Ancient Galley Warfare: Persian Triremes

With this September being the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Salamis, George and Steve have had the great idea of refighting the battle down BIG, assuming it has re-opened, using Osprey's Poseidon's Warriors (with a few other sets waiting in the wings in case we don't like it). Both Steve and George have a number of Xyston Miniatures 1/600th galleys so that dictated the scale, but at £7 a ship, I didn't fancy spending around £200 to raise a fleet (nice though the miniatures are). A bit of research led to the discovery of Voxelhouse's 3D Ancient Navy on Wargame Vault for under a fiver and Matt kindly printed me off 20 plus ships for about 80p a ship.

In the game galleys operate in squadrons of five ships, so I've painted up 15 triremes with one archer tower and 5 with two towers (I will confess my nautical knowledge does not stretch to specifically naming what specific types of trireme these are).

Given the amount of ships that will be on the table I have painted the squadrons in different colours, but with some individual embellishments to break up the uniformity.

I went for quite bright colours then painted Soft Tone dip over to provide a slightly grubby, weathered look which I think has worked ok.

A few of the triremes were damaged and missing their sternposts (this might have been a printing issue we didn't spot), I did try adding some using jewellery makers wire courtesy of SWMBO but it just didn't look right so I dispensed with them.

All in all I'm quite happy with them, I could have spent more time on them but I don't think it would have made them look much better and en masse they look quite cool...