While wrapping up a highlight session on Squad Barakiel yesterday evening, I wanted to check a points value. I fired up BattleScribe, which updated…and showed me a bunch of errors for my army roster.
No biggie, I thought. Probably just wargear checkboxes. Which was the case for every change but one: Scouts, the bedrock of cheap troop choices, are now elites. Which meant my army, previously just a few hours of painting from being done, now needed a third squad of troops.
After playing around a bit with options, though, I’m not upset about it at all. Yeah, it spoils the lovely plan I had to wrap up with my favorite 40k unit, close-combat Terminators (I’m not putting them off just to preserve that plan!), but on the other hand it gives me a clear next unit to paint.
I don’t want to buy more minis right now (there are plenty in my queue already), so I filtered down to troops I have on hand and settled on adding a 5-man tactical squad. (I also considered just repainting the pauldrons and knees of half of Squad Karios, “creating” a new 5-man squad, but it didn’t feel right.)
As always, I went with the Rule of Cool — in this case, a Storm Bolter and Power Axe for the sergeant, and a Missile Launcher for the squad. I also made sure the heavy weapon guy didn’t have kneepads, enabling me to swap him into any other tactical squad in the same company as needed (since he won’t have a squad insignia).
I also learned a lesson from my box of Primaris Infiltrators: Don’t assemble the entire kit if I don’t need every figure right away. If I’d built Squad Dolos, my five Infiltrators, and left the rest of that kit on sprues, I’d have been able to turn the remaining five into Incursors and drop them right into this army — but I built all 10 as Infiltrators. So half of this kit is staying in the box.
One enjoyable evening later, I had Squad Caedes (“massacre” in Latin):
I’ve been looking forward to painting a vanilla tactical squad anyway, so this should work out nicely. They’re so much less bling-y than the dedicated Blood Angels models (and I didn’t swap in any BA bling) that they should be relatively quick to paint.
With my Scouts now filling an elite slot, I’m also considering dropping them in favor of a bike squad — or maybe just moving the bikes up in my painting queue. The points match up, and both units seem appropriate for this army. We shall see.
Between the transition from 8th to 9th and this reshuffling, I’ve had to rework my army twice while I was still in the middle of painting it. Maybe that’s always how it is with 40k? I don’t know — but it certainly keeps me on my toes.