Emperor's Children: Coterie of the Conceited Detachment Guide (11th Edition)

Two clauses in the rule decide how the whole detachment plays, and both are easy to misread.

Pact points are never spent. The thresholds read points gained during the battle, which is a cumulative lifetime total, not a per-round balance. So the detachment is a ramp: every point you bank is permanent, and the question is only how fast you climb.

Pledging is compulsory while your Warlord is on the table. There is no safe option of pledging nothing to avoid the penalty. You must name a number, and if you miss it you gain nothing that round and your Warlord takes D3 mortal wounds.

That combination produces a clear strategy. Pledge low and pledge reliably. A pledge of 1 that you make in all five rounds banks 5 Pact points and reaches the [LETHAL HITS] and [SUSTAINED HITS 1] threshold. A pledge of 3 that you make twice and miss three times banks 6 points but costs your Warlord 3D3 mortal wounds, which in this faction will often kill him, and a dead Warlord stops you pledging at all.

The exception is a round where you can count the kills before you commit. If your opponent has three units that are one wound from dying and your army is in range of all of them, pledge 3. The skill in this detachment is being honest with yourself about which round is which.

Unbound Arrogance (1 CP) is the safety valve: once per battle round, just after one of your units destroys an enemy unit in your Shooting or the Fight phase, increase your pledge by 1. This is how you pledge conservatively and then raise the number after the kills have actually happened. The pack's own FAQ answers the awkward case directly: if your Warlord is not on the battlefield you can still use it, and your pledge increases from 0 to 1.

The 7+ threshold hands your entire army a 5+ Critical Hit threshold, on top of [LETHAL HITS] and [SUSTAINED HITS 1] from the 5+ threshold, on top of both re-rolls. Reaching it means every melee weapon in the army is generating automatic wounds and extra hits on a third of its dice. Nothing else in the faction approaches that.

But be clear about what 3 DP means, because it is a real cost rather than a formality. Taking Coterie of the Conceited means you get no second detachment: no Mercurial Host to make your Advances reliable, no Rapid Evisceration to get you across the table, no Spectacle of Slaughter for your Flawless Blades. Everything this army does, it does with the army rule, this one detachment rule and its six stratagems.

And the ramp is slow and back-loaded. In round one you have nothing. A conservative pledge of 1 per round reaches the 5+ threshold at the end of round five, which is the last round of most games. That is the honest weakness: the detachment's best bonuses often arrive too late to use.

The trade is right when your list is wide, cheap and reliable at finishing units off, because the rule counts enemy units destroyed rather than points killed. It is wrong when your list is a few expensive hammers, because a hammer that kills one big unit a turn banks exactly the same single Pact point that a squad of Tormentors does for finishing off a chaff unit, and the hammer costs five times as much.

Six stratagems, all 1 CP, and unusually most of them name only Emperor's Children rather than a narrow keyword.

Armour of Abhorrence is the entry Faction Pack v1.2 rewrites by name for this detachment. Until the attacking unit has finished making its attacks, each time an attack targets your unit, worsen its Armour Penetration by 1. The rewrite widened it from an attack targeting a model in your unit to one targeting your unit, which is a real improvement in how reliably it applies.

Protection of the Dark Prince gives a unit Feel No Pain 6+, and Feel No Pain 4+ against mortal wounds, until the end of the phase. Worth remembering that your own detachment rule deals your Warlord D3 mortal wounds on a failed pledge, and this is the only thing in the detachment that helps with that.

Unshakeable Opponents lets a unit ignore any or all modifiers to Ballistic Skill or Weapon Skill, to the hit roll and to the wound roll, until the end of the turn. It is a Command phase stratagem, so it has to be planned rather than reacted with.

Martial Perfection re-rolls hit rolls for a unit that has not fought this phase. Note it does not overlap with the 1+ Pact point threshold, which only re-rolls hit rolls of 1, so it remains useful all game.

Embrace the Pain forces every enemy model within Engagement Range of your INFANTRY unit to select that unit as the target of its attacks. A compulsory-target effect protects everything else in that combat, and it is how you keep a fragile character alive in a crowded fight.

Unbound Arrogance is the pledge-raising stratagem covered in the first section.

All four are Pledge enhancements, all read Emperor's Children model only, and one of them matters more here than it would anywhere else.

Pledge of Eternal Servitude (25 pts) brings the bearer back the first time it is destroyed, on a passed Leadership test, with D6 wounds remaining. In most detachments that is a nice insurance policy. Here it is close to essential on your Warlord, because the detachment rule only lets you pledge while your Warlord is on the battlefield, so losing him does not merely cost you a model, it switches off your entire detachment rule.

Pledge of Unholy Fortune (30 pts) is the most flexible: once per turn, treat a hit roll, wound roll or saving throw for a model in the bearer's unit as an unmodified 6. It can save the character or finish the kill that makes your pledge.

Pledge of Mortal Pain (15 pts) is the cheapest and feeds the mechanic directly: at the start of your Shooting phase, an enemy unit within 12 inches takes a Leadership test at -2 if Battle-shocked and suffers 3 mortal wounds if it fails. A repeatable way to finish a wounded unit is exactly what a pledge needs.

Pledge of Dark Glory (25 pts) improves Leadership and Objective Control by 1 for the bearer's unit, which is the Priority Assets pick.

For the list: Fulgrim is the strongest Warlord candidate, which matters unusually much here given what a dead Warlord costs you; his keywords gained MOBILE in this pack. Tormentors are how you actually make pledges, because the rule counts units destroyed rather than points, so numerous cheap squads that can finish off weakened enemies are worth more than one hammer. Flawless Blades are the reliable melee unit for clearing the extra unit a pledge depends on, and they gain most from the 5+ threshold. Lord Exultant carries whichever Pledge enhancement you take.

No pairings are listed on this page because at 3 DP this detachment fills a Strike Force budget on its own.