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 too 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.