Wolfshade
02-06-2013, 06:06 AM
Firstly apologies to anyone who identifies themself with this, this is not meant to cause offense and I'm sorry if it does.
Now onto the meat of the discussion.
When choosing a list, one does not consider each unit selected individually, however quite often we have a specific role in mind so for example we might chose that we want an assault unit, let's assume that we play BA as I am most familiar with them we have a choice:
Assault Terminators
Assault Marines
Death Company
Vanguard Veterans
Now we can compare and contrast each of these in order and use some mathhammer to work out things like:
* Assault Offence
* Assault Defence
* Shooting Offence
* Shooting Defence
And we can work these values out in terms of per MEQ/pt. and for vehicles against the various AVs/pt.
And this can give a good indication of how (in)effective that unit is compared to its contemporise.
Now this is made much murkier when one starts to consider the different wargear options, indeed trying to figure out all the different permissible combinations can be a bit of a nightmare. Eventually you can come to the conclusion that unit X is the most points efficient.
But how are you going to work it out, you may divine that TH/SS terminators despite not being able to shoot are point for point the most offense and durable, but the big problem is how do you then get them into combat?
* Offensive deep strike, using their run move to hopefully spread out and avoid being pie-plated
* Transport them in a LR/Stormraven
* Footslog
The offensive deep strike means that you are not going to be assaulting until turn 3. No reserves turn 1 hopefully turn up turn 2, assault turn 3. Also, can the rest of your army survive without this expensive unit?
In a transport is the most reliable way, but then not only are you shelling out 225pts for the squad but another 250+pts for the transport, yes both options are assault vehicles but you then end up with almost 500pts tied up in one unit and at small scale games 1000pts this is a huge amount, indeed given the cheapest HQ is about 100pts you then have only 400pts to try and squeeze as many scoring units as possible.
Footslogging with average rolls for running means that again you won't be assaulting till turn 3, with good rolls this could be turn 2.
The biggest problem with footslogging is that your enemy can move away from you just as quickly as you move towards them.
So we have a problem the best unit won't be delivering damage to turn 3 or turn 2 if you sink most your points into it.
The next unknown is what will the terrain be like and how can I use that for my advantage? Most people say that you cannot guarantee what the terrain will be like and therefore if you can do it, but the BRB tells us that we place terrain in an alternating pattern, that way you can absolutely guarantee that there will be a big LOS blocking terrain item in the middle of the board, if placed centrally this can be hidden behind regardless of the deployment type.
All these then have to be re-considered when you then choose the next unit with the added complication well how does unit X and unit Y interact with each other. Then other considerations, which HQ(s) you run and how they in turn interact with squads. A no-brainer is sticking a chaplain with the DC, but do you really want to have to have an HQ and an Elite ICs? Probably not so if you want to use that synergy you end up taking a Reculsiarch.
But conventional wisdom will say that you must take a librarian otherwise you will lose. Regardless of whether or not my opponent will be taking psykers, and indeed if you use rulebook powers and they are situationally useless (Being able to have a machine curse against Nids is as useful as a glass hammer).
Indeed the random powers creates a real headache as your librarian may be tooled up for shooting and then get close combat powers and vice versa, there is no point being a brilliantly shooting offensive powers if you plan to have you Librarian in B2B the whole time.
So eventually, you conceptualise the game style you want to play you, pick a list based less on the points efficiency of the list but how everything will meld together and you post on the net and then the criticism come.
Now, I do not have a problem with people critiquing a list, after all that is why you have it online, but the problem is that unless the person knows and games with you then they do not know what your local meta is or what your opponent will be bringing, what the terrain is like etc. They will know what their local meta is, what their opponents usually bring, what terrain they tend to use and how they like to play.
A brilliant example is a list I was going to use against Tyranids, and that the list would be a horde list. The advice I was given reduced my model count and gave me meltas and magna grapple. Now what use is a magna grapple against an army that has 0 vehicles (at the time this was in 5th where magna grapple had to be used against vehicles). The meltas again were ok, but plasmas would have been better, higher rate of fire, don't need the melta rule as there are no vehicles.
So: Why X vs. y does not work.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with algebra the capitalisation is important, a capital is a constant and a lower case is a variable. To me this typifies what is wrong with a lot of list criticisms and indeed follows a conversation that I have with one of my gaming group regularly.
This means that a certain unit will be compared against different opponents and different situations. There is no unit that will be the best in all the situations.
Take the humble terminator squad.
"Oh well there low I means they will get ripped apart in combat by genestealers with their rending."
This is a fair criticism, but the criticiser fails to realise that firstly, the terminators will have at least 1 turn of shooting at them with storm bolters which will thin the numbers down.
Oh well they can be wiped out by 1 battle cannon shot
This is a fair criticism, but you won't be being charged by genestealers and a being shot at by battle cannon in the same game, also unless they have just deep struck then they will not be in a tight group. I play against IG regularly, and my opponent loves his LRBTs and the most he has ever killed in one turn was 2. But the questions are why would you deepstrike in LoS of a LRBT and indeed what else you have in the list to deal with it. Terminators are not a threat to LRBTs unless they are within assault range so if you are attacking terminators with tanks, that leaves other units, less durable to battle cannon un-shot at.
What we need is less knocking of a unit and more constructive criticism of lists as a whole. This requires the list poster to comment about how they are planning to play and what their opponent is. Certainly when it comes to all comers lists there should be more general criticism and disagreement across the whole community as different opponents can be taken in different ways and indeed at low points serious decisions need to be made about what to include and what to exclude, once you get up to 2500pts you are able to take enough to cover and counter any one unit/threat.
Criticisms should also be consistent, so if you complain that there is not plasma in an army you shouldn't go on to say that plasma is inefficient. I really don't see how both can be true, if you think plasma is inefficient then the list should have too much plasma not not enough.
Two final points.
1. There is no unbeatable list, as Jervis Johnson said; if you pit an unbeatable army against itself one will lose.
2. A posted list may be someone’s pride and joy, that they have spent months developing honing and tweaking, they may have enjoyed their longest unbeaten run with this list and be proud of how it performs, so remember that when you say "Vanguard Vets?! What a n00b".
Now onto the meat of the discussion.
When choosing a list, one does not consider each unit selected individually, however quite often we have a specific role in mind so for example we might chose that we want an assault unit, let's assume that we play BA as I am most familiar with them we have a choice:
Assault Terminators
Assault Marines
Death Company
Vanguard Veterans
Now we can compare and contrast each of these in order and use some mathhammer to work out things like:
* Assault Offence
* Assault Defence
* Shooting Offence
* Shooting Defence
And we can work these values out in terms of per MEQ/pt. and for vehicles against the various AVs/pt.
And this can give a good indication of how (in)effective that unit is compared to its contemporise.
Now this is made much murkier when one starts to consider the different wargear options, indeed trying to figure out all the different permissible combinations can be a bit of a nightmare. Eventually you can come to the conclusion that unit X is the most points efficient.
But how are you going to work it out, you may divine that TH/SS terminators despite not being able to shoot are point for point the most offense and durable, but the big problem is how do you then get them into combat?
* Offensive deep strike, using their run move to hopefully spread out and avoid being pie-plated
* Transport them in a LR/Stormraven
* Footslog
The offensive deep strike means that you are not going to be assaulting until turn 3. No reserves turn 1 hopefully turn up turn 2, assault turn 3. Also, can the rest of your army survive without this expensive unit?
In a transport is the most reliable way, but then not only are you shelling out 225pts for the squad but another 250+pts for the transport, yes both options are assault vehicles but you then end up with almost 500pts tied up in one unit and at small scale games 1000pts this is a huge amount, indeed given the cheapest HQ is about 100pts you then have only 400pts to try and squeeze as many scoring units as possible.
Footslogging with average rolls for running means that again you won't be assaulting till turn 3, with good rolls this could be turn 2.
The biggest problem with footslogging is that your enemy can move away from you just as quickly as you move towards them.
So we have a problem the best unit won't be delivering damage to turn 3 or turn 2 if you sink most your points into it.
The next unknown is what will the terrain be like and how can I use that for my advantage? Most people say that you cannot guarantee what the terrain will be like and therefore if you can do it, but the BRB tells us that we place terrain in an alternating pattern, that way you can absolutely guarantee that there will be a big LOS blocking terrain item in the middle of the board, if placed centrally this can be hidden behind regardless of the deployment type.
All these then have to be re-considered when you then choose the next unit with the added complication well how does unit X and unit Y interact with each other. Then other considerations, which HQ(s) you run and how they in turn interact with squads. A no-brainer is sticking a chaplain with the DC, but do you really want to have to have an HQ and an Elite ICs? Probably not so if you want to use that synergy you end up taking a Reculsiarch.
But conventional wisdom will say that you must take a librarian otherwise you will lose. Regardless of whether or not my opponent will be taking psykers, and indeed if you use rulebook powers and they are situationally useless (Being able to have a machine curse against Nids is as useful as a glass hammer).
Indeed the random powers creates a real headache as your librarian may be tooled up for shooting and then get close combat powers and vice versa, there is no point being a brilliantly shooting offensive powers if you plan to have you Librarian in B2B the whole time.
So eventually, you conceptualise the game style you want to play you, pick a list based less on the points efficiency of the list but how everything will meld together and you post on the net and then the criticism come.
Now, I do not have a problem with people critiquing a list, after all that is why you have it online, but the problem is that unless the person knows and games with you then they do not know what your local meta is or what your opponent will be bringing, what the terrain is like etc. They will know what their local meta is, what their opponents usually bring, what terrain they tend to use and how they like to play.
A brilliant example is a list I was going to use against Tyranids, and that the list would be a horde list. The advice I was given reduced my model count and gave me meltas and magna grapple. Now what use is a magna grapple against an army that has 0 vehicles (at the time this was in 5th where magna grapple had to be used against vehicles). The meltas again were ok, but plasmas would have been better, higher rate of fire, don't need the melta rule as there are no vehicles.
So: Why X vs. y does not work.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with algebra the capitalisation is important, a capital is a constant and a lower case is a variable. To me this typifies what is wrong with a lot of list criticisms and indeed follows a conversation that I have with one of my gaming group regularly.
This means that a certain unit will be compared against different opponents and different situations. There is no unit that will be the best in all the situations.
Take the humble terminator squad.
"Oh well there low I means they will get ripped apart in combat by genestealers with their rending."
This is a fair criticism, but the criticiser fails to realise that firstly, the terminators will have at least 1 turn of shooting at them with storm bolters which will thin the numbers down.
Oh well they can be wiped out by 1 battle cannon shot
This is a fair criticism, but you won't be being charged by genestealers and a being shot at by battle cannon in the same game, also unless they have just deep struck then they will not be in a tight group. I play against IG regularly, and my opponent loves his LRBTs and the most he has ever killed in one turn was 2. But the questions are why would you deepstrike in LoS of a LRBT and indeed what else you have in the list to deal with it. Terminators are not a threat to LRBTs unless they are within assault range so if you are attacking terminators with tanks, that leaves other units, less durable to battle cannon un-shot at.
What we need is less knocking of a unit and more constructive criticism of lists as a whole. This requires the list poster to comment about how they are planning to play and what their opponent is. Certainly when it comes to all comers lists there should be more general criticism and disagreement across the whole community as different opponents can be taken in different ways and indeed at low points serious decisions need to be made about what to include and what to exclude, once you get up to 2500pts you are able to take enough to cover and counter any one unit/threat.
Criticisms should also be consistent, so if you complain that there is not plasma in an army you shouldn't go on to say that plasma is inefficient. I really don't see how both can be true, if you think plasma is inefficient then the list should have too much plasma not not enough.
Two final points.
1. There is no unbeatable list, as Jervis Johnson said; if you pit an unbeatable army against itself one will lose.
2. A posted list may be someone’s pride and joy, that they have spent months developing honing and tweaking, they may have enjoyed their longest unbeaten run with this list and be proud of how it performs, so remember that when you say "Vanguard Vets?! What a n00b".