Join or Die Roman empire

Roman Empire STL Miniatures: 28mm Legions for 3D Printing

The Roman army wasn’t the best because its soldiers were the strongest. It was the best because it turned up in the same formation every time, dug a fortified camp at the end of every day’s march, and could replace a dead centurion without the line noticing. That’s what you’re building when you print a legion: not heroes, but a machine.

Part of Join or Die: Ancient World, sculpted at 28mm and supplied as digital STL files for home printing.

Why the legion works on a table

Roman warfare rewards the player who thinks in units rather than models. A legionary on his own is unremarkable. Forty of them holding a line, throwing pila at fifteen paces and closing with the gladius, is a different thing entirely. The army’s whole identity is in cohesion, which means fielding one gives you a force that plays completely differently from the warbands it usually faces.

It also means the painting problem is the opposite of a tribal army. Consistency is the goal. Get the shield pattern and the tunic colour right once and repeat it, and the finished unit has the visual weight that makes a legion look like a legion.

What’s in the range

Legionaries as the core of the force, command models to lead them, and the unit options that give a Roman army the structure it needs on the table. The sculpts carry the equipment that defines the period: lorica segmentata plates, the curved rectangular scutum, gladius and pilum.

Built to face our Germanic Tribes collection, so both sides of the frontier conflict come from the same range and sit correctly next to each other in scale and style.

The shield is the model

Ancient armies are unusual in that the most visible part of a miniature isn’t the miniature. A scutum is large, flat and faces the enemy, which makes it the best canvas in the hobby and the thing that carries most of your unit’s identity. At 28mm you have enough surface to do proper freehand work on it, and a legion with hand-painted shields looks like nothing else on a table.

That also means it’s the part where print quality matters most. A soft or layered shield face undermines the whole model, which is the main argument for resin over FDM here. Around 0.03mm layer height on resin captures the boss and the rim cleanly. Tilt 30 to 45 degrees for drainage, and check that supports aren’t landing on the shield face where the marks will show.

Frequently asked questions

How do I keep supports off the shield face?
Orientation solves most of it. Tilt the model so the shield faces upward and away from the build plate rather than presenting its flat front downward, which is where automatic support generation will otherwise anchor supports. Check the result in your slicer before printing rather than after, because a support scar on a scutum is far more visible than one on a leg or a back, and it’s exactly the surface you’ll want to paint a design on. Both pre-supported and unsupported files are included, so if the supplied orientation puts contacts somewhere you don’t want them, you can start from the raw mesh and place your own.

Should I print legionaries in resin or can FDM cope?
FDM can produce usable rank-and-file Romans with a 0.2mm nozzle at 0.06mm layers, but the shield is the sticking point. Layer lines across a large flat surface are noticeable in a way they aren’t on a textured cloak or a mail shirt, and filler primer only hides so much. If you’re printing a legion you’ll spend hours painting, resin is worth it for the figures. Where FDM genuinely earns its place in an ancient army is terrain, marching camps and fortifications, where flat surfaces and structural strength matter more than fine detail.

How many legionaries do I actually need?
That depends entirely on your ruleset, and ancient rules vary enormously. Skirmish systems might want a dozen models a side. Battle-scale rules that treat a base as a unit might want thirty or forty figures to build a convincing cohort frontage. The advantage of digital files is that you’re not committing to a boxed count: print eight, see how they look together, then print the rest once you know your settings work. Most people underestimate how much better a Roman unit looks at twenty figures than at twelve, precisely because the effect depends on repetition.

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