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 Crimson wrote:

Asmodios wrote:

The game you are looking for is chess. Both players have the same pieces with the same strengths and weaknesses. In 40k each army from a lore point is supposed to have a specific playstyle that functions with the lore. Tau are supposed to be amazing at range with no psychic phase and no CC, Khorne Demons are supposed to kill you up close but have crappy shooting, Nurgle is supposed to be hard to remove, ect. What you are championing for is every army having units that do the same thing at the same efficiency. The end goal of making every army have the same amount of unit choices that do the same things is simply play chess with different looking pieces.

I am not championing for it, I said it would be requirement for the cherrypicking complaint to make sense. And I didn't even mean all armies would need to be identical, merely that their strengths and weaknesses should be equally balance against each other and that there would need to be equal amount of choices. The strengths and weaknesses of factions are not equal. Why does guard have Ogryns or Strakenstar if they're supposed to be a powerful shooting army? Why they're better at everything than vanilla Space Marines?

Allowing things like imperium and chaos to cherry pick across multitudes of codexes with no downsides crushes codexes like tau that will never have an army that is meant to do what a BA smashcaptian does

No army should have what smash captain does, at least for that price.

Guard is supposed to be the largest most diverse fighting unit in the galaxy. They are supposed to have something that can do everything ok, but not outstrip specialists outright. So you have Bullgryns that are durable CC meat shields but can't punch like BA or Khorne, Catachan jungle fighters that are good strong, but not as strong as a dedicated cc unit like Khorne berzerkers (imo I think the catachan ability should only apply the first round of combat, I do think its a bit too strong and that's why its always taken, but that's a different discussion). Cherry picking is an issue because it removes your codex weakness and that's what we keep seeing this edition. Part of the weakness of the guard book is we don't have that absolutely crushing character like a smash captain or jetbike custodes. We are also supposed to have relatively fewergame-changing strategems. But we can right now go around that weakness with absolutely no downside. which is what has plagued this edition and its why you see soup always at the top but mono guard as a very middle of the pack army right now.

Bullgryns punch harder than most, if not all, BA units.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

That's because you're behaving like an Eldar player from 6th-7th edition.

Says the person defending the most broken thing in the meta.

Martel732 wrote:
Bullgryns punch harder than most, if not all, BA units.

I must have missed all the twitch games with Bullgryn droping out of the sky and killing a knight in a single turn..... seems weird people even bring BA captains when a bullgryn can do it

 vipoid wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

That's because you're behaving like an Eldar player from 6th-7th edition.

Says the person defending the most broken thing in the meta.

Name the terribly broken unit I've defended. I insist.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Asmodios wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Bullgryns punch harder than most, if not all, BA units.

I must have missed all the twitch games with Bullgryn droping out of the sky and killing a knight in a single turn..... seems weird people even bring BA captains when a bullgryn can do it

That's because the Captains are cheap and you know that.

Asmodios wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Bullgryns punch harder than most, if not all, BA units.

I must have missed all the twitch games with Bullgryn droping out of the sky and killing a knight in a single turn..... seems weird people even bring BA captains when a bullgryn can do it

I guess capt smash is a "unit". I mean DC and SG. You know, units.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

That's because you're behaving like an Eldar player from 6th-7th edition.

Says the person defending the most broken thing in the meta.

Name the terribly broken unit I've defended. I insist.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Asmodios wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Bullgryns punch harder than most, if not all, BA units.

I must have missed all the twitch games with Bullgryn droping out of the sky and killing a knight in a single turn..... seems weird people even bring BA captains when a bullgryn can do it

That's because the Captains are cheap and you know that.

So you're saying that smash captains have hitting power per points that bullgryn just cant achieve....... and mobility...... and strategems...... so aka they don't fill the same roll as the specialized BA unit and thus IG doesn't not have something in the codex that can mirror it.... So your making my point

Kinda wishing they just took captains out of the codex at this point. This is getting dumb.

 Crimson wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Because these units are being designed and balanced to fit in with a certain playstyle and theme,

Citation needed. The same people who designed these units designed the rules which allow them to be allied.

Mosr of these units already existed before the people currently writing the rules got there, and those paradigms established long ago and havent changed. These people also are under management direction to do things for business reasons, which allies is a huge part of over the last 3 editions. There was an interview with the guy who did the 7E eldar book on reddit where he went over a lot of that sort of thing.

Ultimately the actual in-codex rules for army interaction betwern factions are very thin indeed, that's almost entirely handled in the detachment rules, distinct and apart from the army codex books that are written, presented, and portrayed in most instances as self contained forces.

Or this is a symptom of poor internal balance of the factions.

They can be, but, again, even with perfect costings, fundamentally having access to things like way more CP than one otherwise would or long range heavy artillery in an army of close range specialists can hugely sway things in unintended manners, and we see that played out in tournament lists.

But the current rules allow them to be treated exactly like that! Whyt does it matter in which book the rules physically reside?

The point was that comparing SM/IG allies was not the same as Harlequins and other Eldar.

If you don't want Space Marines to be taking Basilisks, then give Space Marines tanks which do not suck?

They're not supposed to really have something like that, armies arent supposed to have access to everything, no faction is.

Tau and Guard arent supposed to have access to things like fast moving powerful CC and rapid redeployment mobility, Eldar really shouldn't generally be insanely hard to kill, SM's shouldn't have vast numbers or better tanks than the Guard, etc.

I'm ultimately not opposed to fixing many of the issues with the SM book, there very much are issues that need addressing, but like any army, they shouldn't be able to do it all.

Dandelion wrote:
[
But the whole faction strengths and weaknesses spiel is not really present in most larger armies:
- Tau have kroot for CC
- Guard have Ogryns for CC, and Scions for mobility
- Eldar have fast and slow units, and fragile and tough units
- Orks are pretty well rounded with options: horde vs elite and shooting vs CC
- Necrons in theory are also well rounded, with a mix of fast and slow units, shooting and CC
- Nids, again, are well rounded.
etc...
If it's a major faction, it's got the tools it needs. The factions have skews, but they don't really lack those other options.

Right, but that level of skew is important. There is a world of difference between having Kroot or Ogryn that can be a bumper stop or clean up element, and having access to something like a Custodes Jetbike Captain that provides resilient offensive striking power and almost unparalleled mobility.

With Allies, that skew factor gets really muddled.

BTW Bullgryns are a phenomenal meele unit and yes, with gimminick they can become absurdly resilient with 2+/3++.
But they aren't taken because... why? Why punch things when youc can shoot them and BA captains have all your meele needs covered?

I don't think a BA captain should be threated as a meele unit but more as a ranged one time missile. Because meele implies the opponent has some kind of counter-reaction to it. Smashfester just drops, ignores overwatch, charges nearly every time, and it explodes what it touches. Then you just kill him because he isn't that resilient. But is job is done.

Drukhari can turn off the charge strat. They are safe, relatively speaking.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Because these units are being designed and balanced to fit in with a certain playstyle and theme,

Citation needed. The same people who designed these units designed the rules which allow them to be allied.

Mosr of these units already existed before the people currently writing the rules got there, and those paradigms established long ago and havent changed. These people also are under management direction to do things for business reasons, which allies is a huge part of over the last 3 editions. There was an interview with the guy who did the 7E eldar book on reddit where he went over a lot of that sort of thing.

Ultimately the actual in-codex rules for army interaction betwern factions are very thin indeed, that's almost entirely handled in the detachment rules, distinct and apart from the army codex books that are written, presented, and portrayed in most instances as self contained forces.

Or this is a symptom of poor internal balance of the factions.

They can be, but, again, even with perfect costings, fundamentally having access to things like way more CP than one otherwise would or long range heavy artillery in an army of close range specialists can hugely sway things in unintended manners, and we see that played out in tournament lists.

But the current rules allow them to be treated exactly like that! Whyt does it matter in which book the rules physically reside?

The point was that comparing SM/IG allies was not the same as Harlequins and other Eldar.

If you don't want Space Marines to be taking Basilisks, then give Space Marines tanks which do not suck?

They're not supposed to really have something like that, armies arent supposed to have access to everything, no faction is.

Tau and Guard arent supposed to have access to things like fast moving powerful CC and rapid redeployment mobility, Eldar really shouldn't generally be insanely hard to kill, SM's shouldn't have vast numbers or better tanks than the Guard, etc.

I'm ultimately not opposed to fixing many of the issues with the SM book, there very much are issues that need addressing, but like any army, they shouldn't be able to do it all.

Dandelion wrote:
[
But the whole faction strengths and weaknesses spiel is not really present in most larger armies:
- Tau have kroot for CC
- Guard have Ogryns for CC, and Scions for mobility
- Eldar have fast and slow units, and fragile and tough units
- Orks are pretty well rounded with options: horde vs elite and shooting vs CC
- Necrons in theory are also well rounded, with a mix of fast and slow units, shooting and CC
- Nids, again, are well rounded.
etc...
If it's a major faction, it's got the tools it needs. The factions have skews, but they don't really lack those other options.

Right, but that level of skew is important. There is a world of difference between having Kroot or Ogryn that can be a bumper stop or clean up element, and having access to something like a Custodes Jetbike Captain that provides resilient offensive striking power and almost unparalleled mobility.

With Allies, that skew factor gets really muddled.

Allies aren't muddling that Custodes Biker Captains need to be hit. You're...not actually serious are you?

 Vaktathi wrote:
Right, but that level of skew is important. There is a world of difference between having Kroot or Ogryn that can be a bumper stop or clean up element, and having access to something like a Custodes Jetbike Captain that provides resilient offensive striking power and almost unparalleled mobility.

The coldstar says hi:
- Mobility
- Good striking power
- Fairly resilient with SG and drones
- Also decent in melee (onager gauntlet and fusion blades help there)

The thing is, you can't compare kroot to Custodes bike captains. Kroot are a melee unit similar(ish) to ork boyz, or hormagants. Then there's the krootox which hits pretty hard for its cost and is fairly fast.
Digression: the more I look at the kroot stuff the more I want a fleshed out kroot faction

Dandelion wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Right, but that level of skew is important. There is a world of difference between having Kroot or Ogryn that can be a bumper stop or clean up element, and having access to something like a Custodes Jetbike Captain that provides resilient offensive striking power and almost unparalleled mobility.

The coldstar says hi:
- Mobility
- Good striking power
- Fairly resilient with SG and drones
- Also decent in melee (onager gauntlet and fusion blades help there)

Sort of, in some respects the Coldstat is similar if set uo that way, but you can only have one set up like that (as opposed to the double/triple jetbikes we often see) and aren't going to really work quite the same way or have the stratagem support, in addition to costing a lot more after all that kit (iirc, dont have the book in front of me), and only works with ine subfaction (again, IIRC).

The thing is, you can't compare kroot to Custodes bike captains.

Right, that was kinda my point. They have some melee, but not anything to build an army around or strong offensive line with.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Allies aren't muddling that Custodes Biker Captains need to be hit. You're...not actually serious are you?

Ultimately the point is that stuff from one army can become more powerful than it would otherwise be when paired with stuff from other armies. I don't get why the fundamental concept of context is so controversial here.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Dandelion wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Right, but that level of skew is important. There is a world of difference between having Kroot or Ogryn that can be a bumper stop or clean up element, and having access to something like a Custodes Jetbike Captain that provides resilient offensive striking power and almost unparalleled mobility.

The coldstar says hi:
- Mobility
- Good striking power
- Fairly resilient with SG and drones
- Also decent in melee (onager gauntlet and fusion blades help there)

Sort of, in some respects the Coldstat is similar if set uo that way, but you can only have one set up like that (as opposed to the double/triple jetbikes we often see) and aren't going to really work quite the same way or have the stratagem support, in addition to costing a lot more after all that kit (iirc, dont have the book in front of me), and only works with ine subfaction (again, IIRC).

The thing is, you can't compare kroot to Custodes bike captains.

Right, that was kinda my point. They have some melee, but not anything to build an army around or strong offensive line with.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Allies aren't muddling that Custodes Biker Captains need to be hit. You're...not actually serious are you?

Ultimately the point is that stuff from one army can become more powerful than it would otherwise be when paired with stuff from other armies. I don't get why the fundamental concept of context is so controversial here.

The context is Jetbike Captains are too strong on their own without the need for allies. There's no need to consider allies in that discussion whatsoever. So when something is that over the top, why are we going to blame souping or allies?

YEAH Infantry aren't as powerful as a Cawls Wrath Knight, but we still need to have the discussion of the units that are too powerful. If they're auto-include in a mono-army, OF COURSE they're auto-include in soup.

Infantry absolutely win games by sitting on objectives with a 4+ and too many bodies to reasonably kill.

If chess clocks weren't introduced and IG didn't have a wealth of other, more enjoyable options, I can guarantee that their tactic would be the same as Orks which is to bring too many cheap bodies to be killed in a reasonable time and to win by sitting on objectives. Of course they'd be more effective because they get a 5+ save and for every 2 Boyz you'd have 3 Guardsmen.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The context is Jetbike Captains are too strong on their own without the need for allies. There's no need to consider allies in that discussion whatsoever. So when something is that over the top, why are we going to blame souping or allies?

YEAH Infantry aren't as powerful as a Cawls Wrath Knight, but we still need to have the discussion of the units that are too powerful. If they're auto-include in a mono-army, OF COURSE they're auto-include in soup.

The Infantry squad is one of guard's 3 troop choices, of which we have:
Conscripts: nerfed into the ground so hard that even at 3ppm they'd still be a pretty crappy choice
Scions:awesome stats and capability but at over twice the price of a guardsmen they're too expensive to run in large number's, best taken in small numbers for specific purposes (unless you're running a full army of them of course)
Infantry squads:Good stats and model count for a cheap price, they're the bread and butter of Guard lists

Infantry squads are auto takes because they're the best choice to take in bulk Guard has, a troop choice Guard has to take in order to fill brigades and battalion's, you bump them up to 5ppm and people will still take them, nerf them some other way and people will still take them, hell even if conscripts were better people would still run them just so they had less models to build/paint.move around the board. It's one thing to call out optional units like Basilisk's, manticore's, Russ's as auto includes because the basic detachment system doesn't need them to function, but calling out troop choices for it is just silly.

Scions are better marines than marines, though.

Martel732 wrote:
Scions are better marines than marines, though.

Better Marines than Marines? No.

They're a lot less durable, which is key to a Marine's identity.

Are they better IN GENERAL than Marines? Almost certainly.

But Marines are generally acknowledged to suck, so...

When I think of mobile shock troops, I think of scions rather than marines. Admittedly, it's because of cost effectiveness, but it's still depressing.

Scions are more suicide troops though. At least, that's how they get used.

I see that, but if they drop in cover, they can get a 2+ save. That's pretty hot.

Martel732 wrote:
I see that, but if they drop in cover, they can get a 2+ save. That's pretty hot.

Up to two can get a 2+, if you spend a Strat and a Psychic Power.

If you can drop into cover and still get your target.

And they're still T3.

They have T3, but easy access to fallback and shoot. I don't know. They're really good.

Martel732 wrote:
They have T3, but easy access to fallback and shoot. I don't know. They're really good.

What the hell is charging their T3 4+ butts and NOT wiping them?

Lots and lots of marine units. Remember basal marines get one attack. Also, I'm using a lot of guardsmen now, who absolutely can't wipe them.

Don't Guardsmen have 3 S4 attacks each?

 gbghg wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The context is Jetbike Captains are too strong on their own without the need for allies. There's no need to consider allies in that discussion whatsoever. So when something is that over the top, why are we going to blame souping or allies?

YEAH Infantry aren't as powerful as a Cawls Wrath Knight, but we still need to have the discussion of the units that are too powerful. If they're auto-include in a mono-army, OF COURSE they're auto-include in soup.

The Infantry squad is one of guard's 3 troop choices, of which we have:
Conscripts: nerfed into the ground so hard that even at 3ppm they'd still be a pretty crappy choice
Scions:awesome stats and capability but at over twice the price of a guardsmen they're too expensive to run in large number's, best taken in small numbers for specific purposes (unless you're running a full army of them of course)
Infantry squads:Good stats and model count for a cheap price, they're the bread and butter of Guard lists

Infantry squads are auto takes because they're the best choice to take in bulk Guard has, a troop choice Guard has to take in order to fill brigades and battalion's, you bump them up to 5ppm and people will still take them, nerf them some other way and people will still take them, hell even if conscripts were better people would still run them just so they had less models to build/paint.move around the board. It's one thing to call out optional units like Basilisk's, manticore's, Russ's as auto includes because the basic detachment system doesn't need them to function, but calling out troop choices for it is just silly.

Everyone already acknowledges that Conscripts going to 4 points was silly and everyone already knows Vets should be troops again.

What's the real point you're making?

 JNAProductions wrote:
Scions are more suicide troops though. At least, that's how they get used.

Just when you use ‘em for that. They are quite the killy sons a guns. Especially when they have a vehicle that can put out 20 shots at S4 that hit on 3s, with extra shots on 6s.

Can we talk about how strong Scions are for a moment. I haven’t seen the Mathhammer on them. Are they pointed appropriately in anyone’s opinion or not?

 JNAProductions wrote:
Don't Guardsmen have 3 S4 attacks each?

Mine don't. They're valhallans.