When EpicA first came out I cobbled together a Steel Legion army using vehicles from my SMv1 era Imperial Guard mixed in with Epic40k era vehicles. I was never keen on how the army looked with half of it looking Heresy era and half of it looking quite modern in terms of design. As the years passed I decided that my SMv1 Imperial Guard vehicles would be used as a Heresy era Imperial Guard army only and my Epic40k and EpicA era Imperial Guard vehicles would be used for my Cadian Shock Troops and Minervan Tank Legion armies. My Steel Legion army would instead be built using vehicles from the SMv2 era and only using vehicles with the very flat chassis armour pictured below:
I’m not quite sure how I managed to end up with so many of these vehicles from this particular range given that I wasn’t actively collecting them. However, I did recently buy the Chimera variants (Chimerro and Chimerax) on ebay for a very reasonable price to finish the army off.
Sculpted by Norman Swales and Dave Andrews, this is my least favourite range of Imperial Guard vehicles. The flat chassis armour coupled with minimal detail just looks so flat and boring. There is also the issue of bad mould slippage on both sides of the chassis armour. It ranges from barely any to so much you’ll never get it cleaned off and, unfortunately, it’s pretty bad on half of the vehicles I own. Amazingly it’s even on the White Dwarf advert for the Basilisk:
And worse than that some of them have double mould lines. Again this can be seen in an advert for White Dwarf:
It’s really quite shocking to see these sorts of problems in adverts for the models when they’ve just been released.
I usually dive in with a needle file for this sort of work but I found that using a very sharp knife to scrape the worst of the mold slippage off gave a better result. Even so, not all of the mould lines could be cleaned and I’ll just have to reluctantly live with them.
After all of that moaning, imagine my surprise when painting these models that they’re not only quick to paint but, gasp(!), I they look really great. Once the whole army is painted it’ll have a very coherent look to it. The intention was to paint the army as a modern Russian force but the colourscheme looked a bit bland on the test model I painted (no photo, it was quickly stripped and repainted) so I went with an olive green colourscheme. I like it but it it did occur to me that it’s quite close to the Space Marine Salamander Chapter colours. Unfortunately, there’s no photo of the models I painted (6x Basilisks and 4x Manticores) because when I applied my Army Painter Anti-Shine Matt Varnish it dried horribly and now those ten models are sat in the stripping queue. I’m not impressed, moreso given that I checked the varnish on a test model first which dried perfectly. Very annoying..!
Although this range is fairly comprehensive it’s missing an appropriate Bombard sculpt. I own quite a lot of the Mk1 Bombard models so I converted three Bombards that would fit more with this range using three spare chassis from this range and the original Mk1 Bombard guns. A lot of the detail was filed off the Mk1 Bombard guns to keep the simple, flat, look of this range:
It’s really not a great photo because the model isn’t that green or shiny but I wanted to upload what I’d done to make the Bombard.
Finally, I did a quick check of how many Epic Imperial Guard and Space Marine vehicles that are now in my collection. I’ve now amassed 716 Imperial Guard and 297 Space Marine vehicles with more working their way to me in the post. That’s twice what I thought and I’m now not going to count my Ork vehicles nor am I going to tell my wife! 😉 Before you ask just over 200 are painted. If I pull my finger out I’m sure I can get another hundred or so painted this year.
chewinglead 