But you do get to shoot up the gates restricting the Necrons even further, and also putting them under ZoC or ringed with cheap troops to keep the Necrons bottled up while your forces take control of strategic terrain and objectives. While you cannot satisfy your blood-lust in destroying enemy formations, he is similarly restricted in what he can ultimately do.

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

How can something be fluffy, sensible *and* gamey?  *laugh*

It seems like it's tactically sound for the Necrons to do this, both from a "40k universe" perspective and a "playing a game" perspective.

If you're "all out attacking" in Turn 1, you may have suffered serious losses/damage, all of which may *not* get repaired in the Turn 2 "pit stop", heck, stuff might not even rally and will remain broken, denying you any use.

During that "fairly empty" Turn 2, the opponent is going to be positioning, setting up overwatch, and lots of other stuff... which the Necron player can do little or nothing about (sound familiar?  *laugh*), so, in Turn 3, you're going into the teeth of a prepared enemy... that sounds risky to me, and not a "game-breaker".

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

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

You aren't being forced onto the table.  It is a trade-off of safety off board for losing the activation.  I've played Eldar like that for years and never gave it a second thought.  While aircraft can 'burn' an activation, they represent a small percentage of the number of activations in any given army which is why it never really gets out of hand.

I'm not convinced burning activations would get out of hand for ground units either, but I've simply never played that way and I don't see a need for it.

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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.

Yeah, I know.  That's why the potential FAQ answer under discussion would be an exception for a failed activation, not any Hold action in general.

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Neal

It's well established that when you make a move you can choose to move "0cm"  Like a withdrawl move after breaking.  Frequently people who have fearless units will have them withdraw 0cm for example.

When you Marshall, you can choose to Move, or to Fire and then Regroup.  Since Off-board formations are supposed to take a Move component to their activations (and you can't shoot anything while off-board anyway) they choose the Move component of Marshall, and choose to make a 0cm move.. thus remaining off-board, not using a portal, and still getting their Regroup in.

They've used an activation, just like everyone else would, but the difference is that they are not subject to attack when they do this like everyone else is.

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Necron Army Champion
"Do not come whining to me because you are weaker than your enemy." - Alexander Corvinus

i guess there is no animal lovers here.... becuase you're all beating a dead horse
in the necron portal rules we could add a sentence which restates the quote from swordwind about having to take an action that would bring a formation on board, that gets rid of the 0cm move.
so the arguement comes down to should the formation be allowed to remove BMs off board? at first i thought no, but after reading through this post, it seems that there are just as many good things as there are bad to being off board. so why not allow it? if this somewhat rare situation becomes a problem then we could always change it.

What Mosc said.  If you don't want to risk an unfortunate entry onto the table, you don't activate the formation.  It's only if you've already made the choice t enter play that something could go wrong due to a bad die roll.  You're never unilaterally forced to bring a formation into play.


As far as stalling off-board as a concept, I think it's against the spirit of the rules for ground formations.

For aircraft, I don't have a problem with it because they gain great vulnerability simply by being on the board.  They can be Intercepted no matter where they go.  There is no way for them to avoid the enemy except to stay completely off the board.

In practical terms, it would probably never really be a problem for Eldar.  They give up on-board presence and gain only the benefit of dropping BMs in safety.  They are also going to have relatively small numbers of formations affected.  In terms of balance, I see very little chance that this would ever shift a game substantially.

Necrons, on the other hand, are a whole different kettle of fish.  They have large numbers of formations which could take advantage of it.  Their portals are in much greater numbers and superior to the Eldar portals (Fearless, Phase Out, Teleport).  And, of course, they gain a lot more than the ability to shed BMs.

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Neal

aaah, but that's WHY you might keep your people offboard for that second turn.

Consider:  Against a Necron army your initial deployment is crucial.  If you don't set up right, you are likely to get reamed in the first turn unless you are extremely lucky.

So the Necron player will see your set up well, and has two choices:  He can grab the bull by the horns and come in after you, or he can wait, and hope you lose patience and come out to sieze objectives so he can drop on your army and defeat it in detail.

With this way of doing things, he can do both.

Turn one:  Full Frontal Assault.

He sends wave after wave of assaults into your army, doing as much damage as he can, in the hopes of breaking open your formations so he can crack your army.  But he knows that even if he fails, he can still win.

So he throws the kitchen sink at you, withdraws broken units back into the reserves and then waits.

Turn Two:  Regroup
Every Necron Formation off board Marshalls.  They pull off blast markers/regenerate, and basically undo the vast majority of the damage that they sustained in that frontal assault.

You can choose to sit there this turn, and try to brace yourself for another assault, though you are likely in a weaker position than you were to begin with, or you can try to rush out to grab some Objectives.

Take the first option and you are essentially paralyzed.  Take the second and you are likely going to be rendered into hamburger on the following turn.

Either way, you are essentially stuck reacting to the Necrons because they will have the strategic initiave, and will be the ones to decide when, and where there will be a fight.


As Mosc pointed out, I've used that advantage in fights before... I've held back turn one and tried to use the psychological pressure to coinvince my opponent to do something rash.  It usually works.  With a ruling like this, I don't have too.

It feels abusive because I can have my cake and eat it too.

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Necron Army Champion
"Do not come whining to me because you are weaker than your enemy." - Alexander Corvinus

Technically, if we *really* want to get legalistic, the 0cm move thing doesn't work:

Any formation’s that are kept
on the Craftworld may enter play via the Webway
Portal, by taking an action that allows them to make a
move, and then measuring their first move from the
position that a webway portal occupies on the
tabletop

You don't move "through" the portal, if taking such an activation, you measure your first move *from* the portal... 0cm from the portal is still a position on the actual tabletop.


And the counter-point to that is they can't do anything to the enemy either... it's the two sides of the same coin: You can't hurt me/I can't hurt you... how is that *not* balanced?

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

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

Well, Neal seems to be suggesting that you would be forced to move onto the table if you activated (see below). Further, what I think you are saying is that you could defer taking the activation till the end of the turn and then declare that you are "passing" on any further activations, which is contrary to 1.6.1 which states you must activate if you can; and cannot "pass". So unless you are allowed to 'burn' an activation, under Neal's interpretation you would have to move onto the table if you could . . . .

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

@Corey,

In turn #2 when the Necrons are off-table, why can't the opponent kill the gates, or at least most of them?

I have seen exactly this happen on more than one occasion in the early stages of testing, and the Necrons never made it back onto the table in sufficient numbers in turn three, with the result that the opponent was able to mop up the objectives and the few Necron survivors

_________________
"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

It all depends on the opponent's experience with Necrons... the response tactics are not always obvious and, for first-time opponents, Necrons, like Tyranids or other "weird" armies, can be incredibly frustrating and off-putting... negatively colouring their entire thought of EPIC:A.

The same level of frustration can be reached the first time a player is on the receiving end of a well played Marine "corner drop", again, it's all about previous experience.

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

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

Legalistic readings of the RAW aren't going to work in this case.  There's not enough in the GT or Eldar webway rules to parse out all the possible iterations, let alone all the new situations introduced by the option to actively leave the board.  We have to address this with general principals, rules for parallel situations and design intent (as best we can determine all that) in addition to the skeleton of hard rules we have available.

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Neal

This is the way I tend to see it and agree with this procedure wholeheartedly.

I'm not in favour of regrouping off-board (Aside from end phase rallying) because it does feel wrong and has the potential for abuse.  In the case of necrons, if they have been beaten up, they can choose to stay where they are and Marshall (Like everyone else) Or move offboard and spend the rest of the turn in safety, rallying in the end phase.  If they then wish to Marshall they must enter play by moving onto the board and marshalling, the same as everyone else.  This still brings benefits to the necron player because he can ensure his unit takes no further damage that turn and can teleport to a more advantageous position but at the cost of not being to contribute for the rest of the turn (Which it may not have been able to do anyway - depends how badly beaten up it was).  It's a decision that must be weighed up by the Necron player and the pros and cons assessed - which surely is the mark of a good rule.

Surely you can see how being able to teleport to safety and marshall in the same turn and then entering play the next turn, fully charged up and having spent the previous turn unassailable ready for more is abusive, Chroma?  There's no downside as the unit would have spent the previous turn marshalling anyway and had little to no effect on the game.  With marshalling off table they get this in addition to being immune to further damage, immune to rallying modifiers AND getting to teleport wherever they please.  It is having your cake and eating it - as the list designer so succinctly put it.

If you're army is well designed, you generally don't need to put all your portals on the board turn one.  It's usually a good idea to leave some in reserve... just in case.

Either way, it's unlikely that ALL your portals are going to die turn one (if they did, you'd be done anyway).  More than likely, however, they will be broken and Phase out at the end of the turn.

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Necron Army Champion
"Do not come whining to me because you are weaker than your enemy." - Alexander Corvinus