8th Ed. Cannon at Carnosaur Wound distribution?

Especially so if you only have a monster or 2.

Take 1 monster - you have a 20 % chance of instantly getting killed. Against 3 cannons, that means you have 20%+20%+20% chance of losing that monster. we are pretty close to a 50% chance of outright losing a monster with no chance of preventing it. Worse, if the enem goes first, you can't even protect it with magic.

And what you also need to remember, is that the cannons don't stop working after they killed all your monsters. They are still free to bomb anything they want. Less effective, sure, but they will still be wrecking everything they hit. So you NEED to dedicate something to hunt them, which easily costs as much as the cannons themselves. Before you get to them, they'll almost always have killed a monster or two, that often costs twice as much as itself already.

Cannons are always worth bringing, because they'll at least be killing their own point-cost, and likely making the enemy waste an equal amount of points on top of that if they don't want to get bombed the entire game. The misfire isn't that dangerous, and wont destroy it even close to often enough to be any drawback you worry about.

Heck, I have a Skaven army, which have some worse misfires than, say, dwarves, and even those misfires aren't enough to make them any less auto-include. And they have to roll for the strength as well. I often feel I have to exclude them from my list if I want a game that is even remotely fun.

It's just absurd. I really hope they remake cannons for the next edition. I don't want them to be useless, just not as brokenly good as they currently are.

 

sounds like 2-3 is very hard to deal with when you have monsters, at least 1-2 dead monsters per turn

 

If they costed about as much as a monster it would be fair. Some races has cannons, some have monsters.

At 200-250 pts for a cannon it would be faaaaaar from auto-include.

 

Still too good for 200-250, I heard they were planning on increasing monsters to 12-13 or so wounds in 8th ed. but it would still be hard to keep them alive unless they made cannons rare and cost about 200-250, it might give monsters a chance.

 

If they make all ridden monsters combined profiles like the end times characters, mounts as a whole becomes a lot more powerful.

A Skink Character on an Ancient Stegadon with a 4+ ward, T6 and 7 wounds, engine of the gods, and a level 1 spellcaster would be brutally hard to get rid of, for only 160 points more than a standard stegadon. Considering that even 2 cannons would have a hell of a time getting rid of this thing, even given 2 rounds of shooting, I'd say we are getting somewhere.

Still think all monsters should get the stone skeleton rule that Stonehorns has. It halves multiwounds against it - which really should be standard on all monsters, in my opinion. Cannons should be a legitimate threat against lone characters, and infantry/cavalry in general - You don't shrug off a cannonball, after all - but monsters being equally vulnerable to them is pretty absurd.

 

I was hoping for more like str 5 or 6 and D3 wounds. Sounds rational to me. As for hitting both, I'd say if it lands directly on the model. I'm ok with both. But if the cannon ball rolls/bounces into the model, it shouldn't be dealing damage to the rider.

 

It would even make sense for a character to have to take a test to see if his monster fell on him, but realistically when would a cannonball miss the giant monster to hit the relatively small (in most cases) character sitting on it? IMO the character should only be hittable by cannons after the monster dies... Maybe transfer extra wounds to the character...

 

For those of you interested in the perspective of Dwarf players, this might be interesting. Basically it's a discussion based around comparing having magic and no magic with artillery.

http://www.bugmansbrewery.com/topic/45712-can-war-machines-be-compared-to-magic/

 

On top of cannons being cannons, many of them have ways to get around their weaknesses with rerolls and mobility. That sucks.

Fix for cannons:

S10, d3 wounds, heroic killing blow. Roll to hit. Double points OR take a turn to reload.

Fixed.

 

I really like this idea. Especially D3 wounds with heroic killing blow. That way you don't generally kill on the first shot, but you COULD. Increase the cost some and I think it would be pretty balanced.

 

I find it pretty funny that some of them seem hellbent on ignoring that fact that wizards are insanely unpredictable.

They claim you can always just 6-dice your game-changers, which is a lie. You only get an average of 7 power dice, which gives you a fair chance to not even have 6 dice. Furthermore, 6-dicing only gives you about 26% chance of casting with IF, which means any dwarf player ever can just use 1 of his 2 dispel scrolls, and then have a fair chance of making you forget it entirely, making it impossible to even attempt it again.

Compared to a warmachine, espeecially dwarven ones, that never fails, and can reliably one-shot lone models with little danger to the rest of their army.

Oh but you can just take your wizard out of his unit so he doesn't miscast his unit... except that will get him cannonballed off the board on the next shooting phase.

I also find it funny that someone in there said, and I quote: "I'd take 3-500 points less in WMs if we had access to good wizards and a solid set of Lores to choose from."

Because we easily spend 500+ points on wizards alone, which iis 500 points of complete waste if we roll poorly for the winds of magic, ESPECIALLY against dwarves.

I can see 1 person in there who actually understands that it isn't merely warmachine vs magic - because while Dwarves are without magic, they still have some of the best anti-magic defense in the entire game. Rolling x+1 or x+2 on your magic dice, which isn't all that unlikely, and wont give you enough additional dice to reliably get anything off. I have never seen 400 points of cannons do nothing, i have seen 500 points of wizards do nothing several times.

I think the keypoint between them is "counterplay". Magic can be countered. Even regular shooting, like from the skinks or bow-elves, can be countered - high T and armour makes the shots bounce of more often than not, which is indeed a counter to it.

Cannons have nothing. "Aside from hiding" as a dwarf player would say, which is hillarious, considering the most expensive targets we DON'T want killed off from across the board are large targets, who have an immensely hard time hiding from anything, especially if it wants to actually accomplish anything during the game.

Magic isn't an actual counter to warmachines either, because even if they do have some tricks against them, they not only require you have specific kinds of lores, or are very close to them (Which wont happen during the first turn of the game), they are also incredibly unreliable - Iceshard blizzard still only gives us 50% chance of shutting down that warmachine if it doesn't need to roll to hit, and that's assuming you even get it off.

Dwarves especially are just generally horribly balanced. They have a stunning lack of unit variety, which they instead makes up for by giving them insanely good stats for a reasonable price, and among the best shooting in the entire game - even disregarding warmachines, dwarves are THIS close to outshooting woodelves, despite the fact that woodelves are still weak as hell in CC, unlike dwarves, which are rocks you NEED large hammers to reliably kill. They should have dropped their small, overpriced update with their 8th edition codex, and given them some proper units instead, so we don't have this oddly specialized army who is just sufficiently specialized to be almost impossible to play against for some types of armies, and also incredibly polarizing in terms of builds - you either go full gunline, or you try to footslog up the table.

This is obviously mostly an issue with dwarves, but that seems fitting, since dwarves are really the main concern. Skavens have some nasty warmachines as well, but they are super unreliable, which makes them at least somewhat fair, compared to the dwarven kind.


TL;DR
There is simply no real variaty to Dwarven armies, which is why they both require their few builds (Cannon spam + gunline) to be as effective as they are, but also why they are so damn boring to play against. I have tried severa times now, and I have found that there is no such thing as a "fun" build against dwarves. They are just dull to play against, though that is honestly just my opinion.

 

I agree wholeheartedly. This is why I don't run my Dwarfs with a gunline. I agree that something needs to be done to make them more interesting to play rather than, "I'm going to sit here for three rounds and blitz my opponent to nothing before he can reach me." However, I don't think that they will ever get much in the ways of diversity any time soon.

The nice thing is, in this newest army book, you can make what is called a Strollaz list. Essentially you can pour your points into your units rather than war machines and vanguard them. Boom, you get the majority of your army across the board. Get some miners for ambushers and a few gyrocopters for mobility and redirection and you have a Strollaz list. I've found it to be much more competitive and entertaining as you don't have the overwhelming power of artillery. Plus I like the surprise on people's faces when my dwarf army starts halfway across the board.

While I do agree that something needs to be done about war machines, I also think something needs to be done about magic. I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I have seen a wizard with one of those nasty "kill everything" spells, completely turn a game from defeat to victory. I've been on both the receiving and delivering end and both times I did not like it. Yeah, the Winds of Magic can be unreliable, but it just takes one turn and a big spell to win a game against some armies. In two turns I wiped out my uncle's bull hoard with Purple Sun. Yeah he had butchers, but it wasn't enough. They died with the rest of the horde as the spell went over them. By turn three he threw in the towel. With those big nasty spells, you can't even hide in your unit. I've lost my big point dwarf lord, BSB, and half of my Hammerer unit to Dwellers in one round of nasty magic. More recently, I played my Empire army against Orcs. Just for fun I decided not to run a wizard. It was only a 1000 point game, what damage could he do? Well, when my hell-blaster volley gun only succeeded in killing a chunk of goblins, his shaman completely wiped out my halberdier horde, outriders, and Master Engineer. Brutal stuff. While cannons are broken, I've never seen one do that much damage.

 

Well, yes, magic can turn a loss into a win. Warmachines is usually more subtle, changing the opponents gameplan. And if the canon who wins the battle it's usually doesn't show until a few turns later, when you wish your steg wasn't wounded before cc, or it would have survived the cc attacks and thunderstomped the infantry, or the salamander could have soaked up lots of bow fire or been able to sneak around the flank and burn that horde. Instead it had to hide or die.

Or one shot the cowboy who hide with the infantry. Or force the cowboy to hide.