MTH ANCIENT WORLD

March to Hell Ancient World: Greek, Persian and Roman STL Miniatures

The ancient world produced the matchups every wargamer wants. A Spartan phalanx against Persian Immortals. Macedonian pikes against everything. Roman legions against Carthaginian elephants, Celtic warbands and Germanic tribes who kept refusing to fight the way Rome preferred. Antiquity is the period where two armies could meet with completely incompatible ideas about how a battle works.

Our Ancient World range covers most of it in 15mm and 28mm, supplied as digital STL files for home printing.

Armies that fight differently

What makes this period worth playing is that the forces aren’t variations on a theme. A hoplite phalanx and a Roman manipular legion are solving the same problem in incompatible ways, and the Macedonian sarissa answers both by being longer than either.

That produces genuinely asymmetric games. You’re not comparing statlines, you’re working out whether your formation can survive contact with something built on a different principle entirely. It’s also why the period has such a deep rules ecosystem: designers keep coming back to it because the problem is interesting.

The Greek and Persian world

Greek armies. Hoplites and the city-state forces that fought each other as often as they fought outsiders.

Spartans. The professional core of any Greek army worth the name, and the one force whose reputation preceded it onto every battlefield it stood on.

Macedonians. The sarissa phalanx and combined-arms doctrine that Philip built and Alexander used to take everything from the Adriatic to the Indus.

Persians. The empire that all of the above were reacting to, with the numbers, cavalry and diversity of a force drawn from half a continent.

The collection also includes mythological miniatures for the games that want them, and printable terrain to build a Mediterranean battlefield rather than fighting on green cloth.

Rome and its enemies

March to Hell: Rome sits within the wider Ancient World collection and covers Roman warfare across both the Republican and Imperial periods. Alongside the legions you’ll find the peoples who fought them: Carthaginians, Celts and Germanic tribes, plus the broader enemies and allies who filled out Rome’s wars.

That’s the practical value of a range this size. You can build both sides of a scenario from one source, and they’ll sit correctly next to each other in scale and sculpting style.

15mm or 28mm

Ancient warfare was about formations, which argues for the smaller scale. At 15mm you can field a phalanx with the depth of ranks the rules assume, put cavalry on the wings with room to manoeuvre, and still have a table you can reach across. A full army fits in a case.

At 28mm the shields become the point. An ancient shield is large, flat and faces the enemy, which makes it the best canvas in the hobby, and at this size you can do proper freehand work on it. If painting is a substantial part of why you’re in the hobby, this is the period and the scale for it.

Printing

Around 0.03mm layer height on resin covers gaming figures at either scale, tilted 30 to 45 degrees for drainage. Spear shafts and sarissas are the fragile parts, and a Macedonian pike is the longest thin projection you’ll print in any historical range, so check orientation and support placement carefully on those.

Frequently asked questions

Which scale should I choose for ancient warfare?
Work backwards from the game. Rules built around brigades, phalanxes and battle-line manoeuvre get the most out of 15mm, because you can field realistic formation frontages and the manoeuvre rules start behaving the way the designer intended rather than being an abstraction over eight models. Skirmish rules where individual warriors matter argue for 28mm, as does painting: ancient shields reward the extra surface more than almost any other feature in the hobby. Painting time and storage follow from that decision, and both matter more than people expect once you’re building a second army to fight the first.

How do I print Macedonian sarissas without them failing?
The sarissa is the hardest thing to print in an ancient range, because it’s a very long, very thin projection with almost no mass. Three things help. Orient the model so the shaft isn’t spanning a long unsupported distance across the plate. Add support contacts along the length of the shaft rather than only at the ends, since the middle is where warping happens. And let the model cure fully before removing supports, because resin is significantly more brittle when it’s still soft from the wash. Many people print pikes separately as straight rods and glue them into the model afterwards, which is more reliable and easier to replace when one inevitably breaks.

Can I run FDM for an ancient army?
For rank-and-file infantry, yes, with a 0.4mm nozzle at 0.08mm layers on 15mm figures or a 0.2mm nozzle at 0.06mm on 28mm. The limitation is shields. Layer lines across a large flat surface are far more visible than on a textured cloak or a mail shirt, and shields are exactly where you’ll want to paint something. If you’re building a phalanx you intend to paint properly, resin is worth it for the figures. FDM earns its place on terrain, fortifications and larger scenery pieces, where flat surfaces and structural strength matter more than fine detail.

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