My Cassius

I have been working on creating WYSIWYG special characters out of my existing space marine minis. I have already decided that if I was ever going to use a walking Chaplain in power armor the upgrade to Cassius is so small that I would use his rules. I happened to have an older Chaplain with a bionic face so all I need was the combi-flamer. Here I combined a normal bolter with the barrel moved up and ammo clip on the side with a sawed off flamer. The axis of the flamer is slightly off but I think it will work. It should look better once the paint hides the stress marks from the cutting and I drill out the barrels.

Holding Down the Fort

I have been trying to decide what units to use the hold objectives in or near my deployment zone. Since in 2 of the 3 games, you are likely to have an objective in your deployment zone you need some troop choice to hold it even if you are trying to push at the opponent hard. This unit needs to be able to hit things at range while being able to withstand assaults from flankers. Space Marines of course have very limited choices for this with only Bolter Marines and Scouts available as troops standard.

Tac Squad: You will need a good heavy weapon since this will be the only one in range for most of the battle if you are keeping the opponent busy. This means you need to have a 10 man squad for the 5th edition codex. You can combat squad it down but 5 marines without support will not last long against any real threat. You are also probably going to want a powerfist and meltagun to protect against tank shock and dreadnoughts. An option here is to get them a rhino to sit in. The heavy weapon can still fire and it buys the unit at least some protection from assault, fire, and lash. This gets you up to about 250 points for a unit just sitting on the objective taking 1 shot per turn at the enemy. That is not much value.

Scout Squad: Sniper scouts seem like a good choice for this role. They can all have weapons with range but cannot have a transport to hide in so lash can be a problem. The are also very weak in assault. You can give the Sergeant a fist but he will look pretty funny with a huge fist and long thin sniper rifle. I would probably get him a meltabomb just to help out with tank shock and dreadnoughts though. Scouts do allow for a few less members while holding a heavy weapon. I would probably do 7-8 snipers with cloaks, missile, and a meltabomb. The cost difference from the 10 man tac with rhino, fist, and lascannon, can get a dreadnought to hang with the scouts.

Easy Jump Chaplain

I wanted to add a jump chaplain to my army a while back and the FLGS had a Metal Fist Jump Sergeant cheap so I picked it up along with a 5 pack of assault marines. These gave me an extra set of harness chest and jump pack. I simply added in the chaos marine skull head and used a banner topper on a cut off power axe for the crozius arcanum. Only other small thing was one of the shoulder pads is a chaos one with a small skull with the spikes filed away.

Dusk Hunters

I am thinking I now have enough terminators and dreadnoughts to get a Deathwing style army ready for a try at 1.5K points level. Just need to head out and pick up that codex and get myself a Terminator Apothecary made up. I am planning to get another command squad and commander to use to build an Honor Guard unit so maybe the bits will come from that.

I have seen a good deal of discussion recently about Deathwing armies and many of the metal terminators are actually deathwing metals. Also I think for consistency I need to get all the metal minis onto the same 40 mm base that the new plastics use.

Digging Oneself A Deep Hole

In my introductory post I noted that I had about 7000 points of unpainted marines. This is pretty intimidating to look at as a project. This includes a battlecompany, 3 10 scout squads, 4 5 man termi squads, vanguard squad, sternguard squad, assorted weapon options, characters and a small assortment of bikes, speeders, light tanks. I am pretty slow at just the base coat of boltgun and liche purple. Highlighting is going to kill me. I am starting mainly on the starter set marine(3 tac squads) as my practice and experiment group. I think I might line up all the units just to show the random state in the future. I would love to hear the if other people have set themselves up in this kind of state.

Not to mention my tyrant and assault brood box which are still pieces or my 16 blood bowl teams.


Here is the Sons of Twilight Chapter so far. Not even half primed.

Every Chapter Master is Pedro

Here is my work in progress Counts as Pedro. Really no reason not to take Pedro if you are interested in a Chapter Master. Maybe you do not like the I1 of the powerfist but other than that his abilities vs cost compared to a normal Chapter Master are outstanding. Essential get scoring Sternguard, Stubborn, and +1 Attack Banner effect for like 20 points ~ 1 marine.

Added Basing with building bit and ork skull plus drilled out stormbolter. Next step brushed on black basecoat.

The Fight For Food

There was a great little tournament here in Ann Arbor last weekend hosted at Get Your Game On. It was more of a hobby/fair play tournament than a win at all costs. The idea was a canned food drive for a local charity, The Food Gatherers. Entering the event cost 5 cans and up to 4 rerolls could be used or forced per game with additional cans of food. The games used the GW Hall of Heroes Scenarios.

The top prize was for most cans donated but since everyone maxed out their rerolls this was decided by sportsmanship score. Next was the sportsmanship prize which went to the runner up sportsman. The next prize was painting and the final was battle points. The attendance was lower than hoped due to a persistent snow fall the night before and during the day but a good time was had by all who made it.
A significant amount of food was brought even though the attendance was not maxed out and filled a large box such that the box would collapse if lifted. If someone does something like this in the future it might be interesting to use the food as the terrain while encouraging people to bring cans, boxes, and bagged foods for variety.

I did not win anything but still had a good time. My army is not painted so I was out there. I am still working on the tactics and getting vehicles for my mech marines so I went 1-1-1 in the games. I am also not that great of a sportsman since I always like to be right and got into a argument about the new multiple assaulter rules twice where people are still claiming that you are not allowed to fight new assaulters even if you are in base to base contact with them. I was the new assaulter so I was not even trying to get the rule used properly for an advantage.



Here was my army from the event. I am trying to track down the pictures of the participants and will follow up with a few battle reports from the event.

Space Marine Unique Characters

The new space marine codex is full of unique characters who give the army wide abilities without even being on the board. GW also decided to open the characters up for use for any chapter and allow for different characters to appear in the same army provided only one chapter tactics is used. Some say that the characters are undercosted which may be true overall but seems especially true is that they are undercosted compared to the generic HQ choices in the codex. These were both increased in cost and decreased in stats and or abilities in the new codex for 5th edition 40K. There seems no reason to ever take a Chaplain on foot who is not Cassius when you essential get T6 and Feel no Pain for 10 points plus have three weapons instead of 2.

Ofcourse you need a proper WYSIWYG model for each character so GW might just be trying to get everyone to have 10 different HQ units to build armies with. I have been trying to repurpose other models to make the characters.

Here is my Pedro. Nothing really special. Left over bits from a Space Marine Commander Kit who just needed a combimelta changed to a Storm Bolter and a Banner to represent the Inspiring Presence ability. I will probably base it with a ork skull I have in my bit box.

Here is the mini I will use for Sicarius. With the new costs for power weapons and plasma pistols, I just could not see the advantage to having 3 veterans with both. So 1 becomes Sicarius with the addition of the Halo. Another lost his power weapon for a chainsword.

New Warhammer 40K: Space Marine Blog

This is the first test post for a New 40K Space Marine Blog. I hope to discuss Tactics, Army Lists, Modeling, and Painting of my Space Marine Chapter: Sons of Twilight.

I am a newer 40K player with about 3 years experience after a 15 year time frame away from the GW games of my youth.(Blood Bowl, Dark Future, and Epic Space Marine). I currently have about 7K Points worth of Space Marines who are for the most part not painted. I never really got started painting them for being afraid of messing them up with my shaky hands. I also played in mostly friendlys or campaigns were painting was not required. I am trying to get the painting going now so I can be involved in more events.

This Blog will definitely chronicle me trying to paint 7K of space marines with less than 1 hour per day free time.