From BillA: Foot Knights of the Livonian Order (125 Points)

As I have mentioned, I'm building a Teutonic Knights force for Warhammer Ancient Battles, which is played regularly at a local gaming store.  The rules contain strictures on how many of certain types of troops I can field in my army - in an Early Period Teutonic force, which is what I'm currently doing, only 50% of my army list may be Brother Knights of the Teutonic Order.  A large portion of my force must be "Guest Crusaders," which for the sake of using figures I received for Christmas, I have opted to make members of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword - originally a separate order of warrior monks, but merged with the Teutonic Order in 1236 following a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Saule.

Mostly this gave me the opportunity to "assembly line" a regiment of soldiers that had a *bit* more color to them than the black-and-white surcoats and shields of the Teutons.  The figures are Fireforge Games' "Teutonic Infantry" plastic boxed set, assembled with hand weapons, for which I had to raid my Teutonic Knights sprues - while the Teutonic Infantry box provides bodies for 24 figures, it only provides 12 arms holding hand weapons, along with 12 arms holding spears, and 12 arms holding crossbows.  So I grabbed some sword, mace, flail and axe-wielding arms from the Knight sprues, since I assembled all of them with lances anyways.

The bases (magnetic, something I haven't used before - fancy!) are painted brown and then flocked with brown basing grit, some tufts of "Winter Grass" glued down, and then varnished to seal the grit in, before being flocked again with the snow flocking.  I went with this because one of the most famous battles of the Teutonic Order (at which the Livonians were a major presence) was the Battle of Lake Peipus, or "The Battle on the Ice," in which the German knights faced off against Russian forces under Alexander Nevsky.

This also represents something kind of special for me: this is the first rank and file regiment I've built and painted in something like 12 or 13 years, since I was in high school and discovered the Games Workshop store at the local mall.  This is, at 24 figures strong, also the largest rank and file regiment I ever built - the biggest I ever did back in the day was a 20-figure strong unit of skeletons when I wanted to build a Vampire Counts army for 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles.  I never finished an army for Warhammer Fantasy, being far too broke as a teenager to afford it.  I'm looking forward to being able to say I've completed an army for Warhammer Ancients.

ByronM: ARRGGG, yet another era that I always meant to pick up and get into.  They look really good all ranked up and the Fireforge miniatures look like they have a fair bit of detail as well.  I like the white and red colour scheme, especially against the snow bases, which also look good for a tabletop unit.

I hear your paint with big units, they are always a struggle to get through, these will look great on the battlefield though with all their high contrast.  24 figures nets you 120 points but I threw in an extra 5 points for all the hand painted shields, and congrats on your biggest ever unit.