How Many Bolts of Change are enough?

[oCoYoRoAoKo]

I think that we are in agreement that outside close combat, the only real source of anti-tank for the Daemon army is the bolt of change and the Soul Grinder. Discounting the Grinder, im struggling to find how many are needed to make a real impact on the army whilst not wasting points that can otherwise be taken on other units.

For example, i had a game yesterday against marines. I found that my 4 bolts (2 from Heralds and 2 from Princes) were quite ineffective. For the points invested in the 'bolt platforms', i could have bought a second GUO (the first one performed solidly as usual), and upgraded the princes to something more meaty (my usual are nurgle princes with Iron Hide, Nox Touch and Cloud of Flies) or just boosted my core units - though 3 units of plague bearers us usually enough for objecives capture.

Before i drop the bolts all together, i would like to see how many are usually used in other armies. Please also say what type of army you are running (Mixed, dedicated), because normally pure Tzeentch forces will have more bolts then others (at least i would hope so).

[Clarkson]

oh.. daemon armies...

BoC is never over done.. but if over things do better.. then grin and bare it

daemons seems a very CC orientated army where as tau is shooty... so maybe drop BoC and take stuff that annihilates AV in CC

[Reivax26]

You are beginning to notice the same thing that I did with my Daemons and one of the main reasons why I traded my Daemons off for enough Chaos Marines to finish out my army before they get their new codex. Bolt of Change sucks beyond all that has ever sucked anywhere. Seems like everytime I rolled with a Tzeentch Prince against the rear armor of a tank I would either roll a 1 to hit or a 1 to pen. Then the next turn he would get rapid fired and die like a little fly. The best way to kill tanks is with a Winged Daemon Prince or a Bloodthirster in close combat. Surprisingly Fiends of Slaanesh are really good at this too because they get a boat load of attacks and have a huge threat range. Combine that with Rending and you are having a good day.

The straw that broke my back was that regardless of how you slice it, when you have to land in firing range of Grey Knights/Dark Eldar/Necrons/Missile spam Long Fangs, your Daemons are probably going to die regardless. I got to the final table of 2 tournaments and lost both because I went up against some insane shooty army that was killing my Monstrous Creatures the turn that they landed.

[Vsurma]

My vote went for light, 3-4 and here is why.
The Deamon army has a few good cost effective bolts. After this your options are few and close combat becomes a much cheaper and more effective method

The fateweaver comes with one and is taken for other reasons so the bolt is a bonus. He has bs5 so his bolt is reliable however you take him for his re-rolls so you can't take risks on his deployment.

Heralds of tzeentch on chariot, cheap, bs4, lots of wounds and an ok save (Esp if near the weaver), master of sorc and we are legion also allows it to fire that ap3 heavy bolter, a couple of these guys and the fateweavers one together is 9 shots a turn, they will kill about 4 marines out of cover a turn, which is not bad considering its also a bonus, you take them for the bolt, the bonus is the enemy can't safely leave cover anymore.

Blue horrors with changeling, I think the changeling adds enough to make a 100pts bolt worth taking even at bs3, I personally wouldn't take more than 1 unit of these guys as your fighting a losing battle every time you pay 100pts for such a unit, every other army has better antitank for 100pts, they have higher strength/longer range or less cost so competing with bolts is a bad idea.

The last option for bolts is tzeentch demon princes at 140pts, at bs5 they hit fairly reliably but T5 4++ doesn't give them all that much protection, still likely a better choice than the troop versions as they are still decent in CC due to their MC status. They lack scoring though so that is one edge the horrors have over the princes.

So those are basically the options, I like fateweaver for his other abilities and consider his shooting a bonus.
The chariots are great as their jetbike turbo boosting abilities can win you objective based games.
I like the changeling so for that I would consider 1 unit of horrors but no more myself.

I have no experience with the princes so I can't say too much about them myself. They have no we are legion option so the chariots shoot better than princes, they also cost less and can split fire, add to that jetbike and I think they are much better myself.

My list had the fateweaver, 2 heralds and the changeling unit and I would not consider more myself.

For the price of a demon prince with bolt you can take almost 5 fiends or 3.5 crushers, both do a decent job at antitank especially if you can manage to stun / immobilise the vehicles before you assualt them, for that reason you need to have some bolts in the army.

I find that after you add about 4 bolts your spending too many points and that makes your CC elements much easier to deal with but it realy depends on the list your playing.

The 2 Chariots I would always take with the changeling coming in a close 2nd for me.

The other thing to keep in mind is if you are running a lot of crushers, units of 6-8 especially if you have multiples of them mean you need bolts in your army, otherwise the enemy can just tie you up in CC with dreads, getting some stun/immobilise/destroyed results is important. Luckily bolt is ap1.

[Bunnahabhain]

Depends on the points level....

[Infidel]

There are only 2 cost-efficient bolt platforms (incidentally, only 4 units can have them) - Herald on Chariot, Daemon Prince of Tzeentch and that's it.

There are a few ways to spend your HQ slots, Fateweaver is a must if you at all intend to play competitively (don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise) and the second slot can be spent on either:

1. Bloodthirster (S8 + 2++ save against GK in CC, also the codex's best answer to AV14)
2. Lord of Change (Rerollable 3++ with Fatey, can do alright if you don't over-upgrade him)
3. Masque + Scribes (Pavane for additional speed and pulling multi-charge, Scribes for utility)
4. 2 Tzeentch Chariots

In any case, you should only ever have a maximum of 8 bolts in your army. 4 from HQ, 3 from HS and 1 more from your Horror + Changeling squad if you're at all inclined to field one such thing. I get by with just 5 (Fatey+3 TDP+Changeling Bolt squad) even at the most competitive level, mostly because I'm forced to due to cost-effectiveness and FoC limitation.

[oCoYoRoAoKo]

All good advice and insights. Thanks. for my normal armylist i bring (1500):

GUO, cloud of flies
2 Tzeentch Heralds, Bolt, Chariot, Master of Sorcery
2 x 4 Bloodcrushers, full upgrades
6 Fiends
3 x 6 Plaguebearers
2 x Deamon princes of Tzeentch, Bolt

The list seems to be doing a little better with the bolts included - Immobilising a Furioso before it can smash through my fiends is more then enough reason to keep them for me. Its also nice to actually have some shooting when i deploy instead of making that rush for CC all the time.

[DJ3]

Depends on the points level....

Yeah, a positively meaningless question without this.

Not to mention, it's not like we're talking about a uniform field here--a Horror Bolt isn't exactly the same as a Prince Bolt. They only come on four units, and among those four units, there are three different Ballistic Skills. This is why polls in the Tactics forum make my brain bleed.

Anyhow, you can get by with two at 1500 (and are often forced to), and scaling up to at four at 2000 is preferable. If you're inclined to use Pink Horrors, they break down value-wise to be exactly half of a "good" (BS5) Bolt, so accordingly you'd need two of them to count as a single Bolt comparatively. HoTs are the most efficient place to get them, period--but HQ slots are often too heavy of a price to pay for us.

Strictly in terms of Bolts, there's not anything at all wrong with Pink Horrors. They're actually slightly better than half of a "good" Bolt, with the comparison done to Princes--the actual break-even is five units of Horrors to three Princes, given the usual options on either, at which point they cost the exact same amount and have the exact same effectiveness in terms of Bolt.

So the problem with taking Pink Horrors is not that they're bad Bolt platforms--it's absurd to expect a BS3 Bolt to function similarly to a BS5 Bolt directly--because they work out to be virtually identical in terms of efficiency. The problem with taking Pink Horrors is that you have to take a lot of them for it to balance out, and you lose the CC ability of the Daemon Princes they'd be replacing, though that can often be overvalued in the first place. There's a much better explanation of all this in an incredibly long sleep-deprivation-fueled post I made a few months ago in the Daemon Tactica.

The "maximum" Bolts a traditional Fatecrusher would be running at ~2000+ is four (4.5 with a Changeling unit), though I'm currently getting by with essentially 3.5 instead. So with your current list having something in the realm of ~3.5-4 at 1500, lack of Bolts really isn't your problem--at least, not any moreso than anti-tank shooting is our problem in a wider sense. I'd have to think it's potentially more of a target priority problem, and/or your Bolts are getting killed before they should, which is generally an issue any time Fateweaver isn't around.

It's also important to note that Fiends (and to a lesser degree, Seekers/Flesh Hounds/winged MCs) have a reinforcing effect in terms of anti-tank. Shooting is always better than Assault for anti-tank, but the foremost priority is to make sure something is open, Transport-wise, by the time the Bloodcrushers arrive. So anything faster than they are that can reliably kill Transports really helps in that regard as well. Your GUO is honestly hurting you in this regard, because there's positively nothing that he does that eight Bloodcrushers can't do better.

[oCoYoRoAoKo]

I see your point about the GUO. Im only really taking it because its a cool model and the army is vaguely Nurgle themed (not in army selection but for modelling purposes). For his points i can get a third bolt-prince or something.

Yeah, a positively meaningless question without this.
So the problem with taking Pink Horrors is not that they're bad Bolt platforms--it's absurd to expect a BS3 Bolt to function similarly to a BS5 Bolt directly--because they work out to be virtually identical in terms of efficiency. The problem with taking Pink Horrors is that you have to take a lot of them for it to balance out, and you lose the CC ability of the Daemon Princes they'd be replacing, though that can often be overvalued in the first place. There's a much better explanation of all this in an incredibly long sleep-deprivation-fueled post I made a few months ago in the Daemon Tactica.

thats actually a very good summary of horrors vs princes

[Vsurma]

I think the fact that horrors are scoring units was underscored in the article, otherwise I think it had many good points. This again depends on the kind of missions you play but the standard around my parts seems to be moving towards the ETC triple mission objectives standard so scoring units are valuable.

Prince = not scoring, 2 horror units = 2 scoring units.

That said it did inspire me to change up my list a bit to include tzeentch princes which I hadn't run before which was helpful.

[Vsurma]

I think the fact that horrors are scoring units was underscored in the article, otherwise I think it had many good points. This again depends on the kind of missions you play but the standard around my parts seems to be moving towards the ETC triple mission objectives standard so scoring units are valuable.

Prince = not scoring, 2 horror units = 2 scoring units.

That said it did inspire me to change up my list a bit to include tzeentch princes which I hadn't run before which was helpful.