The Strange World of Axel Fendersson

Well, a package arrived from Forge World containing some super-heavy tanks this morning. Unfortunately, however, there was no Reaver Titan inside. The packing slip says it’s on back order.

I have a horrible feeling this means that they’ll um and ah about it for a few weeks before telling me it’s been discontinued. So I’m tempted to ring them up on Monday and ask them to cancel it anyway.

The trouble is that this means that I won’t be able to include any Lucius pattern titans in the army except for a Warlord. Which leaves me wondering whether or not to get one of those. On the plus side, it’s probably the best Titan model GW have ever made (the Mars pattern Reaver and the current Eldar Revenants come joint second), and requires no converting to get the standard weapons configuration. On the minus side, it will look completely different from all the other Titans, and without the trim that is characteristic of the other Mars pattern models (the blue colour of which is one of the most distinctive aspects of the paint scheme I’ve come up with), it’ll be difficult to even use the same colour scheme on it to tie it into the rest of the army.

On the other hand, the Warhounds I won on eBay also arrived this morning, and, after a bit of work re-posing them, are looking very nice.

So, as I mentioned at the time, I finished painting up my Elf Blood Bowl team back in October. And I had intended at the time to post some pictures of them here. But for some reason, I never got around to it. Until now.

I should point out that these are not official Blood Bowl models, but are ‘Gridiron football’ models from Shadowforge Miniatures.

First up, the Blitzers, or ‘Guards’ as Shadowforge call them:

Next, four catchers. These are the only position players for which I have any duplicate models. There are only two different sculpts, but up to four Catchers can play on an Elf team. Although it’s hard to see in this picture, I’ve made the duplicates a bit more distinguishable by giving them differently coloured hair, which was about the only thing that it made sense to vary in their colour scheme. Shadowforge describe these players as ‘Receivers’:

The throwers, or ‘Quarterbacks’:

With the position players costing vast amounts to hire, Elf teams tend to start out with a lot of ordinary Line-elves. Shadowforge only do five different sculpts, so there are, again, a few duplicates here. As with the catchers, the the duplicate models all have different hair colours.

One difficulty with this team was finding somewhere to paint on player numbers, as there are not many flat surfaces on the models of any size. Eventually I concluded that the only suitable location was on the player’s left arse cheeks:

In addition to the players, Shadowforge do some nice models of backstage staff. Here are the Head Coach, Assistant Coach and Apothecary (or Coach, Trainer and Nurse):

And three cheerleaders:

Finally, I also have a referee model to accompany the team. Since the clunky ‘I’ve got my eye on you’ rule was dropped from Blood Bowl, referee models don’t have any practical use in the game any more, but, like models for the support staff, they are fun to have on the sidelines anyway, and I have a referee model for each of my teams. However, only this one and the Wicked Elf are currently painted.

I had a lot of fun coaching this team in our Blood Bowl league back in the autumn. The team was hugely successful at winning games (15 wins, 2 losses, 1 draw), but the team’s low armour values meant that the number of casualties suffered was fairly horrific. A total of four players were killed, and of the original twelve players, only four lasted the entire league without sustaining any kind of debilitating injury. Most of the injured players I retired and replaced, although the thrower who suffered a decrease in strength I kept on, as she was too good at her job to do without, and would mostly not be making blocks anyway.

Having this team done means I’ve got three Blood Bowl teams that I can field using only painted models. I still have a few Orc models left unpainted, but they aren’t essential to field a usable team. Of my Dark Elf team (Shadowforge’s ‘Wicked Elf’ models), however, I have only painted two line-elves and the ref. I’ll hopefully get some more done (and finish off the Orcs) once I’m done with the Epic stuff I’m painting at the moment.

In other news, I am now fairly certain that my old camera was significantly better than my current one for macro photography. Also, I have started painting up some of my Chaos army for Epic. I started this army back in early 2007, but ran out of momentum and stopped before I had enough models painted for a full army. Since most of what I have left to paint consists of infantry, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to alternate between painting models for this army and my Titans without getting bored with either, at least for a while.

Well, my AMTL army for Epic is now fully under-way. This afternoon I successfully bid on eBay for three old-style Warhound Titans, all of them armed with Vulcan Mega-bolters and Plasma Blastguns. I’m also ordering a Reaver Titan from Forge World, which it seems is still available for the time being.

Which, combined with the Imperator and Knights I already have, will mean that I have a 3,000 point army already:

Of course, I suspect this would be a fairly lousy army. With only five activations in total, it’s inflexible even by AMTL standards, and the only AA-weapon is the Imperator’s defence laser (which is very powerful, but only gets the one shot against each squadron). Still it’s a decent start, especially since I’ll also have a couple more formations not used in that 3000 (another Warhound and another formation of Knights. Next addition will probably be some aircraft (a couple of Thunderbolts will help with the weak air cover), followed by a standard-configuration Reaver and hopefully a plastic beetle-back Warlord. After that, a couple more Reavers and a Lucius-pattern Warlord. The Reavers’ weapons fits will depend on what weapons I get with the Warlord, and on what I can convert. Two Quake Cannons and a Carapace Landing Pad would definitely make a vicious artillery platform, while a Melta Cannon, Power Fist and Rocket Launcher would make for an intimidating assault beast. But I’ll have to see.

EDIT: Hmm. I think these Aircraft Punisher Cannons from Forge World would make good Gatling Blasters. I wonder whether the Burst Cannons from Tau XV25 Stealth Suits would work as the basis for Quake Cannons. I’d need to take the four barrels off the end to make it look like one huge gun, but I think it could work. Now I just need to come up with a Carapace Landing Pad.

After that, the army will be over 7,000 points, and I’ll probably call it done for now. After that, who knows? I might see about expanding my Eldar or Chaos armies a bit, or I might make a start on some Imperial Guard.

Well, I now have a fully painted 1,250-point Adeptus Mechanicus Titan Legion army for Epic. Here is a picture of it:

Meet the Ultima Ratio, my Imperator Titan. I got this model about ten or eleven years ago when I first started playing Epic 40,000. In fact, I think I swapped it for the Morg ‘n’ Thorg model for Blood Bowl. At the time it sported a not-very-good unfinished paint job. I finished and fixed up the paint job as best I could, but it never looked particularly good.

With the Forge World Warhound Titans no longer available (not at a sane price, anyway; a pair went on Ebay last week for over £80), I’d been thinking about Epic armies and about titans quite a bit recently. And it occurred to me that a full complement of Titans for an Imperial Guard or Space Marine army (one Warlord, one Reaver and a pair of Warhounds) came to 2,000 points. Which would mean that it wouldn’t take that much more to expand those titans to a full AMTL army. Since I also had an Imperator in the back of the cupboard, that would be another 1,250 points, which I couldn’t use in any army except AMTL. I have a few old Knights, too, which would only be usable in either an AMTL army or a Knight World list, and I don’t have enough for the latter. And with the next few weeks being the last chance to get a Lucius Pattern Reaver, it seemed to me that now was a good time to make a start on an AMTL army.

So I started by digging out my Imperator, and disassembling it as much as possible. It hadn’t been stuck together very well, and most of the joints pulled apart without much persuading. One problem the model had was that it was missing the four Heavy Bolter turrets from around the corners of the cathedral bit, and one of the Lascannon (they’d been gone since I got it). I replaced the missing Lascannon with a spare BFG aerial, but just left the turrets off. Since these weapons are abstracted away as ‘tertiary armaments’ in the current Imperator stats, I figured it didn’t matter hugely if they were missing, since there were still some other weapons fulfilling this role. Having disassembled the model, I then set about painting and rebuilding it, in several sessions over most of last week.

Once this was done, though, I started to feel that the model needed a base. It’s slightly top-heavy and needs a bit of extra stability. In addition, having a circular base makes moving the model easier: with the feet standing directly on the table, it can be difficult to be sure where to measure from in a game if the unit rotates to face in a different direction as part of its movement. But the largest base GW make is 60mm across, which is still much to small to fit an Imperator on.

Inspiration struck when a member of TacComms mentioned that he’d based his Imperator on a CD. I thought that a full-size 120mm CD would be too large even for an Imperator, but I had a couple of 80mm mini CD-Rs that I’d made errors recording but hadn’t thrown out yet. One of those, with the hole filled in, proved to be perfect.

It occurred to me recently that if I was going to share Titan models between an AMTL army, and Imperial guard army, and possibly, in the distant future, a Space Marine army as well, they would all have to have the same style of bases. This was slightly annoying, as I had envisioned fairly different basing styles: black/grey rubble with patches of snow for the Guard and something similar to the Eldar for the Marines. I eventually decided on a compromise between the two, which I will now add to any Imperial armies I do.

The Titan’s name, incidentally, is inspired by the legend "Ultima Ratio Regum" (Last Argument of Kings), which Louis XIV had inscribed on his cannon.