One of many huge changes coming to the newly reimagined Kill Team (you didn’t miss the reveal, did you?) is a complete rework of operatives’ characteristics. Instead of directly adapting Warhammer 40,000 rules, datacards present a new collection of stats that capture each combatant’s aptitudes and special skills in greater detail. Oh, and there’s a new movement system too! Let’s take a look at this Hardened Veteran of the Death Korps of Krieg to see what it all means.
The first thing you’ll notice is the Movement characteristic – what exactly does 3◯ mean? To keep everything quick and easy to measure, Kill Team uses a system of four colours with corresponding shapes to represent common distances.
This allows you to easily check your ranges using the combat gauges included in the Kill Team: Octarius box. As operatives are injured or affected by special conditions, their movement values will increase or decrease – this new system makes modifying their characteristics a snap.
To the right of the Movement characteristic, the Action Point Limit (or APL for short) determines how many actions an operative can attempt in a single activation. While most humans and xenos have a score of two, particularly powerful models like Space Marines can do even more with their turn. We’ll be covering exactly what actions your soldiers can perform in a later article, as there’s far too much to show off here.
Given the tense, close-quarters nature of a Kill Team mission, it’s only a matter of time before bullets start flying. Luckily, your operatives have the Defence characteristic to help keep them alive. This represents how good they are at diving to the ground or otherwise getting out of the way of enemy fire.
The model’s Save value is the only thing that made it across from the old Kill Team datacards, though you may be surprised to know that now it only protects you from ranged attacks. An entirely new system turns your melee fights into the desperate back-and-forth duels you’d expect to see in action movies, which we’ll be exploring in more detail later this week.
See that? Even a humble Guardsman has seven Wounds now. In fact, all operatives now have a much higher Wounds characteristic than before. This goes hand in hand with changes to weapon damage, creating for more cinematic moments as injured soldiers limp towards their objectives, while fewer operatives are cruelly cut down before getting their chance to act.
An operative’s abilities and unique actions are what truly set them apart from their comrades. Each model’s specialist skills are represented either as an effect that lasts all game, or as actions they can take in the heat of battle. The Hardened Veteran can shrug off even the most grievous wounds, for example, while the Comms Veteran can use their vox-casters to relay spur-of-the-moment orders to distant comrades.
Lastly, there’s a keyword section at the bottom of the card – familiar to players of Warhammer 40,000 – that lets you quickly see if an operative is affected by rules that target a specific keyword. Next to that is an array of four symbols representing the specialisms your operatives can adopt during a narrative play campaign as you build a kill team of storied heroes. We’ll be taking a much closer look at narrative play in a future article too.
Join us again tomorrow for more Kill Team rules talk as we dive into the deadly realm of ranged combat. We’re aiming to cover every major change coming to the all-new Kill Team over the next week or so to get you ready to deploy when Kill Team: Octarius pre-orders arrive next month. In the meantime, be sure to check out the new Kill Team website and the awesome, blood-soaked Kill Team cinematic trailer.
