Okay Crusaders vs Intercessors. (Full explanation)

For the "Too long didn't read" group.

• Intercessors are 2ish Wound better than Crusaders on an Objective Marker.
• Crusader's are 1ish Wound better than Intercessors off an Objective Marker.
• Adding the rest of the list makes Crusader's pull ahead as long as you build for them.
• Intercessors work better in a vacuum and you can run whatever you want with them.
• Used 3 AI to run the math.
• Hail the God Emperor

Summery is the difference is 2ish Wounds with the Intercessors on an Objective. Off objective the Crusaders are about dead even before you add anything to the Crusaders. However the moment you drop Crusaders into a list with supporting effects they can actually outperform the Intercessors by as much as 6 Wounds on an Objective. So really saying one is definitively better than the other is an argument in tiny decimal points and semantics. Play what you want to play they are both good just depends what your playstyle is and how many points you want to spend. If you want to fight on Objectives and keep people from fighting you on Objectives, Intercessors. If you build a list to work with them or fight anywhere on the map**,** and bring supporting effects and or Characters, Crusaders.

So by default (very important word here) Intercessors are mathematically better than Crusaders **On Objective Markers. Why is this? Well Intercessors get rerolls to Wound. Either 1s to Wound if off Objective full rerolls if on Objective. Crusaders get Sustained Hits 1 on their chainswords. We are ignoring the Crusaders surge move for now because it is hard to compare with dice rolls.

If you ask an AI to run the math (Or are the kinda person that likes to run calculations by hand be my guest), we get what I am about to tell you. Now note I DID NOT do AP with these since that gets into the nature of your Target and that really skews the math. That said I will talk about AP a little at the very end. That said, we assume Wounding on 4s just for an average and a success on the Wound roll is a "Wound". We are also only doing 10 man Crusaders vs 10 man Intercessors. 20 man blobs are a different animal and if you are running a 20 man blob you don't care about Intercessors anyway because you are having fun (Good on you I'm proud).

As long as the Target is on an Objective Marker the full rerolls to Wounds wins by about 3 more Wounds on average (looking for 3s to hit then 4s to Wound) just counting the chainswords and not looking at special weapons (that comes later). Now if the Target is not on an Objective Marker and we only reroll 1s to Wound Crusaders and Intercessors are about the same with Crusaders being about 1ish Wound better. So marginal.

Now lets add in the Power Fists and Master Crafted Power Weapon. Assuming the fists Wound on 2s suddenly the Crusader squad actually jumps to 17 Wounds on average over the Intercessors who do about 15 almost 16 making the Crusader 1 definitively Wound better. Why? Because Power Fists may be 3 attacks instead of 4 but they Wound on 2s, there are 2 of them, and the MC Power Weapon has Lethal Hits. This is kinda marginal as the numbers have changed by decimal points between pure chainswords and adding special weapons but bears mentioning. We will be using actual load out from now on with 2 fists and an MC Power Weapon on the Crusaders and 1 Power Fists on the Intercessor Sargent.

Now, lets see why the word default matters so much. The Crusader squad does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of the Black Templars, a rather well constructed codex full of complementary parts. Contrary to popular competitive list opinions there are more units added by the codex than just Repulsor Executioners and Sword Brethren. The parts that really matter for our purposes are the Characters namely Grimaldus, Castellans, and Marshals, as well as the Landraider Crusader.

Grimaldus and the Castellan both give full rerolls to hit (I assume you passed your Leadership for simplicity) and are the first example we are looking at. Flat out, Sustained Hits 1 goes to 2 Wounds over Intercessor's reroll 1s to Wound but still lags behind full reroll to Wounds on an Objective Marker by 2ish Wounds. (Getting very close to marginal)

Now lets add a Marshal and a Castellan combo into the mix. This is slightly unfair since critical hits do not matter to Intercessors however the Crusaders suddenly jump from being behind the full reroll to Wound intercessors to within that marginal range where they are mathematically dead even. Note this is now comparing anywhere on the map vs just on objectives. So argument can be made Crusaders pull ahead due to not being positionally dependent and having a surge move. But we are not counting those so dead even.

But what happens if we add in one of the effects that lets the Crusaders reroll 1's to Wound?Say getting out of a Landraider Crusader or an Objective marked by a Combi-Weapon Lieutenant. Suddenly there is no margin. With the Crusader rerolling 1s to Wound they leap to 26 Wounds over Intercessors 20 on Objective Marker with the Marshal Castellan Combo. With the Castellan or Grimaldus they are about dead even with the Crusaders being about 1 Wound more (still marginal there and both dealing 20ish Wounds). But again the Crusaders are potentially doing this anywhere on the map and the Intercessors are only doing this on an Objective marker.

So conclusion. It all depends on what you are doing. If you build a list with complementary parts your Crusaders will outshine your Intercessors because they can take it to the enemy anywhere. I will also add that frankly the Crusaders also have more AP and Wounds on hit thanks to having more power weapons on deck. They also get the surge move and can be given the Intercessor's Ability to reroll 1s to Wound very easily. But you need to build for it. If your just spamming 3 Executioners the Intercessors will work better because they require no infrastructure. If you can always get them to fight on an Objective, they will always win.

If you want to crunch the numbers yourself I would recommend bouncing between 2 AI's at least since despite being fancy calculators, they gave slightly different results (We are talking decimal places but still). I used Grok, Gemini, and ChatGBT and fed them the same information to get my conclusions.

Please by kind, I know I'm speaking out against the meta but it needs to be said that defaulting to Intercessors is not always the right move.