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Ponits - price ratio is all over the place.
The only things that matter to cost (money wise) is size and material.

Your getting a large model, just because its around 50 points doesent mean it should be stupidly cheap.


A while ago thoughy, GW did have an offer in which they included a troop choice + a transport at a slight discount.


However, i dont see why you say people dont use them that often.
Most of my local gamers hammer tanks when they get the chance, including a BA player who runs 6 razors, 3 baals and 3 vindi's.
Cost is cost, its allways been there for transports.

However, rules change like the wind, so they get buffed / nerfed in time.

Khornate25 wrote:
Which army have still viable foot list (except GK and BA) ? Just out of curiosity.

Necrons, Orks, Tyranids, Space Wolves, Sisters of Battle, and Imperial Guard.

Reecius would probably try and convince you of Eldar, but I just don't agree.

Dark Eldar can't function as a foot army and Tau can't function at all. Space Marines are a maybe.

I don't think vehicles or transports in particular are too strong it's that infantry outside of transports are too vulnerable, which is an issue for how armor, cover, and ap interact more than how transports work. Penetrating hits should maybe hit the unit inside the transport as well as rolling on the damage table, it always seemed odd to me that three lascannons lancing apart a rhino just blow a hot breath at the 10 guys inside that take up most of the interior space. Otherwise transports are fine, if maybe a little undercosted for some armies.

htj wrote:

Je suis2 au hazard wrote:But if we pepper the entire game with mechanics like those, it will eventually return to that dark time called second edition, where games never finished, ever. Somewhere, there is a gamer still stuck in turn 2 of a second edition game, who shall not know victory until his game finishes in 8ed.

Yes and no. I think there's a balanced ground between the super streamlined 3rd ed. and the characterful madness that was 2nd ed., something that's been worked towards in 4th and 5th. Infantry at the moment are very basic and very vulnerable. I'd like to see them become more integral to the gameplay. Reducing down some of the more time consuming elements, such as (IMHO) TLoS and replacing them with more abstract, faster systems would allow for this kind of mechanic to be integrated with less slowdown to play time.

Vulnerable?

Infantry are the scariest thing vehicles will ever see. Melta, ML, Powerfist, crisis weaponry, railguns...vehicles are good, but not enough to make infantry weak. Except maybe with the guard, str 10 ap2 LBT is ridiculous.

Viable Foot slogging army: Deathwing, Draigowing.

Transports are a lot more viable in this edition. But there are ways to counter them. my personal fave is my 2000 pt deathwing 16 krak missles a turn plus 6 lascannons and 6 Autocannons. Bring on the METAL BAWKSES! FEWLS!

I don't care i'll blow them all away.

The old system of size groups was aweful! TLoS is good. Its just people seem to want to pick holes in the rules by saying a hand is not targetable because it is not an arm. RAI I believe hands and feet should be allowed.

If the targetable features were more clearly defined it would be fine.

So, one of the things that I think people are missing is that it's not just vehicles that are spammable, here.

5th ed made a lot of changes which, in conjunction with some codex changes along the way, actually made it possible to spam stuff. Yes, this means vehicle spam, but this also means foot horde spam, drop pod spam, etc. Because 5th ed made transports viable again, and because 5th ed encourages spam, it's really 5th ed's fault that we have vehicle spam.

If the rules changed so that things were more like 4th ed (when I scarcely ever saw spam, even in ork armies), then we'd have less spam, vehicle or otherwise.

Make more things suck won't solve the issues of the game. The problem is that many armies are too weak not that the best armies are too strong.

I think that the biggest problem with transport-hammer is that it really benefits shooty armies and generalist units at the expense of assault armies with specialist units.

To me, assault is far more interesting that shooting. Assaults are decisive. They force movement, there are a lot of factors that go into a successful assault; the placement of ICs and special weapons, the consideration of subsequent rounds and what else might show up. Stuff that you need to think about for a few turns while setting up the assaults.

Shooting, on the other hand, gives me a meh reaction in general. Can you make good target priority choices - and after that, it's largely about how the dice roll.

Transport-hammer seriously weakens an assault army. Rather than charge men, you're stuck charging a 30 point box. If it moved, you're unlikely to hit it, and even if you kill it, you're unlikely to have prevented the men inside it from shooting you up the following turn. If you have to assault a vehicle to remove it, you know, with 100% certainty, that you'll get shot the next turn.

That would be okay, if the cost of the vehicle was commensurate with the cost of the assault unit. But they're so cheap, that you're trading 200 points for 30. That's not viable, and, as a result, there are very few competitive builds that don't have to dedicating resources to shooting tanks, even those which would be more thematic without this need (tyranids and daemons come to mind).

This has nothing to do with these armies being weak or strong, but the base mechanic that puts only a marginal effect on a unit when its transport is destroyed. You simply cannot trade a unit for a 30 point box and expect to have an even chance.

Well, you might say, that's what its like in the far future. Attacking a tank with a sword is dumb. Well, yes, that's true. And yes, it does seem dumb. But the established storyline allows for armies without guns to be effective by virtue of them just popping out of the warp, or having so many bodies that you can't just drive away. And the game doesn't.



The second part of the game design that I don't like is the elevation of generalists over specialists. If you're playing a game where an enemy can be in tanks or can be on foot, you need to pack ways to deal with tanks, and ways to deal with men. Imperial and Marine armies tend to be generalist in nature - you get guys with anti-vehicle weapons in the same unit as guys with anti-infantry weapons.

But Xenos armies tend towards specialist units. Eldar Fire Dragons are awful against men, and Dire Avengers can't hurt boxes. Other Xenos armies are designed the same way. Fire Warriors really can't threaten tanks, orks are now organized into specialist units (flash gitz, tankbustas, lootas, burnas, etc), Tyranid troops are largely anti-infantry, with a few elite choices left to deal with vehicles, and so on.

Well, if transports are so good that everyone is in one, specialist units that aren't designed to kill vehicles are left with little to do, and, because the nature of the army requires that you have some of each, a canny opponent can focus on killing your anti-vehicle specialists, and then have free reign with their vehicles.

This issue pretty much means that anti-infantry specialists are a thing of the past in competitive list design. There is just too much chance that they'll be left with nothing to do. In 4th, when you expected to see men outside of vehicles, you'd see Howling Banshees on the table. You'd see Heavy Bolters make their way into lists. I cannot remember the last time I saw someone field Heavy Bolters - they're just irrelevant in a game of boxes.

Maybe 4th ed was too harsh to vehicles (or their passengers), but the pendulum definitely swung too far. Between lowered prices, increased survivability, and lesser penalties for passengers on destruction, transports became far far too good to ignore, and whole swathes of units became relegated to the shelf as they had no anti-vehicle capabilities. That's not good design in my opinion.

captain collius wrote:Viable Foot slogging army: Deathwing, Draigowing.

Transports are a lot more viable in this edition. But there are ways to counter them. my personal fave is my 2000 pt deathwing 16 krak missles a turn plus 6 lascannons and 6 Autocannons. Bring on the METAL BAWKSES! FEWLS!

I don't care i'll blow them all away.

Deathwing, Draigowing, orks, foot guard, suit-heavy tau...

Plenty of lists do not even need transports.

Redbeard wrote: whole swathes of units became relegated to the shelf as they had no anti-vehicle capabilities. That's not good design in my opinion.

Yeah, this would be my real gripe, I suppose. Every army comes with small arms (or counts-as small arms like heavy bolters on chimeras, etc.) making every list, by default, somewhat good against infantry models, but the only way to be good against vehicles is with upgrades. This means that there's basically no reason to take upgrades that aren't good against vehicles unless you have a lot of horde players at your FLGS or something.

You can definitely see how 5th ed made this possible:

- when vehicles are wrecked, you no longer lose guys, and when they explode you don't practically lose the squad, and automatically fail a pinning check.

- vehicles now get real cover saves rather than pen -> glance of the old hull down rules.

- you can no longer destroy a vehicle on a glancing hit.

- you can pop smoke or gain SMF with a scouting unit before the game begins

Yeah, they also did stuff that made foot horde spam viable (like giving them the ability to run and have intervening units give cover saves), and I'd disagree that it's impossible to run an assault army (they just, as you note, need to be able to bring meltaguns, or be in a list that also brings long-range anti-tank, etc.).

That said, I guarantee you'd see a lot more heavy bolters if they were able to wreck rhinos in their own right like they used to, and if wrecking said rhino meant anything more than "oh, I guess now I'll just have to run there now, what a bother".

There is another point I haven't seen crop up: That the survivability and power that a vehicle brings for the cost completely makes every other unit type obsolete. Jump infantry only travel as fast as vehicles and yet they are just as vulnerable as footsloggers and simply cannot bring as much firepower, and worse is that you pay MORE for the jump pack than you would pay for a normal squad in a vehicle. Bikes have the exact same problem, and cavalry are even slower (they only get that extra speed in an assault). Artillery is forced to stand still to even fire any weapon and they die to a glance. Monstrous Creatures fair better because they often have several wounds attached to them, but anything that can easily wipe out vehicles can do even better to MCs.

Milisim wrote:

2. Vehicles fail a difficult terrain test on a 5+. A slight more risk of damaging the vehicle if barreling over terrain.

I agree perfectly with everything you said but this: it's still a tank ffs, maybe introduce tank traps into the game or something similar?

phantommaster wrote:

Milisim wrote:

2. Vehicles fail a difficult terrain test on a 5+. A slight more risk of damaging the vehicle if barreling over terrain.

I agree perfectly with everything you said but this: it's still a tank ffs, maybe introduce tank traps into the game or something similar?

They already exist. We use them all the time. Just get tank traps and call them impassable terrain to vehicles, difficult for infantry.

On topic, complaining about vehicles not being destructive enough is a bit meh. An exploded result atm means I can kiss goodbye to at least half my squad, plus a pinning test, plus a leadership test. Extending damage/pinning to wrecked would do nothing to MEQ, as exploded does atm, and just make life a bit harder for guard.
Personally I would rather pay more for my transports than simply never see my men on the board at all. Making transports more destructive doesn't do much anyway, since after a shooty squad is unseated it's basically useless anyway, and an assault squad doesn't care.

I think if you just gave some more consequences to vehicles it would balance the game more. As it sits now, an exploding vehicle is a slap on the wrist and a wreck is just a minor inconvenience. Make it where you actually have to decide whether or not to put a unit in transport, instead of just auto include, and I would be happy. Make a wreck dangerous to occupants (it did wreck after all, right now its just a forced disembark) and make explosions actually scary for occupants. i think that would go a long way to help balance out the transport spam

Ailaros wrote:
Yeah, they also did stuff that made foot horde spam viable (like giving them the ability to run and have intervening units give cover saves), and I'd disagree that it's impossible to run an assault army (they just, as you note, need to be able to bring meltaguns, or be in a list that also brings long-range anti-tank, etc.).

It's not impossible to run an army with assault elements, or, even with that as the main goal... for some codexes and themes. For example, Blood Angels do very well because of their melta guns and pistols in their units.

Try running a themed Nurgle daemon list... In 4th ed, this was a viable army. Plaguebearers were slow, but hard to kill. Great Unclean Ones and Daemon Princes could handle a few vehicles. Epidemius racked up a tally, and by the end of the battle, your little 1-wound models were rolling things. I remember the last Adepticon under 4th ed and there were several nurgle-only daemon armies in attendance. One of the team entries finished 11th of 80 that year, so it was far from an uncompetitive theme. 5th edition - it's unplayable. You simply cannot get people out of their boxes.

Joey wrote:
On topic, complaining about vehicles not being destructive enough is a bit meh. An exploded result atm means I can kiss goodbye to at least half my squad, plus a pinning test, plus a leadership test. Extending damage/pinning to wrecked would do nothing to MEQ, as exploded does atm, and just make life a bit harder for guard.

Personally I would rather pay more for my transports than simply never see my men on the board at all. Making transports more destructive doesn't do much anyway, since after a shooty squad is unseated it's basically useless anyway, and an assault squad doesn't care.

Making transports more destructive balances the trade. You've got a squad, I dunno, melta vets, in a 55 point chimera. Your total investment is 155 points. I've got a winged khorne daemon prince - same cost. You get to shoot at me with all your guns as I approach. You scoot your vehicle so I need 4+ to hit, while hitting me with 2 meltas the turn before I assault you. I get six swings, three are likely to hit, probably scoring at least two pens. If I'm lucky, I roll a 5 or a 6, and I kill 55 points of yours. You have a Ld test, sure, but you know your melta guys aren't going to be the ones who die, so on your turn, you're hitting me with another two melta shots (of 3 fired) - odds are pretty good that I'm dying here, between the shooting as I approach and the meltas the turn before and after I kill the tank. Net effect - I lose 155 to your 55. If you were auto-pinned, like in 4th, then my guy either requires the rest of your army to get involved, or gets a turn to go after your guardsmen on foot.

And all that assumes that I actually killed the tank - otherwise you get to shoot me another turn and I have to try again. The combination of me having to get to your vehicle, having to manage to get a result on the table, and you still getting to whack me right back, all for a pittance of points, is why we see the sorts of armies that we saw in the Adepticon Championships this year. Most of the Grey Knight players fielded Razorbacks with a minimal squad of guys in them for a total of roughly 65 points. A full third of the finals featured this approach.

I don't think that these types of lists are fun. They're good, sure. But I like a wargame to feel more like a wargame, and not a game of car wars. Something needs to give.

I'd say they probably should be harder to kill, and cost more points, and be more lethal to their occupants (I mean for crying out loud, the tank you are in just EXPLODED)
Price wise in the store, they should cost less however.

- you can no longer destroy a vehicle on a glancing hit.

Well with melta being the primary anti-tank in the game right now, and it being ap1...

Luke_Prowler wrote:There is another point I haven't seen crop up: That the survivability and power that a vehicle brings for the cost completely makes every other unit type obsolete.

You haven't seen it crop up because it isn't true.

There are plenty of foot lists out there that are very competitive, especially out of the rules-twisted tournament environment. Vehicle spam may be common, but it has nothing to do with being the only viable army type.

Je suis2 au hazard wrote:Well with melta being the primary anti-tank in the game right now, and it being ap1...

It's not the same, though. Back in the day, meltaguns didn't NEED to get into the 6" range like they do now. If a meltagun only glanced, that wasn't so big of a deal because it still wrecked the vehicle 1/3 of the time. Now, you really need to get closer.

More importantly, though, it made it so that there was a class of weapons that were anti-tank AND anti-infantry, whereas the current rules make a vast majority of weapons good against one, but not the other.

MrMoustaffa wrote:I think if you just gave some more consequences to vehicles it would balance the game more.

Right, and it doesn't need to be vehicle destroyed results either. Currently, the missions are set up so that if your vehicle is killed, a big majority of the time it doesn't matter, strategically. KP was designed to counter this, but it doesn't do a good job, and tournaments are TERRIBLE about this, often doing things like having three mission types being run simultaneously. If I'm preparing for Adepticon, and I know that the person who wins a game is the one who does best two out of three of the three missions in the rulebook, I'd be foolish not to just let my opponent have the KP part in the bag while I build the rest of my army around trouncing my opponent on the other two.

I mean, for how crappy the system was, even victory points handled this. People would be more averse to crowding a bunch of flimsy boxes into their lists if there was some real penalty for having them killed. Not to say we should go the VP way again, but we certainly could have missions that actually introduce a little bit of balance, rather than allowing for people to spam (vehicle or otherwise) without serious risk or consequence.

Khornate25 wrote:
Which army have still viable foot list (except GK and BA) ? Just out of curiosity.

guard, run the blob platoon formations and you can have a gak-ton of infantry on the board... also the obligatory Ork and Nid lists
Personally, I don't think the meta is affected all that much as by and large, the large majority of vehicles I see are AV 10-11 on the sides and rear, which basically any MEQ can take out without much problem (assuming either very lucky rolls, or wargear options/upgrades) So, I honestly think that unless GW was producing more vehicles with standard AV 13-14 armor THEN there may be a problem, but as the large portion of transports are relatively low armored, it really isnt much of a problem for most armies to handle, either in shooting or CC


Had a game just last week against one of the resident wolf players... he commented after the game that it was one of the more entertaining games he had had in some time, because when he saw me putting down 11 Chimera transports onto my corner of the table, and 3 more Leman Russ tanks he didn't know how he was gonna handle all that armor... neither one of us list tailored, and so we each had to come up with tactics to deal with each others stuff, and for many folks out there, that is a large aspect of what makes the game fun.

I think vehicles - from effect are about right. However - their cost is too cheap. 35 for a rhino? basically cost of 2 marines.
40 pts for a razorback? Excuse me TL heavy bolter and protection. Again too cheap. Chimera multi laser and heavy bolter/flamer for what 65? Again too cheap.

However, I expect Tau and Eldar vehicles to go cheap in the new edition and I know GW likes selling vehicles. The problem is there is zero incentive to play an on foot army except for maybe terminator builds. As an eldar player, I know you give up significant firepower to field a mech army however you gain in protection. For IG and marines, it is just too cheap to mount up everything.

Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Had a game just last week against one of the resident wolf players... he commented after the game that it was one of the more entertaining games he had had in some time, because when he saw me putting down 11 Chimera transports onto my corner of the table, and 3 more Leman Russ tanks he didn't know how he was gonna handle all that armor... neither one of us list tailored, and so we each had to come up with tactics to deal with each others stuff, and for many folks out there, that is a large aspect of what makes the game fun.

What did his army consist of?

I like the idea of adding infantry rules rather than nerfing vehicles. In order to not derail the thread, I started a new topic to discuss what they should be. http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/445726.page

Eldarain wrote:

Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Had a game just last week against one of the resident wolf players... he commented after the game that it was one of the more entertaining games he had had in some time, because when he saw me putting down 11 Chimera transports onto my corner of the table, and 3 more Leman Russ tanks he didn't know how he was gonna handle all that armor... neither one of us list tailored, and so we each had to come up with tactics to deal with each others stuff, and for many folks out there, that is a large aspect of what makes the game fun.

What did his army consist of?

It was a 2k point game, and he took Bran Redmaw (?) (he's from one of the Imperial Armor books) a wolf priest and rune priest (am not 100% it was a wolf priest, could have been another form of HQ though), 4 Grey Hunters (2 in rhinos, 1 in Razorback as it was also only 6 men), a Land Speeder with Typhoon missiles and MM, thunderwolf cav, and a unit of long fangs in razorback.


For comparisons sake, I took Creed in CCS with Vox Caster, 2x sniper rifles and a chimera, 2 identical platoons: PCS with chimera/vox caster, 4 squads total with 1 commissar, 2 vox casters, 2 Grenade Launchers, 2 flamers and 4 chimera. 3 squadrons of Leman Russ: 1 with battle cannon, lascannon on the hull, and heavy bolter sponsons, 1 with battle cannon, HB, and HB sponsons, and 1 executioner with HB and plasma cannon sponsons.

in a 1500 point game you can take 8 deathstrikes and a primaris psyker and 2 bare bones vet squads.... could be fun... i really wanna try this now

I'd like to see a few minor rule changes

1) A glance is one under the AV value

2) Penetrating is still one over, but adds +1 to damage result

3) Explosion is Str 5 to people inside and causes -1 to pin test

Doesn't require massive rework, but certainly changes the game

Lobukia wrote:1) A glance is one under the AV value

Or, you know what, why not get rid of glancing hits altogether? If the result is equal or greater to the AV, it pens. That way you'd be able to actually take weapons other than missile launchers or meltaguns. If a heavy bolter regained its ability to hurt a rhino, then you wouldn't need to spam only the heaviest weapons anymore. It would also "fix" things like the brightlance. It wouldn't fix the main problem that redbeard was talking about, but this rule would actually reintegrate vehicles into the game better.

If you combined the "all glances pen" rule with something like getting rid of stunned results (or adding a result that's the opposite of shaken - temporarily can't move, but can still fire), you'd have tanks that would be immune until destroyed, but still destroyable by lighter weapons. Would make for a better system overall, regardless of mech spam.

I have 12 eldar tanks and 9 war walkers and 3 wraithlords and 6 vypers.

you mad?

juraigamer wrote:

SnaleKing wrote:Anyone who complains about vehicles is usually frustrated that their super-1337 4th ed. army can't handle 5 rhinos, 2 predators and a rifleman. They're fine in-game, really. bring more missile launchers, tesla destructors, bolt of tzeentch, whatever S7-8 stuff you can spam.

I respectfully request you to re-read the thread. No one is stating they can't handle the transports, only that they hurt the metagame and tend to create less enjoyable games.

Would you rather play a battle with troops all over the field, and all that elite, heavy support and fast attack all around, or a game where each player deploys around 7 razorbacks and a few other things.

Course demons don't have transports, and they get their bums red having to deal with them.

My nurgle army really doesn't care how many vehicles you have, they are going to slowly kill you anyway once all my daemon princes drop.

You all do realize if you want to make transports less useful its not necessary to change the rules or points of transports at all.

Play with more terrain.

More terrain= more cover for infantry= more saves= more protection

more terrain= less places vehicles can go without difficult/dangerous terrain tests.

More often than not most people play on boards that have significantly less than 25% terrain, you should really be playing on boards that have closer to 50% terrain coverage.