The Horus Heresy Saturnine – should you buy it?

Thanks to a review sample of the colossal new Warhammer: The Horus Heresy Saturnine box set provided by Games Workshop, I’ve spent two weeks building, painting, and rifling through the updated core rules to bring you this review.  Read on to discover what Horus Heresy third edition offers, as well as the mysteries that still require illumination…

In case you’ve been hiding in an underground bunker complex – perhaps beneath the ruins of Tallarn, or Calth – here’s what Warhammer: The Horus Heresy Saturnine contains:

• Saturnine Dreadnought.
• 40 Space Marine legionaries in Mk II Power Armor.
• Upgrade sprues to turn up to 20 of those legionaries into Veterans armed with disintegrator weapons.
• Six Saturnine Terminators.
• Space Marine Consul in Artificer Armor.
• Space Marine Praetor in Saturnine Terminator Armor.
• Horus Heresy third edition core rulebook.
• Objective markers and Tactical Status tokens.
• A folding range ruler.
• A pamphlet with a cursory ‘how to play’ introduction, and instructions to build the models.

Value for money

It’s an absolute mountain of plastic miniatures, a full army of roughly 1,500 points. Whatever your regional pricing, Saturnine provides these minis at a whopping discount compared to what you would pay to buy these models separately.

But it doesn’t quite have everything you’ll need to play third edition. The unit rules provided in the box only cover the most basic introductory games between infantry, so you’re going to have to acquire a Liber army book to actually play games, even if you only intend to play with the Saturnine models.

It’s also quite a skewed force, focusing on infantry and mid-range firepower. The Terminators can be built for a mix of ranged and melee, but that’s it for your assault elements. There are no fast units, no transports, and nothing much that can crack heavy tank armor. It’s also a better thematic fit for some Space Marine Legions than others.

I wouldn’t mention the force composition at all if this box wasn’t replacing Age of Darkness, which provided a well rounded army as well as a wealth of plastic. Saturnine gives you just as much stuff, but depending on the Legion you may well want to liquidate parts of this box.

Model quality

The miniatures are great. What did you expect? This is modern GW. If there are any issues with the kit instructions they weren’t so stark that I can actually remember them. There are a few little things to watch out for.

The new Mk II Space Marines use the same body layout as the existing Heresy marines, so they’re compatible with the same upgrade sprues. They have small pins projecting from their shoulders that are used to align their weapon arms correctly – you’ve got to watch for these when you cut the torsos off the sprue, as they’re all too easy to clip off (ask me how I know…)

The Saturnine Terminators are each composed of a vast number of components, seven pieces per leg, so plan to be building them for a while. There are no really difficult steps in their construction, but their legs attach to their hips at a ball joint with a lot of freedom of movement. Be careful when positioning the legs so you don’t end up with elite terminators with terrible posture.

The Saturnine Dreadnought is a behemoth, but it’s less fiddly than the Mechanicum’s similarly sized Thanatar. Some of the model’s armor plates (on the back of the legs and on the hip guards) are composed of two parts, which aren’t intended to have a visible seam. Unless you’re much better than me at gluing models together neatly, you’ll need to cover the seam with modelling putty and then sand it down.

When it comes to painting these kits, I’m embracing speed painting techniques – multiple layers of dry brushing, plus paint markers for the armor trim. Mk II Space Marine Armor is perfect for it. I put a lot longer into my Saturnine Praetor (the only figure I’ve finished to my satisfaction) and it was a genuine pleasure to paint.

What we don’t have yet

While the titular Saturnine Terminators and Saturnine Dreadnought miniatures are the flashiest part of the release, in the long term, the new core rules will have the most impact on the game. And having pored over those rules I am – with a few caveats – very, very excited.

But first I should acknowledge that I only have part of the picture. I haven’t received any of the Liber army books for Horus Heresy third edition, so I’m missing critical information about how the many changes made to the core of the game will work in practice. Warhammer Community has published enough information that I can make some inferences, but it’s not enough to say definitively that the core rules changes have landed.

Nevertheless, what I’ve read has me extremely excited. Horus Heresy third edition has been tailored to create games packed with all the stuff that makes the Horus Heresy books so enjoyable: nightmarish weapons, epic sword duels, massed armor formations, last minute air extractions, and dutiful infantry dying by the score. It has enough in common with the previous edition it should feel familiar to old players, but the changes are surprisingly sweeping – and all to the better, as far as I can tell.

With that established, lets start with my biggest critique with the rulebook: the rules are still a nightmare to read.

Rules writing and organisation

The Horus Heresy second edition rulebooks suffered from excessively longwinded, legalistic, repetitious prose. That was made worse by the atrocious organisation, which split content into myriad locations across multiple books. Finding the rules was so bad that I backed a Kickstarter for special bookmark stickers just to make navigating them less painful.

The rules text in the third edition core rulebook is better written than that, but it’s still not great. The legalistic language is still there. It’s ironic: this kind of writing is supposed to eliminate any possible ambiguity in how the rules can be interpreted, but it makes it borderline incomprehensible to casual readers, or those of us with ADHD, because every sentence reads like it’s part of a Victorian dowager’s will.

It’s particularly egregious in the ‘basic principles’ section, where the rules employ language so dense and technical that only the most dedicated and experienced wargamers will have the stomach for it, to explain principles so fundamental and basic that only the most uninitiated and green-eared players actually need the explanation.

Regrettably, FAQs and errata are also going to be needed: I spotted a few typos in my read-through, and while double-checking the rules on challenges for this article I spotted a typo that changed the meaning of one of the Challenge Gambits so that it’s functionally useless.

But unlike second edition, the way the rules are organised is actually sane. They’re broken down into five sections, which start with “what things are” and “how things work”, before progressing to “what order to do things in”. The new sections are:

• Basic Principles – wargaming fundamentals like dice rolling and measuring conventions, unit types, stats, the kinds of dice test and check in the game, and how to perform common game actions like attacking or moving units.
• Advanced Principles – Tactical Statuses, Reactions, psychic powers, vehicles, and flyers.
• The Rules of Battle – the turn sequence, and how and when you’ll apply the basic and advanced principles.
• Battles in the Age of Darkness – the rules for building armies and playing scenarios.
• Armoury – core special rules, and universal Psychic powers, that you’ll need to reference.

While I don’t rate the book as a tool for learning the game, it does have promise as a navigable rules reference for the table. And despite what I said earlier about the prose being overly longwinded, every section of rules is a lot shorter than it was in second edition.

Game design priorities

Overall, third edition is somewhat less complicated than second edition. More importantly, I think the designers are far more aware of how complex the game is, and have decided to control where that complexity shows up. There’s a budget of complexity and it’s being spent where it will have the most impact.

In some places, complexity has been reduced by refactoring the rules, presenting (near enough) the same gameplay effects with a more elegant and efficient system. As I noted when previews started, weapons have more stats than they did in second edition, but they don’t need as many keywords.

In other places, things have gone that will materially change the game, but in a limited way. The core spirit of vehicles – that they have armor facing values that are hard for anti-infantry weapons to damage – remain. But the vehicle damage chart is simpler than it was before. Instead of measuring troop disembarkation from a vehicle’s access point, you measure it from the side of the hull with the access point on it. Less nuanced, sure, but how much did the extra complexity contribute to the game?

Below, I’ve picked out three major rules systems that I think demonstrate the game designers’ priorities: the revised systems for flyers, charges, and challenges. They’re interesting in themselves, but they’re also examples of what the designers prioritised this edition-  a balance between rules that are tactically interesting, rules that feel believable, and rules that help to tell an authentic Horus Heresy story.

Flyers and Combat Assignments

Flyers have always been an odd inclusion in Warhammer 40k and the Horus Heresy. Aircraft just don’t operate on the same time frames as infantry and ground armour, so how do you model them in a 28mm wargame? Second edition Heresy bolted wings onto the core vehicle movement rules, resulting in weirdly slow hypersonic aircraft that were still absurdly fast within the parameters of the game.

Third edition has a totally bespoke system: Combat Assignments. Whenever you bring a Flyer out of reserves you give it a mission. That could either be to drop off troops, pick up a unit, make a hit and run strike, or linger for a strafing run. Depending on its Combat Assignment, a Flyer has access to more or less of its weapons during the shooting phase, and will be more or less exposed to enemy return fire.

At the end of its controller’s turn, a flyer will return to reserves. So fighting back against Flyers now requires your opponent to take the Intercept reaction, or deploy their own fighter craft onto your Flyer’s tail using the new Combat Air Patrol reaction.

It’s a bespoke system that feels more believable, and delivers on the same core fantasy: dropping 20 tactical marines out of a Storm Eagle onto an objective, or blowing up the enemy’s lead Spartan with your Avenger Strike Fighter.

Charges

Complexity has also been redistributed in the Assault Phase – it’s actually a little more complex. It’s going to take some testing to find whether or not the balance has shifted towards or away from melee units, butit already seems more interesting.

Charging now starts with a ‘set-up’ move, a small advance by the charging unit with a distance derived from their combined Movement and Initiative stat. For regular Marines this is likely to be about three inches, while for Saturnine Terminators it will be a meagre inch. Then, after the set-up move, first the charger, and then the target unit, get to snap-fire their assault weapons (which now includes pistols) as Volley Fire.

Snap shots are no longer restricted to hitting on a 6+ – instead the target number varies based on the shooter’s Ballistic Skill, and BS4 models like Marines hit on a 5+. You can also use blast or template weapons for snapshots too. So you might take that set-up move even if you don’t intend to charge, as a way to douse your target with flamer templates for the second time in a turn, from an even closer position (assuming they stay as assault weapons).

The set-up move is also vital for making it into combat, because charge moves are no longer 2D6 inches: now you roll 2D6 and pick the highest single die for your move distance. This still leaves you with a better than 50% chance of rolling a five or higher, and a 75% chance of rolling a four – so with set-up moves, your regular Marines will usually move a total of six to eight inches in the charge phase, just like they did before. But long bomb charges are gone.

This is going to starkly differentiate fast and slow units. Any units that get bonuses to their set-up moves – and GW has revealed that the Space Wolves and World Eaters get armywide buffs to this – will be noticeably better at making charges, and can even perform very close charges that stop their target making Volley Fire or taking the Overwatch reaction. Meanwhile, very slow units like Saturnine Terminators will have a greatly reduced maximum melee threat range.

In terms of both narrative and verisimilitude, infantry shouldn’t be able to outpace main battle tanks just because of a lucky charge roll. It should create real differentiation between fast and slow units – lucky charge rolls were always a way for slow units to mitigate some of that downside, and that option is just gone. Assault weapons are suddenly a lot more interesting, and close range Zone Mortalis engagements should be really spicy.

Challenges

I was sceptical when I first read about the new challenge sub-phase. The challenge rules have always struck me as an awkward outgrowth of the main combat system, and here was a new system that put even more emphasis on them. But the rules have been expanded so much that they’re now a fully fleshed mini-game, free from basic assumptions of combat, and I’m very excited to try them out.

When a Challenge is accepted, the two character models get yanked out of the melee – they’re not part of the wider fight, though the number of supporting troops they have may affect who is in control of the duel. This immediately removes those questions about how other models can (or can’t) attack the duellists.

The players then select Gambits for their heroes. These are special moves, fighting styles, and dirty tricks, which can affect anything from which model attacks first, to how well they fight, to how easily they can disengage from combat, to how much your victory will influence combat resolution.

The core gambits are deeply thematic, from Grandstand – which slows you down, but grants you bonus attacks based on how many allies you have watching – to Feint and Riposte, which lets you prevent your opponent from using a specific alternative Gambit. Each Legion gets its own Gambits, and so do the special characters. GW has already revealed Perturabo’s Gambit ‘The Breaker’ – he doesn’t even bother to fight his opponent, and instead invites a nearby squad to open fire on them with their guns.

The challenge sub-phase in a single turn can also include multiple rounds of fighting. Assuming both fighters survive the first pass of the duel, whoever has the upper hand can decide to go into a second round, and a third, and so on, until one fighter dies or retreats. Some Gambits don’t even focus on killing your opponent, but instead on getting a better position for subsequent rounds.

With multiple rounds, duels between Primarchs might actually reach a conclusion within a normal game. And this new structure means that challenges are full of decisions, second-guessing your opponent while picking the optimal Gambit. While it will take playtesting to determine whether or not these are interesting decisions, I’m genuinely excited to find out – and I’m an Iron Warriors player, for crying out loud.

The overall gameplay experience

I hope that I’ve given enough evidence for my point – the designers are aiming to balance gameplay, believability, and narrative. They’re treating the complexity of the rules as a finite resource, and investing it in rules areas where it’ll add the most.

From turn to turn, you’re going to have opportunities to create the sort of moments you might find in a Horus Heresy book – but what will the experience of a whole game be? I can’t say, not until I have my power claws on the new Liber army books. But the rules for scoring, some of the changes to flyers and transport vehicles, and even the length of a game, give us some tantalizing hints.

Scoring

The way you score points in a game dictates how you play it, and that dictates what kinds of stories it can tell. When people say that 40k doesn’t feel very narrative driven, I think that a large part of the dissatisfaction comes from the scoring system – standing units on buttons and performing randomly assigned tasks is an acceptable way to get points, but it doesn’t curate a narrative.

Superficially, the new core missions for Heresy are pretty similar to second edition, and to 40k. Your Primary objective is to hold objective markers, some of which may be worth more points than others. Classic Secondary objectives reward you for doing things like slaying enemy leader models, having the most models alive at the end of the game, or getting kills in turn one.

But four unit special rules tune this up enormously: Line X, Support X, Vanguard X, and Expendable X.

• If a model has the Line X ability, it counts as X extra models when determining who controls an objective, and you gain X extra victory points for holding an objective with that unit
• If a model has the Support X ability, the maximum victory points it can score by holding an objective is capped at X.
• Vanguard X models only ever score one victory point for holding an objective, but if they ever wipe out an enemy on an objective in melee, or drive them off an objective, you gain an additional X victory points.
• For the purposes of the ‘First Blood’ and ‘Slay the Warlord’ secondary objectives, and the Vanguard special rule, Expendable X units are only worth X victory points.

40k has struggled forever to make it worth your while to bring basic infantry. In 10th edition they’re better at holding objectives than more dangerous units – but you can’t hold a unit when you’re dead, so that advantage doesn’t last very long. The Line rule adds a big pay-off for taking relatively toothless units: if you can create the conditions for them to hold an objective, you’re going to score more points than a player with a more elite force. Support is the flip side of this, making especially damaging units less effective as objective grabbers.

Likewise, the Vanguard rule rewards players for using aggressive melee units aggressively! They’re a terrible unit to leave holding an objective, but if you can capture an objective with them you’ll get a nice reward. And the Expendable rule balances out the liability of units that are forward deployed and vulnerable (like Tarantula batteries), or whose purpose is simply to die (like Mechanicum Tech Thralls or Militia conscripts).

It’s very gamey, and kind of artificial – these are scoring penalties and bonuses stapled onto unit stats, rather than arising organically from the game rules. But, as I said, the way a game gives you points dictates how you will play it – and these amendments are going to encourage players to hold objectives with their line troopers, storm them with assault vanguards, and not worry about the points liability of expendable units. It’s narrative sugar.

A mixed arms wargame

Games of Heresy are now limited to just four turns – and in the core missions, you can score points for objectives you hold at the end of the very first turn. Units have fewer opportunities to move, and thanks to the changes to charge rolls, they’ll have a harder time stealing additional movement with long charges. There’s a significant change to Deep Striking, too – it’s limited to one unit per turn, and in a return to an older version of the rules, you can’t charge after Deep Striking.

Mitigating this are several changes to how transports work. The rules for damaging vehicles have been changed and so far, it seems that it will be slightly harder for vehicles to get blown up: hull points have gone up, penetrating hits simply cannot cause a vehicle to explode in one shot, and glancing hits must first inflict status effects before they can inflict lasting damage. The humble Rhino has even gained +1 to its front Armor Value.

Units can also charge after disembarking any kind of vehicle. This will be a disordered charge, denying the unit the set-up move, volley fire, and any charge bonuses, but hey – a charge is a charge. And if that transport vehicle is an aircraft, they can do that from reserves, and even on turn one, provided their reserve roll comes up.

The penalty for being in a transport vehicle that comes under fire has been reduced – there’s no need to test to see if a unit becomes pinned when its unit receives a penetrating hit. Now that vehicles can’t be blown up by a lucky roll on the vehicle penetration chart, infantry only have to worry about being hit by shrapnel if a vehicle has the ‘Explodes X’ special rule; and even flyer crashes are easier to survive.

So being in a transport vehicle has more upsides and fewer liabilities. Whether the changes to vehicle survivability will hold up against Dreadnoughts and Heavy Support squads remains to be seen, but it’s a move in the right direction.

Summary

There’s so much more I could say, and much more that I simply won’t know until I have a chance to play this game. Tactical Statuses have a new prominence in the rules – but will they actually be that important in play? With the changes to the assault phase, movement, and shorter game length, will melee armies be viable? Will weapons’ new damage characteristic end the age of Dreadnought dominance?

Horus Heresy second edition felt like something that had evolved – third edition feels more designed. That kind of change usually only happens when there’s a ground up overhaul of a game, and the changes here are certainly comprehensive – yet it still feels like a continuation of the older design legacy. I’m not sure what more I could ask for. But it’s not an ideal product for everyone.

If you’ve got the cash and already play Heresy, get Saturnine. Even if you only want the rulebook and tokens, you can sell the minis online and make back the cost of the box. If you’re on the fence about the game and want a way to jump in, find a community to play with before you think about buying this, and borrow an army for some demo games. It’s not an introductory product, and starting with Saturnine would mean investing a staggering amount of time and effort into something you’re not certain is right for you.

As for the third edition of Horus Heresy… well, the new Liber army books could ruin it all, I guess, but that doesn’t seem too likely. I’m stoked. I think this is going to be a real good one.