This army wasn't as well planned as most of mine are, and its been a while since I started them and I still haven't even gotten close to seeing them on the table.

I wanted to build an army that felt very elite and very individual. For this I wanted to keep to the rule of three. No units larger than 3 models. This seems like an arbitrary rule designed to hamstring myself, and you'd be partially right. I'm quite good at doing that.

But any more than 3 models and it feels like a combat squad of marines. 3 feels like some individuals standing together against all odds. These need to feel like superheroes. I picture a hive worker having a poster of some heroic guardsmen on their wall, the guardsmen has a poster of a heroic marine on their wall, and finally the marine has a poster of an heroic custode on their wall. These are the best of the best, it doesn't get very best-er-er than the golden guys.

So threes it is. Units of three wardens/allarus/saggitarum, three terminators, three shield captains, three dreadnaughts.

I roughly have this force planned to work alongside an Inquisitor I've been planning for a loooong time. I still haven't worked out exactly how they will interact or what the starting point for the alliance will be. But for now, I'd like to explore Custodes in the new 9th ed Crusade format.

11/7/20: At the moment, they are all sitting on the desk, with a gold spray and first wash done, awaiting paint. I've got a whole heap of bases ready to go, but I've just been umming and ahhing about the best way to tackle the bases. The idea in my head was for the bases to be marble tiling. But I haven't been able to decide on a method to do the marbling. The tiles are quite small, so I don't want it to look like they all have the same orientation of veins, but I also want to make it easy enough to get a good marble effect.

Ideally, I wanted to test the baby wipe method of marbling. Whereby you spray it with a dark grey, then pull apart a baby wipe and use it as a stencil before spraying with white. The effect looks great and it looks super simple. However talking with my local GW manager, he explained his experiences with that method and how tough it is without the super fine mist of an airbrush. He tried with spray can and the droplets were just too thick. So without an airbrush, this halted me in my tracks for a bit.

15/11/20:

I had my first game with the Custodes the other night. It was just our second game of 9th, so we were still feeling that out, but it was 2000pts of Orks against my 1000pts of Custodes and another 1000pts of Grey Knights.

It was an interesting game and we came out of it well with the Orks conceding at turn 4.

I won't write a full battle report, but I was quite impressed with my shining beacons of the Emperor's Will. But this was probably due to the sheer number of 1's I didn't roll. Some of the highlights were

• The shield captain charging the bikes and almost killing all 6 of them, they ran away so he charged a trukk full of tank busters, they ran away so he charged again. In the end he got bored and ran back towards the objective.

• The Contemptor Achillus deep striking and charging the Gorkanaut and causing the last 15 wounds on it in a single turn.

• The bike captain charging a trukk full of Nobz and wrecking the trukk on the charge

• Allarus Terminators deepstriking behind 27 boyz and killing all but 2 after 2 combats (they then Green Tide-ed back behind me and I had to start again). I only lost 1 terminator.

• The Custodian Guard taking a lot of hits and kept going

• The Saggitarum took a full unit of TankBustas then were hit by a charging Deffdread that impact hit the remaining one to death.

I'm a tad concerned that they may have overachieved in this game and that I'm going to be rolling a lot more 1's in future games. But having said that the Orks didn't throw many high AP shots/attacks my way. The Grey Knights also held their own on the other flank (despite only having 1 wound each...)

Not sure I'd change much going forward, the Achillus was a little bit too brutal and felt like a 'Forgeworld' unit, D3+3 damage is super efficient!, but I wouldn't have had many solid answers to T8 otherwise. The Allarus could have done a bit of work, but aren't super mobile. I'm really cautious of this army. I know how irritating it is to play against something that just saves everything, so in the interest of fun for all I think I'll add in some scions - they die pretty easy.

Crusading

10/8/20: After looking through the 9th book, I've decided Custodes will be my main army going forward (at least until something even shinier arrives - edit: Something shinier arrived!). I think I've got my starting Crusade Order of Battle sorted, and wow, I really can't fit many Golden Guys into it.

Our group has decided to follow others' lead and swap out Power Level for Pts, using 1 Requsition = 100pts and a starting size of 1000pts.

This page will likely be a work in progress as I slowly progress through Crusade.

Below is my Order of Battle, the form was shared from a wonderful user on reddit, unfortunately I can't remember who it was. This will be kept up to date following battles, and hopefully I'll be able to keep some notes below following each game.

So the Order of Battle is set, the pieces are not moving (since most are still on sprues), we come to it at last. The great Crusade of our times.

It looks like, once we've played our first 9th game to learn the rules, we'll dive into Crusade while trying to continue our Cities of Death Campaign. This will be an interesting exercise in time management given we play games perhaps once every couple of months and try and spread that across several game systems...