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Hey guys. So I really like Centurion Devastator models.

My bud told me about this Centurion-Star thing but I'm not quite sure if it's still valid/ competitive since the new SM codex released. Can anyone explain if it's still good in the competitive meta of 40k and what it's composed of?

Thanks you!

The centstar is basically a deathstar army using Devastator Centurions w/Grav as the main offensive focus. You then add some characters to it like Tigurius or Loth, Draigo, etc. and you have a pretty mean psychic deathstar.

Yes, it is still competitive, but as with any deathstar army, MSU is a counter to it. Hence why it might have problems with the new Space Marines and in particular, Battle Company.

Cent-star is still a thing and it's pretty solid. Essentially, you're throwing in some independent characters to shore up Centurians few weaknesses. These characters are usually some sort pysker(s) going for Gate of Infinity, and then stuff like Invisibility, the Ignore Cover power from Divination, etc. You will sometimes also see a beatstck CC character defend against Assaults. Usual suspects are Tigurius, Draigo, Coteaz but there are other good ones as well.

Centstar is 4-6 grav cents with a bunch of psychic support. Typically you see draigo for guaranteed gate and Tiggy or Loth for Invisibility with a GK Lib for Diviniation or other goodies. With conclave you can get even more support.

There's variants that use other codexes and shenanigans. There's also more of a mini cent unit in pod with an IC but it isn't really a deathstar.

I still play it regularly at tournaments and honestly I'm having a learning curve with the new meta... The heavy msu armies and grabbing objectives is by far the biggest weakness. This list can easily steamroll a lot of lists but it does struggle against some. In order to be successful you need to play fast to maximize your damage potential and to not run out of time. You do this by having prewritten sheets / charts to fill out for your psychic powers pregame and then a full mastery of the psychic phase and how it works. You generally don't die so much as just run out of time to kill your opponent or grab enough points.

I've been playtesting and working different builds ever since the new sm book dropped including a double centstar list that uses the Libby conclave but honestly I feel like that wasn't the right list for the new meta. It was reliably getting the necessary powers for the two centstars but just wasn't killing fast enough and wasn't versatile enough without the supporting army elements.

I think coteaz is almost mandatory because of droppods and especially against culexus assassins
Draigo is amazing and definitely worth his points just for automatic gate let alone him tanking wounds and being able to split off and murder squishy targets

It's a very unforgiving yet fun to play army
It's definitely not breaking the format by any means but it is very much competitive

I am planning to bring the centstar to Nova....just 1 big 'ole deathstar unit and a couple of troops. Lol.

 jy2 wrote:

I am planning to bring the centstar to Nova....just 1 big 'ole deathstar unit and a couple of troops. Lol.

Care to share your list please

I'd rather keep it private for now, as it isn't finalized yet. I still need to do some playtesting on it and so might make changes based on my practice games. But friendly it isn't. No, this is a hardcore list for tournament play only.

What you do to support it helps, depending in points and what you own, Stormtalons or Dreadknights go well with it.

If you know there will be SHVs, might be a good idea to bring some NDKs, for example, as they can crush a Knight when they double team them.

But the key is the star. Grav/Hurricane Bolters, usually draigo, tigurius/loth (tigurius warlord trait makes those hurricane Bolters much more terrifying), maybe a conclave, and a GK librarian.

Can also be run without the GKs, if you roll a conclave and smashfether. Might even be able to fit it into a Battle Company/Gladius at 1850.

Cent-stars, aside from having problems in the current meta, are also one of the few things actually countered by a Culexus.

And despite all reason and logic, people still love the Culexus. They'll likely be all over at NOVA with the third "mini-detachment" format.

DJ3 wrote:
Cent-stars, aside from having problems in the current meta, are also one of the few things actually countered by a Culexus.

And despite all reason and logic, people still love the Culexus. They'll likely be all over at NOVA with the third "mini-detachment" format.

With Cypher, the Culexus isn't a problem.

I'm getting 2+ cover against his shooting (in ruins).

I then shoot him, assault him and Hit-&-Run out of combat at the end of his Assault phase.

However, in the 2 times that I did go up against him, he died to my shooting both times, despite me hitting on 6's.

BTW, if you can't cast Prescience, then use your Ultramarines Devastator Doctrines to twin-link your shooting against him.

Anybody who expects a Culexus to live past the arrival turn is doing it wrong anyhow--granted, that's common, and is a huge part of why it feels like 90% of the Culexus strategies people try accomplish literally nothing.

All a Culexus can be relied upon is one turn of mucking up your Psychic powers. With Cent-stars being essentially the only relevant Psychic unit in the game that doesn't move 12", for them that's increased to two turns--the arrival turn, and the fact that you won't be able to move your Psykers out of the 12" bubble with only a 6" move the following turn.

The only Culexus strategy that has a chance of working is dropping it in and hitting the target unit overwhelmingly hard that turn. It's just about removing the defensive powers. Then you smash into it with a Bikewolf unit or something, and crack it open in one turn. Regardless of how many IC's you've got in there, you don't want to be tanking ~40 re-rollable S10 attacks from a Bikewolf unit when your Invis and Sanctuary are down.

In general, it doesn't work against Seer Councils because you'll never catch a Seer Council (and nobody plays Seer Councils) and it doesn't work against Daemons because it still can't turn off the Grimoire. It certainly doesn't always work against Centstars either, it's just that Centstars are the only ones that have much of anything to fear from it at all.

Plenty of Bikewolf players will be using that third detachment to grab one, though. Hitting a unit they can't kill in one turn is about the only weakness to that army, and with Superheavies/Gargantuans out of the mix, they'll be able to focus more heavily on Psychic deathstars.

DJ3 wrote:
Anybody who expects a Culexus to live past the arrival turn is doing it wrong anyhow--granted, that's common, and is a huge part of why it feels like 90% of the Culexus strategies people try accomplish literally nothing.

All a Culexus can be relied upon is one turn of mucking up your Psychic powers. With Cent-stars being essentially the only relevant Psychic unit in the game that doesn't move 12", for them that's increased to two turns--the arrival turn, and the fact that you won't be able to move your Psykers out of the 12" bubble with only a 6" move the following turn.

The only Culexus strategy that has a chance of working is dropping it in and hitting the target unit overwhelmingly hard that turn. It's just about removing the defensive powers. Then you smash into it with a Bikewolf unit or something, and crack it open in one turn. Regardless of how many IC's you've got in there, you don't want to be tanking ~40 re-rollable S10 attacks from a Bikewolf unit when your Invis and Sanctuary are down.

In general, it doesn't work against Seer Councils because you'll never catch a Seer Council (and nobody plays Seer Councils) and it doesn't work against Daemons because it still can't turn off the Grimoire. It certainly doesn't always work against Centstars either, it's just that Centstars are the only ones that have much of anything to fear from it at all.

Plenty of Bikewolf players will be using that third detachment to grab one, though. Hitting a unit they can't kill in one turn is about the only weakness to that army, and with Superheavies/Gargantuans out of the mix, they'll be able to focus more heavily on Psychic deathstars.

I agree. The strategy for the Culexus is to bring down the psychic defense and then hit the unit with overwhelming firepower. This can be of the cover ignoring variety. The Culexus then just has to be within 6" of Draigo and the Centstar won't be able to Gate away and that will be another turn of no psychic defenses. The Culexus shooting is only icing on the cake and not always needed, though his psyche out grenade can't be stopped.

I've dropped a Culexus on one side of the Centstar and a Librarian on the other side and hit the unit with Psychic scream. 3d6 on leadership 7 really hurts. None of the Centstar librarians are generating any warp charge points so they don't have the dice to stop the Scream.

While you hope to kill him T1, you can't really take it for granted that you will. I've seen the Culexus survive before against other opponents. With the gravstar, they are hitting on 6's and then wounding on 6's with the grav-cannons. With a 4++ save, that means it takes 72 grav shots just to put 1W on the Culexus. Thank goodness for hurricane bolters (but even with hurricane bolters, a unit of 5 centurions will only average 2.25W). When I play against him, I have to assume the worst - that I will need to assault him after shooting at him.

As for TWC Space Wolves, they are manageable. You've got options.

1. Screen them out with your cannon fodder troops. In my list, I run scouts in land speeders. I've got the mobility to get up there to screen them out and force them to either go around my scouts or to assault them.

2. With Cypher, just Hit-&-Run out of combat with the Culexus (assuming he survived your shooting and assault) at the end of the opponent's Assault phase. Then on your turn, move and then Gate away from the TWC.

The Culexus is bad news for the centstar, that's for sure. However, in my build, I've designed it so that he is merely a nuisance and not a complete bottleneck to my army.

DarthDiggler wrote:
I've dropped a Culexus on one side of the Centstar and a Librarian on the other side and hit the unit with Psychic scream. 3d6 on leadership 7 really hurts. None of the Centstar librarians are generating any warp charge points so they don't have the dice to stop the Scream.

While they don't have a lot of dice, with a GK librarian and Tigurius in there, don't forget that they are denying on a 4+ or even 3+ (psyker, higher-level psyker, Aegis).

Your comments (killing him on T1 and/or your offensive output against him being relevant) seem to indicate you've been testing against people who deploy their Culexus. I've genuinely never even seen that.

A Culexus in any reasonable list will be in a Pod, at minimum, and is why your capability to kill him is irrelevant--he's accomplishing his goal just by standing there. His offensive output is similarly irrelevant. He's solely there to shut off your powers for a turn (or two for a Centstar, as mentioned) and allow some sort of massive offensive gutpunch from the rest of a list.

Worst case scenario (and a much worse list, but still, worse matchup for a Centstar) has him flying around in one of those ludicrous Space Wolf flyers. It's a bad list, but it's still a thing that happens. Culexus in a Flyer is the point at which it actually starts to become annoying for the other Psychic armies too (Daemons/Eldar), but again, an army that dumps ~350 points into protecting a Culexus has a tendency to lose to everything else anyway.

Everytime I've played against him, he's been in a pod. I don't move away from him. I move towards him (since I can't escape anyways). I've been lucky to have killed him both times with shooting. But even if I hadn't, with Draigo and Cypher in my star, I would have assaulted him and then Hit-&-Run out.

There was 1 other time I played against the Culexus in a pod. That game, I didn't bring Cypher and so I reserved my star. The Culexus survived that game to get Linebreaker and my home objective, but we basically ignored each other the entire game.

the only valid usage of a culexus I can think of involves putting it in a stormraven. Aside from that, its a t4, footslogger model without eternal warrior and a 4++. A WK will ruin him 1/2 the time on each wound alone, including an auto hit hammer of wrath so eldar can ignore him. Nids can take the little guy out of the game with a tarpit or mucolid him down to earth if hes in a flyer. A centstar will have some kind of non psyker (Dante, Sang Priest, Captain w/ pfist) that is a beatstick. So if the little guy doesnt hold his own against the big three hes only in a list to trash demons, and I think if your planning a WAAC list with the concept of using 1 of your 3 detachments for one model as a hard counter to a single army your gimping yourself against every other foe, and from that it becomes a very unlikely selection to plan for.

Not to mention that more and more centstar lists run coteaz now to counter both skyhammer, dropped assault, as well as the pod culexus... Centstar isn't scared of culexus realistically anymore imo

JY2...you might want to double check the way NOVA is ruling Cypher. He has infiltrate and the unit does not; therefore, he cannot deploy with the unit, as he is forced to infiltrate.

Even deploying cypher with them, which apparently isn't an option at NOVA at least, I don't see centstar as a tournament winning build anyway. It's way too easily beaten on missions by the currently top books.

Drop pod anything with him in a pod of his own will tear that unit to shreds in one turn. Any other list will have WAY too many units for the star to beat on missions realistically.

It's a neat gimmick list for anyone traveling light, that's basically how I'd describe it. It will ruin some peoples day early on but then will get weeded out as the tournament goes on. Personally I think SW/DA make a better deathstar though I am not a D-star lover at all.

I see your point with msu based armies and objective grabbing being a struggle but aside from gladius it doesn't truly have a bad matchup... Maybe it's not as dominate as it once was but I feel I'm always at least able to compete in each match up.
The supporting cast outside of the Centstar is what really matters since that's what allows you to have more threats and potentially grab objectives
The centstar is far from dead like so many think it is... To be honest it's been frustrating trying to retool it for the new meta but has been working well with my changes imo

DayOne916247 wrote:
Not to mention that more and more centstar lists run coteaz now to counter both skyhammer, dropped assault, as well as the pod culexus... Centstar isn't scared of culexus realistically anymore imo

Coteaz is ok, but he isn't a great counter to Drop Pod armies. What he is great for:

1) Eldar/DE Webway wraithguards with D-scythes.

2) Pushing drop pod units out of plasma double-tap range or melta ranges.

However, the big problem is this - drop podding Grav-cannons. Skyhammer and centurions can still drop out of Coteaz's range.

 JGrand wrote:
JY2...you might want to double check the way NOVA is ruling Cypher. He has infiltrate and the unit does not; therefore, he cannot deploy with the unit, as he is forced to infiltrate.

I agree. That was how I was running him, that he cannot join the unit until their Turn 1.

BTW, I wasn't planning on running Cypher at NOVA.

 Red Corsair wrote:
Even deploying cypher with them, which apparently isn't an option at NOVA at least, I don't see centstar as a tournament winning build anyway. It's way too easily beaten on missions by the currently top books.

Drop pod anything with him in a pod of his own will tear that unit to shreds in one turn. Any other list will have WAY too many units for the star to beat on missions realistically.

It's a neat gimmick list for anyone traveling light, that's basically how I'd describe it. It will ruin some peoples day early on but then will get weeded out as the tournament goes on. Personally I think SW/DA make a better deathstar though I am not a D-star lover at all.

The centstar is as winning as any other competitive build. They have some bad matchups, but so do any other top build. For example, Battle Company might give centstar a problem, but then BC will get wrecked by Flyrant-spam Tyranids or Scat-bike Eldar. RW will potentially give Tyranids and Scat-bike Eldar lots of problems and a centstar with Perfect Timing will mess up RW. And so on.

Each army has its weakness. Each army can be somewhat countered by another army in this Rock-Paper-Scissors game of ours. However, the centstar is and will always be a threat to almost any other army. IMO, they have as good a chance to compete with as any of the other armies if you consider the RPS nature of our game.

What is RW?

Ravenwing.

Well said jy2
It's great to hear that about centstar especially from someone as experienced as yourself
I am still very much struggling with the optimal supporting cast for the centstar at this point, especially with the meta shift
Gladius is basically the counter to centstar so basically on that match up I just hope to get kill point rolls on my secondary missions and then probably grab my ankles while they snatch points lol jk

I'm tempted to try and fit in the hunter / stalker formation into the centstar list to try and hurt flyrant spam and daemon princes since those lists seem popular these days... Thoughts?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also back to the countering droppods and skyhammer with coteaz... I misspoke on that... What I meant is that he allows you to survive long enough to gate away... Also I'm not sure how often I'll see or how competitive the all grav skyhammer is because of its points cost... Thoughts?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

DayOne916247 wrote:
Well said jy2
It's great to hear that about centstar especially from someone as experienced as yourself
I am still very much struggling with the optimal supporting cast for the centstar at this point, especially with the meta shift
Gladius is basically the counter to centstar so basically on that match up I just hope to get kill point rolls on my secondary missions and then probably grab my ankles while they snatch points lol jk

I'm tempted to try and fit in the hunter / stalker formation into the centstar list to try and hurt flyrant spam and daemon princes since those lists seem popular these days... Thoughts?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also back to the countering droppods and skyhammer with coteaz... I misspoke on that... What I meant is that he allows you to survive long enough to gate away... Also I'm not sure how often I'll see or how competitive the all grav skyhammer is because of its points cost... Thoughts?

Forget about trying to specialize your list against flyers. IMO just go for more ground units. The centstar (with 4-5 cents) actually have enough firepower to take down 1 flyrant or un-grimoired DP a turn even without Skyfire (if you've got Prescience and Perfect Timing on). That is actually pretty good. Invest the rest of your pointage on more troops. That will be how you will beat them as traditionally, FMC-spam lists are weak in the Maelstrom department compared to ObSec marines.

But if you really want to get an anti-flyer unit, IMO one of the best currently is the Fire Raptor.

Grav Skyhammer is going to be common in competitive play. It actually makes for a super-nasty alpha-strike SM army. I played against one at the Contest of Champions where he ran the Skyhammer formation with 2x4 Grav Devastators and then 2x3 Grav Centurions in drop pods. All of them can potentially come in T1.

I've got a friend who runs and even nastier version. He ran the Skyhammer formation with 2 Grav Devastator units (not sure how many gravcannons in each) and then 3x3 Grav Centurions along with 3x5 marines, all in drop pods. At the ATC, out of about 200 players, he ended up 2nd place overall. It is an extremely devastating build.

You've got 2 courses of action against such an army:

1) Reserve your star and pray that the rest of your army can survive.

2) Go for 1st Turn so that you can power up (i.e. Invisibility) or that Cypher has time to join your unit (to give it Shroud). The downside is that you are playing against ObSec units who are going 2nd in the Maelstrom Secondary and you will lose 1 turn of shooting from the lack of targets Turn 1.

Wow those lists do seem nasty... Thanks for the info
Cypher is something to think about for sure, never considered him before honestly

Oh, before I forget, there is a 3rd option:

3) Get a bunker or bastion (or similar fortifications) to house your star. Bunker is the cheapest.