Pimpcron: The Real Imperial Knight Problem

5 Minute Read

Mar 9 2019

Pimpcron has the answers, this isn’t a joke.

Good morning, afternoon, or evening ladies and gentlepeople. Your dually ordained Pimpcron has arrived again to disperse knowledge on your cranium like some sort of disgusting Pez dispenser. Listen up as a vomit forth my worldly experiences and fertilize your senses while with sophistication and style. It’s not an easy job, but this is my gift to humanity.

What is the Perceived “Imperial Knight Problem”?

With all of the hub-bub about knights lately and how they have impacted the tournament scene, we have to take a harder look at them. People are saying that knights aren’t balanced, that they break the game, and that they are too good for their points. I personally don’t care to play with or against them, as I feel like GW’s strong suit is not balance, but that’s another article topic. I think everyone has to admit that their very presence in the meta changes everybody’s lists. Without knights, a lot of heavy weapons would be omitted from army lists, but that is not inherently bad. I want to explain once and for all the real problem behind knights and other very large units in this game and ever game.

“I got 99 problems, but my points ain’t one.”

What is the Real “Knight Problem”?

I think it would be better to explain this as an example rather than trying to explain it in other ways. You and I are tasked with creating a new monster for Tyranids. We will use 20 Tactical Space Marines as the basis of this monster to scale the points. If the 20 Tac Marines are, let’s say 100 points to make it easy, then what would a 20-wound monster cost? The same amount of points, fewer because multiple-damage weapons make some of those wounds worthless, or more points because it is a lot of hit points in a small package? Hmmm. I tend to say fewer points because of multi-damage weapons. But how many fewer points? Well, it seems that we have other moving parts to this that affect its durability.

It seems like giving this monster a 3+ armor save would not change the points any, because the same chances of saving seems fair. But we have to go back to that old issue of multi-damage weapons. A single Tac Marine loses a save and the unit can only lose 1 Wound max, because damage doesn’t spill over. But this monster has a lot more to lose if it fails even a single 3+ save. Hmmm. This a is tough decision, especially that I’m sure all of you know that Toughness plays a large part in durability.

His hunch makes him look like kind of ho-hum, “Here I go killing again.”

It Gets More Complicated

So we have temporarily tabled changing the points value of this new monster based off of Wounds, but we are leaning towards reducing the points. The save value seems a little more ambiguous, but may need a little tweaking downwards too. We have tabled both things because they are only 2/3 of the durability situation. Certainly 20 Toughness 4 Marines is not the same in the game as a 20-wound Toughness 4 monster. That would just be silly. But do we make it Toughness 8? And if so, do we double the points cost because the Toughness doubled? Certainly not. But what kind of change do you do to the points?

Just by using gut instinct, I would say that I would make the points 80 instead of 100 based off of the wounds to account for multi-damage weapons. But the save would reduce the cost by 10 more points due to the same reason. Let’s stick with Toughness 8 for the sake of argument, “most” weapons in this game will wound that on a 6+, but you can’t discount dedicated-vehicle or monster weapons meant specifically for high Toughness targets. I think I’d add roughly 30 points for Toughness 8, making it the same points price as the 20 Marines.

What is this? A Knight for ANTS?

But wait, there’s more! We could talk about the number of attacks in melee, the number and strength of shots in ranged, etc. The fact that not all 20 Marines will probably get into a normal melee combat also plays a part in the points cost.

Do You See the Problem?

The whole business of point-pricing models is not an exact science, and there is a lot guess work in it. Any point system that you create to point-cost your models is going to have scale issues when you try to make an Emperor Class Titan in a game designed mostly around small infantry. Many of you may scoff at this notion, but it is very obvious that GW doesn’t have some sort of secret sauce for costing units. You could make some sort of complex equation which is what most game designers do, but none of them are perfect. So GW does not want to err on the side of making them too weak when people pay good money and points for these units. Nobody would play them if they were weak. So it is a no-brainer that they would err on the side of more-powerful for your points to benefit their bank account. No hate from me, just real observation and logic.

~Have You Ever Thought Of This? Am I Wrong?