Mandragola’s Legio Astorum (and Mortis and stuff)

[schoon]

Amazing progress for such a short amount of time.

Really like what you've done with the pose.

Do you already have thoughts on how you're going to do the base?

[Mandragola]

I’ve ordered a 160mm base from GW, which I’ll need to seriously reinforce. The basic plan is for there to be heaps or rubble on there to match my 30k Raven Guard, which it’s likely to fight alongside.

Here’s what those guys look like. I have an older 7th legion force that I might re-base to match.

I’ll need more than just broken bricks and stuff. I have some larger things, like the smashed Sicaran from Sigismund’s base, so I’ll see what fits and looks good. 

Part of me also wants to add a fleeing traitor Legionary, posed like the Warhammer civilian fleeing from the giant. This would be very silly. Traitor corpses and advancing Skitarii are other potential options I could include. 

[Mandragola]

I have an update on the warhound. It now stands up!

The base arrived and I set about trying to stiffen it a bit. I filled in the underside with plasticard and stuck some more on top to create a bit of thickness where the foot pins would be going in. 

Annoyingly I found that the superglue joints I’d used for the toes just weren’t strong enough. I decided to redo the rod pins, so a single bit of brass rod now goes from the ankle, all the way down the toe, into the base. Then, following lots of drilling, gluing (this time using JB weld quick, which works) and wrestling bits into position, the leg was strong enough to hold up the titan. 

Overall I’m very glad this thing now stands up. It’s been a lot of work to get to this point. Also the magnets I got are perfectly strong enough to hold the weapons in place, as you can see, though I need to change the angle of the one in the VMB. 

I’m not 100% sold on the base. It does the job but it looks small. But the issue remains that a bigger base would be less practical. An option would be to have a larger scenic base for display I suppose. 

One more joint remains to be resolved: the waist. Looking at the size of this thing now it’s built I think I should at least try to magnetise it. That’s awkward due to the thickness (or thinness) of the reactor room floor. I have a sort of cunning plan to just drill the necessary holes, full the damage as best as possible and then plonk a tech priest on top to hide everything. 

a slightly surprising problem (for me) is that there doesn’t seem to be too much space for symbols on the model. I’d like to give it some Astorum badges but I’m not sure where they should go. Options include the sides of the main carapace or in the middle on top of it, or else the sides of the reactors at the back. But I’d like to have flames on one of these and astronomical symbols on the other, which might not work too well with the symbols. Any thoughts?

C+C very welcome as ever. 

[Interrogator Stobz]

Nice work, love that pose so much.

Am genuinely surprised about the weapon magnets, I'm guessing you have placed them below the stubby arms somehow ??

[Mandragola]

Thanks. I’m very relieved that the pose works. 

For the magnets I’ve stuck one in the bottom of the gun’s socket and then embedded the other in the stubby arm. Here’s how that looks, and also the  hole where the legs stick on, which I’m starting to magnetise. I’m going to have three pairs of magnets in there eventually. The challenge there is not having the damn things launch towards each other while the glue dries. 

[Mandragola]

Ok well it’s not pretty on the inside, but it works and I didn’t have to ruin the floor in the reactor room. Waist now magnetised!

 

These magnets are *strong*. Having three sets of them makes it a bit of actual effort to separate the legs and body - at least for my weedy carcass. Still, the thing now stands up all on its own. 

The only remaining joints to glue are the front and rear body and the head. Those are waiting for paint and won’t be challenging technically. Getting the weapon hoses to match up might be tricky though. 

[Sherrypie]

At least with such chunky magnets the problem isn't constantly mishandling them so you can never remember which way they are facing, like I do with the tiny buggers :D

She's starting to look fast and furious.

[schoon]

What a great project! Fun.

Color me jealous. :)

[Mandragola]

A bit more progress on the Warhound. I felt it needed to lean just a bit more to it’s left, which I’ve achieved by cheating a bit. I’ve built up the base under its foot slightly more on one side than the other. This will all eventually be hidden by basing material of various kinds. 

I’ve now splashed a bit more paint on the thing. The legs had a coat of Vallejo mecha primer and then metal colour steel. I love how truly metallic these paints look. 

Next I’m going to adjust the position of the magnet in the plasma blastgun. It hangs a little lower than I want. 

In other news I’m going to be playing some Adeptus Titanicus! On Friday I’ll be at the LGT with either my Astorum or Mortis. Later this year I’ll be at the goonhammer open and Warfare in reading. 

[Mandragola]

I thought I’d have a bit of fun and paint an armour panel. The others won’t all have this much going on but on this I wanted flames and the Astorum symbol. These are the stages:

Essentially it’s about mapping out the shapes and then blending in the colours. I’m not totally happy with the yellow/orange and the symbol looks a bit uneven but it’s going ok.

The gold needs another coat. I think I’ll varnish this once I’m happy and maybe use liquid mask to protect the flames before doing that. 

[Tar Aldarion]

I like that already! Will you add some weathering in the end, or is it going to stay rather clean?

Chapeau btw. for going through this manually, that is without airbrushing.

You mentioned alcohol based metallic. Which brand do you use?

[Mandragola]

Lady Friday I went along to the LGTs mini Titanicus event. It was very small but I did get to play three fun games. 

It was two games at 1500 and one at 1750. At 1500 I ran a Regia with a dire wolf subbed in for one of the hounds and at 1750 I went for Extermigus with the dire wolf as a reinforcement. 

Missions were taken from the hive world set in crucible of retribution, presumably because of the dropzone terrain.

 

game one was vs a home brew legio using Venator rules and an Arcus maniple. The objective was to claim quarters. 

I set up in a sort of clump, planning to expand out later once the enemy was dealt with. 

This worked pretty well. I was able to deal with the enemy a bit at a time, following my usual strategy of killing things in scale order, from smallest to largest. I tend to find that this works well. A Regia is good at killing the things that are easy to kill and removing activations while soaking the long-range fire. 

In this game I was able to take out all the enemy engines for the loss of a warhound. Pretty much everything worked, including the dire wolf shutting down enemies a few times. My hound actually died in the repair phase, thanks to heat causing a reactor leak. The enemy triple volcano warbringer suffered a similar fate. 

Game two was against an Interfector battlegroup playing as a Venator maniple with a reinforcement reaver and knights.

 
 

Here we just had to kill the enemy. I managed to get them down to a structurally-compromised warhound without losing anything myself. The key play was probably dropping a concealment barrage so the enemy melee reaver couldn’t see and then running my dire wolf in to prevent it moving. That stalled the main enemy advance and held them where my Warlords and hound could pour on fire. 

In the end I was actually a bit cross not to finish off the last hound. Still, overall a successful game. 

Game 3 was against more Interfector and again we just had to kill stuff for points. My opponent was running a Mandatum maniple. 

this game features a stupid deployment system where you got to deploy half your opponent’s force. This meant my melee warlord got stuck out on its own where I couldn’t help it, while my opponent just had some hounds and lancers exposed briefly, until they ran away and hid. 

My opponent had a good plan that resulted in a slightly dull game: he’d kill my clawlord and then hide. I was able to keep the clawlord alive till turn 3 thanks to some smoke and stuff and by the end of the game I had killed two hounds and 2/3 knights, edging me ahead on points. It was very close though and included having my dire wolf get its first (and quite possibly last) ever engine kill. The clawlord had punched a hound’s leg a bit and then I tried to shut it down to prevent it firing plasma at the warlord. I randomly hit the damaged leg, rolled a big number and the titan died. 

Generally though this was a cagey game in which I couldn’t bring my warlords’ power to bear against the speedy hounds and cowardly knights. I was mostly reduced to firing at things in lots of cover and doing very little. Most of what my warlords did was bounce missiles off the enemy warlord’s shields without ever hurting it. I finally managed to flush out a hound late on and a warlord was able to one-shot it from full health, thanks to all four sunfury shots causing crits. 

So that was a fun little event. At the end I felt much happier with my Regia than the Extermigus. It’s frustrating to have the enemy simply evade you on a board with lots of LoS-blockers. But you can’t really blame someone for not throwing hounds and stuff at a row of warlords. This tends to result in less awesome games than if your opponent feels like they’ve got a chance in a fair fight.

Despite being the only person to win all my games someone else got best general by killing more stuff (lots of it when one of his own Warlords exploded!). However I did get the best painted prize and that, combined with a 3:0 record, is a great result. 

Edited October 6, 2022 by Mandragola

[Gillyfish]

Congratulations Mandragola! That's awesome work and a well-deserved best painted award too. In some ways I'm quite surprised the Warlords didn't get outflanked, but then I guess no opponent had an option for pinning them in place from the front to prevent another redeploying to face the threat.

[Mandragola]

23 hours ago, Gillyfish said:

Congratulations Mandragola! That's awesome work and a well-deserved best painted award too. In some ways I'm quite surprised the Warlords didn't get outflanked, but then I guess no opponent had an option for pinning them in place from the front to prevent another redeploying to face the threat.

This is something I work quite hard to prevent. The strategy of killing enemy activations is partly designed to keep them from outflanking me. If I've still got a Warlord I can activate then no enemy Warhound wants to stick its neck out. So in the last game I managed to get a Warhound kill and win the game doing exactly this. The hound popped out to the side of one Warlord but the other one turned and blew it to pieces.

[schoon]

Great report and excellent pictures as always.

Thank-you!

[Mandragola]

I’m getting ready for the next couple of events, which are the Goonhammer Open in Nottingham at the end of the month and Reading Warfare two weeks after that.

 

The GHO is split loyalist/traitor and I could only get a traitor ticket. My Mortis will be going to their first event! I’ve ordered them a fire wolf along with a bunch of new Grav guns and a couple more volkites. 
 

I need to put together a roster of titans and then pick forces from it, for games between 1250 and 2500 points. I get 5 resource points to spend on upgrades, though I’ll need to spend a couple of those to have Princeps traits. 
 

I won’t get any of that stuff till the weekend so I will see if I can do some work on the big warhound in the meantime. 
 

The Reading event is 1750 and I’ll be bringing my Astorum, so that’ll be simpler. I probably won’t need to do any work for that, though I might do a carapace volkite for a Reaver. I might do something different like a Ruptura, as I’ve never fielded my warbringers so far. 

[schoon]

Is your Mortis already set, and are you looking to add anything to it in the next week?

[Mandragola]

My Mortis are more or less ready to go. There are some that could do with a bit of work but nothing too major. The main thing will be getting a Dire Wolf and the new Grav weapons ready, so I can try those out. I'll prioritise the grav weapons as I've already had a few good goes with my Astorum Dire Wolf now. I also need to get my actual list to the organisers, but I'm waiting to see the Grav cards for that.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

Hopefully today's the day for Grav...

[Mandragola]

2 minutes ago, Sword Brother Adelard said:

Hopefully today's the day for Grav...

They’ve been dispatched. Should arrive today or tomorrow. 

[Mandragola]

Built a few Grav weapons. One more warlord one to go and a dire wolf for the Mortis. Not sure how I’m going to pose that but it’ll be a nice little project. 
 

[Lord_Borak]

Very nice! What is the quality of the casts like? I'm still waiting on mine :/

[Mandragola]

Casts seem good to me. One thing to watch for is they have tiny power cells to go on the back and these could easily be lost. I’d consider sticking the warhound and reaver ones together before cleaning off the release agent, just to make sure nothing goes down the sink. I cleaned mine in a bowl and managed not to lose anything. 

[Mandragola]

Some progress to report. The new guns and Dire Wolf are all base-coated now. These Grav weapons certainly have a lot of trim! I’ll try and get some washed and transfers on and the dire wolf’s base done tomorrow, if I can. 
 

Edited October 26, 2022 by Mandragola

[Mandragola]

I’ve managed to get my Mortis ready for the GHO this weekend without having to pull any all-nighters or anything silly. I’ll be bringing a 3000 point roster from which to select stuff for games from 1250 to 2500 points. 
 

Here’s the full battlegroup that I’m taking. One of the Warlords is Penumbral Reaper but the other is battlegroup leader. 

 

I’ve made a few of the weirder recent weapons, which I’ll be trying out. It’s the first go for the Grav stuff.