Warhammer 40k Stronghold Assault Article Review and Play tested by SMG's Chaos Pat

Okay, so last time I reviewed escalation, so I suppose it only makes sense that the next article is about stronghold assault, yeah? For the purposes of this review, i'm only covering new things that make a large impact on the army you take. Lets discuss the elephant in the room, the macro cannon. This thing is a huge amount of points for just a building, but it is nearly immune to normal anti-tank fire, since it is av15 and gives minus one on the building damage chart. It also sports a macro-cannon, which can shoot two d-blasts, or one very, VERY, large blast, the bigger of the two has a fun rule that can blow flyers out of the air if they roll a one.

The honored Imperium is next to pointless, and the wall of martyrs defense line is about the same as a aegis line, so we won't discuss those. The vengeance weapon batteries and the firestorm redoubt work almost exactly the same, so we will cover them together. Either one of them can take a punisher gatling cannon, which is a heavy twenty heavy bolter, sounds awesome until you notice that it is fired at bs2, the quad lascannons are awesome, and they reliably give you two lascannon shots a turn that have skyfire and interceptor, but the best option in my opinion is the battlecannon, which cares not for the terrible bs2, and with the points cost, you can effectively bring the firepower of two lemen russes for the price of one.

The skyshield landing pad got a nifty upgrade that it can buy. The upgrade allows you to start a flyer on the table turn one, the only downside is that the flyer must be able to hover, and the flyer can only hover for turn one, which means you loose the benefit of being a flyer. I think this upgrade is not useful for most flyers, since it opens them up to the standard enemy anti-tank firepower.

The prometheum relay pipes are good if you run lots of flamers, since if you stand still you can give the flamer the torrent special rule. Void shield generators are the absolute best option in this book, in my opinion at least, while not very intimidating on their own, they truly shine when taken in a void relay network, which allows you to take three generators, so long as you also take a prometheum relay pipe as well.

One generator gives you a 12" bubble that effectively acts like a transport for your units, so long as one of the three the av12 shields is still functioning, but when you have nine of these shields, it takes almost all of your opponents firepower to bring down the shields, and this is speaking from experience.

My final thoughts on this book would have to be that it is very good, better than escalation from a competitive standpoint, and if a T.O allows this book in a tournament, i'm always going to bring a void relay network, or a couple of vengeance weapon batteries, depending on what army I bring.