My Thoughts on the New Chaos Space Marines now that I've actually got the codex...

I've got Dave to thank for this 'cause he bought me the book as a belated birthday present, and now I'm all excited about doing Chaos again. I registered my concerns in the previous blog about the changes to the rules that would no doubt come with the book, and now that I've been reading it a little while here's my opinions on some of them:

1) They've got rid of Summoned Daemons

OK let's get the easy one out of the way first: In the old rules I think going back as far as 3rd edition you used to be able to summon a unit of Daemons from one of your Chaos Space Marine units, or summon a Greater Daemon by having it possess one of your characters. I guess it worked at the time, but it wasn't a popular move to make once Chaos Daemons became an army in their own right, and with the new rules for Allies in 6th Edition meaning you can field both armies at the same time, the ability to summon Daemons is pretty much meaningless anyway. The fact that in 4th edition the summoned Daemons would be significantly weaker than their codex couterparts wouldn't have helped. Overall it's not a rule I'm particularly sorry to lose.

2) Bezerkers et al back to Elite

What's happened here is that the Khorne Bezerkers, Noise Marines, Plague Marines and Thousand Sons are now Elite choices. Now if I remember rightly this was the case in 3rd edition as well, though if your commander had the mark of the relevant God, you would get one of them as troops choices. So, for example, if you had a Chaos Lord with the Mark of Slaanesh, you would be able to take Noise Marines - but not the others - as troops choices. In 4th edition they cut out the middle man and allowed you to take all 4 as Troops Choices, no matter what your commander was doing, and this lead to some pretty nasty tournament combos, so for balancing issues and also to remind us that there are actually Chaos Space Marines in the Chaos Space Marine Army, they've been put back up to Elite. They've also still got the option of taking the leader with the mark of the relevant god to put them back down to Troops Choices, plus the same rule applies if you take the relevant special character. Kharn the Betrayer, for example, would bring Khorne Bezerkers back to Troops choices.

For some reason, you can't do that with the Daemon Prince. Even though you HAVE to take a Daemon Prince of one of the Chaos Gods, which confers its own benefits, you can't take the relevant units as troops choices. I guess that would represent the idea that if a Champion of Chaos has made it as far as being a Daemon Prince, he'd have to be a lot less near-sighted than refusing to take anything but the units of your own Gods. And also, the Daemon Prince is a LOT more powerful in this new edition. Armies would be horribly unbalanced if they were then allowed to take, say, Bezerkers as Troops choices...

3) Wargear

There have been quite a few changes to the equipment that are going to affect my army lists quite a bit. Here's a selection of them:

• Daemon Weapons: Not sure what's happening with these at the moment. They work in pretty much the same way as they did in 4th edition, though there is no option to take it as a Daemon Weapon with the mark of the Chaos Gods in order to increase its potency and inherent risks. My problem is that there seems to be no way to give a Daemon Weapon to anybody other than Abbadon the Despoiler. They don't appear in the Wargear section as an option; am I missing something here? This means I'm going to have to change the weapon I've given one of my Chaos Lords, although a viable alternative is not far away, which brings me on to my next point:
• Chaos Artefacts: Unique magic items for Chaos? Yes please, we'll have some of that! Might seem a bit cheesy to do this in the new edition of 40K but it's not going to be bad. Some of them are actually Daemon Weapons, and all of them confer particularly nasty consequences for those that find themselves on their business end - but most of them are not without their risks, meaning that they're unlikely to find themselves on the tournament circuit that counts on dependability.
• Vehicle Upgrades: I wasn't particularly happy with the fact that they've weakened Daemonic Possession by having to roll a 2+ for its benefit - ignoring Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results - to take effect, AND given the chance that a dedicated transport might start eating its own crew on a roll of a 1 as they embark or start the game. Granted if this happens it gets a hull point back, but losing a Chaos Space Marine of any kind is going to hurt. The benefit it is supposed to confer doesn't help all that much in 6th edition anyway since there are no Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results off a glancing hit anymore. Thankfully they have at least had the presence of mind to reduce the points cost, but I can see myself taking Destroyer Blades instead, which for what I intend for Rhinos at any rate look a lot more useful. And Havoc Launchers are now twin-linked, which may help a little.

4) Psychic Powers

The psychic powers in the new codex, and in 40K in general, is a lot more, how can I put this? Comprehensive. There's a lot more going on now with the different disciplines so it was never going to be the same, but most of the old spells are gone. This will upset a lot of the tournament players who liked to bum-rape units by grouping them together with Lash of Submission, then take a massive 5" template-sized shit on the unit. Gift of Chaos is gone as well, though I'm not particularly sorry about this because I never used it. Instead we've got several of the disciplines in the rulebook at our disposal, plus some tasty-looking spells in the Codex. I'm not going to go too deeply into specifics here because I'll be here all day but it looks like they've got an eclectic mix of functional powers and kick-ass lightning-bolt style spells.

One spell that was probably overpowered but I will nonetheless miss is Warptime. My Chaos Sorcerer has only participated in 1 battle so far, but being able to re-roll all my hits and misses pretty much won that battle for me.

Well that's it for me so far, I'll come back maybe later with more changes to the rules, perhapes when I've played a couple of games and had a chance to try them.

I'll see you next time...

Painting: Chaos Defiler, Chaos Rhino

I bring to you for the first time in a while a long overdue painting blog. These are additions to the Khornate Chaos Space Marine army I started last year. And a bit of a rant as well, but more on that later...

Daemonic posession might just give it the edge...

OK to start us of we've got a Chaos Space Marine Rhino. This wasn't actually planned; how it came about was that just after Games Workshop released 6th Edition 40K, I turned up at GW to participate in a 400pt tournament. I took my Chaos and my new Space Marine army as well which I have yet to show you guys so get ready. Now the Space Marine stuff I had, but for the Chaos Space Marine stuff I needed a Rhino to make a 400pt list so I got to the shop early and bought this, and painted near enough all of it in the morning apart from the heads and that on the spikes running across the top of it. I painted it pretty much the same way as I painted the Bezerkers; copious amounts of Mechrite Red and Gold painted from Brown. I was pleased with the muck and dust coming up the sides, done with Khemri Brown and Denheb Stone, but I was less pleased when I noticed that I hadn't done it on the back. Ah well, there's always the next one. The detail on the heads were probably my favourite bits to paint, to be honest; I'm getting better at doing that! You can't see it on the photos but I've painted the Space Marine head as though he was from the Black Consuls chapter that I'm painting up as well; the last time I painted a Space Marine head it was Dark Angels and I didn't want to do that again what with Dark Vengeance out now, so I chose a colour to offset the Red: Black. On the whole I think it came out pretty well.

Where were the lascannons?

And then there was this hulking monstrosity. I painted the Defiler in the same way although I found I did have to go over it in Mechrite Red again after I'd painted all the metal. It made a more solid coat of paint which was great. I didn't go into a lot of detail with this one; the metal bits were metal, the brass bits were brass and everything else was either red or my attempt at obsidian; black highlighted with grey. I avoided weathering effects because I honestly couldn't see how to apply them to this. Neither of these models are my best painting job ever, but I never said they were. To be honest, painting tanks is not my favourite part of collecting an army; I think I find infantry models more fun now that I'm actually getting quite good at it. I just haven't got the experience in painting larger models like this. Still, I have to start somewhere, and for what I'm going to be using them for (gaming, largely,) they work as well as they needed. They'd certainly get me into the Throne of Skulls tournament, though I doubt I'd win any awards for best looking army!

Which brings me on to something that's been annoying me about a lot of the models I've been buying, particularly for 40K. You plan an army list, you look at your codex, you equip your squads and vehicles in the optimum configuration... only to find that THE WEAPONS DON'T APPEAR IN THE BOX!!!

This has happened a few times over the models I've been building. The original plan for the Scout army, for example, was to give one of the sergeants a Power Fist. It's allowed in the rules, but the Scout models don't come with power fists. The Khorne Bezerkers that I painted last year, I wanted to give them Power Axes (now that 6th edition makes a distinction between Power Axes and other weapons, I'm very glad I made this decision,) and Plasma Pistols, but you can do neither out of the box, even with the Skull Champion. And then there was the Defiler, for which the original plan was to have a Twin-Linked Lascannon for the right arm. Except when I opened the box THERE WAS NO BLOODY LASCANNON! So instead I'm stuck with the Reaper Autocannon instead, which thinking about it would probably be more useful for supporting infantry charges, but it's still not what I wanted!

Now I know what you're thinking: "Well, why don't you convert it?" Yes, except that what with the Defiler being the only substantial vehicle in my army at this point, there's nothing to convert it from. The only thing I can think to do is if I were to drop another £35 on a Predator, and stick the turret with the Twin-Linked Lascannon on it onto the arm. Which would render the Predator completely redundant since the turret would then be on the Defiler. No chance in Hell, would be my answer to that. Same with the Space Marine Scouts; I'd have to spend more money on a box of Space Marines just to get the Power Fist out of it - assuming it comes with one - and to be honest it would probably have been better employed on the Space Marines anyway. The Bezerkers I actually did convert from Ork parts, and that worked reasonably well, but I'll need to find a way to get hold of a plasma pistol before I paint the next lot or I won't be able to equip them properly.

Of course, I know why it's happened - the rules that allow those weapon options were written after the box was designed. I don't know what you were allowed to do with a Defiler before the current edition of the codex came out but if the designers had no reason to put a lascannon in there, they wouldn't have put one in, and they're not going to redesign the whole box just because of a change in the rules. With the Scouts I'd suggest it's pretty much the same story. The Bezerkers are a bit of a funny one; those models were designed for 2nd edition (the frame of the Sprue says 1994, which even by GW standards is an old model) and while aesthetically at least they work as well as they need to, the fact that they've not had an update for nearly 20 years means that they're currently lacking in a lot of the equipment that is allowed in the rules.

Nonetheless, I'm going to be urinated if the Chaos Vindicator I've ordered doesn't have the Havoc Launchers in there, since every vehicle in my army has them. Not quite as urinated as I would have been if I hadn't got a couple of Havoc launchers left over from the Rhinos I made for my previous Chaos army, but urinated nonetheless. Apart from that, there's not really a lot more to this army as I'll be painting it in pretty much the same way so unless something really amazing happens with the Vindicators, this will be the last you'll hear from them until they're ready for the table...

See you then.