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Overview: A very tasty stat line, as you get with all of the knights and cerastus frames, the cerastus frames have an extra attack in general I think with this knight in particular may not make too much of a difference as we will see!

Special Rules

As a super heavy walker the Castigator comes with a chunk of special rules that include:

– Move through Cover

– Fear

– Strikedown

– Relentless

– Invincible Behemoth

– Smash (eh!?)

– Hammer of Wrath

 The Cerastus frames also has the special rule, Flank Speed, that means they can run 3D6 inches in the shooting phase.

Incidentally, the specific wording is the knight may opt to run instead of shooting A weapon in the shooting phase. This seems open to interpretation that a knight with multiple weapons could sacrifice one weapon to run and still shoot the others. Personally I think it would be a dick move to play it that way as it seems super gamey to me; I just wanted to point out that rules loophole.

 

Equipment

The Castigator has two fantastic pieces of equipment:

Castigator Pattern Bolt Cannon – 36″ S7 AP3, Heavy 8

Twinlinked! on average (and without cover) you will be blowing away 6-7 marines a turn with this beauty.

Tempest Warblade – S10, AP2, Melee, Deflagrate, Sunder, Tempest Attack

The Warblade is not a D weapon, which is a good thing in my book! With a re-roll to armour pen you are unlikely to come away empty handed even against a landraider, and with 5 attacks on the charge you have a decent chance of blowing a Spartan or at least seriously crippling it.

The real beauty here is the fact that Deflagrate will allow you to roll an additional number of wounds equal to each unsaved wound taken by the enemy, so basically melee volkite. However when you combine this with the Tempest Attack it gets tasty.

Tempest Attack lets you forgoe all normal attacks and instead opt for an Initiative step 2 attack that AUTOMATICALLY hits every model in base contact with you. Against power fist or thunder hammer terminators you are going to hit all of the one in base contact automatically and wound on a 2+. If they fail their invulnerable and die then you get to roll again with deflagrate! At S10 this will also double out any pesky 2 wound termies (looking at you Firedrakes!)

Ion Shield – 4++ against shooting attacks with the facing declared at the start of the shooting phase as usual

Options

Only two options here:

Blessed Autosimulcra – IWND weak edition, you can regain a hull point on the roll of a 6 at the end of your turn for 10 points. Worth it for the price!

Occular Augmetics – May re-roll vehicle damage results of 1 when shooting from 12″ or less and also gain night vision for 10 points, not worth it on this knight at all.

Utilisation

Unfortunately the Castigator suffers from one big flaw, and that is its lack of a secondary weapon. This means you have to charge the unit that you shot at which if it is regular marines will likely already have taken a pounding!

Because of this I think it is advisable with the Castigator to send it after priority targets, don’t mess about and get in the enemies face, this might also mean that for the first turn you actually run in the shooting phase. This is particularly advisable if you are playing hammer and anvil and your opponent has deployed far back.

The Castigator has decent ranged attack but it does the business in close combat and you should be sending it after giant squads, tough squads, initiative 1 squads and vehicles to tear them to pieces. I think it could be very easy to have the castigator faff about and do very little. Make sure you pick targets and run them down, indecision will not go well with this knight.