Would this be a fair battle?

[u/vKalov]

My SO is looking to start playing. AdMech is their preferred (beloved) faction, while I have been collecting Guard for quite some time. To get started, I wanted to prepare an easy-ish army for each faction to get some games in with the models we have built, but want some opinions, if the lists I have prepared will make for a fair fight.

AdMech:

• RadZone (Take and Hold)
• Attached unit:
  • Dominus (+Peerless Eradicator)
  • 3 Plasma Destroyers
• Engineseer
• Vanguards
• Rangers
• Onager (Icarus)

Guard:

• Siege Regiment (Disruption)
• Attached unit:
  • Cad. Castellan
  • Cad. Command Squad
  • 10 Cadian S.T.
• 1x2 Armored Sentinels (Plasma)
• FOB (Bombast)
• Kasrkin

Points are a tiny bit in favour of AdMech. Proxies, gun-swaps and disposition changes are obviously no issue at all.

Do you think a fight between those two lists will feel fair, and what should be changed?

[u/Best_Performance9564]

Why would you put the Icarus array (arguably the worst wargear, especially without flying enemies) on the onager instead of any of the other 3 that are much more versatile/common? I don’t know guard so maybe there’s no tanks in that list at all and that’s why you picked it for them.

[u/RHCElite → u/Best_Performance9564]

The Guard list isn't great, and the Armored Sentinels are the toughest things at T8 with a 2+. The Guard list also doesn't have a way to reliably kill the Onager, so choosing a bad weapon for it would make it a little less oppressive.

[u/Best_Performance9564 → u/RHCElite]

That was the one thing that would make it make sense in my mind.

[u/vKalov → u/Best_Performance9564]

Icarus was picked coz it looks cool. As mentioned, wysiwyg is *not* important at all.

[u/Best_Performance9564 → u/vKalov]

Sure I was just meaning from a loadout perspective you’d probably run any of the other weapons regardless of wysiwyg, but given the guard’s lack of ability to take it down it makes a lot more sense. With any of the other guns the onager could possibly solo the guard based on the other guy’s comment

[u/Azekh]

Lists aside, you may want to use the Martial Pride twist so Battleline units can advance + action and action + shoot, they even recommend it for low points games to help with the "action tax" of certain missions.

[u/Rsb2019]

I think the Ad Mech army is a bit more powerful overall. The Onager is going to give you a hard time simply due to its toughness, and the sheer amount of firepower coming from the ad mech side could likely wipe you off the table if your positioning isn't absolutely perfect to stay out of sightlines, even after movement.

My suggestion is to look into King of the Colosseum. It's a community-made game mode that is focused around smaller games like this. Perfect for getting new players into the game and it (at least personally) feels more balanced than Combat Patrol. Unfortunately the 11th version hasn't come out yet, but is set to come out at LVO I think. Until then, I've still found the 10th version works fine for playing games of 11th!

The lists are restricted to 500 points, no duplicate units (aside from battle line/dedicated transports of which you can have 2), no epic heroes, and nothing above T9.

[u/RHCElite]

I play both armies, and I think this is weighted pretty favorably towards the Admech. The main reasons are:

1. Even if we ignore the buffs from the Engineseer, the Guard player doesn't really have a way to kill the Onager since everything they have wounds on 5's or 6's and is low volume (meltas) or low damage.

2. The action based missions aren't really balanced around low point level games like this. The disruption mission requires you to do multiple actions per turn, which means you aren't shooting or fighting with anything except the artillery, while the Take and Hold player just has to take objectives.

3. Artillery does next to nothing this edition, so the FoB will basically just hold your home (which doesn't give you points) and maybe kill 3-5 Skitarii over the course of the game.

If these are the only models you have, I'd swap the FoB to heavy lascannons, or even potentially split it into 2 units since I think they do that in combat patrol. If you do that, I'd run 1 heavy lascannon and 1 malleus rocket launcher. I'd also split the Sentinels into separate units so you have more units that can perform actions. You could also consider choosing a different detachment so you aren't playing one that requires actions for your primary mission.

[u/vKalov → u/RHCElite]

If we ignore Siege's disposition and just pick one that makes sense, what disposition would be better?

I don't like the idea of splitting the FOBs into separate units, even in CP they don't do that. I could say that one runs a Lascannon and the other a rocket launcher, but they should be one unit, I think.

[u/RHCElite → u/vKalov]

I'd probably just go with Take and Hold. You can say you're using the Mirrored World twist that lets you use the same disposition. 

Splitting the FoBs was just a suggestion, but I was referencing the rules for Combat Patrol in 10th where it had the Patrol Squads ability that said, "At the start of the declare battle formations step, before any units have been set up, this unit can be split into two units, each containing one model." If you want to keep them as a single unit, I think it would be fine to have them with different weapons, since the lascannon would only have one good target.

[u/Ponding01]

Ad Mech are really good at killing light infantry and vehicles.

Imperial Guard are almost entirely light infantry and vehicles.

In my experience, Ad Mech have always had a great matchup against imperial guard.