gunslinger007 wrote:
I agree that we should be looking into how to make the terminators a more viable unit, but I think we need to try and limit the number of unique rules or upgrades. I know that just as a general rule of thumb, the EC tries to limit rules like that. I think your concern about this "breaking" demon summoning is well placed. Additionally, essentially making the formation require the upgrade and bumping it up to 500 keeps the same pro in place of them being very expensive.
Aye. And for a 'normal' list (i.e. not something exotic like Necrons) it already has:
Implacable Advance,
Plague Zombies arriving via planetary bombardment,
Invulnerable Saves on almost all AV,
Fearless on the majority of units,
Nurgle's Rot as a formation rule on three units (Pestilent Slime Trail on the Beasts is getting dropped),
'Grot-plus' rule on the Nurgling Swarms.
All in addition to the standard Black Legion rules for Daemons.
The points cost I'm not
too concerned about as there's plenty of scope to upgun the basic statline to justify it, as long as the formation itself isn't so binary when it comes to breaking.
gunslinger007 wrote:
Not that this idea, or other like it, should be written off. Just that we should try and exhaust manipulating existing rules/points as you mentioned. We may also find that these do just balance out as expensive terminators and they need to summon demons the traditional way to beef up. Their stat line is pretty intimidating!
Thanks for all your work on this. I'm sure it's tough to find the exact balance between playability and fluff.
Thanks! However I'm finding that there's limited design space left, given the constraints of Fearless.
atension wrote:
Now you are on to something! I really like that idea of having the terminators teleporting in with deamons attached. It would be very fluffy for them to be swarms (like you said because of Typhus) (also excited because I actually have Typhus as my terminator lord). Terminators with swarms attached would be not bad but maybe ditch the part where they don't count to size of the formation.
Make the terminators:
425pts with icon and focus included and deploy with D3+1 swarms.
An Icon Bearer is already 25pt and an upgrade slot, so 425pt would be on the cheap end.
atension wrote:
Swarms will die easy as the are suppose to but it gives them more size and they can then summon more deamons later.
The other idea so you don't break the summoning rules would be to make the swarms not summonable deamons and just regular units attached to the formation.
Hmm, thinking about this more gives me another idea that's arguably easier to explain and less of an exception:
After teleporting, an unbroken Death Guard Terminator formation may summon daemons as if they were about to activate, but limited to Nurgling Swarms. This takes the place of their usual pre-activation summoning for the turn. The formation must have Daemonic Pact.It's much closer to the normal rules in that it's 'just' moving the timing of the summon. On the other hand it may well turn out to be
too powerful and/or simply not fun to play against - a fully tooled up formation with Chaos Champion and a big enough Daemon Pool could potentially arrive with twelve Nurgling Swarms surrounding them.
Albeit at a cost of 700-odd points...
I think it would also require backing off on the quantity of Firefight Extra Attacks available to the formation as they'll happily throw a pile of Nurglings into base contact and know that they're likely to win the combat purely off massed Firefight dice.