The League

The Kin of the Gnostari Dominion have suffered great tribulations in their recent history, making them an unusual example of their kind. For millennia, the Dominion had been considered an archetypical League; mercantile, industrious, and dedicated to expanding their knowledge and holdings. All that changed in M38 (in Imperium dating), when an unknown contagion struck one of the Gnostari Kindreds, Tral's Shatter Star Kindred. This plague ravaged all of the biological Kin in the Shattered Star's Hold, seemingly infecting even the Crucible itself. The Shattered Star Kindred was then attacked by both a minor Ork WAAGH and an Explorator fleet of the Adeptus Mechanicus, destroying the Kindred's Hold and leaving the two armies fighting over the remains. Gnostari investigators were unable to pinpoint what exactly the contagion was, but they did determine that it was deliberately unleashed on the Kindred. The remnants of the Shatter Star's Ironkin thus swore an Oath to protect all organic Kin- this driving Oath has taken hold of the entire Dominion, as multiple Oathbands have been formed and sent out to aid other Leagues. These Oathbands are primarily Ironkin, the robotic Kin feeling a faint, cold fury at the thought of their biological brethren dying. 

The Oathbands
Gnostari Dominion Oathbands tend to favor fast, mobile detachments of mechanized troops. With so many of their personnel being Ironkin, the Gnostari are able to withstand adverse situations that even the hearty cloneskins of other Kin are unable to, such as void combat, underwater deployments, and even caustic atmospheres that corrode rebreather arrays. Rarely will the Oathbands contract out units of Cthonian Mining Guilds; for while the mining guild's units may be very effective, the fact that most of their members are biological makes them too risky for the Gnostari to use often. Because the majority of Gnostari forces are Ironkin, even their organic members tend to wear full-face helmets that mimic Ironkin standard combat wear, leading to many other races to incorrectly assume that the Gnostari are indeed either a fully-robotic race or an unknown force that employs masses of combat drones, rather than members of the Leagues of Votann. 

Most deployments start with advance units of Hernkyn, either Pioneer hover-bikes or Yaegir scout-teams, with a swift reaction force of transports and gunboats following to deploy Ironkin-heavy Hearthkin and Steeljack combat units. Once dispersed, the troops form crisscrossing fields of fire from entrenched lines while Land Fortresses and Thunderkyn rain fire from afar. Teleporting Hearthguard strike the deathblow, emerging from crackling energy to smash the enemy's final defenses to dust. To fight the Dominion is to fight a storm of silent armored forms bristling with firepower.