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Post by smoothcriminal on Jun 29, 2018 13:01:54 GMT
The benefits of min bombers+UA: - it's 15pt, a rare point cost in AK that is also reasonably small - the output of full unit without UA (which costs 16pt)
Yes, big unit with UA is better, but you may not always have points for it. And you probably shouldn't take big units if you use bombers as purely shooting support and have no caster spell to improve their ranged output.
If we compare to chariot I think caster with Fury would want a unit he could put the Fury on. It's debatable though because chariot will jam very well with Kozlov's feat.
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Post by hocestbellum on Jun 29, 2018 13:14:32 GMT
I disagree on a couple points you've made. You say the engine is tougher. The BE has more armor sure, but even a min+UA bombadiers has more HP and on more than a single model. Pathfinder is an interesting discussion. With the UA the unit will rarely need actual pathfinder. They can advance and have pathfinder. But what if you want to charge, no pathinder. Well, if the enemy models are within your measly 10" threat range ( with kovnik ), i would rather aim and use the mini feat. Same RAT/MAT if aiming and double the shots. They are better at holding a zone. They can toe the zone and threat anyone else that tries to do the same. They are much harder to pick off than a single BE. Also, kozlov has a great spell for them, Tactical supremecy. I have experience with repo'ing my bombadiers with irusk, and wow it is great. Makes the unit way more obnoxious to deal with. They can shoot you, and to retaliate you will need to most likely enter into their mini feat threat. I do use a max+UA and maybe that's the tipping point for them. I have issues with pretty much everything you've written there, but frankly we could argue this back and forth all day. I think you really need to get the BE on the table to see what I mean.
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Post by Havock on Jun 29, 2018 16:48:39 GMT
Bombardiers pay for their flexibility; ok in melee ok in range but you need to make them work.
It can be a variety of things: Fire For Effect for POW20 boosted ouchies, Hand of Fate/S&P or some trick like walking up with them, shooting, then dropping a cloud wall in front.
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Post by borderprince on Jun 30, 2018 3:59:11 GMT
The benefits of min bombers+UA: - it's 15pt, a rare point cost in AK that is also reasonably small - the output of full unit without UA (which costs 16pt) Just to complicate, as this was another fine mess I got the forum into, in the Kozlov list that started this off, the min bombers + UA is actually 10 points + one of the free slots.
Shifting to the Battle Engine would require changing the list a bit more than just a straight swap (remove bombers, make Kovnik free, drop Kodiak to Marauder). And I'd end up with 1 surplus point in the list, which would niggle at me for days.
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Post by mcdermott on Jun 30, 2018 6:16:29 GMT
Bombardiers pay for their flexibility; ok in melee ok in range but you need to make them work. It can be a variety of things: Fire For Effect for POW20 boosted ouchies, Hand of Fate/S&P or some trick like walking up with them, shooting, then dropping a cloud wall in front. I'm just curious as to what makes them "ok" in range shy of khador not having the same level of ranged buffs cygnar does. 12" is a solid distance, meaning if you aren't spd7 reach 2 you need a buff to charge them. Pow 14 is warjack gun level, CRA, RAT 6 is about as high as it gets, and arcing fire. I mean its fair to say they don't have a lot of ranged support in faction, but the raw numbers are actually REALLY good for a ranged unit.
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Post by hocestbellum on Jun 30, 2018 7:34:45 GMT
Just to complicate, as this was another fine mess I got the forum into, in the Kozlov list that started this off, the min bombers + UA is actually 10 points + one of the free slots.
Shifting to the Battle Engine would require changing the list a bit more than just a straight swap (remove bombers, make Kovnik free, drop Kodiak to Marauder). And I'd end up with 1 surplus point in the list, which would niggle at me for days.
No, it's a straight swap. Bombardiers + UA + Kovnik with the UA as the freebie is 14 points. Assault Chariot + Kovnik with the Kovnik as the freebie is 14 points. It's the Siege which is 15 points.
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Post by Havock on Jun 30, 2018 11:45:16 GMT
Bombardiers pay for their flexibility; ok in melee ok in range but you need to make them work. It can be a variety of things: Fire For Effect for POW20 boosted ouchies, Hand of Fate/S&P or some trick like walking up with them, shooting, then dropping a cloud wall in front. I'm just curious as to what makes them "ok" in range shy of khador not having the same level of ranged buffs cygnar does. 12" is a solid distance, meaning if you aren't spd7 reach 2 you need a buff to charge them. Pow 14 is warjack gun level, CRA, RAT 6 is about as high as it gets, and arcing fire. I mean its fair to say they don't have a lot of ranged support in faction, but the raw numbers are actually REALLY good for a ranged unit. Hmmm, yeah. Expensive though, if you take one unit of shocks and the Demo Corps with Dragonman and Arenas, well...
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Post by sand20go on Jun 30, 2018 15:35:24 GMT
Bombardiers pay for their flexibility; ok in melee ok in range but you need to make them work. It can be a variety of things: Fire For Effect for POW20 boosted ouchies, Hand of Fate/S&P or some trick like walking up with them, shooting, then dropping a cloud wall in front. I'm just curious as to what makes them "ok" in range shy of khador not having the same level of ranged buffs cygnar does. 12" is a solid distance, meaning if you aren't spd7 reach 2 you need a buff to charge them. Pow 14 is warjack gun level, CRA, RAT 6 is about as high as it gets, and arcing fire. I mean its fair to say they don't have a lot of ranged support in faction, but the raw numbers are actually REALLY good for a ranged unit. +1. I LOVE them with Vlad2. Hand of Fate goes on em early. Ideally come feat turn you hot swap it over to either the democorp (wreck hard targets) or the shocktroopers - Shield wall up 9 and then shoot 6.
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Post by mcdermott on Jun 30, 2018 20:20:05 GMT
I'm just curious as to what makes them "ok" in range shy of khador not having the same level of ranged buffs cygnar does. 12" is a solid distance, meaning if you aren't spd7 reach 2 you need a buff to charge them. Pow 14 is warjack gun level, CRA, RAT 6 is about as high as it gets, and arcing fire. I mean its fair to say they don't have a lot of ranged support in faction, but the raw numbers are actually REALLY good for a ranged unit. Hmmm, yeah. Expensive though, if you take one unit of shocks and the Demo Corps with Dragonman and Arenas, well... I feel like you're either taking demo OR bombardiers. One of each unit seems a little too dispersed in strategy.
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Post by goodk4t on Jul 1, 2018 6:41:51 GMT
so we all agree that Shockies are the way to go. imho do the demos the heavier lifting with dragos(under kozlov). 1-1-1 won't work?
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Post by Havock on Jul 1, 2018 17:27:31 GMT
Hmmm, yeah. Expensive though, if you take one unit of shocks and the Demo Corps with Dragonman and Arenas, well... I feel like you're either taking demo OR bombardiers. One of each unit seems a little too dispersed in strategy. Possibly, although Bombardiers are flexible enough to "fit in"; what you take massively depends on the caster at the wheel.
Butcher1? Bombardiers with UA. Either you blow up a shot-ton of dudes with half a million UA's or you put massive holes in targets with direct (CMA) hits.
List is stupidly expensive if you want to double down on stuff though...
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Post by mcdermott on Jul 1, 2018 21:59:14 GMT
I feel like you're either taking demo OR bombardiers. One of each unit seems a little too dispersed in strategy. Possibly, although Bombardiers are flexible enough to "fit in"; what you take massively depends on the caster at the wheel.
Butcher1? Bombardiers with UA. Either you blow up a shot-ton of dudes with half a million UA's or you put massive holes in targets with direct (CMA) hits.
List is stupidly expensive if you want to double down on stuff though...
Thats true, Irusks make bombardiers passable melee units with battle lust.
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Post by borderprince on Jul 2, 2018 7:56:29 GMT
Just to complicate, as this was another fine mess I got the forum into, in the Kozlov list that started this off, the min bombers + UA is actually 10 points + one of the free slots.
Shifting to the Battle Engine would require changing the list a bit more than just a straight swap (remove bombers, make Kovnik free, drop Kodiak to Marauder). And I'd end up with 1 surplus point in the list, which would niggle at me for days.
No, it's a straight swap. Bombardiers + UA + Kovnik with the UA as the freebie is 14 points. Assault Chariot + Kovnik with the Kovnik as the freebie is 14 points. It's the Siege which is 15 points. Getting back to Kozlov, sort of, I took hocestbellum's advice and tried the Assault Chariot in place of min Bombardiers + UA (proxying via my trusty Gun Carriage). Only 2 games, but preliminary views.
Pros:
1 - I like not losing hitting power as damage accumulates.
2 - Sturdy - it's tough enough to divert anti-jack firepower to it. Pro and con here - I think it diverted some shooting from jacks and shield wall STs, but meant lower POW shooting was directed only at the Demo Corps, who suffered a bit more chip damage than usual as a consequence.
3 - The melee attack is handy. An extra source of knockdown in a list is never a bad thing.
4 - Better scenario presence. I think this might be more valuable in other lists. I find the Shocktroopers do most the scenario heavy lifting in this list, and there were occasions where I had to think about scenario presence vs getting shooting into the right place, which didn't happen with the Bombardiers. Might get better with practice.
Cons:
1 - Huge base got in the way. This felt worse than colossals, probably because (a) MoW lists are already a bit of a pain to position (especially without Atanas); and (b) the chariot was whizzing around more quickly.
2 - Random attack volume. I don't like this in models generally. I know this is a game of dice, but much of WMH is about using the more predictable rolls of 2D6 to plan ahead, with boosting to smooth things out. How useful the chariot was in a given turn was to some extent dependent upon a single dice roll. I had two options most turns: (a) if I needed more than 2 shots, activate the chariot early and hope I rolled well, using other parts of the list to compensate later in the turn if required or (b) plan for only ever having 2 shots, activate whenever I wanted and see how to exploit any extra shots as a bonus. Barring desperate circumstances I used (b) mostly, so found myself assuming the chariot had a lower attack volume than the Bombardiers.
3 - Hitting power of shots. In one game I really missed my CRA at POW16 from Bombardiers, wanting to get a Firefly out of the game before it got into Ionisation range for a Nemo3 feat. Mini-feating Bombardiers take out a Firefly fairly well (4x RAT8, each with straight dice for damage), especially if the Strike Tanker can help out. The Assault Chariot (even with Strike Tanker), not so much.
4 - Accuracy. Again, I miss CRA. Base RAT6 is decent. It will hit most things in the game just over 50% of the time, before cover or other DEF buffs are added in. But it's not that reliable. And if you're assuming only 2 shots, I want more reliable. I know that the Chariot's scatter is more useful than the Bombardiers' scatters, and I did tag a couple of solos with scatters that did decent damage to them. But in one of those instance a Bombardier CRA would have hit (to be fair, the other would not), and the direct hit would have taken the solo out easily. I'm not a big fan of relying on scatters for blast damage, so not a big point in favour for me.
It's cons 2, 3 and 4 which make it likely that I'll stick with the Bombardiers in the Kozlov list. But 2 and 4 are in part due to my preferences in playing the game. I don't like randomness and (over?)value reliability, which pushes me to the more predictable Bombardiers. Other people might be happier with those trade offs.
(I am wondering about the possibility of a Vlad1 list with a couple of chariots, some jacks and a unit or two though. Vlad1 addresses some of the reliability issues, while the Gun Carriage works well with jacks in WGK because it keeps up with feated jacks. The same might work in AK.)
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Post by hocestbellum on Jul 2, 2018 8:46:50 GMT
Haha, you know, I actually forgot this was a Kozlov thread?
Fair play, they are all valid points. I don't actually take the Assault Chariot with Kozlov either; as you say in point 4, the scenario presence is more valuable in other lists, and I'm mostly testing Irusk2 at the moment. The lack of speed boosts mean I need something quicker, and that can operate independently outside of my 10" tough tactical bubble.
My Kozlov list had double min Demos, I think? Fury and Ragman can make anything dead, so a full unit seemed to be overkill.
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