March To Hell Greeks and Persians

Greek and Persian STL Miniatures: The Wars That Made the West

In 490 BC an Athenian army stood at Marathon facing a Persian force that had no business losing. Darius had already taken Ionia, crossed the Aegean and burned Eretria. What happened next became the founding story of a civilisation, and it has been refought on tabletops ever since.

Our Greeks and Persians range covers both sides in 15mm and 28mm, supplied as digital STL files for home printing.

Why the Persian Wars work as a wargame

Because the two armies are nothing alike. A Greek phalanx is a heavy infantry block that wins by holding together and pushing forward, with almost no cavalry and no answer to anything that refuses to close. A Persian army is the opposite: numbers, missile troops, cavalry, and a force drawn from across an empire that spanned three continents.

That asymmetry is the game. The Greek player needs the fight to happen on ground where a phalanx can’t be outflanked. The Persian player needs the opposite. Everything else follows from that single tension, which is why the period keeps producing good scenarios rather than repeated line-up-and-roll.

The Greek city-states

Greece wasn’t a country. It was a collection of poleis with their own governments, laws and armies, sharing a language and a religion and spending most of their history fighting each other. Athens and Sparta cooperated against Persia and then spent a generation at war in the Peloponnesian conflict.

Greek armies. Hoplites in the Corinthian helmet, with the aspis shield that gives the phalanx its name and its function.

Spartans. The one force that trained for war as a profession, and whose reputation did as much work as their spears.

Macedonians. Later, and different. Philip’s sarissa phalanx and combined-arms doctrine turned the Greek model into something that could take an empire, which Alexander then did.

The Persian Empire

Persia gets treated as the antagonist because the surviving sources are Greek. What the miniatures give you is a force with genuine variety: the Immortals as an elite core, missile infantry, cavalry, and contingents from across an empire that stretched from the Aegean to the Indus.

Painted properly, a Persian army looks nothing like a Greek one. Where the phalanx is uniform bronze and a wall of shields, a Persian force is colour, patterned fabric and diversity of equipment. It’s one of the more rewarding ancient armies to paint for exactly that reason.

Beyond the historical armies

The collection includes mythological miniatures for games that want to leave the historical record behind, and printable terrain for building a Mediterranean battlefield rather than fighting on bare cloth.

Printing

Around 0.03mm layer height on resin covers gaming figures at either scale, tilted 30 to 45 degrees for drainage. Spears are the fragile part on any ancient range, and Macedonian sarissas are the worst case: many people print those separately as straight rods and glue them in afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

How do I paint hoplite shields without it taking forever?
The aspis is the best canvas in the hobby and the biggest time sink in an ancient army, so the trick is deciding early how far you’re going. A phalanx with one repeated device across every shield looks correct and historically defensible, since city-states did use common emblems, and it’s far quicker than freehanding twenty different designs. If you want variety, do three or four devices and repeat them rather than making every shield unique. Transfers exist for the common patterns if you’d rather not paint them at all. Whatever you choose, do the shields before you glue arms in place if the model allows it, because painting a curved surface that’s already attached to a figure is considerably harder.

What scenarios can I actually play with these two armies?
More than the obvious ones. Marathon is the headline, and it works because the Greek force has to close fast across open ground before Persian missiles tell. Thermopylae is a terrain scenario more than an army scenario, which suits small collections. Plataea gives you the largest hoplite deployment of the wars. And once you have both armies, the Peloponnesian War opens up Greek against Greek, where the asymmetry disappears and the game becomes about terrain and timing instead. Alexander’s campaigns extend the same Persian models forward by a century and a half against Macedonians rather than hoplites.

Do I need the same scale for terrain as for figures?
For anything with a human reference, yes. Buildings, gateways and fortifications give the scale away instantly, and a temple that a 28mm hoplite can’t walk into breaks the illusion the moment somebody notices. Natural terrain has far more latitude, since a rock or an olive tree has no built-in size cue. The practical advantage is that Mediterranean battlefields need less architecture than most periods: open ground, scrub, a few walls and some broken terrain will carry the majority of ancient scenarios.

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