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Hey guys,

I am planning on building up a Thousand Sons force to go with my space wolves and realised I don't know toouch about the legion.

I am assuming the TS use mostly ranged tactics along with librarians but what about legion support? Are the more combined arms or do they swing more towards infantry.

Also (the fluff bit) when did they start the more elaborate Egypt themed helmets? I was thinking of getting the GW TS upgrade pack and using the helms for squad leaders.

0. Every legion could do everything. So in terms of what works... well, technically everything, but for now this is really the best piece of information:



1. By the fluff, the Thousand Sons are the smallest or second smallest legion, alongside the Raven Guard. Huge infantry blobs and anything that involves a Space Wolf or World Eater type of meat grinder would be a no-no. Infantry supported by Apothecaries, Librarians, transports, etc. would fit more. Otherwise fast moving ranged support like Land Speeders and Sicarans fit very well into the theme of precision strikes.

2. They always had some Egyptian stuff going on. You can even see that in their new Contemptor, which sports the same type of head. I';d say the modern headdresses are cool.

Some notes from the Heresy weekender:


Thousand Sons. First, they are not Space Marines +1. The FW staff absolutely does not want that, especially in the form of stacking special rule on top of special rule. They do have "a cunning plan" for the implementation of TS which they are currently playtesting; they're not sure if it'll pan out. The staff would not comment on their game mechanics, but they said that the fluff will carry as much as possible into the flavor of the rules.

They are described as survivors. Every battle they take part in involves a struggle for survival. War of attrition is not an option, because they simply don't have the numbers to entertain that kind of strategy.

The staff mentioned that the disciplines/temples of the TS would offer a large variety of options in both rules and wargear. Also that aligning your TS with a temple would provide benefits, but also penalties. To paraphrase: every temple has certain habits/idiosyncrasies/prides/etc. that create flaws.

They use cybernetica automata to bolster their ranks. These would be the Cataphractii we know from A Thousand Sons, but from the overall session it sounded like they might have different types and a much more prevalent use. The TS see the robots as expendable troops, the opposite of their astartes in that regard. These automata are controlled using psychic crystals rather than the usual cortex-controllers. This makes the Mechanicum very angry; they brand it tech-heresy.

Forge World Arkhadine is working very closely with the Thousand Sons, and the Thousand Sons are encouraging Arkhadine to use the psychic crystals and other such applications of psychic powers. So when the Wolves are sent to deal with Magnus, the Mechanicum at large uses this as an opportunity to stamp out Arkhadine which is why multiple Titan Legions are attacking.

I've been waiting for 1k sons for a long time. I think I'd be a little mad if I was stuck with reskinned 40k thousand sons.

"Instead of Rubric marines ... They're actual robots! And now they're in red!"

That aside, I might still spend large amounts of money on them because I don't think I can not collect thousand sons. I'm still looking forward to it, and I hope they do a good job. I'm equal parts worried and excited for what you have said Captyn.

Tell me about it. I've slowly built up a pretty large sons legion over the years, I'll be pretty aghast if I need to buy a bunch of robots to make it playable.
But I'm optimistic.

It would surprise me if they demanded that you always use a lot of robots. Thousand Sons using robots instead of the rarer marines is, I'm pretty sure, fluff that was first written back in the 1st edition but hasn't been a big deal in any way since then because robots fell out of favour with 2nd edition and there hasn't been much focus on how exactly a pre-Heresy legion list of any kind worked until the modern era.

I would think they've got regular tactical squads like any other legion. If nothing else so that the people who've painted them can actually use all of them. There's likely a rite of war for robot lists or just robots available as troops.