I recently bought a box of Warlord ancient Celts to bolster my celtic army. Haven't really done a whole lot with them yet, but upon inspecting and washing the sprues, I noticed a funny thing:

Each sprue comes with enough parts to assemble ten celtic warriors, but only five shields. There is no separate shield sprue. Half the celts are supposed to go into harm's way without even a shield to protect themselves?

This reminded me that in the good old days Games Workshop produced plastic shields you could buy separately. They were pretty cheap and I still have a quite a few of them lying around. Now, they are fantasy shields with bold raised detail so not always appropriate for historical subjects, but for example the Dark Elf shields of that era were direct copies of hoplons. As you can see from the picture, the shields were put to good use with my Foundry greeks.

I'm wondering why not provide sprues of just shields, alternate heads and maybe some weapons and accessories? Many ancient shield types are applicable to many armies and with a few spare parts many troop boxes would be much more flexible, e.g. hoplites could be turned into reasonable thorakitai or thureophoroi with some new shields and maybe alternate helmet styles. Nevermind ancient light infantry clad in tunic only - the shield and helmet styles are pretty much the only things separating them from each other.

I'd sure buy some.

maxxon