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Hey all. I'm just about done collecting my Tau (10,000 pts) and my nids aren't far behind (8000ish). I haven't played 7th as of yet but was wondering where Militarum Tempestus fall in the playable/competitive aspect of the game.

I've been lurking up and down the the forums and there isn't much about them it seems. I know I'd like to do a guard army of some kind and I've narrowed it down to Catachans I think and Militarum Tempestus.

Any info, advice, or tips on collecting these armies would be greatly appreciated

Thank you

Also on a completely separate note how big are the Catachans arms compared to a space marines?

They're not very good. The army in its entirety is Commissars, Taurox Primes, Scion units, and Valkyries. No Vendettas, no Chimeras, basically just Valkyries plus whatever the three new kits that came out in April/May.

On top of that, the Scions suffer from several issues. They do have orders that can help alleviate some, but requires close coordination. They have largely the same statline and only slightly better survivability relative to a 5pt IG grunt trooper, but cost as much as a Space Marine. They have AP3 guns, but they're basically armor piercing wet noodle guns, remaining S3 with a reduced range of 18" with a Rapid Fire profile, meaning you're not getting as many shots in at 24-18" and 12-9" as with regular lasguns and the Strength still struggles to wound most basic troops in this game. The book has some formations and orders to try and remedy these issues, but it requires excellent command to work properly, and even then will still struggle against most truly competitive lists and even many not-so-competitive ones.

On top of that, the book often reads like Harry Potter torture porn, with students killing students in the Schola, teachers killing students in the Schola, etc and in all sorts of awful ways with tons of really bad faux-latin that sounds hocus-pocusey.

I was initially really excited about this, I've always wanted a Stormtrooper codex, but GW putzed it real hard.

EDIT: the Catachan models are a tiny bit bigger in some ways than the Catachans, so they're not quite as bulky as the SM's but are just as tall and not much smaller, basically if you assemble an SM without the shoulderpads you've got something Catachan sized.

 Vaktathi wrote:

EDIT: the Catachan models are a tiny bit bigger in some ways than the Catachans, so they're not quite as bulky as the SM's but are just as tall and not much smaller, basically if you assemble an SM without the shoulderpads you've got something Catachan sized.

Didn't they 'fix' the scale issues with the catachan command and heavy weapon squads though? So you've got heavies and leaders that are noticeably different to the grunts?

That I don't know, I've never seen one of the command squads on a table nor purchased

I think the Scions can actually be a fairly formidable shock element that you mostly take for their specialised duties in getting special weapons in your opponent's face. If I had the time and money, I'd make an Elysian army with allied Scion contingent and Inquisitor detachment.

Take 2 Inquisitors and 3 servo skulls on each, then whatever other gear you want, though you'll need Terminator armour to drop with your infantry in deepstrike. I'd just model each servo skull as smoke grenades (with a stream of accompanying sprayed cotton or something similar), because they'll serve 2 purposes - any pie plates you have scatter less, and all your infantry scatter 1D6 less as well within 12'' of them. Makes them pretty similar to how non-concealment smoke grenades are/have been used in warfare, since it works as a sort of LZ and target marker.

You can place them across the board so your opponent will have to spread out (kind of like the opposite of the anti-drop pod tactic most people use) to knock out your landing sites, and then drop Elysians on turn 1 iirc because of combat drop. The beautiful thing is that if you take platoons with special weapons in each squad, you can determine before each game whether your opponent has enough blasts to make blobbing suicide (since they all go b2b) or whether you'll want to saturate his target priority more. Scions are useful because of the Command Squad Volley Gun team, because of the nice MT orders and because they're a scalpel you can use to put small footprint, higher damage output units in key points across the board in the second wave. Well, either that, or you can run them as Elysians in carapace/however Stormies work with them now.

The models look pretty nice, though building them isn't half as simple as building Cadians or Catachans, especially if you want variation in poses/appearance. I'm pretty glad with how mine turned out, though I found the only kit I've had more difficulty building how I wanted are Ogryns and Nork Deddog.

Seriously, specialsnowflake Ogryn is built from 20 different pieces, including the cigar and the feet split in two. I counted, because it took about hours to prep and build the sod.

I have to say, Mr.Omega, I really like the idea of using smoke grenades for Servo-Skulls.

I'm doing an imperial fists army with scion allies. Plan is for the Fists to stand back and pound the enemy with Thunderfire and Centurions, while a Sternguard Squad drop pods in on turn 1 followed by 3 deep striking Scion Squads on turns 2-3. No idea how it will work but I love the idea of it.