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basically I want to hear your opinions vs making lists that are versatile, like have most or every type of situation covered, or lists that are heavily geared towards a specific type of strategy, maybe like trying to table the opponent, or trying to hold objectives, or something like spamming a bunch of a certain type of unit in an effort to overwhelm the enemy

bat702 wrote:
basically I want to hear your opinions vs making lists that are versatile, like have most or every type of situation covered, or lists that are heavily geared towards a specific type of strategy, maybe like trying to table the opponent, or trying to hold objectives, or something like spamming a bunch of a certain type of unit in an effort to overwhelm the enemy

Does this cover ITC lists built to win the primary missions and a specific selection of secondary objectives for maximum points?

Getting more specific, you can often reduce the efficacy of your opponent's attacks by not including certain ranges of toughness in your lists. For example, a skew list might try to pack in nothing but T3 guardsmen and T8 vehicles to make a lot of mid-strength shooting less effective. Beyond that, mosts lists will want enough firepower to deal with specific skew lists, enough board control to win against a list it cannot outfight, and enough redundancy of units that they aren't crippled by losing a unit or two if you go second.

Talking a more all purpose list, like an army you bring to every match, I feel personally you should tailor your list to the meta mostly, like intercessors being so common and over powered, things that cause two wounds or low str high -ap weapons being strong, but also for me the fun of trying to make a list strong because of a strategy is thrilling

Lists need to be balanced to win games. They need to be tough enough they can score objectives, they need to be killy enough to remove the enemy from objectives. And they need to be mobile enough to get to objectives. They need to have few enough models that the game can be finished is a semi-reasonable time frame.
Skewing too heavily will jeopardize the army's ability to function.

intercessors are not overpowered in a vaccum. Its the Chapter Tactics, plus doctrines, plus stratagems, plus rerolls to hit, plus rerolls to wound that make them nasty. Synergy supporting long ranged shooting is king this edition due to the current AP rules.

Those intercessors need expensive babysitters to make them powerful. But yes, GW gave marines too many rules.

An example of a forceful list is current BA lists. They are tuned to exploit elite castles and consequently frequently skip their shooting phase and go all-in on tripoints.

Elite gunline marine castles are also forceful lists. They lose the to above list because they can't counter the tripoint.

I personally think balanced lists will handle both of these types after all the PA books are out.

I'm in the spam camp.

Most of 8th edition, I've run a Black Legion gunline maximized for lascannons. Brutally effective until Orks, Dark Eldar and Imperial Knight codexes were released. I still play this list and it wins, just not as much as before.

After a while, I switched to Bloodletter Bombs, which were incredible until the new Space Marine Codex came out. Now there's too many ways to prevent charges from deep strike, which neuters the whole army.

After testing a lot of different lists, I settled on Daemon Primarchs with a TS and Nurgle detachment. Most of the points are wrapped up in the Primarchs and their supreme command detachment. This was working well until this virus hit, felt like I was finally getting the hang of things after about 20 games.

In each case - there's a main threat that skews toward long range shooting, deep strike melee, or psychic monsters. It's backed by a secondary threat consisting of massed beatsticks or resilient objective campers. Covering every situation doesn't appeal to me. I just want to destroy enough units by the end of turn 3 to carry an overwhelming advantage the rest of the game.

Question whether TAAC or balanced lists are possible in the current meta. Feels like once you optimize around NuMarines, then you optimize around everything else. Afterwards, you have two entirely different lists. It's better to do one thing very well and just go at it than to focus on being good in many areas.