SkimaskMohawk

There's definitely an issue in terms of lack of incentive. Tanks have good range and armour, but are very inconvenienced by terrain. Infantry basically ignores all terrain and can punch through armour saves in melee. The easiest thing to buy have been tanks and the infantry sets, and you can get a pretty solid amount of both (especially if you do fewer assaults/termites/ogryn per base). You add pioneer/raven guard/alpha legion bonuses on top, and you have some reallllly high pressure infantry units; why would you need ground transports that pay a premium for guns and assault transport? Well, probably because the most obvious counter to infantry is the quad mortar rapier, and its wayyy harder to collect than the infantry you're taking it to blast. You can't use fewer models to come up with an extra couple of stands, and the marine version in particular comes with a bare 2. I mentioned in the news and rumour thread that that it costs $720 cad to make 3 full units of quad rapiers; it costs $180 for 3 full units of ogryns if you split them. But if you had 24 rapiers (or 27 for solar aux), you'd chew through infantry like no one's business, especially with a marauder to remove the penalty. I know i wouldn't want to deal with 48 shots that basically kill my dudes on a 4+ at 30"; I'd stick them in transports loll. We also might see more heavy transports now that the basilisks are hitting the shelves too. They absolutely pound stuff, and if you're not going to blitz them down with infiltrate or jetbikes, you'll want a Spartan to ferry guys through their fire imo.

Lol what? If leandros is an "antagonist" then so is learchus. Leandros didnt like going against the codex and reported Titus for not being corrupted by the warp power source; Titus gets arrested by the inquisition and interrogated. Learchus didn't like ventris going against the codex and reported him to the chapter command; they get arrested and plead guilty, allowing them to not be executed, but still be completely stripped of being part of the chapter and have a death oath to follow. It's the same. Theyre both snitched out by their procedure focused subordinate, arrested, and punished harshly. Neither act as an antagonist or even rivals, their betrayals are driven by the exact same intention, and they both take place at the end of their stories.

The spartan, the land raider, and the storm eagles all kinda have the same problem. They can transport some terminators, but you need a lot of expensive transports for the minimum sized units; you're spending 320 to carry an 80 point unit. Terminators are good, but imo their strength is dropping into the back line and being a bully to whatever units your opponent left there, while scooping some objectives; they're not going to do that much better charging into ogryns or dreads or whatever. But, you can fit 10 stands of tactical marines into 2 Spartans for almost half the cost, and can still do work with any double up fights and tagging more vehicles for combat. Or, you could just fill them with missile launchers and use them as a mobile firebase. 4 tacs+6 missiles is 80 and goes into 2 Spartans cleanly; you get 4 accurate las and effectively 8 other las for vehicles, or 4/2 and 12 anti infantry shots. Not bad for ~250, and its only costing you core and transport slots. Or, you just run them as individual gun platforms in the transport slot, but this only really matters if you're putting some sort of restriction on formations.

McNeil did that. He literally had an ultramarine subordinate report his ultramarine superior for not following the codex, resulting in the captain being sent on a penitent quest to the eye of terror. The concept has been around since 2003.

Ya, offering small amounts of each unit to encourage repeated sales for full collection is a terrible practice for the consumer. "Oh, you want a single full unit of terminators in LI? Just buy 4 boxes of infantry and you'll have them, and assault marines, and plasma, and missiles. Think of the value!" "But I just want 8 terminators, I don't want the other models." You shouldn't need to spend 120£ to get a single full unit of 8 8mm stands that you want lol. Like, I can buy 4 boxes of SA basilisks and almost have 3 full strength units to the tune of $240 cad. It's a lot of money, but if I really wanted that much artillery it gives me over 1000 points of the model I want. If I wanted 3 full units of marine quad mortars (as the only barrage unit available for marines currently), that'd cost me....$720 cad. Easy to see why people dive in to printing when confronted by choices like that lol.

Sorry, it's just the tarantulas that force you to mix both together to run the minimum unit of 4; you can take the marine rapiers in 2s and maintain mono load out. The solar aux box is a way better version; 4 of each of their 3 rapier carriages and 6 of each tarantula. The cyclops are a dud units, but don't realistically compromise the amount of carriages and tarantulas you get.

Ya I remember doing some rough math on the release of the first boxes and it cost around 800-1000 cad to collect 3000 of legions or SA. That's the same as a competitive 2000 point 40k army (no idea about AoS, haven't collected it or played it since the start of 2nd), so it's spending scheme is definitely on par. And that's without even going into the practice of jamming 2-4 different units into a single box, preventing an economical selection of what you want to collect/play with. The solar aux infantry box is notable for having like, no dud units in terms of sculpts or undesirable rules; the marine infantry box has the ever-argued mold slips and also the never taken plasma gunners (seriously, as soon as we got enough of a collection to not take the plasma gunners to fill points, we dropped them). The support box for the Marines is also all over the place in terms of models. Like, was it too much for a dreadnought box? And then a rapier/tarantula box with enough to make min units of each weapon load out?

Storm hammers and dracosans look slick and I'm looking forward to getting some. Pods are one of the biggest scams going, malcs are overshadowed by the specialist versions already out, and the fast attack stuff is 3 worse versions of the jetbikes and the jetbikes lol.

Hey, its definitely on your friend. Didn't he know when Tempest came out 9 years ago that the army wasn't actually meant to be in line with every guard style list that had come out during the times? No, Alan Bligh made an obvious error in how mass humans should play, and so did your friend for being dumb enough to be drawn in by those play styles. Everyone knows that humans only serve as punching bags for marines, so the players should have a similar dynamic and just spend hundreds and hundreds (or thousands, for the resins) of dollars for the privilege of losing 7 years after Bligh's misleading attempts were corrected.

I remember speculating on their rules, and it's hilarious to see that yep, they're just another solar aux unit with more str 6 ap4/5 guns. At least one breaks the range band of the lasrifle .... These things really needed to not have initial unit tax. 50 for 2 Hermes, but 18 points per model after? Just give them 3 for 54. :cuss:, even base lasrifles pay an initial tax, which is super weird when tacs and despoilers don't.

Ward did the marines, ba, gk, and necrons for 40k 5th and daemons for fantasy 7th. I'm always very confused when I see some of the retrospective tier lists because nids>crons (at least after they nerfed the scarab farm). But regardless, 5th edition books were just all strong. The most valid of wards criticism is the fluff. It's really bad. And unfortunately these days we don't get it offset by exciting rules most of the time in 30k. Just botched fluff and a mandate to keep solar aux boring as all sin.

Ward caught a ton of flack for the quality of the lore in his codexes and the huge differential in power they tended to have compared to older books. But honestly, the guy made some extremely fun factions to play and list build with. You know if Matt Ward had written a Custodes codex back in 5th the thing would have been completely insane, with tons of options that made it feel rewarding to make a full collection (as the grey knights did). I don't think most of these people want to do a poor job, but it's clear that writing fluff isn't their forte and they're just extremely short staffed. They also don't have that driving vision that Bligh had for his projects; they're inheriting someone else's project and told to grind it out.

The quality of the lore matches the quality of the edition lol. They have like one guy typing out both the fluff and rules and it's showing.

Less detail doesn't necessarily mean worse models, it just means...less unnecessary details. The tactical marines are bad models; fewer/different details on them would have made better overall models. But apparently those models weren't enough to deter you, so how bad do they need to get? Would a pod that didn't open break the deal? A rhino who's exhausts are less well defined? Like again, those tacs aren't good models, but were largely excused by being so cheap points wise and the like 12 bases. If you got like 12 pods that were closed would that be a fair compromise?

So it's like, a 20+ part model that costs 6 points lol. Maybe I'm a big dumb dumb, but a lot of the vehicles seem a little overindulgent in their parts count and assembly method. Like, these things are a quarter of the size for mass-battle use; they don't need to have super-sharp details equivalent to their full scale models. It feels like they designed both factions infantry boxes to be super low piece count, but then the solo vehicles to be as much as possible. The marines got a lot of flack for the compromises needed to keep them single piece, but doing a 180 in terms of part count wasn't the right call. And is ironically the same issue as the single piece marines (needless detail for the scale).