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Came across this: https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2017/06/18/making-the-case-for-using-power-level-points-in-tournaments/

What are your thoughts? I think it's an interesting idea, but a tournament environment is going to bring the worst out of people and it will be prone to huge amounts of abuse, worse than what you normally see. I don't mind power level for casual games (or matched points), but I think using them in a tournament is asking for trouble and asking for people to just immediately take the best options just because nothing stops them.

The main issue I'd have with PL is not being able to control my unit size (tee hee). Most units are multiples of 5 so you can fill up a Rhino or Battlewagon without an issue, but things like Trukks or Devilfish you can't (without characters). Not a huge problem, but it can make a difference.

PL and Points will still result in people taking the best stuff, it's just that the best stuff is different for each system.

Works for me! The simplified approach to list building appeals to me in so many ways, particularly since 1) tournaments are the only real way that I can justify a full day of wargaming to my family, and 2) I do not have the time to study Codexes (Codices?) anymore and do massive amounts of bookkeeping in trying to figure out what my army should be to the minuscule level.

Now if only the local WAAC gamers would get out of the hobby, then I could enjoy the tournaments again. I don't mind competitive players, but man I cannot stand dealing with shady behavior and condescending attitudes.

Frontling Gaming wrote:The difference in points in terms of the granular, are nearly irrelevant in a 2k list. The decision point between taking one over the other, or “shaving” points to build a specific list isn’t tactical: It’s just list building. Yes, shaving a few points here or there can net you an extra unit or two, which is what creates the idea of “tuned-lists” where you maximize every single point, but this is just playing a game of numbers and efficiency, and again, it creates more of the dichotomy between efficient and inefficient units. If you want a truly competitive game, then it should be the player skill in game that matters, not the ability of a player to be the better accountant and risk management analyst.

^^ This right here. Especially when you consider the "balancing" of different Special and Heavy Weapons for units: Meltaguns are dangerous up close to a single model, while Flamers can do many weaker hits, and a Plasma gun can be fired at a dangerous firemode. Multimeltas are dangerous up close while Lascannons lose the extra potential damage for range, Heavy Bolters are better against multiple weaker enemies while Plasma Cannons can be decent against any target, and Missile Launchers are trading effectiveness for situational adaptability. Heck, we are kind of seeing it with melee weapons, what with Chainswords now getting extra attacks and Power Fists having a To Hit penalty.

Plus, if everyone is maximizing their armies with Power Levels, then is it even a problem? If everyone is overpowered, then no one is, right?

Frontline Gaming wrote:If PL is fully embraced and players are allowed to change their unit(s) wargear/weapons from game to game, the scene not only becomes far more competitive but the amount of worry over cheating via list building goes down dramatically.

I had never thought about that before, and it sounds like a pretty cool idea to me! Rather than having to take entire extra units for "side board" events, you can just take a few different Special/Heavy Weapon models or different Character models instead, or even just the turret options on your tanks. It would really encourage magnetizing models too for that same reason.

There doesn't actually appear to be much of an argument here. The parts that aren't either wildly speculative or simply disingenuous are that PL is easier to calculate and that it provides a natural way to do "sideboarding".

Yes, PLs are easier to calculate, unless you have some sort of program capable of automatically determining the point cost of a unit with particular options. Such programs are common.

PLs provide a natural way to do sideboarding, but it's easy to sideboard with points too. One could even do almost exactly the same thing with points by requiring that the actual units in a list don't change while allowing players to change out wargear and other options while still subject to the point limit. Again this is very easy with a list-building program.

What else of substance is there in here? There's no real reason given to think that PLs will be more balanced than points, that they'll produce more diversity, etc. There's a really embarrassing bit where the author argues that PL lists don't vary too much in their point values because a particular Knight can't vary too much in how many points it costs, apparently forgetting that there are units besides Knights.

Ultimately, whether point values or power levels produce more balanced matches and more varied lists is primarily an empirical question. To the extent that one thinks GW did a good job assigning point values, then presumably points are better, but of course they may have screwed up. I certainly don't see that there's any halfway-persuasive theoretical reason to think that PLs would be better up front. The advantage of PLs is that they're easy to use, but it is hard to see why this is an issue for tournaments with access to the right software.

Sideboarding is just throwing up your arms and admitting your game system favors skew and penalizes attempting to build a take-all-comers system.

The "two army" system of Steamroller is one of the many reasons I could never take WMH seriously as a competitive game.

Me agree math hard

Building lists is 100000000000 times easier and more fun with PL than points.

That is an accurate number. I did the math.

Point are not just for penny pinching over a tactical squad's special and heavy weapon. Some units have a large variety of upgrades which power levels doesn't capture.

A 30 strong Termagant brood is PL9 which could be 120 point cannon fodder, 200 point mix of devourers and fleshborers or a 300 point unit with all the expensive upgrades.

I don't like PLs. I like to go barebones on a lot of stuff to save points for more numbers. That doesn't work with PLs. For instance, I had a 1000 pt Ork army that came out to 60 PL. I had to cut some important stuff and have substandard units (because I didn't have all the upgrades modeled) for a 50 PL game.


Points for me, please.

I love how the same crowd that cried foul about "free points" is now arguing the merits...of making all equipment upgrades free for everybody.

I would posit that many of their points are only relevant with certain units/armies/scales. Sure taking a melta instead of a flamer is a relatively small change that, in the grand scheme of things, probably wont make or break a game at 2000pts.

However, taking 3 battle tanks for say, PL10 and then loading on 60-80pts worth of free upgrades on each will make a huuuuuuuuge difference vs an opponent that doesnt. It's entirely possible for two Power Level armies to have many hundreds of points worth of value difference, and that absolutely will show, skill or no skill. Power Level has many of the same issuss that plagued 7E and Formations.

Likewise, Power Level doesnt account for flexible unit sizes very well, if you want an 8man unit, you're gonna pay for 10. The more flexibility and options a unit has, the less appropriate Power Level is.

GW has come right out and made no bones about Power Level not being for competitive play, why we are attempting to hamfist it in there is...well, silly, especially with all the problems "free" stuff caused in 7E.

They should try it out with their top players and see how it goes over. Nothing replaces direct hands on experience.

Yoyoyo wrote:
They should try it out with their top players and see how it goes over. Nothing replaces direct hands on experience.

An excellent point.

Yoyoyo wrote:
They should try it out with their top players and see how it goes over. Nothing replaces direct hands on experience.

The same top players that abused free transports? Find the best combination of abusable units would become the new hotness.

There is no argument for this. It would rehash older problems. GW moved to a better fine-tuning of points IMHO.
Far from being perfect, I have at least a 3rd edition vibe from the way big stuff and vehicles are priced, and how some equipment price is adjusted for the model carrying it (S, T, W, etc).

I am happy with that and I can subtract and add integer numbers, thank you very much.

I really hate this idea. Power Levels were never designed to and don't capture the nuance of how the options a unit takes can drastically alter how powerful it is.

The article in the OP cherry-picks knights as an example because Power Levels work reasonably well when comparing within that faction, but I can create a 50PL Daemons list that's worth 534 points and an also 50PL Tau list that's worth 1540 points. That's a frankly obscene difference between two supposedly 'equally powerful' armies and the idea that a system with that much variation could be the basis for competitive play is laughable.

It's not a case of PL just being more generous than points - it's that the degree to which it's more generous varies wildly between factions and would result in chronic imbalance. We've seen from 7th edition just how powerful free points are, and make no mistake - using PL in competitive play is effectively identical to giving those factions whose units have expensive options available hundreds of extra points (for free) when compared to factions without those options.

Anecdotes of "my group uses PL and we haven't had balance issues" are less than worthless, because you guys aren't cut-throat tournament players looking to squeeze every last drop of imbalance out of the system.

I also find the assertion that removing list-building and optimization from the game makes for a more competitive environment ridiculous almost to the point of being insulting. Creating an optimal TAC list while accounting for the cost and performance of different options against the spread of opponents you expect to face is a huge skill factor and eliminating it from the game in name of simplicity (and reducing list-building down to spamming the units with the most expensive and flexible options and then picking which guns you want at the start of each game) would make the game drastically less competitive, not more.

There are plenty of other things the article mentions that I vehemently disagree with, but those are the core reasons I think this is an awful idea.

I don't see power levels being a good idea in tournaments. They're too inconsistent, and they're too easy to break. There are units that can more than triple their points based on the upgrades they take. Some units have their PL centered on the high end of their range, others on the low end. Special Weapon Teams for example, have a power level equivalent to their absolute maximum value (which means you're overpaying if you take anything but the most expensive weapons).

Power levels can get away with their fast and loose approach in quick pick-up games as long as you play WISYWYG (proxies would break the system over their knee), because in that situation you'll have a loose collection of models, some over-priced, some under-priced. In a tournament setting you have plenty of time to acquire and paint models specifically for that tournament. It would be far too easy to min-max it. When you have that much time to prepare, points are necessary to keep players in line.

I do find the sentiment of "I would enjoy tournaments a lot more if none of my opponents were playing to win" amusing though. Seems to be missing the point of a tournament...

Even planing to use Power Levels myself...This is a HORRIBLE idea. Points are for tournaments. Don't try to mix things that are obviously not compatible!
I can see with competitive guys could like Power Levels in tournaments. To have free all of their options and stomp those that just don't do that. But that isn't how you get a competitive and balanced game.

Plus, I'm gonna take a seat here, waiting for Peregrine to come down from the sky to smite those blind believers of the virtues of Power Levels

He should predicate the entire article with "For now..." because points will change and PL will not. The second there is a balance pass on points his entire argument is stops being "PL good enough and math is hard" and starts becoming "Math is hard and who cares about balance". I'd rather cowboy up now and deal with the extra math bits, than adopt a system that I know is going to fail eventually.

 durecellrabbit wrote:
Point are not just for penny pinching over a tactical squad's special and heavy weapon. Some units have a large variety of upgrades which power levels doesn't capture.

A 30 strong Termagant brood is PL9 which could be 120 point cannon fodder, 200 point mix of devourers and fleshborers or a 300 point unit with all the expensive upgrades.

I don't think the termagant example is a good one. The expensive upgrades are from melee specialization or ranged specialization. In the case of termagants with devourers, you almost never take toxin sacks and adrenal glands because you don't want them charging into combat. Yes, you can make the unit super expensive, but the first 100 points of upgrades is worth a lot more than the next 100 points of upgrades and I think powerlevel encompasses that sliding scale of effectiveness for termagant upgrdes very well.

It's not an awful idea. The ups and downs kinda cut both ways.

What I'll be doing over the next few weeks is building my lists with points, but making a note of how many PL they come out to, and I'm asking the other folks at my FLGS to do the same. The idea here is to get an idea of how much they differ.

My local group isn't wild about PL (folks call 'em Sigmar Points, because AoS points work pretty much like PL), so I won't likely be playing these, but I'll also be building lists to a given PL limit and seeing how many points they come out to.

I'm very curious just how big the deltas will be, between lists tuned one way versus the other.

I'm skeptical about unit size, and about the edge cases where PL doesn't really work (Deathwatch Veterans, paying 2PL/model even though the full massed heavy weapons loadout makes for a really fragile list).

If you actually wanted to use PL for a tournament you might need a few edge-case tweaks and some kind of mechanism for more granular squad sizes. You'd need some kind of differential cost for upgrades, and possibly fractional PL for inexpensive models.

Though it'd be generally easier to just use points. Or to use the unmodified PL system for some sort of more casual event.

This is mostly just a proposed change to make life easier on tournament organizers and i can sympathize with that but it is a bad idea.

'Sideboarding' in different weapons and wargear is an awful practice that kills the competitive scene, hell the competitive scene largely rose out of people enjoying fighting with and against take all comers lists over tailored lists. Some armies have a huge advantage in their breadth of customization, being able to swap between lascannons and grav amps is a much bigger deal than being able to swap between big shootas and rokkit launchas for example. What optional upgrades do necrons take to tailor their list that they can swap in and out on the fly? Almost nothing in the entire index. For those armies the efficacy is wholly in what units you run in what numbers and not in what options they take.

What you'll see is just a different kind of power gaming where you're incentivized to take something like magnetized crisis suits because they become pseudo obliterators, morphing into whatever weapon profile best meets their needs for that game. And that doesn't just make the game unbalanced on the board, it also makes it more expensive and time consuming to collect different WYSIWYG variants of the same model or needing to carefully magnetize every model you build.

The Imperial Guard index in general is probably a good example of how broken PLs can be if you try, and in a tournament people WILL try.

Take a look at this:

HWS: PL3, min points: 27 max points: 72

SWT: PL3, min points: 39 max points: 60

Infantry squad: PL3, min points: 40 max points: 86

Command Squad: PL3, min points 24, max points 77

Veterans: PL6, min points: 60 max points: 147

As you can see, not only is there a huge amount of variation within a single unit but some units can milk their PL (or get screwed by it on the low end) much more than others.

Knights were a poor example because they have very few options, and all of those options replace something that is already being paid for. So they don't have a lot of cost variation, of course PLs will seem to approximate them well. Just about any infantry on the other hand, well you can see what that looks like above.

Meanwhile, any Baneblade variant can take 4 lascannons and 8 heavy flamers, or it can take nothing in that slot, making a 216 point spread between their minimum and maximum costs.

So their argument is terrible.

Whether you support the use of power level for tournaments (which GW obviously does not) the argument presented here is a bad one.

1.) They use knights for their example of why it isn't a big deal. Picking one unit as an example is never proof of why something works but it can be a proof of why it doesn't. Lets use the Nob squad as an example. a 10 Nob squad with KillSaws, Kombi-skorchas, 2 cyborks, and 10 Ammo runts is 21 power, the same 21% of your list as the Knight they quote. That squad when you pay points for it is 690 points or 34.5% of your army. A 13.5% difference or 270 points. 13.5% is a 30 boy troop unit (power level 13) fully kitted out. SO in power level I get to bring a fully kitted out Boyz squad and a fully kitted out Nob squad, in Points I only get the Nobs. So while some squads end up close (fully kitted out boyz are 13% of a 2k list), some are super far off, so if we assume points mean anything we will see more powerful units on the table." What this suggests about PL is that it really doesn't take full upgrades into account, because if it did these units become fairly unplayble in a PL game (if nobs were Power 34 I doubt they would see much play) so they make the assumption that people choosing this game mode won't be going super cheesey. Think about say deathwatch (22 power, can be equipped however they want but could easily run 680ish points)

2.) Side boards sound great, until you consider it is just "side boards if your units have options" IF you are a necron player you don't really get to sideboard, but the marine player can swap weapons at will to always take the best option for the situation. SO not all players will be able to do this, only those with customizable armies (read imperium, maybe Tau) so it will create a narrow meta. Look at it this way, say I bring a knight army, every game I get to face full anti-tank options from every opponent, but I don't get many options to change my list.

The easiest event I was ever part of or helped ran was an AoS event. Points are very easy, you don't care what equipment is on what, it's just modeled on the units.

 docdoom77 wrote:
I don't like PLs. I like to go barebones on a lot of stuff to save points for more numbers. That doesn't work with PLs. For instance, I had a 1000 pt Ork army that came out to 60 PL. I had to cut some important stuff and have substandard units (because I didn't have all the upgrades modeled) for a 50 PL game.

Points for me, please.

This is probably the best argument I have seen against the use of Power Levels, and I can completely agree with your sentiment. Perhaps instead of upgrades being included in the Power Level of the unit (or "free" as the critics are calling it), we could instead have upgrades cost an extra Power Level? Like a Tactical Squad may take a Special and Heavy Weapon, and upgrade its unit Leader for 2 Power Level, and a Leman Russ may take sponsons for 1 Power Level. It doesn't have to be exact, but maybe something like that would appeal to everyone?

Eldar Vampire Hunter wrote:
The article in the OP cherry-picks knights as an example because Power Levels work reasonably well when comparing within that faction, but I can create a 50PL Daemons list that's worth 534 points and an also 50PL Tau list that's worth 1540 points. That's a frankly obscene difference between two supposedly 'equally powerful' armies and the idea that a system with that much variation could be the basis for competitive play is laughable.

Don't forget, but GW is going to be continually updating those Points values later on to keep things "balanced" for the Matched Play rule set. So that 534 Point list you mentioned could later be 717 Points, and the 1540 Point army could go down to 1269 Points. I mean, I don't know for certain, but it's possible.

Eldar Vampire Hunter wrote:
Anecdotes of "my group uses PL and we haven't had balance issues" are less than worthless, because you guys aren't cut-throat tournament players looking to squeeze every last drop of imbalance out of the system.

So because some of us are not WAAC and ultra competitive, we don't get a say in how the game might be played? Because we aren't trying to find the imbalanced lists that are available in points means we shouldn't use Power Levels?

Eldar Vampire Hunter wrote:
I also find the assertion that removing list-building and optimization from the game makes for a more competitive environment ridiculous almost to the point of being insulting. Creating an optimal TAC list while accounting for the cost and performance of different options against the spread of opponents you expect to face is a huge skill factor and eliminating it from the game in name of simplicity (and reducing list-building down to spamming the units with the most expensive and flexible options and then picking which guns you want at the start of each game) would make the game drastically less competitive, not more.

When one focuses on achieving victory in the list building phase, then yes, the proposals in the article could very well threaten the kind of game that one seeks. But coming out of an age where the top competitive lists were almost identical and built around certain gimmicks, that is no longer list building, but list imitating. A TAC list is great and all, but at the tournaments, your TAC list isn't going to help against that 2++ Invulnerable save coming straight for your army, or when facing off against Riptides and Wraithknights that can blow you away without too much effort.

 ross-128 wrote:
The Imperial Guard index in general is probably a good example of how broken PLs can be if you try, and in a tournament people WILL try.

Take a look at this:

Spoiler:

HWS: PL3, min points: 27 max points: 72

SWT: PL3, min points: 39 max points: 60

Infantry squad: PL3, min points: 40 max points: 86

Command Squad: PL3, min points 24, max points 77

Veterans: PL6, min points: 60 max points: 147

As you can see, not only is there a huge amount of variation within a single unit but some units can milk their PL (or get screwed by it on the low end) much more than others.

Knights were a poor example because they have very few options, and all of those options replace something that is already being paid for. So they don't have a lot of cost variation, of course PLs will seem to approximate them well. Just about any infantry on the other hand, well you can see what that looks like above.

Meanwhile, any Baneblade variant can take 4 lascannons and 8 heavy flamers, or it can take nothing in that slot, making a 216 point spread between their minimum and maximum costs.

Bear in mind that Power Levels are based on the AVERAGE points cost of the unit plus its different possible loadouts for upgrades and weapons choices, and then divided by 20, so a 50 Power Level army will be about 1000 points ish.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm skeptical about unit size, and about the edge cases where PL doesn't really work (Deathwatch Veterans, paying 2PL/model even though the full massed heavy weapons loadout makes for a really fragile list).

If you actually wanted to use PL for a tournament you might need a few edge-case tweaks and some kind of mechanism for more granular squad sizes. You'd need some kind of differential cost for upgrades, and possibly fractional PL for inexpensive models.

I'm starting to see a middle ground being formed. Like (I'm copying myself) a Tactical Squad may take a Special and Heavy Weapon, and upgrade its unit Leader for 2 Power Level, and a Leman Russ may take sponsons for 2 Power Level. It might necessitate the decrease in base Power Level though for an un-upgraded unit, which kind of defeats the purpose of distinguishing Power Levels from Points values.

I would be interested to see a large tournament adopt Power Levels for the event, just to see how it would work out.
__________

On another note, I have found that in our local area, the WAAC tournament players are ironically more in favor of Power Level for casual and pickup games, while the more fluffy/casual/hobbying players are more afraid of them being unbalanced. Of course, when the WAAC guys are, you know, interested in winning, and the more casual players are tired of playing against their cheesy and broken lists and don't want to risk being thrashed around on the tabletop again. Which just tells me that it's not an issue of how the army is designed, but the nature of the players and what kind of game they expect to get anymore.

Breng77 wrote:


1.) They use knights for their example of why it isn't a big deal.

They also got the points for Knights entirely wrong, which helps skew the argument in the way they want it to go. I've kept theirs, and added the ACTUAL cost in red beside it. They only got 1 of the actual points correct;

Knight Errant 23
Thermal+ Sword 426 430
Thermal+Gauntlet 401 435
Thermal+Gauntlet+Meltagun 418 448

Knight Paladin 24
Cannon+Sword 450 458
Cannon+Gauntlet 455 463
Cannon+Gauntlet+Meltagun 472 476

Knight Warden 25
Gatling Cannon+Sword 445 466
Gatling+Gauntlet 450 471
Gatling+Gauntlet+Meltagun 467 484

Knight Gallant 21
Sword+Gauntlet 385 389
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun 402 They actually got one right here
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun+Rocket Pod 464 447

Knight Crusader 27
Gatling+Thermal 491 512
Gatling+Thermal+metlagun 508 525
Gatling+Thermal+Meltagun+Rocket Pod 553 570


They add after they bungle the points

Yes, when fully loaded with a carapace weapon, it is starting to approach the cost of other Knight versions but then this isn’t really a fair comparison as the above calculations do not factor in the most granular points expensive builds for each other variant

Except, the points they left off because it isn't a "fair comparison" are mandatory for the Knights to be legal models.

Then they get to this part, which i'll just edit in the actual quote itself to save time;

Looking at another way, assuming 100 Power Level game versus a 2K granular point game, a Knight Gallant with all the upgrades is going to make up 21% of your overall army in a PL game while a in a granular system, it will make up 23.2% (actually is 22.35% when you get your math correct) of your army.

and

A Crusader is going to account for 27% regardless of configuration in Power Level while a maxed out Crusader is going to still take up about 27% (28.5% in points when you math properly...) of your army in the granular system (Unless you actually max a crusader out with his options and it goes to 598 pts, and 29.9% of your usage).

A bunch of you are assuming that if I take "X" vs "Y" it's "better" or "worse".

In this system the weapons are all changed to be useful against certain types of units, there is not a "all takers" weapon anymore and the PL reflects that. (Just like AoS)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Clay_Puppington wrote:

Breng77 wrote:


1.) They use knights for their example of why it isn't a big deal.

They also got the points for Knights entirely wrong, which helps skew the argument in the way they want it to go. I've kept theirs, and added the ACTUAL cost in red beside it. They only got 1 of the actual points correct;

Knight Errant 23
Thermal+ Sword 426 430
Thermal+Gauntlet 401 435
Thermal+Gauntlet+Meltagun 418 448

Knight Paladin 24
Cannon+Sword 450 458
Cannon+Gauntlet 455 463
Cannon+Gauntlet+Meltagun 472 476

Knight Warden 25
Gatling Cannon+Sword 445 466
Gatling+Gauntlet 450 471
Gatling+Gauntlet+Meltagun 467 484

Knight Gallant 21
Sword+Gauntlet 385 389
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun 402 They actually got one right here
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun+Rocket Pod 464 447

Knight Crusader 27
Gatling+Thermal 491 512
Gatling+Thermal+metlagun 508 525
Gatling+Thermal+Meltagun+Rocket Pod 553 570


They add after they bungle the points

Yes, when fully loaded with a carapace weapon, it is starting to approach the cost of other Knight versions but then this isn’t really a fair comparison as the above calculations do not factor in the most granular points expensive builds for each other variant

Except, the points they left off because it isn't a "fair comparison" are mandatory for the Knights to be legal models.

Points are based on damage potential not always the usefulness.

You are proving EXACTLY the point of this article, points should not be the focus in tactics. You should equip your units for usefulness in each situation, if you are not prepared for that situation then you die.

 sfshilo wrote:
A bunch of you are assuming that if I take "X" vs "Y" it's "better" or "worse".

In this system the weapons are all changed to be useful against certain types of units, there is not a "all takers" weapon anymore and the PL reflects that. (Just like AoS)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Clay_Puppington wrote:

Breng77 wrote:


1.) They use knights for their example of why it isn't a big deal.

They also got the points for Knights entirely wrong, which helps skew the argument in the way they want it to go. I've kept theirs, and added the ACTUAL cost in red beside it. They only got 1 of the actual points correct;

Knight Errant 23
Thermal+ Sword 426 430
Thermal+Gauntlet 401 435
Thermal+Gauntlet+Meltagun 418 448

Knight Paladin 24
Cannon+Sword 450 458
Cannon+Gauntlet 455 463
Cannon+Gauntlet+Meltagun 472 476

Knight Warden 25
Gatling Cannon+Sword 445 466
Gatling+Gauntlet 450 471
Gatling+Gauntlet+Meltagun 467 484

Knight Gallant 21
Sword+Gauntlet 385 389
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun 402 They actually got one right here
Sword+Gauntlet+meltagun+Rocket Pod 464 447

Knight Crusader 27
Gatling+Thermal 491 512
Gatling+Thermal+metlagun 508 525
Gatling+Thermal+Meltagun+Rocket Pod 553 570


They add after they bungle the points

Yes, when fully loaded with a carapace weapon, it is starting to approach the cost of other Knight versions but then this isn’t really a fair comparison as the above calculations do not factor in the most granular points expensive builds for each other variant

Except, the points they left off because it isn't a "fair comparison" are mandatory for the Knights to be legal models.

Points are based on damage potential not always the usefulness.

You are proving EXACTLY the point of this article, points should not be the focus in tactics. You should equip your units for usefulness in each situation, if you are not prepared for that situation then you die.

Not arguing for or against this.

Just correcting the bad addition.

If your argument is that there's not a big deal between different PL and points cost, and that's why points shouldn't be used, the author should probably get the numbers correct, or they fall into the same line of "points shaving" that they accuse others of doing to make their point / win a game.

If every army could sideboard and minmax I would agree, but it varies.

Necrons for example, get a lot less for power level than say, marines or chaos marines.

Make options good because they are good, not because they are free so you might as well take them.