The Iron Hands beating thread

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**An Actual Englishman**

It doesn't matter if you add or divide first. IH are still broken with their relative durability and output. The argument of 'how broken' doesn't really matter at this stage.

**vict0988**

kingheff wrote:
Perhaps haywire cannon spam with skyweavers could work nicely against iron hands?
I put together a quick list of three squads of five skyweavers with haywire, a shadow seer with an ulthwe battalion of three min dire avengers, a farseer and warlock skyrunner plus four wave serpents with star cannons and CTM for 1750.

Probably one of the best anti-IH lists. You could also do Talos instead of Craftworlds for even more haywire guns since Farseer doesn't combo with haywire anymore.

An Actual Englishman wrote:
It doesn't matter if you add or divide first. IH are still broken with their relative durability and output. The argument of 'how broken' doesn't really matter at this stage.

I think you're in the wrong thread buddy. This isn't the whine about Iron Hands being unbeatable thread, this is the Iron Hands beating thread. If you want to surrender all your games to Iron Hands that's fine, but whether because you're a competitive player or because you like a challenge I think this thread does serve a purpose in helping people win against Iron Hands. It's clear from tournament results that Iron Hands aren't unbeatable, don't forget that every faction has overpowered options, even if it appears nu-Marines have more and better options than everyone else. Knowing that your opponent can't halve and then subtract 1 means D6 damage does 25% more damage on average if you choose the right sequence of events (which you can on your turn). 40k has never been balanced, it's less balanced than before the Marine release, by how much is hard to tell. Hopefully Iron Hands get an emergency nerf and other factions get some love between CA19 and Psychic Awakening.

**An Actual Englishman**

vict0988 wrote:
I think you're in the wrong thread buddy. This isn't the whine about Iron Hands being unbeatable thread, this is the Iron Hands beating thread. If you want to surrender all your games to Iron Hands that's fine, but whether because you're a competitive player or because you like a challenge I think this thread does serve a purpose in helping people win against Iron Hands. It's clear from tournament results that Iron Hands aren't unbeatable, don't forget that every faction has overpowered options, even if it appears nu-Marines have more and better options than everyone else. Knowing that your opponent can't halve and then subtract 1 means D6 damage does 25% more damage on average if you choose the right sequence of events (which you can on your turn). 40k has never been balanced, it's less balanced than before the Marine release, by how much is hard to tell. Hopefully Iron Hands get an emergency nerf and other factions get some love between CA19 and Psychic Awakening.

There are no tournament results to prove Iron Hands are beatable because no/very few tournaments have played with their rules yet.

Also if you had bothered to read the rest of the thread you'll have seen that I have already fed my suggestions on how I believe Iron Hands are beaten - using a very boring, tedious list that swamps the board with bodies. Apart from that your options are to try and out damage them, which is a tactic largely for the other nu-Marines.

This thread doesn't really serve a purpose, each of the Faction specific tactics threads are discussing the very same thing anyway and without the details of at least which faction you're playing this is all a bit too vague.

**Darsath**

Best strategy is to just play the objective, maybe tie some units in combat for a turn, and play for points. This is also the absolute worst way to play the game. This is why an emergency change is likely to happen.

**Latro_**

best way to beat them:
- join them and run IH
- time travel to the faq nerf

**Not Online!!!**

Darsath wrote:
Best strategy is to just play the objective, maybe tie some units in combat for a turn, and play for points. This is also the absolute worst way to play the game. This is why an emergency change is likely to happen.

Not to mention not all factions can pull that off successfully without impairing other matchups.

**kingheff**

vict0988 wrote:
kingheff wrote:
Perhaps haywire cannon spam with skyweavers could work nicely against iron hands?
I put together a quick list of three squads of five skyweavers with haywire, a shadow seer with an ulthwe battalion of three min dire avengers, a farseer and warlock skyrunner plus four wave serpents with star cannons and CTM for 1750.

Probably one of the best anti-IH lists. You could also do Talos instead of Craftworlds for even more haywire guns since Farseer doesn't combo with haywire anymore.

I put the craftworlders in for marine clearing duty, the star cannons are good against marines and serpent toughness helps tank their shooting, farseer does mortals with executioner and smite, warlock jinx makes the star cannons go straight through and unlocks +1 to cast for him and the farseer, the avengers just hide on objectives.

**Pyroalchi**

I seriously lack experience and do not posess the IH supplement but as a general idea: would it be an approach to use Cyclops demolition vehicles? As they "attack" via an ability and not by selecting targets, some of the defensive stratagems might not apply (for example cogitated martyrdom, which needs "an attack made against that model" which is not made by the Cyclops. The same should apply for the Ironstone.)

In a similar note: if the IH approach is to clump together to get their buffs, wouldn't it work to drive some relatively (!) cheap suicide bombs (Cyclops, Hellhounds, maybe Malcador Infernus or Valdor tank hunter) close? If the IH destroys them the mortal wounds from the explosions might make considerable damage...

But as mentioned, I lack experience, so take that as a guess for a strategy

**Tyel**

vict0988 wrote:
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Didn't Goonhammer math it out, and even a Warlord Titan firing all it's guns at a IH Relic Leviathan, has a 13% chance of failing to kill it, and even a Smash Captain needs 64 attacks?

The article was wrong and didn't use the standard mathhammer to see what it takes on average to kill a unit, instead, they used another method to inflate the numbers and make it look scarier than it is, not to mention they got the rules for the Dreadnought Stratagem wrong. They said the Dread Strat halved rounding down, when it halves rounding up.

Shouldn't the halving take place after the -1 anyways? So 4 damage, becomes 3 becomes 2? Since it's your turn you get to apply the sequence of effects right? Since it's modifying inflicted damage rather than the damage characteristic I'm not sure.

I expect the order the stratagem is played will be FAQed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't use standard mathhammer" though. Its second tier mathhammer - looking at probabilities rather than averages.
So yes, if the combination of stratagem+stone works out as they say, and their maths is right (and it looks reasonable enough) 57 lascannons would have a 50/50 chance of killing a Leviathan dreadnought.

This is if anything more accurate than the traditional (for example) take of "right, on average a lascannon does 0.444 damage a shot to this target, so if you shoot 32 lascannons at the target its going to take 14 wounds and die" - which isn't right at all. Its just a useful rule of thumb to compare one "average damage track" with another "average damage track" (which is what you see in traditional mathhammer.)

**Daedalus81**

The Forgemaster wrote:
Daedalus81 wrote:
Yea - any IH unit though.

Where is this screenshot from? can you provide a link?

Https://insighthammer.com

It's in development. The goal is to have all the FAQs, stratagems, relics, etc be filterable and searchable.

Astartes, Orks, IH, RG, are fully loaded currently.

**Dakka Wolf**

Admittedly I lucked out majorly in the terrain department under ITC rules but the ~ No Line of Sight on the Bottom Story of Buildings ~ rule saw me through my match with them, rather upset my opponent to find out that he couldn't see my stuff as it travelled through buildings and couldn't overwatch them when they charged out of said buildings, I will say I'm super glad he didn't have anything that cared not for Line of Sight like Whirlwinds though.

**vict0988**

Tyel wrote:
vict0988 wrote:
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Didn't Goonhammer math it out, and even a Warlord Titan firing all it's guns at a IH Relic Leviathan, has a 13% chance of failing to kill it, and even a Smash Captain needs 64 attacks?

The article was wrong and didn't use the standard mathhammer to see what it takes on average to kill a unit, instead, they used another method to inflate the numbers and make it look scarier than it is, not to mention they got the rules for the Dreadnought Stratagem wrong. They said the Dread Strat halved rounding down, when it halves rounding up.

Shouldn't the halving take place after the -1 anyways? So 4 damage, becomes 3 becomes 2? Since it's your turn you get to apply the sequence of effects right? Since it's modifying inflicted damage rather than the damage characteristic I'm not sure.

I expect the order the stratagem is played will be FAQed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't use standard mathhammer" though. Its second tier mathhammer - looking at probabilities rather than averages.
So yes, if the combination of stratagem+stone works out as they say, and their maths is right (and it looks reasonable enough) 57 lascannons would have a 50/50 chance of killing a Leviathan dreadnought.

This is if anything more accurate than the traditional (for example) take of "right, on average a lascannon does 0.444 damage a shot to this target, so if you shoot 32 lascannons at the target its going to take 14 wounds and die" - which isn't right at all. Its just a useful rule of thumb to compare one "average damage track" with another "average damage track" (which is what you see in traditional mathhammer.)

It's just as useful as saying it has a 50% chance of dying, it won't be either dead or alive, it'll be dead or likely very close to dead. No the standard mathhammer is what you want to use in most cases. The chance of success stuff is mostly concerning whether it's worth it to even target something, not how many shots it takes to kill something. So if you want to evaluate how tough something is? Calculate how much shooting takes to kill it on average. Want to know whether you should start shooting it in your Shooting phase? Figure out the chance of you successfully killing it with the available shooting you have and weight out how much of your turn will have been wasted depending on much the target is going to heal back up.

On average 25 lascannons within range of a Captain and Lieutenant kill an Iron Hands Leviathan Dreadnought that halves damage and then reduces it by 1. Killing it is not guaranteed, but 15 might do it as well, that's why the 50% chance of success weirdness isn't worth paying attention to unless you actually have 25 lascannons and you're wondering where to put them.

**grouchoben**

kingheff wrote:
I put the craftworlders in for marine clearing duty, the star cannons are good against marines and serpent toughness helps tank their shooting, farseer does mortals with executioner and smite, warlock jinx makes the star cannons go straight through and unlocks +1 to cast for him and the farseer, the avengers just hide on objectives.

I don't agree, sorry. I've had a pretty rough time against them with Alaitoc.

Starcannons are bad against IH main threats. Expected damage from CHE's twin starcannon is less than 1 most of the time vs an executioner, for example. But yes, goodish agains their intercessors though, as you say. Combine d3 damage with 6+++ and you have around 54% (rough guess) of killing an intercessor for each unsaved damage you inflict.

Serpents get dunked by Executioners, it's not even funny. -1 is nice but against executioner main guns, they go boom like everyone else.

Farseer's Doom has a what, 15% of going off, if IH player is willing to throw 1 (or 2 with reroll) cp at the problem? And IH is a very CP-light army, so they will, without doubt. But that does leave Jinx, so you have a point there. IH player has to choose which power to stop, assuming they haven't nuked a key psyker turn one...

Avengers will be obliterated by their double-firing thunderfire or their eliminators, once they've got through nuking your casters.

Alaitoc -1 to hit has taken a real kicking in the new SM codex, and IH can shoot very very well, on top of everything else they do.

You can't tie them up in CC either, so a desperate serpent charge, or a banshee attack will do nothing. Executioners float away and heal 6+1d3 wounds.

Not saying it's impossible, and I'm far from being a top CWE player, butI do think it will definitely involve plain plane spam and a lot of luck.

**Nitro Zeus**

vict0988 wrote:
kingheff wrote:
Perhaps haywire cannon spam with skyweavers could work nicely against iron hands?
I put together a quick list of three squads of five skyweavers with haywire, a shadow seer with an ulthwe battalion of three min dire avengers, a farseer and warlock skyrunner plus four wave serpents with star cannons and CTM for 1750.

Probably one of the best anti-IH lists. You could also do Talos instead of Craftworlds for even more haywire guns since Farseer doesn't combo with haywire anymore.

An Actual Englishman wrote:
It doesn't matter if you add or divide first. IH are still broken with their relative durability and output. The argument of 'how broken' doesn't really matter at this stage.

I think you're in the wrong thread buddy. This isn't the whine about Iron Hands being unbeatable thread, this is the Iron Hands beating thread. If you want to surrender all your games to Iron Hands that's fine, but whether because you're a competitive player or because you like a challenge I think this thread does serve a purpose in helping people win against Iron Hands. It's clear from tournament results that Iron Hands aren't unbeatable, don't forget that every faction has overpowered options, even if it appears nu-Marines have more and better options than everyone else. Knowing that your opponent can't halve and then subtract 1 means D6 damage does 25% more damage on average if you choose the right sequence of events (which you can on your turn). 40k has never been balanced, it's less balanced than before the Marine release, by how much is hard to tell. Hopefully Iron Hands get an emergency nerf and other factions get some love between CA19 and Psychic Awakening.

Flawlessly said. If Iron Hands are OP, it’s by far less of a margin than past armies have been. I got wins vs TauDar back in the day with a low tier army and I’m certain I’ll get them vs Iron Hands too. I’m a competitive player and thus I’ll look for ways to compete even if the battle is uphill.

**Karol**

Isn't the problem with IH that even if you do kill the leviathan, you still have to deal with 2-3 repulsors and a bunch of normal dreads and scouts/intercessors or an eliminator squad or two?

**AlmightyWalrus**

They're not squeezing all of that inside a 3" aura.

**Jidmah**

Karol wrote:
Isn't the problem with IH that even if you do kill the leviathan, you still have to deal with 2-3 repulsors and a bunch of normal dreads and scouts/intercessors or an eliminator squad or two?

You forgot the planes - but yes, exactly this.

**p5freak**

Each repulsor and leviathan are ~300 pts. I dont think you will see more than 3 of those in one list. Thats 900 pts, two batallions need ~400 pts. for 4 HQs, leaving 700 for standard troops, a stormhawk/stormtalon, thunderfire cannon, and whatever you want to include. You may kill one repulsor, or one leviathan, but not more, because your heavy weapons will be killed when the IH player is finished with his turn.

And btw, damage is a characteristic, so its divided first, and then one point is subtracted.

**Jidmah**

AlmightyWalrus wrote:
They're not squeezing all of that inside a 3" aura.

They still get half of all those defensive buffs.

**AlmightyWalrus**

Jidmah wrote:
AlmightyWalrus wrote:
They're not squeezing all of that inside a 3" aura.

They still get half of all those defensive buffs.

Yeah, but the Repulsors aren't getting the halved damage Dreadnought strat. This is going to sound more condescending than I mean it, but why would you not shoot the stuff outside the aura first?

**Jidmah**

One of the IH lists placing second in a GT didn't even bring a leviathan at all.
The "half damage Leviathan" just add insult to injury, dropping all those defensive buffs on repulsor executioners or an astraeus is already securing that a large part of your firebase will never die or degrade.

Inside the bubble is what's doing the damage and taking out your means to respond to it - if you spend your first turn shooting invictors, storm talons, scouts and eliminators, you'll have nothing left to harm any of the vehicles by turn 2 - and all of those units are cheap and durable enough to make shooting them sub-optimal in the first place.

**Daedalus81**

AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Jidmah wrote:
AlmightyWalrus wrote:
They're not squeezing all of that inside a 3" aura.

They still get half of all those defensive buffs.

Yeah, but the Repulsors aren't getting the halved damage Dreadnought strat. This is going to sound more condescending than I mean it, but why would you not shoot the stuff outside the aura first?

This has been my approach. Leave the bubble; kill the rest. It's still an uphill battle and the bubble breaks up once my big stuff is dead, but I score enough that it's not a massive win for IH.

On that note - you dont need to win every game in a tournament. Minimizing a loss will stunt them and keep you from dropping precipitously.

**Karol**

Don't people just deploy the flying stuff on the third floor, the HQs and eliminators on second floor and dreads on bottom floor. This way everything is within 6" of the father and the banner guy.

**Daedalus81**

Karol wrote:
Don't people just deploy the flying stuff on the third floor, the HQs and eliminators on second floor and dreads on bottom floor. This way everything is within 6" of the father and the banner guy.

At least in ITC you can sit repulsors on top if the base doesn't fit.

**Karol**

But wobbly model rules says that you can do it? But then again we don't play with ITC rules. Bunker buildings are very meh.

**kingheff**

grouchoben wrote:
kingheff wrote:
I put the craftworlders in for marine clearing duty, the star cannons are good against marines and serpent toughness helps tank their shooting, farseer does mortals with executioner and smite, warlock jinx makes the star cannons go straight through and unlocks +1 to cast for him and the farseer, the avengers just hide on objectives.

I don't agree, sorry. I've had a pretty rough time against them with Alaitoc.

Starcannons are bad against IH main threats. Expected damage from CHE's twin starcannon is less than 1 most of the time vs an executioner, for example. But yes, goodish agains their intercessors though, as you say. Combine d3 damage with 6+++ and you have around 54% (rough guess) of killing an intercessor for each unsaved damage you inflict.

Serpents get dunked by Executioners, it's not even funny. -1 is nice but against executioner main guns, they go boom like everyone else.

Farseer's Doom has a what, 15% of going off, if IH player is willing to throw 1 (or 2 with reroll) cp at the problem? And IH is a very CP-light army, so they will, without doubt. But that does leave Jinx, so you have a point there. IH player has to choose which power to stop, assuming they haven't nuked a key psyker turn one...

Avengers will be obliterated by their double-firing thunderfire or their eliminators, once they've got through nuking your casters.

Alaitoc -1 to hit has taken a real kicking in the new SM codex, and IH can shoot very very well, on top of everything else they do.

You can't tie them up in CC either, so a desperate serpent charge, or a banshee attack will do nothing. Executioners float away and heal 6+1d3 wounds.

Not saying it's impossible, and I'm far from being a top CWE player, butI do think it will definitely involve plain plane spam and a lot of luck.

Well, I did say that it would be an ulthwe battalion for the fnp, like you say alaitoc is much less useful Vs chapter masters now.
The anti tank is the duty of the haywire bikes not the star cannons although with doom the star cannons can do work, if you get it off. The psychic powers are more for mortals than anything else.
I'm not saying this is a hard counter list but it's got the tooth to decent damage at least.

**Pyroalchi**

I think my comment went a bit under, therefore again: what is you opinion about this?

Spoiler:

I mean... I might be wrong, nur when everyone huddles in a small buff bubble, don't they get quite succeptible to suicide bombs?

**vict0988**

Removed - BrookM

Dumb Smart Guy wrote:
Idk, you could stop acting like a huge dork? That would help more than being extremely condescending to anyone who brings up issues with the army

Englishman didn't bring up an issue with the army, neither did you. Who exactly are you referring to? Could you stop being condescending to people that try to stop the thread from being derailed? If you truly think the 25% extra damage you do with D6 damage weapons doesn't matter against a Leviathan then say that and say why instead of just calling me a dork.

**Dumb Smart Guy**

Removed - BrookM

**greyknight12**

I think the point of “stop complaining about how OP Iron Hands are” is to keep the good suggestions from getting drowned out. We all know IH are potentially the most broken thing yet in 8th. We all know what their list does, and how play testing either failed or was non-existent. We get it.

The purpose of this thread is to brainstorm and try and come up with general solutions to beat the army because we’re probably going to have to play them at some point. It may be a doomed quest, but we’re going to try regardless. So stay on topic.