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Oh, so you mean like the standings of the past major GTs...

There's the Eldar/Tau game with their deathstars, then everything else. Dunno about you, but I don't see anyone playing Screamerstar, O'Vesa Star or Seercouncils in my local meta. Why?

Because you're huge jerk for bringing them.

If you face them often, then I say don't and refuse to play them. It's not like comparing football teams at all. It's called knowingly broken units in the game that you are a terrible person if you run them outside of a WAAC tournament. And even then, people like Nick Rose still win without using them. OR you can beat a Seer Council if they don't get Fortune or Screamerstar if they fail their grimoire rolls. Fun games of 40k right there...

Planning a true TAC list is almost impossible with the current 6E meta. Planning a hard list that will have some bad match ups is the name of the game these days. As one of the latter lists, the "tubby star" or "centstar" is great.

The Vendetta is undercosted and will be raised in points in the next IG book. As it stands, the BA Stormraven is the best all-around utility variant and is excellent for what it does. Again, comparing solid/good units to almost broken one isn't a fair fight. And a Vendetta that's on the board facing a Stormraven flying with all that Strength "Yes!" AP "Lots!" firepower will sweat.

Why is someone a jerk for bringing a quality list? I face this stuff all the time as my play group loves their net lists. This could be why I found the C:SM codex a bit lackluster. That, and the internal balance still sucks hard.

If I refused to play them, I wouldn't get to play. First it was the sea of Vendettas. Then Helldrakes. Now Taudar. I had a horrible feeling the marines wouldn't get their turn, and they really didn't. I can't even try to hard counter Taudar, because there are still triple helldrake lists and a Vendetta spammer.

Of course, this probably explains why I've been playing Starcraft a lot more lately.

But it will be 1.5 vendettas per Stormraven. The Stormravens are the one sweating. Trust me, I've never gotten over on Vendetta spam. Lascannons are too potent against AV 12.

If you're routinely facing Seercouncil and Screamerstar, that's a bad area to play, I'm sorry.

Taudar, okay one thing. Bringing tough lists, great. But bringing a unit that goes "If I get the right power, we're playing a game and you're the only one removing models," is super fun, right?

Your meta sounds like crap. And I'm a power gamer. There's hard lists and then lists where no one has fun because the units are flat out broken.

The marines codex is awesome when you remove the obviously broken crap in the current 40k scene. If you want to include screamerstar and seer council, then you might as well not play if they roll the power they need. GG, you lost.

So steering back to the topic, the CM + Corbulo + Cents unit is extremely powerful and difficult to kill, but doesn't cost more than 700 points. Even at 1500, that's leaving 800 points to flesh out the armies. For a power unit, it's awesome. Seen a lot of my friends try play testing it to much hilarity as their opponents gently poo themselves a bit at how resilient it is to almost all fire power (even wave serpents and broadside spam!)

Removing the broken crap has always been the holy grail of 40K. But GW is a fail at arithmetic. I've told one of the devs this to their face at a con, but I'm sure they don't give a damn.

I still blame the Taudar at the end of the day because people bring unkillable deathstars to survive the obscene firepower. I have literally been picking up models like it was back to 2nd edition. You know, where the Warp Spiders had instant death flamer templates that reduced armor saves the more they stacked them?

Actually, the big hope against Screamer star and seer council to to TFC their faces off before they go. So we are now down to who goes first. Pathetic.

I'm not buying any cents until I see that the BA get them.

If I seem edgy on these boards, it's because I'm having flashbacks to 2nd edition. Which was horrible for loyalist marines. They couldn't beat a single list in that edition. It's obviously not that bad, but people don't seem to play the things marines can throw down with effectively in my area.

I just don't play anyone with a list involving a rerollable 2+ save style power unit. In the end, I'm the winner

I can't blame them for using something GW put in. I blame GW, not the player. Buy a calculator GW.

Martel732 wrote:
I can't blame them for using something GW put in. I blame GW, not the player. Buy a calculator GW.

Eh, GW has always made shoddy rules. And I'll blame the player day and night if they bring a Screamerstar or other broken crap. It's funny. Once.

I guess it's a philosophical position. One would think that GW would eventually learn, but they never do.

Poly Ranger wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

Poly Ranger wrote:
Psychic powers... we are talking about the optimal load out/powrs right? Even if only half are within 12" that's still 20 dead orks.

Lets imagine they don't ignore cover and they are all further than 12" away. Thats 16 dead orks

That leaves 90 or 94 orks left. You get 110 orks for the price of this unit.

You're missing the point im making - that even against the LEAST optimal target they will still gut a squad. Yes you can get 111 orks (hell - you can get 133 termegants) for almost the same price, but other units can deal with these. Their job isn't to take these units on... but they can. 111 orks would prove a challenge for lysander and 10 th/ss termis, but you wouldnt say they aren't a threat in assault. And as Exergy says - try getting 111 orks into 12" charge range. Grav cents aren't great point for point against horde... but neither are most 665pts worth of models. You don't rate the effectiveness of honour guard by calculating how many grots they can kill, so why use the cents least optimal target to rate their effectiveness? Remember that they will be supported by other units.

The point is that this unit costs 665 points, is short ranged, slow, and is terrible against hordes. Add in 2 TFC and this has more range and is better against hordes, but now it costs 865 points.

You need not get the orks into charge range, you simply need to threaten them. By moving 30 ork boys in a nice spread out fashion near the cents you are denying the cents from moving. They can close in and shoot, but they arent going to kill many orks (as the orks will be in cover and are orks)or they can move away. Getting stuck in combat with even just 1 mob of 30 would be terrible.

Imagine if you will that there is even a small nob bikestar hanging back flanked by 2 units of 30 boys. The boys are spread out to near the max and are slowly marching foward towards the cents. The cents cannot get all of their number to shoot at the orks, and those that do are going to be at long range for the bolters. They arent going to kill many orks. The bikes keep moving foward but always staying out of the range of most of the cents. If the cents move towards the bikes, they are in charge range, and if charged they will die.

Which is exactly why other units are used to deal with those orks. 30 orks are never going to all be in cover! Again the point im making is that this is the least optimal target! You just used 60 ork boyz and a nob biker squad in your example to combat the cent squad, that is still a significant investment of points. I have not advocated that it is the best unit in the game or anywhere near it, just that people have underexaggerated its effectiveness against vehicles and horde. 16-24 kills (on average) at the right moment is not terrible at all, even if this is only ~120ish pts.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Besides - you are not investing in them to combat horde!

It's not Orks I would worry about, as I stated above. I don't think Tau, Eldar, or Daemons would care about this deathstar. So we'll call it a "bullystar". It can whip up on the 2nd tier codices.

The orks would do much better in wagons, there is no way they are getting there on foot. The cents are only likely to take out one wagon each turn though. So three rushing wagons should get two units in there.

Beasts/cavalry with poor save is what this unit fears the most, so deamons is a big pain for this unit.

Poly Ranger wrote:
Which is exactly why other units are used to deal with those orks. 30 orks are never going to all be in cover!

So either they all get cover because some are in cover, or you focus fire the ones out of cover, but then you are killing less of them. It is really unlikely that the number out of cover is going to magically be the number that you can on average kill.

Even if you the numbers suggest that you will kill on average 15 orks and 15 orks just so happen to be out of cover while the rest are in 4+ cover and you choose to FF those out of cover you are now killing less than 15 orks. The average 15 orks you think you can kill is actually all possible likelyhoods multipled by their chance of occuring summed. There are a large number of possibilities that kill 14 or less orks and a large number of possibilities that kill 16 or more orks and a few possibilities that kill exactly 15 orks. By FF you are limiting all results that kill 16 or more orks to 15. Summed in an average you are now expecting to kill considerably less orks.

Example. You are shooting 3 orks with a 3 bolters at long range. Two orks are in 4+ cover. One is not in cover. If you are shooting them out of cover, one would expect 2 hits, 1 wound, 1 dead ork. If you shoot in cover one would expect 1/2 dead orks. If you focus fire the one ork out of cover, it gets more complex.
Out of cover there is a chance your 3 shots will:
kill 3 orks(three hits three wounds)3.7%
kill 2 orks(three hits, two wounds)11.1%
kill 2 orks(two hits, two wounds)11.1%
kill 1 ork(three hits, one wound)11.1%
kill 1 ork(two hits, one wound)22.2%
kill 1 ork(one hit, one wound)11.1%
kill 0 orks(three hits no wounds)3.7%
kill 0 orks(two hits no wounds)11.1%
kill 0 orks(one hit no wounds)11.1%
kill 0 orks(no hits)11.1%

When you add up those percentages times the number of orks they kill you get to 1. On average 1 ork killed.
If you FF and limit yourself to 1 ork killed your average orks killed goes down to .7, 70% of an ork killed.

So against 4+ cover it is better to focus fire in this case, but if it was 5+ cover your expected orks killed is only slightly higher.

In short, focus firing diminishes the number of average unsaved wounds you will cause, unless there are more models out of cover than you have shots.

I like your mathmatical reasoning. If focus firing on a unit of 30 and say 16 are out of cover (as this is the average kills on the whole squad being classed out of cover and over 12" away, so im making it simple for theories sake), 50% of the time due to the bell curve you will kill 16, however due to the fact you cannot possibly kill more as you are only focus firing on 16, the lower kill count the other 50% of the time will indeed bring the average down. You are however still looking at killing 16 orks 50% of the time in this case. Also due to the exponential decrease of the curve, the majority of the other 50% will still be looking at 12 or over killed. Any less starts to be anomolous results more than 1 standard deviation away. The average in this case will be reduced but not by a huge margin.

Dark Eldar Beast squads would tear this unit a new one, especially with a large amount of Kyhmeras and razorwing flock.

Although i havnt math hammed this out i think the unit would be able to take the hits from the Cents, and then dish back a world of pain while closing extremely quickly.

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

Poly Ranger wrote:
I like your mathmatical reasoning. If focus firing on a unit of 30 and say 16 are out of cover (as this is the average kills on the whole squad being classed out of cover and over 12" away, so im making it simple for theories sake), 50% of the time due to the bell curve you will kill 16, however due to the fact you cannot possibly kill more as you are only focus firing on 16, the lower kill count the other 50% of the time will indeed bring the average down. You are however still looking at killing 16 orks 50% of the time in this case. Also due to the exponential decrease of the curve, the majority of the other 50% will still be looking at 12 or over killed. Any less starts to be anomolous results more than 1 standard deviation away. The average in this case will be reduced but not by a huge margin.

I am not saying it is a huge difference, but 12 is less than 16, just as .7 is less than 1 in my simple example.

Remember that the distribution is not normal but binomial(which is only losely similar to the normal)
The bolters are going to follow skew, being very likely to hit and 50% chance to wound
The grav cannons are going to be very boom or bust, very likely to hit but very unlikely to wound(with a ton of shots)
Roll 5 dice together. There are a ton of outcomes that contain no 6s
Roll 30 dice together, there are a ton of outcomes with less than 5 6s

With this boom or bust nature, there is going to be very uneven. Lets ignore the Hurricanes just for a second and talk about 8 orks dead due to the grav cannons.
Some times you are only going to kill 1-3 orks while other times you will kill 20. Limiting yourself to 8 would really bring down your expected kills.

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

The only way would be a psychic power giving them +1 to their armour save, and that certainly doesn't exist. And if it did, no one in the Seer Council would be able to take it.

Thud wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

The only way would be a psychic power giving them +1 to their armour save, and that certainly doesn't exist. And if it did, no one in the Seer Council would be able to take it.

they probably wouldnt cast it when they are about to engadge a centstar. It isnt required that you cast it.

 Exergy wrote:

Thud wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

The only way would be a psychic power giving them +1 to their armour save, and that certainly doesn't exist. And if it did, no one in the Seer Council would be able to take it.

they probably wouldnt cast it when they are about to engadge a centstar. It isnt required that you cast it.

Of course not. But there is a way for a Seer Council to have a majority 2+ armour save. Which was my point.

 Exergy wrote:

Poly Ranger wrote:
I like your mathmatical reasoning. If focus firing on a unit of 30 and say 16 are out of cover (as this is the average kills on the whole squad being classed out of cover and over 12" away, so im making it simple for theories sake), 50% of the time due to the bell curve you will kill 16, however due to the fact you cannot possibly kill more as you are only focus firing on 16, the lower kill count the other 50% of the time will indeed bring the average down. You are however still looking at killing 16 orks 50% of the time in this case. Also due to the exponential decrease of the curve, the majority of the other 50% will still be looking at 12 or over killed. Any less starts to be anomolous results more than 1 standard deviation away. The average in this case will be reduced but not by a huge margin.

I am not saying it is a huge difference, but 12 is less than 16, just as .7 is less than 1 in my simple example.

Remember that the distribution is not normal but binomial(which is only losely similar to the normal)
The bolters are going to follow skew, being very likely to hit and 50% chance to wound
The grav cannons are going to be very boom or bust, very likely to hit but very unlikely to wound(with a ton of shots)
Roll 5 dice together. There are a ton of outcomes that contain no 6s
Roll 30 dice together, there are a ton of outcomes with less than 5 6s

With this boom or bust nature, there is going to be very uneven. Lets ignore the Hurricanes just for a second and talk about 8 orks dead due to the grav cannons.
Some times you are only going to kill 1-3 orks while other times you will kill 20. Limiting yourself to 8 would really bring down your expected kills.

Good points.

Thud wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

The only way would be a psychic power giving them +1 to their armour save, and that certainly doesn't exist. And if it did, no one in the Seer Council would be able to take it.

Um... Is this sarcasm...?
Because... Protect?

Tactical_Genius wrote:

Thud wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

 TheKbob wrote:

The Termietubby star would scrap a Seer Council as they will either have a 3+ armor, or likely a 2+ armor if they are dumb.

There is no way for an Eldar seer council to have a 2+ majority armour save.

The only way would be a psychic power giving them +1 to their armour save, and that certainly doesn't exist. And if it did, no one in the Seer Council would be able to take it.

Um... Is this sarcasm...?
Because... Protect?

Yes.

Mobility kind of gimps Centurions.

Plasma Cannon Devastators against CentStar?

Actually I was thinking about this. What about:

Tiggy
Centurion sarge w/Omniscope and TL LC/ML
Centurion w/TL LC/ML
Centurion X 2 w/Grav cannon w/ grav amp/ML

So this squad comes in around 545, and can reliably frag a WS from 48", and then, as the game progresses, can split fire with the LC cents using krak missiles and the grav cents using krak or frag as necessary. Frag missiles get better with tiggy spamming prescience.

Martel732 wrote:
Actually I was thinking about this. What about:

Tiggy
Centurion sarge w/Omniscope and TL LC/ML
Centurion w/TL LC/ML
Centurion X 2 w/Grav cannon w/ grav amp/ML

So this squad comes in around 545, and can reliably frag a WS from 48", and then, as the game progresses, can split fire with the LC cents using krak missiles and the grav cents using krak or frag as necessary. Frag missiles get better with tiggy spamming prescience.

Everyone includes tigrius for prescience? With that i could just take a DA divination libby and a plas, combi-plas DA Tac squad and take a PFG: all this giving me divination, more plasma, and a 4++ for my centurions to tank the ap2 fire. Sounds cheaper than tiggy, even as good as he is.

Tiggy is more there for the rerolls on the tables for greater chance of getting the other powers like endurance and forewarning.

That and he is Ld10 with rerolling failed psychic tests. Putting him as a much better psyker then Eldrad *twitch*

The missile nipples are a complete waste as the unit can already bone any tank in the game easily and it struggles against hordes, the 3 to 6 twin linked bolter shots each is far more important then the tank overkill.

MLs in this case are critical for engaging and killing the dreaded WS at 48". WS can stay out of 24" range for too long in the course of the game.

Tiggy giving all those frag missiles ignore cover and prescience makes them actually kind of decent, instead of completely worthless.

Splifire only allows one model to engage a different target.