Chaos redux-rethinking Slaanesh and Tzeentch

Oh, man oh man, do I have some tips for you all coming up. I'm making my Thousand Sons Termies which has been a royal pain in the rear, but the pay off is a sight to behold. Yes indeed. I need to get a few more of them painted and then I will post the whole...post.

Until then, I feel I may have steered you all wrong in my "expert" opinion of Slaanesh and Tzeentch. I say this because last Tuesday, we playtested some of my ideas. As it turns out, the distance between my house and the place where I do battle every Tuesday is about twenty minutes. Slash and I carpool. Now, if you read the introduction to this site you know that Slash will play whatever you put in front of him, or don't. I swear the guy would play Quarters as Raveners, nickels as genestealers, and pennies as gaunts with a special Chuckie Cheese Token Hive Tyrant if we let him. Anyways, I told Slash about my blog and about my assessment of Slaanesh, and rather than whole heartedly agreeing with me, he decided to give them a shot that night against Chris's Daemonhunters and Russ's Imperial Guard (man, IG every frickin' time!).

We played 750 a side, which doesn't seem like a lot, but basically means that your army doesn't get tanks and/or dreadnoughts. Regardless, in our discussion, Slash and I came to the conclusion that Slaanesh have a great deal of advantage at tank shocking their opponents. However, no tanks this battle, so I can't tell you how that turned out.

First of all, despite the fact that Slash's chaos lord teleported right into the back of a Chimera on his deep strike (and we therefore lost about 300 points of our force), we still won. Chaos is a hard force to stop, and Chris really just couldn't get his forces on the board fast enough, so that's not a real big surprise. What is a surprise is how handy Slaanesh turned out to be.

First of all, those sonic blasters are a damn sight better than bolters. True they are five extra points, but still really really nice. Three shots at 24" range turned out to make a lot of difference. Plus, if you consider that the mark of Tzeentch costs 10 points a model, and that the mark of Slaanesh only costs 5, you sort of have the 5 to spare. Meanwhile, you can still get heavy weapons.

While the chaos lord never made his appearance, he was a sight to behold on paper. Here's why, the inclusion of combat drugs gives him powers above and beyond those of any other patron god's chaos lords. He can ignore wounds, raise strength, etc.. Sure there's a chance of overdose, but if you only use two of those powers a round, the chance is pretty slim. In addition, the minor powers of Slaanesh are incredible. They are, I think, better than the major powers of Slaanesh. His lord could have waltzed into hand to hand, without being able to be shot at, with a strength of seven before the power fist. I don't know, it looked powerful. Then it teleported into an APC and that was the end of that. Deep strike taketh and deep strike taketh away.

Meanwhile, Tzeentch. I have not lost faith in my new army, but I have had to rethink them a bit. First and foremost, Thrall wizards are not the great thing I had believed. I have not totally abandoned their usefulness, it's just that it's a usefulness that's hard to control. Keep in mind, that in ranged combat, every model gets the toughness of the majority. So, when the termies are in the majority, the thrall's get a toughness of 4, but when the thrall's are in the majority, the termies are at toughness 3, but since the unit has different armor saves as well as toughness saves, the wounds are allocated to the majority first. This is so incredibly frickin mathematically complex that to drag it out would be ridiculous. Let's put it this way. The Terminators block, as per usual, until such time as enough of them die and the thrall's are in the majority. At that time, if the thralls are in a major condition of majority, you're probably all right, in fact, you're probably well off, but...if they only outnumber the terminators by one, and they take enough hits to die and leave more hits remaining then the terminators will have to take the save at toughness 3 and without an armor save. Yes, that does suck. On the upshot, if the shot that kills the thrall wizard is a lascannon, then they're worth the points, moreover, you still get to decide which model takes which hits.

What happened was this, the thrall wizards saved the terminators from getting killed by lasguns. Yeah. I'm not sure they were worth it, and I'm pretty sure, that might have gone far worse. I think, buy A thrall wizard and sacrifice him to get your extra bolt of change shot the second you touch down from deep striking.

As for the Thousand sons termies, combi-bolters. That's all I have to say. Damned combi-bolters. You see you can move and fire heavy weapons in terminator armor, but there is no mention of rapid fire weapons in the rulebook or in the codex. That means they can hand to hand or fire, but they can't do both. THEY CAN'T DO BOTH!

I feel as though this might be an oversight since they can fire lascannons and attack hand to hand, but they can't fire a bolter and hand to hand to hand. Something about that seems wrong, like I can lift a tank over my head but not a penny. Oh well, them's the rules.

So, your Tzeentch non-chosen termies aren't really great at hand to hand because they have power swords rather than power fists, and they aren't really great at ranged because they can't get anything better than combi-bolters, and they can't do both at the same time. I don't know. I'm sure I'll have more to say on them later, but for now, their main purpose seems to be to guard the aspiring champion, which they do fine and all. The question though isn't whether or not they do fine job at protecting the aspiring champion while he throws around the olts of change, but whether or not they do a better job than would 8 normal Thousand Sons marines in power armor, and that I just don't know.

I will say this though, the Thousand Sons have STAYING POWER. I walked a squad of six across the board, and made it, all the while slowly picking of Inquisitor retinue. Also, the horrors of Tzeentch, or more precisely the Flamers of Tzeentch, are awesome. They just get a whole bunch of dice to roll at their enemies.

Having said all that, next time, I will return with conversion ideas for making Thousand Sons terminators and pictures dammit! Where the hell are the pictures? Is this not a site for miniature war gaming, and didn't it promise to include some pictures from time to time? Yes it did, yes I will; cross my heart.