Landspeeder

 On last datasheet to look at, just in time for the release of 11th! The new Landspeeder is here, and it looks good. Very similar to the old one with a suitable scale upgrade with some additional weapons. Along with the Terminators, the new Landspeeder shows how's they should have done the SM refresh, well, apart from the Gravis models, cos they look good as they are. 

Anyway, the new Landspeeder looks good better than the other versions, the Storm speeders. 

It has the classical armament, with melta and "assault" cannon, with the option for a flamer. As with the original version, I cannot figure out why you would want a flamer. To me this unit is a fast moving fire base, designed to skirting around the battle edge, lending firepower where needed, not to be getting up close and personal with the enemy. 

The rules for the unit are good, with the move-shoot-move, even if the second move is not guaranteed. Popping the nose out of cover by and inch or two will prob work, as you can usually bank on getting at least a couple of inches of movement. I like this unit and he will be joining the Dark Guardians and the outriders. 

I guess that we will eventually see a number of versions of this, along the lines of the old versions, with missile pods and the like. There seems a lot of chat about this being the edition of bikes and cavalry, so I also expect we'll see some additional bike characters as well. The only thing I might pick up is the ATV, if it's still around. 

Alongside the model, we also had some rules for flyers or rather the FLY keyword. They seem to have taken a few hints from the old pivot rule, but actually made it make sense here! So flying units can declare that they will fly, subtract two from their movement and then be able to move anywhere in range, which is nice. 

This actually means that flying units will have a lot of versatility and actually be easy to use and understand. Sanguinary Guard have fly and a 12 inch move, so with this rule, they will effectively be able to move anywhere within ten inches regardless of any terrain or enemy models (taking care of engagement range though). No more worrying about movement up or down ruins or trying to figure out if it's better to go round or if the ruin is 2 inches or less. Just straight up and over, ten inches and done. 

I do like these new rules and this is one of a number of rules that I think are good. There's one or two that I still have to get my head around but we're still a week or so away from the actual release, so when I get my hands on the actual rule book, some of them may make more sense than they do right now. 

Knights

 Just a very quick one this time. 11th is just over a week away and I'm still playing catch-up with the previews!

I wanted to highlight this one detachment for the Knights, as it's the only one that I actually care about. Questor Forgepact is the one detachment that allowed you to bring admech and knights together. Having just finished building some more skitarii, to boost my force to 4 squads (more on that in a later post), I now have the ability to field the full 500 points for this detachment. 

The rules have changed a bit, but not as much as you might think. While the knight ability seems to have changed completely, hey have actually just swapped to be Admech ability, which actually makes more sense. The Knights aura has changed quite a bit, although it does have basically the same affect. The models gain the +1BS all the time and heavy when you don't move (very far). In theory, this means that the skitarii guns will hitting on 2+'s. There isn't a wound modifier but I don't think that a major issue with 11th, as it's the hit modifier that's modified by cover now. 

The enhancement has changed slightly as well, although it's really only the wording that's changed, what happens and why is still the same. 

The given stratagem has changed as well. No longer do we get lethal hits but re-rolls to wound, which is still useful but not as good a lethal hits. Most of the time the unit that destroys a Knight is going to be pretty tough, so most likely we're going to be wounding on 6's. Lethal hits would definitely have been the better option here but any help is always welcome. 

Overall, the detachment hasn't really changed, the only question is how many points this detachment will be worth. I don't see it being a 3 points t detachment, 2 is more likely to me. So will I have to choose another Knights detachment or will I be able to fill it with an Agents of the Imperium detachment? I don't know how these will work yet and I don't remember seeing a faction focus for them either but I might just have missed it. 

The triple T's - Temu Taurox Transports

 So, the other week I took a gamble and brought a couple of models off Temu. For just over 10 pound I picked up two vehicles as Taurox proxies. These models armed with a Gatling cannon and small coaxial guns, which seems to represent Hotshot Volley Guns. The original design I think came from NFayma, as the Minotaur APC (link). The original is better is a lot of ways, apart from one major point, it's a 3D print and I don't have a printer. I did fine some pre-printed versions, but they were only marginally cheaper than the GW Taurox. These were less than a quarter of the other versions and about a 5th of the GW original. 

Now, I do question the legitimacy of these prints, being as they are off Temu but I have no idea if they are properly licensed or not. Given they they were advertised under a whole host of other names, I guess probably not and I honestly don't know how I feel about that. 

Anyway, on to the models themselves. The prints are pretty decent, a few minor issues here and there but nothing of any note. The weapons fit in to the turrets nicely, one is a bit looser than the other but it holds fine, with some paint on it will hold properly I think. The size of the models is pretty good as well, they are, as far as I can tell, the right height and width but slightly longer than the Taurox, bug I don't have the GW model to test against. Hopefully someone will have one down the club at some point so I can check it properly. 

The plan is to paint these two up for the Scions, although the final colour scheme is yet to be finalised. It's either going to be black with red highlights, or maybe a similar red\brown to the Scions. I'm tempted to go for the black, with some spot colours but I'll need to have a think about it. 

Space marine Detachments

So a bit late, but here are the detachments for the marines, that were shown off a number of weeks ago. There is a lot that can be said about each one of these, and you can spend hours going in to details on each unit within each detachment and how they they work together. I'm not going to do that, at least not yet. I might do a deeper dive once 12th is out and the various detachments for Guard and Blood Angels are out but not right now. 

Fulguris Task Force is based around the various speeders, including the new land speeder. This basically means that speeders can deep strike. For a lot of people this is not going to be useful, unless your running a few of these units, which is possible given the relatively low cost of the units. (Points wise, money wise their actually quite expensive!). Overall I don't see this being used very often, unless the new speeders are cheap both points and money wise!

Librarius Conclave is the classic psychic detachment. This hasn't changed from the current version, as far as I can tell anyway. This detachment now actually makes sense, as before it could only be applied to a handful of unit, nine if you maxed out the psyker options (not including epic heros, but then it only really went to 10 units), however, this requires you to take three terminator and three phobos, which limits unit options. Now you can take your three Libby's and not really loose access to an actual army rule that will benefit the majority of your units. I can see this being the third detachment choice for a few people, probably me included. 

Subversion Assets applies to phobos and scout squads, giving them the ability to increase the detection range of enemy units by 3 inches, pushing it from 15 to 18 inches. This is similar to the Guard detachment that grants the same bonus to scout sentinels. I think this works better for scouts and phobos units rather than sentinels, as they are a smaller unit and have greater ground coverage, plus the some units have infiltrate, meaning you can take advantage of this detachment from the start. As yet, I don't know how important the hidden rule will be, so I don't really know how important this ability will be but I suspect this will get a fair bit of use. 

The Blood Angels: Wrath of the Doomed detachment seems good on paper but really doesn't do it for me. Your basically loosing one marine, possibly even two, for advance and charge. If your running 5 man units, it's pointless. If your running 10 man units your loosing up to 20% of your force before you even swing a blade. No, it's just not worth it for me. If it was battle shock, even with the new battle shock rules, it would be better but as it is, I just don't think it's worth the sacrifice. 

The Black Templars: Living Miracle is a very narrow detachment, because as far as I know, you can only include one Emperors Champion in your army. The only real use I can see here is the enhancements. If they are good enhancements, you could have several extra in your army, buffing more units and characters than usual but until we see the enhancements, I think this detachment is probably one of the worst on this list.  

The Dark Angels: Dark Age Arsenal on the other hand looks like a main stay of any Dark Angels army. Having +1 strength to all plasma weapons is always useful and really helps out on a number of fronts. The base strength going from 7 to 8 is the main bonus, as it wounds T4 on 2's now. There is less effect on supercharged, as it only goes from 8 to 9, going up to 10 would have been better. I think as a base detachment though, it's a good one. 

 Lastly, the Space Wolves: Champions of Fenris detachment. This is based around characters, which is useful, as you generally have a few characters in space wolves armies. Heroic intervention is not a bad stratagem, especially if you have a combat orientated army. If your going for a shooty army, this is pretty useless. Depending upon the army, this will be either good or bad, for most proper space wolf army players I suspect it will be pretty good. 

Overall the detachments seem pretty good, there are obviously some that are better than others, but I think it's a great start and look forward to seeing the rest of the Detachments.