Games Workshop was kind enough to send us as copy of the new Mechanicum Battle Group, which NotThatHenryC and Thundercloud split, built and kind of partially painted. Thanks very much Games Workshop – additional thanks to Sky Serpent for sharing his thoughts on his Archmagos on Abeyant.
Here’s what comes in the box.
The Sprues
There are four sprues in the Mechanicum expansion – Infantry, Robots, Thanatar Robots and Triaros Armoured Conveyors.
The casting and sculpting is top notch, as has been the case across the epic scale releases. There is a lot of fine detail, even on the most basic infantry, as seen below with the Servo Thralls.
However on the Robot sprue there are two pieces where the thinness of the parts can cause issues, and they’re so delicate that removing the cast sprue from the mould could cause them to break. The tentacles on the Vulturax and the ammo feeds on the Vorax robots. The Vorax ammo feeds in particular are delicate and if they snap have very small points of contact for gluing them back together. The Vulturax tentacles are more likely to have a small bump in a break that you can apply glue to, possibly even still on the sprue, and guide the broken piece back onto it.
The models are excellent and detailed, but approach the point of too much detail. The Servo Thralls, of which you’ll have 20-30 bases, have a lot of detail that you simply can’t see without zooming in or using a magnifier. This level of detail starts getting intimidating, because you want to do it justice, but do you want to paint 150 eye lenses that are less than a mm?
Assembly
Assembly will take a while, especially as you really ought to try and paint anything that where there’s more than one model on a base before sticking them on, but quite a lot of those models require assembly.
For the infantry I created sub assemblies to paint almost everything still on the sprue, gluing the two halves of the Thallax/Usarax together. These were on single pieces of sprue to allow them to easily be held/reached during painting.
NotThatHenryC
I found these to be fantastic sculpts but in some cases they’ve fallen into the trap of detail over practicality. The worst offenders are the Domitars and Arlatax, where there’s just a single robot on the sprue, with a fixed pose. They have fixed positions at the waist and ankles could have been flexible (yes, they have separate feet) and the arms are locked in place by cables – which tbh you could remove to change that a bit. The Arlatax is on its own special hero rock. Both of these come in units of up to six, so it’ll be pretty obvious if they’re six identical copies. You could swap over the Arlatax’s open and closed claws and change the arm positions and maybe use some ruins on their bases instead of the hero rock
I wanted to paint my robots in a scheme that stood out ok on the battlefield, didn’t look awful if you picked one up and was quick to do lots of times over. My method was to spray Leadbelcher, paint the red with Mephiston, a few other details in bronze and wash the whole thing in Agrax Earthshade. I then highlighted the red and bronze a bit and picked out metal details in silver.
Here’s where I got to, in not too much time. I’m sorry to say that real life and the review of the book meant I couldn’t finish the rest of the infantry.
Sky Serpent
Epic-scale has always interested me, especially with the proliferation of amazing Golden Demon entries in recent years so the Archmagos on Abeyant from the Mechanicum Battle Group set proved a great opportunity to test my skill at a tiny scale.
I kept close to the box art for my inspiration and focussed on the highlights to ensure they would work at this scale. I didn’t change my approach that much but I found taking regular photographs allowed me to review how it looked from different angles.
There were a few blank spaces on the Abeyant so attempting some freehand at such a minuscule size felt like a good idea to practice this, I don’t think it was entirely successful but I would like to try it again.
Bases are so important as we all know, to make this one stand out I used Citadel Martian Ironcrust to which I placed some watch parts – I bought these in small tub from eBay years ago and they’ve served me really; perfect for adding flair to Martian bases of all sizes.
Conclusion
We think these are lovely kits. The infantry have avoided some of the casting issues that beset legionaries and everything seems to be a great representation of its 30k model. The Vulturax is the only fragile one so you’ll have to be careful with those, and that does worry us a bit for the Butcher Stalker, whose model we have not yet seen.
If you want to play Mechanicum then this box is a great way to start. Actually you’d probably want a couple of them. It might not be the way to go if you’re planning Dark Mechanicum, however, as you wouldn’t be able to take any of these robots (except as allies) and they make up half of the box. If you play Legionaries or Solar Auxilia you could do worse than getting this box to use as allies.
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