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Well with two manticore and prescience those cultists won't last long. And that's not including the other ranged artillery a guard list can bring.
Also that kind of behaviour in a tournament would net you a disqualification for slow play.

In my meta, a horde army would be terrifying. There was an ork player a while back that frequently fielded 200+ models, and after he left our meta swung to tank and character hunting. It's still very vehicle heavy.

For anybody who thinks that MoK is good on cultists, compare them to Ork boyz... and cry.

 Mitranekh the Omniscient wrote:
Seems as though the horde army is a bad call, so how would you guys run Cultists? What units would be useful in a Cultist-heavy force, and is a Dark Apostle the right HQ?

I don't usually run Cultists, but if I do, I run them in either: Squads of 35 if I want to tarpit say.. Some Obliterators, any kind of heavy, low attack units, or if I want to use them as a meat shield for my (inevitably allied) Leman Russes or Medusas, because IG are slightly more expensive (taking into account the costs of PCSs and Special Weapons) and are not to be wasted as meat shields, but more as objective holders, or I use them to sit behind my lines and in my deployment zone, to hold my own objective in small units, or I use them in squads of 15 to deny any flanking units (this worked terribly well against Genesneakers in my first Apoc game, I was allied with Tau and my Cultists managed to sponge the whole squad until my allie's gundrones got on the scene ;D)

For the points of a mark on cultists you can get more cultists and more wounds to soak up shooting. I used them in smaller games where they would charge a unit with a hammer unit forcing most of the attacks the enemy unit has to go onto the cultists. This way you get more mileage out of your expensive units.

I used them in large blocks to hold faster moving warlords, even though that means the squad is going to draw much fire. In the best case they spend a turn shooting at the cultist squad, kill most of them and then your juggerlord just joins another nearby squad of cultists.

Run them as zombies in small squads of 10-20 to hold objectives.

Take a large squad (25-35) of cultists per beatstick HQ to escort said HQ (Typhus, Abaddon) so they can get to CC where they hurt people. Flamers are not a bad choice but just autoguns seems to work best so you can spend more points on stuff that actually kills something.

If you need objective sitters then take some smallish squads 10-15ish to sit objectives and perhaps if you want to hold a large area a dark prophet in a 20ish man unit. The 20 man unit will be murdered but the small squads around it will be able to GtG and still get Ld benefits from the prophet. Flamers/Heavy stubbers are okay here but you should never expect cultists to have any major impact on you killing the enemy. They are cheap scoring bodies and chaff to throw into the enemy bullets so your important stuff lives...they are exactly what they are in the fluff, huh. Actually pretty good rules there.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 Mitranekh the Omniscient wrote:
Seems as though the horde army is a bad call, so how would you guys run Cultists? What units would be useful in a Cultist-heavy force, and is a Dark Apostle the right HQ?

I don't usually run Cultists, but if I do...

...I arm them with Dos Equis. Stay thirsty for blood my friends.

 Griddlelol wrote:

GeneralCael wrote:
I've recently toyed with the idea of 35 cultists with a Dark Apostle. I want to try giving them Mark of Khorne. That is 140 attacks on the charge, averaging 70 hits, averaging 23 wounds.

I think I'd burst out laughing if I saw this. With all e pie plates I can bring, if you didn't sit at 2" coherency you'd be taking casualties like crazy. However while sitting at max coherency I'd be surprised if you ever advanced. All the difficult terrain rolls and losing casualties from the front means you'll be receding further than your max move.

I tried this only with a termi khorne lord instead and it was infuriatingly useless and expensive. Everything about slowness and coherency was right. Even with just one squad I got annoyed moving them all.