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While snipers can be an issue, it's not hard to hide a single model. There are also a lot of options for defending them, from ogryn bodyguard to the mask relic.

I'm also entirely unclear why IG gets to ignore every potential disadvantage their army should have. High model count fragile armies are weak to morale, so here are rules to ignore that issue. Fragile but cheap characters can be risky, so let's givs them better warlord traits and relics (even though, again, entire armies lack snipers), so that they overperform unless they are sniped.

Other armies actually have to be disadvantaged by their weaknesses. It's hard to spam CP as admech or SM variants, due to more expensive troops and HQs. So shouldn't we get something to give us as many CP as IG, if disadvantages don't matter? It's silly, wardian idiocy that cannot be justified.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Snipers are NOT a threat mathematically.

Thats mostly true, but Eldar can give a reasonable go at it with Rangers and casting Doom. Given that Rangers are probably their better troops option, and Farseers are practically a given, it's an easy combo to have.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Snipers are NOT a threat mathematically.

Thats mostly true, but Eldar can give a reasonable go at it with Rangers and casting Doom. Given that Rangers are probably their better troops option, and Farseers are practically a given, it's an easy combo to have.

Want to post the math on that? Don't know the casting potential of Doom or the stats of Rangers. Mostly people stuck with not using Eldar at the moment in my area.

Rangers are probably the worst snipers in the game, at least outside of FW which I'm not very familiar with, so I wouldn't be too worried. You get 5 Rangers for 100 points, shooting BS3+ sniper rifles. A Farseer within 24" of an enemy unit can cast Doom so that anything shooting that unit re-rolls wounds. This makes the Rangers 33% more efficient, so that they are almost half as shooty as Ratlings rather than only a third as shooty. 10 Rangers (200 points) shooting at a Doomed Company Commander would probably kill him. Obviously this all depends on a bunch of things working out. I still have yet to play on a table where it would be very difficult to hide a single character from infiltrating snipers.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Snipers are NOT a threat mathematically.

Thats mostly true, but Eldar can give a reasonable go at it with Rangers and casting Doom. Given that Rangers are probably their better troops option, and Farseers are practically a given, it's an easy combo to have.

Want to post the math on that? Don't know the casting potential of Doom or the stats of Rangers. Mostly people stuck with not using Eldar at the moment in my area.

A unit of 5 rangers costs 100 points. Vs a standard space marine captain =

Standard:
5 shots.
3.3 hits.
1.6 wounds.
0.5 unsaved wounds. So the captain is totally unharmed, or may take 1 wound out of a possible 5.

With Guide:
5 shots
3.3 hits
2.5 wounds
0.83 unsaved wounds. So the captain is more likely to have taken 1 wound out of 5.

So even with guide (which would make the total unit cost 220 points btw) it will take an entire 5 turn game to kill one standard captain in power armour.

I think the likes of Girlyman, and any captains wearing better armour (which most warlords would be I suspect) are pretty safe.

Vs a Lord Commissar, with guide you would do 1.5 wounds per turn. A bit better, assuming they park their warlord in line of sight of your snipers.

Also, this doesn't take into account CP rerolls for armour saves, and as we know Imperial Guard have CP for days. They're the only army that can reliably reroll a dice each turn, as well as use multiple other strategems.

It does seem like the entire strategem mechanic was designed solely for Imperial Guard.

1.5 a turn on a Commisar? Pfft forget that. I wouldn't need to change deployment because of a few Ranger squads.

Your math doesn't include the '6' bonus Mortal Wound...but other than that, yes Rangers are pretty terrible.

As far as snipers go, there are three good options: rattling snipers for pure ppm efficiency, skitarii with their anti tank rifle, or the vindicare sniper. The former is a good all round choice, can be taken in bulk. The second is good for weaker characters with low to non existent invulnerable saves. The last is mainly useful on models with high invulnerable saves you will need to kill over multiple turns regardless, such as grandpapa smurf.

All of this is a huge tangent though.

 Elbows wrote:
Your math doesn't include the '6' bonus Mortal Wound...but other than that, yes Rangers are pretty terrible.

I'm willing to bet a nice chunk of money that the amount of mortal wounds caused barely makes the shooting shorter by a round.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
Your math doesn't include the '6' bonus Mortal Wound...but other than that, yes Rangers are pretty terrible.

I'm willing to bet a nice chunk of money that the amount of mortal wounds caused barely makes the shooting shorter by a round.

You would lose a nice chunk of money then. That bonus doubles the wounds against a SM captain.

 Elbows wrote:
Your math doesn't include the '6' bonus Mortal Wound...but other than that, yes Rangers are pretty terrible.

Actually, it does. You only get a mortal wound on a wound roll of 6, so you'll only get 1 mortal wound every 9 shots fired. So you'll get 1 bonus wound every two turns of firing, if you only have 5 rangers.

Unfortunatly rangers are by far the best troops choice for Eldar. But yeh, they're terrible.

Snipers need a huge buff in general, considering how powerful characters are right now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Spoletta wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
Your math doesn't include the '6' bonus Mortal Wound...but other than that, yes Rangers are pretty terrible.

I'm willing to bet a nice chunk of money that the amount of mortal wounds caused barely makes the shooting shorter by a round.

You would lose a nice chunk of money then. That bonus doubles the wounds against a SM captain.

Umm, nope? Sorry, Spoletta, you owe Slayer a chunk of money. It doesn't double wounds against a SM captain. Every 9 shots you fire, which would normally be 1.7 unsaved wounds, you instead get 2.7 unsaved wounds. It's like a 60% increase, so it's not nothing, but it's nowhere near double.

Edit: Edited for correct maths, I still had the commissar stats written down instead of the captain. Which is a shame, because snipers almost seemed useful for a second there.

Hmmm?

9 fire at BS 3+ results in 6 hits.
4+ to wound results in 3 wounds and one mortal wound.
3+ armour save results in 1 failed save.
So the mortal wounds result in a 100% damage increase.

Its also terrible - about 30 points of value (on an ungeared Captain I think) for 180 points. 16% expected return is bad.

Tyel wrote:
Hmmm?

9 fire at BS 3+ results in 6 hits.
4+ to wound results in 3 wounds and one mortal wound.
3+ armour save results in 1 failed save.
So the mortal wounds result in a 100% damage increase.

Its also terrible - about 30 points of value (on an ungeared Captain I think) for 180 points. 16% expected return is bad.

Actually, you're right. For some reason the mathhammer site is giving me 6 hits, but 4.5 wounds, when it should clearly be only 3 wounds. I don't know why, I have the S and T input correctly.

Actually, no, I was using Guide in my example thats why the stats were off. I forgot about that. Guide boosts your base damage, without effecting the mortal wounds part.

Still, even with guide they're not very good, but still the best we have. I actually would love to run a couple units of 5 rangers, but they don't seem capable of actually killing characters. And even against normal troops, 10 rangers will only kill 2 space marines per turn, and so won't actually make their points back over an entire game of shooting.

20x.666x.17=2.26 mortal wounds without wound rerolls, Sooo, an additional 1.13 with rerolls. So 3.39 mortal wounds from 20 of them, in addition to 9.99 saveable wounds. Don't know what the armor of the target is, regardless I would just commit to it.

Didn't realize theyre 20 points per though.

If anything, the "Ordering Conscripts on 4+" isn't as much a fix, but just adds even more potential for swinginess to a game. There's a fine line between rolling 20 dice or rolling 40 dice, and reducing it to a coinflip leads to "roulette" scenarios. The same way D was "fair" because it only went off on 6s, or that Daemon Warp Storms were "fair" because you only had a 1 in 36 chance of rolling to lose half your army to Instability!

The real issue is not that Conscripts are a better DPS inflicting screen than Horrors, so much that its the units that they *are* screening are throwing down enough weight of dice to both blow through wound rolls/saves, as well as handle mass wounds.

 Purifier wrote:
They have to use their Warlord trait? That's not the case with other armies. In the AdMech book there is one list of generic traits for all admech, and then one list of WT you can only take on the corresponding forge world's leaders, but Cawl could opt not to take the Mars WT and instead take a generic one.

Every other codex has worked like that actually, and I'm 99% sure the AdMech codex is the same. You might want to check again in case you missed it (or to confirm that Cawl is a special snowflake when it comes to Warlord Traits)

I just checked the book myself, and Cawl has to take Static Psalm-Code. It's in the little paragraph directly above the table of FW-specific traits.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I am not a guard player. Nor I think is at least one other poster who I believe claimed the same thing.

I don't play Guard (sold my cadians a long time ago), but it was claimed that me being a Guard player is the only reason I could ever disagree with their irrational hysteria.

 Melissia wrote:
I don't play Guard (sold my cadians a long time ago), but it was claimed that me being a Guard player is the only reason I could ever disagree with their irrational hysteria.

You can claim irrational hysteria all you want, but you already tried that before and well... which unit ended up being in every winning imperial tournament list? Becoming a staple more omnipresent than anything else, from guilliman to plasma scions? That's right, it was conscripts! The unit you kept defending as balanced while accusing people of overreacting when they pointed out how broken they were.

Seriously, you really going to bring out the same non arguments, just to be proven wrong again? I would think it'd get old, calling people irrational then realizing they were 100% correct surely must make you feel at least a little embarrassed.

SilverAlien wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
I don't play Guard (sold my cadians a long time ago), but it was claimed that me being a Guard player is the only reason I could ever disagree with their irrational hysteria.

You can claim irrational hysteria all you want, but you already tried that before and well... which unit ended up being in every winning imperial tournament list? Becoming a staple more omnipresent than anything else, from guilliman to plasma scions? That's right, it was conscripts! The unit you kept defending as balanced while accusing people of overreacting when they pointed out how broken they were.

Seriously, you really going to bring out the same non arguments, just to be proven wrong again? I would think it'd get old, calling people irrational then realizing they were 100% correct surely must make you feel at least a little embarrassed.

But wouldn't Scions and Papa Smurf be also staples? I don' t think also he has said they are balanced either.

SilverAlien wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
I don't play Guard (sold my cadians a long time ago), but it was claimed that me being a Guard player is the only reason I could ever disagree with their irrational hysteria.

You can claim irrational hysteria all you want, but you already tried that before and well... which unit ended up being in every winning imperial tournament list? Becoming a staple more omnipresent than anything else, from guilliman to plasma scions? That's right, it was conscripts! The unit you kept defending as balanced while accusing people of overreacting when they pointed out how broken they were.

Seriously, you really going to bring out the same non arguments, just to be proven wrong again? I would think it'd get old, calling people irrational then realizing they were 100% correct surely must make you feel at least a little embarrassed.

You know what's nice to see though? Conscripts not getting nerfed a whole lot in response to said hysteria.

 NenkotaMoon wrote:

SilverAlien wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
I don't play Guard (sold my cadians a long time ago), but it was claimed that me being a Guard player is the only reason I could ever disagree with their irrational hysteria.

You can claim irrational hysteria all you want, but you already tried that before and well... which unit ended up being in every winning imperial tournament list? Becoming a staple more omnipresent than anything else, from guilliman to plasma scions? That's right, it was conscripts! The unit you kept defending as balanced while accusing people of overreacting when they pointed out how broken they were.

Seriously, you really going to bring out the same non arguments, just to be proven wrong again? I would think it'd get old, calling people irrational then realizing they were 100% correct surely must make you feel at least a little embarrassed.

But wouldn't Scions and Papa Smurf be also staples? I don' t think also he has said they are balanced either.

Scions sure are.

Guilliman is not the auto-include that either of those are for Imperium. I would never use Guilliman in my army, but i'm behind the curve not using conscripts and scions.

The probelm here.

Conscripts got a fine reduction in power. enough to make a difference, nothing outright destructive.

Is it enough? too soon to tell, maybe, maybe not.


HOWEVER, IG got many powerful buffs elsewhere, including some very powerful tactics, who (unless I missed something) apply to the conscripts.

So, it kina undid itself. and added IG domimance in other fields.

I'm feeling that unless CA nerfs IG a bit, or buffs the books before it, we'll either see a quick creep, or an IG dominate meta for a while.

 BoomWolf wrote:
The probelm here.

Conscripts got a fine reduction in power. enough to make a difference, nothing outright destructive.

Is it enough? too soon to tell, maybe, maybe not.


HOWEVER, IG got many powerful buffs elsewhere, including some very powerful tactics, who (unless I missed something) apply to the conscripts.

So, it kina undid itself. and added IG domimance in other fields.

I'm feeling that unless CA nerfs IG a bit, or buffs the books before it, we'll either see a quick creep, or an IG dominate meta for a while.

Not only are the IG tactics very powerful, but they also seem to have quite a few very strong strategems.

Now, some of the other armies so far have also had decent strategems, but the difference is that those armies will usually play with 6-9 CP's at most, and so can maybe use one or two strategems per turn for maybe 3 turns, before running out (assuming they're using an occasional 2CP strategem, which will burn through them a lot faster).

IG can easily go into a game with 15-20+ CP's, and burn through 3 or 4 stratagems each turn for the whole game. I think it will make a lot more difference than GW expects.

It looks like they balanced stratagems with the idea that most armies will have around the same number of command points. I suspect the guy in charge of stratagems plays Guard.

Having played at a doubles tournament recently that featured a few conscript blobs at low points values, I'm starting to think the orders nerf is at least..more interesting than it was before. In a 500-point doubles format, two players had one decent-sized conscript blob (I had 35, the other had a full 50) and one player had two 40-blobs (as well as two squads of plasma scions+prime).

I saw over the course of the day no less than three occasions where an order to conscripts won a game - one FRFSRF allowing me to wipe a unit off an objective, and 2 Move Move Moves letting a player swarm an objective with obsec.

On one hand, introducing unreliability of those wins would be good for the game's health big-picture. It's a drawback to conscripts that affects the game positively or negatively.

But at the same time, it's still a big swing. It's weird to see the game affected so heavily over a single die roll, and having that 4+ go off and send a wave of obsec bodies 12"+2D6" swarming through any holes in your defensive line to secure an objective on the last turn would still suck aggressively.

The most likely scenario if there is another nerf would be a points hike in chapter approved from 3 to 4, which may be the best we can hope for at this point. Balanced clumsily, to be fair, but at least balanced relatively. Removing their access to orders entirely would have likely been cleaner.

At least overall the armies with a significant chunk of their points in Conscripts only pulled a 3 - 2 - 2 WLD record, and still using the Index rules.

the_scotsman wrote:
Having played at a doubles tournament recently that featured a few conscript blobs at low points values, I'm starting to think the orders nerf is at least..more interesting than it was before. In a 500-point doubles format, two players had one decent-sized conscript blob (I had 35, the other had a full 50) and one player had two 40-blobs (as well as two squads of plasma scions+prime).

I saw over the course of the day no less than three occasions where an order to conscripts won a game - one FRFSRF allowing me to wipe a unit off an objective, and 2 Move Move Moves letting a player swarm an objective with obsec.

On one hand, introducing unreliability of those wins would be good for the game's health big-picture. It's a drawback to conscripts that affects the game positively or negatively.

But at the same time, it's still a big swing. It's weird to see the game affected so heavily over a single die roll, and having that 4+ go off and send a wave of obsec bodies 12"+2D6" swarming through any holes in your defensive line to secure an objective on the last turn would still suck aggressively.

The most likely scenario if there is another nerf would be a points hike in chapter approved from 3 to 4, which may be the best we can hope for at this point. Balanced clumsily, to be fair, but at least balanced relatively. Removing their access to orders entirely would have likely been cleaner.

At least overall the armies with a significant chunk of their points in Conscripts only pulled a 3 - 2 - 2 WLD record, and still using the Index rules.

Not that unreliable though, really. If the conscripts are in a position like that, where getting the order to them means they will overrun an objective or destroy an annoying enemy unit, then the IG player would just burn one of their many, many CP's on a reroll to make sure the order sticks. Makes the odds 75% of succeeding, which is not *quite* as good as a 2+, but it's better than a 3+.

Burning CPs is an attached cost though, even if said CPs were earned by the conscripts to begin with.
After all, if part of the issue is just how many CPs the Ig player has, making him waste a few on getting his conscripts to "probably" work like they used it-is a nerf.

As I said, its not huge, but its not small either. its a decent attempt that may or may not pan out.
Better than old GW balancing (total randomness), or blizzard balancing (it was OP? lets make it utterly unplayable instead)-you take it down a peg, but not all the way down, test the waters with the new level and if needed you adjust again.

 BoomWolf wrote:
Burning CPs is an attached cost though, even if said CPs were earned by the conscripts to begin with.
After all, if part of the issue is just how many CPs the Ig player has, making him waste a few on getting his conscripts to "probably" work like they used it-is a nerf.

As I said, its not huge, but its not small either. its a decent attempt that may or may not pan out.
Better than old GW balancing (total randomness), or blizzard balancing (it was OP? lets make it utterly unplayable instead)-you take it down a peg, but not all the way down, test the waters with the new level and if needed you adjust again.

And the ability to Send In The Next Wave. Nerf or buff? Then other stratagems that affect them, nerf or buff? And the Regimental buffs that affect them, nerf or buff? That's right, all buffs. Yes, buffs that everyone is getting, but Conscripts were doing GREAT right out of the index, and all in all, they're better from the Codex than from the Index.

 Purifier wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
Burning CPs is an attached cost though, even if said CPs were earned by the conscripts to begin with.
After all, if part of the issue is just how many CPs the Ig player has, making him waste a few on getting his conscripts to "probably" work like they used it-is a nerf.

As I said, its not huge, but its not small either. its a decent attempt that may or may not pan out.
Better than old GW balancing (total randomness), or blizzard balancing (it was OP? lets make it utterly unplayable instead)-you take it down a peg, but not all the way down, test the waters with the new level and if needed you adjust again.

And the ability to Send In The Next Wave. Nerf or buff? Then other stratagems that affect them, nerf or buff? And the Regimental buffs that affect them, nerf or buff? That's right, all buffs. Yes, buffs that everyone is getting, but Conscripts were doing GREAT right out of the index, and all in all, they're better from the Codex than from the Index.

Part of this is the generic problem with guard: An already stellar, well-performing army got a TON better across the board, and even the nerfs to the overused stuff aren't crippling and came with buffs (as you point out).

 NenkotaMoon wrote:
But wouldn't Scions and Papa Smurf be also staples? I don' t think also he has said they are balanced either.

Actually, I argued that Scions are more overpowered than Conscripts, simply for the sheer amount of disposable, deep-striking firepower you can put on the board with them. Get rid of conscripts and have players use just guardsmen and scions, and the scions will still pull just as much weight as before with their disposable plasmacide squads.

That's why the biggest fix from this book won't be the conscript nerf, IMO, but (from the rumors I heard) the increase in price of plasma to 7 points to 15 points per gun. Adding 16 points to every dual plasma squad, or 32 to each quad-plasma squad, can dramatically change lists. Assuming no other changes, a 77 point dual plasma scion squad with voxcaster becomes 93 points-- the same price as a tactical marine squad with plasma/combiplasma, a pretty dramatic increase, especially when you consider how many plasmacide squads are needed in order for plasma scion spam to work as well as it has been.

It's unfortunate if this raises the cost of plasmaguns for regular guardsmen, mind you, but at the same time, that's not a huge nerf to regular guardsmen as they serve other roles and are much cheaper.