Horus Heresy Exemplary Battles - The Liberation of Constanix II

[Nagashsnee]

47 minutes ago, Petitioner's City said:

I believe the siege (and Master of Mankind) having so many skitarii reflects a change in the mechanicum forces we see at Terra from that more broadly in the Imperium - while much of the heresy focuses on feudal fiefdoms of the Mechanicum distant from or quasi independent from Mars, on Terra, and within the Solar system, we are firmly within the fiefdom of Mars, be it Hel's Mars, or among the loyalists the Mars of the new Mechanicus, using the tools they have to hand to create what is easiest and most efficient. That contextualises why we see so many skitarii at the Siege - this is the most full expression of Mars in the civil war - and perhaps also forms a prelude to the millennia of change ahead propagated by Mars as it assets increasing control over the rest of the remaining Mechanicus. 

 

But other books that have mech show and mention skitarii in pretty much every corner of the universe? I recently read Dreadwing and they were mentioned/featured in that heavily when talking about the mech forces.  And i know they play a MAJOR role in Know no Fear as part of the mech forces there. Any notion of them as a 'a martian thing' lore wise died a while ago 

 

Tho i admit the disconect between BL books and FW army lists exists and is strong.  And if they had filled the gap with other things it would be different. But mech have mostly been forgotten for a while now, and things like this article are for me salt in the wound.  

[Marshal Rohr]

This article shouldn’t be salt in the wound, those three types of non-traditional but Mechanicum aligned styles of Militia come up all the time in the lore and need to be possible for people to collect and play. It’s just that most of the lists need some serious expansion. Panoptica is ok for house rules but it still isn’t even that robust. There’s no real way to make a lot of the stuff we know exists in the Heresy right now and we are coming up on three years. 
 

Exemplary Battles is the best vehicle to keep widening out the Heresy, so hopefully if Solar Auxilia is the mystery release the next wave of Exemplary Battles is focused on giving us things like Skitarii, even if limited to a Martian focused faction. Doing another list for Imperial Army that is essentially just the full roster of old Imperial Armor vehicles with generic names like “Light Assault Vehicle” for Centaurs would be even better. Especially as things like the Tauros are about to come out in plastic. 

[WrathOfTheLion]

Just this pdf alone mentions Skitarii forces on the main flotilla/island for Constanix II, so I think they must be more prolific than Mars.

[lansalt]

2 hours ago, Nagashsnee said:

the disconect between BL books and FW army lists exists and is strong

With all due respect to the amazing work of Bligh and FW, it's obvious that they were disingenous when talking about the differences between the 30k and 40k mechanicum/ad mech to push sales of their own miniature range.

They created the Taghmata out of nowhere to justify not using the 40k skitarii models they surely knew were in the pipeline, and despite how often they appear as the main Mechanicum troops in the HH. The same can be said about the invention of Solar Auxilia to avoid the actual Imperial Army of the stories, or the many other times when FW does what they want blatantly disregarding previous stablished material (like the Argel Tal and Zephon minis)

Which is a shame, because even in 40k the current plactic Skitarii miniatures are not even the most common version of all the variants out there in the lore, and most Skitarii aren't the Rangers and Vanguard Rad-Troopers we've become used to (see Calgar's Fury). There was plenty of design space for stuff like the feral Skitarii of Know No Fear and other books. Alan Bligh must have know this, because Inferno mentions Skitarii with volkite chargers as the main part of the Mechanicum forces along the SW and Custodes.

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by lansalt

[Marshal Rohr]

The feral Skitarii are from another Abnett book not Know No Fear. 
 

also your timeline is completely wrong. Alan began drafting the Taghmata stuff well before the Heresy and Skitarii release. He did when he was still working in mail orders or something. This was confirmed by John French. 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Marshal Rohr

[Marshal Rohr]

30 minutes ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

Just this pdf alone mentions Skitarii forces on the main flotilla/island for Constanix II, so I think they must be more prolific than Mars.

 

Theres also mention of Cyclorathian Skitarii being made from entire populations of Coronid Reach planets. 

[Noserenda]

See i love the Taghmata idea because its so uniquely Mechanicum rather than Adeptus Mechanicus. The Adeptus Mechanicus has entrenched Skitarii/Titan armies backed up by misc weirdness and smaller factions while the Mechanicum has a much more independant Titan Legions and nothing but weirdness and smaller factions all the way down, the Taghmata is just all the various tech priests wheeling out their cool death rays, improbable engines and murder cyborgs and seeing what sticks :D 

In this era the Skitarii/Franchise are just one faction among many and limited in some ways to Mars and the many (MANY) forgeworlds they dominate/influence whilst the Cybernetica are the more dominant militant faction and many others see the more modified Thallax as a better choice for combat cyborg troops. But its ultimately political, the Cybernetica were seen as supporting Horus more than not (And ill bet daemon engines being a bit too easy to make out of robots didnt help either) whilst the Skitarii were influential in the loyalist faction that became the Adeptus Mechanicus, combine that with the harrowing of the Titan Legions and you have a power vacuum that the Skitarii and their supporters seized post heresy, leading to them being the "default" in 40k.

The problem IRL i think, is that SG want to make Marines pretty much the sole focus of 30k, because space marines sell more than everything else and that commercial imperative is always warring against the need to make money for the company. So for all that some of the creative types want to explore all the interesting differences, nooks and crannies of the 30k era and would probably knock out a whole bunch of army lists left unmonitored, there is a need to sell things branded for age of darkness, and a lot of them.

But yeah, Skitarii and Secutarii both can easily field 30k armies and probably should be on a par with Cybernetica and Reductor in the old 1st ed list (Ive not paid much attention to Mech in 2nd ed sorry) but they are 40k kits (And apparently someone hates Secutarii enough they cant have line?) so its crumbs.

[lansalt]

20 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

The feral Skitarii are from another Abnett book not Know No Fear. 

I remembered the KNF skitarii leader being described as such, but you're right. He's said to be in baroque armour and to be "aposematistic" (which shows that the purple prose of TEATD is nothing new for Abnett lol)

24 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Alan began drafting the Taghmata stuff well before the Heresy and Skitarii release

That doesn't change that he introduced it into the setting when Skitarii were already stablished as the main troops of the Mechanicum, and not just the Martian one. As I said above, this is FW sellling their own version of a faction vs. the most common instances of them in the stories. The same happened with SA vs the Army, or the absence of BA's Sanguinary Guard vs. Dawnbreakers, Scimitar jetbikes vs. Bullock jetbikes... the list goes on and on.
There's a clear pattern going from Betrayal to the latest Exemplary Battles of FW pushing their own narrative and miniature range no matter if they break canon or not, specially when it can overlap with 40k minis.

 

[Marshal Rohr]

That isn’t entirely unreasonable given the behavior of the troglodytes in management and accounting at Games Workshop. If a box of Skitarii is sold, or Sanguinary Guard, that shows as a positive on the balance sheets for 40K product, not Specialist Games. If Specialist Games is able to launch Mechanicum in plastic, the robots will sell and the inverse will become true as people who love Ad Mech in 40K start buying the robots because they want to use them in their games of 40K - moving the needle to the Goblins pocket watching the studios in favor of SG, letting them have more resources. 
 

If the MBA goons running the business had any awareness of their market at all, using the philosophy laid out about the Hobby Trumpet on the Painting Phase, they’d recognize cross selling is net gain and encourage it, but we know they don’t. 
 

Anyway - Mechanicum expansions 

 

Since the Heresy started we’ve been hearing about “The Autokratorii”, an organized professional soldiery that makes up a substantial portion of Taghmata forces. They are mentioned specifically at Paramar regiment-sized groups equivalent to Army forces. This is what the studio needs to provide a list for, even if it’s vague about what models should be used to represent it. The Autokratorii have entire regiments of Tech Guard, which we can see a little glimmer of here with Arms of the Omnissiah and Forge Remnants. The Tech-Thrall provenance fits the Macro-Technia as laid out below. 
 

It is becoming more and more obvious that Specialist Games needs to release an Imperialis Auxilia list similar to Militia and Ruinstorm Daemons that has a system similar to Cohort Doctrines and Provenances that focuses purely on the various professional military formations of the Imperium and Mechanicum. So for you Elite 4+ Save infantry and strong tanks you need to do Solar Auxilia. For mass levies and abhumans (and warp cults) you use the Militia list. For everything in between you use the Imperialis Auxilia List that doesn’t have much in the way of theme but provides that key massed infantry and tank but doesn’t give you much flavor. Maybe a Regimental Organization or Equipment system that lets you swap different platoons as troops without buffing their base stat lines. 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Marshal Rohr

[lansalt]

32 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

That isn’t entirely unreasonable given the behavior of the troglodytes in management and accounting at Games Workshop. If a box of Skitarii is sold, or Sanguinary Guard, that shows as a positive on the balance sheets for 40K product, not Specialist Games

I agree that this must be the underlying reason, but there were other ways to solve that problem instead of breaking lore continuity:

• Sell a plastic kit with resin upgrades/a new 30k sprue included under the HH brand, as they've done many times with vehicles. This counts as their own SKU.
• Sell the same kit just with different decals as another SKU, as they're doing now with Armigers.

32 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

It is becoming more and more obvious that Specialist Games needs to release an Imperialis Auxilia list similar to Militia and Ruinstorm Daemons that has a system similar to Cohort Doctrines and Provenances that focuses purely on the various professional military formations of the Imperium and Mechanicum.

I doubt that they're going to do it. We'll get plastic Solar Auxilia before we get the actual Imperial Army, even if it could be just as easy as using the new cadians with 30k upgrade sprues to get troops almost identical to the ones in the cover of BL novels. It's clear that they've double down in their policy of not wanting players to potentially use the same models in 30k and 40k, or viceversa.

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by lansalt

[Petitioner's City]

6 hours ago, lansalt said:

. It's clear that they've double down in their policy of not wanting players to potentially use the same models in 30k and 40k, or viceversa.

 

 

Except have they?

 

 

 

 

Quote

Now players have an even greater range of miniatures to draw from when putting together their militia armies, including (but in no way limited to) the brand new Cadian Shock Troopers, Death Korps, Blooded, Chaos Cultists, and a plethora of Necromunda gang sets and upgrades. 

 

I just feel we can't be too black and white about this, especially given how many 40k bits and bobs (or full models) forge world staff use in their heresy models. 

 

Even looking at this supplement, where even do those fancy arc rifles and radium pistols included in the new provenance come from, if one is really wanting to use the correct piece? 

[Noserenda]

They encouraged it (In a loose sense as necromunda was pushed just as heavily) for the army that has no model range. For the armies that do have a 30k range there are sometime gaping holes where the 40k kits should be but they dont want you to buy them, hell, even the militia list, despite being an infinitely varied set of armies, (And again, no model range) lacks the Chimera and Taurox as dedicated transports leaving only Necromunda trucks and FW super heavies to move your troops around semi ridiculously.

Its right there, its blindingly obvious dude.