Carrying on...

So.

I have now read the Grey Knights and Necron books and feel like less of an uninformed hypocrite than before. Just out of interest, does anyone know what the plural of codex is? Or for that matter what the collective noun for them is either? I quite like a "nerd" of codexes, but thats just me. Answers on a postcard.

Anyway. Perhaps I was a little bit cruel in my initial estimation of Mr. Wards newest paper based masturbatory fantasies. Thinking through my original comments, combo stacking has been something of an integral part of the game for as long as I've been playing so perhaps that's not such a bad thing as I had made it sound. I also should be a little more thankful that each codex has been redone to contain new and interesting characters and units with some interesting special rules and new wargear thats not just the same crap used in every army under a different name.

I think my actual brooding anger was this - the statistical quality of each unit is not reflected equally in the price of each unit.

For a brief example that is very simplistic and in need of improvement:

1 guardsman (most basic standard unit possible) costs 5pts (50pts for a ten man squad therefore ~5pts a piece).

1 terminator (specialist, expensive unit with durability and both ballistic and close combat skill)

The guardsman gets to shoot once at the terminator and has a 0.028 chance of killing the terminator (=1/2*1/3*1/6).

The terminator gets to shoot once at the guardsman and has a 0.44 chance of killing the guardsman (=2/3*2/3). This actually translates to a 0.88 chance of a kill since the terminator normally uses a stormbolter...

Anyway, this means that at terminator is 15.7x better than a guardsman at ranged combat, so surely a terminator should cost 15.7x more than a guardsman? Surely the terminator should cost 79pts a piece to keep the game fair? Nope, instead the terminator comes in at 40pts, nearly half the value statistics suggest he should.

I know this doesn't quite mesh with the numbers of lasguns that a guard player can bring in and how the points cost accounts for that, but just in this example, marine player has nearly a 50% advantage as far as value for points goes.

Maybe I should just get a small grey knights army and stop complaining...