After the new rules for all the races here come Forge World rules – a book for Imperium and Chaos. Forge World rules were always special – unusual, interesting, and not always balanced. So, let’s see, what’s changed with the new edition. We have a Chaos book, let’s start with it. We’ll look closer at the most popular units, which you might want to see on the table.
Blood Slaughterer of Khorne greets us here. This beast had a bunch of S10 attacks before and was very tough due to the 13th armor. Now he can move 2 inches farther and has T7 and auto-regeneration, typical for all daemon engines. Blind Fury special rule which used to limit him, now just prevents him from falling back. Well, do you really need to fall back, if you have 6-9 attacks S10 with 3 damage? Definitely a useful unit. Run to the enemy and kill everything you see. Even high price doesn’t spoil him.
Everyone who was afraid that the new useless drone from the starter is a substitution for an old one can now sigh with relief. He hasn’t only stayed in the book but has become a bit better. Also, ha can make a scout move of 9 inches and shot his weapon into the close combat since it has Pistol special rule. And he’s quite dangerous from the distance too. It can be really useful for cleaning up the objective markers and fact scoring.
Decimator is a kind of a hellbrute for the same price, but with an invuln. However, the weapons choice is much better. Soulburner now just inflict mortal wounds. 2D3 times. And you can take 2 of these guns. So – potential 12 mortal wounds are enough to take down almost every enemy unit. And the model is still great.
Non-daemonic vehicles, in general, look like their usual analogs, nothing really interesting. But! Almost all of them now can heal themselves by eating enemy models in close combat and they hit really hard. So, if you used vehicles before, everything has become better for you.
The list of vehicles has improved. For example – Sicaran Venator. Giant laser wounds by comparing your 3D6 with target leadership, and then deals 2D6 damage with no armor save. Considering that most vehicles have relatively low leadership, it lets you heavily injure or even destroy the most part of vehicles in the game.
You can mount the same gun onto the Deredeo dreadnaught. (yes, Chaos now has it). The same, algorithm, but 2 shots D6 damage each – the same result in the long run. Other weapons are pretty good too. But the whole guy costs a lot, so choose wisely.
Rapiers look great. They are pretty cheap and their heavy bolters now shoot 12 times – so it’s a reasonable choice – to take 3 Rapiers and destroy every infantry unit you see. Las destroyer is also cool – S12 and the chance to add 1 or 2 dice to standard D6 damage. But there’s only 1 shot, so bolter version looks more reliable.
Leviathan dreadnaught has been shown by GW soma time ago, so there’s no surprise – he’s awesome. An ultimate killing machine. You can (but don’t need to, decimator is cheaper) take Soulburners, take Grav-bombard, which would annihilate every monster or tank, or even adjust your Leviathan for the close combat – S16 with AP-4 and Damage 4 is a fearsome weapon.
With usual droppods becoming so expensive, Dreadclaw now doesn’t look so bad as it used to. And it can carry contemptors and hellbrutes while usual droppod now can’t transport dreadnaughts. Unfortunately, it can’t take Leviathan on board.
Greater daemons are the topic for a special talk. They are marvelous. High toughness, a lot of wounds, amazing close combat skills, and abilities – they are now versatile killers of everything. And…they’ve become much cheaper. It’s nice since now we’ll definitely see more of these miniatures on the battlefields.
Also, there are all the types of Knights, all the new planes. (the old ones are now better since they now can inflict mortal wounds). So, the armory of the Chaos has grown significantly.
In general, it’s obvious that almost all the units here are more than playable. Some of them are even too good. This returns us to the balance issue. How does it match pale and boring units from GW index? Why taking a hellbrute if there’s a decimator? And could it be that the units from Imperial Armor will dominate over the usual ones? So, the argument over IA won’t disappear. But this book itself is definitely great. The rules are interesting, powerful and much better represent the units even with «8th-edition-style» briefness. There are a lot of interesting choices and tactics. I only with the miniatures were plastic…
