Mike: Welcome, folks! You guys have covered Warhammer 40,000 extensively. What are your favourite elements of the new edition? What things surprised you the most about it six months later compared to your initial impressions? Fragile Damage Dealers: The damage dealers in this army come in the forms of special weapons toting Guardsmen or Scions, Manticores, and Tank Commanders. All of these units are relatively fragile and will absolutely fold if you expose them. Shatterer of Wills: The morale ability siren is sounding! This gives one enemy unit you hit -2 Ld for the turn! That’s not nearly enough to justify the slot here! That’s why we have the siren! D There are different ways to play this game. First: you can follow the missions in the booklet, setting up your units and battlefield to start a quest for your army. Second: you can go with the scenarios that are more complex based on the rules to fight against your opponent. If this is not enough to satisfy your appetite, then you may need to consider expanding your army by getting other unit sets online. The more units you have in one army, the more battle points your army has. The larger the battle you get into, a bigger battlefield may be required. This is just a starter set to activate your interest and to give you a condensed picture of what Games Workshop tabletop miniature game play like. You have to make a decision whether this hobby is for you or not, and those who decide to continue will move further on from the starter equipment. Mobile Objective Secured Infantry: Guardsmen with Move, Move, Move are still fantastic. 12″ + 2d6″ movement per turn with 10 Objective Secured idiots still goes a long way even 4 years after the codex has been released.

Suggested starting kits: Start Collecting! Craftworlds, Wave Serpent, Dire Avengers, Avatar of KhaineThe next big questions are exactly what comes in the rulebooks. The introductory book comes with lore basics on the 40K universe and the enclosed models, plus a bit of hobby section. You also get a set of missions using the minis that teach you how to play the game. One of the more useful things you can do with these is take Expert Gunners (re-roll shots) and Pyromaniacs (re-roll 1’s to wound with flame weapons) and staple 2 heavy flamers onto these guys. They’ll net you 2d6 (re-rolling both, or either) s5 ap-1 d1 auto hits per box. This raises them to 75 per model, but you get some reasonable value out of them. In theory this is another unit you could skew into, but much like Conscript spam it’s probably not going to get your very far. Stratagem – Ambush – 3CP: During deployment, you can set up three units (only one of which can be a VEHICLE) in Ambush. They can deep strike within 7″ of a table edge at the end of your movement phase and count as having moved their full movement (important for Grinding Advance). Some units that were a little too efficient against a wide range of targets, such as Inceptors and Retributors, also went up in price. Overall, by opening up the options of some weaker factions and taking the meta’s top predators down a peg, I expect we’re about to enter a period of heavy experimentation in the meta (especially with the next few books arriving soon). I can’t wait to see what players come up with.

Deft Maneuvering – 1CP: Use when your opponent shoots at Armoured Sentinels. Halve the incoming damage from multi-damage weapons (rounding up). A strong reason to use the Armoured flavour for your Strike First, Strike Hard squad as it makes alpha-ing them off the board if your opponent goes first a real pain. B. Disciplined Shooters: INFANTRY can rapid-fire at 18″. It’s fine, and if you’re heavy on infantry you want to push gradually up the board the combo with Wilderness Survivors makes for an acceptable if relatively unexciting trait. C Gaunt’s Ghosts are an extremely interesting unit. They’ve got character protection on the entire unit and have some neat special rules that make them ideal for some neat objective holding and action completing shenanigans. Notably, they can complete actions and still shoot, have a fight last ability, can reduce cost of a CP by 1 (when used on them), come with a 5++, and have infiltrate. Furthermore, being Officio Prefectus, they can be included in other Guard detachments without messing up Regiment Tactics. Haven’t seen them used in the wild yet, but we’re on the lookout for it! TroopsTo charge, a charge roll is made on 2D6, with the result being the distance each model can cover during the charge move. Grinding Advance: Allows Leman Russ Battle Tanks to fire their turret weapon twice if they’ve remained stationary or moved under half their movement speed. Thank God for the Troops slot and its svelte 3 unit choices. Of these, Infantry Squads and Tempestus Scions are the most relevant ones. Once upon a time, Conscript blobs were feared throughout the meta, thanks to their ability to stand around and die but take a long time about it, but a succession of nerfs (including the stupid and reactionary errata to Commissars which, with the hindsight afforded by history, turned out to be unjustified) made them more or less irrelevant.

As mentioned before, we will cover the mechanics of Unleash Hell in it’s own article, but it’s important simply to note that charging enemy units that are themselves ranged, or near ranged units could now come with a potentially deadly response. Overview: The T'au are an optimistic Xeno race who's goal is to spread their 'enlightenment' throughout the universe. A seemingly intelligence-focused race who prefers to absorb planets and societies into their ranks by diplomacy, their technology is incredibly advanced and will help to coerce those who are reluctant to just agree. Each T'au soldier is like an individual Iron Man, displaying and deploying the latest technological advancement made by the race, often enhanced by scientific breakthroughs such as gravity fields, stealth fields or AI. Plague Marines – each festering and bursting out of their armour due to the malign corruption of the Plague God Nurgle. 1 wields a boltgun, 1 is armed with a blight launcher and 1 – the Champion, who leads the unit – has a plasma gun, power fist and plague knife; Relentless – 1CP: A non-TITANIC vehicle can act on top profile for a turn. Not being able to use it on your superheavies is a bit of a shame (but does at least suggest that they’ve learned from the catastrophic error that was Machine Spirit Resurgent), but because of the number of ways in The Greater Good to make one of your tanks somehow superior this is still helpful – if your opponent takes a swing at your Tank Ace and narrowly misses being able to run a full reprisal is good. A

What’s Inside

datasheets for the miniatures in the box – these are handy cards with the information on movement and weapons for each model printed on, meaning less flipping through books for information and more actual gaming Good Shooting: The Guard doesn’t have much in the way of combat, but even with one of the oldest books in the game, a fully-intact Guard army might take the cake for the most powerful shooting in the game (beside Admech, anyways). easy to build push-fit (no glue required!) miniatures in blue and green coloured plastic, representing the heroic Ultramarines and putrescent Death Guard: