Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Ice_can wrote:
Well chaos knights artical confirms Ironstorm pods are blast weapons as well as thermal spears. That does mean that so far knights are not shooting into combat with 90% of their weapons, unless they get a rule to do so.

But your warlord gives you 3CP if Armiger and 6CP if Titanic.

Mono knights seem viable in 9th but I suspect patrol detachment of allies for 2CP isnt going to be uncommon.

Well knights can step out of combat, shoot and charge again. Another benefit is that you get to strike first due to charging as non chargers it's the player whose turn it isn't that starts.

Except Armiger's can't do that, the big lads can though they need to be careful about getring wrapped as they can only use their fallback rules against Infantry and swarms.

Though I'm just hoping GW dont up the cost of a RFBC egen more because it's a blast weapon it's already rediculously over costed.
Not shure how much wiggle room thwre is for a lot of Knight's to see any points increases as they die stupid quick when you take multiple.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 grouchoben wrote:
A patrol costs 2cp - that's hardly crippling is it? I think the numbers have wiggle room for a further tax, consdering a Knight SHD backed up by a BA patrol will give you 10+5cp without an explicit soup tax.

I did wonder if the community article has maybe been written/edited by the PR team and they have made another mistake.

A Super heavy Aux at 1 or 2CP wuuld be more inline with Stu's statements and would be consistent with additional codex costong 1 or 2CP.

Much more feasible to add a LoW from your own codex that way but makes going hard into multi LoW less likely.

Hey @Darkhound, turns out you were right on the money - I've had a look through the 9e leak and can't find any soup tax in there.

Here's the complete breakdown...

spearhead 3 cp doesnt return cp

vanguard 3 cp doesnt return cp

outrider 3 cp doesnt return cp

patrol 2 cp returns cp

brigade 4 cp returns cp

super heavy auxliary (1 lord of war) 3 cp doesnt return cp

fortification 1 cp returns cp

Well loose 2 titanic models and your opponent gets 15 VP for it, 1 titanic gives up 10

Also arimgers are 3VP for each one killed and insult to injury.
None of the secondarys look particularly helpful for knights to be able to score easily.

yeah not an edition balanced around elite infantry to the exclusion of balance for everyone else.

Those secondaries are more than fair. You can't choose to get both 3VPs from Armigers and VPs from Titans, since they're the same category. An opponent also can't score the max 15 unless you bring 5 Armigers, so they probably won't.

Knights are perfectly suited to the Attrition secondary, scoring 4 VPs for each round they killed more units than they lost. That's almost automatically 15pts.

Likewise, Engage on All fronts is easy to pick up since Knights have great range and can afford to spread out. Alternatively, Linebreaker is an option, especially with a lot of Warglaives.

Lastly you can pick a Purge the Enemy secondary that suits your opponent's list. If they have 5 vehicles, you take Bring It Down and get an easy 15pts. Or else if they have more than 2 characters, then you take Assassinate. Of course, Slay the Warlord is less than ideal, but do-able failing any other option.

Knights can very easily score 40+ VPs on generic secondaries, and we haven't even gotten the Knight-specific secondaries yet. Most other kinds of armies are going to struggle to secure the maximum points from secondaries. I'd say Knights have a huge advantage, maybe even enough to ignore the primary objective until it's convenient.

Pure knights are giving away that 15 either way be it titanic or armigers.

Compairing that against a lot of the Marine lists that were prevalent at the start of the year your struggling to get more than 10VP's alot of the time bar the 1 that I expect to loose due to the detachment changes which was assasinate and that would have been a risky pick.

Unfortunately I doubt we will see a new codex untill atleast a year into this edition which is where the faction specific rules will be and untill then I suspect it might not actually be easier to play mono knights in 9th than it was in 8th. but onwards for honor and glory.

Sure, they get Titan Slayers for free, but you get Attrition for free in return. I think you're focused way too hard on killing and trying to get value out of Purge the Enemy. I honestly don't think I'd pick any Purge the Enemy over the mission-specific secondaries unless I was up against a skew list.

Looking at the missions, you'll need to include more Armigers to control more of the board. I also think 9th's focus on objective and board control raises the value of Banner of Macharius Triumphant and the Freeblade trait Sworn to a Quest. Especially using a Freeblade Armiger to sneak on to backfield objectives.

Now, obviously holding objectives is the Knights' weakness. Instead of despairing that you can't get awarded for killing, you should focus on how you can score.

Most mission-specific secondaries reward encircling the enemy and going to their deployment zone. Use that as an opportunity to kill their backfield anti-tank, and temporarily concede the main objectives. You focus on picking up the minimum 5 points and keep them from getting 15 for the first couple turns. Once you've cleared the backfield and scored your secondaries, you can cleanse and contest each main objective. You don't need to be winning every turn for the entire game, you just need to have scored more points after turn 5.

I was leaning to wards armiger spam anyway thanks to the janky terrain rules.

However they look look like they will probably need the custom household for falbavk and shoot or charge, need to test that.
I suspect taking 1 Questorus or above is unfortunately going to be the best way to play short term unless the points take a massive swing in their favour.

Also depends on the new FW rules, my Atropos, Styrix and Lancer would like to be playable.

Good news on the modifiers multiplication followed by additions and subtractions weakens a number of anti knight melee units

I just finished up my Terryn force in time for the new edition. Normally when I paint the same thing for a while I get bored of it, but I found painting the knights to be pure joy. Right now I have two warglaives and two magnetized questoris. Ideally I can run it as pure knights and grab a few more armigers and maybe a valiant, but if it doesn't go that way I can always ally in something. I was thinking about potentially a small dark angels force to sit back on objectives while the knights push up.

Well just watching the Tabletop Titans shows, Army worst effected by the change to 9th edition Knight's

Sound like Allies are mandatory and they have less durability than they used too.

Reece from frontline told me knight players have plenty to look forward to in 9th edition.

Maybe he meant enjoying the money that you make eBaying the models

 Ideasweasel wrote:
Reece from frontline told me knight players have plenty to look forward to in 9th edition.

Maybe he meant enjoying the money that you make eBaying the models

Unfortunately I often find Reexe's idea of "Knight's" to actually be some form of Admech or Guard Soup with 1 or 3 knight's added to give it substance.

It's like asking how the chicken is today and beung told the chicken soup is lovely.

If I wanted chicken soup I'd have asked for chicken soup damn it ;P

"Some guys on Youtube said it's bad, we should probably sell our models."

Can we maybe talk about why, and what we could actually do about it? At this point all the rules have been revealed/leaked except the points changes. There's just not that much different than 8th edition. The worst thing I see is that Knights are disadvantaged against obscuring terrain, but that's reasonably fair when the Knight can see over virtually any other kind of terrain. Otherwise I think secondary objectives actually help mitigate the Knights' weakness at holding objectives.

Haha, I was just having a bit of fun

Although as a Taranis player some big changes are afoot

Our Darkest hour (zombie res) is no longer something I would use

3CP to have to not blow up (1/6) then a 50-50 roll with no influence is no longer viable

When the chances were 66% I’d still fail it shockingly often. Now it’s in low 40’s?(maths) it’s just not worth it.

Maybe they will get a rework

 Ideasweasel wrote:
Reece from frontline told me knight players have plenty to look forward to in 9th edition.

Maybe he meant enjoying the money that you make eBaying the models

The guy that said stompa would be broken good in 8th...

 DarkHound wrote:
"Some guys on Youtube said it's bad, we should probably sell our models."

Can we maybe talk about why, and what we could actually do about it? At this point all the rules have been revealed/leaked except the points changes. There's just not that much different than 8th edition. The worst thing I see is that Knights are disadvantaged against obscuring terrain, but that's reasonably fair when the Knight can see over virtually any other kind of terrain. Otherwise I think secondary objectives actually help mitigate the Knights' weakness at holding objectives.

My Knights arn't going anywhere but apparently the TLD as they where doing a Live Q&A session so not massive detail they are trying to husstle alot of this out about a week plus ahead of schedule now.
The is me

Primary missions are very challenging to do well in as you need to spread out and hold alot of points on the board. Obsec on tough models is a big thing in winning "cough" Primaris do this well "cough"

Knights are so expensive you really need to be maximising both shooting and CC for damage output

Alot of the secondarys are based to holding ground or performing actions.

So far all the actions require you to have infantry, swarm keyword, Knights dont have that, so we are back to playing the stand in certain locations game

With tanks becoming more viable expect people to be teching into vehical killing as the meta goes vehical heavy for the first 3-6 months

The killing secondarys apparently never give maximum points for like 90% of lists sounds like this is by design.

Honestly as Knight player I'm used to be at disadvantage. When I started playing Knight by the end of 7th and during the beginning of 8th, any game was an uphill battle... At least until we had our moment of glory (even if, in my opinion, it was due to Castellan and when you play against someone without a codex: our own codex was alwasy average at best... maybe difficult to manage and to face for a newbie, but never top tier competitive).

In my opinion Knight has always been almost a weird TAC list: if your enemy shoot you engage in melee, if it's strong in melee you shoot and so on so forth.

That said: I think that there are glimmer of hope for 9th edition... but not because we are in a good shape: quite the opposite.If the point increase are accurate, we can field 3 Knight or 4 if we go solo under 2000 point.

I think Knight will be even less competitive, and they will slowly fade away from any competitive scenario and netlists even as a single model due to Detachment system.

Once this happen, we will be able to come back to the table in a different state: people won't be able to tailor relic and warlord trait before the game; the shorter table help us a little to leverage our use of any phase of the game, to limit to stack modifier avoid wombo-combo to which we are particularly susceptible and the amount of CP should allow us to keep reserves and avoid alpha strike... and last but not least I'm not yet sure primary and secondary really disadvantage us.

Also, I'll probably be able to switch from Terryn to another Imperial Household because the Thunder of Voltoris isn't anymore the only battlecannon that made sense. And I can guarantee you that the Banner of Macharius and Sworn to a Quest for a Freeblade make wonder for your objective game if you gave them to the less threatening Knights in your Household.

I suspect next 2-5 months to be really grim... but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I can’t predict the future but I will say this

Competitive 40k games already have had people
Stacking a ridiculous amount of AT for years.

So much so that bye bye, I lose knights a turn almost every turn. This was in a time where as Ice mentions above vehicles were ok.

Now that vehicles have got a load of buffs inbound and weaknesses like tagging and the addition of blast....it’s not unexpected to assume that bringing a metric ton of AT is still a good tactic

That bodes badly for knights. I actually think knights offensive power is massively overrated. The same if not more so for their survivability

 Ideasweasel wrote:
I can’t predict the future but I will say this

Competitive 40k games already have had people
Stacking a ridiculous amount of AT for years.

So much so that bye bye, I lose knights a turn almost every turn. This was in a time where as Ice mentions above vehicles were ok.

Now that vehicles have got a load of buffs inbound and weaknesses like tagging and the addition of blast....it’s not unexpected to assume that bringing a metric ton of AT is still a good tactic

That bodes badly for knights. I actually think knights offensive power is massively overrated. The same if not more so for their survivability

I agree with you, but at the same time I think the AT will focus (as it is now) on mid strength weapons... or, at least, that's my hope. 90% of our resilience is already in the T8 anyway.
Also, I think that due to the performing actions to be made to score and the secondaries infantry will be (or will become) king rather than vehicles.... but we'll see.

Maybe the Detachment system will help a little? We can have our 3 Knight plus a Patrol of something else with very little loss of CP... I'm more worried for the warlord traits and relics CP cost in the new environment.

BTW: playing as Imperial rather than Mechanicus Knight it's not unusual to lose around 25-35 wound any turn... and I'm not talking about top tier list, but average casual list with a bunch of anti AT because they know they will be facing Knight.

A very good point and part of why the ‘anything can wound anything’ system is not perfect

People can just spam high volume mid strength weaponry and it does it all.

Further highlights how fragile knights are. I’m hoping there are some nice changes to keep things viable. Still not convinced a patrol is going to fit everything I need in. Points, CP cost, and restrictions of unit types

Near as i can see

Modifiers buff knights - e.g. repentia are S7 now vs S8 before dragoons tripple hit on 5+ not 4+ both were commonly taken threats before while stacked -1s have gone which is also a big buff for us vs armies like eldar flyers while not effecting us much

Terrain buffs armigers but weakens long range knights however its still board dependent and large opaque terrain doesnt behave much differently - its not like you 50% obscured knights without large opaque terrain before

Engine war has buffed knights extra Strats WL Oaths and canticles if twinned with admech

Blast weapons buffed knights some of our weapons are stronger but reverse is not true against us

5" verticle engagement lets knights hit second floor ruins

5" verticle objective holding also lets knight hold objectives on a first floor when previously they might not have been able to


As to building outside of ETC team style where you want skew knights always took soup allies to do missions that hasn't changed. Much as some people were of the oppinion that the 32 etc where only taken for CP that was never entirely true you took them for Obectives.

Subject to points there are a lot of buffs built into the core rules. - personally im considering an imperial castigator 2 moiraxs claw/grav acompanied by an admech patrol 15" move + charge+1" on the smaller board has me CC them turn 1. And then what difference does the obscuring terrain make

As to vehicles being better so players will take more high S weaponry - the counter is that based on that logic a fair few people are ignoring vehicles entirely in favour of MSU hordes so the opposite may be true but thats about local meta which is to hard to predict pre pts

Your enthusiasm is infectious.

I’ll try and keep hope

I’d love for the valiant to get a rework his bloody spear always fails me lol

Something else to look at is an Inquisitor and/or Assassin. Having a Cullexus just forward of a Knight line can protect against smite-spam type armies and they can use a strat to make a charging enemy fight last.

An Inquisitor is a cheap psyker to score some of the new psychic secondaries, camp objectives, and deny the witch. An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor can also bring along a squad of Acolytes and make the entire group untargetable with a psychic power. Good for camping objectives and providing a source of firepower if needed.

I really hope that they FAQ our Objective Secured abilities to work like the Chaos Knights where we'll count as 10 models instead of 1. I think that would help balance some of the glaring problems that Knights will have with holding objectives.

We have obsec? : P

A Princeps can dream

 Ideasweasel wrote:
We have obsec? : P

A Princeps can dream

Technically we have a relic that makes us count as 10 models.
Unfortunately it seems like GW just made that a base rule for Choas Knights.

To be honest I am hoping that we see some help in the FAQ however unfortunately the playtesters have been making such a crapshoot of Codex Imperial Knight's.
not Codex Soup yhe FLG guys saying ymoh your running a Knights list, oh but I only have 2 knights in my Knights List. WTAF?

How can you be testing how knights work as a codex at that point.

Because knights are intended as a soup not a mono faction

U02dah4 wrote:
Because knights are intended as a soup not a mono faction

Buy that logic you cpuld say the same avout every Imperial codex, and Choas or Aldari Codex.

Nope many imperial codexs are designed as both mono and soup take SM knights are not designed to work mono

2 knights doesn’t seem many.

I’d like to at least run 3 questoris.

Points is going to be a biggy.

I’m hoping I can do a spearhead of 2 fully payload basilisks and a Wyvern and still have 3 knights. Maybe not 3 crusaders but I could make that work.

Might not be terribly competitive but it means if I run into a load of tanks abusing the obscuring terrain situation(why 18w why) then at least I have a fighting chance