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 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Any changes to Soup lists (and strategems) would it force smaller points games, not larger and that doesent sound very GW to me.

If there's a problem with Strategems, it's in command point saturation that some armies get while others don't. Fix that. Reward mono lists, don't punish mixed ones.

I think the 3 freebie Battleforged CP should be for mono only. Then soup armies will have to be a little more conservative. And if you're doing brigades anyway, then congrats for buying so much.

I'm personally a fan of inverting the CP system.
You start with a bigger number of CP (say 9) and each detachment reduces the amount you have available.
So you have smaller elite armies with more tricks up their sleeve or big armies that rely more on the amount of units they bring.

Instead of the current system that rewards more bodies with more tricks

 Ordana wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Any changes to Soup lists (and strategems) would it force smaller points games, not larger and that doesent sound very GW to me.

If there's a problem with Strategems, it's in command point saturation that some armies get while others don't. Fix that. Reward mono lists, don't punish mixed ones.

I think the 3 freebie Battleforged CP should be for mono only. Then soup armies will have to be a little more conservative. And if you're doing brigades anyway, then congrats for buying so much.

I'm personally a fan of inverting the CP system.
You start with a bigger number of CP (say 9) and each detachment reduces the amount you have available.
So you have smaller elite armies with more tricks up their sleeve or big armies that rely more on the amount of units they bring.

Instead of the current system that rewards more bodies with more tricks

That's honestly not a terrible idea. Armies that use the battalion and brigade detachments would benefit from this and probably also cut down on the spam of one unit. This could work granted the detachments are tweaked a bit to encourage variety.

 Ordana wrote:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Any changes to Soup lists (and strategems) would it force smaller points games, not larger and that doesent sound very GW to me.

If there's a problem with Strategems, it's in command point saturation that some armies get while others don't. Fix that. Reward mono lists, don't punish mixed ones.

I think the 3 freebie Battleforged CP should be for mono only. Then soup armies will have to be a little more conservative. And if you're doing brigades anyway, then congrats for buying so much.

I'm personally a fan of inverting the CP system.
You start with a bigger number of CP (say 9) and each detachment reduces the amount you have available.
So you have smaller elite armies with more tricks up their sleeve or big armies that rely more on the amount of units they bring.

Instead of the current system that rewards more bodies with more tricks

With some work that is the BEST idea I have seen for CP's

Yeah, I don't really like the idea of stacking CP from multiple detachments. It favors hoards too much.

The more I think about it the more recersed CP works, hordes have the adavantage of large numbers, where as elites would have the advantage of more CP, emphasising their elite role.

The units would be the same units but would be more tacitcaly flexible with more access to CP.

This would mean that a baseline of CP would need to be established, would it start at 15/20? And decrease from there, horde armies would find it difficult to abuse it too, even their big stuff is usually very cheap.

9 is honestly the most I'd ever want to see on the table. Any more, and the idea of stratagems having a cost is lost entirely.

9 seems fair, with Batallions reducing less than things like Vanguard and Spearheads, but a Brigade reducing less than two batallions.

Say, -2 for a Batallion, -3 for the specialty ones and a Brigade.

I would also put a LoW slot into a Batallion and a Brigade.

 Fafnir wrote:
9 is honestly the most I'd ever want to see on the table. Any more, and the idea of stratagems having a cost is lost entirely.

Agree. We recently had a campaign where you could earn CP for the final battle. In that last battle me and my ally had 20 CP available for 4000 points of Black Legion and Death Guard. We pretty much just used all the stratagems all the time and still didn't manage to use all.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:
9 is honestly the most I'd ever want to see on the table. Any more, and the idea of stratagems having a cost is lost entirely.

Agree. We recently had a campaign where you could earn CP for the final battle. In that last battle me and my ally had 20 CP available for 4000 points of Black Legion and Death Guard. We pretty much just used all the stratagems all the time and still didn't manage to use all.

What charmed dice rolls do you have that you can't use 20CP?

I played a 2k game of Nids vs Tau the other day and burned through 8 of my 12cp by turn 2.

First of all I had a Tallyman, so those 20 were more like 26 CP.

Second, most good DG and CSM stratagems are just 1 CP, the only one that costs more than 1 CP we used regularly was Tide of Traitors. Fury of Khorne was only used once, since none of the Khorne Berzerkers or Daemon Princes managed to reach combat before being blown to smithereens.

Third, the game ended in after Turn 3 when our side reached the enemy gunline.

I'm not a fan of inverting CPs instead. If you go with multiple detachment you're already paying points for some "tax units" in most of the cases. Using a brigade means you must throw some elites, troops, HQs, FA, etc that you may don't want but you're willing to accept in order to get more CPs, that's a fair trade. Generally speaking I'd always favor hordes or large forces instead of small elite armies. Especially those ones that rely on superheroes, which I'd like to see very rarely

Otherwise elite armies can bring a single detachment and earn tons of CPs which can make the army too powerful if their strategem are good enough. And I absolutely hate highlanders and superheroes

Inverting CPs could work for soups though: you just need to select a main faction and gain CPs with detachments of that faction, you lose CP with allied detachments. For example if you bring a SM battallion you get +3CPs and if you ally an AM spearhead you lose 1CP. Units from different books shouldn't be allowed in the same detachment.

I think you misunderstood the idea, Blackie.

Assuming you start at 12 CP, a brigade would be 0 CP, so filling up a brigade would reward you with maximum CP.
A battalion would be -3, vanguard, spearhead, outrider or supreme command would be -4, and so on.
(numbers made up, just to show that 3+1 detachment reward less points than a battalion)

This would encourage fielding as much as possible of your army in as little detachments as possible - right now, you pretty much always want as many detachments as you can get without.
It would also remove those cheap CP generator detachments from AM and daemons people are using now.

Ok, I got it now. But it's not very different from the current system. With the cap of max 3 detachments per list even those cheap CP generator detachment are not really an issue.

Undercosted units should be priced appropriately.

I'm in favor of bringing multiple detachments without getting too many drawbacks. Orks cool heavy support units for example are too many for a single detachment, including a brigade, so if you bring a battallion and a spearhead you

At the rate we're going, the change I'm starting to expect to see is the release date - to April

 Jidmah wrote:
I think you misunderstood the idea, Blackie.

Assuming you start at 12 CP, a brigade would be 0 CP, so filling up a brigade would reward you with maximum CP.
A battalion would be -3, vanguard, spearhead, outrider or supreme command would be -4, and so on.
(numbers made up, just to show that 3+1 detachment reward less points than a battalion)

This would encourage fielding as much as possible of your army in as little detachments as possible - right now, you pretty much always want as many detachments as you can get without.
It would also remove those cheap CP generator detachments from AM and daemons people are using now.

As a GK player there is no way that I can field a usable Brigade at 2000 points. And I'm pretty sure that there are a couple of other codex armies that are in the same position. So what am I to do? Lose CPs or field sub sub-optimal units to stretch to the brigade.

 Dysartes wrote:
At the rate we're going, the change I'm starting to expect to see is the release date - to April

Why? Next weekend is Adepticon. Then they have another week to release it before hitting April.

GW is caring more about tournaments (as seen by Warhammer TV reporting on the major ones) so it makes sense for them to take them into account when they release changes.

Xachariah wrote:
Obviously they just need let Xenos be a faction keyword.

Let space marine players use Celestine. I'll be deep striking in my Monolith and unloading 30 boyz while my Fire Warriors cap objectives.

Lol that would be.... Entertaining.

This summarises the problem with soup nicely.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
I think you misunderstood the idea, Blackie.

Assuming you start at 12 CP, a brigade would be 0 CP, so filling up a brigade would reward you with maximum CP.
A battalion would be -3, vanguard, spearhead, outrider or supreme command would be -4, and so on.
(numbers made up, just to show that 3+1 detachment reward less points than a battalion)

This would encourage fielding as much as possible of your army in as little detachments as possible - right now, you pretty much always want as many detachments as you can get without.
It would also remove those cheap CP generator detachments from AM and daemons people are using now.

As a GK player there is no way that I can field a usable Brigade at 2000 points. And I'm pretty sure that there are a couple of other codex armies that are in the same position. So what am I to do? Lose CPs or field sub sub-optimal units to stretch to the brigade.

Wouldn;t that be one of the advatages of being an non elite army - you can easily field a Brigade whilst more Elite armies like your Grey Knights or my Sisters have more difficulty?

I interpreted the statement to be that the default CPs would be given for a brigade and then all of the other detachments would penalize your CP total. In the list above as a GK player I can only reasonably build a battalion and therefore would lose 3 CPs leaving me only a total starting CP of 9.

 Jidmah wrote:
I think you misunderstood the idea, Blackie.

Assuming you start at 12 CP, a brigade would be 0 CP, so filling up a brigade would reward you with maximum CP.
A battalion would be -3, vanguard, spearhead, outrider or supreme command would be -4, and so on.
(numbers made up, just to show that 3+1 detachment reward less points than a battalion)

This would encourage fielding as much as possible of your army in as little detachments as possible - right now, you pretty much always want as many detachments as you can get without.
It would also remove those cheap CP generator detachments from AM and daemons people are using now.

Eh, that is not a very good solution, I feel. It punishes fluffy armies wanting a variety, like Tyrant's Legion / Macragge PDF equivalents (SM + IG), while doing nothing to curb OP spam (Eldar will just field 6 maximum sized units of Dark Reapers, Tau can still spam their gak, etc), or even to curb spam in general. Say, armies like IG can just abuse 3-tanks-in-1-slot clause to take small detachment supported by spam of max sized infantry units, Chaos has also multiple workarounds, all in all, I feel it would heavily penalize weak armies while 'good' ones can easily adapt around it...

In game design carrots tend to lead to more fun gameplay than sticks. Substractions are not fun

Pratically: add CP rather than substract from an arbitrary maximum. Maybe introduce a hard, soft, or indirect cap on them but don't penalize armies just because you don't like their structure, reward the structure you like. Matched play's rules of one scale badly upward( See GK and TS psychic troubles) and an arbitrary maximum on CP in the detachments would extend this problem to the entire game.

Also how is a balance change in the favor of cheap troops what we need now?

 Earth127 wrote:

In game design carrots tend to lead to more fun gameplay than sticks. Substractions are not fun

Pratically: add CP rather than substract from an arbitrary maximum. Maybe introduce a hard, soft, or indirect cap on them but don't penalize armies just because you don't like their structure, reward the structure you like.

Also how is a balance change in the favor of cheap troop what we need now?

Because some armies just need it to get away from the single build option that they seem to be rooted to now, a.k.a. every Space Marine army where scouts are the only real feasible troop choice.

But improving cheap troops only makes the current problem worse. Anny time you penalize something that isn't brigade or battailon you improve cheap troops and that is not what most amries need. quite the contrary in fact.

SM scouts vs tacticals is in many ways an internal more than en external balance issue. So it's a partially seperate thing.

But once again in general it's more fun to receive rewards than to be handed punishment. So don't go around substracting CP if you can achieve the same result by awarding it somewhere else.

Dionysodorus wrote:
Why not just price things such that they're decent options? Like, why do 11 point tacticals imply 13 point Rubrics? Why do they imply 7 point Sisters?

Why should tacticals only pay two points for an increase to three stats plus a legion of special rules?

Maybe start actually using the entire marine statline more instead of standing around whining about how marines aren't eldar 24/7....

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
I interpreted the statement to be that the default CPs would be given for a brigade and then all of the other detachments would penalize your CP total. In the list above as a GK player I can only reasonably build a battalion and therefore would lose 3 CPs leaving me only a total starting CP of 9.

Sure, but that would still be 3 more than you have now, and the army that could easily field a brigade can no longer field two more cheap battalions for 18 cp. On the other hand, you could field a vanguard or spearhead solo and still have 8 CP.

The detachment most difficult to fill will always need to reward the most points, otherwise you might as well drop it from the game.

There's difficult and then there's, as a practicle matter, impossible. For GK it's impossible to get where almost anyone else can get.

Saying you're better off with this rather than where you were isn't necessarily true. Yes, I have 3 more CPs but how many more CPs do SMs gain? I've never faced an army with 12 CPs in my meta so everyone benefits the same and I'm no better off than before.

 Melissia wrote:

Dionysodorus wrote:
Why not just price things such that they're decent options? Like, why do 11 point tacticals imply 13 point Rubrics? Why do they imply 7 point Sisters?

Why should tacticals only pay two points for an increase to three stats plus a legion of special rules?

Maybe start actually using the entire marine statline more instead of standing around whining about how marines aren't eldar 24/7....

Well lets see..

The idea behind that statline is that you shoot the choppy ones and fight the shooty ones, because that's how that statline should work.. But it doesn't... You see your best weaponry is your gun. If you are outgunned you will have to move up the field on a basic infantry line's movement, while weathering fire to get up close.. And even then your melee skills aren't anything special and you don't have any actual benefit to melee since you are using a bog standard CCW.

Your gun isn't anything special either, but you at least get two shots within a closer range as a result and hopefully will deal more damage out, but the boltgun's effectiveness has dropped against some of it's former prime targets with the loss of AP, meaning it doesn't do very well against say.. a Horde of choppa wielding boyz.

So you have your entire marine statline that doesn't do anything special, doesn't help you in any way to use all of that statline, and thus your statline really only revolves around three to four things. BS, T, LD, And armour.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
[snip]

Sure it works.

First, you spend your movement phase getting marines in to range (walking, driving, flying, drop podding, whatever means you can).
Second, you spend your shooting phase shooting the enemy-- this is the easy part that you clearly already understand. Third, you spend the charge phase declaring and rolling for a charge (which is why you moved so much!). Fourth, you spend your Fight phase having your marines shank the enemy with their big knives.

Congratulations, you just utilized the entire marine statline in a single turn. And yes, I made it sound simple. That's because it pretty much is-- this isn't some hidden secret tricky strategy that takes decades to master, nor is it an automatic win button (which is what a lot of the more whiny players on Dakka appear to want).

Rather, it's the nature of the game that, when you're relying on random dice and working against the strategies of another player, your strategies won't always work. This is true whether or not you're going to be attempting to hide and turtle and pretend you're playing a pure shooty army, or playing utilizing the whole statline. However, the latter will result in you getting your points worth out of the army, and the former just makes it look like you wish you were playing Tau or Eldar and resenting the fact that marines are, in fact, neither Tau nor Eldar.

 Melissia wrote:

Dionysodorus wrote:
Why not just price things such that they're decent options? Like, why do 11 point tacticals imply 13 point Rubrics? Why do they imply 7 point Sisters?

Why should tacticals only pay two points for an increase to three stats plus a legion of special rules?

Maybe start actually using the entire marine statline more instead of standing around whining about how marines aren't eldar 24/7....

This isn't an argument. Tacticals should plausibly "only pay two points for an increase to three stats plus a legion of special rules" because that's plausibly what those stats and rules are worth on tactical marines. Do you disagree? Why do you think those benefits are worth 4 points? I feel like the burden is clearly on people saying that tacticals are basically fine, since we can just look around and see that, empirically, tacticals don't seem to be in a great place.

But I'm not really sure where you're coming from on this -- it would help me if you could give me some more detail about why you find this so wrongheaded. Like, what is almost everyone doing wrong with tacticals that they could fix so as to better use their whole statline? I don't really play Marines but looking over what they've got I don't really see great options for getting lots of CC attacks out of them. Their total package seems to want you to hug cover too -- you probably don't want to be advancing up the board with them so as to eventually charge the enemy on turn 3 or 4.

Just doing some back of the envelope math also seems to suggest that the stat increases alone aren't worth anywhere near 4 points over Sisters. Obviously tacticals shoot only just as well as Sisters. In CC they're somewhere between 1.33x as good (vs T5, T8) and 2.67x as good (vs T2 and T6-7), and will more commonly be something like 1.77x to 2x as good (vs T3 or T4). Defensively they're somewhere between no better (vs S5, S8) and 2x as resilient (vs S2). The "no better" case occurs pretty often (heavy bolters, anti-tank weapons) but they're also commonly going to be 1.5x to 1.33x as durable vs S3 and S4. Okay, so let's say that tacticals are all-around about 1.33x as durable as Sisters, sort of averaging over all the things they're likely to get hit with. Obviously getting some single number for offense does depend how highly we rate their CC ability. It's worth noting that even if we assume that they get to melee attack just as often as they get to fire (which is pretty ridiculous), tacticals are only doing about 17% more damage to T3 than Sisters (rapid firing then charging in for one CC attack) or 20% more to T4. So if we say that tacticals are 1.17x as kill-y as Sisters, all-in-all, then we can take this and our durability number and estimate that they should cost sqrt(1.33 * 1.17) = 1.25x what Sisters do, which would be 11.23 points. And, again, it's pretty clear that we're overestimating how much more kill-y they are, since typically you'll do a lot more shooting than melee attacking.

Obviously this is excluding this "legion of special rules", but I'm not really sure what you have in mind here. If you just mean Chapter Tactics, it's worth noting that no basic Troops have increased in price once gaining Tactics, and presumably Sisters will be getting these too. And of course Sisters have a 6++ and AoF, though neither will come into play that often on standard Sisters. They have different options, though here it's notable that Sisters' seem much better for actually trying to make use of WS and S; it's a lot easier to justify moving them up the board if you give them 3 storm bolters and keep them cheap, whereas Marines' options seem designed to keep them back in cover where they're very often getting hit with things that don't care about the difference between T3 and T4.

Since writing this I see you posted what you meant by making use of the whole statline, and it seems to be basically what I assumed for my napkin math offense calculation. Now, again, this seems like a silly view of the game -- you're obviously not doing this with tactical marines every turn, and on most turns they just want to shoot, and you also should be reluctant to move them out of cover since 3+ saves like cover so much -- but even if you say that this is what's happening you get that 11 points is pretty close to right.

 Melissia wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
[snip]

Sure it works.

First, you spend your movement phase getting marines in to range (walking, driving, flying, drop podding, whatever means you can).
Second, you spend your shooting phase shooting the enemy-- this is the easy part that you clearly already understand. Third, you spend the charge phase declaring and rolling for a charge (which is why you moved so much!). Fourth, you spend your Fight phase having your marines shank the enemy with their big knives.

Congratulations, you just utilized the entire marine statline in a single turn. And yes, I made it sound simple. That's because it pretty much is-- this isn't some hidden secret tricky strategy that takes decades to master, nor is it an automatic win button (which is what a lot of the more whiny players on Dakka appear to want).

Rather, it's the nature of the game that, when you're relying on random dice and working against the strategies of another player, your strategies won't always work. This is true whether or not you're going to be attempting to hide and turtle and pretend you're playing a pure shooty army, or playing utilizing the whole statline. However, the latter will result in you getting your points worth out of the army, and the former just makes it look like you wish you were playing Tau or Eldar and resenting the fact that marines are, in fact, neither Tau nor Eldar.

Congratulations on such a condescending post!

But lets put it bluntly.. You just utilized the statline yes! But did you actually do anything meaningful with it? Sure you could rush artillery at the enemy units to utilize their ability to "grind the enemy" beneath their treads, but that's not going to be very effective use for them is it? Since we aren't going to be adding new units in we'll just use the standard Tac marine. You have left cover to start walking towards the enemy shooting line, thus reverting to your standard MEQ armor save, you are shooting with your rapid fire weapons out of rapid fire distance, unless you desperately want to reach their lines faster and are advancing, thus losing access to your standard guns (with Special and Heavy as well). Now having survived the fire, you have chosen to charge the enemy! And successfully made it through overwatch and terrain, and now you and your S4, AP0, 1 attack combat knives are plinking away at the enemy in some vain hope that your standard attack will actually do some damage and make back some points before the enemy falls back.

Now you can utilize the MEQ line as such... But in most cases you'll be using them from cover while shooting with potentially a desperate charge to deny the enemy from charging something more valuable.