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Neal

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

Now living in Boston... any EPIC players want to meet up?

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Visit www.epic-battles.de the ultimate german epic site&forum!

Any taxi-Falcons sighted since year 2007 (cf. last post here) ?

If this option is so unpopular, it's because it's too expensive. Let's give the taxi-Falcon the same price than the Sword of Vaul Falcon : 50pts, also the same price than Wave Serpent. A Falcon brings bigger firepower, but the Wave Serpent is more armoured and carries two infantry.

And for Alaitoc Ranger War Ost, with the 'standard' 65pts-taxi-Falcon, 4 Rangers + 4 Falcons cost 400pts (2*25pts for Rangers, 4*65pts for Falcons, so 40pts for allowing Falcons to guarnison).
With a 50pts-Falcon, what about 350pts for the same 4 Rangers + 4 Falcons ? (300pts of units and about the same guarnisonning fee as before)

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My gaming and painting blog : http://figsdeflogus.blogspot.fr

The reduction in Falcon cost is something I'm definitely considering.

But one must also consider that, when added to an Aspect formation, they become a 1+ initiative formation, instead of the usual 2+.

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

Now living in Boston... any EPIC players want to meet up?

Yeah I don't think I've taken them, maybe once or twice. Cost is prohibitive.

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http://hordesofthings.blogspot.co.nz/

For what its worth, I have never seen them in the UK, and when I did try Guardians in '8' of them I was also underwhelmed. As others have said, at 820 for a basic Aspect host and 670 for Guardians they represent a lot of points for a relativly brittle formation.

However even when doubling this would kick out 16x AT5+ and 8x AP6+/AT6+ (or ~4.6 AT hits, ~1.3 AP hits) which will embarrass all but the toughest AV formations. With Dark Reapers and a couple of Fire Dragon Exarchs the AP fire and assault stats would be nasty as well. And at that size, you can afford to drop spare infantry when a tank dies.

Cutting the points to 50 each would drop this monster to 750 and 550 respectively, when I fancy you might see Guardian+Falcon formations tangling with Leman Russ, and I would not like to bet on the outcome. However, virtually any other formation would be toast.

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

Right, I forgot that.

On the other hand, if the formation loose more Falcon than infantry, the formation is considerably slowed.

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My gaming and painting blog : http://figsdeflogus.blogspot.fr

I've never really understood why it is that only warmachines may transport troops outside of their own formation.

Couldn't Falcons pick up and drop off troops and just treat them as "intermingled" while on board?

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-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

Using the WE transport rules as a generic "external transport" system would probably work from a mechanics perspective.  Overall, though, I don't see very many uses for it.

Transporting infantry in WEs seems primarily useful in terms of adding infantry to the WE formation rather than as a cool way to move infantry around.  Most non-WE transports are fragile enough that running around mounted is a bad tactical choice, even if it's just a first turn "start loaded and dump the infantry forward" move.  Mounted formations are subject to the whims of the transporting formation and breaking just the transports is obviously easier than breaking the combined formation so they would be even more vulnerable than just normal mounted formations, making it even worse.  Anyone but Eldar would tend to lose activations if they tried to embark or disembark from another formation.

What would you use external transport for?

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Neal

The ability to pick up a unit, deposit them, and then be on your way to attack a target separate from the infantry formation sounds like a bonus to me.

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-Malakai

"You'll never understand how much watching other people's pain gets me off, hearing their screams and knowing that I have the power of a god." -Velvet Acid Christ

You can't do that with WE transports.  It takes a minimum of 2 activations in 2 separate turns to pick up and drop off infantry.  First, the mounting formations has to board using their action, then the combined/loaded WE can activate in the following turn.

If you allow joining/embarking and disembarking/breaking up in the same turn, it causes wonky results with every method anyone ever brainstormed on the playtest boards - formations double activating, moving faster than if they had organic transport, effectively free and unlimited combined assaults, etc..  Bad mojo.  You might be able to house rule it for friendly games, but no one could figure out a way to write hard rules for it that didn't have some sort of exploitable loophole.

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Neal

I've run Falcons as transports, first as an experiment in just doing it.  It was just OK.  I later used it as a way of bumping the price of my Aspect formation so it wasn't the same price as another Aspect formation in Wave Serpents.  It's a great way to avoid having two BTS formations and the extra AT firepower is nice to have, even if it is on two units.  It isn's something I do regularly however.

With that said, I think the Eldar are flexible enough and might suffer success with a change to the pricing (and that goes for ALL the Eldar lists).

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author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

How about using Falcons in the 4-strong aspect troupes in the alt-lists? That seems like a less points-restrictive option, but does it fair well?

For example, 2 shining spears, 2 dark reapers and 2 falcons. For 305 points, it doesn't seem that great, even if it has above average shooting ability.

So, does the point cost of a falcon as transport seem too high at both ends of the spectrum [small formation to big formation]? What about in the 6-strong formations of some of the other alt-lists?