Warhammer 40K: Hammerfall Bunker & Convergence of Dominion Rules Preview
The new Space Marine and Necron Terrain rules have been previewed by GW. Things are going to get interesting.
When Games Workshop teased the new terrain for the Space Marines and Necrons we had some questions about their rules. Well now we have a better idea of what they are going to do. Let’s start with the Necrons as their rules are a tad shorter.
Convergence of Dominion
First up, these ‘buildings’ are three structures and can take up quite a lot of space on the tabletop.
Why would you want to space them out? Well they do some great things for your army. They will add 2 Leadership to any unit within 6″ of any of these Starsteles. In most cases that should bump your Necrons up to Leadership 12. While that’s certainly nice they also provide some extra fire support with their Transdimensional Abductor which is as mean as it the name implies.
And because this is a Necron building, it’s going to be able to teleport thanks to the Translocation Protocols.
You’ll need a Cryptek to do it, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a Necron army.
Hammerfall Bunker
Aside from the Superfrag or Superkrak missiles this thing can shoot, it’s also got a pretty gnarly weapon array.
With guns facing on four sides, we were wondering how this thing would work in terms of shooting and Overwatch. Would it really get to fire off 4 sets of twin heavy flamers?! Turns out the answer is “sort of.”
So it looks like the Hammerfall is going to have the option for two different weapon systems – either a Hammerfall Heavy Bolter Array or Hammerfall Heavy Flamer Array. During the shooting phase instead of having to worry about facing you simply get to unload on every eligible enemy unit within range of the array!
Now, assuming those Heavy Bolters have a typical profile, that’s 3 shots at 36″ range. The base attack doesn’t appear to get any extra shots…except you’re getting to fire at every eligible enemy unit. That should end up being WAAAY more shots than a standard Heavy Bolter especially when you consider the smaller board size. We’d still like to see the weapon profile to learn more. The same goes for the Heavy Flamer which is also kinda frightening.
For Overwatch, you “only” get to target one unit – the one that would be charging in fact. And that unit basically takes double shots so the bolter goes to 6 shots and the flamer goes to 2D6! Clearly the flamer is more deadly in Overwatch depending on the unit.
I suppose the question is how would it best to deploy the Hammerfall Bunker. Do you drop it in your backfield and let the missiles do some work or do you drop it closer to the middle/front line and allow it to pepper every enemy unit in range!? Imagine if 10 units were in range? That’s 30 shots from the heavy bolters! Sure, it’s not concentrated fire but it’s still going to thin the herd.
What do you think of these two pieces of terrain? How would you want to use them in your games?
