well, wouldn't one warhound be better than the 2-3 you're referring to as the start of your marine army building ? Or would you take a single one and a pair ?

There's "Better", and there's "Fixed".

"Better" is 1 Warhound in every single Marine army, instead of 2. At least that would have some more variety.

"Fixed" is making Marine tanks just as viable a choice as taking 2 Warhounds.


Maybe "Fixed" involves boosting the Marine tanks, maybe it involves degrading the Warhounds, or maybe it involves both.
It doesn't really matter to me as long as the eventual internally balanced list is still balanced externally.

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+1 to what E&C says.

I'd like to be able to use my Marine army without any Warhounds, without it being annoyingly sub-par.

did i say anything against changes to other formations ? there are allready quite a few thread around discussing reprices for predators, Land raiders, vindicators...
I even said that I think we should playtest those before changing the warhound. Anyway, you know, making a single warhound 1000Pts won't make predators any better. I thought we were discussing Warhound balance here ?
How do you expect to change the way an army without warhound fare by modifying the warhound ?

With that "both" thing I was talking about above.

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Sure. Sorry I'm getting a bit snappy, I just read too much in Ginger post. I'll let the issue rest a little.

Anyway, there was a whole storm of proposition about this. The way it's looking, the proposed changes to the warhound look like a more meaningful crit and a point increase ?

QFT - E&C, and echoed elsewhere by TRC among others
In summary as others have said:-

• Singletons are underpriced as relative to other Marine formation.
• Warhounds speed and power make them good at supporting a number of Marine strategies
• Multiple singletons are a force multiplier - pairs of Warhounds are never taken

In fact, banning singletons altogether would have much to commend it! Would this be too drastic on its own?
(IMHO we still need to address Predators as well)

I'd dislike this one really.
if only because I currently own 'only' a single Warhound.

Not an option really. Look at the eldar list, it's bloody annoying not being able to take singles.

Ginger:
I don't know that banning singletons outright is nessesary. It might balance things, but at quite a cost...

I've occasionally used pairs to good effect, but used 2x individuals a lot more due to the activation advantage of course.
With the prospect of Warhounds going up to 300pts each, saving a full 100pts to get access to a pair of Warhounds may start to look balanced.


Aye.

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Would we ever see a titan in a marine list in a tournament then ? If yes, why not ?

I would find it a sad day when one couldn't field titans in an imperial army in Epic. But do a pair of warhound, or a reaver, have an effect that warrant their cost ?

I'm afraid the issue we're looking at is the fact that the "activation system", while arguably one of the best turn based mechanism around (and my personal favourite), strongly favour small formations. While Epic is the game where large formation should work the best, they are often hard to use. Arty company, Tank company, titans and such all suffer from this. I wonder if some kind of general solution could maybe be provided to this...
But I'm just mulling around, again.

Banning singlton Warhounds would make the titans much rarer, much like Revenant pairs are, so would fulfill the 'fluff' objective. It would also mean the Marine player planning around their use rather than using them for all strategies which is currently the case as everyone says. Anyway TRC and others have already said the a 0-1 cap would just mean that there would always be a singlton in each army, almost irrespective of the cost hike.

It would also allow us to concentrate more on balancing the other elements of the Marines (Preds etc) in the light of their absence - not least of which being the activation boost they currently provide.

The only concern I have with this suggestion is that there is a legitimate place for a singlton supporting a Reaver or Warlord, so if we did adopt this, I would also suggest allowing a singlton as an upgrade to the Reaver and Warlord. This would also support Atmospheric's point about the 'Epic' scale of the game

Again, if adopted this principle might be applied to other races for the same reasons.

Chaos scout titan's need to stay as singles. 6BP ignore cover with or without MW is a big no to me!

And rather than 0-1 on warhounds move the thunderhawk and LC into the titan/air third. I can still have 2 T'Hawks & 2 Warhounds, but no T'bolts. That means if I want AA I need Hunters, which means ground formations. One Hunter isn't going to cut it so I now need at least 2 formations and probably 3. That eat's into my air assault and terminator allocation.

Noone's raised any problems with Warhounds with 2x Inferno Guns (Which do put out 6BP ignores cover at 30cm range) in the AMTL list in all the years we've been playtesting them.

Inferno/VMB has tended to be a preferred choice, in fact, as it's cheaper in points.

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