At Christmas I got a K47 British starter set

When I first saw the automatons, I thought it would be quite easy to build, but oh how I was wrong! There were so many bits.

All of the Parts from the box

The Machine Gun bits

Limbs

Torsos

There are 5 bodies with ball joints for arms and legs. Then there a 5 automated heads. After that there are over ten arms and ten legs all on sprues. But here’s the twist! They are all metal! And so fiddly that every 5 minutes an arm, head or leg snaps off. But finally -after a lot of frustration- they were complete!

The unit built

Another shot of the built unit

Simon:  The main issue with the automatons is the width of limbs.   There isn’t really enough metal to get a decent pin in.    Consequently the models are a little fragile.   I may try and pin these models for Stefan with a 1mm drill and wire, particularly the join between the arms and the machine guns where there is enough metal for a small pin

Yet I had another crazy (but doable) Stefan idea! I found some wire and ,with a bit of drilling, I had a body falling backwards, his head hanging on by a wire!

I couldn’t wait to see them In game but, unfortunately they didn’t do much they did get a few kills until they got hit by a friendly artillery strike from my own artillery observer in their FIRST GAME, man was it annoying to see them wiped off the board so quickly.

Simon:  Stefan got really unlucky with his artillery strike, he rolled a 1 which allowed me to move the strike over his own troops and then I rolled a six to get a direct hit on his automatons.  They had one round of shooting before this happened and at long range, deleted an 11 man squad of Russians.    They’re not to be underestimated!

In Game.  I think the automatons hit the rule of cool pretty hard.    (They look cool, so they’re going in the list!)    I personally think that they should be like Totenkorps and ignore pins, the lack of reactions coupled with slow / testing every time they get an order is enough of a hinderance to them already.    A full squad will set you back 150 points, 170 with an HMG.    I’m not sure whether the HMG is actually worth having or not.   At times I think the +1 pen and ability to pin 7+ closed top vehicles is good, others I think I’d rather just have 5 MMGs firing at soft targets and making the big scary beasties watch out.