Germanic/Celtic warriors
• 12 Germanic/Celtic special figures
• 27 Roman special figures
• 1 rider
• 1 eagle bearer

Altogether 177 figures (101 Romans, 76 Celts) of which 136 are self casted. 

Of course there are miniatures missing in this plan. I think of roman archers and cavalry for both sides. It seems that Prince August does not have any plans to make moulds to fill this gap so I will have to take them from other manufacturers.