Munkie

Yes, I'm well aware of the guns on my flyer. Staying out of 24" and just throwing D6 str 7 missiles is not a good use for 225 points. I have to stay in range with all guns to get value out of it. You can tout the benefits of a unit you have no experience with all you want, but there's really no justification for one of the highest percentage hikes in the game. A nearly 40% increase is HUGE on an already expensive flyer that got fewer benefits from the edition change than most.

The voidraven has 24" range guns. No, I'll just have to not take it because it is an objectively awful choice compared to other choices. It is not a revelation that if you make bad lists but play them to the best of your ability, you can still wring value out of them. That isn't an endorsement for taking bad choices which is what the voidraven is. Is there a good reason it costs 55 points more than a razorwing? No. So why should I take the over-costed one?

It isn't a wash. The only real defense of Eldar flyers was making them hard to hit. That can no longer be done. The no stacking negatives to hit is disproportionately more brutal to armies that relied on it.

Easier to hit than last edition I mentioned the invul Voidraven has 2 missiles and one of them is terrible. The ONLY benefit the voidraven got was the ability to come back via strategic reserves and its 1 decent missile got situationally better. None of the other buffs apply to it, all of the nerfs do. It is unquestionably in an overall worse position than it was and it went up by 60 points. Just an awful choice now.

It's not a matter of it going up and being hard to fit in. It's an issue of it becoming much more fragile AND much, much more expensive. It's close to a land raider in cost, but only T6 with 12 wounds and 5++, and every heavy weapon on the board can move and shoot at it with no consequence, and every assault weapon can advance and shoot with no consequence, it's just too fragile to justify. This is what I was afraid of, GW arbitrarily hiking prices without considering whether the unit got better or worse in the new edition. Voidraven lost more than it gained, but went way up in price because it's a vehicle and "vehicles are better now".

225 for a Voidraven bomber?!? I regret spending hours installing LEDs in one this weekend. It'll look all shiny gathering dust on the shelf for the next several years.

I'm planning on giving up my favorite opponent pin at OFCC 2030. Make it so.

That just isn't true. Your post was quoting a player specifically talking about attacking heroically intervening units. There wasn't a non-heroic intervention related point in the sentence you quoted. He asked if you could attack a non-character unit that heroically intervened. Your reply looks identical to someone saying "no, you can't, because you didn't declare a charge against them." If you did mean something else, it certainly wasn't relevant to the sentence you quoted.

It says that you can declare attacks against a unit that you charged, or "that performed a Heroic Intervention this turn." So if you charge a unit, and someone performs a Heroic Intervention, you can attack them as well as the unit you charged. Interestingly, due to that wording, you can attack any unit that performed a Heroic Intervention, not just one that heroically intervened against you. For instance, if you had 2 units charge 1 squad, and then a 3rd nearby friendly squad didn't charge, but happened to be in Heroic Intervention range of an enemy character and he pounced. If one of your charging squads kills the enemy unit, the second squad can pile-in and, if they can make engagement range, attack that enemy character before he swings.

Well there would be a million impacts to the venoms anyway, that the one example wouldn't make it a non-issue (like disembarking troops for instance). I forgot they separated that section of measuring into a codex specific distinction, though. Didn't even think to check there.

I'm wrapping my head around the idea that despite the size and shape of my raiders and venoms, all measurements are done to the base. I mean you only measure to the hull if there is no base, right? That's what that posted section says... Does that mean that if I put a raider picket fence facing towards a unit, they can't be charged by the unit? They wouldn't be able to get to those bases with all those the pesky hulls in the way! Monoliths are immune to charges right now, maybe Repulsors too?

Yep, almost completely meaningless. Yes, ruins were breachable in 8th. What you're clearly forgetting is Fly also behaved differently. If Fly didn't give you the ability to move and shoot in 8th, then Fly would've been a liability to have. Vulnerability to the abundant anti-Fly tech would not be worth the incredibly mild maneuverability difference. Now that Fly is nowhere near as powerful as it was in 8th AND there still exists an abundance of anti-Fly tech, yeah the incredibly minor benefit of moving over models would be next to useless. I'd rather Fly give you the ability to be noticeably more maneuverable than footsloggers.

Is it that surprising that we didn't have the finer points locked down? Even so, I think breachable shouldn't be used on ruins. Otherwise fly is almost completely meaningless this edition.

Yeah Fly is still incredibly good, just in a very different (and much more intuitive way). Fly and shoot always seemed like a lazy way to make fly relevant in an edition where it otherwise wouldn't matter. But now that models can only move over terrain pieces 1" high or less, fly matters a ton for getting over the walls of ruins to charge the people within. We had a standoff in my test game between my succubus and some grey hunters. There was a corner shaped ruin between us and neither had enough movement+charge range to get to the other around the ruin. However, we also couldn't move any closer, because the other would possibly be able to charge if we moved up. With a fly unit, you can more freely move up and use ruins defensively. Hide in a corner of a ruin where you can't be shot, and you can hop over and out on your next turn. You can position to threaten footsloggers who cannot, in turn, threaten you. Fly operating as a way to enhance mobility and board control makes way more sense than as a way to enhance shooting.

The Eternal War missions use predetermined objective placement, so cleverness is off the table unfortunately. Oddly, the game setup order does have you set objectives first, then terrain after. So I suppose you could try to place terrain features to give you an advantage, but I wouldn't count on this. Tournaments, for instance, are going to have preset terrain anyway, so the usual order of operations won't be followed (why they put it in that order knowing full well people won't follow it, I'll never know). That said, I don't think LoS is a problem, it just takes some getting used to. Corner piece ruins, for instance, tend to have a triangular shape on their 2 remaining walls. The tallest point where the walls meet, and then the tattered walls barely and inch or 2 high on the edges. Well if the tallest point is 5", then you have to imagine the whole building as infinitely tall and solid, so those short areas can be very misleading with LoS. Definitely doesn't make it a problem though.

Played my first game of 9th today. I'm sure we got a million things wrong but it was good! Played against my friend's space wolves and rolled up the Scorched Earth scenario. 6 objectives and after you score the ones on your opponent's deployment edge, you can spend your entire turn destroying them for extra VP. We decided to skip secondary objectives for now. With the rules being available for less than 24 hours, we wanted to focus on fundamentals and not worry too much about game result. As a side note, if you do skip the secondaries, all other scoring is divisible by 5, so you can just track clumps of 5 as 1 to keep the tallying down. My main takeaways were: -Resilience is key for holding objectives, obsec not so much. Troops are in a weird place. -No stacking negatives is every bit as bad for Drukhari as I thought it would be. When suppressors deep strike in with their heavy weapons, why not fire at the aircraft? They're negative -1 to hit, so there's no penalty for moving and firing heavy weapons at them. Very counterintuitive. Limiting my ability to stack modifiers makes sense, eliminating consequences for moving heavy weapons or moving and advancing assault weapons doesn't. -MCs and Dreads are great. My Talos haywire blasted a wounded dread and then charged the unit of grey hunters he was protecting. Definitely dropping flyers for more Talos. And getting double liquifier guns on them. Flamer type weapons are going to be so good on MCs -Unit coherency takes concentration. It was pretty minimal, because I only had 5 squads of 5, my opponent had only 2 squads numbering 6 or more. The very first time he moved one squad, he accidentally had one model trailing who would have died if we weren't doing givebacks. I would seriously consider movement trays for units larger than 5, because our usual movement habits will get models killed. -17 CPs per game is a lot of CPs!

Yeah that all checks out. They're going to need to errata "unmodified" out of the 1 always failing. Otherwise, yes, they're immune to AP weaponry. *edit* Or I suppose they could errata in that no save can be improved to better than 2+. Solves the same problem a different way.

I've got to say, I'm not a huge fan of their approach to the Eternal War missions. Mission 6, in particular, is going to be an absolute pain in the ass just to set up. Diagonal deployments have always been tricky because laying a tape measure in an uninterrupted 7'2.5" diagonal line and measuring 12" back for the DZ edges is tricky. So memorizing the distances from the table corners and drawing at least a shorter, but still challenging line has been the common workaround. Well now they dictate that distance from the corners so we don't have to memorize it anymore, which is great! Except we still have to try to measure that centerline to set the objectives. Oh, and we also have to measure the other diagonal center line to setup 2 more objectives... Otherwise, I liked the mix-and-match mission-and-map style we've enjoyed for the past few editions. I understand that it's not really doable given the complexity of the missions, but I also suspect this was strongly pushed by the competitive voices within the design team. One of the unspoken realities of ITC play is having random deployments with preset missions. Some arrangements absolutely favor one player and skew tournament results. Eliminating this variable seems like something they'd want.

That's really good. It gives you the CP refund you would have had if your warlord could fit into a standard detachment. So there's no downside to taking Mortarion, for instance, other than you've used 2 detachments and had to buy one extra HQ in the battalion or whatever you wish you could put him into. But still 2 detachments, one of which is a Demon Primarch and the total cost is 0 CP. Not bad at all.

I understand that, just pointing out that the statement "A recent post from Goonhammer seems to be leaning towards large units actually being rather good." is a little misleading. They weren't investigating whether large units were good or not. Nor did they conclude that large units were better off in the one area they were exploring. Their conclusion is that large units are better off in one sense, and worse off in another. Better, because the whole squad won't get wiped automatically by failing morale; yet worse because when taking smaller numbers of casualties and still failing will result in more models dying than in 8th. They concluded that large units are not really better or worse off with morale than they are in this edition--it's too scenario specific to make a definitive assertion. And I agree with that assessment. But if you take that and add blasts and coherency issues, and it's not hard to conclude that they're worse off than they were in 8th. But even then, that's not what's really driving my choice. The difference between 8th and 9th becomes irrelevant once we're playing 9th so it is only the relative value of 9th edition units. As an example, if I want a raider filled with 10 wyches, I can't think of a single reason why I wouldn't run them as 2 squads of 5. Same number of models, same role, but with immunity to these purpose-built counters, the ability to separate my forces if necessary, and additional weird things like spreading out transport destruction damage across both units so neither has to take Ld tests (and actually become immune to Ld for the rest of the game if they drop to 3 models left) With 2 squads of 5, I can still wrap them around vehicles single file, build conga lines, and whatever half-assed placement my half-drunk self comes up with. I'm particularly excited about the idea of charging large or medium size squads on 2 flanks and giving them a hell of a time deciding where to pull casualties. Can't pull too many from the middle or the squad will split in half and explode. If you pull wounds closest to the unit first attacking, you can't retaliate against it. If you pull wounds away from the unit on the other side, they'll still get to pile in and attack because they charged, or maybe they'll just decide to be out of combat. Then after you carefully pull wounds, you've got a pile in and a consolidate move in which you still cannot break coherency. Then a Ld test with even more careful casualty choices, then you check to make sure you're still in coherency. The whole time trying to keep squad leaders and special weapon troopers alive. That's a whole stack of plates I don't have to keep spinning by spending the exact same number of points on the exact same number of models, but in a smarter way. In 8th, there are pros and cons to be weighed before deciding how I want to arrange my troops choices in their transports. In 9th, there will be a correct choice and an incorrect choice for me. Since 3x patrols will be the defacto Drukhari list design, I'll have access to 9 troops choices. That's 45 models of minimum squads. Or I could do 3 total squads arranged into 20/15/10 and know that I made a worse army. I would just like to see rules that encourage list diversity. Not hope that diversity thrives despite the discouragement of GW. Anyway, I'll leave it alone now, as I've beat this horse to death.

In fairness, they are exclusively comparing 8th ed leadership to 9th ed leadership. They do not mention or consider the other counters built into the ruleset into their conclusions.

Fair enough. I don't mean to say the reasons for taking large squads have vanished. There are more downsides than ever for taking large squads, and no added upsides that we're aware of. Of course mentally taxing things are a reason. Do you believe that mental fatigue is non-existent or that it is impossible to make mistakes as you get mentally fatigued? Yes, this is absolutely a valid reason. Yes it is. "Your opponent might roll perfectly anyway, so it doesn't matter" is a terrible, terrible argument. By that logic, we should never put any effort whatsoever into writing optimal lists. If my opponent rolls perfectly, then it doesn't matter what choice I make, I'm going to lose. Avoiding built-in counters is another perfectly valid reason to run MSU. In this example, you're talking about a Ld 7 "elite" unit. I don't know very many of those. Ld 8 is far, far more common. With Ld 8, the only number that matters is losing exactly 3 models. If you lose 4 and fail the test, the last guy dies anyway. If you lose 1 or 2, they can't fail. So if a Ld 8 unit with 5 members loses exactly 3 models, then rolls a 6 on combat shock, then a 1 or 2 on the last remaining model. So 1 in 18 chance of it mattering IF I lose exactly 3 models. It might come up once every few games. Large squads are in no way more resistant to morale than small squads. Just because the reasons aren't going to convince you to run MSU, does not mean the reasons don't even exist as you're claiming.

It's not the risk of having squads larger than 30, it's the multiple risks to squads larger than 5. I'll be taking at most probably 6 squads of 5 troops. Immune to blasts, immune to coherency restrictions, nearly immune to Ld concerns (CP or 2 when I absolutely need it), free sergeants, breakable eggs in separate baskets. There's just no upside to large squads.

Yeah but it will be the new standard. Any store wanting to run ITC events will be changing their mats. They don't have to, but they will. I think the 2 other hard counters they put on large blobs will be sufficient. Large blobs were already more vulnerable to Ld issues than small squads in 8th. Now they're even more vulnerable than they were AND blasts will hurt them harder. Now they have more strict coherency rules too (and extremely punitive consequences for placement mistakes). How many reasons do we need not to take large troops squads? I seriously cannot fathom writing a list for 9th that would contain more than 30 troops models, there's just too many reasons not to. I LOVED running blobs of wyches out of a Webway portal back in 5th, but they'll just be squads of 5, because having more makes them harder to use and easier to kill per model. The only chance blobs have, I believe, is if troops are the only thing that can score (with maybe some mission-specific exceptions). Otherwise, MSU will be the objectively correct choice in most cases.

This is what happens when you try to legislate behavior. There is no fix to people gaming a system. You have to either have an ungamable system (what GW sort of tried to do) or people that aren't interested in gaming a system. Instead of trying to create a perfect system, GW should have let people just handle it on a social level as we've been doing for decades. Creating a different system for people to manipulate accomplishes exactly nothing.