Well they are Cavalry which exchange their horses for Bikes and their lances/sabers for shooting weapons.

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I think this is a fair assessment.

Given that, you could make the base formation 5 attack bikes at 175 and make the bikes the upgrades at 5 points a unit.

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After all these years we are now getting somewhere close to the mark of what they should be priced at.

5 point upgrades would be a godsend for Space Marines players to fill some gaps to full 3000pts.

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The Salamanders army i will field in the Turney this weekend has 10 points left over. Ok i don't field any Bikes

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Hena I'd like to ask this politely - What is it that compels you to fall on the side of keeping the marines down when small adjustments could actually make the list work better or more efficiently? If people say to you "a 5 point unit upgrade will help me fill holes" why discount it out of hand so that player knows it'll never happen? I understand you shouldn't give everything that's asked for but what effect will small adjustments like this have? Minimal, surely?

Dobbsy: With a minimum number of off-point upgrades you can use them to control unusual effects. As you add more and more, you end up with a jigsaw effect where every minor tweak allows a cascade of other minor tweak options. The potential combinations multiply and that means the chance for some overpowered interaction or just a completely goony formation composition goes up as well. It makes it harder to keep play lists reasonable from a design perspective.

For example, 85 point Land Raiders don't give you an effective point break for taking just one. You have to take a pair to get 30 points discount to cover a 25 point increment. The "wasted" points are there intentionally. It gives an incentive to take them in pairs to minimize the loss of points rather than min-maxing something like Devs with 1 Land Raider, 1 Razorback and 1 Rhino. Basically, the "wasted" points keeps the min-max formation composition under control and more in line with the background. You can still do the 1LR/1Razorback/1Rhino combo if you like, but you end up paying effectively a 25 point premium to get that highly optimized and non-traditional composition.

However, if there are multiple 5/10/15 point options then that goes out the window. You can effectively min-max all sorts of freakish formation compositions without fear of "wasting" points. Take your goony Dev transports. You can always make up the points on another formation.

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Personally, I'd say that Bikes and a Bikes with 1-2 Attack Bikes are pretty much worth 200 points.

I'm not in favor of retroactively adding it to the Codex list but if an alternate list were to justify all-Attack Bikes, I'd say make it 2 formations - Bikes as normal (including the Attack Bike upgrade) and an all-Attack Bike formation at 175 - rather than trying to shoehorn it into a single formation with customized point buys.

Isn't this *EXACTLY* what army-building is to begin with? How is it suddenly a "bad thing" when it comes to having options for using up a last few points? Regardless of whether points reach an even thousand or not, people often take very different armies from the same lists; there's no "ultimate solution" for an effective army.

"Min-maxing" is *NOT* "use every point"; it's take the min(imum) amount of bad stuff, to take the max(imum) amount of good stuff.

Min-maxing

I think what people are actually talking about is some kind of "optimization", to make the "best" formation for the points... but, again, isnt' this *exactly* what people are doing when making armies?

How is such a formation "highly optimized"... it's got a single extra transport slot in a very vulnerable armoured vehicle. How is it any more "goony" than a Dev formation with a single Land Raider and two Razorbacks? Or three Razorbacks and a Rhino? How are such formations "freakish"?

And that was kinda my point - 5 points here or there to fill up a gap isn't over the top IMO it's just good book keeping