The Cronos is it really that bad?

Started a new thread on this to get peoples thoughts and run some numbers.

i'm going to measure it against standard marines, the cronos suffers due to being str 3 weapons and with 3 attacks they are not much help in melee either.

Against marines the shooting causes 1.333 wounds at -2ap from shooting.
In melee it causes 1 wound against a marine at -1 ap which would be half a marine dead.

So the numbers really don't add up to this unit being much of a killer. Also math hammering the regain a wound is only going to trigger maybe every 2 turns. one thing i did not take into account is the  roll of a 6 to wound for d3 damage, with it being on all it weapons its going to trigger at least once a turn which i'm calculating at 0.91.
I'm going to be generous here and say 2 marines dead a turn, maybe someone can do better math on this, mine is prob wrong, however point is the cronos can kill 2 marines a turn so its shooting and melee are pretty lackluster, however it does add up and it shouldn't be too hard to do this as that's were the Cronos needs to be, supporting other combat.


now looking at the aura:
10 incubi squad: 1.791 extra dead
incubi kill: 10.046
improved efficiency: 17.82%


10 wyches(+1str, +1att) 2x hydra, shardnet & impaler and power sword:
wyches kill: 6.1
cronos aura: 1.01 extra dead
improved efficiency: 16.39%

10 wyches(+1str, +1str) 2x Hydra, Shardnet & Impaler and Power sword: 1.03 extra dead
wyches kill 7.12
cronos aura: 1.03 extra dead
improved efficiency: 14.55%

10 Wyches(+1att, +1att) 2x Hydra, Shardnet & Impaler and agoniser: 0.769 extra dead
Wyches kill 5.21
Cronos aura: 0.796 extra dead
improved efficiency: 15.45%

without going into this further we can clearly see that the Cronos will roughly generate 15-20% efficiency rate. i purposely chose the att Wyches as i was thinking anything str3 will not gain much from Cronos however i was pleased and surprised at the 15% extra dead efficiency.
Its my opinion that anything str4 with a good number of attacks which is the rest of our army outside Wyches will work well with Cronos, especially with any -ap attached, they also work well with beasts too, which is interesting, lets not forget extra kills in the morale too due to causing this extra damage.

The Cronos gained the fly keyword which makes it quite decent at crowd control as it can fly over combats and engage at will.
Want to stop a unit from charging your big combat already going, Cronos to the rescue.
Want to deny charges but Cronos was already in combat. no worries, Cronos leaves combat and places itself to deny charges and/or make that squad charge it instead. It's still basically a talos in the tanking department, the fly keyword has made the Cronos pretty flexible and gives you great control to dictate combats you are in already and supporting.

I'm finding it difficult to measure this unit.
also i'm unsure were the figure of 420pts of melee to make a Cronos worth it came from?
it seems to me that if you had say 20 Incubi over 2 turns would make the Cronos worth it easily and that's 320pts and by turn 3 these improvements will be effected too from PFP.

Last but not least, if the Cronos gets shot up, then it did its job anyway as a distraction Carnifex.

What do you think, are they worth using, has anyone been using them and if so have you had any success?

Good write up, I think the force multiplier effect it has has been disregarded by those that have written the Cronos off. Im planning on running mine alongside 2 Talos in a spearhead detachment. Another thing as well is that with the Dark Creed obsession the -1 morale modifier makes it more likely the Incubis tormentor rule will go off (not a huge thing but it's nice!)

Thanks for creating this dissie.

To me the cronos has its place but until I was playing a game and thinking about this I was sure you had to be running a very solidly melee list to really make use of it.

As you did, here are the basics, a fully kitted out Cronos does 1.3 average wounds in the shooting phase and 0.58 in the fight phase.  If you combine these two phases, here is a graph of the damage that it does in total.


The rerolling 1's has an effect on every single unit (that doesn't already get a reroll) of 1/6 better ability to wound.  I can run through this formula if ppl would like, but it is what it is.

As a result, the incubi get an increase of only 16.6% (dissie, I agree with your 10.046 number but don't know how you got your without cronos figure)

The hydra gaunlets get rerolls, so they don't get a benefit, hence the 16.6% is slightly lower for them.
Razor flails don't have this as an issue however, and only benefit!

So if you discount their shooting and assault then a cronos is a 70 point buff machine that makes all units 16.6% (1/6th) better.
To make it better than taking another 70 points of wyches we need to work out the size of points it needs to buff with a 16.6% (1/6th) increasing buff.  This can be done by dividing 70pts by the 16.6% (1/6th) buff, 70pts / 16.6% = 70 / (1/6) = 70 * 6 = 420pts


So, is it worth it?
I was playing a game yesterday and realising that I had 15 wyches (147pts) in my 1500 point army, not much CC.  
Then thought a little more. And realised with all the HQ's we all have to have now, they are all CC oriented. And can be made to be real beat sticks and want to be in combat. Additionally, some have weapons that can't be duplicated and are free (Djinn blade is awesome!) that will make this hard to quantify. But lets try!

So I had
15 wyches (147)
2 archons (172)
1 succubus (50)
369 points of Cronos loving damage.
This is getting close to the 420. And I have a relic in there which probably takes that number closer still.  And I'm not running much CC.

So in my list I would say that output alone it wouldn't be worth it. But only just.

I'm not going to go into the distraction thing as it relies on poor playing, something I don't want to assume for my opposition, and unlike a talos, it might be hard to kill but it really has no bite.

I do like your suggestions about how to move it around dissie, they are fun and a good point about the fact, you really don't need to keep this thing in combat.  It just has to stay within 6" of its buffables.


PS: I ran reavers too, but they outpace the cronos so much and are probably dead by the time the cronos arrives!

To me, the Cronos is the equivalent of a HQ tax that you willingly pay for.
- I think we can agree that it's own attacks are piddling at best.
- Regaining a single wound per turn, by killing something in melee (in spite of its ranged weapons supposedly sucking life from their targets) is abysmal even by DE standards.
- It's not too expensive, but probably because it brings so little to the table.
- Even with its relatively low cost, it still requires 420pts of units - all of them melee - to be within 6" of it, in order for it to be worthwhile.
- It's not particularly fast, so a lot of our melee stuff might well outpace it (so either you hold them back and lose the advantage of their movement, or else you charge them in and lose the Cronos' buff).

Even if I was using a list that included sufficient numbers of melee units for the Cronos to theoretically be a worthwhile buffer, I'd still never use the thing. I'd far rather put those points towards another unit that can get work done on its own. Not only does this give my army a little more redundancy, but it also means I don't have to cluster all my melee stuff together just to make my Cronos a worthwhile investment.

LordSplata wrote:

So I had
15 wyches (147)
2 archons (172)
1 succubus (50)
369 points of Cronos loving damage.
This is getting close to the 420. And I have a relic in there which probably takes that number closer still.  And I'm not running much CC.

Does all your melee stuff stick together though?

I don’t have my book with me, can cronos be played in squads of 3? Does the spirit probe give a wound back for each cronos? Or just 1 in total? I’d consider running 3, they aren’t terrible in combat, and have them healing each other, or healing nearby grotesques or talos or HQs.

If the heal is once per fight phase, then not as effective. Still could be fun though. I love the model!

Its simple to me.

If you have lots of Melee 1 is good, if you dont, its not good.

It's 70 points for something that takes most of a turn of shooting to bring down. If you can't see the benefit in that idk what to say.

It says "if a cronos equipped with a spirit probe.." which indicates to me that if a group of 3 each kill something then that's 3 wounds to pass around. Could heal themselves yeah. Might be effective. I might try it. Especially with a 4++

Each Cronos can do it once per round

LordSplata wrote:

The rerolling 1's has an effect on every single unit (that doesn't already get a reroll) of 1/6 better ability to wound.  I can run through this formula if ppl would like, but it is what it is.

The maths doesn't actually work out that way, I can see where you are coming from as each gets a 1/6 percentage increase over its previous percentage, but this is not a 1/6 better ability to wound and certainly not a 1/6 increase in damage output. The formula is x + x/6 where x is the original probability. as such if the original probability is higher the increase in effectiveness is greater. The numbers work out as follows:

Chance of wounding on 6's with no buff: 16.6%
Chance of wounding on 6's with reroll 1s: 19.4%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 19.4-16.6 = 2.8%

Chance of wounding on 5's with no buff: 33.3%
Chance of wounding on 5's with reroll 1s: 38.9%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 38.9-33.3 = 5.6%

Chance of wounding on 4's with no buff: 50%
Chance of wounding on 4's with reroll 1s: 58.3%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 58.3-50 = 8.3%

Chance of wounding on 3's with no buff: 66.7%
Chance of wounding on 3's with reroll 1s: 77.8%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 77.8-66.7 = 11.1%

Chance of wounding on 2's with no buff: 83.3%
Chance of wounding on 2's with reroll 1s: 97.2%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 97.2-83.3 = 13.9%

There are other factors to consider here as well, such as distribution of values, but the averages should be a good enough illustration I think.

The Cronos is not a good combat unit and the wound regen is nothing more than a bonus rather than a fundamental core to the army.

However, the rerolls to nearby units make it very valuable in a beat ball surrounded by a few Talos and maybe some Grotesques if you can squeeze them in. A Cronos and Urien Rakarth turn Grotesques into GEQ blenders. Wound on 2+ with rerolls, they're terrifying.

Will they make up their points cost on their own? Maybe not. Probably not. Are they a fairly cheap way to buff an already killy doomstack? I'd say so. Especially if your opponent doesn't like the fact that he buffs the nearby Talos and puts a lascannon or two into it, that's all shots not going into the much more valuable pain engines.

Drager wrote:

LordSplata wrote:

The rerolling 1's has an effect on every single unit (that doesn't already get a reroll) of 1/6 better ability to wound.  I can run through this formula if ppl would like, but it is what it is.

The maths doesn't actually work out that way, I can see where you are coming from as each gets a 1/6 percentage increase over its previous percentage, but this is not a 1/6 better ability to wound and certainly not a 1/6 increase in damage output. The formula is x + x/6 where x is the original probability. as such if the original probability is higher the increase in effectiveness is greater. The numbers work out as follows:

Or perhaps the way I did it is correct, the formula you provided proves the point, and you would have come to the same conclusion except for you final step.
The reason is you are adding a flat number (1/6th) and multiplying the entire rest of the equation by it creates a straight percentage increase between the two results. (Btw, for anyone reading on, the simplest way to do reroll 1's maths is wound-chance*(1+1/6) )

To use your numbers from before and just divide the two results (not subtraction) and we get:

Chance of wounding on 6's with no buff: 16.6%
Chance of wounding on 6's with reroll 1s: 19.4%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 19.4/16.6 = 16.6%


Chance of wounding on 5's with no buff: 33.3%
Chance of wounding on 5's with reroll 1s: 38.9%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 38.9/33.3 = 16.6%

Chance of wounding on 4's with no buff: 50%
Chance of wounding on 4's with reroll 1s: 58.3%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 58.3/50 = 16.6%

Chance of wounding on 3's with no buff: 66.7%
Chance of wounding on 3's with reroll 1s: 77.8%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 77.8/66.7 = 16.6%

Chance of wounding on 2's with no buff: 83.3%
Chance of wounding on 2's with reroll 1s: 97.2%
Increased percentage chance to wound: 97.2/83.3 = 16.6%

i fudged the numbers a little on incubi forgot to divide by 6 then multiple by 5 again for that 6+ armour save. Yeah very interesting to see that the math on the reroll was always 16.6%, didn't think to check that, i was more interested to see what the end result was and what i was seeing was str4 with -ap converts more kills with the Cronos about.

I'm trying to see at what value the Cronos is worth it, might need to run more numbers on every unit to see which is best, i suspect that incubi, talos and and grots are going to benefit most.

At what point is it worth taking and do we only use 1 or 2 tops?
using a general rule of thumb of what we can already see the 15% seems a good number for calculating the Cronos value against melee. So here's what i'm thinking and let me know if you don't agree.
First turn is worth 0% and we devalue the cost by 33% per turn to max T4, starting from T2.
I'm counting first turn as 0% only as Cronos will not make it to where it needs to be.
therefore we would get

0% + 15% = 15% T2
15% + 10% = 25% T3
25% + 5% = 30% T4

giving us a grand total of 30%

This is why i find it difficult to measure, cause in a bubble the Cronos is worth 15% of that total units points per turn, In this bubble the Cronos would be easy to measure, however once you start adding extra squads and losing units the numbers are difficult deal with.
I feel that my above math is most certainly wrong too, cause you just cant factor in everything that the Cronos could be buffing or isn't buffing. 30% prob is a good flat number to run with though.

this would mean the Cronos is viable to take at 250pts worth of melee rather than the 420pts that has been suggested before, adding more melee improves the value of the cronos, however adding more cronos devalues other cronos, so would it be more accurate to say we can takes 3 cronos per 1000pts of melee.

sorry for late reply on this, was sick last few days.

The reroll is nice with Wych Cults fir sure. The main strength is I still believe the cheapness to toughness of it. The Talos is fairly priced around 100 points for something that big and mean, but the Chronos is just as tough but 30 points lighter. Make them Prophets of Flesh and push 9 of them up the table with appropriate support and you will have some very unhappy opponents.

I was thinking prophets of flesh for sure too.

However coven of the twelve looks great too, if you run a full army of the same obsession it really goes a long way to help coven deal with elite armies in melee, i would still keep the cronos as prophets of flesh though lol.

Yeah, can never undersell that ultimately the Cronos is going to take a lot to take down, especially your take on it and its not as if opponents can simply ignore it either as it will lock down their army and tar pit quite easily.
Would love to see a list built around this, you could prob build a decent wyche army.

TeenageAngst wrote:

The reroll is nice with Wych Cults fir sure. The main strength is I still believe the cheapness to toughness of it. The Talos is fairly priced around 100 points for something that big and mean, but the Chronos is just as tough but 30 points lighter. Make them Prophets of Flesh and push 9 of them up the table with appropriate support and you will have some very unhappy opponents.

Hum they are tough for sure but they do no damage so exept for locking unit into combat i dont see the point of running 9 of them

That's where the proper back up comes in, if run as prophets of flesh they are str6 ap-1with urien, or as coven of twelve str5 ap-2 either way they would be able to do some damage even if they only have 3 attacks they should still be able to eat through basic troops and with it's healing ability multiplied by 9 any damage done to them can basically be ignored unless they are outright killed.

The obnoxious thing is the cheaper they are the more difficult it is for your opponent to justify wasting shots on it. If you go without the spirit probe you can have 9 T7 monsters with 3+/4++/6+++ with decent AP and fly, all for less than 600 points. That's 65 wounds that can single-handedly lock half the table down.

And they heal each other in CC. The extra wounds and ability to wound sound incredibly nice for a Coven list. Ye gods. T6, 4++, regen wounds sounds terrifying of and by itself.

TeenageAngst wrote:

The obnoxious thing is the cheaper they are the more difficult it is for your opponent to justify wasting shots on it. If you go without the spirit probe you can have 9 T7 monsters with 3+/4++/6+++ with decent AP and fly, all for less than 600 points. That's 65 wounds that can single-handedly lock half the table down.

I want to expand on this.

Take 9 at 630pts (for the Spirit probe)

That is 63 T6/7 wounds (my math wont care about the Toughness, but for Assault cannons it will)

4++/6+++
Assuming Re-roll 1's to hit

146 Plasma Over charging shots
84 Lascannon shots


If 2 die and you get 7 into CC, that is 7 wounds you could heal a turn.

Blimey!

I really don't have much more to say. That is one hard to kill blob!
The regen stacks up and becomes crazy, and so dispiriting!

LordSplata wrote:

Blimey!

I really don't have much more to say. That is one hard to kill blob!
The regen stacks up and becomes crazy, and so dispiriting!

Turn 3 is when the regen stacks really start to add up with the +1 WS, their low attacks really 7 of them will only get in 3-4 regen wounds on turn 2.

its quite funny its so game breaking.
though what would you run with it, to make it work, the Cronos is not going to kill a lot even though you may have 9 and stripping it weapons down doesn't help, in fact at that, i still think 720 pts for 9 is a bargain in this scenario with full equipment.

Yay, 720 points that kills half a dozen Guardsmen a turn! Until your opponent just ignores them and kills everything else.

Never said it was good, showing how survivable it was, i'd rather have 1050pts of Grots lol