Big Gunned, Chaos Chicken

   While we aren't doing much in the way of gaming I wanted to try and make sure the combat patrols for the Chaos 40k campaign were ready to go at a moment's notice. Then I could start working on the stuff for bigger games knowing I had a bit more time to do them.

   The Sentinel walker was the last model I needed for my Traitor Guard, so I had to get it moving. It's been built, sprayed and washed, sitting on my painting desk for a couple of months while I tried to decide how to tackle it. In the end, I just put a picture of one on the screen and went in with my gun metal paint for the joints as this broke the big stretch of desert yellow up allowing me to get past my mind block.

   I then added loads of red decals from the Chaos Knight sheet to look like hand painted glyphs, again to break up the single colour. I did this at a much earlier stage than I normally would, again, as I just needed to not have a model in a single block of colour.

Now its been leaked that the new Guard combat patrol is completely different . . .

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31st Hervictus Artillery

   Like my Traitor Imperial Guard combat patrol, my Hervictus guard also needed the requisite artillery pieces, but I found these harder to do, which is why they were put off for so long. My traitors could just have converted crew that came with the guns, they don't have a real uniform anyway, so a slight variation on the gun crew was no big deal. My Hervictus guard use Steel Legion bodies, which just didn't come close to the supplied crew.

   I had a couple of plans of either using regular Steel Legion figures posed around the guns to represent a crew maybe grabbing their small arms but I wasn't convinced when I tested it on the kit I bought for my traitors. My second plan was just to assume there wasn't a Hervictus artillery regiment, so the guns would be supplied by somewhere else*, but I thought it would just look odd on my main Imperial Guard army.

*which is something I plan to do with the other regiments I have in my head

   Then I found someone in Poland selling 3d prints of Steel Legion gun crew, designed for this kit and I was sold. Until I saw the postage costs and I put it off until I just couldn't think of a better plan.

   The markings on the front of the guns show the regimental badge, the regiment number and the platoon colour and gun position, so both the guns are from different platoon**, but hold the same position in their platoon (e.g.yellow might be platoon 1, with white showing gun 1 in that platoon).

**allowing me to expand in the future and have batteries for bigger games

I really fancy another 4 of these now. Oh and a command squad for these?

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The Dark Angels

   My second ever army for 40k was a fallen Dark Angel army using Chaos Space Marines (they were also all dedicated to Slaanesh but that's a different story). I keep starting a fallen Angel squad for my current Chaos Marines but mostly I can't decide what I'm trying to achieve with them - are they a Slaaneshi squad, or a regular marine squad, should they have Noise Marine guns?

   Then I had a thought - why not do a separate Fallen Angel Combat Patrol? Using the Chaos Marine rules (as they will be fighting on the Chaos side anyway) all I needed was a 10 man tactical squad, a Master of Possession, 5 Possessed and 10 Cultists.

   My head canon for this army is that they are Dark Angels from Luther's side on Caliban swept into the void when the planet fell. The Chaplain is a 30k Chaplain, so not the religious nut jobs of 40k but moral leaders whose job is the mental health of marines - if a marine is faltering its their job to fix them. So, 15 lost marines are looking to their Chaplain to explain why their father attacked them and where they now are - except he doesn't have an answer to hand. Then at some point a voice starts giving him answers and leading them to supplies, which is seen as some sort of miracle, however, little does he know but he's being set up by a daemon. As the corruption spreads his men are blind to it, even when the voice explains there is something he can do that would make his men even stronger.

The Chaplain/Master of Possession 

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A Red Sun Rises?

   Painting time has been nearly non-existent over the past couple of weeks but a unit that missed this blog are 10 Khorne Bloodletters that I bought from a second hand model shop in Norfolk to bulk up my Khorne Daemon numbers.

   It was only after I had sprayed them (as I bought them built) that I noticed I had 3 horn blowers, but as I went without any upgrades on the other 3 units I have, this shouldn't be an issue*. Otherwise, they were painted to match the rest of my Khorne Daemons and have been mixed into the box with the rest since this photo.

*although barely any of the rest of this army has made it onto the blog for some reason?

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Bring The Fire

   Carrying on with the models needed for a second Space Marine combat patrol from the aptly named Combat Patrol magazine with a unit of Infernus Marines.

   These guys show a bit better than the captain I paint for the August Lions the chapter colour scheme. Should I have halved both shoulder pads as well as the bodies? In hindsight, probably not, but I'm pleased with how they look at 3 foot.

I am at the point with this project where I both never want to paint another model in the colour scheme and want to buy another box of something for it straight away. Its tough.

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Hosokawa Samurai

   Last for this side of the project we have the units of Samurai. There were a few moving parts on this one when it came to building the units and painting them.

   The first big decision was how big to do the units as Lion Rampant does regular units sizes and halves the unit size for "elite" units like knights, however, reading how most gamers who play this period do, they treat Samurai as slightly better regular troops and save the elite slot for Hatamoto Retinue, which seem to be elite Samurai. So, that is what I did.

   The second was a colour scheme. I decided to make this units a bit more interesting and to stand out for their Ashigaru regulars by letting each guy wear their own colours - to an extent - so the units are mixed. I think this helps the models stand out as elite, while not needing to be very elite in their rules. I then gave them all their back banners to tie them into the army again.

The two units of Samurai

The Samurai Archers

The Commander

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15mm Ashigaru Archers

   The next unit finished for my 15mm Feudal Japanese project is a unit of Ashigaru Archers, again, from the Hosokawa clan. Painted in the same way as they melee weapon carrying colleagues, the thing I struggled to find out was what the rule for their back banners was as half my guys have their hats on their back so can't fit a flag. As far as I can work out, there isn't really a rule for who does and does not wear them, but having a 50/50 split in a unit probably isn't massively historical, but limited by the figures I've done what I can.

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The Horror Of Fire

   As mentioned before, Pink Horrors need Blue Horrors, Blue Horrors need Brimstone Horrors, so here they are. Both units done as one big batch as their complexity level was pretty low.

   Nice easy job of Iyanden Yellow contrast over Wraithbone, with a couple of darker 'highlights' to really get some flames going.

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More Horrors From The Deep Blue

   When building and painting an army, whether planned or not, I always think it is important to get some troops in first. I know a lot of people who always do elite armies that ignore troops, but my theory is that you need two of three units of the absolute bog standard regulars in your collection as you never know what might happen with army lists*. 

   To back this theory up, I bought myself a second box of Blue Horrors and got on with them while the project was fresh in my head.

*I recently saw someone complaining that Warlord Games has done a GW by making his army illegal. Army in question was a minor nation (in Warlord's terms) where a single Theatre Selector allowed him to build his infantry units with different weapons - I believe this was entirely SMGs instead of rifles - so now the army was worthless and going into his bin. While painting a handful of riflemen when he did the army would have future proofed him to an extent.**

**This is not to say I haven't been burnt in the past

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Horrors Of The Deep Blue Kind

   Speaking to one of my brothers before my birthday and I was half joking and half threatening about doing a small Tzeentch Daemon army to compliment his Thousand Sons in our next campaign (before the news that our gaming venue was shutting down). I already have a single unit of Pink Horrors that I don't think ever made it onto this blog, but that need a real tidy up anyway. However, Pink Horrors need a unit of Blue Horrors to be able to be used*.

*and Blue Horrors need Brimestone Horrors . . .

   So a month after my birthday, my other brother turns up at the door with a pile of wrapped presents, one of which is a box of Blue Horrors.

   This things are painted in contrast - just perfect for this job - with a highlight on the top and then painted fairly normally from that stage onwards. Yellow is also contrast as Iyanden Yellow over Wraithbone is just superior to any other yellow I have ever used.

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Hervictus Topup

   A few months back when we were chatting about our next campaign and I was saying I wanted the regular troops on both sides to play a bigger part, but the other 3 players are all going to be using Space Marines of one flavour or another, or Sisters of Battle, which meant the Imperial Guard/Traitor Guard would fall to me to represent.

   While I have everything for the Traitor version of the Combat Patrol, the Imperial side was lacking quite a bit despite have a decent guard collection due to the limitations of the old metal Steel Legion range. I still need to work out what to do with the heavy artillery but the figures below solves most of the infantry gaps.

   The figures are sculpted by someone on Cults3D that I paid for and then printed for me by someone on Bluesky. I initially asked for about 8 guys to be printed but the price for printing was per base plate, which was about 12 figures a go, so I bought a set of rifle armed sculpts and just went for two prints.

   The figures in this batch are a couple of flamers, couple of melta guns, an officer, a rifle I converted with a chainsword, a medic and some of the rifles.

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The Swarm Pt 15

   A post that wasn't published for some reason. At the end of the Fratribusia campaign, I decided to have a push towards getting my Tyranid projects as close to finished as I could, even if I had no plans to use the figures themselves. These Ripper bases were caught up in that push as a fairly simple unit to just get done.

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The Land Of the Rising Sun - but 15mm

   Someone at our club was having a clear out and one of the boxes I managed to pick up was a box of 15mm Samurai. I think they were bought to play DBA but I was thinking Lion Rampant.

   I normally do bases of 24 for 15mm Lion Rampant but I wanted this project to be fairly quick and cheap, so I've gone with 10 on a half depth base - I can always double up bases and get someone that looks ok against my other stuff that way.

   Upon checking the box, I think the only figures supplied were actual Samurai from Two Dragons, so I looked online and added some Ashigaru to my collection along with back banners for every figure that could have one as none were supplied.

   I decided to go with the same colours as my 28mm, which meant I had to check what decals my 28mm Samurai were painted in as I had no idea and it turns out that it is Hosokawa clan - although the symbol doesn't seem quite right to me. Then I found one of their opponents from the Ōnin War in a different enough scheme to be interesting and this seemed to be the Ōuchi clan. This is not my area of expertise, so any mistakes are completely due to my own ignorance.

I should probably get on with the rest of the project

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August Lions Captain

   With the Combat Patrol magazine, I've decided to do another combat patrol of space marines but in a different colour scheme to my current chapter. I've decided to go with a chapter I created for my Death Watch - the August Lions - vaguely based on the name we called the Royal Knight Lego Castle faction when we were kids, the Kingly Lions.

  While the Lego figures don't wear halved uniforms, I took their shield design straight to heart with halved white and red as the basic colours with blue as their accent. This being the captain, he also has a fair bit of gold.

   The Lego King for this era was called Richard, so I suspect that might be this guy's name too.

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Anarchy Knights

   Carrying on with the Anarchy project are the knights, these are a much later paint job being started in the last couple of weeks. I see these as more a knight and his mounted troops rather than lots of knights exactly.

   Painted in a similar way to the infantry, except I batch by horse colour initially, then mix those up to batch paint clothing.

There is one unit to finish but I needed these done for a game.

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Anarchy In England

   One of the big projects I wanted to do last year was an army for the Anarchy, the wars between the (true heir) Empress Matilda and her cousin King Stephen that followed the death of Henry I. Its a period that fascinates me* but I've never known where to start.

*Thanks Griff Hosker

   What I decided was that Conquest Games comes the closest to having the right models, their medieval knights are pretty perfect, along with the archers, but the infantry is where the problems start. As far as my research was showing, I was looking at somewhere between Norman infantry and the early 100 Years War in terms of figures - Footsore's Baron's War stuff gets close but is still not quite right, plus is just too expensive. So what I decided to do was use mostly Norman infantry, with some shield swaps mixed in to update those figures as needed, plus sprinkle in some early crusades figures for other armour types.

   Shields then became my next issue. My research seemed to suggest that heraldry and liveries had started to appear but this wasn't the uniform of 100 Years Wars retinues, so I decided, historically or not, to do a single (varied) shield design across the army, but let each guy have their own clothes. This would also stop it being a new second Norman army.

   As I tend to do with these projects now, I painted mixed batches of figures using the same colour. So batch one might be 10 figures in a mix of archers, crossbows and regular infantry all with orange tunics as they standard thing. The first batch was finished in February and I've painted a batch whenever time and motivation came together.

Archers

Crossbows

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Watch Company Tertius Command

   Lastly, we have the command elements from the Deathwatch box (although I did add an extra Space Wolf Lieutenant as it had more chapter feel to it). 

   I went with the following chapters for these three; Lt Wolf Spear, Lt Black Shield and Apothecary Blood Angel.

   That is the project finished, although, I suspect I need to go back and split squad Valiant into two legal squads in the future,

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Squad Exemplar

   The other squad from the Combat Patrol box is an unit of Aggressors. I had tried to freehand the sgt's chapter logo but the end result was shockingly bad, I'm so much happier with the decals.

Again, in no particular order; Sgt Mentor Legion, Hammer of Dorn and Celestial Lion.

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Squad Valorous

   As mentioned a while back in March when I finished Squad Valiant (who have since become an illegal squad) I had bought the Deathwatch Combat Patrol box as a way of scratching a few space marine itches.

   I built and painted the whole box fairly quickly and got the marines to the point where everything was done including the basing except that the chapter pads were mostly left blank so I could add them as and when I had good ideas*. I got the first 5 of these Intercessors done fairly quickly but was stumped by my lack of free hand skills to do some of the other chapters I had in my head.

   I have since found a guy on Etsy who custom printed me a mixed sheet of chapter logos including one I found online as a png file and this allowed me to get the project finished.

*I had a game with them in this state

In no particular order; Sgt Ultramarine, Space Wolf, White Panther, Red Templar, Death Strike, Crimson Fist, Excoriators, Astral Claw, August Lion and White Consul.

   The model below is the one I am most proud of - I've called it an August Lion and there is a risk you'll end up seeing more of this chapter. The logo is the Lego Knight symbol of the Royal Knights from the era I was really into Lego, I still have the castle waiting for someone cool to go in my hobby shed. As kids we used to call the faction the "Kingly Lions" so I felt the name needed a slight update.

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Cannoth 3rd Lancers

  The Cannoth 3rd Lancers are a 40K Rough Rider regiment from the planet Cannoth. The idea behind them is that the world was raising mounted troops for the first time and decided that the period in history that wanted to emulate was the Napoleonic wars - but they didn't have all the information on uniforms to hand, so they've had to do their best. They are a weird mix of grenadier helmets and French 3rd Lancers.   

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Aeronautica Imperialis

   Slightly behind the times with a game released in 2019, but here are the first few planes I've finished for the rules - a pair of Imperial Thunderbolts matching my 28mm one and a trio of Chaos Lightnings. 

   I bought the first starter box with Imperial Navy and Orks back in 2019, built everything, and got a game in with the Imperial planes vs my mates Imperials to test out the rules. Then it was about that time where both our jobs and lives started to get in the way and I don't think I've played him more than 2 or 3 times at anything since.

   With the next campaign being Chaos and Imperial it felt like the right time to revive the game to use as a bit of fluff in the background (Tyranids didn't get any models or rules before the game was dropped). I don't plan to play any big games with this, I just want dog fights and maybe small bomber missions, but these initial planes will allow us to get stuff on the board and relearn the rules.

   Looking at the points with the aim of keeping small games as balanced as possible, a tooled up lightning is the same points as a basic Thunderbolt, so the first game is likely to be test with a pair of each facing off.

   The Chaos Lightnings are painted in a scheme to match my red Chaos marines to tie the force in a bit, but I might vary future ones colours a bit. Scheme wise I kept them fairly plain - I quite like the idea that the chaos leaders don't value skill and would prefer to just mass produce planes.

   The Imperial Thunderbolts are painted to match my 28mm Thunderbolt as much as possible with changes where I just couldn't.

I've got a fair few more planes to paint yet.

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The Creed Of Perfection

   With the next campaign being Chaos based, I thought I would have a look at the Chaos Marine Combat Patrol, while I'm missing a few bits of it and am probably likely to just pick it up in it's entirety, the biggest missing part is the Chaos Cultists and ultimately, even if I do pick the whole box up in the future, it's never going to hurt to have lots of these.

   I plan to paint every box/unit of Cultists in their own colour schemes to show lots of low level cults that have been founded rather than there being one big monolithic movement*. This unit is the Creed Of Perfection who are probably slightly Slaanesh leaning as a cult with their name and purple/pinkish clothes, but I don't want the core few cults to scream a single God dedication.

*although there are a bunch of weird cult units that I might just attach to one of the cults and make a more dominant organisation in the future.

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The Swarm Pt 14

   I keeping getting odd spurts or so of actual painting motivation and some access to time coinciding with each other, so I've just been trying to get units moving off of my list*. These Barbgaunts are a unit that I hated painting the other 5 of, but as I keep writing lists where I need a full 10, and then can't bring myself to then paint the missing ones.

*it also means I have a lot of half finished units

   Annoyingly, in practise these were a unit that actually weren't too bad to paint, they just take slightly longer than a Tyranid model of a similar size due to how their body armour fits around them.

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Project CMAINLL

   Project CMAINLL is short for Crap My Army Is No Longer Legal and has come about with the release of the new Genestealer Cult codex. I've played a few 1500 point games using the army recently but with the new codex there are a few units I can no longer use in their current form or at all - the key things are the two Imperial Guard Leman Russ tanks that I have to take a specific detachment for, which is easily done but I would rather use another, and the Acolyte Hybrids which are now two differently equipped units which means my current 10 man squad isn't a legal unit.

   To solve these problems project CMAINLL has two prongs:

1. Increase my points to replace the tanks but give me some extra fire power - also wanted to make the army feel a bit more GSC and not like a Guard list

2. Break my Acolyte Hybrid squad down and then increase the resulting parts.

   To complete part 1 I have:

   To do this I have added another 5 Aberrants to bulk out a full 10 "men" and then added a Biophagus (guy in white - medic/mad scientist) to give them a buff. 

   Added a Brood Patriarch to give my Genestealer squad some hitting power

   The added a Primus as these guys are just brutal if attached to a decent squad (photo of the Magus familiar too just as I have finished the Magus it goes with yet)

   The combined with task 1 is task 2. Another 10 Acolyte Hybrids round my squad up to 20 and allow me to create the following; 1 squad of 10 with autopistols and 6 heavy mining weapons and then 2 squads of 5 with hand flamers and 2 demo guys in each - the small squads will be hit and run.

   I found this squad was the headache to build. My current 10 man squad wasn't optimised as it was the 5 I was told to build for Combat Patrol then whatever I liked the idea of to round it out - if I was buying two boxes to make my army legal, I was going optimised - so in 10 men I had to build, 2 sgts, 4 heavy mining weapons, 3 demo guys and a banner (didn't have any space for another).

 
I should have a game to test this theory out next week, so lets see how it does

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