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Meanwhile, the Baneblade with a pair of sponsons comes in at almost exactly its cost in escalation, wherein it got a nerf and a points increase, despite being underpowered beforehand.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Has anybody really tried to break it? Probably not.

Let's spend a few minutes breaking it, just to have fun. A small heavy vehicle with AV 10/10/10 and 2 HP armed with a bolter costs -1 point. Yes, NEGATIVE one point. Every one of these vehicles you add to your list increases your available points by one, in addition to the side effect of spamming an obscene number of AV 10 bolters all over the table. You could literally fill the entire surface of one of the OP's giant floor games with these vehicles, if you felt like making enough models to do it. Or play a 500 point game where you bring 3000 of these and dump a pile of them into the general area of your deployment zone around the Warlord titan you brought. To a 500 point game. They'd actually be good meatshield screens for your titan, if you weren't almost guaranteed to win the game in your first shooting phase. You know, because the OP's VDR rules let you bring a Warlord titan to a 500 point game.

Conclusion: 9 months of development and playtesting don't mean anything if nobody bothered to test your rules properly.

Lol.

I tried making Thunderwolf Cavalry. Not Monstrous Creatues, but close enough. I'm not sure I'm doing it right, but....
W3 = 75pts
Sv3 = 10pts
Beast/Cav = 15pts
Thunderhammer = 15pts
3+ Invulnerable = 60pts

Don't know how to reduce my initiative but lets say -10pts.
165ish points per TWC.

 Peregrine wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Has anybody really tried to break it? Probably not.

Let's spend a few minutes breaking it, just to have fun. A small heavy vehicle with AV 10/10/10 and 2 HP armed with a bolter costs -1 point. Yes, NEGATIVE one point. Every one of these vehicles you add to your list increases your available points by one, in addition to the side effect of spamming an obscene number of AV 10 bolters all over the table. You could literally fill the entire surface of one of the OP's giant floor games with these vehicles, if you felt like making enough models to do it. Or play a 500 point game where you bring 3000 of these and dump a pile of them into the general area of your deployment zone around the Warlord titan you brought. To a 500 point game. They'd actually be good meatshield screens for your titan, if you weren't almost guaranteed to win the game in your first shooting phase. You know, because the OP's VDR rules let you bring a Warlord titan to a 500 point game.

Conclusion: 9 months of development and playtesting don't mean anything if nobody bothered to test your rules properly.

Trololo

I'm kinda glad GW doesn't use tables, they'd make this exact error.

 Selym wrote:
Trololo

I'm kinda glad GW doesn't use tables, they'd make this exact error.

They probably would, though not as dramatic. What's really sad is this kind of min/max design is the first thing I tried with the OP's rules, and one of the first things I'd try to break any system with. It's a classic approach to exploiting a system: any model/unit, no matter how pathetic, has non-zero value just for being a model/unit and therefore every game has a certain minimum cost that units need to have. For example, in X-Wing you will never see a 5-point ship, even the cheapest basic TIE fighter is 12 points. Why? Because merely occupying a base worth of space on the table has a certain minimum value, no matter how poor the ship's stat line is. So if you can find a way to design a unit that is cheaper than the game's minimum you can create massive balance problems by spamming it. It's something the old VDR system had problems with, you could make 5-point immobile vehicles with single lasguns and spam such obscene numbers of them that you'd break the game.

The fact that the OP's system doesn't account for this problem shows that they didn't think very hard about their whole approach to evaluating the power of a unit. The fact that they somehow, after 9 months of "development", missed the fact that you could create a vehicle with a negative point cost is just ing hilarious.

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
Perigrin, how many time must you be told that I DIDNT MAKE UP THAT NUMBER! Games workshop, chapter approved vehicle design rules, look them up.

I tried to keep out of this, but failed, sorry.

What you are actually saying is that the Revenant's price is accurate because GW priced it at 900 points? Even if it doesn't suit the VDR that you keep referring to? I'm confused.

My turn.

Small Eldar MC

Durability: Toughness 8, 3+ Armour Save: 80 pts
Wounds: 3 Wounds: 25 pts
Ranged Weapons: 2x Shuriken Canatapults: 8 pts
Melee Weapons: 3 Attacks at WS4: 3 pts
Options: Fearless: 5 pts

121 pts. Or would it be 177? Do I pay 25 pts for each Wound, or do I pay 25 pts for all three Wounds? Do I pay 3 pts for all three attacks, 3 pts for each attack? If I pay for each attack do I include the 1 base attack as well?

Right. Okay. We've aruged Lyth into a bit of a corner, and Lyth's arguments are becoming repetitive. In the interest of progress (because I would like to see a VDR that works), lets try this from another angle:

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:

To break it down, I will show (with my vehicle design rules) where its points are actually spent.

Armor value: 30 points
9 hullpoints superheavy walker (with all that entails): 200 points
Titan holofield: 100 points
Two pulsars: 185 points each
Revenant missile launcher: 20 points
Revenant jumpjets: 165 points
Agile: 15 points

Making the revenant 900 points.

This is the source of my argument and Peregrine's argument. In this section, you pointed out that the Revenant costed 900 points, and then made a breakdown of how you thought those 900 points were distributed. When you found that it tallied with your VDR, you concluded that it was balanced due to costing 900 points. This argument reads as follows:
Revenant = 900 points, therefore it is balanced.
Our counter argument is that, no, that is not the case. due to its ability to negate most of the incoming damage, the Revenant is practically impossible to kill without equally efficient counter-units. And these counter units for the most part do not exist, unless you decided to chuck £1250 into a Warlord Titan.

Your further arguments seem to have been based on the assumption that we are attacking your VDR. What we are trying to argue is that the result of the VDR, in this case, was not a balanced unit. This appears to be due to you taking in the costs of numerous GW constructs, and then rationalising which item is worth what, according to GW.
While that would have been a fun way to see what GW massively over/under values, it does not make balanced units, as they come to the costs that GW gave them. This can be concluded based on the combined thousands of games we on Dakka have played. We have found via your reverse-engineered VDR that GW believes the Baneblade Cannon to be worth a 160 point increase to a vehicle, as an arbitrary value. Just because it has this points value, doe not mean it is an appropriate price.
We have then been able to find other things that were not priced according to effectiveness, such as Peregrine's 3000 heavy bolter tanks and a Warlord Titan coming in at 500 points.
What this shows is that the points do not correlate with capability.

Your counter argument to this has been "since it adds up to GW's total, that makes it balanced". This cannot be true in many circumstances, due to GW's unit costing being inherently unbalanced. And this is why we are getting annoyed.

If you were to take some advice, and allow further testing to be done, the points values of each individual item could be worked out to what they should cost, and not what they do cost. Retaining GW's values is of no help to the community, as they can be exploited, and do not fix any current issues.

Trasvi wrote:
Lol.

I tried making Thunderwolf Cavalry. Not Monstrous Creatues, but close enough. I'm not sure I'm doing it right, but....
W3 = 75pts
Sv3 = 10pts
Beast/Cav = 15pts
Thunderhammer = 15pts
3+ Invulnerable = 60pts

Don't know how to reduce my initiative but lets say -10pts.
165ish points per TWC.

Don't lower your initiative, why would you do that? And all three wounds cost 25 total. You are at 125 points for this beast with 3++, and init 4 strength 10 attacks.

As for the bolter toting small vehicles, you have a point, I may not have increased the points enough for low armor. But you would have to MAKE 3000 of these in order to do what you are saying. (Might add a minimum point value per size category)

With the multi vanquisher cannon toting superheavy, is 445 points worth of dedicated tank hunter really that far off? I wanna see it on the table, those giant 6 barrels sticking out however you feel they should while also recognizably being equipped with jetpacks would be a sweet looking walker! Remember it has to be bigger than a land raider and modeled to be WYSIWYG, so I don't know how much cover it is going to get on the table...

I can be wrong, but I definitely feel that eldar holofields are worth 3 voidshields. I feel they are DEFINITLY worth more than an invul save, and when I built the revenant I started with creating the pulsars point totals by balancing them against the volcano cannon, then applied all the av, hullpoints, holofields, agile, and missile launchers. When I was done, I compared it to the current revenan's point total and found it was 165 points cheaper than the current rules. 165 points spent on mobility of that level didn't sound absurd to me, so that was where I put it.

The Vanquisher walker would be able to remove an Av 14 vehicle per turn, reliably. More if there was Av 13 or lower.

If you started by purely working out the GW values (and they don't use a table, btw), and then edited it, it'd make more sense.

I tried to remain true to the pricing of the leman Russ tanks apparent cost because at the time I was building it I was attempting to stay where games workshop had their point totals. After a while I had been asked to rebalance points and I started at the highest end of the spectrum with superheavy weapons.

I will get to the lower cannons in the not too distant future, hell the double autocannon variant of the leman Russ pays less for its primary gun than the predator does! I am willing to listen to reason, and I am grateful for the feedback here.

I which case, welcome to the thread!

I vote for making the Baneblade's main gun about 100 pts, rather than 160.

 Peregrine wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Has anybody really tried to break it? Probably not.

Let's spend a few minutes breaking it, just to have fun. A small heavy vehicle with AV 10/10/10 and 2 HP armed with a bolter costs -1 point. Yes, NEGATIVE one point. Every one of these vehicles you add to your list increases your available points by one, in addition to the side effect of spamming an obscene number of AV 10 bolters all over the table. You could literally fill the entire surface of one of the OP's giant floor games with these vehicles, if you felt like making enough models to do it. Or play a 500 point game where you bring 3000 of these and dump a pile of them into the general area of your deployment zone around the Warlord titan you brought. To a 500 point game. They'd actually be good meatshield screens for your titan, if you weren't almost guaranteed to win the game in your first shooting phase. You know, because the OP's VDR rules let you bring a Warlord titan to a 500 point game.

Conclusion: 9 months of development and playtesting don't mean anything if nobody bothered to test your rules properly.

10/10

This post goes beyond argument. It's... It's poetry.

Meh, I prefer haiku. If every one of his tanks was equal in size to say a land speeder, how much room would he have on the table? How did he get them there, back a pickup truck up the the table?

Say you took 10 minutes to custom build every one of these little buggers, it would take thirty thousand minutes to have them all done. That's more than twenty days straight if you don't sleep. Just to cart them around with a warlord titan and hope someone will play you. I don't think it would be worth it.

Obviously no one would do it, but that doesn't mean it should be possible in the rules/vehicle design system thingy. You can't balance things by hoping someone doesn't do something ridiculous but legal in the rules.

-Make 50 HB wagons.
-Play a 250 point game as IG
-Get free IG squad to go with your 50 free HB wagons
-???
-Get kicked out of the FLGS

 Selym wrote:
Your counter argument to this has been "since it adds up to GW's total, that makes it balanced". This cannot be true in many circumstances, due to GW's unit costing being inherently unbalanced. And this is why we are getting annoyed.

Spot on. (I get to quote myself now)

 SirDonlad wrote:
Fair enough for spending time trying to rationalize the points assigned by GW to these units; but to me, thats like trying to rationalize a nations military presence around the world by examining how it's defence spending is assigned.

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
Say you took 10 minutes to custom build every one of these little buggers, it would take thirty thousand minutes to have them all done. That's more than twenty days straight if you don't sleep. Just to cart them around with a warlord titan and hope someone will play you. I don't think it would be worth it.

You really don't get it.

It's not just the -1 pt vehicle. It's the whole thing. The most casual review of any of the tables shows that there are numerous flaws. Everybody who made a thing showed a different flaw, and it's laughable that your 9 months didn't uncover.

It is not reasonable for my vanqwalker to be that effective at killing very heavy armor. It is not reasonable for the not-TWC to weigh in at 165 pts.

The best thing for you to do is to figure out what's wrong with each of the "breaks", because they ARE broken, each in slightly different ways. The fact that you fail to see why only further reinforces how weak your review and playtest system is.

This system will never work, because a 2+ save is much more valuable to a Riptide than to a lowly Terminator. There are multipliers at work on every model, and a single detail can make a model's worth jump or plummet. The devil has ALWAYS been in the details in 40K, and GW is one of the least detail-oriented organizations in existence unless it's a detail on a model.

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
With the multi vanquisher cannon toting superheavy, is 445 points worth of dedicated tank hunter really that far off?

I wanna see it on the table, those giant 6 barrels sticking out however you feel they should while also recognizably being equipped with jetpacks would be a sweet looking walker! Remember it has to be bigger than a land raider and modeled to be WYSIWYG, so I don't know how much cover it is going to get on the table...

Absolutely it is. Take 2 of them (<900 pts) against 3 Tau Supersuits (>1000 pts)on a regular 4x8 board, and it's no contest. The Vanquishers will win far more than 9:10 ratio. You completely fail to see how that thing would work.

Modeling isn't the hard part - there are loads of bitz to work with. The point is that it's a broken unit that someone can (and will) build toward if that's what your rules allow. That's why VDR is no longer part of the game.

Martel732 wrote:
This system will never work, because a 2+ save is much more valuable to a Riptide than to a lowly Terminator. There are multipliers at work on every model, and a single detail can make a model's worth jump or plummet. The devil has ALWAYS been in the details in 40K, and GW is one of the least detail-oriented organizations in existence unless it's a detail on a model.

I have highlighted this on his VDR thread, wherein I double the durability of a pseudo-baneblade for 30 points, instead of the 300 it should have cost, according to the VDR.

This does highlight the problem of the codex system: the mere existence of other units will retroactively make older units more or less valuable.

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:

Trasvi wrote:
Lol.

I tried making Thunderwolf Cavalry. Not Monstrous Creatues, but close enough. I'm not sure I'm doing it right, but....
W3 = 75pts
Sv3 = 10pts
Beast/Cav = 15pts
Thunderhammer = 15pts
3+ Invulnerable = 60pts

Don't know how to reduce my initiative but lets say -10pts.
165ish points per TWC.

Don't lower your initiative, why would you do that? And all three wounds cost 25 total. You are at 125 points for this beast with 3++, and init 4 strength 10 attacks.

Because Thunderhammers force you to strike at Initiative 1, so paying for Init 4 is a waste of points.

 ClassicCarraway wrote:

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:

Trasvi wrote:
Lol.

I tried making Thunderwolf Cavalry. Not Monstrous Creatues, but close enough. I'm not sure I'm doing it right, but....
W3 = 75pts
Sv3 = 10pts
Beast/Cav = 15pts
Thunderhammer = 15pts
3+ Invulnerable = 60pts

Don't know how to reduce my initiative but lets say -10pts.
165ish points per TWC.

Don't lower your initiative, why would you do that? And all three wounds cost 25 total. You are at 125 points for this beast with 3++, and init 4 strength 10 attacks.

Because Thunderhammers force you to strike at Initiative 1, so paying for Init 4 is a waste of points.

Isn't that supposedly taken into account for all weapons that force you to use I1?

 Peregrine wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Has anybody really tried to break it? Probably not.

Let's spend a few minutes breaking it, just to have fun. A small heavy vehicle with AV 10/10/10 and 2 HP armed with a bolter costs -1 point. Yes, NEGATIVE one point. Every one of these vehicles you add to your list increases your available points by one, in addition to the side effect of spamming an obscene number of AV 10 bolters all over the table. You could literally fill the entire surface of one of the OP's giant floor games with these vehicles, if you felt like making enough models to do it. Or play a 500 point game where you bring 3000 of these and dump a pile of them into the general area of your deployment zone around the Warlord titan you brought. To a 500 point game. They'd actually be good meatshield screens for your titan, if you weren't almost guaranteed to win the game in your first shooting phase. You know, because the OP's VDR rules let you bring a Warlord titan to a 500 point game.

Conclusion: 9 months of development and playtesting don't mean anything if nobody bothered to test your rules properly.

Exalted. I can just imagine a horde of dumpy Italian tankettes with boltguns glued on t them charging across a battlefield in front of a Warlord Titan.

1) Make a plasticard box
2) Attach machinegun equivalent
3) Spray paint black, drybrush silver
4) Don't bother with wheels, it can "float". Or use bottlecaps and the like
5) ???
6) Never be allowed to play that list

 Selym wrote:
1) Make a plasticard box
2) Attach machinegun equivalent
3) Spray paint black, drybrush silver
4) Don't bother with wheels, it can "float". Or use bottlecaps and the like
5) ???
6) Never be allowed to play that list

If you have a gak ton of money and you want to be fancy...

http://www.blitzkriegminiatures.com/html%20pages/1-56%20scale%20tanks/Italian%20tanks%20final%2056.html

1)Buy the Autoblindo AS43 in quantity desired.

2) Cut down the barrel.

3) VICTORY!

We shall call it the Peregrine Armored Car.

My god. I love that idea.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

 Selym wrote:
1) Make a plasticard box
2) Attach machinegun equivalent
3) Spray paint black, drybrush silver
4) Don't bother with wheels, it can "float". Or use bottlecaps and the like
5) ???
6) Never be allowed to play that list

If you have a gak ton of money and you want to be fancy....

Please, that's a pauper stuff.

No, if you have money, and really want to be fancy, GW has just the thing for you:

http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/en-US/Grot-Tanks

I think you can buy extra 30k HH Bolter bitz somewhere to replace the guns.

Just be careful you don't drive the people who help modify/create point lists like the OP has. When the time comes and GW Sigamrtizes 40K it will be people like him who figure out how to give everything a point value again.