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Hot Take: Astra Militarum Vehicle Datasheets
Commissar Graves
They did it, they made “drive me closer so I can hit them with my sword” an entire Datasheet.
Commissar Graves on the Commissar Wagon provides the Astra Militarum with the combination of a buff engine for Transport-heavy builds and a powerful positional/objective play piece. Buff-wise, she’s an Officer who can hand out Move! Move! Move!, Duty and Honour! Or Fix Bayonets! to one Regiment or Squadron unit (which can include herself since she is Squadron), which is neat but not particularly unique, as the real prize for Squadron is usually Take Aim!. However, as a mechanised commander extraordinaire, she gets a unique and very powerful trick on top of this, which is that any time in your Movement Phase a Regiment unit disembarks from a transport that’s within 6” of her, she can immediately issue it one of those Orders (with no limit on how many she can do this for).
That opens up some pretty interesting plays for the Militarum, mostly focused around throwing Kasrkin or Krieg Combat Engineers out of Transports to go get stuff done. For the former, handing them free Move Move Move gets them where they need to be without using up their own free Order, which they can then layer on top. You can also use this for Combat Engineers, and for them the option of using Duty and Honour to boost their OC is also very interesting, as it lets them double dip as a source of a Mortal Wound spike and as Primary denial. It needs a bit of forward planning, but you can squeeze some decent value from her this way.
You also benefit from her being a pretty handy all-rounder piece to go out and cause a bit of mayhem. How good this is as a plan will depend on her cost, but her statline is great for just driving around the board denying objectives, blocking enemy hulls and generally just being a pain. T8 12W with a 4+ Invulnerable Save takes actual killing, and OC5 hits a really good breakpoint with that where she ties or out-OCs most other hulls/monsters. She can also move 15” with Move Move Move, gets free Mortals on the charge, hits pretty decently with her sword when she does connect, and has 24 S5 shots at 18” range. Also, if it comes up, she can do a Commissar execution by gatling cannon to un-Battle-shock friendly Infantry, which is incredibly funny, and also ties into her whole mechanised commander schtick (as one of the most common situations where you might need that is after an Emergency Disembark).
Graves rules, and she provides a bit of a build-around for Transport-heavy armies, and has the potential to be a really great value piece at the right price point for wider Militarum use.
You can also take her on foot. Stripped of her sweet ride, Commissar Graves is a lot less interesting - she’s a special Commissar who can use Move Move Move as well as Duty or Fix, hits decently hard in combat, and lets her unit Fall Back/Shoot/Charge. Those are fine things to be able to do, but probably not something you actively want to spend points on achieving in a Guard list.
Centaur RSV
The Centaur adds a new Transport flavour to the Guard arsenal, providing a ride that’s squishier than either the Chimera or Taurox, but rewards you for keeping models embarked within it. While it barely packs any guns of its own, it is fully open-topped, so everyone inside can shoot out, and while it has models embarked it gets +1OC for each full three models riding within.
That means if you want to do sick drive-bys, or put some layered Primary scoring on on objective, there’s some definite interest here. The best unit to stash on board is almost certainly Catachan heavy weapon teams. You can stick six lascannons on one of these bad-boys, the Scout 6” applies, and it lets you squeeze extra value out of an Order or any Stratagem you care to apply. Should you do this? Unclear - it feels like you probably want this slightly cheaper than existing options to reflect it depending on the embarked unit more, so we’ll have to see where that ends up. If that play doesn’t work out, it is possible that you end up running one with regular Catachans as an early scoring piece - it covers a lot of ground out the gate and puts a pretty decent scoring setup onto an expansion objective.
Hippogriff AFV
The Astra Militarum add a second, adorable little car to their roster here, fitting into the well-travelled space of being a light vehicle with one meaningful gun and a unique trick. The trick first, because it might affect which gun you pick - after shooting, the Hippogriff can move d6”. This is OK - it lets you poke out really carefully and snipe on some boards, but it’s not reliable enough to make big plays with.
If you’re going for the poke and snipe option, taking a heavy lascannon from among the guns seems fine. You can take a couple of these in a unit if you want to put buffs on them and snipe, or if you instead want to drive straight at the foe and try and kill them, you can put three melta shots on one by taking the melta cannon and side-slung meltagun.
This seems OK, but the Datasheet has a fairly steep hill to climb because it’s being dropped into a faction that contains the Emperor’s perfect light vehicle, the Scout Sentinel. Technically this has a few areas where it’s superior to those - it’s faster once battle commences, especially because the guns have Assault, and T8 is a meaningful break point. However, Scout Sentinels do so much for the army that you’d need a really compelling reason to take these over them, and Sentinels are realistically already as cheap as you can safely make a unit in this sort of weight class. We’ll see where the points end up, but pretty skeptical on this one.
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