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bouncingboredom wrote:


The problem with the fluff is that in it, everyone is amazing. The Imperial Guard are not just bog standard planetary defence forces; they're the elite creamed from a planet of billions. To compare to the fluff, it would be like if we gathered all of the worlds special forces and all of our elite infantry units, then chucked in the finest police officers, the roughest and toughest gangsters and career criminals, the best cage fighters and boxers, and the entire contents of most Division 1AA schools atheltic programs, then let all of them fight it out in a series of tests until we'd narrowed them down to just 650 or so candidates, who then represented us as the 1st Regiment of Earth.

No?

 Infantryman wrote:

bouncingboredom wrote:


The problem with the fluff is that in it, everyone is amazing. The Imperial Guard are not just bog standard planetary defence forces; they're the elite creamed from a planet of billions. To compare to the fluff, it would be like if we gathered all of the worlds special forces and all of our elite infantry units, then chucked in the finest police officers, the roughest and toughest gangsters and career criminals, the best cage fighters and boxers, and the entire contents of most Division 1AA schools atheltic programs, then let all of them fight it out in a series of tests until we'd narrowed them down to just 650 or so candidates, who then represented us as the 1st Regiment of Earth.

No?

Yes. The fluff is exactly like that sometimes. Which is also the issue. The fluff isnt consistent. Again, fluff should never = crunch.

The marine profile is too dated compared to everything else


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Eldar and guard got dusted off and we got more rerolls lol

I think marines and guardsmen are well balanced in points and durability, untill you factor in orders, regiments and chapter sheenanigans.

Guardsmen should probably be 5 ppm and marines 12 ppm. Maybe even 11 ppm. Marines are victims in 8th.

Martel732 wrote:
Guardsmen should probably be 5 ppm and marines 12 ppm. Maybe even 11 ppm. Marines are victims in 8th.

I agree about guardsmen but I think tac marines are fair at 13, maybe 12 could be ok as well, but 11 seems too cheap. There are at least 7-8 factions that are currently a lot weaker than marines.

I think game gives access to weapons with good AP a bit too easily than it should, which translates to units taking saves less often. Maybe.
Some units also have very high volume of fire or melee capability, meaning whoever gets first charge gets unit wiped. You can't make units cheaper until they wouldn't, since prices would just stop making any sense. But making game little less skewed into all offensive nuke them all before they nuke you would not hurt.

 Blackie wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Guardsmen should probably be 5 ppm and marines 12 ppm. Maybe even 11 ppm. Marines are victims in 8th.

I agree about guardsmen but I think tac marines are fair at 13, maybe 12 could be ok as well, but 11 seems too cheap. There are at least 7-8 factions that are currently a lot weaker than marines.

They are all index armies save the GK, and they are just more-marine marines. The marine scheme doesn't work at ALL in 8th. Cheaper is basically always better. No 4 point model should have a 5+ save. Period. And a 24" gun to boot.

The problem I've found going over the math on Marine prices is that they're pretty much fairly priced in a small-arms-only infantry environment. The way hull points turned killing vehicles into a matter of quantity of mid-power shots in 6th that led to new unit designs for three editions building around volume of mid/high-powered shots and the way vehicle/monster design in 8th has moved to mass wound counts and wildly swingy damage output is a bigger problem for Marines than anything else; it isn't that they're not tough enough compared to guardsmen, it's that the way 40k does vehicle damage means that cost/wound is vastly more relevant than the distinctions between T3/T4 and the difference between a 3+ and a 5+ against a huge chunk of weapons.

To my mind the easy solution is to declare the Primaris statline the new normal and move all Space Marines to it, but that doesn't really solve the problem because it only really helps against one-damage weapons. The solution that'll actually fix the problem is to delete vehicle squadrons and restrict all-tank armies, chop down shot count on cheap high-AP weapons, and rescale damage/Wounds such that one or two shots getting through can have a significant effect on a vehicle/monster so you don't need 8-10 lascannons (for instance) before they become reliable anti-tank weapons.

Or just make marines cheaper to reflect the reality of 8th ed.

 Blackie wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Guardsmen should probably be 5 ppm and marines 12 ppm. Maybe even 11 ppm. Marines are victims in 8th.

I agree about guardsmen but I think tac marines are fair at 13, maybe 12 could be ok as well, but 11 seems too cheap. There are at least 7-8 factions that are currently a lot weaker than marines.

Faction has nothing to do with it. I want power armor marines to be correctly costed just as much as I want howling banshees to be correctly costed. However in the time it takes to fix each unit, the eldar player can avoid the banshees a lot easier than a marine player can avoid running...yknow, actual marines.

I don't care if a codex has a boogeyman "flyrant" build, that doesn't justify other units sucking.

Martel732 wrote:
Or just make marines cheaper to reflect the reality of 8th ed.

...Do we really need to have the "death spiral of power creep" argument again? (In brief: Once you start making Space Marines cheaper you start making small arms worse, which means things like Guardians, Sisters, and Guardsmen become overpriced, which means you need to do something about them, and then heavier anti-infantry weapons become bad and need buffs, and you wander right back to where you started only infantry are no longer relevant to the game except to occupy space.)

Or, more briefly: Do you want to make Space Marines effective, or do you want to make them into Guardsmen?

It's not a spiral. Compared to a 9 point sister, a marine is only worth 11-12 points changing nothing else.

The stats on marines aren't changing. Price is all we have left.

Also, at this point, I'd take guardsmen in a heartbeat. Cheaper is always better in 8th. Quality is frankly irrelevant now. Every quality unit has an overcharge plasma gun with their name on it.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Or just make marines cheaper to reflect the reality of 8th ed.

...Do we really need to have the "death spiral of power creep" argument again? (In brief: Once you start making Space Marines cheaper you start making small arms worse, which means things like Guardians, Sisters, and Guardsmen become overpriced, which means you need to do something about them, and then heavier anti-infantry weapons become bad and need buffs, and you wander right back to where you started only infantry are no longer relevant to the game except to occupy space.)

Or, more briefly: Do you want to make Space Marines effective, or do you want to make them into Guardsmen?

This sounds like a textbook slippery slope fallacy. No one is wanting them to be so cheap that they are better hands down per point than other troops. They just want them to be comparable to other troops. And right now wound and body count are extremely better than toughness and save on a troop unit.

 niv-mizzet wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Guardsmen should probably be 5 ppm and marines 12 ppm. Maybe even 11 ppm. Marines are victims in 8th.

I agree about guardsmen but I think tac marines are fair at 13, maybe 12 could be ok as well, but 11 seems too cheap. There are at least 7-8 factions that are currently a lot weaker than marines.

Faction has nothing to do with it. I want power armor marines to be correctly costed just as much as I want howling banshees to be correctly costed. However in the time it takes to fix each unit, the eldar player can avoid the banshees a lot easier than a marine player can avoid running...yknow, actual marines.

I don't care if a codex has a boogeyman "flyrant" build, that doesn't justify other units sucking.

Hey the Flyrant comparisons are taking off!

Martel732 wrote:
It's not a spiral. Compared to a 9 point sister, a marine is only worth 11-12 points changing nothing else.

The stats on marines aren't changing. Price is all we have left.

It's a play environment problem. Futzing with tiny details about how Space Marines work isn't going to change the basic problem of the increasing irrelevance of infantry in the face of ever-bigger models and ever-fewer barriers to prevent people from running armies entirely composed of ever-bigger models.

The Space Marine isn't the problem with Space Marines. The design philosophy behind the Leman Russ, the Ghostkeel, the Dark Reaper, and the Baneblade, the assumption that we need volume of AP-2 and better firepower to deal with easily-available heavy armour and that it should be made cheaply/easily available as a result is the problem.

Tactical Marines in 30k aren't an irrelevant waste of space, not because they're dramatically cheaper or tougher than 40k Marines, but because they exist in an environment where the big guns are appropriately costed and not easily spammable, and where the scenario rules and army composition are controlled such that large Tactical squads are strong objective holders and can generally rely on having good targets in most games.

40K marines need to be costed for the reality you just described. It's that simple. Other troops should frankly be terrified of marines anyway, as that seems to be marines' "thing". We don't even get our tactics on our non-troops, so by that line of reasoning, marines should have the best troops far and away.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
It's not a spiral. Compared to a 9 point sister, a marine is only worth 11-12 points changing nothing else.

The stats on marines aren't changing. Price is all we have left.

It's a play environment problem. Futzing with tiny details about how Space Marines work isn't going to change the basic problem of the increasing irrelevance of infantry in the face of ever-bigger models and ever-fewer barriers to prevent people from running armies entirely composed of ever-bigger models.

The Space Marine isn't the problem with Space Marines. The design philosophy behind the Leman Russ, the Ghostkeel, the Dark Reaper, and the Baneblade, the assumption that we need volume of AP-2 and better firepower to deal with easily-available heavy armour and that it should be made cheaply/easily available as a result is the problem.

Tactical Marines in 30k aren't an irrelevant waste of space, not because they're dramatically cheaper or tougher than 40k Marines, but because they exist in an environment where the big guns are appropriately costed and not easily spammable, and where the scenario rules and army composition are controlled such that large Tactical squads are strong objective holders and can generally rely on having good targets in most games.

I've never seen more than maybe a couple of people want to take the basic Marine in 30k. Hell, in the short time I played it, I avoided it altogether by using Word Bearers with Ashen Circle as the troops. Worked pretty decently.

Martel732 wrote:
40K marines need to be costed for the reality you just described. It's that simple. Other troops should frankly be terrified of marines anyway, as that seems to be marines' "thing". We don't even get our tactics on our non-troops, so by that line of reasoning, marines should have the best troops far and away.

...My assertion is that Tactical Marines cannot be costed for the 8e heavy-weapon-spam meta. There is no price at which a Tactical Marine will be 'durable'. The statline required to make a Tactical Marine 'durable' would have wonky ripples across the entire infantry space that would do things like make Guardsmen a worse problem than they are. The solution to the problem you guys are describing is to do something about the heavy-weapon-spam meta.

It's much easier to make marines cheaper in response to the heavy weapon meta. That's likely never going away. Hell, admech's big trick is 72 S6 -2 AP shots from a handful of robots.

Martel732 wrote:
It's much easier to make marines cheaper in response to the heavy weapon meta. That's likely never going away. Hell, admech's big trick is 72 S6 -2 AP shots from a handful of robots.

Yeehah. It's easier. And it doesn't solve the problem. Making every Grey Knight unit a point cheaper each is easier than overhauling the psychic system. It'd also fix none of the actual problems with the army.

Looking through this and other posts on balancing marines, majority of arguments against improving baseline marines generally fall under the categories of:

1. Stop crying about how marines aren't as elite as they're reflected in the fluff.
2. Marines can't be made cheaper because they will be overpowered.
3. Fixing marines aren't going to fix anything in the game because you're only talking about small arms fire.
4. Reducing price of marines will cause a spiral effect for the entire game, where it'll begin to break the game as a whole.

Here's the counter argument for the general comments above:

1. The fix isn't about making marines so good that it overshadows all other troops out there. Currently marines are the least efficient-per-point (henceforth EPP), with no options to pay to improve their roles - because lets face it - cheap chaff infantry blob pays for more bodies to make it a better cheap, chaff infantry blob. You pay more for extra marines and you get... a bigger liability and bigger point sink.
2. Folks at 3++ ran some interesting math. The point is, marines even at 11 ppm still performs very slightly worse than guardsmen in wounds-per-point and durability-per-point.
3. Exactly. Making marines cheaper or more durable will do NOTHING in terms of improving chances of losing/winning games. Even if they're cheaper or more durable, they won't be able to all of a sudden kill things they weren't able to before, nor will they be able to stay exorbitantly longer on the table.
4. No. No it won't. Making marines cheaper by a few points or giving it +1W is not going break the game. What was gamebreaking was the free transports in decurions.

This isn't about what's right. It's about what's fair.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
It's much easier to make marines cheaper in response to the heavy weapon meta. That's likely never going away. Hell, admech's big trick is 72 S6 -2 AP shots from a handful of robots.

Yeehah. It's easier. And it doesn't solve the problem. Making every Grey Knight unit a point cheaper each is easier than overhauling the psychic system. It'd also fix none of the actual problems with the army.

Actually it does. There is a price point at which every unit is neither an autotake nor an autoskip.

And although I hate to make this another "nerf AM" comment, but no army in the game can spam special & heavy weapons AND have the most bodies on the table other than AM, with the cheapest, most spammable force multipliers.

Actually on a second thought, take AM out of these equations and everything starts to even out.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
40K marines need to be costed for the reality you just described. It's that simple. Other troops should frankly be terrified of marines anyway, as that seems to be marines' "thing". We don't even get our tactics on our non-troops, so by that line of reasoning, marines should have the best troops far and away.

...My assertion is that Tactical Marines cannot be costed for the 8e heavy-weapon-spam meta. There is no price at which a Tactical Marine will be 'durable'. The statline required to make a Tactical Marine 'durable' would have wonky ripples across the entire infantry space that would do things like make Guardsmen a worse problem than they are. The solution to the problem you guys are describing is to do something about the heavy-weapon-spam meta.

They're not even that durable to small arms though.

 skchsan wrote:
Looking through this and other posts on balancing marines, majority of arguments against improving baseline marines generally fall under the categories of:

1. Stop crying about how marines aren't as elite as they're reflected in the fluff.
2. Marines can't be made cheaper because they will be overpowered.
3. Fixing marines aren't going to fix anything in the game because you're only talking about small arms fire.
4. Reducing price of marines will cause a spiral effect for the entire game, where it'll begin to break the game as a whole.

Here's the counter argument for the general comments above:

1. The fix isn't about making marines so good that it overshadows all other troops out there. Currently marines are the least efficient-per-point (henceforth EPP), with no options to pay to improve their roles - because lets face it - cheap chaff infantry blob pays for more bodies to make it a better cheap, chaff infantry blob. You pay more for extra marines and you get... a bigger liability and bigger point sink.
2. Folks at 3++ ran some interesting math. The point is, marines even at 11 ppm still performs very slightly worse than guardsmen in wounds-per-point and durability-per-point.
3. Exactly. Making marines cheaper or more durable will do NOTHING in terms of improving chances of losing/winning games. Even if they're cheaper or more durable, they won't be able to all of a sudden kill things they weren't able to before, nor will they be able to stay exorbitantly longer on the table.
4. No. No it won't. Making marines cheaper by a few points or giving it +1W is not going break the game. What was gamebreaking was the free transports in decurions.

This isn't about what's right. It's about what's fair.

Counter-counterpoints:

1: Yeah. I agree. Marines aren't as elite as they're reflected in the fluff. My assertion is that nothing about Marine stats makes them that way. Put them in an infantry fight and they are as elite as they are in the fluff, put them up against a weapon that makes the same set of rolls to kill a Marine as a Guardsmen and they're a waste of time. Repointing Marines doesn't make them more elite, it makes them into Guardsmen.

2: Marines at 13pts perform better than any other Troops unit in the game in a straight-up fight between Troops units with small arms, according to my math. Using the work 3++ did to say that 11pt Marines are still worse than Guardsmen involves accepting a play environment in which infantry are functionally irrelevant. It's a short fix. It doesn't make Marines feel or play better. It doesn't make Marines worth taking. It doesn't solve the problems we're actually trying to solve.

3: Yes. It won't improve the game. There are other things you could do that would. Therefore starting endless arguments about how Marines are the problem with Marines rather than trying to address the actual problem with Marines is sort of a pointless exercise.

4: Reducing the price of Marines won't cause a spiral effect that'll break the game. Reducing the price of Marines will cause a spiral effect that will break the role of infantry in the game, because the problems with Marines are also problems with every infantry unit that doesn't come in 30-man blobs for <200pts. The problem with Marines is the same problem Guardians, Fire Warriors, Dark Eldar Warriors, Battle Sisters, Sisters of Silence, Skitarii, Inquisitorial Henchmen, Chaos Marines, Lesser Daemons, and plenty of others are suffering from, it isn't unique to them. Trying to make medium infantry more effective by instituting a blanket points drop for medium infantry isn't going to change the fact that medium infantry units are too easily wrecked by the endless power creep in gun size. And if you declare "the price of the infantry is the problem", do that, then dust your hands off and walk off satisfied rather than trying to address the actual problem you're accepting that the problem is irreversible and infantry that cost more than 6-7pts and come in giant blobs are never going to be playable.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
It's much easier to make marines cheaper in response to the heavy weapon meta. That's likely never going away. Hell, admech's big trick is 72 S6 -2 AP shots from a handful of robots.

Yeehah. It's easier. And it doesn't solve the problem. Making every Grey Knight unit a point cheaper each is easier than overhauling the psychic system. It'd also fix none of the actual problems with the army.

Actually it does. There is a price point at which every unit is neither an autotake nor an autoskip.

Yes. Marines could be Guardsmen. Is that the game you want to play? You could make all single-wound infantry do the same set of things. Is the problem that Marines don't live up to our expectations of what Marines should do, or that Marines aren't Guardsmen?

We are limiting ourselves to what GW is realistically going to do. At least, I am. Yes, rewriting the game will fix it, too. The admech 72 S6 -2 shots aren't going anywhere. Price marines accordingly.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
40K marines need to be costed for the reality you just described. It's that simple. Other troops should frankly be terrified of marines anyway, as that seems to be marines' "thing". We don't even get our tactics on our non-troops, so by that line of reasoning, marines should have the best troops far and away.

...My assertion is that Tactical Marines cannot be costed for the 8e heavy-weapon-spam meta. There is no price at which a Tactical Marine will be 'durable'. The statline required to make a Tactical Marine 'durable' would have wonky ripples across the entire infantry space that would do things like make Guardsmen a worse problem than they are. The solution to the problem you guys are describing is to do something about the heavy-weapon-spam meta.

They're not even that durable to small arms though.

So what I'm hearing is that I need to keep the spreadsheets around, because every time you say something like that I redo the math to point out that Marines win every firefight between Troops units with small arms handily (point for point) and you forget about it five minutes later.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
We are limiting ourselves to what GW is realistically going to do. At least, I am. Yes, rewriting the game will fix it, too. The admech 72 S6 -2 shots aren't going anywhere. Price marines accordingly.

THIS IS PROPOSED RULES. If you want to "limit yourself to what GW is going to do" please go to the section of the forums that isn't entirely about doing things GW isn't going to do.

I guess. But even then, I'd try price drops for power armor units first.

It's not worth the effort to post 10 pages of homebrew to fix something that can mostly fixed by changing "13" to "11".

Martel732 wrote:
I guess. But even then, I'd try price drops for power armor units first.

It's not worth the effort to post 10 pages of homebrew to fix something that can mostly fixed by changing "13" to "11".

So again. It isn't worth the effort of fixing the problem because you could make a one-digit change that doesn't fix the problem?

Tell you what. Drop Tac Marines to 11pts. Go play a game against an army with thirty Dark Reapers in it. Then come back and tell me you've "fixed the problem".