Editing Warhammer 40,000/7th Edition Tactics/Chaos Space Marines (section)

===Legion-Specific Guidelines===
For the first time since the legendary 3.5 codex, making a fluffy yet powerful Legion army is now an option thanks to the Traitor Legions Supplement! Just in case we failed to mention anything in previous or later sections of the tactica, here are some suggestions/tips/observations for compiling a Traitor Legion detachment.

====Alpha Legion====
Alpha Legion is about sneakiness, infiltration tactics, and highly-trained Cultist teams. Alliances of Convenience with Orks are not unknown (as one may recall from [[Dawn of War]]). Fortunately for you, the Alpha Legion tactics do just this, allowing cultists, Chosen, and Marines to infiltrate. In addition, they allow any character to generate a warlord trait after your warlord dies. Who's the real Alpharius? Oh, and they don't get Slay the Warlord unless they kill every character in your army.
*With so many infiltrating units, it is very easy to dominate the early game. Set up 5 plasma gun chosen to assassinate the enemy warlord; melta chosen for armored targets. 20 Man CSM squads plopped onto objectives or close to the enemy (circumventing the need for transports). Cultists infiltrated onto back/midfield objectives. Flamers to crisp some nasty CC units before they can get into combat. '''THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!'''

====Black Legion====
Choice is the name of the game here. With no restriction on marks, you are the only Legion that has access to the entirety of the CSM range, minus characters. Including the new TSons and (soon) Death Guard units. This makes a CAD rather interesting to play with. You also have two warbands to choose from. For killpoint games you have the Black Legion warband, for everything else you have the chaos warband, unless of course you feel like murderizing units off of objectives rather than competing with other ObSec units. So between the aptly named Black Crusade, our Speartip and CAD/formations and access to all units, you can be defensive, aggressive or anything in between. Hell, you can even give TSons a run for their money in the psychic phase. And being the largest Legion by far, it's all fluffy too.

The Black Legion supplement provides a few starting points for fluffy lists. Hounds of Abaddon are a khorne warband with their own formation and it's a core choice for the speartrike. Khorne in general works really well with army wide Hatred. Plays similar to WE. Another option is to go ham on elite choices. We get ObSec terminators and chosen in a CAD and it doesn't interfere with turning the cult units of your choice into troops as well. Spice with Forge World and formations as needed. Cultists are for peasants. Or go full glass cannon with the speartip and enjoy turn 1 assaults with possibly the best legion for the raptor talon and maybe a terminator annihilation force. If you somehow still have points, bring the psychic dakka with a cabal and let the galaxy burn.

====Night Lords====
The Raptor Talon was tailor-made for Night Lords players. Night Lord Raptor Talons inflict [[Rape|-4 LD]] on units the turn they charge. Plus, now it's a core choice for the Night Lords Decurion! To make your horde of Fear-inducing Marines even more absurdly successful, bring the Heldrake Terror Pack formation to force more penalties on your opponents during fear tests.Milage may vary against loyalist Marines, but you do have the cover saves to really make use of the re-rolled charge in the decurion. Still absurdly successful against most other armies in terms of failed fear tests.

====Iron Warriors====
Iron Warriors play differently from most Chaos armies in that they emphasize shooting rather than herohammer. Their Warlord table has a lot of stinkers or depend on your army composition: you will [[Rage]] when your Lord or Daemon Prince gets Fearless, gives all your nearby Daemon Engines It Will Not Die when they already have it, or lets your Obliterators fire the same gun when you didn't take Obliterators!

Thankfully, Obliterator troops mean you can take a minimum-sized CAD (or 2) and get Strategic. It's because of this that the Cult of Destruction is ironically usually not worth taking for Iron Warriors!

If you take the Grand Company, you're doing it either because you love pieplates, or you want to re-enact the Iron Cage and plop down lots of Fortifications. Or you can do both: You can take a pair of Vengeance Weapon Batteries with Battle Cannons, or a Firestorm Redoubt which you can then garrison with a unit of [[Awesome|Objective Secured Tank Hunter Havocs! And the Battle Cannons reroll scatter]]! Fist of the Gods becomes a fun formation if you want to throw down 3 Vindicators, and if you use Legacies of Ruin, you can grant one of them Outflank to really keep your opponent guessing where the next attack will come from!

That said, don't go overboard. You can do Fortification-spam, Vindicator-spam, or even (for more casual games) taking an odd Defiler in support of Maulerfiends, but you won't be able to do it all at once; taking more than one Warpsmith in games less than 2000 points will be a heavy tax for most of your armies, and you should almost never take more than two. If you're playing at lower points or just want to field more bodies, the humble Munitorium Armored Crate is only 10 points more than a Spawn Auxiliary and provides a good deal of support for your Warband, from additional cover, ammo crates to help your Havocs shoot better, and even the Fuel Tanks can let you turn a unit of Chaos Bikes or two into a jury-rigged Torrent flamer team.

====Word Bearers====
While Word Bearers have access to all Marks of Chaos, unlike most legions, they have some of the weakest legion rules, which revolve around a few particular HQ choices. Possessed as Troops in a CAD with no other improvements to their rules are still a bad unit, while the Dark Apostle 6" range is small and only gives Hatred and Fearless(which other legions can get for free). The harnessing of warp charges for Conjurations on a 3+ is the strongest benefit from playing Word Bearers: combining this with a Spell Familiar, and you summon daemons more efficiently than most daemons. You will have to keep this in mind when building the list: free VotLW is the only thing your basic Chaos Space Marines gain from(not counting formation and detachment rules), without the help of your supporting HQs. 

Because Possessed themselves are bad, and Word Bearers do not get any other advantages to support running Forgeworld-heavy lists, most Word Bearers lists should start with a Grand Host rather than a CAD. Although Eight-Fold Path is mostly inferior to Path to Glory in the Black Crusade detachment (you can use it on Daemon Princes or Warpack characters, but it doesn't benefit from Favored Scions and you can't pile blessings), Crusader allows your grunts to get across the board faster while the Word Bearers Warlord Table is rather nice. The question is whether you want to do a Cultist-heavy build, or a Marine-focused build. 

The Cultist build is pretty simple: Use a Lost and the Damned Core, but try to balance the ratio of Cultists to actual killing power; the main reason for this formation is how expendable it is. The Warpack actually makes sense as an Auxiliary for this army, as taking several Daemonology Psykers means you have respectable odds of getting Cursed Earth, plus Warlord Psyker Defiler remains the most memetic Crab Cathedral (Crabthedral) to emerge from rule interactions; take advantage of Crusader so your Cultists can run forth, jam movement, etc. 

The Marine-focused build will go for a Warband, and try to take advantage of the ability to mix-and-match Marks. If you want some Cultists to support this build, one option is to use a Helbrute as your mandatory "Heavy" requirement for the formation, then take an allied Helcult so you have a second Brute and two units of super-unbreakable Cultists. If you're feeling cheeky, you can attach your Lord/Sorcerer to each Cultist unit so they also get Crusader, and move faster towards objectives (presumably the Grand Host characters are whipping them up into a religious frenzy). Bring Spawn or other..OHGODNOARRRGRMGH...as the other anon was saying, other fast-moving assault elements can put additional pressure on your opponent, so that MSU Bikes are not your only trick!

No matter whether you go for a Marine or Cultist-focused build, a Palanquin Summoner is a good pick for your army, as the blessings from Lore of Nurgle can buff your army to do nasty things, while the extra wounds give you additional breathing room for casting powers despite Perils. Though you can run Bike Sorcerers, you're not really taking advantage of the Word Bearers' main draw if you do this. On the other hand, a Daemon detachment (be it Allied Detachment, CAD, or Heralds Anarchic) can provide you a lot of extra Warp Charge to play with as well as Paradox. When you can reliably expect to get at least two free units of Flesh Hounds per turn, while you're running lots of small threats, you can maintain a momentum over your opponent that is more powerful than it appears at first glance!

====World Eaters====
The Butcherhorde is pretty amazing. <s>(Fill in the rest here, World Eaters players!)</s> Don't mind if I do!

* The Detachment is good for a noncompetitive setting because the 2d6 pre-movement will be negated because you don't want your Berserkers from the Maelstorm of Gore to sit out in the open and get shot to death. However, instead of bringing Kharn, bring a Juggerlord with the Talisman of Burning Blood and put them in a bike or spawn unit and now they have a pre-movement of 2d6, base movement of 15" and a charge of + 6" if the Lord is from the Maelstrom of Gore (note: the other model's in the unit he's in won't get that extra 3 inches, so you'll have to put your Lord in front Mad Max style). You can easily get first blood and if you bring the Raptor Talon which can charge when they come from reserves, you can disrupt the front lines turn 1 with the Lord and spawn then charge the back lines with the Raptors/Warp Talons turn 2. Then charge with the Bersekers turn 3. You can bring an additional JuggerLord with the Dimensional Key so your Deep Striking units do not scatter.

* As most opponents will be smart enough to not deploy on the edge of their deployment zone (or they're Tau), a Gorepack for scouting Flesh Hound escorts makes your turn two charges all the more devastating. Mixing in more Khorne Deamonkin like a JuggerLord with Blood Forged Armour and Axe of Khorne escorted by scouted Hounds can be great anti-charge/tarpit units as well. You wouldn't want your Axe of Blind Fury or Gorefather JuggerLords bogged down by Wraiths now, would you? Pretty sure those things don't even have skulls...

* Speaking of special weapon wielding warriors of wape: this army has a few very strong toys to play with. Where Death Guard can MSU and Alpha Legion can Cultists spam, HQ spam seems to be the name of the game with World Eaters. JuggerLords with AoBF or Gorefather are a must. A Deamon Prince with Berzerkers Glaive will make your opponent scream in terror as they fire volley after volley into him before the inevitable bladed insertion. Any Warpsmith (escorting Obliterators) or Dark Apostle (escorting Cultists) can be tricked out with a Burning Brand of What-Do-You-Mean-It's-AP3-Torrent. The trick to a good assault army is to give your opponent too many high priority targets to choose from. If they're too busy taking out your Deamon Prince they'll leave your Spawn wrapped JuggerLords alone, leaving them free to run wild in their deployment zone.

* One very important rule to remember is to not split your forces. World Eater units aren't tough, you will get shot a whole bunch and you will be removing models by the handful at times, but if anything gets close to your mass of swirling axes and flailing tentacles its going to get mulched. Nothing kills you faster than your own hubris, however, and thinking you can split off one unit of Chaos Space Marines to deal with something is a surefire way to get those Marines killed by shooting/PSYKIC NONSENSE. Be a red tide of death crashing into the enemy on mass and you will have success.

“monuments are dust, tales merely words soon forgotten, but blood, blood is forever” 
Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters

====Death Guard====

Another approach is a Death Guard Vectorium with a Chaos Warband with plenty of Havocs and a Cult of Destruction for added versatility. Use Nurgle Bikers to intercept enemy melee specialists.

The Plague Colony Formation compensates your -1 Initiative by also inflicting it on the enemy, along with -1 WS - putting enemy MEQs on the same level as your walkers. So give your Plague Colony some Rhinos, combine with Maulerfiends from a Hellforged Warpack, don't forget the Dirge Casters and maybe add a bunch of Nurgle Bikers. Cue Advancing Wall of Death. Very expensive but can really put a dent in things (especially in Apocalypse games).

====Emperor's Children====
Turn up your sonic weapons to 11 with the Kakophoni formation. Noise Marines in the Decurion have S5 sonic blasters and S9 blastmasters with Shred. Judicious application of Slaanesh psychic powers allows for potential S6+ and S10! ''Yeah good luck with that. You only get the +1S if you field 6 Noise Marine units. That means with minimum Noise Marine units without Icons or Rhinos but with their weapons of course + a Lord without any upgrades would cost you already 980p. Good thing we all play 3k point games everytime, right?'' Things shall get loud now. A Helcult povides you with nice mobile cover, AP2 and is a good way to represent your pleasure slaves. Lost and Damned, while flakier, unlock -and take- Combat Drugs. Alternately take a Chaos Warband for Anti-Air and AP2.

The Raptor Talon really benefits from the Slaaneshi Decurion, especially when you combine it with a melee oriented Chaos Warband.

====Thousand Sons====
There are two ways to go about running Thousand Sons. The first way would be to run a Tzeentchian Sorcerer, unlock Thousand Sons troops, and...that's about it really. Add anthing with a 5++ save to benefit most from MoT and thus legion tactics, maybe a Skyshield Landing Pad as magical fortress for your Havocs. Or start with a War Cabal and expand from there.  Thankfully, Traitor's Hate gives you more leeway in running a wizarding army, and without the need to lock your own Sorcerers into using the Mark of Tzeentch. Run "The Lost and the Damned" as your main core, for the gaggle of cultists/Spireguard that are kept as servants, and add at least two Thousand Sons units as your Auxiliary of choice. Run several Sorcerers with your Command Choices, Add some [[Chaos Spawn|Things Which Must Not Be Named]] or Heldrakes as additional auxiliaries, and max out points on getting . Why not consider adding a Daemon CAD for additional variety as well?

Ok so this has been playtested once and I will try it a few more times before my final verdict but after the first game this is my opinion.
The Ahriman's Exiles Formation. You cannot get any more elite than this. Ahriman and 3-9 Exalted Sorcerers to get a 3+ warp charge. Now, this is a veeeery pricey formation in points, I played a 1k game and it had only four models in it. All were on discs, familiared when possible and level 3. I also threw in some artefacts like the Murder Sword which really paid off. Now I lost on points (Crusade with three of five obj in the opponents board half made things tricky) but that was partly down to my only mistakes early on and some bad luck. The trick is that you rarely perils thanks to 3+ rerollable Warp Charge rolls and if you pick your disciplines right you end up with a very tough (Endurance and Warp Fate almost every turn) unit that can constantly keep out of combat until it wants to get stuck in. At 1500 you add some more Sorcerers and maybe a Malefic one to expand your presence and it could be quite nasty to handle.