Mandragola’s Legio Astorum (and Mortis and stuff)

[General Zodd]

Agreed, those hexagonal roofs are a very good idea! As for combining kits, here are a couple of my attempts, hopefully they might help get the creative juices flowing!

 

 

And here’s a more straightforward example I did. The smaller building on the right is just pure manufactorum, though.

 

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Excellent work on the manufactora (plural?).

[schoon]

Those hexagonal roofs are great. I will have to steal that idea!

 

And as always, your terrain is excellent General Zodd.

[Mandragola]

Yeah someone else came up with the hex design. I think it was Mendi, though it was a while ago. The cool thing with hexagons is that the three sides have the same width (or diameter?) as if you had to equal-sized panels straight. So my building with the hexagonal ends is the same thickness as one with straight ends, and the same sized roof panels fit on it - apart from in the hexagonal bit of course.

 

Here's my first effort at a composite building, mixing kits. It's actually two buildings in theory because the top bit isn't glued on yet. This needed a bit of work with plasticard and green stuff, but not too much in the end. Originally I was going to make much more of the upper structure from plasticard and other gubbins but I decided it would look better to use the nicely detailed "proper" bits. 

 

 

Edit: It occurred to me that the top bit might look better the other way round. It fits on perfectly like this, I'm surprised and happy to report. What do you reckon?

 

 

In possibly more interesting news, I played an actual game of Adeptus Titanicus! I took my Mortis army out for the first time against Zach from Goonhammer, with Gryphonicus. Bit of a classic rivalry, and an opponent I was very keen to meet.

 

It was a 1750 point game. I had:

 

Mandatum maniple

 

Penumbral reaper with bastion shielding

VMB/plasma warhound

Quad laser warhound

 

Ferrox maniple (all with bastion shielding)

Reaver with laser, fist and missiles

VMB/plasma warhound

Twinferno warhound

 

Zach had a sort of weird Extermigus maniple with two Reavers added in. His Warlord was Bellator Magno. He had a lot of upgrades on his titans. All had spark of vengeance. Bellator and the warbringer had plasmatic binders and tracking gyros and both Reavers had motive sub-reactors for free speed boosts. The warbringer also had hunter shells on a gatling blaster.

 

 

We played using the open war deck. The objective was chokepoint (capture the middle of the board). Deployment was diagonal. It was misty (-1 to hit >15") and we were on a war world, so we were getting shot at by quite nasty artillery. I had a secondary to drop a virulent payload, preferably in the enemy deployment zone. Zach had to keep me away from his board edge.

 

Deployment was like this. Nothing too fancy. My Ferrox hounds were on the left and the Mandatum ones on the right.

 

 

A lot of stratagems got played right away. I used march of the dead to move all my titans around (mostly forward) and gave Penumbral Reaper experimental motivators for free speed boosts. 

 

In the early turns we mostly had three fights going on. My Mandatum hounds on my right faced Zach's Seniores in a reaver with Melta and Fist. In the centre my Reaver and Warlord faced Zach's Warbringer and Warlord. On my right my Ferrox hounds faced Zach's other Reaver.

 

Things started reasonably well for me as I was able to strip the shields from his Seniores' Reaver. It then took a coordinated strike from my Mandatum hounds in turn 2, getting a leg blown off by a plasma blastgun in the flank.

 

However, Penumbral Reaper and my Reaver's shields didn't hold up at all well advancing in the middle and they were both getting hot. I had to do some emergency repairs and hide a bit in the mid-game, rather than the heroic charge I'd imagined. And on the left the Reaver had a charge order, so my warhounds had to dodge around to avoid getting their heads punched in. The Reaver gave up chasing them and went to reinforce the centre instead.

 

My twinferno hound got in behind the Warbringer and Warlord and did a bit of damage, but eventually that Reaver killed it, just outside Zach's deployment zone.

 

 

Towards the end of the game there was an almighty clash in the centre, filled with failed orders and lots of injury done by catastrophic damage. My Reaver died and killed one of my warhounds, as well as damaging Penumbral Reaper a bit. The Reaper then failed a charge order, as did Zach's Reaver. I had priority so I moved the Reaper in and used the bloodthirst stratagem to kill the Warbringer (which had been softened up a bit by my remaining Ferrox hound). The enemy Reaver then killed the Reaper though, only to be killed in turn by the Warlord falling on it.

 

The Reaver actually wildrifed into my nearby quad-laser warhound. It didn't do very much damage but crucially it pushed the hound back a little bit with the concussive effect of its fist. This meant the hound was just outside of 10" of Bellator Magno, who was therefore able to kill it with its only remaining gun, its paired gatlings.

 

 

The last act of the game was when the off-field artillery killed Bellator Magno, who had taken a load of damage by this point. This didn't actually matter for the mission, as he'd backed away from midfield (and Penumbral Reaper) but it did mean none of Zach's engines survived.

 

In the end, of ten engines that took to the field, this was the only survivor. It wasn't on the objective but it was near enough to Zach's board edge to prevent him getting any points from holding the line. This meant I won thanks to 5 points I got when my twinferno hound with virulent payload died.

 

 

Meanwhile this was the state of everyone else!

 

Edited August 16, 2021 by Mandragola

[Gattopardo]

That looks a great game. Hilarious levels of destruction and quite a lot of challenging decisions and manoeuvring by the sounds of things.

 

How did you find using Mortis? Was March of the Dead helpful? And what about the Mandatum? That's a maniple I'm keen to try but haven't got a chance to use yet.

[Mandragola]

Yeah it was a very fun game. There was a tricky call on whether to push on with my Reaver and Warlord when both took a lot of early damage. In the end I hid and repaired a bit. It didn't save them in the long term but it kept them alive longer, soaking damage., And I get punished every time I push a Warhound's reactor, so I should remember not to.

 

I didn't really like the Mandatum maniple. It does nothing for the Warlord and as it happened the Warhounds didn't really want to be near Penumbral Reaper. That's because the Reaper was going into the middle of the board where there was lots of other scary stuff. It might work better with a brawler Warlord rather than a melee one.

 

Ferrox remains an incredibly powerful maniple. My flamer hound got around the back of the Warbringer and then the Warlord and they were able to do some pretty respectable damage by kicking things as well as firing their guns at point blank range. But that's a pretty normal thing - Ferrox has always been awesome.

 

If I was doing this again I might change things around a bit to just take a Ferrox maniple with Penumbral Reaper in support. The Reaper gives out buffs to all nearby engines regardless of what maniple they're in and March of the Dead also activates everyone.

 

The alternative would be to run either a Regia or Fortis maniple. The logic for this would be that my engines are already incredibly dangerous up close, so it makes sense to take a maniple that will help them get there, rather than pushing for even more damage output.

 

The main Mortis trait didn't do anything at all. The two engines of mine that got kills died themselves pretty much immediately afterwards. I think maybe there was a shot where a Warhound could have benefitted from rerolls but I forgot, and then a Reaver fell on it. Penumbral Reaper killed the Warbringer but then died in the next activation. One enemy Reaver was killed by Penumbral Reaper's death (yay, a second kill!) and then Bellator Magno died to a random effect so nobody claimed the kill.

 

I did like march of the dead a lot though. It's a strat to build around, so obviously it's more use if you're going for melee than standing back and shooting. Even then you could potentially use it to line up a bunch of shots. It's almost like putting all your engines on full stride without losing their shooting, which is great.

 

Edit: to allow me to run a Regia or Fortis maniple I've started work on a new Warlord. I'm using a couple of Valkyrie missile pods and the cradles from a pair of laser blasters to make some old skool apoc launchers. They'll need a bit of filling but I think it works ok. I've also got a set of gatlings set aside for this guy, and a whole assortment of arm weapons.

 

Edited August 19, 2021 by Mandragola

[Mandragola]

Construction update!

 

 

I've been busily making buildings to try and get a board's worth. I've now got nearly all the big stuff built, so I thought I'd show my efforts so far.

 

The first thing I put together was these fairly straightforward slab blocks. These are meant to be quite big LoS-blockers. I might add roofs to these to put on another layer or so of height.

 

 

Then I did a couple of similar ones with hexagonal ends. I think these look a lot better. The hexagons are also a bit more efficient as three panels make almost as long an end to a building as four would have. These should also probably have roofs, probably with spires on top of.

 

 

An irritating feature of all of these bits is far too many doors. My plan for this is to add balconies made from plasticard. I've also saved a lot of railings from the civitas bits where they weren't needed structurally, which I hope to use for these. Overall I get the impression the Civitas terrain was intended to build rather smaller buildings than I wanted, but I wasn't about to let that stop me!

 

So that's given me three sets of two large-ish buildings. They're probably four residential blocks and two generators... or something. I decided to make some more individual things for my town.

 

This is a building I started a long time ago, when I built the front with the two towers, and never finished. I had assumed that the heights of the different bits would work together but found that they actually don't. A tiny plasticard fill where the tower meets the central walkway bit probably won't be a problem though. It's a shame as it limits what you can do - essentially each layer needs to be made up of similar-height bits.

 

 

This is meant to be some sort of depot or dock facility. The open walls are going to have roller shutters for two little hangars and a vehicle entrance on the ground floor. I think this has come out quite well. I tried adding some of the bits to put ground defences on the roof. I like the radar dish but the macro cannon looked rubbish so I'll try something different.

 

 

Finally this building. I think this might be something official like a governor's residence or some other government function. I think this is the building I'm most pleased with. It's got an awful lot of plasticard inside it, which just about works. I'm not sure what sort of pinnacles to have on the spire things so for now I've left them off.

 

 

I'm thinking of using these two things to flank some sort of triumphal arch. That would require quite a bit of work, which is daunting. I've got a few bits left but nowhere near enough to get up to the height I'd need. Instead I think this'll be made largely from plasticard, and maybe some more 40k terrain. I've got a vague plan that blank walls could be covered with banners. It would be quite fun to have an arch marking the planet's compliance, perhaps achieved by Legios Astorum and Mortis together - in happier times. I'd need to do some work on the statues to make them represent the two Legios better, but it could be done. I could just change the shields slightly - one already says Mortis but the hourglass is wrong.

 

 

I haven't figured out what to do with all my spires bits. I have this idea to use these ones as pedestals for statues, using 30k marines. This guy was just on my desk so I'm using him to show roughly how big a figure would be.

 

 

What do you think? C+C very welcome.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Mandragola

[Mandragola]

I thought I might show a bit of a "how to" on doing Civitas buildings. Might be useful for anyone else approaching this stuff.

 

First I think about what I want the thing to look like. This can involve scribbling a plan, or multiple versions of one, as I did here. This allows me to figure out which pieces I need and how many of them. Actually in this case it was more an exercise about using up the bits I had left after my other stuff.

 

 

So then I prep all the bits. There's a lot of flash to remove and this can be the slowest part of the job.

 

 

I put the building together in sub-assemblies. Usually I make each whole wall and then stick them together first. Then I start connecting them together, often adding internal structure to help support it.

 

 

This building has hexagonal ends so I made those separately. I glued the small wall sections to the tops of the big, lower ones to make six small walls and then glued those to the plasticard semi-hexes (if that's a word).

 

 

Here's what it looks like underneath, showing the various bits of reinforcement. 

 

 

And here's the finished building, with a spire thingy I'm thinking about using on top.

 

 

 

 

 

[LameBeard]

Trapezium?

 

Sorry, old habits die hard. I’m very tempted to get some of these and copy you, they look amazing. It’s just other projects competing for time and budget!

[General Zodd]

I *really* like these, Mandragola, the Demi-hexes are a great idea, but I’m particularly taken with your hangar/garage building. That’s such a good idea!

 

I found the same thing about the differences in height if you mix and match wall heights on the same floor. I ended up having a little pile of 3mm wide 1mm thick plasticard which I could snip to the right length for any gaps I ended up making. As much of a hassle as it is, I think it’s by far the best way to add some interest and make them look less like square boxes.

[Interrogator Stobz]

I'm totally stealing many of your ideas on the use of terrain sets dude, they are great.

[Sherrypie]

The bay area is indeed rather nice, always good to bring some life to these oddly barren ghost towns full of grandiose edifices yet devoid of people.

[Mandragola]

Thanks all. I do quite like that landing bay, but it's also causing me some issues. I feel like really it should be a little bit bigger to allow space for things like fuel tanks. In reality those would be kept safely inside though, so I probably shouldn't.

 

Anyway I'm becoming aware that I've got the LGT Titanicus event in just over two weeks' time. I'm planning on taking my Mortis there and they aren't ready. I think I'll be taking nine engines but only one is based. I've got a Warlord ready to undercoat and a Reaver still on its sprues, so there's work to be done. Might need to pause the buildings for a few weeks - though I may well do some little bits on them here and there.

 

Edit:

 

Speaking of those Mortis engines, I've assembled their second Warlord. For this guy I had a play around with Valkyrie apoc launchers. It's taken me ages to find the right bits to create a mount for them that I was happy with, but now I think I've managed it. Let me know your thoughts on these.

 

 

Here's a rear view showing the mounting. It's made out of the Warlord's laser blasters (which suck, and which I've got several sets of). They're backwards but with the pistons removed and stuck on the back/front. I'll add a tiny bit of GS there to have an attachment point for the pistons on the launcher.

 

 

C+C welcome as ever.

Edited September 8, 2021 by Mandragola

[Sword Brother Adelard]

Do even the Warlord blasters suck? I thought they might be the only decent laser weapons. They have the best dice to heat ratio for shieldbane.

[Mandragola]

Do even the Warlord blasters suck? I thought they might be the only decent laser weapons. They have the best dice to heat ratio for shieldbane.

Well YMMV. Personally I think they're pretty bad. You're paying 50 points for a weapon that gives you -1 to hit almost all the time, and which only fires in a corridor arc at targets >10" away (mostly).

 

It's true that it gives you the best option for shieldbane. In fact it's probably the only case where shieldbane does more damage to the enemy than you do yourself, as it's pretty likely to actually affect a save. But Why would you bother when you can have gatling blasters for only 30 points and make them take twice as many saves?

 

I run Penumbral Reaper so I feel qualified to complain about these things. He really feels like he has far less firepower than a normal Warlord. He doesn't want to heat up using shieldbane because he's trying to run fast and tends to be shot a lot. 

 

Also Warlord arm weapons are far more powerful. The carapace weapon's job is to break shields, thereby allowing those weapons to kill the target. LBs just don't do that. I'd probably use any other laser platform before sticking laser blasters on a Warlord. Even turbo laser destructors would make more sense, at least in theory in an extermigus maniple.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

50pts?! I haven't used them, and don't play my Warlord often. But yikes.

 

Laser weapons generally are underwhelming, I've been much happier since I gave up on them altogether. Particularly on Warhounds.

[malika666]

When I see this pic I can't help but imagine some carapace mounted rotary cannons like that!

[Noserenda]

Amazing work on the terrain again, and interesting to see the insides :) 

I recently mounted some old resin Multiple rocket pods on a warlord and i hate the mountings i made with some bits and reaver elbows, yours look a lot better! 

[Lord_Borak]

Wow, those are ace! Are you using them as 'normal' launchers or something for funky ammo?

 

Laser Blasters on Warlords are a bit 'meh'. I prefer Twin TLD with the Experimental Weapon Strat (on a Warlord with 2 Sunfury's). As Mandragola said they're good in an Exterminus Maniple as they don't run as much heat as Blasters.

[Mandragola]

Thanks all. They'll be normal apoc launchers. I just thought it would be fun to do a design that recreated the old skool design from AT88. Plus also apoc launchers are really good, I needed a pair for my Legio Mortis, and had these valkyrie ones in my bits box.

 

The Reaver and Warlord are both now assembled and underoated. For these guys I decided to try a grey seer undercoat and painting vallejo steel on the skeleton. Previously I've always undercoated in leadbelcher but since I go over it with vallejo metalics anyway I thought I'd try just a grey base. It'll be a bit easier to do any white areas but I'm not sure what it'll mean for the gold. You might think I'd have figured this stuff out by now, working on something like my 24th and 25th titans, but apparently not.

 

[schoon]

Your building work is always inspiring, Mandragola!

 

I'm going to steal the crane support tower idea. Bravo.

[Mandragola]

Ok so I managed to get my Reaver and Warlord battle ready and took this force along to the LGT yesterday.

 

 

The event was... probably not a complete success. 12 tickets sold but only 4 people arrived at the start. 3 more guys arrived several hours late and without any titans, having bought tickets that somebody else might have used. All a bit odd.

 

We did have two loyalists and two traitors. We had 1v1 games to start with at 1750 points. Special rule here was that nothing could see more than 20". I had a full Regia maniple with Penumbral Reaper and my opponent had a Lupercal and Warmaster. Ok then! Mission was engage and destroy for both of us. Deployment looked like this.

 

 

I went for a general plan of trying to kill the warhounds and then gang up on the Warmaster. That worked pretty well. I used March of the Dead to get up the board and had my flamer hound threaten to get behind the enemy. The Warmaster turned to deal with it and somehow didn't quite kill it, despite taking its shields down with VMBs and getting to fire both Suzerains into it at close range.

 

Meanwhile my Brawler Warlord took a bunch of fire from all three Warhounds but didn't fall. It used emergency repairs to put itself together again a bit. By the end of the game it had three engine kills, all scored with its Volkite Destructor. That beam ability to autohit a damaged location is really serious and it pairs very well with a Sunfury. I think that a brawler Warlord with paired gatlings on tracking gyros, a sunfury and either a Volkite or macro gatling will get serious work done. This might be my new favourite titan.

 

 

On the other hand Penumbral Reaper is a bit silly, but lots of fun. I was trying to get a charge off against the Warmaster using warp displacement but it didn't really go to plan. The Warmaster shot the Reaper's shields off (but nothing more, luckily). In the next turn I tried to use warp displacement to get a charge off but only rolled a 3, so instead used my "charge" to go and sit behind a building, out of arc.

 

 

With the Warhounds dead I seriously out-activated my opponent. The following turn I was able to start shooting at the Warmaster, which was starting to run really hot. The Reaper used full stride to get back into the fight and then charged the next turn, which is where things went a bit wrong. It turns out my opponent had a custom legio trait that let him move D3" and attack with a weapon after getting charged. So the Reaper got to do four crits to the Warmaster's head, tracking it but not killing it (they're tougher than most!) and then it ate a Suzerain shot... and then two more suzerain shots in the combat phase. One dead Penumbral Reaper!

 

And then my other Warlord came along with his volkite beam and cooked the Warmaster's crew in their seats. Victory to Mortis!

 

We then decided to chuck out the event pack and play a 2v2 game using our 2500 point lists. We set up an 8x4' table for it and used the open engine war cards to decide a scenario. The objective was to burn objectives in the other team's deployment zone, meaning we'd have to get titans over the board into the face of 5000 points of enemy engines. Not easy!

 

 

So it was chaos, obviously. I had four Warhounds rush at me on full stride but I intercepted two with the penumbral Reaper, who got a 9" warp displacement. This allowed a turn 1 charge, which he used to remove the head from one of those Warhounds. However, my opponent used the loyalist allegiance trait to put the other one onto first fire orders, so it could fire in the combat phase. It did loads of damage to the Reaper with its plasma blastgun, died to its arioch claw, then fell over, hitting the same location its plasma gun had and killing the Reaper dead. And that was on turn 1!

 

The rest of the game was a brutal slot. Warhounds on both sides didn't live all that long. There was a single activation for a charge by some questoris knights that ended with three dead warhounds and two dead knights, following a reactor detonation. The loyalist Warmaster was a monster, partly helped by a battlefield condition that meant any machine spirit roll automatically went off, without a command check to stop it. So when we shot at it and it pushed its shields it tended to run around kicking things and even got at least one bonus repair roll to put itself back together.

 

 

This was the decisive turn. Our Cerastus knights were trying to burn an objective (hidden behind the tower block) but they got taken out by a bellicosa. Meanwhile that blue Reaver weathered the fire from my two Reavers and managed to burn one of our objectives (also hidden, behind those smaller buildings in front of it). That meant the loyalists took the win, which was a fair result. The traitors had killed more stuff but we weren't able to get over the board, having been pinned back by the Warhounds' charge. The Warmaster looked like it might well burn a second objective if given a chance to and we weren't close to anything.

 

So overall the players made the best of a bit of an odd event. We got to play some Titanicus and had a great time doing it and my new models even did more or less ok.

[Noserenda]

Yeah seems like most events are having big dropouts for various reasons, though booking an event, turning up late and without models seems insane to me :D 

5000pt Doubles sounds like it took a while though it looks rad! :) 

[Sword Brother Adelard]

We had an event recently, and 1

Had everyone bar one turn up. I find what happened to you really weird, why did people turn up to a miniature wargaming tournament without miniatures?

 

On Mandragola's Warlord front, my constant opponent always runs the same Warlord: triple Gatling and Plasma, with the gyros. He also always plays overcharged cannon on the plasma so it's super strong. I hate it. It can delete a light titan a turn easy. Gatling down shields, ruin something with plasma, finish with remaining Gatlings. It's brutally efficient.

Edited September 25, 2021 by Brother Adelard

[Mandragola]

Yeah that is a pretty standard midfield brawler warlord. I wanted to see if the Volkite Destructor could be a viable alternative to the macro gatling and on the whole I think it is. It might not be better, but the fact you can automatically land 3 hits where you want is significant. The macro gatling is excellent but there are always times when cover or some other factor makes targeting difficult, which the volkite doesn't care about at all.

 

For the LGT I think the organisers could have done a lot more to stay in contact with the players before the event. If I hadn't emailed to suggest some improvements to the event pack rules I don't think I'd have heard from the organisers at all. That contrasts with the 40k event, which bombards you with emails - somewhat annoyingly as I couldn't actually go. I think there were some pretty basic things they could have done better. Glad your event went better Adelard.

 

I did have fun, because Titanicus is fun. It was great to get a couple of games in after so long on lockdown. I met a couple of nice guys who were good players, and they've now been added to the London AT Whatsapp group - which is in a pretty healthy state. Overall a good experience.