This week sees the release of five new Astartes tank kits for Legions Imperialis, the Mastodon Super-heavy Assault Transports, the Whirlwind and Scorpius Missile Tank Squadrons, the Vindicator Siege Tank Squadron, the Cerberus Heavy Tank Destroyer Squadron and the Typhon Heavy Siege Tank Squadron. Thanks to Games Workshop for providing these kits for review.
The Sprues
Thundercloud: It’s a lot of plastic. The tooling is sharp and well done, as has been the case across the Epic range.
My only real criticisms are that the Typhon and Cerberus, which share 80%+ of their components, could have been a single sprue in the same way the Whirlwind and Scorpius are, and that the Vindicators would have benefited from having the Laser Destroyer version as well.
While I would have liked the Vindicator to have the dozer blade, the design team for the Horus Heresy have gone with a Vindicator design that reflects the 1st edition Space Marine 1st/2nd edition 40k Vindicator, with no dozer blade. I just feel the dozer look is iconic.
Assembly
Thundercloud: Assembly was largely pain free, though for those of you doing sub-assemblies, the housing for the laser on the Cerberus won’t fit over the end of the laser if you keep it separate and try to put it on after.
I had the sponsons as sub-assemblies and painted them all together, sticking them on later.
NotThatHenryC:Â I left the gun shields off my Vindicators, Cerberus and Typhons to paint the guns and stuff behind them. I took the opportunity to spray them black. Just be careful the spray doesn’t blow any of them away! I felt a bit worried I’d lose a gun shield, which provided an incentive to get the painting done fast.
Everything went together fine. There’s a bit of an annoying mould line round the tracks of the Cerberus and Typhon but it isn’t too bad. On the Mastodon I found a join on the top of the track guards that left more of a slot than I was happy with. I filled it in with a little green stuff before painting, which wasn’t too difficult.
The Mastodon comes with two full sets of sponsons, not just two guns and one sponson mount like most other Astartes vehicles, so in theory you could magnetise them. I didn’t bother and just went with the Heavy bolters.
The Typhon and Cerberus both come with several hatch options; closed, with a commander, Heavy bolter or Multi-melta. If you buy these kits you’ll have plenty of spares that you can spread around other vehicles, which is handy now we’ve got rules for them in the Liber Strategia. I built my Typhons with Heavy bolters and my Cerberus with no gun but a waving commander to represent the squadron leader. The Vindicators and Mastodon can’t have Pintle weapons but you get a single waving guy and open hatch on the sprue for both kits.
Painting
NotThatHenryC:Â I painted all my tanks as Imperial Fists. I sprayed them Wraithbone and painted a couple of layers of Imperial Fist contrast paint over the whole thing. That then got a wash of thinned down Agrax Earthshade and a drybrush of Dorn yellow. I did these in a big batch along with some Leviathans, which I plan to have ride around in my Mastodon.
After that it was the more arduous job of painting a few black bits and loads of metal details. I used the transfers the kit came with but found the Legion icons seemed a bit small. Luckily I had a 30k Imperial Fist transfer sheet, which I used to add some stuff to the Mastodon, which is massive. The aircraft transfer sheet has much larger icons so I’d suggest using those for this kit.
So far I’ve only managed to finish this for my Vindicators and Mastodons, due to going on holiday. I’ll finish the rest when I get home.
I’m very happy with how this lot has come out. That big brick of a Mastodon is pretty imposing for a Legions Imperialis model.
Thundercloud: I of course painted mine as Blood Angels, and used a cut down version of the recipe for Blood Angels armour Darren Latham uses (two thin coats of Mephiston Red, rough highlight of Evil Sunz Scarlet and then a glaze of 50/50 Blood Angels Red and Contrast Medium, a few point highlights of Jokaero Orange). There’s a lot of skipped steps there, because the clean edge highlights of 40k scale painting look very artificial in Epic scale, and a rough highlight blended with the base coat with a glaze helps avoid that. I used a Chaos Black undercoat, so making sure there’s a solid red basecoat is important.
The gun shields on the Vindicators and Typhons were painted with Corvus Black, which is a very nice German Grey colour I use a lot when painting blacks and black leathers, and with a subtle highlight of Dark Reaper. Again hard edge highlights can break the illusion of scale, and you’ll mostly look at these models from three feet away.
Transfers are a great way of adding detail, and freehanding at this scale is challenging. I used transfers from the Legions Imperialis Astartes Vehicle Transfer sheet, the Leviathan Space Marine Transfer sheet and the Indomitus Space Marine Transfer sheet.
My advice is to always nicely store away transfer sheets in case you need them later, and in case GW decide that the 30k look of a chapter symbol is going to be different to the 40k one, as they did with Blood Angels.
For Epic vehicles you don’t want to overwhelm the viewer with transfers, and having 2-3 on a Rhino sized vehicle and 3-4 on a super heavy vehicle gives you enough points of visual interest without too many transfers. From a realism point of view, think where you can put chapter markings, unit markings etc. Being able to tell who’s side a vehicle is on from the air is important, especially when, as in 30k, you have a bunch of vehicles on different sides painted the same primary colour (Ultramarines – blue, Nightlords – dark blue, Blood Angels – red, Wordbearers – slightly darker red, Thousand Sons – shinier red). Given when playing you’ll also be viewing these from well above the battlefield, some points of interest you can see are advisable too. The Whirlwind, with it’s flat panels on the missile pod, is particularly good for this, but I also put some blood drops on the Scorpius and skulls on the Vindicators to be visible from above.
Thoughts
Thundercloud: I was very surprised it’s taken till now to release the Whirlwind and Vindicator, as those were the iconic support tanks for Marines in first and second edition Epic (and Epic 40k and Armageddon, it’s only in Legions Imperialis that the number of tanks marines have has exploded.
The large support tanks based on the Spartan are nice to have, seem pretty good in the game (particularly the Cerberus with the 3 dice 24″ Neutron Laser), but marines have become a faction with nearly as much heavy armour as the Solar Auxilia, and with the Fellblade and its variants to come.
I was able to build the minis quickly, nothing was too hard or fiddly, and they painted up nicely and quickly, taking to panel lining well.
I like them, and the Marine armour has proved so much quicker to paint up than the marine infantry. Another six detachments down, only 20 more to go.
NotThatHenryC:Â I also like these kits and I’m also confused by the choices of what goes in each box. Were laser destroyer vindicators too difficult to fit on the sprue for some reason, or will there be a box of eight of those coming too? Does the “standard” whirlwind only exist because the Scorpius doesn’t take up much space on the sprue, leaving space to play around with? I don’t know.
The two of us split these five boxes in half and did a sprue of every type of tank each. I’m pretty happy to have half as many of all these tanks as you get in a full box. It’s enough of them for the size of games I want to play and I’m not sure I’ll ever need more. It’s more fun to paint different stuff than to do loads of the same thing, too.
I’d probably better go and paint some more infantry too. Hopefully we’ll be getting a sprue of those eventually. It feels a bit wrong for me to have an Imperial Fist army with no breachers, who would be great coming out of my new Mastodon.
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