40K: Genestealer Cults Rules Preview – All About Ambushes
The Genestealer Cults are an insidious threat to the Imperium, relying on stealth and subterfuge and the ability to ambush the enemy to win out victories over forces with superior armaments–come take a look at how they’ll do that in 40K.
The new Genestealer Codex will bring with it rules for a ton of new minis–but perhaps one of the biggest changes anticipated is a reworking of the way the Cult Ambush rules work. After all, Cult Ambush is one of the biggest ingredients that gives the army its flavor, and it carries over into the way the new rules work. But we’ll get to that in a moment, first have a look at this interview with the designers to get a feel for what else goes into the army.
Alright now let’s get to the good stuff. There are a lot of new Stratagems to dig through, but let’s start with the Cult Ambush rules.
via Warhammer Community
Cult Ambush now comes in one of two varieties. The first one is garden variety Deep Striking: you can set up any Infantry or Bikes “underground” during your deployment and they come on anywhere outside of 9″ from an enemy as per usual. Which is a nice change–this means no more having to worry about what you rolled, you just decide this is where we want to strike and that’s that.
But then you also have the new Setting up in Ambush rules that allow you to make use of the Sensor Blips that come along with the book.
Instead of setting up a unit underground or on the battlefield, you can choose to place an ambush marker anywhere within your deployment zone. You can place a marker for each unit you choose to set up an ambush – even Transports and larger Vehicles such as a Cult Leman Russ can be set up in this manner! The crucial detail here is that you don’t need to assign which units are represented by each ambush marker – you can decide that later.
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Basically when setting up your army, instead of placing a unit you can place a sensor blip using the same deployment rules you’d use for a unit, only you get to decide what unit is where when you reveal the ambush markers. And, depending on the stratagems you use, you might even have more blips than you do units set up in Ambush.
This humble Stratagem has a lot of sneaky utility to it, owing to the way that your ambush markers work until they’re revealed, so let’s look at that:
If you have the first turn, you reveal all of your ambush markers at the start of your first Movement phase. If your opponent goes first, you instead reveal all of your ambush markers at the end of their first Movement phase, and they cannot move anywhere within 9″ of any ambush markers beforehand.
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This means that you can effectively screen your deployment zone from big turn 1 charges or other infiltrator types getting the drop on you. Until the markers are revealed, your opponent has to stay outside of their 9″ bubble, and the Decoy Stratagem gives you three extra blips to help with that.
These markers are revealed one at a time – each time you do so, you select one unit from your army that you set up in ambush, then set up one model from that unit within 1″ of that ambush marker, followed by any other models in the unit. All units set up in this manner must be wholly within your deployment zone – that is, unless you further mess with your opponent by changing the nature of your ambush.
And They Came From Below lets you not only pay tribute to the loss of Gold Leader during the Battle of Yavin, it also lets you decide that your units that you set up in Ambush are actually just lurking underground–and this sneakily lets you get around some of the restrictions on the rules for setting up Underground (normally only Infantry and Bikers can, but this lets any non-vehicle unit set up Underground). So you don’t even have to reveal everything when you have to reveal everything.
This is a big part of the way the army plays–you’ll always be changing the expectations the player has. The Genestealer Cults have a lot of tricks up their sleeve to try and dictate the momentum of the battle. Including making an Ambush an attack.
You don’t have to do this for a Sensor Blip, you can do this when you have an Infantry or Biker unit shoot twice, move d6″ closer to their targets (for easier charging) or whatever. Definitely worth the 3CP.
And all that before we even get to the fact that most of the Genestealer Cults characters have some kind of Lookout Sir! rule baked into their profiles:
Essentially, each time one of your Characters fails a saving throw or suffers a mortal wound, and is within 3″ of a friendly Genestealer Cults unit with the Unquestioning Loyalty ability, you can roll a dice. On a roll of 4+, a model from the nearby unit is slain but your Character remains unharmed! This is a huge advantage for lightly armoured characters who may otherwise be prime targets for enemy sniper units.
And even if you do end up with wounds on a supporting character, you’ve got access to a few different ways to keep them alive–like Hyper Metabolism.
This is just the tip of the Iceberg, but it’s enough to make you cling to a floating door and watch Leonardo di Caprio sink slowly out of shot while awaiting the next batch of rules previews.
What do you think of the new Cult Ambush rules? What does this mean for the Genestealer Cults? Let us know in the comments!
