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Good morning/day/evening/night Dakka, this thread's about sharing your ideas & reasons on how we can use different units (doesn't have to be fluffy, or even from the CSM dex) to compliment the different cult units of our dex, OR, how we can keep the cult units as elite choices to compliment our main force.

As a Thousand Sons player, horde armies scare the s*** outta me, so i turn to Noise Marines. One ten man strong unit with 9 blaster & Icon, infiltrated by Ahriman's warlord trait can pour out a ridiculous amount of GeQ death. Pay the Lord tax to unlock them as troops & add him to a CC unit, bikers w/ccw or spawn & now we've got some ability in CC in an otherwise shooty army.

So Dakka, what're your choices for covering the weaknesses of your cult troops?

I love noise marines, but the blasters are kinda worthless...

Take the noise marines with bolt pistol, bolter, close combat weapon. Champ with doom siren. Loaded up in a rhino. One of the best assault squads in the game.

Fearless, rapid fire and doom siren the turn they disembark. (Shoot doom siren first, more hits). If they get assaulted after the disembark they still have init 5 and go first most times. If they don't get assaulted you fire the doom siren again, shoot your pistols, then assault.

cult troops are ONLY worth it if you have a lord to make them troops. PM are really the only really good ones, zerkers ahve been nerfed signifigantly and Tsons never were all that great. Noise Marines arent particularly good either, but the doom siren and blastmaster are cool. Salvo USR has made the sonic blasters terrible.

Noise marines make great assault units, as do khorne berzerkers, both are fearless, noise can gain FNP, and khorne can re-roll the charge range plus furious charge.

Then you have plague marines, tough little guys and can handle many roles. Finally thousand sons, who are basically hell to kill unless you use lots of attacks/shots.

The trick is what does your army need in it. If you want thousand sons but are having trouble with hordes, then yes adding noise marines is a good option. Same deal with khorne berzerkers, who's going to hold home base while they are off zerking around? Plague marines.

Now, aside from the ap 3 bolters of thousand sons and the GEQ killy rifle of noise marines, everything else can be done, sometimes better with normal CSM. If you take cult troops make the most of them, otherwise give the old CSM a try.

Kevlar wrote:I love noise marines, but the blasters are kinda worthless...

Take the noise marines with bolt pistol, bolter, close combat weapon. Champ with doom siren. Loaded up in a rhino. One of the best assault squads in the game.

Fearless, rapid fire and doom siren the turn they disembark. (Shoot doom siren first, more hits). If they get assaulted after the disembark they still have init 5 and go first most times. If they don't get assaulted you fire the doom siren again, shoot your pistols, then assault.

Yeah i agree, if i had the models i'd use them but i'm stuck using regular CSM. I disagree with the blasters though, them being salvo 2/3 instead of assault 2/heavy 3 sucks, but as a static firebase they do wonders with the ignores cover special rule.

Exergy wrote:cult troops are ONLY worth it if you have a lord to make them troops. PM are really the only really good ones, zerkers have been nerfed signifigantly and Tsons never were all that great. Noise Marines arent particularly good either, but the doom siren and blastmaster are cool. Salvo USR has made the sonic blasters terrible.

I don't disagree with anything aside from the blasters being terrible (they can be good as a stationary firebase), keeping cults choices as elite's is bit of a long shot, i thought i'd mention it if anyone else has ideas there, but i'd like this thread to be about how we (not i, we) can work around the short comings of the cult troops. As a Tsons player I shared my thoughts on combing them with Noise Marines to expand on the Tsons shooting abilities.
I haven't used plague marines but they look awesome, they're durable, shooty & have cc capabilities BUT they're expensive, so cultist, zombies & IG detachments are my obvious picks. IMO necrons might be a good ally for plague marines, with some res orbs they can be just as annoying to kill as PM & they offer some awesome units choices.
I haven't used Berzerkers in this edition but i'd imagine their biggest problem is getting into combat unscathed, rhinos seem like a bit of a death trap & footslogging takes too long. Huron's an option, combing his infiltration with some deep striking daemons could work, bloodletters, plaguebeaers, daemon princes spring to mind to add some target saturation.

juraigamer wrote:Noise marines make great assault units, as do khorne berzerkers, both are fearless, noise can gain FNP, and khorne can re-roll the charge range plus furious charge.

Then you have plague marines, tough little guys and can handle many roles. Finally thousand sons, who are basically hell to kill unless you use lots of attacks/shots.

The trick is what does your army need in it. If you want thousand sons but are having trouble with hordes, then yes adding noise marines is a good option. Same deal with khorne berzerkers, who's going to hold home base while they are off zerking around? Plague marines.

Now, aside from the ap 3 bolters of thousand sons and the GEQ killy rifle of noise marines, everything else can be done, sometimes better with normal CSM. If you take cult troops make the most of them, otherwise give the old CSM a try.

Yeah I completely agree, personally I run unmarked CSM sometimes & they work fine. Khorne marked CSM w/ bolters & ccw could be a good addition to a Berzerkers army? They could provide some much needed shooting while slogging it up the board

The best way to protect cult troops is numbers. Take a ton of them and do whatever you can to maximize their strengths.

I run 4 squads of 10 noise marines in most games, completely loaded out with sonic weapons, the IoE and a Rhino. I keep them in a giant mob on the board, making it very hard to assault or win a firefight against them. They are either completely devastating or create situations where opponents are doing everything they can to avoid them. They have natural limitations fighting Tau and Necrons, but other than that they are a very effective force.

I imagine it's a similar case with Plague Marines and TSons, it's hard to field a force that can deal with them effectively. Spread lots of units of them across the board and let your enemy try to take them down, the odds are that they won't have enough troops to take down lots of units of them.

I don't know the case with Berzerkers, since no one I know plays them in 6th edition (favoring CSMs with MoK instead). I do know that 10 CSMs with MoK charging out of a Land Raider is a horrible thing for opponents to face.

Now imagine 20

I've used a 20-man squad of noisemarines with 7 sonic blasters and 2 blastmasters recently. Scoot up turn 1, leaving blastmasters stationary. Fire those. For the rest of the game, just snake around the bolter guys in the front to where they're needed to either get to an objective or move into firing range. The unit being fearless and fnp does wonders. They can either deploy on an objective or move forward onto one, and the unit is pretty deadly in an assault as well.

My only problem with multiple smaller units is buying the icon over and over again. This 20-man unit has done me fairly well, though it does reach close to 500 points.