Detachment Focus: Godhammer Assault Force

Codex Supplement: Black Templars is here, and it brings with it a slew of new ways to play everyone’s favorite transhuman zealots. In this series we’re looking at these new detachments, covering what’s in them, how they play, and how they’ll fit into the broader meta and your games.

Black Templars have always been about getting stuck in and fighting their opponents in melee. Sometimes though, your dishonorable opponent will bring cowardly tools such as “Ranged Attacks” to harm you before you get into combat. Luckily a new innovation in the crusading space, Transports, have you covered. This detachment is all about those.

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

Note: Where this article references points costs, these are provisional costs provided to us by Games Workshop to support our review, and may be subject to change until they are published on Warhammer Community.

Detachment Overview

Godhammer Assault Force is all about transports and the guys who get out of them. Expect to bring a Land Raider and a variety of transports to get the most out of what’s being offered here.  The downside is once you’re out of your transports, you don’t get a lot from this detachment. While it’s not the strongest detachment of the bunch, there’s a few good tools here that make a mechanized infantry force interesting.

Detachment Rule: Shock and Awe

Whenever you charge after leaving a transport one of the targets of your charge must make a Battle-shock Test. Additionally, any units that got out of a transport this turn get +1 to hit. While this is no Sky Splinter Assault Force, there’s some interesting tech here. The Battle-shock test could be used to turn off your opponent’s defensive stratagems and if you go MSU you can stack quite a few tests in a turn to try and ensure they fail one of them. The +1 to hit though is the real value here. It’s a simple buff and since it doesn’t require the charge it can also work with units that got out of a destroyed transport that get charged.

Enhancements

• Paragon of Fury (25 pts): melee weapons equipped by the character get +2 strength and if they get out of a transport this turn they also get +1 damage. This is a great buff to a lot of units, but it’s a fantastic buff for the Emperor’s Champion, giving access to potentially damage 4 Devastating Wounds.
• Battle-Psalm Precentor (10 pts): If this unit charges out of a Transport they can impose a -1 to the Battle-shock test forced as a result of the detachment rule. This is nice to have, but I really wouldn’t invest in it unless you have the points left over.
• Augury Servo-Host (15 pts): At the start of the shooting phase, select a unit within 12” and visible and strip cover from it. This is fine, good even. It’s just this list isn’t really asking you to do a ton of shooting that would benefit from this so it’s a bit out of place. That said, stripping cover is never unwelcome.
• Herald of Sacred Slaughter (15 pts): If the bearer starts the battle in a Dedicated Transport, that transport gets Scouts 9”. Now we’re talking. Notably this doesn’t just give the unit inside Scouts 9” but it is still limited to Dedicated Transports, so you can’t use it to get a Land Raider zooming up the table. The benefit here however is that it’s an ability given to the transport and not the unit inside, so you can take the character with a unit that doesn’t have Scouts and use this to scout them forward in a transport.

Stratagems

All your stratagems affect your vehicles and the dudes who get out of them.

• A Ceaseless Cause (1CP): if you were eligible to fight something in melee this turn and are no longer in engagement range, you can move 6”. You can’t use this to get back in a transport if you got out of one this turn. Damn, this is so close to being a fire. This would be a great way to reload your transports for round 2 after punching something hard if it didn’t have that restriction. As is its still flat 6” extra inches of movement, which could be key for getting into a protective position or pinching an objective.
• Focused Hatred (1CP): In the charge phase select a unit that got out of a Transport this turn. That unit can move through enemy models as if they weren’t there so long as they target them as part of the charge. This is a fantastic way to bust through screens trying to protect more valuable targets on the other side.
• Uncompromising Egress (1CP): In your Movement phase one Land Raider can have its embarked units disembark within 6” and within engagement range. This is really cool, just remember you won’t get your charge bonus if you get out within engagement range and your target will fight before you do. That said this can effectively be +3” to move for the unit inside, allowing for some devastating alpha strikes, especially combined with Herald of Sacred Slaughter.
• Condemnatory Info-Screed (1CP): Ok I gotta talk about the lore blurb for this one. Apparently the stratagem puts a laundry list of all the things the thing you wanna fight in the transport your dudes are in, getting them all pissed off and ready to reroll 1’s to wound the turn they get out. Apparently the Land Raiders get a much bigger corkboard to fit more stuff, since you get full wound rerolls instead if you’re getting out of one of those. This is a fantastic tool for punching up. Not super worth using on a non Land Raider but you were gonna bring one of those anyway.
• Gauntlet of the God-Emperor (1CP): Your obligatory smash through walls stratagem for vehicles. Again this is great for that Scouts 9” Land Raider you were definitely bringing, but its also good on a repex, allowing them to set up some threats behind big ruins.
• Blessed Hull (2CP): -1 damage for a vehicle in the shooting phase. This can make getting rid of a Land Raider that much more annoying, but it’s a shame it doesn’t work in the fight phase.

Playing This Detachment

Being successful with this detachment is gonna require knowing when and where to dedicate your melee missiles and properly balancing your transports and support characters with your infantry squads who are going to get the majority of stuff done. You want at least one land raider if not two, and repulsor exexcutioners pull double duty here, giving you some ranged anti tank while also giving you a nice delivery system for some small Sword Brethren squads. Just be sure to protect your vehicles – transport detachments tend to share a single, brutal point of failure, in that they can be easily derailed by some clown with a meltagun.

There are some great stratagems here and they can be combined with some of the enhancements for some devastating early pressure. The only issue here is it’s very CP-hungry to do all the things you want to do. Consider bringing a Captain along to maximize your shenanigans. There’s a lot of squeezing you have to do to get the juice from this detachment, but the juice is certainly here.

Strengths

• Great support for the gameplan: This detachment is very straight forward in what it wants you to do: get in transports and charge out of them. Luckily there’s some great support here to do just that.
• Good tools for early pressure: Between access to Scouts 9” on a land raider and getting an extra 3” while getting out of it, you can project a very gnarly threat range with your big melee units very early.
• You were likely doing some of this already: Transports were always part of the Black Templar gameplan, so adapting to this detachment doesn’t take a ton of doing.

Weaknesses

• Battle-shock rules are still bad: unfortunately the Battle-shock clause of the detachment rule is more of an after thought than anything else. It can be nice but with no way to affect enemy leadership without spending points, and even then it just being a -1, it will rarely be relevant.
• Not helpful after your go turn: once you’re out of your transports there is nothing here to help your units do anything better than their datasheets say. For a detachment rule that will likely affect a unit once or at best twice, it’s not particularly impactful.
• Lots of careful planning required: from building out your list to make sure everyone has a car to get into and characters to support them to playing the game and making sure you don’t over commit too early, this detachment is going to take a lot of brain power to pilot well. Unfortunately you aren’t rewarded to the same degree as the effort you have to put in.

A Sample List

Transport lists can be easy to write in that they’re often just dictated by the question “what transports are worth taking?” Unfortunately, Rhinos aren’t an option for your Tacticus marines, but the good news is that Land Raider Redeemers are still pretty great.

Godhammer Assault Force - click to expand

This list really just does the one thing: puts dudes in cars and then violently inflicts them on your opponent. The land raiders take the big sword bros squad and assault intercessors while the rest go in the remainder of the room of one of those land raiders and the two repulsor executioners. The RepExes double as a delivery system for your squads while also providing solid anti tank, and you won’t be missing Oaths with this list because everything will be rerolling their hits and sometimes wounds. If nothing else I’m a little sad there wasn’t room for an enhancement on the Emperor’s Champion, because Herald of Sacred Slaughter would be really nifty here.

Final Thoughts

This detachment has a lot of neat ideas. The Land Raider dream of moving it 21” in a turn and disgorging its contents another 6” out is really cool but in practice it doesn’t quite get there. There’s just so much work you have to do just to get +1 to hit in a faction that has two characters that can give you full rerolls instead and a vehicle that can give you reroll ones. If you’re really committed to the bit, there’s definitely some cool stuff here, but at the end of the day you’re probably better off going elsewhere for your crusading needs.

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