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There is an easy fix for boring and abusive unit spam lists:

1) Play maelstrom
2) Use 4-6 pieces of los blocking terrain. Agree that the ground floor of buildings should block los
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

What is spam? Picking the same unit over and over.

Why would you do this? Usually for competitive reasons. Possibly fluff reasons but if in 7th your "fluff" was "spam the units everyone knows are the best" I wonder what was wagging the dog.

The problem in 40k (and similar games) is that you have a lot of choices for units that serve a very similar role in game. Unfortunately however they are never going to be equally good. One will be better than the others.

This means that a roster of say 20 codex entries can be broken down to just 3-4 "good options" and there is no real reason beyond whimsy to use anything but these 3 options.

So for instance say you wanted some anti-vehicle firepower in your Marine Army. You could take devastators, Centurion devestators or a predator (or various other options, flyers for instance).

In theory you could conclude regular devastators are better in one situation but worse in others and the same with the other two units. So you take a mix of all three. In practice though this has very rarely happened. You are usually going to be better taking three of one option.

Does this upset competitive players? Not really. Its always been and always will be the case. There are much bigger problems for ensuring there is a healthy tournament scene (which seems to be doing okay anyway).

It mainly upsets players who play for the collecting and painting side. To my mind its much more fun to own and paint up a mix of units. So you can say you have say a full Tau collection consisting of every unit type rather than "I have only the models for my 1850 list and yes it contains 5 riptides".

In the same way its more fun to see lots of different units on the table. People like variety.

Despite that however I don't think you can fix it beyond lots of hard and fast rules declaring "you are permitted no more than 2 of these units". GW are not going to go down this road though because they want to sell models. Also while it may help the super-mono lists it won't change things that much.

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

"I came in 1st in a tourney, and 2nd in a 2nd tourney using vanilla marines in 2nd Ed. So whoever was playing vanilla marines in your neighborhood clearly didn't know what they were doing. "

Good luck when the Tyranid strategy cards killed a 1/3 of your list before the game started. What a great game! I guarantee you could not beat the chaos and tyranid players in my meta with your frickin vanilla marines. Marines had like what? Two effective weapons? I don't know who is in this tournament, but in 2nd ed, I saw TWO table flips vs tyranids. (And a lot of damaged metal hormagaunts) Both marines. Marines were 30 pts a model! For a boltgun! Really? In a game with to-hit modifiers! I personally played a 3K game against CSM where the CSM killed my entire list before I could take a single turn! Not even 7th ed Eldar could that!

2nd was a dumpster fire, and I really do NOT understand how anyone derives any joy from that edition.

Tyel wrote:
The problem in 40k (and similar games) is that you have a lot of choices for units that serve a very similar role in game.

Only if you play space marines.

Tyel wrote:
It mainly upsets players who play for the collecting and painting side. To my mind its much more fun to own and paint up a mix of units.

So the painting and collecting players can shut up and do that.

Tyel wrote:
In the same way its more fun to see lots of different units on the table. People like variety.

Actually, I hate seeing armies where every single unit is different. They look ugly, there's no consistency, it looks like you haphazardly and lazily threw gak together at the last second and you don't really care, so you're wasting my time.

 Peregrine wrote:

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

Spamming troops is always fine. And conscripts are not overpowered.

Spamming big stuff is not fine. Imperial knights lists, tau with basically only riptides and stormsurges (luckily they are no more), stormravens spam lists, big daemons spam, etc... those kind of list based on spamming something really strong are an issue. And some of these units should belong to apocalypse games only. Flyers should be 1 allowed per 1000 points, maybe even 1 per 2000 points.

A list with 180 orks, 200 conscripts, 5 units of kabalites in venoms plus 3 ravagers, any possible tyranid list, etc are not a problem, they're actually cool and BG based.

Orks and guards are supposed to be hordes actually.

Some armies have 10 units, including characters, and like any other army some of these available options are not viable at all, so they can't be played without spamming their best stuff.

"Spamming troops is always fine."

7th ed has only been gone for what? 2 months?

TL/DR....

How are we defining spam?

For instance, Tactical Marines are a solid flexible choice, and theoretically the backbone of any given Marine force.

But if it's say, 'I'll only take Predators' for Heavy Support, does that not depend upon how the rest of the force is comprised?

Yeah. If someone wants to theoretically lose. Marines aren't overcosted per se, but the combination of things they pay for add up to a nothing burger.

Well, if spamming troops gets a blanket pass then a pretty obvious "solution" would be to make all/most troops brokenly overpowered to the point that there isn't much reason to take anything else beyond edge-case utility. Then people would spam troops, but they're troops so it wouldn't count.

It wouldn't really solve spam though, and I'm sure that after a few rounds of SM players getting stomped by non-SM troops the definition would quickly narrow to "if people spam Tactical Marines it's okay, all other troops need some kind of anti-spam measure".

 Peregrine wrote:

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

Yeah, because everything from FW is super broken. I mean, have you seen the rules for the Sicaran and Siege Dreadnought? So scary!

$5 says the guy you quoted says spamming Conscipts is fine because they aren't broken and that's more fluff based than an Armour company or 10th company of Scouts.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
TL/DR....

How are we defining spam?

For instance, Tactical Marines are a solid flexible choice, and theoretically the backbone of any given Marine force.

But if it's say, 'I'll only take Predators' for Heavy Support, does that not depend upon how the rest of the force is comprised?

Well apparently there are actually people here that think that more than 2 of any unit is spam, so who really knows. Apparently redundancy and a cohesive looking army is terrible.

I didn't answer the poll because I don't think it addresses it's intent: what is the cause of game imbalance?

Spam may exacerbate imbalance, but it is not the cause of it. Units too weak or powerful for their cost create imbalance. Sometime imbalance is caused by rules that apply under specific conditions, such as rules for a formation or a scenario. But to say 'spam' is the culprit is like saying rolling too many dice creates imbalance - the the cause and effect are only related when other factors are considered.

Any solution to restore balance without addressing the actual problem is doomed to fail and an utter waste of time.

Tyel wrote:
What is spam? Picking the same unit over and over.

Why would you do this? Usually for competitive reasons. Possibly fluff reasons but if in 7th your "fluff" was "spam the units everyone knows are the best" I wonder what was wagging the dog.

The problem in 40k (and similar games) is that you have a lot of choices for units that serve a very similar role in game. Unfortunately however they are never going to be equally good. One will be better than the others.

This means that a roster of say 20 codex entries can be broken down to just 3-4 "good options" and there is no real reason beyond whimsy to use anything but these 3 options.

So for instance say you wanted some anti-vehicle firepower in your Marine Army. You could take devastators, Centurion devestators or a predator (or various other options, flyers for instance).

In theory you could conclude regular devastators are better in one situation but worse in others and the same with the other two units. So you take a mix of all three. In practice though this has very rarely happened. You are usually going to be better taking three of one option.

Does this upset competitive players? Not really. Its always been and always will be the case. There are much bigger problems for ensuring there is a healthy tournament scene (which seems to be doing okay anyway).

It mainly upsets players who play for the collecting and painting side. To my mind its much more fun to own and paint up a mix of units. So you can say you have say a full Tau collection consisting of every unit type rather than "I have only the models for my 1850 list and yes it contains 5 riptides".

In the same way its more fun to see lots of different units on the table. People like variety.

Despite that however I don't think you can fix it beyond lots of hard and fast rules declaring "you are permitted no more than 2 of these units". GW are not going to go down this road though because they want to sell models. Also while it may help the super-mono lists it won't change things that much.

And how does that help Sisters, Scions, Inquisition, AdMech, and Skitarii players (such as myself)? Am I not allowed 3 Dune Crawlers or Chicken Walkers? Is there an issue when I get 3 squads of Infiltrators?

This isn't some conspiracy of "GW wants to sell models". This is you being unreasonable.

 GreaterGood? wrote:
Whoa.... I'm out of this thread. I forgot how prevalent the anti-competitive mindset was within the 40k community.

There's no point in even discussing issues when people think:

 jeff white wrote:
Spam is a symptom of a general lack of intelligence. Spammers who spam units to make an auto win button for themselves are unable to understand that winning at all costs including excessive reflexive financial costs is not the aim of the game hobby or LIFE for that matter. Mostly I blame the collapse of culture around the worship of Mammon but this is beside the point. I would refuse to play with anyone with a netlist of X units and would rather sit at a table and paint while listening to someone else suffer the bad decision to engage with such.

Maybe not with me. But others, well, you may be able to change someone else's mind.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
"I came in 1st in a tourney, and 2nd in a 2nd tourney using vanilla marines in 2nd Ed. So whoever was playing vanilla marines in your neighborhood clearly didn't know what they were doing. "

Good luck when the Tyranid strategy cards killed a 1/3 of your list before the game started. What a great game! I guarantee you could not beat the chaos and tyranid players in my meta with your frickin vanilla marines. Marines had like what? Two effective weapons? I don't know who is in this tournament, but in 2nd ed, I saw TWO table flips vs tyranids. (And a lot of damaged metal hormagaunts) Both marines. Marines were 30 pts a model! For a boltgun! Really? In a game with to-hit modifiers! I personally played a 3K game against CSM where the CSM killed my entire list before I could take a single turn! Not even 7th ed Eldar could that!

2nd was a dumpster fire, and I really do NOT understand how anyone derives any joy from that edition.

Play with different people. Though I have to say the my main opponent during that time always moved his orks an extra bit and in those year I never won. Not once. But still I like some things about that game that in 8th I don't. Terrain and cover effects. Charging. RPG attitude. More collectible. Less card game deckbuilder... I wonder whatvwe would have iif geedubs just tweaked that system rather than the Wardization enema they gave it ...




In the context of this thread I take spam to be " competitive" people using multiple same units to win at the expense of immersion and in the end sportsmanship... There used to be sportsmanship scores at GTs. Sure spam is also six units of gobbos but this does not represent the intentions of the op. Multiple - as in forty warp spiders for example - OP or broken units kitted out to exploit rules and game mechanism rather than test strategy and army Comp including thematic elements, this is spam afaiac.

 jeff white wrote:

 GreaterGood? wrote:
Whoa.... I'm out of this thread. I forgot how prevalent the anti-competitive mindset was within the 40k community.

There's no point in even discussing issues when people think:

 jeff white wrote:
Spam is a symptom of a general lack of intelligence. Spammers who spam units to make an auto win button for themselves are unable to understand that winning at all costs including excessive reflexive financial costs is not the aim of the game hobby or LIFE for that matter. Mostly I blame the collapse of culture around the worship of Mammon but this is beside the point. I would refuse to play with anyone with a netlist of X units and would rather sit at a table and paint while listening to someone else suffer the bad decision to engage with such.

Maybe not with me. But others, well, you may be able to change someone else's mind.

Ha... thing is, you could make a good fluff argument for a lot of spam lists, and given that 40k is an entirely fantasy universe you could stretch some hack narrative to fit even the grossest Net-spam list... that said, if you are so desperate to 'win at toys' then I'd agree you are kind of a loser at life.

My OCD likes things uniform and organized so I like the look of some spammish armies, but even the staunchest defender of "competitive 40K" or "spam" or "net-lists" or "WAAC" etc... has no know that this edition of 40k [8th edition] was promised to address those "loop holes" because it was ruining the fun for most people and that was not the intent of the game.

 Gunzhard wrote:


Ha... thing is, you could make a good fluff argument for a lot of spam lists, and given that 40k is an entirely fantasy universe you could stretch some hack narrative to fit even the grossest Net-spam list... that said, if you are so desperate to 'win at toys' then I'd agree you are kind of a loser at life.

My OCD likes things uniform and organized so I like the look of some spammish armies, but even the staunchest defender of "competitive 40K" or "net-lists" or "WAAC" etc... has no know that this edition of 40k [8th edition] was promised to addressed those "loop holes" because it was ruining the fun for most people and was not the intent of the game.

Yeah in added a definition of spam in context of this thread that assuages these concerns.
And I agree about army comp and multiple same or similar units in some armies. Sure.

 jeff white wrote:

 GreaterGood? wrote:
Whoa.... I'm out of this thread. I forgot how prevalent the anti-competitive mindset was within the 40k community.

There's no point in even discussing issues when people think:

 jeff white wrote:
Spam is a symptom of a general lack of intelligence. Spammers who spam units to make an auto win button for themselves are unable to understand that winning at all costs including excessive reflexive financial costs is not the aim of the game hobby or LIFE for that matter. Mostly I blame the collapse of culture around the worship of Mammon but this is beside the point. I would refuse to play with anyone with a netlist of X units and would rather sit at a table and paint while listening to someone else suffer the bad decision to engage with such.

Maybe not with me. But others, well, you may be able to change someone else's mind.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
"I came in 1st in a tourney, and 2nd in a 2nd tourney using vanilla marines in 2nd Ed. So whoever was playing vanilla marines in your neighborhood clearly didn't know what they were doing. "

Good luck when the Tyranid strategy cards killed a 1/3 of your list before the game started. What a great game! I guarantee you could not beat the chaos and tyranid players in my meta with your frickin vanilla marines. Marines had like what? Two effective weapons? I don't know who is in this tournament, but in 2nd ed, I saw TWO table flips vs tyranids. (And a lot of damaged metal hormagaunts) Both marines. Marines were 30 pts a model! For a boltgun! Really? In a game with to-hit modifiers! I personally played a 3K game against CSM where the CSM killed my entire list before I could take a single turn! Not even 7th ed Eldar could that!

2nd was a dumpster fire, and I really do NOT understand how anyone derives any joy from that edition.

Play with different people. Though I have to say the my main opponent during that time always moved his orks an extra bit and in those year I never won. Not once. But still I like some things about that game that in 8th I don't. Terrain and cover effects. Charging. RPG attitude. More collectible. Less card game deckbuilder... I wonder whatvwe would have iif geedubs just tweaked that system rather than the Wardization enema they gave it ...




In the context of this thread I take spam to be " competitive" people using multiple same units to win at the expense of immersion and in the end sportsmanship... There used to be sportsmanship scores at GTs. Sure spam is also six units of gobbos but this does not represent the intentions of the op. Multiple - as in forty warp spiders for example - OP or broken units kitted out to exploit rules and game mechanism rather than test strategy and army Comp including thematic elements, this is spam afaiac.

So you don't actually have advice for 2nd Edition games besides play with other people that don't abuse the worst the edition has to offer. Got it. Utterly useless piece of wisdom there, bud.

So please do go on how using three Predators and 10 man Deathmark squads makes me less intelligent. I'm waiting.

They should have revamped the unit type and detachment system more than they did. As is you get way too much flexibility as seen in the flyer spam lists. Command points rewarded for diverse detachment design is a step in the right direction given that a brigade does require you to use at least 5 different types of units, but I believe that the reward is too small and the design constraints a bit too harsh in that case. Since you get some extra CP even with the spammiest lists there isn't enough of a opportunity cost and CP is not that impactful overall. Maybe faction-specific stratagems will change that.

If it were up to me I'd make more "big" detachments like the brigade with similar CP rewards but high diversity demands. The spammy detachments shouldn't give any CP, the flyer detachment and superheavy detachment should even take away CP. It should be enough that the system allows you to play a knight army, getting 3 CP on top of that is too much.

So how exactly are armies that have little diversity supposed to make use of those detachments that require diversity? Because not every army is Space Marines with more unit types than you will ever bother to use.

Brigades are bad enough; at least with them, you can spam the one half-decent heavy support or fast attack or elite choice you have to make up those three slots without having your army be gimped. And you think that more unit types should be demanded?

How about instead of making more and more restrictive rules, you fix the goddamn unit balance instead? Because that would actually solve the damn problem.

This argument is silly, but will likely never go away.

No matter what, uncompetitive players will continue to look at armies with 3 long fang units and call it spam, when in reality it is just redundancy.

If you only have one of a unit, you might as well not have it at all, because of the enemy wants to kill it right away, they probably can.
If a unit is worth taking once, it's better if you take it twice or three times, because it makes it harder for the enemy to remove the threat.
For example, if i am looking at my heavy support slots and decide i need some anti tank, 2 predators, or 2 devastators units, is likely to be better than 1 predator and 1 devastator squad, because they both fill the same role (anti tank) but present very different targets (infantry and tanks). A well balanced list is likely to have the ability to kill one tank and one infantry unit in a single turn, but may have a harder time killing 2 tanks or 2 units of infantry in one turn, making it harder for them to remove all of your anti tank shooting.

Thus, taking 2 or 3 of a unit is always going to be a good coffee no matter what changes are made to the game. This concept of target redundancy is furthered by making lists with all tanks or all infantry to make the enemy lose out on the effectiveness of their shooting. Las cannons having nothing to shoot at but Boyz, and heavy bolters at rhinos, for example, will always be good list building.

In my opinion, the problems only start to arise when one unit or unit type is objectively better than all of the other options, so you only ever see long fangs, or only ever see predators, and the game starts to get boring. Playing 10 games vs 3 long fangs might get old. But playing 10 games and seeing 3 long fangs, 3 predators, 3 cent units, biker spam, terminator spam, and foot space wolves, should be enjoyable despite the unit repetition. This (making all units good enough to take in some kind of competitive army) should be GWs number one goal, in my opinion.

And thankfully, this is something i think GW is getting better at this edition with many units being usuable and there not always being an obvious choice or only one possible build for an army. Plus they have stayed they care about balance, and we can expect them to nerf things every so often if they get out of control.

I don't think storm raven spam will win many more tournaments, and if it does, and it becomes apparent that it is way better than most other armies, GW should nerf them and we can move on. The problem with the list isn't spam, it's that the list doesn't lose that much (assuming that's the case).

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

So we should never take more than 1 of any unit, not have a cohesive list either in the game or in a picture, and be punished for thinking otherwise. Got it

Oh, no. You mistake my post for any form of anti-spam. I don't mind it at all. I was just taking a jab at the T9A mentality that they've got all the problems solved.

Spam is not a problem in itself, but WAAC players who write extreme lists that take advantage of under-costed or overpowered units are a problem and will never get a game from me. Sorry guy with 500 conscripts.

Pancakey wrote:

The_Peacemaker wrote:
Veteran gamer here:

No, redundancy spam is not healthy for the game. But not enough people wanted to play warhammer fantasy battle that requires you make decisions during a game in order to win.

The people that spend money want to play a list building game.

T9A exists people. If you want a sci-fi version then its completely possible to do so. ...although I'm sure there is ample competition in other sci fi games.

Does T9A thoughtfully address the spam issue?

Yes. The main reason for that is because T9A is not a 360degree, true line of sight, kill 20 guys through a broken window type game.

360degree shooting, no los blocking, full turn based, will inherently make a game that requires redundancy spam. When your one gun that kills tanks is always in LOS and in range of the enemy, and your opponent goes first and kills it - the only solution is to spam it so he can't kill them all.

------------------

So does spamming units hurt the game?
...it is the game.

The_Peacemaker wrote:
So does spamming units hurt the game?
...it is the game.

Exactly. Complaining about spam in 40k is like complaining about randomness in card games. It's a part of the game.

 Peregrine wrote:

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

Again with the freaking conscripts?

Tell me, if you can't kill conscripts, how do you plan to deal with orks? Sure boyz are twice the price, but they also have around 4x the hitting power along with morale immunity that CAN'T be sniped out.

 Arandmoor wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

Again with the freaking conscripts?

Tell me, if you can't kill conscripts, how do you plan to deal with orks? Sure boyz are twice the price, but they also have around 4x the hitting power along with morale immunity that CAN'T be sniped out.

4x the hitting power is quite the claim, how do you figure?

Look out for the ETC lists. Worst spam you ever see....

Tyfus wrote:
Look out for the ETC lists. Worst spam you ever see....

Anyone have a peek at these lists yet?

 Peregrine wrote:

pismakron wrote:
3) Don't use broken Forgeworld units of doom.

But spamming GW broken units of doom is fine. Spam all the conscripts you want.

Bloody hell, one of the weakest units in the IG codex finally becomes usable and everyone loses their minds.

 Blackie wrote:
Spamming troops is always fine.

Spamming big stuff is not fine.

So you admit that spamming is not a problem because of balance reasons (as spamming overpowered units is still a balance problem even if they're troops, see 7th edition scatter laser jetbike spam), you hate it because it involves building a list in a way that you don't like building your own lists. IOW, "YOU AREN'T HAVING FUN THE RIGHT WAY STOP IT NOW."