Trickonometry

Well, my Thousand Sons list is underway and I thought I'd take a moment to go over the army list and concept. Based heavily on an infantry gun-line, this is my second one-dimensional army and a major reason I started it was to really contrast with my mechanized-assault Nurgle army.

First, as a fluff purist I always try to adhere to the background first and optimize the killyness of an army second. Now the reason I chose the Thousand Sons for the army was that the two most interesting aspects of the 40k universe to me are the spirituality and the psychic themes. With my Dark Angel army satisfying the spirituality theme, I was left with trying to find an army that embodied the psychic theme. I was originally leaning towards creating a craftworld Ulthwe army, but after much consideration I decided that I really couldn't get behind an army of girly men (don't read into that). The exclusion of the eldar plus the fact that I just love Space Marines led me to humanity's greatest psykers, the Thousand Sons.

With that in mind, I wanted an all-Thousands Sons list that I based on Ahriman's exiled sorceror cabal. Based on the background the Thousand Sons are composed of only two types of marines, sorcerers and rubric marines. So with a whole two options open to me for army creation, I had to start getting creative or risk a creating a force that would be dead on arrival for competitive games. So I started browsing the intrawebz for some inspiration and found what everyone does on the internet, lots and lots of bad ideas and paint jobs. But there existed a gem among them, the usage of Terminator Sorcerer Lord models in a counts-as Obliterators fashion. This idea was the spark that chained into allowing me a a good chunk of the Chaos codex while still adhering to the fluff.

The magic counts-as weapons angle would allow me to take pretty much any infantry unit I wanted in the codex. So with that I started to build my army in earnest and ended up with the following list:

1500 point Chaos List
1 - Ahriman
1 - Pyromancer Coven (Chosen x5 w/ 3 Meltagun/3 Meltabomb)
2 - Rubric Squads x9 (Sorcerors w/ Gift of Chaos)
1 - Sorcerer Lord Coven (Obliterator x3)
2 - Warmage Coven (Havocs x5 w/ 4 Autocannons)

Now the modeling of this army was gonna be fun with making a lot of sorcerer conversions. Instead of painting up a lot of weaponry, I'd have to get creative in making dynamic poses for sorcerers mid-cast. Seeing as how I'm not yet half-way through the army I'll wait until I'm finished to go into further detail on the modeling and painting aspect (with plenty of pictures). However, the ability to easily change army composition by simply switching the counts-as components makes this a very fluid army design.

Having played only one game against Rix, I can't really speak a whole lot about the effectiveness of the army. But I can say that based on it's composition alone, I foresee this army being really good in some circumstances and sucking bad in others. For instance, I loaded up on autocannons to pop rhinos so I could in turn give the AP3 bolters plenty of marines to kill. The inclusion of up to 7 Gift of Chaos attempts per turn also provides a lot assault countering ability. However, I imagine the army will fall victim easily to Walker Assaults (DS-ing Dreads) and Mass Firepower (hello IG!). I've tried to mitigate these factors as best I can but due to the expensive point costs of the units I really can't counter all army types. So I'm just embracing the inherent strength this army provides (coincidentally against all Rix's armies) and ignoring its weaknesses (I mean really, who plays IG? :P).

Hopefully, I will finish this army up in the next two months in time for the blood feud wars I will surely have with Rix's Space Wolves on their codex release. Until then, I guess the only thing to post is the many victories I will claim over Rix's Imperial Fists. :P