Victrix Miniatures Add Ancient Horse Archers To Their Collection
July 14, 2022 by brennon
Victrix Miniatures has been previewing more of their upcoming plastic miniatures. This time around, they are looking at more 28mm Ancients and their Ancient Horse Archers.
Ancient Horse Archers // Victrix
A lot of work has been done on this range now which should be coming in the near future. As with a lot of the Victrix range, the collection features a bunch of dynamic sculpts that are full of motion. They always look like they are charging into the heart of the action or skirmishing around on the battlefield.
Ancient Horse Archers // Victrix
Within the collection are a bunch of male and female warriors including a bunch of head and arm variants for them. The Scythians actually did have female warriors fighting alongside the men and you can mix and match them in as you see fit.
Ancient Horse Archers // Victrix
The collection has been designed so that these riders could be used to represent Scythians as previously mentioned plus Saka, Dahea Tribes and also the Parthians. In addition to having plenty of bows on display, there are also plenty of daggers, swords and axes that you can hang onto their belts.
This set shouldn't be too far off so if you're looking forward to snapping them up. It could be great alongside a whole host of the Ancient metal and plastic miniatures out there.
Are you tempted by these new plastics?
"They always look like they are charging into the heart of the action or skirmishing around on the battlefield..."
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No the Mongols are coming, brilliant looking figures.
Now they do look nice. Victrix certainly do make some beautifully animated cavalry. I have some Huns and these would make for some good allies
Fantastically versatile set. I do hope they have used the horses that are smaller than the whoppers that some of the sets have. These steppe ponies should be smaller like the Numidian cavalry have, rather than the big chargers the Gallic cavalry are on.
There’s always been a “niggle” about horse archers when we see them in miniature form. The pose is always the “classic” one of the archer firing from the gallop, the problem arises (if you are playing a rank and file game rather than a skirmish game) that when you base them up the riders are mainly going about the business of shooting their brothers in arms in their right ear.
Now classically horse archer never rode “at” the enemy, rather they rode across the enemy units frontage shooting as they went (which is where the classic horse archer pose comes from and is what we see here), and even they sometime rode in a circle formation in the enemies front (for example this one was popular with the Huns). Now we can’t really do that when basing for a rank and file game. Perhaps there’s a possibility if the game uses KoW style multi-base/footprint style basing. But again ALL the horse archers are in an actively firing pose (perhaps this would be useful if you wanted to depict your horse archers as being surrounded?).
I do wish as some point the sculptors at Victrix (and other ancient minis companies) would look to adding other poses (like loading, or even just riding while holding the bow “down” ready to use). You do perhaps see one or two options in sets like these, but the majority are all in “ear piercing” poses.
BTW this isn’t really a rant at Victrix (the figures are really good), but rather a niggle that’s been there for years now in how horse archers are depicted, and the problems with basing them up for use in a game without them look “odd”.