Horus Heresy: Looking for Allies

Many creatures which once had shunned this desert ventured to live here now. Many in the band remarked how the daylight owls proliferated. Even now, Ghanima could see antbirds. They jigged and danced along the insect lines which swarmed in the damp sand at the end of the shattered qanat. Few badgers were to be seen out here, but there were kangaroo mice in uncounted numbers.

 - Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

I've been very much enjoying getting into Horus Heresy, if only because I keep getting new modeling ideas all the time.

I like the rulebook and Liber Hereticus because there's a lot of stuff in there. For example, there's this relationship chart, without which I would never have realized that the Salamanders are the friendship is magic legion.

More to the point, it tells me that my Word Bearers aren't really super friends with anybody except the Sons of Horus. I do like their color scheme, but other than that, eh. None of the special units exactly inspire me, and the legion as a whole is just not that interesting to me. All of the fun factions, though, are less close friends and more in the sort of casual acquaintances line.

**

Since I've already got some Thousand Sons for 40k, I have to admit I'm partial to building some for 30k as well. Besides, the magic robots and psyker dreadnoughts are pretty cool. It also occurs to me that the funniest possible Thousand Sons unit would be a Scout squad, and once I'd thought of it I really wanted to build it.

I decided they should have Nemesis bolters, and frankly, the Nemesis bolters on some of the Forge World models just look like boringly generic sniper rifles. Not to mention that the whole idea of a silencer on a bolter is absolutely ludicrous. So I bought a box of regular scouts and took their bolters apart.

I then drilled a couple of tiny holes, superglued in some copper wire, and reassembled the bolter to be longer.

Then it was a simple matter of filling in the gap with green stuff, and we have Nemesis bolters.

I had two telescopic sights in my collection of space marine bits.

For the other three, I chopped sights off some unused Deathwatch bolters.

Then we add some Statuesque Miniatures beret and veteran heads, and we have a Scout Squad.

This is what the Sergeant looks like painted up:

And here's the Scout squad Viman-dadaran-ich, the very producers of doubt, in its entirety.

**

The problem with Thousand Sons, though, is that since they're only Distrusted Allies, they can't score objectives for me. But Word Bearers actually have precious few legions that they're really friends with, which makes sense because they are theologians. Apart from the previously mentioned Sons of Horus and Salamanders, it's just the Emperor's Children, White Scars, and... Dark Angels.

Back in 2019, I got the Vigilus Ablaze campaign book so my Dark Apostle could use the new prayers in our next game. As it happens, Vigilus Ablaze also had rules for a specialist detachment of Fallen, and I wanted to make one. The first model I finished was a Sorcerer with an improvised combi-plasma, made from the Fallen/Dark Angels Veteran kit.

I gave them old-style Librarian heraldry.

Since then, the Fallen were completely dropped from 9th edition, so I suppose this dude is now a 30k Dark Angel Librarian? Mk VII armor was around during the Heresy, it's not completely impossible. While I was at it, how was I supposed to resist Wargame Exclusive's Cypheria? I suppose I could field her as a Moritat...

This all gave rise to another conversion idea. I have a slightly ancient Legion of the Damned sergeant from 3rd edition, and I'd thought about using the model as a chaplain earlier. It's just that there's a problem. Scale creep.

Looking more closely at the model, the torso is more or less the same size as the Mk VIs, but the legs are a lot shorter. I think that's a problem I can solve.

Here we go! While I was at it, I added the Mk VI power sword.

Using the same method that got me the Thousand Sons scouts, I feel like the objectively funniest Dark Angels character to make would be an Esoterist. So while I was at it, I added some Dark Angels bits and a Kromlech Book of Damnation.

Here we go, then:

I managed to get that green stuff shaped at least decently, I think, so I feel like this is going to work! I'm going to argue that this is a variant of Mk V power armour. I think I more or less solved the scale issue:

Here they are all painted up. I'm very happy with this!

**

It's a well-known fact that Warhammer has stolen huge amounts of fluff from Dune. Navigators, proscribed computer technologies, the Imperial religious bureaucracy, and so on. The Warhammer 40,000 timeline is, I think quite explicitly, written so that the events of Dune fit neatly in it.

Even though it's a science fiction classic, I have to admit I only got around to reading Dune after the new movie came out. It was not only a great movie, but also hands down the most Warhammer movie ever made, which is obviously not a coincidence. As I was reading the novels, I started thinking about incorporating some Dune content in my Warhammer hobbying. I was quite pleased, then, when I came across this in Dune Messiah:

A heliograph of 'thopter wings flashed in the bright afternoon sun above the temple, part of the Royal Guard with Muad'dib's fist-symbol on its fuselage.

Muad'dib's fist-symbol! That's it: in my headcanon, the Imperial Fists are now Fremen. I don't know what the deal is with emperors having royal guards, but they did it in Star Wars as well, even though "royal" most definitely means something related to a king, not an emperor.

I've always been slightly partial to the Imperial Fists color scheme anyway, because the yellow is such a bold choice, and I quite often ended up playing as them in the Space Crusade video game. So I hit up the excellent Victoria Miniatures for some appropriate heads, and we're ready to go.

I'm going to start by painting up the sword Praetor from the Age of Darkness box as an Imperial Fists Praetor. I chopped up one of Victoria's Desert Torsos A for an appropriate head. I also couldn't decide whether I should swap the volkite charger for a bolter, in order to take advantage of the legion bonus. I've left the volkite on for now.

While I wasn't really interested in any of the Rites of War available to my Word Bearers, there are actually several Imperial Fists ones that I might want to try: the Hammerfall Strike Force or even the Stone Gauntlet.

I freehanded the army badge and some Imperial Fists heraldry onto the right shoulder pad.

I'm actually kinda happy with this model, and I may now have to start thinking about a command squad for them.

**

One of the ironies of all this is that a big reason I bought the Age of Darkness box in the first place was that I wanted to build Fallen for 40k. Only for the Fallen to then completely disappear from the game. Nonetheless, I've quite enjoyed trying out different legion paint schemes and so on. I'm definitely attracted to the idea of Dune-themed Imperial Fists, but I think I also have some ideas for more Dark Angels...

Let's Paint Victory at Sea: the Kriegsmarine Fleet Box

In war, there is a conception known as the creation of a diversion, which consists of extending the scope of one's own operations to other areas in such a way that the enemy, to defend them, will be forced to withdraw forces from the main theatre of operations and thus to relax his pressure on it. A diversion, however, is of value only when, seen as a whole, it results in an advantage to the side creating it.

 - Admiral Karl Dönitz, Memoirs, chapter 10: the Battle of the Atlantic: November 1940–December 1941

I love small scale war games, and I love naval history. So when a friendly nearby mail-order gaming store offered Warlord's Victory at Sea rulebook for a competitive price, and a sizeable discount on the German navy fleet box, I knew what to do.

 - General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) in KOEI's L'Empereur (1989)

**

The German navy in World War II is perennially interesting because it offers so much fodder for all kinds of alternate histories. Decisively outnumbered by the Royal Navy, unsuccessful in the ferocious bureaucratic infighting of Nazi Germany and hampered by terrible national leadership, the Kriegsmarine still had excellently engineered, powerful fighting ships that could more than hold their own against their enemies. Reading the naval history of the Second World War, even through Anglo-American triumphalism, it's hard to not ask if the Germans couldn't have done more with what they had.

The trouble started at the top. Like most fascists, Hitler was basically a moron who replaced knowledge with bluster and bigotry. Sure, he was a successful politician, but I've always found the whole mythology of Hitler's supposed genius to be highly dubious. After nazism ended in utter defeat, just about everyone involved with it found it very convenient to blame everything on Hitler, and so he came to be portrayed as this sort of demonic spirit that somehow possessed all of Germany. It's complete nonsense. If there's anything the Trump phenomenon has taught us, surely it's that you can be a successful fascist demagogue while also being a complete idiot.

As a war leader and strategist, Hitler was useless. The post-WWI German navy never quite seemed to have a clear concept of what it was for. The ships it was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles made it essentially a coast defence force, but the Germans set out to circumvent this even before the Nazis came to power. Eventually in 1938 Hitler decided that he might have to fight Great Britain after all, and the naval building program known as Plan Z came into effect. The new fleet was to be ready by 1945, and Hitler apparently told the navy that the war would start in 1948.

As we know, the war actually started in 1939, when Plan Z had barely got underway. Because Germany faced an appalling shortage of steel, most work on the warships was immediately stopped. The fate of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin is a good example. Laid down in 1936 and launched in 1938, the ship was almost finished when the war started. In April 1940, work on her was stopped after the heavy losses in the Norwegian campaign. In 1942, however, Hitler and the navy had second thoughts, because now aircraft carriers were beginning to look like a really good idea, so work on the Graf Zeppelin was restarted in May. It lasted until December, when Hitler had a tantrum over the inconclusive Battle of the Barents Sea, fired Grand Admiral Raeder and stopped all work on big surface ships. The Graf Zeppelin was never finished, and was eventually sunk off the coast of Poland by the Soviets after the war.

So there's strategic leadership for you. Hitler's incompetence was magnified by the navy's inability to stand up to him, and its own lack of strategic direction. All in all, it never really seemed obvious what the Kriegsmarine was actually for, and the few heavy ships it did have were more or less squandered in penny-packet actions, or deployed so cautiously that they never got anything done.

This is what makes it such an interesting subject for wargaming: what if the German navy had actually been deployed as a battlefleet, and had fought fleet actions against some of its enemies?

This, incidentally, was why I was reading Correlli Barnett earlier. At the end of 1941, the Royal Navy was in a bad way. That November, HMS Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine; in December, the Prince of Wales and Repulse were destroyed by Japanese aircraft off Singapore, and HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were sunk in Alexandria harbor in a raid by Italian special forces. In the space of a little over a month, the Royal Navy lost four battleships and a battlecruiser.

What this meant in practice was that the Royal Navy had no modern capital ships in the Mediterranean Fleet, and only the ancient HMS Malaya at Gibraltar. The Home Fleet was reduced to two battleships. The Americans had transferred all three of their operational battleships to the Pacific.

If the German navy had come out and challenged the Royal Navy, the outcome could have been shocking. Especially if the Italian navy had simultaneously mounted an operation in the Mediterranean, diverting Force H from Gibraltar. The whole war at sea could have been changed.

Of course, they did no such thing. But this, I feel, is very much what wargames are for.

**

Now, though, it's time to get to those models. Surprisingly, the ships in the box come in two different kinds of resin: lighter and darker grey. The light grey ships are great: next to no flash or anything that needed much attention at all. The dark grey ones, well, aren't. It's a much softer resin, there's a lot of clipping and filing to do, and all of the ships are a bit banana-shaped. The destroyers, the Köln and the Blücher are done in the worse resin, and as you can see, the Blücher is auditioning for a refit to a ski-jump carrier.

I tried dunking one of the destroyers in hot water and bending it a bit. It didn't go well.

My next attempt was with water brought to a near boil, and it actually worked. I'm not exactly delighted that I had to do this, but it wasn't that much trouble in the end. I unbent my ships while making dinner, and frankly I'm still surprised I didn't end up serving my flatmate the Köln in tomato sauce.

Sadly the bigger ships rebounded a bit overnight, even though I dunked them in cold water, but the end result is still a damn sight better than how I got them. Then it was on to the metal bits. The destroyers were all right, you just have to glue on a funnel, but the cruisers were very, very fiddly. Some of those bits are right on the edge of what's physically possible.

After fitting masts and davits and what have you to the Köningsberg and Köln, all I'll say is that the Kriegsmarine better make do with two light cruisers, because they are not getting more.

**

The first ship I'm going to paint is one of the Type 1936A destroyers. In reality, the 1936As were only known by their hull numbers, and as near as I can tell, didn't even display those anywhere. That's all very boring, though, and since I was reading Michael Moorcock's Land Leviathan when I got these, my very first Kriegsmarine ship is going to be the Z26 Gräfin von Landsfeld.

I went for Light Grey for the sides and Sky Grey for the superstructure. Apparently the exact colors of Kriegsmarine ships are the subject of a long-standing argument, like the one on Soviet air force colors, and while I find these things fascinating, I also want to paint my miniatures, so I picked the two closest-seeming Vallejo colors. The decks are in Beige Brown, which someone recommended; it's darker than most people seem to use, but I don't know, I kinda like it.

I painted the water around the ship in Blue, Dark Blue and Blue Green, with some Off-White foam in places. Maybe it's a little Mediterranean, but I like it. I'm also into this alternate-history idea of naming the 1936As after German (or Germanized!) noblewomen, so here's the one I broke earlier, as the Z23 Herzogin Margarete von Bayern, and the Z24 Kaiserin Matilda.

**

Next up, the two light cruisers. I'm going to be honest here and admit that I'm not that keen on trying to figure out the exact historically accurate color schemes for these ships: I'm painting the main deck Beige Brown and the superstructure above it Sky Grey, and calling it done.

The Blücher is getting the same treatment.

**

The box also came with four Stuka squadrons, also in the darker, more annoying resin, and they were a chore to prepare. I also kind of don't get solid flying stands when the same darn company sells transparent ones for its WWII air combat game. But still, the little planes are cute.

I painted the stands Blue and the planes with the same colors as in said WWII air combat game, that is, Light Grey with Neutral Grey stripes, and Green Grey for the barely visible underside.

**

At this point in the project, the Steam summer sale happened, and the PC version of Victory at Sea was available at an 85% discount. I bought it, and it's fun. It's based on the original Mongoose ruleset, and it's very arcadey, almost like a mobile game, but surprisingly fun.

I tried it as the Germans, obviously, and they gave me a 1936-class destroyer to sail around in. The manual is four pages and they do the usual video tutorials that explain the controls, but that's about it. After a couple of introductory battles, I was told to go raid shipping around England, so I did. My first attempt ended when I decided to find out if i could take on a Town-class cruiser, and it turned out I couldn't. At least there's a Steam achievement for being sunk!

In my next game, I started out skippering the Z43, and ended up commanding a battlefleet with multiple battleships and a carrier. Toward the end of the campaign, the game becomes more than a bit repetitive; the overall design of the campaign isn't great, with the enemy sending out their ships in penny packets that are ludicrously easy to destroy. It's a shame, because the combat system is actually fun and exciting, but the game just doesn't know how to make use of it. I've had a good time playing it, but it could have been so much better.

**

Then it's on to the last ships. First, the two other Admiral Hippers: the nameship of the class and the Prinz Eugen. I don't know why Warlord thought we needed three of these, to be honest. But they're in the better resin and there's less fiddling about, so why not. Here's the Hipper.

The Prinz Eugen, though, doesn't really interest me at all. So instead, I've decided to name it after the Hipper-class cruiser I invented for my video game fleet: she is now the Admiral Bellingshausen.

And, finally, the Scharnhorst.

I expected the Scharnhorst to be bigger, but next to the Hippers it drives home that they really were battlecruisers.

There they all are!

**

All in all, I've had a great time painting my little ships and playing Victory at Sea on the computer. I've already got more little ships, and at some point I hope I get to try the tabletop game as well.

Battletech: Let's Paint a Magistracy Army

I'm delighted that Catalyst Game Labs, who currently publish Battletech, are standing up against bigotry. I also enjoyed painting my first ever mechs and trying the game. So I bought some more of them from Iron Wind Metals. Iron Wind used to be Ral Partha, a name I definitely recognize from way back!

**

To start with, how was I supposed to not get myself some Badgers (AR20-744)? They're cute little vehicles and the models are quite decent quality. I'm actually enjoying working with metal models again, believe it or not. Here they are in the colors of the Magistracy.

I also got two Vedette tanks: more products of Bordello Military Goods, Inc.

And a Mobile Long Tom self-propelled gun, which strongly reminds me of the G.I. Joe Thunderclap.

**

The vehicles are all very cute, and they give me flashbacks to Space Marine. I also wanted to try some Inner Sphere Standard battle armor, i.e. power armor dudes, from Ral Partha.

**

I haven't entirely forgotten about mechs! Since there is a Venom, I had to have one.

I also painted a Shockwave, mostly because the model is cool, but also Shockwave.

I also got myself a BJ-1 Blackjack (20-880), because if I recall correctly, it was the mech you started with in the Battletech video game.

**

Mechs and vehicles and so on are all well and good, but you can get those in other miniature wargames as well. Very few of those, however, have submarines. Behold the MCS/m Venom (11)!

When I found out that Battletech had submarines, I simply had to get one.

Mind you, that's just the surfaced version. The Neptune blister also comes with a submerged version, and that one's quite a bit more interesting.

The submerged Neptune has a little metal stand to hold it up, but frankly, it looks flimsy and I can do better. I've got some small Games Workshop flying stands and those Ral Partha hex bases. I drilled a hole in the bottom of the base, filled the base with Vallejo putty, and stuck in the flying stand to make a properly shaped hole. Here's what it looks like after spray-painting.

And this is the whole thing! I think it's wonderful.

Here they are side by side.

**

Dipping into Battletech has been fun! I've really enjoyed working with metal miniatures again, and I thoroughly appreciate the absurdity of the submarine. I may have to look into some infantry and artillery. And hey, this is the closest I can get to Epic. Or so I thought!

Terraforming Mars: A new life in the off-world colonies

Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynarth and Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter and saw the horror on one of the satellites, and gazed at the Cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars’ ruddy disc.

- H.P. Lovecraft: Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Back in 2019, we had the distinct pleasure of being introduced to one of the best board games in the world: Terraforming Mars. We also tried the Prelude expansion, which we quite liked and would recommend. Back then, though, table space limited our experiments with other expansions. We did get to try the double-sided Hellas and Elysium board, which I'd also recommend, but now that we've moved and have a larger table, it was time to try some more stuff. And then, of course, the pandemic happened, meaning an enforced break from board games. But we did eventually get around to trying out a couple more expansions!

Venus Next

First up, Venus. This expansion adds a small Venus board, a new award and milestone, and some new corporations and project cards, which mostly center on terraforming Venus. A couple of the cards can just be added to the base game, but most of the Venus cards focus on an unfortunately named new resource type: floaters. Basically, terraforming Venus is just like terraforming Mars, but instead of three different variables, there's just an overall terraforming percentage. You can invest resources into increasing it, which gets you terraform rating but isn't necessary to finish the game.

Here's the setup for our first game with Venus Next; you can see the Venus board near the top of the image.

We didn't use the "solar phase" rule that speeds up the game, and even with one player who was new to the game, we spent a little over four hours, which is pretty much the same as our average non-Venus game. Also, now that our board game collection is more easily accessible, we finally got to use some proper counters for the Security Fleet card.

All in all, Venus Next is perhaps a surprisingly anodyne expansion. It doesn't detract from the base game or make it particularly longer; you can pretty much just ignore it if you're not doing anything with floaters or Venus tags. But it doesn't really add much to the game either. Nobody in our gaming group actively disliked it, and now that I own it, I'm probably going to set it up with the base game in the future; but I think most of us wouldn't actually bother with buying it.

So I don't know; if you feel like you might like a Venus expansion to Terraforming Mars, it won't hurt the game, but to be honest I think I'd be fine without it.

**

Colonies

Much later, we were able to try Colonies. 

Colonies adds a whole bunch of, well, space colonies. Each player gets a trade fleet, which they can send to trade with the colonies for resources. Resources pile uo in the colonies over time, and reset when a trade fleet arrives. You can also establish colonies of your own, which means you get a cut whenever someone else trades there. Here's the colonies in our game, right above the Venus board.

Colonies adds additional complexity but provides extra resources, and again the two seem to even out pretty well in terms of game length. Most of our table liked it, but I have to be honest: I didn't.

The colonies make a difference to the whole game, because they can substantially accelerate your resource production. Whereas you can pretty much ignore the Venus board, as we did in our game, you ignore the colonies at your peril. I think this is a bad thing, because Colonies detracts from the attractive simplicity of Terraforming Mars, especially in the early game.

It also wreaks havoc with the theme; whereas without it, you can still have the feeling of a sort of bare-bones start on a barely inhabited planet, with Colonies your first moves include sending your interplanetary trading fleet to Titan or whatever.

So I think that both thematically and through the added complexity, Colonies actually detracts from the base game. I wouldn't recommend it.

Colonies also comes with a lot of cards that you can use with the base game, and with Venus Next as well, so even if, like me, you end up not liking the colonies, there's still something here for you.

**

There's one more expansion left that we haven't tried: Turmoil. It brings party politics to Terraforming Mars in the form of a council, and to be honest, no-one in our gaming group is really interested in it. So I think that means we've arrived at our Terraforming Mars setup: corporate era, Prelude, optional Venus Next.

Finally, I just want to repeat myself: Terraforming Mars is probably the best board game I have ever played. If you've never tried it, do.