I don't play AMTL and haven't played against them either. I've been following this debate none the less. Have the potential to come up against the list. It's also a interesting debate. Anyway I mean I am only theorizing below.

I think Armigers proposal is the best idea I've heard so far. MW barrages are really powerful and with indirect fire becomes a lot more so. It sounds rather boring to face a titan with a 6-9BP MW, range 180 cm, indirect barrage. Most armies will have a very hard time taking such a beast out and I can't really make it any less effective without actually destroying it (since WE don't loose power with damage).

I think people will still want to play quake cannon titans, because like I said MW barrage is really powerful. Not having IF will force these titans to be more mobile though. I think it's also an incentive to not take an all quake cannon titan.

just my 0.02$

carry on…

Question: Has there been a demonstrable need shown for AMTL to do this? I believe this was the same argument used to justify leaving the Minorus coy as the Skitarii version of the Arty Titan and part of the reason why we added the avengers.



Yes, but all of those armies I believe have some level of risk invoiced in threatening remote corners of the battlefield. Armies with air assault capabilities can be shot down and assaults can fail leaving the attackers easily wiped out. Planetfall requires (most of the time) a spacecraft which is pretty useless after it shows up. Teleporters are usually small in number and don't always get to activate before they can be engaged. Artillery is usually thin skinned and easily shut down, short ranged, or slow firing.

With Titans, the CLP allows them far more flexibility in engagement and force projection with very little risk outside of failing to activate. What exactly is the downside to an arty titan and what risk do you even have in engaging most anything on the table?

Is the Arty titan really necessary or just easiest?

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-Vaaish

So what do ou think about Armiger84:s idea Vaaish? I like it!

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"You have a right to be offended" - Steve Hughes
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I think disrupt would be less invasive than ignore cover. The quake cannon had ignore cover at one point and it was removed. I'd hate to see it become a MW, Ignore Cover template monster again.

Questions to answer:

1. If the AML changes to 3pb, Indirect Fire, is that enough of a boost or should we change it to 4bp same as eUK list?

2. What are the use cases that make the new CLP worth taking if it allows disrupt on any one weapon?

3. If (2) has no good uses, then should the weapon allow disrupt on ALL of the titans weapons. I can see this making some high fire volume titans become breakers using the GB.

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-Vaaish

I'm trying to post, dang it... stop typing so I can post without the forum telling me someone else has already posted!

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-Vaaish

I'm assuming you are leaning toward giving it ignore cover since the barrage missile already comes with disrupt?

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-Vaaish

I still think that Indirrect Quake cannon warlords are not a problem. I still believe that having a viable Blitzguard is not something that should be removed from the AMTL list
most lists have plenty of viable defensive options that can either still contribute throughout the game (artillery, heavy tank companies, other ranged warmachines) or can hide and reclaim (bikes/speeders, singleuse units like deathstrikes) or just have weight of numbers (infantry companies, ork mobs)
Now, yes, none of those combine the resilience and force projection of a warlord titan with 3 quakes and a CLP, but they also don't cost 1000 points. they have multiple cheap options, allowing for redundancy and flexibility.
AMTL have titans. Expensive units that need to be making use of as much of their weaponry as they can every turn in order not to get overwhelmed. saying to the AMTL player "well you can either place your objectives in an exposed area and get your guard shot to pieces, or you can keep it more safe but be useless" is not a fair trade when the cheapest option they have is more expensive than most every other list.

making a quake warlord unable to fulfil its function harms the list, and if nothing else, if you really dont care about what your players tell you they want, rendering 1/3rd of the army (and an entire swathe of strategies) utterly invalid also renders virtually every battle report submitted thus far useless. the CLP change is a HUGE one, it's not a minor thing that wont even need new battle reports to reach approved status, it's a change that effectively puts the AMTL list back to experimental status (you know, the level where "Players should be aware that models they collect for these lists might not be usable when it is approved.")

If you want to change the list in such a fundamental way, atleast have the guts to do what E&C wanted to do, bring a second list with all your various balancings, and use it (or better yet, just use the eUK list and leave the NetEA one seperate)
Making this change will set back the development of the AMTL list in multiple ways, and is not, as demonstrated, popular with your player base.


that said, here is yet another idea about how to limit without completely prisonshanking the CLP situation:

change it so that the CLP provides a LOS adjustment. not Indirrect, but just a new vector for LOS.
simplest way would be to select a single point on the battlefield and allow LOS to be drawn from this. this represents the classic speeder, or drones, or satellite relays, or whatever you wish. It also means that the range of the weapon is not doubled (so a quake-warlord might have to move in order to be in range, even if not in LOS) and doesnt force a sustain playstyle (so there's less disincentive to move aswell)
you remove the awkward formation and ability to shootdown a speeder problems, while still providing a valid force projection option for the AMTL. the Arty titan is encouraged to move, and is secure knowing that it can if need be move back to defend objectives it left behind, and by dropping its range it no longer has any option to stand in a corner and shoot most of the table away.

Another option would be to change it so that the CLP allows you to draw LOS from any other titan, or maybe just any other scout titan. Again, no indirrect means no requirement to stand still, and less range benefits mean less total board control. It also has the advantage of meaning that other titans need to be in the line of fire, and Scout titans might actually be used in a Scout role.

Generally, because we more often use a TLOS method here, I find I use the range benefit of the CLP more than the LOS ability, so losing that would be a serious blow, so much so that I'm not sure I like the change I just proposed. But I'd certainly prefer it to the one you're running with. Maybe allow the CLP to provide the LOS option, or increased range, but not both at once would be a sufficient option

Personally, I don't think the quake warlord needs to be nerfed, you spend a LOT of points on a formation that relies on a sustain activation to function (meaning it is very easily disrupted by scouts) and is relatively capable of being broken (a warlord is more survivable, but is in many ways easier to break than a marine tactical company)

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~Every Tool Is A Weapon, If You Hold It Right~

It's a problem when it forms the cornerstone of nearly every AMTL report and promotes an unfluffy play style. The point here isn't to remove the blitzguard. In fact, you could post any titan or formation to do that. The point is to make it so the blitzguard isn't also toasting formations from across the board with little anyone can do to counter it. Heck, I've seen 2 squads of termies teleport in, support an air assault, retain and engage a warlord and watch the warlord walk away on multiple occasions.




I think your over reacting here more than a little. The quake warlord is one configuration of titan amid hundreds if not thousands. It's also a configuration that promotes ONE single strategy, though I'd be interested in hearing the entire swathe of strategies invalidated by the change. Making that one style of titan less desirable doesn't make every other titan less useful or less capable but it does make you play differently.



Please, enough with the hyperbole. It's not setting back development; the list has been nearly static for almost three years, it's not killing balance; it's forcing you to try something new, and sometimes unpopular changes have to be made for the sake of progress. You've been around long enough to see that the forums and list development tends to gravitate toward the status quo. Lastly, I offered the community a choice between working to approve the current list and then working on a better titan list or dropping the current list and building a new titan list now. They wanted to see this approved first, so with that said we are going to see what we can do to approve this list, but it's going to be a list that doesn't rely on artillery titans.



This idea interests me, especially drawing LOS from scout titans. Partly because they are supposed to scout and nothing really shows that in the game, and partly because they have more things that block LOS than other battle titans, and partly because scout titans are well within the grasp of most armies to take out and provide a weak link a player can concentrate on to counter an arty titan.

The part that I'm not too keen on is that it still promotes the arty titan. Most people still take warhounds and while it does limit where you can attack somewhat, it doesn't move the list away from the static play style.

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-Vaaish

Ah. I'd missed the part where the barrage missile already came with Disrupt. I figured that changing the AML to 3 BP, IF, the Disrupt would drop back off of it. I'd be hesitant to put a 4th point of BP on the AML in that situation (like it had in an early, early AMTL list), if only because that would give you a Reaver with potentially a 120cm 12 BP (IF) barrage, which, MW/Disrupt or no, would still generate one hell of an impressive kill zone.

My thinking was, if the AML becomes the sole Indirect Fire barrage weapon, what buff could the CLP provide weapons systems on the titan to (A) keep it simple, and (B) provide a useful buff without being horribly over the top? Disrupt and Ignore Cover became the obvious weapon augmentations. Ignore Cover could sort of work to represent a drone pinpointing an otherwise-obscured target for pinpoint fire, just as much as it could represent a weapon so powerful as to completely ignore cover (Bombards). IC as a single-weapon buff could be powerful for a (six-shot) gatling blaster for clearing infantry out of cover, or for a plasma destructor or volcano cannon against an obscured armored target (hull-down super heavies? another titan in a city fight?).

Between Vortex Missiles (ignore cover), and Barrage Missiles (Disrupt), one of the missile options is going to benefit less than fully from the CLP, but as a stat buffer, it can't be expected to synergize perfectly with all weapons systems anyhow. Disrupt would cause one obvious problem: should it be applicable to close combat/firefight attacks as well?

I'd be fine with either buff on the CLP; I was just offering the two I figured might best fit the idea of the CLP launching a scouting land speeder/drone aircraft. I've been personally going back and forth on whether the CLP in this form ought to buff one weapon system per turn or all weapons. Granting Disrupt to all of a titan's weapons could quickly get messy, as could granting Ignore Cover to the other three Quake Cannons on a Warlord

Balancing that would be...fun. As a point of comparison, the "fire control center" on the Warmonger only allows that titan to re-roll ONE miss per turn.

It's an idea. Definitely not saying it's the best one out there and I'm certainly trying on my own to suss out what the most horrible unintended consequences of using either option would be.

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I believe that when people responded to the idea of "approve this list, then build a new one" they thought you meant "approve this list" not "change this list to represent something else, approve it, then build another one that also represents something else"

artillery titans are not unfluffy, they're just not as commonly written about as the other kind (in much the same way as stories about imperial guard artillery regiments aren't unfluffy just because people prefer to write about regular infantry and heroic commissars.

artillery titans have been a part of the game since Adeptus Titanicus (where another titan in the army would act as Line Of Sight, thanks to a piece of equipment called a Relay. this was when no other Indirect fire rules existed btw)
Likewise, titans that Stood Their Ground have been a part of the game and fluff since they first existed. The fact that stories tend to focus on the "striding about shooting everyone" style of titan is no more to the point than the fact that stories of Space Marines are about assault marines and tacticals, and not devastators and whirlwind crew.

Once you stop an artillery titan from being a viable build (and that is the goal here, to stop people taking an entire class of titan, so that all they've got left is a "rush at the enemy" type or a "rush at the enemy a bit slower while shooting" type.) then one titan per army will become relatively useless. It will be forced to guard the blitz, because you simply cannot afford to ignore that, and it will be easily ignored by the enemy, because it will be relatively useless. Unless you plan on reducing the price of all titans to compensate for the loss of either a titan or a victory condition, thats not a minor change.

Any strategy, any battle plan which relies on artillery, be it to prep assaults, shatter broken formations, act as counter-battery, or to act as a first strike to eliminate high value threats, will become non-viable once the arty titan is gone. There may be instances where the strategy will still work, but those will be the exception, not the rule, and they wont be able to function reliably enough to be taken in an "all comers" list.

Without an Arty Titan, the AMTL list is not a particularly good one. It will, infact, become more stagnant and likely to hunker down. I don't play for draws (again, if there's a problem there, fix that, not some side effect) but if my only option for a blitzguard is a reaver who hides away and stays on overwatch, I'm more likely to hang back and avoid sending out my other titans now they're unsupported. meanwhile, I've stopped taking warlords (because my blitz guard should be my BTS, since it's the one I will try hardest to keep safe, if that means it cannot also contribute to the battle, I'm better off having it be as cheap as possible, which means all my formations must be cheaper, which means no more warlords at all) and now my "win" strategy is to take as many cheap shots as i can while keeping everything alive, and deny the enemy objectives, and win by attrition (for the record "win by attrition" is absolutely a fluffy method of fighting for titans, though not a particularly fun one for or against, on the table)

If you dont like the way AMTL tend to do well on draws (again, dont think they do as much as some people say, but it could do with tweaking) find a different way to do it.
the "cant take objectives" one is counterintuitive, and forces a mixed playstyle, or more likely, a deny and win on VP style
how about something like what I did for the tyranid Biotitan list. Count any titan on the AMTL side of the table as one stage down on the "undamaged/broken-halfhealth/destroyed chart for VP
so, for a warlord on the blitz, all you need to do to count it as destroyed, is have it end the game at half health, or broken (much easier to do)

I've played with my Biotitan list (which is a much more aggressive titan list to begin with) and while I take an artillery titan there, I usually try to make it a cheap one, and I certainly move everything else up the table (and infact, if i think I can do so, I'll move my arty titan up too, incase I need to move across the line. of course, in that list I also have teleporting spore-mines to protect my blitz on the last turn if i need to)

That would solve the "stays static and plays for draws" playstyle, while still allowing an arty titan and a reasonable feel for the AMTL player. it also would make them much easier to beat.
combine that with one of my "allow some portion of indirect fire while moving" as a CLP upgrade, and you've got a titan list that doesnt play for draws very well, has to worry about being outmaneuvered or stalled, but maintains all titan builds, and I would imagine, keeps everyone happier than the one you've proposed.

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That's a bit misleading. The relay only applied to single shot support missiles. That's quite different than the arty titans we're talking about. Support missiles were carapace only weapons too.

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-Vaaish

so you could only have 4 per titan...

point is, the very first instance of any indirect fire in the game was a titan on first fire (ie: stand still and shoot)

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~Every Tool Is A Weapon, If You Hold It Right~

And how often did folks load up on support missiles to relay around the table? Availability doesn't necessarily make it the go to choice every game. Regardless, we are taking two entirely different sets of circumstances; AT is a different beast than EA.

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-Vaaish

Yes, but it proves that fluffwise, support titans were always a component of the game. and a 4 support missile titan was the AM equivalent of a deathstrike battery. great for obliterating an enemy titan that got incautious.

Any thoughts on my alternate suggestions? "Fixing" (in the way one might fix a cat) the CLP will not solve the static playstyle. You need to encourage movement by making movement suck less (allow CLP to function while moving) while providing disencentives to play for points (the "anything not across the centre" really does push titans across the table. the "stand on blitz, then stand another one on as many other objectives as possible, aim for a draw, win on points" strategy is completely undermined by this rule. it's possible to do, but its far from easy, and certainly not a good "fallback" position.

I've used it in testing on Splinter Fleet Rusalka, and the nids cannot afford that strategy. a half strength or broken titan on your side of the table counting as destroyed is a serious concern when those titans are comparatively cheap ones. a quakelord that gets broken is a huge risk to the AMTL player, especially if they're the blitzguard. Combine that with an incentive to keep moving (SFR has that built into the fact that they're nids with big claws and scary teeth, the CLP mobility thing) and you have a list that can still play however the person feels is best, but can no longer rely on the fallback of locking down their objectives and riding out a draw.
It solves the actual problem with the playstyle, which is that its "easy" for an AMTL to force a draw, where its survivability will encourage a victory. now thats no longer true. they can still force a draw, but they'll have a much harder time winning if they do.

in situations when the enemy can slow the titan advance and pin them back on their side of the table, the titans cannot afford to go to VP considerations, as they'll lose utterly. the choice to even take a titan to guard the blitz becomes harder at that point. I've played using that rule, and I really think that using it in conjuction with an improved but slightly refocused CLP would solve your stated problems (unless the actual problem is "I hate Quake Cannons") without invalidating peoples titans, experiences, and general feel of the AMTL list.

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~Every Tool Is A Weapon, If You Hold It Right~

Wow, alot of good suggestions in this thread! Both from JTG and Armiger84. Maybe this can lead to a better way of solving the (for one person) problem for us players.

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"You have a right to be offended" - Steve Hughes
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