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Joined: Mon Jul 04, 2005 10:05 pm
Posts: 61
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There has been a small amount of debate already about the proposed Drone changes for 4.2:
| Quote (Steele @ 08 2005 July,23:03) | | I read your planned changes about the Drones,and I am not pleased. I understand that you want to show that Tau aren?t good in assaults, but when you drop the Rule for half casualties , how do you want to put in the effect of them "throwing in front of the enemy"? Dropping the Rule at all doesn?t seem right. What if you change it to : As long as any Drone Unit remain in a Formation and in 5cm of a given Casualty , you may remove a Drone Unit instead. With that wording you combine the Fluff and your planned change as well. They would protect their "Masters" and also would count as 1 Casualty in Assault. The current rule worked for me very well, despite my opponents mauling something like "dammned Drones" and the like. Often they where a last ditch between beeing broken or not. And I used them quite often this way. They are already restricted in the amount of taking them, and regarding Pricing at Forgeworld they would now become even more unatractive. Please tell me if Im totally wrong on this, but if I read it correctly you "just" wanted to drop it for Assaulsts, didn?t you? |
| Quote (baronpiero @ 30 2005 June, 17:28) | Removing the drone rule in assaults seems quite harsh a downgrade as the following will happen:
Example 1: a battelsuit cadre consisting of 4 crisis and 4 drones takes 8 hits.
>Number of casualties inflicted on average = 4*1/3 + 4*2/3 = 3.99
Example 2. the same battelsuit cadre consisting of 4 crisis but no drones takes those same 8 hits
>Number of casualties inflicted on average = 8*1/3 = 2.66
Less casualties if no drone meatshield, so more chances to win the assault without drones. Drones weaken the battlesuit cadre they join in an assault. |
To address those:
First, the REASON for the change is the design axiom that Tau shouldn't have a special rule that benefits them in an assault situation. Run from assault, okay, but nothing useful for assaults themselves.
Next, Tau are supposed to lose in assaults, and should get punished if caught by the enemy. Some formations will lose in assaults even more decisively with this change, but as you can't have more than four drones as an upgrade anyway, the net change isn't as bad (an extra 1 casualty for resolution in most cases, with an extra 2 casualties for resolution at max - if you lose 3 or 4 drones in the assault).
So it's not THAT bad.
Thirdly, having drones is stil a marked advantage: they increase your formation size (crucial in assaults), often by a factor of 2, and they wil take the first hits if placed correctly (i.e., at the front of the formation).
To illustrate my points, let me quote baronpiero's example of a Crisis cadre with and without drone screen receiving 8 hits. While it is true that the cadre with screen did take more casualties, they only lost half the Crisis units compared to the unshielded formation, and still have 4 units remaining, instead of only 1.33
This alone is bonus enough IMHO, for a relatively cheap upgrade, and the main strength lies in partially ignoring BMs anyway.
BTW, coupled to this I have been toying with the idea (and it is just that, *toying* with an *idea*!) of saying that drones simply don't generate BMs at all, while the change above is kept and points cost increased to 100 points (at least for the upgrade).
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