One of the things newer gamers often struggle with is creating a balanced list. Many more experienced gamers can fall into this trap as well without a bit of self analysis on their list after completion.
I am primarily a gamer who plays with moderate strength lists. I acknowledge what makes a strong list and I have designed, on paper at least strong lists. I have studied many tourney winning lists and I have taken the time to understand what makes them tick.
The first thing to consider when building a list is a general one. How do I want this army to play? Some armies are capable of being designed to play in different ways, others not so much. This is what leads to tags like Nidzilla where the general design of the list is around monstrous creatures, or Imperial Guard Leafblower lists designed to blast your opponent off the table before he gets to you.
With a concept in mind, you need to first look at the HQ and troops choices available to you. At this stage you don't need to buy them lots of gear, just buy the units with the minimum equipment needed to complete your assigned role. For example you may want to do a Tyranid horde style army, so you buy two large units of gaunts and a HQ who fits what you want him to do. This might be a Hive Tyrant with wings and Old adversary. Do not spend points on other upgrades at this point unless the Tyrant has a specific designated role eg tank disruption, so you buy him a heavy venom cannon.
Once this minimum requirement is dealt with you can turn your attention to the units which you are employing to actually win you the game. This is not a concept many people actually follow. Many people just blindly add units because they would like to use them. That is also fine, but you risk losing the focus of the list. You often have a choice of units to fulfill what you want to do, and these will often work in different ways. Taking the Nidzilla list as an example, you have a choice of which monsterous creatures to use, be it Carnifex, Trygon, Hive Tyrant, Tergivon, Harpy or Mawloc. You need to consider how each unit will interact with the army. Fast moving monsters will typically need fast moving support units such as gargoyles, ravenors or shrikes, where as the slower ones can be supported with slower moving Tyranid units.
Once you have worked out the focus of the list you next need to turn your attention to two other areas, scoring and supporting. These are both equally important so you need to balance your list with both in mind. Obviously where a scoring unit can fulfil a supporting role, by means of including special/heavy weapons or bringing extra transports to the table, this should be encouraged. In a typical 2000 point game, it is always worth including at least three troops choices to ensure you have enough troops to fulfil the objectives which occur in 60% of the games. Remember those gaunts I mentioned earlier? This is when you equip them for their specified role.
Support elements are the other units which you include to help your army work in its intended play style, and more importantly help you win, by filling in glaring gaps in the checklist I am going to present later on. Typically multiple units can fill this same role. The best example of this is found in the space marine book. You can bring four extra missile launchers on Landspeeder typhoons or Devastator squads for roughly comparable prices, but in totally different slots and functionality. Which you include should be based around how you want your army to behave. There is no point including a single landspeeder in an army with no other vehicles because it becomes a priority target. You need to include multiple units with roughly the same armour band, eg light armour 10-11 to hopefully split the enemies fire. In this situation you would be better to include foot devastators so not to present a lone target. It is the support stage that you should further equip your Hive Tyrant I mentioned earlier.
Once you have completed your list, you need to compare it against the following list of requirements;
Can you deal effectively with the following?
Light infantry: Typically Imperial guard, eldar guardians, tyranid gaunts etc
Heavy infantry: Typically marines and their equivalent
Elite infantry: Typically terminators and other troops with good saves, invulnerable saves and/or multiple wounds/high toughness often with power weapons
Light armour: Typically transports. Armour 10/11 vehicles, typically transports such as rhinos.
Medium armour: Typically tanks. Armour 13/12 in primary facings often with weak rear armour, eg predators, falcons
Heavy armour: Typically heavy tanks. Armour 14 in the front arc. Includes Landraiders, Monoliths, Leman Russes etc
Monstrous Creatures: Large creatures which have multiple wounds, attacks and a generally high statistic line.
Against some of these unit types, you will be able to use the same weapons:
Light infantry: small arms. Most troops will come with small arms like bolters, lasguns, fleshborers etc
Heavy infantry: small arms en-mass can work, but typically they will still have a save. Ideally you need ap 3 or greater weapons to remove these.
Elite infantry: small arms en-mass can work but you will typically need anti tank weapons to remove their saves, and even then they will often have an invulnerable.
Light armour: rapid-fire heavy weapons are best used here, typically autocannons, multi-lasers, scatter lasers
Medium armour: you need higher strength heavy weapons to deal with these, usually strength 8 upwards Krak missiles and melta weapons are typical examples
Heavy armour: ideally melta weapons, otherwise strength 10 or lance weapons will suffice.
Monstrous creatures: rapid fire heavy weapons are best used. Monsters can absorb individual high strength shots due to their high wounds characteristic
If you have a list that can't deal with all of these, it is not necessarily a problem if you know the army you are playing against as some most armies do not have the luxury of all of these types of unit.
Friday, 23 March 2012
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
What makes a good unit?
For the last couple of weeks I have been discussing with my gaming group what makes a good unit. More specifically, what makes a unit useful to the codex that it resides in. This is quite an important distinction. A unit may be poor on paper but be an armies only significant threat against certain units, or it may be generally pretty useless but bring along some useful utility ability which make it useful in certain build combinations.
There are usually a lot of different choices but these can boil down to a three distinct unit types:
Scoring
Fighting
Utility
First of all we need to consider scoring units. In 66% of all games played by the core rulebook, you will be playing for some objectives. This means first and foremost you need to look at what troops choices, or other scoring units you can take. Different armies have different amounts of troops choices. Some, such as chaos marines have five troops choices, other such as grey knights only have two troops choices. Most armies fit between these two extremes, usually towards the grey knights end in number. Some units are primarily just scoring units and bring virtually nothing else to the table. Some examples of these are plaguebearers in the daemon army and grots in the ork army. These units will typically be either very cheap so you can take a lot of bodies or very tough but offer virtually nothing else apart from parking on an objective.
Fighting units are those which have been purchased to inflict and take damage. A unit can be a fighting unit as well as a scoring unit, in fact this is quite common. Most scoring units will be fighting units in some way or another. The distinction between just scoring and fighting and scoring is that the fighting unit can inflict reasonable damage on other fighting units. Most scoring units will just be able to score, and will fold in short order if charged by anything half way competent. Tactical marines are a good example of a scoring fighting unit, being able to take a heavy weapon, special weapon and equip their leader to have a selection of other items.
Utility units are the third and final part of the jigsaw. These cover a myriad of different things, but it can be more or less summed up by something that doesn't inflict damage, take damage or score. Now you may be thinking why on earth would I want to take one of these units. The answer is often quite simple. They allow you to influence the game in a different way. I am including all fast moving units in this section as well as transport tanks. A rhino is a great example of utility. It offers no scoring ability and has just about the poorest weapon for its points value that I can think of. Yet it is a brilliant unit because it can protect your troops, move them around and your opponent doesn't know what you have inside until you reveal it, so he has to assign it an unknown threat rating. Other examples of utility are Eldar Farseers. They have a fairly poor statistic line but come able to be equipped with a selection of powers which boost directly or indirectly their units, be it by allowing them to reroll to hit, wound or save. Some people may call utility units force multipliers or support units, but the name really doesn't matter.
Having considered the different types of unit we now need to look at what makes them good. For any unit to be considered to be a good unit, it needs to fulfil one of the following criteria. It needs to either be powerful, cheap, survivable or flexible. Ideally some combination of the four. Often a unit can be cheap and powerful, such as ork boys, but they have poor armour saves. Tactical marines on the other hand are very flexible in terms of equipment and have good saves, but are only average on power and quite expensive.
You need to weigh up the various pros and cons of each unit against what other units in your codex can do. Taking some of the units I was discussing with a friend of mine recently as an example, we consider Ork buggies vs dethkoptas and normal nobz vs Mega armour nob units. I was trying to convince him he would be better to take ork buggies and mega armour over dethcoptas and normal nobz units. In the case of dethcoptas they have scouting and bikes, compared to armour ten and being cheaper on the buggies. The buggies are around 8% cheaper with rokket launchas than the dethkoptas, and armour value tends to make the unit far more survivable than toughness and a save. As both units are in the same codex and fighting for the same fast attack slots you can make this comparison. The same goes for mega nobz vs regular nobz. The mega nobz have a good armour save and come equipped with a power claw and areasonable gun with options of combi weapons. The eavy armour nobz can take a huge selection of wargear, including invulnerable saves and feel no pain and indeed bikes to exploit the wound allocation rules. However in terms of points the mega nob is cheaper than a regular nob if the nob just buys itself a power claw. Once you start stacking on feel no pain, cybork bodies and eavy armour their prices rocket upwards. You would therefore expect the regular nobs to be better, simply due to the much higher points cost per model.
If they were in different slots or a different codex, it can be a lot more difficult to ascertain if a unit is better than another one.
There are usually a lot of different choices but these can boil down to a three distinct unit types:
Scoring
Fighting
Utility
First of all we need to consider scoring units. In 66% of all games played by the core rulebook, you will be playing for some objectives. This means first and foremost you need to look at what troops choices, or other scoring units you can take. Different armies have different amounts of troops choices. Some, such as chaos marines have five troops choices, other such as grey knights only have two troops choices. Most armies fit between these two extremes, usually towards the grey knights end in number. Some units are primarily just scoring units and bring virtually nothing else to the table. Some examples of these are plaguebearers in the daemon army and grots in the ork army. These units will typically be either very cheap so you can take a lot of bodies or very tough but offer virtually nothing else apart from parking on an objective.
Fighting units are those which have been purchased to inflict and take damage. A unit can be a fighting unit as well as a scoring unit, in fact this is quite common. Most scoring units will be fighting units in some way or another. The distinction between just scoring and fighting and scoring is that the fighting unit can inflict reasonable damage on other fighting units. Most scoring units will just be able to score, and will fold in short order if charged by anything half way competent. Tactical marines are a good example of a scoring fighting unit, being able to take a heavy weapon, special weapon and equip their leader to have a selection of other items.
Utility units are the third and final part of the jigsaw. These cover a myriad of different things, but it can be more or less summed up by something that doesn't inflict damage, take damage or score. Now you may be thinking why on earth would I want to take one of these units. The answer is often quite simple. They allow you to influence the game in a different way. I am including all fast moving units in this section as well as transport tanks. A rhino is a great example of utility. It offers no scoring ability and has just about the poorest weapon for its points value that I can think of. Yet it is a brilliant unit because it can protect your troops, move them around and your opponent doesn't know what you have inside until you reveal it, so he has to assign it an unknown threat rating. Other examples of utility are Eldar Farseers. They have a fairly poor statistic line but come able to be equipped with a selection of powers which boost directly or indirectly their units, be it by allowing them to reroll to hit, wound or save. Some people may call utility units force multipliers or support units, but the name really doesn't matter.
Having considered the different types of unit we now need to look at what makes them good. For any unit to be considered to be a good unit, it needs to fulfil one of the following criteria. It needs to either be powerful, cheap, survivable or flexible. Ideally some combination of the four. Often a unit can be cheap and powerful, such as ork boys, but they have poor armour saves. Tactical marines on the other hand are very flexible in terms of equipment and have good saves, but are only average on power and quite expensive.
You need to weigh up the various pros and cons of each unit against what other units in your codex can do. Taking some of the units I was discussing with a friend of mine recently as an example, we consider Ork buggies vs dethkoptas and normal nobz vs Mega armour nob units. I was trying to convince him he would be better to take ork buggies and mega armour over dethcoptas and normal nobz units. In the case of dethcoptas they have scouting and bikes, compared to armour ten and being cheaper on the buggies. The buggies are around 8% cheaper with rokket launchas than the dethkoptas, and armour value tends to make the unit far more survivable than toughness and a save. As both units are in the same codex and fighting for the same fast attack slots you can make this comparison. The same goes for mega nobz vs regular nobz. The mega nobz have a good armour save and come equipped with a power claw and areasonable gun with options of combi weapons. The eavy armour nobz can take a huge selection of wargear, including invulnerable saves and feel no pain and indeed bikes to exploit the wound allocation rules. However in terms of points the mega nob is cheaper than a regular nob if the nob just buys itself a power claw. Once you start stacking on feel no pain, cybork bodies and eavy armour their prices rocket upwards. You would therefore expect the regular nobs to be better, simply due to the much higher points cost per model.
If they were in different slots or a different codex, it can be a lot more difficult to ascertain if a unit is better than another one.
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Dreadnought Weapons Part 2
This follow on article on Dreadnought Weapons Part 1 is comparing the Rifleman design to the standard box dreadnought armed with an assault cannon/powerfist.
On the field, they both do different things. The Rifleman design is by its nature a stand off and shoot dreadnought. It has no incentive to charge towards the enemy, indeed it should be hanging around at the back firing its guns at light transports like Rhinos and Chimera. With its reasonable mobility compared to a battletank, it can move around the table edges and fire both its guns, meaning you can move it around to get into side arks. This is pretty much its sole use, albeit one which is useful if you lack volume of long range anti tank fire.
In comparison the assault cannon design works in a totally different fashion. The assault cannon has half the range, but twice the rate of fire of the autocannon, but no twin link. Still, on average, an assault cannon will get 2.64 hits on average which is more than the autocannon can possibly get. This instead gets around 1.66 hits on average if I have done my maths correctly. There are however two such autocannons on the Rifleman bringing its average hits up to 3.33. The assault cannon dread comes with a built in stormbolter/powerfist combo which can be upgraded to a heavy flamer/powerfist combo for a minimal amount of points.
As you can see, this makes the box dreadnought a more versatile unit at closer ranges, ideally staying 12-24 inches away from anything with a meltagun. If you stray within melta range, your dreadnought is likely to be turned into scrap metal, much like any other vehicle. You do however have the option of charging a unit with the box dreadnought configuration as you are armed with a Dreadnought Close Combat Weapon [DCCW]. This functions much like a powerfist but doesn't strike last and is strength 10 on every hit, ignoring saves. While this may not kill a lot of models per turn, it is an option against small units of elite troops provided they are not armed with more than one of the following: Meltabombs, Thunder hammers, Power fists, Power clawz, Witchblades, Singing Spears, Warscythes etc. Monstrous creatures of all types, unless badly injured and only have one wound left. Necron Scarabs should be avoided at all costs as they will likely destroy your dreadnought in one round of combat.
If the enemy do not have the required anti dreadnought weapons and are relatively small in number, you can charge into combat and protect yourself from melta in the enemies next turn. Obviously you need both units to remain locked in combat for at least one round to take advantage. Too many enemies and you could end up being tarpitted forever. Not that this is neccersarily a bad thing, it depends on what unit you engaged in combat. If it is exceptional at shooting but poor in close combat, this could well be a good use of this dreadnought design as shooting units tend not to be armed with close combat implements. If you have taken the heavy flamer upgrade, you can cause a lot of damage to lighter infantry before charging which can help in this matter.
Now all of this is fine in theory, but if you are considering not using a rifleman you will want to see the numbers. As before, the twin autocannon statistics are as follows. Please note in this example, both designs have exactly the same number of shots, but these numbers are on a per shot basis.
TLAC Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 13.88% 41.66% 13.88%
VS AV 11 13.88% 27.76% 9.25%
VS AV 12 13.88% 13.88% 4.44%
VS AV 13 13.88% 0% 0%
VS AV 14 0% 0% 0%
Assault Cannon Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 22.22% 7.41%
VS AV 11 11.11% 11.11% 3.70%
VS AV 12 0% 11.11% 3.70%
VS AV 13 3.70% 7.41% 2.46%
VS AV 14 3.70% 3.70% 1.23%
So what do these numbers tell you? Quite a lot really. Against every armour value up to 13 the autocannon is better. It is considerably better on a per shot basis than the assault cannon against AV 10 and 11 while the AV 12 is reasonably comparable. At AV12 onwards, this is where Rending helps the assault cannon outperform its low strength value and offers a small percent chance of damaging every thing in the game, something the autocannon fails on. Notice you can't glance armour 12. You can only penetrate or not.
This is without taking into account the damage the box dreadnoughts secondary weapon can do.
Stormbolter Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 0% 0%
Heavy Flamer Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 16.66% 16.66% 5.55%
VS AV 11 16.66% 0% 0%
As you can see from these numbers, the heavy flamer is actually pretty decent against AV 10, with exactly 1/3 chance of either a glance/penetrate, although it does require you to be virtually on top of an enemy tank. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as you can assault the tank with your DCCW after if it should survive. The stormbolter provides a small amount of extra firepower, but can't really do anything to any tanks.
Now there is another weapon which can be used on a dreadnought to provide anti-tank fire. It is the best anti tank weapon available to space marines and is the cheapest dreadnought option, coming built in for free. I am talking about the multimelta.
Melta over half range Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 44.44% 24.07%
VS AV 11 11.11% 33.33% 18.55%
VS AV 12 11.11% 22.22% 12.96%
VS AV 13 11.11% 11.11% 7.41%
VS AV 14 11.11% 0% 1.85%
Now due to the melta rule using two dice for armour penetration, the percentages will be somewhat different.
Melta under half range Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 1.83% 64.84% 33.03%
VS AV 11 3.66% 61.17% 31.20%
VS AV 12 5.49% 55.68% 28.76%
VS AV 13 7.32% 48.36% 25.40%
VS AV 14 9.15% 39.21% 21.14%
As you can see from these numbers, any weapon which is strength 8 and has the melta rule, will have these statistics. Over half range and it is only slightly more effective than a missile launcher and is less effective than either the assault cannon or autocannon due to their volume of fire and accuracy. Within close range, the melta weapons have a very high chance of inflicting a kill on nearly anything.
On the field, they both do different things. The Rifleman design is by its nature a stand off and shoot dreadnought. It has no incentive to charge towards the enemy, indeed it should be hanging around at the back firing its guns at light transports like Rhinos and Chimera. With its reasonable mobility compared to a battletank, it can move around the table edges and fire both its guns, meaning you can move it around to get into side arks. This is pretty much its sole use, albeit one which is useful if you lack volume of long range anti tank fire.
In comparison the assault cannon design works in a totally different fashion. The assault cannon has half the range, but twice the rate of fire of the autocannon, but no twin link. Still, on average, an assault cannon will get 2.64 hits on average which is more than the autocannon can possibly get. This instead gets around 1.66 hits on average if I have done my maths correctly. There are however two such autocannons on the Rifleman bringing its average hits up to 3.33. The assault cannon dread comes with a built in stormbolter/powerfist combo which can be upgraded to a heavy flamer/powerfist combo for a minimal amount of points.
As you can see, this makes the box dreadnought a more versatile unit at closer ranges, ideally staying 12-24 inches away from anything with a meltagun. If you stray within melta range, your dreadnought is likely to be turned into scrap metal, much like any other vehicle. You do however have the option of charging a unit with the box dreadnought configuration as you are armed with a Dreadnought Close Combat Weapon [DCCW]. This functions much like a powerfist but doesn't strike last and is strength 10 on every hit, ignoring saves. While this may not kill a lot of models per turn, it is an option against small units of elite troops provided they are not armed with more than one of the following: Meltabombs, Thunder hammers, Power fists, Power clawz, Witchblades, Singing Spears, Warscythes etc. Monstrous creatures of all types, unless badly injured and only have one wound left. Necron Scarabs should be avoided at all costs as they will likely destroy your dreadnought in one round of combat.
If the enemy do not have the required anti dreadnought weapons and are relatively small in number, you can charge into combat and protect yourself from melta in the enemies next turn. Obviously you need both units to remain locked in combat for at least one round to take advantage. Too many enemies and you could end up being tarpitted forever. Not that this is neccersarily a bad thing, it depends on what unit you engaged in combat. If it is exceptional at shooting but poor in close combat, this could well be a good use of this dreadnought design as shooting units tend not to be armed with close combat implements. If you have taken the heavy flamer upgrade, you can cause a lot of damage to lighter infantry before charging which can help in this matter.
Now all of this is fine in theory, but if you are considering not using a rifleman you will want to see the numbers. As before, the twin autocannon statistics are as follows. Please note in this example, both designs have exactly the same number of shots, but these numbers are on a per shot basis.
TLAC Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 13.88% 41.66% 13.88%
VS AV 11 13.88% 27.76% 9.25%
VS AV 12 13.88% 13.88% 4.44%
VS AV 13 13.88% 0% 0%
VS AV 14 0% 0% 0%
Assault Cannon Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 22.22% 7.41%
VS AV 11 11.11% 11.11% 3.70%
VS AV 12 0% 11.11% 3.70%
VS AV 13 3.70% 7.41% 2.46%
VS AV 14 3.70% 3.70% 1.23%
So what do these numbers tell you? Quite a lot really. Against every armour value up to 13 the autocannon is better. It is considerably better on a per shot basis than the assault cannon against AV 10 and 11 while the AV 12 is reasonably comparable. At AV12 onwards, this is where Rending helps the assault cannon outperform its low strength value and offers a small percent chance of damaging every thing in the game, something the autocannon fails on. Notice you can't glance armour 12. You can only penetrate or not.
This is without taking into account the damage the box dreadnoughts secondary weapon can do.
Stormbolter Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 0% 0%
Heavy Flamer Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 16.66% 16.66% 5.55%
VS AV 11 16.66% 0% 0%
As you can see from these numbers, the heavy flamer is actually pretty decent against AV 10, with exactly 1/3 chance of either a glance/penetrate, although it does require you to be virtually on top of an enemy tank. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as you can assault the tank with your DCCW after if it should survive. The stormbolter provides a small amount of extra firepower, but can't really do anything to any tanks.
Now there is another weapon which can be used on a dreadnought to provide anti-tank fire. It is the best anti tank weapon available to space marines and is the cheapest dreadnought option, coming built in for free. I am talking about the multimelta.
Melta over half range Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 11.11% 44.44% 24.07%
VS AV 11 11.11% 33.33% 18.55%
VS AV 12 11.11% 22.22% 12.96%
VS AV 13 11.11% 11.11% 7.41%
VS AV 14 11.11% 0% 1.85%
Now due to the melta rule using two dice for armour penetration, the percentages will be somewhat different.
Melta under half range Chance of Glance Chance of Pen Chance of kill
VS AV 10 1.83% 64.84% 33.03%
VS AV 11 3.66% 61.17% 31.20%
VS AV 12 5.49% 55.68% 28.76%
VS AV 13 7.32% 48.36% 25.40%
VS AV 14 9.15% 39.21% 21.14%
As you can see from these numbers, any weapon which is strength 8 and has the melta rule, will have these statistics. Over half range and it is only slightly more effective than a missile launcher and is less effective than either the assault cannon or autocannon due to their volume of fire and accuracy. Within close range, the melta weapons have a very high chance of inflicting a kill on nearly anything.
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