When is a Rhino not a Rhino?

So I have a dilemma, Rhino, or more precisely Rhinos. With my masses of unpainted Chaos troops I have plenty of them waiting and willing for a lick of paint and swell the armies of Abbadon and his cohorts. For Chaos I am fond of using many of my 1.0 Rhinos, with the newer Rhinos being used mostly by my Sisters of Battle with a few stragglers for my Angels of Vengeance, the only other loyalists I currently play.

The problem is that in 5th edition Rhinos are good, they are cheap in points, provide speed, mobile cover and are normally impervious to my opponents dice rolling. I am lucky that there seems to be a lack of interest in melta guns…

All this sounds good, but I am now about to embark on building several Space Marine armies, I know several. Each of these armies is crying out for Rhinos or Razorbacks and I cannot bring myself to use the 1.0 version with them. So I need to buck up, have a stiff drink and work out how many Rhinos I need to buy. Normally I am looking at three transport vehicles in a thousand points and an extra two in the next thousand points. In this total will also be Dreadnoughts, Land Raiders and Predators, more vehicles to purchase. So if I work on a very conservative total of 10k of additional Space Marines over the next ten months, I will require twenty five Rhinos or Razorbacks, or even Drop Pods, realistically probably more. Add in say an extra ten Land raiders or Predators and I am looking at £750.00 of vehicles to realise my goal.

I have played and do play against players who refuse to bow down to the mighty Rhino; they both win and lose games just the same as me. I think it is time I rethought my goal of everything in a transport vehicle and instead returned to foot cavalry; it was good enough for Napoleon…

I am going to have to revisit and rethink how I build armies, with one eye on the Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as the point cost of the force. I am looking to increase my 1k list of Flawless Host to 2k, I managed to scrape around a little of this and that to make up the numbers, the army lacked heavy firepower that two units of two Obliterators will now provide, and having spent the last points I realised that I will need five Chaos Rhinos for the list, five Chaos Rhinos that have not been sprayed black at some point in their past. I have no Chaos Rhinos that fulfil this criteria so will have to pick up five of them to fill out that list. So it is back to the drawing board, or more accurately the points counting spreadsheet.

I am making a vow that every list has at least one squad that relies on feet to move, they can always take the home objective or borrow another squads transport if needed. This should hopefully reduce transport in 1k lists to two vehicles and if I can take one off the second thousand point list I will cut my costs by 40%.

Hmmm, just thinking about how many more models I can now afford….  Oh and the answer to the riddle is, when it is a twenty pound note!