Swiss

At the end of my previous post I said I'd acquired a pile of painted 15mm medieval figures that I was planning on assembling into a couple of DBA armies. Well, I spent this weekend working on one of the armies. Mostly this involved stripping figures from their current bases, a few minor changes to the paint-jobs on some of them, a lot of repairing and replacing of weapons, the addition of flags and, finally, a complete rebasing.

The end result? An Early Swiss DBA army.

Actually it's more than that; a quick check of the DBA lists showed that the first Late Swiss sub-list is very similar and I had the figures to cover the differences. So I did those as well, extending my army's date range by a massive 25 years.

The Early Swiss army offers the chance to have an force made up almost entirely of double-based troops. I found this quite attractive, despite the fact that it's something of a liability not entirely offset by the advantage it offers. So there's nine elements of 6Bd. Including the general. The rest of the army consist of a couple of psiloi with crossbows, and an element of light horse, also with crossbows. That's it. Very one-dimensional.

The Late Swiss list covers the stage when they switched to pikes, but the first sub-list is still basically the 6Bd, with a small core of pike elements. Four to be precise. The army loses the light horse and only fields six of the blade elements.

I did some reading around and the first 'proper' Confederacy consisted of eight cantons. So I gave each of eight elements one of the cantonal flags. The one element without a flag is the committee that commands the army. The flags really set the army off nicely.

I have no illusions about how effective this army is. The other figures I've got should, if I work them right, give me an appropriate Medieval German list to oppose them, but all of their historical opponents are strong on knights; a troop type the Swiss blades are vulnerable to. I suspect that Swiss victories rely on them being the defender and being very cunning in their use of terrain; pretty much how they performed historically, as far as I can tell. Still despite their weakness the army looks great, and I'm thrilled to have finally acquired it at such little effort, and no cost.