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.