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So, for those unaware, Apocalypse has no equivalent of the 40k Matched Play Rule that requires your army to share a faction keyword, only that the detachment itself shares a keyword (that can be any keyword), with the Faction abilities only being granted if they share a keyword that isn't IMPERIUM, CHAOS, AELDARI or TYRANIDS.

Furthermore, you can take three Patrols (1 Troop minimum) for every Core Detachment you can take.

In short, every army has access to a Patrol of Death Korps Field Officer and Death Korps Grenadier Storm Squad (2PL each) and the Death Korps Field Officer has the "Officer" special rule, netting you an additional Command Asset per turn.

How do you feel about this when used to bolster non-IMPERIUM armies like Necrons or Dark Eldar that struggle to generate Command assets on their own? You do technically suffer a punishment for it (your Warmaster doesn't get a random trait) but the punishment is token at best.

I think the benefit is also token at best. Those detachments will get annihilated quickly and you will just loose card draws. Also missions can award victory points for hunting commanders and/or destroying detachments. You just feed victory points to your opponent.

Yes, on turn 1 you will have any 10 cards you want after you discard the other 20. And then you just start loosing.

It seems like most HQs with leadership High enough to be warlords pay about 2pl for the privilege of generating a card. Auras and hq combat abilities generally aren't worth what you pay for them.

So the question is whether paying 2pl for just a card and that's it is worthwhile.

I think it could be, up until you reach the hand limit. The cost of going over doesn't seem worth the usable units you're giving up for the card generators.

As orks I have useful card generating detachments for 3pl. Gretchins, meks and weird boyz will be far better for me than a gaggle of mooks who generate cards slightly more efficiently.

So imo, card generating detachments are something you'll probably see between 100-200pl but above 2pl where the average list generates close to 10 anyway they'll go away.

also if you're sprinkling in detachments from other factions, you're all sorts of a dick and really shouldn't play this game.

Fugging taudar.

stratigo wrote:
also if you're sprinkling in detachments from other factions, you're all sorts of a dick and really shouldn't play this game.

Fugging taudar.

IOW, STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY YOUR A TFG IF YOU DON'T PLAY EXACTLY HOW I WANT

 Peregrine wrote:

stratigo wrote:
also if you're sprinkling in detachments from other factions, you're all sorts of a dick and really shouldn't play this game.

Fugging taudar.

IOW, STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY YOUR A TFG IF YOU DON'T PLAY EXACTLY HOW I WANT

Yes. Yes you are. If your idea of fun is "Well since they didn't specifically tell you not to, let us cherry pick literally the best units from ALL THE ARMIES in the game and only use those. That way I'll always win"

Taudar were fething gross. 7th edition fell apart in part because of so few limits. Do you want apocalypse to work? To have people actually play it? To have it even be competitive? Don't do this gak.

So even if something is permitted by the rules it may still not be permitted unless stratigo says so. Could you produce a comprehensive list of these things so that we can all stop paying the game wrong?

stratigo wrote:
Yes. Yes you are. If your idea of fun is "Well since they didn't specifically tell you not to, let us cherry pick literally the best units from ALL THE ARMIES in the game and only use those. That way I'll always win"

Taudar were fething gross. 7th edition fell apart in part because of so few limits. Do you want apocalypse to work? To have people actually play it? To have it even be competitive? Don't do this gak.

So, more whining about how people having fun by playing the game competitively and building armies around strategic optimization instead of "fluff" are having fun the wrong way. Too bad, despite your apparent beliefs otherwise, GW did not include a statement in the rulebook that your personal favorite way of playing the game is how everyone else is supposed to do it.

PS: against other competitive players they aren't going to win every game because everyone is going to be using the best options and trying as hard as possible to win.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
Yes, on turn 1 you will have any 10 cards you want after you discard the other 20. And then you just start loosing.

That's why the strategy is going to revolve around having your first 1-2 turns decide the game by abusing your perfect 10-card hand. You spend ~75 points to ensure maximum draws and as long as you're getting ~100 points worth of value from it you're coming out ahead. And when you're talking about stuff like double-tap Banesword batteries, orbital bombardments on packed tables, etc, it's easy to see that value being available.

So as usual Imperial Guard ruin everything for everyone!

 BaconCatBug wrote:
So as usual Imperial Guard ruin everything for everyone!

Sure, let's all play a sad violin for Apocalypse, dead before it even arrived!

In theory, I agree with Perry's assessment here. In practice, you don't have a demonstration of it, though.

You can easily quantify what the perfect hand will get you. In 200PL you can just squeeze the card engine in with 5 fairly barebones baneblade chassis, meaning you pay 34% of your list for the ability to deal approximately 30 extra damage blasts and increase your tanks' durability by 33% with psychic barrier.

Sounds great!

What are we comparing it to? How do you quantify the impact of a regular hand of 10 cards out of an optimized deck that would be generated by most normal 200PL lists?

I don't know the answer. But it sure seems like the stance here is "The game is Broken until proven Balanced!" which seems...a little strange? The most glaring balance issues shown so far are obvious copyediting errors that I can only hope will be corrected, like the wristmounted titan plasma cannon on FW contemptor dreads.

I have no problem with mixed keyword armies in apocalypse. It's traditionally been a "bring everything" game, and especially for the non-elder xenos armies, there's a limit to how big you can get without either duplicating units or taking some weird stuff. Imperium, and to a lesser extent Chaos and Aeldari, have all kinds of neat stuff they can fold in compared to Necrons or Orks.

As for the card "batteries" in general... I think they defeat the purpose of these huge games. I'm simply not interested in packing up and transporting an apocalypse sized army only end up playing a game of "who can get their combo running first." I don't have the time in my life to do that.

 Polonius wrote:
I have no problem with mixed keyword armies in apocalypse. It's traditionally been a "bring everything" game, and especially for the non-elder xenos armies, there's a limit to how big you can get without either duplicating units or taking some weird stuff. Imperium, and to a lesser extent Chaos and Aeldari, have all kinds of neat stuff they can fold in compared to Necrons or Orks.

As for the card "batteries" in general... I think they defeat the purpose of these huge games. I'm simply not interested in packing up and transporting an apocalypse sized army only end up playing a game of "who can get their combo running first." I don't have the time in my life to do that.

You can not want to deal with these types of armies, and in a casual "errybody in the club get together and throw down an apocalypse" you probably won't have to. I'm going to run an event like that in the near future and I'm definitely just going to tell everyone "Bring one detachment at or under this PL". That just removes card farming as a thing you can do.

It doesn't mean it doesn't exist though, and considering what you might do against it isn't a bad thing. For my part, I think these kind of list setups appear to cause as many problems for the person playing them as they create for the opponents of the lists. The 68PL battery has 33 tiny units, most of whom are single model and will be trying to hide out of LOS behind 5 baneblade tanks, who all must deploy within 6" of the Astropaths to avoid creating a weak spot, and the This gives you one incredible utility in the double shots stratagem which can cause an amazing 22 blasts out of a single card, but with the way you're forced to deploy your list your opponent will be able to get essentially everything under one of the basic "roll for everything within 6" of a point" cards.

The generic, weakest version of that card hitting this list would cause 16 blasts of damage to it, and reduce the cards drawn on the next turn by 12. Most factions have 3-4 versions of that card they can put in their deck. That's far more damage than is done to a typical list with varied detachments that can actually spread out.

I have not seen anything in apoc able to sway the game turn 1-2 yet.

Built up units are generally too durable and nothing prevents them from getting a chance to act. The cards are good. But again, commanders and detachments can bleed vp. So how could those many little detachments secure your victory?

So far, in practice, this tactic is a liability.

It’s important to remember a lot of the missions restrict how much of your detachments start on the board. If they’re not on the board you can’t draw cards

I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Here I disagree. The cards help shake up a game where some units are objectively better than others.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Disagree. No cards means remove evwry psyker unit from the game basically. And a lot of strategic planning.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Here I disagree. The cards help shake up a game where some units are objectively better than others.

How exactly do the cards improve balance, instead of just adding pointless RNG?

 Peregrine wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Here I disagree. The cards help shake up a game where some units are objectively better than others.

How exactly do the cards improve balance, instead of just adding pointless RNG?

For starters, direct damage cards help prevent the extreme msu spam discussed in this thread and the defense cards help to prevent single turn alpha strike strategies.

In a game without cards, having larger higher cost units presents an inherent disadvantage.

 Peregrine wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Here I disagree. The cards help shake up a game where some units are objectively better than others.

How exactly do the cards improve balance, instead of just adding pointless RNG?

By that logic we should remove rolling to hit and to wound too, both are pointless RNG.

RNG is an acceptable part of game design, as long as you give a player a way to mitigate it sometimes.

 Lance845 wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:
I recommend not even playing with the cards. It's a better game.

Disagree. No cards means remove evwry psyker unit from the game basically. And a lot of strategic planning.

I can see an alternate game mode where you simply replace the current card mechanic with each psyker may choose one psychic power, which can be used once per game at will.

 Peregrine wrote:

stratigo wrote:
Yes. Yes you are. If your idea of fun is "Well since they didn't specifically tell you not to, let us cherry pick literally the best units from ALL THE ARMIES in the game and only use those. That way I'll always win"

Taudar were fething gross. 7th edition fell apart in part because of so few limits. Do you want apocalypse to work? To have people actually play it? To have it even be competitive? Don't do this gak.

So, more whining about how people having fun by playing the game competitively and building armies around strategic optimization instead of "fluff" are having fun the wrong way. Too bad, despite your apparent beliefs otherwise, GW did not include a statement in the rulebook that your personal favorite way of playing the game is how everyone else is supposed to do it.

PS: against other competitive players they aren't going to win every game because everyone is going to be using the best options and trying as hard as possible to win.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
Yes, on turn 1 you will have any 10 cards you want after you discard the other 20. And then you just start loosing.

That's why the strategy is going to revolve around having your first 1-2 turns decide the game by abusing your perfect 10-card hand. You spend ~75 points to ensure maximum draws and as long as you're getting ~100 points worth of value from it you're coming out ahead. And when you're talking about stuff like double-tap Banesword batteries, orbital bombardments on packed tables, etc, it's easy to see that value being available.

Yes, every army will look exactly the same with almost no variation. This is how to make a good game and get people to play it. This level of thought has killed competitive apoc before it will ever have a chance. Did you like 7th edition? Was it fun for you? Unlike 40k, I doubt gw will police apoc regularly to knock down the overperforming units or exploited rules. At a certain point you gotta realize gak is bad, and police it. There’s a reason itc exists. So you can enjoy the Wild West of his game and watch it also fething die, or you can take the steps to fix the oversights of gw, because, as is often the case, gw doesn’t account for that fething guy when they make a rules set

 BaconCatBug wrote:
By that logic we should remove rolling to hit and to wound too, both are pointless RNG.

RNG is an acceptable part of game design, as long as you give a player a way to mitigate it sometimes.

No, not at all. Rolling to hit/wound provides necessary uncertainty in the outcome of a player choice and acts as a neutral arbiter between "I want my guys to kill yours" and "I want them to miss". RNG to see if your army remembers how to use their tactics is bad RNG, taking away player choices about how they want to build their army and replacing it with hoping the CCG deck gives you the cards you need.

Also, you're still not answering the question about what balance goals the cards achieve.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:
For starters, direct damage cards help prevent the extreme msu spam discussed in this thread and the defense cards help to prevent single turn alpha strike strategies.

In a game without cards, having larger higher cost units presents an inherent disadvantage.

The MSU spam only exists because of the cards! If you remove the need to mitigate the RNG of the CCG mechanic then there's no meaningful advantage to having these extremely small detachments, certainly not enough to overcome the inherent drawbacks of taking easy targets when "kill a detachment" objectives exist.

I'll grant some credit to the defensive aspect, but because both players have them there's minimal net effect and alpha strike issues (if any) would be better addressed by making sure that the units involved are balanced.

I think you're thinking of "multiple small detachments" i'm thinking of "multiple small units, probably in extremely large detachments."

Defensive cards typically either exist to save a character from 1-2 blasts, or they exist to save large units from focused firepower.

Offensive cards are mostly the only mechanic in the game that allows a single effect to target multiple units.

Without this factor in place, equivalent points of, lets say Leman Russ tanks, versus a single large unit like a Titan, would generally result in the smaller groups of units always winning because the larger unit can only target a single one at a time. Ditto for 1 large squad of intercessors against 5 squads of gretchins. The gretchins can put their full firepower into the Intercessors, the Intercessors can only completely obliterate a single unit of gretchins, but has no way to attack all the squads at once.

overall, I think the game would function without cards. I think you'd find it extremely non-deadly, and both sides would likely have about half their PL on the table turn 5, but it'd function. Balance-wise, I think you'd heavily skew the game toward particular types of units.

I think there are better solutions to this thing that is potentially a problem. Balancing certain out of line cards (of which there are far fewer than I expected, if I"m being honest). Adding a caveat of "The commander of a Patrol can never be a Warlord, even if they are a character". Adding a detachment limit to certain game sizes.

Complaining that the card mechanic introduces unnecessary RNG is, in my opinion, a little silly considering how incredibly samey most of the cards are, and how you have complete control of what's in your extremely small deck. 30 cards, and in an average game you're drawing 5-10 top of turn 1?

the_scotsman wrote:
Without this factor in place, equivalent points of, lets say Leman Russ tanks, versus a single large unit like a Titan, would generally result in the smaller groups of units always winning because the larger unit can only target a single one at a time. Ditto for 1 large squad of intercessors against 5 squads of gretchins. The gretchins can put their full firepower into the Intercessors, the Intercessors can only completely obliterate a single unit of gretchins, but has no way to attack all the squads at once.

Err, what? Units can split fire in Apocalypse just like in normal 40k. You're limited by the number of weapons you have, yes, but if you only have a single weapon you probably aren't "completely obliterating" your target anyway. In your example the intercessors may have a good chance of killing a squad of grots within half range but they're hardly doing so by such a huge margin that you'd consider it "completely obliterating" them and really want to be able to spread some of the overkill onto another unit. In the case of the titan vs. LRBTs the titan is able to fire each gun against a separate tank with a high chance of killing all of them.

 Peregrine wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Without this factor in place, equivalent points of, lets say Leman Russ tanks, versus a single large unit like a Titan, would generally result in the smaller groups of units always winning because the larger unit can only target a single one at a time. Ditto for 1 large squad of intercessors against 5 squads of gretchins. The gretchins can put their full firepower into the Intercessors, the Intercessors can only completely obliterate a single unit of gretchins, but has no way to attack all the squads at once.

Err, what? Units can split fire in Apocalypse just like in normal 40k. You're limited by the number of weapons you have, yes, but if you only have a single weapon you probably aren't "completely obliterating" your target anyway. In your example the intercessors may have a good chance of killing a squad of grots within half range but they're hardly doing so by such a huge margin that you'd consider it "completely obliterating" them and really want to be able to spread some of the overkill onto another unit. In the case of the titan vs. LRBTs the titan is able to fire each gun against a separate tank with a high chance of killing all of them.

Looking at, for example, a Warhound titan against LRBTs, any gun that titan has access to will have quite a bit of overkill except for the vulcan megabolter, since it's not really an antitank weapon. 6x LR tanks do gain a pretty significant advantage due to the overkill present and the fact that MSU cannot suffer critical damage while single units can.

and a 10-man intercessor squad simply does not have a prayer against 12 grot squads. The issue does really only seem to show up when you have things about 10x the cost of their targets due to how damage works in apoc, but at the same time, this IS apocalypse, those situations will absolutely exist.

Has anyone put this down on the table and tested it in real world application yet?

 Lance845 wrote:
Has anyone put this down on the table and tested it in real world application yet?

I will test it in my next game (and have a backup army in case my opponent ragequits )

Cool. Bat rep as best you can. Its all good to theoryhammer but i am more interested in what actually happens. I still think it will turn out to be a craptactic but i could be proven wrong.

 Lance845 wrote:
Cool. Bat rep as best you can. Its all good to theoryhammer but i am more interested in what actually happens. I still think it will turn out to be a craptactic but i could be proven wrong.

So I had a game against pure Custodes.

I ran Oblits + Abadabadingdong, Apostle + 20,20,5 Berzerkers and 4 DKOK patrols. He ran 3x5Custodes Squads, Trajor, Alarus Terminators, 2 Telemons and 3 Caladius Grav Tanks.

I was drawing 10 cards per turn, on turn 3 I shuffled 15 cards back into a new deck. Since the game only lasts 5 turns I didn't get any more deck refreshes from it. The only real thing that affected the game was that I was able to use Medicae Supplies twice to keep one of my Zerker blobs alive by healing 5 damage.

My Oblits under performed considerably, only taking out two Caladius Grav Tanks and 1 Shield captain all game while his Custodes butchered my Berskers like no tomorrow! Abadabadingdong's auto-passing of Morale is so good, makes Oblits a lot more tanky as they can't lose their last two wounds to morale so easily. I kept my DKOK out of range in the backfield where they didn't do anything. We played the Apocalyptic Assault mission which relies on controlling objectives so I had an advantage there as Custodes don't have the body count to control many objectives.

Over-all I felt like I didn't gain overly too much of an advantage but had we played a different mission I might have suffered more.