Iron Warriors - 3rd Grand Company Elements - Ixus II
Player's Notes:
Hi. This is Keezus
. So why Iron Warriors? To be fair, it was brought about by a few factors.
1. I have many 1000's of points in Eldar. Most of it used and in dire need of repaints. When 4th edition came out, the revisions to rapid fire combined with changes to assaults (no splitting firing and assaulting, no assaulting from transports) made my Swordwind army completely obsolete. That and I was a little peeved that my 60 striking scorpions could no longer be used as troops. While I had plenty of the "good stuff", i.e. close to 60 fire dragons, it would mean pretty much restarting my army, and considering I had no interest in the current power-build (as it was too one dimensional for me - decided it was time for something new. This something new turned out to be WARMACHINE... but that's another story.)
2. So, my buddy who was a manager at the local GW at the time finally convinced me to get back into 40k. I had 4-5 boxes of chaos marines lying around at the time, leftovers from the abortion that was my Emperor's Children army. I still have all the metal shoulder pads and a resin EC dread - so Chaos was a logical choice. I am a very slow painter. So, easy to paint was key. My test EC models took close to 6 hours each, so I decided to go easy with Iron Warriors.
3. The fact that Iron Warriors had gross rules didn't hurt either.
So that's the story on how it started.
It Begins
First off, I decided that while the Iron Warriors are easy to paint, they don't have to look like garbage. I had long wanted to do a conversion heavy army, so armed with all sorts of leftover bits from my aborted Imperial Fists army (see above problems with painting speed) - I made a couple of design decisions.
1. Techmarines as champions.
2. Each member in the squad would have a different head.
3. No topknots! No horns either, unless they are from the IW set. (This made #2 pretty hard)
4. I wanted a Basilisk!
5. I wanted a Vindicator too!
6. No obliterators! I hate the models! This is of course, CRAZY TALK. So I eventually reneged on this one, since Obliterators were too good to ignore.... which brings us to
7. SERVITORS. I would make the obliterators heavy gun servitors, and make gun servitors havocs... and have servitors for daemons (maybe)... and big servitors for greater daemons etc... With daemons so poo, the last two might not come to pass in the near future.
So without further ado... here's the pictures!
Army Pictures
Commander made from the Direct Services Techmarine. No conversion work. He turns evil oh so easily. He's still a WIP. I think I'm going to give him the servo harness minus the bottom arms.
Commander on a bike - I'll probably replace this guy with a Daemon Prince. The DP is just far too good in comparison to the other choices. This guy will probably be my bike squad champion, once I get a bike squad.
Tactical Squad 1, with Champion and ubiquitous powerfist. I've chosen to represent all my icons with auspexes, in order to reinforce their function as teleport homers and communications devices rather than "daemonic conduits".
Tactical Squad 2, with Champion and counts-as powerfist. The thunderhammer is from the new assault terminators. I don't like GW's massive hazard striping everywhere. I tried to use it sparingly, and there are only a few models that have it at present.
Made back in the day before there were Chaos plastic terminators - these boys are hybrids with metal terminator arms and plastic bodies. Body trim is green stuff. On the advice of my friend Clarence, I fitted them with some combi-weapons
Chosen Squad 1. Meltagun and Heavy Bolter configuration. I only ended up using these since I ran out of meltagun parts. In hindsight, at 6 men, they die pretty fast. I think that 8 men is a good number.
Chosen Squad 2. I don't care what others say, if you are using deepstrikers, having the ability to infiltrate an icon is invaluable.
Obliterators - First triumvirate. - Converted from Mega Armored Orks, Space Marine Terminator bits, IG heavy weapons sprues and green stuff... oh yes, green stuff.
Olbiterators - Second triumvirate. - These WIPs give you an idea of what is greenstuffed on these heavy servitors.
This is my favourite unit in the army, appearance and performance wise. The 4 heavy bolters almost never fail to please.
In the 3rd edition codex, I loved this guy. Mutated hull for AV14 front. The current rules with its AV11 sides makes it a waste of points.
My poor useless Basilisk. Oh well... I can use him in APOCALYPSE. Hurr.
Army List
Forthcoming...
Army Background
Forthcoming...
Future Units
I'd like to add a bike squad and a unit of Raptors. I have 2 dreadnoughts WIP, along with a 3rd Tactical Squad of the same pattern. I'm going to keep the WIP pictures off the article, but I also stupidly uploaded all the pictures (and WIPs) from this article to the photo-dump, so if anyone is interested, some WIP pictures can be found there.