Grey Knights

Sorry about the lack of updates the last month - work has kept me extremely busy. I've had a little time for hobby, but not loads - mostly been spent painting and building Dark Eldar, but more on that another time.

Codex Grey Knights, in all it's glory

Today I wanted to take a look at the new Grey Knight codex from a fluff-oriented gamer's perspective. We've heard a lot about the various strengths and weaknesses of the codex, and plenty of speculation on what might make good competitive builds, as one might expect, but the Codex GKs also has some interesting options for more fluffy players like myself.

Firstly, it's a great counts-as codex. And I'm not thinking about this from 'how do I squeeze more l33t out of my chaos models' perspective, but rather from a 'what cool looking force can I build that isn't covered by other dexes' point of view.

Many people were bemoaning the shift from an =I= focus in this new codex - the fear being that the =I= would take a back seat at best, but I've actually been quite impressed with the implementation so far. Sure, you can no longer abuse the allies system to make an uber-build of doom, but I find the inquisition sections open up plenty of possibilities for characterful armies using the henchman warband and Coateaz.

Orange furry alien Oblits, basically

There are so many options here, you could pretty much build an army just using Coateaz and this one force org entry. Crusaders to hold the line, Warrior Acolytes for some cheap firepower (I'm thinking of using my Necromunda Enforcer models as Arbite Acolytes), some Jokaero's for Heavy Weapon support, and a unit of Arco Flagellants for counter assault. Sure, there are more competitive lists out there, but the option to build an ad-hoc militia force is finally here - something I've been wanting for a long time.

In a week or so I'll be playing a scenario with a friend of mine based around the defence of a world caught unawares. I'll be using a small force of Dark Eldar, against a large civilian militia. We were struggling to find rules to represent the militia, but these will work great.

The other thing I love about this codex is the option for armies with a really tiny model-count. 2 wound 2++ terminators with feel no pain that count as troops mean you can risk a really small force and still have a decent chance of success. When I finally get around to actually getting some Grey Knights, this is probably the way I will go. 12 man army anyone?