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Hello all, Im not sure what section this should be put in so if a MOD see's fit to move it that would be welcome. Anyhow, onto the show.

After moving to CSM with the release of Traitors Hate, I am left with a few questions on how three things work.

a) Can the supplement Crimson Slaughter be used to create a Black Crusade detatchment? Black Legion is fine to use due to it being listed as a chaos space marine faction but the Slaughter is worded in a different way. Which is, that it uses the CSM codex to make up its composition rather than outwardly stated that it is a CSM force ala Black Legion.

b) The Heldrake Terror Pack formation states that when a model from its formation makes a vector strike against a pinned target that it deals extra hits. My question is thus. In pinning rules it says that the unit being pinned returns to a normal state at the end of its FOLLOWING turn. To me this reads that if a unit is pinned in my shooting phase then it is gone to ground for both my turn AND his next turn, leaving the unit still in a pinned state at the beginning of my next turn to where I can vector strike it. My opponent says this is not the case and the the pinned unit returns to a normal state at the end of his turn making the special rule of the Heldrake Terror Pack useless. Which of us is right?

c) The Terminator Annihilation Force has a special rule called Target Updated. In which it states that if the recipient of the Targeted for Annihilation special rule dies or is removed from play that you (the controlling player) can pick a new enemy unit as a replacement unit. My question is that since CSM terminators have no way of returning to reserves that they cannot deep strike a second time to make use of the rule on the new target. Which would make the rule useless.

Now once more, im sorry if this is the incorrect section for these questions. If anyone has answers id be very grateful for them. Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure for A & B off-hand, but for C, this is in case you nominate a light target (say a Rhino) as your Targeted for Annihilation and it went off after you Deep Strike, or some other unit killed it beforehand.

One thing I'm personally wondering about is that the rules specifically say Deep Strike and not Deep Strike Reserve, so it could be amusing to see if this combos with Gate of Infinity...

 MagicJuggler wrote:
I'm not sure for A & B off-hand, but for C, this is in case you nominate a light target (say a Rhino) as your Targeted for Annihilation and it went off after you Deep Strike, or some other unit killed it beforehand.

One thing I'm personally wondering about is that the rules specifically say Deep Strike and not Deep Strike Reserve, so it could be amusing to see if this combos with Gate of Infinity...

Hey, thanks for answering. The rule says Deep Strike and not Deep Strike reserve. Im aware of Gate but its a sanctic power and not sure that is worth the extra chance to peril just to get a few more bolter shots on a target. But it could be.

I wasn't thinking Bolter shots. Burning Brand on the other hand. It's still rather silly mind you.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
I wasn't thinking Bolter shots. Burning Brand on the other hand. It's still rather silly mind you.

Now you are cooking with gas. And a great idea. But, i am not sure if a attached charecter is subject to the units special rules. Would be great to find out however as it would be a nasty combo.

A) CS and BL work the same. You can make any csm detachment or formation also a supplement formation which gives the detachment/formation extra rules. Both are of faction: csm.

B) Pinning wears of at the end of the opponents following turn, aka the turn after yours. So you pin something in your turn, they remain pinned during the opponents turn and when your next turn starts they are unpinned again and since vectorstriking happens in the movement phase you don't get a chance to pin them again. The only way to vector strike a pinned unit would be to pin it during the opponents turn or during your movement phase, so unless you are charged and overwatch with a pinning weapon I'm not sure how you're supposed to make this happen. So yes, that bonus rule is all but pointless.

Or you'd need to get super exotic and get the auloth legacy and put it on a hell talon. Now it's bombs are pinning and they also hit in the movement phase, but ...erm...why?

C) It's not useless, but it's not as amazing as you first think. It's hatred(everything) so it's better than the decurion hatred and still applies when they charge the unit later. Plus you have a minimum of 3 units which are unlikely to arrive at the same time, so you can kill the target unit and then nominate a new one for the units that didn't make their reserve roll.

And as for reserves, it specifies them deploying by deepstrike, which means putting them in deepstrike reserve and arriving either naked or in a flyer.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Table wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
I wasn't thinking Bolter shots. Burning Brand on the other hand. It's still rather silly mind you.

Now you are cooking with gas. And a great idea. But, i am not sure if a attached charecter is subject to the units special rules. Would be great to find out however as it would be a nasty combo.

Any random character, no. The formation requires a lord or sorcerer though, which benefit from the formation rules and can take the brand. Funnily enough you could also throw quite a lot of blight grenades with this.

Could you pin a target if you wrecked its transport with a Vector Strike (or with the Terminator formation)? I'm guessing their intent was "Keep the Heldrakes around, lower Leadership, then get extra hits in." It's still a very incidental bonus at that. The rule seems more intended for "following up" breaking your opponent after an assault, so it's still gimmicky. An extra Ld penalty bubble would be nice for Daemons though if they comboed it with Nurgle's bell.

You could if those caused pinning, but neither of them do.

A-Yes, you totall can. do note though, that the formation The Tormented does NOT work well with CS due to the fact they cannot have any units with VotOW, and a deamon price can't not have one.

B-Your opponent is correct. the effect ends in the end of your opponent's turn. getting an enemy unit pinned in your own movement phase is absurdly difficult and can generally only be done by vector striking a transport and blowing it up (overwatch does not work, you can't pin in overwatch), or some sort of special ability that lets you shoot in the movement phase on a unit that happens to be pinning.


C-the hatred part still works (as little at that's worth), and it works perfectly well if the target died/left the field before the terminator squad has deepstruck. I assume the "died before we got here" is the reason why that rule exists.

Excellent answers! Its to bad about pinning. I was making a Slanneshi warband based around pinning and vector striking heldrakes. Oh, what could have been.

Welcome to CSM- where our special rules aren't that special.

 BoomWolf wrote:
A-Yes, you totall can. do note though, that the formation The Tormented does NOT work well with CS due to the fact they cannot have any units with VotOW, and a deamon price can't not have one.

B-Your opponent is correct. the effect ends in the end of your opponent's turn. getting an enemy unit pinned in your own movement phase is absurdly difficult and can generally only be done by vector striking a transport and blowing it up (overwatch does not work, you can't pin in overwatch), or some sort of special ability that lets you shoot in the movement phase on a unit that happens to be pinning.


C-the hatred part still works (as little at that's worth), and it works perfectly well if the target died/left the field before the terminator squad has deepstruck. I assume the "died before we got here" is the reason why that rule exists.

Checked the rules again. You're right. Pinning just says"... [the unit] must take a Leadership test once the firing unit has finished its shooting attack for that phase." emphasis mine. Pinning doesn't specify the shooting phase so would work in any phase, except that overwatch fire can't cause morale or pinning tests. You can, however go to ground from overwatch fire, which makes zero sense to do, but you can. Indeed the last sentence in going to ground says that if you go to ground from overwatch, the charge fails. Which isn't going to happen, like ever. Unless you rigged the dice something fierce.

People seem to overlook the fact that the Terror Pack's bonus goes against units that are falling back as well, so the rule isn't 100% useless. Pointless to include pinning in there, but the rule itself can still be used.

Didn't say the rule as a whole is useless, said the part about pinned/gonetoground units is (practically) useless as the scenario is impractical as it gets.

Unis falling back are often not your prime targets either. and units that fall back on your movement phase are also not very common. practically everything is ATSKNF (auto regroup in their turn), fearless or dead meat anyway.

The formation rules are pretty lousy.
And that's fne because its the "spam heldrakes" formations. and heldrakes are pretty awesome even without formations.

 Roknar wrote:
A) CS and BL work the same. You can make any csm detachment or formation also a supplement formation which gives the detachment/formation extra rules. Both are of faction: csm.

But there is still no way to get the free votlw for a cyclopia cabale, right? As the cabale is not listed as part of the Black Crusade Detachment?

Regarding C, it's not useless at all. The sequence goes like this:

1. Roll for all your reserves together.
2. Deploy a unit from this formation onto the table via deep strike.
3. Immediately make a shooting attack with the unit.
4. If the target is destroyed, immediately pick a new target.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all units from the formation are deployed.

So you can potentially kill multiple targets during the movement phase. Pity there aren't many weapons in a terminator squad worth firing multiple times in a turn.

You could try to pin someone with 6-th Strategic warlord trait and than start your drake on board using a landing pad. Also, they can go to ground from movement phase shooting like csm or marine termie shooting or genestealer cult ambush shooting. It might even come into play once...in gaming history.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Roknar wrote:
A) CS and BL work the same. You can make any csm detachment or formation also a supplement formation which gives the detachment/formation extra rules. Both are of faction: csm.

But there is still no way to get the free votlw for a cyclopia cabale, right? As the cabale is not listed as part of the Black Crusade Detachment?

I wish. I'd be all over that. You take the cabal in parallel to the detachment and unfortunately the free VotLW doesn't apply army wide, it's only detachment wide. I actually prefer the BL formations because of how much smaller they are, but between tax units and mass VotLW they don't really work out all that well. I like playing BL but I still try to minimize the impact of VotLW. Even for fun games it's too expensive to just buy it on everything.

 Cheexsta wrote:
Regarding C, it's not useless at all. The sequence goes like this:

1. Roll for all your reserves together.
2. Deploy a unit from this formation onto the table via deep strike.
3. Immediately make a shooting attack with the unit.
4. If the target is destroyed, immediately pick a new target.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all units from the formation are deployed.

So you can potentially kill multiple targets during the movement phase. Pity there aren't many weapons in a terminator squad worth firing multiple times in a turn.

There's an article on BoLS that uses this sequence as an example of why it's actually really good. You use it as counter for Interceptor. Use your Termies to kill whatever has interceptor, then bring in your Raptor Talon formation unopposed.

 Roknar wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Roknar wrote:
A) CS and BL work the same. You can make any csm detachment or formation also a supplement formation which gives the detachment/formation extra rules. Both are of faction: csm.

But there is still no way to get the free votlw for a cyclopia cabale, right? As the cabale is not listed as part of the Black Crusade Detachment?

I wish. I'd be all over that. You take the cabal in parallel to the detachment and unfortunately the free VotLW doesn't apply army wide, it's only detachment wide. I actually prefer the BL formations because of how much smaller they are, but between tax units and mass VotLW they don't really work out all that well. I like playing BL but I still try to minimize the impact of VotLW. Even for fun games it's too expensive to just buy it on everything.

Yeah, that's the bad thing about chaos. Even now that we got a lot of supplements it doesn't really help since you can't really connect them. It would be a blast if we could take the balestar of mannon in a black crusade detachment cabal...
However, it is possible to take a core choice of the black crusade detachment as Black legion and the auxillary choice as crimson slaughter, right?

Yes. You would have to take the crusaude detachment as vanilla csm though. Then you can still make any od the individual detachments anything you want. Except for a few exceptions, like the command formation or the veterans of the legions, since those aren't real formations. On the plus side it allows you to take special characters or a daemon prince in an otherwise CS army. The command choice would be vanilla csm after all.

Wrong, the entire Crusade is a single detachment and a such must be the same supplement

The crusade detachment is a csm detachment and follows csm rules, the formations that make it up are also csm detachments and any csm formation can also be made into a supplement formation. They are still csm formations. They are also all still faction:csm.

 Cheexsta wrote:
Regarding C, it's not useless at all. The sequence goes like this:

1. Roll for all your reserves together.
2. Deploy a unit from this formation onto the table via deep strike.
3. Immediately make a shooting attack with the unit.
4. If the target is destroyed, immediately pick a new target.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all units from the formation are deployed.

So you can potentially kill multiple targets during the movement phase. Pity there aren't many weapons in a terminator squad worth firing multiple times in a turn.

As someone that does Termicide a lot, it is mostly about running afterwards for a sweet maybe-going-to-survive squad.

 koooaei wrote:
You could try to pin someone with 6-th Strategic warlord trait and than start your drake on board using a landing pad. Also, they can go to ground from movement phase shooting like csm or marine termie shooting or genestealer cult ambush shooting. It might even come into play once...in gaming history.

Only Flyers with the Hover rule can start on a Skyshield.

Heldrakes have Hover.

If you're running a Warband, free VotLW for upped Leadership helps alleviate one of the main weaknesses of Chaos. If you're running Lost and the Dammed or (even) the Maelstrom, Crimson Slaughter at least gives Fear on assorted units that wouldn't get if (Spawn and Cultists. Spooky, spooky cultists).

Dra'al Nacht wrote:

 koooaei wrote:
You could try to pin someone with 6-th Strategic warlord trait and than start your drake on board using a landing pad. Also, they can go to ground from movement phase shooting like csm or marine termie shooting or genestealer cult ambush shooting. It might even come into play once...in gaming history.

Only Flyers with the Hover rule can start on a Skyshield.

A requirement that the Heldrake meets

 CrownAxe wrote:

Dra'al Nacht wrote:

 koooaei wrote:
You could try to pin someone with 6-th Strategic warlord trait and than start your drake on board using a landing pad. Also, they can go to ground from movement phase shooting like csm or marine termie shooting or genestealer cult ambush shooting. It might even come into play once...in gaming history.

Only Flyers with the Hover rule can start on a Skyshield.

A requirement that the Heldrake meets

My mistake. I didn't think they had hover for some reason. . .

Cheexsta wrote:Regarding C, it's not useless at all. The sequence goes like this:

1. Roll for all your reserves together.
2. Deploy a unit from this formation onto the table via deep strike.
3. Immediately make a shooting attack with the unit.
4. If the target is destroyed, immediately pick a new target.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all units from the formation are deployed.

So you can potentially kill multiple targets during the movement phase. Pity there aren't many weapons in a terminator squad worth firing multiple times in a turn.

So, if you have three units of terminators as per the minimum of this formation, and you deploy one unit, which destroys the target, you can deploy another unit elsewhere on the board?
Or can you deploy ALL units via Deep Strike, unload, and (if you kill the first target) deep strike elsewhere on the board next turn?

BoomWolf wrote:Wrong, the entire Crusade is a single detachment and a such must be the same supplement

I thought this was the case. Can anyone give a clear yes/no?

The clear answer is that a detahment may only containa single faction, by default. Marines then hav ea furhter restriction on the detachment having a single chapter tactic, however I do not believe Chaos has the same restriction

Thus CS CSM and BL CSM are still faction CSM