Epic: Iron Lion Zion

"Faith and steel must now be joined."

 - the daemon Ingethel, in The Horus Heresy: Aurelian, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Now that I've played Legions Imperialis, I've got lots of ideas on how to expand my Word Bearers army. When I read The First Heretic, I thought the Legio Cybernetica robots in Word Bearers colors were very cool, so I definitely want a Brethren of Iron formation.

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After the Mechanicum supplement for Legions came out, Games Workshop published PDF rules for what they call Bonded Cybernetica Formations. These are a way to take Mechanicum troops - mostly robots - in other armies, without using up the ally allowance. The marine formation is called a Brethren of Iron; it's a marine HQ and two Core slots, which must be either marines or Thallax automata. All the marine units in the formation gain the Cortex Controller rule, so they can give orders to robots.

So at some point, I'll want at least one marine tactical detachment to do some cortex controlling. This gave me several conversion ideas, so I grabbed a Mechanicum infantry box and got to work. I gave the sergeant an axe from a Tech-Priest Auxilia and a servo-arm from an Archmagos, and added a Rapier crewmember to the stand.

I gave the Tech-Priest who lost his axe a hammer from one of the Terminators on the marine sprue, so I guess I also have a Mechanicum unit.

Since I was chopping up an Archmagos, I stuck his axe on a marine commander, and added another Rapier crewmember, to make a start on an HQ unit.

I'm coming back to these guys when I field them! For now I just want to say that I'm quite surprised I find myself actually enjoying 8mm conversions.

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Another support formation in the same PDF is the Collegia Titanica Support Cohort. It lets you bring robots as part of the Collegia Titanica list, and even better, regular Mechanicum infantry as optional choices. So I painted the tech-thralls in the Mechanicum infantry box in the colors of Legio Venefica.

I think they look pretty good! When I get some robots, I'll be able to field these guys with my Titans.

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I also got myself a second Predator squadron. I wasn't too impressed with the Sicarans, but I liked my las-preds.

Building tanks gave me a very silly idea for my Brethren of Iron. They need an HQ choice. I could just include a command stand, but what do I do with it? It's not fast enough to keep up with the Thallax automata and it doesn't have jump packs, so it would slow them down. But attaching it to a tactical detachment is just a waste of a cortex controller.

You know what could keep up with the robots or go off and do things on its own? A Kratos. And just like that, a stupid conversion idea was born.

Since I already used one Archmagos for conversion bits, I took the tentacles from their Abeyant and stuck them to a Kratos hull.

I stuck the front of the Abeyant, with the speaker and antenna, to the back of the Kratos turret, and the servo-arm to the side, and added another antenna-like thing to the left side of the turret.

I like it!

Meanwhile, I built the Thallax Cohorts from the Mechanicum box and painted them. I quite like the models!

As I was putting my next army list together, I ended up with a spare 20 points and couldn't think of anything else to use it on except even more Thallaxes. Since I don't have any more of the models, I painted two bases of Ursarax automata to proxy them with.

So for my next game, I'll be fielding a Brethren of Iron formation consisting of a Kratos Commander and two four-stand detachments of Thallax battle-automata.

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I like the robots and will almost certainly pick up the Battle-Automata box, but in general, I'm not really sold on the Mechanicum aesthetic in Legions. It's also weird to me that they have no flyers; there are Machine Cult ornithopters in the Horus Heresy novels and 40k, so hopefully we'll see them at some point. And, of course, some more artillery.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 20: Fear to Tread

The war that came to Melchior was fought by gods and angels; it cracked sky and earth, burned mountains and turned oceans to ash, but in the end it was all about a single objective.

 - The Horus Heresy: Fear to Tread, James Swallow

It's time for a full-length Horus Heresy novel again. This is a James Swallow joint - he of Nemesis and the Eisenstein - so I have some expectations. Fear to Tread stars Emps' super special vampire boys, the Blood Angels, who we last met waaay back in Horus Rising. Back when I got into Warhammer in the early nineties, I feel like the Blood Angels were one of the most prominent chapters, so it'll be nice to hear from them.

**

It's lovely that I just complained about how banal some authors make the primarchs, and then Fear to Tread starts with excellent scenes between Horus and Sanguinius. This is how primarchs should be written. In other well-written scenes, you really have to hand it to Erbs, because he manages to show up in Fabulous Bill's lab, of all the places in the galaxy, and be by far the creepiest, most unpleasant person there.

The plot kicks off when Horus contacts Sanguinius via the services of a weird naked astropath, and sends the entire Blood Angels legion to the Signus cluster. Earlier, Horus and Sanguinius led their legions against a xenos species called the Nephilim, who sound an awful lot like Enslavers, and Horus tells Sanguinius that the Nephilim have taken over the Signus cluster.

This, we learn, is actually a cunning plan by Erbs to make Sanguinius and his legion fall to Chaos, but Horus's even more cunning plan is to have Sanguinius killed so he doesn't become a rival to Horus. So instead of Nephilim, the Signus cluster is actually the site of a massive warp incursion by daemons of Slaanesh and Khorne.

As with his previous novels, Swallow writes well, and what he does particularly well here is play on the fact that the Blood Angels don't understand what they're facing, but a reader even somewhat familiar with Warhammer immediately does, and he makes it work.

If I have a criticism, it's that the Blood Angel characters aren't particularly great, and the couple of Word Bearers and Space Wolves along for the ride are all fairly unoriginal stereotypes of their legions. We've had so many sneering Word Bearers doing the Dr. Evil pinky finger, and so many Space Woofs drinking mead and telling us about how they took an arrow to the knee. I know I'm biased, but it's especially galling with the Word Bearers, who got such a great treatment in First Heretic, only to regress to cartoon villainy since.

**

That said, Fear to Tread is an excellent Horus Heresy story, and I very much enjoyed it. It's also an annoying story, because I now want to build some traitor Blood Angels, but maybe I'll make that into a 28mm project.

Epic: Legions Imperialis Artillery

I've now played Legions Imperialis for the first time, and the main lesson I took from it is that I need more artillery. To be perfectly honest, I've thought that in every wargame I've ever played since my very first one, KOEI's L'Empereur (1991) on the PC. In L'Empereur, artillery fire would cause casualties to enemy formations and even break them, leaving them almost defenceless. It taught me to never fight a battle where I don't have artillery superiority, and I intend to take that lesson with me to Legions Imperialis.

So I painted the rest of my Rapiers.

With the release of Liber Strategia, we finally got Whirlwinds, and obviously I pre-ordered a box of them immediately.

They were quite quick to build, and I think I'm already developing a routine for building a Rhino chassis.

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So that's the artillery I've got. But what kind of artillery should I have?

When The Great Slaughter came out, Goonhammer ran the numbers on the Basilisk, and they're impressive. I quote:

a 12 model Basilisk company (430 points of models) can kill a mint Warhound Titan (330 points) with slightly better than average dice, or a Warhound without Voids on below average dice, or a Reaver or Warbringer without Voids on average dice. They can wipe out a 4 model Predator or Sicaran detachment on average dice, or 1 ½ Kratos.

And that's with the old points values: Basilisks actually got cheaper in Liber Strategia!

Now that we've got more artillery units, we can do a little comparison. Not counting Titans, the Mechanicum's only Barrage weapon is on the Karacnos Assault Tank, which is a self-propelled artillery system despite that name. The Legions Astartes can now field Rapiers with quad-launchers as well as the Scorpius and Whirlwind, while the Solar Auxilia have the same Rapiers, and the Medusa and Basilisk.

Surely, by the way, the mole mortar should have Barrage?

The Rapier quad-launcher, Whirlwind and Karacnos fire two shots out to 30", while the Scorpius gets two to 18"; the Medusa fires a single shot to 12" and the Basilisk has a massive range of 90" for its single shot. Everything hits on a 4+. Taking minimum ranges into account, firing at a target 8-12" away that they can see produces one hit per Rapier or Scorpius, 1.2 hits per Whirlwind because it has Rapid Fire, and 0.5 hits per Basilisk or Medusa.

When you convert that into points per hit with the Liber Strategia points values, here's what you get:

Basilisk • 65 points per hit • -2 save modifier

Medusa • 60 pph • -3 • Heavy Barrage

Legion Scorpius • 50 pph • -2 • Light AT

Karacnos • 40 pph • -1 • Ignores Cover

Whirlwind • 37.5 pph • 0 • Ignores Cover

Legion Rapier • 20 pph • -1 • Light

Auxilia Rapier • 15 pph • -1 • Light

So the Basilisk costs the most points per hit, but has superlative range and a pretty hefty -2 save modifier, which does make it excellent for deleting armored targets. On the Marine side, you can get two Whirlwind hits for the same points, while Legion Rapiers are almost half the price again and Auxilia Rapiers are less than half. Of course, the Whirlwind doesn't have the save modifier, but does ignore cover, while the Rapier shots are Light.

With its Light AT shots, the Scorpius is a bit of a special case, as it's going to be good against armored infantry, cavalry and walkers, especially in the open. So a dedicated anti-marine weapon system, which does make sense for something the fluff says was created for the Space Wolves. Similarly, the short range and Heavy Barrage rule on the Medusa also make it a more specialist weapon to use against troops in buildings at short range.

The Karacnos is the strangest artillery system so far. It's called a tank, and in addition to the mortar battery, it has two dice of Point Defence lightning locks and a shock ram with Wrecker (2) - and a CAF of +0. So a self-propelled gun that can ram buildings. It's actually slightly cheaper than a Whirlwind, can defend itself better, and has a -1 save modifier into the bargain. Bizarrely, it's a Battle Tank in the Mechanicum organization chart, so you could bring an Autokratorii Regiment with three of them for 120 points as an allied formation.

For the other systems, I think this isn't a bad balance of costs. Whirlwinds strike me as the best general artillery, while Basilisks are better against armor and Rapiers generate a lot more shots against Light targets.

The picture gets more complicated if you factor in that Rapiers also have a direct fire mode with Light AT and Demolisher, and as infantry they can use buildings for cover. Legion Rapiers have a better armor save and morale, and if they're Word Bearers, they can stay on First Fire even if their formation breaks.

The numbers here are calculated for directly visible targets, frankly because it was that much easier, and firing indirectly affects all the units the same way. The only real exception is Basilisks in artillery companies, or if you bring a Marauder Pathfinder. I think there should be more fire control options, so let's hope something gets introduced in the future.

In general, I think that for an Astartes army, a mix of Rapiers and Whirlwinds seems best, and the Solar Auxilia pioneer company is starting to sound like a really good allied formation to pick.

Speaking of the future, there's still plenty of artillery systems I hope make it into Legions. If I remember correctly, Imperial Guard artillery in Space Marine included the Bombard siege gun and Manticore rocket launcher, and 28mm Horus Heresy has the Arquitor Bombard for the Marines.

For myself, I think I'll be picking up some Mechanicum artillery next!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 19: The Primarchs

He did not dream, he never dreamed, yet this was, inescapably, a dream.

 - The Reflection Crack'd, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs

Due to Black Library charging 1€ more for the whole volume than for just the Alpha Legion short story I wanted to read, I got the entire twentieth Horus Heresy book.

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The volume starts with Graham McNeill at the Emperor's Children again. Even though Fulgrim was almost unbearably turgid, McNeill's improved since, and I found I quite liked being with Fulgrim and his captains again. There's some good bits here, but the ending is a massively disappointing cop-out and Fulgrim's fulminations are just plain boring.

One thing McNeill definitely deserves credit for, and it's Lucius. He is unbearably arrogant, and I think so far the absolute best villain of the Horus Heresy. He was a bright spot all through Fulgrim, and I especially enjoyed his antics in Galaxy In Flames. He's great here as well, and genuinely turning into one of my favorite characters.

The next story is about the Iron Hands, who are boring, and it's by Nick Kyme. I've read one short story of his earlier and it wasn't very good. Neither is this one. The Iron Hands are waging war by marching around on foot and in formation in a desert, as if this was Napoléon in Egypt or something, and Ferrus Manus is a complete buffoon. I didn't finish the story. Gav Thorpe's The Lion is another one of his Dark Angels stories, just as soulless and forgettable as the others.

The greatest sin of the mediocre-to-bad Horus Heresy stories is that they make the primarchs boring. The first novels, from Horus Rising on, had a simple formula: we saw the space marines through the eyes of the human remembrancers, which let us properly appreciate how superhuman the Astartes are. The primarchs were one step above space marines and inscrutable, transcendent characters compared to them.

This all just absolutely falls apart when authors like Thorpe and Kyme make us listen to the primarchs' boring and mundane internal monologues. After Deliverance Lost, I can't think of Corvus Corax as anything other than incredibly boring. The same goes for Guilliman, El'Jonson and Ferrus Manus, to name just a few. They've gone from demigods to just, like, bigger space marines with funnier names. It's a great loss to the series.

Finally, then, The Serpent Beneath, by Rob Sanders. I love that so far, an Alpha Legion story means that the writers seem to get permission to do the silliest spy thriller and video game stories, because as with Legion, this also feels like the author is having fun with it. The story also stars a Primarch, but because it's an Alpha Legion story, any statement of fact about it can always be followed by "or does it". I enjoyed it, and I'm developing a real love for XX Legion.

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I think that was my third short story anthology, and they're still very hit-and-miss. For every good short story, there's at least one distinctly mediocre one, and usually one that's just plain not worth reading. Again, I might still pick some up for pricing reasons if there's a story I think I want to read, but if I'm honest, on their own merits these aren't worth it.