Salutations and welcome, to the review of the Battleclade team found in Kill Team: Typhon. Dust off those Servitors, and mechadendrites as your tech priests and underseers search for archaeotech in the killzone. This team offers a surprisingly different approach to the game with the ability to forcibly activate servitors out in the field multiple times. Battleclade looks to be the tinkerer’s perfect toy, as strategically minded generals let loose a veritable wall of firepower.
Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing a preview copy of these rules for review purposes.
If you’d prefer a video of the review check it out at Just Another Killteam Podcast below.
Battleclades
Eight lobotomised servitors shackled to the machinations of a Tech-Priest and their Underseer, under a Noospheric Network. The Battleclade march onto killzones with the ability to rapidly output offensive actions with their ability to Network Counteract. As of Approved Ops 2024, the team sports the Infiltration and Recon archetypes which looks to keep the best aspects of the team down, as our offensive output doesn’t necessarily lead to points scored.
Abilities
Noospheric Network
When activating any Servitor you may transfer power, subtracting 1 from its APL stat until the end of the activation. After that activation, you may have any other friendly Servitor Network Counteract which lets it perform a free action, that cannot move, in the order of its choice. Though using this bars that network counteract-er from counteract-ing as normal later on. Using this ability doesn’t use up the actual activation of the counteracter so operatives in good positions can do some gnarly combos.
The downstream ramifications of this is that your offensive operatives can function very similarly to Astartes able to drop multiple shoot actions down range.
The Operatives
We’ve got a spread of operative chassis here, between our hero operatives, small servitors, and heavy weapons servitors. The hero operatives are notably 3 APL operatives, 3+ saves with 9 wounds and reasonable ranged pistol profiles. While all servitors are on 4+ saves, 5” moves, 8 wounds, and 4+s to hit mostly across the board. Our chunky heavy weapons platforms sport 11 wounds, which is a solid brick of wounds to survive counter fire.
Battleclade Combat Servitor
Our mook operative, which we need to take 3 of. We’re allowed a fair number of loadouts for those 3 with 3 different weapon types allowed. It’s likely you’ll want a meltagun floating around just for the strong delete button. However the choice between 6” range 4/4 flamers that hit on 2s in the incendine igniters or the infinite range phosphor blasters which are ¾ severe bolters that hit on 4s. Notably we are capped at 3 incendine igniters so the GW balance team thinks they’re quite solid. Each of them is equipped with Servo-claw’s which are 3 attacks on 4s for ¾ damage.
Battleclade Gun Servitor
Chunky boys with 11 wounds, and the BIG weapons. We are required to take both Heavy Bolters and a Heavy Arc Rifle servitors which are both laden with Heavy (Dash only). Both hit on 4s in shoot actions and fight actions. While their Augmetic Claws have 3 attacks ⅘ damage and Brutal. Since you can boost the melee to Shock, Severe and 4 attacks total the Gun Servitors can do a fair job when retaliating. However you’re really here to let loose with the fancy weapons. The arc rifle sports 5 attacks on 4s, 4/6 damage, with piercing 1 and Stun doing a pretty good job at deleting or maiming most targets. Meanwhile the heavy bolter is the same as many other teams with focused and sweeping profile. A good reminder than on gallowdark and inside Volkus strongholds the sweeping profile’s torrent 1” rule granting lethal 5+ makes the piercing crits 1 rule that much more consistent.
Battleclade Technoarchaeologist
Our 9 wound, 3+ save, 3 APL leader operative with middling melee and strong pistol range shooting. The big line item is Seeker of Divine Arcana which is a Strategic Gambit that grants an Omniscan, fall back, place marker, pick up marker, reposition or mission action. With the rider that any movement action needs to end nearer to the dropzone unless it ends within control range of objective markers or mission markers. This can really provide some tactical flexibility letting you position the archaeologist very aggressively only to beat a hasty retreat if you lose the initiative, or line up Ceaseless with your omniscan if you win the initiative. Omniscanner is the unique ability against a visible enemy operative, or operative within 8” of the leader. The omniscan tokens do not drop off and grant all actions against those enemies ceaseless! Honestly kind of crazy considering you can drop two tokens a turn!
Offensively our melee is forgettable with 4 attacks on 4s, ¾ damage with severe and shock. We’re not really threatening kills on anything so I’m actively planning on avoiding lining up for that. Meanwhile our Eradication Pistol is a juiced up krak grenade trading that profiles piercing 1 and 3 crit damage for 1” devastating 3 and lethal 5+. Imagining that you can almost always line up Ceaseless before you go in for the shoot action, and you can threaten almost anything!
Battleclade Servitor Underseer
The second hero operative on our team definitely more focused on the tempo of our servitor operatives. Both unique actions let us manipulate our servitors actively with Noospheric Spur granting a free Dash action to a servitor within 6 of the underseer or auto-proxy operative. While Network Override has a servitor perform a network counteract mid underseer activation. This means the underseer can get your servitors to function almost as 4 apl activations with 2 separate moves, or the ability to flip back to conceal orders when under fire. Offensively we’re focused on the Master-crafted radium pistol which is 8” range 4 attacks on 3s for 2/4 damage, with Balanced and Rending. Best to just avoid thinking about our Dataspikes ⅔ damage as hitting on 5s leave it solidly in the realm of hail mary territory.
Battleclade Auto-Proxy Servitor
An aurabot with a defensively oriented taser goad, offering 4 attacks on 4s with ¾ damage and lethal 5+ and shock. You’re really interested in the Achillan Eye passive ability, which grants Saturate to any friendly operative’s ranged weapon if an enemy operative is visible to the Auto-Proxy. Gaze of the Omnissiah is a unique action that lets you grant Seek Light and no obscurity to any enemy operative visible to the Auto-proxy. Since the Auto-Proxy works alongside the Underseer’s abilities, keeping a strong positional leash on your servitors lets them over perform their middling stat sheets.
Battleclade Breacher Servitor
What counts as a melee specialist on our team, the breacher servitor can do a reasonable job setting up charges from interesting lanes, with its Breach ability. Letting you turn any terrain less than 1” thick as accessible, and letting you line up charges through walls safely. During those fight actions you’ll have 4 attacks on 4s, with 4/6 damage and lethal 5+, while not overtly threatening does threaten any 8 wound operatives pretty well. The real juice will be getting into enemy lines with the lascutter which has a melta-adjacent 2” range close range profile that hits on 3s, with ⅘ damage, pierce 2 and lethal 5+. That 2” range is going to be a hard sell on a 5” move operative, but the short range’s 6” range, ⅘ damage on 3s for ⅘ damage and lethal 5+ is a potent participation trophy. If you imagine only targeting operatives that have been omniscanned both of these profiles with ceaseless do sound absolutely gnarly, and getting a second network counteract out of the deal sweetens the pot even further.
Battleclade Technomedic Servitor
Saving the lives of fellow servitors is incredibly important in a shootout, and the technomedic is no slouch in this department. With a wholly unique ability to save incapacitating operatives, without taking an APL penalty! This makes the technomedic uniquely situated to babysit our long ranged guns, while also offering a piece that can almost always transfer power and remain useful. Similarly the expedient repair ability is more efficient than most medic-style abilities offering d3+3 wounds instead of 2d3 wounds. Offensively we’re restricting to the servo-chirurgic claw a 4 attack, 4s to hit, ¾ damage with rending profile. Only reliably threatening 7 wound operatives, or opponents who’ve taken some chip damage.
The Ploys
Battleclade have some of the stranger ploys with many restrictions and positional requirements before you get their strategic benefits. Noospheric Possession is a support-tagged ploy that grants Accurate 1 to servitors within 6” of an underseer or auto-proxy operative, doing a fair job of letting you avoid some of the 4s to hit floating around across the team. Duty of Reclamation is an interestingly worded ploy that grants a Command Re-roll firefight ploy for 0CP to any operative contesting objective markers or mission markers, luckily with Plant Beacons we do have the option to trigger this on demand. Incantation of the Iron Soul grants a teamwide 5+ shrug to any damage of 3 or more, which honestly seems to be kind of an auto take every turn you expect to get frisky. Prioritised Acquisition designates a single objective marker or mission marker as easier to control with a +1 to the total apl stat, and an extra attack to a cap of 4 on melee weapons.
Firefight ploys follow the same somewhat limited design principles with 3 ploys centering around your tech-priest in some way. System Exorcism lets you purge a rules effect or status change from an opponent before activating a friendly operative. Remote Access is probably our biggest rule break, letting the tech-priest’s activation interact with markers or hatchways within 4” of it. With a carve out that there can be no enemy operatives on that marker, or that any enemy operatives also have a friendly operative within their control range. Auto-ferric Supplication lets the tech priest ignore the piercing rule during an individual sequence helping to keep them healthy. Servile Surrogacy is the traditional bodyguard-style ploy letting a servitor jump in front of a shoot or fight action aimed at the tech-priest.
Equipment
Covert Guises
Roll a d3 and as a Strategic Gambit on turning point 1, you can have those d3 operatives take a reposition action that remains wholly within 3” of your drop zone. Notably your leader can only take one reposition during the first strategy phase between this and Seeker of Divine Arcana.
Electromagnetic Capacitors
Friendly melee weapons have Shock, and while retaliating they gain Severe. Important if you expect opponents to get into control range, as when combined with Prioritised Acquistion can keep servitors alive against middling melee profiles. Think anything that is expecting 2-3 hits with ¾ damage.
Concealed Apparatus
During the second turns strategy phase, as a strategic gambit you can swap the positions of any servitors with other servitors, and gun servitors with other gun servitors. You can only do this if you haven’t used any weapons on its datacard, performed any actions on its datacard, or the mechanosuture array ability. Turning your operatives into a sort of shell game is cute, but I suspect the actual uses will be few and far between. Notably the Achillan Eye of the auto-proxy avoids the restrictions of this equipment so you can get some weirdness out of the saturate.
Neurocyclic Reserve Cells
You get D3 times during the battle where you can Transfer Power without losing an APL. However during that operative’s activation they cannot perform fight or shoot actions. While this reads like D3 free apl during a game, losing the ability to take offensive actions probably restricts this to missions where you’re expecting to do mission actions, or plant beacons. As the free apl is nice when you need to spend apl to score points. Not always the case!
Target acquired, Eliminate with extreme firepower
One of the less obvious abilities is our leaders ability to omniscan and grant Ceaseless to any visible target twice a turn. Once as a strategic gambit, and again during its activation. Between that combination 2 big guns, and the Concealed Apparatus equipment, we can play a fairly loose turning point 1 positionally. Leaving our meltagun, and lascutter very far forward on an initiative gamble, only to turn into less valuable operatives if we lose initiative. If we win however we can get a ceaseless weapon firing into midline operatives and force our opponents to deal with our combat servitors. If they fail to kill them, we can then Network Counteract and let loose a second time in quick succession. Don’t forget that we can use equipment terrain to help us bait out opposing shots with our MVPs babied by our medic operative. A 3+ save sitting on an objective with a tactical re-roll, medic, and potentially a 5+ shrug is a startling annoying target to gun down!
How’s the team look?
One of the weirdest teams ever released, and a potentially very strong one at that. While the team is limited by its slow movement, and restrictive ploys. The ability to treat any offensive piece as a mini-marine with ceaseless, saturate, balanced, and no obscurity is going to lead to some games feeling like absolute blowouts. I’m not sure how the team will approach matchups against melee specialized factions, but at least against the 6-astartes push, you’ve got a pair of piercing 2 weapons which present real threats. Against the Aeldari you’ll be hard pressed to outmaneuver your opponents, and will have to rely on a brutal counter punch. While hordes will fear your ability to bully them with a wall of bullets. Time will tell if the pairing of recon and infiltration archetypes remains an albatross around the Battleclade’s neck, but the team comes into the game at a strong time of balance. Me personally, I’m looking forward to omniscan’ing and eliminating the opposition!
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