What I like about this is it forces your opponent to attack what he wants crumble to affect. That's pretty cool. There is a bit more keeping track of specific wounds dealt during that combat, but its not to terrible.
Crumble, pro or con and dealing with it tactically
- Thread starter najo
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I don't understand what you mean by use leadership instead of combat resolution. Can you clarify please?
SothaMortis
Zombie
I ment that if the VC BSB's range could be used to change the rules of crumble within range. Instead of taking the usual 1 wound per lost CR, you do a leadership test instead and take an amount of wounds equal to how much you lost the LD test.
No idea how balanced it would be but it's a thought.
I think that the best suggestion was that you get your CR; let's say you lose by 4. Then you take a LD at -4. Then you take as many wounds as what you failed LD at. If you pass the LD, then you take no additional wounds. Granted, you could end up taking more than four wounds, but I think that the possibility of taking no wounds outweighs that. I've also lost some combats by more than ten before, so it would end up reducing the number I would take from crumble automatically.
I think that would balance it fairly well and still be fair.
Lol, I swear its like we are playing different versions of the army. It's crazy to me. You guys might enjoy playing daemons BTW!
So, on the LD - CR, difference is wounds. That's exactly how daemons work. The exception being double ones restores all loses from that round and double sixes makes the unit poof. So daemons have a random crumble based on LD tests. Undead being different and having a non random crumble is a feature not a handicap.
As for our BSB, its totally worth taking. It adds +1 to SCR (warbanner takes up a magic standard slot and costs 35pts), it allows rerolls of march and reform tests. You can reroll general dying tests. Plus on top of that, it reduces crumble by 1 within 12". That reduction on one skeleton unit is 30 points in six rounds combat. Now have it in the middle of big fights or boosting units like crypt horrors or black knights and its keeping your MVPs in the game.
I'm happy with our BSB and our army crumbling. I like the relation between our sub par troops and our awesome vampires. Our army book is solid. The main issues I have with our book is blood knights are on the slightly spendy side for having 1 wound, black coach evocation of death needs reworking, master strike is flawed, forbidden lore has no effect on vampire lore, master of the black arts is poorly designed and over costed. If I made changes to these it'd be:
Master strike costs a single attack I instead of all, like necrosphinx.
Master of the black arts grants a reroll of a single power dice per turn and costs 50pts.
Forbidden lore allows the vampire to pick any brb or lore of vampires. If they take lore of vampires they can pick a single spell before rolling.
Blood knights point value can be reduced by 5-10 points each or increase it and make then 2 wounds a piece.
Evocation of death needs an effect that feels like its feeding on the magic and death around it. Maybe for every wound caused within 12" roll a d6 and on a 6+ the black coach goes up a step, or something. Maybe roll for wounds it causes. Then make results a bit better. The coach should feel like the vampire essence within it is feeding on the death and magic to get stronger.
Finally, it might be worth adding necrarch, lamiah and blood dragon upgrades to either the bloodline powers or the vampire lord and hero. Leave the SGK separate as it is.
But that's pretty much my view. Solid army book. Perhaps one of the best in 8th. Nearly the whole thing is playable and can be competitive. Lots of builds and variety.
So, on the LD - CR, difference is wounds. That's exactly how daemons work. The exception being double ones restores all loses from that round and double sixes makes the unit poof. So daemons have a random crumble based on LD tests. Undead being different and having a non random crumble is a feature not a handicap.
As for our BSB, its totally worth taking. It adds +1 to SCR (warbanner takes up a magic standard slot and costs 35pts), it allows rerolls of march and reform tests. You can reroll general dying tests. Plus on top of that, it reduces crumble by 1 within 12". That reduction on one skeleton unit is 30 points in six rounds combat. Now have it in the middle of big fights or boosting units like crypt horrors or black knights and its keeping your MVPs in the game.
I'm happy with our BSB and our army crumbling. I like the relation between our sub par troops and our awesome vampires. Our army book is solid. The main issues I have with our book is blood knights are on the slightly spendy side for having 1 wound, black coach evocation of death needs reworking, master strike is flawed, forbidden lore has no effect on vampire lore, master of the black arts is poorly designed and over costed. If I made changes to these it'd be:
Master strike costs a single attack I instead of all, like necrosphinx.
Master of the black arts grants a reroll of a single power dice per turn and costs 50pts.
Forbidden lore allows the vampire to pick any brb or lore of vampires. If they take lore of vampires they can pick a single spell before rolling.
Blood knights point value can be reduced by 5-10 points each or increase it and make then 2 wounds a piece.
Evocation of death needs an effect that feels like its feeding on the magic and death around it. Maybe for every wound caused within 12" roll a d6 and on a 6+ the black coach goes up a step, or something. Maybe roll for wounds it causes. Then make results a bit better. The coach should feel like the vampire essence within it is feeding on the death and magic to get stronger.
Finally, it might be worth adding necrarch, lamiah and blood dragon upgrades to either the bloodline powers or the vampire lord and hero. Leave the SGK separate as it is.
But that's pretty much my view. Solid army book. Perhaps one of the best in 8th. Nearly the whole thing is playable and can be competitive. Lots of builds and variety.
SothaMortis
Zombie
I think you're a bit negative there Najo. Atm the poll says i'ts 50/50 pro current crumble vs deamonic instability and we're just coming up with ideas and expressing our thoughts.
I'm sure the current consensus is that the majority like the whole crumble deal but wouldn't mind some aspects of it redone.
I'm sure the current consensus is that the majority like the whole crumble deal but wouldn't mind some aspects of it redone.
In all this discussion, it always seems to come back to the point of tournaments and competitions. Well, many, if not most, don't get involved in that scene, and the' fun' game is ruined by the current crumble set up. We need crumble, but NOT as it currently works.
I wasn't being negative at all. Earlier I brought up the poll is divided down the middle. That is my whole point, half the poll find the rules good and an advantage. Half want the rules to be like the daemons. The fact that it's divided down the middle and it's more likely experienced players are more familiar with crumble and making it work, while new players struggle with it are going to vote that it's too brutal, means that crumble is actually more balanced than not. So, if crumble were tonned down much more vampires in the hands of competitive players would be broken.
I get most players don't play competitive, but broken mechanics overpower and ruin games for casuals and competitive players alike. The WoC daemon prince and Tzeentch disc lord are both examples of units in an army that need some reeling back in. Unbreakable vampires and undead units would be the same.
The most valid point made about crumble is the counter intuitive aspect of it being bad to charge elite in to n support your tarpits Blutsaeger mentioned. I agree that is counter intuitive. I even agreed the best solution is to cap crumble to the wound caused on that unit. Though that could harm our vampires, but that idea is headed the right way.
With that said, the thread was intended to discuss tactics dealing with the crumble rules and share ways to use it as an advantage. Instead it keeps going off on crumble wish listing tangents. Which obviously some of you guys need to vent your frustration about the rule, and that's fine. If you read through my posts, I've participated in this even. But our wish listing doesn't change the rule or help us play our army better and most of the exercises show that unless we are going to have the same rule as daemons, our current rule is fairly good if not a little weird when zombies dying crumble your elites.
Any rate, no bad feelings. I just want to help my fellow vampires win games.
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SothaMortis
Zombie
@ najo, so far only 4 votes for crumble costing games. Just because some think that demonic instability crumble would be better doesn't mean that we think the current crumble is horrible. I get the impression you're dragging us all over the edge hence the discussion has gone this way.
Reading back over my posts I don't understand how I'm coming off that way. Other than my one tongue in cheek comment about playing different armies, all my answers and discussion has been on topic, specfic, honest and contemplative. I apologize if I gave you the wrong impression. Please take my posts as joyful and enthusatic, as I have nothing but love and respect for this game, our army and our community around it.
I would way rather have crumble than any other army. One of the main reasons I chose vampires was there un-randomness (then I discover magic sigh). However this being said it would be really nice to have a rule regulating two units being crumbled even though only one 'lost' the combat.
I think the major things that need to be fixed are: General's "inspiring presence" and how it works with crumbling, the BSB, steadfast, and crumbling stopping multicharging units with tarpits. I wonder if crumbling should have limitations similar to ION, such as cav only suffer a wound for every two cr, ethereal vamp units only suffer 1 wound per phase from cr? I would say that steadfast should definately stop crumbling, then Inspiring presence and the BSB could stop like d3 res from all combate and d6 for zombie units in range.
I've been chewing on all of the ideas for crumble and ultimately every exercise eventually shows that if crumble were any different than it is now you make Vampires and ethereals able to hide in combat with tarpits. If you limit the amount of crumble characters suffer, tarpits take most the heat and the vampires will never crumble. If you spread crumble out amongst the units, you can easily fix the damage with IoN, keeping the tarpit alive and easily healing the vampires. If you limit crumble to the amount of damage a unit suffered, then your enemy focus all of their attacks on characters and threats, ignoring tarpits, making tarpits stronger. The current system, though it seems lopsided, is the only way to keep undead in check, allowing us to have tarpits AND powerful characters that are unbreakable and able to heal. The other solution is the system Daemons have, which is random. I personally prefer undead have a different feeling system that isn't random.
I would very much like for Vampiric units to take LD tests. Not like Daemons, just normal break tests. I think they are self sufficient and self serving enough to retreat rather than be destroyed, and it alleviates the problem of them crumbling because some zombies nearby were destroyed.
Skittelz1981
Varghulf
Archamedius
Grave Guard
Having steadfast negate crumble entirely would make fighting our cheap giant blocks of zombies impossible. What about instead if a unit is steadfast allowing it to subtract it's leadership (or the leadership of the general per inspiring presence) from the crumble result. This would mean we still lose models, but the blow is muted somewhat by steadfast. It would also make inspiring presence actually useful beyond marching our troops.
This is an interesting option, but wouldn't ever help our characters when on their own. If there were a way to reduce crumble by unmodified leadership and models use their own, it might work. There is a precedence in the tests made when the general dies to. Of course, those tests support the whole daemon crumble to.
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Archamedius
Grave Guard
I think the fact that since crumble is not random, and our fighty characters are absolute monsters, this should mean you should never have to worry about crumble on a lone character unless you made a poor decision, and punishing people in warhammer for poor decisions IMO makes the game more rewarding. As I understand it, characters in units don't suffer crumble, as the losses effect the unit until it is gone, then the character.
I think you pretty much just solved most the issues with crumbling there. It is a very simple solution and makes both inspiring presence and steadfast actually worth something. I like it also cause it will be important for units of undead that have low leadership to need someone to babysit them where vampiric units will not as they generally have a decent leadership available to them. You could also add that in a battle with multiple units such as one with zombies and some hammer unit that they could use the highest leadership avalible to them, this would help with actually being able to charge a hammer into a unit held up by an anvil.
It sounds elegant at first, works good for characters, but it would mean zombies would have a 10pt crumble buffer if in 12" of your vampire lord. That's a lot! You'd have to reconfigure points per model, healing and how characters work. Our armies would have less healing, less models or both. Personally I like 5pt skeletons and 3pt zombies and I don't want TK healing. So how do you keep those roughly where they are, and address the extremes of the crumble range?
What if characters have their own leadership as a barrier to their own crumble? Still not a unified solution though.
Ya it is probably a bit much, what about assigning specific values for having a general or BSB in range? Such as the whole leadership is subtracted from the crumbling then add on points for if in range of the general and BSB. So for zombies they lose by 10 so then subtract 2 from it for the LD then since they are in range of the general they subtract a d3 then with the BSB you can subtract another 1 from it. Then we would have a use for being in general's leadership and a use for the BSB. In general I think it would allow us to still be able to use hammer and anvil tactics like most armies while getting use from IS and a BSB like other armies have, we still would take a lot more damage without them but not nearly to the extent that we are now.
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The only thing that I would worry about would be ethereals, they would be the ultimate tarpit since even CR would not be able to hurt them. I have not use any ethereals so I do not know how they would be after a change like this.
*Edit*
The only thing that I would worry about would be ethereals, they would be the ultimate tarpit since even CR would not be able to hurt them. I have not use any ethereals so I do not know how they would be after a change like this.
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