Three years ago I wrote a frothing fan-rant about how my Successor Chapter would canonically possess however many suits of Terminator plate I'd painted, and that this meant they'd acquire it very slowly. To prove this point, I have only just now finished painting the multipart kit to bulk out the five beautiful push-fit boys I got in the Leviathan box.
A ten-man squad of Terminators does, it has to be said, have quite an imposing heft to it.
It also provides the backbone of a proper teleport strike for boarding enemy ships (460 points at present, once a character's along for the ride). It also provides justification to paint more characters in Terminator armour, next of which will be a Chaplain. I'm also a huge fan of the Ancient in Terminator armour. The Captain is cool too, which I guess means at some point means a Terminator Assault Squad... and so the cycle continues. I'd better paint some Scouts first, though, or this strike force will get too top-heavy. Cycle morphs into a fractal.
Drew, who isn't particularly a fan of Terminators and is explicitly not a fan of the helmet design, recently asked me if I just like these hulking box boys thanks to nostalgia. Not so, ma'am. I loved the helm and general vibe as soon as I first laid eyes on them. There were always a number of GW designs that I thought looked naff as hell, even as a comparatively undiscerning child, but I always thought Terminators looked great despite the ridiculous anatomical questions they pose, and the general silliness of power fists as a concept. The helmets themselves look absolutely brutal to me.
Posing choices
I did my best to get these dudes into different poses compared to the push-fit lads. I also made a point of maintaining a 1:1 ratio through the squad of guys who are shooting, and guys whose guns are relaxed, so this new batch had only two combat poses and three more relaxed poses. There's always a temptation to have everyone in the classic codex cover "we're all shooting our guns at the same time" look, but on the tabletop, I find units generally look better when there's more variety, and they don't end up looking like they're shooting their own squadmates in the back.
Wargear choices
For that classic boarding action feel I went for a heavy flamer. Sure, my basing scheme's a tad outdoorsy for a spaceship, but nonetheless boarding action remains a major use case. There's a solid case to be made that I should have given one or two of these lads chainfists for breaching hatchways, but I'm not personally wild about the look, and having homogenous melee weapons keeps things simple in-game. Since I wanted to be able to field this unit as either 2x5 or 1x10, I gave the Combat Squad Leader (denoted by the gold skull on his helmet) a power fist instead of the iconic power sword.
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| The Combat Squad Leader |
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| Heavy flamer. Arguably would benefit from some heat damage on the gun for extra interest, but hey ho. |
Most of this year's hobby progress has been Tyranids and Terrain, so it felt great to do some detail work again, even if I felt pretty rusty doing edge highlights. That technique is very much a muscle that needs constant training, I find. Moreso than freehand, curiously.
Now, look, I'd love to have more to say today, and certainly I've been working on plenty of hobby things, but they must remain sekret bizniz for now. If we're lucky, we might get a campaign log from Jeff and Harvey following a recent narrative Imperial Guard weekender I ran the other week. For now, though, I shall leave you with a photo of the whole of Squad Callimachus teleporting into a frontier outpost with the Scions' Chief Librarian Diokles:
The new terminators are indeed still awesome. I fear that with their new T6, the last barrier that made me not have any in my Gravis-only force eroded, and those Cobalt Scions are as always a perfect example of how good they can look.
ReplyDeleteMy own lore headache is with officers. I already have too many captains and can only count-as lieutenant two of them before the company just has too many officer, but squad without characters sometimes look a little alone. What do, loremaster?
Kind words Sleith, thank you :)
DeleteThere's a wealth of characters to deploy in the Marines' range, so if you've a few too many Captains and Lieutenants, perhaps you might be charmed by Chaplains, Librarians and Ancients?
Nevertheless, officers are cool as hell, and so is painting them. The thing is, there's a limit to how many officers you'll actually want to use at once. The way I navigate this is to be more precise rather than less; I currently have two Captain models, one of whom serves as my Chapter Master. But I intend to get two more Captain models. One will be the Captain of a reserve company, who I'll paint once my collection has a few units from his company. The other will be a Terminator Captain, where my plan is that the model will generally lack personal heraldry, but I'll then magnetise a tilting plate and put the heraldry of my various captains on a bunch of tilting plates, so that I can change which Captain is currently wearing the suit.
Ultimately, the intention is never to use all the officers at the same time, but to be able to chop and change them between games to change the narrative and tactical approach taken by that character. So in short: once you're specific about who each officer is and why they're present, you'll hopefully find you'll run out of points before you run out of reasons to deploy them!