Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

If anyone cares I wrote more in-depth views on how to fix soup in the Proposed Rules section. I didn't want to clutter up this thread with it.

Bharring wrote:
-Makes all the IK options playable
-Makes all the IG options playable
-Doesn't get why IK+IG still beats IK lists and IG lists

I literally explained this in another thread.
The Knights + Guard work because you're taking multiples of broken units instead of just the two that reside in your codex. When you replace your bad unit with a broken one, YEAH no gak it's gonna help you out.

Consider how the purer armies won last edition. It was because they had ways to produce multiple broken units within the same codex. While we are more toned down compared to 7th, there are still tons of external issues. Until you make it so units aren't so over the top, why wouldn't you ally them with each other? More importantly, why are we blaming allies instead of the mathematically problematic units in the first place?

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
You wanna make Mono Codex appealing? Make all the options in a codex appealing in the first place.

then the army that has access to two codexes worth of good options that balance out each others weaknesses is much stronger than the one limited to the exact same units, cut into a fraction. Your suggestion improves the game, but doesn't fix this problem.


The solution is pretty simply to nerf soup, and make there a cost for allies. It's not that difficult but progress is hindered by people who don't want soup to be reasonable because as it stands its giving them the advantage they desparately need over non soup players.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
You wanna make Mono Codex appealing? Make all the options in a codex appealing in the first place.

then the army that has access to two codexes worth of good options that balance out each others weaknesses is much stronger than the one limited to the exact same units, cut into a fraction. Your suggestion improves the game, but doesn't fix this problem.


The solution is pretty simply to nerf soup, and make there a cost for allies. It's not that difficult but progress is hindered by people who don't want soup to be reasonable because as it stands its giving them the advantage they desparately need over non soup players.

As badly done as 7th edition was, it had FAR worse allies interactions. However, mono-armies were still the winners overall outside super niche builds. Then sometimes Riptide Wing thrown in random armies.

When units aren't so frickin stupid externally, it doesn't actually matter if you have access to every codex. In 7th, EVERYONE had access to Canoptek whatever and Aspect Shrine. Didn't these things actually need nerfing on their own merit though?

 SHUPPET wrote:


The solution is pretty simply to nerf soup, and make there a cost for allies. It's not that difficult but progress is hindered by people who don't want soup to be reasonable because as it stands its giving them the advantage they desparately need over non soup players.

You just need GW to take control. But they dont really care as long as they make money

Why ask soup players who enjoy what they play. They also enjoy the flexibility of soup. Do the rich really give to the poor?

Honestly people crying foul over soup are overreacting. Imperial soup as dominant as it may appear, still has a variety of other armies winning ahead of it. Brandon Grant won with the LVO with imperial soup but two of his matches were decided by 2 points. Plenty of armies only dropped one game but could have also won them all. In Cancon Australia, the winner had Tyrannid termagant horde. Soup is single handedly allowing imperial armies to be competitive. 1ksons/daemons won the GT last weekend etc.

I'm having trouble finding any analysis of the LVO results (link please?)
What's the ratio of soup to non soup?
I have no problem with allies existing. But if the ratio is as bad as I think it is...
I can't help thinking that decoupling command points from detachments would go a long way towards reducing the prevalence of soup. As I understand it, things like loyal 32 and rusty 17 exist primarily to generate CPs. What would happen if you got the same CPs regardless of army composition? How many of those armies would drop their allies to take more from the primary army?

The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

Zustiur wrote:
I'm having trouble finding any analysis of the LVO results (link please?)
What's the ratio of soup to non soup?
I have no problem with allies existing. But if the ratio is as bad as I think it is...
I can't help thinking that decoupling command points from detachments would go a long way towards reducing the prevalence of soup. As I understand it, things like loyal 32 and rusty 17 exist primarily to generate CPs. What would happen if you got the same CPs regardless of army composition? How many of those armies would drop their allies to take more from the primary army?

The fact is no imperium army should go mono while soup exists. You did have marines in the top but that doesnt make marines any good. Likewise we know that some very good players got orcs into the top, but majority of them were middle or worse. Tau also was in top. Its hard to take results in isolation, some of the best players can make any faction look good.

Most factions seem to be able to generate CP cheap but people prefer not to. Necrons expensive but what if they allowed 5 man warrior squads. If you have a faction that can get a troop choice around 60pts, you only have yourself to blame.

The only factions that can't are the elite armies (custodes/GK/IK)

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

I'll have to wait until the podcast is released public because I can't listen to it through FLG for some reason but it seems to me that they're really showing their GW bias here.

'We analysed the top 5% of players at our tournament and found that they all had good win rates!' Yea no gak Pablo. Kinda to be expected.

'The best players finished in the top 5%!' Again no gak. The best players are those that finish high.

'Almost every faction did well and got into the top 5%!' So? There will always be outliers. This information is totally skewed without knowing the ratio of players of said faction compared to the ratio of those playing in the top flight.

From your summary it seems that they didn't compare factions against each other, so they think having 2 Orks in the top 50 is equivalent to having 15 Castellans, 19 IG players and 15 Aeldari peeps. Give me a break.

E - I've managed to download it somehow, will amend feedback once I've listened.

What is the win ratio of GK, the site is horrible to navigate? Only thing I could find was 30% something for non mono GK.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

I'll have to wait until the podcast is released public because I can't listen to it through FLG for some reason but it seems to me that they're really showing their GW bias here.

'We analysed the top 5% of players at our tournament and found that they all had good win rates!' Yea no gak Pablo. Kinda to be expected.

'The best players finished in the top 5%!' Again no gak. The best players are those that finish high.

'Almost every faction did well and got into the top 5%!' So? There will always be outliers. This information is totally skewed without knowing the ratio of players of said faction compared to the ratio of those playing in the top flight.

From your summary it seems that they didn't compare factions against each other, so they think having 2 Orks in the top 50 is equivalent to having 15 Castellans, 19 IG players and 15 Aeldari peeps. Give me a break.

E - I've managed to download it somehow, will amend feedback once I've listened.

Hmmm, the broadcast is and was always publicly available.
The think i don`t like is that the raw data is not publicly available, the frontline guys don`t have the resources and time to make different kind of comparisons.
Even if you subscribe for BCP you still get only picture data of the lists.
On other hand i understand them, since they wanna people to buy the app to sponsor the development. If raw data was available less people will buy the app since it does not give you any real features. Of course its mostly useless because top list will always be posted in internet sites. The subscription really will decrease the popularity of the application, since no tournament organizer will force players to upload their list to payed app.
I don`t understand why they push to create their own list builder, when we have battlescribe who is very good and even some already developed builders are getting cancaled becouse the lack of support https://wertstammer40k.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/the-builder-is-dead-i-still-love-gw-but/?fbclid=IwAR3gMhcQSft7icy0SkBaZwwpHEbCc6pp_tHKbNvWjo5xeMUnVjzT8UWiTv8

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

I'll have to wait until the podcast is released public because I can't listen to it through FLG for some reason but it seems to me that they're really showing their GW bias here.

'We analysed the top 5% of players at our tournament and found that they all had good win rates!' Yea no gak Pablo. Kinda to be expected.

'The best players finished in the top 5%!' Again no gak. The best players are those that finish high.

'Almost every faction did well and got into the top 5%!' So? There will always be outliers. This information is totally skewed without knowing the ratio of players of said faction compared to the ratio of those playing in the top flight.

From your summary it seems that they didn't compare factions against each other, so they think having 2 Orks in the top 50 is equivalent to having 15 Castellans, 19 IG players and 15 Aeldari peeps. Give me a break.

E - I've managed to download it somehow, will amend feedback once I've listened.

In scientific terms, it is Methodological mismanagement in order to get a statistic that favours their side of the story?

I would find that this would be very special indeed.

You dont fix mono, you fix soup. Limit detachment for allies, 1 allied detachment with max 500pts and cant use their stratagems, relics, WL traits. Problem solved.

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

The ITC definitions of factions usually mean that every faction other than Orks/T'au/Necrons are probably not mono-faction. Reece has begun to make mutterings that they could change the faction rules now so that a faction means what it says but they are clearly in no hurry to do so. At the moment there is unlikely to be much for a pure mono-player to play for at a tournament like LVO, nearly all best in faction prizes will be going to soup lists and the best overall only had one non-soup in the top 8. One of the consequences of that is that we really have very little data on the relative game strength of mono lists - not only are the results not recorded suitably but also there is little motivation for players to put in the effort to make such lists work. Before we get too carried away we should consider the possibility that the apparent imbalances we see in ITC stats might be contributed to by the ITC mission pack and their terrain house-rules. The splitting of competitive 40K into at least 3 different strands (ITC, ETC, GW-standard) makes it very hard to draw conclusions about balance which will be true universally.

There are a couple of stand-out things that look a bit too good at the moment and those are Ynnari (esp. cat lady) and Knights (esp. Castellan). Those need fixing for the ITC meta regardless of soup considerations and if they are fixed some of the soup imbalance may go away as a side-effect. However even for those if we look outside the ITC mission set it is not quite so clear that the balance is as skewed as the ITC stats might suggest.

There is also a difference between different metas. The results from the latest GW heat 4 were totally different in appearance to what we saw at LVO. 4 out of 5 of the top lists there were still "soup" but I do think Ultramarines + smash captains as a winning list is very different to anything we see in the ITC right now and the dominance of Castellan/Yvraine lists was just not apparent. They run the CA18 eternal war missions and book-standard terrain rules which may have a huge amount to do with the difference.

We should still keep some perspective on how balanced we think the game should reasonably be. Very few factions fall outside the 40-60% win rate which would indicate that you can take a well designed list from almost any faction and have a reasonable expectation of winning 2-3 games out of a 5 game tournament. Sorry dedicated GK players, times are hard for you and GK need a boost as much as Ynnari/Knights need a fix downwards in power.

So i think what I am saying is that we can see an issue with mono-codex being less of a competitive choice in most metas but that the clear big winners in one meta may not be winners in another. If we look at how some of the top soup lists work the only common factor is the wider ability to mix/match the best units and the best relics/stratagems/powers from a greater choice of sources. Much as the AM/Castellan list abuses lots of CP many of the Ynnari lists are low-CP already so CP farming is not their main driver. I really think the driver here is mostly "this unit/rule is too good in this tournament ruleset" so GW and the writers of tournament rules need to look at that first. Until that is addressed we do not know how much structural imbalance there still is from soup vs mono that needs a structural rebalance such as is being discussed on this and other threads.

Also...we should not expect GW to focus their balancing on ITC when what they see in the events they run in warhammer world is very different. Maybe, just maybe, the designers have the book-standard terrain and mission sets in mind when they try to balance stuff rather than the different rules for ITC or ETC. If you are an ITC player than does mean that the level of balancing they do to your mission sets and house-rules may be rather limited.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

I'll have to wait until the podcast is released public because I can't listen to it through FLG for some reason but it seems to me that they're really showing their GW bias here.

'We analysed the top 5% of players at our tournament and found that they all had good win rates!' Yea no gak Pablo. Kinda to be expected.

'The best players finished in the top 5%!' Again no gak. The best players are those that finish high.

'Almost every faction did well and got into the top 5%!' So? There will always be outliers. This information is totally skewed without knowing the ratio of players of said faction compared to the ratio of those playing in the top flight.

From your summary it seems that they didn't compare factions against each other, so they think having 2 Orks in the top 50 is equivalent to having 15 Castellans, 19 IG players and 15 Aeldari peeps. Give me a break.

E - I've managed to download it somehow, will amend feedback once I've listened.

In scientific terms, it is Methodological mismanagement in order to get a statistic that favours their side of the story?

I would find that this would be very special indeed.

What exactly do you mean, what is their side of the story?



I will say I often find the "stats" editions of their podcasts to be fairly pointless, no matter what the stats say they sort of twist it to whatever they want it to mean anyway. "Orks are doing poorly? Ah most Ork players are casual so you don't see the true results" "oh ynnari is top faction? sure, but thats also because most the ynnari playerbase are top level competitors" "oh ynarri dropped? Well that is because newer players are jumping on the ynarri bandwagon and dragging down the results" . I don't necessarily agree or disagree with any of that, but I just struggle to see the point in their stats if that's how we are going to go about it.

Make CP a fixed number per battle size(3 at 1000, 6 at 1500, and 9 at 2000 or something) and have stratagems costed accordingly to that variation of the system.

Boom, I solved the ally issue. No more need for CP batteries and we now have parity between stratagem cost between armies. IK stratagems(would now be more costlier CP-wise) can now be costed accordingly in comparison with IG stratagems(which would be cheaper in comparison). So no more will you have IG detachment give a lot of extra CP to a power-hungry IK detachment. This should in turn reduce the amount of big 'bots that subsequently will make haywire spam less important so less allying between Aeldari factions. This would then just leave two problematic pieces which are Ynnari and Doom which should be dealt with as their own problems.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:

 Cephalobeard wrote:
Step 1: Listen to absolutely no one on Dakka.

Then how about we listen to the Cults codex and just impose a 50% penalty on non-primary faction CP generation? It's simpler than most suggestions by a mile and they've already done it once.

Doesn't stop Loyal 32, as they'll just be declared the Primary Faction. The others combo'd with them only generate 1CP, so aren't otherwise affected by the '50% rounded up' rule.

Then you don't get to pick primary faction, it's whatever you have the most points in. Poof, loyal 32 gone.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

I'll have to wait until the podcast is released public because I can't listen to it through FLG for some reason but it seems to me that they're really showing their GW bias here.

'We analysed the top 5% of players at our tournament and found that they all had good win rates!' Yea no gak Pablo. Kinda to be expected.

'The best players finished in the top 5%!' Again no gak. The best players are those that finish high.

'Almost every faction did well and got into the top 5%!' So? There will always be outliers. This information is totally skewed without knowing the ratio of players of said faction compared to the ratio of those playing in the top flight.

From your summary it seems that they didn't compare factions against each other, so they think having 2 Orks in the top 50 is equivalent to having 15 Castellans, 19 IG players and 15 Aeldari peeps. Give me a break.

E - I've managed to download it somehow, will amend feedback once I've listened.

In scientific terms, it is Methodological mismanagement in order to get a statistic that favours their side of the story?

I would find that this would be very special indeed.

What exactly do you mean, what is their side of the story?



I will say I often find the "stats" editions of their podcasts to be fairly pointless, no matter what the stats say they sort of twist it to whatever they want it to mean anyway. "Orks are doing poorly? Ah most Ork players are casual so you don't see the true results" "oh ynnari is top faction? sure, but thats also because most the ynnari playerbase are top level competitors" "oh ynarri dropped? Well that is because newer players are jumping on the ynarri bandwagon and dragging down the results" . I don't necessarily agree or disagree with any of that, but I just struggle to see the point in their stats if that's how we are going to go about it.

The data is available with BCP, you can still analyze the things you are interested. The LVO is good place to analyze data, because of the big data set. Making assumptions on 20 man tournaments is pointless.
If i have time, i`ll try to make analyze how mono faction performed, being secondary or third fraction means really nothing. It`s like saying well you are eldar, imperial or chaos so you have to soup. I mean corsairs were the highest WR like first fraction, does that mean they should be nerfed ?

Ok, but if we nerf the loyal 32 and castellans, don't we just go back to kind of a pre knight meta? We would be again getting eldar beating everyone left and right. That is not much of a change to anyone, but people playing eldar right now.

Also am not sure that the fixation on CP generation is main problem, with soup. It sure doesn't help, but in most cases, it is just that the codex for multiple armies are build in a such a way that that they don't function at all without IG or some other sort of ally. IG can run a baneblade of some sort and have a worse castellan list. And they have it the best. What is a BA or custodes or knight player going to do without ally ? Their army just don't work, when comparing to the lowCP cost eldar soup lists.

The summary of the post LVO Chapter Tactics podcast that I quoted above by Marin is pretty inaccurate.

They go over the stats in some detail but obviously twist them to suit what they want them to say.

"In the top 62 lists (those that went 5-1) every faction was represented except for Grey Knights, that means we are close to a balanced game." [intent, not word for word].
Obviously this is not true as there was no consideration for what percentage of the different factions were in the top 62 nor how much of the total percentage of the overall player base those factions represented.

I have been saying that Orks made up over 10% of total primary detachments, this is wrong, we were 8.1% following IG and IK who both had roughly 9.5% (so 3rd most played faction). Dark Eldar were next.

Though he does a great job collating this information the Falcon (Mr Stats man) doesn't agree with the sentiment that Orks aren't as good as they should be despite all the stats proving him otherwise which I find really, really weird. I guess it's a case of being blinded by bias? Here's a few examples of things he said about Orks that were directly contradicted (sometimes in the same sentence);
"They [Orks] still performed relatively well even if their overall numbers don't show it." What numbers do show it? What is the measurement for performing well if it's not overall numbers?
"They only averaged a 48% win rate [which is only 1% better than how pre beta bolter drill marines fared]."
"[Only]2 Ork players went 5-1 [so were in that 62 player metric discussed earlier] but 14 of them went 4-2 so it wasn't that they were underperforming, it was just [goes on to blame it on poor players with lower results 'keeping their averages down']." Not sure why the 4-2 metric is now used as the basis of a good result and why 14 is considered a decent amount of players doing so. No comparison to other factions and no mention of how many total players went 4-2 means that this information is useless. If we know 14 players going 4-2 is roughly 8% of the field that is bang on what we should expect.

Orks lost more times than they won against Dark Eldar, Craftworld, Necrons, Chaos Space Marines and vanilla Space Marines, often by a large margin. We performed well against Tyranids, Chaos Demons and Ad Mech.

Sean, Pablo and the Falcon discussed the SAG Big Mek but they all talk about it as if you only roll 6s when using it. Things like this were said; "In one round of shooting it killed 8 Talos...If you get the right rolls with it...." What they seemingly fail to consider is that for every high strength roll that hits and wounds, you'll also roll low for strength and whiff every shot the next time. It's massively unreliable and that's a huge weakness.

Reece asked for the stats of Orks vs Eldar as he believes that we have the right tools to deal with Eldar effectively, they are thus; "47% win rate against Dark Eldar [very close apparently], 52% win rate against Ynarri and 43% win rate against CWE [that they immediately played down]". They admitted AoV is a problem for Orks shutting down Grot Shields and Green Tide.

Sean claimed that Eldar "have" to tech to beat Orks which is something I strongly disagree on since they actually tech'd to beat Guard + Castellan and someone claimed that the Ynarri flyer list was "designed" to beat Orks (hence why we didn't get any players in the top 8, of course) which is something I also completely disagree with since it almost won the entire thing and Castellan+Guard made up almost 30% of the field.

I think this statement from Pablo for me really hit the nail on the head;
"I feel like Orks are better than a gatekeeper army despite their results suggesting otherwise..." - it's the same with many players, their feelings are simply wrong. The results speak for themselves and show Orks to be exactly what they are.

Reece briefly mentioned the importance of those buffing characters and the whole puzzle coming together for Orks to be successful, which isn't particularly relevant for LVO outside of Vect but is going to be a big thing moving forward with Assassins about the launch and GSC now out in the wild with A Plan.

Overall pretty disappointed that they fell into the trap of hyperbole when they were supposed to be discussing statistics.

Back on the original question - how best to give mono factions a bit more something

I think the best and most flavourful way to do that would be to grant them some stratagems to represent their better cohesion.

So for an entire army that fulfils the same criteria as Battle Brothers I would give access to a couple of new Stratagems

Command Structure Breakdown - 2CP
A less cohesive command structure can suffer communication breakdowns on the field of battle, the more complex tactics and stratagems do not always work so smoothly as instructions are relayed between units with differing military cultures or approaches to warfare

Use this stratagem just after your opponent has spent CP for a stratagem which for reasons of <Faction> or <Sub-faction> keyword could not have been used by their warlord and before the stratagem takes effect. {Rest of wording as per Agents of Vect - this is an intentionally limited but much cheaper version of that stratagem}

Dissent in the Ranks - 1CP
Units of differing backgrounds and military cultures may misinterpret orders on the battlefield, either through accident or resentment. When this happens disaster might strike

Use this stratagem after your opponent has rolled dice for a model or unit which could not due to the Battle Brothers rule have been part of the same detachment as the Warlord. You may require your opponent to re-roll one dice of your choosing for that model or unit. {So a reverse command re-roll stratagem}

happy_inquisitor wrote:
Back on the original question - how best to give mono factions a bit more something

I think the best and most flavourful way to do that would be to grant them some stratagems to represent their better cohesion.

So for an entire army that fulfils the same criteria as Battle Brothers I would give access to a couple of new Stratagems

Command Structure Breakdown - 2CP
A less cohesive command structure can suffer communication breakdowns on the field of battle, the more complex tactics and stratagems do not always work so smoothly as instructions are relayed between units with differing military cultures or approaches to warfare

Use this stratagem just after your opponent has spent CP for a stratagem which for reasons of <Faction> or <Sub-faction> keyword could not have been used by their warlord and before the stratagem takes effect. {Rest of wording as per Agents of Vect - this is an intentionally limited but much cheaper version of that stratagem}

Dissent in the Ranks - 1CP
Units of differing backgrounds and military cultures may misinterpret orders on the battlefield, either through accident or resentment. When this happens disaster might strike

Use this stratagem after your opponent has rolled dice for a model or unit which could not due to the Battle Brothers rule have been part of the same detachment as the Warlord. You may require your opponent to re-roll one dice of your choosing for that model or unit. {So a reverse command re-roll stratagem}

That would be fine if it just affected factions, but affecting subfactions ir micro factions has some bad effects on balance orks mixing 2 clans is nothing like as much of a power boost as AM brigade plus Castellen.

This isn't a aingle problem with a single solution it's a compounded failure of foresight on the designers part to predict the interactions between codex's and the implications of that.

1 Soup needs a downside and a fairly big one currently.
2 Codex's need to be rebalanced.
3 Mini factions need to be playable/ balanced.
4 soup needs to be rebalanced with the newer balanced codex.
5 detachment books like vigilous need to be rebalanced
6 documentation updated

Actually that's quite a list and probably ripe for an edition change given the amount of books to redo.

happy_inquisitor wrote:

Marin wrote:
The LVO guys have analyzed the tournament data and they say some very interesting things.
Actually the best players won more than any fraction and do it with almost every army.
GW have told there will be codex v2, so the stats were showing the game is most balanced since very long time.
Good necron players have over 65% wr and SM did decent and that is without the new bolt rules.
Orc, admech and tao did very good, custodes and AM have very high ranked players.
Interesting stats, sadly only they have access to the raw data and for the rest of us its only BCP don`t provide enough.

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2019/02/18/chapter-tactics-102-analyzing-the-top-performing-units-factions-and-players-of-the-2019-lvo/

The ITC definitions of factions usually mean that every faction other than Orks/T'au/Necrons are probably not mono-faction. Reece has begun to make mutterings that they could change the faction rules now so that a faction means what it says but they are clearly in no hurry to do so. At the moment there is unlikely to be much for a pure mono-player to play for at a tournament like LVO, nearly all best in faction prizes will be going to soup lists and the best overall only had one non-soup in the top 8. One of the consequences of that is that we really have very little data on the relative game strength of mono lists - not only are the results not recorded suitably but also there is little motivation for players to put in the effort to make such lists work. Before we get too carried away we should consider the possibility that the apparent imbalances we see in ITC stats might be contributed to by the ITC mission pack and their terrain house-rules. The splitting of competitive 40K into at least 3 different strands (ITC, ETC, GW-standard) makes it very hard to draw conclusions about balance which will be true universally.

There are a couple of stand-out things that look a bit too good at the moment and those are Ynnari (esp. cat lady) and Knights (esp. Castellan). Those need fixing for the ITC meta regardless of soup considerations and if they are fixed some of the soup imbalance may go away as a side-effect. However even for those if we look outside the ITC mission set it is not quite so clear that the balance is as skewed as the ITC stats might suggest.

There is also a difference between different metas. The results from the latest GW heat 4 were totally different in appearance to what we saw at LVO. 4 out of 5 of the top lists there were still "soup" but I do think Ultramarines + smash captains as a winning list is very different to anything we see in the ITC right now and the dominance of Castellan/Yvraine lists was just not apparent. They run the CA18 eternal war missions and book-standard terrain rules which may have a huge amount to do with the difference.

We should still keep some perspective on how balanced we think the game should reasonably be. Very few factions fall outside the 40-60% win rate which would indicate that you can take a well designed list from almost any faction and have a reasonable expectation of winning 2-3 games out of a 5 game tournament. Sorry dedicated GK players, times are hard for you and GK need a boost as much as Ynnari/Knights need a fix downwards in power.

So i think what I am saying is that we can see an issue with mono-codex being less of a competitive choice in most metas but that the clear big winners in one meta may not be winners in another. If we look at how some of the top soup lists work the only common factor is the wider ability to mix/match the best units and the best relics/stratagems/powers from a greater choice of sources. Much as the AM/Castellan list abuses lots of CP many of the Ynnari lists are low-CP already so CP farming is not their main driver. I really think the driver here is mostly "this unit/rule is too good in this tournament ruleset" so GW and the writers of tournament rules need to look at that first. Until that is addressed we do not know how much structural imbalance there still is from soup vs mono that needs a structural rebalance such as is being discussed on this and other threads.

Also...we should not expect GW to focus their balancing on ITC when what they see in the events they run in warhammer world is very different. Maybe, just maybe, the designers have the book-standard terrain and mission sets in mind when they try to balance stuff rather than the different rules for ITC or ETC. If you are an ITC player than does mean that the level of balancing they do to your mission sets and house-rules may be rather limited.

First, I think that FLG will never see a fault with LVO, ITC or what they do; it's almost like GW propaganda at this point in that they are always praising and never finding any fault whatsoever. Their faction rankings make it so they can point to different "stated" factions and claim diversity when 6 out of the top 8 are all some variation of "Imperium Soup with Knights". They will say that's diversity and it's really not, and pat themselves on the back saying how great the game is and how balanced this shows it when it really doesn't show that at all.

Also, the fact the GW heats have differnt results is a huge reason why I and others think that it's time ITC used the regular 40k missions instead of their Champions missions. I won't rehash this argument again but the way the ITC missions work is a big reason you see the same stuff come up at ITC events. But it remains that GW uses their own missions and terrain rules to balance. ITC doesn't use these, but ITC provides the feedback to GW on balancing. Do you see the problem with that? GW is balancing based on data that isn't even fundamentally playing the same game.

If ITC events are meant to be playtesters it needs to be mandated somehow that they use the GW standard missions to provide valid feedback.

I like the idea of gaining new stratagems if your army is mono-faction.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Sean claimed that Eldar "have" to tech to beat Orks which is something I strongly disagree on since they actually tech'd to beat Guard + Castellan and someone claimed that the Ynarri flyer list was "designed" to beat Orks (hence why we didn't get any players in the top 8, of course) which is something I also completely disagree with since it almost won the entire thing and Castellan+Guard made up almost 30% of the field.

You totally missed it, they sad he got list that can deal with orcs and its true, he had 2x9 windriders with scatter lasers.
That is 72 shoots or 108 with soulburst, add doom and jinx, vect to stop stratagems, forewarned that works on the jumpa and than you have 7 flyers that if orc make mistake can go and snipe his characters or important units and flyers block infantry movement is probably super annoying for orc players.

You also are making assumption without having the data, until someone dig deep into orc performance data, we will only speculate.

Ice_can wrote:

happy_inquisitor wrote:
Back on the original question - how best to give mono factions a bit more something

I think the best and most flavourful way to do that would be to grant them some stratagems to represent their better cohesion.

So for an entire army that fulfils the same criteria as Battle Brothers I would give access to a couple of new Stratagems

Command Structure Breakdown - 2CP
A less cohesive command structure can suffer communication breakdowns on the field of battle, the more complex tactics and stratagems do not always work so smoothly as instructions are relayed between units with differing military cultures or approaches to warfare

Use this stratagem just after your opponent has spent CP for a stratagem which for reasons of <Faction> or <Sub-faction> keyword could not have been used by their warlord and before the stratagem takes effect. {Rest of wording as per Agents of Vect - this is an intentionally limited but much cheaper version of that stratagem}

Dissent in the Ranks - 1CP
Units of differing backgrounds and military cultures may misinterpret orders on the battlefield, either through accident or resentment. When this happens disaster might strike

Use this stratagem after your opponent has rolled dice for a model or unit which could not due to the Battle Brothers rule have been part of the same detachment as the Warlord. You may require your opponent to re-roll one dice of your choosing for that model or unit. {So a reverse command re-roll stratagem}

That would be fine if it just affected factions, but affecting subfactions ir micro factions has some bad effects on balance orks mixing 2 clans is nothing like as much of a power boost as AM brigade plus Castellen.

I very intentionally did this so that one stratagem could only be used against full ally lists while the other also affected specific aspects of "mono" lists with mixed sub-factions. That gives a boost to the mono faction lists that gain these stratagems in a wider variety of match-ups. A small boost in nearly all games, an extra boost when facing allied lists.

It was just there for discussion so its OK if you think you have better ideas.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:


First, I think that FLG will never see a fault with LVO, ITC or what they do; it's almost like GW propaganda at this point in that they are always praising and never finding any fault whatsoever. Their faction rankings make it so they can point to different "stated" factions and claim diversity when 6 out of the top 8 are all some variation of "Imperium Soup with Knights". They will say that's diversity and it's really not, and pat themselves on the back saying how great the game is and how balanced this shows it when it really doesn't show that at all.

That is not quite right. The top 8 were
3 Imperial guard / Castellan Knight + optional extras
3 Aeldari mashup with Yvraine/Soulburst
1 Chaos soup
1 Mono T'au

Really nobody is saying that the diversity right at the top is what hey would like to see - and only some sad keyboard warriors are still trying to claim that the Castellan and Yvraine are not in need of some changes made to restore a bit more balance to the game.

As for FLG, I am not interested in slating them; they have worked hard to do stuff for the part of the community that loves competitive tournament play. I might disagree with some of the decisions they make but I believe they were made in the right spirit of trying to help the game along. A couple of those decisions - factions, terrain - are well past their sell-by date and should be quietly dropped but that is just my opinion.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
You dont fix mono, you fix soup. Limit detachment for allies, 1 allied detachment with max 500pts and cant use their stratagems, relics, WL traits. Problem solved.

And this fixes the broken units how?
Or you just want the broken units to yourself?

Since they're already going down the road of re-introducing formations to the game, you could limit some of them to only be available to mono armies in 2000 point or lower armies. Couple that with a change to how Command Points are given could be the changes needed. Taking allies would still let you cover up army weaknesses and get access to more stratagems, but lose access to formations and won't award you with easy command point access.

happy_inquisitor wrote:
Back on the original question - how best to give mono factions a bit more something

I think the best and most flavourful way to do that would be to grant them some stratagems to represent their better cohesion.

So for an entire army that fulfils the same criteria as Battle Brothers I would give access to a couple of new Stratagems

Command Structure Breakdown - 2CP
A less cohesive command structure can suffer communication breakdowns on the field of battle, the more complex tactics and stratagems do not always work so smoothly as instructions are relayed between units with differing military cultures or approaches to warfare

Use this stratagem just after your opponent has spent CP for a stratagem which for reasons of <Faction> or <Sub-faction> keyword could not have been used by their warlord and before the stratagem takes effect. {Rest of wording as per Agents of Vect - this is an intentionally limited but much cheaper version of that stratagem}

Dissent in the Ranks - 1CP
Units of differing backgrounds and military cultures may misinterpret orders on the battlefield, either through accident or resentment. When this happens disaster might strike

Use this stratagem after your opponent has rolled dice for a model or unit which could not due to the Battle Brothers rule have been part of the same detachment as the Warlord. You may require your opponent to re-roll one dice of your choosing for that model or unit. {So a reverse command re-roll stratagem}

I like it except the subfactions that are in the same book should not get penailzed.
A bunch of Ork tribez forming a Waaaaghh! or a mixed warband of base CSM legions should not get penalized for it. However bringing 3+ DP's because i use 3 Codices (CSM, CD and DG f.e.) should not be possible.
Or is suddendly everyone and their mother promoted to DP?

Not Online!!! wrote:

happy_inquisitor wrote:
Back on the original question - how best to give mono factions a bit more something

I think the best and most flavourful way to do that would be to grant them some stratagems to represent their better cohesion.

So for an entire army that fulfils the same criteria as Battle Brothers I would give access to a couple of new Stratagems

Command Structure Breakdown - 2CP
A less cohesive command structure can suffer communication breakdowns on the field of battle, the more complex tactics and stratagems do not always work so smoothly as instructions are relayed between units with differing military cultures or approaches to warfare

Use this stratagem just after your opponent has spent CP for a stratagem which for reasons of <Faction> or <Sub-faction> keyword could not have been used by their warlord and before the stratagem takes effect. {Rest of wording as per Agents of Vect - this is an intentionally limited but much cheaper version of that stratagem}

Dissent in the Ranks - 1CP
Units of differing backgrounds and military cultures may misinterpret orders on the battlefield, either through accident or resentment. When this happens disaster might strike

Use this stratagem after your opponent has rolled dice for a model or unit which could not due to the Battle Brothers rule have been part of the same detachment as the Warlord. You may require your opponent to re-roll one dice of your choosing for that model or unit. {So a reverse command re-roll stratagem}

I like it except the subfactions that are in the same book should not get penailzed.
A bunch of Ork tribez forming a Waaaaghh! or a mixed warband of base CSM legions should not get penalized for it. However bringing 3+ DP's because i use 3 Codices (CSM, CD and DG f.e.) should not be possible.
Or is suddendly everyone and their mother promoted to DP?

I think the problem with this is it's potentially broken/OP to have two detachments of the same faction, different subfactions. E.g. alpha legion for cultist blobs and world eaters for melee berserkers to get the best of both worlds. So I'd rather see any non-primary subfaction not get its abilities to prevent detachment stacking with each detachment using the most appropriate subfaction trait.