The Terminator Challenge: Chaos

Hey everyone, Danny from TFG Radio here, and a bit later than normal, but today, I wanted to talk about a fun little challenge that my cohorts and I cooked up to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, I did not get the chance to take this list out to the local RTT yesterday due to the current state of the world, but hey, I thought it’d be fun to talk about the list and what I want to try and do with it. If you want some more information on just about any faction out there, be sure to amble down over to Frontline’s Tactics Corner.

So something that we tend to do at TFG Radio is challenge each other to take wacky lists to RTTs and such. This year, we are doing a 20 Terminator challenge. Yes, that’s right, 20 Terminators in a list, Chaos or Imperium.  If given the choice, I’ll always take Chaos over Imperium, so I assembled a list with what I have and borrowing a little bit of the Latin Gandalf’s terminator stash.  

Here’s the list:
World Eater Supreme Command

• –Terminator Lord. Warlord. Power Axe. 
• Chaos Lord with Jump Pack, Power fist.
•  Chaos Lord with Jump Pack, Z’aall. 
• 10 Red Butchers with double lightning claws

Emperor’s Children Supreme Command

• 2x Daemon Prince of Slaanesh with Double Claws/Wings
• Master of Executions
• 10 Terminators with chain axes/bolters. Powerfist on champion. 

• Khorne Chaos Daemons Supreme Command:

• 3x Bloodthirster of Insensate Rage

So yah, nothing too subtle about this list. I have 3 Thirsters to essentially screen my numerous characters on Turn 1 and provide some pressure. 1 Thrister isn’t hard to kill, but 3 certainly is.  By Turn 2, the drops start. I can either go full pressure and bring in both the Red Butchers and the 10 Terminators, and thanks to the various Faith and Fury tricks, I can reasonably get both into combat right out of reserve. 

For the Red Butchers, there’s the standard Terminator Lord with Violent Urgency Warlord trait and Icon of Wrath.  This gives the Red Butchers an 8″ rerollable charge, While this isn’t automatic by any estimation, it is more or less a reliable threat that my opponent has to think about.  Since this isn’t a pure Khorne army (I know, it hurts me too),  I do have access to Warp Time, and with Apoplectic Fury with the pre-game move, I can deploy the Butchers on the board, move 9 before the first turn, move 10 with Warp Time, and then get 2d6+1 to charge for an average threat of 27″ from where they first deploy.   With the double claws, Red Butchers will murder just about anything, so if I can get them into the fight early, that really does put a huge amount of pressure on my opponent. 

For the Emperor’s Children, there’s the Stratagem  Honor the Prince, which for 1 CP allows you to turn a single die in a charge roll to a 6.  For a 9 inch charge out of reserve, that’s essentially a 3+ (67%) chance of making the charge, and if you factor in a CP reroll, the Emperor’s Children terminators are going to get there.  As they have bolters, they also help answer the problem of screens as they can pump out enough shots to open a hole for where they really want to go, or if I know I am going first, I can deploy them on the board, Warp Time then on turn 1 into a good position to be able to provide some firepower.  If I want to spend most of my CP, I can also give them Combat Elixirs for 2″ of extra movement, so if I deploy them on the board, they can theoretically charge on the top of Turn 1 with 14″ of movement and a guaranteed charge of 6+d6.  This is a bit corner case, but if my opponent has forward elements, it can really catch them off guard and set the tempo for me.  

Of course, the three Bloodthirsters are there just to be big beefy monsters with big beefy axes.  I love the Insensate Rage Thristers because of their versatility.  They can do solid damage to squads and of course bring the A+ power for hard targets, and since they Fly, they can go a lot of places and assault pesky fliers.  I did have the thought of using a small Bloodletter bomb, but this list already has so few CPs and eats a lot of CPs, and really, I wanted some big mean threat that always starts on the board but isn’t trivial to kill.  I need to screen out my characters after all.  I don’t have any easy to kill targets on Turn 1, and adding in a Battalion of Daemons instead of the Thirsters gives my opponent more targets.  

The issue with the list, and it has issues, is that it is low on CP but CP intensive. I have 6 to start but really 4 since I am going to Red Butchers my World Eaters terminators. That leaves me with just 4. I need at least 1 for Honor the Prince or 2 if I want to use Combat Elixirs.  I also need 1 for Apoplectic Fury. That’s already all of them, so I can’t do such.  I won’t realistically be able to Fight Twice or Shoot Twice with the Emperor’s Children either.  Of course, I do have one mechanic to get CPs back, and that’s the World Eater’s characters. Whenever they kill a character in melee, I can spend 1 CP and get D3 CPs back, so there is the chance when going against another hero-hammer style list that I can regenerate enough CP to get going.  That’s a bit of a pipe dream, but hey, always nice to have it in your back pocket.  

The list is guaranteed to give up Head Hunter, but hey, that’s how it goes.  I don’t expect to do terribly well, and if I really wanted to try and go 3-0 with 20 terminator bodies, I’d borrow some Grey Knights.  Oh well, Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it does. 

Thanks for reading, and hopefully I’ll actually get to make the next local RTT, but with everything going on, and I have a new little Termagant due in early May, this seems unlikely. Still, never lose hope! If you have any other fun and whacky Chaos Terminator combos, please do share! I have time to rework the list.

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