The Brain Dead ETC

My response to this post from 40Kings. The post is a response to this. It is nothing more than me putting my thoughts down in purple italics. This will be done in a similar fasion to Dethtrons snowmobile but without the naughty words and insults...

I am pretty sure most of our readers have a rough idea of what “Yes the truth hurts” is and if not, for your own amusement you should go ahead and visit the blog. We will come to see by the end of this that Braindead doesn't visit YTTH as much as he seems to believe. It often makes for a fun read and most certainly keeps new ideas coming, although admittely, most of them are pretty bad when it comes to strategy and army composition. Stelek must understand something about army composition since others on 40Kings agreed with him that the Team America lists were terrible. Lets say it is just the way he (Stelek) roles – and wins at his local gaming club.

With the ETC hype taking grip of the general 40k public in the US, Stelek obviously couldnt resist to rip apart each and every ETC army list sent to him and make a mockery of the general setups preferred by most European countries. For what it is worth I actually had a go at Team America and some other Country before Stelek... but he deleted my posts since they were in a Fantasy topic. The ducking jerk. A fair criticism of ETC rosters could have been quite enligthening, to be honest. Too bad Stelek had to stick with his usual “you fail, because you fail” sort of argument. That was my argument as well... when you put power fists on tactical marines you just fail. After the second set of critiques, I stopped bothering with his ramblings, something I usually dont do, even if I disagree with what has been said. If you haven't read all of the reviews then how do you know that Stelek has ripped apart every list? Stelek does rip into each team but he gave praise where it is due. But this was just too poor.

Now YTTH has come up with a fair try to design a strategy, in correspondence with the rules of the ETC, that would lead to victory only by its ingenious composition of armies. That is something worth looking at I guess. No. Just no. It isn't victory by the ingenious composition of armies. If you actually read YTTH you would understand Stelek is a firm believer in field experience... getting to know your list. Balanced all-comer lists take the focus away from match up and determine the outcome more by the skill of the general. Luck is reduced by rolling as many dice as possible... something that MSU armies are good at.

To sum up the rough idea, Stelek prefers having an all mech composition of 8 mostly identical army lists, that make the most out of a combination of transports and units (with special weapons) and a large shooty component. Once again this shows a serious lack of insight into YTTH. Stelek's mechanised Black Templar list is nothing like the mechanised Blood Angels or Space Wolf lists. One has three Vindicators, one has up to 6 Predators and the other has Devastators. Very little is identical. His favourite 8 armies consist of Marine based armies: Space Marines, Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Black Templar, Dark Angels and Imperial Guard based armies: Imperial Guard, Demonhunters and Sisters of Battle. Fair enough. One can imagine how to create pretty exchangable rosters for these armies, only that some work better (SM, BA, IG) and some are worse (DA, DH). They are just examples... so not sure how they became his favourite. And worse doesn't mean uncompetitive. It just means the codex has few viable units so all the competitive lists look similar... mono-builds.

To understand what the plan with this setup is, lets quote Stelek:

...click HERE to see what was quoted...

Alright. Lets get things straight now, although this might get a bit complicated. His general idea is, albeit not phrased very clearly, to overload the enemy team with a repeated configuration of armies, to which, in the end, your enemy will not have answers anymore. He isn't playing the Rock-Paper-Scissors game. I have to admit, he did indeed understand the concept of a team tournament faster than you would normally expect, given the fact he himself has probably never even thought about the idea of a team tournament before. Kudos to you, Stelek.

His idea is pretty straightforward. Would it work? I dont think so. There are a number of incoherencies in his though process. Lets pick it apart. Wait? You disapproved of Stelek ripping into the epic failure of the ETC lists. Hypocrite. Oh! This must be constructive 'criticism'.

1. His idea is from 2007. You mean during 4th Edition... because if Lexicanum is correct 5th Edition came out July 2008.

First and foremost, the idea of massing up on a particular build is pretty old itself within the evolution of the ETC army setups. Basically, after the first edition, everybody had understood that there is a need to arrange your overall setup in a way to create a pairing advantage which reaches further than just having a counter to certain popular armies such as, at that time, Iron Warriors. Stelek plans on fielding balanced all-comers. There isn't going to be many pairing advantages. The other team will have 2 or 3 dedicated anti-mech armies. Is this where Stelek offers up Daemonhunters and Dark Angels? What about the anti-horde lists like the Dual Lash? Now, the second step in this though process was that an overload on a particular aspect (Stelek overloads on balanced mech forces) will devoid the enemy captain of proper counters pretty fast. But really, how hard is it to face a balanced shooty mech force, a balanced demon hunter or dark angel mech force on top? Wait, what? Have you actually looked at some of the balanced all-comer lists on YTTH? How will your Dual Lash deal with 6 Predators? How will a horde of Orks in Battle Wagons and Trukks open up 10+ Chimera without any reliable long range fire power? And have you looked at the Critical Mass Space Marine list for 1500 points? It is not too frightening at all. As I said... wait, what? So having no counter to a balanced mech force does not lead to having proper matchups on Steleks side, rather, it makes for a number of  balanced mech forces getting hard-countered and a number of overall balanced matchups. This equals a loss in my book. Fortunately, European gamers were smarter than that and developed the idea of overloading on unbalanced forces. Unbalanced forces are much harder to counter, keeping in mind that 40k indeed is a game of rock-paper-scissors (although some ppl seemingly still deny that). Like Stelek, Sandwyrm, Farmpunk, Danny Internets, Raptor1313, Kirby, TKE, MoD, Brother Loring, Dethtron... So with the second edition of the ETC, countries came up with the idea of having some 6 armies with multiple – around 4 or 5 – landraiders (that being only one possible example). At first glance, this seems awkward. But in a team tournament, there will only be so many counters to landraider armies in your own setup. Once tau and dark eldar are gone (no Imps at that time), you start to sweat. So in the end, Stelek had the right idea, only his execution was poor. Too bad his idea still is pretty much 2007… which was back in 4th Edition with completely different codices.

2.His choice of strategy is poor

Since then, frankly, the more whitty countries started to understand that only having an overload of a particular style will not win you the tournament because your design might result in having a couple of good pairings for you, which you might win 13:7 (be honest, 4 landraiders does not really KILL the enemy, even if he has no darklances), but in the end you might also loose a couple of games 1:19 or even 0:20 (because darklances or railguns WILL kill your landraider army). What is with this constant reference to Land Raiders? I get that in 2007 some team might have brought lots of Land Raiders. Good for them. Stelek is talking about bringing 10+ tanks. Good luck on taking out all of those in 6 turns. So after the counting is done, you still are not ahead because compensating a number of high losses is VERY hard in a team tournament when you setup does not include “killer” armies with a massacre potential. In the end, overload setups are not possible with killer armies, but only with fairly standard builds, such as a balanced mech force. Massacre type armies most often are one of a kind, not to be replicated with a different codex book. After all, overload of any kind thus only gets you so far because the overall power of your rosters declines. I think you have the word balanced confused with average. It does NOT mean that you add Rocks, Papers and Scissors elements together. It means you have all the necessary tools to reliably handle any of the above. 

3. Balanced lists are poor in general in your opinion

The latest step of this evolution can be witnessed over the last and this years edition of the ETC: People have now understood that are more suitable composition of armies contains a high number of rosters that will, ceteris paribus, kill a particular type of army reliably, that is: very specialised rosters. In addition, the balanced force has left the stage almost entirely. So, taking a look at for example the lists of team Sweden, you might be surprised to see a number of roster not too suitable for “normal” 40k play on a single player basis, because they run into VERY hard counters every once in a while (20 bike-nobs, 20 bike-locks etc.). But lets look at what would happen if Steleks balanced forces would clash with Swedens unbalanced, very one sided builds. Without going into detail too much, it is very easy to comprehend that 20 Nobs on bikes WILL kill a balanced demon hunter mech force. So you take the worst codex and compare it to a rock army. The same is true for around 6 of the overall Swedish army lists compared to balanced marine/IG mech forces. Their specialisation will ensure that the certain aspect they are concentrating on is developed to such an extend that an allround army will find itself unable to cope with it. It will simply have around 50-70% of its army not contributing to the fight, because a rhino with 2 meltaguns ISTs does jack shit to lets say 180 foot orks. 100% agree with you that ISTs in a Rhino will do jack ish. Except of course the Rhino can Tank Shock and block enemy movement... plus we seem to be forgetting the rest of the army. The couble of countermeasures (heavy bolters or CC counters for orks) available to a balanced army will be unable to cope with a whole enemy army crushing in on them. So the rest of the army is made up of heavy bolters and CC counters? We are talking about Daemonhunters right? The ones that will have Imperial Guard as allies? Which means heavy flamers on the hulls of every Chimera. And there is always the Tank Shocking. That is why 40k is a game of rock-paper-scissors. Balance will help you against balanced forces, but it will lead to defeat against specialised opponents (and it doesnt even matter what their specialty is). You put down Dual Lash who specialise in killing hordes. I put down my mechanised whatever. You put down your mechanised Imperial Guard who specialise in killing tanks. I put down my mechanised whatever that has lots of long range light anti-tanks. You put down a horde of Orks or Tyranids. I just put down a wall of AV 12 with lots of guns behind it. So “balance trumps all” might work if you are more skilled than the other player, but on an equal footing, it simply is nonsense. As long as you get the right match up... and what happens if you go up against TKEs strategy of bringing 5 balanced lists and then 1 Rock, Paper and Scissors? Or what happens if Stelek took this whole pairing advantage thing seriously and brought a mix of Mechanised and Foot lists that were balanced all-comers? We will see something like this: Mech Guard, Mech Marines, Mech SoB, Mech Eldar, Hybrid Tau, Tyranids, TWC Wolves, Deep Striking Blood Angels. Can see examples of those on YTTH.

For this kind of unbalanced setup, you obvisouly need to be very clever at arranging the pairings, but with a good preparation, this sort of “aggressive” countering all through the board instead of a defensive overload on a particular asepct will allow you to win on the overall score. Why does overloading have to be defensive? The lists can still be paired to their advantage. Stelek's mechanised Black Templars will have 3 Large Blasts from Vindicators plus lots of flame templates from 4 Crusader squads and 3-4 Land Speeders. There would be enough melta to open up any transport like Battle Wagons and Trukks. Personally I'd match SoB against a horde. Their Immolators would have heavy flamers while the induced Imperial Guard would provide long range anti-tank or MC with their autocannons.

4.ETC uses los-blocking terrain

Lets take a last aspect into account, considering Steleks love for mech armies. From my point of view, the surge of mech armies in the US has very much to do with the terrain they are playing on – which is close to none. Way to make such broad generalisations. You forget that Stelek plays in his basement. And if you look at Sandwyrm and Farmpunk's games you will notice they have decent LoS blocking terrain. In Germany, the same mechanisms applied and made IG and shooty marines very popular. Didn't you hear? The German and American Team have joined forces to produce the double fail. Altough we dont play desert combat only, we dont have a lot of big los-blocking terrain either. The situation is different at the ETC. Respecting the wishes of countries that are used to play with a LOT more los-blocking terrain, the ETC organisation tries to ensure that at least the criteria from the rulebook are matched in terms of terrain coverage. So 25% of board is covered in terrain with about 2-3 reasonably size LoS blocking pieces? Plus, at the ETC there are always differences between the individual tables in terms of density and design of the terrain, leading to some city-fightish tables, a number of well covered tables and some more open tables. You do understand what the Immolator Spam list looks like right? Or that Stelek doesn't just build Razorspam lists. You will find there are lists that want to get into the mid field like the mechanised Black Templars. There is even a Blood Angel Razorspam army that uses heavy flamers with devastators as support... template galore. In consequence, a high number of shooty mech armies will not only be unable to use the terrain to their advantage (vehicles dont benefit from cover as much as footsloggers do) but they will also find themselves overwhelmed by aggressive armies approaching in the cover of los-blocking terrain (and even more so on cityfight). What do these have in common: Immolator,  Imperial Guard Chimera and BA Razorback. That's right ladies and gentlemen. They all have access to lots of heavy flamers. How much help is a predator with lascanons when it is only offerend one round of shooting before people are in his face? WTF?!? Who is putting Lascannons on a Predator? Listen up peoples. You want Autocannon on top and Heavy Bolter on the sides unless you have the points spare for Lascannons... trust me you wont have enough points spare. If you need heavy anti-tank get some melta guns and leave the Lascannons at home. Taken together, balanced mech lists seem even more of a road to failure than any other composition. It seems like you don't know what a balanced mech lists looks like.

Around a year ago, during the preparations for the last ETC, I invited Stelek to arrange for a team from the US and to participate. He couldnt make it (does he visit bigger tournaments ever?). Do you even read YTTHs? He participated in 'Ard Boyz this year. And there is the whole cost of getting to Europe. Not all of us can go by land. Maybe the truth would have been hurting too much anyway…

- Braindead from 40Kings

On a different note. I had a look at my two posts below after they went up on the blog. Sorry to everyone that had to read them. I swear they flowed so much better in my head.