Horus Heresy Review: Legion Glaive Super-heavy Special Weapons Tank

The final entry in Massacre for the normal legion army lists is a super heavy. The Glaive is interesting for fielding the volkite carronade. This is a beam weapon with a 1" width that not only ignores cover saves, but also deflagrates as per regular volkite weapons as well as haywires enemy tanks. With a high S and low AP, this can cause damage to anything in the game.

The options are somewhat limited though. I'm not sure one wants to get rid of the default las cannon sponsons. Perhaps heavy flamers might be cute instead of heavy bolters to cure any charging units of their suicidal tendencies. But otherwise, I think I would run the following build:

Glaive, with armoured ceramite (650 points).
The armoured ceramite is almost a given in Heresy era gaming, but could be left out if desired as the HP of the tank is large enough to ensure it'll last a while even without it. Although do note that the tank does have a lower AP to the rear which could be a vulnerability.

Game wise, I think the tank will keep a half decent range from the enemy and pump out shots at heavy tanks, heavy infantry (i.e. terminators) as required. The critical thing is to keep the vulnerable rear facing away from heavy weapons and D class tank killers. To be clear: this tank does not have a D class weapon of its own, so if you do take this tank as a Lord of War, you can almost be assured your enemy will have a D class weapon. Therefore you need to play this tank to its strength. It is not a titan killer. But it will take care of lighter tanks and infantry with ease. 

Horus Heresy Review: Legion Dreadnought Drop Pod

The Legion Dreadnought Drop Pod does exactly what one might expect it to. It delivers a single dreadnought - either a regular dreadnought, or a contemptor (including regular mortis or contemptor mortis patterns of course) - to where they are needed on the battlefield.

More than that, the drop pod has the assault vehicle special rule meaning they can assault right out of disembarkation. But this does not apply to the turn that it drops in to play.

Much like the regular drop pod, it can also drop pod assault, and has inertial guidance systems. Perhaps the biggest new rule here is the burning retros rule which can provide shroud on the turn it arrives.

The points cost is more than a regular drop pod to compensate for its larger nature. But that's fine. As I think the dreadnought drop pod can do more than simply deliver your cargo to where it is needed. This drop pod is very capable of denying lines of sight, providing shroud to anything drawing a line of sight through it, and of forming choke points on the battlefield to exploit and / or box in your opponent with. I think several of these, combined with an orbital assault rite of war from a legion praetor will give you the opportunity to play out a "box in" tactica against vehicle heavy opponents. This would make for a particularly interesting game in my opinion.

I have no build suggestions for this entry, since there are no upgrade options. 

Gun Kata - Dynamic Bolter and Bolt Pistol Arms

Judging by the number of hits on my previous Gun Kata Space Marine article, the meme is a popular one. So today, I wanted to explore it in a bit more detail with some more regular parts. 

One weapon that every "standard" space marine comes with is the bolt gun / bolter. There are a number of ways to build in some dynamism in to such weapons to make any space marine stand out on the tabletop from its counterparts and "regular" space marine armies that just have bolters held across the body in a regular fashion.

In the image below, I'm going to illustrate this with both a bolter and a bolt pistol. Firstly, the bolt pistol. This comes from the chaos space marine range. And the only thing that I've done to it is a wrist rotation. Seriously: that's all. But: it is more than sufficient to give any marine holding it a unique "gangland" kind of vibe as the pistol is now held horizontally such that the empty spent rounds are ejected directly downward (rather than sideways as is usually the case). I pinned the wrist rotation in place to give it extra support, but I don't think its really needed. 

The bolter is a more complicated matter. Firstly, Space Marines are supposed to be ambidextrous. But every model always has the space marine holding the bolter's trigger in the right hand. Both space marines and chaos space marines suffer from this. I think the reason is because the spent bolt rounds supposedly eject from that side of the bolter and hence no one wants to be whacked in the tummy by them ejecting in the middle of a gun fight. But this situation is different if a space marine is wielding the bolter one-handedly. And why wouldn't they - they are super human angels of death after all!

Hence for the bolter, I've used a chaos space marine arm (one that connects to a heavy bolter, or a standard bearer arm will suffice) and attached this to a hand taken from the grey knights range (they have a couple of clenched left fists on the sprues) incorporating another wrist rotation when I attached it. Then, a standard bolter (drilled, of course!) is attached on the top of the fist to finish the conversion. The result: a left handed held bolt gun angled horizontal to the ground that makes a matching pair with the bolt pistol. I'll be adding both of these arms to the same space marine to create a unique gun kata style marine that is holding both arms out to his front, stretched out, and firing away at his enemies. 

Alpha Legion Mk.II Shoulder Pads Unboxing

If it wasn't obvious before, then this post will make it obvious: I'm building an Alpha Legion army as my new force. The army will be a 30k force in the main part, but many squads will also (ultimately) also be viable for 40k as well.  I'm aiming for both true scale, as well as "no model left unconverted" throughout the entire army. I'll worry about painting and colour schemes later.

In the image is the unboxing of Mk.II shoulder pads for the Alpha Legion purchased from Forge World. I really like the design of these shoulder pads: they combine together elements from chaos space marine should pads (the edging in particular) with a three dimensional, raised legion symbol. They come in packs of 10, and I've removed one of the set of 5 from the clam pack in the image below. The resin is reasonable, but thin in some places (nothing I can't cope with). Cutting it from the sprue will need a bit of care as the resin can be brittle if clipped too close to the edges of the shoulder pad. Hence I'm going to clip away from the edge of the pad, and then get closer (plus file it down) when its off the sprue. My only complaint: Forge World doesn't yet produce the classic "A" symbol for the Alpha Legion -- I'd love a few of these in addition to the hydra icon. 

Some of the models built, or in progress for this army can be seen in these previous posts under the "unbroken chain" tag. There will be more updates on this project as time progresses.

Dynamic Squad Sergeant Conversion

Continuing building my new space marine army, today I wanted to display a squad sergeant work in progress. To re-iterate: this army will be following the maxim of "no model left unconverted" whilst having dynamism built in to it where I am able. An earlier example of another marine that follows this trend was my "gun kata" model. Both that model and the sergeant displayed here will eventually receive some true scale legs that I've been working on in parallel to these dynamic torsos. 

This model is built out of an Anvil Industry torso as its basis. This is because I wanted this sergeant to have artificer armour, and I think the torsos from Anvil Industry suits this role exceptionally well. 

The left arm is a power fist from the Dark Angels terminators range. I selected this power fist as I liked the pose -- i.e. the clenched fist, and the angle it made at the elbow -- meaning less conversion work ultimately. That said, I have spent some time scrubbing the Dark Angels iconography off of the fist itself as it would not be appropriate for this particular army. The shoulder of the arm is sliced off and connected to a standard space marine shoulder so that I can apply a regular shoulder pad at a later date (as opposed to a terminator shoulder pad). The entire arm is angled out to the torso such that it is almost parallel to the ground. The idea here is that the marine is in mid-swing of the fist, bringing it up from a lower angle and hooking across his body. 

The right arm is a bolt pistol conversion. The bolt pistol has been completely sliced off from the hand and replaced with a space marine devastator melta bomb. To do this, the melta bomb needed its handle shaved off so that it sat flush with the hand, pictured below. 

The final touches were to add a grey knights back pack (the teleporting one!) along with a head. The head is actually a chaos space marines one, but with the top knot removed and filed down flat to a shaved scalp.

Although there is some work remaining (addition of the left shoulder pad, and some green stuff required for the arm pit), this is essentially done and awaiting connection to some true scale legs. Another very dynamic space marine for the new army!

Old Bits Box Raiding

If you're like me, chances are you have a whole heap of spare bits from your collection over the years. Recently, I rediscovered one of my oldest bits boxes and up-ended it all to search through it for interesting bits that I might use for some of my new army build. 

And the picture below is of the tipped out bits!

If you needed an indicator of the age of some of these bits, you can see some of the really old (original) plastic space marines in the yellowish plastic, plus the front of the original rhino model. And scores of shield from skeletons and other miniatures. The white plastics are from elves and other assorted fantasy products. And there's a whole load of orks, eldar, space marine and other grey plastic bits from slightly latter years in there as well. Plus a turret mounted twin linked las cannon from a predator. I might have to do something with that. 

In the end, I found the bits I was interested in (left handed space marine arms that are doing anything other than merely supporting the front end of a bolter!), plus many other accessories besides.  Lots of fun digging through all this stuff regardless!