Company of Hunters Revisited for Pariah Nexus
If you haven't been paying attention and don't know what's coming, here's the Goonhammer review of the Pariah Nexus rules. I'd like to focus on a few aspects of them, and specifically how a Company of Hunters might function under them.
For starters there are 5 mission rules that give in-play advantages to Battleline units. Those rules are below.
Swift Action – BATTLELINE units can perform an action after Advancing or Falling Back.
Stalwarts – BATTLELINE units are still eligible to shoot if they perform an Action, and can perform an Action while within Engagement Range of enemy units.
Rapid Escalation – Also previewed on WarCom. In the first battle round, players can set up BATTLELINE units from Strategic Reserves in the Reinforcements step of their Movement phase. They can’t be set up in the enemy Deployment Zone, and the total points value of units you can do this with can’t exceed 200 in a 2,000 point game.
Raise Banners – At the end of each player’s turn, if a BATTLELINE unit from their army is in range of an objective marker they control, the player scores 1 VP and they can no longer raise a banner on that marker. So this one puts an additional 5-6 Secondary VP up for grabs, depending on the mission.
Prepared Positions – BATTLELINE units can be targeted with Go to Ground and Heroic Intervention for 0 CP.
There are some obvious advantages here for an army that can take Outriders as Battleline units, if Tournament Organizers are willing to use these rules. That is a fairly large caveat however. Anyone who is familiar with the current state of the game knows that the quality of Battleline units varies wildly from army to army. For some armies, Battleline units are build-around units. For other armies, you barely want to take any, and maybe you even want to avoid them entirely. I think GW-sponsored events will reliably use these mission rules, but outside of that I'm not convinced we'll see them very often. I wouldn't consider Outriders a build-around unit, Battleline or not, but they have the virtues of being fast and cheap, so they do have their uses, and if you have them anyway then playing a CoH may give them extra utility if the right mission rules come up.
TOs may or may not choose to use the Battleline-advantaging mission rules. However, Secret Missions are a core part of the Pariah Nexus rules that will be an option in every game you play. Secret Missions are a catch-up mechanic you can use if you find yourself behind on Primary points at the end of the 3rd battle round. They give you another way to score points, one your opponent will not be privy to, though they may be able to guess based on what you do after you decide to go for one. The Secret Missions are below:
Command Insertion – Have your Warlord in range of one or more objective markers in your opponent’s deployment zone that you control.
Shatter Cohesion – Your opponent has no units on the battlefield, or if they do, those units are either Battle-shocked, below Half-strength, or more than 3” away from all objective markers.
Unbroken Wall – You control 3+ objective markers not within your deployment zone.
War of Attrition – One or more BATTLELINE units from your army is in your opponent’s deployment zone, and they have no Battleline units on the battlefield, or if they do, they’re all within (not wholly within) their deployment zone.
The ones that really caught my eye were Command Insertion and War of Attrition. Of the two, War of Attrition is almost certainly easier. If you're playing a Company of Hunters, then getting a unit of Outriders into your opponent's deployment zone while using the rest of your army to pick up your opponent's Battleline units seems like a low bar to hurdle.
However, Command Insertion is worth considering when you build your army. To give yourself the best chance to score it, you'd want to attach a Ravenwing Command Squad to a unit of Outriders. To fully tech into this option, you'd want to give Mounted Strategist to that unit's Champion, so it can charge after advancing or falling back. That might be important for getting the unit on the objective, and with Outriders auto-advancing 6", you'll make distance more reliably. Alternatively, if your opponent screens out his deployment zone, you can pick up the unit with the Rapid Reappraisal strat, and have them come in from your opponent's table edge the following turn. This is why you take a Ravenwing Command Squad instead of Sammael - the Champion gives +1 to charge rolls, so if you have to make a Hail Mary play from a table edge in the 5th turn, you're a little more likely to make the charge roll. And, assuming you have the Ancient in the unit, you might not even need to kill the unit guarding your opponent's backfield objective.
If we're building a Company of Hunters to have a good shot at pulling off Command Insertion or War of Attrition, then a fringe benefit is that it's going to be good at certain secondaries, so we might consider leaning into that and planning to take fixed secondaries, so let's take a quick look at some of those.
Cleanse – Scores 2 VP if you cleanse (Action) one objective marker outside your deployment zone, 4 VP if you Cleanse two. Note that each unit now cleanses a single objective marker, so you can’t double up on this with one large unit.
Establish Locus – This is the reskinned version of Deploy Teleport Homers, giving you an action that one unit from your army can do if it’s either within your opponent’s deployment zone or 6” of the centre of the battlefield. Complete the objective and it’s worth 2 VP if you’re within 6” of the centre and 4 VP if you’re in an opponent’s deployment zone. The lower scoring for dropping a locus near the middle of the table significantly narrows the number of armies which can make use of this, so while it’s still a reliable 16-point clock if you have a repeatable up/down strategy, it’s not really an option if your plan was to repeatedly drop a homer at the middle of the table.
Recover Assets – One of the new Secondary Missions, Recover Assets lets two or more units from your army do an action if they’re wholly within different zones of the battlefield – your deployment zone, no man’s land, and your opponent’s deployment zone. The action finishes at the end of your opponent’s next turn or at the end of the game. Complete the action in two zones for 3 VP, or in three zones for 6 VP. Scoring 3 off this seems pretty easy, and endgame scoring means you can do this the first four rounds for 12 VP, then fire it off at the end of the game for 6 if you’re going second. While scoring for this seems easier in some respects the action is much harder than Locus and has legitimate counterplay so it just may not see use in competitive lists as a fixed option. That said, on some layouts and with some armies, 15 is pretty achievable most games with a unit in your deployment zone and one just inside No Man’s Land.
Behind Enemy Lines – At the end of your turn score 3 VP if you have one non-AIRCRAFT unit wholly within your opponent’s deployment zone and 4 VP if you have 2 or more non-AIRCRAFT units. Mercifully, you can now choose to re-shuffle this if you draw it turn 1. Also there’s no more bonus point for scoring this in Tactical mode.
Engage on All Fronts – At the end of your turn, score 2 VP if one or more non-AIRCRAFT units from your army are wholly within three different table quarters and more than 6” from the centre of the battlefield, or 4 VP if you have units in all four quarters (and more than 6” from the centre). This is much easier to work with than the old Engage, where you no longer have to be more than 3” into a table quarter to make it.
A highly mobile force is going to tend to be good at all of these, but what really catches my eye is a combination of Recover Assets and Engage on All Fronts. To do Recover Assets you're going to want to have units in the same places you'd want them to score Engage, so there's no reason not to double up on them. Again, Rapid Reappraisal will come in handy here, and not every unit in a CoH has to be a Ravenwing unit. I've found a couple squads of Scouts to be gold for scoring secondaries, and a good argument can be made for starting all lists with 2 squads of Infiltrators.
Just for yuks, I banged out a list on Battlescribe intended to do all the things I discussed above.
Sammael
Ravenwing Command Squad: Mounted Strategist (Warlord)
Ravenwing Command Squad
Ravenwing Command Squad
Outriders: 3 chonky bikers
Outriders: 3 chonky bikers
Outriders: 3 chonky bikers
Outriders: 3 chonky bikers
Ravenwing Knights: 6 awesome bikers
Ravenwing Knights: 6 awesome bikers
Infiltrator Squad: 5 sneaky boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 sneaky boys
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Ravenwing Darkshroud
Storm Speeder Thunderstrike
Storm Speeder Thunderstrike
Sammael and the Mounted Strategist Command Squad each join a unit of Outriders to exploit their advance and charge abilities, with the Champion of the Command Squad the Warlord in case I want to attempt Command Insertion. The other two Command Squads join Black Knight squads to create big bricks of plasma-spewing death. The Thunderstrikes are there to add some anti-vehicle firepower and help them punch up. The Dark Shroud is there for the obvious reasons, and can generally be the unit I have doing actions in No Man's Land to score Recover Assets. The Infiltrators screen the backfield so I don't have to worry about my opponent trying to get clever in my backfield, they can probably occupy 2 table quarters while they're doing it, and the one on my home objective can be doing the action to score Recover Assets. The Scouts are in the list because they're cheap and they can uppy-downy with their own native ability.
I think this list is pretty reasonably designed to score Engage and Recover Assets and have a go at scoring Command Insertion or War of Attrition. I don't think this list will routinely come close to tabling opponents, but it should put up enough of a fight to score its points. It's got high mobility and built in positioning tricks, so putting units where they need to go to score points shouldn't be a problem. The trick will be preserving them long enough, but that's the challenge with every list.
Does this mean the Company of Hunters will start being a good detachment under the Pariah Nexus rules? I'm inclined to still say no, but it will be better, particularly if the Battleline-advantaging mission rules start seeing widespread use. If you're inclined to use the CoH in spite of its flaws, then you could do worse than building it something like the example above. I think it will take a lot of skill and practice to be successful with this list, but it should at least be fun to use, and it will be memorable for your opponents. Not many lists have over 30 bikes in them!
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