Codex Imperialis

Mantic corporation army box review

2012-03-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist picking up one of these beauties when I first saw the preview on Mantics website. They really reminded me a lot of the old style Imperial Guard of second edition, but in a good way.

I have a soft spot for the Necromundan Guard in their grey overalls and black flak jackets and these chaps reminded me a heck of lot more of them than the Cadian plastics did. So i grabbed a box as they're going for 25% off or more on many independent sites. Here's the good and the bad:

Good:

Cheaper than cadians
Scale looks better when compared to SMs
Lasguns look better scaled to the models
Really easy to assemble with very little trimming
They come with rules included should you want to play Warpath

Bad:

They really SMELL, badly. I had to put them back in the box they smelled that bad. Hopefully once sprayed that'll change.
There are no options, not even for a sergeant without power fist.
Special weapons are a bit meh and heavy weapons much smaller than GW IG equivalents
The base molded to the feet needs trimming off if you are using scenic/GW bases, and you'll need a sharp knife!
The poses are more limited than the GW models but this isn't really a problem if you ask me.

So in conclusion I am happy with them and intend to use them as the core of an IG army one day. Here's a scale comparison pic to help others decide whether or not they like them better/worse/same as GW models. Cheers.

Heterogeneity in painting/modelling 40k armies

2012-03-16T06:17:00.011-07:00

Firstly, sorry for the confusing word in the title – goes back to my days as a cell biologist. Heterogeneity is, on its most fundamental level, a lack of uniformity. Conversely, Homogeneity is an abundance of uniformity. Where is he going with this you may ask, and for the answer we have to look back in time to 40k second edition.

Second edition was the era when I first became enthused towards 40k as a system. When I revisited my love for that system a few years ago it was towards the end of 4^th edition and I was immediately struck by one thing – you had to take a single army now.

Back in the days of second edition it was perfectly legal to mix and match different armies within a single list. For example, I could take an army that was mostly Blood Angels with some Ultramarines in support. Or I could take a 50:50 split between Space Marines and Imperial Guard. For me this was ideal as, at the time, money was scarce and I based my purchases on what models I liked the most. Therefore I had mostly Blood Angels with a few Wolf Guard Terminators, some Ultramarines, Dark Angels and a few Eldar allies.

When I started collecting again I realised this had to change and that a single army needed to be my focus (the allies rules went out with 4^th ed) and thus I steered towards Blood Angels. Anyone who has seen my blogs will know that even the best of intentions can go awry and, over the past few years, I have built up more armies than any sane person would dare to. One of the driving factors behind this is my need to have variety within my hobby, both in terms of gaming, hobbying and painting.

Now to the crux of the matter – which armies in 40k could be described as Heterogenous? Firstly lets look at those which aren’t.

Codex Space Marines of any flavour are still going to be Space Marines and mixing and matching a squad of each is going to look disjointed as far as an army goes. Imagine having a different colour for each squad, commander etc. While taking squads from different companies within a chapter for some variety is perfectly fine, intermingling chapters just seems a bit wrong. Likewise for black templars.

Blood angels and Dark Angels are a nice way for Painters to get some variety. Though the majority of your Blood Angels will be red, gold is a usable on the elite choices and black on death company. Likewise, Dark Angels allow you the opportunity to paint bone deathwing and black ravenwing as well as the green/robed majority. Space Wolves, ironically, are more uniform especially as they mostly fight as a single Great company without including others. Luckily for painters there are a lot of bare heads and wolf fur shades to play with and keep interest.

Grey Knights and Sisters are comparable to Codex Marines except for one thing. That is, they have Inquisitorial/Ecclesiarchial elements which provide a small respite from the mundane power armour painting.

Then we come to the Xenos. Tyranids, as exciting as they may be to model, all share the same basic paint scheme which will usually be two colours for the majority. The fact that hive fleets are geographically distinct makes it difficult to argue for a combined presence on the battlefield and thus, with perhaps the exception of lictors and Ymargl stealers, they are mostly similar to paint. Tau also are mostly uniform with Kroot and Vespids (does anyone even use them?) to break up the painting monotony.

Now we start to get to the more interesting armies in terms of painting. Let’s start with the Orks. The fluff suggests clans more often than not combine under the banner of a warlord to fight. We are therefore left with 6 very different armies in terms of preferred units, modelling and paint schemes, which we are free to mix and match. This allows for a great amount of painting variety in an army which is already a great army to convert and model.

Next up are the Eldar. Craftworld Eldar retain a core of models which will be uniform in terms of the vehicles and guardians, yet depending on how you choose to paint them you can add great variety to an Eldar army through Aspect warriors. Likewise with Dark Eldar, the gestalt army made up from Kabals, Wych cults, Hellions, Reavers, Scourges, Beastmasters and Haemunculi has allowed me to paint several different schemes which are all tied together with the same armour colour. Similarly for their craftworld cousins, a blue sash/feature shows alaitoc allegiance while keeping the aspect colours distinct.

Imperial guard are an interesting contrast. To some they may seem like the most homogenous of armies to paint, yet when we look at the fluff nothing could be farther from the truth. The Imperial Guard often fight as a joint force with infantry being supplied from one or more regiments, tank divisions from another, artillery from another etc. Therefore it is perfectly fesible to make each platoon a different scheme, say cadians and catachans, with a seperate army commander. Veteran squads from each of the other major regiments can be added (mordian for example), tanks from Armageddon, artilleru from Krieg and so on. This makes them a very flavourful and varied army to model and paint.

Lastly we come to chaos and daemons. Due to the existence of 4 Gods and 9 distinct traitor legions (plus many more renegades and hopefully soon cultists too), chaos wins hands down as being the most heterogenous army in 40k. The variety of modelling and painting possibilities means that literally every unit in your army could be a different allegiance/colour scheme.

I hope this long-winded article hasn't been too painful to read but I felt it was an intetesting look into army choice from the perspective of someone who paints and models principally.

Rise of the necron - the army of fluoro-chrome crons takes shape.

2012-01-31T03:47:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post this for a while and so belatedly here is an article showing off the newest army to the collection.

OVERALL ARMY THEME

For this army I wanted a very bold look, something that says we may be millions of years old but our technology is that advanced that we don’t appear to have aged a day. To this end I thought I would experiment with plastikote chrome spray paint to give the army a super-shiny look. It worked pretty well with the chrome covering the units nicely, if needing somewhat longer to dry between coats than regular spray (24hrs) I wanted the vehicles to remain black however and decided to further distinguish the nobility by spraying all command level units (HQ/most elites) gold rather than chrome.

There were a few other nuances I also wanted to add to the army. I decided to paint all of the sternum logos hawk turquoise with a gold symbol as I liked what GW had done with the turquoise effect on both tomb kings and necrons. I also wanted red, terminator-like eyes and so washed the recesses black before painting them red with a glow around the eye sockets. Note, it’s actually very hard to get black paint to stick to the chrome in order to wash the recesses so before painting en-masse I may apply a coat of varnish first. Lastly, I wanted to add in the glowing green effect traditionally borne by necrons. Dissatisfied with GW paints, I opted for vallejos fluorescent green and yellow which, after a snot green basecoat, made the details of the ribs, vertebrae and gauss weapons stand out fantastically. Also note that I paint gauss in green, tesla in blue and plan for particle weapons in red for a bit of variety,

As well as the paint schemes there were things about the modelling I wanted to change. Firstly, with the exception of the monolith I decided to use no green plastic rods in the army. For the warriors I bought some ghost ark flayers with the newer, circular design to the flayer-barrels and began casting them up to place in the warriors flayers. I also cast the gauss cannon tubes from the annihilation barge and added them to the destroyers gauss cannons. In addition, I converted crypteks, magnetised triarch praetorians/lychguard and customised the lords to some extent. (see later) For basing I used the crystal bases form evil mushroom games which are a bargain at £3 for 10.

UNITS

The overlord is the one from the annihilation barge and is magnetised on both feet so he can be removed from his base and placed on the barge and vice-versa. I have 3 lords to accompany him, two being the old lord models with the rod atop their warscythes destined to be replaced with the orbs from the newer plastic warscythes. A third lord not pictured is being converted using a spare destroyer lord body, plastic warscythe and immortal legs. The crypteks were custom built from both the immortal and lychguard kits.

Elite

The C’tan are nothing special, just the standard models which I ultimately hope to paint in a non-metallic style as it’s not something I have really experimented with before. I assembled the lychguard with shields and swords as I used the warscythes for the triarchs/conversions and figured it would be better to give them more survivability in combat over blatent offensive power. I used immortal arms for some of the poses and magnetised them at the waist so as to be interchangeable with triarch torsos. The triarchs (not pictured) are almost done as I had to cast the necks (no problem) and the torso fronts (big problem) from greenstuff. I’m nearly done with them although it has been problematic trying to marry up the plastic backs with the greenstuff fronts. I armed them with rods of covenant as they seem the best option.

Troops

The warriors were simply chrome sprayed with the paint scheme mentioned above applied. I did buy a lot of models from my nephew which he has already painted in his own scheme. As well as practical issues with repainting, they are actually nicely painted and so I think I will let someone else buy them from me on ebay and replace them with the contents of a battleforce ultimately.

Fast

The destroyers were converted to have modern-necron gauss tubes and have also been magnetised to hold both a gauss cannon or an extended barrel custom heavy gauss cannon made from the annihilation barge cannon. I hope to rebase and repaint the scarabs at some point in the future , whereas the wraith will probably go on ebay with the warriors. I also used the deceivers base decoration as a nice objective marker.

Heavy

For the annihilation barge I went with black with green in the recesses. I painted the tesla hawk turquoise and didn’t attach the crew so I could spray them chrome. There are magnets on the dais to attach the lord and the pulpit is easily clipped in place. The monolith was restored (no DOW pun intended) from an EBay purchase and I’m still not 100% sure where I want to go with it. It’s the only model in the army to retain the green rods as I didn’t see the point with replacing them with casts of the newer style. (for reasons mentioned above) With the paint scheme, I’m painting the same fluorescent green into the gaps between armour plates to make it look as if an internal energy source is ‘leaking’ through. I may paint the spires and/or lower corners with the same gold spray to symbolise it being the roaming fortress of the cron nobility and to mark it as more important than the other vehicles but we’ll see.

FUTURE

The army has already participated in a battle in which it drew. It should be relatively simple to get the army painted up to standard quickly, though I feel it could use a few other elements to make it work better. At some point a couple of battleforces to replace the other warriors, add some immortals and ghost arks and bolster the scarabs seems like a good idea so we’ll wait and see with that one. For now I have still a couple of triarch torsos to assemble, one more lord and a lot of gauss flayers to cast.

Cron-versions! Destroyers and crypteks

2011-12-30T04:22:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

Thought I would post here before uploading these latest creations to my blog (links at bottom if interested). My plan for necrons when I decided to collect them was to use as little green rod as possible in order to have all the models be more uniform. Sadly, where some models had updated gauss weapons (immortals, annihilation barge) others were left with the green rods of old. I therefore decided that I would update my models to look like the newer incarnations. The immortal gauss tubes were too large/small for either the destroyers or warriors, thus I decided to acquire and greenstuff cast the ghost ark flayers for warriors and the annihilation barge gauss cannon for destroyers. Here is the result for the destroyer in the first pic below.

It worked pretty well in the end, but then I decided to take it a step further. Having never been a fan of the heavy gauss cannon model, but wanting to use them in game occasionally, I came up with a way to magnetise the annihilation barge gauss cannon (ABGC) as an extension to the regular one. I first removed the six pronged nozzle from the destroyer GC leaving the stub in place. I then cut the mount off the ABGC and drilled a hole the same size as the stub into it. I placed one disc magnet (with a smaller diameter than the stub) onto the stub, one onto the nozzle (to allow me to use it as a destroyer) and one inside the drilled hole. (to allow the heavy destoyer stock extension to be added) I'm really happy with the results which can be seen in the second pic below.

Now to crypteks. With the range of plastics available and a dislike for the monopose cryptek model, I decided to build my own. I made 4 in total, 2 armed with eldritch lances and solar pulses; 2 with the 'quake' staffs.

For the generic cryptek I used the imm/dm legs, spine and torso front, plus the rear torso and head from the deathmarks. The chin was the rear part of a particle caster from the triarch praetorian kit and a cast of the loinplate from the lychguard and triarch tail were also added.

The eldritch lance was a deathmark gun with the stock cut off and replaced with an orb from the top of a warscythe. The barrel was excised and a particle caster (with the part for the chin removed) put in its place. This allowed the lance to be wrist mounted. The solar pulse was simply a triarch voidblade with the sides cut off.

For the quake staff (name escapes me at present) I used the destroyer lord staff of light and, in place of the transparent green rods, used the offcuts from the deathmark gun barrels. the right arms were spare lord arms.

So that's my conversions for now. I will be converting more destroyers soon as I get some more green stuff - same goes for the warriors. Thanks for looking - comments/crits/questions welcomed. Cheers.

Necrons on the horizon

2011-11-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

I had planned to get the new Necron book for the sake of reading about the new fluff and units, but had never actually planned on getting any models as the army had never really appealed to me before. Funny how fate always intervenes to tempt me off the righteous path. (anyone who can see the tabs to the right can see this is not the first time) A conversation with my nephew who was after my old lizard tank (R.I.P Flick) led me to discover that he had a small necron army secreted away from years gone by. After giving it brief consideration I decided to go for it and trade the tank setup for the crons.

I won’t pick them up til Xmas, but in the meantime I wanted to mess about with some paint schemes etc and thus picked up a catacomb barge and some second hand crons from my FLGS. I wanted the scheme to be bright and bold and thus put some old metallic sprays from a DIY project to good use - chrome for the rank and file, gold for the nobility. I decided to use turquoise to mark out the dynasty and picked up some resin bases from the excellent evil mushroom games (google them – highly recommended!) to go with them. The results are below:

My main problem now is deciding on a scheme for the gauss weapons. The four possibilities are below and I would really appreciate some comments about them i.e what people prefer.
The first one is just a blue colour scheme which I initially liked but then decided wasn’t very necron-like.

This one is just the main scheme with the regular rods in place – I’m not sure whether or not to change the main gun housing colour (black?) also.

This is a mock up of the flayer style seen in the new ghost ark kit – I had planned to either acquire some spare ghost ark flayer off ebay or GS cast some in order to make things more uniform in the army.

Lastly, a simple coloured piece of wire in order to represent the flayers as they are in the Dawn of War PC game, a simple stream of energy that dissipates when the warrior is deactivated.

Opinions greatly appreciated please folks. Cheers.

Blog wars 1.5 playtest

2011-11-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

As some of you will know, Alex (From the Fang/Kabalite) arranged a mini-tournament for himself, Matt, Dave and I last weekend down at Maelstrom. When I learned two of the three other armies were power armour (SWs/BAs) I was only too keen to get the my Eldar out of retirement (still on a power armour hiatus for the moment) and put together a list, which was as follows:

My first game was against Matt and his new Necrons, which I lost to badly. The combination of the C’tan power making all difficult terrain dangerous closed my army down and in conjunction with two of the quake staffs inflicted many casualties upon my troops just for trying to move into range to be useful. Suffice to say that by the time I was in range to do any damage my army was already below half strength and there could be only one outcome. Sadly for Matt he won on a bit of a low through bad the misfortune of performing a sweeping attack with his named Lord’s barge (Anrakyr?), only for him to roll a 1 on dangerous terrain and give away 4 kill points.

Fresh from that game, I took on newcomer Dave and his Blood Angel JP list. Not disillusioned by my initial defeat, I went on to claim 8 tournament points from Dave with the Eldar performing superbly. Dave was let down by some unlucky dice, especially on his honour guard squad, but hopefully took it as a learning experience for the main event in a few weeks time. To me it demonstrated that while the Eldar list suffers against mechanised/ranged armies, it is more than capable of cleaning up against other foot lists, which my friend Dan found out when we played a similar list Vs his Tyranids last month.

Lastly I played Alex and, though it wasn’t so much of a whitewash as my first game, I ultimately couldn’t stand up to his wolf list. For the record though, his wolf lord made an inordinate amount of 3++ saves on his last wound and his Grey hunter squad made in the region of 40 3+ saves over 3 turns of combat, only failing one. To say I was frustrated is a vast understatement, but to his credit he did give us a great day out and drive us to Maelstrom and back despite suffering some foul virus.

So big thanks to Alex, Matt and Dave and hope everyone enjoys BW2 – if not for exams I would be there too.

Dark Eldar approaching completion

2011-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

So I’m nearly there with the Dark Eldar project. Everything is magnetised and based, most things are undercoated and some models have got a lick of paint on them. The colour scheme I had always planned for on them was one of black base-coat, purple edges and a purple wash all over to blend the edges and tint the black. This scheme won’t apply to every unit; namely the reavers and hellions who are going to be more flamboyant, but everything in the army will have some element of black on them. Here to illustrate the scheme are a few very early stage models and my Lelith model who is nearly finished. Comments and crits appreciated.

New blog!

2011-11-08T00:19:00.000-08:00

Welcome! Due to the overloading of my other blog, index astartes, I have branched out and created a new blog: Codex Imperialis.

The idea is that all things pertaining to space marines shall remain in Index Astartes, while all things Imperial, Xenos and chaos shall live over at this Blog.

Over the next few months I hope to slowly get a structure in place and photos of all armies and project armies finally uploaded.

For anyone who hasn't visited Index Astartes before, I am a serial offender when it comes to putting together themed 40K armies on a budget and now am only a few armies away from having them all represented.

Please check back soon. X