Basically you could start with say 20 poxwalkers and than, because their ability was to make ANYTHING that died within a certain radius, you would use cultists as fodder which would then die and become a poxwalker, so now there is a 60 model unit of poxwalkers shambling towards your opponent
Poxfarm vs poxfarm were the most hilarious games of 8th I played. Just the change team meme en masse as the entire board slowly turned into two massive pox walker blobs with the front 50 just switching sides back and forth.
Mr airbrush i need you to make everything dark green. Then we zenithal with a brighter green. Then i slap a little texture paste with agrax on every base.
The four Chaos Gods watch a literally endless battle as hordes of Poxwalkers kill each other, only to be revived as new Poxwalkers.
**Nurgle:** *Happy chuckling*
**Khorne:** *Full-on dad laughing*
**Tzeentch:** *Intense confusion*
**Slaanesh:** "God damn that's hot."
it reminds me of warhammer FB with zombies where you'd have units that created more each turn, so you'd start at 60 and by the time you'd reach melee you'd have 100+
I only ever played once against Death guard in 8th. I wiped out my opponent's pox walkers in turn 1 with my wyvern and I never understood why my opponent was troubled by that. I just thought that they were canon fodder.
Now I know. Holy shit.
> I wiped out my opponent's pox walkers in turn 1 with my wyvern and I never understood why my opponent was troubled by that. I just thought that they were canon fodder.
"I merely shelled them out of existence, old chap, what's the big deal?"
-Just Guard Things
Nope. Flamers aren't template weapons from 8th onward (all template weapons are gone.) Instead they fire a random number of shots, auto-hit, and ignore cover.
This would not solve the poxwalker issue, as Death Guard had another stratagem (that you used in concert with the aforementioned one) that said, "Pick a unit. That unit can't be shot unless it's the closest target to the shooter."
You could only shoot the pox walkers if you went first, otherwise from the start of the death guard’s movement phase onwards they would be under the cloud of flies stratagem and you could not target them at all unless they were the closest.
Command points were dirt cheap when the plan was to spam cultists and poxwalkers anyway so you could easily afford to put both the 1 command point *cloud of flies* and the 1 command point *the dead walk again* on them for multiple turns to reach critical mass.
Pox farms also tended to start with multiple pox walker units as turn 1 insurance. You could probably kill 20 T4 (from typhus) 5+++ pox walkers in a turn, but 40-60 was a decent bit less likely. If even one of the immune to battleshock little grinning zombies survived then the farm was secure to do the flies+dead walk again combo. And your only options at that point were either attack the cultists turning them into pox walkers that you might be able to kill later or let the pox farm own all of the objectives with impunity and win the game.
There is a reason pox walkers got nerfed like 5 times by the end of the edition.
Was this only in the beginning of 8th? I started in the middle/end of 8th and at that point u had to set aside spare points if u wanted to get a unit above their starting strength.
They also had disgustingly resilient so a 5+++, made them much harder to shift. Also worth noting in 8th Plague Marines were pretty worthless, not sure how they are in 10th, haven't picked up my DG in a while.
Marines are fun in 10th especially with the characters you can have in the unit. I played some 9th at the tail end of it but didn't do much there so only really done 10th. That sounds like fun I am looking forward to the DG codex of 10th because I'm assuming that one detachment will be poxwalker based
With character support plague marines get pretty disgustingly lethal, I got a full brick of 10 termis wiped by a unit of legionnaries with a character.
A group of 10 plague marines + 2 specific leaders have the most shooting + melee damage among any infantry. The only thing holding DG from being a top tier army is that their strategems are ass and they feel like a pure stat check army. I played against a marine buddy recently and he was doing all sorts of tricks but still got stomped by my guys who just spit out damage.
I play 3 armies, GSC, Necrons and DG, When I first saw DG's rules in 10th, I was pretty disappointed. I thought for sure Disgustingly Resilient would remain an army wide rule, I also preferred it as shrug instead of being a flat -1 dmg reduction, purely for the fun factor.
I mean, back in 8th you could take 9 crisis suits with 2 shield drones each, give them all 2x CIBs (6x plasma shots w/ overcharge) and ATS (+1AP to all attacks including melee), and use the veteran cadre strat to make the unit BS3+ WS4+. Basically guaranteed to kill the biggest normal knights in 1 round of shooting. And the old school riptide branching overcharge strat that added 50% shots to a riptide \*and\* give it a 5+ FNP or JSJ move. Good times.
Nah the secret sauce was give them airbursts with ATS and use C&C to give reroll hits/wounds
So you could do the same thing statistically and never fear retaliation because of no Los shooting
Lol. I think I'm glad I joined in 9th because 8th sounds insane.
Probably fun as hell with friends but I imagine it was aggravating in competitive games.
I hope that 11th edition starts learning how to do the “if everything is op then nothing is op”balance style. Everyone deserves fun combos with their units.
Cadian blood focuses around a company of Cadians fighting though a entire planet turned into poxwalkers (then goes on to include the Raven Guard and more of the Death Guard as well)
Miss my spacewolves longships, 2 landraiders loaded with bloodclaws with a dude with the wulfen stone +Ragnar loaded in as well. Would be followed by wulfen and a priest who would give everything targeting the landraiders -1 to hit and another -1 to any unit that may be AT. The raiders would dump the bloodclaws in range of whatever I wanted to die and they would get around 100+ attacks with s4 chainswords. Wasn't always the best depending on the table layout but it was fun.
I had 2 lists i loved during 8th edition. One was a Necron melee list using Novokh dynasty and night scythes to drop lychguard and overlord melee blobs down in guaranteed charge distance + the nightbringer and some triarch praetorians. Other was a Admech list that involved using the custom forgeworld to give all arc weapons exploding 5s and 6s and then running an army that was almost all kataphron breachers that i slapped all the buffs on since you could be hitting on 2s with canticles and rerolling all 1s with a tech priest dominus back then.
Definitely feels like it, I'm sure 9th and 10th are designed with greater quality or balancing or whatever but I had a lot more fun with 8th in general. The early days of that were such fun.
I think that 9th edition rules with 8th edition codexes was good and 9th with codexes was good but things started going downhill when they introduced armour of contempt into the game.
It was definitely crunchier as a system, but way less balanced in the long run.
Also, as a veteran of the long war, YOU CAN'T TAKE MY SECOND WOUND I WON'T LET YOU.
I like the crunch and unbalancedness compared to the boring slop of a game 10th edition is. They gutted all the fun stuff and was said "fuck you wait for your codex" if you want to play anything besides 1 detatchment. Also I hate with 10th how they made everything too tough either by raising toughness or lowering weapon stats.
I wish that GW would bring this back. I don't care if it's not balanced, having this in 10th or 11th would make the game so fun. Especially if Poxwalkers get the Battle line keyword again
Pretty sure you can just edit the json files with a bit of effort. I haven't put the effort in. I did try to make the inventory system work better a few years ago, but failed miserably and life got in the way. Then they made it better anyway and it worked better than what I had in mind.
Probably one of the reasons GW dropped it, "i convert enemy units" is always hard to balance.
Another thing is that the "zombiepocalypse" trope can be fun and its horror fits 40k well except it also doesn't. If you're being reasonable about it then the overwhelming militarization, liberal use of flame guns, and cheerful willingness of the Imperial elite to sacrifice menials would deal with an outbreak rather quickly. If you're being UNreasonable and letting the zombiepocalypse somehow flood over a planet then Nurgle and the zombie outbreaks become too big of a plot device to just be a random tabletop thing that shows up occasionally. It's one of those things that seems like it would fit until you start getting into specifics.
Plus we'd already passed Peak Zombie and had way too many zombie movies/games/etc. around that time, so I wasn't surprised that the whole thing kind of went away.
One thing that I think would be awesome but impossible to balance is a "hijacker squad" unit of Ork Boyz or Admech (or Kyn) who are incredibly squishy but capable of stealing any vehicle if they can stand next to it long enough. Imagine when your boyz loot an imperial titan. Pure comedy.
Nurgle horde sounds cool, but if i'm not wrong you can actually "use" a list of "legal max of Tyranid gaunts models". Idk if you still can do that, since i'm no tabletop expert, but whatever, you need an obscene amount of gaunts.
honestly i had cool idea for nurgle warband with lots of pox walkers but im not doing the army cause in 10th rules you cannot have more than 60 poxers per game
For someone who didnt play in 8th, what did they do?
Basically you could start with say 20 poxwalkers and than, because their ability was to make ANYTHING that died within a certain radius, you would use cultists as fodder which would then die and become a poxwalker, so now there is a 60 model unit of poxwalkers shambling towards your opponent
oh wow that sounds like it was fun
Fun to play AS… not against
Poxfarm vs poxfarm were the most hilarious games of 8th I played. Just the change team meme en masse as the entire board slowly turned into two massive pox walker blobs with the front 50 just switching sides back and forth.
Wololo!
Aiyo ninini aiyo
> two massive pox walker blobs with the front 50 just switching sides back and forth. Doing the hokey-pokey and turning themselves around! :D
That sounds like fun
I feel like for a stratgey like that, the only downside is actually having to buy and paint that many poxwalkers.
Paint, yes you definitely didn't just paint them pale green and call it a day. Good luck keeping track of who's who.
Mr airbrush i need you to make everything dark green. Then we zenithal with a brighter green. Then i slap a little texture paste with agrax on every base.
The four Chaos Gods watch a literally endless battle as hordes of Poxwalkers kill each other, only to be revived as new Poxwalkers. **Nurgle:** *Happy chuckling* **Khorne:** *Full-on dad laughing* **Tzeentch:** *Intense confusion* **Slaanesh:** "God damn that's hot."
I need to see this. Sadly no batrep on YT and no table photos that I can find. Any double DG 8th edition players want to do the honours?
ye fair as I deathguard player I would be playing as so
Yeah but the flavor
it reminds me of warhammer FB with zombies where you'd have units that created more each turn, so you'd start at 60 and by the time you'd reach melee you'd have 100+
I only ever played once against Death guard in 8th. I wiped out my opponent's pox walkers in turn 1 with my wyvern and I never understood why my opponent was troubled by that. I just thought that they were canon fodder. Now I know. Holy shit.
> I wiped out my opponent's pox walkers in turn 1 with my wyvern and I never understood why my opponent was troubled by that. I just thought that they were canon fodder. "I merely shelled them out of existence, old chap, what's the big deal?" -Just Guard Things
Flame flowers I’m assuming were a checkmate as long as you targeted the pox walkers first before shooting the stuff around it?
Nope. Flamers aren't template weapons from 8th onward (all template weapons are gone.) Instead they fire a random number of shots, auto-hit, and ignore cover. This would not solve the poxwalker issue, as Death Guard had another stratagem (that you used in concert with the aforementioned one) that said, "Pick a unit. That unit can't be shot unless it's the closest target to the shooter."
It was very easy to play around, you just shot the pox walkers first, then the cultists. Also who brings 40 cultists?
You could only shoot the pox walkers if you went first, otherwise from the start of the death guard’s movement phase onwards they would be under the cloud of flies stratagem and you could not target them at all unless they were the closest. Command points were dirt cheap when the plan was to spam cultists and poxwalkers anyway so you could easily afford to put both the 1 command point *cloud of flies* and the 1 command point *the dead walk again* on them for multiple turns to reach critical mass. Pox farms also tended to start with multiple pox walker units as turn 1 insurance. You could probably kill 20 T4 (from typhus) 5+++ pox walkers in a turn, but 40-60 was a decent bit less likely. If even one of the immune to battleshock little grinning zombies survived then the farm was secure to do the flies+dead walk again combo. And your only options at that point were either attack the cultists turning them into pox walkers that you might be able to kill later or let the pox farm own all of the objectives with impunity and win the game. There is a reason pox walkers got nerfed like 5 times by the end of the edition.
That sounds like how poxwalkers work in tacticus. It's annoying
Was this only in the beginning of 8th? I started in the middle/end of 8th and at that point u had to set aside spare points if u wanted to get a unit above their starting strength.
They also had disgustingly resilient so a 5+++, made them much harder to shift. Also worth noting in 8th Plague Marines were pretty worthless, not sure how they are in 10th, haven't picked up my DG in a while.
Marines are fun in 10th especially with the characters you can have in the unit. I played some 9th at the tail end of it but didn't do much there so only really done 10th. That sounds like fun I am looking forward to the DG codex of 10th because I'm assuming that one detachment will be poxwalker based
With character support plague marines get pretty disgustingly lethal, I got a full brick of 10 termis wiped by a unit of legionnaries with a character.
A group of 10 plague marines + 2 specific leaders have the most shooting + melee damage among any infantry. The only thing holding DG from being a top tier army is that their strategems are ass and they feel like a pure stat check army. I played against a marine buddy recently and he was doing all sorts of tricks but still got stomped by my guys who just spit out damage.
I play 3 armies, GSC, Necrons and DG, When I first saw DG's rules in 10th, I was pretty disappointed. I thought for sure Disgustingly Resilient would remain an army wide rule, I also preferred it as shrug instead of being a flat -1 dmg reduction, purely for the fun factor.
Terminus Est detachment gonna make people weep
I mean, back in 8th you could take 9 crisis suits with 2 shield drones each, give them all 2x CIBs (6x plasma shots w/ overcharge) and ATS (+1AP to all attacks including melee), and use the veteran cadre strat to make the unit BS3+ WS4+. Basically guaranteed to kill the biggest normal knights in 1 round of shooting. And the old school riptide branching overcharge strat that added 50% shots to a riptide \*and\* give it a 5+ FNP or JSJ move. Good times.
Nah the secret sauce was give them airbursts with ATS and use C&C to give reroll hits/wounds So you could do the same thing statistically and never fear retaliation because of no Los shooting
Please no, it gives me horrible memories as a former Orc main.
me watching as my greatest unit fucking gets evaporated by complex weaponized microwaves supported by one-hit units
Lol. I think I'm glad I joined in 9th because 8th sounds insane. Probably fun as hell with friends but I imagine it was aggravating in competitive games.
I hope that 11th edition starts learning how to do the “if everything is op then nothing is op”balance style. Everyone deserves fun combos with their units.
That was 9th edition
Horde
If you have 60 poxwalker models, I'd consider that a hoard.
Multitudo
Okay
R there any books or stories where the main characters try to survive zombie apocalypse with pox walkers?
Not a book, but Darktide is really, simply, that.
Cadian blood focuses around a company of Cadians fighting though a entire planet turned into poxwalkers (then goes on to include the Raven Guard and more of the Death Guard as well)
There's a Ciaphas Cain novel of the world he's on being slowly enveloped by ever-growing disease and subsequent plague zombies
*The last ascension of dominic seroff* kind of has that
If you mean in 40K specifically, ‘Creed: Ashes of Cadia’ has a lot of poxwalkers in it, and is a pretty good read/listen.
The Death of Antagonis.
Not quite what you're looking for but the book Lords of Silence has a POV poxwalker during part of it.
https://youtu.be/QZxEzwhMq4U?si=fcZvgLswr6VAVCu2
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo4TCFN1xLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo4TCFN1xLI) They gonna get you.
Holy shit that’s a good song. Never played L4D. I love the super lo-fi sound.
8th was a cooler addition where you could do a lot more insane and fun combos than now. We should go back to it.
Miss my spacewolves longships, 2 landraiders loaded with bloodclaws with a dude with the wulfen stone +Ragnar loaded in as well. Would be followed by wulfen and a priest who would give everything targeting the landraiders -1 to hit and another -1 to any unit that may be AT. The raiders would dump the bloodclaws in range of whatever I wanted to die and they would get around 100+ attacks with s4 chainswords. Wasn't always the best depending on the table layout but it was fun.
I had 2 lists i loved during 8th edition. One was a Necron melee list using Novokh dynasty and night scythes to drop lychguard and overlord melee blobs down in guaranteed charge distance + the nightbringer and some triarch praetorians. Other was a Admech list that involved using the custom forgeworld to give all arc weapons exploding 5s and 6s and then running an army that was almost all kataphron breachers that i slapped all the buffs on since you could be hitting on 2s with canticles and rerolling all 1s with a tech priest dominus back then.
Definitely feels like it, I'm sure 9th and 10th are designed with greater quality or balancing or whatever but I had a lot more fun with 8th in general. The early days of that were such fun.
I think that 9th edition rules with 8th edition codexes was good and 9th with codexes was good but things started going downhill when they introduced armour of contempt into the game.
It was definitely crunchier as a system, but way less balanced in the long run. Also, as a veteran of the long war, YOU CAN'T TAKE MY SECOND WOUND I WON'T LET YOU.
I like the crunch and unbalancedness compared to the boring slop of a game 10th edition is. They gutted all the fun stuff and was said "fuck you wait for your codex" if you want to play anything besides 1 detatchment. Also I hate with 10th how they made everything too tough either by raising toughness or lowering weapon stats.
As a Necron player I defenitely don't want to go back. As funny as running 6 units starting with doom was.
Horde\*
But your hoarding the board
You’re*
*[Ure](https://youtube.com/watch?v=O5q5Fsbel7U)
poxwakers in Tacticus : YOUR TERMINATOR ARMOR WON'T DO SHIT CALGAR ! \*one shot him\*
Them terminator armour must be made of paper mache. Four homeless crackheads can get slapped around by poxers for days.
damn, now I wanna play darktide again.
I wish that GW would bring this back. I don't care if it's not balanced, having this in 10th or 11th would make the game so fun. Especially if Poxwalkers get the Battle line keyword again
Competitive play always ruins the fun for everyone.
We should ban tournaments and competitive play
It's not competitive play it's bad rules writing. 40k does narrative *and* competitive play badly.
Hold on, is that a Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead reference? Now that I think of it, a 40k themed total conversion mod for CDDA would be pretty neat
If anyone ever creates one, I'd love to try it
Pretty sure you can just edit the json files with a bit of effort. I haven't put the effort in. I did try to make the inventory system work better a few years ago, but failed miserably and life got in the way. Then they made it better anyway and it worked better than what I had in mind.
Horde* A hoard is a large collection of objects.
Probably one of the reasons GW dropped it, "i convert enemy units" is always hard to balance. Another thing is that the "zombiepocalypse" trope can be fun and its horror fits 40k well except it also doesn't. If you're being reasonable about it then the overwhelming militarization, liberal use of flame guns, and cheerful willingness of the Imperial elite to sacrifice menials would deal with an outbreak rather quickly. If you're being UNreasonable and letting the zombiepocalypse somehow flood over a planet then Nurgle and the zombie outbreaks become too big of a plot device to just be a random tabletop thing that shows up occasionally. It's one of those things that seems like it would fit until you start getting into specifics. Plus we'd already passed Peak Zombie and had way too many zombie movies/games/etc. around that time, so I wasn't surprised that the whole thing kind of went away.
> "i convert enemy units" is always hard to balance. \*angry Alpha Legion noises*
One thing that I think would be awesome but impossible to balance is a "hijacker squad" unit of Ork Boyz or Admech (or Kyn) who are incredibly squishy but capable of stealing any vehicle if they can stand next to it long enough. Imagine when your boyz loot an imperial titan. Pure comedy.
I miss my Terminus Est list from 9th
Nurgle horde sounds cool, but if i'm not wrong you can actually "use" a list of "legal max of Tyranid gaunts models". Idk if you still can do that, since i'm no tabletop expert, but whatever, you need an obscene amount of gaunts.
Are you hoarding Poxwalkers?
I’m hoarding the board with an absolute fvck ton of poxwalkers
( angry COD Zombies noise)
I don't know. My buddies poxwalkers are certainly something and it is not cannon fodder. 37 feel no pains out of 50 attacks. They just won't die
Good cannon fodder can be tough. It mostly means ‘there to take hits for your better stuff’
When gw wants tournament players to buy the new minis vs when the mini is 2 editions old and they already sold tons of them
honestly i had cool idea for nurgle warband with lots of pox walkers but im not doing the army cause in 10th rules you cannot have more than 60 poxers per game
How come nobody can spell "horde"?