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 Persecution Prospect from the Leagues of Votann.
The Votann conventionally favour a slow, steady and sturdy style of warfare, but thanks to their mastery of anti-grav technology, some of their units buck this trend. The brave scouts and outriders of the Hernkyn favour a more mobile form of warfare, and this Detachment shows that on the tabletop, encouraging you to surround the foe and hit them hard and fast.
We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes. We have also been provided with a provisional Munitorum Field Manual for the army to use when writing the review, but please note that these points are subject to change until they are published on Warhammer Community.
Detachment Overview
The Persecution Prospect (which I am going to desperately struggle not to call the Persecution Complex any time I talk about it) provides you with tools to do two key things – concentrate violence on key targets, and go fast. These are generally pretty good things to be doing in 40K, so it’s certainly attention grabbing out of the gate. It also works especially well with Hernkyn units, but is at the softer end of mandatory army theming, with only some of its tools being locked to the keyword (and two new Hernkyn units to play with in the Codex as well).
There’s a lot to like on paper here, but unfortunately also one glaring, spectacular weakness that might hold it back from success. We’ll hit that nice and early, so let’s take a look.
Detachment Rule: Assailed From Every Angle
The Kyn of the Persecution Prospect firmly believe that bullying works. Each time one of your units is selected to shoot, you can pick one enemy unit (excluding Monsters or Vehicles). If you do, your unit can only target that unit, but if any of your attacks hit they gain the Assailed condition till your next Shooting Phase, which triggers a bunch of effects in the Detachment. If you do this again to the same target, they also become Pinned, taking -2” to Movement and Charges.
This is a very unique Detachment Rule, and obviously can’t be evaluated entirely by itself, as you need to know how much being Assailed matters. The answer is that it does to a reasonable extent (your army works much more smoothly against Assailed targets), but not enough to be a full Detachment Rule.
That leads onto the issue with this, which is that it is wildly variable in how good it is depending on the opponent’s army. If someone turns up with Adeptus Custodes, they’re going to hate every moment of playing against this. If someone turns up with Chaos Knights, you don’t have a Detachment rule. That’s just way too much variance, and it’s a shame because there’s some cool stuff going on here, to the point where you almost wonder if there’s a real list in it despite the horrendous failure case of hitting a Knight or monster mash build. As is, it’s a bizarre missed opportunity.
Leaving aside that and engaging with this on its merits, the big incentive here is to bring plenty of units so that when it is active, you can drop Pinned on as much stuff as possible. Happily, there’s plenty of ways to pack small units into this, and things like split squads of Pioneers are extra useful thanks to this rule. It also provides a real incentive to take one of the new Cthonian artillery pieces, as being able to reach out and Assail something your bikes are lining up on so they can activate Stratagems is going to be great.
Enhancements
Several of these play with the Detachment rule, which is both a blessing and a curse – it means there’s good synergy, but that they’re terrible if the opponent is on a Vehicle spam build. There’s still some interesting stuff to cover though, and one that’s just great in its own right.
- Eye for Weakness (25pts): When the bearer’s unit targets an Assailed foe, they get +1 to Wound. This is obviously good for absolutely ruining the day of something via Steeljacks or Thunderkyn, but is brutally held back by not ever working on Vehicles/Monsters, and thus being completely wasted points in some matchups.
- Writ of Acquisition (10pts): After the bearer’s unit shoots, you gain 1YP for each Assailed unit they hit. This is pretty funny, but you also don’t usually want your units with Leader splitting fire. This Detachment is moderately YP hungry and this is cheap though, so its probably fine to just harvest one per turn, and you don’t care as much if it’s dead at only 10pts.
- Surgical Saboteur (10pts): After the bearer’s unit shoots, you can pick a Monster/Vehicle they hit to become Pinned. Why oh why is this not Assailed – I got so excited reading every word in this except the last, because if this applied that, it would basically fix the Detachment and make it a legitimately great one; not overpowered, just great. Intensely frustrating.
- Nomad Strategist (20pts): Once per battle, at the end of the enemy’s Fight Phase, you can pull a Hernkyn unit into Strategic Reserves, and pay 2YP each to pull up to two more. Normally these cannot be in Engagement Range of enemy units, but they can be if those enemy units are Assailed. This is super strong – yes your bikes can do this anyway, but this isn’t just bikes, and the possibility that you can use it to rescue a bike unit that’s been bully charged if the culprit is Assailed is almost worth the price of admission alone. Probably an auto-take..
Stratagems
Unsurprisingly, there’s a mix of mobility tricks and ways to punish Assailed targets in here – and some of these are really, really good.
- Adaptable Avarice (1CP): At the start of any phase, if you’re currently in Fortify Takeover, and don’t want to be, you can drop down to 6YP, and be in Hostile Acquisition till the start of your next turn. Of the Votann Detachments this one is probably least interested in trying to fortify a position, so this is a cute thing to have access to in order to ensure that your bikes can murder stuff from mid range, but in practice this Detachment is likely to generate fewer YP than most and spend them fast, so this won’t come up that often.
- Frontier Momentum (1CP): Auto-Advance 6” for Hernkyn. Surprisingly meh – as always for this ability, sometimes you just need it, but none of your good guns are Assault here, so this is strictly a positioning tool.
- Exposed Flaws (1CP): Give a Hernkyn unit re-roll Wounds in shooting against an Assailed target, or (crucially) any target if you spend 2YP. Phew. This gives you something to punch up into enemy vehicles, even if it costs you, and is absolutely critical to making this Detachment look somewhat appealing. Worth noting that there’s no prohibition on splitting fire with this too, so you can get a lot of bang for your CP and YP.
- Ranger Tactics (1CP): Full shooting hit re-rolls for either a Hernkyn unit into any target or any other Votann unit as long as the target is Assailed. Another banger, either boosting the reliability of bikes, or allowing something like Thunderkyn or a Land Fortress to turbo-murder something that’s Assailed.
- Claimstaker Reflex (1CP): A reactive move for non-Vehicle/Artillery units, either for d6” or a flat up to 6” if you spend 2YP. Flat 6” reactive moves (I guess 5” for a lot of stuff in this army) are always incredible, and not tying this to Hernkyn only whips.
- Dispersed Formation (1CP): Give an Infantry or Mounted unit Stealth and Cover till the end of the phase when your opponent shoots at them. Another really good Stratagem, getting both of these effects for one Stratagem for non-Vehicles is quite rare, and very valuable. Decent on bikes, but where it really shines is on Steeljacks, as the army is going to need to be able to hold an objective sometimes, and this does that for you with no questions asked.
Playing This Detachment
Strengths
- Massively boosts the flexibility and target options for Hernkyn units.
- Strong stratagem suite with good force multipliers and defensive tools.
- Absolutely brutal into elite Infantry armies.
Weaknesses
- Terrible into Vehicle or Monster spam lists.
- No access to Sustained Hits for beam units.
- YP-hungry and weaker at generating them than some builds.
A Sample List
This Detachment is pretty up front in what it wants from you, which is to cram in plenty of Bikes, and fill from there. I have, obediently, done this.
Persecution - click to expand Characters Battleline Hearthkyn 100 Other
You shoot them, with your guns. I realise that’s pretty much always the Votann plan, but here that’s the whole plan. Lots of Defenders and Bikes give you plenty of ways to line up early shooting, and the Defenders can blast away then slink back to safety. While the opponent is working out what to do about that, your Land Fortress, Uthar (with half the Hearthkyn unit) and the Steeljacks secure an expansion objective, leaving the unattached Memnyr back home to farm YP. You have plenty of activations to trigger the Detachment rule, and skewing a bit towards railguns where available helps the lift against enemy hulls.
Keeping as many of the enemy Assailed as possible also maximises the flexibility of Nomad Strategist, and opponents will need to be constantly wary of big plays with that via either the Defenders or the Bike squads. That escape valve is important, because as far as this list is concerned melee is a fake idea, and you do not want to participate in it. I do wonder if maybe you want the Steeljacks on melee just to discourage enemy bully pieces somewhat, or perhaps to sneak in a small Hearthguard squad with Uthar, and a bit of iteration would definitely help flush that out.
Final Thoughts
If you want to unleash the full power of space biker dwarves, we hope you have fun with this on. This Detachment probably won’t quite get there competitively because of its weakness to Knights (at least not right now), but it’s fairly cohesive and does a good job of supporting the units it encourages, so should be good fun to have a go with.
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