Warhounds 2 Warmasters

There are a few Legios whose colour schemes I adore but feel I could never manage to do justice to without accepting the devil into my heart and starting to use an Airbrush.

At the top of this list sit Ignatum and for me to do them justice will take a significant run-up to actually doing them. Don’t hold your breath. This is not least because Ignatum are grossly overpowered and are, for me at least, the least fun Legio to play against in AT – which is a level of sadness I don’t want to bring to a table… this week. The scheme itself is technical and requires a level of planning and execution above and beyond the other Legio schemes I’ve so far looked at.

So, as I looked and considered the available options a little lower in the pecking order, I was reminded of the first Legio I really loved the scheme for, the first time I saw a scheme I didn’t feel I could actually do at my current skill level, the God Breakers: Legio Krytos.

Legio Krytos have a pretty limited bag of tricks – they definitely have a gimmick to lean into – but the tricks they have are HUGE.

Thematically, Krytos are all about the Quake effect and utilising it to control the battlefield; limiting and opponents ability to reach objectives or move to position for better arcs. They do this better than any other Legio with their Stratagem ‘Civilisation’s Ruin’ which allows the Quake effect to be applied THROUGH active Void Shields for one game round.

If you face a Krytos force, expect to see Round One First Fires to maximise the damage that this can do to your battle-plans.

Hiding behind this Stratagem is the Legio Trait: Doom of Worlds. This allows a Warlord to be substituted in an Axiom or Myrmidon over a mandatory Reaver. With a Regia or Precept maniple, Krytos can swap in a Warbringer over a mandatory Warhound slot – with the effect in a Regia of the Warbringer becoming an additional King/Queen which can Merge Voids with the Courtiers. In a Fortis maniple, Krytos can swap a Warlord and/or a Warbringer over the mandatory Reaver slot – which is unusual.

I value the ability to slot a Warbringer into a Regia highest among all of the Krytos toolkit – to the degree that I rarely even use Civilisation’s Ruin. It’s THAT good.

When it came to painting, I actually had to plan out what I was going to do. There were one or two panels with mistakes and one infuriating but salutary lesson in overspraying but, I was entirely pleased with my efforts and my first Air-Sprayed Legio were shaping up to be quite the lookers. Being utterly pants with Decals and having largely ruined (for myself) my Legio Vulpa, I took the time to get some detailed instructions and timings – which I then actually followed – from Alex and… it worked. The decals all went on well and are almost entirely seamless.

I spent more time deciding on the basing for Krytos and the Household force I was building at the same time than I did on the paint scheme itself. Having done grimy dirt, devastated urban, wintered ground and blasted martian barrens… I was struggling to come up with anything. Eventually, I decided I wanted to do something like a Xeno landscape with purple to pink gravel and totally-not-tiberium crystal and some neon fauna. Getting the right degree of washes to drybrushes was a challenge, but ultimately I’m very happy with how they ended up looking.

Twisted Titanicus 5

Seeing as I am catching up on my draft articles for the multitude of Legios I have completed in the last year, the following will skip around a bit. I eventually built a minimum Extergimus maniple with a Direwolf for my Krytos force. I supported this with two Acastus Porphyrion as I was juggling projects and building a Household Mamaragon force at the same time and they shared the same unique basing approach.

I had a grand total of one test game before the event but that had played very well. I came third at the event – narrowly losing a game to Simon’s Ignatum.

The overall feedback I was given from people was that 3 Warlords with double Mori Quake Cannons was too oppressive and little to no fun to play against where they spent the entire game moving at a snail’s pace. I took this on board and over the following weeks built a Warbringer, two Warhounds and some Cerastus Lancers to bolster the forces.

At the time, I felt that a Regia was less oppressive and would offer a more balanced force. Due to delays in getting the Titan’s finished and some life-scheduling issues, I didn’t get to actually playtest the Regia (the first I’d played since my first Legio, Mortis) until the Tuesday before the event they were to Premiere: Kirtonian Cataclysm.

As a short remark, the list is absolutely nails and won through all games convincingly earning me a 1st place trophy.

The final game was a rematch against Simon’s Ignatum and it allowed me to lay to rest the haunting defeat he had served me at our last meeting.

Twisted Titanicus: Retribution

I suffered a neck injury whilst building for the mammoth two day, four game 3000 point Twisted Titanicus event in October. I had been working my way through the glorious Knight Household but now found myself unable to paint or hold a brush. I reached out to Twisted-Jim to confirm I would either have to step out of the even or offer a replacement list.

I combined the Krytos that I had most recently built into an Extergmus with an Arcus maniple in support – with two Acastus Porphyrion to finish things out.

I played some fantastic opponents over the weekend – including LSW(!) who had THIRTEEN Titans in her list (Tempestus and Audax) and after 3 wins it was once again the final game set up opposite Simon and a bulked out Double Vortex Ignatum list.

Between Simon fluffing a Vortex shot against my Direwolf, my Direwolf getting a shutdown on the second Vortex Reaver (and following that up with destroying it before it could reactivate and fire that missile), some stellar Void Shield Relay turtling and the most nailbiting final turn in years, I scraped through with a win and took 1st place for the weekend –

I’d never won a first place at the Twisted Titanicus events before so I was pretty chuffed. Simon would have flattened my Knight Household by Round Two. Just saying.

As is my general rule, I don’t play forces that have had a 1st Place Trophy to any more Competitive events – and so the Extergimus and Regia for Krytos take up their well earned rest in the cabinets, guarding their trophies and mostly just sitting around being really, really, really obnoxiously good-looking.*Blue Steel*