Sunday, April 10, 2016

Horus Heresy Review: Sokar Pattern Stormbird

Background.
Designed to bring troops to a landing point and force their insertion through any means, the Stormbird is an amazing craft that hails from earlier designs during the Unification Wars on ancient Terra.

As a Lords of War, the Sokar Stormbird is understandably humongous. As is its points cost and dollar / pound cost! 

Strengths.
With 12 Hull Points, the Sokar Stormbird is going to be hanging around for a while.

But even before that, any incoming shots have to get through a pair of void shields (AV=12) that can also be extended around any troops that are nearby or disembarking.

Better yet, even when the void shields become collapsed, the Stormbird still has an invulnerable save on top of everything else!

The transport capacity is prodigious. No less than 50 models! And these can be replaced with dreadnoughts, as well as capacity to take a single rhino as well. Oh, and that rhino can carry its normal complement inside as well. The rhino counts as 12 models for carrying purposes. Therefore, you get a rhino and 10 marines for 12 inside the Sokar. Not bad at all really!

As if all that is not enough, the weapons are positively amazing. If upgraded, every turn, it can have an orbital strike with an unlimited range to bring in from orbit since it acts as a relay point. A massive blast with indirect fire and D-class is nothing to sneeze at. The macro bomb cluster is also a nice upgrade. But even the base weapons are deadly: 5 lots of turret lascannons and six dread strike missiles can take care of many things in the game, even posing questions for titans.

Weaknesses.
Erm. The rear armour is AV=12?

Builds.
Sokar Stormbird with Orbital Strike (1000 points).
Orbital Strike is so good that I recommend its always taken (unless you're really looking to save points, but we are talking about a Lords of War here, hence you should be sinking a lot of points in to the "miniature", right?).

2 comments:

Siph_Horridus said...

The rules look good, shame the 'mini' looks goofy. Stormbirds were meant to be sleek, elegant craft, not this Thunderhawk half-breed. But, just my opinion, once painted up it looked better, but not for me. Doesn't pass the rule of cool for me.

jabberjabber said...

I don't entirely disagree. I'm not a 100% fan of the sculpt, but I think it has grown on me over time. I also wonder if there will be some future pattern / sculpt released - given that this one is the Sokar pattern.

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