TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 18: Building an Invictor Warsuit

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing log of personal, hobby, and competitive progress for Warhammer 40,000. Last time around I was playing in a charity RTT and testing Thousand Sons against my friend T’s Adepta Sororitas. This time it’ll be a bit faster update, as I’m largely going to be talking about hobby progress in lieu of having had time to play any games – most of my time this week has gone to prep for the GHO.

Updating my Thousand Sons for Pariah Nexus

Last time around I threw around a few ideas for my updated Thousand Sons list. I’m still big on using a brick of ten Scarab Occult Terminators, so I’m mostly playing around the edges. I’m pretty loathe to drop the Rhino, as I think it gives me some much-needed mobility and another unit to do actions when I need the Rubrics to shoot. On that note, actions are a big issue I need to address in the army generally – it became apparent pretty quick that one unit of Cultists wasn’t enough for those turns when I needed to do 2-3 actions. So I’m putting Ahriman on foot to gain 10 points, swapping out a Sorcerer for a third Infernal Master (5 points gain), and dropping the Cultists (55 points), which gives me a total of 70 points, and with the remaining 20 I pick up from the points drop on the Scarabs I can fit two units of Tzaangor Enlightened.

That will make my list:

My Thousand Sons List - Click to Expand

That gives me my painting orders for Tacoma. When I put these with the other models I haven’t painted, here’s what the slate looks like:

• 2x Infernal Master
• 6x Tzaangor Enlightened
• 3x Warpflamer Rubric with Icon of Flame

That’s a tall order for only about four weeks, but if I really can’t make it work I can sub one Warpflamer unit for bolters, or just use my bolter guys – no one can tell the difference between the bolters and warpflamers anyways, especially for the bolters with the bird skull heads on the ends. Still, I should have enough time to get it all painted and even get some conversion work in on at least one of the masters.

I’ll focus on getting some practice games in with this list over the next few weeks as I prep for Tacoma, so stay tuned for those.

Building an Invictor Warsuit

My other big hobby progress this past week involved working with my son, Bryce, to build his first vehicle. We’re slowly working our way through the Games Workshop “Build. Paint. Play.” guide and while he’s painted a character and five Assault Intercessors, the book next calls for his first vehicle. He picked out an Invictor Warsuit a couple weeks ago so that’s what we’ve been working with. It’s a bit of a hateful kit to assemble, but tag-teaming it we make decent work of it. We hit up the Warhammer store on Saturday to get some progress done.

Clipping parts

gluing

Bryce is solid with clippers but isn’t old enough or experienced enough yet to use a hobby knife for trimming/cleaning parts he’s clipped. We’ll likely approach that in another year – he just doesn’t hold the knife right or sure enough to be doing that part yet, so the process is mostly him identifying from the instructions which parts to clip, cutting those out, then I clean them and glue them together. We get most of the warsuit done on Saturday, then come back the following Tuesday afternoon.

This time around I have him do the glue work, and that goes pretty well. He picks the gun hand for his warsuit and we’re able to finish the model, getting the legs done and the whole thing put on the base.

Not pictured: Me, desperately telling him to “just be normal” as I take a photo of the completed model. Those pleas fell on deaf ears.

We finish assembly and get stamps in Bryce’s workbook and there’s apparently a prize for doing this: Max, the store employee, hands Bryce a custom Games Workshop bitz box. It’s a pretty solid little piece. It’s obviously not amazing as a free bit of swag, but it holds the bitz Bryce has left over and it has removable tray walls to change container sizes. Bryce immediately fills it.

All in all, I’m happy with how all of this is going. Bryce really likes doing assembly and painting, and I enjoy doing it with him – it’s a great way for us to share this thing. That said, he’s not really into the game, but that may change in time. Or not, I guess – Warhammer isn’t the world’s best game or anything.

Next Time: The March to Tacoma Begins

That does it for this update. Check back next week when I talk about Thousand Sons, final prep for the 2024 Goonhammer Open, and star the long march toward Tacoma.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.