Are y’all ready for Siege Host? Cause you are getting some Siege Host.  The list we will ultimately be breaking down – https://pastebin.com/WppHYU1L

Before we dive into the list, let’s practice our strategy of list building from the prior article – what is the best thing we can do and how do we get the most out of it? Unlike RnR, we are not spoiled for choice. -1 to wound is a powerful ability and will make our tough units tougher, but it doesn’t give us a direction. Next, let’s look at our Battle Tactics… Not promising. Hit rerolls after getting slapped is not good for Lords because they mostly don’t take a slap well. Crit 5s on something below half Str will have some corner use cases but mostly is dead weight. And out last Battle Tactic is free Pistols but that is again not something we can leverage reliably.

Our 3 remaining tactics are 1 cp to reflect mortals in a cool but niche way, -2 to charge (which is so nice to have), and 5+++ in shooting.  SKRRRRRRTTTTTT – that is the sound of me smashing the brakes and rubber necking the trainwreck of our Strat section when I see this beauty come into focus.  Now, it is only in shooting, but when you consider how little damage melee does this edition, that omission is an easy one to swallow.

So we want to leverage lots of wounds to make sure that our enemies cannot trade efficiently in shooting and we will need to rely on the relatively high base damages of our units to exploit this gap since we have few ways of boosting output.

Let’s talk about the elephant on the table – the Khorne Lord of Skulls. T13 -1 to wound means the game wounds you on 4s and worse and 5+++ means you have 36 effective wounds. It is very hard to deal 36 damage in a single shooting phase for most armies thru a 3+/5++/5+++ so that basically begs you for a Warpsmith to heal him (each wound is an extra 3rd of wound YAY VALUE!) and make his two S14 guns a little more reliable. Sometimes you will need to hide him, but generally you want to bully people with him and he may actually get to use Persistent Assailants.

So we have one big idiot to stand around and bait your enemy into exposing their army and shooting him. We need a second big dumb thing to try to leverage and it would be great if it had different strengths and weaknesses to the Lord of Skulls. Enter our Terminator Brick led by a Lord with the Bastion Plate.

10 3W 2+/4++/5+++ -1 to wound infantry are not wildly dissimilar to Wraiths in terms of how hard it is to kill them. We don’t get to revive or zoom but our guys also have both shooting and melee threats so I accept this. The Lord lets them 0 one failed save, CP re-roll another, and then free CP reroll a third, which you shouldn’t do often but definitely means your opponent has to really hit them to be sure they die. Our plan will be to Rapid Ingress them on turn 2 and make our opponent pay the Iron Price (whoops, wrong universe) to dislodge them. They will always get hit rerolls but 4 Termis and the Lord could definitely use Persistent Assailants to keep their output up. They are obviously our best chance to get a 6+ mortal Brutal Attrition. Being able to shoot them out of combat with the Point Blank Fusillade could legitimately come up. One final trick to remember is that you can RI these folks just outside of 9” with relative impunity, even if they have scary melee if you have set aside 1 of your own for Siege craft.

Okay, so we want to plan to allocate CP to one of these 2 units in many phases of the game and we have spent 995. How do we will in the rest of the list? We need high damage and some mobility and ideally we want to lean into things that are tougher to remove.

10 Warp Talons meet all 3 criteria and are busted, so that seems fine. A -1 to wound Rhino with 2 sets of Flamer Rubrics can shoot Soulreaper cannons out the top and again, that combo meets all 3 criteria. That makes up the next 485 of the list. Both of these units are 2W 3+/5++ -1 to wound, which is about as good a defensive profile as we can get for their damage output.

We need to pay the requisite 80 pt 2×3 Nurgling tax, which leaves us with a tight 420 (blaze it) left to play with. I also don’t play without at least 10 cultists to sticky my home objective and screen the backfield (370 left).

As you may remember from my previous article, I live in fear of things shooting me and me not being able to shoot back. The only platforms that threaten our Lord of Skulls will either be heavy infantry or long range guns, so I wanted more lascannons. I’d play 3 Predators if I could fit them, but we cannot and Land Raiders have 4 lascannons for slightly cheaper than 2 Preds and then are T12 with 16W meaning they sometimes can really use a 5+++. Some games you will start by sticking your home objective and then the Cultists all hop in the Raider and he zips them over to a flank objective. So for the last 130 I am taking a 3rd Pred. Could be 5 Possessed to go in the Raider but I want more shooting profiles.

This list is built to hold 2 objectives and keep your opponent off of anything outside their DZ. You want to bait them into trades where your tougher shooting platforms can deal more relevant damage than they can while your terminators try to force them to be spread too thin but Rapid Ingress and fighting into their threats that could punish your Lord of Skulls.

So this is an introduction to Siege Host list building and how I want to bring them to the table. As long as you follow the magic formula of tough bodies with many wounds (and not Damned models), you are going to get a reasonable chance at your own Perturabo cosplay.

Cheers,

Doug