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So, I was idly running the numbers on Intercessors vs. a GUO (and I wasn't happy with the results) but I'm curious how effective you think any given unit should be into their preferred targets, and against non-ideal targets.

I don't expect exact numbers on hypotheticals, but a general idea would be neat. How many points of Infantry should a 200 point ranged anti-Infantry unit be causing your opponent to pick up, generally speaking? Or a 300 point anti-Tank unit, how big points a tank should they be able to reliably down before it's too much? And vice-versa: how many points of anti-Infantry units should be needed to take down a 250 point monster, or anti-Tank into Infantry.

This is an impossible question to answer, because the points of any particular unit, be it attacker or target, is not evenly divided between offense and defense. This means you cannot just take the points of Unit X and compare to the points of Unit Y for a meaningful offense to defense ratio.

For example, it takes exactly the same amount of firepower to remove the following units from the board:

10 Assault Intercessors (150 points)

10 Intercessors (160 points)

10 Sternguard Veterans (200 points)

10 Vanguard Veterans with Jump Packs (220 points)

10 Legionnaires (170 points)

This is a big range of unit points for the exact same defensive stats.

Yeah it's a non-starter of a question. The correct answer is that this should vary greatly because part of what makes units different is their degree of flexibility. Some units should be specialized and have a great return on investment against a type of target, but other units should be more towards the all-rounder capability, and even then to varying degrees. This should also vary by faction, because different factions should have different strengths and weaknesses.

There is no single answer or formula. Hell, even range is going to shift this around. An AT unit that can fire from 40 inches is likely to be balanced around a different return for a round of shooting than a unit that needs to be in melta range.

When I designed my homebrew, I was roughly aiming at a 33% efficiency for any ranged weapon against a target it would wound on a 3+ with a 3+ armor save.

As others have pointed out, you can't just have the weapon, as each unit brings its own body cost to the equation as well. These things need to be observed and evaluated within the game.

A unit can be too good or bad based on other factors like deployment, access to special weapons or abilities and slot competition.

Coincidentally, those are the things I would play around with first, if a unit seems to be over- or underperforming.

As others said, it depends.

Glass hammer units can be more efficient for their points, rugged units should be less. Same with fast/slow units. Outside buffs, army synergies and theme, etc.

Then there is the issue of “what do you think it should be” and “what would be balanced in the game right now”

Off the cuff in a vacuum I think 33% might be decent? In a 5 turn game, you get one to move into position, 3 to bring it down, one to reposition as needed. You want to burn it down faster, focus fire multiple units or apply more resources.

Against non ideal targets you should have a chance to do some chip damage, or vaporize a lone gaunt with a lascannon. Maybe 1/5th or 1/6th of your points?

Undercaffinated morning muses, take with salt.

I'd follow the number of 33% for shooty units, CC units probably a bit higher because CC is harder to pull off unless you're superfast. Which means units that have a good chance to do 1st turn charges should have rather steep costs or should be less deadly.

In the past stuff like Firewarriors always were a problem because they didn’t "waste" any points on cc capabilities they wouldn't use anyway (like tactical or Chaos marines). And that's usually were it gets interesting.

I think it depends a bit on how the game works.

For example, when the 8th edition Indexes dropped, I did some analysis and came to the conclusion about 80% of the units - at least for shooting - were looking at about a 25% return on their points into about 80% of stuff. It was perhaps weirdly quite balanced - and partly why early 8th was such a breath of fresh air compared with the excesses of 7th.
Competitive people quickly however picked on those units which were better than this average. And - as we would see especially moving into 9th - these figures were a bit illusionary due to how much buff stacking you could apply. In 8th you were seeing a lot of people lose 40% of their army in turn 1 due to various issues (for example turn 1 deepstrike of buffed more efficient shooting units).
To some extend though 8th games felt a bit like a slugging match - and so armies were largely doing the same sort of thing. (Its a bit complicated here I think because you had GW rules which favoured piling points-efficient troops on objectives, and you had ITC tournaments, but... go with it.)

By 9th we were seeing something like 40% points return become standard on the datasheets themselves - but this could easily rise to 80-100% if you had this character buff, combined with this relic and this subfaction/stratagem etc. The game became a bit like an odd version of checkers - because almost every unit could be boosted up to crush almost every other unit.
But this, combined with the changes to scoring, caused the game to evolve into the world of hiding your army behind L-shaped ruins and trading/swapping out over objectives. The only way not to die was to not be in a position to be attacked at all.
Which is - by and large - where we still are today. (Clearly there's some variety across the factions.)

You also I think have to deal with the logic of truel mathematics (if that perhaps weirdly means anything to anyone).
If you always get to attack on your terms, you should have worse odds than someone who will always having to respond. This is because if you can go first, and be successful, your opponent's stuff is dead, so their odds don't matter. That's not always obvious. You can compare say Fire Dragons skipping through ruins an average of 12-13" to then chuck out 12" melta shots - with say a tank that could in theory park itself 48" away - but may potentially never be able to see anything to shoot unless the opponent very politely puts something in harms way. If the tank is having to drive up close to get angles (and so its commander can hit the enemy with its sword) - then those high ranges don't really matter.

40k damage is also mostly random. The higher that average percentage - the greater the chance you swing up and do significantly more damage. This is where we get 9th edition turn 1 tablings, because 60% of the time it works every time.
At the same time, I think you have to be careful on averages being skewed by the potential chance of complete failure. Low-shot, high damage weapons often have this issue. Some games you instantly blow up tanks, and in others you don't scratch the paint work. The average may be fine - but the in-game experience varies massively.
I think there's a tension in how much you want the game to be in the hands of the dice versus decisions you took.

I've not played daemons for a little while - but I'd have thought the issues with the GUO is that its fat and slow. Its going to waddle across the board probably onto one objective, and I suspect it will spend the rest of the game there. It doesn't obviously have the tools to intervene elsewhere if required.

But I mean... how many Intercessors should it take to kill a GUO?
4*2/3*1/6*1/2*5/6=0.185 wounds per Intercessor.
So you'd need 108 to do 20 wounds. (Second order maths would kick in here - its not a 100% chance with 108 shooting, but lets ignore that for now.)
108 Intercessors is... 1728 points unless they got buffed last week (not going to check just now). So a return on your points of 14.47%. Which doesn't seem great for the "all Intercessors" player to me.
Its a fair point perhaps that Intercessors are mysteriously "better" into the GUO than they are into say a humble Rhino (10.41%) which doesn't feel mechanically right. But I think you are still in the world of "this is still bad, even if its not as bad" when shooting the Intercessors into the GUO. And the GUO has much comparatively better defences versus say Las/Melta/3 damage melee weapons that you'd point its way.

Out of curiosity, what're the defenses of a GUO these days. (Great Unclean One, I assume?)

 Insectum7 wrote:
Out of curiosity, what're the defenses of a GUO these days. (Great Unclean One, I assume?)

Per the new Index Chaos Dameons, T12(13 with Aura), Sv 5+/4++, W 20, FNP 6+.

All depends.

Which unit? What target? How many points?

If it’s something like 3rd-7th Ed Banshees, which just sort of bounced off of everything, it’s a poor choice.

If it’s more modern Banshees, which have a decent chance of utterly demolishing anything in Power Armour? That I’d expect. Just as I expect them to fold like a cheap suit if I’m daft enough to leave in range of my enemies guns.

 alextroy wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Out of curiosity, what're the defenses of a GUO these days. (Great Unclean One, I assume?)

Per the new Index Chaos Dameons, T12(13 with Aura), Sv 5+/4++, W 20, FNP 6+.

Ahh, still the index, ok. Thanks! I'll screw around with numbers later.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 alextroy wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Out of curiosity, what're the defenses of a GUO these days. (Great Unclean One, I assume?)

Per the new Index Chaos Dameons, T12(13 with Aura), Sv 5+/4++, W 20, FNP 6+.

Ahh, still the index, ok. Thanks! I'll screw around with numbers later.

So, I was running numbers with Oath of Moment active.

Every five Intercessors get 20 S4 D1 shots on 3+, and 1 Krak shot on 3+ at S9 Dd3.
That's 160/9 Bolt hits and 8/9 Krak hits.
With +1 to-wound, that's 160/27 Bolt wounds and 4/9 Krak.
80/27 Bolt wounds and 2/9 Krak.
About 3.5 damage per 5 Intercessors, before FNP, or just shy of 3 damage with FNP accounted for.

Put another way, without a single buffing character or anything besides shooting (not even the Heavy boost) 35 Intercessors can kill a GUO.
That's 560 points to the GUO's 250... But that's also something vastly outside their target preference.

Edit: You can actually achieve similar numbers without Oath of Moment just by using the Heavy+ detachment, whatever it was called.

I don't want hard numbers or consistent returns.

I want to see the anti-tank unit shooting at a suppressed, flanked, close-range infantry unit in the open be more effective than the anti-infantry unit shooting at prepared infantry in hard cover at long range.

I want the effectiveness of a unit to have something to do with its positioning and employment on the battlefield, rather than be structured around a consistent single value that reduces the entire game to 'LOS y/n' followed by Excel spreadsheet optimized weapon-target pairing, at which point I might as well not show up because there isn't much game to be had.

 JNAProductions wrote:
So, I was idly running the numbers on Intercessors vs. a GUO (and I wasn't happy with the results) but I'm curious how effective you think any given unit should be into their preferred targets, and against non-ideal targets.

I don't expect exact numbers on hypotheticals, but a general idea would be neat. How many points of Infantry should a 200 point ranged anti-Infantry unit be causing your opponent to pick up, generally speaking? Or a 300 point anti-Tank unit, how big points a tank should they be able to reliably down before it's too much? And vice-versa: how many points of anti-Infantry units should be needed to take down a 250 point monster, or anti-Tank into Infantry.

I think you have to start with baseline: For example 200 points of Guard/Boys/Tacs some version of Intercessors etc?/Gants or Gaunts/etc etc vs 200 points of Guard/Boys/Tacs some version of Intercessors etc?/Gants or Gaunts/etc etc on a 12 x 12 board from Planet Bowling Ball. And I'd posit that should take 5 turns for average results of one to on-average destroy the average results of the other.

200 points? At that cost, it should be killing at least most of a squad of GEQs.

 RaptorusRex wrote:
200 points? At that cost, it should be killing at least most of a squad of GEQs.

Well I was speaking of Mirror Match to start, then cross faction BATTLELINE. But 200 points of BATTLELINE should be roughly equivalent to 200 points of BATTLELINE no matter the faction - and 12x12 Planet Bowling Ball pretty much eliminates multipliers/skill disparity.

Personally I think a unit should be roughly 70-75% effective against their intended targets, and significantly less so against targets they weren’t designed for.

One of the worst things about modern 40K imho is the number of highly multi-purpose or multi-roll units/weapons, or weapons that are waaay too effective against targets they’re not meant to be used against.

Often lower S weapons with 2-3 more attacks will be more effective into tougher units if there’s only a small difference in S and AP.

The most annoying example imho, was fixed when they buffed autocannons, but in 8th and 9th heavy bolters were often better into an autocannon’s ideal targets just because they had same AP and damage, but the AC’s S wasn’t high enough to negate the advantage one more shot gave.

70-75% seems too punishing to me. At least when I imagine that it would be possible to outright remove that percentage of my opponent's army in one turn, given the right circumstances.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
70-75% seems too punishing to me. At least when I imagine that it would be possible to outright remove that percentage of my opponent's army in one turn, given the right circumstances.

Agree.

You would need a bigger table, more mitigating defensive factors and more to support those numbers. 40k has problems with alpha stikes as it is. If lethality was that bad without some major changes, the game would just end up with a roll-off for first turn. Anything with a toe exposed would just be vaporized once the game started.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
70-75% seems too punishing to me. At least when I imagine that it would be possible to outright remove that percentage of my opponent's army in one turn, given the right circumstances.

Big agree, I consider that the fact it can even be suggested constituting evidence of a normalisation with lethality creep.

johnpjones1775 wrote:
...One of the worst things about modern 40K imho is the number of highly multi-purpose or multi-roll units/weapons, or weapons that are waaay too effective against targets they’re not meant to be used against.

Often lower S weapons with 2-3 more attacks will be more effective into tougher units if there’s only a small difference in S and AP.

The most annoying example imho, was fixed when they buffed autocannons, but in 8th and 9th heavy bolters were often better into an autocannon’s ideal targets just because they had same AP and damage, but the AC’s S wasn’t high enough to negate the advantage one more shot gave.

As a Custodes player I can confirm this. My guys die to massed bolter/shoota/lasgun shots more often then lascannons/krak missiles.

Dudeface wrote:

 a_typical_hero wrote:
70-75% seems too punishing to me. At least when I imagine that it would be possible to outright remove that percentage of my opponent's army in one turn, given the right circumstances.

Big agree, I consider that the fact it can even be suggested constituting evidence of a normalisation with lethality creep.

I mean, it could be okay if it meant 70% while standing still and firing at an enemy in the open within half range, - and getting severe punishes for being outside of half range, any terrain you shoot through, Cover Boni, modifiers for moving, defensive stratagems or reactions etc. all stacking. But that's not 10th edition.

IMO part of the current 40k issue of lethality, is because they game has devolved into kill vs kill.

Without any morale system that affects unit behaviour and output, there is no mechanism to shut off another unit without just overkilling it.

Suppression and manoeuvre should be key parts of the game, but the more stats they strip out and the less effective anything but S vs T, W and Sv is, the less options you have to do anything but try and destroy units as quickly as possible.


IMO a unit's effectiveness shouldn't need to be measured in wounds caused. But the game doesn't have enough depth to do anything else.

The EA blast marker mechanic, or even just the old break rules and pinning mechanics, all provide ways to control the enemy without purely being damage. And those combined with missions that aren't just abstract 'stand in designated circles to build your victory meter up' create a more dynamic game. Modern 40k has adopted some of the worst aspects of war machine's gamist design, devolving the game into mosh pits around your victory circles. How long you stood on a point has no bearing on whether you held it, only who's left standing on it matters. Can you imagine the Somme where they tallied up how long they each held a hill for and determining who won based on that? You could have held it 99% of the time, but if I held it for the last 1% of the battle before combat stopped, I win.

Very hard question to answer. How do you effectively point something like a TSons Forgefiend (pretty ok against most targets), a MVB (also pretty ok against most targets, but does some melee/ aura stuff too), and Chaos Spawn (kind of depressingly low damage, but have some amazing matchups point-for-point).

And then on the defensive side, a T10/3+/5++ 12W, a T10/4+/5++/5+++ 13W, and two T5/4+/5++/5+++ 4Ws. Like, these are kinda outliers, but there's lots of whiff opportunities. I know we're basing it on averages, but there's some amazingly swingy units out there.

Don't worry, we've got Tzaangor too, which go from 20oc sacrificial, to 41oc kinda annoying, in the space of 65-210pts, yet we're worried they'll take our Cultists away (we are, they're good. F* you GW if you do).

 Hellebore wrote:
IMO part of the current 40k issue of lethality, is because they game has devolved into kill vs kill.

Without any morale system that affects unit behaviour and output, there is no mechanism to shut off another unit without just overkilling it.

Suppression and manoeuvre should be key parts of the game, but the more stats they strip out and the less effective anything but S vs T, W and Sv is, the less options you have to do anything but try and destroy units as quickly as possible.


IMO a unit's effectiveness shouldn't need to be measured in wounds caused. But the game doesn't have enough depth to do anything else.

The EA blast marker mechanic, or even just the old break rules and pinning mechanics, all provide ways to control the enemy without purely being damage. And those combined with missions that aren't just abstract 'stand in designated circles to build your victory meter up' create a more dynamic game. Modern 40k has adopted some of the worst aspects of war machine's gamist design, devolving the game into mosh pits around your victory circles. How long you stood on a point has no bearing on whether you held it, only who's left standing on it matters. Can you imagine the Somme where they tallied up how long they each held a hill for and determining who won based on that? You could have held it 99% of the time, but if I held it for the last 1% of the battle before combat stopped, I win.

On that I must say I prefer progressive scoring and we played the maelstrom missions in 6th and 7th with that mechanic already, because it always felt dumb to play for 5 hours only to see that the one Biker your opponent had left or hidden somewhere would win them the game. Killing also was much more important in the old eternal war missions because of Kill points, which I also dislike. An op codex got rewarded for the things they wanted to do and were good at anyway, no way around it. I'd say the Standard missions are more interesting today compared to 3-7 and were at their height at the end of 8th. The best missions in any edition(and any wargame) are custom scenarios of course.

 JNAProductions wrote:
So, I was idly running the numbers on Intercessors vs. a GUO (and I wasn't happy with the results) but I'm curious how effective you think any given unit should be into their preferred targets, and against non-ideal targets.

I don't expect exact numbers on hypotheticals, but a general idea would be neat. How many points of Infantry should a 200 point ranged anti-Infantry unit be causing your opponent to pick up, generally speaking? Or a 300 point anti-Tank unit, how big points a tank should they be able to reliably down before it's too much? And vice-versa: how many points of anti-Infantry units should be needed to take down a 250 point monster, or anti-Tank into Infantry.

Generaly the good kill units are either "no anwser units" or "kill what ever they want". And they should be small, preferably msu if infantry/cav and around 100/200pts range depending what ever they are suppose to do stuff for more then a turn. There is also a question of synergy. Vanguard vets are not, or rather were, not run outside of BA this editions. So there are outside factors that can make a specific units work just in a single faction, and not work for others. Everything above 200-220pts starts to require being resilient too, and have more then on prefared target or the target ( for example extremly good vs all types of infantry) to be wide spread among all armies. And in general for the good armies, what is being looked for is (assuming the army actualy does try to kill more then bare minimum) trading up. Killing the same number of points is bad, because if your unit dies, or your opponent doesn't bring the specific target or it isn't required for him to win you just wasted point. Now if the units is cheap, then the waste can be carried by a good army, but if you are playing an elite army of some sort and suddenly you have 300-400pts of waste, it could be a game decider.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sgt. Cortez 816076 11739144 wrote:. An op codex got rewarded for the things they wanted to do and were good at anyway, no way around it. I'd say the Standard missions are more interesting today compared to 3-7 and were at their height at the end of 8th. The best missions in any edition(and any wargame) are custom scenarios of course.

Yeah, but now we have the reign of swarm/uppy downy/msu stuff and armies often playing soliter, depending on which terrain pack you are playing in. Which is world part dependant. Also the whole reactive move, "I move 0.1"" away from it", stops to work the very second two people start to disagree or dislike each other. Which makes customes scenarios unusable for pick up games, because customs scenarios are just trying to make the other person play a game the way you like it, not the way current seson goes, or how the rules goes, but the way you want it. This brings w40k away from being more professional and more like a sport.

Yeah, but 40K being "professional" or a "sport" is about as small or an even smaller part of the player base than people playing custom scenarios. So while you're not wrong, we both simply described two ways to play. And from my personal experience custom scenarios achieve more of what I and the groups I've been in wanted from the game than eternal war/ standard missions that you usually only use to learn new editions or in tournaments.

I kind of think you can abstract the Somme as holding points on the board fairly easily.

I mean they can represent breaches in the Trench Line. If you hold them for X turns then you've successfully made a breach - and if not then you've been driven back.

You can say "ah, but it should be who holds them at the end" - but for... real life there wasn't much of an end. I mean as a game we might want to wrap things up at 5 or 6 or 7 turns. In practice though the armies were being fed into the battle for months.

Now maybe you want to simulate the full battle in one game - rather than some small conflict over a specific part of the front. But in that case 40k isn't really the ruleset, or scale, for you.

Tyel wrote:
I kind of think you can abstract the Somme as holding points on the board fairly easily.

I mean they can represent breaches in the Trench Line. If you hold them for X turns then you've successfully made a breach - and if not then you've been driven back.

You can say "ah, but it should be who holds them at the end" - but for... real life there wasn't much of an end. I mean as a game we might want to wrap things up at 5 or 6 or 7 turns. In practice though the armies were being fed into the battle for months.

Now maybe you want to simulate the full battle in one game - rather than some small conflict over a specific part of the front. But in that case 40k isn't really the ruleset, or scale, for you.

Sure but you can also hold an important location and still lose because it's never about the 4 locations on that one part of the battle that determines victory. If you're dragging external factors in you run into all sorts of problems.

The abstract progressive scoring IMO is not any superior to one off scoring at the end, especially if you're interested in simulating a war over playing an abstract game.

bUt it comes down to how you define victory in the small scale of the 40k battlefield. I don't see any real logical way you can explain how someone standing on one spot on that small location for longer than their opponent increases their victory. If for example, they were operating a defence cannon and the longer they stood there the more attacks it made, then yes that makes sense. There's a context. But simply standing somewhere doing nothing for 3 turns while your opponent only got to do it for 2 turns says nothing to me about how you 'beat' them.

And this is where my disconnect with modern 40k is, this and things like every unit gets a random often abstract special rule just cuz. It's game for game sake and loses the setting. A good mechanic is not just one that works mathematically, it's one that effectively reflects the concepts the game is using. Standing on a spot for 3 turns doesn't do that.

Yeah I genuinely have a hard time thinking up scenarios that could correlate with 40k objective scoring in even an abstract way.

Uh databanks fell out of a transport ship. They're too heavy to move. You can download data from them if you're standing next to them. Whoever collects the most data from them can be considered the winner because it's so strategically important. The databanks have a failsafe that means they all explode at 5:00.

These relay beacons send messages to spaceships. We both have spaceships in orbit but they can't target the ground because their sensors are scrambled. If we can control a beacon we can give our spaceships targeting information. When the spaceships pass overhead at 5:00 whichever spaceship has the most info will be the first to blow up all the opposing ground forces with lasers.

There are magic circles for a dark Chaos ritual. Both armies are trying to pray in the circle so that the daemons eat the other guy. The daemons will all awaken at 5:00 and whoever prayed to them the most beforehand doesn't get eaten.

The fact that you neither need to extract the objective nor hold it at the end to win, and that you can win from an obviously inferior position (or even wiped), makes it difficult to explain.