Friday, December 10, 2010

40K Question: Medusa or Colossus or Griffon?

I'm thinking about some arty for the Valhallans. The default is to just build a Medusa gun for my already-completed Basilisk. The bassie has too great a minimum range to amount to much in games that I may play.

Marines in cover? Colossus deads 'em like d-CON but the minimum range is a drag for the average game as well... and the model is all-around expensive too. Great for apocalypse though.

Medusa has some versatility with two differet rounds available, fires direct and has good range for the average table (and no minimum range.)

But looking at stats, I think I like the Griffon the most, at 70 something points and re-rolling scatter, it kills most things in open ground and seems a great value for what it does. I can easily build a heavy mortar to sit in my salamander and park that puppy in a back corner.

Thoughts?

3 comments:

Joe Kopena said...

I'm not sure you can go wrong on this, except for the Basilisk. It's a shame, because I like the look of the Basilisk with the long barrel, but like you say it really doesn't make sense unless you're playing a *big* Apoc table.

I've seen Kiril make excellent use of the Colossus. The AP 3 with no cover saves on a Large Blast marker makes it a Marine killer par excellence. The Medusa also sounds impressive, but personally I think it's somewhat less terrifying. Maybe good for anti-Terminator (hint, hint), but generally the boards you and I play on have a good amount of terrain, so I'm not sure it's as useful as the Colossus. I fear the latter much more.

The Griffon though is probably a good safe bet. I didn't realize it is so much cheaper than the others. One of the big things to me is that you tend to play on 4x4 Warmachine styled boards rather than more standard 6x4 40k boards. On a 4x4 the 24" minimum range of the Colossus could really crimp your style; even on a 6x4 it's tight, and requires parking it in a far corner, ripe for being outflanked. The 12" of the Griffon is a lot more reasonable on a smaller board.

I'm also just generally a big fan of opting for more bodies rather than more fancyness. The other guns don't seem unnecessarily fancy, but the reduced cost of the Griffon yields up a whole other full Veteran Squad, or another 15 normal grunts. But, if you want to soak up points, I think the others are credible.


Either way, remember that Ordnance Barrage weapons (so, everything here except the Medusa's shells) cause a Pinning check with a -1 modifier to Leadership if they cause any unsaved wounds. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but I think that's actually significant. You could potentially achieve almost as much just by pinning units as you do by removing models. Certainly I've had important units held at a stand still from continual pinning wounds.

Yeti's Yell said...

Thanks Joe. I have to admit, I'm more inclined to build a model that looks cool as much as one that performs well. For that, it's the Medusa.

Money to burn? Colossus.

I'll have to take these guys to the range and see how they do compared to a Master of Ordnance...

Colin said...

MoO needs to be matched to your HQ, and his accuracy is crap, but I think you could work him in if you were trying to run an ord blast spam list. I think the Griffons would really complement that strategy, but you'd need a bunch of them to saturate the battlefield for cheap. Hydras are probably a better use of 75 pts though.

I think the 36" S10 AP2 ord blast of the Medusa is awesome against troops, but it also has great duality with the all-important AP1 shot for going after tanks if you need to.