In Service of the Death Lord - DuskRaider's AT Project

[Fajita Fan]

Awesome, just awesome looking stuff. I hope my knights turn out half that good.

[DuskRaider]

Thank you, frater. I've also finished the name plates for my remaining Titans and I'm almost done with the Missile Launchers for the Knights but there's not much to show on either, especially the name plates.

 

I AM tempted to purchase another Warlord and build it specifically as the character for the upcoming pack. I've even seen ways to make a Lucius-Pattern head for the Warlord using 40K Knight faceplate bits, so I may give it a go. Otherwise, I'll eventually get more Questor Knights to finish out each Banner while I patiently wait for the release of the Acastus.

[Rabenga]

Ooo, they are cute little guys! Seriously though, outstanding work!

[malika666]

Warlord with two fists, awesome!!!!!

[DuskRaider]

Thanks guys!

 

A Warlord with twin-Arioch Claws is probably pretty useless in game, tbh. Mainly due to its slow movement, there's just no way it'll get into CC without getting kitted around the board. It does look really cool though.

[bluntblade]

Surprised it's taken me so long to look in here. Excellent stuff Duskraider.

[Chaeron]

The contrast of the Epic scaled troops just adds to the effectiveness of the overall look - kudos! Can't wait to do mine.

[DuskRaider]

I AM RETURNED.

 

Wow, it's been a while huh? The ETL has kept me busy with these guys' bigger (more mutated) brothers. But here we are!

 

I've finished the first two (and perhaps only two) Acastus for House Makabius. They were... interesting. This was the first time I've painted armour plating still on the sprue, which was a bit of a challenge for me. I'm the end, I think they turned out pretty good!

 

I have to give a shout out to brother Chazzmos, he was kind enough to provide me with the transfers for these and I am eternally grateful.

 

So enough with the chatter, let's get on to the photos!

 

The first Acastus is fairly straightforward. I went with a (relatively) plain base. To offset it a bit, I modeled the Missile Rack open and ready to fire.

 

I went in the complete opposite direction of the first Knight and made the base a lot busier. As you can see, the Acastus is accompanied by none other than First Captain Calas Typhon and a small retinue of Deathshroud, his Manreaper glowing with Warp energy.

 

Finally, the Household as it currently stands. I think I may finally be approaching the end of the road with this. I've contemplated boosting the Questoris Banners to a Max of 6 each, but I'm not sure if I want to go that far.

 

That's it for now!

[Fajita Fan]

A pity you’re a far up 95 from me, I love seeing a completed house and I need to finish mine!

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Impressive work. The Death Guard Terminators on the second Knight's base, are a good touch.

[Mendi Warrior]

Once again, very nice stuff!

[Marshal Wolfhart]

Nice, gritty style, looks great!

[The_son_of_Dorn]

Sex on legs!

[DuskRaider]

Hey, thanks everyone! I've had so much fun painting these models. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to call it done for now until GW released some new stuff. As I said, I'm tempted to max the Knight Banners but I have yet to get a game in with them at all so I'm not sure it's worth it. I'd really like to see GW or FW release the Cerastus upgrade bits, though.

[DuskRaider]

Mortis shall walk again.

[Captain Semper]

Oooooh, now we're getting excited! :)

[DuskRaider]

Ya know, I was going to save my next post in here for something dramatic with a finished Titan or two, but... no. We're going to talk about terrain, or why the design of the Civitas Imperialis kit is going to send me to the nut house.

 

I cannot decide if whoever made this kit has a special circle in Hell just for them or when the time comes and I find myself in the underworld assembling these for eternity will be my infernal punishment.

 

The idea that the panels should be joined by the joist only... and that there is no set groove or tab for positioning of said joist... is stupid. It is. For a building with only two side and rear panels it's not terrible (although small mistakes on the base level will be expounded on the third level and up), but for larger structures it becomes a real problem.

 

I've mostly gotten back in the groove of building these, simple designs mainly and built to accommodate the Spires and Manufactorum kits. I decided, "hey, I've really gotten better at this. Let me try building that cool Palace Warhammer Community had up a while back". No. Bad DR. What started out pretty even descended into uneven madness by the time I got about five panels deep on the sides.

 

I'm not a novice at building kits. I've been doing this for twenty years and I cannot wrap my head around this god forsaken kit.

 

*Sigh*

 

I've ordered up another Sector kit and a bunch of loose upper level building sprues. The three and four story buildings are okay and their squatness is somewhat hidden by spires, but when I envision a Warhammer city, I see buildings easily twice that height. You may say, "but DR, you still need to manoeuvre around the board", and I say NAY. I've got this thrice damned Titanicus board from FW and I want it to be grand. That's one of the reasons I wanted a centerpiece building.

 

Sorry, I just needed to get that off my chest. This is stressing me out way more than it should.

[Mandragola]

Can confirm that this building set kind of sucks. I've also been building kits for decades, in addition to which I have an actual degree in architecture. These kits just make me unhappy - much unlike the titans, which are awesome.

 

I have a particular issue with the spires for producing hexagonal towers. These exist almost nowhere and the effect is really jarring to me. But I guess at least they fit together.

[DuskRaider]

Yeah... I mean, I kind of get it with the Spires. They didn't want to go fully rounded and have them look too different from the buildings as to make them incompatible design-wise. But these buildings are killing me. Not in that, but the kit comes with a ton of base level sprues and very few upper level sprues (the smaller ones). It makes building anything substantial difficult and expensive.

[Mendi Warrior]

There are two tricks that can help with that and which I now use quite regularly:

- add 1mm thick plasticard on the back of the walls, inside so that you increase the contact surface on the back of the wall, then glue several parts together by adding another bit of plasticard (or a coffee stirrer or cardboard cut to shape), use a guide and a ruler to ensure the different parts are correctly aligned and the breadth is correct (one component has a breath of 29mm, I compute multiples in excel and then check on the ruler). Also you don't want the added plasticard to obscure the slit for the roof nor the lower part that connects with the lower level.

- make a structure on which to glue the civitas walls, it helps with alignments as well.

The kit can certainly be improved.

For the spires, they fit nicely together. The octogonal towers can be a bit tricky depending on how much pressure you apply when gluing the parts together. I messed up a few times.

I actually don't mind the hexagonal towers but the one thing that bothers me is the lack of octogonal roofs. I am not a fan of hexagonal buildings put on top of octogonal ones.

I agree there should have been more upper levels sprues. Mixing with foamboard, cardboard and plasticard allows for taller buildings without them getting super expensive. But they still remain relatively expensive.

I hope these two tricks can be useful.

[Fajita Fan]

Dude, it’s not just you - a few weeks ago I finally sat down to glue some terrain walls together and I had an embarrassing time getting them square. Mendi’s advice is legit, it’s the only way to keep the base even. I 3D printed some 1x1, 2x2, and 3x2 squares to act as jigs and even then it was a pain in the ass. I’ve been building since 3rd edition 40k and the AT wall terrain is a real step back. The industrial pieces are great, the crane is adorable with the tiny ladders, but the wall sections are much less user friendly than they could be. I’m glad I have a bunch of lengths of sprue laying around, you almost have to prefab all of the walls first and raise it like a barn.

[SkimaskMohawk]

All the 8mm infantry and vehicles is exactly what I wanted to do; it's a great example of how a well executed idea will look at completion. Unfortunately the stuff you used is pretty sparse on eBay right now, so I'm going to be using vanguard miniatures instead.

 

Looks great!

[DuskRaider]

@Mendi: thanks for the advice, I'm going to give some of it a try! It just blows my mind that they thought it was a wise decision to use the joists to assemble walls with no actual guidance on where they should be properly placed. It's so easy to be off just a smidge and have the whole building go to hell in the process.

 

@Fajita: dude, it's horrible. I want to like this kit so much and I appreciate that GW gave us the freedom to make whatever we want with them, but the execution just does not work well. I do agree though, the Manufactorum kit is great. I just got another one delivered today and I believe my other one comes tomorrow. They're so much fun to assemble!

 

@SMM: I've actually found them under Adeptus Titanicus terrain recently. If you can find one Forumware item, look at what else the seller has. Last I checked there were Mk. II / MK. III Marines, Cataphractii Terminators, some tanks... I'll see if I can find them again and PM you. Edit: looks the the seller has either sold out completely or they were shut down for some reason. I'll keep an eye out.

Edited April 17, 2020 by DuskRaider

[Interrogator Stobz]

Alongside Mendi's advice; I use sprue glued in the back, it's a free and available resource that welds with plastic glue.

Super strong once dry.

 

Hey DR, where do you source your basing terrain and especially the wee minis from?

Edited April 17, 2020 by Interrogator Stobz

[DuskRaider]

Luckily I have a metric ton of sprue, I'm going to try that tonight. I'll give the Palace another go.

 

The terrain is from the original Epic. You can occasionally find it on eBay and I was able to snatch up quite a bit. The minis are actually Forumware models... models made by other hobbyists. Also known as garage kits. There's quite a following for 30K Epic (or was) and you can occasionally find the models on eBay. There was a decent amount earlier this week but it seems to have all disappeared.