Ever since Boise GT where the winning list had more Stormravens than Tactical Squads, there has been a fair bit of discussion for what this "means for the meta", and such. There have been assorted suggestions on how to rebalance the game to be less spammy, from restricting units to restricting detachments, but these are at best hacks and at worst outright bandaids. So the question is: How would you rebalance 40k, at least before breaking out the core rule rewrites? Several options:
Sideboards: Either a main army plus secondary units, or bringing two armies to swap out so you can approach a tournament with a Rock and a Scissors list. Personally I view this promotes skew even more than normal (look at WMH's history of Defense-skew -> Armorskew/Miserable Meat Mountain). That said, I could see a lesser form of sideboarding/free gear being ok, for super-situational loadouts (things like Free Transports or Free Weapons = no. Free Grapple Hooks=sure why not?)
-Extreme Counters: Rock >> Scissors >> Paper. The problem being armies mixing towards 33% of each, and the first to break the opponent's counterloop gains the advantage.
-Flatlining/Homogenization: Choice is an illusion.
-Secondary Roles: This one is my personal preference. When you have multiple units that do the same thing, only one will emerge the best. See: Markerlight Drones vs Pathfinders, Wyverns versus Mortar Teams, Scorpions vs Banshees (at least until you break out the Fire Dragons), etc. Rather than having units be only good at one thing, most unit should have some secondary utility in case their primary target isn't around! Increasing intra-unit combos and support options could be one way to encourage a mixed list instead of skew: Letting Mortars fire Smoke or Flare rounds for cover manipulation would give them a purpose against all-vehicle armies, giving Scout Bikes the ability to lay AT mines as they move, bringing back the Monolith's ability to teleport infantry or letting its Exile Gate "pull in" enemy units like a tractor beam, etc. This isn't necessarily about drowning the game in tech or gimmicks, so much as each unit should have one "purpose" depending on what sort of hypothetical skew might be encountered.
Or maybe there's some other option for rebalancing 40k. How would you rebalance armies as a whole?
In the examples of mortars firing smoke and scout bikes laying AT mines; the flier spam list would not care about either of those really (flying over mines and moving long distances to get around temporary cover).
The thing is that with the missions as listed, secondary battlefield roles can be largely ignored. Models need to be as fighty as possible, while being durable(or ablative) and being able to score objectives capably. This seems to be the trifecta in my mind: anything outside of that often just falls into the 'cute' category. The missions aren't really diverse enough or strategically demanding enough to warrant other battlefield roles other than killing dudes, helping to kill dudes, and moving fast.
In another thread, someone brought up Infinity and hackers within it being less useful on the field until they shine. Corvus Belli spent a lot of time developing their missions in order to make choices that stray from the 'killability per point' dynamic worthwhile to take. Even then, a good alpha strike against the opponent can be enough to outperform strategically sound armies.
The thing is that with the missions as listed, secondary battlefield roles can be largely ignored. Models need to be as fighty as possible, while being durable(or ablative) and being able to score objectives capably. This seems to be the trifecta in my mind: anything outside of that often just falls into the 'cute' category. The missions aren't really diverse enough or strategically demanding enough to warrant other battlefield roles other than killing dudes, helping to kill dudes, and moving fast.
Agreed.
The problem in 8th edition tournaments is they are using the same terrible Eternal War missions that have been terrible for 5 years. Every single one of those missions has only one objective "kill more than you lose". There is utterly no reason to even try for the objectives in those games. Every mission is kill points.
I'll admit to not having read them yet, my group rarely uses fliers so it seemed irrelevant, but would the Death from the Skies rules help to balance the flier spam?
heckler wrote: In the examples of mortars firing smoke and scout bikes laying AT mines; the flier spam list would not care about either of those really (flying over mines and moving long distances to get around temporary cover).
I get what you mean in this case and definitely agree that better mission formats are a good way to go too (though not necessarily valid for all pickup play). As for smoke, I always preferred the "harder to hit/the unit is defending" implementation rather than the "blocks LoS" implementation, but either way...
...the fact you can't hide from Stormravens is also notable, since the removal of weapon LOS. That was a weakness they had which is no longer a thing.
The problem with a -1 to hit role is that people will bring enough to put a blanket on their entire army, forming another bunker in the process. The same applies to LOS blocking too, but has more workaround to figure out how they could not be broken (done after movement or something).
heckler wrote: In the examples of mortars firing smoke and scout bikes laying AT mines; the flier spam list would not care about either of those really (flying over mines and moving long distances to get around temporary cover).
I get what you mean in this case and definitely agree that better mission formats are a good way to go too (though not necessarily valid for all pickup play). As for smoke, I always preferred the "harder to hit/the unit is defending" implementation rather than the "blocks LoS" implementation, but either way...
...the fact you can't hide from Stormravens is also notable, since the removal of weapon LOS. That was a weakness they had which is no longer a thing.
You bring up a good point; in many games, the meta for pickup play and for tournament play are different (warmachine, infinity). In my games of 40k, at least at my shop, the meta is very close between pick-up play, league play and competitive play. Unless it happens to be a lower point game, or a game against someone new, most people are just testing out a tournament list in a pick-up game.
I think the best option for 're-balancing' 40K is to play as many games as you can and to then write suggestions on the official feedback forum that GW now has.
If other players have come to the same conclusion, I expect the GW team that's now in place will listen - sorting out personal gripes from player-base-wide issues.
Wow. Anyone who thinks we should be rebalancing anything already is dangerously close to an ignore click. Seriously?! Gamer credentials on a probationary status
One tournament doesn't constitute a trend. Most players are still figuring out how their armies play in the new edition. Give it a few months before we decide "this is the meta now".
pismakron wrote: The stormravenlist is not the problem. Missions without objectives to hold IS a problem.
This.
Maelstrom is the way to play.
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EnTyme wrote: One tournament doesn't constitute a trend. Most players are still figuring out how their armies play in the new edition. Give it a few months before we decide "this is the meta now".
Also this.
1 tournament with 38 people.
I just don't see the need to discuss re-balancing at this juncture. It is far too early. I also *hate* the fact that the ITC has already made changes.
zerosignal wrote: Wait. Not enough time or data yet. Wait for the meta to shake out; GW can repoints stuff if necessary.
Adjusting points doesn't fix the issue of skew...
Unless you mean just favoring one type of skew over anothrr
Or see whats winning or losing and why and points adjust from there.
then do it again and again and again and again untill there is a decent amount of diversity.
that kinda play testing takes a long time and a ton of games. and its easier to make other people do it instead of doing it in house only.
But what if the problem is synergy between units?
For example, I have a Baneblade superheavy tank. It's pretty good for it's points. If I add a 90 pt Trojan, it becomes amazing! So it starts winning every game! Here are your options:
1) Increase the points cost of the baneblade - this means you actually see less of it without Trojans, decreasing army diversity
2) Increase the points cost of the Trojan - this means you will actually see less of it without baneblades, as it will no longer be worth it to put alongside a Leman Russ, for example, decreasing army diversity.
It doesnt have to be a straight linear points increase. if the character and the baneblade is causing an issue then increase points between the two of them instead of just one or the other. at some point the increase will interfere with list building forcing other choices.
and you can always revert or adjust points after another round of checks.
It doesnt have to be a straight linear points increase. if the character and the baneblade is causing an issue then increase points between the two of them instead of just one or the other. at some point the increase will interfere with list building forcing other choices.
and you can always revert or adjust points after another round of checks.
The real answer becomes to analyze the special rules of the Trojan that make it so disproportionately good at buffing Baneblades over other models. But sure, slapping point adjustments fixes everything.
I think most tournaments should be 2 list affairs, sideboards would be nice but 40k has to large a point disparity to make that work. if power levels were better balanced it would be nice to say have the option of deploying units and marking their gear at that point/ putting model down. say you don't know what is on your opponents list but the base unit, then "ok deploying this stormraven with assault cannons, missile launcher and hurricane bolters "( may have it magnetized but as it hits the table it is not set in that gear). then opponent says "I am deploying my big mek gun squad they are traktor cannons" (then deploys big guns with that option selected)
it would be a big change but it would make for magnetizing kits to be pretty awesome or for people to buy multiple of the same model which would be good for GW bottom line. unsure how to balance completely though as obviously take something like a heavy weapons team... that 5 point mortar is worth less than that 20 point lascannon unless you buff all the options to pairity.
I don't think a lot of people really know what they mean when they say "balance". Not all lists can be equally balanced against all other lists, that's not how it works.
Adjusting points won't fix how broken a broken unit is.They need to have a better more restrictive foc the way the horus heresy does.
Being able to spam fliers or low is ridiculous when you get to these outlier units. granted, fliers are nowhere near the problem they were in 7th, but low still can be.
when they announced the first 3 foc it looked promising. but the vast majority of the ones we got are just dumb as gak
Lance845 wrote: Adjusting points won't fix how broken a broken unit is.
For a lot of units, actually they will. Because a lot of units are broken, one way or the other, because they're just not worth the points, or they're worth far more than the points indicate. Similarly with upgrades. It will not solve everything. But it will solve a lot of things (and is also why Powerlevels will never be balanced).
(also, don't get me started on the pile of foetid garbage that is horus heresy; the only reason HH is anywhere close to being more balanced is because everyone is the fething same anyway in that boring mess of a game)
There is no meta yet. People are just trying things, and people are trying things in response to the people trying things. It will take some time for lists and tactics to stabilize. This thread is a bit premature.
Some units seem pretty strong. Let's wait until GW's first FAQ/errata of the actual Indexes.
G00fySmiley wrote: say you don't know what is on your opponents list but the base unit, then "ok deploying this stormraven with assault cannons, missile launcher and hurricane bolters "( may have it magnetized but as it hits the table it is not set in that gear). then opponent says "I am deploying my big mek gun squad they are traktor cannons" (then deploys big guns with that option selected)
That's how all sequential drafts work, where each player tries to outpick the opponent's choices.
40k clearly works better when lists are built cooperatively, this is how you formalize it in a competitive environment.
Lance845 wrote: Adjusting points won't fix how broken a broken unit is.They need to have a better more restrictive foc the way the horus heresy does.
Being able to spam fliers or low is ridiculous when you get to these outlier units. granted, fliers are nowhere near the problem they were in 7th, but low still can be.
when they announced the first 3 foc it looked promising. but the vast majority of the ones we got are just dumb as gak
What? No. This is so wrong.
If the only way to fix a unit is restricting how many you can take is acknowledging that the unit is BROKEN so you need to put a tax or limit how many you can take.
Theres cases where a rule is broken. In those cases, the rule need to be reworked. But those are like only 10% of the broken unit cases. The rest are just units that are undercosted. Wraitknights where OP because they were so cheap. Now they are basically the same as in 7th but apropiately costed and they ... BOOM, are balanced.
It doesn't fix anything that you say "Na, Wraitknights can remain a 200p model and be completely OP. You just can take 1 to your army". Is just a band-aid. A BAD one.
People has been so contaminated by the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k mentality than the way to fix OP units is not really fixing them but just limiting how many you can take and obligating you to spend 25% of your points in useless gak troops that nobody want to take instead of making those troops WORTH taking in their own, that I don't know anymore.
All the OP lists we have seen since old Fantasy and 3rd edition have been based around evading the restrictions of taking bad units and just spamming the better ones because they were UNDERcosted. If you point apropiatelly the different units, you solve those problems.
If you make Tac Marines a 3ppm+1ppm for heavy weapons unit every tournament list would be spam of Tactical Marines. Would that be OK? Did you fix that restricting how many troops you can take? The theory to make a good and balanced game is not that hard. Going from theory to reality is the hard work, because it requires math and thousands of variables.
Hollow wrote: I don't think a lot of people really know what they mean when they say "balance". Not all lists can be equally balanced against all other lists, that's not how it works.
This. The guys at FLG and their Chapter Tactics podcasts have talked endlessly about this: you will see spam lists winning a lot at first, but TAC lists will still be better in the long run. Thinking anything but erratas and FAQs need to come out to change some things (like the god damn FW books) is absurd. No, the FOC don't need to change. No, we don't need sideboards or whatever silly thing people will think up next. I recommend if people actually care about competitive warhammer than check out Chapter Tactics podcast by FLG, they just had a great one about tournament lists: https://www.frontlinegaming.org/tag/chapter-tactics/
I actually think sideboards would be pretty cool, but they'd add time to tournament games and make things more difficult to organize.
That said, imagine an event where you had 1500 points of "core" and 350 or 500 points of "sideboard" - after seeing your opponent's core list, you get to swap in what you want. So if someone shows up with flyer spam, you might well swap in a bunch of anti-air vehicles. If they have only Orks on foot, bring out 500 points of heavy bolters and mortar teams.
I do think this would make spammy lists a lot worse, but it would also make it more expensive to be competitive and would take a fair chunk of time, which is always at a premium at big tournaments anyway.
Sadly, just like with powerlevels, sideboards benefit space marines and eldar more than everyone else, simply because space marines and eldar have by far the most options to begin with. A lot of the necessary rebalancing 40k needs that can't be done by points really needs to be done by giving armies more options.
Some of the reasons why even with this, the game seems skewed are due to the following:
1.) Multiple Choice FoCs. A lot of people don't realize or don't seem to remember that the old "CAD" foc was designed specifically to balance the armies. Namely your "troops tax" and "HQ tax" were suppose to be point sinks. Troops were always inherently worse than any other equivallent you might have in your army; that's because they're the bulk of your army. Back then (and I mean like early 4th ed) the few options that did shift something to the Troops section specifically noted that these were special organizations and were likely not as balanced as the main list (this occured in WHFB too, where it was even more restrictive on non-Core choices). The FoC shenanigans that started in 5th and the event that completely obliterated any semblance of the old FoC in 7th is one of the reasons why a lot more armies became "unbalanced". This trend has somewhat been mitigated in 8th, but until they go back to one unified, troop-centric FoC, I doubt the issue of spam will go away.
2.) The 0-1 and 1+ limits. These most people probably don't remember anymore, but on top of the above-mentioned troops-as-pointsinks, these were another layer on top of it all. Most of the problematic units, if they existed back then, often had the 0-1 limit applied. Conversely, a lot of units that people didn't want to field often had a 1+ minimum applied, to force you to field them. I really wish this would return, as it's a quick and simple way to cut down on people spamming certain units.
3.) Warhammer 40k is a skirmish level game; the introduction of flyers, superheavies and such also brought with them so many variables that it resulted in rules designed specifically to break the existing rules of the game (Strength D weapons). While this edition has done a good job of toning them back down, I still feel like Flyers and Superheavies should be moved into their own game outside of 40k; if everything is basically kept at the skrimish infantry level, there will be very few instances of two armies meeting each other and one having rules that make it basically immune to the other army.
You're not remembering very well if you think the "troops tax" was actually effective at the job you describe it as having. People found countless ways around it even back in third edition; it was never very good at that job you describe for it.
Its real purpose was to encourage fluffy armies, where "troops" were the general purpose grunts of their armies. With the focus on Space Marines, however, tacticals have been left in the dust over and over again as GW keeps trying to find more and more ways to make marines which are more marine than the previous marines. Thus it doesn't even do THAT job well, either.
MagicJuggler wrote: Ever since Boise GT where the winning list had more Stormravens than Tactical Squads, there has been a fair bit of discussion for what this "means for the meta", and such. There have been assorted suggestions on how to rebalance the game to be less spammy, from restricting units to restricting detachments, but these are at best hacks and at worst outright bandaids. So the question is: How would you rebalance 40k, at least before breaking out the core rule rewrites? Several options:
Sideboards: Either a main army plus secondary units, or bringing two armies to swap out so you can approach a tournament with a Rock and a Scissors list. Personally I view this promotes skew even more than normal (look at WMH's history of Defense-skew -> Armorskew/Miserable Meat Mountain). That said, I could see a lesser form of sideboarding/free gear being ok, for super-situational loadouts (things like Free Transports or Free Weapons = no. Free Grapple Hooks=sure why not?)
-Extreme Counters: Rock >> Scissors >> Paper. The problem being armies mixing towards 33% of each, and the first to break the opponent's counterloop gains the advantage.
-Flatlining/Homogenization: Choice is an illusion.
-Secondary Roles: This one is my personal preference. When you have multiple units that do the same thing, only one will emerge the best. See: Markerlight Drones vs Pathfinders, Wyverns versus Mortar Teams, Scorpions vs Banshees (at least until you break out the Fire Dragons), etc. Rather than having units be only good at one thing, most unit should have some secondary utility in case their primary target isn't around! Increasing intra-unit combos and support options could be one way to encourage a mixed list instead of skew: Letting Mortars fire Smoke or Flare rounds for cover manipulation would give them a purpose against all-vehicle armies, giving Scout Bikes the ability to lay AT mines as they move, bringing back the Monolith's ability to teleport infantry or letting its Exile Gate "pull in" enemy units like a tractor beam, etc. This isn't necessarily about drowning the game in tech or gimmicks, so much as each unit should have one "purpose" depending on what sort of hypothetical skew might be encountered.
Or maybe there's some other option for rebalancing 40k. How would you rebalance armies as a whole?
I don't understand the question. Could you explain what's wrong that can't be fixed without throwing huge radical wrenches into the works?
I just can't see why people feel that troops should be just bad and a tax to field the units that you really want to field.
The same goes with the 0-1 and 1+. "Oh, yeah, you need to take ALL of this units that you don't want to take because they suck, to be able to field some of the units you really like".
Whats the point in that? Isn't better to the game (But harder to make right) to just balance troops and other units, so people can be free to field what they really want and like and still have a balanced experience? Troops are my favourite part of any army. I spend more time painting and personalizing my troops than my heroes. My lowly sargeants/unit champions have much more effort than the generic HQGW sells, for example.
If the game was properly balanced, spam lists should be posible but tactically inviable.
One thing that's important is to not be too hasty, especially since the dice can swing 40k games pretty wildly. Sometimes one or two key rolls falling off the bell curve can throw a whole game, especially when lists with a very low model count are involved. So we do need to collect large enough datasets to let that randomness shake out. You'll probably need several hundred matches for each unit you want to evaluate.
Isolating confounding factors will be something to watch out for too, so if you want to collect data for balance purposes that data needs to be very detailed. Not just whether a particular faction won or lost, but exactly which models are on the table, what those models did, and how each individual model performed. It could be quite a lot of work to untangle how each model interacts with every other, both friendly and enemy, and how terrain affects them.
Bolters wound 99% of vehicles on a 5+. They hit fliers on 4+. I think the issue is being blown out of proportion now that everything and its dog can take effective potshots at most fliers.
GreenShoes wrote: Or the game is two weeks old and everyone can take a chill pill for a while.
I think the first step to rebalancing 40K 8E is for the community to play the game consistently for at least a year. During that time, take extensive notes as the competitive meta evolves as well as paying attention to how narrative play shapes up. Then, referencing those notes, identify the problems you actually want to fix (as opposed to the problems you thought you wanted to fix when you started the process) and start discussing possible solutions. Once you settle on a set of solutions to the identified problems, implement them, play-test them for a while, tweak them a bit, play-test some more, then release to the public. Repeat the cycle in another year or two.
That'd be my preferred approach.
Alternately we could nerf all the armies I don't play while buffing the ones I play. The problem with that, of course, is that other people who aren't me will also benefit from that if they play my preferred armies. So if we're not going to use my preferred approach I think the best and simplest way to rebalance 40K is to let me take all my units at a 25-50% discount in points or PL whenever I play.
Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote: For tournaments I would say
1) you can't take a duplicate detachment without first taking a different detachment.
2) limit points AND powerlevel.
So the game would be 2000 points with a max powerlevel of 100 and you'd need at least 4 detachments before you could have more than two of the same.
The way you worded #1 doesn't force you to take 4 detachments before having 2 of the same, it forces you to take 1. Your wording is I cannot take a duplicate detachment without first taking a different detachment. So I take a Vanguard, now I cannot take a duplicate detachment unless I first take a different detachment, so I take a spear head, now I can take a vanguard again. You would need to word it as you cannot take a duplicate detachment unless you have taken every other available detachment. However, given most events capping at 3 detachments, you might as well just say, no duplicate detachments.
I think doing points and power level will result in very few effective army choices, it also benefits armies with a lot of upgrades.
Some of the reasons why even with this, the game seems skewed are due to the following:
1.) Multiple Choice FoCs. A lot of people don't realize or don't seem to remember that the old "CAD" foc was designed specifically to balance the armies. Namely your "troops tax" and "HQ tax" were suppose to be point sinks. Troops were always inherently worse than any other equivallent you might have in your army; that's because they're the bulk of your army. Back then (and I mean like early 4th ed) the few options that did shift something to the Troops section specifically noted that these were special organizations and were likely not as balanced as the main list (this occured in WHFB too, where it was even more restrictive on non-Core choices). The FoC shenanigans that started in 5th and the event that completely obliterated any semblance of the old FoC in 7th is one of the reasons why a lot more armies became "unbalanced". This trend has somewhat been mitigated in 8th, but until they go back to one unified, troop-centric FoC, I doubt the issue of spam will go away.
2.) The 0-1 and 1+ limits. These most people probably don't remember anymore, but on top of the above-mentioned troops-as-pointsinks, these were another layer on top of it all. Most of the problematic units, if they existed back then, often had the 0-1 limit applied. Conversely, a lot of units that people didn't want to field often had a 1+ minimum applied, to force you to field them. I really wish this would return, as it's a quick and simple way to cut down on people spamming certain units.
3.) Warhammer 40k is a skirmish level game; the introduction of flyers, superheavies and such also brought with them so many variables that it resulted in rules designed specifically to break the existing rules of the game (Strength D weapons). While this edition has done a good job of toning them back down, I still feel like Flyers and Superheavies should be moved into their own game outside of 40k; if everything is basically kept at the skrimish infantry level, there will be very few instances of two armies meeting each other and one having rules that make it basically immune to the other army.
A lot of this is rose colored glasses. The "combined arms" foc never really functioned well because not all troops were equally efficient. Some armies could spend almost nothing on throw away troops and then min-max everything else, some had really effective troops and so there was effectively no tax on their army, and some had crappy but expensive troops. This only balances out if the other things in those armies are balanced in such a way that the armies with super cheap troops have overcosted other stuff, those with good troops have less powerful other stuff, and those with crappy expensive troops have amazing other units.
The 0-1 units were not typically super broken units, so that was never a true balance mechanism.
I agree on scale being an issue, allowing full armies of super heavies was a mistake, imperial knights never should have been their own full army, I think allowing a few is ok, but full armies of those lead to skew lists and generally bad games. An easy fix to this would be eliminate the LOW and flyer detachments. Now superheavies (LOW) take up an entire detachment for 1 model, if you keep the 3 detachment max you cannot effectively build and all LOW army (at 2k points each would need to cost 666 points) and you would get no bonus command points. IF the flyer detachment were removed, they would be a 0-2 choice in each detachment (or take up a detachment as an auxiliary choice), this would make spamming flyers difficult because you would be required to take other choices to unlock them. But this assumes either becomes a huge problem. Those 2 FOCs along with Supreme command seem to me to be those most able to be abused for skew lists though.
What army is super strong at basically highlander?
At least Marines, since they have five times as many units as anyone else, and most of them are pretty good.
But 90% of their power is stuck in non troop slots..
you are looking at mostly tacticals which are basic. sniper scouts which could be cool. inserters or whatever they are called being basicly a 10man in a 5 man body tactical.
there will be the occasional odd ball chapter that has weird troops i guess.
Melissia wrote: Their troops are far better than marine players give them credit for.
Well im not saying they are bad.
the initial premise was that restrictions on non troop slots would make strong armies stronger.
im trying to think of armies that are overly skewed into the troop section. especially those that do not need other slots to make them even better like conscripts being limited to a single commissar.
The game JUST came out. I'd say we wait for a few months to get all playing out of the way before we decry it entirely unbalanced (which it isn't. Few things might need adjustments here and there but honestly I think this is the most reasonable the game has been in a long time).
That said, I'm not opposed to the idea of a side board. Something like 350 points you can bring into your list each time as a hard counter to something and junk.
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Melissia wrote: Their troops are far better than marine players give them credit for.
Yes and no.
Scouts have always been strong, as well as Biker troops (but that's not a thing anymore). The issue is that the Tactical Marine is no good, and can't be until the unit's role is actually defined. The reason other troops are better is because they're cheaper or you can kit them out for an actual defined role.
I've always been a fan of trying to do a reverse Skitarii thing, where you have the current way to load them out, but they gain the ability yo purchase an extra Heavy or Special Weapon at 10 strong. No matter how many rules you throw on something, damage output is going to be the main factor on choosing a unit (besides maybe speed).
Melissia wrote: Their troops are far better than marine players give them credit for.
Well im not saying they are bad.
the initial premise was that restrictions on non troop slots would make strong armies stronger.
im trying to think of armies that are overly skewed into the troop section. especially those that do not need other slots to make them even better like conscripts being limited to a single commissar.
so far nids seem to be the only one.
Orks maybe? But they still really want big meks to flourish.
I second the idea that getting points right can lead to a pretty well balanced game.
The problem was that games workshop never made points changes until they released a new rule book. Things that were obviously undercosted from day 1 were left unchanged (eg scat bikes and wraith knights).
With the new edition they seem to have made a pretty reasonable attempt at balancing points (at least compared with 7th), but it takes time, tournaments and lots of analysis to realise which units are truly the strongest. I'm not surprised there are miscosted things in 8th as they not only changed the points costs, but changed a lot of the rules that went with the previous units.
What we really need them to do is come back in a few months (or one year's) time and recost everything that is obviously undercosted or overcosted. AND they'd need to not change the actual rules at the time or they may as well throw out the established meta and start from scratch again.
They hinted that they might do this (it sounds like they might issue a generals handbook or issue new updated indexes in a year or two). I hope they do this!
Much as Dakka likes to pretend the playtesters are all morons and that the handful of games they're played so far is enough to condemn 8th Edition as a clusterfeth, I choose to believe that the claim that generalist lists will take over in popularity as people get more comfortable with the game and don't need the crutch of spam lists, especially if missions are improved as it's already planned by the ITC guys.
What army is super strong at basically highlander?
At least Marines, since they have five times as many units as anyone else, and most of them are pretty good.
But 90% of their power is stuck in non troop slots..
you are looking at mostly tacticals which are basic.
Tactical Marines are friggen amazing. They're one of the most versatile units in 8th edition.
But why do you bring up Troops, that had nothing to do with limiting armies to one of any unit. Marines can easily take 3 different units in any non-Troops slot that is above average. Some armies can't.
What army is super strong at basically highlander?
At least Marines, since they have five times as many units as anyone else, and most of them are pretty good.
But 90% of their power is stuck in non troop slots..
you are looking at mostly tacticals which are basic.
Tactical Marines are friggen amazing. They're one of the most versatile units in 8th edition.
But why do you bring up Troops, that had nothing to do with limiting armies to one of any unit. Marines can easily take 3 different units in any non-Troops slot that is above average. Some armies can't.
G00fySmiley wrote: for my club's narrative events we might be limiting lists to one unit of a type outside of troops.
want a stormraven? no problem you can field exactly 1 storm raven
want a land raider crusader sure enjoy that 1..
obviously not going to happen on our competitive events but keeping narrative events fun is pretty important to us
That only makes strong armies stronger, while doing nothing to address the base problem.
original quote.
narrative event stating they will limit lists to one unit slot outside of troops
you follow by saying it will make strong armies stronger
i ask which armies in "basically" highlander.
I dont think tactical squads are SUPER strong. they are fine but not nearly as good as any dedicated unit that does dedicated things in their respective slots.
I don't think the point is that Space Marines would be stronger in highlander than in standard, but that quite a few factions would be punished harder than they would be. This is because they have a huge unit roster, with a lot of role overlap.
For example, let's say they want an anti-infantry vehicle. They can take a Whirlwind, a landraider, a stormraven, a dreadnought, a predator, a thunderfire cannon, a stormtalon, a razorback, and a landspeeder. They may even be able to technically take multiples of some of those, depending on how you handle variants.
Meanwhile, the Adeptus Mechanicus for example would get one Onager Dunecrawler, one pair of Kastellan Robots, and... that's it. By the way, the Onager Dunecrawler is also the AdMech's best option for anti-tank and anti-air. Too bad you can only have one.
Orks would have problems. Their main troops choice is okay but needs support in order to function well, and that support generally comes from specific units that would hurt them with a limitation of only being able to take one.
Not sure what you mean by Flatline / homogenize being an illusion. If you mean it's impossible well then yeah that's true but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and shoot for it.
Yes it will be impossible but the simple fact is that would be the best way to balance the game and even though we won't be able to achieve that perfectly that doesn't mean we shouldn't try it. There are lots of things that are impossible. Something being impossible is not a reason to not do it. It's impossible to end sorrow we still try. It's impossible to end the hurt and the pain in the world but we still try. We don't do it because we think we can win we do it because it'll make the world a better place. We need to address the question what will make the game better not the question what can we achieve because if you we'll find it's much easier to make the world worse than better.
How to best balance 40K? Tweak the 4-6 things wrong with the 3rd Edition codices and rerelease that edition, with an Apocalypse expansion to cover flyers and superheavies.
I imagine at this point that a million people have already said this, but mission types and terrain really do go a long way toward balancing the game. Like that flyer-spam list would have been hard pressed to win something like the Scouring against any infantry heavy list, while winning a maelstrom mission would be nigh impossible. This isn't 7th edition where a single model can swoop onto an objective with 20 guardsmen on it and contest it. You really need the bodies to score points.
Unless there are no objectives.
Also, personally, really disappointed that they kept first blood and linebreaker in the game. The former punishes MSU and going second too much, and the latter is too easy to score with how mobile everything is in this game these days.
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Desubot wrote: hat army is super strong at basically highlander?
Any army that can take vehicles in squadrons.
Like, Imperial Guard would be an absolute terror in highlander format. You can easily cram 10+ tanks and artillery chassis into a list and not violate the highlander rules. meanwhile everyone else is trying to figure out how to stop 10 tanks when they can only take one HWS, or one devastator squad, etc.
The cherry on top would be that it's even fluffy. "Narrative game? Dude this is my 275th Bullshittium Armored Company!" Can't get any fluffier then that.
Desubot wrote: I mean even nids need their synapses creatures no?
(i haven't really dug that deep into them)
Synapse, although potent isn't as much of a dealbreaker as it was before. Now if you're out of range you take morale as normal and target the closest thing regardless - terrible for gaunt types but not so for big monsters - whereas before a Carnifex brood could literally destroy itself with an unlucky dice roll.
I am always bemused by FLG's claim that spam lists dominated their initial meta but TAC lists won out in the end.
Mainly because this wasn't true in 7th. 6th. Uh.. any edition of 40k and indeed any GW game I can remember. There are going to be good units and bad units and players will spam the good units. No one is going to take a "balanced list" and reliably do well in a tournament.
Mass flyers may get kicked out of the meta but it will surely be replaced by something else.
With that said I feel the discussion doesn't really look at the flaw in 40k which is that damage output is very high, there are only limited options for dealing with it under IGUG and as a result going first is often the most decisive dice roll in the game. Like in 7th you are seeing many games where by the end of the first players turn 2 its obvious that barring super hot dice the player going second isn't going to get back into the game.
The result has been to gamble more and more on getting that alpha strike. That was what happened in 7th and I feel it will happen in 8th as well, whatever the eventual make up of the units.
Sideboards, limitations and the rest are not going to change that unless you create a game where its very difficult to actually kill things, so tabling is almost impossible, and it therefore becomes entirely about chasing maelstrom objectives. This would however just produce a meta of fast units that can reliably get across the board each turn. Its not obvious this would be more fun.
The thing is that with the missions as listed, secondary battlefield roles can be largely ignored. Models need to be as fighty as possible, while being durable(or ablative) and being able to score objectives capably. This seems to be the trifecta in my mind: anything outside of that often just falls into the 'cute' category. The missions aren't really diverse enough or strategically demanding enough to warrant other battlefield roles other than killing dudes, helping to kill dudes, and moving fast.
Agreed.
The problem in 8th edition tournaments is they are using the same terrible Eternal War missions that have been terrible for 5 years. Every single one of those missions has only one objective "kill more than you lose". There is utterly no reason to even try for the objectives in those games. Every mission is kill points.
I agree wholeheartedly. From my experience, the change has to be to make firepower more expensive. While things are better than ever, I still think firepower is a little too cheap, especially for Eternal War. Eternal War is just "destroy the opponent, because if he has no squads, he can't take objectives in the last turn." It's why I almost exclusively play Maelstrom. As anecdotal evidence, last night, I lost 16-13, but I had the field in the last turn (3 Predators and Huron vs. 5 Havocs and a Chaos Lord with 1 wound), but I couldn't recover from being 7-1 down after 3 rounds. My opponent had more mobility in the form of Rhinos, but I had Predators, so he seized objectives while I blasted away at his forces.This has been my experience for the roughly 10 games I've played so far. While there are slightly more things on the table, there's not enough to reasonably take that many objectives.
A quick fix, IMHO, is to move entirely to Maelstrom, or possibly a hybrid. A longer term fix is to bring costs up slightly for firepower when the codices are released. The few tournies I play did that in 8th, so I wouldn't expect there to be a difference in 8th in that regard. Gotta admit though, if your local tournament only is Eternal War, I'd probably have a quick word with the player base.
I have seen other things, like 8 Wave Serpents at 2000pts, loaded up with a single Warlock each, and discharging their Serpent Shields for a 2+ to get D3 Mortal Wounds on a unit within 24". They just remove units and move on. Massive footprint, 13 W, point for point objectively better than a Predator. Rebalancing the cost of certain units is also required, and I hope this is done with the codices.
I think removing the non-Patrol/Battalion/Brigade detachments for Matched Play would be another fix. While certain, very restricted codex/sub-faction specific detachments would work, you can pretty much take whatever you want. While this isn't an issue for Narrative Play, for Matched Play it can throw things out of kilter.
Spellfax wrote: Spam tax
2nd appearance of a unit = 10% more points
3rd appearance of a unit = 20% more points
4th appearance of a uunit = 30% more points
Etc....
Except that just hurts high costing spam and doesn't do much against low costing spam, and has that weird effect of making hodgepodge armies where instead of mainly CSM you'll see a weird mix of everything.
Spellfax wrote: Spam tax 2nd appearance of a unit = 10% more points 3rd appearance of a unit = 20% more points 4th appearance of a uunit = 30% more points Etc....
So basically "feth you Orks, feth you Guard, feth you Tyranids, feth you Daemons, feth you Sisters, feth all of you, you're not space marines so you can feth off".
Marmatag wrote: Regardless of history, they're total liabilities now.
They're really not.
They've got a decent ratio of defense to points for a troops unit (beaten out really only by Intercessors and possibly Necrons), are able to be equipped with a wide variety of special and/or heavy weapons, and are fairly versatile.
Don't be one of those people who will only be happy until tacticals are as cheap as battle sisters and can each and every single one of them equip a plasmagun.
Spellfax wrote: Spam tax
2nd appearance of a unit = 10% more points
3rd appearance of a unit = 20% more points
4th appearance of a uunit = 30% more points
Etc....
So basically "feth you Orks, feth you Guard, feth you Tyranids, feth you Daemons, feth you Sisters, feth all of you, you're not space marines so you can feth off".
Marmatag wrote: Regardless of history, they're total liabilities now.
They're really not.
They've got a decent ratio of defense to points for a troops unit (beaten out really only by Intercessors and possibly Necrons), are able to be equipped with a wide variety of special and/or heavy weapons, and are fairly versatile.
Don't be one of those people who will only be happy until tacticals are as cheap as battle sisters and can each and every single one of them equip a plasmagun.
Youre not understanding the issues behind Tactical Marines again.
No, tacticals have a mixture of stats they have to pay for that don't add up to much. They're a bit better with split fire now and only paying 13 pts. They are so useless in CC, and that hurts them badly.
Spellfax wrote: Spam tax
2nd appearance of a unit = 10% more points
3rd appearance of a unit = 20% more points
4th appearance of a uunit = 30% more points
Etc....
Spam isn't inherently a bad thing. Many people, including myself, much prefer to build and face armies that look cohesive with redundancy. I enjoy having multiple infantry squads in chimeras, supported by multiple Russes and backed up by multiple hellhound tanks. By your definition, its spam, but by my own, its redundancy and flavour. Taking 1 of every unit does not inherently make the game or list any better or fluffier.
Don't focus on trying to unnecessarily restrict perfectly fluffy and reasonable armies. Focus on making bad units worth taking and overpowered units a little less powerful. When you do that, everything will fall into place nice and easy.
A tax is just a Band-Aid on the actual issue. Address the issue, not the symptom.
The sad thing is, that idea punishes people for bringing multiple tactical marine squads, even though people complain incessantly that tacticals are OMGWTFBBQ THE WORTSETS UNIT EVAR! all the time.
Marmatag wrote: Wounds per point
Marines: 18.3
Conscripts: ~3.5
Conscripts are lower toughness and armor by far; they have more wounds but defensively very little else going for them. It's actually not very hard to find a unit of equal points that's able to wipe out conscripts in a couple turns.
Comparing pure wounds without looking at anything else is silly, to say nothing of the absurd assumptions your attempt at mathhammer requires.
Marmatag wrote: Wounds per point Marines: 18.3 Conscripts: ~3.5
Conscripts are lower toughness and armor by far; they have more wounds but defensively very little else going for them. It's actually not very hard to find a unit of equal points that's able to wipe out conscripts in a couple turns.
Comparing pure wounds without looking at anything else is silly, to say nothing of the absurd assumptions your attempt at mathhammer requires.
Yawn. You picked out one part of the post, and of course, you're not considering that volume of wounds actually DOES matter quite a bit in this edition. Hello, mortal wounds. Hello, high powered shooting. Hello assault.
In any case, since you made a case for their durability, why don't you prove it? If it's so obvious, you shouldn't have any difficulty proving it. Thanks
Also his own math shows the Marines doing more damage against T4 infantry even though they're using a bunch of anti-tank weapons, so clearly they're not losing on both durability and firepower at the same time. A more specialized unit can beat Tacticals in one area but not another? Say it ain't so!
LD8 in a 10-man squad also means it's fairly difficult for them to fail a morale test in the first place. They have to take at least 3 casualties to have a chance of failing at all, and the ATSKNF re-roll means they'll pass more often than not. You'd have to kill at least 5 models, half the squad, for them to even start worrying. And they'll still pass that 75% of the time.
Combat squad them into two 5-man squads, and you can reduce their risk of failing a morale test even further. The one with the sergeant can only lose 1 model to morale at most (if it takes 3 casualties it can only lose one model on a 6, if it takes 4 it only has 1 model left to lose). The other one can theoretically lose 2, but you'd have to roll that 6 twice.
So morale just isn't really a big problem for Marines.
The best way to rebalance 40k is to price things properly. The term efficient should be applicable to every model if it is use in it's proper roll. There are still garbage and good units in this game and that's why it remains unbalanced.
ross-128 wrote: Also his own math shows the Marines doing more damage against T4 infantry even though they're using a bunch of anti-tank weapons, so clearly they're not losing on both durability and firepower at the same time. A more specialized unit can beat Tacticals in one area but not another? Say it ain't so!
LD8 in a 10-man squad also means it's fairly difficult for them to fail a morale test in the first place. They have to take at least 3 casualties to have a chance of failing at all, and the ATSKNF re-roll means they'll pass more often than not. You'd have to kill at least 5 models, half the squad, for them to even start worrying. And they'll still pass that 75% of the time.
Combat squad them into two 5-man squads, and you can reduce their risk of failing a morale test even further. The one with the sergeant can only lose 1 model to morale at most (if it takes 3 casualties it can only lose one model on a 6, if it takes 4 it only has 1 model left to lose). The other one can theoretically lose 2, but you'd have to roll that 6 twice.
So morale just isn't really a big problem for Marines.
How would you equip tactical marines in this edition? Drop the specials and they lose the contest dramatically. You are speaking about options, but what other better options are there? I guess in this scenario a grav cannon and grav amp would have been a decent choice.
I included the expected value of a D6 /w reroll (ATSKNF) as a part of their morale. But it serves to point out that marines can lose a large number and then more to morale, whereas Conscripts lose basically nothing. Morale IS a problem for marines in squads of 10, do you play marines? ATSKNF can result in more losses to morale, btw, it isn't pick the lower of the two. if you lose 6 of 10, and roll a 4, your reroll could come up 6, eliminating your squad.
The conscripts are *vastly* more survivable, and provide more utility in the context of their codex.
I think they are on the right track with using cp's as incentives to counter spam. What they need to do imo is take this a step further even, giving more benefits to balanced lists and penalties for spamming a ton of one unit in matched play.
ross-128 wrote: Also his own math shows the Marines doing more damage against T4 infantry even though they're using a bunch of anti-tank weapons, so clearly they're not losing on both durability and firepower at the same time. A more specialized unit can beat Tacticals in one area but not another? Say it ain't so!
LD8 in a 10-man squad also means it's fairly difficult for them to fail a morale test in the first place. They have to take at least 3 casualties to have a chance of failing at all, and the ATSKNF re-roll means they'll pass more often than not. You'd have to kill at least 5 models, half the squad, for them to even start worrying. And they'll still pass that 75% of the time.
Combat squad them into two 5-man squads, and you can reduce their risk of failing a morale test even further. The one with the sergeant can only lose 1 model to morale at most (if it takes 3 casualties it can only lose one model on a 6, if it takes 4 it only has 1 model left to lose). The other one can theoretically lose 2, but you'd have to roll that 6 twice.
So morale just isn't really a big problem for Marines.
How would you equip tactical marines in this edition? Drop the specials and they lose the contest dramatically. You are speaking about options, but what other better options are there? I guess in this scenario a grav cannon and grav amp would have been a decent choice.
I included the expected value of a D6 /w reroll (ATSKNF) as a part of their morale. But it serves to point out that marines can lose a large number and then more to morale, whereas Conscripts lose basically nothing. Morale IS a problem for marines in squads of 10, do you play marines? ATSKNF can result in more losses to morale, btw, it isn't pick the lower of the two. if you lose 6 of 10, and roll a 4, your reroll could come up 6, eliminating your squad.
The conscripts are *vastly* more survivable, and provide more utility in the context of their codex.
Oh no, they might lose 2 models instead of 1, the horror. And if they absolutely refuse to combat squad they miiiiight lose 4 once in a blue moon. How devastating.
Honestly though, do you actually think that tactical marines should be cheaper ablative wounds than conscripts? Whose entire job is to be ablative wounds? Seriously, this is still just "hey look a specialized unit does its specialist job better than a generalist unit". Why are you harping on that as if there's something wrong with it?
After all, I'm sure that marine squad will do a better job of taking out a T6 or T7 target than the conscripts will. Mostly because their loadout is more oriented toward doing that. Will a dedicated melta squad, an AT kitted devastator squad, or dedicated OC plasma squad do better than tacs at T6/7? Sure, but again, those are units that are more specialized toward doing exactly that. They're good at their one job, that's what makes them specialists. Tacs are kind of meh at a little bit of everything, that's what makes them generalists.
Is being a generalist a bad strategy in 40k? Probably, but space marines do have specialist options that aren't tacticals.
Or would you like to propose that tacticals should be more durable per point than Conscripts, more efficient at mopping up T3 than massed lasguns, and more efficient at tankbusting than devastators? Or even equivalent to all those at the same time, when those others can at most land 2 out of 3?
ross-128 wrote: Oh no, they might lose 2 models instead of 1, the horror. And if they absolutely refuse to combat squad they miiiiight lose 4 once in a blue moon. How devastating.
Honestly though, do you actually think that tactical marines should be cheaper ablative wounds than conscripts? Whose entire job is to be ablative wounds? Seriously, this is still just "hey look a specialized unit does its specialist job better than a generalist unit". Why are you harping on that as if there's something wrong with it?
Conscripts are more dangerous than tactical marines. That's not a joke. You really think 1 boltgun at 3+ beats 4 lasguns at 5+? Remember, the latter can also be double for 20-30 points, the price at which a tactical squad might get 1-2 weapon upgrades. The conscripts can also take objectives easier.
If conscripts couldn't use orders you might have a point, but as it stands they are just better than most other infantry. They even put out more damage than other infantry, because they are so absurdly cheap. The idea conscripts are just ablative wounds is just flat out wrong right now, they are simply the best generalist infantry in the game.
Actually I snipped it to make it shorter, because your posts are long-winded and I don't like quote pyramids.
You're acting like volume of wounds is the only thing that matters. Armor saves matter a ton-- high powered shooting is a lot more expensive this edition than previous editions, mortal wounds aren't actually that common, and assault makes armor saves and toughness even more important.
As for my case for their durability amongst troops choices--
Spoiler:
Tactical Marines pay 13 ppm for each of their 3+ save, T4 Wounds. They also have ATSKNF, which is immensely useful. They still get an armor save against most power weapons, it usually takes an anti-tank weapon to remove their armor save in shooting, and their T4 serves them well as it does all Marines.
Battle Sisters pay 9ppm for each of their 3+ save, T3 wounds with 6++. They can occasionally get a model back with Acts of Faith, but it's unlikely AoFs would be used this way so that can be safely dismissed. The 6++ is only useful against things that have AP-4, which if you're tossing AP-4 firepower at a battle sister either something's gone horrible wrong, or horribly right. In order to get ATSKNF, Sisters need to buy a 30 point character which otherwise is nothing more than a battle sister with two wounds. I'm torn on this, so I should probably say they're roughly equivalent?
Scout Marines pay 11ppm for each of their 4+ save, T4 wounds. They can gain a better cover save than normal with camo cloaks, but that raises them to 14ppm, which is higher than you'd pay for tacticals, otherwise cover only gets them to be equal to tacticals out of cover. You only need AP-3 (a power sword) to remove their armor save in the fight mode.
Grey Knights Strike squads pay 21ppm for their 3+ save, T4 wounds, iwth the justicar having two wounds. I... honestly... these guys seem to be considered a joke amongst Grey Knights players, but they're worth comparing against tacticals. I imagine GK players would actually prefer tacticals over Strike squads.
Blood Claws: Same price as tacticals, except they're an assault unit without jump packs.
Grey Hunter: One point more for the same defensive statline. Main difference is they get +1 attack.
Deathwatch Killteam: Six points more for the same defensive statline. Better offense via special ammo, better customization.
Crusader Squad: Is a tactical squad that can include scouts.
Intercessors: 10 points per T4 3+ save wound. Were it not for the presence of multiple-damage attacks, I'd say this is the 'ardest troops choice in the game, but even with that, they're still a top contender.
Kataphron Breachers: 57ppm for T5 3+/6++, 3w, or roughly 19 points per wound, meaning that focusing on defense, they pay 6 points per wound to go to T5. Destroyers are objectively worse defensively even before their increased points.
Skitarii Rangers and Vanguards: 10ppm for T3 4+/6++ save wounds.
Necron Warriors: 12ppm for T4 4+ save. What makes these potentially the toughest troops choice in the game is Reanimation Protocols. Otherwise, 1ppm to go from 4+ to 3+ would be a bargain. Superbly durable, though the unit contains no ATSKNF equivalent. Speaking of price for save increase...
Necron Immortals: 17ppm for a necron warrior with a 3+ save. Mostly the price pays for offense.
Ork Boyz: 6ppm for T4 with a laughable 6+ save. Its leadership ability needs a large unit, but large unit is slow and an easy target for long-range firepower.
Gretchin: Hahahahah... hahahah... hahah... haaaa.... anyway 3ppm for T2 6+ save, moving on.
Tau Fire Warriors: 8ppm for T3 4+ save. Their bonding knife ritual is okay, but rerolls like ATSKNF are better. T4 3+ save and ATSKNF still beats it out IMO.
Kroot: 6ppm for T3 6+ save. Worse than guardsman defensively.
Stealers: 12ppm for T4 5+/5++. The 5++ is useful, but still just a 1/3rd chance to matter. Tacticals are more durable. Gaunts: 5ppm for T3 6+. Worse than Guardsmen defensively, ignoring leadership. Gants: 4ppm for the same. Rippers: About 3 2/3rd ppm for the same. Leadership issues for these four are a bit tricky to measure, but the penalty isn't as harsh as it used to be.
Custodian Guard: 17 points per wound for T5 2+, a respectable increase for 4 points and a contender for toughest troops choice. Their main weakness is multiple damage attacks.
Guardsmen: 4ppm for T3 5+, requires characters to buff leadership ability. For its points, it's decent, but quantity-of-fire weapons and high-attack assaulters can utterly erase guardsman squads even without taking morale in to account. It's actually quite easy to assign excess firepower when shooting at guardsmen, wasting precious shooting power, which admittedly is one of the benefits of using them, especially compared to...
Conscripts: 3ppm for the same, but a pitiful Ld4. Without spending more points on a commissar, they'll be annihilated by morale. Even with doing so, it raises their cost per model up to being roughly equivalent to guardsmen without making them much harder to annihilate than guardsmen.
So basically IMO, defensively, tacticals are one of the better troops choices point per point. They're not in the top three--intercessors, custodians, and Necron Warriors fit that slot -- but they've solid defensive stats for a relatively cheap price.
You can dislike my reasoning if you want, but at least try to understand it.
Spellfax wrote: Spam tax
2nd appearance of a unit = 10% more points
3rd appearance of a unit = 20% more points
4th appearance of a uunit = 30% more points
Etc....
Spam isn't inherently a bad thing. Many people, including myself, much prefer to build and face armies that look cohesive with redundancy. I enjoy having multiple infantry squads in chimeras, supported by multiple Russes and backed up by multiple hellhound tanks. By your definition, its spam, but by my own, its redundancy and flavour. Taking 1 of every unit does not inherently make the game or list any better or fluffier.
Don't focus on trying to unnecessarily restrict perfectly fluffy and reasonable armies. Focus on making bad units worth taking and overpowered units a little less powerful. When you do that, everything will fall into place nice and easy.
A tax is just a Band-Aid on the actual issue. Address the issue, not the symptom.
i myself spam lists and it makes for easy army creation, easy play ability. I m suggesting this as a quick fix for a local level. No way for us to redo points on every unit. But i think its a good band aid for a local level.
Talamare wrote: Conscripts are widely considered to be fairly broken Use normal Infantry Squads for your comparison.
I agree with you - but even still, there are people arguing the opposite, that TAC marines are stronger than Conscripts. I'm not sure what to say to those people. 50 wounds is beyond good.
These are the same people saying Necron warriors are less durable than Marines. I don't even know how to respond to stuff like this, it's just becoming laughable.
I have yet to see a TAC squad in a game of 8th edition.
Ironically the post trying to argue that TAC squads are good totally missed the mark on PAGK, which actually serve a purpose now.
i myself spam lists and it makes for easy army creation, easy play ability. I m suggesting this as a quick fix for a local level. No way for us to redo points on every unit. But i think its a good band aid for a local level.
It isn't a good fix for the simple reason that it isn't fixing anything. You aren't addressing any actual problems, and are just restricting perfectly fluffy and reasonable army lists.
The scale 40k is fought at is where spam wins the day in real life. Only when you get bigger maps in video games for example or larger battlefields where the units are so vastly different in form and function that spam is less of an issue. Even then spam is used. It's the natural order for all time right back to tribes mass producing spears and clubs over a mixed load out. Mixed load outs tend to only do well in really small scales that 40k does not play well at as well since every bit of asset matters in terms of points. 40k's scale is really awkward.
Conscripts are better than tactical marines at being Conscripts, because tactical marines are not conscripts. Conscripts give you cheap ablative wounds and massed S3 shooting. That's what they're good at, so of course they put more wounds on the table and more S3 shooting on the table than a unit that is not specialized in either of those things.
Like I said: specialist unit beats generalist unit within its specialty, news at 11.
Of course, if you're looking at S3 shooting, the durability gap isn't nearly as large as you try to imply. A tactical marine is 12 points for 1 wound, but only 1/3 of hits will wound and 2/3 of wounds will be saved, so it's actually more like 1.25 points per effective wound (ignoring the firer's BS). A conscript is 3 points, but 1/2 of hits will wound and only 1/3 of wounds will save, so they're 0.5 points per effective wound. So it's a difference of 0.75 points or a ratio of 2.5:1, not the 6:1 ratio you tried to suggest.
If the space marine gets in cover he can cut his failed save rate in half, bringing them down to 0.625 points per effective wound, nearly on par.
Of course, as you go higher S and start piling on AP the ratio goes more in the conscripts' favor because now you're overkilling them, but again: specialists excel at their specialty, and using the right weapon for the right job is important. News at 11.
Now, I'm sure any space marine player would probably gladly sacrifice mediocre melee and mediocre AT in order to gain great staying power and good anti-infantry. Or give up mediocre melee and mediocre anti-infantry to gain great staying power and good AT. That's the benefit of specializing, you sacrifice something you're not using anyway to gain something you will use.
But tactical marines as they currently are have mediocre melee, decent anti-infantry, decent-ish AT potential, and good-ish staying power for a small unit. They're pretty OK at anything, but great at nothing.
I'm not disagreeing that conscripts are a more efficient source of wounds (not 6:1 more efficient, but more efficient overall and good at absorbing overkill). What I'm saying is there's nothing wrong with that. You seem to think there is something wrong with that, though I have no idea what you would prefer as an alternative.
I suppose there's a rough way to find out, if you're willing to answer a few questions.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the worst in the whole game (for example, a Warlord Titan for raw points/wounds, at 57 points per wound) and 10 is the best in the whole game (for example, Brimstones for raw points/wound, with Conscripts being a 9 in that category), how do you think Tactical Marines SHOULD rate in the following categories:
1: Durability against S3-5, AP0-1 hits
2: Durability against S6+, AP2-4 hits
3: Durability against mortal wounds
4: shooting damage output vs GEQ
5: shooting damage output vs MEQ
6: shooting damage output vs Vehicles/MCs
7: melee damage output vs GEQ
8: melee damage output vs MEQ
9: melee damage output vs Vehicles/MCs
Something to keep in mind: if you answer 5, then there WILL be units in the game better than tacticals in that role by definition. Like I said, Conscripts are a 9 for durability against mortal wounds (ie raw total wound count), so if you want tacticals to be equal to or better than conscripts in that category, that's a 9 or 10.
Knowing what you want something to not be is not particularly useful. There are an infinite array of things that it can not be. Clarifying what you think it should be is much more useful, and leads to better discussion.
Conscripts are more dangerous than tactical marines. That's not a joke. You really think 1 boltgun at 3+ beats 4 lasguns at 5+? Remember, the latter can also be double for 20-30 points, the price at which a tactical squad might get 1-2 weapon upgrades. The conscripts can also take objectives easier.
If conscripts couldn't use orders you might have a point, but as it stands they are just better than most other infantry. They even put out more damage than other infantry, because they are so absurdly cheap. The idea conscripts are just ablative wounds is just flat out wrong right now, they are simply the best generalist infantry in the game.
That itself is a joke, it takes something like 15 conscripts to kill a single Tac marine.
Also, them tac marines arent just weilding boltguns. Combat squad and throw some frags. Tanks at long range? Bring the lascannon. Or a Missile Launcher. I'll happpily play againt a horde of conscripts with a horde of tac marines. Those giant unweildly units are going to get fragged up close, and fragged from afar.
Edit: do conscripts have pistols? If not tacticals have a convenient extra boost in close quarters.
Insectum7 wrote: Edit: do conscripts have pistols? If not tacticals have a convenient extra boost in close quarters.
Guard units don't get pistols aside from sergeants and characters.
I thought so, thanks!
Since the reintroduction of sidearms and auto-inclusion of grenades on marines, theyre one of those things that players overlook when comparing units. But for basic SMs, those things are key.
Tac squads have been miserable since, well, forever because of their firepower/pt. Defenses mean nothing if you can't hurt the opponent in a meaningful way. The Eldar kill all your good units, ignore worthless tacs, kill them last. I guess you can make nids kill the tacs first, but whatever.
I find the offensive output of Tactical Squads with heavy+special+sargeant weapon just good enough to matter n 8th. They are afterall a "good enough" generalistic troop.
I know that personally I don't want to change the flexibility of my Tactical Marines for other troops. Yeah, they aren't Tau Firewarriors for 8p. But they don't need to be.
Unit1126PLL wrote: My Baneblades are 22 points per wound, Marines are 18.
Baneblades are worse than tac squads.
Discuss.
I admit, I laughed.
This absurdity is why my comparison of units' defensive abilities took in to consideration more than wounds per point. And why I honestly think Tacticals, while they aren't the super-best defensive units, are actually pretty good for a troops choice.
Whatever balancing needs to happen, the current force org charts are going to make that job much tougher. If a unit is even a little north of the balance point, the current force orgs allow it to be spammed in bulk. Look at what happened to scion command squads, people took a unit a little north of balance and spammed the gak out of it. Same thing with stormravens and the rest of the space marine flying circus, someone might sell me on them being undercost but I'm not there yet, I think the real problem is them getting spammed.
The problem with spam is twofold, first you are brining only units that are north of the balance point. The second is that by having only one target profile you punish forces that prepared for multiple target profiles. For instance if you have an all flyer lists, your opponent's small arms and anti-infantry weapons are going to perform at a fraction of their intended effect.
So step 1 before any other changes are considered, we need to stop the spam, maybe an army wide cap of taking a non-troop/dedicated transport unit two/three times. Also move the Ultimate command and flyer wing FoCs into narrative only. that should stop the worst of it, and increase variation.
It seems that everyone has their own thing that they want tacticals to be better at, but that thing is different for each person.
Some people want them to be more durable. Some people want them to be shootier. Some people want them to be choppier. Any one of them would gladly sacrifice the other two to get their preferred stat (well, probably, some people want it all).
But the reason they do none of those things excellently is because they do all of those things decently. Sure, they're not spongier than the spongiest units in the game, they're not shootier than the shootiest units in the game, and they're not choppier than the choppiest units in the game. But they're not supposed to be any of those things, and certainly not all of them at once.
Grimgold wrote: So step 1 before any other changes are considered, we need to stop the spam, maybe an army wide cap of taking a non-troop/dedicated transport unit two/three times.
So wait, my BA 1st and 10th terminator force is to be banned according to you? Wow, I didn't realize it was so overpowered. I'm liking it evne more now
Grimgold wrote: So step 1 before any other changes are considered, we need to stop the spam, maybe an army wide cap of taking a non-troop/dedicated transport unit two/three times.
So wait, my BA 1st and 10th terminator force is to be banned according to you? Wow, I didn't realize it was so overpowered. I'm liking it evne more now
My suggestion was for competitive/tournament games ie matched play, I don't care what the feth you play in your friends basement. Spam is a huge problem in the tournament circuit, and if you make some terrible list unplayable to improve the quality of the game, that's a sacrifice I think we should all be willing to make. I'm in the same boat, I play deathwing, which is more fluffy and established in the lore than ba first company, and I'm perfectly happy to just play that in narrative where I can deep strike the whole thing and play it like it's meant to be played.
Grimgold wrote: if you make some terrible list unplayable to improve the quality of the game
Yeah you haven't actually proven it would make the game better.
You just hate "spam" lists without really actually looking at the deeper problems. There's nothing inherently wrong about "spam". The problem isn't people taking multiples of the same unit, which they so happen to like and want to use. The problem is unbalanced units.
If a unit is broken when you take a lot of them, it's more likely than not also broken when you take just one of them.
Grimgold wrote: deathwing, which is more fluffy and established in the lore than ba first company
No, it's not. Blood Angels are a 1st founding chapter with a great deal of respect from the greater Imperium, and have plenty of resources and power, and there's no reason they wouldn't have a few squads of terminators ready to deploy in time of need. But keep telling yourself that your army's more fluffy, if it helps you feel better.
Galas wrote: I find the offensive output of Tactical Squads with heavy+special+sargeant weapon just good enough to matter n 8th. They are afterall a "good enough" generalistic troop.
I know that personally I don't want to change the flexibility of my Tactical Marines for other troops. Yeah, they aren't Tau Firewarriors for 8p. But they don't need to be.
It's BETTER in 8th, but not by much. I'd rather just use my Scouts and Bikers still for a reason. Flexibility isn't good if the unit isn't good at actually being flexible.
Scouts are good-- to be honest, they've always been good-- but they have a very limited role that doesn't benefit every army list, and even with camo cloaks (which makes them more expensive than tacticals) they're at best as durable as tacticals are.
Martel732 wrote: Tac squads have been miserable since, well, forever because of their firepower/pt. Defenses mean nothing if you can't hurt the opponent in a meaningful way. The Eldar kill all your good units, ignore worthless tacs, kill them last. I guess you can make nids kill the tacs first, but whatever.
The flipside is that you have to kill lots of marines to get rid of the specials and heavies. Take specialists and the opponent has something to focus on, take a bunch of Tacs and they've got no particularly good target. The Tacs and their more protected support units then focus their efforts on taking out whatever will push the battle in their favor, and the flexible Tacs spar it out.
"Tacs suck" is often the cry of people who rely on fat, juicy targets, imo. For me, they're the backbone.
And furthermore, because combiweapons can fire every turn, basically means tacticals now have an additional special weapon in their squad, which gives them the additional firepower a lot of people want out of tacs.
Grimgold wrote: if you make some terrible list unplayable to improve the quality of the game
Yeah you haven't actually proven it would make the game better.
You just hate "spam" lists without really actually looking at the deeper problems. There's nothing inherently wrong about "spam". The problem isn't people taking multiples of the same unit, which they so happen to like and want to use. The problem is unbalanced units.
If a unit is broken when you take a lot of them, it's more likely than not also broken when you take just one of them.
Grimgold wrote: deathwing, which is more fluffy and established in the lore than ba first company
No, it's not. Blood Angels are a 1st founding chapter with a great deal of respect from the greater Imperium, and have plenty of resources and power, and there's no reason they wouldn't have a few squads of terminators ready to deploy in time of need. But keep telling yourself that your army's more fluffy, if it helps you feel better.
On the amusing side, tell me more about your berserking depressed space vampires, who had to be saved from extinction by chaos and papa smurf. On the balance side, to be clear you are arguing lists with five flyers and guilliman are kosher, and that you liked scion command squad spam, and that you think taurox prime spam is balanced and fun to play against. On FLG they were talking about how they think flyer spam or knight spam is likely to win the BAO, and are in the early phases of deciding what to do about it. I'm not sure why you can't seem to understand the problem, whether it's self interest that stops you from understanding, or a gap in your knowledge of the subject. So I'll try to explain it since I assumed a basic level of knowledge that is obviously not present:
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
There are two modes of play for 40k narrative and matched, every suggestion I've given is for Matched. Matched goals are to 1.) Be balanced, 2.) be fun, 3.) reward player skill. Spam is none of those so no matter how fluffy it is, it does not have a place in matched play. QED.
Ultimately, a recosting of things would probably be best. But that is out of our hands. I'm more interested in fixes TOs and players can implement now. The best way to do that, without trying to rework and restrict FOCs and unit selection is through incentivization. The best way to do that, as others have pointed out, is through mission design.
Eternal War sucks. All it does is push people to spam killy stuff. Why bother with objectives when you can just make sure your opponent can't hold them.
Maelstrom missions were a good idea, but poorly implemented. Too random and it doesn't work great for counter play since you always draw objectives at the start of your turn. But scoring points each turn is great and must be used.
1. Being tabled doesn't result in a loss, only scenario objectives count So they can table you by turn 3? Doesn't matter if you spend those 3 turns gathering enough points to make their comeback impossible. Some games already do this and it allows for 300 Spartans-like levels of epicness where your troops give their lives to secure an objective long enough to afford your side victory. It could effectively kill lists that ignore objectives, and at the very least it will make them less appealing.
2. Have different scenarios where different unit types are worth more This works best for tournaments, but can work well in regular matched play with random scenario selection. Basically, if you have a scenario where you score a point each turn you hold an objective, you can have a rule stating that a specific type of units (Troops, FA, HS, Elites) score an extra point when they hold an objective. In tournaments, the unit type can change per scenario, encouraging players to take more variety.
Alternatively, you could give those unit types objective secured.
Example mission : Set up normally, placing 6 objectives
Randomly select a battlefield role (TROOP, ELITE, FAST ATTACK, HEAVY SUPPORT)
Score one point per objective you control at the end of your turn. For each objective you control with a (UNIT TYPE X), score an additional point.
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
And playing an army list against a totally random assortment of units is somehow more engaging? Even if there's no cohesive elements, synergy, or attention to making it fluffy?
Pretty easy to make an argument when you use sweeping generalizations with loose definitions. Does spam have a minimum unique unit count before its not considered spam? How many repetitions of a unit constitutes spam? Does playing against different armies that spam different things constitute facing the same army over and over again simply because they spam?
Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Correction, units are bad because they're unbalanced. People spamming them for competitive reasons is simply a side effect of the actual issue. Address that and the spam will greatly diminish.
Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Which brings us back to point 1. It seems you're assuming everyone is spamming the exact same thing, across every army. We both know this isn't true, so assuming you're facing off against different armies who spam different things (and might have spammed multiple different unit types within each army), you'll still need to bring a broad range of answers. Oddly enough, even if you were facing against a totally random, non-spam force, you'd have to do the same thing, or you could build a spammy army because its something you enjoy doing. Its almost as if the solution here is better balance so that people who want to bring multiples of the same unit can do so without people whining about how they're playing the wrong way.
Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
Its sooooo much easier to randomly throw down one of every unit in your codex, right? This is a terrific argument right here. "My army is better because its harder to run." Go home everyone, we have a winner.
There are two modes of play for 40k narrative and matched, every suggestion I've given is for Matched. Matched goals are to 1.) Be balanced, 2.) be fun, 3.) reward player skill. Spam is none of those so no matter how fluffy it is, it does not have a place in matched play. QED.
Emperor forbid someone plays a fluffy army in matched play. We couldn't possibly have that now, could we? Could you imagine the chaos?
Spam isn't bad. Balance is the issue. Let players build the armies they want to within the rules without people acting all high and mighty with how amazing they are because they don't spam and that people who spam are bad people and play the wrong way.
Grimgold wrote: On the balance side, to be clear you are arguing lists with five flyers and guilliman are kosher
Yes, actually, I am.
If the flying unit is by itself overpowered, then it should be fixed so it isn't overpowered, which will have an even bigger impact to lists taht take five of them and thus remove the big advantage you think lists with five flyers have.
Drager wrote: One of my opponents lieks to play a demi company, he's been taking tac squads as follows:
10 Tacs, Flamer, Combi-Flamer, Power Axe, Missile Launcher 180
He then takes 2 of those and combat squads them, pops the flamer squads in a Rhino and the Missiles on home table objectives.
That's 432 points for a vehicle, 2 Missile Launchers and 4 Flamers. The flamers do a lot of work when they disembark. Honestly they seem fine.
I think you meant something like 252 points; I can't mention the exact cost of the Rhino, but it's between 70 and 80 depending on wargear.
But at the end of the day, you're paying 250 points effectively for 1 troop squad. For 50 points less, you could be bringing a quad Lascannon predator. If you're Dark Angels it'll have a 4++ shield, and reroll hits. If you're Ultras it will have rerolls to hits, and wounds. Your Rhino advancing up the board will have none of this.
I appreciate the idea of trying to make a "jack of all trades" squad, but in general what I would do for competitive games is commit or get out, as in, go with a theme for your army, and go hard. TAC squads simply don't fit a theme other than spam bodies and pray you have stuff on the table at the end of the game. It doesn't work in 8th; TAC squads get flat out erased if anything shoots at them.
Drager wrote: One of my opponents lieks to play a demi company, he's been taking tac squads as follows:
10 Tacs, Flamer, Combi-Flamer, Power Axe, Missile Launcher 180
He then takes 2 of those and combat squads them, pops the flamer squads in a Rhino and the Missiles on home table objectives.
That's 432 points for a vehicle, 2 Missile Launchers and 4 Flamers. The flamers do a lot of work when they disembark. Honestly they seem fine.
I think you meant something like 252 points; I can't mention the exact cost of the Rhino, but it's between 70 and 80 depending on wargear.
But at the end of the day, you're paying 250 points effectively for 1 troop squad. For 50 points less, you could be bringing a quad Lascannon predator. If you're Dark Angels it'll have a 4++ shield, and reroll hits. If you're Ultras it will have rerolls to hits, and wounds. Your Rhino advancing up the board will have none of this.
I appreciate the idea of trying to make a "jack of all trades" squad, but in general what I would do for competitive games is commit or get out, as in, go with a theme for your army, and go hard. TAC squads simply don't fit a theme other than spam bodies and pray you have stuff on the table at the end of the game. It doesn't work in 8th; TAC squads get flat out erased if anything shoots at them.
He was saying it was 432 points for 2 such squads and a Rhino.
But let's use your 252 example. A Rhino has the durability of a Predator -1 wound, and the squad has 10 more wounds. So for 50 points cheaper you get a predator. Yay? I mean it's not like you don't get 10 bodies for those 50 points. Or the special weapons they have. Or their close combat ability (which is leagues above the Predator). And you get the Predator's speed and durability for the rhino.
All you're literally missing out on is 4 lascannons - your comparison is frankly ridiculous. Twice the durability, for only 25% more points.
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
And playing an army list against a totally random assortment of units is somehow more engaging? Even if there's no cohesive elements, synergy, or attention to making it fluffy?
Pretty easy to make an argument when you use sweeping generalizations with loose definitions. Does spam have a minimum unique unit count before its not considered spam? How many repetitions of a unit constitutes spam? Does playing against different armies that spam different things constitute facing the same army over and over again simply because they spam?
If I have to vary my tactics to fight different parts of the lists, then yes, absolutely more engaging. Besides you are making a straw man, list diversity doesn't mean a lack of coherence or theme, any more than spam means fluffy.
Grimgold wrote: Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Correction, units are bad because they're unbalanced. People spamming them for competitive reasons is simply a side effect of the actual issue. Address that and the spam will greatly diminish.
Perfect balance is undesirable in a system like 40k, where minor imbalances and/or special rules are used to give units flavor. Beyond undesirable it's unachievable given that you would have to balance over a thousand units against each other. So minor imbalances are to be expected, and major imbalances are to be dealt with. The problem with spam is that ti can take the expected minor imbalances, and turn them into major imbalances. So we can start removing flavor from the game or we can limit people's ability to spam, and spam is bad for all of the reasons I stated.
Grimgold wrote: Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Which brings us back to point 1. It seems you're assuming everyone is spamming the exact same thing, across every army. We both know this isn't true, so assuming you're facing off against different armies who spam different things (and might have spammed multiple different unit types within each army), you'll still need to bring a broad range of answers. Oddly enough, even if you were facing against a totally random, non-spam force, you'd have to do the same thing, or you could build a spammy army because its something you enjoy doing. Its almost as if the solution here is better balance so that people who want to bring multiples of the same unit can do so without people whining about how they're playing the wrong way.
People bringing the same target profile, Like the two vehicle spam lists I mentioned (knights and flyers)? The only one that isn't vehicle spam is battlesuit commander spam, which is the same target profile. Once again the lack of perfect balance is not an excuse for abusive practices, "If the game were balanced my spam list wouldn't be broken, so it's the games fault my list is broken and unfun to play against" is a complete abdication of your responsibility as a player and a member of the community of players. Perfect balance is unachievable/undesirable, instead we just try and get rid of major imbalances, and spam causes many major imbalances without adding anything to the game.
Grimgold wrote: Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
Its sooooo much easier to randomly throw down one of every unit in your codex, right? This is a terrific argument right here. "My army is better because its harder to run." Go home everyone, we have a winner.
Sticks and stones. If I have the same weapons on all of my units, my thought isn't "which weapons do I use against which target". When all of my units have the same defensive profile, I don't wonder which of my identical units should secure and objective and can weather the enemies fire better. Spam is a huge simplification of strategy and tactics, and once again you use a straw man (random units from the codex) to try and defend a point that is indefensible. List diversity requires more skill, no if's and's or but's.
Grimgold wrote: There are two modes of play for 40k narrative and matched, every suggestion I've given is for Matched. Matched goals are to 1.) Be balanced, 2.) be fun, 3.) reward player skill. Spam is none of those so no matter how fluffy it is, it does not have a place in matched play. QED.
Emperor forbid someone plays a fluffy army in matched play. We couldn't possibly have that now, could we? Could you imagine the chaos?
Matched play has different goals than narrative, fluffy list and battles that tell stories are meant for narrative, where the rules set is relaxed to allow large imbalances for reasons of story. How dare I suggest that if you want to play a fluffy list you do so in the game mode designed for such things, I must be a monster who stops at red lights and puts books back on the shelf where I got them from. Also I don't have to imagine the chaos of spam lists, i can just go check best coast pairings.
Blacksails wrote: Spam isn't bad. Balance is the issue. Let players build the armies they want to within the rules without people acting all high and mighty with how amazing they are because they don't spam and that people who spam are bad people and play the wrong way.
I just can't quite grok how there is no connection between spam and imbalance in your mind, it's has to be some pretty stunning mental acrobatics. Spam is a form of imbalance, not exclusively a result. Also unlike the the minor imbalances where a unit is perhaps a few points cheaper than they ought to be to make list building interesting, spam adds nothing to the game. In fact Spam hurts the game significantly, so I'm at a loss to think of why someone would defend spam lists except to defend something they think gives them an advantage to use over others.
No one is asking for perfect balance either. Just better balance.
I'm defending spam because spam is a perfectly valid and fluffy way to build armies. As a Guard player, its pretty damn hard to avoid spam, if I run 4x infantry squads in Chimeras, supported by Russes and hellhounds. That list is pretty convincingly middle ground in power, but is the kind of list I enjoy running.
If your issue with spam is that you don't like the look of the army across from you, then fine, no one can convince you there. If its a balance issue, then simply fix the core issues of why the units are out of balance.
Most armies will like to spam if they want to keep their logistical situation manageable.
Heck, the Guard have to spam to be fluffy. Highlander guard lists look really bizarre and unfluffy to me. "I'm a superheavy tank regiment. So here's my one unit of rough riders, one unit of ratlings, and one unit of sentinels."
No one is asking for perfect balance either. Just better balance.
I'm defending spam because spam is a perfectly valid and fluffy way to build armies. As a Guard player, its pretty damn hard to avoid spam, if I run 4x infantry squads in Chimeras, supported by Russes and hellhounds. That list is pretty convincingly middle ground in power, but is the kind of list I enjoy running.
If your issue with spam is that you don't like the look of the army across from you, then fine, no one can convince you there. If its a balance issue, then simply fix the core issues of why the units are out of balance.
Simple stuff.
It's only spam if the unit is "good".
Otherwise have you ever SEEN an army with one of every unit? It isn't a cohesive looking army at all, and plays stupidly too.
-Armybuilding is primarily about minimizing costs for maximum damage and resilience. Support is about minimizing costs for maximal buff efficiency. Positional gaming is "ease of objectives" and "get more attack in range of less return attack." Flanking is relatively meaningless, cover is relatively meaningless, etc.
-The game is IgoUgo, aka "I prepare an alphastrike, you hide or suck it up." More the second, since smallers of supers = being more likely to go first, and vehicle degradation happens in a far less granular manner than removing individual small models. Don't forget that you can only enter Reserves if you explicitly have that rule.
-There is relatively little distinction between units. Tanks are just line infantry with more wounds. They do not get binary immunity to shots, or the ability to fire on the move without penalty (not that it matters unless you're Orks, because moving and firing heavy weapons is only a -1). Aircraft are just tanks/just big infantry that move in a square, at -1 to be hit (break out those Inferno Cannons), but with perfect 360* shooting.
-Inversely, there are way too many units that are stupidly overspecialized to the point that taking them to tailor against certain armies automatically gimps you against others. Facing Horrors and Smitespam? Sure, "take snipers" sounds like strategy (and not list tailoring), until you come across a Stormraven army. "Take mass Onagers" sounds good until you come across Horrors and Smitespam. Etc. The game has become far more "matchup" dependent.
Primaris Reivers are of the most notable examples of the flaws with 8e design. They're a shiny new kit, and truth be told I kind of find the "skull masks" and clean armor fun for conversion purposes. However, they're fluffed as an "elite disruption unit" that is excellent for ambushing a Tau Kau'yon. The only problems: They don't Infiltrate, their "disruption" (-1 to hit and shut down Overwatch...if you can get a grenade in range and hit) only works on Infantry (can't have cavalry or Hellions suffering from Shock Grenades, much less Tau Gun Drones), and their skull masks give...-1 Leadership, in a game where Battleshock is fairly meaningless. Such a rule is also useless against vehicles, monstrous creatures, Orks (Oh no, they're only Ld 29 instead of Ld 30), Guard (who only lose 1 model max from BS anyway), etc.
All in all, rather than being a unit that will "have a place in every Space Marine army", they're a unit without any real purpose whatsoever! If GW wanted to make Reivers usable/"interesting" without making them omgwtfbbqhax, a far more creative implementation would be:
* Skirmish Tactics: Reivers may withdraw at the end of any Fight Sub-Phase.
* Shock Grenades: Remove the "Infantry" keyword. Optionally add "cannot be used against Airborne targets".
* Remove Terror Tactics, rename Disruptors: Your opponent may not use CP to enact (non-offensive) stratagems on any units within 3" of one of your units of Reivers.
These would give several benefits to Reivers: They could be used for assassination duty (your opponent cannot spend CP to reroll saves), would be able to support the rest of your troops in an assault (cannot use counter-attack), and make their use as terrortroops potentially meaningful (your opponent couldn't spend CP to autopass Battleshock). It would also future-proof them to act as an "anti-stratagem" techpiece as codexes get rolled out.
ross-128 wrote: I'm pretty sure we already covered why Highlander (and variants on Highlander) wouldn't work. Just think of the poor AdMech, with their tiny codex!
The punchline was that 7e competitive Admech for most intents and purposes might as well have been a Highlander army. Swap out one unit of Grav Destroyers for Torsion Breachers and bam.
No one is asking for perfect balance either. Just better balance.
I'm defending spam because spam is a perfectly valid and fluffy way to build armies. As a Guard player, its pretty damn hard to avoid spam, if I run 4x infantry squads in Chimeras, supported by Russes and hellhounds. That list is pretty convincingly middle ground in power, but is the kind of list I enjoy running.
If your issue with spam is that you don't like the look of the army across from you, then fine, no one can convince you there. If its a balance issue, then simply fix the core issues of why the units are out of balance.
Simple stuff.
For what it's worth, My suggestion was to leave troops alone when it comes to limiting how many times a unit can appear in a given army. Same with dedicated transports, though I might move some current dedicated transports into other slots.
Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game, for all of the reason I mentioned but you didn't respond to. We've already discussed where fluffy armies belong, so that's not a defensible argument for matched play. Also your argument breaks down in that an individual unit might not be OP, but when they are spammed they become so. A single storm raven isn't OP, in fact you rarely see them outside of spam lists, but when you take six of them it's a problem.
Your solution would be to increase the cost of stormravens, taurox primes, suit commanders, and any other unit that ends up getting spammed to advantage. That might work but it punishes those units even when they are not spammed, and it requires constant vigilance and updates. My solution is to make it so you can't have more than three of the same unit in an army, excepting troops and dedicated transports. If that ends up not being enough, we can always adjust, for instance that might not be enough to stop flyer spam so I might add flyer wing to the list of banned items. In one easy to remember rules change the problem is addressed and there is almost no chance of scale based balance problems happening again.Then if we need to adjust individual units, we can do so, but the best rule I've had for troubleshooting is start with the most general and work your way to the specific.
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
So let's take unit A. Unit A is too good for its points. People spam said unit because its too good.
Your solution is to simply restrict that unit.
My solution is to fix said unit.
When that unit is fixed, people can spam if they like the model or how it plays, or they can take one. But the unit being fixed does not in any way shape or form punish people for only taking it once or twice. A balanced unit will continue to be balanced if there's 12 of them or 1 of them, that's the whole point of balance.
And the fluffy army argument is in fact quite defensible as its comically absurd to tell people who want to play matched play that their fluffy yet competitive armies are not welcome.
The solution is very simple. Fix the broken units. Then it won't matter what gets spammed or doesn't.
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
I've given you several reasonable points that you haven't bothered to respond to, please stop arguing in bad faith.
No, you haven't. You haven't actually responded to my points at all really, aside from making baseless assertions that you yourself haven't actually provided the reasoning for. And your points made in other posts in this thread contradict your own arguments.
For example: there's no real difference between overall "list diversity" with "spam" allowed, and "list diversity" with "spam" not allowed. You claim otherwise, yet you provide no evidence of this; it is simply another baseless assumption you've made. If you're worried about everyone using the same OP list, then removing "spam" won't fix the problem. It'll just change up which list is the chosen list for people who seek the most powerful list to play.
Your argument is inherently contradictory. Your own arguments reveal that you don't actually have a problem with "spam", as long as the "spam" is certain kinds of units that you like. It's utterly mind-boggling the way you're trying to claim I'm arguing in bad faith when you're not even able to provide a coherent, non-contradictory argument in the first place.
Blacksails wrote: So let's take unit A. Unit A is too good for its points. People spam said unit because its too good.
Your solution is to simply restrict that unit.
My solution is to fix said unit.
When that unit is fixed, people can spam if they like the model or how it plays, or they can take one. But the unit being fixed does not in any way shape or form punish people for only taking it once or twice. A balanced unit will continue to be balanced if there's 12 of them or 1 of them, that's the whole point of balance.
And the fluffy army argument is in fact quite defensible as its comically absurd to tell people who want to play matched play that their fluffy yet competitive armies are not welcome.
The solution is very simple. Fix the broken units. Then it won't matter what gets spammed or doesn't.
Thats a pretty clean breakdown there.
If spammed flyers is the issue, tweak the flyer to where its no longer viable if spammed in a competetive environment.
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
I've given you several reasonable points that you haven't bothered to respond to...
Blacksails wrote: So let's take unit A. Unit A is too good for its points. People spam said unit because its too good.
Your solution is to simply restrict that unit.
My solution is to fix said unit.
When that unit is fixed, people can spam if they like the model or how it plays, or they can take one. But the unit being fixed does not in any way shape or form punish people for only taking it once or twice. A balanced unit will continue to be balanced if there's 12 of them or 1 of them, that's the whole point of balance.
And the fluffy army argument is in fact quite defensible as its comically absurd to tell people who want to play matched play that their fluffy yet competitive armies are not welcome.
The solution is very simple. Fix the broken units. Then it won't matter what gets spammed or doesn't.
Dodging my point from last time, Units A isn't bad as a single, unit A is OP in groups, what do you do? Also your solution isn't a single solution or simple, but instead hundreds of individual changes that may or may not be warranted at scales of one or two units. That's underpants gnomes levels of logic there. Also narrative and matched are different game types with different goals, why do have two different game types if you insist they be treated the same. I don't got into narrative play with a WAAC army lists, why would you go into matched play with an army whose primary goal is not to win. Also why don't you defend your point about the cosmic absurdity of playing the right kind of lists for the right kind of game mode?
Actually, if it's overpowered in groups it's usually overpowered as a single as well. It's just less noticeable. Fix the unit's balance, and the fix has a much bigger impact on "spam" lists using multiples of the unit than other lists using just one of it.
Spam is fine. Flyer spam list is not overpowered. They're winning, but not handily. I read the batreps of the guy who came in second, using Harlequins, to the flyer spam. He lost the game, but mainly because the last raven rolled 2 6's in melta-overwatch.
Dodging my point from last time, Units A isn't bad as a single, unit A is OP in groups, what do you do? Also your solution isn't a single solution or simple, but instead hundreds of individual changes that may or may not be warranted at scales of one or two units. That's underpants gnomes levels of logic there. Also narrative and matched are different game types with different goals, why do have two different game types if you insist they be treated the same. I don't got into narrative play with a WAAC army lists, why would you go into matched play with an army whose primary goal is not to win. Also why don't you defend your point about the cosmic absurdity of playing the right kind of lists for the right kind of game mode?
Simce when is a points adjustment "hundreds of individual changes"?
-Armybuilding is primarily about minimizing costs for maximum damage and resilience. Support is about minimizing costs for maximal buff efficiency. Positional gaming is "ease of objectives" and "get more attack in range of less return attack." Flanking is relatively meaningless, cover is relatively meaningless, etc.
-The game is IgoUgo, aka "I prepare an alphastrike, you hide or suck it up." More the second, since smallers of supers = being more likely to go first, and vehicle degradation happens in a far less granular manner than removing individual small models. Don't forget that you can only enter Reserves if you explicitly have that rule.
-There is relatively little distinction between units. Tanks are just line infantry with more wounds. They do not get binary immunity to shots, or the ability to fire on the move without penalty (not that it matters unless you're Orks, because moving and firing heavy weapons is only a -1). Aircraft are just tanks/just big infantry that move in a square, at -1 to be hit (break out those Inferno Cannons), but with perfect 360* shooting.
-Inversely, there are way too many units that are stupidly overspecialized to the point that taking them to tailor against certain armies automatically gimps you against others. Facing Horrors and Smitespam? Sure, "take snipers" sounds like strategy (and not list tailoring), until you come across a Stormraven army. "Take mass Onagers" sounds good until you come across Horrors and Smitespam. Etc. The game has become far more "matchup" dependent.
Primaris Reivers
Army building is about getting as much bang for your buck while being able to complete the objectives you will be facing. Right now, spamming and sitting still are in high demand because progressive missions aren't the norm. When they become the norm for your, your area, and/or tournaments, you will see less sit and shoot armies because they will lose to armies that play the objectives. Flanking is meaningless against these kinds of armies and against flyer spam armies simply due to the missions. Once the missions are made more dynamic, again, this will fix the problem.
Not every army alpha strikes so I don't really get your point here. Is your local meta alpha strike heavy?
The lack of distinction comes from two origins: the need for everything to be viable in the initial creation of the 8th rules and the lack of special rules, relics, stratagems, and more that are packed into codex's. When codex's come, units will begin to act very differently between chapters / legions / dynasties / hive fleets and so on.
Again, I don't see your point here? Overspecialized units will not always see their full utilization against every army you will be facing. This is because every army and opponent is different. Even in tournaments you'll be facing a wide variety of foes and units. Top tables will be attempting to utilize whatever they can do get to the top, that is where spam lives at the moment. This is a problem that not only ITC is trying to fix but also GW will most likely address in codex's and FAQs. The point of 8th is to allow people to play what they want effectively but due to the nature of the game and number of possibilities of course this isn't always going to equal a fair matchup. Warhammer was ALWAYS matchup dependent, that is way TAC lists are the end goal of 8th's balance. It isn't there yet and honestly it may never get there or it may with the help of ITC restrictions, but a TAC list should always have a chance against other lists unless the other list is some super specialized list that the TAC isn't prepared to deal with in at least some form or another.
I believe it has been discussed to death that Reivers will be getting more complete rules in the codex / when they get a more complete kit. Implying they will stay as they are is disingenuous.
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
I've given you several reasonable points that you haven't bothered to respond to...
Were they in a different thread?
I'm sorry your incapable of reading a thread here let me waste my time restating my points for someone who can't be bothered to actually look:
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
You could also save me some time by looking at my responses to black sails criticism of those points, but I suppose I can copy and past those as well.
Dodging my point from last time, Units A isn't bad as a single, unit A is OP in groups, what do you do? Also your solution isn't a single solution or simple, but instead hundreds of individual changes that may or may not be warranted at scales of one or two units. That's underpants gnomes levels of logic there. Also narrative and matched are different game types with different goals, why do have two different game types if you insist they be treated the same. I don't got into narrative play with a WAAC army lists, why would you go into matched play with an army whose primary goal is not to win. Also why don't you defend your point about the cosmic absurdity of playing the right kind of lists for the right kind of game mode?
Simce when is a points adjustment "hundreds of individual changes"?
Every point change is an adjustment, and we are dealing with a unknown number of issues of scale. Each point change must be carefully considered as they can have big impacts for an entire army. So yes this could be hundreds of changes required to reach a level of balance that one simple change could make.
No it does not. A lot of lists being similar has nothing to do with spam, in fact, many "spam" lists actually provide more diversity to the kinds of opponents you can fight, because they are bringing things beyond the ordinary.
Grimgold wrote: Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
Spam brings its own complexities, because you must understand all the nuances of that one unit's various capabilities and weaknesses. My proposed 1st and 10th list of five scout squads and five terminator squads isn't "EZ Mode" at all. If anything, a perfectly balanced army greatly reduces the complexity of running it, because you don't have to worry about weaknesses in your list-- you have a unit to cover the weakness.
Grimgold wrote: You could also save me some time by looking at my responses to black sails criticism of those points, but I suppose I can copy and past those as well.
Oh you mean where you did the argumentative equivalent of stuffing your fingers in your ears and shouted "NANANANANANA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" over and over again?
Your argument, as always, is weak, based on an unwillingness to look deeper in to the topic and consider views other than your own.
But to the grander point, can we just let the meta settle a bit before we cry foul? The last tournament top-10 list i saw, had a wide variety of armies in there, including Orks at #2.
Maybe things aren't so bad?
Disclaimer: I reserve the right to be salty about manticores.
Disclaimer 2: Forgeworld should be banned until it is playtested by the same teams.
Marmatag wrote: Spam is fine. Flyer spam list is not overpowered. They're winning, but not handily. I read the batreps of the guy who came in second, using Harlequins, to the flyer spam. He lost the game, but mainly because the last raven rolled 2 6's in melta-overwatch.
I have a feeling flyer spam is doing well because people are not used to it yet.
it may seem over powered because its doing well and everyone is running it after seeing it win rather than adjusting normal lists with more options to deal with the problem.
In fact, forcing everyone to take a diversity of units will wind up with armies looking alike as well, because players will naturally gravitate to units considered best, or combos seen as the most viable. And, tadaa! The range of percieved viable armies goes down, and armies look like each other again.
Dodging my point from last time, Units A isn't bad as a single, unit A is OP in groups, what do you do? Also your solution isn't a single solution or simple, but instead hundreds of individual changes that may or may not be warranted at scales of one or two units. That's underpants gnomes levels of logic there. Also narrative and matched are different game types with different goals, why do have two different game types if you insist they be treated the same. I don't got into narrative play with a WAAC army lists, why would you go into matched play with an army whose primary goal is not to win. Also why don't you defend your point about the cosmic absurdity of playing the right kind of lists for the right kind of game mode?
Simce when is a points adjustment "hundreds of individual changes"?
Every point change is an adjustment, and we are dealing with a unknown number of issues of scale. Each point change must be carefully considered as they can have big impacts for an entire army. So yes this could be hundreds of changes required to reach a level of balance that one simple change could make.
Seriously?
Not awarding any points for that line of reasoning. Points are by far the simplest tool in the toolbox for discouraging spam.
Marmatag wrote: Spam is fine. Flyer spam list is not overpowered. They're winning, but not handily. I read the batreps of the guy who came in second, using Harlequins, to the flyer spam. He lost the game, but mainly because the last raven rolled 2 6's in melta-overwatch.
I have a feeling flyer spam is doing well because people are not used to it yet.
it may seem over powered because its doing well and everyone is running it after seeing it win rather than adjusting normal lists with more options to deal with the problem.
Yes, this.
It's actually the smaller fliers that present the most problems. Interceptors are really, really good, for their points.
Marmatag wrote: Spam is fine. Flyer spam list is not overpowered. They're winning, but not handily. I read the batreps of the guy who came in second, using Harlequins, to the flyer spam. He lost the game, but mainly because the last raven rolled 2 6's in melta-overwatch.
I have a feeling flyer spam is doing well because people are not used to it yet.
it may seem over powered because its doing well and everyone is running it after seeing it win rather than adjusting normal lists with more options to deal with the problem.
Marmatag wrote: Spam is fine. Flyer spam list is not overpowered. They're winning, but not handily. I read the batreps of the guy who came in second, using Harlequins, to the flyer spam. He lost the game, but mainly because the last raven rolled 2 6's in melta-overwatch.
I have a feeling flyer spam is doing well because people are not used to it yet.
it may seem over powered because its doing well and everyone is running it after seeing it win rather than adjusting normal lists with more options to deal with the problem.
Yes, this.
It's actually the smaller fliers that present the most problems. Interceptors are really, really good, for their points.
Thankfully, interceptors do have penalties to hit ground targets with their best weapons, which IMO is how it probably should be for all fliers unless they're in hover mode (and thus not benefiting from -1 to hit).
There's nothing inherently wrong with, for example, a Sisters player using five dominion squads, a Marines player using a ton of terminators, a Guard player using lots of tanks, an Ork list that uses tons of bikes, an Aeldari list that uses tons of Wraith units, and so on.
If any of the lists are broken, what should be done is to look deeper in to why they are broken, rather than immediately blaming the overall structure of the list itself.
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
I've given you several reasonable points that you haven't bothered to respond to...
Were they in a different thread?
I'm sorry your incapable* of reading a thread here let me waste my time restating my points for someone who can't be bothered to actually look:
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
You could also save me some time by looking at my responses to black sails criticism of those points, but I suppose I can copy and past those as well.
*you're incapable
No, no, I read those, I'm looking for the reasonable points you mentioned, not the unsubstantiated and fundamentally flawed ones in this thread.
Spam in a bad sense (as opposed to just a thematic sense or as a product of player preference) is a product of imbalance, it isn't, in and of itself, inherently imbalanced as a concept.
I guess you could conflate it with a skew list, which could look similar on the table, but is exploiting a slightly different idea. Again though, skew lists aren't inherently imbalanced as an idea, unless their components are also imbalanced, they simply have a different performance profile (one where they utterly dominate some games but are vulnerable to being equally dominated in others.)
Six Storm Ravens isn't unbeatable (which would make it broken) it merely exploits the fact that most players won't take sufficient tech in a TAC list to deal with it. If it's gains sufficient traction competitively, players will adjust their list, the meta will move on, and it'll become a footnote of early 8th competition.
Honestly, the game is fine. If everything was truly "balanced" we would just be trading blows with no need for strategy... Beyond that, how do you balance a game controlled by dice?
Example: last night I got home from work and had a pick up free for all game with my roommate and his kid in the garage.
Kid had an Eldar Wraithknight allied with an Imperial Knight Paladin. Roomie had a Renegade Knight with a bigass melta and claw fisty thingy and a Lord of Skulls with a Daemongore Cannon and Skullhurler.
Between arriving in a Stormfang with Arjac leading an almost killsquad (plasma guns mostly, for gaks and giggles), Arjac's team managed to lay down some notable wounds on the Paladin and Wraith, kill the Renegade Knight, and almost took out the Lord of Skulls. The Lord was the last thing on the table before he finally managed to kill Arjac and only had 3 wounds left.
Use your noodle. Strategize. Work cover. Git Gud. You aren't losing because of balance, you are losing because
Option A) The Dice Gods are displeased with you,
Option B) You aren't using your noodle,
Or Option C) You expect things to work like they did in 7th.
Just my two cents, and the advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. Just remember... It is just a game.
pismakron wrote: The stormravenlist is not the problem. Missions without objectives to hold IS a problem.
This is really silly. Pitched Battles have been apart of war throughout history. The problem is SPAM.
If you can't play a balanced game during a pitched battle without terrain. Then the game is unbalanced.
Spamming a whole flyer list should be against the rules.
They need restrictive rules on Spam.
So you make an argument based on historical example, then choose to ignore every instance in history where battles are comprised of multiples of the same type of unit. You might even call it spam. History is OP. The problem is HISTORY.
So here's something I don't get either about the merits of restricting units for some nebulous concept of 'list diversity'. If I bring a battery of three Wyverns, a battery of 3 basilisks, and a battery of 3 Griffons, I've technically met the the requirements of not bringing more than 3 of each unit type. But I also have 9 vehicles with the exact same profile, and 6 of which have roughly the same weapon. Is my list sufficiently diverse?
How about 9 Russes, but three different sets of 3 with different turrets and sponsons? How about Sentinels vs Armoured Sentinels?
You could do what Medieval 2 Total War did and charge extra for each copy of a unit in an army?
Then even an underpointed unit wouldn't be as efficient to take a second of, because you would have to pay the 50pt copycat charge or whatever.
Couldn't friendly tournaments just introduce handicaps? The winning player loses 3 command points for their next game and the loser gains 3 command points for their next game.
You could make it even more extreme and if you win your first game you must strip out 100pts from your army, if you lose your first game you get to add 100pts.
You could do what Medieval 2 Total War did and charge extra for each copy of a unit in an army?
Then even an underpointed unit wouldn't be as efficient to take a second of, because you would have to pay the 50pt copycat charge or whatever.
Couldn't friendly tournaments just introduce handicaps? The winning player loses 3 command points for their next game and the loser gains 3 command points for their next game.
You could make it even more extreme and if you win your first game you must strip out 100pts from your army, if you lose your first game you get to add 100pts.
The question remains, why?
What are you gaining? What are you fixing? What advantage does this bring to the game? Is it even a good solution to the problem that is ill defined?
Grimgold wrote: Back to the issue of spam, my issue with spam is that it's bad for the game
You keep saying this without providing any reasonable argument why it's bad for the game, especially not one you don't later contradict.
If it's bad for players to spam, there's no reason why it would be okay for troops to be an exception. Troops are just units like any other one in the codex, and spamming them suffers the same "downsides" you mentioned as spamming any other unit, so your argument contradicts itself.
I've given you several reasonable points that you haven't bothered to respond to...
Were they in a different thread?
I'm sorry your incapable of reading a thread here let me waste my time restating my points for someone who can't be bothered to actually look:
Spam is bad because it's boring, fighting 5 or 500 of the same unit makes for boring battles, since it's the same tactics over and over again.
Spam is bad because it's unbalanced, a minor imbalance can be magnified greatly by taking the imbalanced unit over and over again.
Spam hurts list diversity, having a wide range target profiles means there are several correct answers on how to do your composition, having one target profile running amok, means there will only be a few right answers in terms of comp. So spam begets spam.
Spam is ez mode, bringing a ton of the same unit reduces the complexity of running that army.
You could also save me some time by looking at my responses to black sails criticism of those points, but I suppose I can copy and past those as well.
TIL fighting 3 squads of terminators is boring and EZ mode AND unbalanced.
Are you a troll account? I'd think not with 900+ posts, but your logic is garbage.
You could do what Medieval 2 Total War did and charge extra for each copy of a unit in an army? Then even an underpointed unit wouldn't be as efficient to take a second of, because you would have to pay the 50pt copycat charge or whatever.
So basically "feth you if your book doesn't have tons of good choices".
Sisters of Battle have exactly one troops choice, two fast attack choices, two HQ choices, and two heavy support choices-- and the elite units they only have more than two of because of some mediocre buff characters that few people really want to take any more as they're just not worth the points for most lists due to poorly worded rules.
Even including Ecclesiarchy units, that still leaves only two fast attack and one troops choice, and that forces you to take one exorcist, one retributor squad, and one penitent engine, alongside one canoness, celestine, and jacobus, in every list unless you want to be penalized, and there's no way you can't be penalized in fast attack choices. And you'd get one rhino, one immolator, and one repressor as transport before penalties.
So good now everyone who plays sisters is encouraged to play the exact same list by yet another arbitrary, poorly worded rule. feth yes this is so good for list variety guys why don't we do more gak like this!
Well the OP was asking how to make the game less about spamming the same units, so that was the problem I was trying to solve :-)
You have a fair point that some people might not even consider it a problem, but I think most competetive games consider it healthy to have a variety of different strategies and tactical options work at the highest level. 40k does have more variety in its little toe than most games do in their whole bodies though haha!
I kinda want to see a meta where only Stormravens are good, then we could rename Warhammer as 'G-Police Wars'
-Armybuilding is primarily about minimizing costs for maximum damage and resilience. Support is about minimizing costs for maximal buff efficiency. Positional gaming is "ease of objectives" and "get more attack in range of less return attack." Flanking is relatively meaningless, cover is relatively meaningless, etc.
-The game is IgoUgo, aka "I prepare an alphastrike, you hide or suck it up." More the second, since smallers of supers = being more likely to go first, and vehicle degradation happens in a far less granular manner than removing individual small models. Don't forget that you can only enter Reserves if you explicitly have that rule.
-There is relatively little distinction between units. Tanks are just line infantry with more wounds. They do not get binary immunity to shots, or the ability to fire on the move without penalty (not that it matters unless you're Orks, because moving and firing heavy weapons is only a -1). Aircraft are just tanks/just big infantry that move in a square, at -1 to be hit (break out those Inferno Cannons), but with perfect 360* shooting.
-Inversely, there are way too many units that are stupidly overspecialized to the point that taking them to tailor against certain armies automatically gimps you against others. Facing Horrors and Smitespam? Sure, "take snipers" sounds like strategy (and not list tailoring), until you come across a Stormraven army. "Take mass Onagers" sounds good until you come across Horrors and Smitespam. Etc. The game has become far more "matchup" dependent.
Primaris Reivers
Army building is about getting as much bang for your buck while being able to complete the objectives you will be facing. Right now, spamming and sitting still are in high demand because progressive missions aren't the norm. When they become the norm for your, your area, and/or tournaments, you will see less sit and shoot armies because they will lose to armies that play the objectives. Flanking is meaningless against these kinds of armies and against flyer spam armies simply due to the missions. Once the missions are made more dynamic, again, this will fix the problem.
Not every army alpha strikes so I don't really get your point here. Is your local meta alpha strike heavy?
The lack of distinction comes from two origins: the need for everything to be viable in the initial creation of the 8th rules and the lack of special rules, relics, stratagems, and more that are packed into codex's. When codex's come, units will begin to act very differently between chapters / legions / dynasties / hive fleets and so on.
Again, I don't see your point here? Overspecialized units will not always see their full utilization against every army you will be facing. This is because every army and opponent is different. Even in tournaments you'll be facing a wide variety of foes and units. Top tables will be attempting to utilize whatever they can do get to the top, that is where spam lives at the moment. This is a problem that not only ITC is trying to fix but also GW will most likely address in codex's and FAQs. The point of 8th is to allow people to play what they want effectively but due to the nature of the game and number of possibilities of course this isn't always going to equal a fair matchup. Warhammer was ALWAYS matchup dependent, that is way TAC lists are the end goal of 8th's balance. It isn't there yet and honestly it may never get there or it may with the help of ITC restrictions, but a TAC list should always have a chance against other lists unless the other list is some super specialized list that the TAC isn't prepared to deal with in at least some form or another.
I believe it has been discussed to death that Reivers will be getting more complete rules in the codex / when they get a more complete kit. Implying they will stay as they are is disingenuous.
The lack of distinction comes from turning everything into line infantry, and removing "unit types" altogether, alongside with flatlining the S/T chart that it's only one step removed from playing AOS where everything wounds everything on fixed values.
A TAC list should always be viable and have a chance. Period.
The current rules for Reivers, as released are not promising. They might get weapon options but I doubt their core function will change, or they will turn one Shock Grenade into another. It really does not make for good design to have units that are only allowed to do one thing, against one type of opponent. Duality 101 means more options in-game, rather than gambling on "did my opponent take linchpin characters, or is he running Stormravens" when you take Snipers
Kroem wrote: You have a fair point that some people might not even consider it a problem, but I think most competetive games consider it healthy to have a variety of different strategies and tactical options work at the highest level.
Then why are you arguing that such a huge slew of tactical options should be taken away?
To say nothing of how your proposed rule feths over certain armies to begin with, it MASSIVELY reduces list variety and encourages everyone to take the exact same units.
You could do what Medieval 2 Total War did and charge extra for each copy of a unit in an army?
Then even an underpointed unit wouldn't be as efficient to take a second of, because you would have to pay the 50pt copycat charge or whatever.
So basically "feth you if your book doesn't have tons of good choices".
Sisters of Battle have exactly one troops choice, two fast attack choices, two HQ choices, and two heavy support choices-- and the elite units they only have more than two of because of some mediocre buff characters that few people really want to take any more as they're just not worth the points for most lists due to poorly worded rules.
Even including Ecclesiarchy units, that still leaves only two fast attack and one troops choice, and that forces you to take one exorcist, one retributor squad, and one penitent engine, alongside one canoness, celestine, and jacobus, in every list unless you want to be penalized, and there's no way you can't be penalized in fast attack choices. And you'd get one rhino, one immolator, and one repressor as transport before penalties.
So good now everyone who plays sisters is encouraged to play the exact same list by yet another arbitrary, poorly worded rule. feth yes this is so good for list variety guys why don't we do more gak like this!
Yeah regardless an all flyer list is clearly broken. Why not make troops free of spam restrictions Or place certain limits on certain army builds like Max 2 flyers
ForceChoke wrote: Yeah regardless an all flyer list is clearly broken. Why not make troops free of spam restrictions Or place certain limits on certain army builds like Max 2 flyers
If a flyer is broken taking six of them, it's broken taking one of them. May be less broken, but still broken.
Why not just fix the don't bypass the language filter like this. Reds8n flyer instead? When a problem calls for a screwdriver, you shouldn't be surprised when people say don't use a hand grenade. If the six stormravens are broken (and there's not actually much evidence it is, given how close their victories were in the tournament games), then fix stormravens.
Spam is not the problem, and the proof is that nobody is crying about full terminator armies or full... I don't know. Ork Walkers armies.
If people spam a unit is because that unit is overpowered. To remove spam is to regocnise that "We can't balance unit, so at least we limit you how many OP units you can take". The solution is not to eliminate the freedom of choice, is to balance units as Melissia is saying.
Kroem wrote:
You have a fair point that some people might not even consider it a problem, but I think most competetive games consider it healthy to have a variety of different strategies and tactical options work at the highest level.
Then why are you arguing that such a huge slew of tactical options should be taken away?
That wasn't my intention, I was suggesting that players be asked to pay slightly more points for spamming the most point efficient unit options so that their power level is equalised with other options within the codex.
In Rome Total War ranged cavalry and infantry dominated the competetive online play and people would bring entire armies of horse archers.
In Medieval the cost of those types of units increased as you bought more of them. This meant that you could still bring an all horse archer army if you were good, but because they were less cost efficient than before bring a mixed army or a historically accurate army composition wasn't suicidal!
That made the online multiplayer much more enjoyable in my experience. That was the coolness that I was suggesting bringing to 40k :-)
I think the command point handicap idea is much better anyway, as command points are easy to add or subtract from an army to limit or buff its potential. I think GW could have attached much more aggressive negative command point tallys to formations like all fliers or all lords of war.
I'm just concerned that 20 command points might be no better than 10 as you wouldn't have time to use them all.
Jarl of Vashon wrote: Honestly, the game is fine. If everything was truly "balanced" we would just be trading blows with no need for strategy... Beyond that, how do you balance a game controlled by dice?
Example: last night I got home from work and had a pick up free for all game with my roommate and his kid in the garage.
Kid had an Eldar Wraithknight allied with an Imperial Knight Paladin. Roomie had a Renegade Knight with a bigass melta and claw fisty thingy and a Lord of Skulls with a Daemongore Cannon and Skullhurler.
Between arriving in a Stormfang with Arjac leading an almost killsquad (plasma guns mostly, for gaks and giggles), Arjac's team managed to lay down some notable wounds on the Paladin and Wraith, kill the Renegade Knight, and almost took out the Lord of Skulls. The Lord was the last thing on the table before he finally managed to kill Arjac and only had 3 wounds left.
Use your noodle. Strategize. Work cover. Git Gud. You aren't losing because of balance, you are losing because
Option A) The Dice Gods are displeased with you,
Option B) You aren't using your noodle,
Or Option C) You expect things to work like they did in 7th.
Just my two cents, and the advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. Just remember... It is just a game.
This is also silly the fact an all flyer list won or Razerback Spam... just means again the game is out of whack. 40k has almost zero tactical depth now in 8th. You could GET GUD in earlier editions of the game as long as people did not bring MIN MAXED armies to the table. And you used tactics . Except maybe 6th and 7th
You can't accuse people of not using their brains in 8th. It's designed for the lowest common denominator and children.
Kroem wrote: That wasn't my intention, I was suggesting that players be asked to pay slightly more points for spamming the most point efficient unit options so that their power level is equalised with other options within the codex.
Which, again, translates basically to "feth you for not playing space marines". Because some codices-- and mostly non-Marine ones, though Grey Knights also suffer from this-- only HAVE one or two points efficient options in any given slot. Of course they take multiples of that.
Or, to be more blunt; Why are you trying to use a sledgehammer to turn a screw?
In Total War, you're not buying each individual soldier and painting and assembling their models yourself, and furthermore, Total War has less variety than 40k does by far.
ForceChoke wrote: Yeah regardless an all flyer list is clearly broken. Why not make troops free of spam restrictions Or place certain limits on certain army builds like Max 2 flyers
If a flyer is broken taking six of them, it's broken taking one of them. May be less broken, but still broken.
Why not just fix the flyer instead? When a problem calls for a screwdriver, you shouldn't be surprised when people say don't use a hand grenade. If the six stormravens are broken (and there's not actually much evidence it is, given how close their victories were in the tournament games), then fix stormravens.
That I disagree with. A single overpowered unit or even two may dominate a game but you can often beat it with tactics. However a whole list of 1 type of unit like flyers is just insulting to the main idea of the game. FUN with FRIENDS.
It's not fun when your friends bring a Tank to a knife fight.
Kroem wrote: That wasn't my intention, I was suggesting that players be asked to pay slightly more points for spamming the most point efficient unit options so that their power level is equalised with other options within the codex.
Which, again, translates basically to "feth you for not playing space marines". Because some codices-- and mostly non-Marine ones, though Grey Knights also suffer from this-- only HAVE one or two points efficient options in any given slot. Of course they take multiples of that.
Or, to be more blunt; Why are you trying to use a sledgehammer to turn a screw?
In Total War, you're not buying each individual soldier and painting and assembling their models yourself, and furthermore, Total War has less variety than 40k does by far.
Kroem wrote:
You have a fair point that some people might not even consider it a problem, but I think most competetive games consider it healthy to have a variety of different strategies and tactical options work at the highest level.
Then why are you arguing that such a huge slew of tactical options should be taken away?
That wasn't my intention, I was suggesting that players be asked to pay slightly more points for spamming the most point efficient unit options so that their power level is equalised with other options within the codex.
In Rome Total War ranged cavalry and infantry dominated the competetive online play and people would bring entire armies of horse archers.
In Medieval the cost of those types of units increased as you bought more of them. This meant that you could still bring an all horse archer army if you were good, but because they were less cost efficient than before bring a mixed army or a historically accurate army composition wasn't suicidal!
That made the online multiplayer much more enjoyable in my experience. That was the coolness that I was suggesting bringing to 40k :-)
I think the command point handicap idea is much better anyway, as command points are easy to add or subtract from an army to limit or buff its potential. I think GW could have attached much more aggressive negative command point tallys to formations like all fliers or all lords of war.
I'm just concerned that 20 command points might be no better than 10 as you wouldn't have time to use them all.
I really like this idea. Needs tweaking and testing but. Amazing Idea.
Because the player used their list well. And even then, it came down to the wire with some very lucky rolls that just barely managed to win them the game.
Do you accuse every tournament-winning build of being "ez mode noob list" or something? Grow up, dude.
Yea it depends on the limts set for each individual unit before you start paying the tax, but I can see how the little factions would be at a disadvantage in a 'one limit for all' situation.
Or, to be more blunt; Why are you trying to use a sledgehammer to turn a screw?
Maybe I am using a sledgehammer! I certainly have no illusions about being a rules writer, just offering a suggestion I've seen work in a similar situation and seeing what people think of it.
Ideally there wouldn't be any OP units and we wouldn't have to argue about how to stop them from dominating the metagame
Kroem wrote: Maybe I am using a sledgehammer! I certainly have no illusions about being a rules writer, just offering a suggestion I've seen work in a similar situation and seeing what people think of it.
The similarities between total war and tabletop 40k are, at best, superficial. It is a bad comparison that leads you to a bad conclusion. Might as well be saying "Well, a jalopeno looks like a fat green bean, so clearly it'll taste the same."
Kroem wrote: Ideally there wouldn't be any OP units and we wouldn't have to argue about how to stop them from dominating the metagame
If you want to fix OP units... here's an idea... fix the freaking units. The gameplay itself, the list building itself, is actually fine. Better than it has been in ages. The problem is poorly balanced units. So tweak the units themselves, and you change the game as little as possible in order to avoid your change rippling over in to negatively impacting other units, or, just as bad, causing other units to become overpowered.
People don't spam a unit because it's overpowered, they spam a unit because it is a points efficient option.
If you want to argue a unit is overpowered, you need more evidence than that some lists use multiple copies of it.
There are units out there you can't spam that are totally overpowered, for their cost. For instance, Magnus. He hasn't come up yet because we're talking about spam, but he's the single most undercosted unit in the entire game, excluding Forgeworld.
Azreal13 wrote: Points efficiency is, essentially, a synonym for being overpowered, it's silly to try and draw a distinction.
Points efficiency is largely restricted to the scope of the codex,
No it isn't. Grey Hunters vs Tactical Marines vs CSM is an entirely reasonable basis for a conversation about efficiency and is in no way limited to specific books. It's utterly elementary to compare similar units across codexes and make a call on which offers greater points efficiency, a "point" isn't worth more in one codex than another.
whereas overpowered makes a statement about the balance relative to other codexes.
Yes, because, as I said, excepting a few corner cases they're the same thing.
If you lose every game spamming the best unit in your codex is that OP?
If that's the best you've got, probably better concede the point and move on dude.
The best way to prevent spam is to make sure two conditions are fulfilled.
1: Different units have different jobs, no one unit can fulfill every job at the same time.
2: Those jobs are all necessary, so that focusing on one to the exclusion of all others is a poor strategy.
Though there is a limit to what we can consider spam, mostly because outside of a very narrow definition (a list consisting entirely or almost entirely of a single unit with a single loadout) it starts to break down very quickly. Is a list with no vehicles "infantry spam", or just an infantry list? Is a Tyranid list with few or no shooting units "assault spam", or are Tyranids just a choppy army? Is a Tau list with no melee units "shooting spam", or are Tau just a shooty army? Is a parking lot list "vehicle spam", or just an armor list?
pismakron wrote: The stormravenlist is not the problem. Missions without objectives to hold IS a problem.
This is really silly. Pitched Battles have been apart of war throughout history. The problem is SPAM.
If you can't play a balanced game during a pitched battle without terrain. Then the game is unbalanced.
Spamming a whole flyer list should be against the rules.
They need restrictive rules on Spam.
Spam has also been a part of war throughout history.
"Oh man, how can I deal with all those hoplites? Hoplites OP."
Automatically Appended Next Post: There should be a peltist tax.
Because most of warfare is fought with men. And you are in correct. Especially in modern warfare. They have huge arrary of tools units artillary tanks jets etc. They don't just use Jets. Though often air suprurity is the first option. But it does not work unless you can paint a target. Thus unit diversity
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ross-128 wrote: The best way to prevent spam is to make sure two conditions are fulfilled.
1: Different units have different jobs, no one unit can fulfill every job at the same time.
2: Those jobs are all necessary, so that focusing on one to the exclusion of all others is a poor strategy.
Though there is a limit to what we can consider spam, mostly because outside of a very narrow definition (a list consisting entirely or almost entirely of a single unit with a single loadout) it starts to break down very quickly. Is a list with no vehicles "infantry spam", or just an infantry list? Is a Tyranid list with few or no shooting units "assault spam", or are Tyranids just a choppy army? Is a Tau list with no melee units "shooting spam", or are Tau just a shooty army? Is a parking lot list "vehicle spam", or just an armor list?
I think the same unit type over and over and over and over again that is not infantry. Seems to be fluff breaking Thus it seems to annoy some people.
ForceChoke wrote: \Because most of warfare is fought with men. And you are in correct. Especially in modern warfare. They have huge arrary of tools units artillary tanks jets etc. They don't just use Jets. Though often air suprurity is the first option. But it does not work unless you can paint a target. Thus unit diversity
This is 40k, not the real world. In the real world we have to use infantry because we can't just slaughter everything in our path. We have to care about not killing civilians, wiping cities off the map, etc. That's not true in 40k. Civilian casualties in a battle are an extra bonus, as every civilian killed on the battlefield is one less civilian that has to be rounded up and exterminated once you win the war. So yes, it's entirely thematic to have a 40k army that consists of nothing but aircraft. The army gets air superiority, bombs every target into rubble, and leaves only burning ruins in its wake.
Frankie and Reece on the podcast 547 start gaking on Tau again. Reece... are you crazy? Yea spam lists are a problem, but you list the Tau commander spam list despite the fact that is easily gets swept by flyer spam lists? Man you have got to have some serious data to make those claims. Show me the numbers and data.
Have you seen the insane loss rates of the Tau all across the internet? Not just suit spam from 7th but proxied lists with commanders and other lists too not doing great?
I get it you don't like spam lists I don't either, but if you kill this list for the Tau its over from a competitive stand point. You need to look past your own ideas of what Tau are to see how bad they are right now. Forget 7th it's gone. Look at how bad they are now.
Starts around 17:41 ish.
He is very committed to his Tau are "fine" angle. I will hand him that.
Im inclined to think that most Tau players aren't yet adjusted to the idea of lots of Fire Warriors. Vehicles and "monster" type units have gotten expnsive, and I'd imagine that some of their combo habits are hard to break.
ForceChoke wrote: \Because most of warfare is fought with men. And you are in correct. Especially in modern warfare. They have huge arrary of tools units artillary tanks jets etc. They don't just use Jets. Though often air suprurity is the first option. But it does not work unless you can paint a target. Thus unit diversity
This is 40k, not the real world. In the real world we have to use infantry because we can't just slaughter everything in our path. We have to care about not killing civilians, wiping cities off the map, etc. That's not true in 40k. Civilian casualties in a battle are an extra bonus, as every civilian killed on the battlefield is one less civilian that has to be rounded up and exterminated once you win the war. So yes, it's entirely thematic to have a 40k army that consists of nothing but aircraft. The army gets air superiority, bombs every target into rubble, and leaves only burning ruins in its wake.
Being a MtG player my first thought was three 500 point submitted sideboards and five to ten minutes to read your opponent's main list and decide on and submit which sideboard you intend to use.
Was still thinking that when I tagged Sideboard in the vote.
As somebody pointed out though such a move probably wouldn't help anything much, probably just make it harder to convince new blood to buy in.
Got a reminder on Facebook of just how much advertising happens with Wizards employing Deadpool's ironic idea of "Maximum Effort" in the month leading up to each new set of cards and how much information is spread and gathered in every card spoiler.
That and the release of the new Rules and Indexes made me think a yearly or even two year edition schedual would be wonderful for "balance", the best balance I've found is when everyone is still adapting.
Couple of bright shiney new toys for each army, booksales that don't stay relevant long enough to have resale value, everybody back on level ground and less people with five years of grief to rage about might bring new players into the game.
Also with consistent practice GW might get good at making balanced units and writing balanced rules or at least have those few months where people believe there is balance - even MtG gets it wrong every now and again.
Honestly a sideboard would just be a cool thing in general, like you WANT to bring all your models so maybe you'd get a chance to use them. It kinda fits the reinforcements theme.
Sideboards don't work in 40k because of the point increment problem. It's simple in MTG because every deck has the same one-card increment for adding or removing stuff. So you give everyone the same 25% of your total deck, and everyone swaps single cards in and out at a 1:1 ratio. But that can't be done in 40k because not all units/upgrades have the same cost increment. If you have, say, a 250 point sideboard then many armies aren't going to hit that 250 points exactly. They might have a 150 point unit and a 75 point unit, and 25 points wasted. Then the units in their list that they want to swap out might be 165 points and 70 points, so now they have to lose even more points and play at a lower point total after sideboarding. It's just really awkward to get the swaps to work out right and if you manage to get effective use out of your sideboard it's probably due to sheer luck rather than good skill in list construction.
Peregrine wrote: Sideboards don't work in 40k because of the point increment problem. It's simple in MTG because every deck has the same one-card increment for adding or removing stuff. So you give everyone the same 25% of your total deck, and everyone swaps single cards in and out at a 1:1 ratio. But that can't be done in 40k because not all units/upgrades have the same cost increment. If you have, say, a 250 point sideboard then many armies aren't going to hit that 250 points exactly. They might have a 150 point unit and a 75 point unit, and 25 points wasted. Then the units in their list that they want to swap out might be 165 points and 70 points, so now they have to lose even more points and play at a lower point total after sideboarding. It's just really awkward to get the swaps to work out right and if you manage to get effective use out of your sideboard it's probably due to sheer luck rather than good skill in list construction.
I was thinking more of a side-grade kinda thing.
Seems like with this edition the main point level being built for is 2000, right? So you'd build for 2000, and then your "side-grade" is an extra 500 points you can tailor to your opponent. So kinda like a 2500 game, except 500 points are whatever your want and will change per game.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Seems like with this edition the main point level being built for is 2000, right? So you'd build for 2000, and then your "side-grade" is an extra 500 points you can tailor to your opponent. So kinda like a 2500 game, except 500 points are whatever your want and will change per game.
Again, the problem is getting multiple useful 500 point blocks. Like, say you have a 150 point unit and a 300 point unit that you want to use. You probably can't find a meaningful 50 points, so now you play every game at 2450 points. Or it could be worse, and the gap might be more than 50 points unless you throw in random powerfists and stuff just to fill up points.
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Yoyoyo wrote: That's why PL can help. Sideboard your upgrades or units.
Power level does not help because you still have uneven power level increments.
Alternating draft is an even better idea. Player A picks a Stormraven, Player B picks anti-air. It doesn't get more simple than that.
And how exactly do you make that work? It's unlikely that the Stormraven and AA are going to have equal point costs.
Dakka Wolf wrote: My suggestion was more edition releases.
Shiny new toys for each army.
New Indexes.
New Rulebook.
This doesn't create balance, it creates complexity creep and change for the sake of change. New releases work in MTG because you have a very low investment in a particular set of cards, unlike the level of time and emotional investment people put into their 40k armies. So WOTC can afford to keep the complexity of the game under control by completely cutting the previous stuff out of the game when they release new sets. Imagine if GW tried that with 40k, 9th edition arrives and space marines no longer exist. And even WOTC isn't stupid enough to keep releasing new editions of the core rules. MTG has very stable and well-refined core rules, while making new 40k editions that are different enough to drive the kind of balance cycle you're talking about would mean changing tons of stuff just for the sake of changing things. The game would never get better through iterative development, and would likely become even more of a dumpster fire than the current edition.
If you all hate 8th so much, feel free to PM me regarding selling your armies, whatever they might be Nobody is forcing you to play the current edition, and if you don't appreciate it you might as well let someone who does appreciate the game have at it.
The game is not broken, you just need to rethink strategy. User error. Git gud. Maybe play the thing for more than a month and realize that the old tactics don't work as well in this edition - this has happened 7 times now. We should all be familiar with this.
Sorry your favorite toys keep dying. Maybe find a way to prevent that with your own tactics instead of nerfing everyone who isn't you.
Jarl of Vashon wrote: If you all hate 8th so much, feel free to PM me regarding selling your armies, whatever they might be Nobody is forcing you to play the current edition, and if you don't appreciate it you might as well let someone who does appreciate the game have at it.
IOW, "POSITIVE COMMENTS ONLY I REFUSE TO ACCEPT CRITICISM OF MY BELOVED GAME".
The game is not broken, you just need to rethink strategy. User error. Git gud. Maybe play the thing for more than a month and realize that the old tactics don't work as well in this edition - this has happened 7 times now. We should all be familiar with this.
Sorry your favorite toys keep dying. Maybe find a way to prevent that with your own tactics instead of nerfing everyone who isn't you.
You might have a point if the criticism of 8th was only coming from people who couldn't win as much with their 7th edition armies and tactics, but there are plenty of us criticizing 8th edition for entirely legitimate reasons. I mean, I play IG FFS, I could easily drop a conscript horde or melee Baneblade stupidity or whatever on people and win games, but I still think 8th is terrible.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Seems like with this edition the main point level being built for is 2000, right? So you'd build for 2000, and then your "side-grade" is an extra 500 points you can tailor to your opponent. So kinda like a 2500 game, except 500 points are whatever your want and will change per game.
Again, the problem is getting multiple useful 500 point blocks. Like, say you have a 150 point unit and a 300 point unit that you want to use. You probably can't find a meaningful 50 points, so now you play every game at 2450 points. Or it could be worse, and the gap might be more than 50 points unless you throw in random powerfists and stuff just to fill up points.
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Yoyoyo wrote: That's why PL can help. Sideboard your upgrades or units.
Power level does not help because you still have uneven power level increments.
Alternating draft is an even better idea. Player A picks a Stormraven, Player B picks anti-air. It doesn't get more simple than that.
And how exactly do you make that work? It's unlikely that the Stormraven and AA are going to have equal point costs.
People already try to fill points with maybe useless upgrades simply because it feels nice to get as close as possible. That would mostly mean you kinda plan for what you need (So 500 ready for Anti-Swarm, Tank, Objective Grabbing, etc). I don't really think it's as much a problem as you'd like to believe. The only issue I can think of is that, until a perfect balance is achieved, it's plausibly a win-more button for certain armies.
How is playing your ideal list with lots of infantry spam fun? How is playing a list without a ton of flyers fun?
sorry, maybe I was not clear. Personally I like at least 3 troop choices. And then armor support then eltes etc. Never run flyers myself never have never will feel it ruins the spirit of the game.
I definitely have criticisms of all the editions, but this happens every time a new edition is dropped. People hate it until they figure out how it works, and in the meantime spam and cheese takes the cake. The game has never been balanced, and the power shifts from edition to edition are how GW forces long term universe narrative. That is why strategy is key, and also how infantry can take down superheavy stuff that they are widely outpointed by without getting squibbed.
If you don't like it, play Malifaux or Hordes or something instead. Vote with your dollars (or euros or rands or rupees or whatever you feel like using) and sell me the armies you don't need anymore.
It's only been a month. Growing pains are expected. Opening up salt mines over some rule changes, however, is just angsty teenager gak.
ForceChoke wrote: Never run flyers myself never have never will feel it ruins the spirit of the game.
And IMO not having flyers ruins the spirit of the game.
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Jarl of Vashon wrote: The game has never been balanced, and the power shifts from edition to edition are how GW forces long term universe narrative.
No, it has nothing to do with GW forcing long term universe narrative. Good and bad units happen apparently at random, there is absolutely no tie to any narrative events. It is purely a result of GW's rule authors being incompetent.
That is why strategy is key, and also how infantry can take down superheavy stuff that they are widely outpointed by without getting squibbed.
Err, what? What does that have to do with anything involving balance or edition changes?
If you don't like it, play Malifaux or Hordes or something instead. Vote with your dollars (or euros or rands or rupees or whatever you feel like using) and sell me the armies you don't need anymore.
IOW, "POSITIVE COMMENTS ONLY IF YOU DON'T LOVE MY GAME GTFO".
Opening up salt mines over some rule changes, however, is just angsty teenager gak.
Thank you for proving my point. You are dismissing legitimate criticism of 8th edition as "opening up salt mines" and "angsty teenager gak", and that is not acceptable behavior.
In nearly thirty years Magic the Gathering hasn't discovered the unshakable formula for balance.
Centuries old IGoUGo board games haven't got it either.
You don't need to create complexity just to bring out a new edition or did you forget how much of the current edition is copy/pasted from older 40k editions and Age of Sigmar?
Blending together things that worked got us 8th.
Hell, in considering 9th edition you could take a shot at making 7th/6th not a dumpster fire.
Yeah we might end up with an edition or two of dumpster fires but we just had two straight editions of that so even the knowledge that we'd only have to put up with a year or two of each dumpster fire is an improvement in its own right.
The Indexes needed some proof reading and maybe some re-arranging, unless you - like me - were happy to run a stanley knife down the spine of yours and use a printer and display folders to get easy use. Frankly they're still better than the overpriced Codexes from 7th and five new indexes for each edition means each new edition is a fresh chance at balanced units even if nothing else changes.
If there's a plan to phase current marines out for the lackluster Primaris Marines it's either a really long-term goal or as lackluster as the Primaris Marines themselves.
Some examples of shiny new toys for every army.
#9th edition
Starter kit - Sisters of Battle vs Traitor Guard (even monopose snapfit is better than metal).
Update a few metal kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
Update a few failcast kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
As for armies that are fairly up to date a different kind of Drone, some different posed Fen Mutts, Winged Jump Packs and a new Bike kit will probably see you through.
Legit criticisms are fine. There are definitely plenty to be made. After all, the game was created by humans. This is one of the most polarizing releases I've seen for 40k. MOST people I talk to love it and think the changes have been a long time coming. A good chunk hate it though and wanted a reboot already. I'm just gonna play it for a few months at least before I start calling for nerfs or rewrites, because after all, those fallible humans have made a career out of creating a universe and game that I love and spend WAY too much money on. They just might have a reason for doing things the way they did. We don't even have codices yet for frack's sake.
If you don't like the rule sets for the army or unit you played in the past, there's probably other armies or units you might like better now. I used to play Orks exclusively. I have since moved on because I didn't like how Orks played in 7th, so in 7th I played Nurgle. Nurgle now is definitely competitive but lost the appeal in my eyes, so I switched to Space Wolves. Still on the fence for them, but I've never been interested in marines much.
It's a game. If you don't like a unit's rules, fill the gap with something else. If you have an opponent with a particularly annoying rule set, make them your next target. Like I keep saying, find the weak spots. Sure, you might get your booty kicked for awhile, but how gratifying will it be when it all clicks? And how boring would it be if nothing ever changed?
Dakka Wolf wrote: In nearly thirty years Magic the Gathering hasn't discovered the unshakable formula for balance.
Centuries old IGoUGo board games haven't got it either.
No, but they have come far closer than GW can even dream of. Don't fall into the trap of "nobody has perfect balance, so balance doesn't matter".
You don't need to create complexity just to bring out a new edition or did you forget how much of the current edition is copy/pasted from older 40k editions and Age of Sigmar?
No, you don't need to add complexity for a new edition. It's possible to have a new edition simplify the game. But you do have to add complexity to have your proposal for having more new releases. You can't remove the old stuff MTG-style, so every new release adds more complexity to the game.
Yeah we might end up with an edition or two of dumpster fires but we just had two straight editions of that so even the knowledge that we'd only have to put up with a year or two of each dumpster fire is an improvement in its own right.
It's not just a year or two, and that's the problem. Good game design uses an iterative development cycle where you start from a clear vision of the game and each new edition fixes the problems of the previous edition and brings it closer to your design goals. As the cycle continues the changes get smaller and smaller as you converge on your ideal game, and at some point you stop having new editions because there's no more reason to change the rules. That's what MTG has done with their core rules, over time they've settled on their final version of the core rules and that's it. But when you're making major changes each edition in an effort to shake up the metagame you're never learning from your previous mistakes. Each edition throws out the lessons of the past in favor of something completely new and untested. 9th would be a dumpster fire, 10th would be a dumpster fire, and so on indefinitely. And if by some miracle GW managed to stumble into a decent version of the rules they'd be obligated to destroy it and replace it with another dumpster fire, or be forced to abandon their entire business model. So not only would your proposal mean being stuck with a dumpster fire in the immediate future, it would mean the end of any hope that the situation ever gets better.
#9th edition
Starter kit - Sisters of Battle vs Traitor Guard (even monopose snapfit is better than metal).
Update a few metal kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
Update a few failcast kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
As for armies that are fairly up to date a different kind of Drone, some different posed Fen Mutts, Winged Jump Packs and a new Bike kit will probably see you through.
That's talking about model changes, not rules changes, and model changes don't change the metagame.
You hate GW's business model.
You think practically every edition is a dumpster fire.
You anticipate all future editions to be dumpster fires.
You clearly don't enjoy the game.
Yet you are still in the hobby.
I don't follow.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I also don't understand the comparison between a deck building card game and tabletop wargaming. Talk about Apples and Oranges. More like Apples and Sausages. Not just different games, different types of games, different target demographics, different literally everything about them beyond being games.
No, you missed the point there. That was a response to Dakka Wolf's proposed future path for 40k, not the real game. I do anticipate future editions to be dumpster fires like 8th until GW fires their entire "game design" staff as they should have done years ago and replaces them with competent people, but things could get better. They absolutely won't under Dakka Wolf's proposal.
I also don't understand the comparison between a deck building card game and tabletop wargaming. Talk about Apples and Oranges. More like Apples and Sausages. Not just different games, different types of games, different target demographics, different literally everything about them beyond being games.
The comparison is relevant because the common claim is that 40k is impossible to balance because of its complexity. Games like MTG manage to have vastly higher complexity but also have much better balance and rules that function without any ambiguity. The differences between the genres aren't relevant to this specific problem.
Dakka Wolf wrote: In nearly thirty years Magic the Gathering hasn't discovered the unshakable formula for balance.
Centuries old IGoUGo board games haven't got it either.
No, but they have come far closer than GW can even dream of. Don't fall into the trap of "nobody has perfect balance, so balance doesn't matter".
I'm not saying balance is impossible so give it up, perfection is just another word for stagnant.
Wizards are doing the best possible things with their releases of MtG and even Wizards constantly tweaks the core rules.
The new GW is making those tweaks.
I'm saying that with a constant edition schedule GW would be able to either bring up a new method or go back to an old method that worked with a few new ideas or even take another crack at an edition that did not work with better ideas.
You don't need to create complexity just to bring out a new edition or did you forget how much of the current edition is copy/pasted from older 40k editions and Age of Sigmar?
No, you don't need to add complexity for a new edition. It's possible to have a new edition simplify the game. But you do have to add complexity to have your proposal for having more new releases. You can't remove the old stuff MTG-style, so every new release adds more complexity to the game.
I think you're going to have to seperate your complexities before I tackle that one. If the new edition simplifies and streamlines the game it doesn't add complexity.
Yeah we might end up with an edition or two of dumpster fires but we just had two straight editions of that so even the knowledge that we'd only have to put up with a year or two of each dumpster fire is an improvement in its own right.
It's not just a year or two, and that's the problem. Good game design uses an iterative development cycle where you start from a clear vision of the game and each new edition fixes the problems of the previous edition and brings it closer to your design goals. As the cycle continues the changes get smaller and smaller as you converge on your ideal game, and at some point you stop having new editions because there's no more reason to change the rules. That's what MTG has done with their core rules, over time they've settled on their final version of the core rules and that's it. But when you're making major changes each edition in an effort to shake up the metagame you're never learning from your previous mistakes. Each edition throws out the lessons of the past in favor of something completely new and untested. 9th would be a dumpster fire, 10th would be a dumpster fire, and so on indefinitely. And if by some miracle GW managed to stumble into a decent version of the rules they'd be obligated to destroy it and replace it with another dumpster fire, or be forced to abandon their entire business model. So not only would your proposal mean being stuck with a dumpster fire in the immediate future, it would mean the end of any hope that the situation ever gets better.
That's pretty cynical even by my standards.
You don't throw out the lessons of the past you file them for later examination, I might be giving GW more credit than they deserve but even Wizards still make tweaks because their system isn't a finished product.
Games Workshop has only just conceeded that like-it-or-not they are game designers. A few editions of the release schedule and they might stumble on two or three bases they can swap between with an improvement on each as they go back to revisit it. As far as I'm concerned 8th is a solid enough base to consider it their first stumble onto the goods.
#9th edition
Starter kit - Sisters of Battle vs Traitor Guard (even monopose snapfit is better than metal).
Update a few metal kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
Update a few failcast kits to plastic, most Xenos and Chaos armies have them.
As for armies that are fairly up to date a different kind of Drone, some different posed Fen Mutts, Winged Jump Packs and a new Bike kit will probably see you through.
That's talking about model changes, not rules changes, and model changes don't change the metagame.
Games Workshop make and sell models.
It's what has people on edge about Primaris Marines phasing out "standard" Marines.
Models themselves don't change the meta but needing new units to justify new models does change it.
Tell me the introduction of Superheavies and Flyers into general play didn't change anything. Fixing older units might give the designers time to consider the balance and number crunching, maybe even playtesting of newer units and the kind of fires they're prone to.
My only real fear with a set schedule of editions is that one day I'll look at the number of the new edition, think about how long I've been playing with toy soldiers and feel truly old.
Dakka Wolf wrote: In nearly thirty years Magic the Gathering hasn't discovered the unshakable formula for balance.
Centuries old IGoUGo board games haven't got it either.
No, but they have come far closer than GW can even dream of. Don't fall into the trap of "nobody has perfect balance, so balance doesn't matter".
In what world (edition) has MTG ever been closer to balance than GW stuff? Really an honest question, I don't ever recall a time when even all colors could compete equally There are always huge net decks that win, there might be 5 at one time, but of all the possible decks this is a minimal amount. MTG wins out because it is much easier for people to trade out for the new net deck. This doesn't really work for 40k, where you spend a ton on an army, build, paint etc. People are not frequently jumping ship from one faction to another (some do, but most do not).
The balance between cards, and in general in magic, is and always has been terrible. The difference is that they rotate out broken combos, and people adjust because doing so is easy. If GW did that people would scream to high heaven. IF they said in 7th, well we see eldar with Warp spiders and Wraithknights are winning left and right, so those things are banned.
Now GW could do a better job of balance (8th is a giant step in the right direction compared to 7th), whether that will continue in a favorable direction with tweaks, new codices etc. or not remains to be seen. I'm hopeful that it will, but worried based on the past that codex releases will see balance go down the tubes.
Yeah I often hear the claim on the internet that magic is balanced, and then every time I go to a local thing with some buds they always tell me that 'we're all gonna lose anyways because we couldn't get our new decks built in time.'"
That doesn't scream balance to me, and neither does dividing magic up in to 3-5 (?) types of play in order to restrict or allow certain cards.
That's exactly like dividing 40k up by unit type and even army building and calling it balanced. (e.g. models created past 3rd edition aren't allowed at this tournament, this tournament only plays models released in 4th-5th and anything before or after is disallowed, this other tournament / play format only allows models released in 8th edition, etc).
Peregrine wrote: And how exactly do you make that work? It's unlikely that the Stormraven and AA are going to have equal point costs.
Regariding an alternating draft, a list has equal costs, say to 100 PL. Once one player hits 100 PL or as close as possible, they stop. Then the other player completes their list.
Is it less granular than points? It has to be. But the biggest "balance" factor here is how well the players draft against each other's selections. Points don't have to be the be-all, end-all of balance mechanisms. Imagine this format versus that Stormraven list.
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Unit1126PLL wrote: That's exactly like dividing 40k up by unit type and even army building and calling it balanced. (e.g. models created past 3rd edition aren't allowed at this tournament, this tournament only plays models released in 4th-5th and anything before or after is disallowed, this other tournament / play format only allows models released in 8th edition, etc).
The best examples I can think of are Highlander formats, or the "No Retreat" comps in Europe (where DE could win in 7th).
Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.
Martel732 wrote: Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.
Starcraft has a few things 40k lacks though, which I would argue makes balancing it easier:
1) Computer-assisted adjudication means games can be tested more quickly, and things can be adjusted more easily. 2) Wider playerbase means that imbalances (which do make it through testing obviously) are more easily spotted. 3) There are clearly counter units and 'best armies' (e.g. there are counters to Marine bio-balls that, if played against Terran mech, lose horribly) so armies can be reconfigured on the fly (tech-transitions) which in 40k they cannot - a Marine bio-ball just loses and goes home if it meets its counter. 4) The maps are controlled by the developers rather than the players involved; e.g. if a unit would be OP on planet bowling ball, the developers simply don't put a map in the rotation that is Planet Bowling Ball - in 40k, a super-shooting unit may be far less OP with more terrain on the board, but there is no way to guarantee players play with the requisite amount of terrain of the exact specifications to downgrade that unit's ability, as Starcraft can.
Martel732 wrote: Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.
Not really because it still lacks the draw backs of balancing a minis game. If something gets nerfed, people can easily and cheaply adjust. There is much wider testing, much easier and cheaper to implement changes. StarCraft probably has more games played every day than 40k does in a year as far as what can easily be recorded as results for balancing.
Martel732 wrote: Starcraft is a better counter example over MtG. Still has problems, but is consistently way better. Yes, it has fewer units, but it is also much more thoroughly put to the test.
Not really because it still lacks the draw backs of balancing a minis game. If something gets nerfed, people can easily and cheaply adjust. There is much wider testing, much easier and cheaper to implement changes. StarCraft probably has more games played every day than 40k does in a year as far as what can easily be recorded as results for balancing.
Starcraft also has a much smaller unit selection, but a lot of bizarre edgecase tactics that can come from how they interact. The game is also at times less about raw tactical forethought, so much as your ability to localize bullettime in your fingers and attain superhuman APM as you out-micro as well as out-macro. :(
I imagine Starfleet Battles is probably the best old-school analogy, just because both players have a frankly crazy set of moves available to them. From jury-rigging shuttle payloads in-game, to Tractor Beam shenanigans, to deciding when to overcharge your Warp Drives if you were Orion Pirates.
Martel732 wrote: It's probably easier to balance Starcraft, but they also put in the effort.
40K desperately needs something like a tech-transition, though. Blind build sheet losses suck.
I also don't like the lack of temporal cost as a balancing factor.
GW could publish standardized competitive maps pretty easily, at least eliminating that factor.
Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.
Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.
Starcraft was imbalanced for years. Did you play online before the spawning pool got nerfed? It was an absolute joke, on small maps you could not defend. If you drew a Zerg opponent, and you weren't playing Zerg, you lost. End of story.
It wasn't until that game had been out for years did they actually start balancing it. But a computer game has a few advantages, namely they can track statistics much more easily, across the entire playerbase.
And in reality, most of the time you know what builds people are doing in Starcraft. That game comes down to micro control, and scouting for base locations. In a competitive environment your army build is pretty much predetermined. The better "micro & multitask" wins, the battle itself is an ancillary thing.
But that is neither here nor there.
I think the core question here is, should you have a 50/50 win chance in every game you play? Or is it enough that it averages out to 50/50?
This whole thread smacks of "I lost therefore the game is imbalanced."
Melissia wrote: Why are we discussing an inferior RTS anyway instead of something good like 40k?
Because it's 5X better as a balanced game.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Marmatag wrote: Starcraft was imbalanced for years. Did you play online before the spawning pool got nerfed? It was an absolute joke, on small maps you could not defend. If you drew a Zerg opponent, and you weren't playing Zerg, you lost. End of story.
It wasn't until that game had been out for years did they actually start balancing it. But a computer game has a few advantages, namely they can track statistics much more easily, across the entire playerbase.
And in reality, most of the time you know what builds people are doing in Starcraft. That game comes down to micro control, and scouting for base locations. In a competitive environment your army build is pretty much predetermined. The better "micro & multitask" wins, the battle itself is an ancillary thing.
But that is neither here nor there.
I think the core question here is, should you have a 50/50 win chance in every game you play? Or is it enough that it averages out to 50/50?
This whole thread smacks of "I lost therefore the game is imbalanced."
I have been able to block a 6 pool since day one in SC II.
It's a festival of mediocrity that wasn't even in the top five RTS games of the year it came out, let's talk about 40k instead.
Sure. The hopeless slog where the codex with the best costed models gets to flop their plastic schlong on the table and win. Oh, I'm sorry, sisters are still on metal.
If you want to talk about trash games like starcraft, we have a video games forum for it.
Frankly, I'd rather play an unbalanced 40k than a "perfectly balanced" starcraft any day. Even with balance where it is, there's a lot more interesting things going on in 40k tactically and strategically than a lot of people give it credit for.
I'd like there to be at least one list build in each available faction that could reasonably beat the list builds of every other faction in the game when no obvious mistakes are made by either player in that game. Factions, in this context, exclude any keywords that are subsets of other factions. That's my definition of balance in regards to 40K.
In order for that to happen, I think a sideboard in list construction is required to prevent catastrophic matchups. In order for a sideboard to work, each faction needs a roughly equal amount of options to counter the list builds of every other faction. I think you need to break up the Imperium faction tag as a first measure. After that, many of the factions that have less options will need a lot of releases. Also, the internal balance in the factions among options will need to get better.
It takes a comprehensive look at the game in light of all apparent list builds to balance; per model balancing will never do enough.
Melissia wrote: If you want to talk about trash games like starcraft, we have a video games forum for it.
Frankly, I'd rather play an unbalanced 40k than a "perfectly balanced" starcraft any day. Even with balance where it is, there's a lot more interesting things going on in 40k tactically and strategically than a lot of people give it credit for.
Sort of? It's better in 8th, where its harder to win in the list building phase. But 40K had quite a run of that problem being first and foremost. But 40K is not very deep, especially compared to historical-based games.
40k has a lot more variety than most historical based games. Also better lore-- everyone and their mother can rip off history, and most of them do it poorly at that.
Melissia wrote: 40k has a lot more variety than most historical based games. Also better lore-- everyone and their mother can rip off history, and most of them do it poorly at that.
Variety does not make for interesting game play by default. How much variety is there going to be with 27 pt scatterbikes in 7th or chimeras from 5th?
40K's lore is also far less interesting than actual equipment used by actual people who died accomplishing actual goals. 40K writers are lazy and use too many Deus Ex Machinas (Rowboat?). To me, the lore for 40K is a negative that create dopey-looking WWI tanks.
I have rarely played a historical-based game that was worse than 40K.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.
Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.
I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.
Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.
I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.
Truth be told, I always took the view that being able to reinforce or recursively add troops to your army was not in and of itself overpowered. Material advantage only goes so far when the positioning itself is restrictive. Remember Chenkov Conscripts and Tervigons dominating 5e? Neither do I.
The real issue with 7e summoning was you could add it fairly easily to an army, and there was no real positional drawback you had to work around in order to make Summoning work. This became even more notable when the summoners were airborne or on Jetbikes. Pop out of reserves, summon, then swoop an extra 2d6 or turbo or whatnot. Summoning was akin to a methed-up Saiyan flying in, dropping in a unit, then legging it!
I agree with the 8e "cannot move" part of summoning. I disagree with the idea of it being a "fixed reinforcement points" setup, as not only is it inconsistent (Necrons can get "free troops" via continual reanimation, but a Bolt of Change will only turn a target into a Spawn if you spend points to do so), but just a hack-fix in general, where the only real reason to summon is to throw up an impromptu Horror-Wall or few.
The issue in 7th was how many units could summon, and could be summoned.
IT isn't a problem if an expensive unit like the Tervigon, can summon termagants, but also has a pretty high chance of losing that ability at some point. It is a problem when those summoned units can not only summon, but also assist in making it easier to do so.
So if summoning was extremely limited (say a GUCO could summon some nurglings in base with himself) it could be a thing. But summoning with no practical limit is broken. SO in 7th summoning was broken because you could in theory summon thousands of extra points fairly easily.
You mention the Tervigon, in 5th ed, at best in a 5 turn game would have been summoning 78 Termagants which was I think 390 points of cheap troops. On average it was much closer to 30ish total. Which also all had the downside of exploding if the tervigon died, were limited by synapse etc.
When Daemons could summon heralds, it was a problem. If summoning was a fairly expensive ability (the porataglyph, was not horrible), as an upgrade for Heralds/Greater Daemons/sorcerers, and disallowed for Tzeentch (other than splitting horrors) and could only summon the respective marked troop units, (2D6 models, if you roll doubles you can no longer summon, if you roll double 6s you die). It could be made to work/have worked. As it was in 7th it was horrible.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Yes, but how would you do a tech transition sort of thing? You see my list, so you can change yours, but then I see yours so I can change mine.... when does it end? In starcraft, actually playing the game is possible because part of playing the game is losing and rebuilding your army. In 40k, you don't get to have your army wiped out, rebuild your list, and come back to have another go.
Think of 40k as /just/ the army battle in StarCraft - if you're a Marine bio-ball and you meet your hard counter, you lose, womp womp. That's how it has to be for there to actually be a game.
I think there is something to be said for giving other armies something like the demon ability to have reserved points rather than models. Also giving demons a version that isn't painful to use might help but I digress. It can still be from a limited pool (such as units that can normally enter from reserves due to existing abilities) but it gives every list the ability to tailor on the fly to at least a small degree.
Truth be told, I always took the view that being able to reinforce or recursively add troops to your army was not in and of itself overpowered. Material advantage only goes so far when the positioning itself is restrictive. Remember Chenkov Conscripts and Tervigons dominating 5e? Neither do I.
The real issue with 7e summoning was you could add it fairly easily to an army, and there was no real positional drawback you had to work around in order to make Summoning work. This became even more notable when the summoners were airborne or on Jetbikes. Pop out of reserves, summon, then swoop an extra 2d6 or turbo or whatnot. Summoning was akin to a methed-up Saiyan flying in, dropping in a unit, then legging it!
I agree with the 8e "cannot move" part of summoning. I disagree with the idea of it being a "fixed reinforcement points" setup, as not only is it inconsistent (Necrons can get "free troops" via continual reanimation, but a Bolt of Change will only turn a target into a Spawn if you spend points to do so), but just a hack-fix in general, where the only real reason to summon is to throw up an impromptu Horror-Wall or few.
Really, GW would just have to care about balance. Guilliman, for example, is clearly too strong at 2000 points. His buff makes any weapon that hits on a 3+ and wounds on a 3+ 80% more effective. If you apply his buff to the 1600 remaining points in the list, they shoot like 2880 points or more if rolls go into 4+ territory if you completely discount his personal impact on the game. That level of force multiplication just isn't available to any other faction. That clear and obvious imbalance just shows that GW doesn't really care to balance their game, despite what their rhetoric may say.
That isn't to say that the game isn't good. The conversion opportunities and hobbying aspects are superb, and actually putting those models on the table to PewPew is really satisfying. The game just isn't close to balanced.
LiMunPai wrote: I'd like there to be at least one list build in each available faction that could reasonably beat the list builds of every other faction in the game when no obvious mistakes are made by either player in that game. Factions, in this context, exclude any keywords that are subsets of other factions. That's my definition of balance in regards to 40K.
In order for that to happen, I think a sideboard in list construction is required to prevent catastrophic matchups. In order for a sideboard to work, each faction needs a roughly equal amount of options to counter the list builds of every other faction. I think you need to break up the Imperium faction tag as a first measure. After that, many of the factions that have less options will need a lot of releases. Also, the internal balance in the factions among options will need to get better.
It takes a comprehensive look at the game in light of all apparent list builds to balance; per model balancing will never do enough.
The game you are looking for is called Warmachine. You're welcome.
Yeah, is like a hamburguer. You know is bad to your health. You really know that at the end of the day, isn't the best food in the world.
But oh boy, isn't it delicious when you are eating it.
Give me Crazy Fanatical Nuns with a sexual fetichism for fire and Space Men Knight Monk fighting agains't Green English hoolligans with axes and swords!
MagicJuggler wrote: Or maybe there's some other option for rebalancing 40k. How would you rebalance armies as a whole?
Rule 1 is it has to meet GW's bottom line. It has to generate profits for the company. Because if it doesn't do that, then GW is not going to give a damn. And GW needs to be on board, because to date the community hasn't come up with a workable wide-scale solution. I'm not trying to give GW crap or the community crap. But it is what it is.
Rule 2 is there need to be variant missions and/or objectives. The OP is writing about units filling multiple roles. But if games come down to combat 9 out of 10 games, then combat is what armies are going to be built around. Combat combat combat combat combat. Combat is a simple formula.
That's all you need to know. Everything else is just corollaries around those two rules.
==
e.g.? points values. People can talk about point values all they want. Increase points. Decrease points. But if you make one unit less viable just by decreasing its point cost, that only changes balance regarding that one unit. Then another unit becomes overpowered when used in conjunction with other units in certain situations, and that becomes the new imbalance. Then that's fixed, then there's another imbalance. It really doesn't matter. Even if you implement something like having units cost 3.2 points instead of 3 points, rounding fractional values, or assigning additional point costs to *units* rather than just models reflecting utility of securing objectives &c - in the end it's just a lot of noise and fury over something that fundamentally doesn't make changes. If you have a two-dimensional game, it's two-dimensional.
As to specific fixes, I've seen plenty of good ideas over the years. But a lot either satisfy Rule 2 but not Rule 1, or they satisfy Rule 1 but aren't really good at Rule 2.
There *used* to be a Rule 3. "Don't piss off your existing customer base." But the way I figure it, GW decided to roll the dice on that in a big way in recent years. I mean hey, they were always going to try to push the envelope for higher profits, but recently they've been really rolling the dice. Can't say that's the wrong move either.
MagicJuggler wrote: Or maybe there's some other option for rebalancing 40k. How would you rebalance armies as a whole?
Rule 1 is it has to meet GW's bottom line. It has to generate profits for the company. Because if it doesn't do that, then GW is not going to give a damn. And GW needs to be on board, because to date the community hasn't come up with a workable wide-scale solution. I'm not trying to give GW crap or the community crap. But it is what it is.
Rule 2 is there need to be variant missions and/or objectives. The OP is writing about units filling multiple roles. But if games come down to combat 9 out of 10 games, then combat is what armies are going to be built around. Combat combat combat combat combat. Combat is a simple formula.
That's all you need to know. Everything else is just corollaries around those two rules.
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e.g.? points values. People can talk about point values all they want. Increase points. Decrease points. But if you make one unit less viable just by decreasing its point cost, that only changes balance regarding that one unit. Then another unit becomes overpowered when used in conjunction with other units in certain situations, and that becomes the new imbalance. Then that's fixed, then there's another imbalance. It really doesn't matter. Even if you implement something like having units cost 3.2 points instead of 3 points, rounding fractional values, or assigning additional point costs to *units* rather than just models reflecting utility of securing objectives &c - in the end it's just a lot of noise and fury over something that fundamentally doesn't make changes. If you have a two-dimensional game, it's two-dimensional.
As to specific fixes, I've seen plenty of good ideas over the years. But a lot either satisfy Rule 2 but not Rule 1, or they satisfy Rule 1 but aren't really good at Rule 2.
There *used* to be a Rule 3. "Don't piss off your existing customer base." But the way I figure it, GW decided to roll the dice on that in a big way in recent years. I mean hey, they were always going to try to push the envelope for higher profits, but recently they've been really rolling the dice. Can't say that's the wrong move either.
For perfect balance, points don't work, but with adjustments things can become close enough that everything is at least a good fun game. That is really the balance extreme you are trying to avoid, not Scouts are slightly more cost effective than tacticals, so min-maxing take scouts. Scouts aren't blowing people off the table. You are trying to avoid: 7 storm ravens is super efficient and turn 1 cripples almost any opposing army to the point where the game is basically meaningless because only 1 player has a chance.
LiMunPai wrote: Really, GW would just have to care about balance. Guilliman, for example, is clearly too strong at 2000 points. His buff makes any weapon that hits on a 3+ and wounds on a 3+ 80% more effective. If you apply his buff to the 1600 remaining points in the list, they shoot like 2880 points or more if rolls go into 4+ territory if you completely discount his personal impact on the game. That level of force multiplication just isn't available to any other faction. That clear and obvious imbalance just shows that GW doesn't really care to balance their game, despite what their rhetoric may say.
That isn't to say that the game isn't good. The conversion opportunities and hobbying aspects are superb, and actually putting those models on the table to PewPew is really satisfying. The game just isn't close to balanced.
He is 360 points and doesn't do anything else until combat. It's not like you can fit the whole army within 6" of him either.
LiMunPai wrote: Really, GW would just have to care about balance. Guilliman, for example, is clearly too strong at 2000 points. His buff makes any weapon that hits on a 3+ and wounds on a 3+ 80% more effective. If you apply his buff to the 1600 remaining points in the list, they shoot like 2880 points or more if rolls go into 4+ territory if you completely discount his personal impact on the game. That level of force multiplication just isn't available to any other faction. That clear and obvious imbalance just shows that GW doesn't really care to balance their game, despite what their rhetoric may say.
That isn't to say that the game isn't good. The conversion opportunities and hobbying aspects are superb, and actually putting those models on the table to PewPew is really satisfying. The game just isn't close to balanced.
He is 360 points and doesn't do anything else until combat. It's not like you can fit the whole army within 6" of him either.
Since it is units within, not models, it is actually rather easy to fit quite a large amount of an army in 6" radius circle of him.
Since it is units within, not models, it is actually rather easy to fit quite a large amount of an army in 6" radius circle of him.
I'm aware. If it's combat blob then you're waiting for him to cross the field. If it's a gun line they're going to risk getting looped into combat. It's no joke, but it's also no small investment for an already small army. I'll bet there are some silly forgeworld things that could make it crazy though.
Not that much risk of combat when you have Rowboat as a counter charge element, and you need to survive re-roll overwatch, after re-roll shooting.
It isn't unbeatable, but to downplay just how good he is, is a bit silly.
I mean for less than 1500 points you can get 4 lascannon/missile Dev squads, Rowboat, 4 TAC Razors, and your 1 cheap HQ choice. That is 48 S6 shots, re-rolling hits and wounds, 16 lascannon shots, re-rolling hits and wounds. with 7 CP for re-rolls as needed. The biggest risk is a turn 1 charge, which when you go to 2k, you throw in a couple scout squads to negate.
Jarl of Vashon wrote: I was under the impression that the entire unit had to be in bubbles for them to apply...
Nope, unless it specifies (like a big mek's kustom force field) if a bubble says "a unit within..." only one model of that unit must be within that range.
Breng77 wrote: Not that much risk of combat when you have Rowboat as a counter charge element, and you need to survive re-roll overwatch, after re-roll shooting.
It isn't unbeatable, but to downplay just how good he is, is a bit silly.
I mean for less than 1500 points you can get 4 lascannon/missile Dev squads, Rowboat, 4 TAC Razors, and your 1 cheap HQ choice. That is 48 S6 shots, re-rolling hits and wounds, 16 lascannon shots, re-rolling hits and wounds. with 7 CP for re-rolls as needed. The biggest risk is a turn 1 charge, which when you go to 2k, you throw in a couple scout squads to negate.
You'd need an extra HQ since RG is LoW, which is easy enough to grab by dropping a Razorback. Razorbacks are fairly undercosted at the moment. That would also make it 10 drops, which seems a big higher than average for a marine army.
Otherwise a pile of devastators are going to get shot off the table - especially by deepstrikers - and lose their fire power quickly. Sarab termies can easily clean one and CP charge into another and maybe rope a 3rd or 4th in with pile-in.
If this army gets the first turn the Razorbacks do basically nothing with 24" guns considering RG wants to babysit the devs and not move, too. So, whatever 16 lascannons (probably kill Magnus) can do and then you're going to get hit.
Breng77 wrote: Not that much risk of combat when you have Rowboat as a counter charge element, and you need to survive re-roll overwatch, after re-roll shooting.
It isn't unbeatable, but to downplay just how good he is, is a bit silly.
I mean for less than 1500 points you can get 4 lascannon/missile Dev squads, Rowboat, 4 TAC Razors, and your 1 cheap HQ choice. That is 48 S6 shots, re-rolling hits and wounds, 16 lascannon shots, re-rolling hits and wounds. with 7 CP for re-rolls as needed. The biggest risk is a turn 1 charge, which when you go to 2k, you throw in a couple scout squads to negate.
You'd need an extra HQ since RG is LoW, which is easy enough to grab by dropping a Razorback. Razorbacks are fairly undercosted at the moment. That would also make it 10 drops, which seems a big higher than average for a marine army.
Otherwise a pile of devastators are going to get shot off the table - especially by deepstrikers - and lose their fire power quickly. Sarab termies can easily clean one and CP charge into another and maybe rope a 3rd or 4th in with pile-in.
If this army gets the first turn the Razorbacks do basically nothing with 24" guns considering RG wants to babysit the devs and not move, too. So, whatever 16 lascannons (probably kill Magnus) can do and then you're going to get hit.
No extra HQ, 2 detachments 1 Spearhead with the 1 cheap HQ choice I mentioned (maybe a naked captain, or Chaplain, or tech marine), the devs and razors, 1 Super Aux with RG and that is at 1500 (original list - HW was like 1420, so 80 points for filler HQ guy). At 2k (what most tournaments seem to be going for) you add scouts, so deepstrikers are 18+" away, use razors to block LOS against ranged threats to the devs, and you still have something like 400 points left to spend, throw in some cherubs on those dev squads.
It is naïve to think that your termies are going to get an easy drop and shoot on the devs (easy to force you beyond rapid fire range even without scouts, just using RBs, and give you the option of maybe charging a RB or 2, then getting counter charged by RG.
As for turn 1, depends on the opponent, if they are an assault army lining up at the edge of their deployment the razors move up slightly and unload, if not block los with and pop smoke on the razors making them harder to hit turn 1.
The It probably takes 3 squads to kill magnus (assuming he is warlord, and takes the 6+ FNP each squad averages 6 wounds) in a single turn. Which I'll happily take, while the remaining squad squad lays down fire on something smaller. Taking missles on the Devs is a little more well rounded, but puts out a little less damage against big targets, but helps tons against horde armies.
I mean this also isn't even a near optimal list, just one I put together quickly and it is not unbeatable, but it isn't weak either, RG is super good.
As for turn 1, depends on the opponent, if they are an assault army lining up at the edge of their deployment the razors move up slightly and unload, if not block los with and pop smoke on the razors making them harder to hit turn 1.
The It probably takes 3 squads to kill magnus (assuming he is warlord, and takes the 6+ FNP each squad averages 6 wounds) in a single turn. Which I'll happily take, while the remaining squad squad lays down fire on something smaller. Taking missles on the Devs is a little more well rounded, but puts out a little less damage against big targets, but helps tons against horde armies.
I mean this also isn't even a near optimal list, just one I put together quickly and it is not unbeatable, but it isn't weak either, RG is super good.
I'd welcome a challenge like that. Unload then move though.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the blob deployment. Blasts may have been slower to resolve, but they sure discouraged bunching up. I'm hoping some downsides become more apparent.
The problem in 40k is that damage output for good armies is high. So the alpha strike tends to be overwhelming.
The all flyer list works because your stuff can get where it needs to be on turn one, focus down the main threats and then mop up for the rest of the game. If it goes second its not that amazing.
This is true for many lists. If I gave you a choice to go 1st but I was allowed to take away 25-30% of your army would you consider it a good trade?
Now you could stop this. Rather than two 40k armies having a fairly high chance to table one or the other in 5 turns (often less) the stats could be changed to make it almost impossible (which I feel it was in certain editions - maybe 5th?). If on average dice you would only kill half an army it would all come down to getting objectives.
The question is though whether this would be any more fun. Maelstrom is random and frustrating. Meanwhile who can throw more chaff on a certain point on the battlefield isn't exactly entertaining either. Some of the AoS scenarios have some novelty value but they are often not great.
