The Armageddon Battalion: Deathwatch is, I’m pretty sure, the best Deathwatch boxed set Games Workshop has put out in years. In this video I walk through every sprue, every interchangeable shoulder pad, and the whole stack of reasons this thing punches above its £105 price tag. You get a Corvus Blackstar and ten Deathwatch Kill Team miniatures inside, all push-fit, all on the kit that originally arrived with Kill Team: Tomb World. That previous box ran £155 for two similar squads with no aircraft.
What’s in the Box
Cracking the lid, you get two five-man Kill Teams plus the Corvus Blackstar. The Veterans are built on the Tomb World sprues, which is the version of the kit I’ve been wanting GW to repackage for ages. They have proper interchangeable shoulder pads, the right balance of bolter and special-weapon options, and enough loose helmets that you can tell every operative apart on the table. The kit is dense with kitbash bait once you spread the sprues out.
The shoulder pads are the part I always check first on a Deathwatch sprue. The aquila and skull pads here are crisp, the chevrons read cleanly even at tabletop distance, and the alternate pads let you mix in models from other Space Marine chapters with zero filing. If you’ve got a Primaris Lieutenant or a stray Intercessor squad in your bits box, the alternate pads will fit them without any conversion work.
The Corvus Blackstar
The Corvus Blackstar is the headline kit. Small footprint on the table, big footprint in the rulebook — and the sprues here are unchanged from the 2017 release, which is fine by me. It’s a kit that aged well. I went with the missile barrage build because the alternative loadout never feels as ridiculous as launching a wave of frag warheads at a Boyz mob, and the Armageddon launch lore sets the campaign up to put the Blackstar in exactly that role.
Assembly is the same multi-part affair you remember if you built one years ago. The cockpit is the only fiddly part. Everything else clips together cleanly enough that I had it on its flight stand inside an hour.
Stretching Ten Models Into Twenty-Two
This is the part that surprised me when I started laying the bits out. With the spare arms, helmets, and pauldrons in this box plus a small stash of extra torsos, I can field twenty-two Deathwatch operatives off the contents. That is not a typo. I already built twenty-two off Kill Team: Tomb World earlier this year using the same trick, and the Armageddon Battalion sprues stack on top of that count.
The maths is just bits arithmetic. Each five-man frame ships with more arm and weapon options than five bodies need, and the alternate heads and pads mean you can put together full extra Veterans as long as you can scrounge torsos. A standard Intercessor box gives you ten torsos for cheap. If you’re paint-curious about the Deathwatch’s all-veteran aesthetic, this is the most efficient way I’ve found to push past the standard squad count without buying a third box.
Is It Worth It?
At £105 you get the Blackstar (about £55 standalone) and ten Veterans (about £45 per five-man squad). The arithmetic comes out to roughly £40 in savings if you’d buy the kits separately, which is solid for a Battalion box. The real value sits in the kitbash potential and the fact that GW finally bundled the Blackstar with a discount inside a Deathwatch-themed bundle.
The box mostly makes sense for players who don’t already own a Corvus Blackstar. If the flagship kit was already on your wishlist, the £40 saving justifies the Battalion box on its own. For anyone who already built a Blackstar in a previous edition, this drops to a £50 ten-Veteran purchase on identical sprues to the Tomb World batch, which works mainly as a clean second squad. The same calculation showed up on my recent Iron Hands double-Redemptor unboxing, and the answer lands in the same neighbourhood.
I dropped a poll in the video about which loadout people would run first. The shotgun-and-thunder-hammer build won by a small margin in the early comments. I leaned towards the heavy bolter and stalker pattern bolter combo myself because long-barrelled bolters in Veteran hands look right to me. Drop a comment with which Veterans you’d field, and I’ll work the most-voted build into a paint guide on the channel soon. The full picture of GW’s recent army-box cadence is on the blog if you want to compare this drop against last year’s wave.
