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I'm thinking its definitely one of the ones with the vehicles given the recent changes to the S/T Band. The SW's with their Invictor Suit at T8 is going to be tough for many of the other patrols. The Dark Angels with a Redemptor is sort of in the same boat, but they give up a lot for a Redemptor and 3 Inceptors. They're going to have model count issues. BA too maybe.

Black Templar look like they're in a good spot. Drukhari may be in the best spot with one of the few Patrols with legit anti-vehicle weaponry.

Just glancing through them on GWs site id say itd probably be one of the ones with a walker (be it a dread, wraithlord, or that stealth thing).
And the only one I'd even buy is the GK Patrol - simply because I don't own any GKs.....


But is Combat Patrol even a going concern anywhere bar theory-hammer discussions?
In my area (at the shops anyways) this format is the very definition of DOA. If it went away I don't think anyone would even realize it had existed, let alone care.

ccs wrote:
But is Combat Patrol even a going concern anywhere bar theory-hammer discussions?

Nope. Optimizing your purchases based on on-table strength is missing the entire point of a newbie-friendly one box format. The only thing worth analyzing is which one gives you the best discount on the price of the models you want to buy for your real army, otherwise just buy whatever looks cool and play a game or two.

CP is the entry format, but that does not mean it’s dead. I finally got around to attending my FLGS who has been doing CP every Sat this month. Eldar vs. Tau. WL was not as mean as I was expecting, Ghostkeel was tougher than I thought.

We were both making some basic mistakes, and our dice were all sorts of moody. I did win with the Eldar, and suspect that their general power level translates into this format.

Each combat patrol has it's own tweaked ruleset, with fixed datasheets, and new enhancements/strategems. These can dramatically boost some of the boxes. For example, grey knights, which has a ton of points, actually has to pick either the Dreadknight or the terminators (who do not have an apothecary), and their default enhancement is "gain a CP when you kill a character on a 2+"

The IG box, which is well under 500 points, has a default enhancement for 1 CP in your own command phase PLUS making orders affect all units on the board. They also have very strong strats, including recycling cadian squads for 1CP, and ": Until the end of the turn, halve the Move characteristic
of enemy models, halve Advance rolls made for enemy units, enemy units cannot declare a charge and each time an enemy model makes a ranged attack, subtract 1 from the Hit roll." for two CP!

I don't know if I'd pick IG over grey knights, but those strats and enhancements give them some real juice!

 Polonius wrote:
Each combat patrol has it's own tweaked ruleset, with fixed datasheets, and new enhancements/strategems. These can dramatically boost some of the boxes. For example, grey knights, which has a ton of points, actually has to pick either the Dreadknight or the terminators (who do not have an apothecary), and their default enhancement is "gain a CP when you kill a character on a 2+"

The IG box, which is well under 500 points, has a default enhancement for 1 CP in your own command phase PLUS making orders affect all units on the board. They also have very strong strats, including recycling cadian squads for 1CP, and ": Until the end of the turn, halve the Move characteristic
of enemy models, halve Advance rolls made for enemy units, enemy units cannot declare a charge and each time an enemy model makes a ranged attack, subtract 1 from the Hit roll." for two CP!

I don't know if I'd pick IG over grey knights, but those strats and enhancements give them some real juice!

I don't know why, but I'm surprised and disappointed that rather than making good Combat Patrol Boxes, they just obliterated the "regular" game expectations you would have for these boxes when you;'re not playing Combat Patrol.

GK patrol box is one of the few , the ad mecha one is another, that gives a perfect feel of the army. Playing the real deal 2000pts is going to be just as fun as it is going to be play those patrol boxes. Some patrol boxes are reverse traps, for example the custodes box is horrible. But the army is fun to play.

But in general the patrol stuff, was rarely something actualy worth buying. Technicaly there was some discount, but the boxes had stuff that people wouldn't want to run. The good boxes were that either by accident, the DA box for a short time, or good because the armies had extremly limited unit options or were so good, that getting a bad unit didn't impact the enjoyment of playing enough to make someone feel bad.

What I do know is that people that started with patrol, have a bad jump from that to regular w40k. They remember wrong rules, wrong stats etc.

Breton wrote:
I don't know why, but I'm surprised and disappointed that rather than making good Combat Patrol Boxes, they just obliterated the "regular" game expectations you would have for these boxes when you;'re not playing Combat Patrol.

Until recently, the combat patrol boxes were meant to be your actual force in a game in only the loosest possible sense. And the Death Guard one wasn't even legal.

I think they were assembled like most value add boxes, and not really meant to be super playable until very recently. FWIW, the new Necron combat patrol rules give some insight into how any new boxes will look: mostly push fit, recycled models, a battle line choice, an elite, and a Big guy.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:
But in general the patrol stuff, was rarely something actualy worth buying. Technicaly there was some discount, but the boxes had stuff that people wouldn't want to run. The good boxes were that either by accident, the DA box for a short time, or good because the armies had extremly limited unit options or were so good, that getting a bad unit didn't impact the enjoyment of playing enough to make someone feel bad.

Rarely seems a bit much. A few are legit trash (SG, 1k Sons) while some are absolute building blocks to your army (Dark Eldar, GSC, Grey knights) but most are a semi random assortment of stuff seemingly designed to prevent people from buying multiples.

I still say that buying one of each space marine combat patrol yields a pretty interesting army, but each one on it's own is odd.

Breton wrote:
I don't know why, but I'm surprised and disappointed that rather than making good Combat Patrol Boxes, they just obliterated the "regular" game expectations you would have for these boxes when you;'re not playing Combat Patrol.

I don't think you could do it any other way, not without abandoning the goal of having a one-box game at a flat price point regardless of faction. $160 of guard is never going to be equal to $160 of marines if you're using the standard 40k rules. GW would have to either eat a loss on every guard box by packing in a bunch of extra sprues, along with all the damage that would do to sales of anything else in the range, or have the guard box cost $3-400 and have zero appeal to newbie customers who don't understand why the price is so high.

The simplest solution, by far, is to just use modified rules where each $160 box is adjusted to be reasonably balanced against all the others. Horde armies get fewer points and stronger buffs, elite armies get more points and weaker buffs.

Orks patrol is pretty great IMO.
You get a powerful Hq (Mega Armoured Warboss)
You get 20 ork Boyz, the backbone of all good ork armies (they're the gakky monopose ones but their loadout isn't horrible)
You get a good fast attack option (deffkoptas. They can't take big bombz now but it's worth it for a special ability IMO)
AND you get a powerful Heavy support option, the mighty Deff Dread.
I can't think of a better patrol. The mechanicus one sucks though IMHO.

Depends on what you consider best.

Is it points per dollar? How well it will perform in a combat patrol game? How well it will perform in a non combat patrol game? How well it will function as the core of your army to build on?

I personally feel like Daemons, Genestealer Cults, Orks, and Drukhari have the best combat ptrol boxes, as far as value and forming the core of a future army.

I'm somewhat on the fence about Adepta Sororitas and World Eaters. Sororitas box is decent, but you may not be able to use all the minis. The World eaters CP box might be the only pure WE thing you'll end up needing to buy (apart from Angron because I've never not seen WE without Angron).

Further muddying things up at the boarding patrol boxes which are still kicking around in some places.

I really like the Drukhari box, as it contains not one, but TWO vehicles.

PenitentJake wrote:
I really like the Drukhari box, as it contains not one, but TWO vehicles.

And they're both the only vehicles the Drukhari use outside of the (currently stinker, may be better in codex) venom.

The raider and ravager can be magnetized to be each other.

And! They both come with enough character attachments that you could in theory squeeze out a few more kabalites out of them or even some kitbashed leaders.

The fact that the raider and ravager have performed from amazing to solidly consistent through the last few editions is just icing on the cake. They're very, very unlikely to get phased out entirely, due to the drukhair just not having a plethora of choices when it comes down to it.

My local store has quite a few new players, so most weeks there are at least a couple of combat patrol games going on.

I've found the genestealer cult one is quite powerful. It has easily rolled over all the others I've played it against so far. The fast and tough melee vehicle with a big flamer usually does a lot of damage before it goes down. Plus you still have four squads of decent respawning infantry to deal with after that too. It can play the objective game while also rushing the opponent with melee units to keep them locked down.

The weakest I've run into so far is ad-mech. It doesn't have the unit count to really play the game, and seems built to just sit in its deployment zone and shoot. Which isn't a winning strategy.

I had an idea, could you adjust Toughness down on the toughest vehicles on the best forces? Would that be a good way to change things or should power only be changed through the special rules? I'm afraid that you'd end up with some combat patrols with loads of rules to make up for lacking base stats.

they should have completely re-written the profiles of the units, not just tweaked the rules

some include things that others seriously struggle to hurt or are able to easily delete the sort of units other have

e.g. the amount of shots things fire needs to be carefully considered to be appropriate for the size of forces in the box

looking at you Dark Angels aggressors with [sustained hits 2] on units with an already high rate of fire - they should have good firepower for sure, but not 'delete a unit at a time' firepower

leopard wrote:
they should have completely re-written the profiles of the units, not just tweaked the rules

some include things that others seriously struggle to hurt or are able to easily delete the sort of units other have

e.g. the amount of shots things fire needs to be carefully considered to be appropriate for the size of forces in the box

looking at you Dark Angels aggressors with [sustained hits 2] on units with an already high rate of fire - they should have good firepower for sure, but not 'delete a unit at a time' firepower

I was thinking how many have a hard time with one T9+ vehicle, let alone two. That I think is the main problem with the new Combat Patrol paradigm. And its just anoter example of GW's biggest failing. They don't think any moves ahead. They changed the way Combat Patrol works, and then didn't change the Combat Patrol rosters.

Breton wrote:

leopard wrote:
they should have completely re-written the profiles of the units, not just tweaked the rules

some include things that others seriously struggle to hurt or are able to easily delete the sort of units other have

e.g. the amount of shots things fire needs to be carefully considered to be appropriate for the size of forces in the box

looking at you Dark Angels aggressors with [sustained hits 2] on units with an already high rate of fire - they should have good firepower for sure, but not 'delete a unit at a time' firepower

I was thinking how many have a hard time with one T9+ vehicle, let alone two. That I think is the main problem with the new Combat Patrol paradigm. And its just anoter example of GW's biggest failing. They don't think any moves ahead. They changed the way Combat Patrol works, and then didn't change the Combat Patrol rosters.

essentially the same issue in reverse and yes the rosters needed changing, keep the flavour of each faction but units either with changed stats or "new units" (using existing models) with their own profiles

The Dark Eldar one is by far the strongest on paper.

2 fast vehicles, that have some serious firepower, a good objective camping unit, that also has some impressive anti-infantry firepower, a dedicated melee unit, that is good at what they do, and a character that can also carve up some kills in melee.

The power from pain rule also helps them.

Other contenders are the Dark Angel one, Inceptors and a Redemptor Dreadnought are brutal in small points games, getting both is just unkind.

The Dark Angel one is hurty

The Daemons one is also a serious stat check for a lot of others. It's playing with so many extra points and has so many models that it can just run over some of the other patrols very easily.

 Bosskelot wrote:
The Daemons one is also a serious stat check for a lot of others. It's playing with so many extra points and has so many models that it can just run over some of the other patrols very easily.

It can also be a good force to use in AoS, and WFB. So, offers a lot of mileage.

Depends.

Single best Combat Patrol for single use, as a starter? Sisters of battle, and its not even close.

Best sale discount? I believe there's an Auspex Tactic video about it. Its easily calculated with an excel. Genestealers is the king if you dont like monopose.

Best point/price ratio? Custodes, no surprises here.

Actual best Combat Patrol? Something that you can buy once, twice or even three times and still be useful to your army is what I personally consider the best. This requires no monopose units in the Combat Patrol. With a character that can be sold reasonably well on eBay/other website.

For the latter one, there are few competitors. Imperial Guard, Dark Eldars or Black Templars are the winners for me. And these 3 are fun to play, specially DE and BE despite being a guard myself. The Death Guard looks nice if you want a zombie-horde faction.

the space marine combat patrol was a very good one for the price, if one accepts GW prices. Now the new one costs more, and has a tank model less.

People always said here that the GSC box is very good, and that getting 2-3 allows to get a good chunk of the army and the GSC characters are bland enough for it to be easy to convert them in to each other.

 Guillérmidas wrote:
Depends.

Single best Combat Patrol for single use, as a starter? Sisters of battle, and its not even close.

Best sale discount? I believe there's an Auspex Tactic video about it. Its easily calculated with an excel. Genestealers is the king if you dont like monopose.

Best point/price ratio? Custodes, no surprises here.

Actual best Combat Patrol? Something that you can buy once, twice or even three times and still be useful to your army is what I personally consider the best. This requires no monopose units in the Combat Patrol. With a character that can be sold reasonably well on eBay/other website.

For the latter one, there are few competitors. Imperial Guard, Dark Eldars or Black Templars are the winners for me. And these 3 are fun to play, specially DE and BE despite being a guard myself. The Death Guard looks nice if you want a zombie-horde faction.

The best Combat Patrol for playing Combat Patrol

I’m honestly considering buying a dread just to give combat patrol a try (well played again GW), because I have all the other ork units (really, who doesn’t already have a boss, a squad of koptas and a handful of boyz), and with the limited number of games I get in each edition, it seems easier to learn the rules and get some reps in
It is disappointing to hear though that if I do get a full blown game in that the rules are different and I may be incorrectly assuming things work a certain way if I don’t very carefully study the differences.
Fundamentally, this is my problem with 40k these days. I want to be able to start small and simple to learn a new edition’s ruleset and gradually scale up but it feels like instead you have to go all in and learn more than my poor brain cares to keep up with when I only get a game or three in per edition. I suppose that makes me not the target audience, but still…