Detachment Focus: Vindication Task 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.

This detachment asks you a really simple question – is the Warhammer 40K 3rd Edition box art etched permanently into your brain? Does the thought of a heroic battle pile of Black Templars rallying around their standards and fighting off all comers activate neurons that could potentially have been used for curing cancer or things of that nature? Well, good news – this is a detachment for waving your fancy flags and refusing to stop no matter how loud the opponent hollers.

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

This detachment has two themes – Ancients and Crusader Squads. Ancients in Crusader squads? Even better, though not strictly mandatory. This detachment takes both those units and amplifies their ability to get onto objectives and stay there, allowing you to live out all of your glorious last stand fantasies on the battlefield. It creates a highly durable army that excels at controlling space and scoring, at the cost of not packing the brute killing power of some other detachments. It feels like it’s got all the chops to be a team event superstar, and could also mimic the horde Templars builds of the past by breaking through into singles.

Detachment Rule: Purge and Sanctify

In line with the dual themes, the detachment rule brings one bonus for Ancients, and one for Crusader Squads. You can, naturally, have both if you put an Ancient in a Crusader squad.

For Ancients, if an ANCIENT unit is within range of an objective marker, then you subtract 1 from Wound rolls against it if the Strength of the attack is above the Toughness of the unit. Always serviceable, and especially good here since you’re primarily going to slam it onto 40W worth of T4 models. Hell yeah.

For Crusaders, in this detachment they can choose to use their Righteous Zeal move to go towards the nearest objective marker instead of the nearest enemy unit, allowing them to flip objectives like champions. Given how much space such a squad can take up, plus their high OC, and the other defensive buffs in this Detachment, this can allow them to completely dominate scoring.

This is fairly linear stuff that pushes you very hard towards a scoring plan – if you’re serious about this detachment, you probably want 2×20 Crusaders minimum, maybe three, and perhaps some other Ancient-toting units on top. You don’t even need to put them in a unit – either a tough Terminator Ancient or ultra-cheap Bladeguard one are handy as scoring pieces. With all that accumulated, you’ve got so much stuff to pile on objectives that ever scoring any Primary is going to be a matter of substantial sadness for the foe.

Enhancements

• Imperialis of the Eternal Crusade (15pts): Ancients only -2” to Charge rolls against the bearer’s unit. Obviously Templars like to be in a fight so it’s not quite as exciting to stop foes doing that as it might normally be, but on a large footprint unit this can still be annoying.
• Warden of Honour (20pts): Crusade Ancient only, makes the Fight on Death they give their unit trigger on a 3+ rather than 4+. Kind of marginal for 20pts.
• Orb of the Emperor’s Aegis (10pts): Deep Strike for a unit. Lol. Lmao. Do you know who can take Enhancements now? The Emperor’s Champion. Do you know who gets +2” to charges against a common Keyword? The Emperor’s Champion. Do you know who is taking this in every single list for this detachment? The only question is whether he’s rolling with a big 20-man Crusader unit for maximum pressure, or just cruising about with five Assault Intercessors as a horrifying murder missile. I’m leaning towards the latter so that your Crusaders can focus on holding the board, but both options have appeal!
• Consecrating Aura (25pts): 5+ Invulnerable Save for the bearer’s unit. Windmill slam this into a big Crusader unit – it’s a huge improvement on their durability.

Stratagems

• Refusal to Yield (1 CP): Stand an Ancient back up at the end of the phase on full Wounds, standard deal with only being able to do it once per model per battle. This creates a strong incentive to bring along one solo Terminator Ancient as an annoying scoring piece.
• Litanies of Purgation (1 CP): In the Fight Phase, give a unit +1AP against enemies that are within range of an objective marker. This is great, exactly what you want with high volume attacks from a Crusader unit, and helpful for a lot of other stuff in a pinch.
• Spoor of the Unholy (1 CP): Give a unit Ignore Cover and ignore hit and WS/BS modifiers in either the Shooting or Fight phases. A bit more niche here – lists for this detachment aren’t going to rack up much volume shooting, and in a Fight you’re going to be trying to set up for re-rolls in some way, shape or form. Best way to use this is probably on either a Lancer or Executioner you’ve brought along for fire support to ensure an opponent can’t spike a 6+ in Cover against their AP-4 guns.
• Reclaim Our Honour! (1 CP): When an Ancient dies and you don’t use Refusal to Yield on it, give your army +1 to hit against the culprit for the rest of the game. Again, you’re mostly aiming to have high volume and re-rolls going so this may not always do that much, but if a Knight or Greater Daemon pops one of your guys, might be worth getting real mad about it.
• Recitation of the Revered (1 CP): Give an ANCIENT unit -1 to hit against Shooting for a phase. This combines with the detachment rule and Consecrating Aura to really stack the defences up, making your control of the board even more secure.
• Perfervid Intervention (2 CP): Declare a Charge at the end of the opponent’s Charge Phase against one or more targets within 6”. This is a super powerful effect and this is the perfect detachment for it – not only is the opponent having to deal with the sheer presence you can put on the board, they also have to worry about big units that can move in multiple different directions in response to being shot then do this.

Playing This Detachment

Orb of the Emperor’s Aegis and Warden of Honour give you two powerful clues to how to start building and running this army – both want to go on large squads of Crusaders. The first to get your unit onto the battlefield early and safely across no man’s land (making them a good rapid ingress target), and the latter giving them the durability they need to make the trip. From there your big question is “how many ancients do I want to run when I build this list, exactly?” And there we think the answer is “probably two or three,” where you’ll have a Crusade Ancient paired with a large unit of Crusaders (and probably an Execrator for Advance and Charge), and we’re big fans of taking a solo Bladeguard Ancient as a cheap solo dork to use the revival stratagem, though he’s also just fine with a unit of six bladeguard veterans.

Strengths

• Exceptional board control and scoring. All those ancients really help you beef out your OC characteristic, giving you an army of guys who are great at standing on objectives.
• Two very powerful Enhancements to anchor any build. Orb of the Emperor’s Aegis and Warden of Honour both add a ton of utility to your big Crusader units.
• Versatility and Depth. There’s a surprising depth of options given how many things you can put Ancients with.

Weaknesses

• Offensive buffs. You have limited offensive options here – Ancients are cool but taking one means you’re spending a lot to up a unit’s OC without making them much better at fighting, and the best way to hold an objective is to kill everything on it.
• Defensive buffs. There’s no access to Feel No Pain on big units, so some natural counters exist where armies can spam D2 firepower.
• Point costs. Your centrepiece units end up very expensive.

A Sample List

Time to get waving those flags, boys.

Vindication Task Force - click to expand

This list is (obviously) centred around two big Crusader blocks, one fast, durable one with the Execrator and Crusade Ancient, and one more cautious one with reliability and protection against charges. Between the two, you claim some board position, then consolidate control of it. Supplementing them are a couple of super nasty troubleshooting units – Deep Striking Emperor’s Champion with Assault Intercessors, ready to play “Will it Blend?” with any enemy Characters, then Helbrecht with Sword Brethren in a Repulsor Executioner. Enemies have to plan really carefully to deal with this, because if you keep the Transport relatively close, then when they Fall Back Helbrecht and the boys can jump straight back in.

The RepEx is tag-teamed with a Lancer to give some ranged punch, and also doubles up as a very nasty Overwatch threat thanks to access to re-rolls. Don’t forget with the tanks that AP-4 is one of the places where Ignore Cover is unusually good, because stripping away the ability of something with a base 3+ save to spike a couple of 6s is a big boost to reliability, especially as both tanks will also be sporting some flavour of re-roll. Because this is Space Marines, you’ve got a decent amount of points left after cramming all that in to have some scoring and backfield protection, including a rather lost Bladeguard Ancient who can either stand on an objective or walk on from a board edge and die twice, all creating a nice, rounded list.

Final Thoughts

This detachment feels like the perfect combination of flavour wins and power, and if you want to get Crusaders onto the table, it feels like a very strong choice.

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