Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I have one question to ask, why are people dead set against list tailoring?
I play a few different opponents and we generally know what we are facing. This has led to a certain amount of tailoring but has also forced us to become inventive with our builds. We know that some hard counters are going to be coming our way and it really doesn't bother us.
I will add at this time I don't play at shops or clubs, nothing against it I just don't, so this means no pick up games or near strangers to annoy.
So there is the question at the start of the post, why is it such a big no no?

I only loathe it if the tailoring is the result of learning exactly what you're bringing.

I used to play in a regular group of players without a lot of new blood. As time goes on you pick up on the tendencies and preferred units/playstyles of your opponents and try and take what you think will best defeat them.

This level of tailoring was always a fun dynamic as it allowed you to try less "viable" units in an effort to thwart the tailored aspects of your opponents list.

I think there are several pieces to it.

1.) The Pick-up aspect at local clubs or shops. If you bring a take all comers list and I tailor to beat it, it seems like bad sportsmanship.

2.)The Tournament aspect. If I want to practice for a tournament I am not list tailoring because I don't know what I will face.

3.) It is no fun getting your list crushed by a hard counter. If I don't own as many models as you and you can hard counter what I do own it does not make for a very fun game.

That said if you and your buddy agree to tailor lists to fight one another there is nothing inherently wrong with it. In theory it makes more fluff sense that if say your marines are going to fight orks they would bring the tools with which to best fight them.

That said I never do it because I feel like it makes you a worse player in the long run if you always bring the hard counter to something.

I'm dead set against it because you are not as skilled when you are faced with an unknown opponent.

In my opinion, especially in your situation with home games, too much tailoring leads to an 'arms race' as one person does, it then another to counter the counter, and then again to counter that. Pretty soon you are in full twink mode as the only way to play.

Then again, this comes from a CSM player that uses no Heldrakes. I love to use all those units that people say are non-competitive. Makes winning with them all the more sweet.

I guess the goal is to enjoy your games. If you like people trying to counter everything you have, and you doing the same, and it works, why not do it? But you are right in thinking that for pick-up games this is a nono. Most people just come with a list that is good against anyone. If you have the knowledge of their army ahead of time, and they don't, it is pretty much a dick move, IMHO. Doesn't make for a fun game.

I think most people are dead set against list tailoring in regular pick up games. Only because no one ever wants to waste 20min watching some one rewrite a list the second they see your army. Then repack everything because the guy brought out nothing but hard counters.

There is a fine line with list tailoring and meta tailoring. To my mind, the latter is fine in any situation. For example, in my group of regular oppoenent, I am the only one that brings MEQ of any kind, so I often go with AP4 over 3 (maul against sword for example), and conversely I am fine with my opponent bring more AP3 than normal if they expect to be playing against my marines.

In terms of list tailoring, my group generally has an agreement that tailoring against the army is fine, against individual units is less ok. Sometimes we will agree to go all-out and try and build complete counters to each other, but on the whole it's along the lines of 'Player A plays tau, and often uses a lot of vehicles, so I'll bring a melta drop pod.', rather than 'He is brining a Hammerhead, so I won't take any vehicles.' Ususally, we build list after choosing opponents, so it really is impossible to avoid a bit of tailoring, especially as we all know each other's armies and collections pretty well.

The way I see it is this: Taking a tonne of AP3 if you see a lot of MEQ is no different to bringing more AA if you see a lot of fliers. No one frowns at the latter, so the former should be equally accepted.

List building is bad for two reasons:

1) Only one player can do it. Say you look at my list and decide to counter my mech IG with lots of lascannons and melta. Now I decide to counter you buy swapping to green tide orks. Now you counter me with lots of flamers, and I go back to mech IG. Eventually one of us has to commit to a list, and then the other person gets to tailor to it and get a huge advantage. The only fair way to handle this is to have neither player get the advantage by committing to TAC lists before they know who they're playing.

2) It favors the person with the biggest wallet in a game that's already too expensive. List tailoring requires you to have spare models, and maybe even entire spare armies. That costs a lot of money, so the person who can spend $5000 on a game has a huge advantage over the person who can only buy a single 1500 point list.

I think I may have misunderstood the term then. My group don't see lists before building our own. I guess we do kind of micro meta building, we know the army buy not the build.

Tailoring to the metagame is fine, and it isn't like you can enforce something like that anyways. Keeping in mind policies on proxying and the amount of resources both players can put into the game like what Peregrine mentioned above, tailoring when both players have the same information and have the same relative ability to alter their lists can also be fine. For example, both players knowing what kind of terrain or mission you're playing ahead of time can be an interesting and fair change to the regular process.

But yeah, what you're describing is just playing to the meta, and is okay with most people.

My definition of Tailoring would be seeing my opponent's list and then building a list specifically to beat it. That is what Tailoring is.

Simply building a list that is for your specific meta is no big deal.

Some people think that they should be able to write one list and change it as the meta shifts.

Some people, like myself, like to have several lists prepared and labeled for what I think I might run across. I typically have 5 lists, Anti-Horde, Anti-MEQ, Anti-MCs, Anti-MEC, & TAC

Now some might call it Tailoring to some degree or another, I call it an excuse to use some models that would never get used otherwise.

List-tailoring is not necessarily bad. Most of the open-gaming nights at my local store, I don't bring a list. Once I have an opponent I find out how many points he wants to play and then build my list (with no knowledge of what army he is playing). That being said, certain people play certain armies and don't change much in their lists, so I try to avoid making an army that is specifically built to counter. The other reason is I have shown up numerous times and have been asked to play my Nids because I'm the only one at my store who plays them so occasionally people want to try a potential TAC list to see how it measures against the Endless Swarm.

It's only a big 'no-no' if people don't expect it.

Example:
In a week or so I know I will be playing an Ork-list with tons of Boyz and Nobz.
I could build a list that focuses purely on flamers and other stuff that would wreck Orks instead of taking some TAC-list, but that would surely ruin his game since he doesn't expect me to do that.
So instead I will try to build a list I would take against any random opponent as I know that he will do the same.

(I lied, I won't build a 'random'-list. He's a new player so I will try to build in some weaknesses until he becomes familiar with all the rules)

Tailoring your list for your local meta - fine
Arranging a game with someone and tailoring your list for what you expect them to bring - Fine as long as you tell them you'll do it and give them the chance to do the same
Arranging a game against someone and asking them for their list beforehand so you can tailor yours to hard counter it - not cool, bro
Playing a pick-up game and having an array of lists so that once you see your opponent's army you can select one tailored against it - not cool, bro

I typically tailor my list based on knowing who my next opponent is, I don't see anything wrong with that. If I know I'm playing against Daemons then I bring the units that have worked well for me against Daemons in the past. That being said, I have my own preferences as far as tactics and unit synergy are concerned, so my list doesn't change that much, it is mostly equipment that I change when I tailor for a specific army.

Seeing as we tend to agree who we are playing a week in advance, it is pretty hard not to tailor just a little bit.

"You fancy a game next week?"

"Sure thing, who do you play as?"

"I'M NOT TELLING YOU, YOU EVIL LIST TAILOR!!!!"

This doesn't tend to happen much, but the best thing you can do is know that the other person may tailor to your army, so you have to work around that.

The irony is that people act like those who list tailor are unpleasant when in reality its the people who absolutely cannot handle the idea of not having a completely balanced game where they do not have absolutely equal chances of winning are the sort of people I detest. They're the sort of people where they show up to play and win first and foremost, even if they're not WAAC necassarily, and stare at you funny if you suggested playing a match with an interesting element to it that might harm their chances, even if it might be more fun.

War is not completely balanced. Changing the odd thing around to tailor can actually make a game more interesting.

Keep 3 different lists, set all your stuff out, wait for him to get his stuff out, randomly pick your list and deploy. Make a dice roll of it so he knows you didnt pick after you saw his.

Only one player can do it.

Not entirely true.

Let me give you an example from historical gaming. Back in the '90s i was big into the Ancient wargaming tournament scene. Now for those who don't know, in such games, the player built points based armies from a large list of forces from the 3k BC to 1485 AD era and in competiiton play you rarely got historical match ups. So you might play a game with 12th Century Crusaders against say Imperial Romans. In alot of ways it was similar to 40k.

In most cases the tournament organizer would allow the player to register two seperate lists built from the same army . After you found out what your opponent for the round was, but before the deployment started, you chose which of your lists to deploy. Most people tended to have one of their lists tailored to meat a specifi type of opponent. So some would build an "anti-cavalry" list for facing a horde of horse archers. Others would build an army based around beating elephants. Personally I usually brought an "Anti-Aztec" list as the local meta-game was heavy on armies like Aztecs that featured hordes of highly mobile light ifantry armed with short range missle weapons. My point is that it was a form of list tailoring in which both sides were aware of it and were expected to participate.

My local mini-meta-game (I rarely play with players outside of a group of about half a dozen older friends) more or less runs on a similar setup. Most of use carry more figure than we need for one army and usually have more than one list on hand. Like in our old ancient days it's not uncommon to have list designed to beat a specifc type of army. "Ok, martin brought his Space Orks. Time to pull out the list with the heavy bolter devistator squad." We all expect it, and all do it so it's no big deal.

In short, sitting there and cooking up a list on the spot to counter a specifc foes is not cool....if for no other reason than it's time wasting. But the sort of "limited tayloring" I describe above is different.

TR

Something also to keep in mind is that not every army can tailor and/or can be tailored against.

An example always popping up is taking tons of flamers against orks. So, assuming the ork player wants to counter that, what does he do? It's not like orks have the option to give everyone and their dog a plasma gun like most MEQ do, or have something that's doesn't care about flamers and large blasts.

I know someone who tailors a lot. When playing our necron player (old codex) he would always bring phantoms to take out his three monolith in an instant. Against orks scatterlasers, scorpions and flamers everywhere. Against tyranids he would infiltrate 30 snipers to take out all MCs turn one. Against MEQ, it was firedragons and laser lances.
He tailored to such extremes, that he lost hard when someone massively changed his tactics, for example when I suddenly fielded a kan wall instead of my usual battlewagon rush.

As you can't really fight fire with fire in this case (how do you tailor against eldar?), a lot of people stopped playing him for this reason. Getting curb-stomped by the perfect counter to the 1500-2000 points of models you own over and over again isn't fun for anyone.

How's terrain tailoring? Like I build my armies like for city warfare with tons of cover or for open ground with little to no cover.

TheChunk wrote:
I have one question to ask, why are people dead set against list tailoring?
I play a few different opponents and we generally know what we are facing. This has led to a certain amount of tailoring but has also forced us to become inventive with our builds. We know that some hard counters are going to be coming our way and it really doesn't bother us.
I will add at this time I don't play at shops or clubs, nothing against it I just don't, so this means no pick up games or near strangers to annoy.
So there is the question at the start of the post, why is it such a big no no?

Well it is all a matter of scale. Given that I have way more minis than my regular opponents I know, pretty much, what I will face at any given point level with them. They cannot do the same with me because they just never know. If I were to build my lists knowing what they will have on the table and to specifically counter it, I would have an unfair advantage in the games and would ruin everyone's fun. Now if you have a group of people who know what the others have, but won't know exactly what they will face in games exactly it is another story. You are all building your lists using the same approach and same expectations which means no one has an unfair advantage. What you and your group are doing is trying to outguess the other and what they will be bringing to the table. That is NOT list tailoring.

Where list tailoring comes in and is very rude is with the player who consistently shows up late for "game day" and watches other games, picks an opponent and notes EXACTLY what they are playing that day and then goes and builds a list to specifically counter that list. That is unfair and very rude, but happens somewhat regularly in some places. Another example is the GK player who had his "regular" list and his "anti-daemon" list. If a daemon player shows up he used his "anti daemon" table denying force specifically to screw over the daemon player on deployment as opposed to playing a regular fair game against the person. We had one person like this in our flames of war league and it got so obvious what he was doing that many of us started to bring 2 armies every game day, knowing that he would issue a challange and then list tailor while waiting for his chosen opponent to finish their first game. Of course he can only get so cranky when we swap armies for the next game without stating outright he tailored his list to win against the previous list. Oddly he hasn't seemed to realize that we are doing it on purpose to him.

What you and your friends are doing is the typical concept behind 40k army building. You think about what you *might* be facing and how to deal with it. This gets tougher when you are thinking of an all comers type environment, but in a smaller group is a little easier, but you still don't *know* that what you think your opponent will bring to the table is exactly what they will bring. Sometimes you'll be right. Sometimes you'll be wrong. List tailoring requires more specific knowledge of an opponents list to gain an unfair advantage most of if not all of the time.

Skriker

This gets tougher when you are thinking of an all comers type environment, but in a smaller group is a little easier, but you still don't *know* that what you think your opponent will bring to the table is exactly what they will bring.

How can you not know what your opponent plays , they would have to own two armies for that or more units then they could actualy use and while I can imagine that with tau or eldar , a lot of armies a lot fewer builds. It is not hard to tailor against IG or SoB. 4 helldrakes 2 mini cultist units 4 units of autocannon havocks and list is ready..

Makumba wrote:

This gets tougher when you are thinking of an all comers type environment, but in a smaller group is a little easier, but you still don't *know* that what you think your opponent will bring to the table is exactly what they will bring.

How can you not know what your opponent plays , they would have to own two armies for that or more units then they could actualy use and while I can imagine that with tau or eldar , a lot of armies a lot fewer builds. It is not hard to tailor against IG or SoB. 4 helldrakes 2 mini cultist units 4 units of autocannon havocks and list is ready..

I have about 3000 pts of Nids and 3000 pts of Eldar. I've fielded multiple different armies for Nids form Nidzilla to endless swarm. If my opponent thinks I'm going to run swarm he would bring lots of blasts and templates. Which aren't as useful against MCs.

I agree that tailoring for the meta is fine - if no one in your area uses flyers... then why bother fitting your army to deal with them. If hordes are popular then maybe flamers over meltas is a good idea.

If you are tailoring for a specific person though - it's generally not cool.

I prefer all comers lists anyways - adds more flavour and generally if you opponents bring similar lists then nothing in your army will be wasted points.

The only tailoring I'm guilty of is if I see your army has no flyers, I may drop the 1-2 velocity trackers I use and swap in 2-3 drones to sprinkle around. It would just be wasting 20-40 pts if I left it as is.

I have nothing against people adapting to a local meta and brings things to deal with it. If someone in your group plays a lot of LRs I don't think it is wrong to bring more melta in your list than normal. I have nothing against people knowing/predicting what will be at a tournament and adjusting their list.

I do have a problem with people who ask you if you want to play, ask you what army you have, and then go and write a list. I am against a specific list for a specific opponent because it is unfair. If both players know what the other is bringing and write lists accordingly then that is fine because they have the same advantage.

im fine if people tailor lists vs me, for A) i do it also (not by individual lists, but like how since 80% of players in my meta playe marines, i get lots of d scythes) and B) i would like to see what type of lists could beta my serpent spam, even if it list tailored.

I'm not seeing the problem with tailoring against a person. If you know someone is a guard player, you sure aren't going to be taking plasma guns. The only time I make an all comers list is when someone I'm playing against is gettting ready for a tournament and is running their all comers list, or when we are playing 2v2 or 2v1 or 3v1 games(which are fairly common local).

The problem with tailoring for people is that is basically a non-data point for a more competitive setting where you don't know what your next opponent will be. Or fixed list leagues.