Show Notes
Date: 7-26-16
Intro
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News
Upcoming ITC Events
- 2016 Ordo Open ITC Event, VANCOUVER, WA, July 29th, 2016
- Nowa Nadzieja IV, Sopot, Poland, July 30th, 2016
- Huzzah Hobbies’ July RTT, Ashburn, VA, July 30, 2016
- 40k Doubles at Everything Hobby, Rochester, MN, July 30th, 2016
- Fantasy Books and Games ITC Highlander Style Tournament, Fairview Heights, IL, July 30th, 2016
- SCGC July ITC Event!, SoCal Games and Comics, Temecula, CA, July 30th, 2016
- Warhammer 40K – ITC Tournament, Coliseum of Comics – Fashion Square Mall, Orlando, FL, July 30th, 2016
- Max Aggression Tournament, Ontario, Canada, July 30th, 2016
- Wolfbrothers: Great White Ape Invitational, Comic Kingdom, Reno, NV, July 31st, 2016
- Liga po pracy MK X, Warsaw, Poland, Julye 31st, 2016
- Westeros Summer ITC, Västeras, Sweden, July 30-31st, 2016
Rumors: The Rumor Section is gathered from the web and is not in any way information we receive from  any manufacturer nor is it necessarily accurate. This section of the podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only.
Rant Session
Tactics Corner
Frankie’s Tau at ATC:
- The list Performed well and was copied a few times
- Went 4-1-1
- Weakness to the Progressive and Kill Points
- Excelled at winning by turn 5
- Was a great  deterrent enabling us to rig pairings
- Team Format thoughts
Reece’s Astra Militarum list at ATC:
- Reece had his worst tournament performance in his life, haha.
- Record was not impressive!
- Weakness to durable melee units.
- Still had a ton of fun in the team format, will be back better prepared next year.
Rules Lawyer
Completed Commissions
List Review
Your tournament recap episodes are my personal faves. From time to time, I still re-listen to the one you guys did with Geoff after Broadside Bash. Love hearing how the games unfolded and post game thoughts. It’s very insightful.
I think what you guys said about Death from the Skies is true. It’ll really take out interactivity from the game if it was all flier spam.
But, if it gets voted in, maybe you can limit the number of dtfs detachments to one. This’ll still let you take fliers in their formations for the bonuses but possibly avoid spam. Like you guys said, it really hinders Deathstars and will force people to bring AA instead of just a blob of units that rolls over you. Overall, it might be good for the game (with some tweaks).
Looking forward to hearing more about the tournaments you guys are attending over the coming weeks!
Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, we learn a lot from tournament play. Nothing like trial by fire.
Flyer spam in DftS is not going to be a positive thing for the game, IMO. We need to tone it down just a bit.
The flyer counter to death stars only really works if they leave next to nothing on the ground to be mulched by the opposition. Which really does leave little interactivity with lists that brought nothing to counter flyers – like the current crop of assault death star lists.
I think it is far easier for most armies to counter flyers than death stars – most codexes have ways to counter them and the smaller codexes generally have some options via allies. If you have AA then the bonus from attack patterns diminishes pretty fast with each flyer you can bring down – in a tournament where players were still not bringing AA because they did not foresee the effect of DftS the impact could certainly be magnified.
On the other hand I do think there could be a problem with the GW rules not really taking into account the FW flyers. The Vulture is an obvious problem case because:
1. It has Vector Dancer making it easy to stay in an attack pattern every turn to get the bonus you need/want
2. The AM specific leader traits apply to the whole wing if they are in an attack pattern so they get two layers of bonus
3. The Vulture was pretty darned good anyway and did not need the bonus rules so much (what I think of as the Riptide Wing effect).
Agree. 2++ re-rollable (sanctuary/veil of time) death stars are harder for most lists to interact with than flyer spam. Especially with culexus assassins losing the ability to hitch rides and affect blessings from inside of vehicles once the GW FAQ is finalized.
Everybody gets flyers of some type, or AA, or both.
Flyer spam I think would only be a problem for a short while, countering flyers even with dfts is not hard, it just requires quite a different approach to list building. I’m not completely big on dfts, I’d prefer a different approach to making flyers work in the game (honestly I think a stripped down version of the surprisingly great Stormcloud Attack game would be good), but I do think it’s better than not having it.
But then I’m not a competitive 40K player, so don’t know how much my observations are worth 😛
Interesting hearing about how DftS went, I know I’m not looking for a flier game, if I wanted that I’d be playing the very old Mustangs and Messerschimidts (showing my age 🙂 0
I want to play 40K where air support is just that, air support for the ground game.
I remember when the last Air rules were released by GW, there was about 3 weeks of air battles at the local GW store until everyone was basically bored of it and went back to regular 40k games.
What list did your team run?
Geoff: War Convo + Libby Conclave
Reece: Astra Militarum
Frankie: Tau
James: Chaos
John: Orks
Was Frankie running Pacific Rim or Dawnblade?
His monster mash list.
Dawnblade wouldn’t stand a chance in the hardcore environment at ATC, unfortunately.
Great show guys! And funny as always. I had no idea DFTS could be so brutal until listening to the recap. Not that I feel bad for the death star player getting stomped by flyers, but we really don’t need another hyper efficient element that lacks interactivity. Anyways I’ll be seeing Franklin and Jason at Gencon! Bring your big boy pants because it’s likely we’ll be seeing some top tier players given the location.
Not that shaking up the meta is always a bad thing, but I’d still be cautious of letting their anti-deathstar abilities be the tipping point from DftS. It’s kind of like bringing in an invasive species to kill off a nuisance. Once the original nuisance is gone, now you have a new one.
You go from un-fun, un-interactive deathstars to a bunch of flyers that can be equally un-interactive depending on the lists. I get that GW is trying to make flyers thematic and “realistic” but they really need to find a way to make them feel more at home on the tabletop. Not “I shoot you, you take models off, you don’t shoot back, I fly off the board because I can’t reach anything else.”
Precisely. It is one problem for another.
As long as you limit being able to take just 1 flyer wing, so a max of 3 fliers from dtfs formations, I think it’ll be pretty well balanced.
Fliers are much, much easier to deal with than Deathstars. Deathstars are the invasive species. It totally breaks all other army types and just smashes the meta. There is literally no counter to a well composed, psychically powered Deathstar.
That sounds like a reasonable limitation to me.
There were three Battle Company players… The one you mentioned didn’t do as well as I did!
Nice one! Thanks for the correction.
As always great show, but you two look exhausted. Take a summer break it looks like you have a hectic and crasy full schedule and need some time off. But not too long, I need my shows 😉
Haha, thanks! Unfortunately August is the busiest month of the summer for us.
Any chance you can share John McCool’s Ork list? I get crushed with my Orks and I would really like to know what a successful Ork player is running this late into 7th edition.
Big mek Stompa + zhadsnark, And bikers
I second that. Would love to see what he’s running, but more importantly, would like to hear some insights into his tactics against different armies with his list.
Perhaps a list-tech article? Paging Pablo.
We can do that.
sooo, DFTS actually makes flyers stronger… well I’m glad that got confirmed:)
not having mysterious objectives really sucks. the chance of sky fire especially if you have psykers for re rolls on it
we’ve played it here at our local since it came out and only had at most three flyers with DFTS and we’ve really liked it. but yeah… heaps and heaps of flyers might be annoying, still reminds me of the necron flyer spam lists at the start of 6th, you do get a lot better at dealing with flyers the more you try vs them.
like getting your whole army across to their side of the field so they have to fly over you on their first turn. that’s going to be a lot easier for some armies than others but messing up movement is a pretty big deal vs flyers.
Lovely show as always guys:) see you in vegas 🙂
Good points on Necron flyer spam. The big difference though is break turns. With that (possibly auto passing the check) you can’t hide from them.
I don’t think Flyer Spam was as large of a problem as many believe. The one team that brought more than 3 Flyers, Chicago Kamikazee/Bukake, dropped after round 1, day 2. They got rolled up. I had the Crimson Death formation, the break turns help but nothing I couldn’t do with Vector Dancer. It was our team’s only counter to Knights and I played 11 of them over the course of the weekend. If Flyers are in the air, they aren’t scoring progressives which is going to be a tough fight for Star lists anyways. I think the Flyer lists that were doing well, had them in moderation and I don’t believe we need to nerf moderation.
Good seeing y’all at the show. I got the chance to chat with McCool a bit – super cool guy. Great showing for TZC.
I should add, that I don’t necessarily feel bad about bringing three flyers when I’m up against Imperial Psykers reliably summoning two units of Daemons a turn on a 2+. You’re right Reece, Psykana is ROUGH!
Psykana is rough.
The missions at ATC hurt flyer armies for sure, I agree. But not all formats use progressive objectives every round of play, either which is important to keep in mind.
Very valid. If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a fan of bad match ups. I would love to see the day where all factions are fairly even in terms of power level and army composition determines lopsided match ups. I’m sure we are a long way from seeing that day. That said, check your email homie.
I remember looking over the Chicago Kamikaze lists. As I recall, some of the lists were vulnerable to an alpha strike. If you had the tools, you could table them Turn 1 and those flyers would never see the table. The Elysian drop troops could come in Turn 1 so that list was pretty safe but some of the others weren’t. My team was supposed to play them Round 5 but they’d dropped without informing the judges so we ended up playing a team we’d played earlier who also had an opponent who’d dropped. So we started late and purposely changed our pairing so that everyone had a new opponent. Worked out and everyone had fun. I even had time after the game to go around chatting with friends.
During play testing, I went up against a 12 flyer list and played them to a draw. I scored Progressives, he scored Relic, and we pretty much tied on Kill Points (I didn’t have Skyfire but I did have a lot of dakka). He was smart and killed off my ObSec units early but with a bit tougher ObSec units (larger squads, better cover saves, Invisibility, whatever), a player can win End Game objectives or at least tie them.
I’d have to play more games against mass flyers to test things out but I’ve got tactics for dealing with them. Whether they’re effective or not remains to be seen.
Can Fire raptors normally be in a wing or was this unique to the event?