I will say on horde… I run 2 armies with horde units… in my O&G i have 2 units of 50 Night Goblin Spearmen… and I use the width more to allow me to deploy fanatics more effectively as i can deploy them off a unit of fast cav on my flank by moving and then launch them off the other end into the center of the board. then in my Beastmen i run a unit of 50 Ungor with Spear and Shield and it works well i either use it to replace the unit of 20 that gets put in the watchtower in scenario 6 or any other building and they basically become unkillable.
What I think GW was going for was breaking up the use of Death Stars which was annoying as all hell. With the ways the rules are now doing so is a serious handicap now. Of course, opinions vary on that.
I agree that GW has definitely been trying to get rid of the deathstar units. However, I don’t think the horde rule had a major role in that, I think the killing blow to those units was the rule change that made it almost impossible to kill your way out of combat, and then on top of that the ability to make any large cheap unit stubborn. This meant that if a deathstar unit ran into your 10 deep slaves then they would be stuck there for a while, and possibly taking a few hits in the meantime until your hammer unit was able to come up along side them and hit them in the flank, or possibly the rear.
I agree that GW has definitely been trying to get rid of the deathstar units. However, I don't think the horde rule had a major role in that, I think the killing blow to those units was the rule change that made it almost impossible to kill your way out of combat, and then on top of that the ability to make any large cheap unit stubborn. This meant that if a deathstar unit ran into your 10 deep slaves then they would be stuck there for a while, and possibly taking a few hits in the meantime until your hammer unit was able to come up along side them and hit them in the flank, or possibly the rear.
Corker
Completely agree Corker - the problem is that elite units should get better at slaughtering because of supporting attacks but the cheap, large units they should be able to massacre are sticking around because of Steadfast :mad!