Horus Heresy Review: Legion Mastodon Heavy Assault Transport

Background.
Employed only sparingly during the Great Crusade to breach enemy positions, the Mastodon saw increased use in the days of the Heresy as a fully armed and armoured transport capable of protecting its transported marines even against titans to a reasonable degree.

Strengths.
This is both a Lords of War entry in the force organisation chart, and possesses an incredible 40 spaces for transport up for grabs. Importantly, it can also take up to 2 dreadnoughts (taking 10 spaces each) in this capacity, making it very formidable for enemy armies.

It carries out its transport role very well with not just crazy Land Raider style armour, armoured ceramite, a whole slew of hull points, but dual void shields to boot. (Recall: even a war hound titan has only 2 void shields itself!).

Even without carrying anything, its presence in a game is very significant and entire armies and strategies could well be built around its use. Its weapons are formidable enough to be a headache for almost anything (granted, they're not destroyer strength though). Flamers, lascannons, meltas, they're all here!

As if that's not enough, if a unit occupies it, there are houses to snap shots when being charged at, catastrophic damage table rolls get a whopping -2 modifier, and if it survives it becomes a proper ruins with 2 entry points! This is very cool in my opinion and represents such a big structure turning in to a battlefield obstacle that can then be used tactically in subsequent firefights.

In terms of upgrades, the vox relay is a cool way to manipulate reserves for the army and punish the enemy for deep strike mishaps. Take if you want fliers on the board on turn 2. Otherwise, probably don't bother.

Weaknesses.
Destroyer weapons.

Builds.
Mastodon, super heavy command tank (720 points).
Look, you don't have to take any upgrades at all. But hey, you've invested a lot of points already, so why not a few more? I like both the relay vox and the sky reaper battery, but hesitate to sacrifice the sky reaper battery for the relay on accounts of the sky fire rule there (without knowing if the rest of the army includes fliers or not).

This could be just downright dirty with the right army. Consider the Iron Hands with Head of the Gorgon rite of war for instance. Or how about Ferrus Manus himself in an unbound list? Ferrus Manus *inside* the Mastodon? With air support? Good luck.

Horus Heresy Review: Legion Vindicator Siege Tank Squadron

Background.
In the original Betrayal publication, the Legion Vindicator was a singular selection for the Heavy Support slot in the army list. Here, in Retribution, it appears that this decision has been reversed to a more standard 1 to 3 tanks in a squadron. Nice! I'll therefore simply update my review for the original Vindicator entry here.

Strengths.

Genuinely, I'm quite fond of the vindicator as a tank. The Betrayal book explicitly notes that the vindicator finds a lot of use in both Iron Hands Legion and Sons of Horus Legion forces. But for my own part, I regularly use vindicators with my 40,000 Death Guard armies and have won some solid victories through the holes they've manage to punch in enemy lines.

My earlier reviews of Chaos Vindicators and Dark Angels Vindicators still applies in the Heresy era (modulo the daemonic possession stuff in the chaos variant, of course!). I think they make great tanks for many legion armies, but they are competing for a heavy support slot against other viable options here (assuming we're not playing with unbound armies). One interesting option available in the Heresy era is to replace the demolisher cannon with a laser destroyer array. I like this option as it provides a very nice tactical flexibility (especially coupled with the overload option).

Weaknesses.

As with rhino's, the rear armour is something to watch out for. Otherwise, its a very sound and robust tank with very little worries beyond positioning and range.

Builds.

A few sample builds to think about.

Legion Vindicator, dozer blade, armoured ceramite (145 points)

I think this is probably the baseline vindicator for the Heresy / Great Crusade era. The use of the armoured ceramite is almost a given to protect against lance and melta a little better and the dozer blade to help the tank get where it needs to be.  Add a machine spirit and/or auxiliary drive to taste. Of course, naked works well as well here.

Legion Vindicator, Laser Destroyer Array, armoured ceramite (150 points)

With a slightly larger range than the destroyer cannon, the need to move around is lessened and I've removed the dozer blade. This is probably the baseline build for the laser destroyer variant.

Legion Vindicator, dozer blade, armoured ceramite, havoc launcher, machine spirit (185 points)

For when you have to get somewhere and you want to pressure the enemy significantly. Half tempted to replace the havoc launcher with a heavy flamer for counter charge purposes. At this price tag, it starts to get expensive though.

Legion Vindicator, Laser Destroyer Array, Heavy Bolter (145 points)

At first glance, this seems kind of odd. But then factor in that the weapons both have the same range and realise that this combination could be a character killer.

Legion Vindicator, dozer blade, hunter-killer missile (135 points)

Cheaper and highly expendable. This one - particularly if taken a couple of times and filling out the heavy support slot - can be a painful experience for an opponent.

Wargames Gallery: Overlooking Wraiths

Surprised that some Xenos Eldar even managed to scratch their land raider, let alone wreck it, the Tartaros armoured terminators of the Alpha Legion plot their next move carefully overlooking some Eldar wraiths!

[I lost today's game very narrowly, but it was a good one! If nothing else, its taught me that 30k legions can be competitive against even the might of 40k Eldar when played right. In the image, you can see my updated paint scheme on my terminators and a selection of Alpha Legion decals applied to the shoulders of the terminators.].

Heldrake Base Colours

I am currently in the process of painting up a Heldrake for a friend. The colour scheme for this one is green, with lighter edging. Not too dissimilar to the efforts that I put in to the Warhound Titan that I am currently finishing off to be honest.

The image shows where I'm up to. The base colours are now all in place. Following a black undercoat, a silver airbrush layer was applied to ensure a certain shine on the model, followed by a couple of thinned down layers of green. Reikland Flesh edging was then applied to offset this green colour nicely, and is slightly Nurgle suggestive in parts.

The model is not yet finished. It is simply to a "table top standard" at this stage (which is to say more than the usual 3 colours minimum that is specified by some tournaments). I'd like to do some shading next, but the model is needed for play soon, so I'm pausing at this point and will continue with this one later in the year. 

One of the problems faced here though was the sheer spikeyness of the model! I like to hold the model in my offhand whilst painting. Yes: I know I could do other wise and use the stand, but its just the way I like to undertake things. But oh my! - my offhand feels very prickled right now! I'm going to bed to heal up and hope that I don't get a Nurgly infection!

Sgt. Alpharius Accepts

Sgt. Alpharius accepts your challenge, Eldar!

(which were almost my exact words to the local Eldar player for this week's round…).

And, as everyone knows, a more completely painted miniature has a much better probability of surviving a battle. Which is why I've spend some time on this marine (and others) painting on some battle damage (partially complete - please note!), eyeballs, and a small heap of other detail such as the decals. Enjoy!

Perennia Knight Basecoat

Proceeding today with the base colours for my Imperial Knight (an interesting allied option for my Alpha Legion forces, I thought!), I wanted a colour scheme that would somehow resonate with them. Then I recalled that I had started a green colour scheme for my Warhound Titan. Everything clicked in to place and I decided that the Knight would be from the same Forge World as the Titan -- Perennia. 

The undercoat here is black, airbrushed on. This was followed by two silvers (gunmetal and rune fang) airbrushed in to position. On top of this, I have applied three coats of (very) watered down zinc green from Vallejo airbrush range. The idea is to build up the colour in a layer of glaze, not unlike the shiny colours one often sees associated with Alpha Legion or Thousand Sons (or even a beast like a Scorpion of Khorne). 

I'm pleased with the metallic green effect and will proceed on to the edging soon enough!