On Wednesday, Games Workshop released two free updates to Warhammer: the Horus Heresy which bring back beloved elements of the game that have been missing from third edition. A new set of Legiones Astartes Primary Detachments allows you to build armies laser-focused on a single type of unit – be that elites, jetbikes, tanks, dreadnoughts, or drop assault troops – just like the old Rites of War system; and the updated Core Mission Pack Imperium at War allows end-game scoring once more, just as the Emperor intended.
In the current version of Warhammer: the Horus Heresy, the term ‘Rites of War’ refers to the unique army rules for each Space Marine Legion, but in previous editions, the term referred to a flexible – if occasionally clunky – system that allowed players to construct army lists that completely rewrote the game’s list-building restrictions. These recreated some of the most iconic formations of the Heresy war: the massed Terminator charges of the Justaerin, the armored tank columns of the Iron Hands, or the gravbike cavalry charges of the White Scars.
The new Legiones Astartes Primary Detachments can be taken in place of the standard Crusade Detachment as the core of your army. Each has a unique force organization chart, plus unique restrictions, penalties, and bonuses.
As a quick example, Fury of the Ancients allows you to field 10 War-engines for a massed onslaught of Dreadnoughts. The force can only contain Command and Specialist units that have the Battlesmith (X) special rule; most Auxiliary detachments aren’t allowed; and the death of a War-engine grants the opponent an extra VP. It also offers a new Prime Advantage, Ancient of War, which grants a non-malefic War-engine Eternal Warrior (1).
The most radical new Primary Detachment is the Orbital Drop Assault, which makes drop pods meaningful once again. The Drop Assault player takes the second turn by default, but gets to deploy all of their drop pods in a single rain of iron. To diminish the coherency of this assault, you have to roll for each unit on a new Orbital Drop table, which might make them scatter or even get held back in reserves as their flight zone is impeded.
The new Core Mission pack Imperium at War is a vital compliment to the updated Primary Detachments because of one small but incredibly impactful change to mission scoring: vehicles and cavalry can control objective markers. This gives vehicle-only Armoured Spearhead and cavalry-only Sky-Hunter Phalanx armies a fighting chance.
Beyond that, the Imperium at War pack has six deployment maps, three mission categories – holding objectives, slaying enemy units, and holding battlefield sectors – and the option to play missions either with Escalation (progressive) or Hammerblow (end of game) scoring. It’s a huge increase over the tiny selection in the core rulebook.
The spirit of the second edition mission War of Lies – in which the actual value of any given objective was only revealed at the end of the game, and could even be negative – lives on in Hidden Caches, which sees every objective marker scatter before it’s scored. Cue Yakety Sax as units rush around after vanishing objective markers.
If the sudden inability to run your favorite army list gave you the ick when third edition Horus Heresy launched, are you thinking of going back? I’ve got a sudden urge to get back to work on my Iron Warriors Fury of the Ancients list… let me know if you’re planning to dust off an army in the Wargamer Discord community, and why not share some pics of your legion in our Share Your Army channel?
Source: Wargamer
