If painting 400 models for one army not sounding ridiculous enough the price tag will…

But… don’t hold yourself back. Go for it 😀

Kha’banda is the Bloodthirster who constantly torments the Blood Angels and has been doing so since the Horus Heresy. By getting between the Swarm and its prey, he has probably just made himself a very powerful enemy indeed. The Tyranids can’t eat him directly, but by putting himself between them and their feeding grounds he has made himself a target, and the Hive Mind has an awful lot of psychic power to draw upon to deal with nuisances like Daemon Princes.

In the earlier fluff, one of the things that hacks the Chaos powers off most about the Tyranids is not only that the bugs aren’t afraid of, or in the least bit impressed by, the Chaas Gods, but also that they offer the Ruinous Powers nothing to work with. Khorne feeds on rage, hatred and bloodlust – all emotions the Tyranids don’t understand and aren’t capable of. Tzeentch is empowered by manipulation, lies and deceit, and yet the Hive Mind holds the Tyranids to an absolute unity of purpose that leaves Tzeentch nowhere to go. Nurgle embodies disease, entropy and decay, but the Swarm endlessly renews itself. It is not infected, but rather takes disease and moulds it to its own purposes, and its most powerful, conscious beast are all effectively immortal through reincarnation by the Hive Mind. Finally, Slaanesh is concerned with moral corruption and degradation, pleasure and excesses of sensation, and yet the Tyranids are so totally alien that it isn’t even known if they can experience pleasure, and their senses are so far removed from the experience of anything else that Slaanesh has nothing to offer them .

In a universe full of mortal toys, the Tyranids not only don’t play ball – they are one of the few legitimate rivals to the Chaos powers. Worse, they are a threat. If the Tyranids consume all the mortals whose emotions give form and power to the Chaos gods, then it is game over for the big four.

In the fluff, the Necrontyr were a technologically advanced species that evolved on a world in a solar system with an energetic and unstable star. The constant exposure to radiation caused germ line genetic damage that left their entire species sickly and with foreshortened lifespans , and even their technology couldn’t help them fix that. They travelled interstellar distances in huge cryo-vessels called Tomb ships that employed an early, less advanced form of their inertialess drive systems, and ultimately encountered the techno-mystical Old Ones with their unblemished forms and de facto immortality.

The Old One’s either couldn’t or wouldn’t help the Necrontyr with their biological woes, which ultimately led to a war between the two species. Despite their technology, the Necrontyr were losing badly, in part due to the edge the Webway offered to the Old Ones and their armies, and it was at this time that the Necrontyr first discovered the existence of the C’tan – energy beings that feds directly on the photospheres of stars and possessed immense powers that allowed them to directly manipulate physical reality itself. The Necrontyr created the Necrodermis technology that allowed the C’Tan to take on physical form, and the C’tan struck a deal with the Triarch Council, the ruling body of the Necrontyr, lead by Szarekh the Silent King. The C’tan offered to help the Necrontyr both escape their biological doom and defeat the Old One’s at one stroke through biotransference, where they exchanged their biological bodies for technological ones (essentially an alien version of mind upload transhumanism with a hefty dose of Lovecraft-esque cosmic horror thrown in, though the Necrontyr didn’t know about that last part). In the words of Admiral Ackbar, it was a trap, and the process fed the electromagnetic energy of the Necrontyr people to the C’tan (people apparently being tastier than stars) and left them as slaves to their betrayers, with only the senior Necrons having any scrap of their own will and identities still left to them.

The C’tan went on to consume the energy of the Old Ones and their armies to a large degree, but in the process essentially ate too much and left themselves bloated and vulnerable, which was when Szarekh turned on them and used the most incredibly powerful weapons in the Necron arsenal to shatter the C’tan into Shards (the C’tan are all but impossible to actually kill, and actually managing to do so has really dire consequences for whoever dares to to strike the blow) and bind those Shards into Tesseract Vaults.

A legacy of the war with the Old Ones was the creation of so many psychic warriors by the Old Ones (amongst them the Eldar) that it led to the Enslaver invasion of real space from the Warp. The Necrons weathered the Enslaver assault, and the attempted revenge of the remaining warriors created by the Old Ones, by going into Stasis for a million odd years. Szarekh, the only surviving Triach, did not go into stasis, blaming himself for the terrible doom that had befallen his people because he had trusted the C’tan, and instead remained awake along with his elite legion of bodyguards and warrior servants, the Triach Praetorians. They ultimately travelled out of the Galaxy in self imposed exile, and it was out there in the darkness between unknown stars that Szarekh first encountered the Tyranid Swarm hundreds of thousands of years later, and came to understand the threat it represented. Szarekh still hoped that the Necrons might one day find a compatible organic species to use as a means of returning to a biological existence and thus stave off the creeping insanity that their existence as machines is bringing to all Necrons, but that would never happen if the Tyranids ate all the candidate species first, and even the Necron’s machine bodies themselves might wind up on the menu once more palatable alternative food sources for the Swarm were exhausted, so Szarekh returned to the Milky Way Galaxy and sent his Traich Praetorians to accelerate the reawakening of the Tomb Worlds to try to stave off the Tyranids before it was too late.

So far as I understand it, bodyguard units of the type Tyrant Guard are allow a D6 roll for each wound suffered by the character being protected, and for each roll of a 2+ one of those wounds is converted to a mortal wound taken by the Bodyguard unit instead. This is still very good though, since a Hive Tyrant is toughness 7 with a 3+ armour save and 4+ invulnerable save. With Catalyst it can block any wound suffered on a 5+ before testing for the Tyrant Guard, and then there are the Adaptive Biology warlord trait and Hivefleet Gorgon Hyper Adaptive Biology bio artifact to consider, that both trigger when the model is wounded and from the end of the first phase in which the carrying model is wounded add +1 to its toughness (so 8 for a Hive Tyrtant) and reduce by 1 to a minimum of one the damage it suffers from any attack respectively. Throw in a 6 strong unit of Tyrant Guard who can soak lots of wounds before going down, and you will have a very resilient source of 18″ synapse that also has considerable psychic ability and can ruin people’s day in close combat.

The swarm army plan is awesome and sounds like it would play as the Tyranids are portrayed in the audio books.

I’m going to build the army – 6 termagants a month until finished……. 🙂