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 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Based on these rules, you attach units at the start of the game, and there they stay until the unit they're attached to ceases to be. The situation you've described isn't even likely to occur, and certainly isn't worth spending any effort considering. Moreover, "I can think of a situation where an donkey-cave would cheat" isn't a compelling reason not to do something, or even a valid reason to dismiss an idea.

Then what is the benefit of your suggestion? It seems like the auras would either be strong enough that you'd still want to aura stack them or too weak to where you would always attach them to a unit. What do we get for adding an extra layer of complexity while risking aura stacking making a comeback?

"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

\

Which article is that in? Not doubting, just seeking clarification.

Another potential upside to not relying on buff bubbles is a squad with a Lt can now scuttle off up a flank, away from the main body, and not necessarily miss out on buffs.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Which article is that in? Not doubting, just seeking clarification.

It's not. I made it up.

I did so to illustrate that Canadian 5th's objections come in two forms:

"That wouldn't work because of [minor fringe case that might as well be a red herring]."
"I found a single tiny potential flaw, so the whole idea is obviously unworkable and we shouldn't even discuss beginning to find a solution!"

When no attempt is made to engage with speculation, theories, and simply looking for simple rules-based solutions, then there's no reason to engage back.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

Isn’t this limiting choices and just as arbitrary as only letting characters join specific units?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

So are you going to tell me how you intend to make the attached an unattached modes equally useful so this illusion of choice is actually useful or whine because I think your suggestion is clunky and bad?

Aash wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

Isn’t this limiting choices and just as arbitrary as only letting characters join specific units?

Yeah. The reality is almost any rule is imposing some kind of limitation. Different people just disagree on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should be drawn.

I think limiting character buffs by limiting which units they can join seems fine. It allows for more specific tailoring of buffs to certain units and makes balancing the game easier, as does limiting the number of characters who can join a unit.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"That wouldn't work because of [minor fringe case that might as well be a red herring]."
"I found a single tiny potential flaw, so the whole idea is obviously unworkable and we shouldn't even discuss beginning to find a solution!"

When no attempt is made to engage with speculation, theories, and simply looking for simple rules-based solutions, then there's no reason to engage back.

Don't you know that GW game design is absolute peak rules writing and it is impossible to write better rules or design a better game with so many units to take care of to avoid unwanted interaction
no one can make better rules without investing thousands of hours /s

or in other words, it would decrease corporate profit if more than the absolute minimum is spend on writing those rules and you should be glad that they even cared of writing new stuff and not just copy&paste the old book and replace the headlines (not that this already happened from 3rd to 7th)

Aash wrote:
Isn’t this limiting choices and just as arbitrary as only letting characters join specific units?

It means there's no benefit to "bonus stacking", as it can't be done, which is - in my mind - better than placing arbitrary hard limits on who can join who.

Another alternative - as opposed to just pretending there are no solutions and asking meaningless red herring questions like the guy beneath your post - is something that was suggested elsewhere here (sorry I forgot who) in that characters only provide a benefit to the types of units they can join.

So, for instance, a Captain in Terminator Armour's bonus only applies to units with the 'Terminator' keyword, so joining him to a unit of Intercessors or Sternguard really has no advantage. That's less egregious than "He can join this unit, but not this unit because... we say so!". There's actually an in-game mechanical reason then beyond an arbitrary limitation.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
So are you going to tell me how you intend to make the attached an unattached modes equally useful...

Yay! A False dilemma! What fun!

But if I must answer that which need not even be asked in the first place, the answer is fething obvious: You can either get a small bonus for lots of units at once, or a larger bonus for a single unit. That's the built-in choice. There's nothing artificial about it. Really simple stuff.

Surely you could have thought of that yourself?

this is GW looking at other games and think keywords are cool we want that too
but not knowing what they should use them for
same with USRs

hence we have keywords and USRs but instead of using the potential we get additional special rules on an additional unit card to write down what keywords and USRs should do in the first place

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

oh you got the rules and know thats a possibility? Or even how it works at all?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Aash wrote:
Isn’t this limiting choices and just as arbitrary as only letting characters join specific units?

It means there's no benefit to "bonus stacking", as it can't be done, which is - in my mind - better than placing arbitrary hard limits on who can join who.

Another alternative - as opposed to just pretending there are no solutions and asking meaningless red herring questions like the guy beneath your post - is something that was suggested elsewhere here (sorry I forgot who) in that characters only provide a benefit to the types of units they can join.

So, for instance, a Captain in Terminator Armour's bonus only applies to units with the 'Terminator' keyword, so joining him to a unit of Intercessors or Sternguard really has no advantage. That's less egregious than "He can join this unit, but not this unit because... we say so!". There's actually an in-game mechanical reason then beyond an arbitrary limitation.

But surely that's just as much of a limitation? I mean, why would the Captain's orders/commands/advice be suddenly ignored by his first company brethren because they don't wear the same armour?

They're both arbitrary abstractions and limitations. You're just drawing them in a different place - which is exactly what Aash was saying.

No-one's saying there are no solutions, but don't pretend that your "solution" isn't just as arbitrary.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Here's a little throwaway item from today's article that I haven't seen discussed.

The old Look Out, Sir! rule has also been devolved into this new system. Your Leader is kept safe by their Bodyguards, and can usually* be targeted only when everyone else in the squad has breathed their last.

I'm suspecting they have dealt with the issue of characters having different Toughness values than their unit and the issue of them using better Saves to soak wounds by simply having all damage go into the unit without any allocation or saves by the Leader(s). As for the *, I think that has to do with the Precision USR which in some way allows you to allocate select hits into any model of a unit, including Characters.

Thoughts?

A lot of the issues with character wound allocation go away if the player taking damage never gets to choose; either the non-character models always take the damage, or the attacker has Precision and gets to pick. At first blush I don't see how this could be abused by the defender.

I don't think it will get abused, but it presents a problem with the current rules. With Precision you can have a wounded character and a wounded unit member. I imagine the controlling player can assign wounds to a wounded model of their choice, but then are they forced to pick the character after the other model dies? Probably not. So that wording has to change a bit.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

I don't think it will get abused, but it presents a problem with the current rules. With Precision you can have a wounded character and a wounded unit member. I imagine the controlling player can assign wounds to a wounded model of their choice, but then are they forced to pick the character after the other model dies? Probably not. So that wording has to change a bit.

my guess would be that characters are ignored for the purposes of wound allocation by the defender

that way you can't just do one damage to the character then unload in the unit and watch the defender be forced to kill the character.

Okey, but what will happen if your unit is made out of characters vide warlocks+2farseers, or a unit of paladins with an ancient, apothecary, Grandmaster and brother captin attached. If someone unloads Lion number of attacks in to the unit, it may run out of regular "troopers" very fast, often ending up with a ton of excessive wounds, and with the "unit" no longer being a thing if there are no more regular models in it, I struggle to imagine how the wound jumping would have to work.

I think we're safely in the - they haven't given a whole enough picture, people are making assumptions based on past behaviours and/or contemporary information which won't exist or come to pass in both cases - zone, hence people are having concerns, making bold statements and getting frustrated in all directions, myself included.

Hopefully they fill in more gaps soon. Too easy to run with an incomplete picture and make wrong conclusions.

Karol wrote:
Okey, but what will happen if your unit is made out of characters vide warlocks+2farseers, or a unit of paladins with an ancient, apothecary, Grandmaster and brother captin attached. If someone unloads Lion number of attacks in to the unit, it may run out of regular "troopers" very fast, often ending up with a ton of excessive wounds, and with the "unit" no longer being a thing if there are no more regular models in it, I struggle to imagine how the wound jumping would have to work.

We have nowhere near enough info to answer this. However, it would appear from the article yesterday that the max number of characters you can add to a unit is 2 - one Captain-type character (probably Overlords, Archons, Grandmasters, etc) and one mini character (Lts, Warlocks, etc). We can probably further conclude that attacks go on the unit and use the unit's T and Save, so maybe having characters in a unit will, on occasion, mean they are easier to hurt if you manage sufficient overkill on their unit. That doesn't seem like a terrible trade-off for being almost immune to damage the rest of the time. They also seem to be trying to tone down offensive output, so maybe such extreme overkill won't be as common in 10th.

Karol wrote:
Okey, but what will happen if your unit is made out of characters vide warlocks+2farseers, or a unit of paladins with an ancient, apothecary, Grandmaster and brother captin attached. If someone unloads Lion number of attacks in to the unit, it may run out of regular "troopers" very fast, often ending up with a ton of excessive wounds, and with the "unit" no longer being a thing if there are no more regular models in it, I struggle to imagine how the wound jumping would have to work.

They said most units will only be able to have a single character join them. And its probably gonna use the Toughness of the unit for the to-wound roll. And if you wipe the unit and only the character is left, you just take saves on them normally.....

Oh and most importantly, we havnt seen the rules, just wait.

Dudeface wrote:
I think we're safely in the - they haven't given a whole enough picture, people are making assumptions based on past behaviours and/or contemporary information which won't exist or come to pass in both cases - zone, hence people are having concerns, making bold statements and getting frustrated in all directions, myself included.

Hopefully they fill in more gaps soon. Too easy to run with an incomplete picture and make wrong conclusions.

Agree.
While getting to read snippets of stuff to come is mildly interesting, it's of no real use or concern for me yet.
Nor is theorizing how this one bit might/might not work & dreaming up variants (that gw will almost certainly not implement) for it.

As I've said before, I play games in the here & now.
So I'll worry about what's to come when it arrives in about 2.5 months.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Karol wrote:
Okey, but what will happen if your unit is made out of characters vide warlocks+2farseers, or a unit of paladins with an ancient, apothecary, Grandmaster and brother captin attached. If someone unloads Lion number of attacks in to the unit, it may run out of regular "troopers" very fast, often ending up with a ton of excessive wounds, and with the "unit" no longer being a thing if there are no more regular models in it, I struggle to imagine how the wound jumping would have to work.

They said most units will only be able to have a single character join them. And its probably gonna use the Toughness of the unit for the to-wound roll. And if you wipe the unit and only the character is left, you just take saves on them normally.....

Oh and most importantly, we havnt seen the rules, just wait.

That is true. Still GW is made on exeptions, and even with marines we know they can attach a Lt and a Cpt/CM to a single unit. The rules have to, or at least should represent what happens, if a Calgar and an Lt joined by a single Blade guard get hit by a 20 shot weapon. Does it spread, or does the blade guard get hit REALLY hard and then the Lt and Calgar split. All rules interaction can be "broken" and all that can impact the game will impact the unit composition.
At worse we are going to have to roll each hit/wound/save separate for such units.

Karol wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Karol wrote:
Okey, but what will happen if your unit is made out of characters vide warlocks+2farseers, or a unit of paladins with an ancient, apothecary, Grandmaster and brother captin attached. If someone unloads Lion number of attacks in to the unit, it may run out of regular "troopers" very fast, often ending up with a ton of excessive wounds, and with the "unit" no longer being a thing if there are no more regular models in it, I struggle to imagine how the wound jumping would have to work.

They said most units will only be able to have a single character join them. And its probably gonna use the Toughness of the unit for the to-wound roll. And if you wipe the unit and only the character is left, you just take saves on them normally.....

Oh and most importantly, we havnt seen the rules, just wait.

That is true. Still GW is made on exeptions, and even with marines we know they can attach a Lt and a Cpt/CM to a single unit. The rules have to, or at least should represent what happens, if a Calgar and an Lt joined by a single Blade guard get hit by a 20 shot weapon. Does it spread, or does the blade guard get hit REALLY hard and then the Lt and Calgar split. All rules interaction can be "broken" and all that can impact the game will impact the unit composition.
At worse we are going to have to roll each hit/wound/save separate for such units.

The same thing already happens when a Tau Commander with some Drones gets hit by a Knight's Avenger Gatling Cannon. It's not hard to resolve.

Yeah, attacks are allocated to the unit as a whole. They aren't allocated to a model until you have to take a save. I'm not sure what the problem would be.

ERJAK wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

Currently it's most likely that an inquisitor in termie armor would be a lone wolf. Nothing in the reveal suggests a unit with a deepstrike capable setup (terminator armor/Jumppack) would be able to join a non-matching squad.

I can't wait for acolytes to not be able to bodyguard my inquisitor after doing so for 6 editions

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

Currently it's most likely that an inquisitor in termie armor would be a lone wolf. Nothing in the reveal suggests a unit with a deepstrike capable setup (terminator armor/Jumppack) would be able to join a non-matching squad.

I can't wait for acolytes to not be able to bodyguard my inquisitor after doing so for 6 editions

I REALLY hope they flesh out Agents of the Imperium as a standalone faction honestly, the boarding action box kinda gives me hope.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

Currently it's most likely that an inquisitor in termie armor would be a lone wolf. Nothing in the reveal suggests a unit with a deepstrike capable setup (terminator armor/Jumppack) would be able to join a non-matching squad.

I can't wait for acolytes to not be able to bodyguard my inquisitor after doing so for 6 editions

I feel like you could resolve these issues with:
-Allow the character to join the unit, even if they have different defensive profiles or deployment methods
-Don't allow the unit to deploy via alternative means unless the character also has the same ability
-Hits are resolved solely against the unit until the entire unit is gone

There's still the edge case of how you fast-roll attacks that have the potential to kill the whole unit and then also hurt the character- probably just roll in batches the size of the unit, which could get tedious if you're down to one dude plus the character, but that seems like it's going to be a relevant concern in any implementation.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

Currently it's most likely that an inquisitor in termie armor would be a lone wolf. Nothing in the reveal suggests a unit with a deepstrike capable setup (terminator armor/Jumppack) would be able to join a non-matching squad.

I can't wait for acolytes to not be able to bodyguard my inquisitor after doing so for 6 editions

I REALLY hope they flesh out Agents of the Imperium as a standalone faction honestly, the boarding action box kinda gives me hope.

The boarding box admittedly gives me the opposite of hope, but then again I'm a fan of the Inquisition, not Agents. It's like if they bolted on a bunch of extra stuff to ecclesiarchy in sisters then kept adding stuff until the Sisters themselves became a footnote in their own faction. The Inqusition units (Named Chars, inqusitor, acolytes, jokero, Daemonhost, Inquisition Land Raider Promethius) haven't had their actual stats changed since 8th. Not to mention, Agents doesn't feel like a cohesive force, rule sor lore wise. The Inqusition Doesn't regularly fight alongside Navy Breachers. An Assassin doesn't regularly fight with a Rogue Trader and her Crew. The Old Daemonhunters/Witchhunters books worked because those forces *did* fight together. The Inqusition, their Specialists, their Stormtroopers, and their respective chamber militants do fight together regularly. These days Agents can't even take Death Cult assassins, which they had in the old codex. They can't even take the crusaders that are listed in their sections on their page on the Fething Website, even though they could in Witchhunters.

Inquisition and Angents will need a serious rework to remotely function either as standalone or as the support faction they seem to want it to be.

 catbarf wrote:
There's still the edge case of how you fast-roll attacks that have the potential to kill the whole unit and then also hurt the character- probably just roll in batches the size of the unit, which could get tedious if you're down to one dude plus the character, but that seems like it's going to be a relevant concern in any implementation.

They could just treat it the same way transports currently work, it takes two activations to kill a transport plus its cargo and the first activation can only kill the transport and often results in overkill/wasted damage. Currently if you fire 1,000 bullets at a Rhino and deal 500 wounds or fire 20 bullets to deal exactly 10 wounds, the end result is the same.

Aash wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"A unit may only benefit from one aura or attached character at any given time."

RuLeS aRe HaRd!

Isn’t this limiting choices and just as arbitrary as only letting characters join specific units?

Limiting choice is a good thing when a lot of the choosers are stupid.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I can't wait to add an Inquisitor in Terminator Armor to my all plasma Acolyte squad so their armor save can be a 2+ for the first six wounds for six plasma guns (and a psycannon, naturally).

Currently it's most likely that an inquisitor in termie armor would be a lone wolf. Nothing in the reveal suggests a unit with a deepstrike capable setup (terminator armor/Jumppack) would be able to join a non-matching squad.

I can't wait for acolytes to not be able to bodyguard my inquisitor after doing so for 6 editions

Or maybe he get that rule they talked about in the article where they screen him. Or maybe they'll just get rid of the inquisitor with terminator armor altogether. Or maybe he'll only be 1 wound now. Or maybe his terminator armor will be 4+ save. Or maybe they'll send out GW employees to eat all the termieInq models before the new edition comes out.

It's all irrelevant until the full rules drop. Right now all you're doing is making something up and then choosing to be mad about it.

EightFoldPath wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
There's still the edge case of how you fast-roll attacks that have the potential to kill the whole unit and then also hurt the character- probably just roll in batches the size of the unit, which could get tedious if you're down to one dude plus the character, but that seems like it's going to be a relevant concern in any implementation.

They could just treat it the same way transports currently work, it takes two activations to kill a transport plus its cargo and the first activation can only kill the transport and often results in overkill/wasted damage. Currently if you fire 1,000 bullets at a Rhino and deal 500 wounds or fire 20 bullets to deal exactly 10 wounds, the end result is the same.

And it isn't rocket science anyway. You could just arbitrarily decide on simple mechanics other than discarding the wounds like, applying all unsaved wounds to the remaining character and allowing that character to save against those wounds.

Does it mean the wound ends up getting saved twice? Yes.

Is it better than the big pile of wounds miraculously missing the Primaris Lieutenant and piling into the corpse of the single Bladeguard Veteran left in the unit when the attack happened? Yes.

Are there other ways GW could do it? Yes.

I say we wait to see the all the rules on attack resolution and characters in units before we panic.

Personally, I'm trying to figure out what Precise means as a weapon rule as a thought exercise. My current theory is: A weapon with this rule may target Lone Operators regardless of the distance to the target and may have its hits allocated to Wound a Character leading a unit. This makes sense in relation to Tyranid Hyper-Adaptions: Hive Predators use of Precision against Character units (assuming units led by a character gain their keywords much as one model in a unit having a keyword give that unit the keyword in 8th/9th).

Tyranids gain Precise only after rolling to hit, so it cannot be something that influences targeting.

IMO normally all hits are resolved against the unit, you can't hit the character and the owner cannot have the character take the hit.
The character is literally inside a transpor, for targeting purposes. You can only hit the transport.

With Precise, the attacker can allocate the hits to the character instead of the unit.