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Greetings folks,

So my question today is simple: is a PURE imperial knight army viable or competitive at 1k points? See, like a lot of people, I think that Knights look great and I would totally like to get a few (at some point, not necessarily anytime soon,)... but considering that I almost exclusively play games that are at MOST 1.5k points (and most of my games are just 1k points) well... I have some doubts as to whether the "big boys" can actually win battles at that level.

What do you think?

I feel like IK is a very all or nothing army. Given your very small army size and that 9th ed is all about objective holding, it's basically dependent on how much your knights can kill and if your opponent has enough Obsec/anti-tank to neutralize you. Against most modern 9th ed factions, I don't think IK would do very well, even at 1K. Your opponent might not have enough anti-tank, but with obscuring terrain and smart screening/use of Obsec, I think you'd face an uphill battle.

At low points you may want to look at Armigers rather than full knights. heck, you can legally run 3 at 500 points in kill team.

just give some consideration to your opponents. In my last bout with my Chaos Knights I played against a World Eater player, and switched from chaos to imperium so he could benefit from 'Death to the False Emperor' without changing my WLT or Relic. (which was Fight First and Obsec on my Knight Gallant).
Considering that I was going for a game and not a ROFLSTOMP, neither of us particularly enjoyed that game. Try to do better than I did.

Anyway, at 1k points I ran:
Questor Imperialis
Custom Household
Hounds of War
Stormstriders

LOW = 420 pts.
Knight Gallant
Freeblade; Peerless Warrior, Exiled in Shame, Obsessed with Vengeance
Heirloom: Banner of Macharius Triumphant
WLT: Revered Knight
Meltagun, Ironstorm Missile Pod

LOW = 310 pts.
2x Armiger Helverins w Heavy Stubbers

LOW = 270 pts.
2x Armiger Warglaives w Heavy Stubbers

That's actually fairly close the the army idea I came up with in battlescribe!

Honestly though, I definitely think the problems you describe are going to pop up in most match ups.

I can see going against people that can't hurt us almost at all, and people that just blow us away, and people that don't even NEED to hurt us, because by turn 2 they have maxed out all their objectives while we are still stomping around pretending to be mecha-godzilla :-)

Yeah, Knights are kind of the ultimate Rock-Paper-Scissors army. Which is why, in the tournament scene, the best they can generally do is to be a "gatekeeper" army. I would imagine this probably is many times worse in smaller games.