Lord Inquisitor wrote:
Faithful.
I’m not sure I like the idea of tying it to characters. Yes, this is done in 40K, but then any squad like a basic Battle Sisters can take a character upgrade that makes the squad faithful. In 40K, effectively all squads are faithful in a sisters army. In epic, you can simply make all true sororitas apart from the repentia Faithful and be done with it, and this was what I did in my list initially. Giving a *unit* a rule that affects the whole *formation* seems wonky. Note also that your wording will benefit Rhinos and other attached units that aren’t by themselves faithful by any measure. Put simply, I prefer the way Faithful used to be and I don’t understand the rationale for the change.
The rationale for this change is threefold. Firstly, I wanted to up the power of faithful in this list, since it focuses on the ecclesiarchy, and I found from playtesting your list that it really didn't do much. This is why I allowed regrouping, effectively making it a standard
hold order with the bonuses.
Secondly, this is also why I made it affect everything in the formation. Faithful effectively is mainly used for bunkering down and holding objectives. As such, it's about surviving, but the bonuses were often made useless in your version because the vehicles in the formation were not protected, so the formation would still take a bunch of kills and break.
Thirdly, the change to only characters and seraphim having faithful was not just to represent the background better, but also to give some reason to take the heroine characters. Frankly,
commander is pretty pointless and the
inspiring that the priests have is far more useful. Compare the number of marine Captains to Chaplains that you see. Without the sisters characters adding something extra they'd never be taken, and that would be a shame. It also acts as a counterbalance to the increase in protective cover to the whole formation; kill the character and they're no longer protected.
Frankly I'm tempted to make it even more powerful; it's still rarely useful.
Lord Inquisitor wrote:
Army list structure.
Broadly, I’m fine with our lists differing in structure, indeed otherwise what’s the point? The one thing I will take umbridge with is the Order Famulous Inductions. Firstly, the most obvious glaring issue is the Lunar Cruiser. No Ecclesiarchical formations should have warship support! It violates the Decree Passive following the Age of Apostasy and even allied forces under Minsitorum command seems fishy. To be honest, the whole “ministorium imperial guard” thing strikes me as really out-of-date canon. Is there any mention of it since Rogue Trader days?
The cruiser is allied, which is why it's in the guard section. I'm well aware of the Decree Passive, hence there is no Ministorum ship, but they needed to get around somehow in the days before they retconned the sisters to work with the inquisition all the time. An allied imperial navy vessel seemed the best option, see my next answer for more details.
Lord Inquisitor wrote:
Last I heard the Ecclesiarchy cannot have a standing army (other than the Sisters, obviously!) and even the Frateris Militia seems to have been phased out. What are these units meant to be? The Orders Famulous are a non-militant order of the sororitas and are diplomats and advisors, is this meant to be Imperial Guard units that have been acquired by the diplomatic corps? That seems silly and quite against the character of the list, furthermore these would be allied, not inducted, formations.
The sister famulous background comes from the sisters list in Codex Armageddon, which is the most recent list to focus on the adeptus ministorum.
"A sister of one of the Orders Famulous can use her connections with the imperial nobility to command other Imperial servants to provide her with troops. These are usually Imperial Guard or Planetary Defense Force Personnel".
I'm perfectly happy to call them allies rather than inductions.
Lord Inquisitor wrote:
I would give serious thought to just axing the entire Order Famulous Inductions set from the list. What purpose does it serve? It also muddies the water – if the Ordo Hereticus list is sisters+guard/inquisition, having guard units in the Ministorum list just waters down the distinction, and it seems to me entirely against the canon that the Ministorum should have *any* kind of Imperial Guard units. The redemptionist formation on the other hand is a great touch. *This* is what the list should be rounded out with, vast swathes of poorly armed and equipped, if pious, rabble. Incidentally, I don’t think the “one per Sororitas detachment” restriction for Redemptionists is required, and I’d be tempted to give them some kind of transport such as trucks in the LatD list.
The Canon issue I have addressed above; the order famulous uses its influence to get imperial troops to command. The role of the guard is much the same as their role in your list; ranged firepower in a list otherwise almost entirely lacking in it. Equally they fill out the number of options in the list which would otherwise be very low given the small number of ecclesiarchy units that exist.
Redemptionists are there deliberately instead of fraternis militia because I've never understood how the militia can be allowed by the Decree Passive. The redemptionists, however, are not technically controlled by the ecclesiarchy; their priests are independant of it and unlikely to obey any orders from above. They would certainly be used by the ecclesiarchy in a great crusade however.
I mentioned previously that I could expand on the redemptionist elements, but that many of the other redemptionist units would overlap significantly with sister units. Zealots would be nigh on the same as Repentia, and Deacons basically the same as battle sisters. Novice would be something new, an even more rubbish and probably disposable unit. Redemptionists never use infantry heavy weapons, so are unable to fill the useful ranged role provided by the guard.
As for transports, the only canonical transport the redemptionists are known to have used is the Redeemer's Pulpitek, which is a cut'n'shut rhino hull crossed with a chapel and armed with a twin autocannon. Only one of these is known to have existed however. I dislike the land transporter mostly because of it's weird generic heavy weapon, and non-canonical status.
Lord Inquisitor wrote:
Allies
I would be very tempted to remove the Titan and Air Support allies, and instead give sororitas good access to flak. While allied Navy formations are a possibility, it seems unlikely and it would really underline the lack of Navy assets that the Sisters have. They simply aren’t allowed military aircraft or spacecraft of their own and they have no authority to requisition them – unlike the Ordo Hereticus. Is a list without aircraft possible? I think so. Challenging? Well, your faith will have to guide you!
Similarly, I would remove the Titan Legion allies. These are followers of the Machine God! What are they doing hanging around with a Ministorum crusade? Simply put, the Mechanicus and the Ecclesiarchy just don’t get along that well, the theological conceit that their worship facets of the same god really doesn’t filter down to the actual devotees. Will that leave a gap in the list? Probably, but, we can fill that gap with gigantic rolling cathedral-fortresses!
I realise the Ordo Hereticus have Navy assets, a range of spacecraft and allied Titans. Well, that’s the benefit for hanging around with the Inquisition, they have contacts... It also serves to differentiate the lists.
If I strip everything out the list just ends up as Witch Hunters but worse.
There is plenty of evidence of sisters wording with the imperial navy; dawn of war has the lightning strike fighter as one of their key units for example, and I have proposed replacing the thunderbolt with it for this reason. The order famulous argument certainly works here;
they'd be able to get PDF aircraft at the very least.
While the ecclesiarchy aren't on great terms with the mechanicus, there is nothing suggesting they don't work together. Indeed the ecclesiarchy do actually have titans of their own, Emporor class ones. I see no pressing need to remove the titans until I've decided what to do in the mobile cathedral direction.
I have no intention of including a 12 DC mobile cathedral as you have; such a construction simply ends up dominating the list, which should be about the sisters and ecclesiarchy. As far as I can tell, the only reference to the mobile cathedrals is one piece of artwork, and that's not enough for me to put in a war engine bigger than a warlord titan. If we're true to the artwork it should be about DC 100 anyway. I will definately be adding a mobile cathedral in some form, but likely a much smaller version, DC6ish?, and maybe a DC3 version as well which could allow me to remove the guard baneblade.
Lord Inquisitor wrote:
Units.
As I said already, I’ll go through the individual units thoroughly later. For the time being, I would just mention the dominion/retributor thing. I don’t like dominions for the same reason I don’t think Space Marines should have veterans. Too fiddly, and I don’t think meltaguns should be represented (plus don’t Chaos Raptors use them?). As for Retributors, I originally made them with heavy bolters and even playtested it ... they sucked. The extra range was really worthless and two AP5+ shots didn’t do much at all when the rest of the army carries AP4+ heavy flamers. The army need AT firepower and it doesn’t need to be long-ranged. So I maintain that the multimeltas are required for balance reasons. Anyway, I understand the desire to have a heavy bolter ranged unit and a melta short-ranged unit, so how about this for a compromise. We rename my unit with 2 multimeltas as “Dominions” ... yes, it’s a bit of a fudge, but bumping meltas to multimeltas is not such a big deal, is it? Then we can also have zombo’s Retributors with heavy bolters to differentiate the two units without needing a unit with meltaguns as a weapon. What do you think?
Dominions are quite different to veteran marines; the sister equivilent of veterans are celestians, who are rightly not represented here. Dominions are special weapons squads.
While one meltagun in a squad of raptors is rightly represented as part of their FF, 4 dominions out of a squad of 5 carry meltaguns. That compares much more accurately to fire dragons, who get not only a MW FF but also a short ranged MW shot. I've just got for the FF, which is actually the conservative option. A unit carrying 4 meltaguns absolutely deserves to be represented at this scale.
Given that this is a ministorum list rather than hereticus, it is right that it focuses a little more on the sisters. One extra unit compared to your list is not the end of the world given how many units are stripped out.
From playtesting your list I found the exact opposite to you with retributors; I found I was severely lacking in the ability to lay BMs at range. I found retributors to be fairly useless, especially if they lost a transport. This was why I changed initially to a mixed weapons load of a heavy bolter and a multimelta, but when Keaios convinced me to include dominions I saw the chance to develop different roles for each type.
Note that this inability to lay BMs at range is one of the reasons I upped the stats of exorcists and allowed them as formation upgrades.
What you do with your list is up to you, but multimeltas are not the same as meltaguns, and dominions cannot carry any heavy weapons, including multimeltas. If you remain dead-set against heavy bolter retributors then I guess we'll have to do some unit renaming.
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I’ve written enough, but broadly the Ministorum doesn’t really play well with others, and I think this list needs to focus on the Ecclesiarchical forces.
The thing is, there are hardly any ecclesiarchical forces. Priests, arco flagellents, penitent engines, maybe redemptionists and fraternis militia, that's all there is.
The point of this list is to show an ecclesiarchical deployment of the sisters, so they are the core and the focus of the list. This is why they are covered at a little more detail in this list, with a character-based, slightly more powerful version of
faithful, dominions and repressors all represented, more upgrades available etc.
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The Ordo Hereticus list has more than enough combined arms stuff so allowing allies or inducted guard forces in really doesn’t differentiate the list enough. I think we can throw in more religious nutters and expand the Sisters themselves a bit. This list needs to focus on the core aspects of the Minsitorum – for example, there should be no spacecraft support, even if an allied warship is theoretically plausible is violates one of the core themes of the list.
The sisters always used to ally with guard before they were connected to the inquisition; it's perfectly fine background-wise.
I'm flexible on the spacecraft; I can't really see anyone taking it anyway. They have to get around somehow though, and this seemed the best fit.