"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.















