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Recently I've begun a new army, joining the righteous forces of Chaos against the evil soup of the Imperium! Been having trouble thinking of a theme for the army though, and I'm someone who needs a theme to work towards as I hate to end up with loads of models of different styles and colours, y'know?

Originally I thought I would do a Dark Mechanicus force, and maybe steel some models from AdMech as conversions, but I realised that the one thing AdMech lacks (for me, anyway) is character. Not <Character>, though they lack those as well, but just... I dunno, units and leaders that are essentially faceless robots are hard to name, build stories behind, root for on the tabletop. They're no Sly Marbo or Mephiston (or whoever your favourite character is).

So I looked for alternatives, while still trying to keep the options of big hulking fiends and daemon engines and hellforged dreads open to me as I really do like those models. And so I started to consider the route of Technomancy, mixing the idea of sorcerers, necromancer, etc, and daemonic engines built from bone and metal.

So a nice paint scheme of Bone armour plating, metallics, and without the usual (somewhat overwhelming, in my mind) decay and rot that comes up a lot with Chaos (particularly nurgle, and the new death guard). Throw in some skeletons and I'm good to go!

The list I'm imagining is something along the lines of :

Daemon Prince
Sorcerers (and Lords, but Sorcerers would seem to fit more)
1x Obliterators
1 or 2 units of 5x Warp Talons
Maulerfiend
2x Giant Chaos Spawn

Maybe a Chaos Decimator
Maybe a Hellforged Contemptor and/or Leviathan

I realised by this point that most of these units are daemons, except for the contemptor/leviathan... and so it might also be good to add in some Chaos Daemon units too. Opens up a whole extra psychic spell tree (or three!). I'd also need some troops of course, but both cultist and daemon troops can be easily painted to fit the theme.

And so, some questions:

1) Would an army built around these units actually be feasible? I know obliterators are strong right now, but I assume they'd need backing up by other units. What am I missing that would fill the gaps?

2) Which chaos god would be the better fit? Nurgle has the option to heal wounds to nurgle daemon units, which would seem to work on the maulerfiend and the giant spawn, which seems pretty handy. Don't know how well the rest of the nurgle discipline stacks up against the others though. I'd expect nurgle to have the weakest psykers. Actually I realise the nurgle psykers have no mounts at all, so the fastest is only 6". Would need to be summoned, which isn't ideal. Tzeentch powers seem good, but high cast cost so unreliable? And slaneesh... not sure. Symphony seems like it might be interesting to stack with alpha legion and changeling (even though that's tzeentch, it seems like all 3 would stack?).

Maybe this is a bad idea to mix these things, but it would be fun to model a mix of bones and technology. Colour scheme should look pretty good too (hopefully).


Appreciate any thoughts

I say go for it.

First of all, all of the units you mention are, for the most part, pretty solid. So i don't think you can really go wrong with them. You might not use them all every game once your collection grows, but that goes for any army collection, really.

Secondly, the awesome thing about custom / count as armies, is that not only are they an absolute blast to model and see on the table top, you can change around things like what legion you are playing, and even things like weapon options if you are consistant and it's clear to your opponent what is what. And anytime you want to run a new unit or a new legion, it's just a new excuse to make some really cool new models.

Another thing i would recommend for a new project is magnets. Being able to change options around, still be wysiwyg, and not have 3 of each model is totally worth the cost of the magnets and time to drill the models. Just go slow and you'll get the hang of it. Then you can do stuff like have 20 marines that you can swap between noise marines, normal chaos marines, jump pack guys, etc, and any time you get a new box of anything, you get more and more options. This works even better in the custom armies like dark Mech or tech chaos etc, where count as is acceptable vs wysiwyg as long as all of weapon x counts as weapon y.

And at the end of the day is all about having fun making a cool army. Plus, the beauty of 8th edition is that most units are pretty playable in some fashion at at least a fair level of competition, like the kind you find with pick up games at local stores.

jcd386 wrote:
I say go for it.

First of all, all of the units you mention are, for the most part, pretty solid. So i don't think you can really go wrong with them. You might not use them all every game once your collection grows, but that goes for any army collection, really.

Secondly, the awesome thing about custom / count as armies, is that not only are they an absolute blast to model and see on the table top, you can change around things like what legion you are playing, and even things like weapon options if you are consistant and it's clear to your opponent what is what. And anytime you want to run a new unit or a new legion, it's just a new excuse to make some really cool new models.

Another thing i would recommend for a new project is magnets. Being able to change options around, still be wysiwyg, and not have 3 of each model is totally worth the cost of the magnets and time to drill the models. Just go slow and you'll get the hang of it. Then you can do stuff like have 20 marines that you can swap between noise marines, normal chaos marines, jump pack guys, etc, and any time you get a new box of anything, you get more and more options. This works even better in the custom armies like dark Mech or tech chaos etc, where count as is acceptable vs wysiwyg as long as all of weapon x counts as weapon y.

And at the end of the day is all about having fun making a cool army. Plus, the beauty of 8th edition is that most units are pretty playable in some fashion at at least a fair level of competition, like the kind you find with pick up games at local stores.

On the plus side, I already have a bunch of magnets from when I was magnetising my killa kanz and deff dread, though hopefully I'm now capable of being a bit neater about it all!

Though the only model I'm working on at the moment is a maulerfiend, so that's easy enough as it basically only has one loadout. Though converting the head is already being a pain... cutting plastic indoors is a pain. The only solution I can see is using my dremel, much easier but I'd have to do it outside on a nice day (and it's winter in England so none of those for 6 months lol)

Thanks for the encouragement though hopefully I make some progress