The Mercenaries DLC for Hegemony Rome just launched today, so here are the concept art pieces I did for each unit.
First up, The Garamante Spearmen. A unit from modern day southwestern Lybia, the Garamantes were a Berber people of Northern Africa. One of the reasons we included them in Rome was to help diversify the units. Not a lot to play with on this one - almost all my research turned up the same images for what they wore.
Second, The Iberian Swordsmen. These are troops from modern-day Spain, which at the time had a few different cultures, including the Iberians, who would later be conglomerated into the roman province Hispania. These were really fun - lots of variation though it was hard to peg down specifics for the time period. Their sword - the Falcata - is beautiful, and very specific to this area, and now I want one.
Next up, the Dacian Swordsmen. Dacia was an ancient nation of Northern Thracians that changed in size and shape over it's history, and was conquered by Rome later, but was generally located in the area of Romania and Moldova now. They used a thin, curved sword called a Falx - the one you see here is a one-handed version, but they also had a longer two handed version that was bad ass. I really liked their scale mail and distinctive helmets.
The Sarmatian Lancer! In our game we gave him more of a spear than a lance (due to animation difficulties) but in reality they would fight with lances between 3 or 4 meters long! They were generally used to run down and utterly destroy infantry. Instead of a lance I've pictured him here with their traditional banner, which were completely awesome and kind of look like dragon heads. In reality, the horses of the time period were quite a bit shorter/stockier/fuzzier but we tend to see non-modern horses as 'wrong', so I kept with a small modern horse.
Thracian Peltasts! Those of you who played Hegemony: Wars of Ancient Greece should recognize these guys - Peltasts were skirmishers and light infantry for Ancient Grecian - and Thracian - armies. They also have amusing hats.
Here's the quick sketch I did for the Suione's ships - basically the precurser to the later viking long ships. There is almost no physical example of them extant today, but they are described in contemporary reports and the carvings you can see that I included above. The top have of the image are my references, the bottom the sketch that I did. I included the ref of the ships that they were using several hundred years after this - but at the time of our game, they didn't have the distinctive mast and sail.
That's it! Hope you enjoyed.
