Ecdain wrote:
KhorneontheCobb wrote:A Lord of Change armed with the Paradox staff guarantees a unit of summoned daemons if you use 5 warp dice.
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Or a herald of Tzeentch for that matter
Oh? How's that work?? Would be awesome.
The Paradox lets you, once per turn, flip the warp charge dice upside down for a psychic test.
So you roll 5 dice. You'll either pass it (3+ successes) or fail it (3+ failures). But if you get 3+ failures, flip the dice upside down and you get 3+ successes instead! Its the only way in the game I believe to 100% guarantee casting a power.
If you want to go summoning, you can stack warp charges quite easily as Tzeentch, but beware of going too far in to summoning and not getting enough board presence. The stuff you summon in takes a while to get going, and the enemy can capitalize on this by targetting your squishies quickly to get your dice down.
You should budget roughly 6-7 dice to cast summoning without the Paradox. 5 dice gives 50% chance, 6 is 65%, 7 is 77%.
The best spells to keep are obviously Incursion and Sacrifice. Sacrifice is the one you really need to be casting to beef up your warp charges quickly.
Your army should consist of Fateweaver and/or some Tzeentch Daemon Princes, some heralds of Tzeentch in units of Screamers, and Pink Horrors in units of 11-12 models. Heralds are your most efficient Warp Charge generators (3 dice for 95pts), and Horrors give 2 dice at 11 models / 99pts. The screamers are important to keep around because you need mobility and they're pretty decent in combat; the Daemon Princes give some credible combat threat; and Fateweaver mitigates a lot of the pain Warpstorm brings.
YOu need to consider the maths of summoning vs just bringing stuff to the table. 2 Heralds of Tzeentch cost 200pts for 6 Warp Charges. If they only get to cast Summoning, but survive all game, they cast 6 times at 65% chance for 4 successes, or 400pts brought in. These units can be of any type (whichever is best at the time), but can't really do much the turn they arrive, so its a bit of a tradeoff. When you look at the return from Horors, they cost 300pts to bring in 400pts across the game (assuming none of the 3 units takes even a single casualty), again with the tradeoffs above. You need to consider if it would be better to just have a 300pt unit of Daemonettes on the table turn 1 rather than coming in piecemeal.
My base that I'd start with for a summoning army is:
Fateweaver
Herald of Tzeentch, Lv3, Disc, Paradox
Herald of Tzeentch, Lv3, Disc, Grimoire
Herald of Tzeentch, Lv3, Portaglyph
11 Horrors
11 Horrors
9 Screamers 275
This gives you 17 dice to start with, with an investment of 1200 pts. That gives you 2-3 summons per turn, which is probably sufficient.
You CAN go higher with dice, but you suffer from not having any combat presence; and you've nearly exhausted your cheap warp charge sources. 3 additional units per turn is pretty bonkers anyway.
From there i'd probably invest in more combat threats. You can go with Daemon Princes of Tzeentch in Heavy Support to give Warp Charges + combat power; or more screamers. A unit of Nurgle Plague Drones with Herald is also a popular addition at this point to give a big deathstar.
Summoning needs to function as a complement to your combat presence - to bring in threatening units where the enemy thought they were safe, or to get objectives that were out of reach - but if you make it the sole focus of your force you'll end up with a ton of squishy wizards and no actual board presence. So be warned.
. Also Noone in my area plays any sort of chaos other than a straight nurgles player.
