Ryan's Hobby Hangout! Legions Imperialis March 2024

Hey there, Battle Foam fans, My name’s Ryan and I’ve been a miniatures/wargaming nerd since I was 12 years old. One of my many roles here at your favorite miniature storage company is building all the new releases from Games Workshop, Atomic Mass Games, Privateer Press, and many other gaming companies. Every week I’m building some new release, and thought I’d add my two cents out into the community. Here I’d like to highlight some of my favorite aspects of building, maybe some things that grind my gears, as well as some hobby tips for building each release.

This week we’re building Legions Imperialis that release(d) March 2nd, 2024. This includes Spartan Assault Tanks, the Malcador variants the Infernus and Valdor, and a Support Box for the Astartes and Solar Auxilia respectively. The things I’m most excited for here are the Leviathan Dreadnoughts and the Spartans. Who doesn’t love Spartans?!

Building the LI boxes were pretty straight forward this week, there were no miss labeled parts that I could find, which I feel like is pretty rare. Most releases I’ve found have at least one where two parts have their numbers switched in the build guide. Putting together these LI kits is always so fun once you have them all done, and you can look at all the massive Tanks and Dreads side by side to their 30k/40k counterparts.

As I said before, most everything was straight forward but, as always there was an outlier. When building the Astartes Land Raider Spartan, there is a small piece that needs to go on the inside of the side panels with the treads before gluing it to the main body. I fail to see how these parts couldn’t have been modeled into one piece based on how the parts were oriented on the sprue (if you know how a plastic sprue is made, then you know what I’m talking about.)

Then after cleaning up the sprue gate on this small part and gluing it into place, then gluing the tread side panel to the main body, you can’t even see the piece you just glued in!! You might just be better off saving yourself the headache and skipping that step and just glue the tread panel to the body without that little doodad, because at this scale from a gaming distance of 2 to 3 feet, it’s completely imperceptible. Otherwise, paint it before it goes in because you won’t have access to it after!

One hobby tip I feel I could give is on the hull mounted weapon for the Spartan. The instructions tell you to glue the small side pieces but to not glue the middle, so the gun can turn side to side. At this scale, you might not care if the gun can move side to side, which in that case, I’d just say glue it, not a big deal. If, however, you’d like the extra moving pieces, I found it easiest to stab the top of the piece with a fresh blade so the piece will be upside-down.

From there it’s easy to add a small dot of glue to either side and use your blade to press it into place. Give the blade a little quarter twist either way for it to release and you’re good, much easier than trying to fumble with it by hand and getting your fingers covered in glue.

That’s it for this week of releases, next week we’re going to cover the recent releases of Marvel Crisis Protocol made by Atomic Mass Games.