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.
Hello, friends, and welcome to another Goonhammer faction review for Kill Team 2024. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the latest rules for the Space Marine Scout Squad. Scouts were a surprisingly late addition to Kill Team despite being a bit of a no-brainer and a featured player in 2017’s Shadow War: Armageddon release.
Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing a preview copy of these rules for review purposes.
Scouts return with their original configuration of nine models, including a sergeant, two heavy gunners (one heavy bolter, one missile launcher), a sniper, tracker, hunter, and warriors that can choose between bolt pistols & knives, shotguns, or boltguns. Fear not: New scouts are looking pretty decent thanks to a handful of subtle changes that have had a surprisingly big impact. Scouts play best when leveraging asymmetric ambushes and cagey positioning, while also focusing on scoring opportunities provided by their Infiltration and Recon tac ops.
Abilities
Forward Scouting
The Scout Squad’s Forward Scouting ability maintains the same vibe as their Kill Team 2021 incarnation, although it has been entirely cleaned up and enhanced. You still choose up to five options from the abilities offered below:
- Redeploy allows you to change the setup of one third of your operatives, rounding up. You can take this option once. Before, you could take this option up to five times, and each selection of redeploy allowed you to change the setup of a single operative. This is a big change that really streamlines the ability.
- Reposition allows you to perform a free reposition action: This is the same as the core game’s Scouting option. You can take this option twice. It’s essentially the same thing as the original Recon option from Kill Team 2021. You can use this ability twice.
- Trip Alarm is very streamlined. You place a token more than 6” of the opponent’s drop zone, and all of your weapons gain the Seek special rule when targeting enemies within 2” of your trip alarm. It’s also worth mentioning that the trip alarm token doesn’t go away when activated anymore: instead you remove it in the ready step of the third strategy phase, which is a huge improvement. You can use this option twice.
- Booby Trap is similar to the trip alarm: place a token outside 6” of the enemy deployment zone and not within 2” of other tokens. The booby trap goes off automatically when an enemy moves within range, dealing 2d3 wounds and ending that enemy model’s activation. This is quite an improvement over the old version of the same ability as well.
- Diversion is also streamlined and boosted to be more impactful than it already was. Diversion grants you a once per game strategic gambit to subtract 1 APL from any enemy within 6” of any board edge. This could be the enemy’s deployment zone, which would essentially function as it had before, but now you have an option to save it and use it later.
- Devise Plan remains unchanged: Gain one Command Point.
- Designate Target remains unchanged: Gain Balanced against a single enemy for the duration of the game.
- Spy is a complete new option that replaces the no longer relevant infiltration option: spy forces your opponent to reveal their tac op.
Overall, these scouting options are looking great. None of these options look like a bad choice anymore.
The Operatives
Scouts keep their 10 wound, 4+ save base statline. Scouts generally hit on 3s in shooting and melee, with the exception for shotguns and the sniper rifle, all of which hit on 2s. This is especially impressive in the context of 3rd edition kill team, where most factions don’t have a lot of access to weapons that hit on 2s.
Scout Warrior
Every option for scout warriors honestly looks great: bolt pistol and combat blade grants you a versatile package with 8” shooting and a formidable 4 attacks in melee that can easily be 4/5 damage in melee (with combat blades equipment). Shotguns are one of the few weapons in the game that still hit on 2, which is amazing with a 4/4 damage profile, and the boltgun’s unlimited range is a powerful tool. All of these profiles are especially valuable with the Scout Squad’s easy access to re-rolls to make them even more reliable. The warriors are the backbone of your team and shouldn’t be disregarded nor taken lightly.
Scout Sergeant
Although the Scout Sergeant no longer hits on 2s with anything but the shotgun, he still looks improved compared to his previous iteration. Guidance and Experience can now be used at any point during his activation, which is another big improvement. Previously this ability had to be used as soon as you selected the sergeant to activate. The sergeant still has 11 wounds and 3 APL, which is even more important now that he has the Astartes rule baked into his datasheet for free: allowing him to shoot or fight twice within a single activation without having to burn your Astartes Training ploy. While also keeping the ability to counteract on conceal orders.
Scout Heavy Gunner
The Scout Heavy Gunner remains unchanged from its previous layout, which is actually kind of a shame. Heavy (dash only) will be really easy for your opponent to play around. I would strongly consider only bringing one or zero heavy gunners, especially because your warriors are so strong. To make things worse: the gunner with the heavy bolter can no longer shoot twice with the Astartes Training ploy.
Scout Hunter
The Scout Hunter also remains unchanged: he’s essentially a knife warrior with a Grapnel Launcher which allows him to treat any vertical distance as 2”, and Grapnel Assault which grants lethal 3+ during an activation during which the hunter climbed, dropped, or moved underneath a vantage.
Scout Sniper
The Scout Sniper remains essentially unchanged as well, but that’s actually a pretty big deal given the context of the changes for snipers across the rest of the new edition. The Scout Sniper is one of the few snipers who truly has a Silent profile that doesn’t go away after the first shot, and the Optics ability to ignore Obscuring lasts the duration of the turning point. Another fun bonus is that the sniper now has a mobile shooting profile that matches any other bolt gun.
Scout Tracker
The Scout Tracker falls in line with all the other Auspex wielding warriors in the new edition: activating the auspex creates a 8” radius bubble around the tracker where any targets within can’t be obscured. In addition, he can Track Enemy, which marks an enemy within 8” so the rest of your team gets Seek Light against that target. Other than that, he’s a warrior with a bolt gun.
The Ploys
The Strategy Ploys are pretty similar to how they were before.
- Gunfire Ambush and Blade Ambush offer re-rolls during activations in which a scout changes to engage order, the effect of which is amplified when you target an expended enemy model. Gunfire Ambush goes from balanced against any enemy to ceaseless against an expended enemy, and Blade Ambush goes from ceaseless against any enemy to ceaseless + rending against an expended enemy.
- Stealth Relocation remains unchanged: allowing you to dash and/or change order as a strategy ploy with a single model that is 6” or more away from enemies.
- Guerilla Engagement also remains unchanged, allowing you to re-roll a single armor save per defense sequence against incoming shooting attacks, which is actually very strong, especially when combined with Camo Cloaks.
The Firefight Ploys are also very similar to their older versions.
- Astartes Training allows a single model to shoot or fight twice within the same activation. Important to note that heavy weapons can’t be selected as a weapon with which to shoot twice with, nor can the sniper rifle. Any of those operatives could take a second shot using their bolt pistol though. It is also worth noting that this now has a use case beyond allowing your sergeant to shoot or fight twice, since your sergeant can now do that for free anyways.
- Raw Physiology allows a single scout to act as though they aren’t injured until the start of its next activation.
- Emboldened Aspirant allows you to gain the Severe special weapon rule when fighting or shooting, so long as it’s the first shoot or fight of the turning point, or the target has a higher wounds characteristic than the scout. It is important to note that you can choose to use this ability after rolling dice for a shooting attack or fight action. Also important to note that this does not apply to retaliating.
- Covert Position is a firefight ploy that grants super conceal, using the same cleaned up language that we see elsewhere in Kill Team 2024.
Equipment
Camo Cloak
Camo Cloaks allow you to retain an additional cover save. Since this is just a passive buff that applies to the whole team and isn’t dependent on the range of the shooter, this is a very strong ability. Camo Cloaks plus Guerilla Engagement is a potent combo that heavily incentivizes you to engage in long range shootouts against your enemies.
Combat Blades and Knives
This equipment selection improves the melee combat profile across your entire team: any scout that was equipped with fists gains an extra point of damage on all critical hits, bringing them from 3/4 to 3/5. Any scout that already had a knife gains an additional damage to normal hits, bringing them from 3/5 to 4/5. This isn’t really a big deal for the fist wielding scouts, but for the scouts that already had combat blades this is a must take.
Heavy Weapon Bipod
The heavy weapon bipod grants the Ceaseless keyword to your heavy gunners for shooting attacks during activations in which they have not yet moved. With gunfire ambush already boosting your heavy gunners, and warriors being a solid option to take instead of heavy gunners, this would be my first equipment option to drop for barricades or something else.
Targeting Oculars
Targeting Oculars are now a floating option for anyone on your team to gain the Saturate special weapons rule for a single shot, once per turning point. This is especially good against any other team that can double retain saves in cover.
Final Thoughts
Shotguns and knives on a bunch of tough bodies makes for a pretty competitive team in terms of spearheading onto hotly contested points, which should mean that the scouts should do ok in contesting the primary mission.
With only 9 operatives and very limited access to additional APL, you need to be extremely mindful of your action economy in terms of scoring tac ops. If you don’t want to spend actions to score points, look into the recon tac op Confirm Kill. It’s actually the only tac op available to scouts that doesn’t require actions to complete.
To avoid giving up any more than 3 points to kill ops, you will want to have at least 3 scouts alive at the end of the game. Sounds reasonable, right?
Although it looks like the changes from Kill Team 2021 to 2024 were pretty subtle, this team is actually jam packed with buffs. Anything that wasn’t buffed was left alone, which is great since other comparable units did get nerfs between editions. Scouts are looking quite good for the launch of 3rd edition, and to top it off, they look pretty straightforward and simple to play.
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