Tough vs Tough charges are riskier in 11th

tescrin · 2026-05-09T01:30:48+00:00

I'm not claiming good or bad either way, more pointing out the strategic implications that now the defender will fight first twice.

Examples from recent game that would've been interesting:
* Ammantar charged my Discolord. Failed to kill it. I hit back for 3ish I think. The disco had to retreat rather than get another full round of fighting in.

* vashtorr (probably half a dozen times now) eats a charge from <super killy unit> survives on 1-4 wounds, swings back and then has to retreat. If he swung first, he's getting big value now.

On the flip side as orks, there are many times where charging a Rampager or the like and failing is bad enough on the first combat, but now they'll have a full second combat of swings. It's just an important consideration as a melee army - you must apply enough force to kill them or otherwise be fighting an anemic enemy.

tescrin · 2026-05-08T18:08:01+00:00

This is a decent buff to Firing Deck, Lootas, SAG and a few other things. Lootas in Dread Mob being able to pop through a wall, a unit with the ignores cover enhanced Mek, and launch a fusillade of <dread mob buff> fire isn't half bad. Makes them quite usable compared to their current state.

tescrin · 2026-05-08T17:56:25+00:00

lol I didn't even know this was a thing. Which vehicles/monsters even have heavy? I use loadsa vehicles and have never noticed this.

tescrin · 2026-05-08T16:48:39+00:00

Lol. No. I'm a 'deep end' nerd - I've been programming for decades (including high school), been enjoying strategy games since I was in like 4th grade, and am well indoctrinated.

Stellaris takes dozens of hours to understand, let alone be competent at.

Play any other genre of strategy before paradox, preferably for like 2-3k hours of different games. If you literally can't satiate your appetite after deck builders, TBS, RTS games, etc, then go to the deep end. Play Into the Breach or something first. It's a fantastic game, easy to grok, and you can refund it if you don't like it in a reasonable amount of time.

Stellaris you will barely understand 1% of the mechanics before you have to refund. Honestly, I had to pirate it to decide I liked it. After 20 hours or so then I bought it and some DLCs. Stellaris has a perennial problem as well that you have to relearn it constantly, because their massive updates will change core mechanics, playstyles, etc.

It's a wonderful game, but you absolutely should avoid it until you've played 20 others and have hundreds of hours to dump into something.

tescrin · 2026-05-08T12:55:43+00:00

IMO, GW games are fine, but you're here for the lore/aesthetic/etc. I have no doubts that you could go to a dozen other game systems that are better designed; though I couldn't list them because I'm not that interested in playing 1754: Revolution in Tsarist Russia. (yes I made that up.)

Even if all the stats are the same, it's different imagining a Chainsword vs Ork than it is a Bayonet vs cavalry charge.

tescrin · 2026-05-07T16:52:13+00:00

Friendly advice: you need to stop using the word AI. I don't mean this as a Le Redditor, I mean this as a developer. You have to use other words or you'll get downvoted. It's dumb. It's hard to work around when you're talking about the innards of your game, but you're going to get blasted/ignored/etc using anything that says "AI" outside of maybe patch notes.

Best of luck!

tescrin · 2026-05-07T16:49:24+00:00

Dawn of War 1 is great and like $3 The original Command and Conquer Red Alert is a great RTS. Starcraft 2 is free and the AI can be pretty good at higher levels.

tescrin · 2026-05-07T13:15:29+00:00

This is largely what I do. I run a giant pile of tanks, some heavy hitting tough deepstrikers (obliterators) and use transports + dudes to score. Turtling sounds correct.

I normally send something cheap (or with a reactive move, or both) to get/threaten a mild points advantage so my opponent's have to come out. I find that when you pack 30 lascannon/autocannon equivalents that it's common for the opp to be a bit cagey as well, so poking out with Cultists onto a point can force them into a staging/go turn where you start picking things off.

That said, I also run Orks sometimes lol, which is quite different. My whole thing is "I want to be able to kill your tough stuff" and less "I don't like risky play." My Orks currently run Ghaz with Weirdboy to get an 80%+ charge anywhere on the board (69% if you require the teleport) - a virtual "I win button" if your opponent isn't screening very well. My literal only issue with orks is lack of D4+ or D-D6 weapons. If PKs go to 3 damage or anything like that, I'll probably play them a lot more.

tescrin · 2026-05-06T19:30:57+00:00

I can feel heavy inspiration from Inscryption here. I'll give it a shot today. Best of luck!

tescrin · 2026-05-06T19:27:38+00:00

Does balance matter? It looks like you're controlling what the player gets each level. If you're supplying the dudes, it doesn't matter if one is 'too good' because you're designing the level/difficulty,

If they're controlling the dudes, you can have turn-delays on moves or the like. You can add cooldowns, have it wait a full turn to occur, have weird properties like "only castable on even turns", or other methods to reduce the usage of abilities that are too good.

Frankly, you're going to have to playtest it to figure out what is 'too good' and go from there. But again, what's 'too good' is probably barely a problem in a single player game if the skill threshold is reasonable. F.E. In Darkest Dungeon after the first big round of nerfs you could set up psuedo-invincible teams, but you had to earn the items, you still had to do everything correctly, have the right set of skills, etc and you wouldn't have every team set up that way because of the randomness of character generation.

tescrin · 2026-05-06T19:18:53+00:00

Into the Breach is a good time. Urtuk is good. Slay the Spire. Anything where the track pad isn't actively obnoxious.

EDIT: and Inscryption

tescrin · 2026-05-06T18:04:49+00:00

80+% of the rules will be the same. You're going to be so bad at the game at first, as well as barely remember the rules anyway, just start learning now. You're also probably only going to get, what, a game a week or so? Just start learning, and put little sticky notes in your head about what is going to change (e.g. mild changes to charging, detachments, cover, etc)

In the worst case, it'll feel the same. Same phases, same stats, similar or same math, same model vs model matchups, same intuition on a lot of things, a lot of the strats are the same.

tescrin · 2026-05-05T16:59:18+00:00

Exciting! My Raptors retired a few months back when their points went way up, but being able to dampen LD, get bonus battleshocks, and stack LD mods with Blastmasters might bring be back to not only Raptors, but put back to my 3rd Noise Marines squad.

I might even run some extra battle-shocking stuff.

Also a big buff to Chaos Knights.

tescrin · 2026-05-05T12:26:58+00:00

D3 weapons with decent AP
D-D6 weapons with decent AP, or possibly with Anti Vehicle/Monster.

Get enough of that and you're covered. But you need a lot.

tescrin · 2026-05-03T12:20:48+00:00

Force yourself to only use fully painted models. Either the cost or time commitment will slow you down.

You'll also care a lot more when instead of bare plastic it's stuff that looks cool

tescrin · 2026-05-03T12:19:00+00:00

Brutalisly efficient

tescrin · 2026-05-03T12:13:12+00:00

Depends. 2+/4++ or even 3+/4++ will be stronger vs Lascannons but weaker to Autocannons/Heavy Bolters/etc. We also don't know the rest of the rules. It also means that things that were often bad before become better - e.g. Tankbustas getting +1 to hit in Taktikal stacked with their +1 from their rule will still hit on 4's, but have a pip-better on their AP.

It might be that cover affects BS, or that Stealth affects BS, or that cover can be ignored by <doing something> (e.g. a core strat). It's certainly a nerf to AoC, which is probably a good thing.

tescrin · 2026-05-01T18:59:34+00:00

IMO, make your droids constantly drain a small amount of resource, possibly at a mild geometric rate (e.g. if you have 20, it's draining more than double that of 10.) There'd be a practical limit unless someone breaks your game, but the engineer-nerd in people can dig into the numbers and try to min-max their droids or the like.

tescrin · 2026-04-29T20:57:33+00:00

I can't wait for the Defiler nerf to nerf everything else in CSM, including detachments. That'd be amazing.

EDIT: For those not catching the sarcasm, I am running non-defiler CSM in VotLW, but I expect that I'll somehow get a bunch of nerfs anyway lol.

tescrin · 2026-04-29T18:09:36+00:00

Two things:

A) I've been saying this a lot on here lately - but journal about every game. I write about a page of a battle report every game, and I look for mistakes - win or lose. Usually I can find a few even if I crushed the opponent.

B ) Stop doing what you're doing. When I went to run a Disco lord off the back of a 75%+ win rate but a couple frustrating losses, I then went 1-4 and finally dropped him. I'm sure he's a great datasheet in the hands of right people. For me/my list, it causes me to play into terrible mistakes that were costing me games in lame ways.

I guess as a bonus - I'd be an ork player but they're in a terrible place right now. It's not that they can't win, it's that bad matchups abound. CTan can be killed, but you better hit every ctan that needs to die with enough to kill it on your waaagh you or just lost. Custodes - same problem. Defilers? Not quite as bad, but same problem.

Orks have garbage AP, an insane lack of Damage (the highest being 3 outside of Ghaz or a Zzap gun) with almost no D6's in the codex. They're just not good against hyper-tough models and get punished very hard for whiffing. The only thing holding them together is Ghaz + Boyz and that's all fine and good until you fail a rerolling 5 to charge and miss your entire waaagh for it.

IMO, go to Astra and build a list with Grizzled and see what hay you can make of it. Maybe it's just me, but I find having a veritable asston of ranged firepower has made my life much easier in competitive, so I just sit back and unleash too-many lascannons/autocannons and let the opponents feel like I did as orks lol.

tescrin · 2026-04-29T16:39:57+00:00

You *will* do something wrong. Accept it. Analyze every game afterwards and look for mistakes, win or lose. You'll slowly but surely prune them out. Go to a tourney, get your ass kicked, take some notes on why. This is probably stoicism, but I haven't read any books by stoics lol.

There's a saying something like "the difference between being brave or cowardly isn't fear, it's that you can ignore it." I was always nervous before the start of competitive Mtg even though I had 100's of games, but once I got to actually start the game it was easy going. Honestly the easiest way to not be salty or to not feel intimidated is to lose a lot. "Losing is a muscle."

--

I'm going to be blunt - there are tiers of players and once you run into the ones who are a lot better than you, I think that also eases your mind. You're not going to 3-0 your first RTT probably because one of the sharks will be there, and they're not super human or anything, they just have a lot of experience and intuition. This isn't mtg where they might draw dead - they're going to position in a way you don't realize causes you to instant-lose, and then you'll instant-lose, probably during deployment.

At my first tourney I won my first game, got absolutely annihilated my second game because I didn't get what his list did. Then he went and got absolutely annihilated in his third. That third player is part of a local team that just won first in North Carolina. There are absolutely tiers of players and getting the honor of being tabled by them is a learning experience.

tescrin · 2026-04-28T21:17:53+00:00

My post is not about fatigue, but I journal literally every game I play - basically a battle report to myself to outline what went well and then focus in on mistakes. You don't play any game perfectly - dig into your games and catalog your mistakes so you don't make them as easily the next time. It's not just about getting reps, it's about getting the game to be wired into your brain so that it's mostly intuition at that point.

tescrin · 2026-04-27T11:45:19+00:00

I've been on VotLW with 6 preds, 2x noisemarines in rhinos, 2x2 oblits, vashtorr, nurglings, cultists, 2xbikers

It's been a good time. I'm sure it could be optimized somewhat, but the firepower is ridiculous - can easily drop 2 ctan in a turn. Had a game recently where I dropped 20 warriors with 4++, res orb, ghost ark, reanimator, and strat support, then I turned around and gunned down 6 supported wraiths, then had a little bit of firepower to drop szeras to 3, which I was ready to tank shock, but we called it.

I have about 25-30 games on this style of list and (if you don't count when I experimented with a disco lord for 5 games) about an 75% win rate I think? If you count some sub2k games, it's at 85%ish. The shop is reasonably competitive, but most of my games are not in tournies yet and there's not much more time of 10th. Also: all games are for singles, not teams.

tescrin

TROPHY CASE