Agent of the Imperium

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If you’re planning to enlist some of the Emperor’s own constabulary, it’s also a great time to be thinking about the updates to Warhammer 40,000 just over the horizon. Much like in the current edition , AGENTS OF THE IMPERIUM can join other Imperial armies as auxiliaries and overseers – but this time the rules are a little different. Renew the Oaths covers your other problem category, providing Knights with an Action secondary of your very own. The ask here is simple – perform an Action running from the end of movement to the end of your turn within 6” of the centre of the Battlefield (with no requirement that the enemy be absent) and get 3VP each time, +1 if the model doing so was TITANIC and +1 if they were a CHARACTER. You even gain an extra Honour point on a 4+ each time you perform it! The design here is cool, because on paper this is one of the easiest Action Secondaries to max out there – but because you generally have so few models as Knights, taking one out for a whole turn hits you harder, a good bit of tension. My feeling is that this still probably ends up very good – every list I’ve built with this book has ended up heavy on Armigers, which should be able to comfortably push this to 9pts over the first few turns, and the fact that at the end of the game if you need to one of your big Knights can just slam this button for 5VP on your last turn feels very good. Probably even better than Duel from a pure scoring perspective, but asking a bit more of you, so there’s some judgement between them. LOW: Knight Preceptor, Knight Baron: Knight Seneschal, Heirlooms of the House: Mentor’s Seal – 420pts Building armies is much simpler in the new edition , so there’s no need to fiddle about with Patrol Detachments and the like. Instead, depending on the battle size, you’ll be able to take a certain number of units with the AGENTS OF THE IMPERIUM keyword, no questions asked. Just slot them into your force and dispense some justice.

Note: The Honoured ability here is an oddity in that it’s clearly army-level, but almost all abilities in this book that interact with the Code Chivalric are written in a way that assumes all bonuses from Oaths are all evaluated at a unit level. This raises the question as to what happens with this if, for example, you have a unit in your army with an effect that ensures they never count as Dishonoured – do you get the CP bonus here even when your army is Dishonoured as long as one unit has that ability? For evaluating everything else I’ve assumed the answer is no and that you have to be Honoured on an army level for this to count, but keep an eye on what the FAQ does for this. Any Imperial Knight detachment gains a number of abilities discussed below, and any Armigers within the detachment gain Objective Secured (because they’re the closest thing you have to Troops). Knight LancesBeyond that, you have a fairly predictable suite of stuff to round things out – standard 9th Edition upgrade Stratagems plus the spicy double Warlord Trait special (for your actual Warlord) on top, some boosts to each of your different melee weapons (with both titanic feet and the paragon gauntlet getting some ways to bypass defences at a cost of a bit of risk), and an equivalent of the “automatic litany” stratagem for Preceptors (at a bargain 1CP price). One final note on that lot – giving a Relic to a Knight no longer makes them a CHARACTER, but they also don’t need to be a CHARACTER to be given one (adding a Trait still adds the CHARACTER keyword as well). Questor Imperialis is generally skewed towards aggression and melee combat, and with that in mind the big, big winners here are House Griffith. Their Household Tradition gives them +1A in the first round of combat, now even when they get Charged , and that’s strong stuff – the baseline nastiness of Knights build for melee has increased quite a bit (especially in combination with Refuse No Challenge), so this rules. It also goes extremely well with their Warlord Trait, which is just straight up Advance and Charge all the time for the Warlord. The Full Tilt stratagem no longer provides this, so if you want to go for Maximum Gallantry, this is now your angle. Their Dragonslayer stratagem is also improved – it’s still +1 to wound when Shooting or Fighting, but now keys off VEHICLE or MONSTER rather than 10+ wounds, giving it far broader utility to blow away mid-range units. The Relic is kind of whatever, Mortals on charge, but everything else here pulls hard in the right direction, and looks like a very strong choice. Ion Shields is vital for keeping your units in the game in the face of enemy shooting, and Super-Heavy Walker makes it harder for opponents to bog your Knights down with chaff (though do note – most Questoris units got a bit slower in this book, so clearing the opponent’s models can be a challenge). Noble Households

Mechanicus ups the durability of your knights, helping you play a more calculating, long game. It provides one extra wound to Armigers, two to TITANIC knights, and allows each model to heal one wound each turn. Bondsman Abilities: Questoris Knights can now hand out powerful buffs to Armigers, meaning your army is especially deadly when it’s working as a team.When the Adeptus Astartes fight, they employ a set of combat doctrines to eliminate the enemy. After pounding the foe with heavy weapons, warriors advance to lay down a hail of bolter fire before charging forth with chainswords roaring to finish the foe.If every unit from your army has the ADEPTUS ASTARTES keyword (excluding AGENT OF THE IMPERIUM and UNALIGNED units), this unit gains a bonus (see below) depending on which Combat Doctrine is active for your army. During the first battle round, the Devastator Doctrine is active for your army. From the second battle round onwards, at the start of the battle round, you can change which Combat Doctrine is active for your army, as follows: The ability to use any Bondsman ability the Knight has an additional time each turn (via the Exalted Court keyword and ability).

Inevitably, there are always some things in books I like a bit less, and here that’s the Code Chivalric. To be extremely clear, I don’t think that’s because it’s bad– it’s a significant boost to the power of Knights, sufficient that I’m sure the slight clunkiness will be forgiven by the playerbase. To my eyes though, despite the power, it just feels a bit unfinished – I don’t think you’re motivated enough to really strive for Virtuous status, and lots of the abilities that key off it seem to assume that the bonuses are universally model-based, where in fact two of the eight (including one of the most important ones) operate at the army level. It still mostly works and no one’s going to hate a mechanic where they get to build up a big pile of points for being cool, but there’s a definite feel of some fairly late stage changes to the mechanic that weren’t fully cascaded across the whole book. Two from me here – one Imperialis, one Mechanicus. We’ll start with Imperialis, because as I haven’t been able to shut up about, I think House Griffith potentially gives the strongest builds in this book. House Griffith YOLO Mode If the Tactical Doctrine was active for your army during the previous battle round, you can change it so that the Assault Doctrine is now active.

The chronicle of Bland reveals secrets of the history of the star-spanning Third Imperium and spans 400 years from early Imperium (about year 300) through the mid-post Civil War period (about year 700) touching known and unknown events you may have encountered in your own reading of the Imperium: everyday events, political intrigue, deadly dangers, Arbellatra, Capital, Encyclopediopolis, the Karand's Palace, and a Tigress-class Dreadnought.