The growing battlefield....

Question;  what do you do when you have spare models and to much time on your hands?

Answer; create more armies. I mean, what other possible answer is there for a man who already has to many armies, most of which are unpainted.

Now, I know what your thinking and your right, it is silly. The main reason for these thoughts is that I'm planning on getting Renegade for my birthday (ssshhhh, haven't told the wife yet!) and as such I will have two knight's to add to the collection, thus I need a supporting army to go with them.

So, I shall introduce the House of XXX (no not the X rated house, just doesn't have a name yet) and the knight's Dagalien and Daggri. Dagalien is a Knight Warden and is the senior of the two knights, while Daggri is a Knight Gallant. The rest of the force is made up of members of the houses subjects, sworn to protect the great and ancient war machines. They will be formed of an allied detachment with a HQ and two platoons with a significant number of heavy weapons alongside numerous infantry to protect the knight's from being charged. I'll write a proper house history at some point, after I get the box set, I'm not gonna count my chickens just yet.

This will form a 4th IG/MT army, and be of a different format again, giving me an infantry, mechanical, deep strike and super heavy based armies. And this got me thinking, there aren't many other type of IG/MT armies apart from Aircav (maybe for the future) but what other types Marine armies are there?

Now I've got a shooty one in the disciples, so that basically covers ultrasmurfs and Imperial Fists, I have bikes and TDA from the Guardians, taking out DA and Scars. The Knights take out BA and Raven Guard. So that leaves the Sallies, Iron Hands, Black Templars and the Puppies.

Now, Sallies don't really interest me and there not that much different from the other codex forces, the same can be said for the Iron Hands. That and I could run the Disciples as Iron Hands if I wanted. That only leaves the Templars and the Puppies. Now I'm sure I'll get wronged for calling them puppies, but hey, yap yap yap little doggies ;-)

Now I know that the wolves have not successors, and that the ferisian wolves are unique to the chapter, but I like some of the rules. So what would I do? Simple, the chapter, the Stone Dragons, is based on a feral world of large open savannah and grass land where the local tribes live in stone age existence, large hunting dogs (or cats, I haven't decided yet) roam the plains and are used for hunting by the tribes and of course the marines. Whilst I will keep some elements of the wolves, such as wolves, others will be lost, no psykers, no Calvary, no wolfen etc.

The force itself would be a small elite type of affair, the main body would be a large pack of blood claws with a full grey Hunter squad and several wolf guard units, and a full compliment of HQ units and as many dog/cats as can be fitted. I'll write a more comprehensive chapter history for them at some point, but as there a bit of a paper work exercise it could be a while.

That just leaves the Templars, or the Brazen Hawks as they would be. The hawks would be a vehicle heavy army, namely land raiders, with few HQ and lots of large squads of crusaders, maxed out to fit in the crusader raiders. All the units would be fixed for combat with the fire-power being supplied by the raiders. They would be very similar to the black Templars in many respects apart from their history, which I have a good idea of, I just need to put pen to paper as it were. Again these guys are really a paperwork exercise, so the process will probably be quite slow.

The marine armies are not really ones for the table top, as my current grand plan is to finish painting all my current IG/MT armies plus the knight's if I get them, and paint my marines. The Knights are waiting to see what there Gladius detachment brings and what adjustments I need to make, the disciples need to be slightly adjusted still to meet the new Sternhammer Formation and the Guardians still need some decisions making but likely a very basic Lions Blade detachment (out of the B@C box) plus the wings will be made bringing to force well over 2000pts in total. I still need to figure that out.

So there is still lots to do, I'm chipping away at it slowly, very slowly but chipping away none the less.