Detachment Focus: Gate Warden Lance

In our Detachment Focus series we take a deep dive into an army’s Detachments, covering what’s in them, how they play, and how they’ll fit into the broader meta and your games. In this Detachment Focus we’re looking at the Gate Warden Lance from the Imperial Knights.

Imperial Knights are practically mobile bastions, and nowhere is that more literally true than in the Gate Warden Lance Detachment. This offers a very unique set of rules that encourage you to either build a solid wall of steel across the table, or forge a path straight through the middle of the table, and while it looks quite gimmicky on the surface, there’s a surprising amount of punch in the rules it offers you. Let’s find out what makes it tick in a Detachment Focus.

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.

Detachment Overview

The Gate Warden Lance Detachment lets you pick parts of the table to prioritise, and then massively powers you up when you’re either occupying them or pushing the opponent off them. Like many similar rules in tenth edition this is based around objective markers, but gets a bit weirder with it than the norm, which can be both an advantage and disadvantage. It also, helpfully, support this with some fairly potent positioning tools, and while you’ll need to plan your games out quite carefully, the rewards it offers are fairly massive.

Detachment Rule: Dauntless Defenders

At the start of the first battle round, you pick two objective markers on the battlefield to form your Foundations, and for the rest of the battle any time a unit is touching a line between any parts of these two objective markers, they are on your Defensive Line. If something causes one of the two objectives picked to be removed, you can pick another to replace it.

Many of the rules in this Detachment depend on either you or your opponent’s units being on the Defensive Line. In addition, your Imperial Knights units get a (powerful) static bonus while on the Line – Sustained Hits 1, and ignoring Hit Roll modifiers as long as they’re targeting a visible unit.

Note: It wouldn’t shock me if, like for Warpbane Task Force, this got errataed so that the “visible” rider only applies to Ranged attacks, so that you’re not penalised for Fighting through a wall.

OK, so at baseline there is a pretty strong bonus here which you definitely want, and if you read forward into the rest of the Detachment, a lot is riding on being able to trigger this. How easy is that though?

Well, up front there are two things that can help us:

• If you’re running this Detachment, make sure to bring some actual 40mm objective markers to place on the centre of any mats you’re using, because the line goes from any part of each marker to any part of the other, which means the line is 40mm wide, and if you’re touching any part of either marker, you’re on the line.
• There’s no rule saying the line cannot cross other objectives, so 99% of the time with this you’ll either want to pick:
  • The two non-central no-man’s land objectives, which will make a nice big line right across the middle of the battlefield (including through the centre).
  • Your home objective and your opponent’s home, after which you can lean into stereotypical Knight tactics and charge straight for them.

That gives you a bit more space to play with than you might think, especially as all your models have quite large bases to tag onto the line. Importantly, because of the size of your bases and only needing to touch the objective, it’s never possible for an opponent to both contest an objective that’s part of your Foundations (or is the central one when you have a line going through it) without you being able to both engage them. You also get to choose which your objectives are at the start of the first Battle Round, so after knowing who’s going first, so you can always pick the “direct” option if you’re going first, and the mid-field one if you’re second.

The result is definitely not something that works all the time, but it’s often going to be possible to switch it on when it really matters. The biggest challenges are going to be:

• Getting access to it turn 1 if you choose the no-man’s land Objectives, as on many maps a big Knight won’t reach them and be able to shoot turn 1, and even where that’s possible it can require bold deployment.(though there is a Stratagem that gives you the movement to do this).
• Overly cluttering the line if you pick home to home, especially for shooty toys.

I think that means you want to make sure you have a balanced threat profile with a mix of melee and ranged Knights – one ranged one to go ape with some of the tricks here is definitely good, but you want some hunters too. There is also a world in which this is the Detachment where you don’t always take the Hit and Wound re-roll as your Quality, since +2” Movement makes it much easier to set this up, and also stacks with the +3” Movement stratagem in the Detachment quite nastily. Probably a rare pick still, but maybe if you’re up against some sort of horde build where positioning helps more than a marginal output boost? For fringe choices, you should also bear in mind that there will be an occasional use case for drawing your line from home to one of the side No-Man’s Land objectives, primarily for missions like Purge or Scorched where you don’t need to try and fight for more than two objectives. In those, if your opponent is a very high threat army, this can be the play to let you defensively whittle them down.

The final concern with this is that it is slightly redundant with units that already have access to Sustained Hits, especially Canis Rex, the big dog himself, and the conversion beamer on the Defender. There are other benefits, but do consider that when building a list.

Enhancements

As will be the trend for the rest of the Detachment, these are all themed around the Line. Learn to love the Line. Luckily, some of them are pretty good.

• Acquisitor-at-Arms (15pts): A rather confusing one here – while the bearer is on your Line, and no enemies are anywhere on your Line, then the bearer’s bondsman gets to add the bearer’s OC to their own. That’s so many steps, good grief. Obviously an OC14 Armiger is a decent payoff, but I’m skeptical that this is going to come up that often in situations where you aren’t already about to win a crushing victory. It is the one argument in this Detachment for not always doing a “long” defensive line, because going for a shorter one makes it easier to hit the condition of your opponent not being on it, but that feels like you’re shooting yourself in the foot to set up a trick that still needs quite a lot of things to align to be good.
• Purgation’s Hand (20pts): This, on the other hand, is good clean fun – while the bearer is on your Defensive Line, they get to re-roll HIts and Wounds of 1 when making a melee attack. Helps ensure a Gallant or Lancer can turn foes into paste with utmost reliability, and not bad on other Knights as it stacks on top of the Quality re-rolls to get them pretty close to full.
• Augury Halo (20pts): Ignore Cover while on your line. Very solid on any double gun Knight, particularly a Crusader.
• Vengeful Tread (15pts): 0CP Tank Shock. Not bad, especially as you probably want a Lancer in this Detachment, so putting this on something else lets you do double free Tank Shock each turn, which is certainly something.

Stratagems

Once more, most of these are Line-themed, but do at least give you a big payoff for standing on it. However, perhaps the most important of them does not require you to be on the line, providing a big movement boost that can go anywhere. Clearly this is intended to help you reach the position you need to be in – but you can also just be aggressive with it!

• Drive Them Out! (Battle Tactic, 1CP): When targeting an enemy unit that’s on your Defensive Line, give one of your units 5+ Critical Hits. Doesn’t technically require you to be on the line yourself, though obviously that’s what gives you Sustained if you don’t have anything built in. Pretty great – scope for foes to play around it, but it won’t always be possible, and it hurts when it goes off.
• Lancebreaker (Strategic Ploy, 1CP): -1 to wound in the Fight Phase against opponents with Strength higher than your Toughness while you’re on the Line. Fringe as all hell, but when some big nasty comes for your Lancer making them wound on 4s isn’t going to be bad!
• Steadfast Superiority (Steadfast Superiority, 1CP): Full hit re-rolls in melee while on the Line. Your biggest melee threat probably has this already from the Enhancement, but this is great to help a Warglaive pull off a challenging lift.
• Marshal the Defence (Battle Tactic, 1CP): Pick two Knights and give them +3” Movement. Super spicy – gives you massive reach on Lancers and Gallants, even more so if you stack it with the +Movement Quality. There’s a world where this Detachment ends up building double Lancer to use this plus that Quality, and getting hit re-rolls from the Enhancement and Steadfast rather than leaning on the normal Quality.
• Titanic Bombardment (Battle Tactic, 1CP): A Stationary TITANIC Knight on your LIne gets Sustained Hits 2 in the Shooting Phase. Big setup to land this, but big payoff if it works, shame that it’s redundant on the Defender, which is probably the Knight most willing to stand in the open on the line. You could use this with a Castellan that just toes onto your home line and whatever terrain is near it and dares the foe to appear anywhere on the table though.
• Fortress of Intimidation (Epic Deed, 1CP): Use at the start of the Opponent’s Command phase, on a TITANIC Knight on the line. For the Phase, anyone charging them has to take a Battle-shock test at -1. Legitimately quite good in any sort of melee matchup, as it both messes objective-flipping plans and potentially sabotages Stratagem use, which many foes will rely on to try and kill a big Knight. 

Playing This Detachment

The biggest question for this Detachment is whether you can build a list that’s able to pivot between the two main Line placement plans or not. Going straight for the enemy home obviously demands at least one melee big and preferably some Warglaives to run shotgun, while a more midfield plan wants big shooting pieces and Helverins.

Whichever you pick, the plan is largely going to be to occupy the Line in force on turns two and three and try and go for big, swinging hits, then push off of it once the opponent has been largely de-fanged. The +3” Movement stratagem is key here – I feel like you pretty much always end up slamming that on turn 2 to get yourself into alpha strike position, and then try and rock from there. You’ve got decent tools to soften any melee counterpunch, and you want to use those to try and keep the momentum going to the end.

Strengths

• Damage output. You can get a strong output boost from Detachment Rule, when it’s active. There’s a ton of Stratagems in here which boost your damage output on top of that, helping you get the most out of those units.
• Mobility. Being able to add 3″ to your movement is big, adding threat range to an army that can really make the most of it.
• Big alpha strike potential. Big movement and big damage output means you’ve got an incredible ability to alpha strike enemy units off the table.

Weaknesses

• Location-based. The Detachment Rule needs finesse to use, and can sometimes be played around by savvy opponents, who can likely predict where you’ll be. 
• Lack of focus. The rules here are pulling in several different directions, sand end up a bit unfocused.
• Redundant rules. There’s quite a bit of redundancy here between the Detachment’s rules and built-in effects on Datasheet/Army Rule.

A Sample List

This Detachment can be a bit all over the place, but you’ll need to figure out early where your Defensive line is going to be and use that effectively.

”Aggro

While my heart always yearns for toolbox builds, I think the biggest “wow” factor this Detachment offers you is speed boosting two Knights, so I’ve leant into that here. Lancer and Gallant, extra Enhancement bonuses locked and loaded, ready to zoom 15” then smash stuff (or even go 17” if you decide to pick the relevant Quality, which could be worth it since they bring re-rolls). A close second for most exciting thing is the tantalising prospect of putting Sustained HIts 2 on a Castellan, so they’re here too. Various drafts of the list had an Ignore Cover Crusader or a Defender in the slot, and I’m sure there’s reasons to explore those, but I decided to just go big. Hit them hard, leave them dead, sorted.

Final Thoughts

It’s always fun to see something quirky that has some actual power to it, and it does feel like this Detachment manages to hit on that front. We’re excited to see if it makes it onto the table anywhere.

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