Friday, January 9, 2015

Horus Heresy Review: Konrad Curze


Bereft of any civilising influence that the likes of Corax had during his upbringing, Konrad effectively raised himself and found a world mortal sin and filth in Nortamo. His solution was effective in the extreme: serenity through abject fear and hunting down any transgressor. Coupled with something of a split personality and mild psychic precognition, Konrad is a nasty primarch in both background and rules.

Unusually for primarchs, he comes with a jump pack, giving him the necessary freedom of movement to go where he needs to be on the battlefield.

He is a force multiplier for the Night Lords too. With him as the warlord, every Night Lord gains the fear special rule. And with a negative modifier to success rolls. This might not sound brilliant until you factor in that 30k armies do not have too much fearless troops stomping around. Just by having him on the table, the likelihood of chasing other space marines off the table through sheer terror increases significantly. This is one of the reasons (in addition to their bonus to wound rolls) that the Night Lords player should have troops that are large sized and concentrate on mobile marine forces (see the review of their special rules). But more than even that, Konrad (personally) imposes an even heavier penalty on fear rolls than his sons do when he is on the table and can cause troops within a radius of him to flee when he destroys a unit. Presumably because he does something really bad to kill them. I mean, Angron is nasty in combat, but he just isn't inventively malicious. Konrad most assuredly is. He also ensures night fighting in the first turn which Night Lords are well poised to take advantage of with their night vision abilities.

His armour is nice, and provides hit & run, plus bonus hammer of wrath attacks which dovetails very nicely in to one another (and don't forget that valuable jet pack as well). His weapons are his natural artificer selected lightning claws which have AP2 and a few other rules to boot. He's basically going to be taking down many foes in a single turn when he charges in. Hopefully the entirety of a unit and cause others to flee they see what he does to them.

And finally, he flings micro-serrated throwing blades, ninja style. They're only 12 inch range, but they are assault 3 and make precision strikes. Hence he's well capable of taking down squad sergeants before even an assault happens.

As with other Night Lords, he's looking to pick on enemies that are weaker than him, and to make sure that other units see him do it to ensure they flee before his grizzly death dealing ways. That said, he can go toe to toe with other primarchs, but he's not the strongest of them. His points cost is quite reasonable for his abilities, but one cannot overlook his force multiplying fear ability. In concert with a drop pod style assault, this could be incredibly powerful and finish an opponent in the middle turns of a game if they're not careful. The weakness of such an army would be a fully mechanised opponent (e.g., Iron Hands). Hence tactically such a Night Lords army needs counters to heavy armour and fliers.



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