realgenius wrote:But I agree, flanking War Walkers are really good.
I disagree...sort of. While war walkers are on my MVP list right up there with the dark reaper exarch, flanking is a very poor choice of moves for them. First of all, it means that they are not on the board on turn 1, which is a lot like having your entire squad stunned for the first turn (and possibly several turns after that depending on how your reserve rolls go). The reason for this line of thinking is that any good weapon you put on war walkers has at least 36" range, which means they will be in range on the first turn...always. The second thing is that war walkers are fairly frail and as such, you want to keep them as far away from enemy fire as possible while still remaining effective. This generally means you need to stick in the 25-36 range from your opponent, the farther back, the better. This seriously limits the number of weapons the enemy can get in range to shoot at your walkers and thus the damage they end up taking. If you use the flank march, you come in on a board edge that may or may not be the one you want and even if it is, there’s a very high chance that you'll be closer than 25" away from your opponent (giving him a much better chance of killing you). So while I highly encourage the use of war walkers, I highly discourage the use of the flank march for them.
While we are on the topic of war walkers, lets talk about weapons for them. The scatter laser is a great choice because its high volume of fire,
str 6, and inexpensive. The only other choice worth taking is the missile launcher. It has reasonable anti tank ability and great anti infantry ability. Funny enough though if you look at the various roles the two weapons can play, you might be surprised at how they compare. Missile launchers come out to be the same against troops if you assume you hit 3.3 guys on average (a few more when you hit and a few less when you scatter). If you are hitting less than that, the scatter laser would do a better job since it wounds on 2+ against most infantry rather than the 4+ of the missile launcher. If you are hitting more than 3.3 on average, then the missile launcher comes out ahead of the scatter laser in effectiveness. Against vehicles, it’s a whole different story. Here’s the math hammer on the average number of damaging hits and destroyed results for various armor values. These numbers are for 1 weapon shooting at BS3.
AV 10
Missile launcher => .42 damaging hits and .11 destroyed results.
Scatter laser => 1 damaging hits and .22 destroyed results.
AV 11
Missile launcher => .33 damaging hits and .08 destroyed results.
Scatter laser => .66 damaging hits and .11 destroyed results.
AV12
Missile launcher => .25 damaging hits and .06 destroyed results.
Scatter laser => .33 damaging hits and .0 destroyed results.
So over all, the scatter laser is better for taking out
AV 10 or 11 vehicles and still causes more damage to
AV 12 vehicles even though due to the fact that it can only glance, it won’t really kill on any time soon (although it will cause .06 weapon destroyed results and .06 immobilized results so those could eventually be stacked up to destroy the vehicle). Actually, now that I think about it, lets see which would kill a 3 gunned
av 12 tank first…looks like 18 missile launchers vs 36 scatter lasers. This goes down to 27 if the target only has 2 guns. Either way, the missile launcher is superior in this respect as it is with dealing with
AV 13 which the scatter lasers can’t touch. In general though, for walkers I would suggest sticking with all of one weapon or the other. This prevents you from using them in situations where one or the other weapon is less than optimal.
