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I have been pondering fielding some special weapons teams with 3 demo charges each, and having them mount up in chimeras bought for platoon command squads. I would keep them around to knock out deep striking or drop pod units. Has anyone tried this? It would be 95 points for the team, and you would have to pay the extra chimera cost on another unit. But still, 3x str8 ap1 large blasts in one shooting phase would take care of some drop podding terminators. Anyone ever try this or think it might work?

Sounds interesting, I've been working on IG with allied inquisition as a completely inquisition themed army, I may have to give these a shot sometime, they would be a decent suicide unit.

That's a lot of points for a one trick pony. It might pay off now or again, but good luck finding an opponent who'll bunch up in range of your guys!

Possibly as a counter measure by keeping them near your expensive units, but many deepstriking units who would threaten these are either cheap and expendable (termicide) or quite durable (thropes).

You're about half-way to a good idea. It works if you run a very infantry heavy army, and need another counter-charge unit (the PCS with quad flamers being your first). The enemy runs up, pastes a squad and you put 3 Demolition charges down his throat. Putting them in a Chimera and driving them around... not such a great idea. The enemy will make sure that's one of the first Chimeras to die, and then what will you do with the 6" ranged Demolition charges?

Keep in mind though, this is a scoring unit.

I think it's a good idea just because it's COOL... (I'm not a very practical minded gamer, sorry). It reminds me of the old old 'penal legion' rules with the 'human bomb' suicide striker guy in each squad (usually whoever committed the heinous crime of insubordination one too many times)... yer gonna be executed by the commissar anyways after the battle, so you may as well make yourself useful, right? Go out with a bang! I think it's a great idea. It is funny that demo charges quite often just blow up their couriers when the scatter dice goes backwards. That's kind of the fun of it though.

Cool - but very niche.

If you did intend to run this unit, I'd probably recommend putting them in a Valyrie (you do have Valkyries...right?), zooming them forward 48" (Scout and Flat Out) and dropping via grav chutes. Yes, you may well die horribly, but it'll get you exactly where you want to be, and with the relatively small size of the squad, you should avoid any mishaps.

L. Wrex

You could potentially put two squads of them in a valk. I am thinking I am going to make 4 squads of 3 demo charges each and make a catachan suicide squad army list. It would at least be something nobody would be expecting. Something different than packing your army full of melta gun vets.

90% of the players around here are SM with a lot of drop pods. The trick would be getting them to survive the initial attack from the drop pods. Maybe use an inquisitor to let them throw at a deep striking unit. I run a lot of troops so they could be shielded behind a combined squad. It would probably scatter and blow up a lot of my own troops, but it would hit theirs as well. And that's what the guard is all about.

I personally love the idea. I've used bomb squads in a chimera without too much success, but still wanna try them out in a valk. I love the idea of zooming them 24 inches then deep striking them and tossing their charges. It probably has only a 1/100 chance of success, but hey, isn't that what heroic suicide missions are all about?

I prefer the idea of vets with the Demolitions options in a valk. If your opponent doesn't put troops between you and his tanks, you can zoom them up to exactly within charge range with your scout move (you need to stay 12" away, and your "hatches" are slightly further away than that, but you get to deploy out another 3 inches almost so you can deploy slightly inside 12".) Meltabombs plus a demo charge can mess up any vehicle's day.

A suicide squad mounted in an expensive Valk just for the purpose of busting one vehicle does seem rather overkilly. I would think holding them back and waiting for the inevitable closing of the badguys (who doesn't close on IG? ...well maybe Tau) then shove them up front and do-or-die once you see the whites of their eyes would be a more viable plan.

Galactic Inquisitor wrote:You could potentially put two squads of them in a valk.

Sorry, but "A transport may carry a single infantry unit and/or any number of independent characters." - BRB p. 66 (my emphasis)

I use the Special Weapons Squads quite a bit, so I feel I can confidently chime in on this.

I would not recommend a squad with three demo charges for several reasons:

1. At 95 points, it's bloody expensive!
2. After those charges are used, the unit is basically worthless except as a speed bump.
3. In my experience, three demo charges are complete overkill.

Instead, I would advise you take a special weapon squad with two demo charges and a flamer. Again, there are several reasons for this load-out.

1. At 80 points, it's still not cheap, but 15 extra points is nothing to scoff at.
2. After the charges have been used, the unit still has some offensive punch with the flamer (one of the best special weapons available). They die as easy as the squad above, but at least now they have the option to do some damage if they happen to survive.
3. Against small, elite units that require AP2, two demo charges have proven more than sufficient. If you're just trying to put a bunch of wounds on a mob of infantry, the auto-hitting flamer will have about as much impact as another scattering template.

So yeah, SWS with two charges and a flamer... I never leave home without it. I always put them into a Vendetta, which gives me several options. If I get the first turn and the opponent deploys aggressively, I can scout move up, and then disembark to hit them first turn. If I go second and the enemy has potent long-range AT firepower, I can outflank them to clear rear objectives of enemy troops (i.e. vendetta pops the rhino, the demo squad blows up the passengers). And there's always the option of keeping the Vendetta hovering around my home objective, the unit inside making it scoring and able to deal a hard blow to any enemy unit that approaches. Even if the vendetta is destroyed, now I have a convenient crater/wreck marker on my objective giving the unit a 2+ cover save with the Incoming order.

so, think of it in terms of firepower. A 3x demo squad gets basically three turns of really short-ranged battlecannon fire. Not bad considering your average russ won't get more than three turns of shooting anyways.

The determiner is in the differences:

- the SWS is scoring. If you don't have a lot of scoring units, this is a good thing.

- the SWS gets to discharge three battlecannon shots all at once. This is great as it means it gets to do a lot of damage right away, but it's bad if they get killed before they even deliver one blast template (which a russ can definitely do), or if you're in a situation where a russ would have gotten more than 3 turns of shooting (specifically, your opponent is incompetent).

- the SWS is not a tank. This is good if you don't have a lot of other tanks. A lack of AV, however, will not help your other AV units survive any better (such as chimeras).

- both are good at splatting balled up groups of tac squads. If you don't face off against a lot of balled-up tac squads (or have other ways of taking them down), then neither are particularly useful.

In any case, paying a mere 95 points to splat an entire tac squad in a single turn is not a bad value (consider paying 125 for a basilisk for comparison), but like flamers and priests etc. they are hella futzy to use, and if you don't use them right you're going to be spending a lot of points every game on something that dies before it has a chance to be useful. Of course, the only way to get good at them is to use them...

You will not get three turns of chucking demo charges, you can forget that.

Terminus: What Ailaros is alluding to is the fact that 3 x demo charges is the equivalent of three turns of battlecannon fire.

I can't really advocate the spending of close to 100pts on a 6-man suicide unit. 3 charges is, quite simply, overkill in the vast majority of situations. If you regularly face Green Tide, Tyranids or lots of Tactical squads then yes, 3 demos may be worth it, otherwise I dislike the rather large points sink for such a small squad.

I do, however, like Terminus' idea of 2 x demos and a flamer, at least then you don't render the unit completely impotent once they've chucked their charges.

L. Wrex

Terminus wrote:You will not get three turns of chucking demo charges, you can forget that.

Amen. To tell you the truth I would just gun them down as fast as possible before they even get close enough. Not a difficult task... barring deepstrike those guys don't stand a chance. Then they will get one good hit in if they do deepstrike, and then get slaughtered by even the weakest of shooting if they haven't used them, or completely ignored once their charges are used because they are no threat any more. So... is the squad plus the valk really worth the one target that it may or may not take down, depending on scatter (or kill itself... or even funnier, kill its own valk)..? but still I like the idea. I love the random in games and a squad like that is definitely throws down for an interesting turn of events, or not, if you scatter wrong. Up in the air is always fun.

Thatguyoverthere wrote:I personally love the idea. I've used bomb squads in a chimera without too much success, but still wanna try them out in a valk. I love the idea of zooming them 24 inches then deep striking them and tossing their charges. It probably has only a 1/100 chance of success, but hey, isn't that what heroic suicide missions are all about?

you could play an (forgive my spelling on this) elysian (IIRC) drop troop list. They're in imperial armor and pretty annoying to play against. you start with nothing on the field then deep strike and blow stuff up with your demo packs. requires 2 good scatter rolls, but hey your into risky suicide stuff

Guitardian wrote:Amen. To tell you the truth I would just gun them down as fast as possible before they even get close enough. Not a difficult task...

but ALL guard squads are easy to destroy on an individual-unit basis. If you're not comfortable with bringing cheap, low-durability squads (ragardless of their firepower), then don't play guard.

The way we handle things is with redundancy, not durability.

And yes, like rough riders 3x demo SWS drastically lose their combat power after a single turn of use. The thing is, that one turn of use does the same amount of damage as other squads shooting for many, many turns. To put it otherwise, once a demo SWS flattens a 5-man terminator squad, what more do they NEED to do?

Dropping out of a fast-moving Vendetta is dumb with a demo unit. Your odds are very slim of landing within 6" and not having a mishap. And if you hit a terrain piece and lose two guys, they have 50/50 odds of running away the first time they take a leadership check. This is simply unreliable and a waste of a unit.

You want to turbo boost in two situations:

1. Scout move. For example, you get first turn and can turbo boost + move 12" and simply disembark for a precise strike up to 44" away.
2. It's the last turns of the game, and you can turbo boost them to an objective and say embarked to contest it.


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Lycaeus Wrex wrote:Terminus: What Ailaros is alluding to is the fact that 3 x demo charges is the equivalent of three turns of battlecannon fire.

If so, that's a very inaccurate assessment. For one, the demo charge is AP2 rather than 3. Second, there is a lot more value to frontloading damage all at once, instead of spreading it over several turns (it also gets around wound allocation). It's the reason a Manticore is so great and the 4 turn limit not a limit at all, it is that it can produce multiple shots early in the game when it truly matters.

right, fine, so if you want you could say that it's BETTER than the amount of firepower a russ will likely put out over a game, except it gets to put it out all at once.

A normal russ can chuck out pai the entire game just fine. AV14 is pretty much indestructible from range, and deployment can make sure that it will probably not get assaulted or melta'ed. The closer ranged russes are a better comparisson. Especially the demolisher in this case. IMO, 95pts is way too much for this unit. Just grab Marbo or chuck demolitions on some vets instead

I could see it working well in a mech IG army.

Hide the Demo team in a Chimera that is in the rear of the IG gunline.

Wait for a CC unit to charge and destroy a Chimera. After a Chimera goes boom the CC unit that just destroyed it is clustered up nice and tight in the outline of a Chimera ready to be demo charged.

Personally rather buying a special weapons team with 3 demo charged for the same points one could upgrade
3 squads of melta vets to be demolitions experts, and thus gain 3 demo charges. The same tactics work, and it's spread out over a larger area.

lol chimera bombs.

I love the idea of playing wantonly aggressive with a chimera because you WANT it to get blown up so you can play whoops a daisy with the bomb squad that pops out of the rubble.

demo squad in a chimera: 150 points. Making your opponents terrified to assault your chimeras: priceless.

My thought is to put a squad like that with captain al rahem. The entire platoon outflanks and then when it comes in on the side you should be near something and throw all 3 of them and blow up some stuff. Problem being that after they shoot they are now useless and will die messily or be completely ineffective.

firstly, once they've killed something, how much more useful do they need to be? They've already been more useful that most single squads will be over the course of an entire game. Don't they deserve a little time off?

Plus, they're still scoring units (who now have nothing better to do than to hold objectives), something which is good to bring with al'rahem.

The more I think about it the more I like it. If they come in and outflank and use their charges they lose their threatening status. So they become one of those units that people overlook because they are useless and so they have the best chance of surviving in a paradox of sorts.

But so easily hosed down for either a KP or an objective, I don't think anyone would think twice about turning some slight bit of fire on their squishy useless unthreatening butts, not letting them stick around because of those reasons.

right but ALL guard infantry squads are easy to kill on a per-unit basis. If you're going to be playing a guard army AT ALL, you've got to be comfortable with the fact that your units give away easy KP. Once you've accepted this, then it becomes a question of how to arm them before they're killed. Demo charges rock, ergo are a good thing to include.

The above argument would only be valid for a space marine army or something else that you expected to be able to survive for several turns in a row (in which case, demo charges might not be the best option anyways).

That is a way too simply view. Guard have easier and harder KP's like any other army. A blob is f.ex. a hard killpoint, while a single sentinel or a SWS squad is an easy KP. The SWS is also much more likely to be exposed to enemy fire, as they have to get within 6", and might not even have a coversave because the need for range trumps taking cover.

Personally i think demos are pretty useless. 95 points plus 35 to add a chimera could be traded for a bassie- which insta-kills termies, IIRC. But it is hilarious to watch a squad of guard get blown to bits when there demo bounces of a rock and lands on top of their heads. Even for the victim.