Lucien Eilam

Absolutely, if you find yourself playing against a joyless charisma-vacuum, it’s extremely important that your drop pods remain attached to their Officially Sanctioned Plastic Sticks® and in the horizontal orientation at all times during the game. You can usually spot them. They’re the ones not even making engine noises when they move their tanks. Awful people.

Haha… I’ve built a ton of FW models over the years, but a very long way from being able to say “most”. I’ve never built a Mastodon or a Mk IIb Raider, but it’s probably fair to say the hybrid kits tend to be worse than pure resin. It seems to me the issue is that plastic models cast very consistently, and the resin is anything but. Warped, twisted, shrunk, expanded, bubbled – almost every component has slight imperfections in one way or another. It can be like trying to build onto a uniform brick wall using pebbles off the beach. You can soften resin components with heat and make them conform to each other, but it can be a lot harder to make resin conform to plastic, which won’t meet the other component halfway. I find it’s not too bad when the plastic is forming the “skeleton” of the model. The Fellblade variants have a few issues, but the Baneblade components are barely even visible when they’re under the resin shell, so you’ll never be able to tell if it’s not 100% flush at every contact point. Deimos Rhino hulls are similarly forgiving, where you’re gluing resin bits onto the sides of a fundamentally sound structure. With the Fire Raptor and Storm Eagle, the resin forms a much more substantial proportion of the structure, and every minor imperfection adds up to affecting the “frame” where a completely inflexible rectangle of plastic needs to sit. If you do leave any gaps, they’re going to be right on top and painfully obvious. Then there are models like the Dreadclaw, where bits of the plastic drop pod are being used in a way that’s very clever, but was clearly never intended. The Kharybdis superficially looks like the same thing scaled up, but not having to incorporate plastic makes the whole thing much simpler, with single piece, solid sides and a decent area of contact at every join. But I think the biggest factor of all is the age of the kit. The Arquitor Bombards and the Sabres are an absolute joy to build compared with a Proteus or even a Sicaran, and as a direct comparison, the new dread pod is a vast improvement on the old. They got much smarter over the years about dividing the kits into components, where they place the casting gates without ruining the detail, making it easy to magnetise, etc.

Yeah, the main, long claws have a notch near the bottom. If you don’t glue them, you can either slide them all the way up/back to the engine for “in flight”, or slide them forward/down and tip them into the notch to lock them for standing it up like a Dreadclaw. The FW product page doesn’t make any mention of it, but you can actually see the different positions in the photos, once you know what you’re looking for. Don’t necessarily take my word for it, as I haven’t dug the army case out of the stack to check, but my recollection is most power armoured figures would fit under it comfortably, was possibly getting a bit tight for a Cataphractii Sergeant with a grenade harness.

Most of the names are super-generic, but they were sold as: Top row: Traitor Librarian in Cataphractii Armour, Ultramarines Legion Herald, Praetor in Cataphractii Armour Bottom row: Autilon Skorr, Legion Primus Medicae in Cataphractii Armour, Space Marine Legion Centurion, Legion Praetor Tribune in Tartaros Armour

The build isn’t bad, much easier than a Dreadclaw. Only real complication is a bit of painting before assembly required due to the retractable claws. Only had a couple of opportunities to use it, I filled it with combi-grenade Cataphractii. Mostly did what you’d expect of a bigger Dreadclaw – got a squad where I needed it, then loitered around as a minor annoyance. I’d say the storm launchers are situationally useful at best – bounced off basically everything in my games, but they have potential if your opponent gets careless and you can drop it in the rear arc of a bunch of vehicles.

If you don’t have the means to drill the steel, and probably even if you do, I’d strongly recommend building up around the point of contact. e.g. a short stack of big washers around the base of the rod to increase the surface area, epoxy that to the steel base, then texture over the whole thing with Milliput.

You won’t need multiple bases, and it doesn’t need to be massive. You want a material that won’t bend, and I like to counterweight heavy flyers with some decent weight to it so it’s harder to accidentally tip over. I’ve seen everything from heavy steel discs to wood “landscaped” with lead shot and Milliput. Heavy duty (20+ mm) clear acrylic rods work well for the stem. Couple of nice examples in this guy’s White Scars army: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVtUPhAtU-h/

Vindicators are okay, but the Arcus is stupidly good for the points. The main point against it is how much fire it’ll attract from any player who’s faced one before.

It’s not hard to justify for creative types but I think a lot of hobbyists, maybe the majority, look to Black Library and the black books for inspiration, and there are very few direct examples. Besides the Scars thing and the Dark Angels it’s like… Alastor Rushal? I guess at this point we’re only going to find out exactly what his deal was if A D-B picks up Sevatar’s post-Heresy career. And then maybe a handful of footnotes scattered across 9 volumes of the black books. I’m sure a lot of people have completely missed that it’s possible. I think a couple of colour plates over the years, a short story or two, a few more minor characters in the novels, etc. would all have gone a long way.

Yes, it’s in the FAQ:

Because a Dreadnought that can’t punch things is an embarrassment to his Legion, that’s why.

If you’re specifically targeting Terminators and Dreadnoughts in Zone Mortalis, I’d probably think about Tactical Support with plasma or melta, or Seekers with combi weapons, ahead of any variety of Heavy Support Squad. Either of those squads would still work great in big games coming out of a Termite.

Drop the 3rd Templar Brethren squad and one of the Contemptors, gets it down to about 2000 points and that’s a solid enough foundation to build a much stronger and more varied 3000 point list without losing the theme. As it stands, it would probably do all right against first gen style Heresy lists that were mostly either blob squads with Apothecaries, or cash-restricted Pride of the Legion armies, but otherwise it manages to be a bit dull and quite weak.

Have you considered volkite? In Zone Mortalis, there’s only light armour to shoot at. In Spartan Town, HSSs are rarely the most efficient or effective anti-tank choice whatever they’re armed with, so you may as well build them to excel at a different job. Even if a culverin squad has to move, 40 shots at S6 with deflagrate and tank hunters will kill 2-3 Marines or a Javelin. When they don’t move, it’ll delete whole squad(ron)s. And either way, they’ll look cool doing it.

I think the colour plates referencing Seekers at all are for the Alpha Legion and Dark Angels, neither of which use Principia Belicosa markings in these examples. But the Alpha Legion one states: And they don’t have the stat-line to be Veterans. So, everything points to treating them as a specialised Tactical Squad.