Rhinos

[Fenriel]

Anyone have tips on how to handle these things? Getting pin balled between two is insanely obnoxious. Shutting down morale action once they glory really hurts. 

[spooky_squirrel]

There's a few things we can do:

• Make use of card draw mechanics to get a Tome to hand to cheat on damage.
• Make use of Margin triggers to improve the Strength of the attack to Strength 5 (5 + 0 versus Armor 5 cracks Armor, does a wound).
• Magic Dampeners will make the action harder to succeed with in the first place, especially if it's not yet in Glory. It can also mess with other Cult shenanigans, so might not be a bad take in place of an extra Mounted Gunner.
• Area attacks spill damage onto them, it's not a Penetration Flip, so Cinnamon's usual protection doesn't kick in.
• The Lord of Steel can quickly cover the distance and outright Wound the Rhino (Strength 5 base) without needing a Tome in hand to guarantee it.
• My favorite: Nuke it from orbit before it has a chance to go to Glory or do anything, especially Advance or Rush.
  • Mechanized Infantry's Combined Arms Fireteam is brilliant for doing stuff. That Battle Cannon has a built in trigger for knocking Shaken Tokens off of the Rhino even if you cannot use the tokens, which dramatically reduces its toughness when it's in Glory. You get this just for hitting the Rhino, before you worry about hurting it. It's also Strength 3 piercing (base), so you need one of the two cards flipped to be a 2 or higher or to have enough of a Margin to go to Strength 4 (or take the action again with the Versatile Tactics trigger). You can do this from 36 inches away. If you happen to have a Flare Gun on the Squad, you can be taking the Battle Cannon shot at an AV of 7 instead of 6, giving you an improved chance against the Rhino. If it's not in Glory, you can use a Shaken token to get an improved Margin to give you an even greater chance of getting those Margins.
  • Rail Gunner, especially if it's already in Glory, is stupendously good for this. AV 12 vs Df 5 with a Margin 3 trigger for bumping your strength means that you have a very strong chance of being able to kill the Rhino even without a Tome. Getting it into Glory while still having the ability to shoot is potentially tricky, but we've got tricks for that. Like Unathi having them use a Prototype (and they only need a Tome on success to go to Glory).
  • If you get desperate, Detonate Soulstone does a Strength 5 hit, which is enough to crack Armor and inflict a single Wound. Trading a hurt Fireteam to kill a Rhino isn't a bad trade.

[DeleteAccount]

Adding a bit to @spooky_squirrel list of very good things to keep in mind also be very careful with how you deploy based on enemy portal possition. Also, as for the area suggestion, it ignores the Tome rule but doesn't go over the discard a shaken token rule, so keep that in mind if you set up for area attacks.

If the enemy is the attacker and you deploy next to a portal, you are getting bombed for sure and if you don't make it easy, don't forget a unit of stalking portals can move, teleport the Rhino and then the Rhino can coordinated strike activate, move and explode, it does require more setup for sure buy it can definitely happen. Also, due to their small footprint they can come in from any portal not completely covered with ease.

Also, the Rhinos are very easy to cover from LoS so don't expect to snipe one before it gets to do anything unless you are packing a lot of flares and drew some tomes (though if the chance is there, take it).

At the end, accept that it's near impossible to cover all the attack angles Cult can come from, the Rhino kaboom is coming, but the question is more of when and where, if you can minimize those 2 factors you can at least reduce the mayhem. Also, though it's harsh, try to build a force not too dependant on morale skills, or at least that they have enough speed to get out of the aura when you need to do them. It's bad enough that taking objectives is hard in their areas, becomes much worse if even standard squad actions aren't an option.

If you are really really really desperate, you can use Kassa to let you bring some Infiltrators from King's Empire, they strip tokens like the best of them and are cheap for what Abyssinia is used to paying. They are very frail though and their token strip action is a Morale action, so they are definitely not an automatic solution, but if you can strip those tokens and your strong card draw gets you those tomes, you have good odds at taking down a Rhino once it exposes itself without wasting too many resources.

[MuMantai]

It may be a lot of resources, but keep in mind the stratagem Unwaivering Resolve. It counts as a very high tomes and can instantly do three to four damage to a Rhino as long as you hit.

[ClanAzule]

here is a link to an ongoing discussion about Rhinos.

 

[Fenriel]

Thanks all! Good stuff and things I hadn't considered. 

[katadder]

Well as we have a 1 commander +5 scrip tourney this weekend and I am sure there will be multiple rhinos, any ideas?

From the earlier post the best I can hope for is to somehow draw tomes into hand or try to beat it by loads as I have no native str5 stuff yet.

Seems ridiculous that you almost have to plan everything around a 3.5 scrip model, wyrd need to fix this model and soon, how did it get through play testing?

[trikk]

20 minutes ago, katadder said:

Well as we have a 1 commander +5 scrip tourney this weekend and I am sure there will be multiple rhinos, any ideas?

From the earlier post the best I can hope for is to somehow draw tomes into hand or try to beat it by loads as I have no native str5 stuff yet.

Seems ridiculous that you almost have to plan everything around a 3.5 scrip model, wyrd need to fix this model and soon, how did it get through play testing?

I don't remember Marauder/Rhinos being tested TBH. Or they came late, late into testing.

[Adran]

47 minutes ago, trikk said:

I don't remember Marauder/Rhinos being tested TBH. Or they came late, late into testing.

I can recall reading discusions on their durability, but I didn't actually play any games during the play test, so I can't recall very much.

[spooky_squirrel]

Marauders definitely take a lot to kill and can do a lot. My opponents would always focus fire on the Marauders or move to deliberately tie them up with something that would take a long time to fully die. It caused me to start reshaping my own play to bring in more Tactics Tokens (break away with one of those instead of spending activations).

Their adaptation to my single Marauder happened to sync with my own adaptation to their single Rhino. We learned that a single Rhino is quite fragile against elite elements that can set their hands, just like we learned that a single Marauder will get stuck in combat for a long time if you don't allocate resources to work around it.

It's colored our impression of those two models/units.

We have not run multiples, let alone spam-level multiples of them against each other. Nor are we likely to, because we like to play the game and not the gimmicks. I can see why people are concerned about Rhino spam and action/activation attrition when Rhinos are on the table because they immediately become less frail when you have to kill more than one. It's still not hard to erase one early, but it does take resources to do. Two of them take more resources, especially since the Cult player will likely have enough time to put the second one in Glory after you kill the first one.