I has spam - Part 1

When I posted about the army list I took to a local tournament I made an off-hand comment about how it wouldn't have looked out of place in 5th Edition.

And this got me thinking about all of the bitching that used to go on about Razorback Spam. Do a quick search on the internet and you'll see some of the comments that were made on the build prior to the release of 6th and I think it's fair to say that the 40k world was divided into 3 camps; those who hated it, those who loved it and those who really didn't give a toss about it.

But is spam bad?

Well, my list only had four Razorbacks, so in the grand scheme of things, it probably wasn't too spammy, and I don't think that it was the Razorbacks themselves that people didn't particularly like; after all there are units in 40k who can almost spit through their armour; it was what they brought to the table with them that raised a few eyebrows and had people poring over my list to see if I'd stuck a couple of extra units in there.

And what they brought to the table were twin-linked lascannons and 5 man tactical squads with a plasma cannons, and if you break the cost of that down and look at my overall list, you'll find that the most expensive unit in there was a dreadnought.

Now, I'm not going to get into a see who can piss the highest contest about whether a unit is over or under costed, because personally I think that the cost of a Razorback is fair. Combine the very low armour and fairly expensive weapons options (compared to some armies) and you'll find that it doesn't make it a game changing unit by any stretch of the imagination.

But four of them on a table will make your opponent stop to think.

Why?

Because that's four tanks that have a re-rollable chance of killing any of your opponent's armour at range, and four scoring units inside them who can take out a lot of their footsloggers with an ignore cover AP2 weapon. That's not nice. But, it probably answers why people hate Razorbacks - they're an armoured weapons platform with a transport capability that can get down your opponent's throat quickly.

But let's face facts, to let your army have any chance of doing something with them, they definitely need more than one, which in turn leads to accusations of spamming.

But is spam bad?