Warhammer 40,000/Tactics/Mechanicum (30k)

Ave Omnisssiah!

Why Play Mechanicum?

Because for the first time since some stuff in Rogue Trader, the followers of the Machine God can finally take to the field! If you like technology worshiping transhumans with robots and cyborgs, this is the army for you. Most of the units we have are horrifically tough, albeit rather expensive and we get all the fun bling.

Also robots.

Armory of the Omnissiah

Being a heresy era list, we get some funky wargear that's not found in later eras/outside of the hallowed halls of the machine god. Augments may also be a thing.

Ranged Weapons

• Volkite Weapons Ancient ray guns that date back to the Age of Strife, they were in the process of being replaced by the bolter as the preferred weapon of the Space Marines due to difficulties in production and maintenance. Volkite weapons have the 'Deflagrate' special rule, which means each unsaved wound caused inflicts another automatic hit. They come in five flavours, Serpenta (pistol), Charger (Assault 2), Caliver (Heavy 2), Culverin (Heavy 4) and the monster Carronade (S8 with Haywire and a beam effect that lets it hit everything in a straight line in front of it). Strangely, they have 15" range increments, so culverin is 45", but the charger only 15", and only have AP5.
• Conversion Beam Weapons Could be seen as inverse Melta; Longer range, Greater damage. The only two difference between the heavy and regular version is the former has a large blast radius but requires the unit to remain stationary in order to fire.
• Graviton Weapons These possess no strength, but possess both concussion and haywire effects. They also have a curious way of causing wounds by forcing the enemy to roll D6; if the result is above their unit strength they take a wound - a result of 6 always causes a wound. Annoyingly this makes it large ineffective against infantry blobs (seriously guardsmen have a 1 in 2 chance to survive this arcane weapon). However it also creates difficult and dangerous terrain in its blast radius, so it can at least severely impede their movement... because soemhow they got better in the 10,000 years since the heresy?
• (I)Rad Weapons What you get if you rip out a cathode ray tube from an old television and soup them up. They have fleshbane because you kill your foes with Space-Cancer. The larger one gets torrent and AP3.
• Photon Weapons Funky particle ray guns that have strength 6, gets hot, ap2, blind, and LANCE. Comes in a pistol, a gun, and a cannon.

The following are some specific weapons that pop up a lot.

• Rotor Cannon Basically a salvo lasgun.
• Las-Lock 18" assault s4 ap6
• Plasma Fusil Strength 6 salvo plasma. Doesn't get hot. Since most of our dudes get relentless, the salvo isn't really a concern.
• Maxim Bolter Short range bolter that gets an extra shot.

Cybertheurgy

Like psychic powers. For machines. WHERE IS YOUR WARP HERESY NOW?!

Special Stuff

Augments may go here.

• Cortex Controller Keeps your Cybernetica from attacking their nearest foe. Right now the only cybernetica is Castellax, but there will certainly be more. You'll want a few of these around.
  • Programmed Behavior: unless within 12" of a friendly model with a cortex controller , the following restrictions are place on the units use in the game , thes restrictions do not applt if the battle automata maniple is already locked in an assault :
    • methodical: may not make sweeping advance or run moves
    • target priority: if enemy models are within 12 " and within line of sight during the shooting phase , the battle automata maniple mist fire all its weapons against the closest enemy unit it is able to harm . if this is not the case , they are free to select targets as usual
    • onslaught:if enemy models are within 12" during their assault phase , the battle automata must attempt to charge the closest enemy unit oif able , not that the battle automata may still only charge the same unit it fired at in the shooting phase . if consolidating after combat , they must do so towards the nearest enemy model if one is present within 12

Army of the Machine God

HQ

• Magos Caleb Decima - Tough motherfucker, he is most useful for one-shoting any non-superheavy vehicle with his hywire-spamming one-use gun. Due to he is the only available HQ, you didn't have the choice anyway. But he's a badass who hijacked a Fellblade to shoot at the traitors and survived, so there shouldn't be problems with taking him.

• Magos Dominus - What the average neckbeard has become by the 30th millennium. Can take all sorts of fun stuff, cortex controllers, conversion beamers, etc. Give her holytechiness an abeyant for an extra wound, it will not die, and relentless. They're not terribly good in CC, better at shooting, so this seems to be more a support/shooty HQ than anything else.

Elites

• Enginseer Auxillia -

• Mymirdon Secutors - Sturdy SOBs. T5 W2 3+ 5++.

Troops

• Thralls -Tougher conscripts, but with fearless and 6+ fnp. Get Las-locks.

• Mechanicum Thallax Cohort - Shock Troops of the Ordo Reductor, Thallax are Ogryn sized Jet Troops. You can only have a special weapon for every 3 thallax, so keep the units in multiples of 3. Their standard lightning gun (18" S7 AP5, heavy 1, shred, rending) is best used at short range against light vehicles, so a good option is a simple multi-melta and destructor augments. The photon thruster is really the best weapon option - sadly you have to take 2 expensive ablative thallax for each one. Overall pretty damn good but start to cost a lot of points quickly. This isn't a fantastic way of picking up a tonne of high strength weaponry; Legion heavy support is far cheaper, and carries more vanilla weaponry for this purpose. However Legion Heavy support doesn't have Relentless and meltabombs.
  • Phased-Plasma Fusils are an interesting weapon choice, though listed as Salvo 2/3 it needs to be remembered that Thallax possess relentless, thus turning this into a Assault 3, 24" S6 AP3, which is amazing against marines. Of course you may be wondering if this subverts the point of using the Thallax cohort as tank hunters and you would be right it does. However if you're running an all Ordo-Reductor these weapons are extremely potent as they provide a cheap way of taking out chunks of marines without taking out chunks of your self.
  • Irrad-cleansers are also a very interesting weapon; 2+ Fleshbane (not poison!) template pretty much guarantees a large portion of the target will get wounded, at AP5 however it could vary widely as to how effective it is afterwards; Ork, Nids, IG and even Nurgle demons blobs; not a problem. Khorne Berserkers and Space Wolves; better use that 2D6. Tau with their 4+? You're S/T5, A2 striking at the same intiative, you can charge them and crush them like the blue berries they are.
  • Multi-lasers are also an option, unless you really want to throw some really cheap S6 hits at 36" (5pts) don't bother... it is really cheap though.
  • The other augments are also neat, though if you're taking this as an allied choice they are really diminished.
  • Icarian: Would be good if all your weapons weren't in the category of being short ranged or too long in strength to reliably at least glance AV12 (Most fliers tend to be around 10-12)
  • Ferrox: Rage is nice adding 2 attacks on the charge, so is rending. In a legion list you already have quite a lot of pretty good melee units, many with power weapons and a pretty good strength value. This particular anon is still wondering if its worth also taking heavy chain blades with this upgrade; it would allow you to instant death a huge blob of T3 units and give you the opportunity to score quite a a lot wounds on units with T5-6, which previously would of been difficulty... but you already have rending so this upgrade could be somewhat irrelevant in that respect, as a roll of 6 with S5 is as a effect as a S7 now that you have rending.
  • Empyrite: This is a Jetpack unit. It already has deep strike along with all sorts of other gubbins. In "zone mortalis" (in door fighters) a unit can only deepstrike via teleportation. So in the rare event you and your coacaine dealing compandres are playing some 30k together, this might be useful, but otherwise this is terrible.
  • It's somewhat shocking too see that Djinn-sight has been overlooked completely. Djinn-sight prevents units from being infiltrated within 24" of a Thallax model (so you could really abuse some cohesion if you wished.). But most importantly is there ability to reduce covers save by 2! This combined with their access to pretty high strength weaponry means they can take on horrors such as Nob bikers at range! Go to ground in open terrain is ignored completely as that provides a 6+ save.
• Mechanicum Land Raider - "Build Your Land Raider" construction kit. As dedicated transport. Starting from 195 points you can make any and all type of pre- and post-heresy LR's, except Terminus Ultra and Ares, and even some homebrew beast that does not exist on any sacred blueprints (disregard the fact, that this is techno-heresy) - like mixing melta-imunity with heavy flamers all around to burn shit and does not afraid anything (cause railguns won't be invented for a few millenia)
• Mechanicum Castallax Battle Automata - T7 4W 3+ monstrosities, these bad boys also can make their CC attacks concussive. In addition to their built in bolters, they come standard with bolt cannons-- 3 shots of S6 Ap3 pinning hatred. They apparently get rage in cc too, but that may be an augment (ferrox?). They cost about a dread, but can be taken in squads of up to five. Yes. Five.

Fast Attack

• Imperial Avenger Strike Fighter - Ground Attack support plane which looks like the results of a one night stand between an A-10 and a Stuka. It has a tasty Strafing Run rule, an absolutely useless defensive rear-mounted Heavy Stubber, two Lascannons for armour busting, and the AVENGER BOLT CANNON, which is basically half of a VULCAN MEGABOLTER. This means it packs SEVEN Megabolter and two Lascannon shots at BS3/4(+1 with strafing run)for only 150 pts, to ruin the day of anything with less than AV14 or a 2+ armour save (which in the all Marine environment of 30k, is almost everything). Plus it can be upgraded with Battle Servitor Control, giving it the Tank Hunter rule to better kill enemy armour.
• Storm Eagle - An interesting choice, particularly with the transport capacity.
• Lightning - Given the other choices and the fact that we can give our troops skyfire, there's not much reason to take this.

Heavy Support

• Legion Artillery Tank Squadron - See elsewhere.
• Myrmidon - Same as above, but with different cool guns. Also not clear if they get the groovy axes.

Lords of War

• Warhound Scout Titan - Do you remember this is 30K, where Imperium tech was not a tale of slow degradation? Well, pre-heresy Warhound comes with one extra void shield and night vision for the same price as post-heresy one. Even though 6-th edition nerfed D-strength a lot (no more +1 on damage chart), pair of DB TLD's is still a go-to load-out, but due to all-marine environment choosing megabolter or inferno cannon actually start to make some sense, especially with huge blobs of said marines.
• Reaver Battle Titan - Bigger, tougher, meaner and slower titan. As with Warhound, destroyer blast spam is still preferable weapon loadout, but nothing wrong with choosing gatling blaster or melta cannon. Vortex missile for carapace weapon is an interesting choice, capable of one-shoting any other lord of war with removing D3 SP from super-heavies or just instakilling any other model (yes, even primarch) with no saves of any kind allowed, but it is one use only, so use it wisely.

Allies

Battle Brothers

• Sons of Horus
• Iron Hands They don't really offer us much we don't already have.
• Salamanders
• Iron Warriors Not out yet, but Castellax seem flavourful.
• Raven Guard Not out yet, but Thallax would certainly fit the play style.

Fellow Warriors

• Emperors Children
• Night Lords
• Death Guard
• World Eaters
• Word Bearers
• Generic/Other
• Custodes
• Sisters
• Imperial Army

Tactical Discussion

Seeing as all this is new, let's talk.