10th edition armies

 So, I’ve had as very quick look through some of my armies, namely, all three guard armies, the Eagle Knights Marines and Deathwatch strike force armies  and the AdMech and other marine incursion armies and so far its a pretty mixed picture. Ill list some of the key points here quickly but i will be going in to detail on all the armies soon, firstly though I’m going to run through all guard data cards over the next couple of weeks. 

I’ll start with the guard and there have been a number of changes overall. The Hjaltland LI has lost it scout sentinels, as these are now needed with the Wyverns in the Hrossey MechInf, due to the synergy. Apart from that they are still pretty similar. The Hrossey has lost some units due to price increases and the addition of scout sentinels but on the whole look fairly similar. The Dagr Ormr Militarum tempestus list gave me a bit of a scare, as i have six squads of scions and was thinking i could only use 3 of them, having spent time, effort and money redoing them for the last codex. However, i seem to have missed the but about having a Militarum tempestus command squad as a warlord makes Scions battle line, and thus i can take 6 of them! There are a few changes outside that, as points have gone up and units have changed but they should still work the same way.

The Eagle Knights have not had much of a change, as the army is all primaris and they have not seen very many changes, mostly points wise but not units rules wise. 

The Deathwatch are a different matter, these have had to have some big changes. With the way points work, the 6 and 7 man units are now going to be reduced to 5 man units, with the extras being put together to form an additional unit of veterans. The Vanguard vets have also had a rejig and the addition vet has been removed and has become an additional Captain. Why Captain? Well you apparently can’t take a Lieutenant with a jump pack anymore. So my Lt with jump pack has also been promoted to Captain. So the army now has 3 Captains with only 2 units that they can join! I will have another look but I can’t see jump Lt’s, which is a real hit for them. I could run the vets and vanguard vets as 6 and 7 man units but its a lot of points for just a couple of extra bodies. Lastly, i was running two apothecaries, but now i can only run one as part of a command squad, which i, luckily, had the right members for. So I’m an apothecary down, which is annoying. Why they got rid of command squads to bring them back again is annoying!

Now we get in to the other armies, the smaller ones. I’ll start with the other marine armies, all of which stay the same, the points have changed here and there, but really haven’t changed that much. I haven’t had a full look at them as i have been dealing with my main armies. 

The AdMech, while not a main army, is one i really like, however, the army is now pretty much useless. With the changes to the codex, mostly in respect to the Skitarii units, has cause quite a few issues for me. Previously i had several MSU units, 4 ranger and 2 vangaurd units, but now that i have to field 10 man units, i can only field two ranger and 1 vanguard unit, leaving me with several models spare, mainly a special weapon and a Sgt model. I have thought about adding in more models to make a full unit but i think if i do add in models it will be a separate close combat unit. I also have issues with the knight allies. I currently have two armigers and a knight to build, however, I can’t ally them all in, as it’s an either/or situation. 

I’ll go in to each army in detail later but first up i am going to look at the various new guard data cards.  

 

10th edition guard

 So we have finally seen the data cards for the Astra militarum. I will go through all the units in detail the same way as i have in the past, going through the changes, good points and bad points and also how i think they will fit in to my Astra militarum armies. Here i will just go over the very basics and give my initial thoughts on the new army.

First up, they look very good, not game braking but very competitive. There are some good changes across the board, there are also some questionable changes and i also think there are a few negatives. I maybe being a bit harsh in some respects but having only just received a new codex ( The special edition one went on sale in November 2022 but the general release wasn’t until Jan 2023), where we received a number of well needed updates and buffs, only to loose them less than 6 months later.

As i said, in general, there are a lot of good things here, starting with the new bigger infantry squads. 20 man infantry squads are really good for battle shock tests and also for maximising orders and stratagems. I think orders are going to be in short supply this edition, so being able to use them on larger squads will be mitigated this slightly. The ability to attach two characters to infantry squads is also going to be useful in attaching a command squad and also a commissar, in order to really help with battle shock. 

Another good change to Cadians is the sticky objective ability, being able to hold objectives and move off to do other things is really good and i lost at least one game against marines who could do this. 

However, while there are a number of good points, there are also a number of bad points. The first is the change to flyers. Having to between hover and flying is not good, being able to chop and change was a key point of flyers, there is now very little advantage to taking flyers over other transports or tanks. 

Talking of tanks, the wyverns have been nerfed quite a bit in my eyes. The changes to the number of shots (2d6 down from 4d6) and the addition rules drop the effectiveness off the vehicle and even the drop in points still don’t make it as good as multiple mortar squads. It was always hard to justify taking wyverns over mortar squads and now it’s even more so.

Lastly the changes to tank commanders BS is also another negative to me. Even with the addition of heavy, dropping the BS hits them hard. I like them and people will still take them but its still a feels bad thing.

There are a couple of strange moves as well. Combining all the regimental advisers in to one units is a bit strange, as you have to take all 3 even if you don’t actually need or want them. I don’t need a Master of Ordnance in an army with no artillery or an Officers of the Fleet in an army with no flyers. 

Servitors are another strange one, the changes in the last codex were strange, as they basically don’t do anything. Previously they added bonuses to repairing vehicles, which made sense, not they just bimble around taking up points.

Lastly and a big one for me, is the way infantry squads heavy weapons and special weapons interact. Cadians can take two special weapons, Catachan can take two flamers and DKoK get medics and specials and infantry can take special weapons and heavy weapons, or not as is the actual case. Now the rules state that you can take one special weapon for every 10 models, but if you take a heavy weapons, the squad now contains only 9 models, so no special weapon allowed. So either one special weapon and be a crap cadian squad or one heavy weapon and loose a lot of versatility. I’m sure its not supposed to be that way and standard infantry squads are supposed to be able to take both a heavy weapon and a special weapon in a standard size squad but as it stands you can’t.

Birthday haul

 So, I recently had my 40th birthday. I am starting to feel old these days. My lovely wife took me away for a child free weekend while the mother in law watched the kids, so i was not expecting anything apart from a few little bits and pieces from the kids. However, i got a few nice gifts from the family. Apart from the Panini press/maker/toaster, which I love (I told you I’m getting old), I also got a few bits of of 40k.

First up i got some horsies. I have always wanted some Rough Riders, ever since they first came out many many moons ago. I will be looking at some kit bashing for these guys though, as i want to change the heads out for different heads, which heads yet I don’t know, but i suspect that they will be from Wargames Atlantic. 

Secondly i got a new floaty tank for the marines. The Repulsor Executioner will slot in to my Eagle Knights army adding some heavy anti-tank firepower. I had been flipping back and forth between the Executioner and the standard Repulsor, mostly because of the transport capacity. However with the changes to auras and attached characters, I think that the Executioner will be the better bet now. The plan will be to stick the blade guard in there with a character, possibly the Chaplin or captain, and charge it forward, I’ll just have to get some impulsors for my assault marines (unless they during out jump packs for them!!!)

Lastly i got this beauty! A big stompy boy to go with my AdMech forces. Now with the new rules I don’t know if I’ll be able to run this knight with the armigers and the AdMech forces. I really hope that I can but I suspect that I wont be able to. I plan to try and magnetise this as much as I can, so that I can build all the various versions, a friend has recently done this, so I’ll be asking them for some advise.

A couple of day after my birthday these showed up in the post. 

Limited edition stamp ingot

Games Workshop stamp collection

These were courtesy of my parents, who decided it was a nice coincidence that both Warhammer and I are celebrating the same birth year! These will be going away in the safe box upstairs for future, as you never know, they might be worth something one day.

I also decided to treat myself as well and brought myself a box of these:

These will be build as Kasrkin and the extra bodies formed in to part of a command squad. I don't really need them but I've wanted a box since they first came out and decided now was as good an excuse as any.

So not a huge haul of models and stuff but still plenty of big shiny new models to keep me going!

Thoughts for guard in 10th

 

So we have seen a fair bit of information so far on 10th and so far it’s looking good. However, i want to put some thoughts and ideas, both good and bad, on guard in 10th. There is not a huge amount of information specific to the guard apart from the faction focus article. 

Overall, i am looking forward to the new guard, however, there are a few issue that I foresee. I say issues, they might not be issues as we don’t actually have nearly enough rules to decide what’s and issue and what’s not.

The first thing that jumped out at me when i read the faction focus article and that was the new orders. While the orders look good and all are useful, it was the fact that there seem to only be 6 orders in total, for both armoured and infantry units. Now, the six orders can easily be used by both types of unit and will give a good bonus to the unit, however after having just been given 18 orders, it feel like a step backwards. On its own I don’t necessarily see this as a negative thing but when combined with a couple of other factors, it does seem more so. The first factor is the orders range, which is back down to just 6 inches and also doesn’t appear to bounce between squads. This means that you’ll have far less orders to issue, even with officers going back up to two orders per character. At one order per officer, it’s going to feel quite lack lustre. This is even more so for armoured units. Having to keep your tanks or other vehicles so close together reduces their mobility and ability to dominate the battlefield with their firepower. 

The second issue to this is the changes to Vox casters. The new rules for these have nothing to do with order and are instead about gaining command points. While it is nice to gain additional command points, there are a lot of conditions to gaining them. Not only do you need to use a stratagem on the unit, you need an officer in range and you need to roll a 5+, so all in all, it’s unlikely that you will get many command points over the course of a game. Why the Vox caster does not enhance the orders range i don’t know, even if it doubled the range, i would have taken that over the CP generation. 

When you combine all these things, the reduced orders, short range, no bouncing and Vox caster no longer having an effect, orders, while still useful, don’t seem nearly as powerful or useful as they were. As i said above, we still don’t know how many orders officers will get or if vehicles will get additional range, as it stands i do think this is a minor nerf to the guard. 

There is a minor offset to the no bouncing of orders, that the new squads can be taken in squads of 20. This means that you’ll get more bang for your buck with each order, however it’s still not quite as good as being able to bounce an order to multiple units. The 20 man squads are good for many reasons, not only is there a greater output of fire from the squad but it will also have an effect on battle shock. With twice the number of men, you’ll need to loose twice as many men in order to need to worry about battle shock. The other good thing about the 20 man squads come from the fact that battle line units are restricted to 6 units of any one type. If you wanted to run more than 60 men in the only 10 man squads you would have to look else where, now with 20 man squads you can take up to 120 men, which for some might still be restrictive, but for me it should work out nicely. 

The reduction in AP is something that might go either way.Firstly it helps us with our poor saves, meaning that we will get our full same more often than not, keeping the guardsmen alive for longer, however, it also means that were not going to be dishing out as many wounds to our enemies. This seems especially true for some of our bigger guns, such as the Leman Russ and artillery, like wyverns. While i do think that this a good move in general, it feels bad as some of our weapons have only just got the boost that they needed in our last codex. Also the reduction in the number of weapon profiles is a bit of a negative, weapon like the death strike have taken a bit of a nerf when they have only just felt like they were where they should always have been. 

The changes to leadership will also be interesting. The way morale works and the new battle shock rules will mean that guard will most likely suffer most battles and might find it hard to run proper infantry lists. Characters like commissars will be very important and what their special rules do will also be critical to keeping infantry squads working. Hopefully they will enable us to ignore battle shock tests, probably through the loss of one or more guardsmen or they will have a very low leadership value making passing the tests easier.   

In relation to commissars is the fact that many guard squads can have two separate leader units attached, rather than one like many armies. Having two attached will be interesting, especially as command squads seem to only count as one choice. That means that in theory you could have a squad size of 26, with 20 guardsmen, a command squad and a solo character. In addition to this what’s going to happen to the command squad advisors? At the moment they are just added to the command squad, will this happen in 10th? Or will they be separate characters that you attach to units? 

There are currently a lot of unknowns with the new edition and there have been a number of additional previews and leaks since I started writing this article, so some of this will have probably changed. However i will be writing a full review on the new guard when we get all the rules and i will also go through each of my army lists and look at the changes that will need to be made (again!) and also look at how i think they will work in 10th.

A couple of previews reviewed

 A short while ago i put up a post about a crazy army idea that i had (here) which included a number of imperial agent units all mushed together in to a single army list. However, given that we have just seen a two preview articles that i have read with great interest, this army idea may not be the most sensible idea. 

The Imperial Agents article was not entirely new to us, as we have seen a couple of bits before. The main on is the chart with all the details about how many imperial agents units you can take in certain games sizes. Now i was hoping that this list was going to be an additional rule, much like the imperial agents rules currently and that we were going to have additional rules for running an Imperial Agents or Inquisitorial army list. However, what we have seen is that is not going to be the case, it does seem like we can run a full Agents army but there is no benefit or point to it, as you won't gain any benefit.

The rules are designed to add units to other armies, which I will be.looking to do instead, as I already have inquisitors attached to most army lists, this will just make it easier, plus I can have other units attached as well.

The navy Breachers look good and I'm very much looking forward to when the imperial agents boarding patrol comes out, as I will be snatching up one of these boxes to add to one of my armies.

The inquisitor data card looks good but I would like to see the back and what weapon options are available, as most of my inquisitors will not fit in to the weapons listed on the front! Also, do all Inquisitors have to be psykers? I hope not, as I don't want all of mine to be psychic.

The Vindicare looks good, not as many options for shooting but still, I think he will be deadly, although like much of this edition, he won't be quite as deadly as before. Get a couple of 6's and he'll take out pretty much any character in the game.

Next up I want to have a quick look at the rules for the various space marine chapters. While Blood Angels are my main faction, I do still.also have smaller factions of dark angels and space wolves plus my Deathwatch force. 

The deathwatch tactics enable you to tailor for shots depending upon the situation, unfortunately you only have 3 tactics to use over 5 battle rounds. It would have been nice to have the option to use them multiple times or have at least 4 options. Overall though the tactics do give you some good options. 

The data card that we got given for the deathwatch shows some nice options, although i am disappointed with the changes to the combi-weapon rules. All the combi weapon now seem to have the same profile, with the anti-infantry keyword. Apart from this, they have a worse profile than a bolt gun. Why they didn’t split the combi-weapons in to at leat two different options, anti-infantry and anti-armour, I don’t know, but it takes away a lot of the anti-vehicle firepower in my deathwatch list, alongside the changes to frag cannons. 

The Dark Angels rules look quite good and really play to their narrative. While they don’t offer a lot of utility they will mean that you will always be able to rack up points for objectives as you’ll always have the option to hold them. With the changes to terminators, it looks like the dark angels will be quite a force to be reckoned with. Open thing i do wonder about though is with the changes to keywords and the apparent absence of “Primaris” on data cards, can you just mix and match new and old terminators together? 

The space wolves are probably one of the strongest options for space marines, albeit with a slight caveat. If you can get all 4 of the sagas off you will have a very strong force, but it’s going to be quite as bit of effort to get them all. An army with sustained hits and lethal hits in combat, plus a 6+ FNP and extra OC will be a very hard army to shift, especially at close range, where the wolves love to be. I don’t think that you’ll be able to get all of these off in one battle unless you are lucky but a couple should be achievable.

Lastly and most importantly we have the blood angels. This rule is in a similar vein to the last couple of iterations but applied to strength and attacks rather than wounds. The only downside is that you have to have charged in order to get this benefit, so you have to take the fight to the enemy, rather than sit back and let them come to you. Given that my army is based around going towards the enemy, this wont be much of a problem. 

This was just a quick overview of some of the new rules and i plan on going in to details on each one and how it will affect my various marine armies when we get the full release. As it stands i don’t think that there will be much change for my marine armies moving in to 10th and i still think that the biggest shake up will be around the point rather than rules. 

 

League / Tournament list review

 This could be quite a long post as I’m going to go through all the units in the army and talk about how they faired in the tournament and what i learnt about them. I’m not going to go through every single unit individually as going over the same thing for 4 infantry squads would be a little pointless, as i would be writing the same thing over and over again. 

Firstly i want to put a little note about the main rules. These were a little confi=using and i think i got several of them wrong on several occasions. The min thing was that were were only using the Arcs of Omen detachment and not the rest of the rules. This mean that i should have been paying CP to reserve my flyer and not reserving it for nothing as per the AoO rules. Secondly, AoO only give 6CP for detachment building but we were using the full 12 and getting the 1CP at the start of every turn, meaning a total of 22CP available rather than the 16CP from the pure AoO rules. It was all a bit confusing and I’m still not sure i got it right.

As for the actual units, well, there were some winners and some losers and there are a number of changes that i would make to the list if i was to run it again.

Within the HQ section there are a couple of changes to be made. The primary Platoon Command Squad would drop the relic the Finial of the Nemrodesh 1st as this did very little during the whole 5 games. I think i would take the Barbicans Key, but probably on the Militarum Command Squad. I would also change the war gear options for the bullgryn. I would replace the ripper gun with the Maul, as he spent most of his time in combat than shooting and would have done significantly more damage had he had it. The extra points would be recovered from the Priests war gear.

The second Platoon Command Squad And Primaris Psyker would be left as they are. Both these units did what was required of them. The command squad was expendable yet packed quite a short range punch. I had wondered about replacing one of the weapons with a plasma gun it I think it would not have worked as well overall. The psyker worked very well and the two defensive powers did what I wanted and there was only two occasions I can think of where other powers would have been useful but smite did the job anyway. 

The Troops section will not see many changes. The three Cadian Shock Troops would remain as they were, one change that could be made is switching the flamers for plasma guns but I’m not convinced it would gave made much difference. The Infantry Squad’s all worked as i hoped and so would not receive any changes. Both the Cadian squads and infantry squads worked, with the mortar squads doing a very good job holding my home objectives in all the games bar the Knights game, but that was a disaster from the start, so we'll ignore it! The final troop option was the Death Korps of Krieg. Now while i had some success with these, i really don’t think they were worth the extra 20 points over their counter parts. I would replace these with another Cadian squad armed the same as the other 3. The extra 20 points would go towards upgrades on other units.

There are a couple of changes to be made in the Elites section. The Commissar’s would remain the same, I would have liked to out power fists on them but that is unfortunately no longer an option. The Regimental Enginseer would also remain as he did a sterling job keeping the Hellhammer alive in several games. The Regimental Preacher's on the other hand will see some minor changes with both being armed the same with autogun and pistol with chainsword. The maul was useful a couple of times but dropping it pays for the maul on the bullgryn, which would have been far more useful, as the preachers are there mostly to buff the other units. I think all these units earned their place in this list without a doubt, i could probably drop a preacher but i think having two worked very well. 

The Valkyrie would also remain the same but will definitely start every game off the table, as it did much better that way. The Lord of War would see a minor change to it. While the Hellhammer did well in most games and certainly earned back its points most of the time, i think having Knight of Piety on it was a waste of points. I didn’t need the 5++ as i could get that from the Techpriest and i took very little damage from mortal wounds, in fact I’m not sure i actually took any in these games. For 35 points it was expensive for the return i got. I would most likely replace this with either Master of Camouflage or, more likely, Veteran Commander with the Heirloom Weapons doctrine for the 16” flamers, although Industrial Efficiency would also work quite well.  

The Militarum Tempestus Detachment would remain mostly unchanged, with just the Militarum Tempestus Command Squad gaining the Barbican's Key relic. The Tempestus Scions would remain the same, although I would try and remember that I'd armed the tempestors with plasma pistols and not HS laspistols!

Overall with these changes I would have 25 points to spend and I'm not sure quite where I'd spend them. One possibility would be to split the second Scion squad in to two squads of 6 men with a melta and grenade in each and drop them in the Valkyrie but I liked the twin melta unit as it gives some redundancy. Another option would be to swap the DKoK squad for another Scion squad and not a Cadian squad. Tool this one up with flamers and grenade launchers and put this in the Valkyrie, although I would only have enough points for an 8 man unit with just two special weapons. Dropping the door heavy bolters on the Valkyrie would make up the points and I forgot I had these most of the time anyway! This would enable me to drop in the squad using the grav-cute insertion rule to get up close and personal with their weapons. 

Overall I think the base list worked very well but with a few little tweaks here and there I think it could do better. I really did miss the bullgryn maul in melee, that extra strength and damage would have gone a long way and this was probably my biggest mistake in the list. I do wonder what this list will look like in 10th? We will hopefully be running a similar league / tournament in 10th, which i am looking forward to. Over all my biggest take away from this whole thing is that I remembered just how much I enjoy playing games.