Goatboy’s 40k Thoughts: Are We Letting Mech Win?
Goatboy here bringing some Warhammer 40k thoughts for everyone to chew on. The question today is, is mech really breaking the game? We all know vehicles are pretty good right now. If you look at the Glancing/Penetration table you can see that it really takes a lot to kill a vehicle in 5th. So we all can agree they are good, but are we letting them win by panic-changing our armies to fight them too much?
The rise of melta has created an interesting shiift in the meta-game. Melta is a great gun. One of the best as it is cheap, effective, and one of the few ways you can usually get a 50% shot at killing a vehicle. But what it is not good at is killing dudes. Yes you can put a wound on something and most likely kill it, but with the amount of cover saves all over the board you still only have a 50% chance of killing them. And this lack of anti-infantry killing means, even though you are popping those vehicles, the guys inside are getting a chance to get their job done with little threat as you don’t have enough torrent of fire to make sure they die.
We all know how bad ass TH/SS termies can be, but remember if you put enough heavy bolter wounds on a squad you should take out 1 or 2 guys per volley. Every time you kill one of them, you ate drastically limiting their effectiveness, becasue the squads are often small. We all can do math, so you know if you put 6 wounds on a guy, he should roll a 1 when he has to roll all of those armor saves.
So what do I think we need to do? I think min maxing armies is not the way to go, as we all know that if you max out one side, a lot of the time you limit yourself and take a chance to get hurt by an army that is designed into the other direction. A melta gun army loses to a massive horde list. It just doesn’t have enough firepower to kill out full squads of guys quickly. Just like a anti horde army is hurt by any kind heavy mech list. So what do we need to do? Balance our plastic warriors. Yes we can’t always crush an opponent quickly, but what we can do is win the grind and always be prepared.
My latest marine builds I plan on finishing usually resolve around 6 to 8 melta guns (no more), 8+ Heavy Bolters, and a bunch of other massed fire. Mix this in with an assault element to help stop other assault elements and you got a nice, balanced list that should give me enough power to at least bring some form of competition to any game I might throw some dice at.
So why not try to balance out your armies a bit more. You will notice that your games become a bit more tactics-heavy as you try to use all your bits of your army to win the game. If you have a questions please feel free to email me at ”[email protected]”. Your turn.
