Jstove is back at it again with more Necromunda: Underhive with 7 principles you need to know when are planning out your gang roster!
JStove here, and today I’m talking about writing your roster for Necromunda. Now that we have 3 boxed gangs and their rules available, we can begin to see a formula for how the design of the noble houses will play out, and we can create some general guidelines for gang planning strategy that covers every house, past, present, and future. Will the off-brand gangs like Genestealer and Chaos Cults, Enforcers, and whatever else is on the horizon be the same? Likely, but for now, focus on the Houses.
The Magic Number
First things first, the correct number of models to have in a gang, regardless of which house you pick, whether it’s the 3 that are out when this article was written or any of the ones that release afterward, is 10. Ten is the correct number of models to start a gang with because ten is the number of models in the box, and it’s the most economical spread of equipment and manpower you’re likely to achieve. Unless you are wanting to be the Red Army at Stalingrad and just have a bunch of guys and only give a gun to every other dude.
To hit the ten model golden number, you’re going to need a Leader, 2 Champions, 2 Juves, and 5 Gangers. The “Ganger Tax” means that for every model that isn’t a Ganger, there must be one model that is. That means that when you start planning on expanding your gang, the first guy you hire as model #11 must be a Ganger. You need a Leader because you need a Leader. You need 2 Champions because Champions do almost everything the Leader does on the tabletop and in the campaign phase, to an equal or lesser degree. You need Gangers to tax them, and you need Juves because you need bodies on the table, and hopefully, they’ll survive long enough to someday be useful. If not, they can just be bullet sponges. Either way, they serve a purpose.
The most important reason to have 10 models though, is bottle check and activation rodeo. The more bodies you have on the table, the less likely you are to flee from a fight and let your opponent win and the more activations you have to play with. Since every model activates individually and you and your opponent take turns activating, and some of your models (Champions and the Leader) can activate multiple models at once, strategizing your activation priorities and having a numbers advantage is a big deal. The guy in the back with the machine gun can only activate and kill all your dudes once per round, and if he’s the last guy your opponent has on the table, then you have the rest of the round of unanswered activations to clobber him with your numbers.
Always Lowball the Gang Rating
The most important statistic for you to track on your roster is your gang rating. Gang rating is ultimately how you determine your standing in the campaign, and more importantly when you will get bonus XP for fighting a superior gang. What’s a superior gang? A gang with a significantly higher gang rating than yours. Your goal is to keep your gang rating low throughout the campaign so that you can keep your opponents lowballed and farm underdog XP off them, then at the end of the campaign, when you’re in a rush for the finals, that’s when you crack open the wallet and buy the big expensive toys that inflate your rating for the final push.
You want most of the value of your gang to be in men and experience. You want your gang to be a hardcore crew of dangerous veterans, not a bunch of goons with shiny toys. The vets can always pick up shiny toys later, but the goons are crap without them. A veteran fighter with crappy guns and 200 credits worth of skills and advances will always kill more enemy models more reliably than an inexperienced chump fighter with 200 credits of gear. He can’t kill anyone if he never hits them.
This is especially important when you consider buying melee weapons if you consider meleeing a valid strategy for your gang. While fancy toys like power weapons are attractive, they may not be as cost-effective as lead pipes, chains, or just a point-blank shot to the dick with a pistol. An expensive weapon is always an inflation of your gang rating, and many times what can be done with a big fancy weapon can be done just as well with a board with a nail in it.
The economy of Equipment & Rule of 4
Most gangs present and future have special equipment that you can only purchase a limited amount of. This always includes heavy weapons, but can also be weapons that aren’t actually in a “Special” category but are just prohibitively expensive. A good example is plasma pistols in House Escher and Combat Shotguns in Goliath and Orlock.
When it comes to special equipment, consider the Rule of 4. Generally, Leaders, Champions, and 1 lucky Ganger on the roster can grab a special weapon, meaning that your starting gang theoretically has access to 4 of them. This means that you have to decide if that weapon is attractive enough to build your gang around it and if you can fit 4 of them into the roster. Naturally, for expensive triple-digit cost heavy weapons, the Rule of 4 does not apply, because you’ll most likely only be able to afford 2 heavy weapons at most and still be able to reasonably equip 8 other models. Consider instead whether or not going for 4 specials is valid, or if you want a more generous spread of equipment throughout the gang.
Rule of 4 weapons, whether they are “Special” or not, are generally premium weapons that are very likely to kill their targets if they connect. Examples include the Bolter/needler, the plasma pistol, and the Combat Shotgun. (Which in salvo ammo, is basically a short-range bolter)
Every gang in the game at the time of this writing basically has the same 3 general build options:
- 2 heavy weapons and economic equipment on the remaining 8 models. (Doesn’t actually work for Goliaths since everything in Goliath is expensive and the rivet cannon is garbage.)
- Rule of 4 weapons and economic equipment on the remaining 6 models. (Conversely, this is very attractive for Goliaths since their rule of 4 option is the grenade launcher.)
- Full economy. Spread the wealth evenly across 8 models except for the 2 Juves, who can’t have nice things anyway.
The Poverty Leader
The Leader is the most important model in the gang because he has the ability to activate 2 other models with himself, who will typically always be Gangers because you cannot “Chain activate” by cascading one into another. (A Leader cannot activate his champions who will then activate more models, etc) You typically want the 2 models the Leader activates to be Gangers, since they will be carrying decent equipment since Juves are forbidden to carry cool toys. If you are playing a Rule of 4 gang, one of these bonus Gangers might be a specialist weapon.
Because the Leader’s most important role is activating his comrades, it’s more important for him to position himself for that purpose than to position to take his own shots. Therefore, it makes sense to give him good equipment to take advantage of his 3+/3+ hit rolls, but not always the best equipment, since getting his friends in the fight is more important. Ideally, he should use his own fighting skills to set up other models for a kill.
For this reason, I would avoid going whole hog on the Leader’s equipment unless it’s a Rule of 4 gang and he has to take one of the big toys. Ideally, you want to fast track the XP on models that aren’t as good at fighting/shooting up to speed, especially Juves, who never take an XP penalty and desperately need the upgrades.
Cowboy Juves
Juves, regardless of house, are typically best served with two pistols. There are 3 reasons that make juves ideal candidates for the job:
- They can only have pistols and cheap melee weapons anyway.
- They usually have the best movement and initiative, which makes them ideal for navigating treacherous terrain and closing into pistol range.
- Their ballistic skill is so awful that you might as well just fire 2 pistols at once and go for broke and hope for a miracle. (Risk 2 shots looking for sixes, or one-shot looking for a five. Is that actually better math? Probably not, but it is rolling more dice!)
The gunfighter Juve can eventually become a real threat if he picks up ballistic skill advancements so he can actually shoot straight, and if he picks up the gunfighter skill as well, even better.
The two best options for the cowboy Juve are the stub gun and the laspistol. The stub gun is great because it has a +2 bonus at 6 inches, meaning that even with the penalty for firing two weapons, he’s likely to actually score a hit if he gets that close. Furthermore, once he learns to shoot, you can upgrade the stub gun with dum-dum bullets, which are less accurate but are Strength 4.
The laspistol has an 8” short range, making it the most generous pistol for applying it’s +1 bonus. This gives any Juve lucky enough to own them more breathing room to execute his attack run, and hopefully actually do something with his worthless life before it gets thrown away when the opponent reacts. In future supplements, laspistols may also get access to the hotshot power pack, which would convert them to S4. As we’ll talk about with the stub gun later, any weapon that has an upgrade option to S4 is a good option.
While the autopistol does look attractive due to rapid fire (and it is cool as hell and I still personally put it on Juves anyway because they look like little uzis) the problem with it is that it has a prohibitively low short range to get that accuracy bonus crutch a Juve desperately needs, and you only get to rapid fire if you actually hit. The autopistol is better in the hands of fighters that can already shoot straight and are more likely to deliver the rapid-fire dice.
The workhorse of the Underhive, the humble stub gun
The stub gun is the budget weapon of choice throughout the Underhive regardless of which house you play. Even if your gang does not have access to stub guns on their starting roster, consider buying them in the future at the trading post for future juves. Chances are that if your roster is starting to look tight because you picked up 2 expensive heavy weapons or you went Rule of 4, you’ll be handing out stub guns.
- The stub gun is 5 credits, the cheapest gun in the game.
- The stub gun has a +2 accuracy bonus at 6 inches, very handy when you’re too close to the opponent and pinning them to create breathing room for yourself is more important than actually killing them.
- The stub gun can use Strength 4 dum-dum bullets for only an additional 5 credits, bringing the total cost of the gun up to 10 credits, making it not only the cheapest gun in the game but the cheapest S4 gun in the game.
- Pistols can be shot in melee, which makes a stub gun, especially with dum-dum bullets, an ideal melee weapon for Juves or injured fighters with low strength scores that hit like little girls. (In the case of Escher Juves, actually are little girls.)
Melee weapons are better at the trading post
At the start of the campaign, most gangs can only buy their unique house melee weapons, some of which are brutally effective but heinously expensive, others of which are expensive but not that great. If your strategy involves melee, it’s probably a better idea to wait for a trip to the trading post to round out your kit. There you can buy low budget vanilla melee weapons (Or just more stub guns with dum-dum bullets) that will get the job done but won’t break the bank or pad the gang rating.
A great example of this principle in action is the Goliath “Everything is expensive” doctrine. A normal axe worth 15 credits grants +1 Strength and has the disarm ability. (Disarm is amazing, it forces enemies to use unarmed attacks only, which against a T4 Goliath wearing Furnace Plates, makes him very hard to kill.) A power hammer also grants +1 Strength, -1 rend, and deals 2 damage, and is a power weapon, but is 45 credits. Is the extra killing power of the power hammer worth the extra cost in credits and gang rating? In any gang but Goliath, probably. With Goliath, models and equipment are too expensive for that investment to pay off, especially while running face first into a wall of Orlock rapid-fire lead. The Eschers have a similar problem with the stiletto sword. A normal sword is cheaper and doesn’t have the riskier toxin rule. (The toxin rule makes a dice roll-off against your target’s toughness, and if your opponent wins, nothing happens. It’s garbage without the chemsynth, but the chemsynth is an action tax.)
Genestealer Cults on the Horizon…
At the time I wrote this article, Genestealer Cults have been announced, but the White Dwarf issue they will appear in is not released yet. Once I get my hands on the Dwarf, they’ll get their own article.
- The cult is small and does not include Purestrains, a Magus, or a Primus. The only models in the cult will be run-of-the-mill Neophytes and the Aberrants.
- Since the Aberrant models are only available in the Deathwatch Overkill boxed game, they’re going to be prohibitive for GSC players to collect, and may not be a good option at all.
- Abberrants being hard to get might become a non-issue. For the Aberrant to be worth taking, he’s going to have to be really, really good. Keep in mind that plasma and melta are in the game, and a shot in a melta gun’s short-range automatically takes any model out of action on a successful wound. It’s theoretically possible that there’s simply too much firepower available for a fatty like an Aberrant to be worth his investment in credits.
- GSC has access to autoguns and heavy stubbers in their box, which are strong choices for economy, so they will likely be competitive for economy gangs. I’m less confident that they’ll work as a Rule of 4 gang, since their box kit has a ‘1 of everything’ spread of special weapons.
For now, this is all that we know.
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About the Author: Jack Stover
