The following comes from the Warhammer-community site.
Today we take a look at brutal urban combat in the 41st Millennium and a little bit at how terrain works in the new game generally.
Battles in the sprawling gothic hives of the Imperium provide many of the most iconic images of war in the 41st Millennium. To recreate battles like this in the new edition, you need look no further than the new Warhammer 40,000‘s Advanced Rules on Cities of Death. These rules, like the Stronghold Assault rules we’ve seen already, are an optional add-on to theme your battles and add more variety to your games. In these types of games, certain units will thrive, while others will find their paths across the battlefield more limited.
So, speaking of cities… let’s chat about ruins.
The crumbling masonry of once-proud Imperial architecture has been a staple of Warhammer 40,000 battlefields for a while now. In the new Warhammer 40,000, they still will be, but the way they interact with the game will be a little different. Their impact takes the form of bonuses for units with certain keywords, and limitations for others.
Infantry are the big winners here. They alone have the flexibility and dexterity to move easily between levels of a building, over ruined walls, through doors, hatches and windows, as well as taking advantage of holes blasted in the ruins themselves. They are also the only units that benefit from cover naturally, just for being in a ruin. Other units (monsters, vehicles etc…) will need to actually be obscured to gain any bonus.
In Cities of Death games, these bonuses get even better – if a unit does not move, its cover bonus from being in a ruin is increased from a +1 to their Armour Save to +2, representing the unit digging into cover and fortifying their position. This can make even a humble Guardsman squad difficult to shift, and a power armoured unit all but invulnerable.
It’s not just Infantry though, flying units will do very well in Cities of Death games, as they are able to leap from rooftop to rooftop easily. Some of these units will be Infantry as well! Imagine facing an entire army of Night Lords Raptors in the twisting streets of a ruined hive, and you start to understand what terror means…
It’s not going all Infantry’s way of course. There are solutions to dug-in enemies. Grenades for example. Any Grenade thrown at a unit in ruins will always count as having rolled the maximum number of shots (6, in the case of a frag grenade) and can reroll to wound thanks to the “Fire in the Hole” mission rule.
One last thing Cities of Death gets us is a new selection of Stratagems. One of our favourites is Sewer Rat, which lets you set up a sneaky unit of subterranean infiltrators in the enemy’s face during deployment or right on an objective.
One war zone where the narrative certainly calls for Cities of Death battles is Ultramar. At the end of the Gathering Storm, we already saw the forces of the Traitor Legions launch their attack on the Ultramarines utopian* worlds. Now the great cities of every planet are either surrounded or active battlefields.
With his home under siege, you better believe that the liberation of the 500 Worlds** are high on the list for Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade…
*Well, by Imperial standards anyway.
**Being in stasis for 10,000 years, it probably only feels like yesterday to Guilliman that he liberated them from the Traitor Legions the first time…
I love all these changes! No toe in cover shenanigans! Grenades with a new purpose! Entrenching bonus! Good stuff!
Not sure if you can confirm this, but I’m not clear which rules are for Matched Play and which are for CoD(other than the strategem).
I’m pretty sure reading it that it’s all CoD apart from the but about infantry making better use of cover and not needing to be obscured in ruins. I could be wrong obviously.
They mention both general rules and CoD specific in this article.
I was mildly concerned how strong some units would be in cover without using high AP weapons.
But showing that there are rules that effect units in cover is cool. Perhaps there are others that do this too….hmmmmmm.
Kinda light day otherwise. This week we’ll see a couple glaring ommissions from the faction focusses and hopefully a look at how flyers will work.
Problem is it sounds like the +2 armor save for my moving in cover is for matched play. And the rules for grenades having max number of shots may be COD only. It’s hard to tell. Furthermore I assume full cumulative bonus counts so a power armour unit not moving in cover gets full use of the +2 cover bonus and will negate all -2 rending weapons. If these units are able to stack something like shrouding or stealth as well then we can once again have a case of 2+ save units with only mortal wounds able to negate the save. It’s hard to tell with the way this article is written.
The +2 for not moving in ruins is definitely CoD only, it says in Cities of Death it gets even better because of the +2 for not moving. It’s only the grenade thing that’s a bit obscure, but I’m almost certain it’s CoD only as it’s part of the same thought saying it doesn’t go all infantry’s way in CoD.
To me the +2 in cover when not moving sounds like it is Cities of Death only. I could be wrong but this is what I gleamed:
General rules:
-Ruins are +1 to armor save. Infantry always gets. Other unit types have to be obscured.
-Only certain units such as infantry can move freely through all levels of a ruin
Cities of Death rules:
– +2 armor if you haven’t moved
– Specific strategems (like the one shown)
– Can fly around tops of buildings
And to me the grenade rules sound like they are CoD specific as well because they specifically reference a mission rule.
Really like infantry making better use of cover than other types of units. One of my biggest gripes with 7th was that bikes and the like were inherently better than infantry with only points cost to balance (which isn’t enough at that fundamental level, as they’re just better until they’re too expensive, very little middle ground).
I wonder what’s up at. GW today. This article went up an hour later than they have been going up and no faction article 90 minutes or so later. Maybe something big coming before end of the day?
They’ve been doing faction articles every other day. The Nid article came out on Sunday. We won’t get another faction focus until Tuesday if they follow the current trend.
So during the stream Frankie and Reece seemed to confirm that “They alone have the flexibility and dexterity to move easily between levels of a building, over ruined walls, through doors, hatches and windows, as well as taking advantage of holes blasted in the ruins themselves.” implies that non-infantry [MC and vehicles] cannot go through walls, buildings, doors, or even the big one:
get on top of ruins.
This suggests that MC/Vehicles simply cannot charge infantry on top of ruins period. This would be a big change.
Again, wait and see on some of this stuff. The main thing we were trying to communicate was only infantry and “Kool-Aide” man through walls, now.
Cityfight was one of my favourite expansions when it was first released, I remember making about 30 foamboard buildings to run a cityfight campaign at my local gaming group.
Very excited about this, as I would love non-standard games such as cityfight, planetstrike, etc to make a big come back.