The Bronze Age in 3D

While I've 3D-printed some terrain and the odd tank or specialist unit, I've never taken the plunge and printed a whole 'army' for the tabletop.

In this blog, I explore my experiences in creating a European Bronze Age army, inspired by the Tollense Valley battlefield and an article in WS&S 129, The Riddle of Bronze. This will be my first fully 3D-printed skirmish force (ok, not quite an army). 

For those wanting to read more about Tollense, get a copy of Ancient Warfare 103, Battles of the Bronze Age, and learn more about this fascinating period.

I have a few Bronze Age armies, including Egyptians. When the magazine received a PDF of Fire and Bronze, the recent Kickstarter by Bad Goblin Games, we thought it'd be good if we did a Let's Play on the game. For that, we'd need forces, and I fancied trying something new. 

I remembered the article from WS&S 129 and thought it would be cool to collect some models. I found the STLs I was looking for in the vast archives of Wargames Atlantic Digital. They did a set for the Battle of Tollense.

This set had two different factions, one bare-chested and the other in furs. The files have the arms to equip them with various swords & shields, and bows. This was a little limiting; I wanted more! I wanted axes, spears, and slings! But where to get them? And would they be compatible?

Then it came to me, I'd seen bare-armed Sumerian spears and Sumerian axes in the Sumerian collection. Even better, they were socket axes and spears, which fitted with my idea of what these warriors would have been armed with. 

This is where I discovered my first major hurdle. The Sumerian arms looked a little flimsy, so I printed the first batch at 5% bigger. Still too small, so the next batch was at 10% bigger. STILL too small! 

My solution was to print at 20% bigger, or 120% of the original file. In the photo above, you can see some of my rejects. The bigger ones are scaled to 120% and the smaller to 105%. Now, they looked chunky enough for my planned Bronze Age Europeans. Good. 

The next challenge was that there were only four torso types for each faction. I opted to mirror the torsos, which doubled the possible poses. This was only possible as the torsos were pretty basic and didn't have any features on one side - this would not necessarily work with troops from a later era. For example, British Napoleonics would end up with their water bottle and ammo pouch on the wrong sides.

Once the prints were correctly sized and redone, construction began. Armed with my 'trusty' superglue (trusty enough to glue my fingers together repeatedly), I constructed some of my new models.

I dry-fitted the models first, with blu-tack to keep them in place. For the most part, the parts fitted fine, but a few required some careful cutting to size with a sharp knife and some gap filling afterwards. 

The finished results are pretty good. I'm very happy with them. I could supplement them with some other Bronze Age miniatures, but then they wouldn't be a fully printed force. 

I do like the flexibility 3D printing brings to create parts to customise existing models or to build unique ones. They are smelly (mine is in the garage to isolate the household from the fumes), costly (in terms of the initial purchase price), and require a certain degree of patience and technical knowledge (mine was earned by trial and error!). Mine only went wrong twice in printing. Some parts had printed, but then it was the chore of cleaning the tank, re-leveling, and trying again. 

Expect to see a painting guide in my next blog. I ran out of space in this one!