One of the many ways the the Tyrant of Badab broke with Imperial edicts was that he increased the size of his chapter to at least three times the standard strength of just 1000 Marines.
In order to replicate this rapid mass production of Marines, having no stores of gene-seed squirrelled away, I took to eBay and snapped up a cheap lot.
These are the Tactical Marines from the 40k fourth edition starter set, The Battle of Macragge, and appropriately, they had already been painted with enthusiasm as Ultramarines, and so needed stripping.
I normally strip miniatures with Dettol, which works fine on metal models, but is less than great with plastic. Therefore, I decided to invest in a tub of Biostrip 20, which I'd heard good things about.
I then proceeded to make a bit of a pig's ears if using the stuff (I used water to rinse them, which was a bad idea) and ended up with clumps of melted paint tucked away all over the models.
I then tried again (after faffing about trying to pick out the clumps with a needle) and made a better fist of things, although in the process neglected to clean up some mould lines.
I'm not totally happy with that part of the process, but at least I learned a few things.
However, I'm happy with the painting process, which I've now nailed down as a production line that's not too onerous for mass producing an army.
I followed the exact same process as for the first unit I painted, with the only change being that I've left the shoulder pads gloss varnished after doing the transfers as I feel this works better with the metallic armour.
According to the official Tyrant's Legion army list from the Imperial Armour: The Badab War book, each Legion Cohort (which is what they call a Tactical Squad) allows me to add heavy units from the main Space Marine list to the army, giving me some flexibility.
Despite this, I'm not sure I'm going to do any more Legion Cohorts for the time being. Firstly, I should probably include at least one HQ units to make the army playable, and then I want to include some more interesting units.
Painted: 310
Lead Mountain: 673
Interesting to hear of the problems with the biostrip, as I've never used the stuff, the cohort looks effective though
ReplyDeleteI think that all the reviews skip over any issues, which are minor, but there. There's a decent amount of scrubbing needed, but not the wait time you might expect.
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