Australian gamers

Since moving to Australia for work in the last couple of weeks I have since discovered that Perth has a lively and interesting 40k scene.

Now having spent a couple of consecutive afternoons at the local store I can see myself coming back however what I'm more interested in is getting these people out of their retail happy-fun-vibe shells and into something a bit more brutal and competitive.

In looking at Kirby's post about competitiveness in people he is fundamentally correct. At a psychological level people who play sports are instinctively compelled to compete against others for material benefit, despite any claims to the contrary. Whether that material benefit is measurable eg money or un-quantifiable eg prestige and leadership value is moot. They tend to come hand in hand.

One minor observation about Australian players so far is that they have no, read 0 (zero) functional knowledge of the direction of GW and performance based analytical review of what they're using, where or why.

Simple example: yesterday I was watching IG and CWeldar fighting it out on a 4x4 board. I'm assuming about 1k each player though I could be wrong.

Rough estimation of player forces:

Eldar; farseer with guide. (yes only guide. No army list but no other power or wargear expressely used so this is my assumption.)
Bikeautarch w/ laser lance
roughly 20 guardians with support platforms (2x scatter lasers) with warlocks in each squad.
1x10 dire avenger squad
Wraithlord with brightlance and sword?
Nightspinner with shuriken cannon?
falcon with scatterlaser. no upgrades.

IG; 6man command squad with at least 1 voxcaster, one commander and 1 commissar.
2 chimera with heavy laser thingies both containing melta veterans
1 basilisk (? really. so retarded)
1 mortar squad of 3
3 hwts with MLs & HBs on opposite side of board.

Amazingly the IG player lost. The falcon died in turn 3 having accomplished fucking nothing but shaking the basilisk and the guardians did fuck-all as well. Autarch creamed a chimera and its veterans before dying like a chump to MLs.

CCS did nothing. Like literally nothing except fire off orders once and dying like bitches to moving after being hit by nightspinner. Idiot. So fucking stupid. Basilisk fired once AT GUARDIANS WOO.

I could go on but it's just so sad.

I mean look, these guys are nice enough but they're obviously new and totally can't accept an alternative point of view on what they're fielding. The eldar player told me he'd been playing for 3 years which is hard to believe since he was using store models in 2 cases. Even if he was telling the truth he took himself pretty seriously while he chopped up a total newb with a bajillion unpainted models with his own craptacular army.

It wasn't just the list construction that was poor, it was their utilisation as well. The whole game reeked of amateurish decisions with little to no understanding of the underlying principles of the game. I'm all for playing 'just for fun' but these two clearly thought they were pretty pro, even going as far as to argue (admittedly only a little) over a couple of things. Totally pointless. I would savour bringing my army to the local scene here and totaling that other eldar player. I wouldn't even need to build a list specifically designed to do it either, a balls-standard army could have done the deal in 3 maybe conservatively 4 turns.

My list to use against that other eldar player?

3x5 Direavengers w/ gunxarchs in eml waveserpents w/ scannons.
1x autarch w/ pw & fusion gun
2x falcons with eml and holofields.

that's roughly 1k isn't it? I don't even care to count.

9 s6
10 s8
everything able to move 24"
reserves manipulation.
Anti-infantry to deal with stupid troops choices.
Why holofields? Simple. Falcons take only 1 hit to kill. So holofields increases chances of weapon destroyed? As if I give a shit? I have only 2 MBTs, if weapons get popped that's better than losing the chassis and everything else at the same time. The 70pts those holofields cost me wouldn't be justified by taking more troops, another autarch or warwalkers or whatever since the falcons themselves are there to suppress infantry and KILL tanks.

Who is the workhorse here? Noone, really. Waveserpents carrying 3 s6 1 s8 can multirole, falcons can multirole, autarch is there to mop up. Direavengers dont have bladestorm since that's a waste of points. The extra Ld and a higher I for at least one guy seems justified though.

And there you have it. Resilient and flexible. Not even designed to specifcally kill his list, it just will though, through being better constructed.

5e Necrons and GW game design

So I'm browsing /tg/ and reading up on 40k rumours through the webs.

There's a couple of comments being made across the world that don't make the greatest sense..

Try dodging or parrying a blade that can phase through anything, it'll be hard as shit, especiall when Pariah were NOT slow asshat robots and were semi-human.

But yeah, you guys think it's fine when why not have EVERY closecombat weapon be something thats a power weapon that adds +2 strength.
Because A warscythe. a Klaive and an Honourblade are all practically the same thing right?

In fact, lets hope Gauss weapons are bolters exactly, with no anti-tank or rending rules because hell! it makes sense too right? It shoots at people, and it hurts! So it must be equal to the mighty bolter!

Well that's just fascinating really. A very simple way to look at 5th edition and the inevitable 6th edition is: simplify, streamline, better core rules, fewer core rules.

So in that sense you have races which relied on oodles of special rules have throughout the editions received fewer perks over the big 3 (Chaos, SM and Orks). Some races still have special rules in their 5th edition format (IG for example) but the general format of the game as a whole is moving towards, summarily: convergence.

It is held that evolution converges on certain designs as needs see fit. Horses and Zebra? Buffalo and Cow. Lynx and Tiger. Yes they share genetic ancestors but so do Humans and Apes and yet we developed cities and they are at the mercy of their environment. Certain physiological designs gain prominence and stay on top while poor or overspecialised trends die out. It's nothing to fear really.

The same concepts can be applied to game rules. Rules which are poorly designed or overspecialised will be scorned and un-used while the cheesiest will be abused and find their way in to every list. So we are observing convergence on the game rules here; what specifically is happening?

The base unit attribute set is still the s3/t3/5+. Necrons specifically are converging toward contemporary space-marine stat-lines (albeit now with a 4+ save however they have their technical 5+ secondary save and are cheaper) and their weapons are being diversified at the expense of their special rules. So now Necrons quite truly have Lascannons and Assault Cannons and probably Melta Guns and in the case of Pariahs specifically; they are rumoured to being removed from the game entirely. Perhaps they are.

So they are converging to the 5th/6th edition standard of codex and greater game design. As said elsewhere by people with longer gazes than I. From my perspective we're seeing the game shifting to being a matter of having 3 templates that the armies are based off and deviation from the armies themselves is simply a matter of applying unique abilities to that army as a whole rather than trying to balance 9 different sets of stats AND their weapons/special rules.

Where does that leave the other armies then? I think CSM will stay much as they are. Their unique problems are more that they are overshadowed by contemporary SM's and not so much that they as an army are outright terrible. They need to be updated and have the things which gimped their army removed. I'm not saying to give them back Daemons in the bloodletter/GUO sense but certainly make the overall effect of taking a themed Lord have more impact, eg, Lord of Khorne opens up bloodletters but restricts Tzeentch units. Whether or not the Daemons themselves become worth the purchase is a different question altogether.

Tau? BS3 firewarriors. At the very minimum. Heavy weapons options on more squads. Whether those take the form of railguns, missile launchers or meltabomb-kroot I don't know but that's the theory.

 Craftworld Eldar? Now there's a good question. Were it up to me, banshees would be dropped and there'd be slight decreases in price on our tanks and heavy weapons. As far as infantry are concerned? DarkReapers with access to EML on each unit member (really, 35pts a piece, 55 for exarch with EML. Most expensive HS infantry ever?) CWEldar are a tough cookie because they are only just sub-par right now so any sweeping changes to them would probably put them in the easymodo catagory.

The theme as always is convergence.. but when the race in question is the one who sets the standard if you screw it up you screw over all the others that are based on it.

Fundamentally the 3 templates are CWE, SM and Nids. Tell me I'm wrong.

CWE = DE, Tau, IG
SM = CSM
Necrons = Tyranids, Daemons

Eldar heavy weapons; the complete edition

From thread; http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/eldar/206944-repairing-our-codex-one-unit-time-part-ix.html



Post 1;

In thinking of what I've just said on the vypers discussion page.. we really need to talk about the heavy weapons choices for Eldar. Do we need to add any? Can we replace one? Do we make them rending or give them a lower AP? Add more blast templates? More flamers?

Unfortunately lazy me cannot just grab a synopsis of the units from MWG.com but since we have so few heavy weapons anyway I hardly think it matters.

So, me first.

We definitely need a largeblast heavy weapon. It can be low strength for all I care (though if it is <5 I demand rending). Let's say... hmm..

Sunburst; S4, AP4, 48", Heavy 1, Largeblast, Rending, Blinding*.
"The sunburst is a new weapon seen employed by eldar forces. It fires a nimbus of energy at the target, which explodes in an intense flash of heat and light. Eyes are burnt out, optics damaged and tyres singe and burn under the projectiles energy release."
*Targets of the sunburst roll for a 3+ coversave. If they fail, they are considered blinded and move as if under the USR slow and purposeful and they fire with a -2 BS modifier for their next turn.

Eldritch zephyr; S7, AP5, template*, Heavy 2, pinning.
"In recent years, the increased militarisation of the Craftworlds has borne new weapons to their arsenal. In addition to new aspect warriors emerging or re-emerging after prolonged absence, bizarre and frightening equipment has surfaced on the ancients' vehicles and wraithconstructs. Of these, the bizarre psychic 'flamer' has also been recorded. Soldiers who have come under this weapons furious grip sometimes emerge alive, though very rarely. Video records show soldiers burnt to cinders or falling down, spasming and frothing from the nose and mouth, lightning dancing over them as they thrash and wretch. Others still are seen stiffening in place, typically from the arcing energy off an already dead comrade."
*The eldritch zephyr fires out from the firing model with a range of up to 6", place the template so that the narrow end is within 6” of the weapon and the large end is no closer to the weapon than the narrow end.

--- ahem----

So that's two new weapons. I'll let others talk about the infinitely more graspable weapons we already possess.

Post 2; 

At the risk of combining better weapons with better BS..

The IG codex has demonstrated that a large variety of heavy weapons is achievable (though not always fair or economic).

Post 3;

We have approximately two cover-ignoring heavy weapons, both of those are mounted on Forgeworld tanks. One is a d-flamer and the other is the doomweaver (Nightspinner might be codex approved but it is still a forgeworld creation so dig it). I'm totally confident to say that if we left the Eldar purely in the hands of GW and its staff, then all you'd see is a reshuffling of points and strengths on our current weapons totally ignoring that yes, we still don't have a decent multiple-barrage weapon or a tank-mounted flamer of any kind.

Post 4;

Let's not lie to ourselves. A wraithlord is a 3-wound AV12 dreadnought and DarkReapers are gimped Devestators. So the exarch gets a multiple-barrage weapon? Only available thanks to an FAQ ruling. That hardly counts. It's S4 ffs. We need something s8-s10 that's ordnance and a decent tank-mounted flamer.

Post 5;

Actually now I'm really liking that mirv idea. Would be better than a tankmounted flamer anyway.

Post 6;

If that's the case then our heavy weapons platforms need to be more accurate no? These guns aren't literally being held by infantry, where their heartrate or jostling from running or whatever is having an impact - these are guns mounted on tanks mounted on anti-gravatics. If we are going to depend on singleshot, non template weaponry, then our tanks should be BS4 base, with wraithlords and prisms being BS5.

If we are not going to significantly change our modus operandi for the weapons themselves, then we need to adjust the platforms they are mounted on. Ok so we pay 40pts for a brightlance on a wraithlord, make it AP1 and consider it's now on a BS5 AV12 dreadnought with 3 wounds. Is that worth it yet? What if brightlances were S9?

Post 7;

Well it's more than just for fluff reasons. I put down the changes I do because we must break our dependancy on farseers. Our playstyle has stagnated as a race because instead of a farseer being an optional extra that can twist the game in new ways, they're a mandatory choice. It's said best in one of my links, ie that our units have cost of a farseers' guide/doom built into their mostly mediocre stats but then you need the farseer anyway AND the power you're going to cast.

So these series of threads have been a massive experiment for me to determine in what ways we can change the meta for eldar by making the units themselves act in a way that accomplishes their design goals without requiring a farseer to be dependable. So that when we come to look at the farseer we don't have to have doom or guide or whatever as mandatory powers for a farseer, they're optional extras used to boost guardians up to par, that the powers a farseer will possess will be more applicable to *an army* and that the farseer will himself be a just an alternative to other HQs wherein all HQs provide army-wide benefits and that no HQ on its own will be so gamechanging as to be a surefire winner for affection.

Let's face it, if farseers didn't have guide or doom or fortune would you ever take them? I wouldn't.

 Post 8;

Yes. Heavy 3 starcannon seems fair. The gamebreaker of 3rd edition was the crystal targetting matrix, it was never actually the starcannon that was the problem. As for the brightlance I have trouble finding a way to improve it. Maybe just remove it altogether and make the pulsar have lance as a rule? Pulsar for 40pts (50 for wraithlord) doesn't sound too terrible if it has lance. 48" S8 AP2 lance heavy 2.

 Post 9;

Not bad. Let's go one step further:

48" S8 AP2 Heavy2
48" S8 AP1 Heavy1, Lance

NOW it's worth the points.

Post 10;

Example: a 15point brightlance is still just brightlance. It's a singleshot s8 weapon which gains bonuses over less than 50% of ingame vehicles. Contrast with eml which is 20pts and can change to a template with pinning for those times you want to gib some troops. Even if brightlances were 15 pts I probably wouldn't take more than 1 per army. Much more effective to spam EML at a tank and then blast the contents the next turn.

Moving on from eldar

Far from abandoning my CWE book altogether, I'm contemplating running my guys counts-as DEldar. Probably with a view to buying some cheap vehicles as they become available on auctions rather than going all-in for the moment.

But why? Well I think it's because CWE are, at least for the next year to 1.5years minimum, dead. Yes you can still play them but why bother? There are well established 'good' units with plenty of real experience to back them up.. and a good 18 units hardly worth taking in anything more srs than a weekend drinks+game. Fritz manages to pull gimmicks to win, and that's plenty fine but after a while I guess I kinda got bored of his videos because they became predictable and his list never changed.

Which is pretty much a symptom of eldar everywhere. LO, BOLS, warseer, dakka et al just seem to have players produce the same things over and over. And that's only partly the fault of the players (it is tempting after all to dismiss stuff that's "bad on the internet") but unlike (apparently) most of those players I do own about 90% of the models for eldar and have playtested every god damned one. The eldar codex is mediocre at best and cannot unto variety propegate.

So I'll switch over to the next best thing: Dark Eldar. Since I'm not digging their fluff I'll just run as corsairs and handwave the rest as necessity.

Already I feel a zephyr of fresh energy through me. Now I can actually have choices that matter! I can win based on my preferences, not what the internet tells me! New models actually actually!

So ... what to pick. I'm thinking.. assloads of those ghost dudes with the smoke bodies.

Since I can just proxy DA for kabalites I won't worry about them right now, I'll just focus on getting myself the mandrakes or whatever, the guys I actually want to run and then fill out the rest later.

Lesse..
Decapitator.
Vect? Maybe Drazhar instead. A nice counterweight to my Kharandras.
At least 20 mandrakes. With their nightfiend sergeants (haven't seen anything to indicate a unique sculpt for this)
Trueborn? Bloodbrides? Both?
2 squads of each troop probably. I normally run 3 troops so this will give me a bit of flexibility.
1 scourges and some beastmasters look pretty good.
Probably limit myself to 4 raiders. I will want to run some foot troops after all.
A bomber? Ravagers? Maybe a cronos.

I definitely like to run "dickish" armies so the more wacky crap I can pull the better. Nothing quite beats upsetting an opponents grandplan because you refuse to obey the laws of convention.

On the subject of a competitive 40k

I wrote up a series of thoughts on the game a long time ago when I was at work (I had a LOT of free time) and posted it on 4chan originally. Took a lot of time before some people actually got it, and they agreed the potential was there.

One of the sideeffects however would be dropping the max points limit to like 750 or something, at least as far as testing is concerned, because without adding in randomisation again, the games would be too brutal and fast to really warrant a high points limit. You'd spend assloads of time pulling models and not actually playing.

At the same time though that's what you'd get for sucking so who knows?

Vypers, the complete edition

From thread; http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/eldar/206711-repairing-our-codex-one-unit-time-part-viii.html

Post 1;

They gain a 3+ cover for turboboosting.
They are BS4.
They may deepstrike with no scatter. If they elect to do this, they count as having turboboosted and may not shoot this turn.
They may deepstrike normally (up to 12") and may move&shoot but must move at cruising speed and may not fire their main weapon.
They have a 6" assault phase movement.

Post 2:

The comparison of Vypers to Hornets was inevitable, and it is fair but they are very different units. Hornets have higher armour, are not opentopped and can carry more heavy weapons. They scout and have starengines in their base cost. At this exact moment in time Hornets outclass vypers.

Introduce my changes however and you gain a couple of key differences that make vypers a more valid alternative. Well first off they hit more often. Secondly they gain a higher save from turboboosting and can deepstrike whereas hornets may only scout. They can assault move back behind cover.

The net effect is that Hornets are fast warwalkers, vypers are heavy jetbikes with deepstrike.

Post 3:

Of course I'd like to remind people at this point to consider defining a role for the vyper that's independent of and complimentary to the hornet, rather than trying to make it a direct competitor. What I'm seeing here in this thread is things that would make the vyper a matter of list min-max. Certainly it's true many lists won't have a use for vypers in the future much like now, but look at spearhead. Our 5e/6e codex might incorporate some of those ideas, allowing mixed squadrons - which is why I made the heavy jetbike comparison... and I suspect why farseer mcloud thought of allowing the vyper to be taken as a 'support platform' in much the same way as a guardian squad takes a scatterlaser. Instead you're looking at guardian jetbikes getting an av10 jetbike that mounts a heavy weapon.

Post 4:

Which brings about next question.. does the idea of a vyper being a razorback type transport (low model count, 1 TL heavy weapon) differentiate it enough from the hornet to make the vyper viable?

Post 5:

The reason I'd say you keep it as a vehicle is so you can abuse wound allocation out the ass. Since it's a mixed unit, just place all <s5 shots on the vyper and laugh as they have only a 17% chance of even damaging a mediocre unit. One vyper per squad of 10 jetbikes is barely worth attacking directly, but you can mitigate assloads of damage that would otherwise be hitting your troops by aiming it at your fortuned, turboboosting vehicle.

Post 6:

Falcon transport capacity exists for no other tank... I'd prefer it if GW made the falcon an actual BS4 tank that gains titan-holofields or something. Shove the transport to vypers and make falcons better.

Post 7:

I'm not sure I see how making vyper susceptible to S2 weaponry is making them better Yes sure they require more 'hits' to go down this way.. but against every single S2+ weapon they can now be more reliably damaged.

Post 8:

Where vypers are concerned it comes down to the idea that they're heavy weaponry, which is really the next topic I should cover before I move on to other units that use heavy weapons. If we thought that making a starcannon s6 ap2 h3 again for example, and loaded it on our brand spanking new vyper, 2 in a jetbike guardian squad.. you've got flying SoBs that shoot something like 6-15 S6 shots per squad. Provided costs aren't altered.. I'm not sure it's quite balanced, possibly leaning to the OP side.

A quick thought on GW

Nothing amazing in this post. Just a general observation about GW's practices lately.

Ok what first needs to be established is that this company is not stupid. Think about it. For the last 6 years they have reported lower sales figures and are compensating for this by increasing efficiency in both production and their stores. This overall process is probably not sustainable and will eventually implode but not before 2 key things occur, for 3 key reasons.

Key reason 1; There is only so much you can raise prices to offset lower sales. People have finite spending money for toys. This limit is commonly accepted as having been reached already.

2; They, as a company, have been introducing policies that aren't working. They've been doing this for years. These policies are far reaching in effect and wide in scope and have culminated in job losses, store closures and decreased performance from the stores that remain. A brilliant compendium on this can be found here (about 4/5ths down, no hotlink directly there)

3; Market saturation. By this I'm referring to the process of there not being a large enough incentive to buy from the manufacturer (ie GW) because online retailers and auctions (like ebay or amazon) sell them for much cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Plenty of posts I see refer to "veterans" picking up models en masse for cheap from what seems like mostly teenagers who may have bought models when they were 12/13 and then dropped the game later due to lack of interest. The fact is, at some point GW will see itself trying to push models in an environment where so much second hand stock already exists that nobody will feel any need to "buy new". The same problem exists in the car market in NZ, for the record. I don't know a single person who owns a 'new car'. Everything is second hand. Everything. Selling new cars to NZers is like trying to sell homemade chocolate to a supermarket, you just simply cannot hope to do it.

So with that being said, what are the 2 key things that will occur during the death throes of  this current incarnation of GW.

1; Vigorous defence of 'intellectual property'. The suing of people who attempt to copy or emulate a GW game system (which might fail, given what happened to d20 and WOTC) or a GW iconographic "thing". CHS recently got plugged with a court date because they used the terms "space wolves" and other stuff like that to describe his products. Since the term "space marine" cannot be copyrighted or trademarked to GW on the basis of the fact they didn't invent the term, it was the very specific matters of "Space wolves" and "Blood angels" and "eldar farseer" and other things like that used in direct reference to what are clearly plagiaristic uses of another company's iconography.

What's amusing for me is that this new trend of big companies suing EVERYONE who dares use some term that's tangentially related to a product of theirs was predicted in the 2005 citigroup "plutonomy" memo. Apparently fatcats have no imagination and all follow the same rules. As set by a corrupt mega-bank that bribes politicians. Ha ha ha.

2; A switch over to the production of books and computer games. Simply put this is the future of GW. They will continue to produce new models, using forgeworld as an initial launch platform to test for market interest, however the company GW itself will run much lower production sizes on models and instead switch over to lucrative royalty schemes involving computer games. Dawn of war in 2004 saw a peak in sales and income for the company that has not been met or exceeded at any point within the last 10 years. Then there's things to consider like WAR (which was EA's fault for flopping), DoW2, the already planned DoW3 and now an MMO based on the 40k universe. Books will also begin to surface more regularly as we've seen with the HH novel series which in 23years of 40k has only just started relatively recently to appear in official novels rather than passing mention in other fiction, not to forget that they have that trio of eldar books and for all we know soon enough there'll be one about Tau as well.

GW will switch over to products which carry no need for retail space beyond a middlemans shelves, it will continue to introduce policies that lower the throughput of retail stores for their models and forgeworld will see an increase in activity as the experimental skunkwerks of GW, launching untested products to the masses and then trawling the internet for feedback before officially introducing them to the main game either by making IA books 'canon' or by directly ripping the unit into a new codex.

In the death throes of the old GW, having failed to grasp the attention of longtime purchasers from auctions and making the barrier to entry too high for newcomers, it will be reborn from the ashes like a phoenix, bright and strong and ready to rape a new medium with the same cold, ineffective callousness that saw TCS get bought by Hasbro, only that this time GW has a pre-established computer market to maliciously exploit to the continued detriment of everyone involved. While GW will still produce pewter/resin/plastic miniatures, it will be in far smaller volumes than today and will act mostly as a supplement and as the "plastic crack" that the new generation of video gamers will buy without having fully understood the roots of the company, or why such cool little models aren't more popular. And probably without realising that there's thousands of online auctions everyday for the same shit at atleast 50% off.

Shadowspectres part 2

Just read a very interesting thread on the spectres on dakkadakka.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/340775.page

One thing I would like to point out about the spectres is that they can move a minimum of 13" a turn, should they need to rapidly redeploy. Not to mention since they have jump packs they ignore terrain for the purposes of passing over it ergo they can take shortcuts during movement/assault phase by hopping over the edges of terrain. Pretty handy. Don't forget of course that jetpack infantry can move like normal troops according to the BRB so it's actually not important either way. Your boys can just walk the first 7" before getting a nifty 6" leap to cover more ground.

The general consensus remains the same by the way; this units' abilities are squandered in the heavy support slot. It directly competes with 5 other options up to and including the new Warp Hunter.

But having said that there's a ray of hope. One poster mentions giving the squad a JOTWW/Blood lance effect where you just draw a line to the set distance and then count out penetrations on a given basis. I have no experience with Tau but I thought their big railguns worked in a similar way (or was that just wishlisting?) in that you measure downwind at a target, then for every penetrating hit you take the next model behind it and roll off for damage against that, and so on... or otherwise functions in a way similar to vibrocannons in that all hits are resolved automatically and you merely roll for penetration?

If that's the case, a single squad of these guys could deepstrike then obliterate an entire stream of vehicles. I really do hope this change to a 'line of effect'  does occur because it would then make the unit a very serious contender for even a HS slot. A decent position would mean that a spectres squad outclasses the fireprism in a way that would turn a prism green with envy.

Dire avengers and multiroles.

 Why would you want to take 5 shots that are hitting on 2+ away from your unit?
You should not be making them well-rounded, they are for one task, and one task only. Eldar are designed to control the game, not allowing assault units to assault your squishy troops etc. so if you're not doing this, then you're going to lose.
Your units should always be supported by other units. Your enemies assault units should not be assaulting your shooty troops because in order to do so, your Scorpions, Harlequins, Jetbikes or Banshees should have stooped them or be stopping them. You sould be shooting such units with your avengers, then assaulting them with something else. This is how Eldar works.

There can be many reasons for not taking a dedicated assault unit in your army. Consider your average 1750pt game, you're looking at around 3 troops, the tanks to carry them, outfitting those tanks with weapons, taking more tanks in other slots, your HQs (whom are rarely cheap unless you wish to lose) and finally any elites you may wish. And we all know firedragons are probably the best there and they'll need a tank too! For each squad!

And then once you've built this list and look back at the cost and suddenly realise you're 700pts overbudget and start cutting..

and finally you end up with 3 troops, 2 squads of elites (all in serpents).. maybe 2 fireprisms and a decent HQ.

So... now you start bean-counting. Maximising throughput on every unit. A squad of banshees only works properly against MEQs. Which is fine, assuming you get to charge them in the first place. FDs on the other hand can pop a tank and then you just EML the contents to death. Scorpions have some nice tricks.... buuuttt fall apart once you get to anything more complex than guardsmen. IIRC gaunts rip&tear scorpions like nobodies business so no point there.

So what do you do? Yes it's true that eldar aren't generalists and yes that means that if they start doing things they weren't "designed for" then they start falling apart but consider the following; Would you use assault marines to kill tanks? Do you use wyches to kill terminators? Do you use Trygons to soak up damage? Do you use SM dreadnoughts as gun platforms? What about SM dreads as assault units? Do you ever use Chaos sorceror powers? Gift of chaos?

The answer... is yes. In all cases.

Let us be perfectly honest here, in any game over 750pts the extra TWO attacks from doublecata in shooting isn't going to matter squat in the long term. The last time someone posted about DAs vs terminators, it takes nearly 200 shots to kill 10 terminators. That's more output than a squad of DAs can make in an entire game.

Now what Mortiki is saying (and based off my own experience) is that suppose you have a squad of DAs. Let's say 10. You have an exarch and a PW/SS and find yourself staring down a group of nasty spacemarines. Doesn't even have to be terminators. In my case it was bikers. Anyway, so these marines are going to be able to shoot/charge you. You are going to shoot/charge them. In this instance you might as well shoot&charge. If you skimped on bladestorm and just took defend that's totally acceptable. I mean, not only do the marines suffer casualties from shooting, they strike later than you in assault and only get one attack each.

So WHY take the PW/SS? For a defensive squad. One that is going to bait units into attacking them. The careful art of attack and defend, the parry and riposte. A unit of DAs that gets into a charge can be assumed to have already lost against a dedicated assault unit which is why you try and use your PW/SS exarch to launch attacks against units that aren't dedicated assault units. Like generic marines. The PW/SS exists only to mitigate the damage of a tactical marine sergeants PW. A 33% chance to save against a S4 attack is pretty reasonable, especially since in ideal cases that attack is coming after yours anyway.

So I'll say it again; The PW/SS exists only to mitigate the damage of a tactical marine sergeants PW. If you can get in 2 rounds of shooting before suffering an assault, that's great. If you risk being overrun in the assault, you may as well assault first. If you're facing low numbers of PW attacks, then the PW/SS is an excellent choice and gives you more flexability. You will use this squad to attack enemy troops choices, preferably ones on foot that are already below full strength, as you are trying to force them to fail combat resolution and therefore not be capable of regrouping.

Because honestly? Why would I pay 90+ pts for a dedicated melee (and totally mediocre) elites choice, not to mention their transport, when 30pts on an exarch power and a PW + 33% invulnerable can net me the same result.

Also if you think DAs are good at shooting you are so, so very wrong. They only become good when the 140pt DA squad has a 130pt farseer babysitting them with guide+doom. A PW/SS works on its own.

Rangers, the complete edition

From thread; http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/eldar/206545-repairing-our-codex-one-unit-time-part-vii.html

Post 1;

Now I use rangers already and don't consider them to be "that terrible" but a lot of other players I see call them outright worthless.

Why is this? Yea sure they're expensive but let's talk about what would make them worth 19/24pts instead of just demanding they get cheaper. Cheap troops that are useless are are just cheap and useless, not suddenly worthwhile, afterall.

I'm really gonna need other people to kick this off because personally I don't think they're that bad.

Post 2;

If every unit in a game could 'earn its points back through firepower' then I'd wager most games would be over in a 2 turns. It's endemic to the IG codex.. their shit is just too efficient. Most other codeci are bordering towards 50-70% efficiency which is the only way to prolong a game for 6 turns. From what I see anyway.

Post 3;

I've just had a totally crazy thought.

STALKERs. Eldar rangers are stalkers. BS4 GEQs, who are really good at hiding. They have 2 weapons. Ranger longrifle which is a rending weapon that wounds on a 2+, Shuriken UMP which is a pistol with the following profile S5 AP5 6" Assault 2. Rangers have defensive grenades. Pathfinder upgrade gives them Hit&run and they count as relentless.

Post 4;

In addition to testing out the new Spectres unit I have ran two seperate lists that included pathfinders. My results have been skewed by my opponent being a newbie and me taking a lot of time to teach him the game. But pathfinders are pretty much a 'press the big red button' unit so they're relatively easy to talk about.

So first off what I've found is that, simply, they don't provide enough of a net benefit to an army to be worth taking, for reasons I will detail now.

Firstly they're really designed to cover and assist a foot list. These guys are useless for mechdar. Mixed list doesn't have that much of a benefit either but it's better. For a foot list pathfinders primarily provide movement suppression and MC killing. Against tanks they're a waste of time, despite rudimentary transport popping power. The best way to use pathfinders is to get a group of 6-8 and park your farseer in with them, deep centre. From there you have a tough to kill core of psyker powers and a launching platform for starengine tanks to benefit from fortune. I was playing on a 5' x 5' board (roughly) and the main mistake myself and my opponent made were putting our eldrad to the side parked with pathfinders, when eldrads main strength really only gets leveraged from the centre of the table. He's an expensive target, he's in a unit of pathfinders under fortune, he can snipe your commanders and doom your troops. Any tanks near him can receive fortune for that lovely 36" charge into your rear lines ready to disperse hot fiery death.

The pathfinders themselves though.. from the centre of the board they hold a commanding position over skimmers/MC's. If you had 3 moderate sized units placed in a line across your part of the board, they could pretty effectively force your opponent into a detrimental movement methodology. As happened to me with my zilla cluster.

When I landed my DAs near to his pathfinders, and they got within charge range.. because they're in cover a few problems emerge. Obviously even pointblank shooting with bladestorm was mostly ineffective. Charging in afterwards meant he struck first thus reducing my assault power slightly. The second time I attempted this on a different unit of pathfinders, they weren't in range to charge. In his turn he had two choices, pistol me and charge at initiative 1, or sniper me and risk me saving/no pinning. Well as it happened he snipered me, killed only a couple of guys and on my turn I tankshocked 75% of his list off the board. BUT THE POTENTIAL WAS THERE.

IF he had had shuriken UMPs or analogue on his pathfinders then maybe we'd be looking at a very different story. A high strength low AP machine pistol that allows a charge afterwards. In that case, a last ditch attempt to keep his pathfinders alive and score another killpoint would definitely have been more accessable for him and the game might have gone very differently for me then.

I'm contemplating testing out all our 'new rules' in an upcoming game against this same opponent (since he's new it's not like he knows any better) and we'll see how they stack up. Since he and I have agreed to standardise our loadouts via xml comparisons (ie we use identical troops choices with no deviation allowed, preset limits on the other catagories) it will help to balance things out (he will be using eldar too so obviously I won't have a massive advantage over him or anything).

My predictions for eldar after the introduction of my 'codex repairs' will be that eldar may play much more aggressively than it does now.

Post 5;

Alright.. so adapting on your two ideas.. make their UMP 12" range and still a pistol? There's your valid carbine-AR alternative to the longrifles for when things go pear-shaped.

Using visuals for a competitive advantage.

An interesting idea struck me today while browsing the internet. One word: Zebra.

What is a zebra though? Well sure it's an animal. It's also tangentially related to the horse. It can be ridden like a horse. They taste pretty good too or so I'm told. But that's not what a zebra is.

A zebra... is a walking camo suit. Zoologists on animal planet suggest that the construction and positioning of the lines on a zebra make it hard to determine the orientation of the animal for predators. In the same way that conventional camoflague for humans uses irregular shapes in no particular pattern to break up the outline of the object/soldier, zebras developed this trick naturally over millions of years. Not knowing exactly where to shoot a camo soldier is a potent trick in jungle warfare. Not so good against bombs, but alright for use against troops. Also, just how many camo soldiers are identified may be an issue too. You see one soldier moving but noone else. You can guarantee he's got friends.. but what if he doesn't? What if he's carrying a message/package from one officer to the next? What if he's a distraction? What if he's a vanguard of the main force?

As far as 40k is concerned it theoretically won't be an issue. The whole battlefield is visible at all times, camo makes no difference to your plastic men unless there's a special rule in effect. You can paint your CSM bright pink or pitch black and it makes no difference from a gameplay perspective.

From a gameplay perspective. But let me tell you something about 40k. You're not actually playing a game of dice. Not really. It's involved but there's a whole macro-strategy that must be determined before you even begin the game. Camo on your plastic helps, and here's why.

Camo paint on your troops, breaks up their outline. A casual glance at the unit might produce mental affirmation of 6 models when the real number is 9. A more scrupulous player might know already, but miss their exact location because from 4 feet back, out of the corner of his eye, their exact location isn't simple to determine. Camo can force your opponent to mentally count each model every turn, mentally log their location every turn. Added benefit to you? He's wasting time and diverting valuable attention away from his core strategy. WAAC players will suffer the most from this, as they misinterpret the threat over and over again, and feel pressured by time constraints to act more quickly.. thus generating more mistakes and oversights for him.

Camo is to most people a 'tryhard' thing to paint on your guys. It's not thematically compatable with 40k (which for the record is bright&gaudy with few exclusions) and may help you as your opponent views you as being more amateurish. You know those popular stories about xyz marine player seeing abc opponent and thus playing a totally gimped list in sarcastic retaliation and then losing horribly? It's the same thing, but without the requirement of turning up with GK to a 2500pt tournament. 

The most efficient form of attack is one that uses as many vectors as possible simultaneously. Attacking your opponent himself at the mental level is a valuable +1 over what you would otherwise be doing purely on the tabletop. And the best part about camo is? You get all those subtle benefits without any trashtalking, joking around or pokerface. It's implicit to your army, meaning you still have all those other tricks to dispense at leisure in addition to him psychologically being unable to take your plastic army seriously.

Musing on 5e and GW

 Below is a direct copy of a post on librarium online made this day;

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All the blogs I am reading.. everything is pointing to a dramatic shift in GW policy regarding the handling of the 'game' part of 40k. Things are getting updated more often, previously abandoned sections of the game are now getting their updates and we may start to see a return of necromunda (which I believe kill teams was a 5e pilot for).

And this shift in policy is good. Previously the game survived on the theory of exclusivity, 40k was a reclusive thing for nerds that got played in the corner of a comic-book store. Now we have movies and big-budget vidya gaems being made for the universe and that has proven at least one thing to the corporate; accessability sells. So where previously you saw.. what.. 12 codeces on a shelf and anyone nearby could tell you that only 4 of them are objectively 'good' with 2 more being 'alright' and the rest being 'crap' and/or 'useless' now you have 12 codeces with some 6 being good, another 2 or 3 in the pipeline for updates and the remainder on the backburner.

So how does that translate to the rules for a nightspinner being posted for download? Well first off it means all those people who bought a nightspinner after june 2010 will now actually be able to use them. Always good to keep those people happy. Secondly it means that GW is now embracing the increased number of players DoW 1/2 have brought in, and let's be honest here, since the release of DoW the population of 40k players has probably at least doubled. Before those videogames were made the only people I saw playing 40k were late 20-somethings, typically of the grognard variety. Now you have a whole pile of wheezing 15-18year olds with skin problems but whatever at least there's more variety.

Let's also compare a couple of things before this drags into tl;dr territory. Within the last year we've seen; BA officially launched, DE (12 years) updated, Necrons (9 years?) rumoured, GK (9-12 years?) confirmed, DA/BT (9 years?) modernised via FAQ, FAQs for the BRB (finally), FAQ for DE (bizarrely fast) and 3 new models for eldar via FW with another aspect still coming not to mention the nightspinner being a codex approved model now via WD 365.

What has been the driving factor for all this? Dark eldar. These guys have sold a metric shitton of models. People are sick of marines and corporate GW has noticed.

[edit] not to mention that if you have 6 marine codeces what's to stop someone from just calling their army whatever the FOTM force? A generic SM player has 6 different flavours to pick. DEldar actually required people to buy new models. Hurrr GW exists to sell products right.. so more marine codeces means only a book gets sold in comparison to several dozen plastic mans..

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I will return to this topic eventually.