Strategy vs Emperor's Chosen Custodes

[Xenith]

Last night I got absolutely spanked by an Emperor's Chosen army - if you're unfamiliar, their rules allow them to ignore moretal wounds (from any source) on a 4+, and then reroll one failed hit or wound (!) roll per unit. 

 

As you can imagine, these rules cripple TS that need MW output to keep up with other armies, and this is before you get to most of their weapons being D2 to ignore all is dust.

 

Normal custodes are tough, but manageable with MW output, but these are off the scale.

 

How would you approach these in terms of trying to win the game, not necessarily kill Custodes.

 

Last night I played abandoned sanctuaries, with mutate, stranglehold and to the last. I got 9, 3, 0 respectively for these, however O did push out to try and claim objectives. 

 

I might have had much more success with banners and T The Last (TTL), keeping the majority of my stuff hidden, basically playing the waiting game of holding 2 objectives then trying to stay alive. Though I was playing duplicity, not time, which TTL is maybe better for

 

What secondaries would you pick v custodes to try and stay in the game? What cult would they be for?

 

Would duplicity be better served by things like Engage/Nachmund data? 

 

TL:DR

If you were playing against the Emperor's Chosen Custodes, what secondaries would you pick, and how would you play that game?

[WarriorFish]

Sounds tricky :confused: I can't comment on secondaries as I've not done them much but for the MW issue it might be worth focusing on the tactical aspect of psychic powers and going with these as much as possible? That way the 4+ save is less of an issue and you can try and play the mission more, and counter their effectiveness with the reposition game etc.

[dice4thedicegod]

Infantry Custodes might struggle against damage reduction, so maybe a big terminator block that can have the -1 damage strat played on it (play it up front, so it is the focal point for the Custodes attacks)

[Lucky_Lee]

I play against custodes regularly.
My primary custodes opponent typically plays "meta" lists from GTs and such. While he's a very proficient and friendly player, knows his rules, uses both tactics and strategy. I wouldn't call him a competitive one. There's been times he meant to perform an action but forgot and shot. He has decided to have fun and charge into a bad combat because it would be cool. Stuff like that.  But sometimes we both agree to "go all out" and we play like we got money on it lol.

That said I've had a lot of success with a particular strategy that he's struggled to stop.  The Cult of Mutation is fantastic against them and spice it up with an Infernal Master and you can really start punishing his elite army by penalizing their ability to move. Also you can make a pimp combat Terminator Sorcerer.

Once you isolate a unit or two you pick them apart in shooting/psychic. 

Our basic bolters put most of the custodes at their invulnerable save and sisters at a 5+. Literally the biggest threat to their infantry is ours. To make matters worse we have ways of increasing our to hit and to wound further adding insult to -2 AP injury. 

Use the +1 Str pact, +1 to wound strat and extra bolter shot strat on a 10 man SoT. You can literally just choose something and delete it unless he just bosses the saves.

If you manage your CP right and use your cabal points for the extra CP every turn you should comfortably be able to do this twice a game while still having the ability to use their psychic to bring models back through the strat for that. These guys are a terror when supported by Ahriman. Your opponent will do everything they can to stop this. It's a good thing the're still another 1375pts of your army and 5 out of 6 games the SoT still survive.

 

Soulreaper cannons on 5man rubrics are effective en masse as well. 

3x10 tzaangors can be an excellent tool for generally delaying things and tagging units you don't want to shoot.

Use efficient trading, fight on objectives, and remember that dreadnoughts are actually pretty easy to kill in the psychic phase as long as the sisters aren't around. 


I hope I gave you some stuff to at least ponder. Please let me know if you can replicate the results!





 

Edited March 12, 2022 by Xenoscry

[Prot]

I play against them a lot.

 

I played against them using Grey Knights as well, and I had a better edge there because I could hit back hard in CC, while 'skirting' the playing field, and remaining focused on scoring and melting hard targets with MW's is more the way I played my Thousand Sons.

 

So I think the way Xenoscry above explains it is how I had the most success. I was always a very big believer in the flamers, and I used them out of Rhino's frequently. What sucks now is you have to decide on you army wide ability instead of having some units that can jump around, etc.... so anyway, the flamers, with +1 to wound/S5 just rely on the opponent taking a schwack of invuln saves and that scares most of those Custodes guys. They hate seeing that. They live on that 4++/T5/2+ save, but if you start making him take handfuls of 4++ saves, they start to fall, and get panicky. 

[Xenith]

Great advice from both! I think an issue was a lack of cover on the table which exposed most of my army if I wanted objectives, so I couldn't really pick and choose my fights as much as I'd have liked. Soulreapers put the hurt on them, and I've tried splitting one of my 10 man units into 2*5. I think and issue as well was my trying to play to to the last, with duplicity instead of time, on a terrain poor table where I had to trade units. Another secondary would have been better, TTL is maybe built for cult of time.