This thread is to talk about the benefits of going with Damonic Incursion, and to determine if this is a valid approach to building armies, and to discuss the various advantages and drawbacks of it.
Command Benefits
Daemonic Corruption :
Objective markers controlled by units from this Detachment count as controlled for the rest of the game, even if the controlling player has no untis within 3" of them.
This effect lasts until an enemy scoring unit controls it.
This effect is really powerful, but requires a change of playstyle to get the most out of it. For years, we have played with the concept of 'deckchair units' whose job was just to sit down on an objective the entire game.
This this rule, the daemons can advance forward passing over any objectives. If you opponent has no units that can jump deep into your zone to remove those objectives, you can count on having them for the rest of the game. This playstyle leads for a daemon host that is advancing forward instead of sitting back, making for a much more aggressive playstyle.
It's not just the troops that have this command benefit. If you are running a Tetrad, then all four princes not swooping can take corrupt objectives while closing on the enemy.
Your units in this formation do not have objective secured in tradeoff to a
CAD -- however I think that the tradeoff in this case is worth it if you are playing an aggressive list - which most of the daemon lists you can build are.
Unearthly Power :
When rolling on the Warp Storm table, you can choose to add or subtract 1 from the result
This is another power that has obvious benefits. I've heard the phrase, "You don't need to take fatey" with this perk.
This command benefit is actually a lot better than fateweavers reroll. The reason is simple, you are not forced to pick the second roll if it's worse. You need to roll a 2 or 3 in order to have no negative effects you cannot mitigate, or a 8.33% per game turn. Conversely, that's a 91.66% of a good result.
You can also shift the most common roll -- a 7, to something that will have an effect on the game. This means that you are not getting 'null' results, and given the ratio of good to bad results, the warp storm table suddenly becomes a very nice perk of the army.
You will still occasionally roll that 3 on the table. If your luck is like mine, that roll will seem to come up every game -- but over the course of enough games it will average out. Even if you are forced to make an instability test, the next command benefit can help reduce the damage incurred..
The Warp Unleased :
You can choose to re-roll any Daemonic Instability tests for units within this detachment
Humans naturally have something called the
'Optimism bias" - a cognitive bias that causes a person to believe that they are less at risk of experiencing a negative event compared to others. It's our natural reaction to look at something like this and say to ourselves "Oh, I'm playing an assault army, I'll never need to make instability tests"
In actuality, it happens -- even with assault oriented lists. A few bad dice rolls, and you can easily lose combat by just 1. This has caused me to lose multiple wounds off my tetrad before, or caused squads of plague bearers to just evaporate. Lets say that you have a
LD 7 unit lose combat by one, then you will pass the instability test 41.66% of the time. This is pretty bad. However, if you can reroll this value, then you have about a 65.85% of passing the test!
Furthermore, if you failed by a large percentage resulting in the loss of many wounds, you can reroll the result. If you failed the test with just one wound lost, you might want to keep the result as a 'marginal failure'. The overall result is that your units take less wounds.
Other Advantages
One Detachment
There are some options available to you in this detachment not normally allowed in a CaD, such as the ability to grab three daemon lords. To achieve this, normally you would need to grab multiple CaDs.
Furthermore, the detachment also throws away the concepts of 'Heavy', 'Elite', 'Fast Attack', etc. Bringing six soulgrinders becomes very easy to do with this detachment.
All models in the detachment count as being part of the detachment and the formation, meaning that all units grab the three command benefits above.
Excellent Units
Almost every formation that in this detachment is really good with very little 'tax' that has to be paid. The only 'tax' are a unit of Chaos Furies, but even those can be useful to jump around and corrupt objectives.
Drawbacks
Lack of Herald Spam
You can only bring one Herald per formation, and not in even then in every formation. If you normally like bringing 4 Heralds, this can be a downer.
Expensive Formations
This is the biggest kick in the pants for this detachment. While the formations are good, they are expensive point-wise due to the sheer size. A warpflame host will run you ~800 points. A rotswarm costs between 800-1000 points. A forgehost costs between 420 and 500 points.
This limits the flexibility of your detachment -- especially at lower point values.
AT 1850 you can bring a warpflame host, burning skyhost and daemon lord -- but you won't have the flexability of a unit with 3 heavy slots, 3 elite slots, etc.... The degree of this disadvantage is debatable. It encourages more 'spam', but we already see a lot of spam in today's lists.
Your Thoughts
So what do you think of the Incursion? Is it worth it? Why or why not? Did I miss any advantages or disadvantages?
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