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Interested as to whether people think of this as a points thing (with or without character points), a model count thing or a difficulty to kill thing.

Personally I think it was the unit consists of, and the points follow. You can have a unit of Core infantry in horde that costs 300-400pts, but it won't be good as the smaller unit of Special infantry or cavalry with the Lord/Hero in it. Basing a death star on points I think can work of course, but is more restricting than making the unit first.
(I dont think Sidious and Vader figured out their budget before building their Death Star )

A proper death star has two main qualities.

1) It does lots of damage, so much that it cannot be successfully engaged in melee.

2) It is hard to destroy, meaning it is difficult to get points out of.

It then becomes a points-denial unit; all his points are tied up in the unit so you can't win a big victory without engaging it... but you can't survive engaging it.

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

A death star to me is a unit that holds a majority of points in the entire army.

Just having a high model count doesn't make a deathstar.

Typically a deathstar is a large unit with all of its characters crammed into it to make a mega unit.

 Vulcan wrote:
A proper death star has two main qualities.

1) It does lots of damage, so much that it cannot be successfully engaged in melee.

2) It is hard to destroy, meaning it is difficult to get points out of.

It then becomes a points-denial unit; all his points are tied up in the unit so you can't win a big victory without engaging it... but you can't survive engaging it.

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

This right here.

A true Deathstar unit can only really be countered in one of two ways;
a) play 'Avoidancehammer' with it by feeding it a couple chaff/re-director units and then kill everything else.
The typical plan, but one that as mentioned above, never gives you more than a minor victory at best because there is typically at least 50% of the enemy army wrapped up in the Deathstar.

b) 6-dice FTW!lolz!11!!!1! the #6 spells or Dreaded 13th in the case of Skaven.
The plan I find a lot of Deathstar using trollz will tout as being the so-called 'easy counter'... Because of course, only 6 armies in the game have the best counter spell (Dwellers) and DoC require a 500+ pts named character to even get it. While Purple Sun & Pit only work on the low Initiative Deathstars... (so Elves and WoC are pretty safe) And Final Trans only ever kills 33% of the unit at a time.
The problem with these 'mega spells' however is that their damage output, (outside of Dreaded 13th), tends to drop off significantly as the Deathstar is reduced in size. (as there are fewer models taking the test, meaning fewer fails)
And the fact his entire so-called 'plan' requires you to a) roll-up the required spell. b) 6-dice - and likely miscast the spell multiple times without exploding your wizard and/or losing wizard levels and likely said FTW spell!

Easy, right?!

That's why they do it. Its not easy. However to tout their tactical mastery of the game they will tell you it is easy and for the lulz and that if you can't figure out how to beat it that means you are a stupid noob that deserves to get beat anyway and you don't belong on the world championship stage with them and their mighty deathstar.

I've even heard people say that deathstarring is a difficult tactic to learn how to use properly.

He said it with a straight face.

Grand. Realised mid game last night that after characters had joined, one of my units was roughly half my points and I don't want to be accused of deathstarring.
Hellcannon / Death magic to lower ld would be effective against deathstar, as a single wound causes panic tests...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I suppose I could build a legal 2400 point list with 2340 points in one unit, try to win just by killing with magic, but how dull would that be....

Winning games is serious business. There is no dull. Only the trophy or lack thereof


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In all seriousness I hope they deal with the starring of units together like this in the next edition or I may be fading out to something else.

 Vulcan wrote:

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

Or clobber him with magic. Or clobber him with your own, superior deathstar. Or clobber him with a combination of both.

 The Shadow wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

Or clobber him with magic. Or clobber him with your own, superior deathstar. Or clobber him with a combination of both.

Unless you're up against an I2 Deathstar, (so that means Dwarfs, Lizzies & Ogres), you're not going to be able to nuke it with the auto-kill spells unless you're Skaven with access to Dreaded 13th. (because it's damage is not linked to models failing an attribute test, but rather a flat 'X models auto die')
Even High Elves bemoaning how "Dwellers still shreds a SkillBannerstar" seem to convienently forget that only roughly 50% of a S3 unit dies per casting. (and that drops to only 33% if the unit are White Lions!)
The fewer models that take the attribute test, the fewer that actually fail...

Hence why only low initiative Deathstars are truly vulnerable to the BRB #6 spells, because they are looking at losing roughly 66% or more, meaning within a couple castings, you could likely have the Gutstar/Slaanstar down to an actual killable level.

This is one of the main things 9th needs to bring back; half pts for units & characters that are brought below 50% starting size/initial wounds. That alone completely shafts the whole pts denial tactic of Deathstars because now it's possible to take some pts from that brick.

 The Shadow wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

Or clobber him with magic. Or clobber him with your own, superior deathstar. Or clobber him with a combination of both.

Which means that there are two big units and bunch of minor units on the board that contribute nothing interesting to the game.

This is why death stars are bad for the game, they render it a stupid contest between two units. The answer is to devise some scenario or victory condition that cannot be achieved by some super unit.

The asininity that is "skillbanner" is utterly worse than any army using the Banner of the World Dragon.
I would rather play as Daemons against an army that had that banner in every unit than have to read people writing that.
/

To me a DeathStar is all about huge damage output and a very small weakness that even a computer would have a hard time hitting.

Ok if people are gonna keep bashing the Banner of the World Dragon can we stop calling it the skillbanner? It sounds lame and makes no sense, Banner of the Ward Dragon is much better.

JWhex wrote:

 The Shadow wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

Best tactic against it is to acccept you can't engage it, wipe out the other two units he MUST take, avoid the deathstar, and win a minor victory instead.

Or clobber him with magic. Or clobber him with your own, superior deathstar. Or clobber him with a combination of both.

Which means that there are two big units and bunch of minor units on the board that contribute nothing interesting to the game.

This is why death stars are bad for the game, they render it a stupid contest between two units. The answer is to devise some scenario or victory condition that cannot be achieved by some super unit.

I never said I liked the idea. I don't. But, fighting fire with fire, metaphorically speaking, does work.

Ugly Green Trog wrote:Ok if people are gonna keep bashing the Banner of the World Dragon can we stop calling it the skillbanner? It sounds lame and makes no sense, Banner of the Ward Dragon is much better.

I see a trend. And that trend is that people will find an opportunity to complain about the Banner of the World Dragon in every single WHFB Thread...

Technically, fighting fire with fire either leads to one bigger fire or nothing left at all....
As to the Banner of the Weeping Deamon, it makes me change my list, but the two times that I have faced it the unit has died to my core, so meh.
It does suck for Deamons, but I think they kinda like feeling persecuted, makes such a change and gives them something to talk about.

I like "skill banner" or "banner of awesome skill" or even "the nerd-illustrated banner of win". It all pretty much sums up how I feel about it nicely, encouraging the stupidity that is already rife by inserting new brainless items that encourage deathstarring.

It also sums up how I feel about mat ward pretty well.

If someone can use the phrase 'all your eggs in one basket' you probably have a deathstar of some kind.

In short?

A tarpit that kills stuff.