TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 27: Renegade Raidin’

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I talked about playing some games of Boarding Actions and testing different lists. This time around I’m back on that 40k grind, getting in some practice games with Chaos Space Marines and testing out some new lists.

Testing Renegade Raiders

I’m pretty comfortable with my Thousand Sons at this point so I wanted to get some test reps in with Renegade Raiders. I’ve seen a few Raiders lists do well recently and in particular Josh Roberts’ winning list from a few weeks ago. I’m looking to build a modified, toned-down version of that for my Atlanta list, but also looking at running the list proper for Warzone Houston. Using the models I had, this is what I put together:

My Renegade Raiders Test List - Click to Expand

The three Rubric units sit in rhinos with two units of Chosen + Lord and the final unit of Legionaries with a Lord. I’ve traded out a unit of Rubrics and Cypher here for a unit of Bikers and a unit of Warp Talons, which give the list some extra speed without sacrificing too much. They’re also already what I have painted and converted as Night Lords, so that helps. The Rubrics are a perfect fit for Renegade Raiders; they can’t get much from Dark Pacts anyways (and don’t get the rule) but they benefit big here from the Detachment rule – AP-2 warpflamers that jump to AP-3 on 6s to wound against targets on an objective are massive, and that gets even rougher when you add in the ability to re-roll all wounds against targets on objectives you don’t control. I briefly considered swapping one out for a unit of plague marines, since they also benefit in fun ways, and then realized that I was just building the ideal detachment for my Black Legion army from last year. Heavy sigh on that front.

I decided to hit up my usual crew for a practice game. One of the most interesting things about the group I game with down here has been watching them slowly grow into strong competitive players over the past three years. They’re still fun guys to play Crusade with, but players like Andrew and Dan have improved dramatically, and have become great sparring partners for tournament practice. So I had Andrew over on Saturday to play some test games with his Astra Militarum.

Game 1: Take and Hold / Raise Banners / Tipping Point

Andrew's List - Click to Expand

And to go with this, I had Andrew put together his thoughts on the list:

“Tanks, tanks, and more tanks. This list forgoes Bullgryn to focus on jamming in more hulls to put on points. The 3 Rogal Dorns are the obvious power of the unit, they hit like a ton of bricks and they take damage like a ton of bricks, but the Hellhounds are deceptively useful. At a dirt cheap price of 115 pts for a 2+ save and a T10 hull I’d almost take them without guns. But throw in some extra melta shots that also strip cover and it can sometimes just pop most standard vehicles in one go.

The 3 squads of Kasrkin in Chimeras along with the Scout Sentinels are my flex units. They can sit tight on objectives early, they can put out a bit of damage, or range out and screen drops/charges. The scout moves mean I can afford to get a little aggressive with placement which helps ease the Traffic Jam issues this list can experience with so many hulls to place, particularly on a map like Search and Destroy.

Then you’ve got the house sitters, Leontus and his Cadian friends plus a Basilisk. Leontus is the glue here, taking your tanks to 3+ BS or getting extra movement to push lanes that might have been out of reach, or even just to scrape the 1 extra OC to steal objectives. The extra CP is essential to Guard, although I find myself rarely using most of their index strats besides Inspired Command and Reinforcements, maaaaaybe Armoured Might for -1 damage on one of my tanks in the Shooting Phase. Generally I prefer to focus on Grenades, Tank Shock, and Overwatch as my common spend. The Basilisk meanwhile just chips damage away and slows down key infantry units. Fantastic against armies like Custodes where I can keep a very valuable unit pinned down and focus down the rest or any infantry units with large bases to make it difficult to get through ruins.

The army game plan is pretty simple, Tanks Towards Targets. The chimeras are usually my first objective pushers, hopefully positioned in such a way that they will need something juicy to crack them so that the Dorns and Hellhounds can come out and blast it. At this point one of the sentinels might come out to grab a secondary, but I try and preserve them to keep my rerolls up. On turns 2/3 the tanks move up and plop onto the points, trusting in the durability, OC, and threat of OW to establish lane dominance. Leontus and crew also tend to start pushing out around then, provided there’s no deepstrike threat remaining. Whether to screen or push OC onto an objective later, the unit is too valuable to keep hidden behind a wall at home all game and if the opponent decides to reach hard and hit them, then that’s just fine. At this point I’ve usually reinforced a Kasrkin squad and can either use them to score backfield secondaries or pump out more damage, while the rest of the army floods midboard with whatever I have left.”

This is a really bad matchup for me – the terrain heavily favors Andrew here as I have few places to hide my army from his Rogal Dorns and the open lanes in the middle of the table are the last thing I need. This is also just not a great matchup for my raiders list: with a 2+ save and the ability to blank incoming damage once per turn the Dorns are very hard for this army to chew through, as most of the timing I’ll be wounding on a 5+ or 6+ and watching Andrew take 3+ saves. I really want to go second in this mission, and end up going first – not great! Renegade Raiders generally want to go second if they aren’t throwing out turn 1 charges because their army ability is reactive – most of an opponent’s army won’t start the game on objectives but if you’re going first you typically want to commit to them, and so by going second you usually guarantee your opponent will give you fat, easy targets for your boosted AP and other abilities.

I roll my Vindicators forward trying to hide them as best I can while snaking my Rhinos along the edges of the table and staging for some turn 2 charges. It doesn’t work – the Vindicators still get wrecked despite Smokescreen and Armour of Contempt being deployed – Andrew just refused to roll low shot counts on his Hellhounds and Dorns – leaving me with little to no anti-tank options right out of the gate, despite only being visible to two tanks. On top of this, my surviving Vindicator would wound itself via Dark Pact for three wounds and bracket before loosing its first shots of the game. Fantastic.

Much of the game was spent scuffling over the objective at the middle of the table, where my Chaos Lord and Chosen tried mightily but failed to kill a pair of Hellhounds, leaving the first on a single wound, following which it would kill my surviving Vindicator. My big mistake this game was moving out onto objectives turn 1 – I needed to play much more cagey, and remember that being seen by the Guard means getting killed by the guard. On this map that didn’t leave me with many options, but forcing Andrew to stick his head out first would have been a much better outcome. The real lowpoint of this game was the Warp Talons arriving from Deep Strike on turn 3, making a re-rolled charge into Leontus, then losing a model to their Dark Pact and failing to kill his whole unit (they really needed those four extra attacks), then getting completely wiped when they couldn’t make a single save to survive his four power sword wounds the following round. Just an incredible sequence of failure.

By the game’s end I only have a unit of Cultists and a unit of Chosen on the table and not much to stop Andrew from scoring. He gets some lucky objective pulls to go way up but doesn’t need them. With a few different draws this could have been closer in score but it wasn’t actually that close in practice – Andrew was always in the driver’s seat.

Result: 67-92, Loss

Game 2: Burden of Trust / Prepared Positions / Search and Destroy

This is a much better mission for me, and in many ways – we start closer together but also the terrain is much more forgiving – way easier to hide my tanks and stage for an assault on the middle of the table. And while being able to react to an opponent going first is usually ideal, on Burden of Trust it’s not so bad since going first is a big advantage with the primary mission – the player going second cannot defend objectives on the final round, meaning I’ll have a 4-to-6 VP advantage if I don’t get tabled. I win the first turn roll-off, and notice that Andrew has heplfully decided to try an experimental approach to deployment, putting his Dorn’s too close to see what he can get away with. The answer is “not that much,” and I immediately post up for turn 1 charges with my Chosen + Lord teams and my Nurglings while capturing the middle with a unit of Legionaries and the top objective with a unit of Bikes, using the stratagem to go 6″ to ensure I’d end up there and able to defend on turn 2. My Vindicators move into line of sight and take out a Dorn turn 1, while the Lord and Chosen teams kill a Hellhound and a Chimera and pin Andrew in his Deployment Zone on turn 2.

Most of this would get destroyed on Andrew’s turn, but it’s a good trade – Andrew starts the game pinned in and will only score 2 VP on turn 2 for primary, while I’m going to reliably pull 8 per turn from here on out just holding the two objectives I’ve got. I continue to press forward and we go back and forth trading for the middle objective. The Vindicators do work here but they consistently fail their Pacts, chipping away at their health and making it easy for Andrew’s surviving tanks to pick them off.

Ultimately, killing nine tanks is a really tall order for this list and I’m forced to rely on my early lead to carry me – I probably played a bit too aggressively at parts, but keeping Andrew off his turn 2 score proved to be the pivotal points I needed for a win – with only two turns of defending objectives even as options, I was able to limit him to 26 VP on primary.

After some early push, I mostly run out of gas as the Tanks just keep holding on to life and with only a few powerfists left to work with I’m not going to get the kills I need here. My last hope is my Chaos Lord, stuck in combat with Andrew’s last Dorn, who promptly rolls a 5 on his Dark Pact and kills himself before he can swing. Andrew gets a mostly uncontested last turn, but even with a 10-VP turn he’s going to fall short on scoring.

Result: 68-59, Win

Dark Pacts Suck so Goddamn Much Now

While I’m here I just want to take a moment to say that they absolutely ruined Dark Pacts in the Codex update. They feel absolutely awful to play with, and the experience of losing a model form your unit before they ever shoot or fight just feels so bad it makes me never want to play this army competitively. And sure, part of this is that I roll 5s for my tests seemingly always, but I also just don’t care for the play pattern it creates and as a result the only time I’ll even consider the faction is running a list full of Rubrics who don’t make Pacts anyways. Two practice games in, as much as I like the army I don’t think I’ll be taking them to Warzone unless something dramatically changes with Thousand Sons.

Hobby Progress

I said last week that painting one marine per week was not a sustainable amount of progress to meet my goals. And so this week I painted two marines, finishing off my first unit of Legionaries. Huzzah!

I’m really happy with this first unit, and now it’s time to give them some help. My next project up is probably going to be a Master of Executions – I’m going to free up some points for the Narrative by dropping a unit of Rubrics (or possibly two), since they’re a bit too good for that format to run three of them, and that means I’ll have room for some other characters. So a Master of Executions is next on the list. In the meantime, here’s the full squad.

Next Time: Back to the Thousand Sons

That’s it for this week but my plan is to get another practice game or two in with my Thousand Sons before Warzone Houston later this month. And I should really get some more reps in with the dusty lads before then, just to stay on top of their rules and how they play. So look forward to that next week, plus the usual hobby progress on my Night Lords.

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