Unit of the week CSM 10th edition Unit of the week: Cultist Mob

[Cpt.Danjou]

 

CSM 10th edition Cultist Mob

 

This is a topic about Cultist Mob in the 10th edition.

 

• Do you use them?
• How are you using them?
• Do you think they perform well?
• How do you equip them?
• Do you attach them to any specific unit?
• Is there a detachment that they are extra crucial?

 

Other Unit of the Week for Chaos Space Marines can be found in the link below.

 

Chaos Space Marine Unit of the Week Links

[gaurdian31]

Great objective grabbers and can be used to tar it semi-ok.  Miss their cultist firearms as that made the unit better at being back objective campers.

[Dr_Ruminahui]

First off, the loss of autoguns and "upgrade guns" (heavy stubbers, flamers, etc) from our cultist mobs with the new codex is garbage and still aggravates me (not least because it invalidates 2 of my favourite painted units - I suppose I can field them as traitor guardsmen, but that just doesn't feel the same and I lose the heavy stubbers).

 

Second, given that they now just have pistols and melee weapons, their sole battlefield roles are melee and objectives/actions.  Melee wise, they just aren't that great - against T4 Sv3+, a 20 cultists inflict roughly 2 wounds in combat, while about the same number of points of legionaires (5) with chainswords and 2 heavy melee weapons inflict roughly 6 - and this isn't even taking into account legionaires buff on objectives or ability to attach better characters.  Compounding are the difficulty of getting full attacks on a 20 model unit and their fragility making it unlikely to get many into combat anyway, cultist mobs just aren't good melee troops.

 

Which leaves their final role - objectives and actions.  Here they excel, because of their low cost, low opportunity cost of giving up their shooting, but mostly because of their "sticky objective" rule.  This rule allows you to continue to hold objectives even after your cultists wander away from them or die. This is obviously better against static armies that can't easily move a unit over to take the vacant objective away from you, but still is good against armies that can as it may pull a unit out of position where it would otherwise be more useful (you would rather have your opponent's fast melee troops move out of position to take the objective from you than move to an objective where they can also kill your troops while doing same).

 

In terms of actions (so things you can do with a unit to score victory points, which usually require you give up your shooting) cultist mobs are the ideal unit to do those in that they are cheap, and they aren't losing anything of value to give up their shooting.  Plus, for where it matters, they are battleline if the mission/vp rules give any importance to that for performing actions.

 

So, while I see chaos mobs as having literally no other role than helping you gain victory points through objectives and actions.  That said, they are cheap enough and good enough at that one role that I always find room for 2 squads of 10 in my lists.

 

In terms of upgrades, they don't have any real choices, so that's easy.  As for squad size, I always go with 10 man squads.  Their role doesn't really require them to have a larger squad size, as the only thing that brings is more durability, but frankly if your opponent wants to kill them and has the models in range and LOS, those extra models really aren't going to matter.  Indeed, a larger unit will likely be harder to hide and maneuver.  

 

As for detachments, they work in all of them.  For their role as action monkeys, I think renegade raiders is the best, as it lets them run and still be able to do actions (as they can still shoot) - at least for older missions, I think the Pariah Nexus cards don't let you run and do actions.