Brigade Schmigade

[Hive Bahamut]

So earlier on in 8th I loved Brigades. Then the FAQ updates Batallions to 5 and I dropped that nonsense. That being said I have a question.

What armies are Brigades practical for? I can't seem to find anyone that can even come close to the broken structure of Militarum. Militarum can comfortably field one at 1000 points, and I bet if I tried hard I could probably figure one out for 750, or 500.

Every other army I look at is closer to 2500. Almost Acocalypse level.

Apart from a get out of jail free card because Matt Ward plays them, is there any reason that army follows none of the rules established by everyone else? The dirty 32 is the best 180 any imperium player can spend.

[able]

If hive tyrants took another big nerf, then I would seriously consider going with one. Brigades are great for HQ starved armies with decent options in every other slot, which we are pretty close to. OOE, neurothropes and tyrants are our only really competitive HQs, while between rippers, pyrovores, spore mines, and biovores we can fill slots relatively efficiently.

It is only really armies that want large units that the detachment rules punish hard. Orks, demons, and necrons in particular really want max sized units across the board. The hyper elite armies like custardies obviously struggle too, but marines can carve out a brigade for about 1200pts, and pretty easily in 2000. Tau can get one for 700pts.

There are rumours of detachment level buffs, which will be a game changer. It will introduce a reason to field a single large detachment over several small ones. I hope the change the whole system, because it is stupid anyway, and just another thing to game. The really frustrating thing is that PL is the ideal tool for a system that is much less army dependent and harder* to game, so it is not even hard to build a better system from existing tools. Something like a battalion having 8-15PL of HQs, 12-19PL of troops, and up to 12PL of the rest would be so much closer to what they are trying to do. Currently my rippers have the same impact on CP as 20 necrons, and my detachment of 3 hive tyrants, 9 ripper bases, and 90 gargoyles is apparently a troop detachment.

*Harder does not mean hard. Expect to see units of 11 gants walking around if it is done naively. The more impact PL has though the more incentive there is to make the system better. Personally I'm a fan of deriving PL from matched play points, and then also having standardised unit cards with the sets. Beginners can play with the standard units with factory calculated PL out of the box, while more advanced players can calculate their own PL when designing their custom units. A tool which prints unit cards could auto calculate the PL on the card. Building a PL army would then be a case of throwing pre built units in, and the PL would much closer reflect the matched play values. The codex would then consist of fixed unit cards together with rules for generating your own.

It might bug me a little how lazy some of the design work is.

As for AM infantry being faster than jump infantry (19" average), bringing more firepower than space marines (2S3 4+ > 1S4 3+), and buffable to being better at CC than an ork (4.5 S4 4+ attacks), rocking a leadership of 9 with a reroll, and hiding a heavy weapon, at half the points of a fire warrior in a structure that poops command points (but we'll give them relics and warlord traits to make sure they have enough)… I'm pretty sure they were high.