Yup agreed. I don't think anyone is saying no to that, just that someone (the person asking ideally) should probably step up and take that on, that's all.


Considering that PDF=> Word converters abound and that the unit data is available freely from Miniwars API (correct me if I'm wrong elsmore) this is a noble but less than even tertiary goal atm. It's probably just easier for the sub-ACs to provide a link to the damn word documents they probably used in the first place

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LoL - Fortis, please don't take the above as a personal criticism, but rather a statement of why it is both difficult and undesirable to do what you are advocating on a formally approved level. This does not mean you should abandon all hope, As Kyrt and Jimmy agree, there are alternatives and you should also create your own 'house' lists including the relevant units.

And please, please both read up the "Beyond the Green River" campaign, where any and all of the units you both mention could be included for a huge variety of reasons. Indeed you might even set up your own campaign . . .

The unit data is available from miniwars if you know how, which is not really the same as an API (a documented API is what I'd like to see but didn't want to get technical ). However if you think about what someone would actually need to create a new list, it's not just the miniwars data for units but also the structure of the list, in an understandable form someone can edit, add new units to, and the code to convert all that data to a formatted list. So far we don't know what Dave's tool for building the TP/ALC looks like but it could prove to make this sort of thing much easier to do, but the will to make it an "open system" and easy for non technical people to use has to be there.

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I was more calling into question why units that have been shown to be perfectly well balanced as units, formations and overall haven't been added into the core lists.

Do you guys really think the base lists are internally and externally balanced? I mean, they're not bad, but they are so prestine and perfect that changing them in any way will destroy a delicately balanced system. They're merely "good enough". For example have you ever seen more than one predator formation across from you and thought anything other than "great". Stuff like the Crusaders making the Landing Craft lists slightly better don't seem to be a huge problem, those combos are in other lists and they aren't destroying the game.

I just think there's some utility especially for new players in being able to say "here is the base list, it has all the models in it that you'd like to play with, you can look at the other theme lists if you want but you don't have to just to play with those fancy nice land raider crusaders". Making new players trudge through 10+ theme lists to find a list that has the unit they want to use just to find it has some other assenine restriction on it for the theme of the list (which they don't even care about because they aren't even playing that chapter/craftworld, they just want to use their pretty new unit) just doesn't make much sense to me, when the formations and units are more or less balanced.

I understand why you guys are saying this, but it seems like a lot of groupthink and dog whistling. I get that there is a utility to having a set of control lists for testing is good but I don't think they should be treated as sacrosanct and never to be updated. I just wanted to encourage a bit of reflection and consideration of *why* the lists haven't been updated and to cause the community to consider if this is a good thing for the game both in it's established playerbase and the new players and if this is causing a barrier to entry due to list bloat. In my view it is.

This was already answered above - the lists are possibly a bit 'clunky' but they work. E:A abstracts details to a 'summary' level where many variants look and work in similar ways, though may have dissimilar 40K stats. The "core" lists definitely *are* balanced both internally and externally - and we have the statistics to prove it, built up over many games. If you are interested, check out the championship thread on E-UK, which lists every army used in all of the tournaments back to 2006.

And yes, we are very cautious about changing the 'core' lists as they are the yardstick against which other lists are ultimately measured. Think of it a bit like changing from Imperial measurement (feet and inches) to Metric (meters and centimetres). In your terms these are both measurements of length and volume etc, so ought to be interchangeable. However more than one aircraft has had a major emergency caused by planning flights using imperial terms, but filling up with that number of metric units.

If you guys added a new column in your database for each armylist and unit entry called "available to" and used it to add if a particular entry is available to for example: "Cadian | Minervan | Baran" it would make it very, very easy to create updated collated lists. And postfixed the entries where there are duplicates with similar names but different rules, stats or point cost with the army name: For example:
Tactical Marines (IF)
Tactical Marines (White Scars).
Those small changes would make it very easy to collate the list.

Alternatively one can do copy paste work but then every time an army list is updated all that copy paste will need to be done again. Which is many hours of work as opposed to a couple of clicks with a mouse.

I hope you guys will consider that.

The core lists should not have new units added to them in my view. If players want to put together their own fan based lists to share among themselves, then that's a matter for them, but such lists should not be included alongside the official or experimental lists here, there are too many army lists as things stand, the last thing we need is more of them in my opinion.

One of the arguments put forward in favour of new units seems to be that it would attract more 40K players. I've yet to see any convincing evidence to back this up. What attracts more players from across the gaming spectrum is clarity. If a new players know which lists are official, which aren't, and which lists they should be using for where they want to play their army, then that is what matters. The lines often get blurred by discussions such as this, and it's confusing. Ideally, there should be one list for every army (or variant if you want to classify chapters and craftworlds as variants), but even then there are fan based variants or lists for those which never existed as separate lists in previous GW supported editions of the game. If you then add variants on top of variants to accommodate new models from 40K is just becomes silly in my opinion.

I will also never understand why there's need to emulate 40K. If there are new vehicles or units in 40K why does Epic automatically have to include them? What are they adding? How will their rules be distinctive yet well balanced enough (internally and externally) to justify their inclusion? What role could they fulfil in the existing lists which isn't already covered by another unit? Epic takes abstraction to a higher level than 40K, so these are important questions which have to be answered. 'Because I like unit x' isn't a good enough answer when it comes to adding units to existing army lists.

Finally, the core lists, as others have stated, are well balanced. Tinkering with them is not a good idea at all in my view.

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