Competitive CSM: Pactbound/Renegades

[darkseren1ty]

Guys, I am having a bit of a conundrum.

I love running elite heavy infantry armies. I’m entering a tourney pretty soon where I’ll be running a predominantly infantry based list.

I’m talking 20 possessed, 5 termies, chosen, havocs, 4 oblits, 10 warp talons,  cultists, and a helbrute, with hqs in the form of a MoE and dark apostle to move up with the chosen, and a termie sorcerer to boost death hex key targets

 

I’ve had a few practice games running raiders and it’s been interesting, the extra AP on objectives makes scoring a fair bit easier, and the mobility is crazy useful. however, I found that they tend to die off after the first/second turn because I over extend and get flanked by reinforcements.

 

my PBZ games with a similar list however tend to be much lower scoring in the first 2 turns and the games turn into a war of attrition, which I end up losing against armies that can take my attacks better than I can take their onslaught. 
 

So my question is: with an elite infantry heavy army, one that likes to use a lot of termies and possessed and oblits, which detachment would you choose for a competitive edge and why?

[INKS]

My guess would be Raiders. 

Cultists and Accursed Cultists are so... powerful right now they are just in everything. 

It doesn't even seem to matter for them what detachment you put them in. It's kind of silly to be honest.

Going against that, I would guess that Raiders will give you what you are looking for.

[TrawlingCleaner]

 

Guys, I am having a bit of a conundrum.

I love running elite heavy infantry armies. I’m entering a tourney pretty soon where I’ll be running a predominantly infantry based list.

I’m talking 20 possessed, 5 termies, chosen, havocs, 4 oblits, 10 warp talons,  cultists, and a helbrute, with hqs in the form of a MoE and dark apostle to move up with the chosen, and a termie sorcerer to boost death hex key targets

 

I’ve had a few practice games running raiders and it’s been interesting, the extra AP on objectives makes scoring a fair bit easier, and the mobility is crazy useful. however, I found that they tend to die off after the first/second turn because I over extend and get flanked by reinforcements.

 

my PBZ games with a similar list however tend to be much lower scoring in the first 2 turns and the games turn into a war of attrition, which I end up losing against armies that can take my attacks better than I can take their onslaught. 
 

So my question is: with an elite infantry heavy army, one that likes to use a lot of termies and possessed and oblits, which detachment would you choose for a competitive edge and why?

 

Ignoring units you haven't listed here and without transports, quite a chunk of the detatchments strategems are sort of locked off. Warpcharged Engines, Ruinous Raid, the better part of Opportunistic Raiders are unusable with the units you have. Opportunistic Raiders is still an excellent strat though. Obviously all of your units love the additional AP but a large chunk of your army doesn't shoot at all so is only getting -1ap in combat and ignores the rest of the detatchment ability.

Whilst the units you have are tougher than the standard legionnaries largely, they're still just T4, T5 infantry which will just get shot off the board. Rhinos can be really important to get your units across the board but possessed, termies and Oblits can't go in those obviously.

 

I think your best bet might be Pact-Bound Zealots or Veterans of the Long War at an absolute push. They seem to benefit your units much better. Competitively speaking, the other detachments are traps and hot garbo unfortunately (Win percentage on the left from this week, win percentage from 11 weeks of play min the middle):

 

Mileage will vary for sure and some detatchments need some element of building into to make them better. Raiders is a great detatchment but needs more building into like Rhinos, mounted units are optional IMO but bikes are excellent, the Chaos Cults detatchment requires you to pretty much only build cultists and Pact-Bound is largely all comers in my experience