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Armigers and Dreadnoughts are better than Knights in Horus Heresy, IMHO.

Different uses, but not far off in terms of being really effective units.

And when a Dreadnought has a solid chance of Knight Tipping? It’s difficult to say Knights feel massively unfair.

They are still a skew list. And my overall grump with skew lists isn’t that I need to adapt to them, so much that I’m often very limited in what those adaptations might be.

Knights? Better pack a load of effective anti-vehicle firepower. Dwarf Gunline of Numbing Inevitability? Speed across the board swift as I can and hope I’ve enough stuff left over to give them a clobbering and so on.

Just thinking a bit further on the army differences in Heresy, and something struck me.

In Heresy, because I’m markedly less dependant on Tanks for Knight killing firepower, it’s harder for Knights to eliminate the main threats.

Consider a Predator Annihilator. Four Lascannons, quite capable on paper of dropping a Knight in a single volley. Yes it still needs some luck to do so, but not a massive departure from Averages. But equally, all four of those Lascannons can be silenced in a single shot, either for a turn (Crew Stunned) or altogether (Vehicle Destroyed, which admittedly needs a proper anti-tank AP in Heresy)

But. A squad of 5 Lascannons? That’s trickier to pull off. Squad Coherency can help me mitigate the inevitable pie plate. And in Cover, I’m getting a decent enough save. Even if my opponent scores a direct hit, he needs a lot of luck to entirely eliminate that squad. Between the pie plate scattering, uncertain coverage, having to wound, potential saves on my behalf, he’s just facing more variables than against the Predator.

This means with anti-Knight solutions being infantry based, it’s a bit trickier for the Knight player to make things properly safe.

 vipoid wrote:
Knights are indeed an anti-fun army. Not because they're necessarily powerful (depends on edition and matchup), but because they are irredeemably boring.

Maybe if GW hired developers with actual talent, then playing against Mechwarriors could be an entertaining battle. Alas 'talent' and 'competence' are GW's watchwords.

Thus, expensive models that should have interesting mechanics (allocating power to different systems, taking damage to different areas/systems etc.) are instead abstracted to the point that they are just walking bricks that interact with as few mechanics as possible.

They're like a boss in a video game that doesn't do anything special but is immune to almost every negative effect and has a ridiculously-large health bar. So you're reduced to hitting it with your sword until either it kills you or keels over and evaporates in a puff of disappointment.

100% agreed. And given how few units a Knight player has, a game will consist mostly of waiting on their opponent.

In its drive to simplify (some might say dumb down) the rules, GW has been applying one-size-fits-all solutions that are hurting Knights the most. Not in terms of tabletop viability, but in terms of fun and strategy, both for the Knight player and their opponent. I'm not sure what can be done about it, though, unless a whole new layer of rules is created specifically for Knights.

Power allocation sounds interesting, though. The simplest system I can think of is as follows:
- At the start of each round of battle, roll 10d6 (or whatever) for each Knight on the battlefield, and put down a marker indicating how many 3+ results it has rolled. These are Power Charges (PCs).
- PCs can be used at the start of a phase to do stuff like fire a gun (from 1 to 3 PC depending on its power), activate an ion shield (2 PCs for a 5++ and 3 for a 4++), fight with any melee weapon other than the feet, perform an action (does not prevent you from shooting as long as you have PCs to do it), and so on. Normal movement is free, though advancing might cost a PC.
- At the end of the round, unused PCs are lost. Or there might be a mechanic to store them for the next round (such as a stratagem, or a chance of taking MWs from overheating).
- As the Knight takes damage, it either rolls fewer D6's to gain PCs, or the target number increases (to 4+ and then 5+), meaning it can fire fewer guns or needs a larger share of its current power supply to maintain its ion shields.
- If a Knight with unspent PCs is destroyed, its Deadly Demise rule is likelier to trigger and/or more destructive.

Of course, since this system acts as a restriction rather than new possibilities, Knights would need to either go down in points or have an increase of their weapon stats.

.

Or let the Knight player overload their reactors to do additional damage, but take automatic mortal wounds or some such.

This is why, I realize now, why I like the mechanics for Adeptus Titanicus so much.

Dude, if you've never had the pleasure, Imperal Knights: Renegade is a fun mini-game from 2016. The pdf is found with a little bit of googling...

You could purchase a single box of Epic-scale Questoris, and use cms instead of inches, and whip up some very simple scenery pieces.

SamusDrake wrote:
Dude, if you've never had the pleasure, Imperal Knights: Renegade is a fun mini-game from 2016. The pdf is found with a little bit of googling...

You could purchase a single box of Epic-scale Questoris, and use cms instead of inches, and whip up some very simple scenery pieces.

Never heard of that... time to hunt for some Knight fun. Thanks!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just found it. It looks really cool. Now to find some foul chaos traitors.

You're welcome.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I've been discouraged from playing Imperial Knights in 40k/HH.

The interwebs make it sound like playing against them is no fun... and it's my weird belief that both sides of the table should have fun playing.

Am I overthinking things again, or should I just use my one Knight Castigator as an ally and shelve using more stompy guys?

They were designed for a different game.

When Knights came out, the game was still about killing your opponent first, playing the missions second.

In theory now that's the other way around. In theory you can lose most of your army and still win by playing the mission. Realistically it's still possible/plausible to lose because you've lost all of your army.

But most of the time if you're in a relatively balanced game, Knights won't be fun for either side because the Knight Player will have difficulty playing the mission, and the other player will have difficulty fighting the knights. The problem ebbs and flows from edition to edition - its been worse in previous ones, but its not really getting better.