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Morning all - I made the mistake of looking at the responses on Twitter to WarCom's tweet announcing the dataslate and MFM update, and noticed there are a lot of salty Ad Mech players.

A lot of salty Ad Mech players.

I know their 'dex came out late last year, with Stilts McGee as the accompanying model release - what about the book has everyone so salty?

Short version - Codex is a bit rubbish, and we got nothing in the updates.

 Dysartes wrote:
Morning all - I made the mistake of looking at the responses on Twitter to WarCom's tweet announcing the dataslate and MFM update, and noticed there are a lot of salty Ad Mech players.

A lot of salty Ad Mech players.

I know their 'dex came out late last year, with Stilts McGee as the accompanying model release - what about the book has everyone so salty?

When you don't like changing unit rules and your go-to solution to improving an army is "make the models fewer points" and follow that to the bottom and run out of room, you get admech. Weird design choices, pants units they're reticent to change and they've already made them so cheap they've pretty much hit the floor and made the army cost prohibitive in real life currency.

basically, the army struggles because of weak datasheets ever since the index, which weren't powered up in either the codex release or the dataslate. GW are VERY reluctant to alter datasheet stuff as a matter of policy, and the other lever they have is reduced points cost.

the issue is, most admech units are ALREADY very low points, so thiers just not much room to make them cheaper, and doing so drives up the real world costs of the army, which were already quite high due to sheer amount of plastic you needed to buy.

also, it appears the recent balance dataslate chose to not do anything with the admech, which people are guessing is a case of GW deciding to "wait and see" on the effects the recent codex had before jumping in with too hasty buffs or nerfs.

so, basically, admech are weak, expensive to collect, GW are reluctant to fix the core issues for various reasons, and thus the army is just stuck being weak until, at best, a summer dataslate MIGHT make some changes, 8-9 months after the player consensus on how weak the admech are was reached, while at the same time other armies are having good changes made to them, or at least harsh nerfs on their worst parts.

it all comes across like GW doesnt like admech, really.

beast_gts wrote:
Short version - Codex is a bit rubbish, and we got nothing in the updates.

Because its too soon. People got confused and decided it was a november release, but it was a two-week preorder, so it (and necrons) weren't actually released until the first week of December. Then the holidays happened. Data collection, sifting, analysis and writing updates surprisingly takes time, and they also need data sources to collect from.

They could rush and throw crap at the walls again with no basis or justification, but then people would rant about that.

I mean, I wouldn't be that shocked if these dataslate changes were ready before the New Year, if I'm honest.

Voss wrote:

beast_gts wrote:
Short version - Codex is a bit rubbish, and we got nothing in the updates.

Because its too soon. People got confused and decided it was a november release, but it was a two-week preorder, so it (and necrons) weren't actually released until the first week of December. Then the holidays happened. Data collection, sifting, analysis and writing updates surprisingly takes time, and they also need data sources to collect from.

They could rush and throw crap at the walls again with no basis or justification, but then people would rant about that.

So they didn't test their own rules. No one sat down looking at the pre print rules and went "let me build a list" and found out that A there is one list and B that it costs a ton of money ? The whole wait and see stuff from GW is an odd excusse, because basic changes sometimes take them a whole edition to do. Some genius, who wrote the GK index rules, didn't notice that with cover everywhere ap1 weapons, may as well be ap 0? That maybe 5 attacks hiting on +4 on an easy to kill platform, may not be a good statline? How much shifting does GW have to make for someone to notice that GK Lt is called a Brother Cpt or that there are Thunder Hammers in both the Strike and Terminator box? Months of waiting for a change and they do a heavy psycanon buff. Awesome. Now will we have to wait to see regular psycanons be changed, for lets say another 6 to 9 months? And my dudes aren't even in the worse position, we didn't get our codex yet. Worse situation is being given a current edition weak codex. Good riddence to people playing Ad Mecha and DW, when books like eldar come out. Even right now an Ad Mecha player has no reason to deploy his army, when playing vs something like necron.

While it is hard to say how much or how well GW playtest new Codexes, we do know that the rules that went to print are tested in a different dataslate and MFM than the one they are released into. That means what may have looked fine might not work when it finally gets into the hands of the players.

All that being said, according to GW's numbers, Ad Mech is bumping along at the bottom of the target range. Maybe the work to moderate the top of the range will help them out until they can get a proper treatment in the next dataslate?

Right. The premise is the dataslates and point changes are based on actual real-world data.

Regardless of whether they are or not, an overhaul to AdMech this soon (less than two months after release, with holidays bollixing everything up) would prove they're not. There's enough time to calculate a win percentage, but not enough to develop and test real solutions rather than crap-at-the-wall stopgaps.

 alextroy wrote:
While it is hard to say how much or how well GW playtest new Codexes, we do know that the rules that went to print are tested in a different dataslate and MFM than the one they are released into. That means what may have looked fine might not work when it finally gets into the hands of the players.

All that being said, according to GW's numbers, Ad Mech is bumping along at the bottom of the target range. Maybe the work to moderate the top of the range will help them out until they can get a proper treatment in the next dataslate?

GW stats do not overlap with any stats, any group of people, who gather event stats, have. Their last one has all but 2 "slightly over" armies. If they base their rules changes on their own doctored win %, then good luck to the armies that don't have a studio member as a pet project. On top of that, and I don't know why, people who look at win % data think that if an army shows at 37%, then this means (especialy with the low representation it has) that it has a 37% win chance vs any army. Which just isn't the case. And vice verse. An army with 55% win rate, pre removing mirror match ups, is be a living god, because bar a potential anti list, such win rates mean it only loses against itself. And the lower the skill cap, the more powerful rules, become powerful. So a "Worlds" win rate of +50% means in a store or game between friends, the army is doing some really unfun stuff to other players.

Regarding the tested rules not going to print. Well someone wrote the rules, and someone okeyed it. I am not talking here about testers or no testers. But there is a dude at the studio who thought that GK teleportation rules, combined with super resilient Ctan (also undercosted), are okey to be combined with powerful offensive combos. And I get that someone can miss a chaplain dread doing powerful stuff in combination with X rule. The studio works, as if FW didn't exist. But we are talking about basic stuff. Cover everywhere, toughness go up. wounds go up. Anti tank weapon gets -1AP or -2AP? That is not an anti tank weapon. Melee units without an ability to get in to melee, get costed as if they started in melee range? I guess this works in studio games, where I assume people don't shot at melee only units, as that would be unfun to the person playing with the army. Great for studio games, not so great for the rest of the world. GW ain't an indy company on its first edition of the game. It is a 40 year company, with 10 editions, in which they do the same errors over and over again. How many editions do we have to go(for me it is 3 ) through to agree that powerful indirect fire, that can be spamed and comboed is a problem. GW has not learned the lesson after 8th, 9th and 10th.

Karol wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
While it is hard to say how much or how well GW playtest new Codexes, we do know that the rules that went to print are tested in a different dataslate and MFM than the one they are released into. That means what may have looked fine might not work when it finally gets into the hands of the players.

All that being said, according to GW's numbers, Ad Mech is bumping along at the bottom of the target range. Maybe the work to moderate the top of the range will help them out until they can get a proper treatment in the next dataslate?

And vice verse. An army with 55% win rate, pre removing mirror match ups, is be a living god, because bar a potential anti list, such win rates mean it only loses against itself. And the lower the skill cap, the more powerful rules, become powerful.

No Karol, that would mean any army has a 45% chance to beat it, which means another army will win 9 out of every 20 games.

No, 2 semster of sports theory tell me that, a team/player with a 55% win rate playing a team/player with a 45% win rate, does not have an effective win rate of 55% and vice versa. The 45% win team does not have a 45% chance to beat a 55% win army. In fact If I remember correctly a sub 40% win rate team/player, playing an outlier (someone/team with a 55% or higher win rate, which by the way is rare) has a an extremly rare chance to win.

Karol wrote:
No, 2 semster of sports theory tell me that, a team/player with a 55% win rate playing a team/player with a 45% win rate, does not have an effective win rate of 55% and vice versa. The 45% win team does not have a 45% chance to beat a 55% win army. In fact If I remember correctly a sub 40% win rate team/player, playing an outlier (someone/team with a 55% or higher win rate, which by the way is rare) has a an extremly rare chance to win.

No, that's literally what it means. It means on average one will win 11/20 games and the other 9/20.

What you're trying to do is reference specifics, it might be that Team A has a 65% win rate against B and a 45% against C giving an average of 55%. But that's not the level of detail proffered without data, we have an unreferenced mean of the win rate irrespective of match ups etc. All we know is that Team A win 55% and Team Z wins 45%. In absence of further data, you have to assume that Z will win 9/20 games.

The problem is we do have that data.
Its common to find "bad armies" have a horrendous win % against "good" factions which is offset by the bad. (And vice versa for the top ones).

Its special pleading but Ad Mech were what, 35% and bottom at the LVO 2 weeks ago? This is the source of some salt.

Tyel wrote:
The problem is we do have that data.
Its common to find "bad armies" have a horrendous win % against "good" factions which is offset by the bad. (And vice versa for the top ones).

Its special pleading but Ad Mech were what, 35% and bottom at the LVO 2 weeks ago? This is the source of some salt.

Once you get into the minutiae it's not that clear cut, the armies with the higher win rates naturally will draw in the more astute and capable competitive players, as naturally they want to leverage small advantages. As a result the "less good" armies are abandoned by players who want to stack odds to win the event, so you end up with Timmy the casual running the army with the cool robot guys with lists that'll be stood on by the people on the way to the top.

If you had the top 8 players all taking a meta ad mech list that'd massively shove the win rate up, albeit I don't think they'd be in the top 8 any more.

That is again taking into consideration we don't have GW's data source to validate anything, you just have the LVO data; which whilst very good as an anecdotal snippet, is exactly that. If you want to do the fun part I'd point out that LVO actually dragged ad mech down as clearly whatever metrics GW uses has them performing better elsewhere.

General Win Rates are biased towards the faction selection of the opponents. According to Goonhammer 40K Stat, Ad Mech have a win rate of 40.52% in Leviathan GT play, which is quite bad. But if you dig into the Ad Mech vs Faction stats you see interesting things (all stats are since January 1, 2024):

Most common opponent is Space Marines, where they have a 42.80% win rate.
Second most common opponent is Necrons, where they have a 41.92% win rate.

Their best Win Rates are against Deathwatch (79.17%), Imperial Knights (55.56%), and Aeldari (54.55%). Interestingly, they have played more games against Aeldari than Deathwatch and Imperial Knights combined.

Their worst Win Rates are against World Eaters (35.71%), Leagues of Votann (37.18%) and Chaos Daemons (37.50%).

Strangely, this all tells us that Ad Mech is good into the number 2 faction (Aeldari) and manages to play better than its overall performance into the number 1 faction (Necrons). They also get smashed by the number 3 faction (World Eaters).

This all says, that you can't just compare overall win rates to have a reliable idea of how well you will do in a game against said faction. The actual factions matter, not just that faction having a higher win rate than yours.

 alextroy wrote:
General Win Rates are biased towards the faction selection of the opponents. According to Goonhammer 40K Stat, Ad Mech have a win rate of 40.52% in Leviathan GT play, which is quite bad. But if you dig into the Ad Mech vs Faction stats you see interesting things (all stats are since January 1, 2024):

Most common opponent is Space Marines, where they have a 42.80% win rate.
Second most common opponent is Necrons, where they have a 41.92% win rate.

Their best Win Rates are against Deathwatch (79.17%), Imperial Knights (55.56%), and Aeldari (54.55%). Interestingly, they have played more games against Aeldari than Deathwatch and Imperial Knights combined.

Their worst Win Rates are against World Eaters (35.71%), Leagues of Votann (37.18%) and Chaos Daemons (37.50%).

Strangely, this all tells us that Ad Mech is good into the number 2 faction (Aeldari) and manages to play better than its overall performance into the number 1 faction (Necrons). They also get smashed by the number 3 faction (World Eaters).

This all says, that you can't just compare overall win rates to have a reliable idea of how well you will do in a game against said faction. The actual factions matter, not just that faction having a higher win rate than yours.

I did the same thing on the same site and got different numbers to be honest, but it also tells me they haven't updated their 40k stats since 2nd Jan despite listing results later than that. But I agree, when you have the data you can perform that analysis, but nobody has GW's data as it is and as a result you're left to take the % at face value. One way or the other, Ad mech is winning 4/10 games on average and yes that'll depend on the pilot, list, opponent, local meta, but as a starting point/brief snapshot then it's not terrible.

As you've shown above though it's not to say that there isn't an ad mech player out there winning more than 60% of their games, even against the "good" factions if they're piloted by relatively poor players etc. but that's not really the focus here I suppose, the point stands that better players in reported large events will gravitate to better armies and the "less good" will appear worse than they are as a result of being trodden on by the better players.

Yes. If you are going to a tournament to win and you have a choice of factions to take, you are less likely to take a bad faction. This will result in the bad faction looking worst that it might actually be since the competitive players are more likely to be playing the good factions, running their scores up.