Atalan Jackals are currently in vogue – fast, mobile, can trigger Exposed for fun and do nasty things with demolition charges. But what difference do Crossfire and Exposed make to their damage output?
Jackals come with a lot of rules: they can make a pre-game scout move, are always -1 to hit (even in melee), can fall back and still shoot and charge, and count targets within 6” as Exposed (although we still need to trigger Crossfire to take advantage of that one). They also have access to several useful stratagems that can potentially offer significant enhancements to their combat effectiveness.
Here, I’m interested in a couple of things. Firstly, for baseline purposes, how the wolfquad options compare against each other. Then, once we know that, I want to see how Jackals get on into a single target (marines, in this case) at their base rate, with Crossfire and Exposed in play, and with all guns and stratagems blazing (because why not).
Let’s see what happens.
WOLFQUADS
A unit of Jackals can always include a wolfquad, and a full-sized unit can include a second. A quad costs as much as two bikers (or slightly more than that with a mining laser), so ideally it needs to be offering twice the firepower too.
Here, we’ve got two bikers firing small arms (for four shots), three shots from the heavy stubber, a single shot from the mining laser, and d6 hits from the incinerator, which we’ll average out to 3.5 hits. At this stage, we’re not including any other benefits or stratagems.
Small arms do pretty well here. As long as they’re in range, they’ll always do better than a heavy stubber (because the strength and AP are the same, and two bikers get more shots than a single quad). They also out-perform the mining laser (again, range permitting) in terms of damaging hits, but this isn’t as clear-cut: whilst both small arms and a mining laser will damage a marine roughly once every three turns, the small arms will drop a single wound on him, whereas the mining laser will kill him 83% of the time, and even if it doesn’t, will still inflict a single wound and match the small arms. Similarly, whilst both are unlikely to wound a gravis captain, at least the mining laser will do d6 damage on the rare occasions when it does punch through.
In terms of damaging hits, the incinerator is the clear winner, making it a better choice than both the heavy stubber and the small arms (unless you really want to shoot something 12-36” away) – as all of them do one damage, volume of hits counts. The incinerator does better than the mining laser into guard, and is arguably better into marines too – a mining laser is likely to kill a marine once every three turns; the incinerator is likely to wound a marine every turn, meaning that over three turns it’ll kill one and wound another. Something similar applies to the captain: over six turns, the incinerator is likely to inflict five wounds; the mining laser is likely to wound just once, and still needs to roll for damage (so has just a 1-in-3 chance of matching the incinerator).
[Variable shots means that the incinerator could get extremely lucky and kill three marines (or six guardsmen); variable damage on a single-shot weapon means that even rolling straight sixes, the mining laser can only kill one.]
I’ve not included it in the table above, but for completeness, the mining laser is (unsurprisingly) better into tanks. An incinerator is likely to damage a Russ twice in five turns, causing two wounds; a mining laser is likely to wound a Russ just once in five turns, but with d6 damage, so will match or exceed the incinerator 83% of the time.
In short: don’t bother with the heavy stubber, and if you’re hunting infantry of any kind, go for the incinerator.
GRENADES
Jackals have a variety of grenade-type options. They can drop their small arms for grenade launchers (firing frag and krak), they all come with blasting charges, and can take demolition charges as an optional extra. As Jackals need to be within 6” to trigger Raiders, they’re going to be within grenade range more often than most.
All the grenade options are competing with small arms. The two grenade weapons also compete with each other, as we can only throw one grenade a turn, but the demolition charge is better in every way, assuming you have one available and don’t want to save it for another target later in the game.
For this one, we’ll run frag and demolition charges at 3.5 shots each, blasting charges at 2 shots, and krak at just the one (because that’s all it can do). And as all of them potentially replace the small arms, we’ll include those as a baseline.
Well, a grenade launcher is always a better option than small arms (and notice that, although a krak has the same chance to deliver a damaging hit into a marine as small arms, that hit has a 2-in-3 chance of killing the marine, so works out better overall). Similarly, as we expected, the demolition charges always do better than the blasting charges. More usefully, we can see that both of them out-perform the small arms – if you’re close enough to chuck a grenade, you should.
CROSSFIRE and EXPOSED
In this next part, we’re sending our Jackals after a squad of regular marines. A full tactical or intercessor squad costs 180 points, the same as eight jackals and two wolfquads (although we’ll be generous and gift ourselves a demolition charge too). We’ll assume that we’ve already dropped a Crossfire marker onto the marines, and that we’re within 6” to gain Exposed as well (conveniently meaning that we can also ignore cover).
So far we’ve learned that we should take incinerators on the quads, grenade launchers (firing krak in this instance) instead of small arms, and should always throw a grenade of some sort. That boils down to (generally) seven hits with incinerators, two krak shots, a demolition charge (3.5 shots) and ten small arms shots. Let’s run a baseline, and then do it again with the +1 to hit and wound.
[To determine the total kills figure, I’ve rounded each score to the nearest whole number and applied the appropriate damage. So the unmodified Jackals would expect to kill a single marine with the demolition charges (rounding down to one damaging hit), whereas the Exposed Jackals would round up to two, killing twice as many. If we simply went for sheer averages, multiplying the raw chance to cause a damaging hit by the damage stat of each weapon, unmodified Jackals cause 6.26 wounds, and their Exposed brothers cause 8.76 wounds, a less impressive increase, but still 40% better. This is largely due to the swing caused by krak grenades creeping over 0.5, and thus rounding up to 1 rather than down to 0, and a similar effect with the demolition charges.]
It’s worth getting that Crossfire marker in place, then. The twin buffs of +1 to hit and +1 to wound combine to double the damage output of the squad, which is very helpful. Interestingly, though, our two best weapons – demolition charges and incinerators – don’t feel the full benefits, as the incinerator always hits, and the demolition charges already wound on 2s.
The combined effects of Crossfire and Exposed cause a significant relative increase in effectiveness (krak grenades are 70% better here, for example, and small arms 78% better), but a low relative increase (krak causes just an additional 0.23 damaging hits, and the small arms gain 0.65 damaging hits, which is still better than the 0.4 extra picked up by the demolition charges). Bluntly, it’s because we weren’t doing brilliantly in the first place, and 178% of not much is still not that much. On the brighter side, just by utilising the right weapons (and a five-point upgrade), our Jackals have wiped out 5 marines, and that’s not a bad thing.
MAXING OUT
But what if we were prepared to invest a few CP into this unit? There are a couple of stratagems that could further boost the Jackals’ output in different ways.
Overload Fuel Cells gives an extra point of damage to the demolition charge and the incinerator – the incinerator particularly benefits here, as the jump from one damage to two makes it instantly lethal into a lot more targets (marines included). In fairness, the demolition charge going to three damage is going to really pay off in certain situations, and is always helpful into vehicles if that becomes necessary. Talking of demolition charges, Primed Explosive is great, guaranteeing six shots with our most potent weapon and making sure a one-use-only weapon isn’t wasted.
We could also dip into Raking Fire for full rerolls to hit (as long as the target is Exposed properly, and not just by the Jackals’ own ability), or Massed Firearms (if we have at least six models left) to turn 6s to hit into automatic wounds. These two are more situational, as they come with conditions, but they do apply to the whole unit, not just a couple of weapons.
Looking at our example against the marines, Overload moves the incinerator from three wounds to three kills. Priming the demolition charge pushes the big grenade to 2.78 damaging hits, which we’ll round to 3, gaining us another kill for the charges too. So those two CPs gain us another 2.5 dead marines, for a total of 7.5 kills – as it happens, the same increase as we saw going from no bonuses to Crossfire/Exposed. Are two dead marines worth 2CP? Maybe, at the right moment. And, of course, we’ve been playing with averages here – jumping from 3.5 shots on the demolition charges to 6 shots isn’t insignificant, but any individual roll has an equal chance of scoring from 1 to 6 shots. Knowing that you’ve definitely got six shots coming rather than worrying about just getting one, and then potentially using a CP to reroll it anyway with the risk of getting a one again anyway is a whole other kettle of fish.
CONCLUSION
Yeah. I could dive deeper into Raking or Firearms. But the sudden loom of 10th edition on the horizon has rather taken the wind out of my sails. So I’m going to leave this one as it is. There’s still things we can take out of it, though:
o Wolfquads are worthwhile, as long as we upgrade the heavy stubber to something else; incinerators are superior into infantry, mining lasers into tanks
o Grenade launchers out-perform small arms
o Blasting charges and demolition charges are both better than small arms too – use them when in range
o Crossfire/Exposed provide a significant increase in relative firepower (40% against marines, for example)
o Overload (on the incinerator) and Primed Explosive also provide a significant boost, and are worthwhile in the right situation
So, up-gun as much as possible, and give a lot of thought to getting within 6” of targets, where Exposed and grenades both come into play.
As with many of our units, the strength of the Jackals is not just in their firepower – they’re also incredibly flexible: fast, relatively tough (and hard to hit), hard to pin down (the option to fall back, shoot and charge is great), play well with a lot of creeds, offer board control options, and they look good doing it.
I’m very tempted to run a full-size unit alongside an Alphus armed with Oppressor’s Bane – using the Alphus to set up Crossfire (and therefore Exposed) for the Jackals, whilst they offer virtual immunity to their leader, feels like an interesting combination, if somewhat pricey for a unit that wants to be very close to the enemy to maximise its potential. Whether my painting speed will get me there in time remains to be seen.
Having worked through most of the Cult codex (and, selfishly, having covered pretty much all the units that I tend to make regular use of), I think I’m going to put things on hold for a few months, until the new edition drops. At least we’ll get a codex (or index, I guess) straight out of the gate, which will be an interesting experience – recently, we’ve had a chance to learn the new edition before having to learn the newest codex too. If I can think of any interesting-but-faction-agnostic ideas, I might dive into those instead.
Ultimately, I like this codex. It feels balanced, generally speaking, and more importantly, fun. The Red Brotherhood have really started to feel like my army, especially as I’ve leaned into the Myriad Cult rules and options. I’m going to miss it. Fingers crossed for the next one, right?