Saturday, December 11, 2010

Hobby Retrospective - Imperial Assassins

The weekend hobby retrospective returns - this time around, it's the agents of the Officio Assassinorum. In larger games (3000+) I like to include an Inquisitor and an Assassin to my guard force. They all have their uses, but I figure I'd address them in my ascending order of use.


On paper the Eversor is a solid choice as a close combat monster, but when it comes time to actually make the army list I find I prefer the other three options for the special abilities they bring to the table. I don't believe I've ever actually fielded the Eversor, now that I think about it...


The Culexus Assassin is awesome against foes with multiple psykers such as the Eldar, or vs. Psyker Battle Squads in the Guard, but as nearly every opponent I have plays Marines, he rarely takes the field. Love the model though!


Coming in at number 2, the Callidus Assassin is assuredly the most disruptive - forcing enemy unit repositioning and appearing unerringly in the backfield with a Neural Shredder and C'tan Phase Sword, she definitely causes my opponents consternation!


...And my favorite, the Vindicare Assassin. He is my go-to model, the specialist ammo and his ability to pick out ICs have caused tremendous damage over the years. To be fair he rarely survives the encounters - the last time I ran him, my opponent dedicated a Baal Predator to hunting him! The Turbo-Penetrator round let me down that day...

I'm finding it interesting to go back and look at these models again to see which of my painting methods have changed. For example, you'll undoubtedly note they are all pretty shiny. For the longest time I resisted the use of a matte varnish. I'm thinking I'll touch them up a bit and re-seal them with the new varnish, if only it wasn't 20F out at the moment!

2 comments:

  1. These are some good looking assassins. Nice work.

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  2. If adding them to your guard force, remember it doesn't necessarily matter if you're fighting marines. A culexus assassin stood next to YOUR psyker battle squad has a potent weapon. I haven't used it in fifth edition but back in fourth, when schaeffers last chancers could all be psykers, I decimated an opponents deep striking terminators with the fire from that assassin (and the inquisitor with msytic meant I got to fire at him as he landed.)

    Similarly, the callidus neural shredder can work fantastically in conjunction with the psyker battle squads leadership tampering abilities.

    Finally, the eversor, something to cosider. Don't assassins have scout and infiltrate? That allows the eversor to outflank, and his beast like charge means anything within 18" of a board edge is at risk. Put an astropath in your command squad, you'll get him in quicker and where he needs to be.

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