Choosing the right Chaos lord for you- part 1

In an earlier post, I went through choosing Tzeentch, but I went through it kind of quickly, so I thought I'd back track here.

The first question you have to ask yourself when you decide you want to play chaos is whether or not you want to play an army devoted to a specific chaos lord or whether you want to devote the army to Chaos Undivided. Now, this is going to sort of depend on what you have. Obviously, if someone gives you a squad of Chaos bikes, you're going to need to play a chaos army that allows bikes (Slaanesh or undivided), or if someone gives you a pack of horrors (Tzeentch), you're unlikely to feel drawn to Khorne. Regardless, no matter what you have as a miniature or miniatures, the possibility always exists to play Chaos Undivided.

So, before going any further, you may want to ask why not just play Chaos Undivided? Here's what you get with Chaos Undivided. First of all, you get access to the entire Chaos list. There is no nook or cranny of the Codex which you cannot exploit if you so wish. For instance, everything that is good about, say, Noise Marines of Slaanesh, are available to you because you can include Slaanesh Noise Marines (as an elite choice, if your general isn't Slaanesh). In other words, the army is undivided, but the individual squads can be dedicated. In short, you can have Khornate berzerkers, Tzeentch sorcerors, Plague Marines, and Noise Marines. If you want your Predator to have the corruscating flame, just dedicate it to Tzeentch. Want to give your leader the Pandemic Staff? Dedicate him to Nurgle.

If you choose a specific chaos god for your army, you lose this power to mix and match. Moreover, you lose Chaos Raptors, Obliterators, and normally Bikes (Khorne and Slaanesh can still use bikes). Furthermore, no one gets heavy weapons except for Slaanesh and the chosen of Tzeentch. So, that's another big strike against dedicating your army. Also, in an un Undivided army, you can have squads that haven't been dedicated. Every miniature in the Tzeentch army has to pay 10 points for the priviliage!

So, the real question is why would you ever choose to play a dedicated army? Well, there's a number of reasons, and only a few of them are qualified by point costs. The "game mechanics" reason for dedicating your army is that you get the demons onto the table quicker and you get your aspiring champions for free if the squad is favored (the number of guys in the unit is equal to the patron god's "number"). The second of these two options is especially important for Slaanesh. A squad of five gets a sixth member free and that member is an aspiring champion. Of course, Slaanesh's aspiring champions are kind of lame, but hey, he's free. Tzeentch, with its sacred number of 9, rarely makes this dedication worth while. By the time you've give 8 guys the rubric sign, you've spent 80 points. Saving 27 isn't that big of a deal.

The real reason to dedicate the army is more psychological and aesthetic. First of all, the hodge podge army looks...well...hodge podge. You have a bunch of orange guys and one squad of blue. If you want a bunch of miniatures painted different colors, play Eldar. There's something initmidating about a Thousand
Sons army that just cannot be accomplished with an undivided army, even when everything in the undivided army is dedicated to Tzeentch. Plus, the armies are sort of divided between general tactics. While, you cannot adopt these tactics in your undivided army, the hodge podge-iness of it, leads to tactical skitzophrenia--not that I'm against tactical skitzophrenia.

Also, Chaos Undivided seems pretty close to Chaos undecided. I don't want to generalize here, but there is a certain stigma attached to an army that simply doesn't want to dedicate that isn't the same as say, an Imperial Guard army that isn't wholly dedicated to one of their arrangements.

My final thought on this subject--whether you should choose a particular chaos god for your army or simply play undivided is this: don't choose. Make an undivided army with the understanding that it will incorporate pieces from a particular chaos power until such time as you have enough pieces incorporated that they can split off from time to time and play in an army of their own. My Thousand Sons army, for instance, represents a limited set of my chaos miniatures overall. Unlike most other armies, a big enough chaos army is really five armies ready to be played. The same is not true for many other forces except perhaps daemonhunters (a large daemonhunter army is always also either an imperial guard army, space marine army, grey knight army, or sisters of battle army).

My suggestion if you are planning to implement your chaos force the way I have suggested is to concentrate on the demons. Everything else you can cannibalize, but the demons you will not be able to fake. So, if you're planning to branch out into Khorne, for instance, make sure that when you buy demons for your chaos undivided army (as in with money), you buy Khorne stuff. Once you have that and a few guys with chain axes, you will have a World Eaters force.