Mandragola’s Legio Astorum (and Mortis and stuff)

[Lord_Borak]

Damn, those buildings are awesome!! 

[Mandragola]

Thanks. I've been having fun with this stuff. The Civitas set is very labour-intensive but it does allow you to design all sorts of things. 

[General Zodd]

Thanks. I've been having fun with this stuff. The Civitas set is very labour-intensive but it does allow you to design all sorts of things.

Agreed, they look fantastic! I love the hangar doors, I always like when you can see enough detail on a building to give you some ideas how it might actually be used, rather than just what class of Titan can feasibly hide behind it.

 

That sloped roof is amazing, how did you go about it? As for adding something to it, how about some very small railings around the edge? Just an idea, but I like it as it is.

 

Great work, as ever!

[Mandragola]

Thanks. I probably should have taken some pictures of the roof under construction. It's not entirely simple!

 

The side of a hexagon is equal to half the measurement between two opposite points. That means you can make a hexagonal building end using 3 bits and it'll fit against a wall 2 bits long. You can see that in this WIP shot of one of my other buildings. 

 

 

If I remember right the Civitas walls are something like 29mm long, which means you need hexagons 58mm across (point to point, not side to side) if you want to do this. But measure a wall yourself - I might be misremembering.

 

So for the roof the starting point is the flat bit on top. I made a half hexagon the size to go round the spire I was putting on top. The width of the roof is double the length of one of that hexagon's sides. The long side of the roof is the same length as the wall it goes above. The long flat side of the roof is just a simple rectangle.

 

The slightly tricky bit is making the sides of the roof where it's hexagonal. It just requires quite a lot of measuring. You measure the height, which will be the same as the long side rectangle if your whole roof is sloped the same way (which it doesn't have to be, but that this gets harder if not!).

 

On this drawing the top width is going to be the same length as the side of the flat roof's hex side. The bottom width is either the same as a civitas wall or a bit less if you want a walkway round. Mine was 24mm. You centre the top over the bottom by marking half the bottom edge's length (so 12mm in my case) along the top edge, with half the top edge's width either side of that.

 

 

Note that you can't tesselate the pieces. If you made any pieces the other way up then their slats would be the wrong way up. The areas highlighted in grey are waste, sadly - unless you can think of something clever to do with them.

 

The actual roof pieces are made of polystyrene sheet from a company called Evergreen scale models. This is code 4051 clapboard siding, with 1.3mm spacing, though they do various spacings and all sorts of other stuff too.

 

Some railings might be good.I'll have a look into what's available. 4d modelshop does these strips, which are 6x92mm.

 

https://modelshop.co.uk/Shop/Model-Detail/1-200-Scale/Fencing-Railing/Item/1-200-handrail-6-92mm-Pk2/ITM5876

Edited March 22, 2022 by Mandragola

[General Zodd]

Ah, 4D Model Shop, the old reliable! Those would work. Thanks for the detailed breakdown, really helpful, and those building are really inspiring!

[schoon]

Love your roll-up doors for the hangar! Consider that idea stolen ;)

[Mandragola]

Today (following some debate with my partner) I was able to secure a ticket for Maximal Fire's Reactor Meltdown III tournament in July. There are still tickets available if you're able to make it to the South Coast: https://entoyment.co.uk/product/09-07-22-reactor-meltdown-iii-meltdown-with-a-vengeance-saturday/

 

It's 1850 points, which is a bit unusual. The good thing about this is that it's an opportunity for me to bust out all four of my Astorum Warlords, which is what I'll probably do. That will also mean that between now and then I'd better get the 4th one finished, I suppose. It's on my desk now, dusty and about 80% complete.

 

Here's what a 4-Warlord list at 1850 points looks like:

 

Extermigus Battleline Maniple 1850

 

Warlord Titan - Princeps Seniores 475

Sunfury Plasma Annihilator

Macro-Gatling Blaster

Apocalypse Missile Launchers

 

Warlord Titan - Princeps Seniores 475

Sunfury Plasma Annihilator

Macro-Gatling Blaster

Apocalypse Missile Launchers

 

Warlord Titan 460

Macro-Gatling Blaster

Arioch Power Claw

Vulcan Mega-bolter Array

 

Warlord Titan 440

Mori Quake Cannon

Mori Quake Cannon

Apocalypse Missile Launchers

 

Technically there are other kinds of titan that I could bring. I might give a little bit of consideration to other options. At this level you could have a Warmaster and a Ferrox maniple, for example, and the Psi-Titan also becomes a bit easier to build around.

[schoon]

I really wish there were more Titanicus events over here on the other side of the pond.

 

I'm thinking that I may have to bite the bullet and organize something myself at one of the big US conventions, such as Origins or GenCon.

[Mandragola]

Lack of events is a problem. There are a few in the UK though and it’s slowly growing I think.

 

I’d recommend starting small. Get a few tables next to each other and do a thing for 6-12 players. Running events isn’t easy so don’t feel you need to build 20 tables to even get started.

[Noserenda]

Yeah we have run a couple of small events like that for about a dozen and it works pretty well :) 

I usually immediately rule out anything marketed as a tournament these days but how has the atmosphere been at these events previously?

[Mandragola]

Beachhead was really good. A bunch of us were there from the London Wargames Guild and it was a very good atmosphere all round. If you can make it I'd definitely recommend the event.

 

I agree it's a bit unusual to see a "tournament" for AT. To be honest I don't see it being a bad experience though. They've actually toned down some of the things you can do - banning vortex missiles, Acastus (apart from households) and saying you can't combine corrupted titans with homebrew Legios.

 

The last event was well run and the tables mostly looked good too, with just a couple of dropzone boards. If I can I might bring my own terrain to the event to fit out another board.

 

Here’s a link to the event pack, in case it’s useful to anyone: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ck1wg2lsbont1obzhcuh6/REACTOR-MELTDOWN-III-1.docx?dl=0&rlkey=kjw48co3pm0fg3xh0p70egxei

Edited April 5, 2022 by Mandragola

[schoon]

Here’s a link to the event pack, in case it’s useful to anyone: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ck1wg2lsbont1obzhcuh6/REACTOR-MELTDOWN-III-1.docx?dl=0&rlkey=kjw48co3pm0fg3xh0p70egxei

 

Hmmm. That DropBox link doesn't seem to be working for me. Anyone else having an issue with it?

[Mandragola]

Here’s the website of the shop that’s running the event. You can find the link there: https://entoyment.co.uk/product/09-07-22-reactor-meltdown-iii-meltdown-with-a-vengeance-saturday/

 

Still 17 tickets left for anyone who wants to go along. Should be fun!

[Mandragola]

I played a great game yesterday. It was a bit of a teaching game for three other players, so we had a four-player game. One guy had his own 1850 Ignatum force so I ran 1850 of my Mortis and lent 1150 points of Astorum and Mortis to the two newer players. This made for a 3k game on a 6x4 table.

 

Ignatum had a minimum sized Principia and Ferrox maniple, backed up by an Astorum Fortis maniple including Lucius Praetorian. Mortis brought a Regia with Penumbral Reaper, 2 hounds and a reinforcement Reaver as the 1850 point list, plus an 1150 point Ferrox of 2 reavers and 2 hounds. I added some corruptions to the Ferrox maniple so both Reavers would auto-pass charge orders and get +1 dice to melee weapons, while the Warhounds didn't need to push their reactors to put power to locomotors. 

 

I've recently bought this mat and have been building this terrain for ages. Slight shame that mostly isn't painted yet but it was good to get it on a board. It looks like I've got more or less enough for a 6x4 and definitly plenty for 4x4.

 

We used the open war deck. The mission was the one where you're trying to burn objectives in the enemy deployment zone. Deployment zones were triangles from the back corners to the middle of the board, so in theory we could set up almost touching. 

 

Deployment. The =I= objectives are the Imperial ones and the skulls are on the chaos side.

 

In the first turn Mortis plays March of the Dead and gets to move its whole army forward, which is hugely impactful. With the first activation of the game the Ferrox Seniores charges and kills an Ignatum Warhound, that had advanced dangerously forward. The Reaver then gets shot in the combat phase causing the entity within to awaken. It storms into a collision with a second Warhound, breaking off one of its guns without suffering serious damage in return, then activates and smashes the Warhound. Two melee kills from a single engine in turn one!

 

Meanwhile the Ignatum and Astorum engines are shooting, a lot. The other Ferrox Reaver and Penumbral Reaper take unsustainable amounts of fire and both eventually fall without reaching melee.

 

The Ferrox Seniores gets its third warhound kill in two turns before its body is cored out by an Astorum Reaver and its reactor goes critical - though without doing a lot of damage to anyone nearby.

 

Later in the game the sacrifice of the melee engines proved worthwhile. Mortis Warhounds had managed to sneak through largely unobserved. They planted a flag in the enemy DZ, shot a bunch of stuff and burned two objectives.

 

Warhounds surround an Astorum Warhound on Mortis' left flank

 

While on the right, a warhound is able to sneak within the Fortis maniples' shields, do a bunch of damage with its plasma gun and then burn an objective (which is under it). 

 

Unfortunately I took the last two shots just after the Ignatum Warlord and Warbringer were put away. They were actually still there and in pretty good condition.

 

It finished a clear win for the traitors. They had 20vps for burning two primary objectives and 15-20 points for secondaries (we didn't check how far they were from the Mortis banner) at the point the game was called. The Imperials had 0-10 points for secondaries.

 

March of the Dead was a huge deal in this game, as was the fact that the Chaos force was generally more aggressive. Even though many of them died, they pinned the loyalists back and dominated control of the battlefield.

 

I'd been considering using a Fortis maniple more but on this occasion I wasn't too impressed. I don't like anything static in AT really and this does kind of force you to stand still. That's not generally a great choice.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

That's alovely density on the board. A lot of the event tables I've seen are really poor on the density front. (The Adepticon tables for instance, while built with HUGE sections of lovely terrain, could easily have used the same amount of GW parts and built twice as many buildings, and it might then have been ok.) on a 4x4 it will be awesome.

Fortis is tricky to use, but in a game like this, with that deployment zone, I'd have been tempted to plop two Fortis Warlords much more central, maybe next to a shield relay, and make them the problem. backlining in a game where the primary requires movement was a mistake IMO.

 

Also, as an aside on the Fortis front, my reading of the rules is that "moving" for the purposes of rthe trait, doesn't include turning. Because of the interaction between moving using the speed characteristic, and turning the turns. This may be relevant because when I played one last time, I initially thought that moving included turns, and I didn't want to lose the bonus from one of my Warlords pivoting out of base to base, say for quake or a damaged leg so I (foolishly) decided to position them as touching on an angle so that if they span towards eachother, they wouldn't move. The downside was that they ended up being spun a lot, and ultimately one killed the other with collisions. But if turning isn't 'moving', then I could have placed them just touching side by side at the tip of the oval bases, and then if one had spun, it couldn't collide with the other, and could then turn back without losing the Fortis bonus?

[Mandragola]

You're right about Fortis. You can turn and still get the bonus and it's definitely best to have them touching at the widest part of the base, so they don't spin and hurt each other. That also lets them turn and move off, if necessary. It's also worth bearing in mind that you can always merge shields, regardless of how far you move.

 

It would have been difficult for the Imperial forces to advance with Penumbral Reaper and the Ferrox maniple coming at them. This is a problem I've faced myself quite often while running my Astorum against traitors. You are looking at a midfield full of horribly mobile stuff that often out-activates you, pretty much any of which can one-shot a titan if it gets inside its shields. Standing back and blasting is a sensible approach in the circumstances.

 

I think this may be where it makes sense to bring knights and lighter titans to screen against this problem. The Ignatum Ferrox Reaver was out on a flank and their Warhounds were in the middle. I'd have swapped that and had the Reaver ready to counter-charge ours. That way the Warhounds could have skirmished with ours rather than falling victim to such an early charge and the traitor hounds might not have made it to burn stuff. The Ignatum hounds might have even got through that way, while they were never likely to live that long in the centre.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

Yeah, the Mortis movement shenanigans are a problem. It's mainly why I dislike the idea that Vox Blackout shouldn't affect strats like that, because it doesn't leave a loyalist player with many options, particularly now that it costs 3SP to play it. But I also get why Vox shouldn't affect other first turn strats like experimental locomotors, so in our local event pack we use this ruling:

 

"- The following stratagems can be played (and are deemed to have been played) in the deployment phase, and are therefore unaffected by a first turn play of Vox Blackout:
o Dawn Attack
o Dusk Attack
o Cursed Earth
o Unhallowed Ground
o Experimental Weapon
o Overcharged Cannon
o Homing Warheads
o Experimental Locomotors
o Augmented Servitor Clades
o Gifts of the Dark Mechanicum
o Profane Blessing
o Veteran Princeps
o Venerable Machine Spirit"

 

I agree with the counter charging Reaver, on a board like this it can be deadly to have a secondary line of titans on a charge order, ready to counter anything that comes close. I had a game with Spearhead and I think we had 3-4 first turn charges and 3 engine kills first turn.

 

[Mandragola]

March of the Dead is interesting. Mortis aren't generally seen as an especially powerful Legio but that strat changes things, a lot. I think it might be more relevant when using the open war missions, which tend to reward movement even more.

 

The Maximal Fire event in July is billed as an actual "tournament". I used to really enjoy 40k tournaments so I wonder if it would make sense to take this a bit seriously and try to take an actually "good" army. My first thought was that it would be awesome to bring my four Astorum Warlords as an Extermigus maniple and it's true, that would be awesome, but it certainly wouldn't be good at doing missions like the one I played yesterday.

 

An aggressive Mortis force might well be better. Something involving a Ferrox maniple and Penumbral Reaper would probably do good work, though it's a bit awkward to work out how the maniple split would work. A full Ferrox with PR as a reinforcement might be the best option.

 

Astorum on the other hand have much more staying power. A Regia maniple might be good for them, with a couple of midfield brawler Warlords, a couple of warhounds and maybe a Warbringer in support. Maybe one of the Warlords could have a claw, so I had some melee power.

 

My Psi-titan is also worth considering. At 1850 I could have it and a minimum Principia maniple. That sounds pretty scary and also flexible.

 

From what I've put together so far, I think this is my scariest list at 1850:

 

Astorum Principia Battleline Maniple

 

Warlord Titan 475

Macro-Gatling Blaster

Sunfury Plasma Annihilator

Apocalypse Missile Launchers

 

Warbringer Nemesis Titan 395

Mori Quake Cannon

Gatling Blaster

Melta Cannon

 

Warhound Titan 220

Vulcan Mega-bolter

Plasma Blastgun

 

Auxiliary Titan

 

Psi-Titan 760

Macro Gatling Blaster

Sinistramanus Tenebrae

Apocalypse Missile Launchers

Better armour on Sinistramanus

Tracking Gyroscopes

[Sword Brother Adelard]

I don't rate the warbinger, it just doesn't seem to know where it wants to be, it has a main gun which wants to be outside 24" and largely arm guns that want to be under, especially if you want to get any benefit out of the gatling as a finisher.

 

I really rate the full Ferrox and Triple Gat/Plasma Warlord, it's my friend's go to list after his Ignatum Extergimus and it's really good.

[Mandragola]

I've never actually fielded a Warbringer. I do share your analysis that its weapon load-out is confused, up to a point. But the quake cannon is awesome and a really useful tool to have in a list. I think the thing to do is treat it as a midfield brawler and just accept that the quake cannon won't always hit. That said, the Psi-titan itself does get to do the quake effect, so a list with one in doesn't need quake cannons so much. I could swap the Principia for an Axiom and equip the Reaver (possibly Lucius Praetorian) for melee, I suppose.

 

The obvious thing is probably to bring a Ferrox with the Psi-titan. I'd be a bit low on firepower but I could afford some upgrades. I'd rather not do the obvious thing though, if I can avoid it.

[Mandragola]

I'm now in the progress of painting up some of the terrain I used in the game earlier this week. Unfortunately I ran out of grey seer spray quite soon, so didn't get all that far. But here's what I was able to undercoat.

 

My method for these is very simple. Grey Seer spray, Basilicanum Grey all over and then a drybrush of Ulthuan Grey. I then pick out metalwork and put Nuln Oil in the windows. Floors/roofs get an Eshin grey coat and then nuln oil.

 

The bronze statues are Warplock Bronze, Nihilakh Oxide and then a drybrush of Castellax Bronze.

 

 

 

And this building has had its contrast layer but nothing else so far - just in case someone wanted to see what a building done just in Basilicanum Grey looks like. Not actually completely terrible, to be honest, but the drybrush is a big improvement I think.

 

 

And now I need more Grey Seer. I'm going on holdiay next week so I won't order some just now. There's plenty of other stuff to work on!

Edited April 20, 2022 by Mandragola

[schoon]

@Mandragola - love those hexagonal, double-spired buildings at the center of your board. Really excellent work.

[Mandragola]

@Mandragola - love those hexagonal, double-spired buildings at the center of your board. Really excellent work.

Thanks. The hexagons weren’t my idea originally- I think it was Mendi Warrior but not sure). I really don’t like putting a hexagonal spire on a square building, so needed an alternative and I think this works well. There’s sort of a guide on how to make them on the page before. Edited April 21, 2022 by Mandragola

[Lord_Borak]

Your buildings certainly have a touch of realism and look like they actually have a function which is sometimes lacking from a lot of 40k buildings.

 

The brass looks good as well. Stealing that recipe for future. Also, where did you get that gaming mat from? Asking for a friend. 

[Mandragola]

Well once upon a time I actually did a degree in Architecture, which probably helps. These Imperial designs aren't necessarily what I'd choose to design myself if I was working from scratch, but they're my idea of a gothic administratum centre of some sort. It's certainly been a fun project.

 

I started out with the priority that the terrain should block LoS as much as possible, while having relatively small footprints to allow movement as much as possible. This meant generally aiming for tall, thin "slab" buildings rather than sprawling low-rise estates of the kind GW tends to advertise. Key to making this work was getting some balconies from Vanguard terrain, which allow me to put doors upstairs.

 

The mat is from DeepCut studio. I got them to print it for me double-sided, with a sort of generic muddy field on the back. It's quite cool to now have my own gaming set up because prior to this I've always had to game at clubs - which in fact I was doing on this occasion. It'll be even better when the stuff is all painted of course.

 

I've still got most of a set of the Admech stuff, largely unused. It's a bit tricky to make all these pipes and stuff into useful objects as AT terrain. I'm thinking about getting the new Fronteris landing pad and radar dish, then sticking AT pipes and stuff to them.