The forces of the Mechanicum grow this week with the awesome Mechanicum Heavy Support Force up for pre order today! Boasting a trio of three heavy options for your Mechanicum forces for Warhammer The Horus Heresy, this is the first chance to pick up some ace new kits!

In this full unboxing and review we’ll be taking a look at the contents of the Mechanicum Heavy Support Force box, building up all of the kits and painting them in the scheme of Forge World Xana II – as people have been asking since the previous Mechanicum box, I’ll also include a painting guide which also works great for House Malinax!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over a free review copy to check out on the site! If you would like to support the site then why not buy your Mechanicum goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing of the box, which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, lets jump into the brand new Mechanicum Box!

Mechanicum Heavy Support Force Unboxing and Review

So we all knew that new Mechanicum kits were on the way, but I don’t think anyone expected that we’d get a big bundle box containing 3 new models for heavy support options!

Maybe we should have expected, as Battle Group boxes have become a regular fixture for Horus Heresy, giving us a collection of brand new kits at a discount, and the discount here isn’t to be sniffed at either. The Mechanicum Heavy Support Force retails at £110 which is a cracking price as far as I’m concerned – if you look at the price of a Thanatar and a Triaros that would set you back £120 just for those two kits (And I suspect the Karacnos will cost a little more than the Triaros) and you’re getting an extra tank in the form of the Krios in the box too! If we base the Krios on roughly the price of a Scorpius then that puts the value on this box at approximately £160, giving you a good chunk off the RRP.

So what’s in the box?

Leading the pack is the Thanatar Calix, a one per unit upgrade for the standard Thanatar and packing one of the nastiest weapons in the Mechanicum arsenal. The Sollex heavy-Las is a 3 shot S10 Ap2 monstrosity with Armourbane and Shockpulse. While it is amazing at cracking open vehicles, it’s also brilliant at taking out things such as Terminators with very little effort. Upgrade it with Paragon of Metal and you’re packing precision shots too, making this even nastier.

Most of the kit is the same as the existing Thanatar, but with a new sprue to upgrade it to the new build. This is something we’ve seen throughout the life of the new edition of The Horus Heresy, and the Specialist Games team make great use of reused sprues in order to maximise the awesome models they can put out.

The Calix was a dream to put together, and I found the main weapon assembly to actually be easier than the standard siege mortar on the vanilla version! If you’ve built the regular one then you know what to expect here – pay attention to the instructions as there’s variants for having it standing still or striding forwards, and this alters the build in subtle ways.

Next up we have the Karacnos Assault Tank. This is one of the coolest models in the Mechanicum range, a huge artillery tank built on the Triaros chassis. As you might see in our unboxing video, at first I thought this was just a single sprue different to the basic Triaros, but after building and painting it and comparing it to the transport, there’s quite a lot of differences here compared to the basic version – the entire top of the tank is made up of different pieces, with the “nose” of the Triaros replaced with a more sleek curve. As expected the missile bays can be built open or closed, but you can actually just not glue them and they will stay in position with resistance if you want the option of moving them during a game.

This is the real star of the Mechanicum Heavy Support Force box for me, and I wish you could take more than 1 in a unit, with the Mechanicum list having a very exciting heavy support section! It just oozes cool, and I’ve been tempted more than once to pick it up in resin. In plastic it goes together just as easily as the Triaros, so if you’ve built that you’ll know the drill here – just be careful with the bar that divides the rocket bays, as it’s easy to put the piece in the wrong way which will stop them from closing properly.

When building it I’d recommend not sticking the rocket bays in too, as it’ll be really tricky to paint all the details without having this as a separate part.

The final kit in the box is the Krios Battle Tank. This is something we’ve been expecting to land at some point, due to it getting a new variant in the recent Mechanicum book. This kit actually builds all three flavours, the 2 standard options (including the new Irradiation Blaster) and the Venator Siege version. I found that if you want to just build a vanilla Krios it’s actually really easy to make the main gun swappable so that you can switch between the two weapons as you wish. The Venator add some additional parts and a blast shield, which makes it slightly harder to make swappable, but I’m sure you’d be able to do this with magnets. For this review I was against the clock so option to build the standard Battle Tank and simply swap between the two main weapons

I’ve never actually built the resin version of this tank, but the plastic one is ace with lots of brilliant little details. The main fun is connected to a cockpit with a curved back that is very reminiscent of the Space Jockey seat out of the original Alien film, and this entire assembly can rotate back and forth to raise or lower the main gun. Detailing is very nice with exposed engines and gubbins and big wheels aplenty to mirror the larger Triaros transport.

I do wonder if this main assembly of this kit will be reused for the tracked sections of the Ordinatus Engines. These large Super Heavy Weapons on tracks are no longer available on the Games Workshop website, and while we may be a while away from a plastic Titan, I do think that something like this would be much easier to do using this kit as the assembly of the lower tracks.

So how did I paint these?

It’s pretty straight forward, though I did use an airbrush to make this a little easier, and if you’ve painted and House Malinax Knights then this is a close approximation of that scheme based on information I dug through online.

I started off basing using Colour Forge Black

Next up was the armour panels, which is the bulk of the work. Start off with a coat of Tamiya Flat Earth, then next a layer of Tamiya Wood Deck mixed 50/50 with Desert Yellow. Finally this is highlighted with a coat of pure Tamiya Wood Deck – use this to define the highlights and curves and this does mos tof the heavy lifting on this colour scheme.

Metals are then brush painted silver and the dark grey trim is a 50/50 mix of silver and grey. This gives a nice contrast in metal colours to add some variation over the model. Once dry, the metal is then shaded with Nuln Oil

Once those colours are dry, get the airbrush out again and hit the entire model with a 50/50 mix of Nuln Oil and Seraphim Sepia – this gives the model the tint that gives it that Malinax effect, and dont be scared to do to a couple of coats here to bring the tone down as suits you.

Once dry, paint and sponge on chips and damage with Rhinox Hide (Or whatever colour you are using for your bases) to reflect some weathering.

Finally, I took Ryza Rust, thinned it down with Lamian Medium and ran it into the recesses to add the feel of rust on these corrupted vehicles.

Pretty quick to do, and I feel it looks pretty effective!

Summary

So what do I think of the Mechanicum Heavy Support Force? This is a brilliant box at a great value with 3 really fun to build and paint kits included. I’d have eagerly picked up all these kits individually, so a big box containing all three of them is a dream come true! If you’re after all these kits then this box is absolutely the best (and most likely cheapest) way to get them, but I suspect this is only going to be available while stocks last – so make sure to pick it up sooner rather than later if you’re tempted!

If you picked up the earlier Battle Group box then this is also a great way of expanding your Horus Heresy Mechanicum force into a larger army.

I’m super excited to see what further kits come to the Mechanicum range and if there are any more bundle boxes like this when they drop!

The Mechanicum Heavy Support Force is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 8th March

Games Workshop provided Sprues and Brews a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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