stormcast powerlevel and small campaign

[jeanfluflu]

Hi guys.

I've recently started a small narrative campaign using the path to glory system with some friends.
Theres me the stormcast player, my khorne friend, an orruk player and a gravelord player.

I've noticed some unbalanced between battletomes when it was time to create the list (for example my gravelord friend initially wanted to use his daughters of khaine army and created a build filled with 10 bloodsisters 5 bloodstalkers and a bloodwrack shrine).

Considering our path to glory board only allows 3 sequitors when my friend get to play his full squad of 5 stalkers we decided to pump the numbers up for everyone and balance the factions using the point system the gamme gives us (working on 560 to 600 pts armies to start the campaign).

To be sure we can start with a balanced system i made some test games and the results where surprising, at least for me.

Each battle ended up in a striking victory for the stormcast army, like not even close games.
My friend just killed 3 miniatures and i deleted him from the board on one of them.

Here's the lists we played with:

Stormcast, for 560pts:
Lord arcanum on dracoline
2x5 sequitors
3 evocators

Chaos, for 570pts:
Chaos sorcerer lord or chaos lord on foot.
3 varanguard
2x5 chaos warrior (maybe in this format the chaos marauders could be useful, especially since he can choose to play them as pack of 20)

Anyway, my friends are already complaining that stormcasts "have it all" despite my numerous attemps to tone down my list building and some units and stormhosts that i actively avoid (such as raptors or even dracoline for example) and they don't seem to have fun in the game even though this is why i spent so much time writing this narrative campaign.


I'm far from being a pro player even though i play this type of board games since a while now but when i follow the discussions arround there people seems to complain from the opposite: stormcast armies being average everywhere when other armies have very specialized units that can outclass us easily in a specific domain.

Since the rest of the stormcast "path to glory" board does not seems to punch this hard do you advice me to play liberators instead of sequitors, maybe play two small characters instead of one big lord arcanum?
Is the point system useless at this size without all the buff units, totem heroes...etc?

I'd really like them to have fun and i'd rather step my game down in order to have longer meaningfull games than to make them step up (i already find that the game is too "killy" there's like no chance to recover from a charge at this format).

do you have advices? tips and previous experiences with path to glory?

[CommissarRotke]

AFAIK you should be using the path to glory points, or just no points in general? you could try 2x3 sequitors vs the 2x5 chaos warriors. Ironically Stormcast do seem better on smaller scales, when synergies don't come into play as much

[jeanfluflu]

Yeah, maybe we can try this way with squads of 3 instead of 5. 

One leader with a Big mace, another one with mace too and the last one with Shield.

I was afraid to be the joke army, when i saw that the orruk player can get a 600pts army while i run with 10 miniatures.

Let's try this way with something like this:

Lord arcanum on dracoline

2x3 sequitors 

3 evocators.

[Nizrah]

I don't understand. You are using Path of Glory points to build a army or normal points like in matched play? 

[jeanfluflu]

On 5/29/2021 at 12:49 AM, Nizrah said:

I don't understand. You are using Path of Glory points to build a army or normal points like in matched play? 

Well we used the path to glory system for list building purpose but decided to fill the ranks of some units (5 sequitors instead of 3 per unit for example) to get some balance by comparing the army pints.
It isnt one or the other it's both, at the same time.

That approach was wrong as we saw because some stormcasts units outclass thir counterparts in this format by too far.

[Lucur]

It's less that SCE are super powerful, though the units themselves are okay warscrolls. The things that drag SC down at 2k pts is synergy and base-/ unit sizes. With larger units and more interactions between multiple units other armies outclass SCE, while at smaller scales we do pretty well.

[jeanfluflu]

On 5/31/2021 at 8:49 AM, Lucur said:

It's less that SCE are super powerful, though the units themselves are okay warscrolls. The things that drag SC down at 2k pts is synergy and base-/ unit sizes. With larger units and more interactions between multiple units other armies outclass SCE, while at smaller scales we do pretty well.

Yes i agree on that, problem is that my friends are severly biased against me because of how many loss they got (once again i'm not a very good player) so they got this idea that somehow stormcasts armies are OP and the new edition of the gamme will probably not change that as well :D.

we'll wait for the new edition to start the campaign i think, they told us that path to glory would be changed and i hope with this fresh eye we can get some funny games together.

[Lucur]

I feel ya, i had the same issues at the beginning of 2nd, when SCE were arguably more powerful than most armies, of winning a few to many games and then suffering for it for the rest of time. I hate it when people wipe my army by turn 3 and still explain to me which of my units are op in which way

[Zappgrot]

On 6/4/2021 at 6:26 PM, jeanfluflu said:

Yes i agree on that, problem is that my friends are severly biased against me because of how many loss they got (once again i'm not a very good player) so they got this idea that somehow stormcasts armies are OP and the new edition of the gamme will probably not change that as well :D.

we'll wait for the new edition to start the campaign i think, they told us that path to glory would be changed and i hope with this fresh eye we can get some funny games together.

Well it's sort of true. SCE have really good eeh power density  (for lack of a better  word) That means their individual units/ models are really good stat wise.  So in small games where everything acts on a unit vs unit basis SCE are really powerful. How ever as the battle  gets bigger and the board grows and there is now a need to be everywhere at once.  One of two things tend to happen. 1) The sce needs to splitt up to cover all the objectives. And one part of the army gets to face a part of the opponents force that is vastly inferior while the rest faces the bulk of the opponents army.  This is bad  for  the SCE player since he losses way more in this unbalance then the opponent. The  other thing that can happen is that you keep your forces all together. Smash the opponents main line only to lose on objectives.  That beeing sad it's really hard to play a balanced  game against ppl that are biased against your army since their bias usually prevents them from seeing how they could beat your army. And explaining it to them will only  make them feel talked down to. Sometimes for the sake of keeping a campaign going it's a good idea to toss a game ( no matter what the new  player code might say)   

[jeanfluflu]

On 7/13/2021 at 12:01 PM, Zappgrot said:

Well it's sort of true. SCE have really good eeh power density  (for lack of a better  word) That means their individual units/ models are really good stat wise.  So in small games where everything acts on a unit vs unit basis SCE are really powerful. How ever as the battle  gets bigger and the board grows and there is now a need to be everywhere at once.  One of two things tend to happen. 1) The sce needs to splitt up to cover all the objectives. And one part of the army gets to face a part of the opponents force that is vastly inferior while the rest faces the bulk of the opponents army.  This is bad  for  the SCE player since he losses way more in this unbalance then the opponent. The  other thing that can happen is that you keep your forces all together. Smash the opponents main line only to lose on objectives.  That beeing sad it's really hard to play a balanced  game against ppl that are biased against your army since their bias usually prevents them from seeing how they could beat your army. And explaining it to them will only  make them feel talked down to. Sometimes for the sake of keeping a campaign going it's a good idea to toss a game ( no matter what the new  player code might say)   

Yup i did that once and it helped (toss a game) i made an obvious bad comp and did some funny things, both of us got fun and my friends did enjoyed that as well (and were much more happy to play again the next time).
It's all that matters in the end :).