captPiett wrote:
Tiny-Tim wrote:
I'm keeping an eye on this and starting to look at proxies for building my own army. I am very interested in hearing how the DC2 continues to influence and affect the test games.
My view on the DC2 thing from playtesting with Dave is that it helps knights act more like their fluff in a more elegant (rules-wise) manner. DC2 has both positives and negatives for them, as it should be. Advantages come to the fore when engaging and working out suppression. Disadvantages become more obvious when LoS, clipping assaults, and crossfire come into play. I think it reflects an arcane, if somewhat obsolescent, form of fighting vehicle rather well. Smaller things should fear them, but then they become targets to larger WEs, large numbers of AT shots, and TK weapons.
These benefits and drawbacks even out rather nicely IMO.
Generally agreed with captPiett. It's important to remember we're dealing with abstractions when playing the game, and despite the preference/tendency to want to include more minute detail into the game rules, I was and am strongly in favor of simplifying rules where possible to minimize the rules explanation part of the warm-up phase and keep from forgetting things during play. With DC2, if you know the rules for War Engines, and your opponent explains "+1 on engage & rally rolls; first defensive roll is 4+ unmodifiable, 5+ re-roll if the attack isn't MW or TK, no shield if crossfired & no shield vs. supporting fire; power & shock lances only on charge," there's not a whole lot to have to keep straight. The alternative with DC1 war engines was to have to explain all of that, AND THEN have to explain that 3 out of 4 space marine special rules apply (and which ones they are) because they're DC1 war engines and need special treatment.
Going up to DC2 streamlined the rules (most of the benefits of "space marine" blast marker/morale rules without having to put in paragraphs of explanatory text), while adding some other benefits and drawbacks.
DC2 gives you a slightly better barge (going down to vehicle, non-DC which was one of the other possibilities considered would have taken this away entirely) to represent a building-sized war engine plowing into an infantry or vehicle formation on an engage, but it also lets you get swarmed more easily when up against a mob army too (and beware the ants...).
The only other major wrinkle in going to DC2 was that you got greater unit coherency, which imo was a good de-complication from the previous playstyle. Having to maintain 5cm coherency was a pain, and pretty much ensured that formations larger than 3 typically ran into major LOS firing issues due to the whole War Engine thing. Here, going to DC2 gives you more room to maneuver and probably better reflects Knights at 40k scale as well, since you get 3-7 semi-autonomous walkers in a spaced out assault formation. The only major potential "gamey" part of this is the current testing of giving
Scout to Lancers. That said, while it looks beardy on paper, in practice I'm not convinced it's that much of a boost since it can easily lead to Knight sniping and forcing consolidation moves on a very expensive and high priority target anyhow, just to take advantage of the wider spacing & ZoC opportunity. Now that I'm back from a long international trip I'm going to try to get a few games in to prove this out, but I have a feeling I'm going to be proven right in that regard despite my best efforts to abuse it.
I haven't yet seen a good opportunity for wound-sharing shenanigans despite my best efforts (believe me, I've tried). It sounds like a great "gamey" opportunity, but in reality those crossfires and supported/clipping assaults combined with the low model count per formation prevents it from making a serious difference in most games.
Overall, so far I think the list does a pretty good job of demonstrating that each Knight is quite powerful (and yes, those unit entries DO look very scary on paper, and with good reason...), but given the amounts of fire the Knight Player's opponent can often focus on individual formations, those low model count & low activation quantity armies take a major hit to combat effectiveness every time the blast markers start stacking up or a Knight bites the dust (
especially if both happen).
My plans for near-future gaming tests:- Custodian formation sizes & effectiveness - (although I think the either/or MW/BP2 might have resolved the worst of this with a max cap of 4)
- Lancer shenanigans (time to paint up my latest shipment of proxies...)
- - - - -
On a totally unrelated note, I have mixed feelings about some of the alternative loadouts Forgeworld is starting to churn out. As for handling it, I suspect it might be worth it for now to do something similar to the EA Titan Legion List and/or the EA Tyranids Lists, i.e. get a solid list based on existing models brought to Approved status first, and then develop a variant list for the alternative loadouts, or playtest some of the alternatives in stages and bring them in slowly/eventually.
In particular I'm curious to see whether that one leaked loadout is a vulcan mega bolter (like whoa, Titan guns on a Knight...), or a "twin-linked avenger bolt cannon," a.k.a. a twin-linked half-vulcan (like how does that make sense?)...
