Let's Be Friends! - Chaos Space Marines

Giving us a one two punch of darkness, comes our look at allies for Chaos Space Marines! These guys have access to a lot more friends than what their Daemonic counterparts do, and all of them offer something pretty darn amazing. To me, the biggest reason to look at most of these allies is because for a (mostly) minimal tax, they replace your cultists, which is awesome! Cultists aren't bad by any means, and certainly work in the right list, but some of these allies ought make you question their necessity or validity. So, let's try to keep an open and evil mind as we examine those who are willing to ally themselves with the servants of the dark gods.


The most obvious ally comes from our last article, Chaos Daemons! These guys have to either forsake heralds or greater daemons, which sucks, because greater daemons are awesome, and heralds help make the troops matter. That said, if you like or own Daemons models, don't field cultists. Don't. You might want to, but the daemons are just plain better. Both have similar costs, but daemons are fearless and invulnerable, and they have rules that actually matter. Not only that, but daemons offer you soul grinders and some quick hitters in the form of cavalry or beasts. If you need to tie something up in your meta, make some quick daemonic friends and go for it. Literally every god has options to pick something good up from the Daemons book, especially in terms of psychic powers.

Then there's the Guard. Again, these guys will replace your cultists. Guardsmen do infinitely more than cultists could ever hope to do. Our fellow former imperials also bring the vandetta, to fly alongside our heldrake, reigning terror from the heavens! Past that, guard should only be looked at for cheap platoons to replace your cultists, and for options to up your armor saturation for highly mechanized lists. This is especially valuable for Maulerfiends, which really like to capitalize on high volumes of mech on your side of the table. On the whole though, these guys are super straightforward.

Moving along, we find the Lawful Evil to our Chaotic Evil: the Necrons. Aligning yourself with the evil robots allows you to bring plenty of highly aggressive flyers. Unfortunately, they do not offer you an out to cheap troops. Sure, warriors can sit on a base, and immortals help by being nice shock troop reinforcements, but bringing Necrons is not going to solve any of your cost problems. However, they do allow you to play much more aggressively in almost any phase of the game, and really get maximum mileage out of the mark of Khorne, Slaanesh, or even Nurgle. Ultimately, you'll want to bring some kind of CC presence to balance out the shooting presence from Necrons, but there's nothing wrong in the current edition with going for broke on the shooting phase.

Next comes Orks. These guys fit back into the mold of offering cultist replacements. Boys replace cultists. They just do, and they do it very very well. Their stat line is superior and they have the out to fearless in large enough numbers. Alternative options include mega boss with mega nobz in a land raider rush list, crammed full of khorne berzerkers. Very aggressive, very choppy, and probably not very good. Don't let that stop you though! These guys make for potent allies, but their lack of strong shooting options might make them challenging to use effectively.

Last, there's Tau. I'm not really sure why these guys will work together, but, whatever. Follow the rule of cool, defy the fluff and cause the space commies to worship the dark ones. Adorn the riptide with spikes, and watch while it and your dinobots throw away your opponents army with impunity. Crush the non-believers! Other possibilities include swapping your obliterators out for crisis suits, and obviously, swap cultists out for fire warriors. If you can justify it to yourself, this is potentially an excessively potent mix, as anyone who's seen what two dragons and a riptide do to an opposing army at 1500 points.

So, there we have it! A quick and effective breakdown of who is willing to work with the former angels of death. Did I miss something? Undervalue or overestimate something's potency? Hit me up in the comments! Thanks for reading!