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sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Spoiler:

sieGermans wrote:
From a design perspective, you’d prefer to have a tiered perspective in every slot type: FA, Elite, HS, etc. This gets modulated based on how you want to reflect certain Faction flavor elements. (For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones).

You definitely shouldn't make a unit pricier or worse just because it doesn't fit into your view of how an army should operate. You can limit the amount of that unit can be included in an army, make the unit sizes small, one per Detachment, one per other choice, but making the unit worse is unfun, especially because GW balance is hit and miss. Sometimes they may be pushing a unit or trying to limit how good a unit is, other times they've just done a poor job at balancing. So you can't say Elites are tier 1 Necron Fast Attack are tier 3 without saying some Necron Elites are tier 0 and some are tier 2 and some Fast Attack are tier 2 and some are tier 4. It won't say on the box whether a unit is tier 1 or tier 4, when balancing pts the most amount of people should be able to have fun with their armies as possible.

And then there’s our Elite slot. This is a total mess—which is pretty poor from a Faction differentiation perspective. If the idea is that Necrons are an ‘elite’ army with fewer, better guys this would be the slot to push, along with the Heavy slot. Instead, the tiers seem to be: FOs, then Praetorians and Lychguard, then C’tans. For shooting we have... the Stalker with the antisynergy of being null dynasty. Where are the Elite shooting low range and midrange options? Why are the low and midrange melee options so expensive for such poor performance.

However! This reveals the reason why FOs further suffer. In the modern design criteria, they should really be Troops. Their statline is basically “Warrior, but CC instead of shooting...” but if you took them out of the Elite slot, what will fill its place?

This glut of midrange, overlapping role options is part of the problem Necrons have in general, and why we get pushed to the extremes of running 6Ark3Scythe, because we have too many options in one spot, and are too anemic elsewhere.

FOs are Elites because of fluff. Troops are Troops to incentivise building armies with units that don't do crazy stuff or at least they do less crazy stuff than the Elites, they may be more restricted in weapons they bring or be less elite. Our bad elites are bad because they cost too many pts, you are way overanalyzing this. Doomsday Arks are good because they are pts-effective. There is no secret sauce there, the rest of the codex is just relatively overcosted. Maybe people would run Flayed One bombs, you can add as many rules as you want but at the end of the day you just have to look at the value to cost ratio of different units and take the units that provide the most value to your list and playstyle. Instead of fiddling with giving units various abilities or changing their combat roles you should just change their pts and be done with it. Except when you have a problem with their gameplay, I don't think Monoliths are fun as-is, I don't think they evoke Necron technology when I've played with them, so I think their rules need to be changed. How does making Flayed Ones into Troops evoke more or a Necron feel, how is the gameplay better? Well it's better because some Dynasties use a lot of Flayed Ones, so changing them into Troops is a good idea from a thematic stand-point. Changing FOs to Troops to make them more viable outside of casual settings is a waste of time when you can just cut their pts to 15 and people might start to experiment with them competitively or 12 and people take them in moderate amounts or all the way down to 9 and bam people spam them.

One side note: it isn’t necessarily the case that Necrons are MEANT to be an Elite concept. It could be that the idea is Necrons are a relentless horde model. In this case then troops and Character or Machinery support would be the name of the game, and we need quite a few more options in these slots.

That would ruin the theme of the army. Fielding tonnes of similar models is a thing that I enjoy, at least in my Troops choices. If Deathmarks and Flayed Ones were Troops and fielded 2x5 Deathmarks, 2x5 Flayed, 1x20 Warriors, 1x10 Immortals that wouldn't be as satisfying to me as fielding 6x10 Immortals or 3x20 Warriors. Cool auxiliary options are cool, but the soulless core should remain an option. I don't see the need for a dozen more kinds of medium-range infantry or more Elite options. I really don't need any more Necrons models, maybe in 5 years I'd want something. For now, I'd like some more Character sculpts and a posable Transcendent C'tan with a couple of different heads and arms. What SM got with their 6 different kinds of Intercessors is not appealing to me. 6 different kinds of Crypteks would and maybe that just means I want Necrons to be pushed into a HQ direction instead of a Troops or Elites direction from your perspective an army having a slant. IMO the Necrons HQ slot isn't just relative to the rest of the slots, it's tiny, held up only by a very nice selection of unique units.

I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options.

You're overanalyzing some more here, GW are mostly just bad at balance and once in a while they sneak in an obvious or not so obvious buff or nerf to push new product. Consider the Imperium, they have the best chaff and the best Titanic units, Necrons having similarly diverse options would not hurt the game. Doomsday Arks might get relatively stronger with a chaff squad on the same tier as Infantry Squads, but the price would just have to be adjusted.

Describing the incredibly facile and overly simplistic run-down I gave as “OVER-analyzing” has undertones of Dunning-Kruger. Just because the outcome is poor doesn’t mean GW doesn’t put a lot of effort and thought into internally balancing these systems. I guarantee you I’m probably wrong 100 different ways, but it won’t be because I’ve analyzed it TOO deeply.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating: FOs are overcosted or underperforming for their cost and probably in the wrong force organization. And they have been for a while. And I am willing to provide a testable hypothesis: they will only be seriously re-tooled if/when they become available in plastic. I have 30 metal ones I’ve painted, ready to go, so hopefully I’m wrong!

Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

What is more simple, "GW is bad at balancing" or "I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options."

Why do you believe that GW are waiting to buff Flayed Ones for a plastic release? Obliterators got a new kit and then they were nerfed.

What is your proof of any of your theories? Why do you claim expertise on the subject of game balance and GW's corporate culture? From the rumours I've heard, GW has a truly terrible testing methodology (throw a bit of everything on the table and tell us how you feel about it). Have you tried balancing a codex? Why do you claim my assessment that the pts are just off to be flawed? I've written a fandex for Necrons that I used a couple of times, then I wrote another codex for Necrons I used several dozen times and iterated upon several times, I've also written and iterated upon half a dozen other fandexes for other factions. Pts is the ultimate decider, I don't care if you have a unit that has an ability that lets you win on a 2+, if it costs 2001 pts then you can't bring it to a 2k game.

I may have been ambiguous when I referred to tiers; that was referring to Quality assuming an equal application of points:effectiveness. I wasn’t referring to tier of competitiveness.

You said "For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones" so let's say Necrons are a ‘slow, plodding army’ and I want to give them as many FA options as HS options for some reason, I design Destroyers, Scarabs and Wraiths. Now I test them and find out they are worth 50, 13 and 50 pts, but you told me they need to have pricier Fast Attack options so I set their costs at 60, 20 and 60. Or do you mean to say that a ‘slow, plodding army’ should never have any fast cheap units like Scarabs? Now you talk of Quality, so do you instead mean Necrons should not have access to Wraiths and Destroyers because those are more elite or higher quality units?

 vict0988 wrote:

sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Spoiler:

sieGermans wrote:
From a design perspective, you’d prefer to have a tiered perspective in every slot type: FA, Elite, HS, etc. This gets modulated based on how you want to reflect certain Faction flavor elements. (For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones).

You definitely shouldn't make a unit pricier or worse just because it doesn't fit into your view of how an army should operate. You can limit the amount of that unit can be included in an army, make the unit sizes small, one per Detachment, one per other choice, but making the unit worse is unfun, especially because GW balance is hit and miss. Sometimes they may be pushing a unit or trying to limit how good a unit is, other times they've just done a poor job at balancing. So you can't say Elites are tier 1 Necron Fast Attack are tier 3 without saying some Necron Elites are tier 0 and some are tier 2 and some Fast Attack are tier 2 and some are tier 4. It won't say on the box whether a unit is tier 1 or tier 4, when balancing pts the most amount of people should be able to have fun with their armies as possible.

And then there’s our Elite slot. This is a total mess—which is pretty poor from a Faction differentiation perspective. If the idea is that Necrons are an ‘elite’ army with fewer, better guys this would be the slot to push, along with the Heavy slot. Instead, the tiers seem to be: FOs, then Praetorians and Lychguard, then C’tans. For shooting we have... the Stalker with the antisynergy of being null dynasty. Where are the Elite shooting low range and midrange options? Why are the low and midrange melee options so expensive for such poor performance.

However! This reveals the reason why FOs further suffer. In the modern design criteria, they should really be Troops. Their statline is basically “Warrior, but CC instead of shooting...” but if you took them out of the Elite slot, what will fill its place?

This glut of midrange, overlapping role options is part of the problem Necrons have in general, and why we get pushed to the extremes of running 6Ark3Scythe, because we have too many options in one spot, and are too anemic elsewhere.

FOs are Elites because of fluff. Troops are Troops to incentivise building armies with units that don't do crazy stuff or at least they do less crazy stuff than the Elites, they may be more restricted in weapons they bring or be less elite. Our bad elites are bad because they cost too many pts, you are way overanalyzing this. Doomsday Arks are good because they are pts-effective. There is no secret sauce there, the rest of the codex is just relatively overcosted. Maybe people would run Flayed One bombs, you can add as many rules as you want but at the end of the day you just have to look at the value to cost ratio of different units and take the units that provide the most value to your list and playstyle. Instead of fiddling with giving units various abilities or changing their combat roles you should just change their pts and be done with it. Except when you have a problem with their gameplay, I don't think Monoliths are fun as-is, I don't think they evoke Necron technology when I've played with them, so I think their rules need to be changed. How does making Flayed Ones into Troops evoke more or a Necron feel, how is the gameplay better? Well it's better because some Dynasties use a lot of Flayed Ones, so changing them into Troops is a good idea from a thematic stand-point. Changing FOs to Troops to make them more viable outside of casual settings is a waste of time when you can just cut their pts to 15 and people might start to experiment with them competitively or 12 and people take them in moderate amounts or all the way down to 9 and bam people spam them.

One side note: it isn’t necessarily the case that Necrons are MEANT to be an Elite concept. It could be that the idea is Necrons are a relentless horde model. In this case then troops and Character or Machinery support would be the name of the game, and we need quite a few more options in these slots.

That would ruin the theme of the army. Fielding tonnes of similar models is a thing that I enjoy, at least in my Troops choices. If Deathmarks and Flayed Ones were Troops and fielded 2x5 Deathmarks, 2x5 Flayed, 1x20 Warriors, 1x10 Immortals that wouldn't be as satisfying to me as fielding 6x10 Immortals or 3x20 Warriors. Cool auxiliary options are cool, but the soulless core should remain an option. I don't see the need for a dozen more kinds of medium-range infantry or more Elite options. I really don't need any more Necrons models, maybe in 5 years I'd want something. For now, I'd like some more Character sculpts and a posable Transcendent C'tan with a couple of different heads and arms. What SM got with their 6 different kinds of Intercessors is not appealing to me. 6 different kinds of Crypteks would and maybe that just means I want Necrons to be pushed into a HQ direction instead of a Troops or Elites direction from your perspective an army having a slant. IMO the Necrons HQ slot isn't just relative to the rest of the slots, it's tiny, held up only by a very nice selection of unique units.

I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options.

You're overanalyzing some more here, GW are mostly just bad at balance and once in a while they sneak in an obvious or not so obvious buff or nerf to push new product. Consider the Imperium, they have the best chaff and the best Titanic units, Necrons having similarly diverse options would not hurt the game. Doomsday Arks might get relatively stronger with a chaff squad on the same tier as Infantry Squads, but the price would just have to be adjusted.

Describing the incredibly facile and overly simplistic run-down I gave as “OVER-analyzing” has undertones of Dunning-Kruger. Just because the outcome is poor doesn’t mean GW doesn’t put a lot of effort and thought into internally balancing these systems. I guarantee you I’m probably wrong 100 different ways, but it won’t be because I’ve analyzed it TOO deeply.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating: FOs are overcosted or underperforming for their cost and probably in the wrong force organization. And they have been for a while. And I am willing to provide a testable hypothesis: they will only be seriously re-tooled if/when they become available in plastic. I have 30 metal ones I’ve painted, ready to go, so hopefully I’m wrong!

Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

What is more simple, "GW is bad at balancing" or "I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options."

Why do you believe that GW are waiting to buff Flayed Ones for a plastic release? Obliterators got a new kit and then they were nerfed.

What is your proof of any of your theories? Why do you claim expertise on the subject of game balance and GW's corporate culture? From the rumours I've heard, GW has a truly terrible testing methodology (throw a bit of everything on the table and tell us how you feel about it). Have you tried balancing a codex? Why do you claim my assessment that the pts are just off to be flawed? I've written a fandex for Necrons that I used a couple of times, then I wrote another codex for Necrons I used several dozen times and iterated upon several times, I've also written and iterated upon half a dozen other fandexes for other factions. Pts is the ultimate decider, I don't care if you have a unit that has an ability that lets you win on a 2+, if it costs 2001 pts then you can't bring it to a 2k game.

I may have been ambiguous when I referred to tiers; that was referring to Quality assuming an equal application of points:effectiveness. I wasn’t referring to tier of competitiveness.

You said "For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones" so let's say Necrons are a ‘slow, plodding army’ and I want to give them as many FA options as HS options for some reason, I design Destroyers, Scarabs and Wraiths. Now I test them and find out they are worth 50, 13 and 50 pts, but you told me they need to have pricier Fast Attack options so I set their costs at 60, 20 and 60. Or do you mean to say that a ‘slow, plodding army’ should never have any fast cheap units like Scarabs? Now you talk of Quality, so do you instead mean Necrons should not have access to Wraiths and Destroyers because those are more elite or higher quality units?

First of all, I’d really appreciate a more civil tone. I’m happy to be wrong, and I’d love to explore where and how, but it’s pretty hard when you adopt such a vicious stance. I get ‘this is the internet’ but we can do/be better.

Occams’s Razor is philosophically problematic. In practice it is difficult to be sure that you have reduced an argument to its simplest form for comparison. This is a trap you fall into here. You compared the following:

“GW is bad at balancing” to “GW made a mistake in design”

I think it is unlikely that an absolute and permanent assessment of capability is more correct than a performance assessment on a specific set of actions.

You ask why I thought GW is waiting for a plastic release before buffing FOs; which suggests my post was written poorly since that’s one thing I was talking about directly. Rather than repeat myself a second time, I’m happy to drop it. I would point out that my point wasn’t that it was a necessary precondition, but rather would be evidence to support the overall point.

You ask for “proof of my theories” and that’s what I was offering by providing testable hypotheses. Admittedly, they are Observation studies rather than Retrospective studies, but we get enough of the latter ad nauseam on these forums, and it’s a bit flawed anyway since there’s so many confounding variables between different editions, different writers, different design philosophies, etc.

You asked why I claim expertise and then proffer your own repeated excursions into the activity. I don’t have any expertise, so feel free to dismiss whatever you feel like on claim of authority. I’d suggest if you think an idea is worth examination, that can be true even without expertise. In a similar vein, however, I simply cannot accept the fact that you’ve written a bunch of (probably excellent!) proposed ruleset as sufficient expertise to be dismissive of conflicting discussion on the subject. I do really appreciate your excitement about the hobby and this faction though—it’s superfans like you who really support this game for the rest of us with quality extracurricular content, analysis, and help.

You raise a great clarification question around what I meant about balancing around a faction philosophy. I’m glad you asked, since this was what I was trying to describe in the first post, and clearly did so quite poorly, since this is now my third post!

When designing a Codex for Faction you have quite a few questions you need to answer first before you begin: Why should this Faction exist? How will it be different from the other factions that already exist?

The answer can be “it will only look different, but it’s rules will be identical to [another faction]”. For a while, some of the SM chapters were like this, even! It can work, but don’t expect too much excitement about it because people like Differentiation, and it is far more powerful to have deep differentiation than simply superficial.

If you have decided to make the Faction mechanically distinct, you next need to ask some fluffy questions to guide later decisions: How will the mechanics reflect the chosen areas of distinction you’ve chosen for this Faction? How will players be presented with options that make them feel engaged with the army’s flavor? How will opponents playing against this faction experience the mechanic distinction?

To answer these, you need to be rather robust in understanding the faction’s fluff: what does this faction care about? What does it oppose? What drives it? How does it solve problems? What does it excel at and wha does it do poorly? These are important, since they help you answer the former questions in a way which gives Mechanical Distinction.

With a game as mechanically dense as WH40K you thankfully have TONS of different knobs and levers you can pull to make these mechanic distinctions. At the model level, you can use relative changes in BS, Strength, and AP to demonstrate competence or incompetence. You can use Toughness and Saves to demonstrate resilience.

At the Faction level, however, you should have a coherent plan to reflect the Faction distinctions you set up earlier in the armies selection choices. If you have a “fast hit and run” faction and a “tough defensive” faction, it would be inappropriate to give them each all the exact same options at the same costs and availability.

This is where you suggested you can use selection restrictions to make these distinctions. Presumably you would either forbid or restrict how many bikers the defensive force could take and vice versa. This is definitely a good knob you can use! It’s also fairly realistic to our own human experience of opportunity costs in military investment.

But there are absolutely other tools at your disposal! Remember one of the questions: “What is this Faction good at? What is it bad at?” We didn’t give that level of detail in the fast/defensive example earlier (a good reason to make sure your faction philosophy design document is thorough—especially for larger design teams working collaboratively).

Let’s pretend the defensive faction, by virtue of focusing on “defending their homeland from raiding attacks” has invested in fortifications at the expense of R&D into other options, and so are bad at designing motorcycle engines or have inefficient antigrav tech. Here rather than giving both factions the same options at the same cost and merely saying the defensive army can only have fewer of them, you could instead reflect the worse tech as an inefficiency in the production of the same output, and increase the relative point cost for the same option for the defensive army. Or maybe they don’t have the same option at all, but for the same cost they have a weaker version. Or maybe they have the same costs and availability, but you make the drivers less experienced and worsen their WS and BS.

You can also reflect this phenomenon by designing in some more complexity: if you establish a baseline ratio of point:effectiveness, you can set up different bands (I’m avoiding using the term ‘tier’ here!) of Units, like: Cheap, Midrange, Powerful. So, cheaper and weaker units, more moderately costed and powerful units, and expensive powerful units. In an idealized case, with equal points, they would kill each other identically as quickly; but that’s unlikely.

So returning to the example, another permutation would be to give more Bands of options in the Fast Attack slot to the hit and run faction than to the Defensive faction. Or maybe not give any cheap or powerful options to the Defensive faction. Etc.

While you’re right that the point cost approach can be difficult. It’s one of the things people point to with frustration because players believe all like options should cost the same; but it’s simply not the case in a properly designed game with distinct factions. ALSO fair is to say it’s not the only tool either can you could try to design it without this option, but what a missed opportunity to reflect some deep flavor in the mechanics.

Sheesh. No if you have 2 units just as effective only noob game designer would make them cost differently based on fluff. Balance needed!

Number restrictions are better though for 40k scale also stupid and artificial. White scars can and do field slower units in numbers appropriate for 40k. Blood angels have enough defensive units to make gunline ba totally appropriate in 40k

Lol everyone pulling their A-level philosophy knowledge out to argue about bloody Flayed Ones.

tneva82 wrote:
Sheesh. No if you have 2 units just as effective only noob game designer would make them cost differently based on fluff. Balance needed!

Number restrictions are better though for 40k scale also stupid and artificial. White scars can and do field slower units in numbers appropriate for 40k. Blood angels have enough defensive units to make gunline ba totally appropriate in 40k

This is a totally valid game design approach. You may find that it fails to satisfy a player-base who want meaningful distinctions between factions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

IanVanCheese wrote:
Lol everyone pulling their A-level philosophy knowledge out to argue about bloody Flayed Ones.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing—or at least I hope not!

I think what we’re discussing are the underlying design mechanics upon which rest Flayed Ones along with a bunch of other phenomena we’ve been experiencing.

sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Spoiler:

sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

sieGermans wrote:
From a design perspective, you’d prefer to have a tiered perspective in every slot type: FA, Elite, HS, etc. This gets modulated based on how you want to reflect certain Faction flavor elements. (For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones).

You definitely shouldn't make a unit pricier or worse just because it doesn't fit into your view of how an army should operate. You can limit the amount of that unit can be included in an army, make the unit sizes small, one per Detachment, one per other choice, but making the unit worse is unfun, especially because GW balance is hit and miss. Sometimes they may be pushing a unit or trying to limit how good a unit is, other times they've just done a poor job at balancing. So you can't say Elites are tier 1 Necron Fast Attack are tier 3 without saying some Necron Elites are tier 0 and some are tier 2 and some Fast Attack are tier 2 and some are tier 4. It won't say on the box whether a unit is tier 1 or tier 4, when balancing pts the most amount of people should be able to have fun with their armies as possible.

And then there’s our Elite slot. This is a total mess—which is pretty poor from a Faction differentiation perspective. If the idea is that Necrons are an ‘elite’ army with fewer, better guys this would be the slot to push, along with the Heavy slot. Instead, the tiers seem to be: FOs, then Praetorians and Lychguard, then C’tans. For shooting we have... the Stalker with the antisynergy of being null dynasty. Where are the Elite shooting low range and midrange options? Why are the low and midrange melee options so expensive for such poor performance.

However! This reveals the reason why FOs further suffer. In the modern design criteria, they should really be Troops. Their statline is basically “Warrior, but CC instead of shooting...” but if you took them out of the Elite slot, what will fill its place?

This glut of midrange, overlapping role options is part of the problem Necrons have in general, and why we get pushed to the extremes of running 6Ark3Scythe, because we have too many options in one spot, and are too anemic elsewhere.

FOs are Elites because of fluff. Troops are Troops to incentivise building armies with units that don't do crazy stuff or at least they do less crazy stuff than the Elites, they may be more restricted in weapons they bring or be less elite. Our bad elites are bad because they cost too many pts, you are way overanalyzing this. Doomsday Arks are good because they are pts-effective. There is no secret sauce there, the rest of the codex is just relatively overcosted. Maybe people would run Flayed One bombs, you can add as many rules as you want but at the end of the day you just have to look at the value to cost ratio of different units and take the units that provide the most value to your list and playstyle. Instead of fiddling with giving units various abilities or changing their combat roles you should just change their pts and be done with it. Except when you have a problem with their gameplay, I don't think Monoliths are fun as-is, I don't think they evoke Necron technology when I've played with them, so I think their rules need to be changed. How does making Flayed Ones into Troops evoke more or a Necron feel, how is the gameplay better? Well it's better because some Dynasties use a lot of Flayed Ones, so changing them into Troops is a good idea from a thematic stand-point. Changing FOs to Troops to make them more viable outside of casual settings is a waste of time when you can just cut their pts to 15 and people might start to experiment with them competitively or 12 and people take them in moderate amounts or all the way down to 9 and bam people spam them.

One side note: it isn’t necessarily the case that Necrons are MEANT to be an Elite concept. It could be that the idea is Necrons are a relentless horde model. In this case then troops and Character or Machinery support would be the name of the game, and we need quite a few more options in these slots.

That would ruin the theme of the army. Fielding tonnes of similar models is a thing that I enjoy, at least in my Troops choices. If Deathmarks and Flayed Ones were Troops and fielded 2x5 Deathmarks, 2x5 Flayed, 1x20 Warriors, 1x10 Immortals that wouldn't be as satisfying to me as fielding 6x10 Immortals or 3x20 Warriors. Cool auxiliary options are cool, but the soulless core should remain an option. I don't see the need for a dozen more kinds of medium-range infantry or more Elite options. I really don't need any more Necrons models, maybe in 5 years I'd want something. For now, I'd like some more Character sculpts and a posable Transcendent C'tan with a couple of different heads and arms. What SM got with their 6 different kinds of Intercessors is not appealing to me. 6 different kinds of Crypteks would and maybe that just means I want Necrons to be pushed into a HQ direction instead of a Troops or Elites direction from your perspective an army having a slant. IMO the Necrons HQ slot isn't just relative to the rest of the slots, it's tiny, held up only by a very nice selection of unique units.

I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options.

You're overanalyzing some more here, GW are mostly just bad at balance and once in a while they sneak in an obvious or not so obvious buff or nerf to push new product. Consider the Imperium, they have the best chaff and the best Titanic units, Necrons having similarly diverse options would not hurt the game. Doomsday Arks might get relatively stronger with a chaff squad on the same tier as Infantry Squads, but the price would just have to be adjusted.

Describing the incredibly facile and overly simplistic run-down I gave as “OVER-analyzing” has undertones of Dunning-Kruger. Just because the outcome is poor doesn’t mean GW doesn’t put a lot of effort and thought into internally balancing these systems. I guarantee you I’m probably wrong 100 different ways, but it won’t be because I’ve analyzed it TOO deeply.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating: FOs are overcosted or underperforming for their cost and probably in the wrong force organization. And they have been for a while. And I am willing to provide a testable hypothesis: they will only be seriously re-tooled if/when they become available in plastic. I have 30 metal ones I’ve painted, ready to go, so hopefully I’m wrong!

Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

What is more simple, "GW is bad at balancing" or "I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options."

Why do you believe that GW are waiting to buff Flayed Ones for a plastic release? Obliterators got a new kit and then they were nerfed.

What is your proof of any of your theories? Why do you claim expertise on the subject of game balance and GW's corporate culture? From the rumours I've heard, GW has a truly terrible testing methodology (throw a bit of everything on the table and tell us how you feel about it). Have you tried balancing a codex? Why do you claim my assessment that the pts are just off to be flawed? I've written a fandex for Necrons that I used a couple of times, then I wrote another codex for Necrons I used several dozen times and iterated upon several times, I've also written and iterated upon half a dozen other fandexes for other factions. Pts is the ultimate decider, I don't care if you have a unit that has an ability that lets you win on a 2+, if it costs 2001 pts then you can't bring it to a 2k game.

I may have been ambiguous when I referred to tiers; that was referring to Quality assuming an equal application of points:effectiveness. I wasn’t referring to tier of competitiveness.

You said "For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones" so let's say Necrons are a ‘slow, plodding army’ and I want to give them as many FA options as HS options for some reason, I design Destroyers, Scarabs and Wraiths. Now I test them and find out they are worth 50, 13 and 50 pts, but you told me they need to have pricier Fast Attack options so I set their costs at 60, 20 and 60. Or do you mean to say that a ‘slow, plodding army’ should never have any fast cheap units like Scarabs? Now you talk of Quality, so do you instead mean Necrons should not have access to Wraiths and Destroyers because those are more elite or higher quality units?

First of all, I’d really appreciate a more civil tone. I’m happy to be wrong, and I’d love to explore where and how, but it’s pretty hard when you adopt such a vicious stance. I get ‘this is the internet’ but we can do/be better.

I don't believe it's uncivil to say that you are overanalyzing, I did find it uncivil when you invoked the Dunning-Kruger effect since you are thereby implying that I am so unknowledgeable about that which I am speaking that I don't even see how little I know. It's a thinly veiled way of saying "m8 you're an idiot you better shut up and listen to what I (an intellectual) am saying". This is also why I stated my amateur game-design credentials, which admittedly aren't worth three hats, but I do believe I know enough about game design and balance to say that I'm also aware of the difficulty of balancing a game, even with 99% pure intent and with a better balancing methodology balance mistakes still happen.

Occams’s Razor is philosophically problematic. In practice it is difficult to be sure that you have reduced an argument to its simplest form for comparison. This is a trap you fall into here. You compared the following:

“GW is bad at balancing” to “GW made a mistake in design”

That wasn't the argument I read, it doesn't matter whether GW has decided that Necrons are elite or chaff, either they intentionally made Flayed Ones overcosted because of a design decision or they accidentally made them overcosted because they made a mistake or they made them overcosted because they don't want to sell finecast Flayed Ones. Your argument for why they made that design decision to make Flayed Ones underpowered was that Necrons are neither designed to be elite or nor to be chaff. Every faction has good chaff and good elite units. Imperium has Infantry Squads and Bullgryn, Chaos has Plaguebearers and Rubric Squads, Necrons have Scarabs and Immortals.

I think it is unlikely that an absolute and permanent assessment of capability is more correct than a performance assessment on a specific set of actions.

You ask why I thought GW is waiting for a plastic release before buffing FOs; which suggests my post was written poorly since that’s one thing I was talking about directly. Rather than repeat myself a second time, I’m happy to drop it. I would point out that my point wasn’t that it was a necessary precondition, but rather would be evidence to support the overall point.

You ask for “proof of my theories” and that’s what I was offering by providing testable hypotheses. Admittedly, they are Observation studies rather than Retrospective studies, but we get enough of the latter ad nauseam on these forums, and it’s a bit flawed anyway since there’s so many confounding variables between different editions, different writers, different design philosophies, etc.

You can test your hypotheses against the units that have come out in the past, look at SM. Why are Reivers and Inceptors worse than Assault Centurions? We don't have insight into GW's stock of Assault Centurions, but we do know that Reivers and Inceptors are newer kits. You might be right in this one case that GW has just kept Flayed Ones in the competitive basement in order to curb demand of a product they are less interested in selling compared to their newer Necron kits, but you see people going out and buying the insane FW units all the time, which probably yields a higher return on investment for GW than if they sold the cheaper Citadel miniatures, if GW makes plastic Flayed Ones they'll probably be cheaper, why wait when they can just sell a bunch of the expensive finecast Flayed Ones? We don't even have the slightest rumours of Flayed Ones coming out in the next two years, so that's 4+ years of preparation for a big Flayed Ones sale?

You asked why I claim expertise and then proffer your own repeated excursions into the activity. I don’t have any expertise, so feel free to dismiss whatever you feel like on claim of authority. I’d suggest if you think an idea is worth examination, that can be true even without expertise. In a similar vein, however, I simply cannot accept the fact that you’ve written a bunch of (probably excellent!) proposed ruleset as sufficient expertise to be dismissive of conflicting discussion on the subject. I do really appreciate your excitement about the hobby and this faction though—it’s superfans like you who really support this game for the rest of us with quality extracurricular content, analysis, and help.

You were the one that claimed I was so unknowledgeable that I couldn't even see how little I know. I did not say that when I said you were overanalyzing, I just think you're looking at things from the wrong point of view, not because I think you are stupid or because GW isn't trying their best, but because game balance is hard and even with extensive theory-crafting and playtesting things almost always turn out wrong in some percentage of the things you implement into your game. My thought on the matter of Flayed Ones is that a simpler explanation is probably the right one. I don't claim to know that your thought of it being a conspiracy or some elevated level of balance is wrong for certain, I'm just posting a simple explanation and saying that according to Occam's Razor my theory is generally more likely to be correct because I'm not making any assumptions except that GW don't have a perfect testing apparatus. It's like when physicists measured the speed of some particle and it went faster than light according to their first calculations, it could be that our laws of physics are fundamentally flawed or maybe the testing or computing mechanism is flawed. According to rumours and out of house playtesters GW's testing apparatus is flawed. We know A is true and that can cause C, but you argue that B is the cause or part of the cause in this instance. Something we cannot verify, except maybe if GW come out with a plastic kit and errata the cost of Flayed Ones within a week to make them competitive.

You raise a great clarification question around what I meant about balancing around a faction philosophy. I’m glad you asked, since this was what I was trying to describe in the first post, and clearly did so quite poorly, since this is now my third post!

I truly do love discussing things and I did not mean anything negative with my first reply and your take was interesting. I don't think your post was bad or stupid and perfect clarity can never be achieved in a written medium, see the 40K You Make Da Call forum if you want your daily dose of insanity.

Spoiler:

When designing a Codex for Faction you have quite a few questions you need to answer first before you begin: Why should this Faction exist? How will it be different from the other factions that already exist?

The answer can be “it will only look different, but it’s rules will be identical to [another faction]”. For a while, some of the SM chapters were like this, even! It can work, but don’t expect too much excitement about it because people like Differentiation, and it is far more powerful to have deep differentiation than simply superficial.

If you have decided to make the Faction mechanically distinct, you next need to ask some fluffy questions to guide later decisions: How will the mechanics reflect the chosen areas of distinction you’ve chosen for this Faction? How will players be presented with options that make them feel engaged with the army’s flavor? How will opponents playing against this faction experience the mechanic distinction?

To answer these, you need to be rather robust in understanding the faction’s fluff: what does this faction care about? What does it oppose? What drives it? How does it solve problems? What does it excel at and what does it do poorly? These are important, since they help you answer the former questions in a way which gives Mechanical Distinction.

With a game as mechanically dense as WH40K you thankfully have TONS of different knobs and levers you can pull to make these mechanic distinctions. At the model level, you can use relative changes in BS, Strength, and AP to demonstrate competence or incompetence. You can use Toughness and Saves to demonstrate resilience.

At the Faction level, however, you should have a coherent plan to reflect the Faction distinctions you set up earlier in the armies selection choices. If you have a “fast hit and run” faction and a “tough defensive” faction, it would be inappropriate to give them each all the exact same options at the same costs and availability.

This is where you suggested you can use selection restrictions to make these distinctions. Presumably you would either forbid or restrict how many bikers the defensive force could take and vice versa. This is definitely a good knob you can use! It’s also fairly realistic to our own human experience of opportunity costs in military investment.

But there are absolutely other tools at your disposal! Remember one of the questions: “What is this Faction good at? What is it bad at?” We didn’t give that level of detail in the fast/defensive example earlier (a good reason to make sure your faction philosophy design document is thorough—especially for larger design teams working collaboratively).

Let’s pretend the defensive faction, by virtue of focusing on “defending their homeland from raiding attacks” has invested in fortifications at the expense of R&D into other options, and so are bad at designing motorcycle engines or have inefficient antigrav tech. Here rather than giving both factions the same options at the same cost and merely saying the defensive army can only have fewer of them, you could instead reflect the worse tech as an inefficiency in the production of the same output, and increase the relative point cost for the same option for the defensive army. Or maybe they don’t have the same option at all, but for the same cost they have a weaker version. Or maybe they have the same costs and availability, but you make the drivers less experienced and worsen their WS and BS.

Spoiler:

You can also reflect this phenomenon by designing in some more complexity: if you establish a baseline ratio of point:effectiveness, you can set up different bands (I’m avoiding using the term ‘tier’ here!) of Units, like: Cheap, Midrange, Powerful. So, cheaper and weaker units, more moderately costed and powerful units, and expensive powerful units. In an idealized case, with equal points, they would kill each other identically as quickly; but that’s unlikely.

So returning to the example, another permutation would be to give more Bands of options in the Fast Attack slot to the hit and run faction than to the Defensive faction. Or maybe not give any cheap or powerful options to the Defensive faction. Etc.

While you’re right that the point cost approach can be difficult. It’s one of the things people point to with frustration because players believe all like options should cost the same; but it’s simply not the case in a properly designed game with distinct factions. ALSO fair is to say it’s not the only tool either can you could try to design it without this option, but what a missed opportunity to reflect some deep flavor in the mechanics.

I enjoyed what you wrote. I think the problem with creating mechanically inferior units is that it won't say in Necron lore for example that "Doomsday Arks are gak because Necrons don't often like long-ranged weapons" or "Annihilation Barges are great because they play into Necrons strengths as a medium-range army" so when Timmy goes and buys one of each he won't necessarily know which is better. Timmy might also not play any of the units that you think should be the core of every Necron army, he might build his list entirely around Scarabs, Spyders and vehicles, unless you make it clear to him that this is a bad choice via the fluff or website info then how will he know? With White Scars you know to build around bikes, because the rules clearly incentivise that and the lore supports it. But White Scars still need to be able to compete with Iron Hands assuming both players play to their army's strengths because the fluff and website info won't promote one over the other.

 vict0988 wrote:

sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Spoiler:

sieGermans wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

sieGermans wrote:
From a design perspective, you’d prefer to have a tiered perspective in every slot type: FA, Elite, HS, etc. This gets modulated based on how you want to reflect certain Faction flavor elements. (For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones).

You definitely shouldn't make a unit pricier or worse just because it doesn't fit into your view of how an army should operate. You can limit the amount of that unit can be included in an army, make the unit sizes small, one per Detachment, one per other choice, but making the unit worse is unfun, especially because GW balance is hit and miss. Sometimes they may be pushing a unit or trying to limit how good a unit is, other times they've just done a poor job at balancing. So you can't say Elites are tier 1 Necron Fast Attack are tier 3 without saying some Necron Elites are tier 0 and some are tier 2 and some Fast Attack are tier 2 and some are tier 4. It won't say on the box whether a unit is tier 1 or tier 4, when balancing pts the most amount of people should be able to have fun with their armies as possible.

And then there’s our Elite slot. This is a total mess—which is pretty poor from a Faction differentiation perspective. If the idea is that Necrons are an ‘elite’ army with fewer, better guys this would be the slot to push, along with the Heavy slot. Instead, the tiers seem to be: FOs, then Praetorians and Lychguard, then C’tans. For shooting we have... the Stalker with the antisynergy of being null dynasty. Where are the Elite shooting low range and midrange options? Why are the low and midrange melee options so expensive for such poor performance.

However! This reveals the reason why FOs further suffer. In the modern design criteria, they should really be Troops. Their statline is basically “Warrior, but CC instead of shooting...” but if you took them out of the Elite slot, what will fill its place?

This glut of midrange, overlapping role options is part of the problem Necrons have in general, and why we get pushed to the extremes of running 6Ark3Scythe, because we have too many options in one spot, and are too anemic elsewhere.

FOs are Elites because of fluff. Troops are Troops to incentivise building armies with units that don't do crazy stuff or at least they do less crazy stuff than the Elites, they may be more restricted in weapons they bring or be less elite. Our bad elites are bad because they cost too many pts, you are way overanalyzing this. Doomsday Arks are good because they are pts-effective. There is no secret sauce there, the rest of the codex is just relatively overcosted. Maybe people would run Flayed One bombs, you can add as many rules as you want but at the end of the day you just have to look at the value to cost ratio of different units and take the units that provide the most value to your list and playstyle. Instead of fiddling with giving units various abilities or changing their combat roles you should just change their pts and be done with it. Except when you have a problem with their gameplay, I don't think Monoliths are fun as-is, I don't think they evoke Necron technology when I've played with them, so I think their rules need to be changed. How does making Flayed Ones into Troops evoke more or a Necron feel, how is the gameplay better? Well it's better because some Dynasties use a lot of Flayed Ones, so changing them into Troops is a good idea from a thematic stand-point. Changing FOs to Troops to make them more viable outside of casual settings is a waste of time when you can just cut their pts to 15 and people might start to experiment with them competitively or 12 and people take them in moderate amounts or all the way down to 9 and bam people spam them.

One side note: it isn’t necessarily the case that Necrons are MEANT to be an Elite concept. It could be that the idea is Necrons are a relentless horde model. In this case then troops and Character or Machinery support would be the name of the game, and we need quite a few more options in these slots.

That would ruin the theme of the army. Fielding tonnes of similar models is a thing that I enjoy, at least in my Troops choices. If Deathmarks and Flayed Ones were Troops and fielded 2x5 Deathmarks, 2x5 Flayed, 1x20 Warriors, 1x10 Immortals that wouldn't be as satisfying to me as fielding 6x10 Immortals or 3x20 Warriors. Cool auxiliary options are cool, but the soulless core should remain an option. I don't see the need for a dozen more kinds of medium-range infantry or more Elite options. I really don't need any more Necrons models, maybe in 5 years I'd want something. For now, I'd like some more Character sculpts and a posable Transcendent C'tan with a couple of different heads and arms. What SM got with their 6 different kinds of Intercessors is not appealing to me. 6 different kinds of Crypteks would and maybe that just means I want Necrons to be pushed into a HQ direction instead of a Troops or Elites direction from your perspective an army having a slant. IMO the Necrons HQ slot isn't just relative to the rest of the slots, it's tiny, held up only by a very nice selection of unique units.

I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options.

You're overanalyzing some more here, GW are mostly just bad at balance and once in a while they sneak in an obvious or not so obvious buff or nerf to push new product. Consider the Imperium, they have the best chaff and the best Titanic units, Necrons having similarly diverse options would not hurt the game. Doomsday Arks might get relatively stronger with a chaff squad on the same tier as Infantry Squads, but the price would just have to be adjusted.

Describing the incredibly facile and overly simplistic run-down I gave as “OVER-analyzing” has undertones of Dunning-Kruger. Just because the outcome is poor doesn’t mean GW doesn’t put a lot of effort and thought into internally balancing these systems. I guarantee you I’m probably wrong 100 different ways, but it won’t be because I’ve analyzed it TOO deeply.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating: FOs are overcosted or underperforming for their cost and probably in the wrong force organization. And they have been for a while. And I am willing to provide a testable hypothesis: they will only be seriously re-tooled if/when they become available in plastic. I have 30 metal ones I’ve painted, ready to go, so hopefully I’m wrong!

Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

What is more simple, "GW is bad at balancing" or "I do kind of also think it’s possible that Necrons are (inappropriately) being designed for both options, or have been historically anyway. This would be problematic as you’d end up offering an Elite force access to good chafe, and simultaneously be offering a Horde force access to good Elite options."

Why do you believe that GW are waiting to buff Flayed Ones for a plastic release? Obliterators got a new kit and then they were nerfed.

What is your proof of any of your theories? Why do you claim expertise on the subject of game balance and GW's corporate culture? From the rumours I've heard, GW has a truly terrible testing methodology (throw a bit of everything on the table and tell us how you feel about it). Have you tried balancing a codex? Why do you claim my assessment that the pts are just off to be flawed? I've written a fandex for Necrons that I used a couple of times, then I wrote another codex for Necrons I used several dozen times and iterated upon several times, I've also written and iterated upon half a dozen other fandexes for other factions. Pts is the ultimate decider, I don't care if you have a unit that has an ability that lets you win on a 2+, if it costs 2001 pts then you can't bring it to a 2k game.

I may have been ambiguous when I referred to tiers; that was referring to Quality assuming an equal application of points:effectiveness. I wasn’t referring to tier of competitiveness.

You said "For example, a ‘slow, plodding army’ may not have as many Fast Attack options, or may have pricier ones" so let's say Necrons are a ‘slow, plodding army’ and I want to give them as many FA options as HS options for some reason, I design Destroyers, Scarabs and Wraiths. Now I test them and find out they are worth 50, 13 and 50 pts, but you told me they need to have pricier Fast Attack options so I set their costs at 60, 20 and 60. Or do you mean to say that a ‘slow, plodding army’ should never have any fast cheap units like Scarabs? Now you talk of Quality, so do you instead mean Necrons should not have access to Wraiths and Destroyers because those are more elite or higher quality units?

First of all, I’d really appreciate a more civil tone. I’m happy to be wrong, and I’d love to explore where and how, but it’s pretty hard when you adopt such a vicious stance. I get ‘this is the internet’ but we can do/be better.

I don't believe it's uncivil to say that you are overanalyzing, I did find it uncivil when you invoked the Dunning-Kruger effect since you are thereby implying that I am so unknowledgeable about that which I am speaking that I don't even see how little I know. It's a thinly veiled way of saying "m8 you're an idiot you better shut up and listen to what I (an intellectual) am saying". This is also why I stated my amateur game-design credentials, which admittedly aren't worth three hats, but I do believe I know enough about game design and balance to say that I'm also aware of the difficulty of balancing a game, even with 99% pure intent and with a better balancing methodology balance mistakes still happen.

Occams’s Razor is philosophically problematic. In practice it is difficult to be sure that you have reduced an argument to its simplest form for comparison. This is a trap you fall into here. You compared the following:

“GW is bad at balancing” to “GW made a mistake in design”

That wasn't the argument I read, it doesn't matter whether GW has decided that Necrons are elite or chaff, either they intentionally made Flayed Ones overcosted because of a design decision or they accidentally made them overcosted because they made a mistake or they made them overcosted because they don't want to sell finecast Flayed Ones. Your argument for why they made that design decision to make Flayed Ones underpowered was that Necrons are neither designed to be elite or nor to be chaff. Every faction has good chaff and good elite units. Imperium has Infantry Squads and Bullgryn, Chaos has Plaguebearers and Rubric Squads, Necrons have Scarabs and Immortals.

I think it is unlikely that an absolute and permanent assessment of capability is more correct than a performance assessment on a specific set of actions.

You ask why I thought GW is waiting for a plastic release before buffing FOs; which suggests my post was written poorly since that’s one thing I was talking about directly. Rather than repeat myself a second time, I’m happy to drop it. I would point out that my point wasn’t that it was a necessary precondition, but rather would be evidence to support the overall point.

You ask for “proof of my theories” and that’s what I was offering by providing testable hypotheses. Admittedly, they are Observation studies rather than Retrospective studies, but we get enough of the latter ad nauseam on these forums, and it’s a bit flawed anyway since there’s so many confounding variables between different editions, different writers, different design philosophies, etc.

You can test your hypotheses against the units that have come out in the past, look at SM. Why are Reivers and Inceptors worse than Assault Centurions? We don't have insight into GW's stock of Assault Centurions, but we do know that Reivers and Inceptors are newer kits. You might be right in this one case that GW has just kept Flayed Ones in the competitive basement in order to curb demand of a product they are less interested in selling compared to their newer Necron kits, but you see people going out and buying the insane FW units all the time, which probably yields a higher return on investment for GW than if they sold the cheaper Citadel miniatures, if GW makes plastic Flayed Ones they'll probably be cheaper, why wait when they can just sell a bunch of the expensive finecast Flayed Ones? We don't even have the slightest rumours of Flayed Ones coming out in the next two years, so that's 4+ years of preparation for a big Flayed Ones sale?

You asked why I claim expertise and then proffer your own repeated excursions into the activity. I don’t have any expertise, so feel free to dismiss whatever you feel like on claim of authority. I’d suggest if you think an idea is worth examination, that can be true even without expertise. In a similar vein, however, I simply cannot accept the fact that you’ve written a bunch of (probably excellent!) proposed ruleset as sufficient expertise to be dismissive of conflicting discussion on the subject. I do really appreciate your excitement about the hobby and this faction though—it’s superfans like you who really support this game for the rest of us with quality extracurricular content, analysis, and help.

You were the one that claimed I was so unknowledgeable that I couldn't even see how little I know. I did not say that when I said you were overanalyzing, I just think you're looking at things from the wrong point of view, not because I think you are stupid or because GW isn't trying their best, but because game balance is hard and even with extensive theory-crafting and playtesting things almost always turn out wrong in some percentage of the things you implement into your game. My thought on the matter of Flayed Ones is that a simpler explanation is probably the right one. I don't claim to know that your thought of it being a conspiracy or some elevated level of balance is wrong for certain, I'm just posting a simple explanation and saying that according to Occam's Razor my theory is generally more likely to be correct because I'm not making any assumptions except that GW don't have a perfect testing apparatus. It's like when physicists measured the speed of some particle and it went faster than light according to their first calculations, it could be that our laws of physics are fundamentally flawed or maybe the testing or computing mechanism is flawed. According to rumours and out of house playtesters GW's testing apparatus is flawed. We know A is true and that can cause C, but you argue that B is the cause or part of the cause in this instance. Something we cannot verify, except maybe if GW come out with a plastic kit and errata the cost of Flayed Ones within a week to make them competitive.

You raise a great clarification question around what I meant about balancing around a faction philosophy. I’m glad you asked, since this was what I was trying to describe in the first post, and clearly did so quite poorly, since this is now my third post!

I truly do love discussing things and I did not mean anything negative with my first reply and your take was interesting. I don't think your post was bad or stupid and perfect clarity can never be achieved in a written medium, see the 40K You Make Da Call forum if you want your daily dose of insanity.

Spoiler:

When designing a Codex for Faction you have quite a few questions you need to answer first before you begin: Why should this Faction exist? How will it be different from the other factions that already exist?

The answer can be “it will only look different, but it’s rules will be identical to [another faction]”. For a while, some of the SM chapters were like this, even! It can work, but don’t expect too much excitement about it because people like Differentiation, and it is far more powerful to have deep differentiation than simply superficial.

If you have decided to make the Faction mechanically distinct, you next need to ask some fluffy questions to guide later decisions: How will the mechanics reflect the chosen areas of distinction you’ve chosen for this Faction? How will players be presented with options that make them feel engaged with the army’s flavor? How will opponents playing against this faction experience the mechanic distinction?

To answer these, you need to be rather robust in understanding the faction’s fluff: what does this faction care about? What does it oppose? What drives it? How does it solve problems? What does it excel at and what does it do poorly? These are important, since they help you answer the former questions in a way which gives Mechanical Distinction.

With a game as mechanically dense as WH40K you thankfully have TONS of different knobs and levers you can pull to make these mechanic distinctions. At the model level, you can use relative changes in BS, Strength, and AP to demonstrate competence or incompetence. You can use Toughness and Saves to demonstrate resilience.

At the Faction level, however, you should have a coherent plan to reflect the Faction distinctions you set up earlier in the armies selection choices. If you have a “fast hit and run” faction and a “tough defensive” faction, it would be inappropriate to give them each all the exact same options at the same costs and availability.

This is where you suggested you can use selection restrictions to make these distinctions. Presumably you would either forbid or restrict how many bikers the defensive force could take and vice versa. This is definitely a good knob you can use! It’s also fairly realistic to our own human experience of opportunity costs in military investment.

But there are absolutely other tools at your disposal! Remember one of the questions: “What is this Faction good at? What is it bad at?” We didn’t give that level of detail in the fast/defensive example earlier (a good reason to make sure your faction philosophy design document is thorough—especially for larger design teams working collaboratively).

Let’s pretend the defensive faction, by virtue of focusing on “defending their homeland from raiding attacks” has invested in fortifications at the expense of R&D into other options, and so are bad at designing motorcycle engines or have inefficient antigrav tech. Here rather than giving both factions the same options at the same cost and merely saying the defensive army can only have fewer of them, you could instead reflect the worse tech as an inefficiency in the production of the same output, and increase the relative point cost for the same option for the defensive army. Or maybe they don’t have the same option at all, but for the same cost they have a weaker version. Or maybe they have the same costs and availability, but you make the drivers less experienced and worsen their WS and BS.

Spoiler:

You can also reflect this phenomenon by designing in some more complexity: if you establish a baseline ratio of point:effectiveness, you can set up different bands (I’m avoiding using the term ‘tier’ here!) of Units, like: Cheap, Midrange, Powerful. So, cheaper and weaker units, more moderately costed and powerful units, and expensive powerful units. In an idealized case, with equal points, they would kill each other identically as quickly; but that’s unlikely.

So returning to the example, another permutation would be to give more Bands of options in the Fast Attack slot to the hit and run faction than to the Defensive faction. Or maybe not give any cheap or powerful options to the Defensive faction. Etc.

While you’re right that the point cost approach can be difficult. It’s one of the things people point to with frustration because players believe all like options should cost the same; but it’s simply not the case in a properly designed game with distinct factions. ALSO fair is to say it’s not the only tool either can you could try to design it without this option, but what a missed opportunity to reflect some deep flavor in the mechanics.

I enjoyed what you wrote. I think the problem with creating mechanically inferior units is that it won't say in Necron lore for example that "Doomsday Arks are gak because Necrons don't often like long-ranged weapons" or "Annihilation Barges are great because they play into Necrons strengths as a medium-range army" so when Timmy goes and buys one of each he won't necessarily know which is better. Timmy might also not play any of the units that you think should be the core of every Necron army, he might build his list entirely around Scarabs, Spyders and vehicles, unless you make it clear to him that this is a bad choice via the fluff or website info then how will he know? With White Scars you know to build around bikes, because the rules clearly incentivise that and the lore supports it. But White Scars still need to be able to compete with Iron Hands assuming both players play to their army's strengths because the fluff and website info won't promote one over the other.

Really great points.

I should have mentioned that presumably any designed deficits should be offset by designed benefits (or like-deficits in the other factions’ units) elsewhere. The Codex should be internally balanced and externally balanced.

But you’re absolutely right: it doesn’t say on the box “this unit has been gimped because your faction should be bad at this.” However, while I agree that people may not know this, coming back to Flayed Ones, isn’t this problem already happening anyway? We all accept that White Scar bikers should probably be better than IH Bikers. This is the central theme to Casual v. Competitive list building already—a Casual list specifically chooses army compositions based on criteria that may not be the Faction’s optimal configuration.

Plus people learn through experience anyway. It doesn’t say “don’t field 2000 of only Doom Scythes” (setting aside the Rule of 3 which was imposed because sometimes 2000 of something is too good!), and even though that would be terrible, we’re okay with letting a hypothetical Timmy foolishly purchase 10 of them.

All of this isn’t a defense of how poor the Necron Codex is performing: I think there are some really bad mistakes both internally and compared to other codices. I’m simply trying to suggest it may not be the case that all of our units should be identical in point cost and competitiveness to other armies. So long as other elements work to offset them, poor performers or overcosted units in our Codex are totally fine from a healthy design perspective, and actually help create a compelling theme.

Going to have a 1750p match against Imperial Guard player. Never played against IG and heard there may be a Baneblade coming. The match is not ultra competitive, but I am trying to make reasonably efficient list. Any comments/feedback on the list?

pesusieni999 wrote:
Going to have a 1750p match against Imperial Guard player. Never played against IG and heard there may be a Baneblade coming. The match is not ultra competitive, but I am trying to make reasonably efficient list. Any comments/feedback on the list?

Spoiler:

++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ +

Cryptek: Staff of Light
Warlord: Warlord Trait (Codex 3): Immortal Pride

Overlord: Artefact: The Veil of Darkness, Warscythe

+ Troops +

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Necron Warriors: 18x Necron Warrior

+ Fast Attack +

Canoptek Scarabs: 6x Canoptek Scarab Swarm

Canoptek Wraiths
5x Canoptek Wraith

Destroyers
6x Destroyer: 6x Gauss Cannon

+ Heavy Support +

Doomsday Ark

Heavy Destroyers
3x Heavy Destroyer: 3x Heavy Gauss Cannon

+ Flyer +

Doom Scythe

List looks fine, you could make your game easier by taking 3 Doomsday Arks but you're not really bringing any trash units and your Relic and WL traits look good. I don't know how much experience you have playing against Titanic units but try not to shoot them unless you have confidence you can kill this in the current turn or at least the next turn. Astra Militarum are moderately weak to morale, killing a full squad is overkill, let Morale do some work. Somewhere between 7-8 is probably most efficient math-wise. Good luck.

 vict0988 wrote:

pesusieni999 wrote:
Going to have a 1750p match against Imperial Guard player. Never played against IG and heard there may be a Baneblade coming. The match is not ultra competitive, but I am trying to make reasonably efficient list. Any comments/feedback on the list?

Spoiler:

++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ +

Cryptek: Staff of Light
Warlord: Warlord Trait (Codex 3): Immortal Pride

Overlord: Artefact: The Veil of Darkness, Warscythe

+ Troops +

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Necron Warriors: 18x Necron Warrior

+ Fast Attack +

Canoptek Scarabs: 6x Canoptek Scarab Swarm

Canoptek Wraiths
5x Canoptek Wraith

Destroyers
6x Destroyer: 6x Gauss Cannon

+ Heavy Support +

Doomsday Ark

Heavy Destroyers
3x Heavy Destroyer: 3x Heavy Gauss Cannon

+ Flyer +

Doom Scythe

List looks fine, you could make your game easier by taking 3 Doomsday Arks but you're not really bringing any trash units and your Relic and WL traits look good. I don't know how much experience you have playing against Titanic units but try not to shoot them unless you have confidence you can kill this in the current turn or at least the next turn. Astra Militarum are moderately weak to morale, killing a full squad is overkill, let Morale do some work. Somewhere between 7-8 is probably most efficient math-wise. Good luck.

Actually, since Baneblades do not have an "Operate as if at full wounds," strat, bracketing one is a good investment, even if you can't kill it.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

pesusieni999 wrote:
Going to have a 1750p match against Imperial Guard player. Never played against IG and heard there may be a Baneblade coming. The match is not ultra competitive, but I am trying to make reasonably efficient list. Any comments/feedback on the list?

Spoiler:

++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ +

Cryptek: Staff of Light
Warlord: Warlord Trait (Codex 3): Immortal Pride

Overlord: Artefact: The Veil of Darkness, Warscythe

+ Troops +

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Necron Warriors: 18x Necron Warrior

+ Fast Attack +

Canoptek Scarabs: 6x Canoptek Scarab Swarm

Canoptek Wraiths
5x Canoptek Wraith

Destroyers
6x Destroyer: 6x Gauss Cannon

+ Heavy Support +

Doomsday Ark

Heavy Destroyers
3x Heavy Destroyer: 3x Heavy Gauss Cannon

+ Flyer +

Doom Scythe

List looks fine, you could make your game easier by taking 3 Doomsday Arks but you're not really bringing any trash units and your Relic and WL traits look good. I don't know how much experience you have playing against Titanic units but try not to shoot them unless you have confidence you can kill this in the current turn or at least the next turn. Astra Militarum are moderately weak to morale, killing a full squad is overkill, let Morale do some work. Somewhere between 7-8 is probably most efficient math-wise. Good luck.

Actually, since Baneblades do not have an "Operate as if at full wounds," strat, bracketing one is a good investment, even if you can't kill it.

Guess it depends on the list, I've only played against one backed up by the re-roll everything vehicle and/or +1 to hit vehicle and maybe Vostroyan meaning another possible +1.

 vict0988 wrote:

pesusieni999 wrote:
Going to have a 1750p match against Imperial Guard player. Never played against IG and heard there may be a Baneblade coming. The match is not ultra competitive, but I am trying to make reasonably efficient list. Any comments/feedback on the list?

Spoiler:

++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ +

Cryptek: Staff of Light
Warlord: Warlord Trait (Codex 3): Immortal Pride

Overlord: Artefact: The Veil of Darkness, Warscythe

+ Troops +

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Immortals: 10x Immortal, Tesla Carbine

Necron Warriors: 18x Necron Warrior

+ Fast Attack +

Canoptek Scarabs: 6x Canoptek Scarab Swarm

Canoptek Wraiths
5x Canoptek Wraith

Destroyers
6x Destroyer: 6x Gauss Cannon

+ Heavy Support +

Doomsday Ark

Heavy Destroyers
3x Heavy Destroyer: 3x Heavy Gauss Cannon

+ Flyer +

Doom Scythe

List looks fine, you could make your game easier by taking 3 Doomsday Arks but you're not really bringing any trash units and your Relic and WL traits look good. I don't know how much experience you have playing against Titanic units but try not to shoot them unless you have confidence you can kill this in the current turn or at least the next turn. Astra Militarum are moderately weak to morale, killing a full squad is overkill, let Morale do some work. Somewhere between 7-8 is probably most efficient math-wise. Good luck.

Thank you for the good pointers. Going to have to ask the opponent if he has a way to ignore bracketing. But getting Baneblade to the second bracket should reduce the damage potential quite a bit if I am correct.

Have I understood correctly that IG can issue commands to tanks by using Tank Commanders? Can they command Baneblade as well?

Nope-only Leman Russes.

tneva82 wrote:

 Jancoran wrote:
Check your codex again. I mean not that I'd use him, but the Stormlord comes standard with one of them. But there are others. It's pretty sweet honestly. But the way you use them with a Cryptek and possibly Anrakyr or even the master of deception himself... It's good.

Ummm okay so reroll 1's to hit...weeee. So awesome! Problem with flayed ones isn't hitting. It's lack of AP and GETTING INTO COMBAT!!!

Grans strategist: Nothing related to flayed ones.
Lord of storms: Ditto
MWBD: So you are foregoing deep strike and foot slogging across the field? That's sure death. If you DS you can't use this(PLEASE don't tell me you MWBD flayed ones when they come from deep strike to improve charge roll? As that would make you blatant cheater)
Phaeron: Useless for here. Can't use with deep strike flayed ones so 2 isn't any good.
4++ and improved living metal, none.

So basically you pay 160 pts for reroll to hit and somehow needs to keep up with DS ones...That's not worth it. That 160 pts would be better spent for more flayed ones. More attacks>reroll to hit.

Only synergy that provides is the reroll to hit. But that doesn't solve the issues which is making into combat(PLEASE don't say your grand plan involves DS+MWBD charge? Surely you aren't so sure of them because you blatantly cheat?) and lack of AP.

Master of deception I presume refers to deceiver? That's no good either. You get to position yes but can't charge and then you are shot off the board.

Literally only way to get them into combat reliably is deceiver+zahndrek+obyron but that misses your stormlord and you have spent 840 pts for the 20 guys. 6 wraiths costs 300 and are T1 charging anyway and you aren't having half the army in enemy DZ ready to be killed in return. Hardly most cost efficient way to go around.

So yeah. Fail on you. Where's that awesome synergy you mention? 12" reroll 1's to hit isn't awesome. You arent' going to be within 12" of flayed ones unless you use another character AND relic to deep strike them there as well.

So first attempt from you to show the synergy: Epic fail.

Remember the dumb posts regarding the fact that Imperial Guard had one of the best melee death stars in the game 6th-7th?

This is the same poster and has always posted bad ideas and bad backups to his claims, like how he beat "Serpent Spam" with a terrible list, with said "Serpent Spam" being like 3 he faced. It's ridiculous.

I rather liked sieGermans's analysis, and I found vict0988 being too dismissive. If anyone were still philosophizing.

Well except one thing - can Flayed Ones be seen as Elite from a fluff perspective? Aren't they just half crazed skirmish guys wandering around in shadows just after the initial scarab attack, well ahead of the bulk of the attacking force? Popping up from nowhere to slice unlucky ones in two? Not really Elitish by and civilizational standard in the 40k universe?

Having them as troops and shaved a couple of points more, could have them serve that role on board as well. I could see myself setting aside <200 points somewhere for a skirmish unit like that, that would teleport in and may or may not make its charge. Regardless it would make my opponent adjust.

Otherwise at some point I think you need to boost damage output and/or survivability on a select set of units, rather than adjust all down in point values. They can't all be cheap mediocrity.

Flayed Ones are okay mathematically because they still have Shred. Because of this they don't exactly need an AP value.

HOWEVER, with no reliable means to get to melee for the price, and being super expensive to begin with at 17 points, why would you run them?

The only reason i can find to run Flayed Ones over something else, even Lychguard is to have a way to 100% charge Turn one, wrap something valuable without fly and with poor melee output to take some hostages, and use consolidation move to engage the maximum of units.
I would need the opposing army not to have some CC units that can counter charge.
Then in theory you can lock for a long time (especially with RP) to gain some advantage elsewhere.

The problem with that scenario is that you won't reliably charge turn one especially with screens, and it costs you 340 pts which will be blown to piece if your plan doesn't work.
It will also don't work against a lot of factions.

The second problem is that scarabs are probably better for the job (you have 3 units of 9 scarabs for the (almost) same points).

Even with a hefty point reduction, ~11-12 ppm, i don't see Flayed Ones working. They have to many flaws : slow, no shooting, no AP, need tons of ressource to support them, almost no way to guarantee charge without spending even more ressources.

when you guys were talking about a pylon being used? were you talking about this? https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/en-US/Necron-Pylon or the sentry pylon? is this and the other FW models in battescribe?

xenoterracide wrote:
when you guys were talking about a pylon being used? were you talking about this? https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/en-US/Necron-Pylon or the sentry pylon? is this and the other FW models in battescribe?

Pylon usually means Titanic Gauss Pylon, it's a niche unit but it can destroy a couple of Repulsors in 2-3 turns. Sentry Pylons don't seem horrible, far from the best either IMO.

Flayed ones have done an excellent job, and their cost per kill is great. Getting them there is literally the issue for ALL assault units and The Flayed Ones don't struggle there. That's where you earn your stripes as a General is to solve those issues. But pretending like this is somehow impossible? It just hurts my head to see defeatism as an ARGUMENT.

 Jancoran wrote:
Flayed ones have done an excellent job, and their cost per kill is great. Getting them there is literally the issue for ALL assault units and The Flayed Ones don't struggle there. That's where you earn your stripes as a General is to solve those issues. But pretending like this is somehow impossible? It just hurts my head to see defeatism as an ARGUMENT.

Done an excellent job where? In your local casual basement games? AFAIK they've never done anything at any tournament, not even an RTT, if I've just been mishandling them I'd love to know and learn more, but everything from the math, to tournaments to my personal experience tells me they are pretty bad (not straight trash, but overcosted enough that I believe them to not be worth bringing except for fun). Getting into assault is easier for some units than it is for other units, generally units that have to rely on a basic 10" charge are bad, especially if they have a M of 4-5, units that get an +1 to charge or can re-roll failed charges or one of the dice when charging are good. Flayed Ones have a pitiful chance of making it in compared to Evil Sunz Orks, you're completely ignoring that fact and focussing only on the 1/3 of games where they make their charge or your opponent is playing such a crappy list that he won't instantly annihilate 20 FOs as an afterthought. It's not impossible to make them work, they're just not worth their pts when compared with alternatives like Immortals, Wraiths or Doomsday Arks.

You say that it's defeatism but you have no idea what math has been done for FOs nor how much I've tested them. Yes, I've had success with them a few games, but in the overwhelming majority of games they do little or nothing. A unit of 20 Warriors can do the same amount of damage on average because they still do at least a little bit if they fail their charge, can tag as many units in melee as FOs (which is half the damage melee does in 8th really), if you invest the Deceiver (the actual Deceiver), Zahndrekh or Veil of Darkness you can also give them MWBD. You're completely ignoring the opportunity cost of 2 Doomsday Arks every time you bring a full FO blob, it's not worth it. I've tried both FOs and DDAs several times, I've tried FOs with Anrakyr, Lord's Will, +1 S, Crimson Haze and fight twice. I have tried 5-man FO squads, I tried the Zahndrekh FO bomb back in the index, I'll keep my DDAs thank you. Post a couple of battle reports of your next couple of games using FOs in spoilers and let us know how you make them work, in what list they work, what lists they work against and in what mission and terrain setup they work, better yet, win a GT with them and let the whole world know.

Oh this argument again. My basement? I mean... hoboy where to begin. The old "meta" thing.

The problem for you is that I can enumerate my meta to you, and you will look foolish for having challenged it. If you want. Luckily some other...person did this same song and dance with me, and I was happy to correct him. I'll cut n paste that post it if you want to go down that road with me.

Heres a hard fact: necrons are good but they arent winning a ton o GT's anyways, so that has zero to do with whether Flayed Ones are good.

I am glad you "tried" Flayed Ones. Thats good. They arent the cure to cancer. No one said otherwise. We were just comparing them to Wraiths... which also dont cure cancer.

I play an enormous number of armies so I just dont have the time to dedicate a season to Necrons. I play them. I win a lot when I do play them, but I can only compete with so many in actual events. Flayed Ones do an excellent job. Wraiths are much EASIER to use but they aren't better. They arent really the same threat type nor do they have the same weaknesses. So as I said previously, more than once, the Wraiths are good but for really different reasons having less to do with their killing ability. I dont hate wraiths at all.

 Jancoran wrote:
Oh this argument again. My basement? I mean... hoboy where to begin. The old "meta" thing.

The problem for you is that I can enumerate my meta to you, and you will look foolish for having challenged it. If you want. Luckily some other...person did this same song and dance with me, and I was happy to correct him. I'll cut n paste that post it if you want to go down that road with me.

Don't bother it'll come up if you search for meta in your post history. I need an actual reason to believe you are more than just a guy playing casual games in his basement, I've got that now, thank you, doesn't make you automatically right on this issue but it does make me more interested in trying harder to make Flayed Ones work.

Heres a hard fact: necrons are good but they arent winning a ton o GT's anyways, so that has zero to do with whether Flayed Ones are good.

I'm not asking for GT wins, I'm asking whether you've used them in competitive games and against more than a couple of people playing casualhammer, I don't understand why you think this is such an outrageous thing to ask. Don't you agree that the opinions of some people on the meta and viability of units is worth more than others, like people that have used Flayed Ones in competitive games vs people that just use them in casual games? I'm saying this because I've used FOs in casual and in competitive games and Flayed Ones don't suck in casual games, neither do Heavy Destroyers or Warriors.

I am glad you "tried" Flayed Ones. Thats good. They arent the cure to cancer. No one said otherwise. We were just comparing them to Wraiths... which also dont cure cancer.

I play an enormous number of armies so I just dont have the time to dedicate a season to Necrons. I play them. I win a lot when I do play them, but I can only compete with so many in actual events. Flayed Ones do an excellent job. Wraiths are much EASIER to use but they aren't better. They arent really the same threat type nor do they have the same weaknesses. So as I said previously, more than once, the Wraiths are good but for really different reasons having less to do with their killing ability. I dont hate wraiths at all.

Fair enough on not having time to play Flayed Ones in tournaments, although if they were as good as you make them out to be I'd think you'd use them if you play Necrons in tournaments at all. How much have you tried Flayed Ones? What lists do you use them in and what lists have you used them against? It's great knowing that you often play against great players, but your statement of FOs underrated Wraiths overrated still isn't proven purely by the calibre of players you play against, help me get across this last hurdle and believe Flayed Ones have competitive merit. I've played around 10 games with Flayed Ones in 2019, I think that along with knowledge of top Necron lists is enough to know what tier they are in. 2 games gives a rough estimate, I put Doomscythes too low on my tier list before they had tournament success, but that was caused by only playing a couple of games with them and never getting the opportunity to use the Amalgamated Targeting Data Stratagem, I don't see what information or playstyle I'm missing that is going to make Flayed Ones better than C-tier (uncompetitive) and solidly placed a tier below Wraiths (slightly competitive), but I'd be pretty shocked if Flayed Ones top even a small tournament where everyone is playing competitive lists. Against Marines in particular I see Flayed Ones as being useless, at least warscythe Lychguard can one-shot Primaris without a save.

Kay. Well since we are past the "qualuty of opponent" garbage, I dont mind sharing what I have done with them. I use two lists. This is the one I am talking about, trade out Z for Anrakyr for max shenanigans.

As you'd expect: doomsday arks. Didnt spam 3. Two seems to be enough most of the time. I'm a little more aggressive with mine. Depends on the enemy but this is a tactical decision you can make in your games. I don't always just sit like a lump on a log with them. But I digress.

Immortals are engineers but if I want, I can Tomb World one.

The type of opponent determines how I work w the Big Z and Orikan, but generally, the plane delivers the goods. Stratagem to ensure it. You can use Anrakyr as well. Both are good options for entirely different reasons. You can also slow roll this for round 3 if terrain or the enemy demand it. Most of the time its a round 2 play but I definitely have waited to 3 to do it.

Destroyers and Tombblades form an incredibly good foreward firebase, while followed by the cryptek. The Doomsday arks often come up behind them to help. Adding 40 rapid fire shots is not a small thing. Depends on what Im facing. Fly rules makes me like this. The saturation of the threat makes it difficult for enemies. The Scarabs are a lot of interference and the Stratagem to give them We'll Be Back makes them annoying. They allow you to slow roll the characters if you choose to go w the round 3 play. IF. 27 regenerating wounds = fairly reliable at screening.

I try to cut the board in half. Fighting on one side or the other primarily plays well to the Necrons strengths.

Flayed Ones combine with the Scarabs to control the board. Engineers score for you, recon usually easy enough to get 4 points on and you can do Butchers Bill with fair confidence.

This version of the list hasn't really lost. Its fought most meta lists. Havent fought executioners (as that cheddar is new and im not playing Necrons as often as I am playing other armies). But it has played the Plague Bearers, some other tough lists like Kastellan Robots, Triple Tide, etc... it actually did surprisingly well in that match. Being aggressive w Doomsday arks paid real dividends in that game. Getting through drone shields is work. The more shots, the better when it comes to that and it REALLY makes target priority tougher on them.

Anrakyr is a good replacement for Z. But i like his nerfbat and it changes the math dramatically for the enemy to lose their auras. You can play with it. Season to taste or make room bor both if you can.

Necrons arent winning big events, in general, so it really ISNT about that. Flayed ones re-rolling wounds, Anrakyr buffing them, Orikan there, all combine to make Flayed ones good at their jobs.

Controlling the board is just easier with their larger units.



++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) [71 PL, 8CP, 1,234pts] ++

+ No Force Org Slot [8CP] +

Battle-forged CP [3CP]

Detachment CP [5CP]

Dynasty Choice
. Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ [15 PL, 265pts] +

Nemesor Zahndrekh [9 PL, 150pts]

Orikan the Diviner [6 PL, 115pts]

+ Troops [12 PL, 225pts] +

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

+ Elites [16 PL, 289pts] +

Flayed Ones [16 PL, 289pts]: 17x Flayed One [289pts]

+ Heavy Support [20 PL, 320pts] +

Doomsday Ark [10 PL, 160pts]

Doomsday Ark [10 PL, 160pts]

+ Flyer [8 PL, 135pts] +

Night Scythe [8 PL, 135pts]

++ Outrider Detachment +1CP (Necrons) [43 PL, 754pts] ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
. Dynasty: Mephrit

+ HQ [5 PL, 85pts] +

Cryptek [5 PL, 85pts]: Canoptek Cloak [5pts], Staff of Light [10pts]

+ Fast Attack [38 PL, 669pts] +

Canoptek Scarabs [6 PL, 117pts]: 9x Canoptek Scarab Swarm [117pts]

Destroyers [18 PL, 300pts]
. 6x Destroyer [18 PL, 300pts]: 6x Gauss Cannon [120pts]

Tomb Blades [14 PL, 252pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]

++ Total: [114 PL, 8CP, 1,988pts] ++

 vict0988 wrote:

xenoterracide wrote:
when you guys were talking about a pylon being used? were you talking about this? https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/en-US/Necron-Pylon or the sentry pylon? is this and the other FW models in battescribe?

Pylon usually means Titanic Gauss Pylon, it's a niche unit but it can destroy a couple of Repulsors in 2-3 turns. Sentry Pylons don't seem horrible, far from the best either IMO.

right, so the one I linked, since I don't see others... is this listed in battlescribe? I couldn't find it.

xenoterracide wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

xenoterracide wrote:
when you guys were talking about a pylon being used? were you talking about this? https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/en-US/Necron-Pylon or the sentry pylon? is this and the other FW models in battescribe?

Pylon usually means Titanic Gauss Pylon, it's a niche unit but it can destroy a couple of Repulsors in 2-3 turns. Sentry Pylons don't seem horrible, far from the best either IMO.

right, so the one I linked, since I don't see others... is this listed in battlescribe? I couldn't find it.

https://imgur.com/a/kpkkAbC It's a Lord of War.

 Jancoran wrote:

Spoiler:

++ Battalion Detachment +5CP (Necrons) [71 PL, 8CP, 1,234pts] ++

+ No Force Org Slot [8CP] +

Battle-forged CP [3CP]

Detachment CP [5CP]

Dynasty Choice
. Dynasty: Sautekh

+ HQ [15 PL, 265pts] +

Nemesor Zahndrekh [9 PL, 150pts]

Orikan the Diviner [6 PL, 115pts]

+ Troops [12 PL, 225pts] +

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

Immortals [4 PL, 75pts]: Gauss Blaster [35pts], 5x Immortal [40pts]

+ Elites [16 PL, 289pts] +

Flayed Ones [16 PL, 289pts]: 17x Flayed One [289pts]

+ Heavy Support [20 PL, 320pts] +

Doomsday Ark [10 PL, 160pts]

Doomsday Ark [10 PL, 160pts]

+ Flyer [8 PL, 135pts] +

Night Scythe [8 PL, 135pts]

++ Outrider Detachment +1CP (Necrons) [43 PL, 754pts] ++

+ No Force Org Slot +

Dynasty Choice
. Dynasty: Mephrit

+ HQ [5 PL, 85pts] +

Cryptek [5 PL, 85pts]: Canoptek Cloak [5pts], Staff of Light [10pts]

+ Fast Attack [38 PL, 669pts] +

Canoptek Scarabs [6 PL, 117pts]: 9x Canoptek Scarab Swarm [117pts]

Destroyers [18 PL, 300pts]
. 6x Destroyer [18 PL, 300pts]: 6x Gauss Cannon [120pts]

Tomb Blades [14 PL, 252pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
. Tomb Blade [28pts]
. . Two Gauss Blasters [14pts]: 2x Gauss Blaster [14pts]
++ Total: [114 PL, 8CP, 1,988pts] ++

Your list looks like garbo, I'll give it a few tries and see if I can make it work. It might just have to come down to you playing the army really well. Do you take the relic SoL on the Cryptek?

Kay. Well since we are past the "qualuty of opponent" garbage, I dont mind sharing what I have done with them.

I don't understand what the problem is with being a bit skeptical of someone claiming something outrageous. Would you believe me if I said that Transcendent C'tan are better than Doomsday Arks? It wasn't about quality of opponent either, it was about your opponent having the right mindset, I've been told by people that they like to turn their brain off when they play and they prefer their opponent doing the same. There's like 25% of the 40k players that don't try to win and get mad if you only barely have LOS to something and shoot it. I'm not talking about rules lawyering saying you can't shoot with assault weapons after advancing or cheating by an inch whenever you can get away with it, just being honest about what the rules for LOS say and trying to win the game fair and square. You can even play super gentlemanly and allow take-backsies and be laid back, as long as you don't start trying to lose when your opponent has a bad roll, people's experiences in those kinds of games are worthless to me because I don't want to be coddled when I have bad dice.

do wraiths with whip coils get to fight again if the unit is wiped in melee (meaning all models are dead before their activation)?

Jancoran is the same guy that said Imperial Guard had one of the best melee death stars 6th-7th. Any advice presented by him is garbage. Hell, in the Scion thread in the main 40k subforum, he actually suggested mixing Scion weapons.

Can we just get a mod to delete his comments in this thread?

xenoterracide wrote:
do wraiths with whip coils get to fight again if the unit is wiped in melee (meaning all models are dead before their activation)?

Yes, the models are not removed until after they've made their attacks. Whip coils are generally a waste though, there is no guarantee that you'll get in melee and those 3 attacks are meh most of the time. Maybe if you play them as Novokh with Crimson Haze WL trait it'll be worth it, I refuse to try them because I don't think the price is remotely worth it.

In Jancoran's list, how do you propose getting Anrakyr up the board if you use him? He can't ride in Nightscythes, and walking takes far too long.

Whip coils on wraiths are bad mostly because they only function if you don't fight first, and you should usually be getting the charge unless you are using them to screen. So they basically only become useful in your opponent's turn.