Imperial Knights. (We’ll come back to that “Imperial” part later in the article.) They’re a thing in the game now. Since basically no one uses or likes Escalation, they are the first “real” presence of superheavies in the game, and due to this they have a lot of people really worried. How justified is this concern? How much will Knights change the game? There’s a lot of worry in the game and a lot of calls for preemptive banning, but so far I don’t think it’s justified. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the book and what it means for players of various stripes.



What Do Knights Do, Anyways?

So since there’s more than a bit of confusion, let’s go over the basic rules. Both types of Knight are basically the same- they are Superheavy Walkers with AV13/12/12 and WS4, BS4, I4, A3, HP6. Both variants have an Ion Shield, a Str D melee weapon, and a Heavy Stubber; the Knight Errant mounts a Thermal Cannon (36″ S9 AP1 Melta Large Blast) and the Knight Paladin mounts a Rapid-Fire Battle Cannon (like the Russ main gun, but two shots) and an extra Stubber. Both main guns are fairly similar overall, able to kill light-to-medium tanks and most all infantry fairly well, with the Errant obviously having an advantage against 2+ saves and heavy tanks while the Paladin is better against most everything else.

The superheavy walker rules give them a couple relevant abilities: Invincible Behemoth means that they ignore all damage results except Explodes (which does d3 extra HP to them) and they similarly won’t automatically die to other effects that normally kill immediately and are immune to Entropic Strike. Smash and Strikedown give them some basic functionality in melee no matter what, and Hammer of Wrath and Fear add some minor bonuses as well. Additionally, when they are destroyed, they create a huge (15″ diameter) blast that starts out Str D at the center (large blast template sized) and scales down from there depending on what you roll on their random table. Generally, however, it is quite dangerous. Note that this explosion, unlike other vehicles, scatters before being placed, so its actual effects are rather unreliable, if potentially strong. Last but not least, they move 12″ and have Move Through Cover, although it’s slightly unclear how this interacts with their movement. (There is a RAW solution, but it’s a bit silly, so it’s worth asking your TO/playgroup about.)

The Ion Shield is the other big part- when a Knight is deployed or at the beginning of each enemy shooting phase, you can choose one of its four facings (front/left/right/rear) to protect with a 4++ save, which is a pretty strong defensive ability. This does not function against melee attacks, however, and can be mitigated by putting shots in multiple facings.

Knights have only some very small ways to differentiate from each other; one Knight in a primary detachment is nominated as the Warlord and gets a warlord trait (most of which are slight variations on existing ones from the BRB or another book) and the maximum “experience” bonus. Other Knights can choose to roll on the “experience” table if they so choose; on a ‘1’ they are only WS/BS3 and their Shield is 5++, on a ‘6’ they are WS/BS5 and their Shield is a 3++, any other result has no change. Knights in a primary detachment are scoring, those in an allied detachment are not; like many other “special” allies, Knights don’t take up your ally slot.

At 370pts for the Errant and 375pts for the Paladin, Knights are extremely pricey and even allying them in is going to cost a pretty penny. Their lack of options also makes it difficult to fit them into some points values; for example, a 1750 or 2000pt army essentially can’t run pure Knights, and an 1850 one is forced to run nothing but Knights Errant.

Just How Hard Are They to Kill?

This part is a little tricky to math out, since it will depend in no small part on how able you are to distribute yourself across different facings to minimize the Ion Shield. However, with their rather wide wide arcs (as they are a walker), a lot of your shooting against Knights will be at AV12, and AV12 with HP6 just isn’t that tough at the end of the day. A Knight is roughly equal in survivability to a pair of Wave Serpents on most cases- both are AV12, shrug off half the glances/pens on them, and ignore most rolls on the damage table. Moreover, because they are not immune to penetrating hits the way Serpents often are, merely ignoring most of the damage table, “spikes” in damage from a lucky Explodes result are very possible.

The typical S6/7 weapons fielded by many armies these days are far from useless against a Knight, but realistically Meltaguns, Lascannons, Railguns, Lances, etc, are really the weapons you want to destroy them. Appropriate melee attacks (Smash from a MC, Meltabombs, Haywire Grenades, anything S9/10) are also reasonably effective, although it’s worth remembering that Knights are pretty strong in a fight, as we’ll detail below. Because of the Ion Shield, highly mobile shooting attacks are vastly more effective- a Knight can generally present whatever armor facing it pleases to a single unit unless that unit can also maneuver appropriately. Eldar have a huge advantage here, not just for their fast units but also because Battle Focus allows them to reposition themselves after the Ion Shield has been deployed, avoiding the worst of it.

If you want some harder numbers, ignoring the Ion Shield, an Autocannon shot does a bit shy of a third of an HP, a Lascannon shot does just about exactly one HP, a Meltagun in double-pen does about 1.2HP, assuming BS4 on all weapons. As noted, however, the stronger weapons have very high potential for damage spikes from Explodes results, which can finish off a Knight in very short order.

How Killy Are They?

Knights, outside of melee, actually have a pretty pathetic damage output. Especially with the meta where it is, focusing heavily on MCs, expendable infantry, and light-to-mid weight vehicles, with cover saves predominating, Knights will often struggle to do any damage to things at all. The Paladin’s cannon is likely to put ~8 wounds on most squads- not ignorable, but for a unit bordering on 400pts that is hardly an impressive feat. The Errant’s melta is almost always going to penetrate any vehicle it tags, as 9+2d6 is pretty huge and an 18″ range on the double-pen will almost always be in, and any damage result that goes through is likely to do a lot of damage, but it still only causes one hit and must contend with the omnipresent cover save (as well as Serpent Shields, etc) and thus is only going to actually kill something perhaps a third of the time or less.

The Heavy Stubbers are basically a joke from a DPS perspective, though they serve their own purposes; they can theoretically ground FMCs and give the Knights the ability to target additional units, meaning they can shoot their main gun at one thing and charge another- flexibility that is sorely needed when your army only consists of four or five models.

In melee, however, Knights are a totally different animal- with MEQ-level stats, multiple attacks, and a Str D weapon, they are in position to wreck house on just about anything they charge, and Stomp gives them the capacity to tear down horde units should one try and lock it up. Because Str D ignores all defenses and special rules, even the vaunted 2++ rerollable units will fold to it in short order, as will things like TH/SS or SM’s Bikemaster. This is in no small part because the Knight is swinging at Initiative 4 with WS4, which means that many of the threats to it actually have to wait until it has done its thing before they can go, if they are still alive at that point. While hitting on 4s with a limited number of attacks can easily go wrong for it, as I’m sure most folks already know, it will generally just remove 1-3 enemy models each turn with no recourse while losing nothing in return.

Stomp only adds further to this, since it is made in addition to its normal attacks, though not until Initiative 1 rolls around. It gives d3 small blasts to be placed, the first in base contact with the Knight and any further up to 3″ from the last one, even potentially striking units outside of melee (which is a pretty nice trick.) It uses a unique “wound” table, doing nothing on a 1, S6 AP4 hits on a 2-5, and removing all models underneath on a 6 (functionally similar to Str D, though not identical.) Vehicles instead suffer nothing/penetration/scatter d6″ and explodes results, respectively. Superheavies, buildings, GCs, and anything in the air are immune to Stomps, as you would expect.

(Horde players would do well to study the pile-in rules in more detail- remember, you aren’t forced to just clump up every single guy right next to the Knight. Models must get to base contact if they can, or within 2″ if they can only do that, but beyond those limitations you just have to keep coherency. Leaving 0.99″ gaps in your “second rank” to prevent other models from piling in any further and then using your other moves to spread them out can reduce the number of casualties Stomp will cause on you, though only to a finite degree.)

In short, there’s really nothing that a Knight is bad against in a fight, since it can kill both tough and numerous opponents and is very well-protected by AV13. It is worth noting, however, that they lack grenades and thus being forced to charge into a tough fight can be somewhat bad for them, though often enough it won’t really matter.

One of the biggest and least-intuitive strengths of the Knight, however, is its speed- with a 12″ move, Knights will be getting into combat rather quickly against a lot of armies, so you won’t have a ton of time to deal with them. Though not quite as fast as, say, a Maulerfiend, Knights will still get pretty consistent second-turn charges against most things, though as usual mobility can mitigate this a lot, as can good use of blocking units, bubblewrap, etc. They do NOT ignore terrain- in fact, it’s not clear at all how they interact with it- so making use of that (both against movement and against charges) will make a huge difference as well.

What Does This Mean for My Army?

Alright, after having read all of that, I want you to take a deep breath and relax. Do Knights seem invincible? They’re not. Think of each Knight as two AV12 tanks strapped together. Is AV12 impossible to kill? Certainly not. Knights are the epitome of the “high-pressure” army that is going to rely on making the enemy panic and play incorrectly in order to win, because their raw survivability and damage output just isn’t that strong.

If you are a casual player, you may struggle with Knights somewhat (or a lot, depending on your army.) Like many of the other “tougher” things in 6E, Knights are probably going to take a place as one of the “talk it over with your opponent before bringing a bunch of them to the table” armies. Just like bringing six Night Scythes, sixty Khorne Dogs, or five FMCs, the list is hardly unbeatable, but it can be very hard for an unprepared opponent to do anything against them.

For tournament players, I think it means that we’ll see more heavy anti-tank being included in lists, since those are the guns that really shine against them. Certainly many armies have the tools to destroy them anyways, as Wave Serpents are a major concern for the meta and what works on one can work on the other, but a trend towards a few more high-strength AP2/1 guns seems like a natural reaction to them. Knights also provide a pretty crippling counter to deathstar lists, especially Seerstar/Screamerstar, as they are fast enough to trap them, resilient enough to ignore most of their firepower, and give exactly zero shits about all their fancy defenses as well as being pretty strongly resistant to their melee attacks (though not immune.)

Mobility is also pretty key against Knights, as mitigating their early charges is a very big deal. Armies that have both guns and speed (Eldar, some Tau, SM bikes, Nids) will do fairly well against them in most cases, whereas static armies will need either a very strong layered defense or overwhelming firepower to push through a win.

Pure or Allied?

This is the question I’ve been putting to myself since the book was leaked, and I’m still not sure about it. Knights are an army that lives on saturation- it is only because you will have to kill three or five of them that they are dangerous, as a single Knight will be little more than an annoyance to a good general. For this reason, it would seem that a “pure” Knight army would be preferable, or at the very least one that includes only very specific types of allied units to maintain its saturation of high-AV targets.

On the other hand, a pure Knight force simply lacks solutions of any realistic kind to many of the types of armies out there these days. It is utterly incapable of hurting most common flyers, struggles mightily with FMCs, gets overwhelmed by MSU or recyclable swarms, etc, not to mention its issues with actually scoring objectives (Knights, as walkers, are not denial units, remember, so a single enemy scoring model on an objective is enough to make it theirs, not yours.) For all of these reasons and more I wonder if some kind of mixed army, either Knights primary or Knights allied into something else, would be a better way to do it.

The question is, though, who and why? Knights are not just expensive, they are incredibly expensive, and they are never scoring in an allied detachment (though this does console those who get them as Desperate Allies slightly, removing the main disadvantage of that part.) Why spend four or seven hundred points on something that is basically just a Wraithknight at the end of the day? You could get a Farseer, Wraithknight, and even a squad of troops for only a tadr more than the minimum Knight price, and the Wraithknight alone is arguably better than the Knight at many tasks (like killing Riptides!)

So this is a question I still wrestle with. Is there an army that wants to bring in a Knight? I don’t think that pure Knights, as a pure force, are a viable tournament competitor- though certainly they will play spoiler army to some others and will occasionally take tournament victories because of some good rolls. (Getting a 3++ on multiple guys or the opponent just never rolling an Explodes on you can be pretty clutch.) If any readers have thoughts on the subject I’d be interested to hear them- as far as I can tell Bike marines are the most likely to want a fast countercharge unit, but certainly in theory there could be some others as well.

I can’t kill Knights, What Should I Use??

Blood Angels: Sternguard with Melta. Assault Marines with Melta and Meltabombs. Death Company Dreadnoughts. Vanguard Veterans with Meltabombs (or Infernus Pistols for laughs.) Stormravens.

Dark Angels: Deathwing Knights. Ravenwing with Meltaguns. Azrael hanging out with a Blob of guys with Meltabombs.

Dark Eldar: Dark Lances. Wyches and Scourges with Haywire. Reavers with Heat Lances. Blasters.

Eldar: Wave Serpents with Wraithguard or Fire Dragons in them. Swooping Hawks. Bright Lances.

Grey Knights: Psycannons are okay. Daemonhammers with Hammerhand. Melta Henchmen. Psyflemen.

Necrons: Tesla Destructors. Gauss. Stormteks. Warscythes in a pinch.

Orks: Lootas. Deffrollas (pray that they try and Death or Glory you!) Warbosses with Klaws. Nobz/Meganobz with same.

Sisters of Battle: Basically every relevant model in your army carries an S8 AP1 weapon. You’re super-fine.

Space Marines: Bike Melta. Chainfists? Trilas Predators. Stormtalon/ravens. Melta Sternguard. IF Devastators/Centurion Devs. Assault Centurions for a comedy option.

Space Wolves: Thunderwoof Lord? Meltaguns everywhere I guess? Long Fangs?

Tau: Missilesides. Melta or Missile Crisis. Riptide with Melta and/or HBC, especially if he has Tank Hunter. Piranhas. Hammerhead. Skyrays. Fire Warriors with EMP Grenades for a comedy option (make sure the Knight is charging you, not vice versa!)

Tyranids: basically all the units you were taking anyways- Crones, Harpies, Flyrants, recycling Gargoyles/Gaunts. Carnifexes if you are feeling really sassy.

So Why Does Games Workshop Hate Money?

I really don’t know. Even the already-existent fluff talked about not just “freeblade” Houses that would work for the highest bidder, regardless of who they were, but also an outright-renegade House that had joined with Chaos during the Heresy (and presumably during the subsequent ten thousand years at least one other Knight had fallen to the Dark Powers, otherwise they are some kind of moral miracles.) With these strong precedents in place already and a rather niche kit, why not make it available to all, or virtually all players? Knights are a model you’re selling based on the Rule of Cool anyways. They’re fancy centerpiece projects.

So why deny xenos and traitor players these toys? There’s talk of a Chaos Knights book, but given how absurdly-tiny the rules section of the Knight book is, they certainly could have slapped another two pages of rules in there for Chaos Knights in there. More cynical individuals might sneer and say that “they just want to sell us another book,” but it’s worth remembering that GW pays some pretty significant costs in order to print a book- high-quality paper and illustrations like that, not to mention editing, binding, etc, all cost them a pretty penny, and for a book with a limited potential for sale like Chaos Knights (not every Chaos player is even going to want a Knight, and Chaos is only one sub-faction of the game anyways) it would seem to make very little sense to make that investment.

Games Workshop, however, seems blind to these factors, since the Knights are only available to Imperial, Eldar, and Tau players (the latter as convenient/desperate allies.) Given how many other releases share this same web of “these factions get Special Fancy Privileges, everyone else can go to hell” it is hardly any surprise that they are the majority of the dominant armies in the game, and certainly this isn’t going to change things much.

Yeah But What Do You Actually Think of the Book?

Well, on the one hand, Knights themselves are reasonably well-balanced. Maybe not perfect, but there’s no obvious OMGWTFBBQ options in there and they are pretty playable against most types of opponents without being dramatically unfair, which is a nice contrast to their try with Escalation. On the flip side, the actual content of the book is laughable- six or so pages of rules (most of which are just reprints of the superheavy walker and Str D stuff) and two units with zero options? I could’ve thrown together more than that in ten minutes. Having absolutely no options is what is especially vexing to me- several of the supplement codices manage to at least do a lot with a little, but the Knight book is just going to make every Knight army incredibly same-y, which is bad design practice. A table of relics to buy, starting the Knights off a bit weaker (but with some upgrade options to let you wiggle on points), etc, would have made the book infinitely more interesting with a minimum of effort.

Concurrent with this problem is that something like half of the book is just pictures. Pretty pictures, sure; they’ve got a bunch of shots of Knights in different paint schemes and heraldry as well as some short text about different individuals from the Houses, which is nice, but in terms of the amount of text included it’s… rather sparse. I would’ve been fine with it basically being an art book if there were ideas/examples for conversions or the like in it, but GW has steered drastically away from that recently (I dare you to find a conversion in any recent codex- it’s quite a search, I’ll tell you) and in doing so sucked out a lot of my interest in the illustration section of the books.

In short, the Knights book is something I’m okay with in the most general sense, but it feels like a tremendously wasted opportunity. With only a slight amount of work, GW could’ve made it ten times better and more interesting, and that’s a real shame.