Soup is not the problem - LVO 2019

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**Wayniac**

To be fair, in the Top 8 while the Castellan is certainly a problem, the lists themselves weren't that bad except for the (as of last night) #1 Ynnari list which was pure cupcakes with 6 flyers and 18 scatbikes.

There were two Guard armies that were actually Guard + IK, rather than Loyal 32 and smash captains or other assorted trash. Although one did have 2 Custodes bikers and Trajann Valoris.

The AdMech army (it was #4 or #5 as of last night) was a little bad, as it had the Rusty 17 and then a variation of the Loyal 32 as well but also had about 5 tanks and *melee* knights of all things (2x Warglaives and a Cerastus Knight Lancer).

The second Ynnari list at least looked like what I'd expect a Ynnari list to have: A actual mix of Craftworld, Drukhari, and Harlequins.

Anyways my point is that yes the Knight is a problem and yes soup still needs to be toned down (they really need to give more incentive to NOT soup, rather than more incentive and bonuses if you do), but the top 8 weren't terrible from an overall army standpoint at least compared to the usual disgusting tournament lists you see.

**Wayniac**

Marin wrote:
Wayniac wrote:
To be fair, in the Top 8 while the Castellan is certainly a problem, the lists themselves weren't that bad except for the (as of last night) #1 Ynnari list which was pure cupcakes with 6 flyers and 18 scatbikes.

There were two Guard armies that were actually Guard + IK, rather than Loyal 32 and smash captains or other assorted trash. Although one did have 2 Custodes bikers and Trajann Valoris.

The AdMech army (it was #4 or #5 as of last night) was a little bad, as it had the Rusty 17 and then a variation of the Loyal 32 as well but also had about 5 tanks and *melee* knights of all things (2x Warglaives and a Cerastus Knight Lancer).

The second Ynnari list at least looked like what I'd expect a Ynnari list to have: A actual mix of Craftworld, Drukhari, and Harlequins.

Anyways my point is that yes the Knight is a problem and yes soup still needs to be toned down (they really need to give more incentive to NOT soup, rather than more incentive and bonuses if you do), but the top 8 weren't terrible from an overall army standpoint at least compared to the usual disgusting tournament lists you see.

Really ? Top 4 had 3 list with Castellan and 1 cupcakes Ynnari list with 7 flyers, only the cheese list was match from the 8 mounts old IK+IG list.
It is a problem if only fraction that can use double action is a match for the IG/IK list and even that is not enough.

They did but the 2 guard lists I saw were actual Guard and a Knight (okay one had 3 Custodes guys). It wasn't a pure trash list as I could see a guard brigade backed up by a knight in the fluff. Far from "good" as far as things are concerned, but not pure cupcakes like Loyal 32 everywhere. One of them was a legit catachan guard army that had a knight in support.

To expand a little more thought on my feelings, in general, the issue is that it really seems like IK were designed with the notion that you would have very limited access to CP, so their stratagems are better in many ways to account for that. Soup lets you ignore that entirely by brinigng cheap CP batteries to power the high-end IK stratagems.

That's a big indicator of the problems. You can't balance something around "Oh they will ony get 5 or 6 CP at most" and then give a way to get 14 CP.

GW really does need to address soup though it is a huge issue.

**Wayniac**

I honestly think that as cool as the detachment system is, it was a terrible mistake. The FOC with ways to make certain units as troops for thematic purposes was fine and way less prone to abuse

I really think the best solution overall would be to make only your primary detachment generate CP, maybe even remove the bonus for Battleforged.

The idea is to keep CP very limited, not something you want to game to have as much as possible. Then you have the freedom to make better stratagems because you know that CP will be very limited, so if you use a 4 CP stratagem that might be all but 1 or 2 of the CP you're ever going to get. The problem now is that you get your cake and eat it too: high-end stratagems that are clearly meant to be rare things being used more often because they are fueled with cheap CP batteris.

An army should not have 14 CP, period. Fix that problem and the stock of soup goes down and the stock of CP being something rare that can really help swing the game goes up.

**Wayniac**

iGuy91 wrote:
Crazy idea. Why don't we jack up the points cost of the Castellan by...iunno....100 points to bring it in line with its over-performing status.

Seem fair?

Before CA18 I actually heard a lot of speculation that the Castellan should be like around 670 points

**Wayniac**

Slipspace wrote:
Horst wrote:
Why do most of you want to nerf allies, when the only really annoying knight to play against is the Castellan? Just nerf the Castellan, and maybe some Eldar lists to compensate, since without the Castellan list the Eldar are undisputed number 1.

Because while at the moment the Castellan is the obvious example that shows why soup is broken in its current form, if you just nerf the Castellan we'll be dealing with the same problem with different units. There's a fundamental problem with being able to mix different armies to cover each other's weaknesses and gather up loads of CPs for factions balanced around having limited access to such things. The Castellan is the most obvious culprit now but just removing that shifts the problem rather than fixing it.

This is a VERY good point. We need to stop doing band-aid and kneejerk fixes to things that are currently being abused and actually change the underlying cause to try and minimize the whole treadmill that you see with the min/maxing lists. If you nerf Castellan, you'll just see the next best thing show up just as frequently. Then that gets nerfed, and the next thing in the chain gets abused. Fix the abuse in general.

What we should be striving for is having there be a minimal gap between what's currently OP and what the next OP thing will be when you nerf the first OP thing. Cure the root disease, not just provide endless treatment for the problems.

**Wayniac**

glados wrote:
Let’s get to the heart of the real issue. It’s not soup, it’s the inclusion of Titanic vehicles to the game.

If a Land Raider was the biggest armoured vehicle in the game this thread wouldn’t be happening,

Phase out super heavies to only being permitted in a special rules Apocalypse style game and the problem is completely solved

This is the best solution but also impossible at this point in time. Flyers and Superheavies don't belong in 40k proper, but they've been included too long to phase them out.

The biggest mistake of all was rolling Apoc into the base game instead of keeping it separate and distinct.

**Wayniac**

The issue is if you just nerf Guard, then the next best thing will be used. And the next thing after that.

Fix the root cause. Fix CP being able to be stacked from other sources and used on something else where it benefits the most. We wouldn't be having this discussion if you couldn't power multiple Agents of Vect or Rotate Ion Shields or whatever with 2 cheap battalions to get an immediate 13 CP for minimal points investments.

If CP is meant to be a rare commodity and stratagems are meant to be powerful, sometimes game-changing things, then they need to be rare and limited.

**Wayniac**

Would it matter at all if ITC adopted the Cities of Death terrain rules? Make it harder to just blow somebody off the board.

Also, the issue with soup is as people say it lets you ignore your faction weakness, which throws any sort of balance out the window. If a faction's weakness is, for example, lots of cheap troops that die easily but no heavy hitters and you can just "ally" in big heavy hitters from another faction, what is your drawback?

Each faction should have distinct strengths and weaknesses that help balance them; if some can ignore the weaknesses entirely, then it's unbalanced.

**Wayniac**

The biggest offender though IMHO is being able to do it in the first place.

The Castellan definitely needs a nerf. But the solution isn't to just nerf Guard into obscurity. Guard/Loyal 32 might be the main issue but it's enabled by soup being allowed to be as powerful as it is, and stratagems being so good (one of the worst design decisions they did IMHO; stratagems should have just been generic things, not faction specific as part of the faction identity/abilities)

**Wayniac**

Earth127 wrote:
Background is a meaningless term in this discussion.

There is a game mode called narrative where hilariously everything you suggest is possible since the requirement to share 1 faction keyword across all armies is A MATCHED PLAY ONLY rule.

Actually, the requirement to be Battle-Forged is for Narrative too, it's just Open Play that allows everything. Although IIRC the whole "not Imperium/Chaos/Aeldari/Tyranid" rule is Matched Play only. Which still doesn't help Tau/Orks/Necrons unless you play Open and come up with some wonky situation where they would ally (e.g. the much-maligned Necron+Blood Angel "Brofist") which in and of itself would be a very rare thing to even play a game with that sort of situation; it certainly wouldn't be the sort of thing you saw frequently.

And this is a moot point anyway since Matched Play is the default 99% of the time.

It is incredibly ignorant to say "allies are here deal with it". It's a problem, it should be addressed. The blame is mostly, as usual, on GW for not having it consistent and pushing stratagems as big combos which encourage using soup to power them, and partially the inability to balance superheavies while continuing to push them as part of a normal game rather than relegate them to Apocalypse style games where balance is already largely thrown out the window and it's more about the spectacle of huge armies and gigantic war machines than actually wanting an interesting game.

Guard may be the ones who benefit the most but it's not a case of just nerf Guard and the problem goes away. And IMHO it's foolish to go down the path of well, if you keep nerfing one thing and then the next thing and then the next, eventually you'll get parity because the timelines for that is completely unrealistic. The issues should be fixed in one go, not spread out over time so that there are gaps where OP things run rampant over everything because one problem was fixed and the competitive crowd just moved on to the next best thing until thta also gets nerfed, repeat ad infinitum.

**Wayniac**

Bharring wrote:
Typically, if a player "cheated" once (moves the wound die) in a multi-day tournament, they made an unintentional mistake.

If a player "cheated" more than once (moves the wound die a couple times in different games) in a multi-day tournament, they are doing so deliberately, or at best out of a lack of capability.

So if someone cheats, call out the mistake ("You moved the die"), don't call them out as a cheater ("You cheated and moved the die"). That way, if it truly was an honest mistake, and rarely happens, you move on.

If you have to constantly "remind" them, then a TO should get involved - so there's record of the discord. If they argue that they didn't, call over a TO. Even if it's not provable which way it went, there's no record of this discord.

Point is, this is a small enough hobby where these things get noticed. Consider "If the first person you meet this morning is an donkey-cave, they're the problem. If everyone you meet this morning is an donkey-cave, you're the problem.".

The players who make careless mistakes once or twice get called out, and it gets fixed. The players who make careless mistakes all the time get called out frequently enough that (1) it gets fixed, (2) people know to watch them, and (3), most important for the person making the mistakes, they learn that they need to be more careful.

The person who cheats once or twice and gets called out gets identified as a cheater very quickly. They get punished by TOs, they get watched, and either they clean up or nobody plays them/they get kicked out of tournies.

So there's really no reason to need to prove any one individual case of cheating. Point it out. They'll be watched more closely. If they truly are a cheater, they'll continue to cheat. And other cases *will* get caught.

There have been cheaters in my meta (not many, though). I've known who they were and how they cheated. I avoided games with them. When I did play them, I took steps (which vary based on how they cheat) so they couldn't cheat. I didn't need to prove every cheating case.

(Oddly, one of the two biggest cheaters I've known tended to win most of his games, and the other, despite cheating, lost most of the time.)

This is pretty much spot on. Forgetting/misunderstanding a rule once, even in different games, doesn't necessarily mean someone is cheating. But all of these "cheaters" do it every game, sometimes more than once in the same game. If it happens frequently, then I agree you should call a TO so they are aware that this person *could* be cheating. That way the ones who do it often will be repeat offenders (TOs called continually to their table) and at that point it can be safely assumed they are doing it on purpose because if they are told the first two times they are doing it wrong and keep doing it, it's on purpose.

**Wayniac**

Karol wrote:
So like 9th age, pass then

If 9th age was officially supported, then yes. Horus Heresy is Forgeworld, just it's a cleaned up 7th edition ruleset rather than 8th.

**Wayniac**

The Salt Mine wrote:
So people that play mono lists get what they want, and soup players can't play with their models anymore? Allies have been a thing for the last three editions. They are not going away. The only people I feel slighlty sorry for are codexes that can't ally with anything as of right now. But I am pretty sure future releases will add things that those codexes will be able to ally with.

This is a misnomer because allies, as it is now, is not the same as allies before. They are not even remotely close to the same thing to be comparable.

**Wayniac**

Formosa wrote:
Blndmage wrote:
Formosa wrote:

Has the entire range of 7th ed xenos codex's to choose from with some slight adjustments to fit the force org chart and no formations.

They have discontinued several low selling sets or sets that have a plastic alternative from gw, but have also annoyingly discontinued several much needed sets for certain units, conversions for these units are incredibly easy however, they are continuing to add new units however but not on the scale of 40k due to having split resources and a low amount of staff.

Including Necrons and Tau?
They were around in 30k?

Yes including necrons and tau, all those codexs are playable in 30k due to sharing a similar ruleset, as for fluff reasons, i leave that to you, we have had a tau fleet lost in the warp in recent fluff, bam turns up in HH for "reasons" and necrons is easier, some woke up early, well thats already happened so its not much of a stretch.

People I've seen tend to treat Xenos that wouldn't technically be around (so that's mostly Tyranids, Necrons and Tau) as being one of the myriad of xenos races wiped out in the crusade.

So like T'au are normally played as proxy for the Interex or a similar more futuristic type race. Necrons could be the same, an alien races that used "robots" or something. Tyranids are usually some sort of alien bug/monster (e.g. the Megarachinids). So this fundamentally means you're doing a proxy army.