Never Metagame I didn't like.

One of the mods asked me about doing some articles. Here is one about Warhammer 40k in general that was originally intended as a discussion starter for another site but then I withheld it because someone else brought this up first. I also have one about a different subject, and more Dark Eldar specific, but this is already complete so I figured I'd drop it here and get some feedback:
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Metagame, like most of the best English words, has Greek roots. Meta- is a specific kind of Super- if anyone has taken any German, Meta = Über. Supra- is the Latin version. It means "above and beyond" or "transcendent." A metagame, then, is the game beyond the game, or gaming the system. We metagame when we realize that half the armies have 3+ on their basic troops, and that the difference between AP4 and AP3 is more important than AP3 and AP2. We metagame when we realize pretty much everyone's staple anti-infantry guns are AP5, and so 4+ armor is a big improvement over 5+, and that Genestealers losing a point of armor save wouldn't be such a huge nerf if they'd been 5+ armor or 3+ armor to begin with.

Anticipating what other people in your local area will bring is tailoring, which is a kind of cheating. You have an unfair and unsportsmanlike advantage over non-local players; how could they know the only person who owns a Librarian is stuck going to his Sister-in-Law's wedding that weekend, and that an Autarch would be way better than a Farseer with Runes of Warding? Or maybe you are the lone Eldar player among all Marine players with Psykers, and you know everyone is an idiot who wastes points on Epistolary - when I show up and destroy your tailored anti-psyker Eldar/GK with IG/Dark Eldar and I have no psykers, just tons of Poison, Melta, and Plasma shots, it backfires horribly. This is not metagaming.

"But Agahnim," you respond, "what's the point of playing like I'm at a tournament? I know these chuckleheads, and my list may not be balanced, but I can handle some newcomer fine and dandy. If they're that much better, I'm fine losing that one time." Very well, I can't make everyone super-competitive and ambitious, as exciting as it would be; I call people names and mock them for insisting things are competitive when they really aren't, not for acknowledging and accepting that certain units unilaterally suck but they will take them and try their best anyway - the former is self-delusion, the latter does not deserve half the hate it gets on the Sea of eStupidity.

Think of a list like a martial arts stance. If it's balanced, no strong, uneven force concentrated on one specific area can knock the martial artist over. The skilled fighter with a balanced stance will even use the unbalanced force of their opponent in some sort of Aikido move or Fencing riposte. Likewise, if a list is truly balanced, it will demolish what is on the board before the flyers come in, or eliminate the foot list's mobility and anti-tank and then use cheap vehicles to barricade it, etc.

As for what works locally - I've been at this since 10th grade. 9 out of 10 times the best player in a game store or GW outlet is the one who is best able to play the missions, and to know when to stop killing their opponent and focus on winning the game. Rarely does their list factor in, and if it does it's because the sort of person who figures out that this is a game like any other and not a man-dolly deathmatch is the sort to enjoy playing more than hobbying, as a gross generalization. I would stake money on this claim, if I could: 90% of the local superstars are simply the people who focus on the mission objectives every game. That's why I come down so hard on Dark Eldar troops - not because I don't love the army, but because having badass Elites, Fast Attack, and Heavy Support only gets us so far.

Nice article. A particularly like the comparison of a balanced list to a martial arts stance - a very poetic analogy. I also agree entirely with the sentiments of your last paragraph. I particularly remember one objective-based game in 5th where my opponent threw away his victory by moving his scoring unit off the objective in an attempt to wipe out my army. Thing was, I had already lost all of my scoring units, so that move in turn 5 turned my loss into a 0-0 draw.

I do think this statement is overly harsh though:

Quote :

Anticipating what other people in your local area will bring is tailoring, which is a kind of cheating.

There are many ways to play the game, and one of the joys against a known opponent can be both trying to tailor your lists to beat the other, whilst already knowing what models he's got and how he likes to play.

There is alot of truth here. My one problem with it all goes with "what is considered list tailoring?"

Consider this. I roll into my local game store. I know that we dont have that many marine players there (I know... shocking). Being the Super Special Awesome Archon that I am already have lists made to play. I try to balance my force as much as possible. Even though I can almost bet that I wont be playing against a MEQ army, I still prepare to fight them as well as any other codex.

Now take Joe here. Joe is one of those hobbiest players, which means he rather hobby than game. He comes in right after me to do some hobby work and sit around and soak in the atmosphere., and I ask him for a game. Joe hasnt played in awhile, and wouldnt mind getting in a game. Sadly he has no army list off the top of his head, and has to write one. He says "sure, what army do you play?" I tell him Dark Eldar. Now Joe has probably seen me playing DE around the shop, and knows I run a basic variation of venomspam, and he knows the tropes of DE. Glass Cannon that cant take a hit. So he goes loads everything in a transport and loads up his autocannons on his Hydras.

We then go to start the game, and I hand him a copy of my list. Its a WWP list with no transports, and everything is T4-7 except for the harlies, who have a 2+ coversave. Not a tank in site. Now those Hydras are a useless, and he is going to have a hard time to pull me off of objectives. His list tailoring backfired.

Basically my problem with what people call "list tailoring" is we all do it, we just dont know it. When you write up a list, you go through the normal tropes of each army and compare how it will do. Fighting marines??? well they have alot of 3+ armorsaves. Fighting guard??? Once you pop open their transports, they fold quickly. Fighting Orks??? Normally high volume of bodies, or lower number of super durable units.

These quirks in each army is what defines them, and is how we see each army. But there are ways out of these tropes that can throw a person off balance. Running Foot Guard or a SM Bike List are two good examples. These come unexpected and can deal great damage due to it.

My basic point is what some people claim is list tailoring, is nothing more than being prepared. You try to prepare for as much as you can, that is how you win.

"He says "sure, what army do you play?" I tell him Dark Eldar."

You answered, and enabled him.

What if you were that guy who has 7 different unpainted armies lying in cases scattered around the store, and you said you were playing Blood Angels? Maybe you are "being prepared" and lying maliciously to gain an advantage. Maybe you changed your mind. Maybe someone took your Blood Angels home by accident. If he tailors to play Blood Angels, it's a kind of cheating. It's not to the degree of malice and evil as lying about dice, but it is a kind of cheating. Any kind of advantage not gained through combining the rules in the books is cheating by definition, malicious or not.

If I jaywalk I'm breaking the law. I mean, come on, jaywalking. But it is breaking the law.
http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/b0k5ni/stand-up-hannibal-buress---jaywalking-ticket

In the same regard, tailoring is cheating - it's not breaking any rules, it's not intentionally lying about anything, but it is gaming the system and can give someone an unfair advantage. In your example it was you - you had an unfair advantage by their decision to build an unbalanced list designed to beat a threat that wasn't there to the degree they expected. It's the same as if you put all the LoS blocking terrain/cover on one side of the board and a couple shrubs on the other, they win the roll to pick sides, and they picked the shrubs. The terrain is still totally unfair, they just let you get the good side/corner. That doesn't make it fair or correct.

You say everyone does it. I don't list tailor. I don't care if others do so against me; it's not a concern the way faking dice rolls or constant appeals to "roll a 4+ to see what happens" bullshit. I prepare lists in absence of what I'm fighting, because I never know when I'm going to be in that scenario you described, or if there's a subtle variation because my opponent is counter-tailoring. If I'm going to play listbuilding head games, there's an easier way.

Back to the martial artist, say you had "Romeo Must Die" vision and could use your Jet Li powers to spot every physiological weak point in their stance. Short of some prior injury or exercise cramp, the Kung Fu master would register no weakness. Perhaps their strengths would not be pronounced either but that's not a bad thing - it means they're adaptable on the fly, like when you show up with no Venoms.

These are much more effective head games. If you can't tell what's the biggest threat in my army, and I can, I am winning. If you can't spot my counters to your threats, and I can, I am winning. If I can manipulate your correct target priority choices by developing different pieces, and you can't, I am winning. For every fearsome strength of the tailored list, a new flashing red weak-spot appears. Imagine how much harder Zelda games would be if there wasn't a giant glowing eye or bright red flashing gem on all the bosses.

This is the point - regardless of the moral weight you assign to it, you don't need to tailor. The ideal of any game is that you have only yourself to thank for victory and blame for loss, not your character or controller or the tournament ruleset. Tailoring is a crutch for the intermediate to beat novices that will ultimately fail when you fight the dojo master. Or just someone half-decent with a balanced list.

Now, I have stuff to paint.

True, you don't need to tailor, but sometimes it's fun. I generally think of it as theming though, rather than tailoring. So everyone was expecting my Venom spam list but this week I decided to try WWP. I don't think that gives me an unfair advantage. It just gives me a different set of strengths and weaknesses to other list constructions, and it gives my opponent a different set of challenges. Of course, if my opponent had brought his martial-arts balanced list, he would stand a decent chance against whatever wacky lopsided theme I like today. But if he's gone unbalanced like I have we're probably going to end up playing a game where one side is at an advantage ... but that can be fun too.

i agreee with the tailoring i also agree everyone does at least to a lesser extant. i mean i know there are lots of marine players around here more chaos then normal as well so i look to counter those first and then run down the list of all the races and going against what i know about them think on how well they are likely to do.

you are also completely right about the best players being those who play to the mission

Interesting post Agha.

As for all the martial art references, I have always seen martial arts as a game of counters and bluffs, where unbalancing your opponent is key. It's like a game of rock, paper, scissors where the winner is the person who can discern his opponents next move a few seconds before it is executed and counter it appropriately whilst misleading his opponent into thinking he is going to do something else. No stance will counter everything, but each stance has a purpose (be it rock, paper, scissors or paper that looks like it's a rock).

In relation to balanced lists, I see them as a solid foundation, like building your martial art on a solid base. A good but basic punch, kick, grapple, throw and block can be far more effective than anything more impressive or complex. Keeping your plan simple but adaptable is key.

You can be good at Karate, but what do you do if your opponent closes the gap to grapple range? You can be good at judo but what happens if your opponent has the space to keep his distance and land blow after blow? You can be a boxer, but what happens if your opponent disables one of your arms? As much as I loath the name there is a reason mixed martial arts is called mixed martial arts, and that is the contestants need a broad range of skills to compete in the event (although the size of the ring does favour grapplers). The same approach should be taken into account in all aspect of list building to ensure you have the tools for the job.

What I draw from this article is: don't tailor, play the mission, use a balanced list, don't use bad units. Did I miss anything?

Shadows Revenge wrote:

We then go to start the game, and I hand him a copy of my list. Its a WWP list with no transports, and everything is T4-7 except for the harlies, who have a 2+ coversave. Not a tank in site. Now those Hydras are a useless, and he is going to have a hard time to pull me off of objectives. His list tailoring backfired.

Sounds strangely familiar.

Fortunately you play a balanced list, and you know I experiment with my lists and to expect the unexpected (and that there will always be reavers in one form or another). That being said we both rocked up with balanced list, despite mine being unorthodox, I wouldn't have called it unbalanced, or tailoring for that matter seeing as you were potentially playing, eldar, biker marines, tyranides, necrons or sisters. If anything that's the fun of balanced lists/take all comers.

I have some feedback. If this was a persuasive article to convince me to not engage in certain behavior, I will say that it failed to move me for a variety of reasons. I am not particularly receptive to this message, so you are free to accept my concerns as biased if you wish.

Metagame, like most of the best English words, has Greek roots. Meta- is a specific kind of Super- if anyone has taken any German, Meta = Über. Supra- is the Latin version. It means "above and beyond" or "transcendent." A metagame, then, is the game beyond the game, or gaming the system. We metagame when we realize that half the armies have 3+ on their basic troops...

The invocation of the Greek doesn't do much, but I am glad you did not attempt to use a dictionary definition.

Anticipating what other people in your local area will bring is tailoring, which is a kind of cheating. You have an unfair and unsportsmanlike advantage over non-local players; how could they know the only person who owns a Librarian is stuck going to his Sister-in-Law's wedding that weekend, and that an Autarch would be way better than a Farseer with Runes of Warding?

Now, hang on a minute, you just said that thinking about the composition of opponent's armies is fine. Why is it okay to analyze weapon AP by what you expect to be fighting but not when analyzing your HQ choice? Are you saying if you compare to 40K in general you're fine, but if you compare to specific player's armies you're not fine? Interesting if true!

"But Agahnim," you respond, "what's the point of playing like I'm at a tournament? I know these chuckleheads, and my list may not be balanced...Very well, I can't make everyone super-competitive and ambitious, as exciting as it would be...

Wait, now we have a third term to juggle, balance. And you espouse your dislike for people who compete for first place with sucky units, and your (dare I say condescending?) acceptance of those who play with sucky units but acknowledge that they aren't competing at the highest level. What does this tell us about metagaming? Is it a humorous aside?

Think of a list like a martial arts stance. If it's balanced, no strong, uneven force concentrated on one specific area can knock the martial artist over. The skilled fighter with a balanced stance will even use the unbalanced force of their opponent in some sort of Aikido move or Fencing riposte. Likewise, if a list is truly balanced, it will demolish what is on the board before the flyers come in, or eliminate the foot list's mobility and anti-tank and then use cheap vehicles to barricade it, etc.

This appears to be an argument for constructing a list with balance as opposed to pointing out anything about list tailoring. But how are lists balanced? The sum possibilities of the 40K ruleset? No, they are balanced against their metagame, of course! If literally everybody but 10 people of people out of 100 ran army of, I dunno, 9 Scythes, any other army that didn't have a plan against 9 Scythes, but was instead balanced against some imagined metagame, would get laughed out of the room. They would be unable to execute a "riposte" 90% of the time, and the generalship of the player would be mitigated. 9 Scythes is an example: you could fill any army that preys on those who do not have a plan for it.

I think you trivialize how important the non-representativeness of local playgroups is in determining if an army has a balanced gameplan that lets generalship impact the outcome of the game. Whatever moral imperative you assign to pretending that a local playgroup consists of the sum of the 40K rulebooks is invalidated because that's never going to be true! Do not give out moral advice based on fictions.

Let me know if I have miscontrued any of your points. In any case, I recommend re-writing your article in order to A) get your point across more clearly B) agree with the reality of the game and C) remove any extraneous asides that are distracting.

"Are you saying if you compare to 40K in general you're fine, but if you compare to specific player's armies you're not fine? Interesting if true!"

That's exactly what I mean! See, this is what I'm suggesting - you'd think that if you tried to determine what's good in general 40k, you'd get some sort of non-existent "internet meta" that doesn't work in reality. But here's the tricky thing: when you bring things that actually ARE good in general 40k back into real world, IRL specific 40k, they don't stop working. Suddenly, we can have productive discussions about what is objectively/inter-subjectively good without having to know the intimacies and intricacies of each others' local stores.

That is what's so interesting if it's true, and why I brought up the Greek etymology - because suddenly we DO have a metagame! General 40k is that metagame, and it makes for really interesting discussion! By reflecting on our specific 40k games in light of general 40k discussions about strategy, list-building, and tactics, we can discern what works and what doesn't. It's this constant interplay back and forth between our specific games and general theory that lets us logically prove or disprove theory, and apply it to playing the game and listbuilding. What you call general 40k is the definition of what a true 40k metagame is, it's the transcendent factor of trying to discern generalized abstract rules that govern all of our specific, concrete games.

Granted, the metagame may be more or much more ideal or presume a higher degree of competition than your specific community. You totally misread what I said, I went back and checked. It helps if you don't break apart sentences. I clearly said that I respect when people take what they want, what I don't respect is when they take something that is less than ideal, and insist it is anyway. And I did the exact opposite of "trivialize how important the non-representativeness of local playgroups is in determining if an army has a balanced gameplan" - I was saying that's who usually chewing out fluff/hobby oriented players.

It's because what I take works, regardless of where I'm playing it that I don't have this overpowering need to convert followers. I offer friendly advice, people take it or they don't. But the metagame isn't balancing against other lists, it's balancing against the rulebooks. The rules in the Core rules, each codex, WD add-ons, this is General 40k, and this is what you can balance against.

"Whatever moral imperative you assign to pretending that a local playgroup consists of the sum of the 40K rulebooks is invalidated because that's never going to be true! Do not give out moral advice based on fictions."

I'd like to point out the contradiction here. "Do not give out moral advice based on fictions!" I'm not giving moral advice; I'm not saying what's good or evil. And you're telling me to re-write this because A) you didn't understand it when you read it the first time B) you don't think it's possible to play a game strictly following the rules in the rulebooks and C) you don't like people who have different writing styles and don't misuse big words to seem pretentious. I'm not "invoking" the Greek, I'm trying to explain where the term metagame comes from so we can take it apart and make sense out of it, to get the point across more clearly.

There's no need to get snippy though and start making demands of me, let's keep things polite, OK? Save the petty posturing for those Mon'keigh forums please, we're all great fiends here.
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"You can be good at Karate, but what do you do if your opponent closes the gap to grapple range? You can be good at judo but what happens if your opponent has the space to keep his distance and land blow after blow? You can be a boxer, but what happens if your opponent disables one of your arms? As much as I loath the name there is a reason mixed martial arts is called mixed martial arts, and that is the contestants need a broad range of skills to compete in the event (although the size of the ring does favour grapplers). The same approach should be taken into account in all aspect of list building to ensure you have the tools for the job.

What I draw from this article is: don't tailor, play the mission, use a balanced list, don't use bad units. Did I miss anything?"

Pretty much. You don't need to tailor if you plan properly and have a goal, and in fact you'll be better off because you can adapt on the fly, not before the game. You never truly know what an opponent will bring so why plan for a specific one if you can plan for all of them? And indeed, this is why certain units perform so well, because they aren't locked in to a specific task, they can perform multiple roles well. Thus the metagame - figuring out what lists can accomplish missions, threaten other optimized lists, and counter their threats.

Like I said above, if you succeed against the ideal opponent, you won't fare any worse against a real opponent. If you can beat 3 Night Scythes, you can beat 9. If you can beat 10 Terminators, you can beat 30. The more they shift, the more of your army they free up to compensate. No mech? Meltas shoot terminators. Tons of flyers? The Venoms and Dark Lances wipe the rest of Necrons off the board for the win Turn 1.

It doesn't matter how many rocks I bring, if you stock your toolbox with enough paper I lose. The MMA analogy is fantastic; why bother deciding your lists' strengths in the listbuilding phase? Why not do it in game? That's what makes a unit good - it's versatile, durable, and you can stock extra in your toolbox in case the opponent decides to kill it first.

If you write a good list knowing what any opponent can throw at you, it can handle any opponent. There's only so many things another player can take, and a lot of times something you have that's good against one works against others.

I think I've made my point several times over.

Agahnim wrote:

Pretty much. You don't need to tailor if you plan properly and have a goal, and in fact you'll be better off because you can adapt on the fly, not before the game. You never truly know what an opponent will bring so why plan for a specific one if you can plan for all of them? And indeed, this is why certain units perform so well, because they aren't locked in to a specific task, they can perform multiple roles well.

This is probably worth a topic in itself. You pay a premium for multi-roll units, sure they are flexible and that makes them strong however it also leads to inefficiency as the unit can only do one role a turn. Reavers are a perfect example of this, probably the most versatile unit in our codex: 9 reavers, 3 blasters, champion, venom blade is a fantastic toolbox unit. It can do ranged combat and dance around it's opponents, it can do anti tank, it can do anti heavy infantry and anti light infantry, assault, contest, screen you name it. However it has a massive price tag of 258 points! For less you could get a ravager and a venom with warriors (230pts), which gives you more fire power that can be used against both infantry and armour on the same turn.

This was the problem I ran into when I was using three large squads of reavers, I had massive flexibility, but I had the choose between AI or AT on any given turn, which can be very problematic.

So we have a dilemma. Do you pay more for a powerful multitool unit? Is it worth the extra cost? I would say yes. But its not without it's limitations: A multitool can only do one thing at a time. You can't use it to hammer in a nail at the same time as you are using it to tighten a bolt.

There's no need to get snippy though and start making demands of me, let's keep things polite, OK? Save the petty posturing for those Mon'keigh forums please, we're all great fiends here.

That's true, this is a friendly discussion. Your article did rile me up for a number of reasons, but I had no cause to accuse you of being condescending, of moralizing, or trivializing any aspect of the topic. For that, I was wrong, and I apologize.

I agree with you that, when discussing units and weapons and strategies, a detachment from one's personal metagame is helpful for the discussion in total. When someone says "Haywire is an important weapon to consider because it deals with Land Raiders, etc." and someone else replies with the equivalent of "Haywire is unimportant because zero people own Land Raiders near me", then the discussion has gotten nowhere.

In practice, I contend is 100% okay and 100% not cheating to consider the overall makeup of your playgroup, or even the makeup of the playgroup that is going to be there that day in order to make your list. Of the many factors that go into making a cohesive army, making smart predictions about what you are likely to face in what numbers is not unsportsmanlike; it's just rational. Weight your expectations to face what is actually there moreso than facing what some outsider might bring or regular might brew, because you are more likely to face what is already there. If you do not try, at least, to weight your expectations based on your predictions, then you might not suffer a whole ton, but you're not being as rational as you could be.* Everyone else goes through the same process, though the key difference, and where the unfairness can emerge, is in information. This applies both to the general 40K- you can't know what an opponent is able to do unless you read his codex, and studied typical army builds, and have studied how and why they work- and tabletop 40K, where you can't predict what someone specifically is going to use without any data.

I should not try and answer this question for everyone, "How much information are you indebted to give your opponent?". Certainly, during a game all information is on the table (okay, the rulebook says you can keep your list secret, but who does this?). Before the game even begins, are you indebted to tell what army you are playing, if you know your opponent only owns one army book? What if he only owns one army? If he doesn't know your Codex, do you give it to him to read for a few minutes? Do you let him pick terrain or you? If you know your opponent is highly competent and can take care of himself, do you give him anything? The flip side is, your opponent asks himself the same question as well, and you could have different answers! How much information can you gather without feeling guilty? If you make your own list beforehand and never change it, you don't have much to lose...but what if one of your buddies says "Yeah, that guy likes to do X with his Y unit, watch out for that". Do you thank him for that? Do you use the information? It's not like Dark Eldar gives you much room for being surprised. Do you offer your opponent a tasty morsel of information in return? Would he be grateful?

The question looks simple but isn't, and I think I took offense that you seemed to be answering it definitively with "Anticipating what other people in your local area will bring is tailoring, which is a kind of cheating". But I could be wrong, and each step of clarifying what each other is saying helps get to the root of the issue, while defamatory language on my part does not help.


*It is important to not be rational for the sake of being rational, but to accomplish a goal. My goal is to make an ass-kicking army.

Agahnim wrote:

You answered, and enabled him.

What if you were that guy who has 7 different unpainted armies lying in cases scattered around the store, and you said you were playing Blood Angels? Maybe you are "being prepared" and lying maliciously to gain an advantage. Maybe you changed your mind. Maybe someone took your Blood Angels home by accident. If he tailors to play Blood Angels, it's a kind of cheating. It's not to the degree of malice and evil as lying about dice, but it is a kind of cheating. Any kind of advantage not gained through combining the rules in the books is cheating by definition, malicious or not.

Lol sounds like someone we both know

but here is where we differ in oppinions, I dont see telling him what I play as "enabling" him. Every codex, even the older ones, has atleast 2 strong builds in them. To counter one most likely leaves you open towards the other. Take for example Orks. Most people play either Battle Wagon spam or Nob Bikerz. So my opponent sets up a ton of meltas and long range AT. Sure enough we get to the game, and Im running Green Tide. Or for example the new CSM book. Most people are running these foot nurgle armies. So he prepares with a ton of blasts, sure enough Im running classic rhino rush with sonic marines and dirge casters so my maulerfiends dont get overwatched as they charge in.

Sure, he can try and predict what I am going to bring, but its the exact same thing that happens when you prepare for a tournament. "Hmm... CSM just came out, so Id bet there will be a ton of them. Cron Flyer and Daemon Flying Circus w/ flamers/screamers are also doing well, so I should expect them as well. Also you see a lot of GKs mixed with Crons/IG still, so I should expect them" It is all one in the same. You expect to see those lists because they are popular, so you figure out weaknesses to exploit and take those. Yet you end up playing someone running Green Tide or Nids. This is how people like Stelek lose consistantly. They expect the obvious, but get blindsided by the random.

I think a mutral friend of our Dave has the best story to explain this. Basically he is a IG player, and back when the BT book came out, a guy who played them asked Dave for a game. So ofc people had been talking about how great their tanks were, and how great their land raider was with their assault troops. So Dave LOADS up on melta and AT. When the game starts and realizes that the guy is still putting marines on the table. The guy brought something along the lines of 100 + marines and scouts. Lets just say Dave lost that game (although he did say his battle cannon never had such a high kill count)

Like everyone else I liked your analogy about martial arts and list building, it was very elegant. I have to say I disagree with your stance on tailoring a list to be cheating, especially because I know one of the reasons I enjoy playing against some of my friends and doing it often is how we will tailor our lists to suit each other's armies and counter tailor and it becomes a big cycle which I find makes the game a lot of fun just because it makes you feel more like an actual general on a battlefield. After all if you were a general fighting a war you would most likely have intel about your enemy's resources and have past battles to draw on experience from allowing you to tailor your battle plans to reach your goal in winning the war. That being said I completely understand that tailoring your list in a setting away from people you play regularly is an awful idea as it leaves you open to too many possible counters because anyone could on any given day try a different list than the one you were expecting. I think the main reason we may disagree about list tailoring is because we look at Warhammer 40k differently, because where you look at it with the only goal of winning in mind I find that winning comes second in importance to me after getting enjoyment out of playing "interesting" armies and doing my best to make them work

CaptainBalroga wrote:

There's no need to get snippy though and start making demands of me, let's keep things polite, OK? Save the petty posturing for those Mon'keigh forums please, we're all great fiends here.

That's true, this is a friendly discussion. Your article did rile me up for a number of reasons, but I had no cause to accuse you of being condescending, of moralizing, or trivializing any aspect of the topic. For that, I was wrong, and I apologize.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I feel like I ruffled some feathers using the C-word. I think tailoring is cheating the way jaywalking is illegal, hence the video. If it makes everyone less upset, I'll retract that, the point I wanted t make is you can't always plan and it's hard to really address whether it's a legit thing to do or not. Better?

But moving forward from tailoring and metagaming, there was a tangent I didn't want becoming a distraction, maybe now we should address it - good units vs. bad units. Nobody likes hearing their favorite unit is "bad" but is that just because the person telling them is usually wrong anyway, or calling them names? Or, in light of the "general vs specific 40k" distinction I was getting at and CaptainBalroga elucidated, how would we know if there are any, and if they exist how do we point them out?

With all due respect, Shadows, I don't use (m)any of our mutual friends as indicators of what is successful in game. I like them, they are nice people, and I believe they are better than me at many, many things and in many, many ways, but... I'm ending the sentence prematurely. This is just my point - I'm confident that by understanding the rules and knowing what every army is capable of, certain things will immediately become ruled out as possibilities. Mushkilla, my point wasn't that you can make a single unit able to handle everything, but that overlap comes from certain things being inferior versions of others.

For instance, look at the Beast squad. You have 4 statlines/models you can populate it with: Beastmasters, Khymerae, Flocks, and Fiends.
Beastmasters are unique in that they unlock one of the other 3. So we can't equate Beastmasters to one of the others.
Razorwing Flocks have multiple wounds and Rending. This means that in decent numbers they can handle Heavy Infantry armor, like 3+ and 2+. Their great wound count of 10 wounds per Beastmaster taking Flocks means they're the most efficient way to add raw wounds to your pack. So they aren't adequate to any of the others.
Khymerae have 4 attacks on the charge at S4. This is a significant amount, and on its own could be equatable to a Razorwing Flock through sheer weight of dice rolled vs MEQ and all around superior against GEQ. But Khymerae have half the wounds, and instead have a 4++. This 4++ gives them the useful function of being better at catching low AP, S6+ firepower normally targetted at the Flocks efficiently.
Finally there are Clawed Fiends. The problem is, anything a Clawed Fiend can do well, one of the other two beasts can do better. For its points it has the fewest wounds, its toughness isn't that much higher than the Khymerae, and like the Flocks it has no armor and so it lacks the Khymerae's defenses against High S/Low AP shots, and the Flock's defense against Low S/High AP shots. Nor does it distinguish itself in offense.

So you never see the Clawed Fiend taken because the other beasts do the same thing much better. Further, if someone were to take one anyway, for fluff reasons, model aesthetics, trolling, or naivete, it would not be such a shock because the things that handle the other Beasts aren't suddenly at a loss to deal with it. Everything in the game is a better or worse version of something else, and can be dealt with by the same counters. There are no truly unique threat types, it is the combinations of threats and combinations of counters in a single units that make them more or less unique.

Another example of building an army on general theory vs specific local info: Often people will tally up their Lances, hull points, poison shots, etc. This doesn't necessarily assure that the army has synergy or will claim objectives or function well in game, but notice what they're trying to do: They want to make sure they've saturated threats across the army, and that their counters are redundant to prevent them from getting obliterated by a carry/sweeper* unit, usually some kind of Deathstar or a spammed MSU unit.

So then it's no longer an issue of "does my list have an answer for Scarabs, Sternguard, Manticores, Grey Hunters..." but of more generalized threats. Often, knowing how many an opponent will probably bring at a particular point value is helpful, as it will keep you from going overboard on Meltaguns (though the IG player in question probably made some tactical mistakes somewhere else, which is why I'm leaving names out of this Shadows Revenge, it's just not nice), but then this is also why it's useful not to tailor - because at a certain point, taking excess of a counter becomes wasted effort and you unbalance yourself unnecessarily. If you're expecting lots of infantry, and you take a ton of blasts and templates, that doesn't guarantee success unless the enemy themselves are unbalanced - it's likely taking all those blasts and templates cost you a ton of points that could be spent on bigger squads, and now assaulting your tiny squads is an option for them where it wasn't before.

Or maybe you know their army has little anti-tank and go too far into MSU Mech for 6th edition - again, you've unbalanced yourself and if they carefully de-mech and stunlock you they can pick apart the anemic infantry piecemeal. That's the thing - maybe they can take 9 Razorbacks at 1750 or 90 Space Marines but if the further past the point of threat saturation they go the more the effect is wasted. If you can beat 5 Razorbacks at 1750 you can beat 9; if you can beat 40 MEQs you can beat 70, etc. This is why having lots of durable Troops is important, because if they can kill one squad of 3 Wracks they can probably kill all of them just as easily.

I hope this is helpful. Again, my intention is to write articles about playing with the twin goals of winning and using Dark Eldar as part of the army above all else. I don't mean to suggest it's impossible to play the game otherwise, or that I'm immune to critique, but that I'm trying to offer thoughts on one way of playing that I feel is rarely given attention, and when it is, it usually devolves into people bickering about whose tournament ruleset/terrain is the best way to play, and everything lapses into people unable to extract their egos from their regionalism.

*Sorry, I play a variety of games and game theory interests me. If you think people making fun of your Wyches is bad, try finding out your favorite Pokemon is bad in competitive play. There's a term in MOBA and Pokemon games, "carry" and "sweeper" respectively, for a particularly potent damaging character who can easily win the game for you, but is highly susceptible to being countered. Almost every game of Pokemon, League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients or Heroes of Newerth boils down to who can build up their carry/sweeper into a threat, remove and counters, and ace/sweep the other team and win. If you wanted to apply this, however loosely, to 40k, it would be getting rid of anything that could claim any objectives you don't contest, or kill the Troops on the uncontested objective you are claiming.

Agahnim, quiet the wall o text there! but it was worth the climb. Thanks for the articles , very thought provoking.

[Edit] Answered my own question when going back over the article. Sorry

I have to say, I am really glad you wrote this article and these comments, Agahnim, as it has certainly helped to understand your point of view about units being bad. The "balanced stance" approach is really something that should be spread around more, as it encourages one to think less of the individual strengths of a unit, and more about the army list as a whole, decry the "cheesiness" of certain units or armies less and think about what they are doing more.

For a while now I've been fielding more generalist lists that try to catch the enemy off guard by not being able to find the priority target. Despite me using units of somewhat questionable worth (such as Wraithlord and Warp Spiders), they always fulfill their task - they make the opponent's decisions harder. Sure, it's just one Wraithlord over here and five Spiders there, but what if they are allowed free reign? I like forcing the enemy to make difficult decisions because not only does it make it more difficult for them to defeat me, I believe it also makes them better players. Sure, there might be more optimal ways for me to do it, but only more games and experimenting will tell.

For majority of your commentary, I cannot really say much else. Well structured, well thought out responses. Thank you for writing this up, and I'm really looking forward for more from you, Agahnim!