Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hi

I was planning to use Void Shield generators to soak damage while I move my Ad Mech army against my friends 2xRiptide-1xStormsurge Tau army. However, there are few things I am not sure about it rules wise, since it is not the most clear written piece of codex.

1) Can units inside the 12" bubble of VSG shoot outside? The way it is worded makes it sounds like nothing gets in or out

2) You can deploy it like you would any unit at the start of the game I guess?

3) This is the big one. Does VSG cover models or units? Internet seems to be torn about this and I couldn't find a FAQ that clears this

Thanks
Zalek

1. Units inside the shield can shoot out without penalty.

2. You deploy it along with the rest of your army. I believe it has to be 3" away from any board edge or any other piece of terrain.

3. The VSG very clearly protects units not models. The wording refers to units being targetting. You target units, not models. If even one model in a unit is partially within 12" of the VSG, all attacks fired on to the unit are redirected to the void shield. The shield stretches out with your unit currently.

However, the GW draft FAQ will change this once it is finalized. After the faq is official, your entire unit must be 100% within 12" of the VSG to benefit. If one model sticks his toe outside of the 12" range the unit won't benefit from the shield.

It currently covers any unit that sticks his toe inside the shield and lets you conga line stretchy force fields as far out as you want,, but you'd be best off playing it how the new FAQ rules and stick anything you want protected all the way in.

Void Shield Generators are insane when you compare what they do for what they cost. I really dislike them. They need to be revamped. They cost less than an Aegis Defense Line.

Curiosity here, my opponent ran one the other day in a game protecting troops and buildings inside its radius. We were playing the buildings had to have the shield down first before they could be hit directly. But troopers in said buildings and in the radius just were given cover saves. Were we playing that right? Will ignore cover, ignore the shield?

I had no issue taking them out as I had two units of 5 Tyrant terminators but the order of fire would have been different if they were shielded and not a cover save.

Ignore cover has no effect on the Void Shield, you still need to knock down the shield before you can effect a unit under the shield.

SJ

Ahh ok, so we were playing it wrong. No biggie, a volley of 10 kraks from the tyrants tore it down pretty quick anyway even if it wasn't in the right order.

spect_spidey wrote:
Void Shield Generators are insane when you compare what they do for what they cost. I really dislike them. They need to be revamped. They cost less than an Aegis Defense Line.

Recently, I have been playing a VSG quite frequently and would like to share some observations

1) they are not less than an Aegis. VSG & Aegis base cost is exactly the same. if you add 2 more shields, the VSG cost doubles. The advantage, however is that for a few more points, you can add up to 6 Barricades, which function almost that same as an Aegis. The notable differences are Aegis give +2 cover for G2G, Barricades do not. Barricade must be placed wholly within 6" of the VSG, which is pretty limiting. At most, I only take 2 Barricades just in case the shields go down.

2) In several games, my opponent has actually benefitted from my VSG by moving close to me or Deep Striking near my. My army (Eldar) then moves as fast as possible to get away, causing me to now have to down my own shields. Always good for a laugh.

3) Most shooting armies can easily down the shields in 1 turn. If you aren't a shooting army, you do not care about the shields. At best what the Shield does is force an opponent with a balanced army to make mistakes out of frustration.

Overall, I love the VSG, but have found it is only useful in half my games. Maybe it's just my meta, but 100+ pts for something that might do nothing isn't exactly broken.
BTW, here is my "Eldar" VSG:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XrqoLQYb9qE/V1C4Z4dDiDI/AAAAAAAABTU/4LiXlAVdki00USq6H_X_XLE6e1SRDzaKwCLcB/s1600/VSG.jpg

--

 Galef wrote:

spect_spidey wrote:
Void Shield Generators are insane when you compare what they do for what they cost. I really dislike them. They need to be revamped. They cost less than an Aegis Defense Line.

Recently, I have been playing a VSG quite frequently and would like to share some observations

1) they are not less than an Aegis. VSG & Aegis base cost is exactly the same. if you add 2 more shields, the VSG cost doubles. The advantage, however is that for a few more points, you can add up to 6 Barricades, which function almost that same as an Aegis. The notable differences are Aegis give +2 cover for G2G, Barricades do not. Barricade must be placed wholly within 6" of the VSG, which is pretty limiting. At most, I only take 2 Barricades just in case the shields go down.

2) In several games, my opponent has actually benefitted from my VSG by moving close to me or Deep Striking near my. My army (Eldar) then moves as fast as possible to get away, causing me to now have to down my own shields. Always good for a laugh.

3) Most shooting armies can easily down the shields in 1 turn. If you aren't a shooting army, you do not care about the shields. At best what the Shield does is force an opponent with a balanced army to make mistakes out of frustration.

Overall, I love the VSG, but have found it is only useful in half my games. Maybe it's just my meta, but 100+ pts for something that might do nothing isn't exactly broken.
BTW, here is my "Eldar" VSG:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XrqoLQYb9qE/V1C4Z4dDiDI/AAAAAAAABTU/4LiXlAVdki00USq6H_X_XLE6e1SRDzaKwCLcB/s1600/VSG.jpg

--

I disagree. Yes they cost the same initially, 50 pts. A VSG can add two more shields. With the Aegis, there is plenty of things that can ignore cover. However with a VSG, there is not nearly as many things that can glance armor 12 to bring the shield down. You are looking at a minimum of Str 6 weapons to even touch the shield and it protects anything within its bubble. The shields come back on a 5+ on the next turn. Even if you do bring them down, to eliminate them from the game you then have to take out 4 HP of the building to make the shields inoperable. That is a possibility of needing up to 7 penetrating hits at minimum Str 6/7 before you can even begin to target their army. And that is all for what a 100 points? Name one other item in the game that will require 7 damage rolls on at AV12+ that is only 100 points?

I recently played against one for the first time. I play Tau. I took all three shields down in my turn one, but afterwards there wasn't any effective shooting left to target my opponents army. And next turn the shields were right back up. He was running Renegades with a super heavy, 3 Wyverns, 4 Rapier batteries, two blobs of cultists(which were in reserves), a chimera, and 3 Medusa artillery platforms at 1500 points. My traditional Tau army had no chance.

I thought the shield go back on 5+ only.
If this is the case, you just have been unlucky.

spect_spidey wrote:

 Galef wrote:

spect_spidey wrote:
Void Shield Generators are insane when you compare what they do for what they cost. I really dislike them. They need to be revamped. They cost less than an Aegis Defense Line.

Recently, I have been playing a VSG quite frequently and would like to share some observations

1) they are not less than an Aegis. VSG & Aegis base cost is exactly the same. if you add 2 more shields, the VSG cost doubles. The advantage, however is that for a few more points, you can add up to 6 Barricades, which function almost that same as an Aegis. The notable differences are Aegis give +2 cover for G2G, Barricades do not. Barricade must be placed wholly within 6" of the VSG, which is pretty limiting. At most, I only take 2 Barricades just in case the shields go down.

2) In several games, my opponent has actually benefitted from my VSG by moving close to me or Deep Striking near my. My army (Eldar) then moves as fast as possible to get away, causing me to now have to down my own shields. Always good for a laugh.

3) Most shooting armies can easily down the shields in 1 turn. If you aren't a shooting army, you do not care about the shields. At best what the Shield does is force an opponent with a balanced army to make mistakes out of frustration.

Overall, I love the VSG, but have found it is only useful in half my games. Maybe it's just my meta, but 100+ pts for something that might do nothing isn't exactly broken.
BTW, here is my "Eldar" VSG:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XrqoLQYb9qE/V1C4Z4dDiDI/AAAAAAAABTU/4LiXlAVdki00USq6H_X_XLE6e1SRDzaKwCLcB/s1600/VSG.jpg

--

I disagree. Yes they cost the same initially, 50 pts. A VSG can add two more shields. With the Aegis, there is plenty of things that can ignore cover. However with a VSG, there is not nearly as many things that can glance armor 12 to bring the shield down. You are looking at a minimum of Str 6 weapons to even touch the shield and it protects anything within its bubble. The shields come back on a 5+ on the next turn. Even if you do bring them down, to eliminate them from the game you then have to take out 4 HP of the building to make the shields inoperable. That is a possibility of needing up to 7 penetrating hits at minimum Str 6/7 before you can even begin to target their army. And that is all for what a 100 points? Name one other item in the game that will require 7 damage rolls on at AV12+ that is only 100 points?

I recently played against one for the first time. I play Tau. I took all three shields down in my turn one, but afterwards there wasn't any effective shooting left to target my opponents army. And next turn the shields were right back up. He was running Renegades with a super heavy, 3 Wyverns, 4 Rapier batteries, two blobs of cultists(which were in reserves), a chimera, and 3 Medusa artillery platforms at 1500 points. My traditional Tau army had no chance.

You are seriously complaining about the VSG as a Tau player? Tau are the best army at dealing with the VSG becaus ethey get SOO MUCH S7 shots. A single unit of 3 Missile Broadsides alone is a enough to down 3 AV12 shields. If your tau can't handle the VSG the problem is with your army list, not the VSG.

Another observation (that many of you may think is obvious, but others might not), is that if you have a unit with different types of weapons, you can down multiple shields.

I played against Dakka Tyrant spam recently and one Tyrant took out 2 shields (Devourers took 1 shield, E-grubs took another), then a second Tyrant took out the last shield with E-grubs, then was able to shoot his Devourers at a target.
This allowed the other 3 Tyrants to wipe out over half of my army.

In 6th ed a unit made a "shooting attack" with all it's weapons at once, meaning that 1 unit could only down 1 shield, no matter how many glances or pens. In 7th, you resolve each weapon type individually, allowing a unit with different weapon types to down multiple shields

--

I can concede that my army list was not ideal. I do not own any broadsides, ghostkeels, or stormsurges. I was running two hammerheads with railguns, ion accelerator riptide, a drone commander with unit of marker drones, 3 crisis suit teams of two. Each team had dual weapons. One team had missile pods, one had fusion blasters, and another had plasma rifles. And I had two piranha. I had a squad of pathfinders for additional markerlights, some firewarriors, and a heavy sniper drone team.

The tournament ruled that markerlights would have no effect until after the shields were down so there was no way to boost my BS to ensure hits. Deployment was vanguard strike. Due to fusion being shorter range, I opted to deep strike them inside the shield on turn 2, but they mishapped and he placed them in the farthest corner. So in summary, I only had 7 shots a turn that could penetrate the shield and only 3 shots that could damage the building.

Needless to say, having s super heavy dropping apocalyptic pie plates with all the wyvern fire, did not leave much for me to be able to do. But I do feel that had the shield not been a factor in the game, I would have had a better chance at being competitive. And I feel that something like the VSG should be more points than it is.