Kyrt wrote:
I actually like 3+ tacs, this is what they should be anyway IMO. Cutting the heavy weapons to 1 in 2 is fine too. Though ISTR in 40K 3rd ed they did allow 1 per 5 man subteam, but it was years ago. No idea what the story is now.
Background in 40k 3rd ed. (it's never changed) was 1 heavy weapon per 10. 2nd ed. allowed a player to take a 10 man Tac. squad and split it into 2 x 5 man 'combat squads' on different parts of the battlefield, one of which could have a heavy weapon. 3rd ed. simplified and allowed 5-10 strong Tac. units in the army list, with the explanation that the rest of the squad could have been killed off, or they could have split up into two combat squads and the other half of the squad could be fighting off table on the battlefield nextdoor. That explanation is fine for a squad or two but when a player takes a couple of Tac formations in Epic all 12 stands would have to be half strength squads that have residually ended up with the heavy weapons (or we assume that on the battlefield nextdoor there are 12 more Tac stands that are the other halves of the squads we're fielding that lucked out and carry no heavy weapons at all so that the overall numbers balance) and either stretches credulity to ridiculous levels.
I understand in 3rd ed. Tacs. weren't much good and competitively people took all 5 man squads with both a heavy and special weapon in each. I find it perplexing and crazy that Jervis and the EpicA developers based their Epic stats for Tacs. on the min maxing habits of win at all costs tournaments players when that contravened the background and the rules of the Codex Astartes (that most chapters view as their holy book akin to how a devout Christian might view the bible). Perhaps they thought the background might get changed so that 5 men Tac. squads with a heavy would be allowed? What actually happened though was that GW recognised it as a problem in the army list and fixed it - since the 5th ed SM codex a decade ago you can field a 5-10 model Tac squad but if you want to take a special and heavy weapon you have to field a full 10 man squad.
I'd love to see Tacs be corrected to 1 heavy weapon per two stands in Epic. It would correctly differentiate Dev's as the long range shooting specialists and could be done as a trade with the FF3+ change, but players are so used to the Epic's norm of doing them wrong there'd be resistance.
This thread is making me fancy digging out my marine army and paying some games with them again
There's a perception that ground mechanised SM are un-competitive and that was the case in the original rulebook list and still mostly so with the Epic-UK list but with the various changes and points drops made some years ago to the Net-EA list it can quite viably be run that way.
