It’s been a weird edition for Imperial Knights. With a solid index Detachment and a just-for-fun Grotmas Detachment, they’ve been reliant on points changes and the occasional balance pass for any kind of variety. It’s been a fairly one-note army, especially in contrast with Chaos Knights, who saw their own full codex release earlier this year. Things for Imperial Knights changed with that update when they received a stopgap index and updates to their Datasheets that suddenly turned them into the game’s top army, leading to some off-cycle balance adjustments a few weeks ago.

Imperial Knights have largely lacked the variety that their dark cousins have had – even their Grotmas Detachment was a nothingburger – and so with this new book there are two key questions any knight player is going to have going in:

1. Does this give me more interesting ways to play the army so I can have some much-needed variety, and
2. Is it more or less powerful than the Index, and if so by how much?

We’re going to answer both of those in this review but before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of the Codex for review purposes.

Army Overview

We’d love to say there’s some huge sweeping change to how this army will look and play, but no matter the exact ratio, this army is always going to be about running big freakin robots with a couple of smaller guys to run around and do stuff. The big changes to the characteristics for Imperial Knights already happened with the index update back in June, bringing them in line with Chaos Knights by dropping the toughness of some Knights and increasing their wound totals. This means players have had plenty of time to get accustomed to the new statlines, but it also means that they key changes here are going to be a bit more “in the weeds.”

We think the following are five standout features of this book:

• Army-wide Feel No Pain is gone. With the loss of the Noble Lance Detachment, the days of army-wide 6+ Feel No Pain are over. This is a huge deal, as it generally means that Imperial Knights will no longer feel like they have 20% more wounds than their Chaos counterparts.
• The Honour Rush is over. Rushing to get honoured isn’t quite as important as it was before, save for one detachment. Speaking of…
• It’s much easier to get Honoured now. There’s a new system for becoming honoured and gaining bonuses from it that’s both easier to accomplish and more interesting overall.
• There’s some great Detachments to list build around. Anything that brings more variety to how this army plays is a good thing, and we’re happy to finally do something different with it, with Detachments that don’t just change how you build an army, but how you play it.
• The new Knight Defender is a fantastic addition to the army. He brings the kind of defensive support abilities nothing else has had, filling an interesting gap that we didn’t know we were missing.

On top of this, a smattering of Datasheet changes have been made to help less-played Knights see the table. There have definitely been winners and losers in the narrow selection of Knights you can pick, with some getting sidelined for the entire edition, and this book shakes things up.

The Video Version

If you’d like to watch a video version of this review, we’ve got you covered – check out our video review here:

Army Rules

For an army with a small number of Datasheets, Imperial Knights have an outsized number of army rules. The names here will be familiar, but the rules themselves have changed, particularly Code Chivalric, which now has new Oaths.

Code Chivalric

At the Read Mission Objectives step, Imperial Knights get access to the Code Chivalric ability, which has you pick a Deed and a Quality. You can randomly roll for these or pick them manually. Your Quality is the rule that applies to your whole army – you don’t need to complete the Deed to get it, but if you do complete your Deed you become Honoured, gaining 2 Command Points, or 3 Command Points if you rolled randomly on either table.

The Deeds are:

1. Lay low the tyrant – At the start of the battle select a Character in your opponent’s army. If you kill it, you complete the Deed at the end of the turn. This is way easier than the index iteration, which forced you to go after your opponent’s WARLORD and can be an easy way to get Honoured quickly, especially against enemy knight armies.
2. Reclaim the realm – If, at the end of your opponent’s turn you control more objectives than they do you become Honoured. Since you’re playing knights this generally isn’t that tall of an order early in the game, when you have plenty of fast units which can hop on objectives and stay there.
3. Reap a great tally – If, at the end of the turn, more enemy units died than allied units in the current battle round, you become Honoured. This is another easy one to get around turn two but if you miss your shot early it’s gonna get harder later in the game. 

Meanwhile the Qualities are:

1. Martial valour risen over all – Each time one of your models shoots or fights, re-roll a hit and a wound roll. This is your default pick and one of the things that helps make Imperial Knights function. Don’t leave home without it.
2. Eager for the challenge – Add 2” to this model’s move characteristic and add 1 to Advance and Charge rolls. You probably won’t see this one unless you’re playing the Questoris Companions Detachment or maybe in some edge cases in Valorstrike Lance. Not that these movement buffs aren’t good, but the rerolls are just too good for an army that often relies on low volume, high quality attacks.
3. Yet shall our legacy be unsullied – Improve the OC of your models by 2 and Leadership by 1. This is great for letting you bully objectives like the index days, but still not better than the re-rolls (dead models can’t contest objectives). This also explains the OC difference between Imperial Knight Questoris chassis and their Chaos Knight counterparts.

These rules are all nice ideas, but there’s some clear winners here. You’re going to generally pick a Deed that is easiest for your army composition and matchup, and almost always go for the Martial Valour quality, as those re-rolls are just too good to pass up. 

Bondsman

Most of your big Knights also have a Bondsman Ability which lets them select an Armiger within 12” to get a Datasheet-specific buff, which we’ll go into later.

Super-Heavy Walker

The Super-Heavy Walker rule is back, and this lets your TITANIC units walk through models and walls at risk of being Battle-shocked on a D6 roll of 1. This is pretty necessary for letting your huge models get around the table.

Freeblade

Finally, the Freeblade rule is back, which lets you ally Imperial Knights units in with your non-Knights armies, giving you either one TITANIC unit or up to three ARMIGER models, none of which can be your warlord.

Detachments

Imperial Knights armies have access to four Detachments in the codex, plus the Questor Forgepact from Grotmas. We’ve got summaries of them below, but for a deep dive into each, click through to the related Detachment Focus article.

Valourstrike Lance Detachment Focus

Valourstrike Lance is your default Detachment, letting you reroll advance rolls and giving all your Knights’ weapons Assault. It mostly focuses on getting your Knights up the board, into the fight, and around the table, helping pretty much everything in the codex. This is also the only Detachment with Rotate Ion Shields, so if you were leaning on that one a lot, this’ll be home for you.

Gate Warden Lance Detachment Focus

Gate Warden Lance is an odd one, forcing you to play defense as your models need to remain on a designated line on the board to get the most out of it. It’s unusual and not our favorite, but it’s an appreciable attempt to do something different with the army. 

Questoris Companions Detachment Focus

Questoris Companions is for those who think Honored is so nice they’d like it twice. You get to stack honored deeds and qualities, with the caveat that your enhancements get spent, only reloading after getting honored again.

Spearhead-At-Arms Detachment Focus

Spearhead-At-Arms is an Armiger-focused Detachment, making the little guys Battleline and letting your Bondsman abilities extend out further and to more Armigers per turn. 

Questor Forgepact Detachment Focus

Lastly, Questor Forgepact is still here and still a fun option, if not necessarily the most competitive. If you’ve got Admech and want to dip a mechadendrite into Knights though, it’s a fun way to do so. 

The Datasheets

As we mentioned earlier, Imperial Knights already had an adjustment to their Datasheets earlier this year when the Index was changed to bring them in line with the updated profiles for Chaos Knights. The short version is that pretty much every unit in the army lost a point of toughness and some OC but gained more wounds, while your big Knights cap out at a 3+ armor save. There’s also a new Knight in this release, and he’s got a jaunty little hat. 

In addition to those baseline changes, Knights’ Damage brackets are slightly higher, and Armigers lose OC now when they didn’t before. In case you missed the changes to Knight Datasheets over the last few months, here’s a quick rundown of how they’ve changed from the original Index released at the start of 10th edition:

• Armigers are now T9, W14, OC6 instead of T10, W12, OC8. Bracket at 1-5 Wounds instead of 1-4, and lose 3OC instead of none.
• Questoris are now T11, W26, OC8 instead of T12, W22, OC10. Bracket at 1-9 Wounds instead of 1-7 and lose 4OC instead of 5.
• Dominus are now T12, W28, 3+ Save, OC8 instead of T13, W24, 2+ Save, OC10. Bracket at 1-10 Wounds instead of 1-8, and lose 4OC instead of 5.

New Datasheet: The Knight Defender

There is one new Datasheet in this book: The Knight Defender, a Questoris-class Knight with a new kit which acts as sort of like a smaller Castellan, mounting a plasma executor and a conversion beam obliterator. It has a 4+ invulnerable save against ranged attacks rather than 5+, and its Datasheet ability essentially confers this to models behind it – if an enemy unit makes a ranged attack against an IMPERIAL KNIGHTS model from your army that isn’t fully visible to every model in the attacking unit because of your Knight Defender, then that unit gets the Benefit of Cover and a 4+ Invulnerable Save. This is very powerful – it gives portable cover to your other Imperial Knights and can more than make up for Rotate Ion Shields not being present in every detachment.

Emphasising its defensive role, the Defender’s Bondsman ability is Defender’s Duty, which grants -1 Damage to a nearby Armiger – always a good ability wherever it’s found.

Offensively, the Defender’s shooting is pretty great. The plasma executor is very similar to the Castellan’s plasma decimator, with a slightly shorter range (36” vs. 48”) and lower AP (2 and 3 in standard/supercharge instead of the Castellan’s new 3 and 4), but identical shot count and Damage. The conversion beam obliterator has a 36” range with 3 shots at S12, AP-2, and a chunky 4 Damage; on top of that it has Sustained Hits D3 and the Conversion rule, which means it generates Critical Hits on a 4+ if the target is more than 18” away. That gives it a very high ceiling, with half of your hits triggering Sustained D3 before any re-rolls.

Updated Datasheets

Let’s start with the little dudes, as both see some changes. The Warglaive sees the same Thermal Spear range change their Chaos cousins got, reducing them to 18”, and their ability also sees an update. Instead of Sustained hits on the charge, they get an extra attack, or two if you’re sweeping. This is mostly a wash, but sustained in a world where you could re-roll was slightly better.

Meanwhile the Helverin sees a major change: Skyfire Protocols is gone and replaced with Suppression Protocols, which instead imposes a -1 penalty to hit on something you hit (not a monster or vehicle) until your next turn. This is good, but you won’t be sniping out daemon primarchs and Bloat-Drones with Anti-Fly 2+ anymore. 

On to the big dudes, and the biggest change to the army: Canis Rex received a massive nerf, no longer critting on 5+ and instead getting the ability to un-Battle-shock something. That thing can be any imperial model – which is cute – but it’s a far cry from Canis being able to reliably yeet any enemy unit into the sun. Canis will likely still see play, but he’s much less of a Must-Take than he was.

The generic Preceptor also sees some major changes. It still picks something at the start of the battle to be its least favorite thing, but now you re-roll wound rolls against that target, and if you kill it you get to pick a new one. On top of that the bondsman ability changes to also allow the Armiger to reroll wounds against your quarry. This can be devastating in something like the Spearhead-at-Arms detachment where you can create a castle of armigers aimed to kill a particular big target.

There’s also a smattering of smaller changes beyond these. The Paladin now gets extra AP against the closest target instead of the extra re-roll, making its stubbers and battle cannon much scarier. The Gallant gets an extra 3” Consolidate instead of its -1 to hit, which is a bit of a nerf but can allow you to tag something very far if you combine it with Moment of Glory in the Questoris Companions detachment. Lastly, the Valiant loses the Anti abilities on the harpoon; it now hits on 3s and has D3 shots with blast, and its Battle-shock ability is now replaced with the ability to splash mortals after you shoot. It’s way worse, don’t take it.

How They Will Play

Ultimately Imperial Knights will look very similar to how they do now, but the new Detachments offer a wealth of new ways to play. Without the Feel No Pain they’ll be slightly less durable than they were but also you can expect them to get Honoured way faster and more consistently. The big thing to note with this book is that the Imperial Armour options, e.g. Lancers, Atrapos, and other Cerastus-class Knights, haven’t changed and are still as effective as they were, though which ones you’ll want will depend more heavily on which Detachment you’re taking. They’re not as tough as they were now that they lose the 6+ Feel No Pain from the Index Detachment, but they can make up for it in other areas. 

With the changes to Canis and a lesser extent the Gallant, you can expect to see Imperial Knights armies shift even more towards gun lines and shooting-heavy approaches, relying on the Imperial Armor knights for their melee threats. The front runner detachments look to be Spearhead-At-Arms and Questoris Companions, but all four have something neat to recommend. 

Final Thoughts

This a great book. It’s not as much of a slam dunk as the Chaos Knights book was but Imperials also didn’t need as much to create more list variety. As with the CK book though, this is all going to come down to points. At the time of writing this we’re still very much in a “Knights are too cheap” meta. If we transition to a “Knights are too expensive” meta, this book is gonna struggle.

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