Maxed out FoC and why not allowing double FoC is fethtarded.

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**Wrakkar**

Hello, and welcome to this thread of lolz. Some people here on dakka, and in other forums are moaning about 2,000 pts games having 2x FoC.

I will soon tackle the problem.

But first, here are some maxed out FoC lists.

CSM

Spoiler:

IG

Spoiler:

Orks

Spoiler:

A few people seem to have been wondering what a maxed-out list would look like. This should give you an idea - an MEQ, a infantry army that can be mechanised, and a horde army.

_____________________________________________________

Right. Onto the main matter.Double FoC's.

Building an army can be quite expensive, and many people would like to get a large - sized game, but without spending £1000's and 100's of hours on troopers - building, painting, placing. Furthermore, mechanised usually looks better. And this is just point "A". There is more to say than this.
Weaker points first, however, these mainly being that if you want a large game to actually fit in the space of a day, placing tonnes of troopers kinda invalidates this. Also - armoured siege-warfare/style/type/thing doesn't really fit in the standard FoC. (Yes, I know this paragraph is rather incoherent, I'm writing as I think, and am trying to get to the larger points).

Moving on to larger points here.
Firstly, when you play a game with double FoC's BOTH players can use double charts, meaning that you can use more of your models than usual, and can use some larger-scale tactics to out-wit or out-battle your opponent.

Secondly, even if your army doesn't use the two charts, when you battle someone who does, they'll have used it to gain a higher proportion of something in their army. This means their army won't be as balanced as yours. The army you're fighting against will most likely have dumped a lot of points on tanks - their armour will be hard to crack open, but this breaks down into two things - 1) There's less points on troops - you can get the objectives with less competition from your opponent. 2) Tanks are not particularly well known for having as many guns as a fully decked-out infantry unit. Furthermore, they take up a hell-load of points each with the real "manly man" tanks like russes or battlewagons or LR's meaning that a good few lascannon shots (on an CSM army, this is about 50pts per cannon, and they can be reused) and you'll probably be able to eliminate a large number of points quite quickly.
Vehicle spam makes target priority easy, and any army can take them out fairly easily with the right tactics.
An example of this is ork tank-spam against an IG army. Turn 1, orks trundle up the field and sit on the objectives. Turn 1, part 2, the IG open up with their lascannon/autocannon teams and blow away a good 25% or more of the ork's points.
At 1 turn less, I think the IG player could win fairly well with a 25% handicap in their favour.

In short, if you expect to face a double FoC tank-spam, just take a gunline.

Thirdly, if you find that your opponent may be taking double FoC to have troop-spam, you may be thinking this: "How the f***k do I stop a huge green tide/genestealer spam!? I don't have enough guns!", try taking a load of ordinance. Basilisks, grot big-gunz, GK's GM, SM's Chapter master, Defilers, Whirlwinds, anything with a large blast will do. Ofc, this can be countered by any good IG gunline, but such is the nature of war.

There probably is more, but I'll end my post for now.

**juraigamer**

Your post doesn't make any sense.

The issue is someone taking two cheap HQ's for guard, 4 small vet squads and then 18 lemon russ tanks.

Or Nercons taking two destroyer lords, 2 small warrior squads, 2 large ones and 6 doomscythes.

It's the old min-max nonsense all over again. Spam heavy support, run little else.

The same can work for guard with massed fliers, nothing like having the guys entire army in 18 fliers. That's fun.

**Wrakkar**

juraigamer wrote:Your post doesn't make any sense.

The issue is someone taking two cheap HQ's for guard, 4 small vet squads and then 18 lemon russ tanks.

Or Nercons taking two destroyer lords, 2 small warrior squads, 2 large ones and 6 doomscythes.

It's the old min-max nonsense all over again. Spam heavy support, run little else.

The same can work for guard with massed fliers, nothing like having the guys entire army in 18 fliers. That's fun.

It's not done yet...

**juraigamer**

Then I'll say it another way, listing maximum possible points per army per normal FOC doesn't mean a damn thing. The issue is how little each army can spend and get double FOC.

An ork player can take 2 big meks and 4 grot hordes for next to nothing in points. They could then easily add in 6 dakka jets and 18 killa kans.

Being able to run the highest cost stuff means nothing, it's the cheapest that allows for the spam which is the issue.

**Grey Templar**

How many points does 18 LRBTs run?

Way more then 2k allows I'll bet, not to mention some lists will just feth it over big time.

**Wrakkar**

juraigamer wrote:Then I'll say it another way, listing maximum possible points per army per normal FOC doesn't mean a damn thing. The issue is how little each army can spend and get double FOC.

An ork player can take 2 big meks and 4 grot hordes for next to nothing in points. They could then easily add in 6 dakka jets and 18 killa kans.

Being able to run the highest cost stuff means nothing, it's the cheapest that allows for the spam which is the issue.

Grey Templar wrote:How many points does 18 LRBTs run?

Way more then 2k allows I'll bet, not to mention some lists will just feth it over big time.

These are not the points I'm trying to make! This is a 2-part thread - just wait until I've finished the first post. (That's when it no longer says ****WORK IN PROGRESS + WILL BE UPDATING THIS POST*** ).

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Right, now you can start attacking my arguments.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Seriously, anyone.

**Milisim**

So I am being FORCED to play a gunline if my opponent chooses to play with 2 FOC and I dont?

WOW sounds like a game I want to play!

Thats a moot point really since this is GunlineHammer basically now anyways. So what if the opponent is spamming gunline.... then what ? I have to TAILOR my list to play a game?

The 2 FOC argument will never end. You will have those who think its dumb and those that thinks its great. Neither side is wrong or right.

I could field 120 Marines on foot and 2 HQ's and still have room for Dakka Preds @ 2000 pts. Sounds like a pretty damn good Gunline to me that basically has everything scoring too.

Obviously Im in the Anti double FOC school of thought though.

**Wrakkar**

Milisim wrote:So I am being FORCED to play a gunline if my opponent chooses to play with 2 FOC and I dont?

WOW sounds like a game I want to play!

Thats a moot point really since this is GunlineHammer basically now anyways. So what if the opponent is spamming gunline.... then what ? I have to TAILOR my list to play a game?

The 2 FOC argument will never end. You will have those who think its dumb and those that thinks its great. Neither side is wrong or right.

I could field 120 Marines on foot and 2 HQ's and still have room for Dakka Preds @ 2000 pts. Sounds like a pretty damn good Gunline to me that basically has everything scoring too.

Obviously Im in the Anti double FOC school of thought though.

You make a good point there. But I believe that the 2FoC is just something where we must design a new line of tactics in order to combat a larger-scale strategy.

Think of it this way: When you start 40k, you'll probably only have a HQ and two troops with which to play. Until you buy more, that's what you're limited to, and must form tactics accordingly against your more invested foes. It's the same here.

**UncleMeat**

I dunno. The problem I see is that some armies have extremely undercosted units that are only made fair by the FoC limits. Long Fangs and Annihilation Barges are extremely undercosted for what they do, but because you can only take 3 units they don't become ridiculous. You are forced to spend your points on more "fair" units because you max out at like 420 points for the Long Fangs and 270 for the Barges. With 2 FoCs, you can have a higher percentage of your army be made of these "unfair" units. 6 squads of Long Fangs is extremely powerful against almost any build. You get 30 missiles that can fire between 12 targets and it takes up less than half of your total points. I really cannot see why a SW army wouldn't take 6 full squads at 2000 points.

It just leads to less interesting armies. At 2k, one of the best strategies will be to take some troops and the 6 copies of the best unit in your codex. Because most of the time this is a Heavy Support option and most of the time they are expensive, you will see more armies that are only made of troops and one other choice. Necrons can either do ridiculous flyer spam or run 10 barges. IG will run Vets and Vendettas that dont need to be in squadrons. Orks can take more than 2000 points of just boyz. Daemons can run 4 Greater Daemons.

I just hate homogenized armies and doubling the FoC will only aggravate that problem.

**Wrakkar**

UncleMeat wrote:I dunno. The problem I see is that some armies have extremely undercosted units that are only made fair by the FoC limits. Long Fangs and Annihilation Barges are extremely undercosted for what they do, but because you can only take 3 units they don't become ridiculous. You are forced to spend your points on more "fair" units because you max out at like 420 points for the Long Fangs and 270 for the Barges. With 2 FoCs, you can have a higher percentage of your army be made of these "unfair" units. 6 squads of Long Fangs is extremely powerful against almost any build. You get 30 missiles that can fire between 12 targets and it takes up less than half of your total points. I really cannot see why a SW army wouldn't take 6 full squads at 2000 points.

It just leads to less interesting armies. At 2k, one of the best strategies will be to take some troops and the 6 copies of the best unit in your codex. Because most of the time this is a Heavy Support option and most of the time they are expensive, you will see more armies that are only made of troops and one other choice. Necrons can either do ridiculous flyer spam or run 10 barges. IG will run Vets and Vendettas that dont need to be in squadrons. Orks can take more than 2000 points of just boyz. Daemons can run 4 Greater Daemons.

I just hate homogenized armies and doubling the FoC will only aggravate that problem.

Hmm. How to counter this...?

[Not Sarcasm]

**Testify**

UncleMeat wrote:I dunno. The problem I see is that some armies have extremely undercosted units that are only made fair by the FoC limits. Long Fangs and Annihilation Barges are extremely undercosted for what they do, but because you can only take 3 units they don't become ridiculous. You are forced to spend your points on more "fair" units because you max out at like 420 points for the Long Fangs and 270 for the Barges. With 2 FoCs, you can have a higher percentage of your army be made of these "unfair" units. 6 squads of Long Fangs is extremely powerful against almost any build. You get 30 missiles that can fire between 12 targets and it takes up less than half of your total points. I really cannot see why a SW army wouldn't take 6 full squads at 2000 points.

It just leads to less interesting armies. At 2k, one of the best strategies will be to take some troops and the 6 copies of the best unit in your codex. Because most of the time this is a Heavy Support option and most of the time they are expensive, you will see more armies that are only made of troops and one other choice. Necrons can either do ridiculous flyer spam or run 10 barges. IG will run Vets and Vendettas that dont need to be in squadrons. Orks can take more than 2000 points of just boyz. Daemons can run 4 Greater Daemons.

I just hate homogenized armies and doubling the FoC will only aggravate that problem.

The only one of them that's really a problem is the Long Fangs, and they're only a problem if you run AV 11/12 en masse.
If you run horde, he's using half his points on something that will kill at most a dozen of your guys a turn, and that's being generous. I'm sure your boyz can suck it up.
If you run gunline you'll smash them apart first turn - no ablative wounds and weak cover saves mean pretty much anything ranged will beat them.
None of the armies you listed is nearly as scary as even 3 Vendettas, let alone 6 or 9.

**Wrakkar**

Testify wrote:
None of the armies you listed is nearly as scary as even 3 Vendettas, let alone 6 or 9.

Yeah, they are a problem, but you could always bring a few of the fortifications (Don't say "fortification-hammer", that's an argument for another thread).

**valace2**

Testify wrote:I just hate homogenized armies and doubling the FoC will only aggravate that problem.

The only one of them that's really a problem is the Long Fangs, and they're only a problem if you run AV 11/12 en masse.
If you run horde, he's using half his points on something that will kill at most a dozen of your guys a turn, and that's being generous. I'm sure your boyz can suck it up.
If you run gunline you'll smash them apart first turn - no ablative wounds and weak cover saves mean pretty much anything ranged will beat them.
None of the armies you listed is nearly as scary as even 3 Vendettas, let alone 6 or 9.

**sudojoe**

hrm... 6 squads of 15 lootas and 6 squads of heavy guns. Bring it doomscythes! I gotz your cover save right here hahahaha. The giant tide of shoota boys will pull through! ( I don't even use bosspoles or power klaws anymore, more bodies works great on everything cept necron vehicles which are all armor 11, damn cheating robots)

30 man sized squads have proven to be incredibly sturdy with shootas. I usually use them like some sort of club and actually just cap things with the 10 man grot squads following behind. Nothing has any upgrades. Just pure bodies.

**felixander**

And making broad generalizations because someone disagrees with you is really cool.

The issue a lot of people have isn't the fact that you can add in more units, it's that people then use it to simply bring boring spam armies to a new level. Oh you brought 12 purifier squads? Oh that has to be tons of fun to play. Oh you brought 18 Vendettas? Awesome...

Spam armies are a problem already not just because they're too powerful, but because they're not fun to play against. This game is supposed to be fun, right?

**Grey Templar**

Why are they not fun to play against?

You know that in real warfare having duplicates of everything is a sound strategy. I like the look of a uniform army clashing with it's foe over a nice looking battlefield.

**felixander**

I'm not talking about appearance, I'm talking about whether it creates an interesting and dynamic game. Fighting against 12 of the same unit makes it lackluster at best. Yes it is extremely effective, but a lot of people play this game for fun. Keep your WAAC lists for tournaments.

I'll gladly play a double FOC game, so long as it's not JUST so someone can spam more meltavets / Long Fangs / etc.

**Wrakkar**

felixander wrote:I'm not talking about appearance, I'm talking about whether it creates an interesting and dynamic game. Fighting against 12 of the same unit makes it lackluster at best. Yes it is extremely effective, but a lot of people play this game for fun. Keep your WAAC lists for tournaments.

I'll gladly play a double FOC game, so long as it's not JUST so someone can spam more meltavets / Long Fangs / etc.

Which, in friendly battles, is what any reasonable player would do.

**felixander**

Agreed, so against people you don't know I think it's reasonable to not be interested as you don't know if he is reasonable in the same way you see it. He might see it as reasonable to bring the strongest army possible.

**Twiqbal**

Grey Templar wrote:Why are they not fun to play against?

You know that in real warfare having duplicates of everything is a sound strategy. I like the look of a uniform army clashing with it's foe over a nice looking battlefield.

No one's talking about "real warfare:" this is a game. If I'm going to drop $700+ to play this game, I want my experience to be a good one.

They aren't fun to play against because you have to tailor your entire army to it. Flier army? Guess I need skyfire and tons of twin-linked weapons. 10,000 Boyz? Looks like heavy bolters and flamers are all I'm taking.

A codex should encourage diversity - you should want to take a bit of every unit to have a flexible and effective force, as opposed to an army grounded in redundancy. The point of this game is fun; to badly paraphrase Yahtzee, realism was lost when Space Marines were stabbing dinosaurs on the planet Zog.

I personally don't enjoy redundant TFG lists, and that's why it's perfectly reasonable to oppose 2xFoC.

**felixander**

Twiqbal wrote:
Grey Templar wrote:Why are they not fun to play against?

You know that in real warfare having duplicates of everything is a sound strategy. I like the look of a uniform army clashing with it's foe over a nice looking battlefield.

No one's talking about "real warfare:" this is a game. If I'm going to drop $700+ to play this game, I want my experience to be a good one.

They aren't fun to play against because you have to tailor your entire army to it. Flier army? Guess I need skyfire and tons of twin-linked weapons. 10,000 Boyz? Looks like heavy bolters and flamers are all I'm taking.

A codex should encourage diversity - you should want to take a bit of every unit to have a flexible and effective force, as opposed to an army grounded in redundancy. The point of this game is fun; to badly paraphrase Yahtzee, realism was lost when Space Marines were stabbing dinosaurs on the planet Zog.

I personally don't enjoy redundant TFG lists, and that's why it's perfectly reasonable to oppose 2xFoC.

EXACTLY. Plus a real army wouldn't just field the same thing a billion times, you would need to be ready to counter whatever is thrown at you.
But that's not the point, building fun, versatile, and diverse armies should be the base of an army list.

**Mahtamori**

Wow. Just wow. Those are some pretty horrible example army lists to use to make a point that multiple FOCs are a good thing. Or are you possibly trying to make a point through sarcasm?

Your point is that at 9000 or higher we can expect to see armies maxing out a force allocation. That's why at 3000-4000 people start playing Apocalypse instead.
The Force Allocation Chart is there to limit your army so it doesn't contain as many Leman Russ as you can fit. Having double chart at 2000 points is a bit early in my opinion, and I play an army which is actually getting limited at those point costs!
Try making an example army out of Eldar to make a point. You do NOT want Fast Attack, and your troop choices are a plague you must deal with to get scoring troops. Elite choices are a bit meh, but I guess Serpent Dragons aren't too bad.

Eldrad 210
Farseer around 150
10x Pathfinders 220
10x Guardians with Warlock around 130 points
10x Wraithguard with Seer to hide the Farseers in.
5x Serpent Dragons 195
5x Serpent Dragons 195
5x Serpent Dragons 195
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
2141 points.

Not a bad army, contains just about everything you need except possibly loads of flamers to deal with a greentide. Eldar FOC slots are generally quite cheap, there's not a lot of really expensive units like Land Raiders or Leman Squads that are decent. This means that an Eldar starts getting cramped for decent choices at just after 2000 point mark. Eldar really need a second FOC at 3000 points to field a worthwhile army. Many armies do not, and IG are a really bad example of this since they can make squads of their vehicles and so on.

Sticking up a second FOC removes the purpose of the FOC. Sure, it does prevent me from running 4-5 Wraithlords at 1000 points or from bringing 6 Fire Prisms at 1500 points, but many armies have some pretty damned powerful SCs which when allowed to take 4 of brings silliness to a whole new level - especially as early as 2000 points. Just look at what idiocies Space Wolves could pull.

If you really want huge battles, Apocalypse is for you.

**Wrakkar**

Mahtamori wrote:Wow. Just wow. Those are some pretty horrible example army lists to use to make a point that multiple FOCs are a good thing. Or are you possibly trying to make a point through sarcasm?

Your point is that at 9000 or higher we can expect to see armies maxing out a force allocation. That's why at 3000-4000 people start playing Apocalypse instead.
The Force Allocation Chart is there to limit your army so it doesn't contain as many Leman Russ as you can fit. Having double chart at 2000 points is a bit early in my opinion, and I play an army which is actually getting limited at those point costs!
Try making an example army out of Eldar to make a point. You do NOT want Fast Attack, and your troop choices are a plague you must deal with to get scoring troops. Elite choices are a bit meh, but I guess Serpent Dragons aren't too bad.

Eldrad 210
Farseer around 150
10x Pathfinders 220
10x Guardians with Warlock around 130 points
10x Wraithguard with Seer to hide the Farseers in.
5x Serpent Dragons 195
5x Serpent Dragons 195
5x Serpent Dragons 195
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
Wraithlord ML/BL 155
2141 points.

Not a bad army, contains just about everything you need except possibly loads of flamers to deal with a greentide. Eldar FOC slots are generally quite cheap, there's not a lot of really expensive units like Land Raiders or Leman Squads that are decent. This means that an Eldar starts getting cramped for decent choices at just after 2000 point mark. Eldar really need a second FOC at 3000 points to field a worthwhile army. Many armies do not, and IG are a really bad example of this since they can make squads of their vehicles and so on.

Sticking up a second FOC removes the purpose of the FOC. Sure, it does prevent me from running 4-5 Wraithlords at 1000 points or from bringing 6 Fire Prisms at 1500 points, but many armies have some pretty damned powerful SCs which when allowed to take 4 of brings silliness to a whole new level - especially as early as 2000 points. Just look at what idiocies Space Wolves could pull.

If you really want huge battles, Apocalypse is for you.

Dear god... those lists were for people who, on other threads, wanted to see the most expensive fully-decked out list. If you read the post properly, it is Separated from the part about 2 FoC

Automatically Appended Next Post:
On another note, tactically, you can make a good TaC list to combat a 2 FoC.

Divide your army into two sections: The shooty and the assaulty.

The shooty: Three parts: Those who form a gunline, those who sit on objectives, those who move forward.

The assaulty: Those who defend the gunline, those who forcibly remove enemies from objectives, and those who move forwards.

Fulfil these type requirements, and fit to the points limit, and you're sure to be able to exploit your opponents weakness. Even against 2 FoC. Because spamming won't always work. As Orks often prove.

**Mahtamori**

So, you're making, in the original post of a thread, a separate post about a different thread. Why not post in that thread?

**felixander**

Well once again if you feel the need to use two FoC then cool. But attacking people because they disagree with it just makes you look (incoming understatement) bad. If someone wants to play the game differently than you do then don't play them. But there's no need to talk trash about them.

I don't play WAAC players because I don't find that to be fun; however, you'll be hard pressed to find me calling them "fethtarded" because they disagree.

**Testify**

valace2 wrote:
Testify wrote:I just hate homogenized armies and doubling the FoC will only aggravate that problem.

The only one of them that's really a problem is the Long Fangs, and they're only a problem if you run AV 11/12 en masse.
If you run horde, he's using half his points on something that will kill at most a dozen of your guys a turn, and that's being generous. I'm sure your boyz can suck it up.
If you run gunline you'll smash them apart first turn - no ablative wounds and weak cover saves mean pretty much anything ranged will beat them.
None of the armies you listed is nearly as scary as even 3 Vendettas, let alone 6 or 9.

I think that double FOC is an incredibly stupid idea. An 30 missile launcher Long Fangs can glance a Land Raider to death, for hordes, what do you think 30 small blast templates are going to do to clustered orcs?

**pepe5454**

2 FoC's are just a way to sell more stuff. I am ok with allies but the 2 FoC's just seems like forcing people to buy a ton more stuff for their already existing army to be competitive not just a couple more things but several. Lot's of cheese can be done but it's not the cheese itself that bothers be as much as the heavy push to spend a ton of money.

**Npcmaster**

I think it should be one of those "if you and your opponent agrees" kind of thing to use double FoC. The only example i can think of is two people playing some small points game, one using whatever units, and one using Kill Team restrictions or something. The game of WH balances itself (mostly, kindof, meh) because of the even-ness of the setup. You can only spam a certain number of units, but it also stops your opponent from over-spamming. It is You could always play games of 1999 points to avoid the issue entirely

Also, why did they have to pick 2000? I like 2000 point lists, and now I have to deal with this! They couldn't do "over 2000" so games at like 2500 or 3000 could use the Double FoC where they really needed it, and spare the 2000 point games.

**Amanax**

I'm not sure what the point of this is...

But I just want to add, that a few months to a year ago a thread was created to see what the largest points were possible to obtain while staying within the FoC restrictions.

If I recall correctly, everyone thought that BA had it hands down, until a chaos marine player reminded everyone that summoned lesser daemons didn't take up an organization chart slot...and therefor CSM were capable of infinite points.

Therefor, all of this is nonesense. For Chaos shall drown you in daemon bodies...

**Kaldor**

Milisim wrote:So I am being FORCED to play a gunline if my opponent chooses to play with 2 FOC and I dont?

WOW sounds like a game I want to play!

Thats a moot point really since this is GunlineHammer basically now anyways. So what if the opponent is spamming gunline.... then what ? I have to TAILOR my list to play a game?

Twiqbal wrote:They aren't fun to play against because you have to tailor your entire army to it.

It's almost like you have to take your local meta-game into account when building your lists. Isn't that a bizarre concept?