The 2024 Edition of Kill Team has overhauled the game, changing rules, datasheets, and bringing with it an updated set of rules for every team in the game. In this series we’re taking a look at each team, how they’ve changed, and what it means for how they play in the new edition.
Citizen, come and learn of the wise, mighty Inquisitorial Agents and the heroic, just and proportionate actions they perform!
Inquisitorial Agents first arrived in the Ashes of Faith campaign supplement, facing off against the Chaos Cultists. Both teams were extremely strong on release and went through significant changes through the edition, though the Agents remained strong to the end. Inquisitorial rosters were famous for being about the size of a 40k army, due to their ability to recruit help from across most of the Imperium, and now the complete removal of roster restrictions means they’ll be bigger than ever.
Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.
The Video Version of the Review
We have a video version of this review courtesy of Can You Roll a Crit?
Team Overview
For the most part these are fairly normal humans with 7 wounds and 5+ saves. They tend to be good at either melee or shooting, hitting on 3s with their stronger ability and 4s with the weaker one.
Perhaps more than any other team, the Inquisitorial Agents are individuals, so they each have very different abilities. There’s a blind mystic with an autopistol that hits on a 2+ and has seek, though mostly they’ll be using their psychic abilities to help their colleagues. There’s a Deathworld Veteran who apparently thinks he’s an Ork, so he can charge from conceal and ignore a normal hit once per turn. The Oathkeeper brings one of the best melee weapons in the game, with four attacks on 3s doing 5/6 Brutal, whereas the Autosavant is armed only with a sharpened feather. The Pistolier can fire her plasma pistol and silenced autopistol as a single action and can then fire either one again, though we think that’s probably a mistake and due for an early FAQ. You can have a Servitor with a massive gun attached, though it won’t work very well without direction. Your core operatives provide a real toolbox of abilities, even before you look at the array of different operatives you can requisition.
You can also pick any archetype you want, rather than being limited to two set ones. It’s fantastic to have even more options here, so long as you can handle the mental load.
Special Rule: Inquisitorial Requisition
This is the rule that lets you draft in members of other Kill Teams to fill out your roster. I’ll talk about this more as we look at team composition.
Other than the phenomenal customisation options you get and a case containing at least twice as many models as anyone else, this special rule doesn’t actually do anything once the game starts. Indeed, requisitioned models lose many of their own team’s special rules, instead becoming replacing their own faction keyword with Inquisitorial Agent for all purposes. As such your Inquisitorial ploys will work on them and abilities from people like Vox Operators and Medics will work across your whole team, but they’ll have access to fewer of their original abilities.
Team Composition
The team is made up of an Interrogator, his pet skull and either five or ten Inquisitorial Agents, who are some of the weirdest freaks from the 40k universe – which is really saying something. If you only bring five agents you can requisition some operatives from another branch of the Imperium, letting you pick from most operatives on those teams, though their leaders are not available.
Your options are:
Five Tempestus Scions
These have 8 wounds, 4+ saves and hit on 3s in shooting, 4s in melee. These are just the same as Kasrkin, just with fewer options, so they’re the one group you probably don’t need to buy.
Five Sisters of Silence
With 8 wounds and 3+ saves these are your toughest operatives, though 8 wounds might not last all that long. There are three varieties, with a bolter, flamer or greatsword (3A, 3+, 4/6 Lethal 5+).
The main point of these is their Psychic Null rule. This means they’re immune to psychic powers and attacks, and that nobody, including your operatives, can use Psychic abilities while within 6” of one of them. On the other hand none of them are specialists, so you’re ruling out things like vox operators to alter AP by taking them. You take these against psychic teams, or possibly if you want to see what happens if you bring six flamers (including the Penal Legionnaire).
Six Death Korps
Individually the weakest option, with only 7 wounds, 5+ saves and hitting on a 4+. They also lose out on their orders, meaning they will tend to be inaccurate and struggle to do damage. You can take up to three gunners (including the sniper) and there’s a medic and vox operator. You get access to quite a lot of specialists, including the excellent spotter, the sapper and a few melee options. The real selling point here is having an extra body on the board.
Five Exaction Squad
These have 8 wounds and 4+ saves. They are mostly armed with shotguns that hit on 3s doing 4/4, with most other weapons hitting on 4s. You get up to two Subductors, one gunner and a wide array of specialists, including a sharpshooter who doesn’t count as your gunner. You can bring a dog too and he’s a very good boy who can apprehend enemies to make them worse at melee and stop them falling back. They retain the Subductors’ abilities to double-parry and all of them can shoot into melee. Those 4/4 shotguns are great into tricksy 8-wound elves, making them a great pick for that match up.
Five Imperial Navy Breachers
With 7w, 4+ saves and mostly hitting on 4s, these feel a bit weaker than some other teams. You can only bring one gunner, who isn’t that great due to his poor BS. Their Void Armour still works to protect them against blast and torrent weapons. These guys don’t look like a great pick except perhaps on ITD, though their specialists do bring some of the more unique abilities. They’d have play if you can work out how to make the most of them.
Five Kasrkin
These are very like your Tempestus Scions, with 8w, 4+ saves and hitting on 3s with the same guns. You can only have two gunners, including a sniper and five other special weapon options. You get some great specialists including a Vox-operator who can hand out two APL boosts a turn, a Demo-trooper with melta mine and the Recon-trooper, who can use the Kasrkin Relocate strategy ploy to give operative’s within 3” of the Recon-trooper a free dash.
Playing This Team
I’m going to do my best to talk about the options you have here but I’m sure I’ll miss some good combos and tricks. There’s a lot here.
One of the key tactics is using the Inquisitorial Tomes carried by your Interrogator and his pet skull. Each of these can project a 2” aura, granting either an extra attack dice vs enemies in the aura or removing a dice from attacks targeting friends in it. When attacking, this extra dice is likely to do damage simply because the enemy has run of saves. When defending you’re usually going to be removing a dice that would otherwise have hurt you, as you only have 3 saves vs usually at least four dice of incoming damage. I think by default you’d use the skull to buff damage and have the interrogator lurking somewhere with the protective aura up, though there will certainly be times you want to change that. A Subductor within the protective aura would be pretty tough to shift.
Other than that a huge amount depends on who you choose to bring. The best thing is to check out our reviews of the teams you can requisition.
Your ploys have a running theme of thwarting your enemies nefarious plans. The Strategic Ploy Denounce forces an operative to wait for D3 others to be activated before it can go, by which time you’ll probably have done something justified and proportionate to it. Its cost increases every time you play it, but once is often enough. The Tactical Ploy Absolute Authority is your “nope” card, so if your opponent does a ploy you can simply stop it. The mere threat of this can be enough to prevent your opponent using some of their key tactics, knowing that you can stop them and leave their operatives exposed. Relentless in Pursuit lets you Reposition or charge with an operative after an enemy within 2″ moves, so long as you charge or get back within 2″ of them. Intimidating Presence lets you add 1AP to the cost of an enemy pick up or mission action if one of your operatives within 3″ (or the Mystic within 6″) can see them. That will often mean they can’t do the action, costing them VPs.
Other Strategic Ploys let you kill stuff and stay alive. Intense Scrutiny lets you ignore cover (of all types) within 4″, which is excellent for torrent weapons, while Quarry gives your whole team Ceaseless against a nominated enemy, switching to a new one if they are incapacitated. Meanwhile Irrefutable Juristiction lets your operatives reroll a save when within 3″ of an objective, or all results of a particular number if they contest it. Finally the Tactical Ploy The Emperor’s Will lets an operative ignore any changes to their stats, such as from being wounded.
To keep enough CPs to maintain all this stuff you might want to consider the Enlightener, who gives you a CP whenever an enemy dies in their control range.
For equipment the Inquisitorial Rosette lets you switch the target of your Quarry ploy once per game. It could be useful if the original target is somehow able to flee from justice but generally you should just do a better job of target selection and take something else. Armoured Bodysuits let your operatives retain a single 4 as a success when being shot at, which is particularly handy if you bring Death Korps. Combat Daggers give all your operatives a 3/4 melee attack, hitting on 4s or on 3s for Sisters. The humble Servo Skull may be the pick of the bunch, letting you do a mission action for one less AP once per turning point. It’s a major quality of life upgrade that may well win you games, especially if you don’t have a vox-operator to boost APL.
What’s Changed?
One really huge change is that there’s now no limit on how many guns with Piercing you can bring. Want the Pistolier, a plasma-cannon-toting Servitor and five Scion gunners? Go right ahead. The only limitation is that you might want some more interesting tricks instead of going for raw firepower.
Check out our reviews of the teams you can requisition for a more detailed look at their changes.
Three Cool Things About This Team:
- You’re in charge. Field who you want, do the mission you want and if the enemy does something you don’t like, your Absolute Authority will stop them.
- They’re good at killing elites, which look like they’re very strong. Actually elites look so strong that you still might struggle, but you’ve got a chance.
- You’re also good at killing everything else, which is nice. There are no impossibly bad match-ups for this team.
Final Thoughts
At launch, Inquisitorial Agents are one of the most powerful factions available. This is mainly due to their flexibility, meaning you can spec to fight whoever you come up against far more than anyone else. You can bring truly alarming amounts of Piercing against elites, for example.
Buying this team from scratch is a severe challenge for the wallet. The agent box only contains seven models including the skull, so you’ll have to get two boxes or hit your bits box for some spare torsos just to get your agents, and that’s before you look at the six other teams you “need” to have all the options you could take. For some of those you might even want more than one box to get all the options. I’m tempted to recommend the 40k Imperial Agents combat patrol as a start point, as it gives you some agents and enough Arbites to make a full roster, which you can run as their own team if you want. Pious Vorne could work well as your Penal Legionnaire, but I’m not sure what to do with the Eversor. Maybe add a box of Kasrkin, to build all the gunners and specialists, and you’d be off to a start.
This isn’t going to be an easy team to learn, as you have many times more options than other players have to contend with. At first you’ll almost certainly pick the wrong team to requisition or a tac op that turns out to be harder than you thought with the team you field. It’s going to take us all a little while to figure this out but, when we do, the Emperor’s enemies should be mightily afraid.
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