Warhammer 40K Tactics

[Shas aia Toriia]

Sorry, but there is one question that has been bothering me.
What does a close combat weapon do? Do you suffer penalties for not having one? Does it help you out?

Help is appreciated.

[tyckspoon]

Close combat weapons are used to make close combat attacks, naturally. There are no special rules regarding them, specifically, although some items are close combat weapons on top of their other rules, like power weapons and pistols. Every model is assumed to carry one, even if it's just a standard-issue combat knife or cheap club. If the model is carrying two of them (typically done as sword+pistol; the only combination I can think of that is two assault-only weapons is Lightning Claws) it can make an extra attack in assault.

[Mr._Blinky]

I was wondering, is it legal to make a unit with two power weapons, besides Lightning Claws? I kinda' want to give a pair of swords to a Veteran.

[SolkaTruesilver]

If I remember right, the limit is set in each codex, and it says that you cannot give twice the same item to the same model..

But then, why not use a power sword and a power axe? Different item, same effect... (I am sucha cheata)

[Psychotic]

To be honest with you, from a modeling standpoint I don't see a problem with having a sergeant dual-wield power weapons if he's got his pistol or whatever modeled on him. That extra sword doesn't confer any additional benefits, even if it's an additional power weapon. The pistol at his belt is just to appease the WYSIWYG nazis.

[YPU]

Two melee or melee/pistol is an extra attack. A special weapon plus melee/pistol is an extra attack (but not with the special rules of the special weapon I believe?) then two special weapons give you an extra attack and all having the special rule. Two different special weapons no extra attack as they are to complicated to use at the same time. I think that besides the ultramarine chapter champion there are very few models who can have two power weapons. It is cool tough, but a an extra pistol tends to be more useful. often models who can be equipped with special weapons have a higher then normal BS which would be a waste not to use.

[Eldan]

I don't have my codex with me, but I'm nearly sure that a banshee exarch can have two power weapons.

[Kane]

More on weapons, do all power weapons double your strength, or just powerfists? Also, do power swords lower your initiative to one like a 'fist does?

Friends were enjoying thier new AonBR set last weekend, and I (designated guy who's supposed to learn the rules) wasn't sure.

[YPU]

no and no. power weapons ignore armor.
power fists ignore armor and double your strenght but you strike last (or is it Ini 1?)

[Psychotic]

You strike at Ini 1 with a Power Fist.

[Lorn]

I'd use them as a deterrent to horde assaulters. Sit back behind cover between your line and theirs, then any horde that wants to charge past, gets 6 heavy flamers in the face, then assaulted by tanks.

I'd like to point out that this is an excellent tactic against 'nids.

Specifically Genestealers - you autohit, wound on a 3 I think, and they do not get saves. Any left and if it comes to it, Sentinels can't easily be hurt by a couple of them in close combat...

[Dervag]

I say its possible with some sort of incendiary missile type of weapon which orientates itself in the preferred direction right before impact. But the hellhound has a flamethrower like weapon modelled on it, fuel tanks and all, I cant see how that would work. Or are we talking it being possible in the rules?

In real life, flamethrowers do not produce an arc of flame. They produce a stream of flaming liquid, like water from a firehose. Of fire.

The arc effect we normally see from WH40k infantry flamers would represent the guy with the flamer playing the stream of fire from his weapon back and forth across the arc described by the template.

A Hellhound's heavy flamer shoots the burning liquid much farther. My image is that it fires the liquid on a ballistic arc. Then when the stream hits the ground, it sprays outward in a big zone matching the shape of the template.

[Bryn]

For everyones' convenience...

{table=head]Weapon|Rules
Power weapon|Ignores armour saves
Power fist|Doubles your strength and ignores armour saves, but you strike at Initiative 1; you can only get the having-two-weapons bonus attack if you have two power fists
Lightning claw|Ignores armour saves and allows you to re-roll to wound; you can only get the having-two-weapons bonus attack if you have two lightning claws
Thunder hammer|Exactly the same as the power fist except you have a chance to knock any models who take a wound to initiative 1 for a turn; you can only get the having-two-weapons bonus attack if you have two thunder hammers
Force weapon|Power weapon, and will instantly kill anyone it wounds with a psychic test
Poisoned weapon|Always wound on a certain roll regardless of Strength and Toughness
Rending weapon|On a roll of 6 to wound, it wounds automatically and is treated as a power weapon. When hitting vehicles, a roll of 6 to penetrate adds 1d3 to the roll.
Witchblade|Always wound on a 2+, treated as S9 against vehicles, but they still allow armour saves[/table]

You don't need two power weapons to treat all your attacks as power weapon attacks. To quote the 5e 40k rulebook...

A normal and a special weapon
These models gain one additional attack. All of their attacks, including the bonus attack, benefit from the special weapon's bonuses.

Power fists, thunder hammers and lightning claws are an exception to this. Only a second power fist, thunder hammer or lightning claw can confer a bonus attack to a model equipped with one of these weapons.

So you don't need to pay for two power weapons: one and a normal CCW work exactly the same.
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Apart from that, Genestealers are always the first target for my hellhounds; it's almost as if they're designed to be hellhound fodder I imagine sentinels would be similar.

Edit: Dervag, you don't mind if I quote that for anyone doubting my ability to point the hellhound turret the way I want, do you?

[Eldan]

Ah, flamers. Beautiful weapons. I only got the two on my wraithlord, but I love them. Honestly, I can't think why anyone would take shurikencatapults instead of flamers for the same cost.

[Lorn]

Apart from that, Genestealers are always the first target for my hellhounds; it's almost as if they're designed to be hellhound fodder I imagine sentinels would be similar.

Much better actually. Generally as the other guy realises you've vaped about five of his kitted out Genestealers with one 40 point model

Having said that, I haven't really experimented with Hellhounds, due to most of the people back when I played regularly having power armour armies. Me using Guard, well, I tended to die quite badly if I went anti-infantry... sentinels being a different matter, I started with Catachans and have Marines/Daemonhunters as well. The sentinel chainsaw is great for this. Eviscerator and bionics in one cheap, affordable bit of plastic.

[Eldan]

Heh. I've never played against IG or Marines. It seems people don't like the empire around here. I know two necron players, another Eldar player, a Tau player, two Ork armies, a chaos army and one army of Dark Eldar, but I've never seen any imperial forces except in a showcase.

[Bryn]

This discussion has persuaded me. I'm going to track down my sentinel sprues and attach some heavy flamers.

Does anyone have the Elysian sentinel? Can they say whether or not it comes with a flamer option? I love the look of the model but I'd rather not use the spectacularly short range multi-melta.

[Lorn]

Sentinel weaponry tends to be interchangeable - just don't glue it in, and you're fine.

Not 100% sure about Forgeworld stuff, but I'd guess it's similar - worst comes to the worst, it looks like you should be able to just lop off the end of the melta and replace it with a flamer, you'd expect one to be, ah, armoured if you're going to drop it. Especially with highly flammable tanks of sticky goo on it.

[Psychotic]

If it's on a turret of some sort, then I suggest magnetizing it. I use magnets on my flyer bases as well as weapons that I can possibly swap out.

[Kane]

Any advice on magnetizing would not go amiss; I'm planning on magnetizing my Crisis suits, my hammerhead, Piranhas, and Stealth team leader, while I have an SM friend who wants to be able to change his Force commander's and his veteran sergeant's load outs.

[SolkaTruesilver]

Any advice of magnetisation would be lost on me, I live in Dubai, and trust me, it's netherland to find some hobby stuff. I got lucky to find 1 single warhammer shop...

z-axis, you tell me how it turns out! Against orc, nids and IG, I am sure you'd burn them to oblivion. But always better to confirm with live action..

Z, what would be your recommendation about the philosophy of an army when fighting [put each different army here]?

[tyckspoon]

Any advice on magnetizing would not go amiss; I'm planning on magnetizing my Crisis suits, my hammerhead, Piranhas, and Stealth team leader, while I have an SM friend who wants to be able to change his Force commander's and his veteran sergeant's load outs.

It's essentially the same operation as pinning models together, only instead of bits of wire you use very small powerful magnets (or, with long enough rod-style magnets, you could do both- extend a rod magnet through the join to act as a removable pin). The most difficult part of the whole thing is likely to be acquiring the magnets. You could try checking any DIY hobbyist shops you have around, but chances are you'll need to look to online sellers in order to get enough magnets at a decent price. At a quick check, the first few bulk retailers I get from Google offer model-sized magnets (ie, ones where you won't have to core out the entire shoulder join) at 10 to a dollar or less.

[SolkaTruesilver]

I think I'll put that on my shopping list next time I come to Canada. But far, far, far, far, far away from my magnetic cards...

[Psychotic]

It's essentially the same operation as pinning models together, only instead of bits of wire you use very small powerful magnets (or, with long enough rod-style magnets, you could do both- extend a rod magnet through the join to act as a removable pin). The most difficult part of the whole thing is likely to be acquiring the magnets. You could try checking any DIY hobbyist shops you have around, but chances are you'll need to look to online sellers in order to get enough magnets at a decent price. At a quick check, the first few bulk retailers I get from Google offer model-sized magnets (ie, ones where you won't have to core out the entire shoulder join) at 10 to a dollar or less.

Basically, correct. I like to use Magnets on things such as turrets, vehicles, anything on a flyer base, monstrous creatures or heavy weapon platforms. The reason why I recommend sticking to this is because it looks tons better when the magnet isn't sticking out in an obvious fashion. Also, the paint job doesn't suffer as much as if you used this method on an infantry model.

What I use are rare earth magnets - they're fairly strong and pretty tiny in size. There's a store in town for me to pick them in up in about quantities of 10 at a time or so, but I'm sure you could eBay/Google for bulk.

[Telok]

A friend of mine plays 40K so I got him some tiny dot magnets as a gift.

http://www.sciplus.com/category.cfm/.../23/maxrows/11

That's where I got them, second from the top.

[YPU]

Any advice of magnetisation would be lost on me, I live in Dubai, and trust me, it's netherland to find some hobby stuff. I got lucky to find 1 single warhammer shop...

I could ship stuff to you if I find it

[Ghal Marak]

Well, that game I said me and my brother were going to play in didn't happen exactly as I had anticipated. First off, I wasn't even there. I got called up to Tennessey over the weekend and had to skip the game. My brother (who got teamed up with somebody who had no clue how to play) decided to go with Space Marines. The other guy went with Eldar. They... well, they got stomped hard. First off, playing against 2500pts worth of IG (a two-on-one match) that featured a baneblade. They managed to cause a point of structure damage on it before getting mauled in the face. Then, another two-on-one match against tyranid. Four ranged Carnifexes, and a vicious hive Tyrant. All equiped with that regenerating thing and improved toughness. Yeah, all their matches were pretty one sided.

EDIT: Oh, and all of it was with 5th edition rules, so everybody was confused as hell.

[Bryn]

So, I tried out heavy-flamer wielding sentinels today. The game was pretty small, 1000pts against Tau. It was Cities of Death (and I know that some people here hate that book, consider it acknowledged), but both of us took Demolition as our Stratagem, and both of us rolled a 1 when we tried to blow up the building, so effectively it just meant we had a load of buildings.

Spoiler

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The Tau essentially formed a gunline in two buildings, with a squad of Fire Warriors and a Broadside in each one. Lurking behind the buildings were a Skyray and a Hammerhead. One of the buildings also had a whole bunch of gun drones and a small unit of Vespids.

The Sentinels mostly failed in their goal of getting up close to the Tau and burning them out of the building. This was mostly as a result of the enemy shooting. I attempted to run them up to the right flank of the Tau, going between a building at my end of the board and the board edge itself.

The Sentinels were shot to bits before they got close enough to properly deploy flamers. They did have a chance to toast some vespids, but by the time they reached the enemy building, one Sentinel was left and it had lost its flamer. It did have a chance to charge the damaged skyray on the rear armour, but any Sentinel could do that.

That's not to say that the Hellhounds fared much better. One of them was nailed by a railgun early in the game, and the other burned four Tau off the top story of a building before getting destroyed as well. All in all, it wasn't a good day for AP4 template weapons.

I had a pretty unlucky time of it, and although I cleared out the more full of the two Tau buildings, in the end the Tau cleared me out of the objective building. I believed we carried on playing for several more turns than we were supposed to, so technically I should have won, but all in all it was a pretty bad day for my Imperial Guard.

I've yet to have a go against Tyranids, and really I need more data before I can write the Sentinels off entirely. A lesson was learned, though: blue sentinels need cover badly.

[Psychotic]

Actually, the idea of your heavy flamer sentinels appeals to me. I kinda want to try the Council of Doom out now.

Basically, a Seer Council, all with Spears on Jetbikes. One Farseer with Spirit Stones, Runes of Witnessing, Fortune and Doom. The Locks have Enhance, Embolden and the rest of them have Destructors. The unit will cost upwards to about 450-500 points or so. Basically, fly around as an all-purpose unit slagging whatever they come across. Fortune on them makes them ridiculously long-lasting and Doom combined with more jetbike support is for killing stuff. Spears kill armor, Destructors waste infantry. It's a hard unit to counteract simply because of the 6" assault move putting them back into safety, as well as the 12" (or 24") move speed getting them to whatever needs killing.

[Albub]

The only problem with putting all of your lotion in one basket like that is a few unlucky dice rolls kinda finish you off.