8th Ed. Power builds among friends - a discussion

This times 1000. I hate to be the guy who breaks it to yall but 90% of the conversations about what is good and workable in the lizard army book on this forum are pointless. If you want to play competitively go cloud or go home.

This is why I'm moving away from Lizards, the internal balance is off the charts terrible.

 

At least it is miles ahead of Tomb Kings.

I know I complain about Tomb Kings pretty regularly, but one good thing about having played with them for many years is that Lizardmen feel, to me, like a whole new world of flexibility, options, and fun.

In other words, you kids don't know how spoiled you are to be playing with Lizardmen.

Now, get off my lawn.

 

Aw that's too bad, I really enjoyed your podcast about the book and about your adepticon games.

Regardless I can still totally understand. It's a very limited book.

 

Agreed.

Even though the Cold One Bus seems to have things going for it, and big units of krox do good...its still a stretch.

1 krox = 10 skinks.............hmmf

 

I personally prefer Saurus. I know it is inferior, but Meh. Skinks are boring, and make the game lose all kinds of fun, when the entire strategy is cheese-incarnate. You have a Nurgle Greater Demon, buffed up to bhave 10T? Oh look, poisons! You just lost 500 points to 120 points of skinks you did not even get into close combat with (and this is an actual scenario from the last mini tourney I was part of.)

And to be quite honest, I would much rather play a list I enjoy, with models that I enjoy, but lose every game. Luckily, I don't lose every game, though. In fact, I have, with a total of 28 games, a perfect 50 % win rate. Even the new wood elves have been munched by my saurus, and the only ones that really fuck me up, is high elves, because the HE player spams WL and that banner of unbalanced brokenness they have. They could MAYBE be handled by skinks, but I frankly don't care. Not going to fight cheese with cheese - I just refuse to play him if his entire special choice is filled with WL and his dragon banner. If he refuses to play anyone with SCs, he can go suck it if he expects to have an easy time finding opponents with a list like that.

While we are on that subject, why disallow SCs in the first place? I don't get it. To me, that's equivalent to banning an item or unit in your army book.

 

I agree with you completely, skinks are our replacement for cannons and they are much less reliable. I can also attest to not being able to spam skinks to achieve victory. One of the first tournaments I did was a 3 day event and i brought a modified skink cloud list i found on the interweb because I had no idea what i was doing (i still don't but I can fake it now). I think i went 0-4-1. I believe i had something like 3 cohorts, 4 skirmisher units, 20 chameleons. I just didn't know how to keep them alive. It seemed like every game turn 1 i would be down by at least half of my skinks.

Also the great unclean one has 6 wounds and a 5+ ward save. It's going to take a few turns of shooting on average to poison him down. Thats no different then taking a cannon ball and the opponent rolling a 6, and that can happen on turn 1 with absolutely nothing that can be done about it. At least with skinks you get a chance.

 

Don't have enough skinks for a skink cloud, unfortunately, but the one game where I made a pseudo skink cloud list (fielding about 50 skirmishers), I demolished the local VC player. He had no way of catching me, and his expensive lord on foot, fully kitted out, got shot down before he reached combat. The VC player was annoyed, and I was bored out of my mind.

SCs bring flavour, though, and disallowing them, while allowing the so-called "cheese" builds, kind of makes you a hypocrite. If you can tell me I am not allowed to use Tetto, our only viable non-lord caster, then I should be equally allowed to say you aren't allowed Banner of the World Dragon.

At least to me, there is no difference - Both things are "uniques" present in each army book.

 

I agree with this. One reason I chose to play Lizardmen is because of the fluff and the models. I like playing a balanced army, and the mighty Slann leading his army of Saurus and Temple Guard with Skink, Cold Ones, and Dinos as support units appeals to me because of the fluff. I do not play tournaments, and while I like to win, I also like to play an army I like. I will not win all my games, but I always have fun.

 

His lord was in a zombie block, which got shot to death by turn 3, leaving him on his own.

I didn't have a full cloud, and my CoR took care of his heavy cavalry. Likewise, knowing my enemy, I had plenty of skink chiefs to take care of his ethereals, that i also made sure to shoot down with magic whenever I had the chance.

 

When I play my HE, I always take the banner of the world dragon on my main special choice unit (usually either white lions or swordmasters) because it's the only way to keep an overly expensive unit alive. Elves are damn expensive, very weak and relatively unarmoured, though i'm still afraid of units. Or a light breeze...
The other main reason i take the banner is to protect the unit from miscast damage because elves rely so heavily on magic, so the miscast come flowing in. My theory is, Elves get one cheesy item, whereas the likes of vampire counts, daemons, warriors, and dwarfs have a book full of cheesy stuff.
Without it, I'd lose nearly every single game I play (i normally play against power gamer with warriors or empire).

(edit: for reference i'd usually go something like:
3x 15 archers
2x 5 reavers
1x 20-25 white lions/swordmasters with BotWD or phoenix guard w. razor banner
frost phoenix
2x bolt throwers
eagles
and characters where points allow)

 

This thread touches something of a sore spot of mine...

I think the fun part of this hobby is trying come up with the most efficient, effective builds I can, and then back them up with the most effective, clever tactics I can.

To that end, I prefer if my opponents play the "hardest" lists they can. I think the game is the most fun when everyone is doing their utmost to win, and forcing you to rethink the way you do things to see if you can find a way to do it better.

Similarly, I'm always sad when I see people upset that other people are playing to win, or encouraging other people to deliberately play less than their best. People who complain about "cheesy" lists are one of my pet peeves; as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing.

 

Sing it, Brother Derek.

No offense to others, but if I could have Ten Warhammer Wishes, one would be to get people to stop using the word "cheesy" and describing things as WAAC, powergamer, or other things of the sort.

Try to be your best. Be kind. Be generous. Be all those things a good sport should be, but for eff's sake, don't be ashamed to try to succeed within the rules to best of your ability, and when people get upset with you for doing so, realize that the problem is theirs (they failed to know what a "game" is) and not yours.

Amen.

 

I think power builds among friends is absolutely fine. People are different and play the game in a different ways and this variety enriches Warhammer. What I'd say though is that fairness should be a consideration as well. Some things are broken in the game and some things can be played in such a way (which probably wasn't the original intention) to give people what is verging on an unsportsman-like advantage. If this results in an almost pre-meditated victory then this cheapens the win in my mind. This is particularly pertinent among friends because presumably you want them to continue gaming with you and to remain your friend ... although there have been times .

When I game with a mate he'll often agree not to take Purple Sun if I don't take Dwellers. It changes the game but for our purposes it improves our enjoyment.

Now tourneys are a different situation all together

 

Only because I have to against VC. Lizardmen have barely any magical damage around, all focused on your heroes or lords, with the exception from the lone revered guardian. When he always runs at least 6 units of ethereals, it is either "Tailor your list to have a fighting chance", or just hand him the victory before deployment.

So basically, considering I had 4 loses with not even a slim chance of victory against him the first 4 times, we agreed that either I get to tailor my list to include magic weapons, or I wont play against him. Might just be me that have no idea how to handle ethereals, but I just do not see anything in our book that makes it possible to fight so many units of "your skinks will stand there until the game ends, they die, or get overrun."

Also, with regards to Banner of the World Dragon, and your "expensive" units, I feel I have to ask: Are you actually a lizardmen player? Because White Lions are 13 points per model, where TGs are 14 points. WL have better WS, same strength but GW (so better anyway), better initiative, and doesn't get ASL from GWs, can attack in an extra rank, so they get almost as many attacks as well, better movement speed, and somehow manages to have better armour against ranged attacks as well. TGs have better toughness, and in close combat, have 1 better armour save. And of course, they have "better" leadership because of Cold Blooded, and have a 1/6 chance of getting an additional attack from the first rank only.

I'm sorry if this sounds too "mad", but I just have a sore spot for this kind of horrible balance WHF have sometimes. It is just too obvious that the creator of the HE book favours them quite a bit.

 

Hi everybody!
I'm a long time reader, and this is my first time posting a comment.
This thread about power builds caught my attention, and somehow seems to be a viable channel for letting of some steam (no, I'm not going to burst into a frenzy and only complain about how unfair the balancing in WFB is - no offence intended). ;-)

I got back into the hobby about a year ago, and my main opponent has been a HE player. When we play we usually agree to bring all-comers ETC lists; lists that you'd bring to a tournament and such. So we're not tailoring our lists specifically for the army the other one plays. In that context, a power build is quite okay. But everytime, every single time, I struggle with the HE (truth be told I haven't beaten my opponent yet - I am fairly new to the hobby). It just seems to me that High Elves is quite a bad match-up for Lizardmen. They got great mobility, great magic, great shooting, ASF, monsters, martial prowess, great weapon skill etc. og that is all just fine - a challenge, yes, but I tend to think in the lines of what phat-motha said - what they doesn't do good and exploit there weaknesses. However the only severe weakness I can think of is that most of them are rather squishy. It seems to me, that their book have tried to compensate quite a bit for the fact, that they're only T3, and I just can't find the same kind of compensation in the lizardmen book. But that's actually not what I want to address. What I want to address is that, it's all fine when there is at least one way of handling your opponents units. It should somehow be possible to find a way to deal with everything and not have to tailor your list to deal with a single very specific unit. It doesn't have to be easy or anything like that, it just has to be somewhat doable. What I'm thinking of is actually in the lines of the ethereal discussion - if you can't do anything, then it simply isn't fun. For instance, in our last game, my opponent fielded a nice silver helm bus, with lots of fighty characters, some death-mages, and (of course) BotWD. In another words that bus killed everything it just looked at in CC, the 2+ AS completely negated my skink's heroic efforts and the banner made the use of magic futile. I simply couldn't think of any way to deal with it with my list. Actually, the only ways I could of was by using Final Transformation, Dwellers Below or a non-magical cannon. The cannon is by obvious reasons not a solution, and the spell-options will force me to abandon Wandering Deliberations or Focus of Mystery (yes yes, I know it... Contemplations could be the answer, but that's just really unreliable... really...), and in an all-comers list i do believe those to options are the best choices for magic. My point is, that to deal with that (very) hard bus-build I would have to use some spells that seems to be complained about quite a bit. "Dwellers is an all too easy solution and you don't have to be good at the game to cause a miscast"-sort of argument. But to deal with hard builds you'll have to use hard choices which, in my book, is synonymous with minimizing risk and minimizing your opponents opportunities to interfere. Take the canon - there is a chance of misfiring, which is a risk you'll have to take; it can actually blow itself up. Take Dwellers - You need to quite a bit of power dice to force it through, and your opponent has a chance to interfere with your casting attempt. The High Elves bus: Movement 9 = my opponent chooses the CC matchups, 2+ AS = Skinks not an option, 2++ vs. magic = Slann can't do nothin'! In other words: My opponent takes NO risk at all by bringing and, more importantly, 'using' that Silver Helm unit and I have NO way of interfering with the success of that unit on the battlefield. Anyone able to offer any solutions to this problem?

So, to sum up: I think the definition of power build needs to be centered in the discussion of risk and possible interference. So if you could discuss the power build with your opponent and you could agree upon, that there have to be more than one very specific way of dealing with a unit. Like the only option I could think of to deal with the Silver Helms is to roll the sixth spell in a single lore, that I have to choose specifically to deal with that one unit, thus limiting everything else magic-wise in my army, then perhaps it is too narrow a range of options to deal with that unit. Thus, my opponents choice carriers with it little risk for him (there really isn't a lot of bad match-ups for that unit), and carries a minimal opportunity for me to interfere = power build. If you could somehow agree upon being aware of the notions of risk and interference when building your lists, then perhaps it would make for more interesting/fun battles?

Hmm... This ended up being a quite a lengthy comment, with quite a bit of ranting along the way. Anyway, it was my thoughts on the power build. I do apologize for any misspellings, weird placing of words, bad grammar, horrible punctuations, a general level of incomprehensibility etc, as I haven't written in english for quite a lot of years.

Cheers!