{"id":2332,"date":"2014-09-03T00:18:23","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T04:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2017-09-05T09:29:55","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T13:29:55","slug":"stompin-time-notes-on-knights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2014\/09\/stompin-time-notes-on-knights\/","title":{"rendered":"40k: Stompin’ Time—Notes on Knights"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend a good-sized crew\u00a0from PAGE<\/a> went out to the NOVA Open<\/a>.\u00a0I pretty much got my face punched in throughout the Trios and Narrative tracks (reports here<\/a> & here<\/a>), but I learned a lot and had a great time. Even in those but especially walking around the Invitational and GT you couldn’t help but notice\u00a0the multitudes of Knights: Imperial Knights, Wraithknights, Rip-knights… Gorgeous models, under-costed points, for once GW figured out how to really sell something everyone will like, as long as it’s on their side of the table. The following are some\u00a0lessons I’ve learned about fighting and using Imperial Knights.<\/p>\n

\"Your<\/a>

Your weapons are (all but) useless, puny fleshlings! Charles Craig’s sweet Chaos-allied Knight picks a fight with Sgt Titus and his meltagunner friend.<\/p><\/div>\n

War at Range<\/h2>\n

Knights have considerable effective shooting\u00a0range: 36″ on their guns\u00a0and 12″ movement over clear spaces. Gerantius the Forgotten Knight<\/a>, a White Dwarf character that should have been in the damn codex (making for a whopping ~4 pages of rules), can additionally run and then shoot. That basically means if you want to shoot\u00a0at one you’re going to need at least 36″ effective range, ideally 48″ if you want to hit it on turn one while it’s still in its backfield.\u00a0For the most part that requires a vehicle, able to move and shoot, or missile launchers,\u00a0which have enough range to sit & shoot. I have a multi-melta on one of my tacticals because I get a re-roll to hit (Vulkan) and it’s useful against Dreadnought\u00a0Drop Pods coming down on my\u00a0lines, of which there are still some in my club. The range isn’t enough though to help me fight Knights, which\u00a0take far too long to walk into range, even assuming they don’t just hang back and blast away. So in the future that MM will be either swapped out for another missile launcher, or start riding down in a Drop Pod with its compadres for early melta snaps and hopeful midfield\u00a0positioning.<\/p>\n

Sir Stomps-A-Lot<\/h2>\n

Depending on which side of the\u00a0machine god’s wrath you’re on, stomp attacks are either really useful or more salt in the wound. Of course they’re powerful\u00a0just for clobbering\u00a0whatever is currently\u00a0in close combat with a\u00a0Knight, particularly if it’s being tarpitted with a gaggle\u00a0of\u00a0weak\u00a0infantry. But they also have a handy ability to reach out and touch enemies.<\/p>\n

A stomp attack has\u00a0you put down D3 blast markers.\u00a0The first one goes in base-to-base with your Knight, but the others can be up to 3″ from a previously placed marker and\u00a0don’t have to be placed\u00a0over an enemy base. That allows you to chain the attack out and hit targets up to just under\u00a015″ away. There are also no line of sight restrictions on placing the blasts, so even large terrain doesn’t provide protection.\u00a0Nothing came of it, but in one game I was caught off guard when an opponent used that to hit a Landspeeder tucked\u00a0behind terrain\u00a0over a foot away, waiting for the combat to end so it could pop out and\u00a0melta the Knight.<\/p>\n

Stomps can also be useful to cause secondary casualties and force a positive combat result. In a different\u00a0game I used\u00a0a second and third stomp to pile wounds & then casualties onto a bunch of Blue Horrors nearby but not involved in the combat in any way. Since all\u00a0unsaved wounds incurred by a side are\u00a0counted in combat results, that drove the leadership way down for the Instability roll\u00a0on the Daemon Prince my Knight was actually fighting. In that case it\u00a0created\u00a0a bunch more free wounds, but\u00a0against other armies it’d be a good way to force\u00a0a morale break on an otherwise stalwart\u00a0unit.<\/p>\n

So, as a Knight player, the\u00a0stomps let you\u00a0reach out a bit from combat for some neat tricks. Playing against a Knight, you have to be aware that\u00a0units could be directly affected by the combat even at a significant distance\u00a0away.<\/p>\n

\"On<\/a>

On the left, a Knight stomps its way through a warehouse and into a poor lonely Landspeeder. On the right, a Knight drives down the leadership of a Daemon Prince by stomping Horrors trying their best to avoid the combat.<\/p><\/div>\n

Huddle Up<\/h2>\n

The large blast, low AP shots rained down\u00a0by a Knight are a huge\u00a0problem. Getting models into cover is obviously good, but even better is not being targetable at all. Unfortunately getting and staying out of line of sight can be difficult given how tall the Knight is and how fast it moves over open terrain. However, another way to not get shot at is to huddle up\u00a0close to enemy models. Blasts generally can’t be placed such that they’ll be over the shooting\u00a0player’s own models. If it’s not possible to put the marker over your models without touching their own, your unit will be safe from being directly targeted.<\/p>\n

Clearly that’s pretty situational, there’s\u00a0a relatively limited set of circumstances in which you can or want to be that close to the enemy. However, one such situation\u00a0that\u00a0comes up fairly often is deep striking units to join an assault. The arriving unit\u00a0is very\u00a0exposed, typically having to stand around for a turn and get their bearings before joining the combat. When there’s the potential to be tagged by a Knight or other large blast in the interim, better than ducking\u00a0into nearby cover is to use the combat itself as a shield. By getting\u00a0up tight with the enemy models, those models won’t even be targetable by the blasts and will have a much better chance of living through the next round of shooting to make it into the fight.<\/p>\n

\"Drop<\/a>

Drop Podding Vulkan and a powerfist combat squad huddle up tight against a combat for blast protection before being able to assist their Terminator battle brothers.<\/p><\/div>\n

Bubblewrap<\/h2>\n

In my local scene there’s a bunch of meltagun\u00a0Drop\u00a0Pods, with their 6″ armor penetration bonus,\u00a0as well as Screamers of Tzeentch, which have armourbane on their bite attack, so bubblewrapping key vehicles is important. One thing to note is that unlike a normal vehicle, with any reasonable amount of terrain on the board\u00a0it’s quite a bit easier to bubble wrap a Knight on the move without sacrificing its mobility since\u00a0it moves as normal infantry—so slow!<\/em>—through terrain and the base is so big it’s bound to hit some wherever it’s going.<\/p>\n

To protect my Knight I’ve been vacillating\u00a0between cheap Imperial Guard and expensive storm shield Terminators. There’s a clear\u00a0tradeoff between the two: For ~100 points I can bring enough\u00a0Guardsmen to wrap completely around the Knight and protect it from all angles, but in a purely sacrificial way. Something else, possibly the Knight itself, needs to step in to actually remove the threat, and quickly so before all the Guard are eaten through. On the other hand, for 225 points\u00a0a squad of thunder-shields can\u00a0clobber most assault threats, or at least tarpit on their own for quite some time. That handful of models though has a tough time maintaining\u00a0an effective wall\u00a0against mobile threats like Screamers that will just do an end run around it. Which approach is better in general is tough for me to say, but in many tournaments, as at NOVA, restrictions on detachments, allies, or sources may\u00a0force your hand. Similarly, Come the Apocalypse allies won’t really be able to wrap\u00a0at all against an alpha strike.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

This bubblewrapping successfully protected my Knight against incoming dangerous assaults. Note that the opposing Knight is not shielded at all, because it had to deploy 12″ from CtA allies.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"It<\/a>

It worked out ok in the end and the Knight lived on the rest of the game, but this bubblewrapping has failed completely and the Knight should die. Screamers have a ton of ability to just fly over and around low model count walls.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tarpits<\/h2>\n

Similarly but on the\u00a0flip\u00a0side, an important tactic fighting Knights is tarpitting.\u00a0Every turn it spends stomping expendable troops is a turn it’s not dropping\u00a0pie plate blasts or mega-chainsword swipes on\u00a0critical units. In thinking about doing so, it’s easy\u00a0to overestimate how killy a Knight is in close combat.<\/p>\n

Like many big models, with the 7th edition Destroyer weapon table and the Knight’s basic statline, it’s more efficient and effective\u00a0going after big targets than little ones. Successful D weapon hits put multiple wounds\/hull points on models<\/em>, not units, so they clobber vehicles and monsters but are\u00a0way overkill and not more effective than a standard powerweapon or monstrous creature against typical\u00a0infantry. In ongoing combat, a Knight is only going to kill 1.25 MEQs per round with its base attacks (3 attacks, 4s to hit, 2+ to wound at AP2). The effect of the stomp attacks is fairly situational because\u00a0the hits are determined\u00a0by\u00a0blasts and thus dependent on precise positioning. But, if I’m doing my math right, each MEQ has a 65% chance of surviving each hit (2\/3 chance of Ker-runch effect times 5\/6 chance of wounding at S6 times 1\/3 chance of dying on 3+ save plus a 1\/6 chance of the Overrun effect is 35% chance of an unsaved wound per stomp blast over a MEQ). Each Marine thus has a 45% chance of surviving a stomp attack (1\/3 for 1 blast times .65 plus 1\/3 for 2 blasts times .65^2 plus 1\/3 for 3 blasts times .65^3). So even if a full combat squad is bunched up to be wholly placed under a blast, it should\u00a0expect to lose “only” 2.75 guys per round to stomps, and remember that the guy killed by the base attacks can’t be hit by the stomps.<\/p>\n

All in all, that’s pretty good for the MEQs! Even a few\u00a0lowly Tacticals can tarpit and hold up to one of the Martian C’Tan’s warmachines\u00a0for a bit. They might even do some damage, because their krak grenades and melta bombs if they have them will strike simultaneously with the Knight’s base and stomp attacks respectively. In the photo at the top of the article, those two Tacticals\u00a0tied up that Knight for several critical rounds of combat, leaving my other forces free to deal with other threats.<\/p>\n

Don’t Get Shot!<\/h2>\n

Against longer range shooting attacks, bubblewrapping and protecting\u00a0a Knight can be difficult. The model’s just so big that almost no models and only the biggest, purpose-built LOS blocking terrain will give it a cover save. Its ion shield of course will give it a save, but only against one facing. It’s therefore important to try to force incoming\u00a0shooting into one arc, and to otherwise minimize the damage through range and any available LOS blocks as well as the board edges.<\/p>\n

In a recent game against Necrons, I set up my Knight as in the picture below. Without\u00a0Drop Podding melta or fast\u00a0assaults to worry about, I placed\u00a0my Knight aggressively in\u00a0hopes\u00a0of\u00a0moving forward quickly and clearing the central LOS blockers for more shooting options. In actuality\u00a0though this Knight was dead before my first turn: I\u00a0got literally caught off guard by having the initiative seized, and then caught off guard again by a Cryptek and Vargard Obyron teleporting ~30 Necron Warriors\u00a0on top of me in double tap range. The two\u00a0blobs went into two separate arcs, rendering my ion shield\u00a0applicable to just one. Either way though, no Knight’s going to stand up long against 60 gauss weapon shots and it\u00a0promptly exploded.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The game begins, and I’ve already made horrible mistakes!<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Jeremy<\/a>

Jeremy Chamblee’s Necrons are about to take this Knight down, and how.<\/p><\/div>\n

What I probably should have done is set the Knight hard into a corner with just its front facing exposed, enabling the ion shield to protect\u00a0the whole exposed area. Further, I should have\u00a0used various units to build a wider diameter\u00a0bubblewrap around the Knight, leveraging the two board edges in the corner to minimize the models needed. I’m so used to protecting against melta Pods and assaults that I was thinking\u00a0there was little\u00a0I could do about longer range gauss shooting. In reality though, I could have forced them to teleport in beyond double tap range, literally\u00a0halving the number of shots the Knight would\u00a0have to survive.<\/p>\n

Notable there is that with melta Pods I worry about\u00a0bubblewrapping a 6″ radius with a tight cordon so dudes can’t work their way into bonus range on disembarking. Against double tapping gauss or other weapons the bubble has to be much wider, pushing them out beyond\u00a0twelve inches. Making that easier though, the wrap doesn’t have to be as tight. Individual shots sneaking through aren’t as lethal as melta, and\u00a0a large blob like these tens of Warriors will have a\u00a0large deep strike mishap footprint that stands a good\u00a0chance of hitting a loose curtain wall if they’re\u00a0dropped\u00a0aggressively or scatter badly.<\/p>\n

Pincer Attack<\/h2>\n

Conversely from the defender wanting to force all shooting onto one ion shielded facing, I think the most\u00a0important tactic in going after an Imperial Knight is being able to hit more than one facing at once. This seems to be overlooked by many\/most tacticas and maybe overlooked by many people but is fairly\u00a0easy to apply, at\u00a0least\u00a0in theory.<\/p>\n

The Knight’s\u00a0ion shield confers a 4+ save, 3+ if it’s a Seneschal or Gerantius, and a re-rollable one if deployed in the Adamantium Lance formation<\/a>. It’s limited to one facing though, chosen at the start of shooting.\u00a0The best way to leverage\u00a0that limitation and mitigate a key part of the Knight’s defense is simply to hit multiple facings at once, ideally with a roughly equal spread of power, leaving it able to shield only a portion of the attacks. This is going to be more effective than a mere large number of shots alone.<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>

My lonely Knight is taken down yet again, this time by Joe Johnson’s gorgeous army of Knights+Eldar buddies.<\/p><\/div>\n

To do so, the attackers need multiple units capable of hurting the Knight, and the mobility to get them\u00a0into multiple arcs. Flyers and skimmers\u00a0are a good option\u00a0for this as they can’t be blocked as easily from getting into position by terrain and other units. To me, Crimson Hunters seem particularly ideal as the Knight can’t shoot back at them effectively at all, mitigating their AV10 weakness, and their Vector Dancer USR enables them to\u00a0loiter around a battlefield longer and deliver shots on target much better than most flyers.<\/p>\n

For the ground pounding Drop Pod set,\u00a0hitting multiple arcs realistically means either multiple\u00a0Pods or two combat squads coming out of a single Pod bearing roughly equal amounts of vehicle killing power, presumably melta. The combat squads are\u00a0cheaper in points, take up less FOC slots, and in many cases are easier to deliver onto target. Multiple\u00a0Pods though give flexibility if there for once isn’t a Knight or other single major target to pile up on, as well as potentially being able to constrain future movement of the target and create some cover for your own guys. Either way, the key thing is moving\u00a0those guys into more than one arc on the drop.<\/p>\n

\"Kingbreakers<\/a>

Kingbreakers Marines attacking from all angles.<\/p><\/div>\n

Facing<\/h2>\n

Finally, to that note, facing is not a completely straightforward issue.\u00a0The Imperial Knight has a\u00a0fairly complex model &\u00a0shape, and many get posed with the base, legs, and torso\u00a0all at different angles, all of which\u00a0can lead to\u00a0different interpretations and intuitive takes on what is actually part of the hull, what is not, and how to determine facing angles.<\/p>\n

In the picture below, Sternguard with a couple combi-meltas have dropped from the skies to destroy the traitor Knight. They’ve disembarked\u00a0as far as they can.\u00a0I\u00a0looked at that quickly and\u00a0my intuitive read was that they were in the Knight’s rear facing. My opponent\u00a0just as quickly thought they were on the side armor but wasn’t completely confident. It was kind of a big deal, I had two\u00a0other melta shots coming in from\u00a0the right side out of picture so I really wanted these guys on the rear\u00a0armor and there was a good chance to do a lot of damage (Vulkan giving me re-rolls on to-hits for meltas).\u00a0It wasn’t worth a big thing though and we could each see the other’s view\u00a0so we just rolled for\u00a0the couple on which he was in doubt to decide their\u00a0quadrant; they wound up on the side armor and both units got ion shielded.<\/p>\n

\"Combi-melta<\/a>

Combi-melta Sternguard disembark as hard as they can toward the rear armor of their target.<\/p><\/div>\n

Looking at it more closely from that photo, I’d also now lean toward side armor but there’s\u00a0definitely some gray area. In the annotated picture below, yellow is the hull bounding box and associated facing line if you include the Knight’s shoulders. Previously this was roughly my intuitive approximate take on facing for Knights.\u00a0The pink line is the facing divider from the leftmost to the rightmost corners of just the main body.\u00a0The green line goes from the leftmost corner of the main body to the angled corner of the main body behind the smoke stacks.\u00a0I didn’t have time to ask, but assume my opponent’s interpretation\u00a0was something like\u00a0those two. The blue line goes from the leftmost to the bottommost point in that corner of the main body. Finally, the red is the bounding box and associated divider of the main body. There’s quite a difference among all those slight variations!<\/p>\n

\"Various<\/a>

Various hull bounding boxes & extremal points and the dividing lines they entail for facing.<\/p><\/div>\n

So, there’s a couple questions here: Do you use the bounding box for vehicle facing, or a specific point on the hull body? My impression is that almost\u00a0everyone uses some sort of intuitive bounding box for rounded vehicles like Wave Serpents. With the boxy but not quite regular shape of the Knight’s main body though, a lot of people might be using a specific point on there. The follow-up is then, of course,\u00a0are the shoulders\u00a0considered part of the hull? What if someone has assembled their model without the shoulder covers? I was pretty close to doing that with mine just to get a different, more mechanical look.\u00a0There’s probably a variety of opinions on including the shoulders. From my end, I’ll only say that everyone is more than happy to tag the sponson wings on my Predators as part of the hull when shooting at them, and ditto the shoulders of my Knight.\u00a0I would guess though many Knight owners getting shot at\u00a0would not consider\u00a0the shoulder covers as part of the hull, and\/or aren’t including them in determining facing, making the front and rear arcs much more narrow than they otherwise would be.<\/p>\n

I don’t (yet) have a strongly held take on what should be the correct arc lines. More important though than the actual “correct” answers to those questions is nailing\u00a0down with your opponent the answers that will be in play for a given match before beginning a game and finding yourselves with\u00a0different interpretations at a clutch moment. From now on I’m definitely going to include them in my ever-growing list of topics\u00a0I try to remember to discuss with\u00a0new opponents before matches.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

All in all, the Imperial Knight’s an interesting model\/unit. It’s almost certainly under-costed in points but I can’t quite decide what point value\u00a0I think it should be. In particular, it’s very robust but you can’t just throw it out there willy-nilly either.\u00a0A\u00a0large variety\u00a0of units and attacks can make it pop quite quickly. Similarly, it can do a ton of damage in both shooting and assault, but is also prone to being tarpitted or held up in terrain and not actually delivering much. One thing’s for sure though, there’s bound to be a ton of them on tabletops for the foreseeable future, so please share your attack and defense ideas in the comments!<\/p>\n

\"Nothing<\/a>

Nothing can stop us! No, seriously, nothing.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend a good-sized crew\u00a0from PAGE went out to the NOVA Open.\u00a0I pretty much got my face punched in throughout the Trios and Narrative tracks (reports here & here), but I learned a lot and had a great time. Even in those but especially walking around the Invitational and GT you couldn’t help but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[272,51,238,274,248,24,36],"class_list":["post-2332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rules-and-tactics","tag-40k","tag-eldar","tag-imperial-knights","tag-miniatures","tag-nova","tag-space-marines","tag-tactics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2332"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3548,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332\/revisions\/3548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}