Whoa whoa whoa whoa! I think at some point here we lost our sense of perspective. Let's dial all this back a little, shall we?
focusedfire wrote:tgf wrote:@ captain avatar - I am disappointed you felt the need to hurl insults my way then essentially prove my point.
Out of all the armies you listed everyone of them with the possible exception of blood angels was a shooting build. If an armies theme is assault oriented, and they use shooting to win, long fangs, razorspam, psyspam, venomspam did they win the game in the assault phase or the shooting phase? I think my original point still stands and is even reiterated by your post shooting is dominate. Necrons did not have enough time to flourish in 5th but after their codex release they had several top finishes in GT and the number 1 seed at adepticon. If you want you could even add them to the shooting is dominate argument but I felt there was not enough data with them to really put them on the pile new dexes have a learning curve associated with them and sometimes they are successful till people adapt to tricks or an FAQ comes out and fixes issues (scarab conga).
Reading Comp/Fail
Go back and reread what he posted.
First) He did not insult you. He insulted your opinion. Opinion/=you. Also the reference to cow droppings alludes to an old addage that when put with his stating now for his opinion, comes across as that his opinion will be viewed by you as have said same cow dropping content.
Sure. He only insulted his opinions. Though the way in which he did it was like saying "I wasn't insulting YOU when I called you fat. I was insulting your FAT!" It's the internet. All we are is opinions here. If he disagreed then there are far better ways to phrase that than the... shall we say "undiplomatic" turn of phrase used. I won't even take a stab at figuring out what your "alludes to an old addage" statement means. I'm afraid I don't understand you.
Second)He did prove his point. He said that 5th was dominated by newer assault armies that had good shooting and been given access to really cheap & shooty transports.
Third) He did not say that shooting dominated, He said that assault armies with newer codices excelled with the added boost of plentiful shooting. Not quite the same as you are twisting it to be. Basically, Captain Avatar is saying that when you have a new codex that gives you nothing but good and no real drawbacks, then of vour army they will excel. The Shooting alolowed the assault portions of your armies to do what they needed.
In other words, "How did the SM lists deal with the only true shooty army to be Top tier (IG)?". They assaulted. they assaulted the command squads. they assaulted the vehicles and they assaulted the units on objectives.
This third point is the sticky part, and really where I think you might be having troubles with. "The shooting phase allowed[sic] the assault portions of your armies to do what they needed." This is not assault. This is combined arms. My definition of an assault based army is one that has the overwhelming majority of the army geared towards winning in the Assault (or Close Combat) phase of the game. A "shooty" army, is one whose overwhelming majority is geared towards winning in the Shooting phase. A "Combined Arms" force is what you describe: one where shooting allows your assault elements to do what is needed, whether that be cracking transports, softening up hard targets or horde units, or what have you. To put it another way, the Assault portion and Shooting portions of your army complement one another. Where the delineation is for these catagories is a little fuzzy and is often based on personal preference. Some people see it as based on number of units, others on number of points spent, and others on the number of attacks (at ranged or close.) For instance I classified my 4e
SM army as a shooting army as there was only one assault unit and it was used primarily for counter assault, rather than aggressively seeking out the enemy. This, despite the fact that it comprised nearly a third of my points at 1850. Ahem. This definition is admittedly broad and unsubstantiated, but appears a common sense one based on experience and local mindset.
Fourth) Necrons-How did they get there? Was it by Shooting only? No. CCB lords doing fly-over "Assaults" and Scarabs "assaulting" Vehicles? Yes. Their shooting was powerful because of the On/Off night fight ability but it was the CCB getting in your face and wrecking your back field that really crippled your army.
So I'd say that once again, it was a army that has great assault potential at some point in there list that also had access to cheap transports.
IMO, Captain Avatar proved his point that it was not shooting but newer "Good at everything" codices that dominated.
And this backs my belief that there is some missing understanding or communication here. You are asserting that only a
CCB or two and some scarabs constitute an "assault army." As defined above, that is barely combined arms, let alone assaulty. Barely. Even Captain Avatar agrees that Necrons are a shooting army. Based on the above provided definition about what constitutes an assault army, he did not in fact prove his point. You are free to rebutt, but you should support your counter-arguments better than you have. His thesis has nothing to do with the newness of the armies. The entire argument centered around shooting vs assault, when
tfg asserted that shooting "was the dominant trait" of competitive armies, and
CA attempted to refute that.
CA then went on to list what I have defined as shooting armies, which did not support his claim sufficiently.
A) SM's
They are an assault army with good shooting. Tau and IG are shooty armies.
But you admit that they were all-rounders, which is what Captain Avatar was saying. So you both agree, Shooting is not what dominated in 5thed, it was newer good at everything armies that dominated.
No, they are a shooting army that can survive assaults. You can define this by total number of assault oriented units in the book, the effectiveness of the ones that exist in the army, or by the viability of builds that concentrate on winning in the assault phase, but no matter how you define it the Codex: Space Marines is not for assault armies. Just because you can SURVIVE assault, doesn't mean you are an assault army. By that understanding,
TH/
SS terminators are clearly shooting units because of their ability to withstand shooting.
B) IG
Yes, Captain Avatar showed he was credible by admitting that A shooty army could excel, provided they had been updated. Others here, can't claim such credibility because they keep insisting that best assault armies of the Imperium were not "Assault armies but rather won on their shooting ability only.
No one said that even shooting armies won by shooting only. The first assertion is that shooting "was the dominant trait."
C)
SW
That you cannot admit that
SW's were, are and always will be an assault army that has one really good shooting unit, leads me to question your credibility here. Are you really saying that the
SW's are not an assault army first?
Quick question: Long Fangs were easy to wipe out of the backfield. when this was done,"Was it an auto-lose for the
SW's?"
Yeah, They could win with the assault units.
Second question: If shooting was so dominant, why was
TWC considered so broken.
Here I have to point to another of my definitions of an army type: its type (shooting or assault) is also based on what the most usable units are. Grey Hunters were good at shooting and not bad at assaults. Bloodclaws were build for assaults. No one took Bloodclaws. They used Grey hunters as close range fire support. Assault was only something you would do (with any army, in truth) when the odds were in your favor or to suit some other purpose. Did Greyhunters charge? Sure. Against
IG, Tau, Space Marines, weakened and depleted units... Hell, I've launched assaults with Firewarriors before (more than a few times, actually) but that no more makes them an assault unit than it makes a Grot a tank.
No one claimed that Long Fangs were the only good unit in the list, the one upon which the entire army had to have survive for the entire game in order to ensure the win. "Could" win and "would" win are two very different things. I "could" beat an Ork warboss in
CC with a squad of Firewarriors. "Would" I? Not more than once.
All of this is about list construction. If you didn't have more shooting to crack vehicles, then you would lose when you lost the Longfangs.
TWC was considered broken because it was broken. It was unbelievably resistant to shooting and assault. Taking a single unit, or even a few assault units doesn't make your army an assault army. At the end of the day, does more of your game plan revolve around shooting or assault? Even if you wanted to get your
TWC into combat, that didn't mean your army is an assault army. You simply didn't want to waste points by having your
CC unit sit around doing nothing. No matter its purpose, a unit doing nothing is worthless.
Could you make a mean assault army with
SW? Yes. Was it shooting or
CC SW lists that most people saw? In my area, it was shooting.
D) 'Nids
Thanks to both you and Captain Avatar for leaving the 'Nids alone.
Now IMO, Maybe their problem was that 5th ed rewarded Assault armies that had the ability to be generalists and punished specialst armies('Nids and Tau) or maybe it is what Capt Avatar has been saying about 5th rewarding newer codices that gave access to plenty of cheap transports.
Honestly, the only real boosts shooting got in 5th ed were the new los rules and more importantly, cheap vehicles. It was not that shooting was that great, It was that Vehicles were that cheap.
But that was not the point of the argument. The argument revolved around shooting vs assault. Nids is an assault army that sucked. Tau is a shooting army that sucked. Clearly we can't use these polar opposites to form our opinions and will have to dig deeper for evidence supporting one side or another. I could say that Assault was the Dominant Trait of 5e because Tau sucked at it, but that would be a false assumption when so many other shooting armies were doing well.
Were vehicles doing your assaulting for you? Were they engaging in the close combat phase for anything but grenade magnets? If they weren't dreads, the answer is no. The cheap vehicles that you are talking about here are transports. The cheap transports that were the most game changing were the ones that put out the most shots. Sure, you could take a rhino to get your assault units to where they needed to be, but in my meta at least more people were taking Razorbacks. More cheap, shooting transports leads to... ahh! More shots! That must somehow strengthen the shooting phase. Naturally this will vary according to your list design philosophy, but
RB spam was more common from what I saw than Rhino or Drop Pod spam.
F) DE
Again, you agree with Captain Avatar that it was newer Assault armies with cheap transports and good fire support that ruled 5th ed.
The dominating
DE lists were not Assault based, but Shooting based. My own list was 70% in points allotment and 10/13 choices taken in shooting only, and many viewed that as too diluted.
G) GK
Funny, my Tau never lost to the GK, unless they assaulted. GK were rediculous in both assault and Shooting. Again this proves what Captain Avatar was saying. %th ed rewarded armies that could do both. What made GK's really diferent was that they did not have to spam cheap transports.
Purifiers and Paladins could shoot, as mentioned, but they still didn't win in the assault. They won because their
CC abilities made charging them suicidal, but they didn't win in the
CC phase unless they sought it. This meant that armies that weren't equipped to outshoot them (pure or mostly assault armies like Orks) had to fight the Grey Knights on their terms, which is always disadvantageous. Maybe those Purifiers and Pallies would move across the board for you, but they were still shooting the entire time, and killing most of your army while they were at it. They might charge what was left, but that is a far cry from 3rd ed when your untouched (and even depleated)
CC squads would engage untouched ranged units and wipe out unit after unit with no reprisal. Henchmen lists didn't assault at all.
I do find it interesting that your Tau never lost to
GK unless somehow the
GK charged you, given the high numbers of high strength, long range, and mobile shooting
GK's can bring to the field, and the obviousness of any close combat tactics aimed at your lines and the Tau ability to redeploy (if you build for it.) Unless of course those
GK brutalized you in the shooting phase for 2/3 of the game and assaulted you off of the objectives in the last turn. Just because you lost because of an assault doesn't mean that assault was the game's focus, or even dominant trait. What about the 4-5 turns of shooting that preceeded that assault?
H) Necrons, We agree except on shooting trumping their shooting. In 5th, it was the Lord using his
CCB to do fly-over "assaults" while his Crypteks played the Night fight on/off for the first Two turns. And what was the best way to kill the Necrons? Yep, assault them.
Your last bit here when responding to the Tau question. You admit that it is the ability to assault that really makes the difference.
Thank you
See? The necrons were so good at shooting that their shooting trumped their shooting!
One assault unit doesn't make an army, nor did that one model wipe out armies, nor even do a majority of damage. Night Fight negatively affected Necrons as much as it protected them from the other army's SHOOTING attacks. It did nothing to curb ASSAULT armies. So naturally it was easier to beat them in assault. If you had any units left to do it, that is. And even when you did, you'd just get the tarpit anyway unless you were a brutally good
CC unit. Did the Necrons charge that unit with wave after wave of their own men until it died? Nope, they shot it, staying away until it was dead. In short, avoiding assault, or counter assaulting with their own units when the odds supported it. Why charge when you can shoot? Shooting allows you to engage more targets at greater range and offers more tactical flexibility than
CC does, and the fact that the Necrons have so few
CC oriented units supports this design intent.
Nagashek wrote:
Good stats do not an assault army make. Any experienced vanilla SM player will tell you that charging a squad of Ork Boys is suicide with a TAC squad. Razorspam and Combat Squadding allowed you to break the objectives game while at the same time keep our short range firepower seperate from your long range, static firepower. No one was actually CHARGING with 5 man half-squads unless it was safe to do so or you NEEDED to out of desperation. Just like any other not-assault army. Look at the number of CC units to the number of shooting units and you'll quickly discover SM is a shooting army that did not win by assaults. Q: Which was the better unit in Codex: Space Marines? Vanguard Vets or Sternguard?
A)Actually, Good stats are exactly what makes for a good assault army. To say other wise hurts your credibility.
I say otherwise. BS5 WS1 S1 T5 A1 LD10
SV 3+ Is this unit for Assault? Are you sure? It has good stats. Clearly it must be meant for assault.
What about BS4 WS4 S3 T3 A1 LD8
SV 5+. What is that one good for? I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it could describe most of the units for at least two army books.
What about if the top one has a Power Weapon? The bottom one? What about if the top one had a S6 AP3, Rending 36" range gun? And if the top one is 3ppm while the bottom is 9?
Which good stats are WHERE is what helps to define a unit. The rest is equipment, options, position in the Force Org chart, etc.
B) Charging a 30 strong squad of Ork boys with a Tac squad no. Wittle them down a bit and you betcha. His point about having a army that does everything well and that gets cheap transports is still valid.
Wittle them down a bit by... what? How? Bribes? Harsh Language? Asking them to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? Shooting? What a novel idea. Once again, Assault here is your secondary concern, AFTER shooting.
C)Charging with 5- man squads was a viable late game tactic for objective denial/seizing. (What else were you going to do with the squad after their Rhino was dead.
Stay in cover and never do anything as slowed as charging a unit you couldn't beat? Unless it was going to outshoot you. But hey, its that odds thing again. Charging COULD be an option for late game objective denial/siezing. So could just running. If one opponant was still mounted and the other was not, then you had a much greater advantage and your enemy could never catch you in order to charge (with allowances for the vagaries of luck/skill, of course.) Yet the point of contention was primarily Assault vs Shooting, not Mech vs Footsloggers. That point is mentioned, but as a supporting option rather than as the whole argument.
D)SMs won by assaulting late game.
Against who? Only armies in situations that could lose if they got assaulted. You know who
SM beat by shooting off of objectives? Only armies in situations that could lose if they got shot. Did the majority of the game happen because of shooting or assaulting? My point here is that "could" is a matter of option, while "would" is a matter of designed intent. If they would always or usually win in the assault phase, not just because only one objective was left to fight over at the end, then assault was the point. If they won because they held/contested all the other objectives due to judicious use of firepower, then shooting was the point.
E)Which was better? What does it matter? Both would kill my Tau units by assaulting, not by shooting. Same goes for IG and most other basic troops unless they were hoarde.
So Sternguard armed with Combi Plasma would rather charge you than shoot you? What about combi-flamers? AP4 rounds? What if they were on the objective and you weren't? Would they charge you and get pulled off of the objective, or stand pat and shoot you until you left? Just because it is better at assaulting than you doesn't mean its meant to assault!
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
Second, was the only true shooty army that dominated, the IG. Why was this so?
I think it is because they got a codex designed to work in 5th. They also got a few tennet breaking features like:
A) Firing out of the top hatch of their chimeras without the vehicle becoming open-topped.
B)HellHounds and their variants becoming fast vehicles when they are a more heavily armoured (And therefore "more heavy"
versions of the chimera chassis.
C) Vendetta/Valks moving flat-out and still deploying their passengers
D) Tank Squadrons
On top of this, they recieved a massive points reduction on thier core units/vehicles.
It is a 100% shooting army, this is obvious. It took full advantage of every part of the shooting phase.
Yet if the Game was dominated by Shooting in 5th as you claim, then the
IG would have been unbeatable. But they were not. Hmm, How did all of thesee shooty can't assault worth a flip
SM chapters you are talking about manage to beat such an unstoppable juggernaut? Oh yeah, By assaulting the Key elements of the
IGs non-moving backfield and their troups after you cracked their Transports/tanks. Outflanking scouts or Scoutbikes would Melta the transports and then would "assault" the passengers are some of the common ways this was done
That's rediculous. If 5e was as dominated by Assault as YOU claim, then Tyranids would have been unbeatable. How did they (
SM) manage to beat
IG? How does someone beat Grey Knights? Just because something might be broken or super powerful doesn't mean skill can't play a factor, for one. Two, they shoot the transports, as you just mentioned. Did they assault the transports? Sometimes. Only when shooting failed. "Why would they assault the units inside once they popped those transports?" I can hear you asking. Because it was a way to double dip the damage? Kill a transport with Melta, you'd get to charge the guys inside. That's two units downed in the same turn by one unit of yours. Value! Otherwise you'd have to wait on other parts of your army to shoot them, and likely (because
IG has SO MUCH CRAP on the field) they were busy elsewhere. I never said they COULDN'T assault, I just said that
TAC squads only would do it when they had the advantage. "But so would any unit!" you might be thinking. Yet the equipment for a
TAC squad does not benefit them to assault. It benefits them for shooting. So they remain primarily (or, one could say, "dominantly"
shooters until the time comes to switch tactics. No one is saying Marines lack the versatility to perform multiple roles, but that primary role is shooting. And objective holding.
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
Third, was Space Wolves. Arguably one of the best cc armies in the game. Also happen to have one of the best shooty units in the game(Long Fangs). If the Space pups had to rely upon their shooting alone they weren't that great(Watched people make that mistake and suffer for it). Having both great shooting and awsome cc is what made them excel.
SW was a shooting army that had assault elements. Bloodclaws were the assault units. Who took them in competitive lists? No one. Who took Longfangs? Everyone. Did you see anyone taking
TWC? Sure, when they could reasonably proxy them, but they were hardly in every list.
Actually, Grey hunters are really good at
cc and shooting and yes you did see
TWC.
That you claim that the
SW's are not an assault army but, rather a shooting army that has an assault element seems to be (
IMO)at best disengenuous... and at worst trollish.
And you couldn't give me the benefit of the doubt here? Actually Grey Hunters are awesome because they have Counterassault. That means they don't have to charge you to get the benefits of charging you, and can just shoot the bajeezus out of you as you try to close with them. That and
BP/
CCW means that they have a bunch of attacks in
CC. Once more, their abilities are a deterrant for Close Combat (well, for anyone wanting to
CC them.) I would call the Space Wolves a Combined Arms army, not strictly assault. At least not from what I have seen compared to their previous incarnations.
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
Fourth to dominate was the BA's. A fast assault army with cc monster Special characters. They also got Rhino/Razor spam like the other 2 SM dex's, only faster. BA was is and always will be an assault army.
An Assault army with a boatload of shooting in it. Even as an "assault army" there was still more shooting than your average Tau arm, thanks to those oft mentioned supercheap razorbacks.
Dude, maybe it is time to take a break from assembling your models.
As to the
BA shooting.
Lol, Never lost to a
BA player who tried to outshoot my Tau. If they didn't push in for assault. I would at least pull a draw. Assaulting is what would get them the win.
3 Broadsides with Targ Lock, 2 IonHeads Squadron of Pirahna with
FB, 3 Crisis teams One with Mis pods and the others with
Plas/fusin blast made quick work of any mech-
meq army that tried to duke it out at range. I would run 3 small troop units that i held off of the board with the posi-relay until late game and have them walk on to my objectives as my vehicles and suits pushed to contest the opponents. My Tau could Keep up with most other armies shooting.(Except the
IG)
Grats. Except I never said that they could beat you at shooting, only that they had more shots than the average Tau List. Though that might be a hyperbole, it isn't by much. Range, manuverability, and target prioritization all matter very greatly as I have proven to many opponants time and again.
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
5th to dominate was DE.. Hhmmm. A fast assault army able to spam lots of cheap vehicles/ transports that were *Gasp* BS4 gun platforms.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hey DashofPepper, how many Wych units did you take? Thor? Anyone? Here, let me go check some national tournament level lists. Hunh. All venom spam? All three elites filled by shooting? All 6 troop slots filled with 5man Blaster toting units in Venoms? All three Heavys were triple lance Ravagers? Are you sure? I'm pretty sure i saw some Talos in there... No? Hunh. Oh wait! Look! Its a Beastpack! That's a
CC unit! Oh, only taken as a mandatory supercheap body guard for the mandatory auto include
HQ special character? Barely ever sees combats, eh? Oh well. My army? Oh, well I took an Archon, a unit of 4 Incubi, and two Wych squads, but that was because I liked the fluff, the appearance, and the combined arms approach the army was capable of (after playing Tau since 3rd.) I was also laughed at any time I posted the list. My close combat elements were more effective at scaring people than they ever were at
CC, absorbing an illogical amount of shooting due to my opponants' fear of their ability, rather than their actual abilities. The army has 21 non
SC entries. 13 of those entries are for
CC, yet only 3 of these saw any regular use, one far more than any others. The predominant strength of the army was still shooting even if it was meant to be combined arms (which it CLEARLY was.)
.....................Reading comprehension Fail.............................
Re-read what he typed.
Captain Avatar consistently made the point that 5th was dominated by assault based armies with plentiful cheap transports that had plentiful shooting. His point was and has remained constant that Mech ruled but it was mech assault armies that ruled the most. Why was this? Maybe it is because the average shooting unit in an assault army has better
cc abilities than the
cc oriented units that shooting only armies have.
I did. And you are incorrect. His first assertion was that ASSAULT ruled 5e. He then mentioned cheap spammable transports. By your own points, his as well, you have shown that without shooting, Assault is nothing. Therefore mechanized Assault (which means that your transports are there to carry more
CC troops into battle) is NOT more powerful, nor even the dominant trait of 5e. If one has to chose between assault and shooting, then the dominant trait of 5e is shooting. Hands down. If you can not unhorse your opponant, you can not beat them. If the argument instead is "Has Mech dominated the game more than shooting or assault?" then that is another argument entirely. The combination that has dominated is Mech shooting. Time and time again it is the army that brings the most guns to bear on target time and again will be the one to win. By all these examples you have given, you seem to be asserting that, if an
IG player and a Tau player were fighting, and the
IG player obliterated every single other tau model from the board but a lonely squad clinging to an objective, that if the
IG then charged the Tau off of that objective, that the
IG would A) be an assault army, and that B) Assault was the point of that game. It may have won the game that time at the very end, but it was not the predominant factor in the win, nor could have the
IG player been planning his end game strategy around a close combat assault. If the
IG player was not doing that, but instead was spending more time shooting and manuvering, than that makes his army a Mechanized Shooting army. The game was FORCED to be decided in the Assault phase BY the shooting phase. Therefore the shooting phase played the more dominant role.
Let me make it easy for you. Assault + Shooting > "Shooting only" in 5th ed.
And Moving+Shooting > Moving+Assault in 5e. Let me break this down another way. If you can't shoot me, but you have a transport, but I can shoot you and I have a transport, who wins? Me, because I start at a longer range and have more chances to stop your mobility before you even get to me. Even if you do catch me with whatever is left and you manage to pop my transport, I still have a unit ready to go and relatively untouched. It backs away and shoots you. If you don't, I just dance away for as long as needed and burn you into the ground. Therefore, shooting + mobility trumps
CC+mobility. The person who stops the other's mobility first will win, and ranged is just better at it than
CC. Even if you change the conversation to be "Shooting +
CC + mech is how you win," you are still wrong, because more armies were winning in the shooting phase than in the close combat phase. Or, more of the games outcome was decided by that phase than in the Close Combat phase.
By the way. Nice way to try to prop up a fallacious argument with name dropping. I'm sure that Dash and Thor will be pleased to hear that they automatically agree with you.
Not at all. I've just read their tacticas. I thought I'd ask for their input in case they were reading. Tournament results and
DE meta are the real proof. Any
DE army that even has a majority of points spent in
CC rather than Shooting will lose, as it can not crack transports, even with the anti armor the army can proliferate so easily.
About those only three cc units "that ever saw regularly use"....LOL...Thats at least 2 and really 3 more than a "shooting only" army gets.
Tau has three. Do you use them?
As to you playing Tau in 3rd, Yeah. What is coming across is a player that maybe ran them for a few games and them moving on to the assault based armies.
Try picking them back up now. It may help correct where your baseline view, of what constitutes average ability, has slid to the point that you can not admit that SM and SW's are assault oriented. And that you can't admit that the BA and GK assault abilities play a large roll in helping them to win.
So... in order to reset my "baseline" you are stating that playing Tau would remind me what average is? If a Firewarrior is "average" than a Guardsman is an assault model. Why not? He has +1
WS and I on a Firewarrior. Now, if you are stating that the statline of 3 in
WS,
BS, S and T is average, I suppose that depends on your definition. The one I choose to use is the mathematical one. "Average. n.: a quantity, rating, or the like that represents or approximates an arithmetic mean." You will remember that to arrive at an average, you add all the numbers in a set, then divide by the number of entries in that set. Thus, if there are 14 different
40k armies, and one took the standard or average
BS in each book and added them together, then divided by 14, you would get the average
BS across the game. I'm willing to bet that it's alot closer to 4 than it is to 3.
WS is certainly closer to 4 than it is 2. If that's the case, then Tau are below average. If we round to the nearest whole number, then Space Marines are more average than Tau are, primarily because
MEq's make up half of all armies. If the average is 4 in weapons skill and Tau are a 2, then that doesn't make Marines assault oriented by default any more than it makes their BS4 to your BS3 shooting by default. That's where equipment comes in.
I can admit that their abilities play a role in the win for
GK and
BA. It's because it would be suicidal to charge them, so you have no option but to shoot. And guardsmen standing in front of Tau would rather charge, because it's suicidal to stand there and get shot. For
GK and
BA the assault never played a role because it never happened. No one charged. For the Guardsmen, it was the Tau shooting abilities that played a role in the decision to charge, but the shooting never happened, because they had to charge. Grey Knights (largely) get to do BOTH and WELL. Since both phases are strong, they are at least a combined arms army. But since its safer to stay inside of transports and shoot rather than risking your units to charging a unit, killing it, then getting rapid fired to death, shooting is the clear winner, time and again.
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
Finally came Necrons but they were just starting to shine when 6th hit. Don't think that I can make the claim that they dominated in 5th.
Shooting army, clearly. They had counter assault units, but those were rarely used apart from Scarabs and Wraiths, and Scarabs were anti vehicle assault more than anything.
Assault is assault and those 2 units make the necrons pretty sick against shooting only armies. Neat trick you have of agreeing with the Capatain and then trying to claim that makes him wrong.
Not winning the game? Not the focus of the strategy? Then not an assault army. As explained, there is a world of difference between assault and counter-assault.
Nagashek wrote:Captain Avatar wrote:
My last point is that if 5th was truly dominated by shooting, then why wasn't Tau one of the Top-tier armies?
First: Tau were NEVER a top tier army. People may have rose colored glasses remembering the "horrific evil that was Fish of Fury," but that tactic was a technique that made the army playable at best. Tau never had serious contention for top tables in 4th, and certainly never in 3rd, eras dominated more by Iron Warriors,
SM Las/
Plas spam, and the occasional Seer Council than anything else. Tau was, at its heart, an elegantly written and supremely balanced army list: in a clumsily crafted and hamfisted rules set (both 3e and 4.)
Second: Tau is most recently a 4th ed army, an edition that gave us supernerfed vehicles and made us pay out the nose for the priveledge of having any.
Third: and I really can't stress this enough, Tau is a CRAPPY SHOOTING ARMY. They are terrible in
CC with no commensurate benefit short of longer range guns. Other armies outshoot them, even armies like
DE who are supposedly an "assault first!" army. The units cost too much, shoot too poorly, and are far too fragile compared to other armies in the game. Our strengths are in the range and strength of our guns, and over costed units that are designed to offset the enemy's use of cover and the Tau's own terrible shooting ability.
Costs for troops and vehicles have been steadily declining for 2-3 editions now, and with the age of the codex, they simply can not compete.
Fourth: The last point is especially telling when one considers the premier hallmark of 5th edition: mech spam.
The much touted trademark of Tau fire superiority is the Railgun, a massive beast of a weapon that we could take no more than 9 of in an army. Do you know how many popped vehicles that is in a turn? Potentially 9 (RIP, Target locks!), but with 5th's over generous coversaves, it came to be almost nothing.
Other armies could take more anti armor for cheaper than the Tau could and it was distributed across more slots than just Elites and Heavies. Other armies could also take cheaper (half the cost to start) transports than Tau, that were more effective at adding in firepower. Not only were these ubiquotous boxes hiding their scoring units, they could also effectively join in the fight in a way that our pathetic Devilfish NEVER COULD, often adding multiple S6 shots at 24-36" or more, often twin linked, rending, or with a high volume of fire. NONE of which were options for the race.
I could go on for freaking PAGES about what was wrong with Tau and why they couldn't compete in 5th and why 6th will be little better for them, but I'm pretty sure I've made my point.
5e was the worst assaulting ever should have gotten, and as a Tau player in 3e who had to contend with BA rhino rush and Speed Freeks every saturday, I honestly never thought I would say this. GW went too far with 6th ed with the CC rules.
TL;DR You are wrong. 5e was a shooting player's game.
GW has been moving away from assaults since the 3e revised assault rules.
A)Reading Comprehension fail and fallacious assertion in an obvious attempt to discredit Captain Avatar and to cloud the issue. This attempt reeks of desperation for some reason. Why are you getting so upset?
Captain Avatar never said the Tau were Top-tier. Funny that you read that.
It might leads me to believe that you have problems with the game having any shooting element. Maybe this is why you are geting upset and shouting.
I never said that he did. Perhaps you should try looking at that from another angle. He asked why weren't the Tau one of the top tier armies in 5th? I explained that they never were. This was designed as a prelude. I go on to explain the the Tau codex is old, and even when it was new, it wasn't great. There wasn't anything about it that made it an EZMODE army that people could just auto win with. WIth a codex a full edition out of date (and never that strong to begin with,) the mere fact that it is a shooting army in what I contend to be a shooting edition won't do anything for it. By his logic, Tyranids should be a great army. Orks should be a great army. But they aren't. You can cite "...in the hands of a competant general" all day long, but the truth of the matter is that some armies are just inherently stronger than others. If even that level of agreement can't be reached between us, then we are speaking different languages.
This is also when you start getting really rude, primarily by casting aspersions as to my character and the sort of army I play. Also you conveniently forget I play
DE.
B)No rose coloured glasses, in late 4th, the Tau were very good if handled by a competent player. US tourney scoring kept them down but in europe they did quite well.
Iron Warriors kept them down. Demon Bomb kept them down. Scoring had little to do with it. Even if you gave the bird to your comp scores (And holy crap was the percentage in Troops rediculously unweildy for Tau to hit!) you still had an uphill fight against most armies. Regardless, I can't disagree that Tau were a fantastic army if handled competantly.
C) Wow, you really hate/are frustrated with Tau. First You claim that you played them and that they were elegantly crafted and balanced, then you hate on them claiming that were a crappy shooting army.
Maybe the problem isn't with shooting or the Tau, maybe it lies with you. So just because you couldn't get them to work they are crappy??? Dude, get over yourself.
D)Hey at least you proved Captain Avatars point that 5th was not good to shooty armies, it was good to new armies that had the abilty to assault , take cheap transports and shoot on near the same level as shooting only armies.
E)Your comment about 5th being the worst assaulting should ever get confirms my suspiscions that you have an irrational bias against the shooting phase. Love how you try to claim to be a Tau player here to prop up an(
IMO) irrational and fallacious argument.
F)( Cue generic german interrogator voice)Admit it, your no true Tau player. You are an
SM player that has a small Tau army sitting on the shelf somewhere, collecting dust.
All of these roll nicely into one.
Backstory time! Hi. I've been playing Warhammer
40k since 2002. I had just gotten home and my buddy introduced me to the game by loaning me his Alaitoc army to go against his Ork army. Naturally it was a crushing defeat, but my interest in the game was kindled! I liked snipers, but Alaitoc wasn't QUITE my cup of tea. Something about those guardian helmets was just rediculous. I went to the
LGS and browsed, meanwhile having many, MANY people suggesting the Space Marines. It's great for beginners, it's very forgiving, it has lots of options, it's very popular... Ugh. Sounded okay, and certainly safe enough to start learning with, but who wants to be good at everything? Anyway, I had the codex and the
BF box in my hands when I took one last look around. That's when I saw it: the slender curve of a Fio designed nacele. I crouched down, pulled out that box, and stared in wonder at my very first Devilfish. I knew nothing about Tau, but I knew what I liked. So I looked at the codex: young, idealistic, expansionist race. Naive yet brilliant. Technology and hope winning out against superstition and a doomed existence. A focus on range and manuver versus close combat and speed.
I had found my niche.
I started playing Tau that very night, and over the next couple years learned target priority under the unforgiving axe of my good friend's Speed Freeks. The army grew quickly, soon surpassing 4000pts and included pieces from Forgeworld and a number of fun conversions and backstories, including one particular Shas'ui whose tale grew with every game. "Oh yes, that's Kovash Shi. He killed an Ork Warboss in close combat. He survived an entire unit of gaunts charging him. He rapidfired a demon prince to death." And still my opponants would try to crush him, thinking him some unknown special character while I just laughed and let them chase me.
I took them to casual games and I took them to tournaments. I fought in ruins and on jungle boards where the only lines of sight ran diagonally across the board and an army of Spacewolves was rhino rushing for me. I recognized early that I had to kill whatever would do the most amount of damage to me in the least amount of time. I won many, many games. Not all to be certain, but more than I lost, and when I did lose I bloodied noses and gained a grudging respect in Kansas City. It was my only army in 3rd ed.
When 4th ed came out I had a wild hair to try Necrons, since they were so different from Tau. I was successful, the army was well painted and the fluff was fun, but I had to be in the right mood to play Necrons, and that mood was never a good one. After playing WAY too much Fallout 2, and with the recent streeting of the 4e Space Marines codex I built a DIY
SM army themed around the Brotherhood of Steel. I made water transfer sheets for the shoulderpad insignia, modelled razorbacks out of HMMW-V models, and everything. I rejected the common wisdom of the day, and instead took everything I had learned from Tau and applied it to Space Marines. The result? 25 wins, 2 losses, and both losses due to dice rolls so astronomically bad I thought I could roll my entire life and never see its like. Until the second time. (
btw we're talking 29 rerollable powerattacks at S5 I5 that only inflicted 2 wounds.) Satisfied, I took my
SM out when I was in the mood to enjoy my models, but mostly stuck with Tau. Until 5th edition.
The Space Marine codex veered sharply away from my design philosophy, and so soured me. The Tau lagged even further behind than before. My friends all took up Warmachine or Fantasy (mostly the latter) and my Tau, indeed collected dust. Last year started looking at
40k again (shortly after 8th ed came out. Not so shortly that I didn't play the hell out of it, just short enough that I saw all I needed to and realized I was done with it) I saw
DE, read up on them, and liked what I saw. Combined arms. Emphasis on mobility over toughness. Capable of bringing focused agression onto very small points to destroy the enemy. And sexy, sexy models. I was hooked again, and built my army enjoying every moment of modelling, relearning
40k, and painting. And beating the socks off of the competition with my new army. Gratifyingly, I was beating more experienced players with better (newer) armies. Even ones who knew how to fight
DE. I thought about taking the army to Adepticon, but knew the softscores would murder me. I'm an okay painter, but some of those armies were cherry.
Where were we? Oh yes. No. Tau ARE a crappy shooting army. They are 100% shooting, and as you (and I) have pointed out, there are melee armies out there that can shoot more and better. Not only are they 100% shooting, but they get very little to offset their intentionally lower
WS and I stats. Not cost, not manuverability, not shooting skill... Their trade off is a S5 30" gun that in 5th you couldn't move with. Meanwhile
IG, another "all shooting" army, have better base stats, troops choices with BS4, more and better tanks, fliers, and a gun for every problem. The well written and designed part I had mentioned was talking about the editions in which they found themselves. As
CA mentioned, "You used to have a trade off" if you were good at one thing. Well, that was the hallmark of a balanced army, and Tau had that in spades. They could cover their weaknesses, but the general had to do it just right. However, it was one of the few armies that was "balanced!" Therefore, a balanced army in an unbalanced game. If the other armies were as solid and well written as Tau (you get some good here, some bad there, and this defines you) then the game would have been in a much better state. I got them to work, and often prevailed even against Iron Warriors. I appreciated the fact that I had to be GOOD to win, and the other guy just needed 9 oblits and 4 pie plates.
If you played 3e you remember that you could sweep from one combat to the next with no repercussions. A
BA player would drive up, deploy his men, then charge you with them. They would kill your whole unit, then hit the next one with an automatic 6" consolidation. Fresh combat, you count as charging, it's fought on the Tau player's turn. Kill that unit, consolidate 6. If you hit a unit, great. If not, move 6, assault 6 more for 18 unanswerable inches. If your rhino was nearby, consolidate back into it. Rinse repeat. That sucked, but I could beat it.
4e lowered it to a 3" or d6" consolidate based on how you won. You could still consolidate into fresh combat. However, you couldn't assault from Rhinos, they were death traps, and the random consolidation meant a canny player could space his units just right to avoid the consolidate if you were lucky. Use an Etherial to time your
CC loss so it was most advantageous.
Then came 5th. No fresh combats. If you hit a unit and it died, you got rapid fired to death. No consolidating into vehicles for cover. A successful assault army was one that was either well orchestrated amongst units, hitting the right numbers of the enemy at just the right time to ensure you didn't get killed, or one so stout that you didn't care. You could be clumsy or sloppy as hell and it didn't matter. (I'm looking at you, Blood Angels.) This was hard on the Assault armies, but a sigh of relief for shooting armies who could now get more time to get away (Run!) or rapidfire the assault units. The primary concern became cracking vehicles, as the chart was far more forgiving, cover was easier to get (even if trees didn't block
LOS anymore. BOO!!!) You couldn't just jump out of a rhino or trukk and powerfist the rear hatch of a tank open anymore and instantly kill everyone inside. You had to shoot them first. And based on how they got out, you might not have the room to reach. Shooting was more reliable, more ubiquitous, and cheaper.
In short, I don't have a bias against the shooting phase, I have a bias against
GW making half of a combined arms force (as I see
DE,
SW, and others to be) utterly worthless. I enjoy playing all phases of the game. Dark Eldar lets me to that in a way that Tau,
SM, and Necrons never did. I'm more manuverable, shooty, and assaulty than any of those armies. I'm also more fragile, too, but I like the finesse. I do not disagree that combined arms was strong in 5th, or that assault played a role in the game, but when I look back and compare 5th ed against the backdrop of my
40k experience, I know that 5e was nothing like the previous editions of the game in terms of assault. To call 5e's "dominant trait" assault when compared to those is just not correct.
*
BTW,
TL;DR Means To long, didn't read. Yet you posted to every part of the message. How did you do that with out reading it???
OOOHHH, Are you Psychic?
TL;DR is also utilized on forums to summarize a very long post. Shouldn't you be glad I read it in order to form a more cogent argument or would you have preferred flaming vitriol?
All in all, shooting was weaker in 5th ed but retained an emphasis due to the Vehicle survivability and new codices allowing for spamming in order to sell models.
If shooting had been strong you would not have had to invest so much into shooting units to deal with the mech spam and to provide proper support to for your assault units.
GW created a rock, paper, scissors situation in 5th ed. They made shooting much weaker, Assaults much stronger except against vehicles, and finally made Vehicles more survivable overall but best countered with other vehicles.
The need to remove vehicles was the primary reason you saw shooting and think that shooting was dominant the 5th ed. When it came to what was inside the vehicles, you still assaulted.
The fact that just a few CC units in any army was enough to do the same damage as the rest of the army should tell you which was more powerful and truly dominant.
Thing is that, IMO, 6th ed fixed this and you will see more assault oriented units in lists just in order to get the job done, while there will be fewer shooting units because they will require less to get the job done. This edition favors Bikes, Jump-infantry, Monsterous creatures and fliers. 3 of those are assault oriented unit types that get Hammer of Wrath to help make up for Overwatch.
I look forward to this edition because(IMO) it makes the difference between assault armies, generalist(do everything well) and shooting armies clearer.
I disagree, but this is also the best part of your post and the most well thought out argument. Therefore I call it "food for thought" and will come back to this later.
Officially elevated by St. God of Yams to the rank of Scholar of the Church of the Children of the Eternal Turtle Pie at 11:42:36 PM 05/01/09 
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