Traitor’s Hate: Terminator Annihilation Force Review
Howdy Heretics! Today we look at the new CSM Terminator Annihilation Force. Can it win you games?
Dean from Blog for The Blood God here with a new weekly review / Tactical article series for the formations found in the new Traitors Hate Chaos Space Marine Suppliment!
If you have any ideas / tactics you wish to contribute / discuss head over to my Facebook Page and shoot me a message! Without further adue lets get into the fourth installment!
Terminator Annihilation Force
Units
- 1 chaos lord, or sorcerer must be equipped with Terminator Armour for free
- 3 -5 units of Chaos Terminators
Rules
Targeted for Annihilation – Basically pick an enemy unit at the start of the game, your Terminators gain Hatred and the ability to make an additional shooting attack immediately after they arrive via deep strike.
Target Updated – Basically if you destroy they unit markedfor Annihilation you can select a new unit, rinse and repeat.
Loadouts
First let’s discuss the units, what to take and how to equip them. In my experience Chaos Terminators are ideal suicide squads (and no I don’t mean one of them has to be Margot Robbie for it to work). What I mean is they drop in, unload their combi-weapon payload and then die.
For this reason I suggest keeping the unit as cheap as possible. Stick to a minimum squad of 3 and give them all combi melta or plasma and no other upgrades.
You can find a previous article on chaos terminator tactics here.
As for the Chaos Lord / Sorcerer, there are two ways to look at this. Either equip him with matching combiiweapons and join him to the suicide squad OR equip him however you want and join him somewhere else. Remember you are not forced to join him to a unit from the same formation. He could very easily be used elsewhere and since these Terminators units are suicide squads I think it is best to place the Lord/Sorcerer elswhere.
There is a 3rd and in my opinion superior option. That is to leave the Lord / Sorcerer solo and equip him with the Burning Brand of Skalathrax. The ability to fire this twice at different targets the turn you arrive is brutal, and can be very cheap. A Sorcerer in terminator armor with the burning brand only costs 90pts when taken in this formation.
Thoughts
So is this formation good? It has potential but also has some major design flaws. Being able to make a shooting attack immediately after arriving from DS is great, but as the only decent shooting Terminators have comes from Combi Weapons you are only getting one round of shots anyway. If you make the squads larger you can add heavy weapons but once you do this for 3 – 5 squads you will end up with far too much of your force in reserves.
There are a few hidden uses to this formation however. An important thing to remember is that the free round of shooting happens in the movement phase, so here are a few ideas to consider.
1. Destroy enemy transport with combi weapons in your free round of shooting, then shoot the occupants with bolters in the shooting phase.
2. Use the free round of shooting to ground Flying Monstrous Creatures in the movement phase so they can be shot at normal ballistic skill in the shooting phase.
3. Fire at Imperial Knights in the movement phase to bypass thier ion shields which are only deployed in the shooting phase
4. Shoot enemy units that might be blocking your movement at the start of your movement phase to free a path for your units.
5. Take squads of 6-8 termies with combis. Deep Strike the first one near the target, and immediately after they’re deployed shoot half of their combis at it. Hopefully the target will die, allowing you to immediately choose another target before Deep Striking the rest. Second unit arrives, does the same thing, then you choose yet another target. Third unit does the same again. Then in your shooting phase, you still have 3-4 combis available per unit to hit other targets in the same turn. This relies heavily on good scatters and blowing up targets with only 3-4 combis, but in the right circumstances can possibly work. Even if you fail to kill the intended targets, you can still think of it like Split Fire.
6. The psychological game, you pick your target before deployment so select an enemy unit, then your opponent is likely to deploy in a way to protect that unit. Then just drop your terminators or deploy them like you would if they were part of a CAD. You can effectively use this formation to “psych out” your opponent.
7. Shooting before your opponent can use interceptor on you, take down that Riptide before it takes down your Terminators.
8. Choose a Sorcerer over the Lord and try to roll up Gate of Infinity from Sanctic Daemonology. Deep Strike every turn 🙂 This also potentially allows 3 rounds of shooting turn 1 as you get one round when you arrive in the movement phase, one when you redeploy via Gate of Infinity and then a 3rd in the actually shooting phase.
9. Finally you could go balls to the wall with 1 unit, bulk it out to 10 Terminators so you can take 2 Reaper autocannons and use it to obliterate units of infantry. It is a huge points sink to target infantry though.
Weaknesses
This formation, as with all formations has some glaring weaknesses. Other than those mentioned above this formation also struggles with reserves, and scatter rolls. These two combined can spell doom for your Terminator squads so I suggest taking a Bastion or Aegis Defense Line with a Comms Relay – this will help your reserves. If you want to protect against mishaps check out this advice on deep strike placement.
Conclusion
~So what are your thoughts on this formation? Have i missed any fantastic uses? How would you equip them an what tactics would you use?
Chuck some comments below or join the conversation on Facebook. Lets show the false emperors lackies what the power of chaos can do!
-Dean Sinnbeck
