I would almost never shoot at russ companies with marines other than to prep an air assault... Sounds like you're playing to the marine's weakness there really.

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Ya I have to agree here, Russ companys are a marines weakness. But at the same time other armies lol at russ's since they can bring what you need to go head to head with them. With marines it's surgical strikes ftw, but you can't use a scapul to dismantle a brick $hit house.

Yep this thread is about artillery companies, not russes

Hopefully they could break 1 formation per turn. They certainly won't be destroying huge amounts because artillery have mediocre to hit rolls and no MW. They are vulnerable to counter artillery, especially with their poor armour; if you spread out to minimise the risk 4 sentinels probably isn't enough. They are a juicy target for aircraft, and one hydra probably isn't deterrent enough so really you need a battery. That's ~950/1000 points sitting far away from the objectives.

When you can save 250 points with little or no drop in performance by taking 2 batteries and one fewer scout formation, it's tough to justify.

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Curis makes very good points: and with 2 Batteries you can happily take Manticores in both: then you get the joys of Disrupt and quite a lot of flexibility in how you spread yr 6bp of fire power each turn:
-firing off all 6bp gives: an extra blast marker, 2 templace
-firing off 4bp gives an extra template and leaves a token 2bp for next turn
-Or firing off 3bp each turn gives a steady stream of relatively OK AP/AT shots across the board.
When I take two batteries I usually stick one in each corner of my deployment zone so as they have to be targeted seperately.


RUSSES!
Sorry to disagree Dobby but most people I know would take a Reaver over a LR company any day I reckon: easier to get into cover, loses firepower a lot less quickly (if at all due to being WE), MAYBE more durable due to firepower.

A LR company is usually your BTS as wel so once again the reaver wins the day. The only thing you get better out of a LR Comp is a shed load of Heavy Bolters and 15cm extra range on the Battlecannons.

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I'm not sold on dropping the artillery price jsut because I don't think it will make a difference unless you go ridiculously low. Even at 500 2 batteries are still a better pick, especially when you consider that on top of the cost of the company you will then need to spend a couple of hundered points more on AA/scouts/OW units to protect them - and even then they will probably get targetted and destroyed pretty easily.

IMO they are a big game and scenario formation.

Regarding Russ Co, like SM, I think their results are skewed by new players often bringing them. IIRC steel legion won 3 tournaments last year 2 of which were won by armies containing a Russ Co.
A price drop would make them easier to use as it would reduce the activations lost by taking them but I'm not sure its strictly necessary.

They are a unit which if you allow it to do what it want (sustaining, single move+shoot) they are deadly but using BMs to try and stop them activating+reduce firepower, speed to make them have to double or not get all their guns in range and just targetting the rest of the army (like against an army with a big titan) tend to limit them unless the other player uses them well. Eldar, SM +tau seem particularily good agianst them.

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If arty companies aren't as useful at 500pts as two arty platoons (and I don't actually disagree, i guess) then I see no reason not to drop their points to 575 or so at the least, and maybe drop them even further in future years.

Another point against them is that they must certainly be the easiest BTS to kill in the game.

Russ companies aren't quite as pants but they're still not worth 650 IMO.

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I have no opinion on the points as I don't have the experience to bring to the table but......



If you compare company vs platoon and the platoon option wins out then is it worth asking the question "is the cost of the arty platoon too low?"

If you are going to change the value of Unit A because of a comparison vs Unit B, then the cost of Unit B should be justified to give an accurate baseline of comparison. This may have been done in the past and the platoon points agreed by all, I don't know just asking the question

Arty platoons are generally regarded as ok. With bombard platoons as slightly sub-par.

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I can see what you are saying Steve in that there can be formations which do not have a points value that you would take them at before they become undercosted for bigger games, but IMO that mainly applies to formations who are too niche, or whose downside is purely that they are expensive. That is, they can't be taken due to activation count, BTS issues etc. The problem with the artillery co isn't just the fact that it is an expensive formation, it's also that the formation's power is dependent on the barrage table, which does not scale in power linearly.

If SHT companies get a 1/6 discount over 3 platoons, artillery companies should get a bigger discount. They suffer the same issues (trading 3 activations for 1), but also have the "diminishing barrage returns" issue. Even just a 1/5 discount over 3 batteries puts the company at 600 points. I'm not sure it's possible to justify the current situation, that artillery companies get a smaller relative discount for combining 3 batteries than SHTs do.

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I agree. The idea that arty companies are useful in bigger games i believe is flawed... They're even easier to kill once the points level goes up IMO than they are at 3k (as you tend to have more specialist deep strike or air assault toys and arty companies have rubbish armour and poor FF/CC abilities), and they're *still* likely to be the BTS.

They're just overpriced, perhaps by as much as 150pts, as suggested above... Which would not be as dramatic a reduction in points as the Marauder Bomber squadron has had (50% price drop).

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I think they suffer in big games too, it's difficult to blat more than one unit a turn with an arty company, and like E&C says, they're less defensible (my arty company was wiped off the board by hordes of tunnelling nids in short order at the xmas big game....)

it's a difficult one to balance IMO, right now they're too much of a target, but reduce the points too much and they're potentially game breaking....

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Are they really game breaking?
As noted above they put out about the same firepower as two arty platoons, hardly the most destructive force imaginable.

Compare to an Ork Gargant for example, which puts out better BP attacks for the same price and is also hard as nails!

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You can't do 3BP/3BP as a split.

Unlike the Warhound plasma weapons or other slow fire weapons with multiple shots, the Manticore has one weapon with shot at 2BP. It would need to be 2xweapon or the weapon would need to be 2x1BP to allow splitting the slow fire.

I thought the BP table was a little better at high numbers, but yeah, 2 manticore batteries puts out one more template for the cost of 2 extra blast markers.....

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I think that one danger here is using the comments of a group of very experienced gamers as a basis for the determination of a set of point costs. :-)

You all have played the game extensively and have deep experience playing the game and that leads you to question costs in a way that less experienced players won't.

If you want to test out point cost changes why not do it in the Epic UK tournament lists. Since a lot of this feedback seems to be from tournament games why not change that first?