With Warhammer 40,000’s 10th edition rapidly approaching, there’s a ton of new info to process, including near-daily updates from Games Workshop around factions and units. Each week we’re reviewing all the new releases and to help keep you up to speed on what’s changing. If you missed our first weekly review, you can find it here. 

This week’s set of previews were a bit more faction heavy, so more units and army rules have been shown off, with less of a focus on the universal rules. Though a couple more ways to play the game have been revealed.

General Rules and Unknowns

Firstly a couple of unknown rules. The first of these is Stealth, which has made an appearance on Be’lakor, we haven’t seen exactly what this does just yet, but we’re putting a pin in it. Another keyword we’ve seen on a couple of infantry units is GRENADES, it’s kind of obvious what this implies, but we haven’t seen just what this means either. These both join Pistol, in things that we’ve seen but haven’t had explained just yet.

Also it looks near certain that the game won’t be moving to universally ‘sticky’ objectives (an objective that remains under your control even after you move away from it, at least until an opponent takes control of it). However, we’ve seen quite a few special rules that factions have through stratagems or unit abilities that can make an objective sticky. Interestingly though, it’s been stated that you need an OC of at least 1 to control an objective (since an OC of 0 is ‘nothing’), so a squad that has failed Battle-shock can’t take a completely uncontested objective.

A major change we’ve seen, albeit buried in the footnotes of a faction update, is that units forced to disembark a transport when it explodes are affected by Battle-shock. So there’s no using them to cap objectives, or have stratagems used on them.

Weapon Rules

Extra Attacks is one of the new rules shown off and helps to solve the issue of mounts in close combat, or some guy with a bajillion weapons. This USR allows a weapon to make attacks, in addition to the weapon chosen by the bearer to attack with. It’s essentially the Malefic keyword, but turned universal, but it’s also way more elegant than “each time the bearer fights it can make X additional attacks”.

Indirect Fire makes a reappearance, allowing a weapon with this keyword to target units or models that the bearer cannot see. If this happens, then the weapon is -1 to hit and the target gains Benefit of Cover against the attack.

Conversion has also been given a keyword, in the example we’ve seen, if a target is chosen more than 12” away, a successful hit of 4+ inflicts a Critical Hit.

Combat Patrols

GW have announced their plan with Combat Patrols, which I’ll go over really quickly:

• It’s played on a slightly smaller map (two Kill Team boards smushed together)
• It has custom missions, tailored for combat patrol.
• While it uses the same core rules as 40K (the sole difference is that Battleline units make objectives sticky, which makes sense considering how there’s less units total), each combat patrol has its own special datasheets, secondary objectives, enhancements and stratagems.
• Each combat patrol box is a self-contained…combat patrol that you use to play…combat patrol with.

Now that the words ‘combat patrol’ have lost all meaning. I’ll just say that even though there’s not much to say about it, I’m an enormous fan of this. One of the last articles I wrote on Goonhammer before taking an extended posting vacation was the KT18 roundtable, and one of my major issues with that system was just how bad the process of onboarding new players was, and now they’ve gone and fixed the whole thing by just letting you buy one box and it has everything you need to play a game, and the models are good, and the factions are balanced!

I really like this, my sole criticism is that they put the invulnerable save in a position where it should be in the ‘normal’ datasheets. Yeah, my one criticism of this is that it’s too good.

 

Crusade Preview

Swiftblade: As someone who’s been having a lot of fun with Crusade in the Goonhammer Global campaign, getting confirmation that Crusade is coming back is a welcome piece of news. Going over the article, there are quite a few familiar mechanics, but also a few changes that I think are neat for the crusade system.

Looking first at what’s unchanged, the familiar rank up system with XP is back from the current system, as well as rewards like battle traits, crusade relics, and weapon enhancements when you reach new ranks. The few that get previewed look a lot like the kinds of bonuses we have in crusade now, with the Crimson Medallion of Bastior standing out as the most interesting one shown off here since it lets you generate CP on a 4+ while holding an objective.

What’s new is the Crusade Blessings system. In the current crusade rules, if your opponent has more Crusade Points than you do, you are given extra CP equal to half of the number of the crusade points difference between you both. While this is neat in theory, what actually ends up happening is someone just has more CP than they have any idea what to do with, so it’s not a great way to level the playing field.

Crusade Blessings aim to amend that. Now, you can take a number of bespoke bonuses depending on the difference in crusade points between the two forces. This includes extra CP, but we are also previewed a blessing that lets you gain extra XP for surviving the battle, as well as getting a free Battle Shock reroll once per turn.

Additionally, it looks like Crusade will have different settings that campaign books are set around, and this “setting” for Crusade at launch, Tyrannic Wars, contains two special crusade blessings that are faction specific. One is for Tyranids only, and the other one is for everyone else who isn’t a Tyranid but would like to shoot them real good.

Each campaign supplement will also focus on different unit types. For Tyrannic War, we get a glimpse at Monsters and Those Who Hunt Them, which gives bonuses to Infantry and Mounted when fighting Monsters and Walkers with Monster Hunters upgrades, and vice versa with Striding Behemoths. I think this is a potentially neat system, and reminds me of the Seasons of War in Age of Sigmar.

Finally, Battle Scars and Devastating Blows are back, but now the kicker is that if a unit has no battle honors to lose and has three battle scars they just die forever. In current crusade, there’s no mechanic for a unit just biffing it if they keep getting owned, so now there’s a little more drama in getting a battle scar.

If you’re worried that you might have to end your current crusade early before tenth releases, we do get some reassurance that WarCom will have rules on how to transfer Crusade into the new edition. Overall, this looks like a nice cleanup of crusade, rather than a complete overhaul, which works for me.

Faction Previews

Astra Militarum

Swiftblade: Kicking us off this week for 10th edition rules previews is a faction preview for the Astra Militarum, also known as the Imperial Guard if you’ve been in the hobby for a while.

The article starts by giving us the new army rule for Astra Militarum, Voice of Command. This rule keeps the tradition of giving models in your army bonuses from orders given by units with the OFFICER keyword. Compared to its current iteration in ninth edition, the new orders have been much simplified and streamlined:

While many of these orders are recognisable from the 5th edition Imperial Guard Codex, this current iteration is very different and slimmed down from the current rules surrounding orders in 9th edition. For me, I don’t mind this change. Playing against the current book where my Guard opponent goes through orders and just starts pointing to all the things that each order hops around to makes my eyes glaze over, and each one does something very different from the last which doesn’t help my poor brain. With these orders, each one improves something very straightforward. Easy to use, easy to remember.

We also get a sneaky look at the detachment ability for Astra Militarum, which gives out LETHAL HITS in the shooting phase if a unit remained stationary during the movement phase. There is also mention of an enhancement that allows LETHAL HITS to go off on 5’s instead of 6’s. I like this update to Born Soldiers alot. It’s a great compromise between the strength that massed Guard firepower can provide when 6’s auto-wound and having some sort of downside in order to use it. Astra Militarum players will need to find good shooting positions to hunker down in order to take advantage of Born Soldiers now, rather than just getting it all the time.

Chucat: There’s also the Enhancement, the Death Mask of Ollanius, which gives a unit of OC of 1 instead of 0 when they’re battle-shocked, which seems very useful.

Next, we get a look at the Cadian Shock Trooper datasheet, which seems pretty familiar to what Astra Militarum players may expect out of what their rank and file Guardsmen currently look like.

A few things that stick out to me on this datasheet is that you can take Shock Troops in squads of 20 now, and you can attach a Command Squad to a unit. A unit of 20 Shock Troops will not only be a pretty beefy bodyguard for a Command Squad, but a squad that big under the new Duty and Honour! order will have an impressive OC value of 60 before counting an attached command squad. I’m going to take a guess and say that’s a hard to beat OC number in tenth.

We also see a Baneblade, which is big and mean as hell. It’s so big, in fact, it can hand out cover to units behind it. At T13 and 24 wounds, a Baneblade might find new life in tenth as not just a backfield big gun, but a big gun that protects all your little guns as they move into firing positions.

Next, we see some weapon previews. The Battle Cannon picks up two points of strength at the cost of becoming AP-1, which isn’t surprising considering the lowering of AP values across the board. The Volcano Cannon on the Shadowsword goes down to d3+1 attacks, but is now strength 24. At the time of writing, that’s the highest strength weapon we have so far seen in these previews.

Lastly, we get a peak at an all new stratagem for Astra Militarum, Reinforcements!, which lets you select a REGIMENT unit that was just destroyed and add an identical unit at full strength into strategic reserves. It’s interesting to note that this is the only 2CP stratagem we have seen so far, but this is a very strong ability so it makes sense it costs more CP to use.

While we don’t know yet what units have the regiment keyword yet, but the article gives us some insight. The article lists not just core troops, but Heavy Weapons Squads, Field Ordnance Batteries, Tempestus Scions, Sentinels, and Rough Riders as units having the appropriate keyword for this stratagem. All of these options seem like strong options, I’m already dreading having to deal with a big blob of Shock Troops again after killing them.

Astra Militarum are the classic gunline army, and with these new rules it looks like you’ll be rewarded for setting up strong positions to maximize shooting, while having plenty of tactical flexibility when you need it with orders. The hammer of the Emperor looks to be hammering on in the new edition!

Daemons

Daemons show up with two soft army rules, one full blown army rule and one army rule that technically doesn’t apply to them. Firstly, all their units have Deep Strike and an invulnerable save. Their actual rule is pretty interesting and is called Shadow of Chaos and it’s basically an expanding ‘good shit’ zone that exists on the battlefield. Your deployment zone is always within the Shadow of Chaos; meanwhile No Man’s Land and your opponent’s deployment zone fall under the Shadow of Chaos if you hold at least half the objectives in those areas, with it being checked at the start of every phase.

As for what it does, it gives you a buff for passing battle-shock tests (regain D3 wounds for that unit, or add D3 models back if it’s Battleine) and your opponents a further penalty for failing battle-shock tests (they take D3 mortal wounds). To further sweeten the deal, you get +1 to Battle-shock tests and your opponents get -1 to Battle-shock tests. Thematically it’s a pretty neat way to show off how daemons are strengthened by the warp and how it’s naturally going to be more powerful the better they’re doing. My sole worry is that it might be a bit of a ‘win more’ mechanic.

Skipping over the second army rule for now, we also get a look at the detachment, which is called Daemonic Incursion and has the special rule Warp Rifts. This basically says that if you deep strike your Daemons entirely within a Shadow of Chaos zone, you only have to be 6” away rather than 9”. Your Daemons are going to want to get into combat, and a 6” charge is way, way easier to make than a 9” charge, and getting more flexibility with where to pop your units down is also great.

The other part of the Detachment we get to see is their Stratagem.

As mentioned earlier, this is one of the means of creating a sticky objective. Interestingly, it also creates a localized Shadow of Chaos around the objective marker as well, which creates a place where you want to be and your opponent really doesn’t want to be. The other bonus of sticky objectives, for daemons specifically, is that it makes it easier to tip an entire location into falling into the Shadow of Chaos.

Doubling back now, the second army rule is called Daemonic Pact and this is where things get a bit more interesting (though not for Chaos Daemon players specifically).

Let’s get the tiny bit of bad news out of the way first. There won’t be a surprise standalone Emperor’s Children faction (or Fulgrim) releasing at the launch of 10th Edition. They’ll still be using the Chaos Space Marines faction, taking Lucius, and making him the Warlord. With that out of the way, let’s see what we’ve got going on here.

The short and simple version is 25% of your army can be Chaos Daemons, you won’t get to use stuff like Storm of Chaos though. If you’re one of the four mono-god factions, then you can only bring daemons belonging to that specific god with you. So if you want to be the fluffy Word Bearers guy, you can bring whatever daemons you want with you.

Going on from there, we get a look at a couple of Greater Daemons, starting with the Keeper of Secrets.

While the model has lost two wounds from last edition, the inclusion of a 5+ Feel No Pain means that it’s essentially running on 24 wounds instead, so enjoy your enormous durability buff right out of the gate. -1 to Hit is also retained, which helps a lot as well. The weapon profiles have also been cleaned up a lot, meaning that you’re always just doing 13 attacks in close combat now with an extra point of armour penetration, and you’re not exactly half bad at deep strike range shooting as well.

Next up is the big guy, Be’lakor.

Be’lakor has also lost a couple of wounds, but he exchanges this for the ability to hit way harder, with more attacks and higher strength and he also gets to do some pretty nice damage with his psychic power as well, but that’s not the really interesting part of this.

His Shadow Form looks pretty monstrous, especially Pall of Despair forcing a Battle-shock test if a unit is even just ‘lightly grazed’. He also counts as being a localized Shadow of Chaos, which means these lightly grazed units are taking their test on -1. He looks pretty much made for deep-striking in an opponent’s territory, charging whatever poor sap is guarding their backline objective and just making a mess of their pots and pans. Then you could just fly around and stab tanks as well, that’s fun too.

Adepta Sororitas

Swiftblade: We also got to take a look at everyone’s favourite nuns with guns in space this week, with some big tweaks on familiar mechanics and some big glow ups to reward the faithful.

Firstly, we get to see the army rule for the Soroitas in the returned Acts of Faith mechanic, centered around gaining Miracle Dice you can bank to spend on changing the value of dice rolls – each unit can do this once per phase. In tenth edition, there’s two basic ways to gain miracle dice:

• You get one at the start of each turn
• Whenever an Adepta Sororitas unit is destroyed

The preview article also gives us a good look at the kinds of rolls we can expect to be allowed to use miracle dice on, and the procedure for spending these dice.

A big note for current Sororitas players is that the wording makes it clear you can only substitute one dice each time you select a unit for an act of faith. This means you can no longer use miracle dice to guarantee a charge, or ensure multiple hits. This is a step back for Acts of Faith from its current iteration, but it’s still a very powerful rule and as we see further into the preview there’s plenty of ways to interact with the rule to make it even more powerful.

Next, we see the detachment teased for Sororitas, Hallowed Martyrs. This detachment rule is all about making your units stronger as they take damage, getting +1 to hit if the unit is below starting strength, and +1 to wound if the unit is below half strength. The rule also clarifies that a single model unit is considered below starting strength if it has lost any wounds, similar to the wording that a single model is below half strength for purposes of battleshock if it has less than half wounds remaining.

I’m very interested to see how this will play on the table for the Sororitas. Most units in this faction aren’t really known for their durability, so while there are some huge bonuses to having a handful of models left in a unit running around getting +1 to hit and wound, usually Sororitas units just get wiped off the board when they start taking serious fire. Also, being under half wounds leaves you vulnerable to battleshock tests. Maybe with the promise of tenth being less lethal, Sororitas units will get to take advantage of the buffs from this rule more frequently, and we could see some tricks to getting around frequent battleshock tests.

As far as datasheets go, let’s look at the easy one to break down first: the humble Battle Sister Squad.

My favourite thing about this datasheet is how it’s value is at something that isn’t just straight up killing models or just being hard to kill. Battle Sister Squads look like great ways to generate buttloads of miracle dice, with three separate rules that allow it to generate more miracle dice. The sting of having less miracle dice a unit can spend on each roll is much lessened by having a basic troop unit that can make sure you’ve got more miracle dice than you know what to do with.

The Triumph of St. Katherine was also teased in the preview, and its datasheet in the new edition is a triumphant return for the centerpiece model.

This is one of those datasheets that gets crazier and crazier the longer you look at it. Selecting two of these abilities every battle round is fantastic, and for my money Simulacrum of the Ebon Chalice and The Fiery Heart are standouts from the list. Getting extra sixes for miracle dice is always handy, and being able to spend any number of miracle dice per phase could mean you can do really nasty stuff with whatever unit is in that aura. Plus, the Triumph is a leader, so it’ll be attached to a unit to keep it safe, and when it does get stuck in the Triumph has a whopping 18 attacks at Strength 5 AP -2 1 damage. The Triumph of St.Katherine looks like a great way for Sororitas players to have a mean brick to hold the middle of the board and be extremely hard to shift, while very dangerous.

Up next, the Exorcist Missile Launcher gets a nice upgrade. The deadliest organ solo in the universe keeps its indirect fire abilities, and it’s anti-tank profile now gets d6+2 shots, BS 3+ Str 10 AP -2 D6 Dmg while its anti infantry profile gains blast and ignores cover with a 3d6 BS 3+ Str 5 AP 0 1 dmg profile. Interestingly, both profiles have heavy, so remaining still lets you balance out the -1 to hit from indirect fire. For the anti-infantry profile, you also have ignores cover, so you’ll effectively ignore the negatives of shooting indirectly with that profile if you stay still. That’s bad news for the poor chaff unit holding an objective in range of the holy pain organ.

Morvhan Vahl’s sword gets previewed, and it hits just as hard as anyone would expect it to. Good for her.

Finally, on the stratagem front, we see a stratagem that lets a unit shoot on death with Rejoice the Fallen. Activating on death is one of the strongest trade abilities in the game, so I expect this will get plenty of use for Sororitas players. Combined with the detachment ability from Hollowed Martyrs, a half-strength unit getting cleared off the board will get to do nasty damage before it’s removed. Multi-melta Retributors couldn’t be happier.

Overall, Sisters look very similar to how they play in ninth, but I really like all of these tweaks here. I’m a sucker for armies that like an aggressive playstyle, and Hollowed Martyrs looks like it will reward exactly that.

Leagues of Votann

There’s also a look at a couple of smaller factions as well.

Leagues of Votann are back, with their army rule Eye of the Ancestors, they get Judgment tokens back, albeit simplified by 50%, and their tokens go from Lethal Hits on 6+/5+/4+ to adding 1 to hit and wound rolls. Tokens are gained by enemy units when they destroy one of your units.

The detachment rule for the Oathband detachment, Ruthless Efficiency, gives you another, easier way to get Judgment tokens onto a target, and get some sweet CP in the deal as well.

In exchange for this, the two datasheets we’ve seen so far have their units hitting on 4s, albeit with decently strong weapons. So it looks like against quite a few targets you’ll be hitting on 3s and wounding on 2s.

On the brighter side though, Hearthkyn get an extra point of toughness, making small arms fire much less effective against them, they can make objectives sticky, so they can keep trundling around, and they can get a 6+ Feel No Pain, which always helps with durability.

The Hekaton gains way more toughness and the rather nice Fire Support rule. If you’ve got a good memory, you might remember this rule being shown off for the Falcon, but there’s a difference here where for the Hekaton, it only works in the shooting phase, whereas the Falcon’s buff lasts for the whole turn. You may now complain about Elves for a bit.

We also get a stratagem.

Out of phase shooting that gets the benefit of being in the Shooting phase is beautiful, and considering how tough your units are, you’re likely going to hit back pretty hard. This also leads to a weird scenario where your enemy is going to want to use units with tokens on finish off your units, which is a pretty easy way to get a second token onto them.

Finally, we get a look at the SP Conversion Beamer, which has Conversion and Sustained Hits D3, which essentially means if fired at a target more than 12” away, you’re doing D3 extra hits.

World Eaters

We get a look at the World Eaters army rule, and this one is an absolute doozy. It’s called Blessings of Khorne and you roll 8 dice, then you use those dice to give your entire army buffs. What are those buffs?

At worst, at absolute worst (assuming a roll of 11123456), you get one of, for your whole army: Fight on death in melee, Lethal Hits, a 6+ Feel No Pain, or 2” extra movement.

If you roll hot then you get to Advance and Charge(!) with an extra 2” movement, or just give all your melee weapons Sustained and(!) Lethal Hits. Or just stack any huge buff with fight on death. I’m not a melee army person, but these look really, really good.

If you’re more interested in finding out the chances of getting each result properly, check out this Hammer of Math article which goes into much more detail.

We get a small peek at their Detachment, which is called Berzerker Warband, but all we get to see is a stratagem.

I really, really like this. It’s a sticky objective thing, but it’s essentially designed to screw over an opponent who tries to shoot you off an objective. If they run up and fight you, it won’t work (unless something weird with Battle-shock happens), but if they shoot you, it still belongs to you. It’s thematic and powerful.

Speaking of “bad things that happen when you shoot at them”, there’s the Khorne Berzerkers.

Blood Surge is terrifying. Shooting at a unit and then the unit is in melee range of something with absolutely no recourse is like a horror movie pitch that got rejected for being too scary. Their melee profile is pretty much the same, albeit with a slightly nerfed eviscerator, but considering the army buffs they’re getting now, that’s relatively minor. Icon of Khorne is also a really nice ability as well, letting you stack the Blessings of Khorne even more in your favour now.

Finally, there’s Angron.

If you roll a good Blessing of Khorne then Angron has a potential threat range of 33 inches, isn’t that nice for everyone who isn’t you? If you’re already within 15 inches of an unfortunate squad, tank, or anything, which is probably easy to do considering you have Deep Strike, you can instead just do 8 attacks, hitting on 2s, re-rolling misses, at strength 16 with D6+2 damage. You’re totalling everything up and including a Baneblade. Then if Angron does die (possibly dealing D6 mortal wounds, because why not), maybe getting to fight on death as well, just roll 3 6s at the start of your turn (with some Icon of Khorne re-rolls) and he’s coming back.

The Daemongore cannon for the Lord of Skulls is also shown off, and it has both a strength and damage buff, going from 10 to 14 and from D3+3 to D6 + 2.

Tyranids

Surprise! They showed off a couple of new units for them. First up are Barbgaunts.

These pretty much seem made to be long range anti-infantry, further cementing them in their state of anti-infantry is their rule that only works on infantry, which causes them, on a successful hit, to reduce the movement characteristic, as well as any advance and charge rolls of that unit by 2”.

Swiftblade: I expect that these are going to be a really popular new unit for Tyranids, especially if the movement reduction still works if you split-fire the unit. Get owned, Terminators.

Second up are Neurogaunts, which have a melee profile.

On the bright side though, they’re Synapse extension cords, so they’re useful just by virtue of being annoying chaff that you have to kill.

 

That does it for this week’s roundup, but check back next Monday for another review of everything we know about the edition so far. And in the meantime if you have any questions or feedback, drop them in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.