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Izural wrote:

And being a devotee to the Chaos Gods, I also hate steadfast. No way men-at-arms will hold the line against my WoC that just butchered 20 guys in return for 1 of their own. ¬¬

My point exactly. My solution is their Ld penalty should be halved. This provides a great tangible benefit, lose combat by 6 but outnumber the enemy? Ok take your test at -3, you can still use the general & BSB. This makes it beneficial while not overwhelming.

I don't know how men-at-arms getting slaughtered 20-1 get to use rerollable Ld 10 because your general says "Keep at em boys there's more of you than them"

 Shas'O Dorian wrote:


I don't know how men-at-arms getting slaughtered 20-1 get to use rerollable Ld 10 because your general says "Keep at em boys there's more of you than them"

I can get behind that. What worries me is "Sir, there's a huge monster in our back, as tall as a house! What do we do?" "THROW YOURSELVES AT IT! WE WILL DROWN IT IN OUR CORPSES!" *re-rollable LD 10*

That's just stupid.

I was thinking about this a bit ago. I was at concert some years ago and it was the most people in the smallest area I had ever seen.

We were walking around a convention center and it had been cold out at the time. And there were SO many people surging in one direction that I kept stepping on jackets and backpacks and other crap. I.e., people had dropped them but couldn't stop and pick them up, they were lost forever because the crowd was pushing them.

I'm not a small guy but at one point I was lifted off my feet by the crowd briefly.

If I had suddenly become terrified and tried to turn around and run, there is zero chance it would happen. The 30 people in front of me could be on fire and I would have no way of escaping. We could all be surging into a meat grinder and I couldn't have stopped. The only way we could have "broken our steadfast" is if all of us could see the danger at once and all of us turn around in a coordinated fashion and flee.

Now, we weren't wearing light armor and carrying weapons and pumped with adrenaline of life-or-death. A surging mob is really hard to stop. The people in back couldn't even see some dudes wearing scary armor or even know the 20 guys in front were butchered.

 DukeRustfield wrote:
The only way we could have "broken our steadfast" is if all of us could see the danger at once and all of us turn around in a coordinated fashion and flee.

Now, we weren't wearing light armor and carrying weapons and pumped with adrenaline of life-or-death. A surging mob is really hard to stop. The people in back couldn't even see some dudes wearing scary armor or even know the 20 guys in front were butchered.

This is definitely what steadfast is meant to simulate, and I think it does a good job. For units fighting front-to-front I really don't think there is anything at all wrong with steadfast, and making it easier to break steadfast just makes infantry even more worthless than it already is.

However, I do think there should be more ways to punch through steadfast than "grind them down to nothingness." A -1 modifier for fighting in the flank and a -2 for fighting in the rear would be nice. You're only dropping LD10 rerollable down to LD7, but a 40% chance of breaking them when you've set up a flank and rear charge is a hell of a lot better than a 10% chance, and a lot more tactically rewarding in my mind.

I think it would be great to have options vs. steadfast. But it would have to be careful not to make fast/elite the go-to again and big hordes big piles of poop.

I would like to see some way to break Inspiring Presence and BSB reroll as well. But it would have to be something tactical.

Flanks and rear are cool and all, but there are simply some armies that are slow. And all of a sudden that would become a much much harsher penalty. (And dwarf gunlines would become the only path they use.)

I'm thinking something like--and this is just spitballing--if you attack with 2+ full ranks and they give up their attacks, you can negate IP or BSB. So you could have one unit trying to disrupt while another grinds. Or Terror negates IP or BSB.

I disagree. Any viable counter should always be a tactical counter. Being able to circumvent IP / BSB by merely amassing models is a very low-tier technique and you would not reward a player's actual skill.

The only way to bypass Steadfast should be to technically outmaneuver the enemy unit, i.e. attacking in flank or rear. And while some armies definitely have less mobile units than others, every army has some way to counter big units, even aside from magic, e.g. fast or strong cavalry, additional damage in melee (impact hits, etc.) or superior war machines.

Not every army has remotely the same ability to outmaneuver. If your army has lots of low cost, viable units of M10, you're going to win the movement war against armies that are capped at 6. Likewise, you shouldn't HAVE to take certain units or be screwed. It makes for boring list building. Dwarfs would be required to take their only 2 units faster than 3. Lizardmen would be required to take their only 2 units faster than 6.

Maneuvering is cool, but it can't be made uber because not every army can come close to doing it as effectively as each other. Just like Stomp can't be suddenly made KB because not everyone has it. It's one reason why people complain about cannons, because half the armies have them, they become auto-include, and they're crazy good.

What I'm gleaning from this is that Fantasy might actually be a pretty solid game with minimal balance issues and few stupid rules.
Is this correct?

 Small, Far Away wrote:
What I'm gleaning from this is that Fantasy might actually be a pretty solid game with minimal balance issues and few stupid rules.
Is this correct?

pretty much.

It is right now, well, when compared to Warhammer 40k that is.

One might even say its SO balanced, that its almost IMBA.

So, just a quick interjection, steadfast brings WHFB back in line with most other games with a similar theme.

It's a rule in MANY games that there is a fundamental rock-paper-scissors of:

Artillery beats infantry
Infantry beats cavalry
Cavalry beats artillery

It's a stable platform. All those people who want cavalry to be able to beat both cannons AND huge blocks of infantry just want cavalry to be overpowered. Cavalry do, and always should lose to big, well-formed blocks of foot soldiers.

As for cannons, I play 40k, and the only thing more annoying than the chance that your monstrous creature could possibly be killed in one blow is monstrous creatures being practically unkillable.

WHFB does not need the equivalent of a triptide list.

Furthermore, monstrous creatures do need to have some weakness. Which would you rather, a giant creature going down hard to a few horses with sticks, or to a pile of skaven slaves?

Likewise, monsters can't be good against everything always, just like cavalry.

As best I can tell, the only thing properly wrong with WHFB (structurally) is that you can, on purpose, take a big pile of wizards to act as ablative wounds so that you can burn through uber-spells.

Artillery beats infantry, cavalry and monsters.

That's the problem.

I don't really understand all the hate that comes from the cannons. Yeah, maybe they could lose strength after a certain amount of inches distanced, but even then what is the problem haha? Use some monstrous infantry in front of the thing you want to protect from cannons and the cannon becomes pretty useless against that thing real quick. Every time that cannon fires it has a 1/6 chance of just not working, it's 120 points now which is an entire 20 man regiment of some cheap core.

My problem from cannons comes from them making ridden monster bad.

I would love to have my vampire lord on a zombie dragon at the center of my army. Unit ONE cannonball knocks him dead, let alone lists with 2+.

Personally I think they should do D3 Vs large target. Still powerful, but a cannon blasting a chariot is bound to do more dmg than a going through a giant undead dragon. I'd also like to return to the cannon only hitting one (monster or rider). Currently I cannot bring my lord on dragon model because it is at far too much risk of being sniped turn 1 and that cripples my VC list.

There's a lot of really cool ridden monsters that you don't see much because your big expensive hero/lord on this big expensive monster is too easily countered turn 1 by these 2 small inexpensive cannons.

 DukeRustfield wrote:
The age of a game doesn't matter much.

It does. We're not playing WHFB v8, but v4.5.3b, this game is 20+ years old, and it shows.

Of course, WHFB is miles ahead of 40k, but that's not because WHFB is the greatest game ever made. That's just because 40k is a mess.

 Rommel44 wrote:
Steadfast needs to be tweaked to help cavalry, also if you are hit in the flank with a large enough unit, you should lose steadfast. Its no broken but it needs a few changes.

WAB does have steadfast too, and it works great.

What are the key differences? Well, for starters, one ruleset was designed by Rick Priestly, one by Matt Ward.
- My unit need at least twice as minis as yours if I want my unit to be steadfast.
- If my unit combats from two sides against units that have at least one complete rank, it's not steadfast.
- If I lose the combat but pass the break test with the steadfast rule, my unit falls back 1D6ps (2D6 for cavalry). You can follow up, but don't have to.
- If my unit can't fall back because of a friendly unit or piece of scenery, it panics. If it's an enemy unit, my unit is destroyed.

In other words, WAB's Steadfast is more difficult to get, can be easily cancelled if I'm not careful and it doesn't transform my unit in an immovable anchor.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Artillery beats infantry, cavalry and monsters.

How do cannons beat cavalry?

They don't have many turns to shoot at them, and cavalry are usually only one rank deep. A cannon will knock down a single horse, maybe two before the tiny pile of crew gets butchered. Even small blast weapons are less effective, thanks to larger cavalry bases, and, once again, the single rank nature of most of them.

 Ailaros wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
Artillery beats infantry, cavalry and monsters.

How do cannons beat cavalry?

They don't have many turns to shoot at them, and cavalry are usually only one rank deep. A cannon will knock down a single horse, maybe two before the tiny pile of crew gets butchered. Even small blast weapons are less effective, thanks to larger cavalry bases, and, once again, the single rank nature of most of them.

Reliable and wide area denial, great at stopping them from flanking. Heavy Cavalry can hardly flank against an enemy with good cannon positions. Keep in mind that hitting from the side means going through the flank, thus getting 3+ hits.

Light Cavalry can be good against cannons due to Scout, but has to be aware of enemy units defending the artillery as they cannot do anything against units.

If better positioning by the cannons is the problem, then there is a better positioning by the horses solution. Assuming that the cannon player is clever and the cavalry player is just charging forward mindlessly won't produce typical results.

And in any case, you don't need much more than a single surviving horse to destroy a gun crew.

 Ailaros wrote:
If better positioning by the cannons is the problem, then there is a better positioning by the horses solution. Assuming that the cannon player is clever and the cavalry player is just charging forward mindlessly won't produce typical results.

And in any case, you don't need much more than a single surviving horse to destroy a gun crew.

The problem is that the cannon only needs about one or two turns to destroy its primary targets. By the time the cavalry gets into position on the cannon and maneuvers around the enemy chaff the cannon has already done what it needs to do.

Litcheur wrote:

 DukeRustfield wrote:
The age of a game doesn't matter much.

It does. We're not playing WHFB v8, but v4.5.3b, this game is 20+ years old, and it shows.

Chess is pretty old. Go is pretty old. The age doesn't matter. Stuff doesn't always get better with age (40K) or be perfect because it's new (imagine not having FAQs).

Assuming you keep improving, then yes, time is good. But a game company is making changes because it makes money by making changes and getting people to buy the new books. I have no idea if V3 wasn't absolutely perfect because I didn't follow it then.

I know other games that went out of print and the community took over. It basically froze in time except for community-agreed FAQs. And it became about as perfect as you could make it. Bloodbowl comes to mind on that. But there's a lot of examples.