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How effective are bikes? I ask because I'm thinking of fielding Chaos Bikers in my first CSM army. I've never used them before and, believe it or not, in my 9 years of (rather infrequent) playing, have never fought any!

Thoughts??

Bikes are definately more useful now than they where in third edition. In Chaos Marine armies they are great for delivering deamons. In my experience though they take a little more experience to use them at 100% effectiveness.

(This is really more of a tactics post, but anyway...)

Chaos Bikes are much better than their loyalist counterparts. If Slaanesh-marked, you can put Sonic Blasters on them fairly cheaply which gives them a nice bit of firepower as well as letting the champ swing at (an effective) I5. If Khorne-marked, their chainaxes plus raw number of attacks make them a serious assault threat. The big difference, though, is that an Aspiring Champion is a much scarier squad leader than a Veteran Sergeant, and Chaos Bikers are a nice delivery mechanism for their squad leader.

For that squad leader, I strongly suggest taking advantage of the mechanics of Chaos bikes and Lightning Claws -- the Lightning Claw is costed taking its disadvantage -- that it may not use the two single handed weapon +1A bonus -- into account. Chaos bikes grant +1A but disallow the same bonus; as such, you effectively get to ignore the bonus, and the claw comes in to its own quite easily on the biker AC.

Oh, yes -- turbo boosted on the first turn yields a squad of T5 models with a 3+ invulnerable save, which is excellent for dropping off daemons. Bikers paired with the ability to summon your dominant daemon type work well. They are more than a daemon platform, though.

That is one squad I wouldnt neccesarily use sacred numbers with though....very spendy.

I have been toying with them using for lustwing...teleport homers are nice when turboosted into enemy territory. Especially when I get sonic blasters.

Excellent! Thanks for all the advice (and for moving to the appropriate section, whoever did so...).

I think I'll switch out my Raptors for some Bikers w/ an Icon-

http://www.dakkadakka.com/Forums/tabid/56/forumid/14/postid/128862/view/topic/Default.aspx

You gotta be careful with 'em, though. I've faced a couple of EC bike units and wiped them out before they could deliver the goods. Make sure you have other ways to bring pressure and/or 'feint' with the unit so that if/when they get wiped out, those daemons are coming from somewhere else.

I know CSM players who swear that their bike squads are more feared than their tricked out Daemon Princes. With particular note to Khorne bikers.

I'm in the process of ordering the bits needed to convert my Khorne Bikers and was wondering what the most effective number is for them points cost / points earned.

I already have a 1500 pt army so the bike squad with a unit of 8 bloodletters (to be summoned off the bikes) will be the bulk of getting me to the 2000 pt mark. I was thinking of going with six; the AC with a powerfist as the multitude of power weapons from the bloodletters will not be able to touch and dreads that my opponent could throw at the unit to tie it up.

I DEMAND AN ANSWER!

pander to my whim foolish mortals

What about using Chaos Bikers to drop The Keeper of Secrets? I think a properly used one could be pretty nasty.

Okay, chew on this:

5 chaos chosen, all upgraded to champions, each with
-chaos bike
-mark of khorne
-daemon armor
-feel no pain

Give one champ a powerfist and icon, make another one the daemonhost, the rest get chainaxes.

They're hella expensive, but the turn after boosting they can take all the shooting of an entire enemy army (2+ invulnerable save, any failed save against strength 8 or less they also get a 4+ feel no pain save) without more than, at most, one casualty in my experience. After the daemons get there, they can carve up weedy str3 troops or normal marines. Just keep them away from powerfists.

Creds to Centurian99 for the concept of the chosen biker squad.

Ewwwww. I call foul on that unit. I've heard somewhere using the biker champion as the demonvessl being called the Twin Linked Bloodthirster.

Brutal, but very cool.