10th Edition Competitive Faction Focus: Chaos Knights

For our first Faction Focus of the week, we’re once again meddling with the forces of Chaos, but with 200% more giant robots. That’s right – Norman is taking a look at his beloved Chaos Knights.

If you’ve missed a Faction Focus, you can find all the ones we’ve published so far here.

10th is here and giant robots are in. Sure at the time of writing this the smooth, lame, annoying knights are doing better, but Chaos Knights have some cool tech and access to some of the best costed and highest performing vehicles in the game.

Why Should You Play This Faction?

Look I’m gonna level with you, at the time of writing this article Imperial Knights are just straight up better. They have one of the best army and detachment rules in the game and access to many of the same datasheets. Meanwhile, with how battleshock works and how easy it is to use Insane Bravery stratagem, I’ve basically been playing the army as if my faction rules didn’t exist. They’re unreliable and ineffective. All is not lost though! Chaos knights are cheaper, have access to more diverse loadouts, and most importantly can run all War Dogs. On top of that they get access to Daemon allies and frankly just much sicker models. So if you wanna do vehicle skew on hero mode, read on!

Five Things to Know

• Your Army Rule and Detachment Rule are Bad: These rules all revolve around Battleshock with Harbingers of Despair handing out -1 to the tests and bonuses against those who fail it and Traitoris Lance forcing the tests below starting strength. The thing is, even with the debuff it’s still too easy to pass these tests. On top of that if a key unit fails your opponent will have just gotten a shiny CP to spend on Insane Bravery if they fail it. Do not build around Battleshock
• Your Datasheets are Good: You get access to some of the most efficient and effective vehicle datasheets in the game. Brigands can and will carry this faction to all of their wins and the other datasheets are no slouches either.
• You Don’t Need to Take Big Knights: The only list building requirement in 10th edition is that you need to take a character, and luckily the War Dog Stalker has that keyword. This means you can take a horde of angry little robots to flood the board.
• The Stratagems are a Mixed Bag: Since you’re playing the Battleshock focused faction, a lot of your stratagems revolve around that mechanic. This means some of those stratagems are situational at best. That said Knights of Shade lets you bypass one of the biggest downsides of playing an all vehicle army (getting around terrain), and Dread Hounds will help you rip down big targets.
• Daemons are Your Friends: Don’t sleep on the Daemons! You’re playing a low model count army which means you need to be very careful what you decide to do with each knight. Often you won’t have the bandwidth to worry about deploying teleport homers or cleansing objectives with your big knights since you need them killing idiots. This is where Daemons come in to save the day, providing cheap bodies to do utility during the game.
• (Bonus Thing To Know) You Have Easy Access to Towering: For the uninitiated, the Towering keyword lets you use true line of sight from anywhere on the battlefield even if there’s ruins between you and your target. This means you can snipe out enemy targets from as early as turn one if you can get angles on them. That said, all of the units with Towering have gone up since the indexes were released, making some of the choices you’d usually take to leverage this (namely the Knight Tyrant) much harder to justify.

What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?

The number one stand out unit is the War Dog Brigand. Coming in at 150 points and the ability to take 6 due to them being battline, this unit is a workhorse that can handle any situation. Need to take out a vehicle? Get in close and start firing the thermal lance. Need to erase some massed infantry? Spin up the chain cannon. Got some pesky infantry behind cover holding a home objective? Use the havoc missile launcher to shoot a mortar at them. The best thing is these all hit on 2s (3s if firing indirect I guess) meaning the thermal lance which is usually famously unreliable, becomes a real strong pick and with the Brigand’s ability to give its weapons extra AP, the chain cannon becomes incredibly lethal. 

Beyond that it gets a bit hairy. The bigs are all a bit over costed since the price hikes from the Towering balance pass with the Desecrator probably being the best pick there. On the War Dog side of the house, the Stalker would probably be the runner up pick if not for the fact that they’re all characters. This means if you take more than a couple (though you do want a couple) you give up lots of Assassination points, giving your opponent two easy fixed secondaries instead of one. The Karnivore would be a nice pick if it wasn’t for some reason the most expensive War Dog despite being the locked to melee to be effective. Huntsman and Executioner stand as the runners up but with the Executioner being cheaper it probably wins out as the dog you fill your list with after you take 6 brigands.

It’s worth noting that if the points come down, there will likely be good play with the Knight Tyrant with the Panoply of Cursed Knights enhancement. Specifically the loadout to take is the big flamer and harpoon with 2 missiles up top. This provides enough avenues for devastating wounds to be a real problem and a potent overwatch threat. Right now it’s far too expensive for what it brings to the table. In addition I’ve found in a lot of match ups, it dies just as easily as anything else (Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, anything that can focus fire) so it becomes more of a liability than an asset.

Wings: Norman alluded to it earlier by highlighting that Daemons are great with Knights, and on that front The Changeling may as well be an honorary model for this faction for must-have purposes. I suspect I don’t need to explain why a low model count army wants the ultimate backfield objective sitter.

I’d also say that the Knight Tyrant could start looking pretty hot depending on how other factions move around in the next balance pass, even if its own points don’t change.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

Scoring and denying primary is where knights reign supreme. The minimum OC you get in the faction is 8 on all the War Dogs. With them being such fast movers and access to the Knights of Shade stratagem to go through terrain, you can flip most objectives and often have the toughness necessary to keep them. When playing chaos knights you want to overwhelm your opponent’s key objectives by throwing as many cheap War Dogs on them as possible. Your models also have huge bases which means you can easily move-block opponents from being able to move onto objectives during their turn.

Secondaries however are a bit more of a problem. In a knights army you don’t really have units who are good for completing actions and being expendable. Luckily you have access to daemons for support. Personally I like using Flamers of Tzeentch. While their lethality isn’t as high as last edition, they still provide a potent overwatch threat and at T4 3 wounds and a 4+ invulnerable save, they’re annoying to shift. In addition to that they fly, move 9” and can fall back and shoot meaning they can provide a charge screen for your knights one turn, then fall back and do a secondary the next. 

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

The short answer is Chain Cannons. These can be found on Brigands and Stalkers and sit at profile of 12 S6 Ap 1 D1 shots. It comes on cheap platforms and at the perfect strength for dealing with most infantry toughness profiles. The Ap 1 is a bit regrettable due to cover being so plentiful but the Brigand can pump that to Ap 2. The Havoc launcher can also help in this department since its D6 shots and blast and are available on every platform (yes also the Brigand, you may be seeing a pattern). The most useful part of this weapon is that they can fire indirect, but they can provide some real extra power into chaff units no matter what the context.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Well, kinda everything does well at this. Every knight platform has access to a weapon over strength 10 except for the Executioner, and that one can often punch up reliably due to volume. What you’ll be using most often is the Daemonsbreath Thermal Spear (yup another brigand weapon). On its own it’s not very reliable at 2 Shots of S 12 Ap 4 D D6, but with Melta 4 and being able to be taken en masse you’ll be popping vehicles no problem.

What Combos Should You Build Around?

One of the big differences between Imperial Knights and Chaos Knights is that you don’t really need combos in Chaos Knights. All of the unit abilities work independently outside of the bigs giving minor buffs to nearby War Dogs, the most useful of which being the Desecrator giving nearby dogs reroll 1’s to hit in shooting. That said all of your abilities can be very potent. The Brigand gets extra AP if they shoot the closest model, The Stalker can get +1 to wound if it targets something 6” away from friendly models, and the Executioner can get +1 to hit if it targets something below half strength. All these abilities can be leveraged by planning out your turn carefully and can add up to create very powerful datasheets.

Sample List

Here’s the list I’ve been playing with:

Army List - Click to Expand

This is a pretty standard all comers dog spam list. Generally piloting it comes down to keeping your target priority on point and making sure your opponent has to deal with multiple knights a turn. With the executioners being less valuable than the brigands, I generally try and have them be my aggressive objective holders since every shot going at them is a shot that could have gone at a brigand. You’ll notice there’s only a single stalker in the list, this is for two reasons. One, every stalker you add provides another Assassination target since they’re characters. Two, ironically the place knights often struggle is into marine equivalents. The chain cannon doesn’t quite get there and the thermal lance is overkill. The executioner auto cannon is not ideal at only AP 1 but it gets the job done. 

Generally my games break down in the following way: I start with the stalker on my home objective so I can make it sticky with the Aura of Terror enhancement. Meanwhile I push pretty aggressively with most of my army towards the center of the table, advancing where I need to to get on every objective in no man’s land if I can. This means my opponent needs to deal with all 3 objectives on their turn, and if I positioned correctly their fire is going into the less valuable but just as durable executioners. The flamers meanwhile generally go to the middle of the table, move blocking and screening for the knights or do a secondary if I draw one that requires them. Since the flamers are relatively durable with 3 wounds each and a 4++ and can fall back and shoot, I don’t really care if they get charged. Over the course of the game, you want to take out your opponent’s anti tank capabilities quickly and strangle your opponent on primary.

Wrap Up

Chaos Knights may be playing second banana to their smooth brethren for now, but there’s still a lot of unique things they can do. By leveraging strong, independent datasheets they can be an oppressive force on the tabletop and can overwhelm most factions in the game. Primarily they’re a shooting army now, but they have access to some good hybrid threats and if the Karnivore ever comes down (please) you can probably expect to see that pop up in a few lists. This faction probably won’t win any GTs but they continue to be a fun force to put on the tabletop.

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