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I want to talk about synergies and maximizing the daemon engines.

I played with a decimator with 2 soulburner petards and a leviathan with 2 butcher cannon arrays last night. The decimator was amazing with a lord close by. The leviathan was good and hit pretty hard.
Bloat drones are the bomb. Fly and the 1" extra move are worth the extra points, I think a few crawlers with a lord and a few drones is the answer.
I think epidemius is an auto-include, as is a warpsmith and a couple of chaos lords.

Alpha Legion
sorcerer
warpsmith
Decimator w/ soulburners
2 contemptor with 2 x soulburners and 2 x fists
Leviathan w/ butcher cannon arrays
Deredeo w/ butcher cannons and greater havoc launcher

Death Guard
2 x lord
bloat drones
plagueburst crawlers

Daemons
epidemius
big plaguebearer squad? Nurglings?

Sounds good.
I wouldn't say a warpsmith is auto include, as there are Nurgle daemon spells that can cover healing.

Each Lord only affects it's own Legion so you are looking unoptimised there. And worth noting a deamon prince had the advantages of a Lord and sorceror and adds to the tally!

I would definitely consider a Warp Smith though, simply because you can only cast the daemon spells once per turn, and likewise a unit can only be healed by one Warp Smith per turn - the problem is the Warp Smith keeping up with a running or charging model.

I take Warp Smiths simply because I love my old models that I use for them...but mobility is an issue (particularly with their short range weapons).

edit

Another thing to note, Obliterators are keyword faction deamons, make em nurgle, they'll add to the tally and catch every spell/stratagem.

The nurgle Loci effects your daemon engines (even shooting), and Obliterators also happen to be eligible for Veterans of the Long War. Drop em down with a Deamon Prince and you're hitting 3s rerolling 1s, wounding +1 (from VotLW) and 5+s do +1 damage.

I'm running an army that leans into Daemon Princes with the affinities, stacking Virulent Blessing and Blades of Putrefaction on the same prince is brutal (especially if he's equipped with Corruption). You're wounding on 2s on basically anything, rerolling, 5s cause a mortal wound, get +1 damage (if within nurgle Loci), and do double damage (in that order). With corruption you're looking at up to 8 damage (plus a mortal) per 5's to wound. Even a maelific talon is doing 6 damage per 5's to wound with that setup.

I’m a fan of mingled detachments, as the Death Guard benefits for Death Guard only detachments are less useful for a Daemon engine list.

Epidemius as an HQ is pretty much mandatory for me.
Daemon princes with wings are good as babysitters for drones.

I would run something like this

Outrider
Epidemius
Drone w/sprayers x 3
Mower drone

Outrider
DP with wings
Drone x 3 -probably sprayers or mowers

Spearhead
Lord or DP
Crawler x 3

Maybe throw in a unit of haulers. Add more drones to taste

We have a few FW options too, but I don’t run FW much

hollow one wrote:
Another thing to note, Obliterators are keyword faction deamons, make em nurgle, they'll add to the tally and catch every spell/stratagem.

Unfortunately, as far as I know (which was checking the GW errata just now) GW have now erratad this and moved Daemon to a keyword (not a faction keyword) for all the CSM units that are not "full" daemons (i.e. not also found in the Daemon codex)

Mark.

Ah damn you are correct! I had not noticed this, thanks for pointing that out.

Foetid Bloat-Drones are pretty brutal, I tried running two at the weekend and they did a lot of work.