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BAs are good because they have points-competitive, decently strong combat infantry with the fly and infantry keywords, meaning you can bypass screens unless the enemy castles up, get T1 charges, and often avoid overwatch by charging from out of LOS. This gives you board control, letting you win on points even if they table you.

The combination of fly and infantry is very powerful on combat units, and BAs are the only faction that really has the tools to fully make use of it.

Spoletta wrote:
Agree. That's a shooting/assault hybrid. 2 dedicated ranged threats, 2 dedicated melee and 3 general purpose (assuming that a talonmaster gets the sword, if not there is one more ranged threat).

Fun list, but i don't like the darkshroud in there.

I've been considering cutting the darkshroud but I also like the idea of it ensuring that my speeder HQs or units on an objective get a nice -1 to hit. It's probably my first cut if the list is struggling.

Good players can negate or at least severely limit fly. I do it all the time in mirror matches. By passing screens is hard when your foes realizes that they can clog up your landing spots, too. T1 charges usually get you a poor return as well. Unless you tricorner.

I personally hope that we will see a 9th edition or at least 8th ed 2.0 this summer because the way the game is set up, melee armies are at an inherent disadvantage.

Now, you can alwaysbuff melee centered units an armies and that is most likely what GW will do if they even try to fix anything, but where does it end?
You can't solve underlying issues of the ruleset with constant power creep.

GW gonna get rid of tricorner I bet.

Martel732 wrote:
Good players can negate or at least severely limit fly. I do it all the time in mirror matches. By passing screens is hard when your foes realizes that they can clog up your landing spots, too. T1 charges usually get you a poor return as well. Unless you tricorner.

So how are those players getting a 52% win rate managing it?

Martel732 wrote:
Good players can negate or at least severely limit fly. I do it all the time in mirror matches. By passing screens is hard when your foes realizes that they can clog up your landing spots, too. T1 charges usually get you a poor return as well. Unless you tricorner.

Well sure, you can...but as I said, that involves castling. Few armies have enough models that they can maintain good board presence while also screening against flying chargers by not leaving any space to land and/or trap. And you can generally only do it for one turn, because after that you're so compressed that your screening unit can't fall back any more because it's pressed up against the unit it's screening, if it's still alive. Meanwhile while you are being pushed into a tighter and tighter castle, the BA player is free-scoring on the rest of the board.

I'm not saying fly cures all the problems with combat armies or that BAs are unbeatable or anything like that. Just that the reason BAs work as well as they do is they have fly and infantry on points-effective combat units, something no other army really has (except Harlequins, and they have too limited a roster to be top-tier competitive run mono). This allows them to mitigate the worst problems with 8th edition melee combat, making them the closest thing to a combat army that actually works in combat. But the fact that to do that they need flying infantry shows you how messed up the game is. They and Harlequins are literally the only factions in the game that have flying infantry (ok, harle is not technically fly, but it's the same thing for combat purposes). You shouldn't need flying infantry to make combat vaguely viable.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Good players can negate or at least severely limit fly. I do it all the time in mirror matches. By passing screens is hard when your foes realizes that they can clog up your landing spots, too. T1 charges usually get you a poor return as well. Unless you tricorner.

So how are those players getting a 52% win rate managing it?

I don't think that's how they are winning. Or their opponents are just making mistakes. I almost never lose to another BA player. Been like that since 3rd ed.


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yukishiro1 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Good players can negate or at least severely limit fly. I do it all the time in mirror matches. By passing screens is hard when your foes realizes that they can clog up your landing spots, too. T1 charges usually get you a poor return as well. Unless you tricorner.

Well sure, you can...but as I said, that involves castling. Few armies have enough models that they can maintain good board presence while also screening against flying chargers by not leaving any space to land and/or trap. And you can generally only do it for one turn, because after that you're so compressed that your screening unit can't fall back any more because it's pressed up against the unit it's screening, if it's still alive. Meanwhile while you are being pushed into a tighter and tighter castle, the BA player is free-scoring on the rest of the board.

I'm not saying fly cures all the problems with combat armies or that BAs are unbeatable or anything like that. Just that the reason BAs work as well as they do is they have fly and infantry on points-effective combat units, something no other army really has (except Harlequins, and they have too limited a roster to be top-tier competitive run mono). This allows them to mitigate the worst problems with 8th edition melee combat, making them the closest thing to a combat army that actually works in combat. But the fact that to do that they need flying infantry shows you how messed up the game is. They and Harlequins are literally the only factions in the game that have flying infantry (ok, harle is not technically fly, but it's the same thing for combat purposes). You shouldn't need flying infantry to make combat vaguely viable.

After a turn or two, the BA player is dead. That's the problem. They're still super glass cannons despite having a tremendous number of meaningless melee swings.

I think this is one of those cases where talking back and forth isn't very useful.

Here is an example of high-level competitive players (not Nick Nanavati-level people, but solid tournament players) playing BA vs IH that shows you how BA can succeed against one of the most ridiculous factions the game has ever seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dQIxqMkvKQ

Now admittedly this game would play out totally differently if BA goes second...but Stephen Box still could have won by playing the board control game instead of going for the alphastrike.

Incidentally this is one of the best competitive battle reports that's ever been posted on youtube. Well worth the watch for anyone interested in competitive play, whether they play BA or not.

The enclosed ruins can't be relied upon imo. Especially with folks insisting on CA missions.

Relying on forlorn fury is pure insanity in my mind.

This report was nausea inducing with all the tricornering. It's such a dumb mechanic.

IH guy needed to space better.

I agree it's a stupid mechanic, but it's how combat works. You can't complain that combat armies aren't viable while ignoring the thing that makes them viable. I obviously agree that combat armies are only viable when you make the most of the rules, including wrap-and-trap...but that's true of any army.

IH player makes one significant mistake, at the bottom of turn 2 when he leaves his impulsor close enough to be consolidated into. Game might well have gone differently if that hadn't happened. But the point isn't that BA is unstoppable, just that it actually is a viable combat army that can succeed at a competitive level.

I don't think that's what killed him. I think he was bunched up too much at the start. Spreading out is how you kill BA dead. It short circuits all the fight twice shenanigans. Auras be damned. BA want to crush people in a corner to hog up VP even if they all die. The trick is making the BA kill your cheap crap while blasting their valuables off the table easily.

This video showed me nothing I don't already try to do every game. The IH guy just sat there and let him win in my view.

Probably hating tripointing is affecting my play, though. I've also been physically threatened over the mechanic. From someone who owned firearms.

Well, that's the big question. Would it have been better to go wider in deployment? Maybe, but it would have made it way easier for the BA player to wrap and trap, or even to just bypass the chaff entirely with fly, and it would have totally neutered what makes the list work, the overlapping auras. He's really damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

Which is again what makes BAs work as a combat army in 8th. The point isn't that BA can't be beat, just that they perform competitively against competent players playing top-tier competitive lists like IH.

The way things went illustrates why BA are good right now, though: they are really good against IH and other elite castles, which had been at the top of the meta. It'll be interesting to see how BA fare in the next couple months as the meta likely moves away from the builds BA are best against. A list like that would probably struggle hard against something like GSC.