Cult of Personality - My Genestealers

Warhammer 40,000 – Finally I have all my genestealer cult assembled. With what I have I've built a solid 1000 point and two decent 1500 point lists. The next step is to get these bad boys painted up.

After hemming and hawing about a color scheme I decided to stick with the traditional purple and blue scheme. For the suits I'll keep the orange and white mining company look. I don't really like the look of guardsmen with different heads so I'm sticking with the mining suit look for my full force. 

For the few tanks I'm using I'm going to paint them like they're part of the mining operations security force, maybe there to help fight off native life forms. The yellow and black hazard markings are going to be prevalent throughout the force.

I'm really happy I was able to build almost the whole force from two Deathwatch Overkill sets. For the Acolytes with demo charge I snipped off the knife and added melta bombs to the arm as well as a bunch of grenades form my bitz box. 

I also converted a few of the grenade launcher neophytes to hold a flamer instead. I don't really like grenade launchers and think the flamer is more useful in this type of force. It was relatively easy to snip off the offending part and replace with one of the many flamers I have in my bitz box. While they don't fit in my current builds I might be summoning them later in the game.

I was able to get this force on the table a few times now and I'm noticing some trends. So far I've faced off against Space Marines, Death Watch, Grey Knights, and Imperial Agents. Granted I'm still learning the army and they play very different than anything I've played before so there is a learning curve, however I've been curb-stomped every game. That's not to say the games haven't been fun and there haven't been moments where the cult shines but in general my approach to playing them has been less than successful.

My current 1500 Cult Insurrection force has the following formations: First Curse, Neophyte Cavalcade, Armoured Claw, Shadow Sulkers, Cult Mutants and a Magus.

Every game I've tried using the Cult Ambush table during set up and have as of yet been able to roll that elusive "6" which means I've been deploying really close and not being able to assault thereby getting shot up pretty badly. On paper it seems brilliant, in action not so much. I think I really just need to deploy them normally instead of infiltrating and hope to go second to get off some early charges. 

I'm going to try to use the Return to Shadows and Cult Ambush as a means of redeploying and getting back lost models in the next few games I play. My gut is telling me this will work out significantly better for me.

The other issue I've been running into is the Chimeras, I've been outflanking them each game and they've been coming in late and on the wrong side of the table most of the time. Initially I thought of these two units as the calvary swooping in late game to grab objectives near the board edges or clean up for some random units but they've failed to do anything useful. I think the correct play with these is to put them on the table to start and maybe return to shadows with the troops if things go south.

I'm going to stick with my list as I have it now to see if I can make it work. I'm really thinking I might need to get several Goliath trucks to maximize the effectiveness of the army or bulk up on the hybrid squads. Given as I'm not totally sold on how it plays I don't think I want to dump a ton of money into more transports until I get a better handle of how the units work together.