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Monday, September 24, 2012

Horde Mentality Part 2


Yesterday I spoke about a new style of play that could become more popular with the soon to release Chaos Space Marine (CSM) codex. Supposedly Typhus will make Cultists coung as Plague Zombies and there is no mention of them not being able to score - Feel no Pain, Fearless, plus Slow and Purposeful. CSM will now have one of the best new horde armies if this is true. 35 cultists in a max size unit and they appear to be around 5 points per model! Can you say crazy good? I sure can. Today I want to go into more detail and point out some of the inherent strengths that come with an infantry heavy army and these are mainly due to the new 40k6 rules such as rapid fire.

Imperial Guard has transitioned quite well to the new edition mainly due to the rules for their orders. Blob IG was more of a novelty in 40k5 but now it is quickly becoming more prevalent and has remained competitive. Imperial Guard is one of the best choices for allies along with Space Wolves. There are many armies that are well adapted to infantry heavy lists besides guardsmen such as Dark Eldar and the non Venom generated mass poison weapons are coming into their own now.

Rapid Fire
This is a really big one - now a unit with rapid fire weapons can move and fire one shot at full range. Stormbolters en masse have been a strength for Grey Knights and now other armies can benefit as well. The new rapid fire rule makes plasma more than twice as good now and will return over melta again as the prevalent special weapon.

Leadership
Leadsrship tests are much more forgiving now. If a unit breaks its not the end of the world anymore (assuming of course they are not swept in combat). It requires more of a concentrated effort now fairly large units which means dedicating more fire power on a sole target. As the game winds down a handful or less of models could easily win a game.

The Death of Treads
Transports for the most part have taken a huge hit from the nerf bat which in its own way makes infantry just that much stronger. GW wanted to really make sure that transports go the way of the Dodo bird... You can't assault your next turn if the unit's vehicle is destroyed (unless of course it's an assault vehicle). You're paying points for something and you need to see a return.  I still like the rhino since its so cheap and you can flat out any vehicle now... Other than that and flyers I'm not too hip on any other much when it comes to transports.

There are plenty of other good reasons as well and we can discuss those but I'd like to digress for the moment and discuss what I believe is an excellent idiom for infantry based armies. There is a saying about Tyranids that if you see some little ones there is bound to be plenty and you can be sure there's some really big ones close by as well. The little ones aren't exactly what you'd call friendly and the big ones are just down right mean so you better be very careful in that neck of the woods. This is an excellent method to design a horde or infantry heavy army. You'll want plenty of meat shields with some more stout units interspersed. I am a big fan of the flyer and believe it can integrate well with this style of army. It looks like CSM will seemlessly fit into this slot since they have plenty of troops and various multi wound high toughness units to bolster the lines.
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