[CLT40k]

The internet seems to be advocating large blocks of troops to make them steadfast... and everyone says "you need that 5th rank"

But at the same time everyone is bitching about how "broken" magic is now...

So, given that you see a number of spells now that will pretty much NUKE a unit and you'll have a very difficult time stopping it.... Here are some thoughts.....

1. Do you think this will cause the game to shift towards running more units at the expense of unit size? (ie, if you run 2 units of 25 vs 1 unit of 50 - dwellers won't hurt you as bad cause you're mitigated your risk by not running a mega block)

2. How viable is that big "uber unit" when they can get popped pretty easily by devastating magic that you really can't stop reliably? Do you think the changes to magic will cause a decline in the character heavy pointsink blocks?

 

[Khorothis]

I think that one factor balances out the other and vica versa. Nuke spells will render ridiculously big units useless, while the new arcane items can give your deathstar unit the chance they need to get into close combat. Also, theres a necessity for bigger units, but like I said, there are lots of nukes out there, plus the bigger a unit is the harder it is to manouvre it and the easier it is to attack it from the sides or behind. Once people realise the inner workings of the system of 8th, they'll forget about spamming broken spells and ridiculously big units. I'm not saying they'll disappear, only that they won't be as frequent as people are afraid it will.

Another thing to get used to is that everything can be countered, and that more and more armies can have said countermeasure. All you have to do is to look and plan carefully.

 

[Masked Jackal]

What Khorothis has said is largely correct. There are some niggling little things, like a certain trio of armies being relatively weak in this new edition, but a lot of this stuff balances itself out.

Personally, I'd be far more worries about say, a Skaven player spamming 50-man units of Slaves. 100 points for 50 guys, and they're pretty damn hard to kill under the new rules as well.

 

[Arli]

I may be the only one who feels this way, but I don't go for the horde units. The 10 wide unit is simply too big to be effective unless you know you are facing another horde unit. As far as saurus go, i would top out at about 30 models, no more (6x5). I would go as high as 40 skink cohorts (with 3 krox) at 7 or 8 wide. No more than that. As for the dangers that these units face...

Horde units are going to face more danger (think salamander-templates now auto hit). Magic is always going to be a threat. If you're opponent targets that huge unit, he is not targeting something else that you can kill him with. You could always take something that draws fire (stegadon or chameleons).

If you could not tell, I am a lizardmen player as well.

 

[Sethis]

I run Horde Chaos Warriors (30 men) most of the time, because the extra 5-10 attacks that normally hit on 3s and wound on 2s more than makes up for the loss of 2 ranks of combat res. If needed to I just reform during combat or the turn before the charge.

It does also lead to situations where people charge me with two infantry units, letting me kill about 30 of them before they strike, which is always funny.

I suppose it helps that I'm naturally very resistant to characteristic-test-or-die spells in the first place. The worst one so far was an irrisistable Final Transmutation which knocked off a full 10 man rank, but he only took Lore of Metal cos he knew he was fighting me in the first place.

Once new army books are released I think we're going to see a glut of new items designed around the new magic phase anyway, so we'll see how it runs. Waiting for the High Elf item that lets them reroll the winds dice, for example.

 

[mynameisgrax]

Large blocks of infantry are nice, but unless you go horde, they don't really win you games. They just hold off opponents, lock up smaller units, and keep a good number of the points in your army 'safe', since it's difficult to completely wipe them out.

Magic really can't win you games on its own either, except for the odd freak occurrence. In fact, NOTHING is really a game winner on its own anymore. You need a good balance of infantry, magic/shooting, and powerful close combat units to really win.

The only unit that can win more or less on their own are Chaos Warriors, and even they could use some help taking out warmachines and fast cavalry.