A couple of excellent questions here and I'll try to answer them all.
jimmyzimms wrote:
I'm with you but the weapons then should be short(er) ranged and why, must I ask, are they so tough then? Should they be all full of Hot MW death? Should any of them even have indirect? Why are they barrage weapons? There's no rule that they HAVE to be that way.
1) Squat War Engines are always going to be big slow chunky boxes. That's always going to the theme and reflected in the rules. And there isn't much dispute with them being like this from either a fluff perspective or a balance perspective. Nobody is asking for Squats to be fragile, fast eldar walkers for example)
2) Why should they be MW barrage death? Well a big 500 point war engine is going to have a decent big gun and the fluff has them sharing a big barrage gun called the Doomsday Cannon that shoots shells the size of rhinos. The rules have them as Quake cannons and it's a reasonable fit.
If you also look into the Squat list then you will notice that that outside the war engines the squats don't really have much shooting at all to speak of - not much long range AT fire, almost zero MW and TK. They really lack the great 'killer' units that other armies have. No teleporting terminator death squads. No Shadowswords, no massed Leman Russ.
So squats certainly deserve to have some sort of decent range weapons on the big War Engines. It's kinda their thing.
And when it all comes out in the wash, the squat war engines are pretty much reavers with more restrictive weapon choices. Sure a Quake Cannon is great against that clump of 4+ Space Marines but sometimes you would kill for some different options like a Plasma Destructor or a Volcano cannon -type shot. But nope, Quake Cannon is all they've got.
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If we're trying to balance some stuff then why do we need a wonky rule to counteract when another preexisting one well understood could probably be leveraged?
3) I once checked all the other main approved lists and apart from Steel Legion, Squats have the *least* number of special rules. Spotter, +1 to rally and halved withdraw (which is a negative). If Tau can have a markerlight rule then surely there exists the space for Squats to have a special rule of their own. And it is less about balance and more about having some 'fun' and 'flavour' in a list that otherwise will play very close to Steel Legion.
But I agree that the way it is written and implement could be less clunky.
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If the goal is to make something that isn't a bit bland then anything should be open and not sacrosant even if that means douching the list. My biggest issue with the history of squat lists is the inability to pull itself away from trying to be SM2 ported to EA stats instead of being it's own thing but with a few nods towards the history.
4) When EA first dropped there were a number of very different fan-made squat lists put up, all of them with wildly different ideas of what Squats should be. None of those lists got anywhere. it wasn't until years later that Moscovian pulled together the idea of a list that would be as close to 'original squats' as possible. and this theme stuck.
It does have a certain amount of respect, in that a squat player can field a full army of 100% legal GW models (here's looking at you dark eldar and other minor races) but it does mean that is has been harder to achieve balance if we were allowing ourselves to invent anything new (I wish that aircraft and spacecraft models existed!)
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Personally they probably work great being proxies for an assault orientated AdMech force but that's just me.
You bite your tongue! At least we have more posts and activity than the Inquisition forums (and gaining ground on the ork section... maybe). Not to mention right now on my desk is a big pile of third-party 6mm models that I am going to create a assault-orientated AdMech army with!
