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Was glancing through the AM codex and thought these seemed like interesting guys and I would give a shot at making some stats for them. Not sure how balanced it is so I would love feedback.


Indigan Praefects

Regimental doctrine:

Megafauna Slayers - Tasked with keeping their world safe from the myriad of exotic beasts that stalk the wild, the Indigan regiments are ideally suited to putting down
monsters on any battlefield.

Units with this doctrine add 1 to hit rolls in the shooting phase when targeting units with the MONSTER keyword. In addition, they may add 1 to their attack characteristic when targeting MONSTER units.

Regimental Strategem:

Monster Bait:
Indigan Praefects have perfected the strategy of luring beasts into position through the use of tightly packed infantry formations.

2 CP - Use this strategem when an enemy unit with the MONSTER keyword makes an attack against a Indigan Praefects Infantry unit from your army. Select an Indigan Praefects Infantry unit within 6" of the attacked unit. This unit can immediately make a shooting attack against the attacking MONSTER unit. In addition, add 1 to the wound roll for this unit until the end of the phase.

Regimental Order:

Aim for the weak spot! - Knowing where to aim their Lasguns is integral for bringing down the often heavily armored beasts the Praefects fight.

Until the end of the phase, whenever a model from the ordered unit wounds a MONSTER unit, it can make an additional shooting attack against the target. Any of these additional attacks that wound the MONSTER unit do not themselves generate extra attacks.

These guys are very cool, and it's neat to see a take on their tabletop rules. I note that there's no Warlord Trait or Relic?

My main problem here is the complete monofocus on Monsters. While it's certainly in-theme, most armies don't include any Monsters at all, which means all of these abilities become completely useless against anyone but Tyranids, Daemons, and Aeldari.

This is less of a problem for Stratagems and Orders because you have to actively use those mid-battle, and other options exist that use the same resources: even if a highly specific Stratagem (like this one, or like firing on Deep Striking enemy units) is rendered useless by a bad match-up, you can still spend your Command Points elsewhere.

On the Regimental Doctrine, however, it's a death-knell. Faction-wide special rules like this are something that should always be useful, regardless of the match-up or game, and should encourage or reward you to act like that Faction on the tabletop. Note that Armageddon sticks its anti-Ork tech into Stratagems, because they're not always going to fight Orks. Catachans keep their cover-based abilities in Orders and Stratagems, because the board won't always have cover and your opponent won't always use it. Cadians have their anti-Chaos boost as an optional Relic, which still works against non-Chaos units, just less well.

Faction-unique features can be summed up as:

Faction Trait: Passive, Compulsory, Exclusive, Fixed. If you pick [FACTION], you have to take that specific Faction Trait, it will constantly affect all your units, it will always be part of your army roster, and you can't ignore it and use something else mid-game. Therefore, a Faction Trait should be as broadly useful as possible, and encourage/reward general choices and behaviour.

Warlord Trait: Passive, Optional, Exclusive, Flexible. If you pick [FACTION], you have the option to choose its Warlord Trait, and you can change that choice on a per-game basis. Therefore, even though these abilities can't be changed mid-game and exclude other options, they can be much less broad than the Faction Trait. They should still encourage and support the Faction Trait, however. The same goes for Faction-specific Relics, as well as Faction-specific Psychic Powers, like Chaos gets.

Stratagem: Active, Compulsory, Inclusive, Fixed. If you pick [FACTION], you automatically gain access to its Stratagem. However, you don't have to actually use that Stratagem, and there are plenty of other ways to spend the same resource, so a Faction-specific Stratagem can afford to be highly specific or entirely reactive, rather than encouraging or allowing a broad set of general behaviour. The same goes for Faction-specific Orders.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

RevlidRas wrote:
On the Regimental Doctrine, however, it's a death-knell. Faction-wide special rules like this are something that should always be useful, regardless of the match-up or game, and should encourage or reward you to act like that Faction on the tabletop. Note that Armageddon sticks its anti-Ork tech into Stratagems, because they're not always going to fight Orks. Catachans keep their cover-based abilities in Orders and Stratagems, because the board won't always have cover and your opponent won't always use it. Cadians have their anti-Chaos boost as an optional Relic, which still works against non-Chaos units, just less well.

In other words, you need to take a look at the tactics you want the Indigan Praefects to employ, and give them a broad, general ability which encourages those. They specialize in fighting large, dangerous beasts, are presumably good at jungle fighting and guard duty, and are stated as being able to "bait Mawlocs with tightly-packed infantry formations". So you need to look at abilities which will work all the time, but encourage one or more of these. Your order/Stratagem are less crucial, but could use similar treatment – compare the Militarum Tempestus order to yours, in terms of usability.

One very straightforward example of a broad Doctrine would be:

Each time you make a wound roll of 6+ for an attack made by a model with this doctrine, add 1 to the Damage characteristic of that hit. If that hit has a Damage characteristic of D6 or 2D6, add 2 instead.

This is pretty boring, since it's a passive/random buff that you can't really do much to encourage, but it definitely makes your troops into better monster-killers, it's still useful against armies without monsters – and even armies without vehicles, if there are bikes or terminators around – and it has good synergy with the Bring It Down! order. 20 rapid firing Infantry with no special weapons will deal 1.1 wounds to a Carnifex, on average – Cadians who didn't move will deal 1.3, or 1.6 with Take Aim. These guys will deal 2.2 wounds on average, or 3.8 with Bring It Down... but they're no better than Doctrine-less troops against a Gaunt swarm.

Alternatively, look at the bait/jungle fighter stuff and add overwatch tech – Mordians get to double their effectiveness on Overwatch if they're tightly packed together, so you could do something like the T'au Greater Good for Indigans to encourage "ambushes":

When an enemy unit declares a charge against a unit with this doctrine, any other units with this doctrine that are within 3" of one of the charging unit’s targets may fire Overwatch as if they were also targeted. Units that do so cannot fire Overwatch again that turn. At the end of the enemy charge phase, a unit with this doctrine can perform a Heroic Intervention as if it was a CHARACTER.

Or give them a bonus against single-model units – still boring, but you could work some interesting conditions that would trigger it. Or go for a more generic "focus fire" bonus – The Purge trait is kind of overpowered, but it's aimed at encouraging focus fire, and Freebooterz approach it from the opposite direction by rewarding focus fire instead of encouraging it. One way to handle that might be:

Re-roll wound rolls of 1 for units with this doctrine if the target has lost one or more wounds already this turn. If an INFANTRY unit with this doctrine is issued the ‘Bring It Down!’ order and the target has lost one or more wounds already this turn, re-roll all failed wound rolls for the unit until the end of the turn instead.

For an example of a broader version of your Stratagem:

Monster Bait (1 CP)
The Indigan Praefects risk their lives to lure wild beasts and savage foes into position for a hunter's ambush.
Use this Stratagem in the enemy Charge phase, after an INDIGAN INFANTRY unit from your army is chosen as the target of an enemy unit’s charge. Pick up to two INDIGAN units within 6" of the unit being charged. The units picked can fire Overwatch at the charging unit even if they are not the target of the charge. If the charging unit is a single model with a Wounds characteristic of 10 or more, all Overwatch attacks this phase will hit it on rolls of 4+, regardless of modifiers.

I see what you're saying. I need to make it more applicable and not so narrow.

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
I see what you're saying. I need to make it more applicable and not so narrow.

Yep. And by doing so, you'll have yourself avoid double-dipping on benefits. Double-dipping (repeatedly giving a unit similar stacking benefits) can take a set of bonuses from "flavorful and good in a niche situation" to "way too good in a niche situation." Right now, a plasma gun squad shooting at something like a carnifex would be hitting on 3's, wounding on 2s, and generate an extra attack 5 out of 6 times.

Any one of those rules would get the fluff across. All together, they're going to make it tricky for your tyranid friend to enjoy playing against you with his 'nidzilla list.

Also, a note on Monster Bait. Speaking as someone with a ynnari army, people seem to get really cranky when you get to shoot them up out of sequence.

Just spitballing a few "monster fighting" rules that don't directly up your damage against monsters:
* Change some of the anti-monster effects into anti-monster AND vehicle effects. What's a deff rolla battle wagon but a charging metal monstrosity? And daemon engines certainly blur the line.
* Let your infantry fall back from monsters and vehicles and shoot normally or at a -1 penalty afterwards. They're used to running away once they get the big thing's attention.
* Inflict a small charge range penalty against monsters and vehicles charging your infantry; again, they're not too proud to back up when they see a charge coming.
* How about a strat or order or warlord trait that lets you " aim for its eyes!" and impose a to-hit penalty? Your guys know that killing monsters in one go is tough, but limiting its ability to fight back means you live long enough to finish the job.

Most of those will be useful against most armies, only the first one really increases your raw killing power, and (I feel) they depict fluffy monster hunting behavior.

I would advise looking at similar rules in other armies, to steal for good ideas.

For instance, from the Orks codex:

Monster Hunters (3 CP): Use this stratagem at the start of any phase. Pick an enemy model with a wounds characteristic of 10 or more. Add 1 to wound rolls for attacks made by Snakebite units in your army that target that model until the end of the phase.

Simple. Concise. Powerful. Useful for hunting monsters, but also for bringing down vehicles and fortifications.

For your Regimental Doctrine, consider the Salamanders.

Master Artisans: You can reroll a single failed hit roll and a single failed wound roll made for a Salamanders unit with this tactic each time it shoots or fights.

It's generally useful, as an ability, and would be perfect for both your Vehicles and Infantry. It emphasizes the use of potent, single shot weapons - such as lascannons, and missile launchers - which are the perfect weapons for bringing down monsters, without pigeon-holing them into only being useful against monsters.

I would also add the ability to reroll a single damage roll to this ability - "Chapter Tactic" abilities are becoming stronger and stronger over time, and the Salamanders have been left in the dust. Even so, a good starting point.

I like the concept of your Order, but although it doesn't really imply the ability or knowledge of aiming lasguns into weak points. The order would be most effective with plasmaguns, which could be firing up to 4 shots each. Instead, I would make the following suggestion:

Aim For The Weak Spot!: Until the end of the phase, each time you make a wound roll of 6+ for an attack made by the ordered unit, that hit is resolved with an AP of -4.

This is much more rewarding for lasguns and frag grenades, which would otherwise struggle against monsters and vehicles, and much less of a bonus for plasmaguns and lascannons - which, logically, ought to not gain much benefit from aiming for a weak point.