What would ancient naval warfare be without a land dimension? The short operational range of triremes made the availability of a friendly shore a key strategic and tactical factor, so much that Kagan famously spoke of "amphibious warfare" beside naval. So, should Alkedo not include some marines?? Of course it should! Therefore I will add infantry to the range before sending it all to the moulder to do the "pizza mould".
The scale will be 2mm. First, because the focus should remain on ships: second, because we should need large numbers of infantry and the 2mm blocks works perfectly for that: third, because I already have experience with 2mm: fourth and final, because I clearly could not sculpt anything else.
Given the opportunity, and given that I plan to use the ships for 1-to-1 scale battles, why not sculpt a 1-to-1 infantry formation?
So I am going for half an hoplite lochos in one block: 40 files, four ranks. This way with 2 blocks you have one full lochos of 40 shields, 8 ranks. This I will also use to play the Perfect Captain's beautiful Hoplomachia rules, for which you need lochoi on 2 bases.
This is the first try, sculpted with the same super sculpey I use for ships. Here is compared with Irregular's 78 men block in 3 ranks (BG34):
It's not as pretty, but I am quite happy so far. And it has shields in the front, made with greenstuff and a lot of swearing (it helps a lot):
I moulded a couple of other in resin from the master sculpt and painted them. So, here's what an hoplite lochos would look like if you go back in time, rent an helicopter and fly above a training range or something:
And here it is attempting a periplous on the poor IR block:
Not bad for a first try! Now I want to try and do one in greenstuff, to see if it work better as greenstuff is usually better for organic sculpts.