Are Kabalite Warriors worth taking?

The Shredder wrote:

lessthanjeff wrote:

I believe he's saying they're cheaper than cultists because you have to buy the cultist unit at 50 points while we just spend 40 for the kabalite unit.

Even so, calling Warriors cheaper when you're comparing their price to twice as many cultists seems disingenuous.

And that's fine. The option of a cheap troop choice that's just there to capture objectives (and unlock a Venom) is a great thing to have.

But, again, my issue is that I'd also like the option of doing other things with my troop choice. What if I'm building a more aggressive army and want a troop choice that can actually do something useful on the front lines? What if I want to bring some decent anti-vehicle stuff?

My problem is that Kabalites aren't remotely versatile enough for a unit that's basically our only troop choice.

I wouldn't call that disingenuous, that's more a matter of perspective. My Chaos Space Marine army ends up spending 100 points for the CAD req of two units of cultists that I hate and expect absolutely nothing out of. In contrast, I spend just 80 points for the CAD requirement of two units of kabalites and their shooting is better against every target in the game that I can think of.

lessthanjeff wrote:

I wouldn't call that disingenuous, that's more a matter of perspective.

Perhaps badly phrased then.

lessthanjeff wrote:

My Chaos Space Marine army ends up spending 100 points for the CAD req of two units of cultists that I hate and expect absolutely nothing out of.  In contrast, I spend just 80 points for the CAD requirement of two units of kabalites and their shooting is better against every target in the game that I can think of.

But without transports those Kabalites are unlikely to accomplish much shooting-wise. And, in terms of objective-sitting the Cultists have twice as many bodies to soak up wounds.

I'm not saying that cultists are better, it just seems rather dubious to me to say that kabalites are cheaper, when what you actually mean is that a minimum squad of 5 kabalites is cheaper than a minimum squad of 10 cultists - because the individual cultists are markedly cheaper. But whatever, maybe I'm just being nitpicky.

Out of interest, do cultists actually serve a useful function other than objective-sitting (I'm not very familiar with them or the CSM book)? I know that in KDK you're basically paying for extra blood points who can sit on objectives in between getting killed, but I don't know what (if anything) they do in a CSM army.

The Shredder wrote:

Out of interest, do cultists actually serve a useful function other than objective-sitting (I'm not very familiar with them or the CSM book)? I know that in KDK you're basically paying for extra blood points who can sit on objectives in between getting killed, but I don't know what (if anything) they do in a CSM army.

Eh, cheap flamers?

That's about the only affordable thing they have access to, and I think its 1 per 10 cultists.

Marks are all costly, and they have to pay 1 pt each just for lasguns, or else they're stuck at 12" shooting with pistols.

EDIT - If you take Typhus, of course, they're quite a different unit.

In case you've not seen Typhus zombies, if you have Typhus in your list, you can choose any unit(s) of Cultists to lose all upgrade options and all guns to gain FNP, Fearless and S&P Special rules.

Nifty for a 4 pt model imo.

In KDK I don't even recommend taking cultists. Bloodletters are a far better choice.

For CSM, I take them pretty often but it's because they're in a similar boat to us as far as not having many formation options available to them. As terribad as they are, they're still better than marines themselves. I try to leave them in reserve as long as I can and hopefully have them run onto an objective at the last second. Yes, they have larger numbers, but they don't score objectives at the end of the game as well as kabalites because they're easier to scare off the objective and their size make them harder to keep out of LOS.