I’m going to try this thing where I write an article every Tuesday called Tech-Priest Tuesdays where I highlight and discuss all things Ad Mech.

The idea is that it will vary from highlighting cool lists that I’ve found online, admiring the work of fellow Tech-Priests, painting, lore, or kit bashing, to general discussion of Ad Mech releases and strategy.

Lets see if I can keep it up for more than a week before I swap to a different army again. The Ad Mech hyper fixation can only last so long.

This week is pretty easy, there are new Ad Mech units, lets look at them.

Thulia Ghuld

Going up for pre-order THIS WEEKEND the 04/04 is Thulia Ghuld and the Hastarii, a sort of heavy ranged weapon Skitarii (datasheets below).

Thulia Ghuld is an Arch Magos like Cawl, except she got a dump truck.

She comes with some interesting rules that won’t necessarily change the way Ad Mech is played, but will rather help facilitate the gameplay and give you additional levers to pull.

For example, she has the Fanatical devotion, which allows you to advance and shoot/charge with a Skitarii unit. In Haloscreed, this lets you puts the Noospheric Transference buffs on other units, or pick a different buff to advance and charge while doubling up. It’s a lot more flexibility which is always nice.

I think a great boon Thulia brings is the ability to give Ruststalkers, a very fast, premium melee unit advance and charge in EVERY Ad Mech detachment.

Although these buffs are only limited to Skitarii which is pretty lame, for real for real.

Thulia has an impressive ranged, and melee profile and a cool anti-vehicle ability in Secutor of Olympus. I estimate she will be below 170 points (minimum), and I’ll likely take her in my lists, pretty cool.

Hastarii Exterminators/Fusiliers

Next up are the new heavy weapon Skitarii, featuring two profiles:

• Anti-infantry main with anti-tank side gun
• Anti-tank main gun with anti-infantry side gun

Why the mix and match you ask? Fucked if. They do look pretty cool though.

The Exterminators are the mainly anti-infantry profile with a few anti-tank shots tagged on. There is a dissipated, and focused attack on the Eradication caster, which, fucking seriously, gives a single extra AP as the difference.

That is the lowest effort split weapon profile I have ever seen, and I know how to read.

At 15″ you can get -2 AP, at 30″ -1 AP, cool. 30″ range on some anti-infantry weapons is ok, they also have a 3+ save, 5+ invuln, and 2 wounds. Classic Ad Mech.

They get Sustained hits 1, on non-vehicle/monster units so with full re-rolls to hit you can expect to get your moneys worth of wounds. Coming out of a Dunerider with full re-rolls to wound could be spicy, infantry ranged anti-tank is something Ad Mech is missing – speaking of…

The Fulisers are the anti-tank heavy weapon infantry that Ad Mech have been waiting for (lol get fucked Kataphrons). Let me rephrase that, the anti-tank infantry that Skitarii have been waiting for.

As each day passes, it feels as though the cult-mechanicus side of the Adeptus Mechanics is slowly being pushed out of the range. In saying that, they did release the servitor battle clade recently, and Thulia is cult mechanicus, maybe I’m just an idiot.

The Fusiliers are each equipped with Neutron Fusils, 1-shot Lascannon equivalents that shoot 24″ and get ignores cover against Monsters and Vehicles, random.

Unlike Chaos Space Marine Havocs, each model in the unit, including the ALPHA have the big gun. No sustained or anything, but you could give them Lethals with a Manipulus or have them led by a Dominus to make them a bit tankier.

Conclusion

Overall, not an entirely list warping Ad Mech model drop, but something relevant and interesting enough that it will see play – sorry Skatros.

I will be pre-ordering mine this Saturday and am seriously considering 1x Thulia Ghuld, and 6x boxes of Hastarii. We’ll see how I’m feeling on Saturday at 12pm.

Thanks for reading and I hope we’re both back here next Tuesday to do this again xoxo