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What an incredibly fun an innovative mechanic...which will have a work-around when the 9ed version of "Gathering Storm/Psychic Awakening" comes around!

Space Marines dominated for about a period of 18 months, from the 2nd Codex of 8th all the way up until a combination of Drukhari/Admech dropping and eating huge points nerfs in MFM2021 brought them back down. And even at the height of that, certain chapters like Iron Hands, White Scars and Deathwatch were still able to regularly post strong results.

Racerguy180 wrote:
What an incredibly fun an innovative mechanic...which will have a work-around when the 9ed version of "Gathering Storm/Psychic Awakening" comes around!

When you really look at all the numbers, Votann honestly has less units, wounds, models, even less shooting and melee depending on the list. The only way to get lots of shooting is bike spam.

My test Votann list that I played a few games with is 11 units at 115 wounds
My UM list that I play normally has 18 units with 137 wounds
The wounds are close but 7 more units is a huge deal. Also 22 less wounds, thats 11 more Marines, or 7.3 Terminators, which also is a lot.

This also isn't looking at other armies like my DE for example, which has 175 wounds and 22 units lol.

So while they do get better odds of wounding, they actually are working with less. The question is, is that amount of easily wounds too much compare to how much less they have? When I play them I do more damage per unit over all, but it has not really been more damage on a army by army base so far. I can however with Votann more reliably kill though, but at the cost of going for secondaries, actions, objectives, etc....

Basically I am saying, each unit is stronger, but with less units and wounds, each unit needs to be, and IDK if its too strong yet (it could be, but also might not be).

SemperMortis wrote:

I love the fact that anytime Orkz have anything remotely competitive its labeled broken or absurdly powerful. A Squigbuggy ON ITS OWN, as in no other buffs was getting 2D6 shots at BS4 and 1D6 shots at BS5 with the smaller gun getting 18' range compared to the 36 of the bigger one. The big gun AVERAGED 7 shots, 3.5 hits, 2.3 wounds and 1.5 dead Marines. The little gun at half the range averaged 3.5 shots, 1.16 hits, 0.77 wounds and 0.51 dead Marines. All told this thing AVERAGED 2 dead Marines a turn. Now, lets compare it to the ridiculous Voidweaver that you said was just as bad as the squigbuggy. Voidweaver, without buffs averaged 1.3 dead Marines with just its secondary guns, add in the Prismatic cannon and it became 2.4 dead Marines with ease, the biggest difference being the Squigbuggy couldn't hurt vehicles very well, the Voidweaver could switch to a secondary weapons type and plunk S12 -4AP 2D3 dmg shots into vehicles.

Both those were 90pts btw.

The thread's moved on a bit (and so its off topic) - but I feel you are underselling this a bit. Because you would have Speedwaaagh up for 2 turns, so you'd expect to kill 2.6 (give or take) marines (no AOC then). You'd also potentially have freebooterz up - which buffs that smaller gun and pushes it to 2.9 or so (although in practice it was common to get Freebooterz up with Squigbuggies as they got less benefit than everything else in the list - but you may have had multiple units of squigbuggies.)
But, most importantly, you could do all this through walls/any other LOS blocking terrain. Which was a massive advantage that not even Voidweavers got.

Following general creep and the hard nerf to ignore LOS shooting, the Squigbuggy is now no great thing. But that wasn't the case in mid 2021.

Anyway, clearly Voidweavers were worse/more overpowered relative to everything else then available in the game - but the point is it was the same zero to hero approach. Squigbuggies in 8th were awful. In 9th they got a massive buff (gaining triple the firepower, ramshackle etc) and went down 10 points versus their final 8th edition incarnation. (I can't remember what they were on initial release of 9th. In initial 8th they were 140 before getting a cut.)

I think the magna rail is going to be a problem, but there's another thread for that.