"We will take the battle to the enemy"

“The Emperor looks down on the faces of his followers, sees the trust written there, feels the weight of responsibility it brings. He knows that for their sake he must try, even if it is hopeless, He casts forth his clairvoyant sight, lets his mind drift beyond the ruined gardens of the palace, over fields where colossal Titans battle by the twisted light of the sculpted moon. He sees the whole war spread out beneath him, his pitifully outnumbered legions being mown down by the traitor hordes. He reaches up to the sky, where he senses the fleet of battle barges that rain orbital doom upon the tortured Earth. Amid those thousand glittering points he finds the Warmaster.

Hope flickers within him. The shields of Horus's ship are down. Briefly he wonders why. Is the traitor's confidence so overwhelming? Does he wish to witness the battle himself. Or is it a trap? The Emperor touches the ship and recoils from what he senses within. How could Horus have done that, made a pact with the ultimate abomination?

The Emperor comes to a decision. Trap or not, this is the only opportunity he will get. He has no option but to seize it; the position is so desperate. Even as his spirit returns to his body, the ominous thought strikes him that the Warmaster must know this.

"What are your orders, Sire?" Sanguinius asks again. The Emperor's eyes snap open. His voice is full of authority. "Prepare to teleport. We will take the battle to the enemy." The men smile confidently. They now have a purpose. While he inputs the teleport co-ordinates they move, without question, to obey.

A flash of light, a feeling of coldness. They have teleported into the Warmaster's ship. The Emperor takes an instant to re-orientate himself and realises that something has gone wrong. He stands in a vast, warped chamber with only a few Marines in attendance. The Terminators and Primarchs are not present. How is this possible he wonders. Could Horus have disrupted the teleportation beam? Is he so powerful?”

Bill King WD 132 (I think)




The story that this is an extract from is probably the first piece of 40K text I read that wasn’t linked to Space Crusade or Hero Quest, and it stuck in my mind. The story is only a couple of pages but managed to communicate the personal side of the Horus Heresy.

Also it was full of things that inspire young kids like The Emperor’s hair catching fire, his skin melting and his eye popping.

The line "Prepare to teleport. We will take the battle to the enemy" stuck in my head particularly, likely aided by the fact that though teleportation wasn’t used much in 2nd Ed. it had a key role in all the Space Hulk games I was playing. The fact is, this line basically inspired my Grey Knight army. My Daemonhunter army was based around hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned Inquisitorial Stormtroopers taking on the worst the galaxy had to offer with little support, but my Grey Knights are based on superhumans teleported into the worst of places with a grim resolve to kill what needs killing.

I’m not going to say that teleporting is something that should always be used, and I expect that in the majority of cases it’s definitely not advisable but at the same time it’s good to keep your options open, especially with Grey Knights. The Grey Knight list was built with adaptability in mind, and we should surely use all the tools at our disposal? Often I ended up not using deep strike in the last edition- it never seemed to work out well with small units outnumbered and scattered all over the board. I started using it again recently with the up-to-date codex though, and I think deepstriking is a viable option again.




The problem a lot of people have with deepstriking is that even if your drop/teleportation goes perfectly, you have a unit that’s often cut off from the rest of your army. Trying to deepstrike units to support each other creates a huge risk of mishaps as they threaten to land on each other. The answer I found was personal teleporters. As long as I’ve deployed with some plan in mind, the terminator squad I just threw onto the flank of a gun line isn’t going to be alone as I can use the shunt move to accurately get my interceptors and dreadknight into support positions.

The units tend to negate each other’s weaknesses. Interceptors are terrible in close combat but the terminators are on hand to help them out. The terminators’ inability to sweeping advance is negated if the interceptors join the combat. They all benefit from being able to bring more guns to bear on any one target, particularly the interceptor and dreadknight incinerators. That said, if there’s a lack of cover to shield them from the rest of the enemy’s shooting it’s not going to end well.

So far I’ve used deep striking to take out a fire warrior gun line, a dark eldar horde behind an aegis wall and 3 dreadnoughts through using S5 stormbolters on their rear armour.

Is anyone else using much in the way of teleportation?

My list is based heavily on Deep Striking from Reserves.

The core for my 1500pt lists tends to look something like:

Coteaz
3 Warrior Acolytes in a Psyback
6 DCA, 2 Crusaders, Mystic, Psyback
10 GKSS, Psybolt, 2 Psycannons, Psyback
10 GKIS, Psybolt, 2 Psycannons
LRC, Multimelta, Psybolt

That core is about 1200 points, leaving 298 to spend on other things, such as:
-pumping the 3-Acolyte warband to 5-6 and buying Plasmaguns, or bying them a Mystic if I have the points
-running a third Dakka-Hendman Warband in a Chimera with 3 Servitors a Jokaero or two, and some Acolytes (maybe another Mystic, but it's typically a back-field unit)
-one to two Dreadnoughts
-a Dreadknight
-a cheap Inquisitor upgraded for Psychic Communion
-and, more recently, I've been toying around with the idea of 2 Solodins Deepstriking for their pie-plates

The list is pretty simple. Combat Squad all of my Power Armor. I tend to reserve all four Combat Squads, but there are situations where I'd want to keep 1-4 on the table. The GKSS can put 5 in their own Psyback, and then they have the option to start the other 5 GKSS behind the DCA/Crusader Psyback and hop in turn one (since the DCA group goes in the LRC).

My Razorbacks chill in the backfield, hopefully behind something that gives them a coversav, while my Landraider rushes forward, having the Mystic modify it's 6'' bubble around the large hull of the LRC. I can either Cruise or Flat-Out the Landraider, based on enemy positioning, to set up a turn 2 shock attack.

I don't always use the LRC as a Beacon, though. For instance, my last game, I ran my LRC up the right side of the board, and deep struck everything else on his left flank. The result was the Land Raider blowing up turn 2 to a stray Vindactor blast, and my Power Armor doing some serious damage to the bulk of his scoring units (also taking out his second Vindicator with rear armor S5 Stormbolters).

The Interceptors are nice, because, unlike my GKSS who gets one round of surprise fire, the Interceptors get two. Once when they Deepstirke, and another when they Shunt.

It's not a super competitive list, but I enjoy the way it plays. It gives me a lot of versatility when playing with the list, as well as giving me a lot of room for choice for list-making.

My question is which book is that from?

I only saw it in White Dwarf. I just looked it up in wikipedia and it was published in 1990. I was 8. That would explain the strong influence I guess.

I think it might have been republished when the Horus Heresy boardgame came out. In those days they had quite a few background pieces. I remember one of the Felix and Gotrek short stories was in White Dwarf. They had joined up with the sewer guard and Thanquol was met for the first time. They also released a stand-alone add-on for Horus Heresy called Warmaster free in the magazine about the final attack on Horus' battlebarge. It was a different magazine in 1993/94.

The Interceptors are nice, because, unlike my GKSS who gets one round of surprise fire, the Interceptors get two. Once when they Deepstirke, and another when they Shunt.

I was thinking of doing something similar with one of my combat squads. Once I get to 1500 points I tend to include a stormraven for anti-air duties, so I may as well use shadow skies while it's zooming about. Then, like you say, they can drop in, smoke a squad of scout types out of the woods before jumping somewhere else useful.