Winter Guard Gun Carriage

A weapon platform that can deliver death and ruin to nearly any part of the battlefield, the Khador gun carriage is a rolling engine of destruction. Its dual cannons can blast apart enemy warjacks, shatter troop formations, or transform the earth into a crater-scarred wasteland. Their resounding thunder often heralds Khadoran victory on the battlefield. Even without its mighty guns the massive machine can easily shatter through enemy lines and trample foes beneath tons of iron and horseflesh.

Basic Info

Abilities

• Template:Cavalry
• Template:Construct
• Template:Pathfinder
• Template:Crushing Weight
• Template:Line Breaker
• Template:Dual Attack
• Template:Reposition 3

Weapons

Military Rifle
File:Gun icon.jpg		RNG			ROF			AOE			POW			LOCATION
		10			1			Template:-			11			-
Template:Rear Attack
Heavy Cannon (x2)
File:Gun icon.jpg		RNG			ROF			AOE			POW			LOCATION
		10			1			4			16			1 Each Side
Template:Crater

Theme Forces

• Khador
  • Template:Warriors of the Old Faith
  • Template:WG Kommand

• Other Factions
  • Protectorate players can use this model in the Template:Warriors of the Old Faith theme.

Thoughts on Winter Guard Gun Carriage

Winter Guard Gun Carriage in a nutshell

The Gun Carriage is a powerful combat piece. Its design intent is slamming into enemy lines and disrupting their formation while the rest of your army advance behind and take advantage of the ensuing chaos. Crashing through infantry units to knock down, slam, and fire cannons that leave behind craters of rough terrain is a perfect combination for a forward assault-style vehicle.

To demonstrate how powerful the Gun Carriage is, consider a typical activation:

• Declares a charge
• Contacts a model, declares impact attacks against everything within 0.5" of its front arc (thanks to being a Cavalry model)
• Gets 3d6 for the impact attack rolls (thanks to Line Breaker) that auto-knockdown and deal a POW 14 +2d6 damage roll.
• Rinse and repeat (thanks to Crushing Weight) until you either reach your charge target, or fail to kill something within the charge lane.
• After finally completing the charge move, you get to make a charge attack with the mount (thanks to Trampling Hooves).
• You get 3d6 for the charge attack roll (thanks to being a Cavalry model), that auto-knockdowns, auto-slams (thanks to Ton of Bricks), and deals a POW 14 +3d6 damage roll (damage boosted from the charge)
• Oh, and if you slam the charge target into something else, you can get an extra damage die vs the target and/or do POW 14 +2d6 vs the something else.
• Then it starts shooting (thanks to Dual Attack).
• Then it repositions into a better position to do it all again next round.

That's what it does every turn, before you start buffing it. With buffs its performance can only go up.

Combos & Synergies

• Assuming you get the charge (which is almost guaranteed thanks to Crushing Weight), you'll get auto-boosted melee attack rolls, so its MAT doesn't really need any help.
• If you want to damage anything heavy, be it high-ARM multi-wound infantry or just a typical jack, then you need to debuff their ARM. You can't buff the Carriage's STR, but you can buff its Melee Damage using Fury for instance.
• If you want to maximize the shooting, you'll want to debuff the target's DEF to make up for your average RAT.
  • Winter Guard Artillery Kapitan - His Veteran Leader ability buffs the Carriage's MAT and RAT. Can target the Carriage with Artillerist for an even greater RAT buff on your first ranged attack. Beware though, his CMD is only 8 and so the Carriage tends to outrun him.
  • Winter Guard Field Gun Crew - They can knock targets down for you to run over.
  • Sorscha1 - Has a feat that makes everything in her CTRL range and LOS stationary.
• Most of the Vlads have a way to boost or buff his army's attacks.
  • Vladimir1 - Signs & Portends and Boundless Charge are amazing on this model.
  • Vladimir3's feat affects the Gun Carriage, being a Cavalry model, and gives it Side Step and Sprint for a turn.
    • Note that Side Step will only trigger on your one initial attack, not your impact attack(s). Also you can't resolve Sprint and Reposition on the same turn.
• In Warriors of the Old Faith, taking these with Feora3 gets you POW18 Cannons with POW16 horses through Incite. Plus Flame Trail on a huge base to burn whatever you don't immediately kill.

Drawbacks & Downsides

• As with all Battle Engines, it costs as much (or more) than a heavy warjack, but loses out on any potential warjack spell buffs and/or battlegroup buffs. And Khador has a plethora of those. This can make it less appealing (depending on your caster's spell list).
• The Gun Carriage reaches peak performance when it can deal medium-POW attacks to multiple models every turn. If there are only a few enemy models on the table, and/or if those models are difficult to damage (ie warjack-heavy lists), the Carriage's impact on the game is going to taper off quickly.

Counterplay

Crushing Weight makes the Carriage a hard model to stop, but there's a few things you can try:

• A direct debuff against its movement
  • A "soft" debuff with a SPD penalty, that will reduce how far it can charge (such as Crippling Grasp).
  • A "hard" debuff that prevents advances and/or charges, so it can't charge at all (such as Shadowbind).
  • More esoteric debuffs, like using Telekinesis to spin it around so it can't see charge targets.

• You can block it with a model it can't reliably kill.
  • Remember, with boosted attack rolls it can reliably hit DEF 16, and with POW 14 it can reliably roll 20-21 damage.
  • You can't block it with Tough models, since it knocks you down before the damage roll (unless you have some way of ignoring knockdown)
  • So, to block it, you're really looking for a fast light warjack of reasonable durability. Fast so it can jam it quickly, and durable so it's not trivially removed prior to the Carriage's activation.

• The second thing you can try is board positioning. Because every time it pauses to make an impact attack, that has to be a legal position to stop. It can't pause on top of terrain or other models (even if it has a rule that allows it to move over/through that terrain/model.
  • For example, even though the Carriage has Pathfinder and can charge over obstacles, this doesn't let it stop halfway on top of an obstacle to make impact attacks.
  • You can line up your troops behind obstacles, far enough away that it can't attack them in melee, but close enough that there's no room for it to "land" on the other side of the obstacle.
  • If you have Incorporeal models, a few them scattered around in front of it can really eliminate all potential "landing zones".

Tricks & Tips

• Don't be afraid to sit back and shoot for another turn if the Gun Carriage can't get a good charge off.
• Even if your target is out of range, rough terrain AOEs from the cannons can really mess with the enemy's threat ranges (if they don't have Pathfinder).

Other

Useful external links

• Assembly Guide

Trivia

• Released in the Warmachine: Wrath expansion (2011)