Friday, December 9, 2016

Horus Heresy Review: Mechanicum Ceratus Knight-Atrapos

Background.
Designed during the Great Crusade to take on filthy xenos macro-engines, the Atrapos is now a very rare commodity. Really, its only the Mechanicum who deploy these, but on the odd occasion they will use them as "payment" to a Knightly household should the need arise.

In 30k, they can stand for both a Lords of War choice in a mechanicum army, as well as being in a Questoris Knights army list.

Strengths. 
The armaments of the Atrapos are just as rare as the beast itself. Firstly is the lascutter. This can be used as a beam weapon with a very short range and Destroyer strength. Or as a close combat Destroyer weapon. Both are very nice to say the least.

Secondly is the graviton singularity cannon. This has a 36 inch range and therefore marks the Atrapos out as being a much shorter ranged threat than others in the Questoris army list options. With armour bane, concussive and the potential to shoot off a vortex template, this is a superlatively strong weapon.

The real role of this beast is to take out enemy super heavies. This can be done nicely thanks to the Macro-extinction targeting protocols that give its weapons the twin-linked rule when it points them at enemy super heavies and gargantuan creatures.

Weaknesses.
Should the dice gods not be with you, then the Atrapos can help kill itself by wiping out hull points through unfortunate rolls of the singularity cannon. Whilst it can produce vortex results (as mentioned above), at the opposite end of the scale, it wipes out a hull point with no saves allowed once every six times it is fired, on average. Personally, this is a risk worth taking I would contend!

Also, its worth mentioning the restriction here: only one of these machines is permitted per 2000 points in the army. Hence you're looking at high points games only here.

Builds.
The only option here is to add on occular augmetics. So here it is:
Atrapos with ocular augmetics (445 points).

In terms of house hold ranks, the most obvious is the Arbalester. That said, I could certainly find a use for it as my HQ and wouldn't mind it being the Seneschal. Dolorous and Aucteller are reasonable other choices here too. Situationally, the Implacable might be nice if fighting in a dense city or under hive.

Of course, a Freeblade would be the most entertaining as one could craft an entire narrative around how such a situation ever arose!

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