The ability to advance and charge gives the Cult a healthy threat range. But how reliable is it?
The Cult has various ways to access ‘advance and charge’. Genestealers (and the Patriarch) have it built in, acolytes can make use of the Genetic Lineage stratagem, and anyone can be on the receiving end of the Psychic Stimulus power (advance and charge aberrants as a surprise package, anyone?)
The potential to gain 18” on top of a basic move means that everything in a Cult force has a 24” threat bubble (or 26” for genestealers). This can be pushed even further – Twisted Helix adds 2” to advance moves, a Clamavus gives +1” advance and +1” charge, and if we really want to eke out every inch, disembarking from a vehicle would give us another 3” on top of that, for a massive 31” potential move. Hurrah. Except…
RELIABILITY
Except how reliable is that? It sounds great to throw 31” around, but it’s a theoretical maximum and far from guaranteed. So let’s trim out all the extra bits and focus purely on the random bit, the advance and charge moves – three dice that give us anywhere between 3 and 18” of our overall movement. For any distance within that spread, what are the chances that we make it?
Let’s say that there’s an enemy unit 20” away from our acolytes. We can take 6” off for our basic movement, so we’ll need to cover 14” with the advance and charge moves – there’s only a 16% chance we make it (almost the same odds as needing a six on a single die). Not ideal.
The first thing that this shows us is how useful a Clamavus is. In this particular scenario, his bonus inches would mean that we’d only need to roll 12, which has a 38% chance (more than doubling the chance of success). With long-bomb situations, those extra 2” can really shift the odds – it’s still tricky, but we’re ten times more likely to get 16” than we are to get 18”, for example.
The second thing is similar – it highlights the value of Twisted Helix in this sort of play. Having that 2” bonus built in is great, and when coupled with a Clamavus for an extra 4”, it can make all the difference. In this case, as a Helix player with a well-positioned Clamavus, I go from needing to roll 14” (a 16% chance) to needing just 10” from the dice (a 63% chance) – a one-in-six chance has become a two-in-three. Suddenly, that 20” assault looks very doable.
REROLLS
This leads me on to the next thought. How should we make use of rerolls here? Given that we roll the advance first, with a single dice, when should we gamble on rerolling, not knowing what the charge might bring? At the extremes, it’s fairly simple. If we need to make 18” on the dice (because the enemy are 24” away, and we have no other bonuses to hand), then anything that isn’t a 6 needs to be rerolled. And at the other end of the spectrum, if we only needed 3”, then we’re not going to need to reroll anything anyway.
But what about in the middle? What if I’m looking for that 14” from earlier? In this scenario, there are again a couple of obvious moves. A 1” advance leaves me needing a 13” charge – that’s not going to happen, so I need to reroll the 1. And a 6” advance (leaving an 8” charge) is as good as it gets – no need to reroll that. But say I roll a 3” advance, leaving an 11” charge. What do I do now?
Let’s pull up that chances table again, but add in a row that covers just the charge roll.
As a general rule of thumb, I think the question we need to ask here is: “Has my advance roll improved my overall chances of making the distance?” Continuing with our example, I initially had a 16% chance of landing 14” across three dice. After rolling a 3 for the advance, I now need a further 11 for the charge, with only an 8% chance of pulling it off. Rerolling the advance is a risk – I have a 50% chance of getting a better result, but I could also make it worse, or even make the charge impossible. So it’s a gamble, but my suggestion here is that we’re probably better off rerolling (if we can), because the 3 just isn’t as helpful as it could be.
Rolling this out more widely, it looks like this.
· Six: don’t reroll a six. Obviously.
· Five: keep a five, unless you needed 18” overall. For any other target, a five gives you better odds on the charge dice than you had when you started.
· Four: keep a four if your overall target was 14” or less. If you needed 15” or 16”, you’ll improve your chances if you can reroll a 5+, but run the risk of making the charge impossible on a low roll. And if you needed 17” or 18”, you have to reroll it if you can.
· Three: reroll a three, unless you only needed to get 7” or less (although in that case, are you sure you need to advance and charge anyway?). However, if you need anything up to around 10”/11”, the chances are so similar that you’re not that badly off with the three.
· Two: reroll a two unless you only needed 4” (seriously, just charge)
· One: reroll a one unless you only needed 3”
The rule becomes less relevant as the over distance needed shrinks. By the time it’s a clear advantage to keep a 3, the overall distance is so low that you should be seriously considering whether it’s worth using advance and charge resources in the first place (unless you’re using genestealers, in which case carry on).
It’s also a rough guide, based on a crude comparison between two sets of odds. There is no right or wrong answer, and rerolling anything carries a risk of making the situation worse rather than better. There will always be an element of player judgement, particularly when you consider the effect of a real table-top.
It might be that a 3” advance leaves me neatly behind an obscuring ruin – I could reroll and try for an extra inch or so, but then I’m having to make a charge from open ground, risking overwatch, and knowing that if I fail, I’m going to be shot to pieces next turn. So perhaps I’ll keep the 3”. Yes, it makes for a trickier charge, but now the risk is far less if I do fail, as my unit is safely out of sight, and could even set to defend if counter-charged in the opponent’s turn.
CONCLUSION
Whilst a 31” threat is a nice headline (and useful propaganda), it’s rarely a workable option, and extremely unlikely even when the stars align. More realistically, we have a 50% chance of making 11” across a combined advance and charge (before rerolls). For regular Cultists, that’s a 17” threat; with good use of a clamavus it could be 19”; and for the Helix, 20” is within reach with a fair degree of regularity. Throw in a vehicle, and we’ll reach 24” half the time – enough to give the other player something to worry about.
This is a good place to be in. Most enemy troops can do 18” tops – 6” move, 12” charge if they’re lucky. So once our threat bubble exceeds 18” we’re saying, ‘There’s no way you can come and charge me without giving me a chance to charge you first’. That’s very helpful in terms of board control and area denial.
Getting over 18” is also good on a number of deployment maps – it means that we have units that can cross no-man’s-land in a single move, pushing the opposition back into their own deployment zone if they want to avoid potential first-turn charges. Even if we go second, blips mean that we can pull back a little, drop into cover or out of sight, and leave the opposition worrying about their own forward movement potentially taking them into a trap. Happy days.
Clearly, this is a tactic that works well with the Twisted Helix. But even for other creeds, the combination of a Clamavus, Psychic Stimulus and Genetic Lineage is a powerful one, and well worth playing around with.