Foray into 40k

As I continue my journey into the 40k world, I've spent a lot of time thinking about lists. Not only my list, but my opponents lists as well. I'm fortunate enough to have Army Builder, so I'm not just doing all this stuff by hand (The purist approach). All in all, one can spend as much time list building as actually playing the game if you're not careful.

These Terminators from awesomepaintjob.com look incredible.
I'm thinking of something similar for mine.



For those of you who are frequent readers of the blog, you'll know I did a piece last week on putting magnets on terminator arms to have flexibility in the terminators. I'm sure plenty of you thought, "Why would you need that?" The answer is the endless list building and tweaking. You can keep everything WYSIWYG to keep things straight, but also enjoy playing different load outs regularly.

The particular list tweak that I want to dive further into today is proper amount of Thunder Hammer / Storm Shields in a unit of 5 Dark Angel terminators. Whether they are troops or elites really shouldn't matter, but if they are with certain HQ it might. For the sake of this, let's assume no HQ involvement in the unit. For maximum wound allocation, which leads to survivability, we want to maximize unique combinations. This would cause units to be built in one of these ways:

Option 1:  Sergeant TH/SS, Term1 PF/SB, Term2 CF/SB, Term3 TH/SS, Term4 TH/SS
Option 2:  Sergeant PW/SB, Term1 PF/SB, Term2 CF/SB, Term3 TH/SS, Term4 TH/SS/CML
Option 3:  Sergeant TH/SS, Term1 PF/SB, Term2 CF/SB, Term3 TH/SS, Term4 TH/SS/CML



Dark Angel Graffiti



There are also variants with power claws, but I don't want to address those in this, as its not our primary focus. I've been using a lot of Option 2. As I play more, I sure would like to get the extra TH/SS in though. In doubles, where points are tight, I was thinking of trying some of Option 1. So what are the thoughts out there? I'm going to dive in and try out a few combos, but the collective experience of the many will help to guide me a lot better than a few games ever will. Your thoughts will be greatly appreciated.