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They seem like a faction that is Warhammer 40k on easy mode. Every model is T7/8 and has a shield for 5+ invuln. They have giant Knights that can get boosted for 4++ that give aura bonus to all nearby knights. They are also no slouch in melee even if you close the distance. They can basically blow away tanks and do okay in melee. Then they move 12” and charge so they have great mobility. Then they have “counts as C models” for taking objectives. It just seems like their play style is super simple “move up and shoot everything”. AND their whole army has these dread auras that cause more of your units to flee. My opponent say “well they don’t have an invuln in melee”. So what? They’re still squads of walking tanks that are dangerous at every distance and hard to wound to begin with. They seem like they don’t even belong in 40k as a faction.

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts. if any faction could just run all tanks with invulns that could also shoot into combat and have good melee it would be nuts. Chaos knights seems like total BS to me.

Well, they’re kind of oddly limited.

Yes they have the perks you mentioned, but even dropping a single one leaves a pretty large hole in their line.

As for Objectives? They don’t tend to come in large numbers, and yes they count as X models, but for horde armies or mob tactics, that doesn’t necessarily help them.

And being few in number, focussing firepower just doesn’t carry quite the same risks as against more numerous armies. Yes small arms firepower is little threat to them, but never confuse Little threat with no threat. Pour it on, plink those wounds away, letting your beefier weapons have an easier time when doing the heavy lifting.

They also need to be wary of Mortal Wound Spam, when nobody cares about their toughness and respectable save.

warpedpig wrote:
They seem like a faction that is Warhammer 40k on easy mode. Every model is T7/8 and has a shield for 5+ invuln. They have giant Knights that can get boosted for 4++ that give aura bonus to all nearby knights. They are also no slouch in melee even if you close the distance. They can basically blow away tanks and do okay in melee. Then they move 12” and charge so they have great mobility. Then they have “counts as C models” for taking objectives. It just seems like their play style is super simple “move up and shoot everything”. AND their whole army has these dread auras that cause more of your units to flee. My opponent say “well they don’t have an invuln in melee”. So what? They’re still squads of walking tanks that are dangerous at every distance and hard to wound to begin with. They seem like they don’t even belong in 40k as a faction.

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts. if any faction could just run all tanks with invulns that could also shoot into combat and have good melee it would be nuts. Chaos knights seems like total BS to me.

And why are Imperial Knights not a problem for you?

Never played Imperial Knights. I’d imagine they’re about the same right? Another cheeseball faction.

Used to be that a Terminator Squad with TH/SS could kill 3-4 Knights in a round of combat with the Fight Twice Strat. Probably can't do that anymore, but the point is that Knights can be taken out pretty easily if you're prepared for it.

warpedpig wrote:
They seem like a faction that is Warhammer 40k on easy mode. Every model is T7/8 and has a shield for 5+ invuln. They have giant Knights that can get boosted for 4++ that give aura bonus to all nearby knights. They are also no slouch in melee even if you close the distance. They can basically blow away tanks and do okay in melee. Then they move 12” and charge so they have great mobility. Then they have “counts as C models” for taking objectives. It just seems like their play style is super simple “move up and shoot everything”. AND their whole army has these dread auras that cause more of your units to flee. My opponent say “well they don’t have an invuln in melee”. So what? They’re still squads of walking tanks that are dangerous at every distance and hard to wound to begin with. They seem like they don’t even belong in 40k as a faction.

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts. if any faction could just run all tanks with invulns that could also shoot into combat and have good melee it would be nuts. Chaos knights seems like total BS to me.

Sounds like someone's a sore loser.

Anyways, I've never had too much trouble with Knight lists (Chaos or Imperial).

warpedpig wrote:
They seem like a faction that is Warhammer 40k on easy mode. Every model is T7/8 and has a shield for 5+ invuln. They have giant Knights that can get boosted for 4++ that give aura bonus to all nearby knights. They are also no slouch in melee even if you close the distance. They can basically blow away tanks and do okay in melee. Then they move 12” and charge so they have great mobility. Then they have “counts as C models” for taking objectives. It just seems like their play style is super simple “move up and shoot everything”. AND their whole army has these dread auras that cause more of your units to flee. My opponent say “well they don’t have an invuln in melee”. So what? They’re still squads of walking tanks that are dangerous at every distance and hard to wound to begin with. They seem like they don’t even belong in 40k as a faction.

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts. if any faction could just run all tanks with invulns that could also shoot into combat and have good melee it would be nuts. Chaos knights seems like total BS to me.

And yet I can majestically fly my Bloodthirster with Argath King of Blades over to it and mathematically will cut any 24 wound knight that doesn't have an invulnerable in melee clean in half. In a single fight phase 80% of the time.

And as for Imperial Guard? Can pretty handily dunk a big knight or two per turn with their shooting.

See, the thing about knights is that for a 400+ point model they are in fact fragile. They have devastating offensive power but it is far harder to remove a brick of Dark Angels Terminators that cost less or even the Indomitable Onslaught Bloodthirster that kills knights easily I mentioned, who costs like 360 points.

I play Chaos Knights. My win ratio is around 50%, they are not overpowered, and tend to be pretty fragile in the games I've played.

The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

warpedpig wrote:
The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

So build a list that can do a bit of both or take more heavy weapons in your squishy list. The idea is to build a list that can take down a reasonable swathe of threats without hitting hard counters not to build a list that can't handle armor and then whine about it.

Knights are not overpowered in a Meta sense.

Goonhammer Stats https://40kstats.goonhammer.com/#GbF have Chaos Knights at 45.69% Win Rate in Arks of Omen. Imperial Knights are worst at 43.46%.

Games Workshop Metawatch https://www.warhammer-community.com/2023/03/09/warhammer-40000-metawatch-reading-the-omens-of-the-arks-of-omen/ has them a bit higher at 50% for Chaos Knights and 47% for Imperial Knights.

In any particular matchup, there can be serious problems between a Knight army and others depending upon builds. Competitively, Knights simply don't have what it takes to be top tier, although the are near the middle of the pack in performance.

warpedpig wrote:
The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

A "low toughness" army - lke say, Guard? Lol, I bring enough anti-tank firepower that I'm not worried about whether a Knight might shrug some of it off.

warpedpig wrote:
The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

With all the d3+3, meltas, ignore inv guns, able to shoot at them while being hidden etc you can blow them up quite well. Can also use ruins etc to hinder their path to melee forcing them to go around.

If you bring army of only intercessors with bolters...well that's problem with your list building

Hint: if you want shooty army you bring in the big guns. Not some random bolters and bolt pistols and call it a day.

warpedpig wrote:
The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

Just name drop the army you're talking about versus knights and boy I hope it isn't guard. Because if there's one army that can just reach out and pick up two 400+ point knights a turn at range it's the Imperial Guard.

Chaos Knights are the better of the two Knight armies but they're not overpowered. Yes, they have all the advantages you mention, but they are a low model count army even if they spam the Armiger class knights, which is generally seen as they best approach with them. Each model lost is a big blow. They often struggle to play the primary well, even with their "counts as X models" rules. They also give up Bring it Down as a secondary really easily. They shoot well and can do close combat well, but not on the same models, and they still suffer from simply having fewer guns than everyone else, which makes it more difficult to use their weapons efficiently.

Knights are a very skewed army though, which can lead to some bad games due to match-up issues, even if you have a generally balanced army yourself. I've seen players just get massively flustered when an opponent drops a whole bunch of T7/8 models on the board and almost beat themselves before a single dice is rolled. You need to approach games against Knights differently to other games, but any reasonable army build should be able to do fine against them.

I have played against chaos knight army with my harlequins and Votan a lot times and never lost to them.

I am going to hazard a guess that you were playing an infantry heavy guard list and/or are rather new to the game with a limited collection?

The important thing to remember about knights is that only 1 model can get the 4++ a turn, so once your opponent uses it focus on something else and above all against knights focus one down at a time. Do not waste your shots by splitting fire to whittle multiple knights down, focus on one because once a single knight is gone the offensive output of the list decreases dramatically.

Guard have some fantastic tools, aka Vanquisher or Shadowsword, for wrecking knights. Also, in reference to your point about an all tank army with 5++ for guard...that is entirely possible. With Enginseers and Primaris Psykers you can give your tanks 5++ and with the AoO detachment you can take nothing but tanks.

(Speaking from the perspective of having played imperial knights but not chaos ones.)

It's not that they're overpowered; it's that they're automatically a skew list. And skew lists tend to be frustrating to play against if you don't happen to have the right tools for the job.

As Mad Doc Grotsnik says, the smart move is to keep piling on your small arms fire even though it doesn't do much, but rolling that many dice for so little effect can be kind of an unpleasant experience in its own right.

You can absolutely win the match by focusing on objectives, movement blocking, etc., but it can almost feel like you're not playing 40k when the enemy's entire army is nearly immune to your low strength attacks. I'm unashamed to say that I've straight up turned down games against pure knight armies because it's just not an experience I want to spend several hours of my life on.

No shade to knight players. Knight armies have cool fluff and cool models. But 40k just doesn't handle all-knight armies very well. They were an awkward fit when introduced, and they still run into scale issues now.

It’s part of the risk of taking a skew force of your own.

Themed Lists can be a lot of fun to field. Sometimes you absolutely steamroller an underprepared opponent. Sometimes, steam rolls you. But most of the time, you and your opponent get a fun and hopefully different experience.

I find it hard to sympathise with Themed List get their occasional steamrolling, because it’s simply the price of the theme. Sooner or later, your Achilles Heel is gonna get an arrow to it.

For instance? Green tide Orky armies. Going back to 7th Ed they kind of relied on being too numerous for the opponent to stop. Imperial Knights (for Chaos Knights hadn’t arrived) were a bad matchup though, as your green tide could be forced into a scrap where it just couldn’t damage its opponent, tying up a huge portion of the Orky Force in a forlorn hope, leaving the other Knights to claim objectives etc. It wasn’t a sure thing, but a dicey situation for the Orks.

If your theme is purposefully light on anti-tank? That’s your choice, and you need to take your licks when it doesn’t pan out.

You sometimes have to think outside the box as to where a faction benefits the game, as we've found Knights to be ideal opponents for solo-coop and for games of "mini-40K". Also, we've worked them(Armigers) into games of the older edition of Kill Team.

Finally, Knights are a good choice for players who's only opponents tend to be insisting on large point games, but they don't want the hassle of painting so many smaller models and vehicles.

warpedpig wrote:
The point is, if you have an army thats naturally going to be going for melee then yes Knights arent that crazy of an opponent. If you have a low toughness army thats not great at melee then knights shrug off a ton of your shooting and just stomp over you because their just naturally tough as hell. So its rock paper scissors, which is lame.

This. Even matchups are rare with IKs. If you want to have a good battle fight another IK player or tell the opponent to adjust his list before the game to avoid an one-sided massacre.

Well, if they're pushing all big knights then pick objectives that aren't kill focused and beat them on count. It would be incredibly easy to get into their backfield with free reserves when they only have 4 models.

As Mad Doc Grotsnik says, the smart move is to keep piling on your small arms fire even though it doesn't do much, but rolling that many dice for so little effect can be kind of an unpleasant experience in its own right.

It's not even necessarily that low an effect. Whilst knights have a 4+ invulnerable save, they don't have the 2+ save with armoured tracks like guard heavy tanks do, so small arms knock off wounds a lot more often than you'd think.

Born Soldiers guard ignore the knights' key advantage- that universal T8 - with auto wounding hits, and I've seen guard infantry fire chew through them terrifyingly fast.

Daedalus81 wrote:Well, if they're pushing all big knights then pick objectives that aren't kill focused and beat them on count. It would be incredibly easy to get into their backfield with free reserves when they only have 4 models.

The issue isn't necessarily that winning is difficult (warpedpig may disagree with me); it's that the core engagement of the game (meaningfully trading blows with your opponent) might not be there. Agreeing to play 40k and then spending the game scoring objectives without being able to meaningfully fight back is like agreeing to play Connect Four and then your opponent breaks out Shoots and Ladders. You might still win, you might even still have fun, but it's just not the experience you agreed to.

locarno24 wrote:

As Mad Doc Grotsnik says, the smart move is to keep piling on your small arms fire even though it doesn't do much, but rolling that many dice for so little effect can be kind of an unpleasant experience in its own right.

It's not even necessarily that low an effect. Whilst knights have a 4+ invulnerable save, they don't have the 2+ save with armoured tracks like guard heavy tanks do, so small arms knock off wounds a lot more often than you'd think.

Born Soldiers guard ignore the knights' key advantage- that universal T8 - with auto wounding hits, and I've seen guard infantry fire chew through them terrifyingly fast.

That's true, although auto-wounding rules (hi swooping hawks) are rather odd ducks. It's very weird that lasblasters are one of my more reliable tools for forcing Mortarion to take saves.

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts.

8th and 9th have always allowed pure guard tanks, as far as I know. And whilst they may not have an invulnerable save with a 2+ save they might as well do as even AP-3 hits still dink off your mundane armour on a 5+.

locarno24 wrote:

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts.

8th and 9th have always allowed pure guard tanks, as far as I know. And whilst they may not have an invulnerable save with a 2+ save they might as well do as even AP-3 hits still dink off your mundane armour on a 5+.

I'd argue that a tank spam skew list is annoying in a lot of the same ways an all-kinghts list is. There's a little more counterplay as tanks are bad in melee (so you can charge them to force them to shoot your melee units instead of your objective holders), but it's still the sort of skew list that can lead to a bad experience.

locarno24 wrote:

If Imperial Guard could run 100% Leman Russ and they all have 5+ invulns they would be pretty nuts.

8th and 9th have always allowed pure guard tanks, as far as I know. And whilst they may not have an invulnerable save with a 2+ save they might as well do as even AP-3 hits still dink off your mundane armour on a 5+.

Wether you're a Guard tank, a Knight, termies, etc? You go right ahead & make those 5+ saves. I like my odds of damage getting through just fine & I like it a far sight more than if you'd been aiming for 2+s.
And if some bounces? Eh. I've got more fire in- bound on you.
(ranged firepower is NOT something my armies lack. Especially not my Grots. Not by a longshot. Hell, even my melee lovin World Eaters pack more firepower than most people expect).

Oh I completely agree. But my point is that I don't get why a tank with a 2+ save is somehow ineffective without an invulnerable save because stuff with AP-4 or better is very few and far between so to all intents and purposes you rarely need worse than a 5 anyway, especially if you've bought armoured tracks and have a sort of 1+ save against damage 1 weapons.

It's the same reason why guard don't necessarily need dedicated antitank weapons if you've got enough 'born soldiers' high rate of fire weaponry.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

The issue isn't necessarily that winning is difficult (warpedpig may disagree with me); it's that the core engagement of the game (meaningfully trading blows with your opponent) might not be there. Agreeing to play 40k and then spending the game scoring objectives without being able to meaningfully fight back is like agreeing to play Connect Four and then your opponent breaks out Shoots and Ladders. You might still win, you might even still have fun, but it's just not the experience you agreed to.

I think all it takes is a bit of reframing.

Your task is to lead your army to victory. Perhaps you find yourself in the part of the wider battlefield where there are these knights and perhaps even a titan visible, but not active in the zone. You know you can't overcome this force easily and the titan will soon be in the area, but you can delay and hamper until 'reinforcements arrive'.

The game at least now gets to be more than 'roll dice and stuff goes boom'. Victory in the face of adversity is the best kind of generalship, imo.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

The issue isn't necessarily that winning is difficult (warpedpig may disagree with me); it's that the core engagement of the game (meaningfully trading blows with your opponent) might not be there. Agreeing to play 40k and then spending the game scoring objectives without being able to meaningfully fight back is like agreeing to play Connect Four and then your opponent breaks out Shoots and Ladders. You might still win, you might even still have fun, but it's just not the experience you agreed to.

I think all it takes is a bit of reframing.

Your task is to lead your army to victory. Perhaps you find yourself in the part of the wider battlefield where there are these knights and perhaps even a titan visible, but not active in the zone. You know you can't overcome this force easily and the titan will soon be in the area, but you can delay and hamper until 'reinforcements arrive'.

The game at least now gets to be more than 'roll dice and stuff goes boom'. Victory in the face of adversity is the best kind of generalship, imo.

I get that there might be in-universe scenarios where delaying tactics or various objectives are the point, but that's still not necessarily the experience I'm signing up for when I show up at the table for a pickup game. See above's Connect Four vs Chutes and Ladders example. I've even had this happen to me. I've hastily thrown together a pickup game online, showed up at the store with a bunch of splinter rifle toting drukhari only to find that my opponent's army was a couple of armigers and some bigger knights. I played the game, got my licks in, used movement blocking to my advantage, played the objectives, etc. I was a good sport about it and had a reasonably good time, but it was neither the sort of game I thought I'd be playing that day nor an experience I'm eager to repeat.

In 5th edition, the Battle Missions book had a special scenario where one guy brought a trio of baneblades and the other guy brought a list tailored to try and deal with the trio of baneblades. The non-baneblade guy's goal was to destroy as many of the baneblades' guns as they could by the end of the game with the remaining number of guns acting as a modifier on a die roll to see if the baneblades successfully blew up an off-screen shield generator. That's a cool scenario where the non-baneblade player knows they almost certainly won't be wiping out the baneblades and winning a straight up fight. But you'll note that:
* Both players know that there's going to be a skew list involved in advance.
* The non-baneblade player gets to tailor their list to pack it full of anti-tank guns.
* Because you're loading up on anti-tank guns, you still get to spend the game doing the core engagement of 40k (trading blows).

It's not a surprise one-sided fight where half of one player's army is useless.