Renegades and Heretics

I was reorganizing my Thousand Sons army and I realized that I have a fatal lack of anti-tank. I also lack bodies - with Thousand Sons being such an elite army, there were very few models that make up my Thousand Sons army. It kind of sucks, but hey...that's the price to pay for playing Thousand Sons.

Of course, there would be people laughing at me and wondering why I'm not using any Tzaangors. Because I don't want to. The reason is that simple. I don't need to justify why I don't want to use Tzaangors for my Thousand Sons army, do I? It's my army, not yours. I'll play it the way I want to. You wouldn't like it if I tell you how to build and play your army.

On the other hand, I do lack bodies and anti-tank. I've been supplementing that somewhat with butcher cannons, but I might not have enough. My current iteration of Thousand Sons only has 12 butcher cannons shots. I probably have D3 shots from my Leviathan Dreadnought's grav-flux bombard, but that's nowhere near enough. I got totally crushed by a 10-Dreadnought army (he used 4 different types of Dreadnoughts - 3 Venerable, 3 Ironclad, 3 Redemptor and 1 Contemptor - in case you're wondering about the rule of 3) because I don't have any anti-tank, and I foresee the same problem against Knights or tank-heavy lists like my own Imperial Guard. That said, I in turn destroyed an Imperial Guard and Space Marine list the other time, one with two Leman Russ tanks. Oh well.

I'm contemplating replacing the siege drill and grav-flux bombard with twin butcher cannon arrays, and removing my Osiron Contemptor Dreadnought because the mixed shooty-melee thing isn't working out. Even with the awesome soulburner. Oh well. That will give me 24 butcher cannon shots for now, which is twice the amount I have right now. I'll probably add another Contemptor Dreadnought to my list (kind of regretting having sold my twin lascannon one now), hopefully making him a melee-focused Contemptor Dreadnought. Or I could just proxy the twin volkite culverins as ensorcelled volkite beams that use Butcher Cannon rules, which explain their souped-up Strength. That should work. Either way, we'll see. Made a stupid mistake by selling my other Contemptor Dreadnought, but I'll deal with it somehow.

Now that's settled, I'm planning on reducing my warpflamer Rubric Marines to half-squad. Currently they always die before I can deploy them, with my opponents shooting everything they have into my poor Rubric Marines. Sure, they are durable, and there are 10 of them, but that's 261 points off the table even before they do anything or get into range. And that's even with a Rhino transporting them across the table. Everyone is so afraid of them that they literally shoot them off the table before I could do anything with them, and as always, that's 261 points off the table. Ouch.

So what do I do with the 130 points now that I've reduced it to half-squad? With the left-over points from removing the soulburner and replacing my Osiron Contemptor Dreadnought with a more melee or shooting-focused Contemptor Dreadnought, as well as the discount I get by replacing the Leviathan Dreadnought's siege drill and grav-flux bombard with the much cheaper butcher cannon arrays, I can probably use them for a Battalion. I have 2 choices - one, I can just flood the table with 3 or 4 squads of Cultists (and probably combine the 2 Rubric Marine squads into a squad of 10, with soulreaper cannon). Or I can try and build a super-cheap Battalion with the leftover points while leaving the Contemptor Dreadnoughts in a Vanguard Battalion to get an extra Command Point (every Command Point counts!).

Wait! You may cry. What kind of super-cheap Battalion can Thousand Sons build? Even the Sorcerers alone cost 98 points, which means the cheapest Battalion is 346 points (maybe 302 points if you just take an allied Chaos Space Marine Detachment with 2 minimal Chaos Lords and 3 squads of Cultists). Okay, so let's look at Tzeentch Daemons, who have the cheapest Daemons Troops choice of Brimstone Horrors at 30 points each. Unfortunately, the cheapest Herald of Tzeentch, the Changecaster, is 65 points, so taking 2 of them would set you back at 130 points, and the minimum Tzeentch Daemon Battalion would cost 220 points. Hey! That's not so bad! That's actually pretty cheap, comparatively.

But what if I tell you that Chaos has a cheaper Battalion than even the Imperial Guard's 180-point Command Point battery?

Oh, right. Yeah, we do. In the form of Renegades and Heretics. With the Renegade Commander only at 25 points, we can field a Renegades and Heretics Battalion for only 170 points. Of course, we don't get Orders, we have terrible BS and WS (5+), a poor armor save (6+), and low leadership. And we don't get our Chaos Covenant unless our Renegade Commander is the Warlord (hell, no, I ain't letting some random mortal be the Warlord of my army when I have my Thousand Sons - the Warlord should be Ahzek Ahriman or an Exalted Sorcerer at least!). They should FAQ that, and I'm sure I wrote an article on Renegades and Heretics and proposed changes about a year ago. Another point of interest is that while the Cultists have gone up in points to 5 points per model, the Militia Guardsmen remained the same at 4 points. So we still have access to cheaper Guardsmen than Cultists, at the cost of BS and WS. Worth the 10 points?

No, but that's not why I'm choosing Renegade Militia Guardsmen over Cultists (okay, maybe it is, along with the extra command point the Vanguard provides).

I'm choosing Renegade Militia Guardsmen because for some reason they can take 1 special weapon for every 5 models in the squad. That means I can have 2 flamers in their dirt-cheap Troops slot. Since you have a minimum of 10 dudes per squad, you can take 2 flamers per squad.  For 52 points, 4 less than Cultists, you can have the same number of bodies with 1 more flamer. Furthermore, because flamers are auto-hit, you don't have to worry about the poor BS of the Militia Guardsmen. Yay. Time to spam flamers!

Therefore, with the about 200 points I have left over, I can spam 6 flamers with my Troops alone. And if they die...well, they were cheap and expendable. And my opponent just wasted shots getting rid of my Guardsmen instead of my more expensive Rubric Marines. Heh. I even have 5 points left over to give one of my Renegade Commanders a plasma pistol. Yay! To be honest, I would prefer to take a Malefic Lord as my 2nd HQ because it would be fluffier and more thematic (they're Spireguard allied to Thousand Sons after all), but with his points being at 80, it's just not worth it and I don't have room for that (I might as well use a Chaos Lord).

That will give me about 14 Command Points for a 200 point game. For bigger games, I can throw in my 5 Rubric Marines with warpflamers and maybe a couple of Leman Russ tanks, and still have a few points left over. But that's something else for another time and I rarely play games above 2,000 points. In any case, with quite a relatively high amount of Command Points, I can spare 1 to upgrade the combi-bolters on my melee-focused Contemptor Dreadnought with Inferno bolts. With the new bolter rule in effect, my Contemptor Dreadnought will be able to fire 8 AP -2 Inferno bolts at 24" even if he moves. YAY! I can't wait to see how this will change the way my Thousand Sons will play. And I wonder if it's really a good idea to throw in Renegades and Heretics and have them run around with 2 flamers each. Only one way to find out!

Oh, and it really fits the fluff for my Thousand Sons warband really well, because they rely on mortal troops and allies such as their own Spireguard, instead of mutants and Tzaangor hordes. With Spireguard being Renegade Guardsmen or Renegade Militia (I kind of like the word Renegade more than Chaos Guard or Traitor Guard as it implies that they're still somewhat Loyalist and not entirely beyond salvation or redemption), the Renegades and Heretics might fit them more. I was also thinking of a background story, where they are formerly the Phoenician Spireguard, but after some circumstances, they end up forming the bulk of the military forces of my Thousand Sons warband. They were abandoned and left to die during a Tyranid invasion and could only helplessly wait for death as the Imperial armada above was about to perform Exterminatus, but the Thousand Sons Warband, the Sons of Shadow, opened a portal to the webway and basically evacuated the entire regiment to safety. Or relative safety anyway, for they ended up being hunted and hounded by the Harlequins during their escape to the ashes of Prospero or whatever world on the edge of the Stygies Sector that the Thousand Sons conquered. There they began rebuilding and retraining, rearming and developing as a fully fledged mortal army for the Sons of Shadow to draw upon. Maybe that will be a cool story titled Spireguard or something. We'll see. Their emblem is the phoenix, which explains their primary armament being flamers. I should get some Hellhounds for them, but I dunno. As I said, we'll see. They shall rise from the ashes once again and march to victory under their Thousand Sons massters, for the glory of the Imperium (and not Tzeentch - I told you, my Sons of Shadow are secret Loyalists).