New Mega gargant rules. I like what I am seeing so far. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/10/07/sons-of-behemat-better-in-bulk/
Sure but this isnt exactly new. A lot of casual games dont even use terrain features or bother with objectives and it is essentially just a big brawl in the middle of the board. The winner is whoever has the strongest damage output army. Alot of questions “how do I beat X?” is answered by simply playing the objective game. Look at Gotrek as an example. This is really no different. How are Gargants meant to compete on Better Part of Valor or Places of Arcane Power?
Not a fan of the mightier makes rightier rule they have. I mean, I get that they need a rule similar to the Mawtribes to make up for their low unit count but 20 (or 30 with the right tribe) for the mega gargants seems excessive. It further accentuates how little they degrade when wounded making the only way of "weakening" a gargant unit to just kill it. Aside from that, "grab those rocks and chuck em at something" seems like something to keep an eye on. Depending on how many gargants players manage to buff with that it could allow them to have shooting rivaling tzeentch. Also, another way to destroy terrain, at least it's not terribly reliable. In principle this'd be interesting, especially if we used more terrain in general. But it seems like something that's useless in 90% of all games, and gamechanging in the remaining 10% whenever you get to destroy some important faction terrain. Aside from that it's mostly fine. Seems to be one of the more thematicly coherent tomes which is nice. yeah, but usually you don't face an army worth of gotreks, so wasting time with some cannonfodder to occupy him while you take objectives & actually fight the rest of his army doesn't feel so bad since you still get to do fun stuff with the rest. Whereas in this case wasting time with cannonfodder is the counter to the entire army at which point you don't get to do much fun stuff yourself.
Plus, Gotrek is slow. I've faced him and once i won by simply ignoring the guy, blasting the rest of the army and take the obj. I didn't even needed to feed him cannonfodder. It was fun because i managed to avoid him, running aroud and (figuratively) drive the guy crazy. With gargants it's a luxury you cannot afford
Honestly, I think your complaints are a waaaaaay overblown. I mean, shooting rivaling tzeentch? Thats so outrageously exaggerated it becomes meaningless.
they would need 1500 points of giants to be on par with 1 min unit of flamers. as i said before the throw rocks ability is trash
Assuming we're not attacking a horde and there's no exalted flamer hanging around: That command ability does 0.44 damage against a 4+ save on average per Gargant. A single flamer does 0.5 damage against the same target. You do not need 1500 points worth of gargants to equal a min unit of flamers.... Also,until a F.A.Q. states otherwise; the command ability stacks. Depending on how many CP they can pump into this & whatever other bonusses they might be able to tag onto it (battalions, artefacts, whatever). Combined with the ability to buff every gargant in range when you use the right tribe, you can pull a hell of a lot of shooting out of thin air. Potentially enough to rival proper shooting armies if it gets ridiculous enough. For reference a random list: - Warstopper 480 points - 9 Mancrusher Gargants 1620 points - 8 extra CP - the tribe that chucks more rocks than the others total: 2500 points Turn 1, use 9 command points, get 18" 81D3/4+/3+/-1/D3 attacks, without any other potential buffs they might get from battalions and such (or other things that haven't been shown yet). You can probably push it a bit higher if you actually calculate the optimal combination of gargants & CP, but I can't be bothered to calculate the optimum. I'm fairly certain that's enough shooting to rival Tzeentch for a turn.... .
I dont think anyone really cares about 2.500 pts matches. At least people that expect things to be somewhat balanced when 2.000 pts is the standard. You also cant buy more than 1 CP.
oh lord you keep pushing this. fine lets do math. flamers when hitting the worst possible target in the proper faction (it's only fair you have the gargants in their faction) and with no buffs average out to 1 damage each not .5 to be specific they average out to 1-7 and can spike as high as 11 with out droping the % below 1% chance but that is unlikely all for 160 points. on the other hand 6 gargants and the general required to use the ability in the first place push you up to 1560 and do 2-9 damage spiking up to 14 but rarely. now if you use flammers properly with their own buff hero and a good target they do 4-11 damage and spike to 16 and still for less then 300 points so no it would be 1500 to one and thats if you are as kind to gargants as you can be and about as unfair to flammers as you can be. my statement stands
It only cost you 9 command points (which you're getting somehow) and 1600 points in gargants. Seems worth it. Are you seriously telling me that 1600 POINTS AND 9 COMMAND POINTS shouldn't give you a mediocre shooting attack? If someone seriously wants to invest that much (assuming theres some way to even get 9 command points) into one turn of rend 1 shooting, i'll let them do that ALLLLLLL DAY.
Right, couldn't remember what the limit on CP buying was anymore and couldn't find it quickly anywhere. And fine, we'l go for 2000 then. Anyway, in that case: - some hero; worst case 490 - Some battalion with as much gargants as possible and requiring only 1 hero. probably 100-200, let's say 200 to be on the carefull side - 1 CP 50 -7 gargants 1260 - Rock throwing tribe 2000 points, 3CP total turn 1 That's still 21D3/4+/3+/-1/D3 attacks for a turn 1 opening salvo for what is supposed to be a melee focused army. That's still the rough equivalent of 21 unbuffed flamers, so about 7 MSU or 1120 points worth of shooting from a dedicated (but unsupported) ranged unit for a single turn. And it wouldn't exactly be unlikely to get another bonus somewhere to further support this strategy (battalions, artifacts, maybe an ally with an interesting buff) Also, bear in mind that this isn't exactly a weird gimmicky list where you have to jump through hoops to set things up and buy awkward support heroes or bad tax units to get the required battalions and other buffs. Unless gargants end up desperatly needing those 3 CP elsewhere you're not exactly sacrificing much for the extra ranged firepower in this list. My mistake, I forgot to take into account the D3 damage for both. It's 0,5 succesfull attacks against a 4+ save, and 1 damage for the flamer, whereas with the gargants its 0.44 succesfull attacks and 0.88 damage per gargant. And yes, obviously a fully buffed and supported flamer is going to be more efficient, I should hope so. Point being 21D3/4+/3+/-1/D3 is still equivalent to roughly a thousand points worth of (unsupported) flamers, a dedicated shooting unit, but now in an army that can actually follow up that shooting in melee. Out of curiousity, if 18" 81D3/4+/3+/-1/D3 in a single round of shooting is mediocre? What in the world is good? That'd be (roughly) 4500 points of unbuffed flamers. I'm sure with buffed flamers you could be more efficient point wise, but regardless it should still be several thousands worth of shooting. That does not exactly seem "mediocre". And, again, messed up the amount of CP you can buy. Anyways, the same holds for the more realistic 21D3/4+/3+/-1/D3, that's still a 1000 points worth of flamers. It may not be the best use of 3 CP against every target, a horde of say fully supported fyreslayers should probably shrug it off. But it should be plenty to take a good chunk out of most armies or at least annihilate the squishier support elements in an army and break their synergies. And again, it's not like the rest of the army is gimmicky just to set this up, there's no terrible sacrifices being made to get this going and you got plenty to follow up with after your opening salvo of rocks.
Unless they have a special rule saying they don't have to field three battleline units you aren't going to for your unit of 7 in a 2000 point army.
Edit: turns out I was the one wrong on how the battle trait and command ability interacted! Dunno if it makes it any more worth, but mediocre was probably unfair. Still don't think the CA is stackable, it says when you use the battle trait if effects everyone. The CA itself doesn't allow the shooting attack to go off, so unless there's a way to make that battle trait activate several times, its still just one activation.
The little dudes count as battleline but cost 180 a piece. If you bring 3 in a single unit they fulfill your entire battleline requirement and they cost 480 (slight discount). So you can either go 3 big + 3 small in a single unit, 2 big + 2x3, 1 big 3x3 etc.
Is 3 the max size? Edit: deeply mistaken on how the battle trait and command ability interaction worked.
In Canas's defence the ability he's referencing allows one CPU to apply to all units within range so you could get to the numbers he's talking about in his latest post. still not good but he's right as far as what numbers you could get to