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Being a xenos player in 40k for the last decade is pretty much like being someone's prison bitch for the last decade. You can complain and fight, but you may as well just bend over and accept it if you want to minimize the suffering time. Thats pretty much the role GW wants the xenos players to play.

Any time a xenos book accidentally does something good, it generally gets yanked and handed to one of the SM books instead. Necrons will get the same treatment in their next book, just like Eldar, Nids, Sisters of Battle (which may as well be a xenos book, since it has women in it) before them did.

This is because the staff love them some giant greek mangod supersoldiers and are not interested in putting enough time into descent adversaries. This is doubly true of forge world, though their ork and anime tau fettish has seen some cool xenos stuff come out there.

So while the FW situation certainly aggravates it, the underlying issue would exist with or without FW in the mix. In other words, the game cannot be balanced either way, so you may as well be inclusive and slap some comp scoring in there if you want some sort of incentive to not bring a dozen Sabres/Helios Platforms to the table. Or maybe you don't care if everyone with the disposable income does that, and you just live with it.

Bottom line, unless you were playing Eldar over a decade ago, you knew you were strapping on the bal gag and leather body suit the moment you started collecting that army, so live with it. FW has nothing to do with that situation.

Oh good, this again

I'm cool with either allowing or disallowing. Just be honest. It's certainly not for balance. I'm one of those people who finds 40k to actually be really balanced right now. But that's probably just me.

My only issue with Forgeworld is how happily they hand out interceptor. If most of their AA units just had Skyfire I'd be down for forgeworld all the time. Then it's a choice for people. But since everything has interceptor that also has skyfire for FW I'd prefer it not be open season just because I like flyers, I don't wanna return to Edition 5.5 with updated rules but no one bringing flyers.

@Phazael

A lot of people won with the Orks from 3rd-5th edition. Granted the 3rd edition goodness was due to the Chapter Approved Clans. They are even still pretty viable now though we're not really into 6th's first tournament season yet so there is no way to know.

Nids were good in 4th and 5th (honestly don't remember them much in 3rd). Eldar were friggin king in 3rd and 4th and could still compete in the greater part of 5th. And now with allies can compete again. Tau and Necron dominated for significant periods and Necrons are back to dominating again.

Xenos are actually generally pretty solid codexes and have actually been dominant books over 3rd-5th edition. Far more so than marines who until SW's and GK's didn't really compete on the same level. And even then some xeno lists are hard counters to those armies.

Shh Hulk, don't ruin the anti-marine moment with your silly facts and well thought-out comments!

Oh, and Phazael: try being a Black Templars or a Dark Angels player the last decade. It's not as rosy as you seem to think it is.

 Hulksmash wrote:
Oh good, this again

I'm cool with either allowing or disallowing. Just be honest. It's certainly not for balance. I'm one of those people who finds 40k to actually be really balanced right now. But that's probably just me.

My only issue with Forgeworld is how happily they hand out interceptor. If most of their AA units just had Skyfire I'd be down for forgeworld all the time. Then it's a choice for people. But since everything has interceptor that also has skyfire for FW I'd prefer it not be open season just because I like flyers, I don't wanna return to Edition 5.5 with updated rules but no one bringing flyers.

Interceptor on something other than a single quad gun for most armies is hardly going to bring us back to "5.5" (there's far too many other changes for that to be possible), and many of such weapons still aren't spectacularly effective against the most common and hardy flyers in the game. Given the power of Vendettas, Scythes, Heldrakes and Stormravens currently, even with gobs of interceptor weapons, you're not going to see them go away.

Besides, you still have a chance to destroy said Interceptor weapons before your flyers ever come on the board, most aren't particularly hardy.

I feel much of this "worry" over interceptor is a bit overkill. Sabre Batteries can't hide in blobs and are exceedingly easy to panic off the board (they're Ld7 and if they fallback just once the guns go bye-bye). An ork Flakk Trakk costs more than a Hydra, is Open Topped, can't be taken in Squadrons and takes up a Heavy Support slot all by itself while the squadronable Flakk Trukks are AV10 Open Topped and cost as much as a Hydra. Hyperios Battery's only get 1 missile shot each at only BS3 and are only T6 instead of T7 like most Artillery units, while the Land Raider variant is a nearly 300pt monster with a cut down transport capacity and the Whirlwind variant costs half as much again as the basic version and all it does is get one TL Interceptor Krak missile each turn for the price of a Dakkapred. An AA kitted Mortis Contemptor is going to cost as much as a Land Raider and must stay stationary to gain Interceptor. A 180pt Eldar Firestorm with an S6 Interceptor weapon isn't exactly the scariest thing out there. The Hydra platforms aren't even artillery units, they're still AV10 2HP immobile vehicles.


If any of these are making it such that Flyers aren't able to be played properly, something is wrong, and to be perfectly fair, in some ways flyers could use with a hard-counter because in far too many games they never face a legitimate threat.

It certainly would have helped if GW hadn't decoupled AA ability from firing at ground targets, having instead inexplicably bundled it with the completely unrelated ability to fire at an enemy as they move on from reserve.

And it's not like FW doesn't add a ton of new flyers, especially for factions that otherwise don't have them.

140pts for 8 T6 wounds, with interceptor and 4 Twin-Linked St8 AP3 and can't be panic'd in a slot most space marine armies don't use seems solid. Especially when those weapons can drop vehicles in the opening turns because they can fire at ground targets at full bs (granted BS3).

The guard ones are incredibly hard to move as they go-to-ground behind an aegis and get back up thanks to orders. Your oversimplifying.

Some of the interceptor choices aren't great. But the fact that it's been placed on what would be excellently costed anti-air to begin with makes certain units no brainers. And since those certain units belong to armies that can be allied into almost any army in the game (outside of Nids) it means that those units are going to see massive population. Ask people how often they saw a Stormraven in 5th. Or if Night Scythes or Doom Scythes were used back then. That's where you're headed back to with the current forgeworld being fully allowed.

Flyers are costed to be hard to hit. Execellent AA that can also impact the field at large for a reasonable price break that pricing structure on the flyers and cause them to not be worthy of inclusion in a TAC list.

I demolish flyer heavy lists now, without decent AA. I shudder to think what would happen to flyer armies with units like the ones mentioned above being prolific.

That's my single issue with Forgeworld. Almost everything else about FW is fun and would add an interesting element to the game.

 Hulksmash wrote:
140pts for 8 T6 wounds, with interceptor and 4 Twin-Linked St8 AP3 and can't be panic'd in a slot most space marine armies don't use seems solid.

They're probably the one unit that one could legitimately have an issue with since they can't be forced to run, but aren't particularly worse in terms of overall ability to impact the game than many codex based units. That said, being immobile and weaker artillery leaves a good deal of room to mitigate these guys.

The guard ones are incredibly hard to move as they go-to-ground behind an aegis and get back up thanks to orders. Your oversimplifying.

Only Sabre's can get orders, the Hydra platforms cannot get orders nor can they go to ground, and you're relying on Ld7 orders to get back up after going to ground, which also requires having a Company Command squad nearby and purchasing an Aegis line to go to ground behind.

Nice when it goes off? Of course. But at that point you're talking about 100pts minimum (50pts for command squad without upgrades, 50pts for aegis line) on top of the Sabre's cost, and relying on a Leadership value that only passes 58% of the time with the Officer being within 12", and now you're talking 3 different FoC slots and two units coordinating with a terrain feature on what is a slightly better than 50/50 chance to function as you describe.

Some of the interceptor choices aren't great. But the fact that it's been placed on what would be excellently costed anti-air to begin with makes certain units no brainers. And since those certain units belong to armies that can be allied into almost any army in the game (outside of Nids) it means that those units are going to see massive population.

Some perhaps, but usually because existing equivalents having glaring flaws (e.g. IG heavy weapons teams being often hilariously expensive and fragile for what they do and hugely susceptible to S6+ weaponry so Sabre's make a lot more sense simply because the basic HWS is so bad). Allies could bring about a greater spread of such units, but as allies they also can't be as spammed as they can in the core army and access/usability of allies is highly variable, and it also makes more flyers available as well.

Ask people how often they saw a Stormraven in 5th. Or if Night Scythes or Doom Scythes were used back then. That's where you're headed back to with the current forgeworld being fully allowed.

Once the model came out for the Stormraven, I think I only had a single game against BA's that didn't feature at least one, they were everywhere. Considering the Scythe's didn't get a model until just a couple weeks before 6th, that might also have something to do with not seeing tons of them under 5th. I saw proxies in a good number of games however, especially for DS'ing Doom Scythes to engage IG tank gunlines. Now under 6th I don't think I've played or watched a game involving Necrons without any Scythes, and that speaks to me of an imbalance. I really don't think I have the same experience here, because I saw these units frequently under 5th, they just weren't as "auto-take" as they are now.

Flyers are costed to be hard to hit. Execellent AA that can also impact the field at large for a reasonable price break that pricing structure on the flyers and cause them to not be worthy of inclusion in a TAC list.

When it comes to flyer costing, at the current time, this simply isn't true for the vast majority of flyers. Most were costed to be Skimmers, not Flyers, and were simply declared to be Flyers with the advent of 6th and no changes to their cost or stats. As for AA units, I disagree, largely because most flyers were costed as skimmers and many intentionally over-armored to be survivable as skimmers (the Valkyrie even has this built into its IG codex fluff).

I demolish flyer heavy lists now, without decent AA. I shudder to think what would happen to flyer armies with units like the ones mentioned above being prolific.

Well, I don't see most people slaying flyer heavy lists now with great ease, I do however see lots of people show up to play on League nights and sit there without any reasonable answer to three Heldrakes rolling around the board.