Aye, but you could still absorb a small swarm that's below half strength, thereby bringing a big swarm above half strength, generating VP's for yourself in a "gamey" manner.

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To my memory, no one has accused the Necron "counts as destroyed" note(s) of being a change to the basic GT victory rules.



Theoretically, yes, you can have a gamey situation.

IF you have a small swarm below half...
AND a big swarm below half, but close enough in numbers to be bumped up by merging...
AND the swarms are close enough physically and in a proper tactical situation to merge...
AND the game goes to points...
AND the points are close enough that the merge/change matters.

Same for BTS - different considerations, but a similar chain of "if, if, if".

The point is that it will need a note.

Personally, I'm fine with explanitory notes, as long as the basic BTS and Tie Breaker rules remain standard.

It does help to balance their ability to regenerate. Regeneration helps them with tiebreak, counting as destroyed when off board hurts them.

I tried to apply that to Onachus' spawning/absorption. Spawning helps them with tiebreak, killing the synapse/absorbing a formation hurts them.

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IIRC 9.2.1 had a very notably high rate of tie breaks.

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10/23 of the Onachus playtests have gone to points.

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That's not a recipie for a balanced, tactically complex wargame.


Which is also a notably high amount.

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Maybe it was because BTS was too hard to achieve when it was based on synapse creatures, so the opponent was working from a pool of 4 VCs instead of 5?

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We could, but I'm sure people would want to see some playtests for that.

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It wasn't all that hard to achieve if your opponent took a balanced army. Warrior swarms tended to nix the chances of taking BTS though.

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Surely this all depends on the circumstances when merging is actually allowed?!

Those who are raising objections seem to be implying there are no restrictions at all to merging.
I do not think this is true; merging may only happen where one of the two swarms is 'uncontrolled' (ie all it's synapses have been killed). At that point, the Nids are 1 swarm down, and the question is whether the remainder of the swarm can be controlled by another swarm or not. Note, this is not the same as brood creatures passing from one swarm to another at the end of the turn.

On victory conditions, I always thought that even if pre-game reorg was allowed, once the game started the number and composition of swarms was known and their initial size could thus be recorded. This means that the Tie-breaker calculations can be performed if needed, and arguably that the 'biggest' formation (or swarm) could be used as the BTS. If a swarm is destroyed, the player counts its value at the start of the game, otherwise he compares the current size against it's starting strength.

Yes it does mean that the Nid player could just possibly do something 'tricky', but as Neal says, this is going to be unlikely because of the concatenation of circumstances required.