Mandragola’s Legio Astorum (and Mortis and stuff)

[Lord_Borak]

Nice to see those Grav weapons all done!! I've built and under coated mine today :D

 

The Belicosa and Grav is a cool combo. I like it!! I'm still a bit undecided about the Warhound Grav myself. I kinda like the idea of 2 of them, or one and a Turbo for a little sniper hound. But i think it needs to be something I try out in a Venator or something.

 

Really nice looking force anyway. I'm sure you'll let us know how it goes :D

[Mandragola]

Part of the fun of this event will be bringing four lists and only using one of them twice. It’s going to let me try a few different weapon combinations. 
 

I do think bellicosa and Grav looks like a good combo and possibly better than bellicosa and quake. Support warlords have always had a problem with being unable to do targeted shots, but now they’ll be able to, somewhat. Two shots isn’t ideal because you can’t guarantee any hits though on the plus side if you aren’t targeting you have a good chance to land a concussive hit on something. You still have the option of firing one or other gun at knights to shake/kill them.

 

I have a feeling the Psi-titan might really enjoy a Grav gun. I might paint my other one black for My long-unfinished psi-titan rather than my Astorum. Hmm. 

[schoon]

1 hour ago, Mandragola said:

I have a feeling the Psi-titan might really enjoy a Grav gun. I might paint my other one black for My long-unfinished psi-titan rather than my Astorum. Hmm. 

 

I hadn't considered that combo - yes, that could work quite well.

[Sword Brother Adelard]

My Psi Titan has finally left its box. Along with all of the weapons I've been stowing away for it.

 

I am now slightly regretting the sheer number of options however, as currently on my desk are:

- power fist 

- Sunfury

- macro gatling

- Volkite

- top gatlings

- Apocs

- Vulcans

 

At least, I suppose, I don't have to mask these for camo!

[Mandragola]

Here’s how the first day at the goonhammer open has gone.

 

Game one was against Pete and his amazing-looking Atarus. Trying to claim three objectives and also get close to the enemy table edge. 
 

 

low gravity meant that titans would scatter a bit after moving and this ruined the start of the game as a warhound tried to hide, scattered back into LoS and died horribly in turn one. This left a warlord and dire wolf facing two reavers and a warlord on my right. The warlord tried to hold out but ultimately couldn’t weather all the voidbreaker missile spam. 
 

however on my other flank things went a lot better. Penumbral Reaper used a cheeky warp displacement to teleport away from some knights and into melee with a reaver, which he killed. A warhound then vapourised the bunched up knights before running for the end zone. So in the end it finished 1:0 to me on objectives and Getting that hound across scored a bunch of extra points. 
 

Game two was against a second Fortis maniple, this time of loyalist Legio Mortis! I had a full Regia with a possessed melee reaver as reinforcements - though it didn’t actually live that long. 

 

Penumbral Reaper basically won me this game, thanks again to a bit of warp displacement and its speedy boosted move. It was able to cross the board and charge the enemy support warlord, though I slightly fluffed its charging attacks. The support warlord fired its quake cannon and scattered to hit both of us, turning Penumbral reaper to the side before it could finish the job… but pointing it at a nearby reaver - which it then punched to death. Having quaked itself the enemy warlord was unable to back away fast enough and was finished off in the following turn. Elsewhere my other warlord and warhounds exchanged largely ineffective fire with enemy engines, with the occasional attritional kill. My opponent ended up with a reaver and warlord alive and I still had enough little guys to claim control of most quarters, getting the win. 
 

Game three was 1250 point doubles (so 2500). I was using a full Venator and my partner had a warmaster. Both traitors had Mortis and both loyalists had Astorum. 
 

This was really tough and we never really got anywhere. Our mission was to get titans forward but our opponents had a really aggressive army with loads of Cerastus knights. It took us too long  to kill these. 
 

We only got to play three turns but more wouldn’t really have helped. While we were swamped by an Ignis maniple an Axiom maniple including a nasty support warlord were pounding us, easily knocking over my out-activated warhounds. It’s a while since I’ve run hounds outside of a Regia maniple and they can die incredibly fast, especially with everyone (on both sides to be fair) getting double heat on literally every turn one reactor dice. 
 

 

So a win for the loyalists. The warmaster didnt do a lot though it killed a few knights and was our only engine to make it into a scoring position.

 

So far I can’t report brilliant performances from the Grav weapons. I have actually scored a couple of crits thanks to rending with one on a Reaver but I’ve also missed completely a lot, thanks to only having one shot. I’ll see how they do tomorrow. 

Edited December 20, 2022 by Mandragola

[Sword Brother Adelard]

Any Grav kills yet Mandragola?

[Mandragola]

On 10/30/2022 at 8:39 PM, Sword Brother Adelard said:

Any Grav kills yet Mandragola?

Not many to be honest. I did get a knight and finished off one titan with rending hits but in general I haven’t been that impressed by Grav weapons this weekend.
 

The problem is just not having many dice so it’s easy to miss entirely and you’re never going to do that much structural damage. Titans die when they get compromised somewhere but Grav weapons just don’t do that - and neither do they hit hard enough to cause crits.
 

They feel very weak on warhounds and reavers with only one shot. On a warlord they’d probably be better in a different force than my Mortis, who play aggressively and don’t need the longer range. But to be honest it’s hard to think of a situation where I wouldn’t prefer a quake cannon to the warlord version. 

 

My two games today were quite fun. In the first there were three objectives along the centre of the board which could be moved into the opponent’s half if you controlled them in the end phase. Victory went to whoever could get the most objectives into enemy territory.

 

 

So here we were in turn one with Penumbral Reaper, following March of the Dead and Warp Displacement, charging the enemy warbringer. I managed to land a couple of crits to it’s body, which was cool, but then the reaper got shut down by the sabotage stratagem and had its head blown off by a warhound. Not good!

 

The enemy dire wolf proved a massive nuisance in this game, shutting down my other warlord three times! Luckily, as a Regia maniple, I was able to protect that warlord with the shields of its warhound courtiers. 

 

Meanwhile my melee reaver went on a mini-rampage, taking out a warhound, damaging the warlord and then killing the dire wolf, while my warhounds stripped shields from things and my warlord (when it found itself awake) somehow racked up three engine kills. So after a pretty bad start I managed to wipe out the enemy and get the objectives into their territory for the win, losing no more engines myself. 

The final game’s objective was just to kill the enemy, which I did. To be honest this was a bit of an unfair match up as I had a deployment zone right up to the middle of the board. After playing March of the Dead I was right in the enemy’s face and of his 2500 point army only a Reaver survived into turn 3. 
 

This was the board at the end of turn one’s strategy phase. The template is a concealment barrage. 
 

That Reaver killed a warhound in melee and another one when its own reactor went critical, which was the end of the game.

 

I felt a bit bad about this outcome as it wasn’t much of a game for my opponent. In particular I used warp displacement to avoid a charge against Penumbral Reaper that would have destroyed it, allowing me to charge and kill an enemy warlord instead and get right into the enemy line. I didn’t really feel very sporting about doing this but my opponent insisted I did it, as it was clearly the right move. Warp displacement is an incredibly powerful strat. 

 

Overall this was a fun weekend of Titanicus with good games and friendly opponents. It was interesting using some of the campaign mechanics from shadow and iron to buff titans and also suffer persistent damage. I do find there can be problems with this stuff though as the mechanics tend to benefit better players, who win games and become even more powerful. I personally tend to prefer more of a matched play format with Swiss pairings, as it tends to result in more even games for everyone.

 

Edited December 20, 2022 by Mandragola

[Noserenda]

Glad you had a good weekend, i definitely saw big death spiral potential in the campaign rules as written for AT, for our own weekend event i just removed persistent damage, used set points values per mission but kept rerolls via xp, though from memory i dont think anyone got more than one on any given titan, it was mostly a bit of fun to track kills etc, id definitely be a bit wary of more complicated xp systems! 

[Master Ciaphas]

Looks amazing! I have been spending far, far too little time on AT18 in 2021 and 2022 - so I definitely need to get a game on. 

 

Thanks for sharing, Mandragola!

 

Cheers

MAster Ciaphas

[Mandragola]

It was fun overall and a really well run event. There are always lessons to take from these things though, and we also have our own preferences that aren’t necessarily right or wrong. 
 

Anyway a couple more photos. This was my full battlegroup:

 

 

And the event photographer took some shots of Penumbral Reaper doing his thing, which I quite like. 
 

here he is bringing the warmaster’s judgement down on some loyalist legio Mortis(!). 
 

 

Here he has just charged the warbringer, only to be shut down by a sabotage order. This didn’t go as well!
 

[Mandragola]

Last weekend I went to another AT event: Warfare in Reading (actually farnborough airfield’s conference centre). Astorum were back in action this time. This was another campaign weekend, though without experience or tracking damage. Instead you got to pick your army after seeing the mission you needed to achieve. Accordingly, I took along all the engines I could fit into a case. 
 

 

Actually, despite bringing three reavers, I never actually fielded them. I did get the warbringer out a couple of times though, for the first time since buying it about 2.5 years ago. 
 

So five more games at 1750-ish, though with varying army lists. Here’s how it went. 

Game one was meant to be 1750 but ended up being 2000 points, as that’s what my opponent had and it was easier for me to add points than for him to delete them. The mission was to destroy enemy engines and the middle of the board was full of an ork town. If you went into the town you got attacked by orks, so we didn’t do that much. I took an Extermigus maniple of three warlords and a warbringer, with quite a few upgrades. A couple of Cerastus knights outflanked. 
 

 

The clear highlight of the game was my opponent’s two Porphyrion. I had priority on turn one so I fired an Extermigus-boosted quake cannon at them on first fire. That killed them as well as a nearby Lancer. Hurrah! Then I killed the rest of the enemy force. The set up helped me a lot because my opponent had to send his smaller engines round the edges of the board where they were safe. I had my clawlord going up one side with the warbringer in support and my shootier warlords faced across the town, killing whatever they saw. My Cerastus took out a reaver but one of them died as it exploded. lots of points were scored for the loyalists. 
 

My intact Extermigus maniple then spent a turn cooling their reactors before systematically obliterating the ork town. 

 

Game two was 1750 and I took a Regia. Two warlords (midfield and clawlord), two hounds, two Cerastus and an armiger banner, outflanking. I was supposed to be capturing a power station, defended by a Vulcanum Extermigus with a dire wolf. 
 

This was another fairly one-sided game to be honest. The Regia shield-sharing, combined with Astorum repairs and out-activating my opponent’s warlords was overwhelming and I was able to put the enemy engines down one by one. One enemy warlord died to my Armigers, though it had the bad grace to fall on them and wipe them out - my only losses for the game. My clawlord got hold of the dire wolf, with satisfactory results.

 

Game three was the toughest of the weekend, in a mission to capture four landing pad objectives. This was partly my doing, as I brought a silly list of three warlords and a warbringer at 1750. This can be done but really shouldn’t, it turns out, as you can’t have good load-outs. And it didn’t help that my opponent was a really good player.

 

This time I was the one getting out-activated and seeing my titans overheat. A dire wolf repeatedly shut down my support warlord. My clawlord and warbringer died, leaving my brawler Seniores and double-quake warlord to try and hold out on two objectives. They actually managed to dig in and hold out, while blasting the thrice-damned dire wolf off an enemy objective to pull out the win. My opponent had a warlord, hound and warbringer shooting me but his support engines weren’t on objectives and left it too late advancing, possibly having been held back by the clawlord threat while it lived.
 

I was pleased to come away with the win here. I had to really play properly to earn it and that felt good. 
 

My in laws live reasonably near to the venue, though the sat nav decided to take me down a load of unlit b-roads instead of the motorway. After an evening of strictly and blankety blank, I was ready for day two. 
 

The mission here involved trying to kill enemy engines, with bonus points for taking them out from the side or rear. Unhelpfully, my opponent (who had a full axiom and two lancers) was given six bonus strat points to spend on outflanking, which he did with both his warhounds. I reverted to my Regia maniple and sent my own armigers to outflank as well. I took the “hold the centre” secondary, on the logic that I’d probably be there anyway. 
 

This was a really good game. It was quite cagey at first. There were a lot of LoS-blocking high-rise buildings and our knights and hounds snuck around these at first. My armigers managed to come on behind an outflanking warhound and kill it over two turns, with a big bonus for a kill in the back, though they were wiped out in the process. I lost my clawlord to a Reaver charge with the traitor allegiance bonus but I managed to take out that reaver and the enemy lancers. My own Cerastus lived but couldn’t catch the other enemy hound. My armigers’sacrifice earlier on had given me a big points lead though and I retained that, especially with my three surviving engines getting to the middle for 6 extra VPs from the tertiary. 
 

The final game was a 2v2 doubles game with 1250 points each on a 6x4 city board. I took a basic Regia maniple with brawler (downgraded to apoc launchers, luckily as it turned out), clawlord and hound. Due to the intrigues of the campaign it transpired that I was teamed up with my Vulcanum opponent from game two against my opponent from game three and a “loyalist” Vulpa Ferrox maniple, which was  worryingly close, 24” away or so.
 

Set up was quite fun in that we deployed in any corner we wanted, in order of a roll off at the start, rather than having a “side”. Actually it ended up with me and my team mate on the same side, fairly conventionally. I’d have been happier playing end to end, with the Vulpa stuff nice and far away. 
 

I’m not always a fan of multiplayer games but I really enjoyed this format. Small-ish forces meant we didn’t take a crazy amount of time to play the game. 
 

my team mate had a dire wolf, apparently recovered from its encounter with my clawlord the day before. It infiltrated between the enemy forces, somewhat bravely. This kind of worked, in that two Vulpa hounds charged off after it, leaving only a couple of reavers to face me - something they were not able to do. My clawlord one-shotted one reaver with a charge. The other one turned and ran but was ingloriously shot in the back by my clawlord and hound. There was a moment of comedy when the surviving Vulpa hound (one had overheated) charged my own hound to no real effect, then got counter-charged by my clawlord, which missed. The clawlord figured it out in the combat phase and swatted the hound but not before it got a chance for a point blank PBG volley on my own hound… and hit a weapon. Phew!

 

Meanwhile far away the two actual traitor forces were laying into each other and various engines were exploding, which was good to see. I found myself with no more enemies in range so my Seniores spent a lot of the game on first fire, raining missiles on the “enemy” traitors, who might otherwise have been overwhelmed. That meant the battle over there was more or less a draw, with just a warlord left on my side and a warbringer facing it, but my own force was intact and the Vulpa were gone. Another victory was recorded for Astorum. 
 

Overall this was a very successful outing. Lots of traitors were blown up (and a large number of orks) in exchange for three engines and a few knights. I got the best painted prize as well as best loyalist player, and the loyalists won the campaign. Together with the LGT and GHO that made twelve wins out of thirteen games at events this autumn, with my Astorum undefeated and just a lost doubles game for my Mortis at the GHO counting in the wrong column. 

Edited December 20, 2022 by Mandragola

[Sherrypie]

Good showing, pretty solid win ratio there. Did the campaign use the previous rounds' results in any dynamic way to determine where the scenarios are heading?

[Mandragola]

The campaign mechanism was partly opaque to be honest. The way it seemed to work was that there were three zones (desert, hive and industrial) and whichever side had scored most VPs in each one was deemed to be winning there. This event was actually continuing from one that had previously happened and so the areas were already partially under control. 
 

Each table had a terrain set up and a mission to achieve on it, and there were also random special missions handed out occasionally. One quite interesting mechanic was that the tables had destroyable terrain and it stayed destroyed for subsequent games - until the board got reset to represent somewhere new. 
 

on the whole I thought it all worked well. All the missions had been made up for the event and they seemed quite interesting. There was a weird issue where not all games had anywhere near the same number of VOs on offer. Games where you got a VP per point of scale you destroyed could score a lot, where those to claim objectives tended to score only around 10VPs or so. 
 

Ultimately though, the missions all gave us challenges to achieve and the biggest of these is always your opponent and their maniple. I thought it worked well. 

[Sherrypie]

I do quite like continuous use of terrain and the zone division, those are pretty straightforward ways to introduce common tie-in elements to the event without forcing much cognitive load on people. 

[Noserenda]

I do appreciate these reports, nearby titanicus events always seem to double up with something i cant cancel annoyingly! 

I did consider continuous terrain for our last weekend, which largely featured the card dropzone buildings but figured they would be flat by game 5! Good to see it worked :) 

[Mandragola]

The terrain wasn’t entirely continuous. Various campaign-related events would cause new stuff to appear, so we never ran out. The city boards started very dense as well. 
 

Destroyable terrain did lead to some fun moments. It wasn’t entirely safe to hide behind a building as you could sometimes find it demolished. I might actually start using those rules a bit more myself in future. 

[Sherrypie]

Oh yeah, destructible terrain is a key feature of the game, I'd never leave it out unless playing with people who explicitly wish to keep the rules interactions to a minimum that day.

[Noserenda]

Yeah we love it in our group along side dense cities, sometimes you just need to make your own route to target :D Or widen an alley some knights are hiding in to mug passing titans! 

That said most buildigns dont die deliberately, they get caught in blasts or exploding titans wake! 

[schoon]

Excellent report, and lovely collection of Titans.

 

Thank-you!

[Mandragola]

Recently I’ve been working a bit on Horus heresy stuff, which I need to get ready for Warhammer fest at the end of April. A quarter of that army is the Warhound that I’m doing in the colours of my Legio Astorum. 
 

The interior was a bit of a mental block for me but I’ve finally cleared it. With this done I’ve finally been able to stick the hull and head together (though not the upper armour plates, which will be magnetised) and I’ll be able to work on more of the armour plates. 
 

What I’ve basically done here is to paint the inside with Vallejo steel, pick out a few details like purity seals and then daub the whole lot in the necron canoptek glow paint. I found that one coat on more or less everything apart from deep shadows, followed by a coat on just raised areas, created a pretty decent effect, quickly. 

 

This was my first pass of the reactor room. I went back and added more to the left side after this, as well as tidying. Up the console. 
 

 

the body’s now all stuck together so you’re just looking down into it. I think the level of detail in the paint is pretty adequate for that. 
 

 

 

I painted the bridge crew fairly properly before daubing them in canoptek glow as well.  
 

 

I’m glad that’s done. I think it works and I’m looking forward to the next steps. 

[Lord_Borak]

Love the green glow effect. Almost gives a sickly feeling to it. 

[Interrogator Stobz]

Really cool interiors Brother!

 

[Mandragola]

Thanks both. I’m quite pleased with the result, especially since it only really required daubing canoptek glow around the place a couple of times. I’m tempted to try it on some of the boarding terrain, but also aware that I don’t have anything like the time or patience required. 

[Sherrypie]

The glow effect is very nice, though might benefit from some tidying up at flat panels and sharper edges to sell the effect better.

[Mandragola]

Thanks, those are good tips and things that I might possibly do... but not soon if we're realistic. Let's get the damn thing's body painted first.