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stratigo wrote: Because you get to see yourself in everything already.
I absolutely don't and never have. It's not helpful to just assume everyone to be a white man because they don't agree with your presuppositions. Self-insertion was relevant up until when I was about 11 years old, and even then I could be a ninja turtle, a velociraptor or whatever was the current thing. After that, I learned to appreciate characters and stories for what they are, not for how well they represent my arbitrary phenotype and cultural heritage. Then again, I was well cared and provided for, so maybe that's the reason I'm no longer bound by those infantile notions. I can see people needing this if they have lacked proper attention and care in their lives and, in those cases, they have my deepest sympathies.
I’m not sure if you realize it, but you sound needlessly condescending here.
StudentOfEtherium wrote: "women are weaker" is such an unscientific excuse. look at any number of female strongmen, female martial artists, female sports players. people are so against the idea of strong women...
Yes, women can be strong and participate in sports/hobbies/jobs etc that require it. But on a basic, even, and biological level, men are physically stronger than women. That doesn't mean 'every man is stronger than every woman', 'women can't be strong' or 'I'm against women who are strong'. Those are incorrect extrapolations you have made. I'm not even going to touch the rest of what you said beyond identifying it as absolute rot. The two genders have significant differences and we should celebrate them, not try and pretend they don't exist.
DeathKorp_Rider wrote: Also, don’t bring “gender politics” into this as that has no relevance and will only derail the conversation
This entire conversation is about gender. It's right there in the title.
Manfred von Drakken wrote: I think anyone who is actively upset by the idea of female Custodes or Marines really needs to have an honest conversation with themselves about why.
I've already done so. I resent the idea that a hitherto male-only organisation like the Custodes has suddenly been retroactively altered to have apparently always had female members with little rhyme or reason beyond a shallow attempt to appeal to modern sensibilities. This would extend to Space Marines too, were it to happen to them. That would be even more egregious, because the universe has provided us with reasoning for them being male-only, whether you agree with it or believe it would hold up to real life science, or not. Even putting aside the science part, the Marines are analogous to a brotherhood of monks, the same way the Sororitas are analogous to a nun convent. Those are the explanations within the universe, so there's no good reason to change it except for an attempt to score real-life political points. Certainly I don't approve of doing it in the name of 'recruitment': if a woman wants to be involved with 40k or wargaming as a whole, that's great, and they should be welcomed. But 40k (or any work of fiction, for that matter) shouldn't be changed to try and cultivate a theoretical fanbase when it already has a dedicated one.
I would have the exact same response to the sudden appearence of male Sisters (Brothers?) of Battle that had mysteriously always been there. I had the same response to the Salamanders suddenly changing from being ethnically black to literally coal-black - that one would certainly seem to torpedo the idea that any of this is done with a genuine consideration toward 'representation'.
40k is a fictional universe and the Imperium it depicts is supposed to be a dystopian fascist hellscape. So why on earth does it even matter that one or two of its factions are male exclusive? The Imperial Guard has women in its ranks because if you can operate a lasgun, you can be a meatshield. The AdMech have women (or a close approximation) because the Omnissiah doesn't particular care who's grafting mechanical bits to themselves. The Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence exist. The Eldar and Tau have women in prominent societal and military positions. The Tyranids are a force of nature without gender at all. There's plenty of 'representation' already without trying to crowbar it in.
I’m not sure if you realize it, but you sound needlessly condescending here.
I didn't intend to. I'm not a native speaker so please bear with me. I'm aware that lack of validation, especially during childhood, can be a difficult topic, and I've navigated a particularly bad case in in my immediate personal environment for several years. It's not meant to dismiss those people, but rather to explore where this need for external validation by representation, in popular media of all things, might be rooted in.
I’m not sure if you realize it, but you sound needlessly condescending here.
I didn't intend to. I'm not a native speaker so please bear with me. I'm aware that lack of validation, especially during childhood, can be a difficult topic, and I've navigated a particularly bad case in in my immediate personal environment for several years. It's not meant to dismiss those people, but rather to explore where this need for external validation by representation, in popular media of all things, might be rooted in.
MalusCalibur wrote: I've already done so. I resent the idea that a hitherto male-only organisation like the Custodes has suddenly been retroactively altered to have apparently always had female members with little rhyme or reason beyond a shallow attempt to appeal to modern sensibilities.
But why? What does "all-male" add to the custodes? What story does it allow you to tell that you cannot tell with it being a mixed gender force, and has GW ever actually told that story, or would the stories told of the custodes be absolutely the same regardless because their gender was never actually a defining aspect of their character?
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
40k is a fictional universe and the Imperium it depicts is supposed to be a dystopian fascist hellscape. So why on earth does it even matter that one or two of its factions are male exclusive? The Imperial Guard has women in its ranks because if you can operate a lasgun, you can be a meatshield. The AdMech have women (or a close approximation) because the Omnissiah doesn't particular care who's grafting mechanical bits to themselves. The Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence exist. The Eldar and Tau have women in prominent societal and military positions. The Tyranids are a force of nature without gender at all. There's plenty of 'representation' already without trying to crowbar it in.
I believe the disconnect between you and those people is that you're fundamentally arguing on different levels. Your argument is largely an in-universe one, theirs is a real life one. What you call "scoring political points" on the real-life level to them is a necessary effort towards fixing some sort of deficit within player communitys and maybe society as a whole. It's not surprising those positions are irreconcilable.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/04/16 14:04:45
MalusCalibur wrote: But 40k (or any work of fiction, for that matter) shouldn't be changed to try and cultivate a theoretical fanbase when it already has a dedicated one.
By this argument, no game or piece of media should ever try to evolve or grow to increase its appeal so long as there are people who like it exactly how it is. This is an argument for stagnation and increasing irrelevance.
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
MalusCalibur wrote: But 40k (or any work of fiction, for that matter) shouldn't be changed to try and cultivate a theoretical fanbase when it already has a dedicated one.
By this argument, no game or piece of media should ever try to evolve or grow to increase its appeal so long as there are people who like it exactly how it is. This is an argument for stagnation and increasing irrelevance.
I think this is going to come down to both the nature of the change and how it chooses to adapt. As I've noted before in this thread there are a LOT of ways you can take GW and 40K (and other games) as they are right now and adapt the wrapping, marketing and everything else around the game to be more welcoming to different groups. All of that can be done without changing the lore at all; though you might choose to highlight some parts that were less well mentioned (accepting that sometimes some fans won't have ever read them so will need to be introduced to the classic information in the first place).
The fact that I don't really like the custodes that much in the first place dampens my joy about female custodes a bit. I will never do a full army of them, and IIRC we currently have no proper ally rules to include just a squad or two in a bigger force.
It's a shame they haven't redone the Torchbearer Fleet rules from 9th which let you mix Custodes and Admech to escort Primaris Greyshields to the Chapters they were meant to reinforce. Once located, the Grey Shields had to earn the trust of the Firstborn, then finally the Firstborn and Primaris could fight together as allies and the Custodes and Admech would retreat back to the fleet to bring more Grey Shields to another chapter. These were the rules that finally made me not see Primaris as a huge mistake- they were arguably the coolest rules in 9th.
Armies of Faith were similar- they let you mix Sisters, Marines and Guard... But the built in story wasn't as strong.
BertBert wrote: I can see people needing this if they have lacked proper attention and care in their lives and, in those cases, they have my deepest sympathies.
Well we live in a heck of a world.
I mean, if you're a woman, you already know you make 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, you're 16% more likely to be killed by your partner (worldwide) and many law makers are currently trying to take away your right to decide what is done to your own body.
If you're trans, things are worse.
And if your sex/ gender overlap with visible ethnicity or disability? All of the sex/gender based gak you have to deal with is ramped up even further.
Those factors are active whether you got attention as a child or not. Having the best parents and family in the world will not allow you to make as much money as a man in the same job, nor will it let you end an entopic preganancy in Arizona. And being bombarded with those unfortunate facts everytime you turn on the news does make it nice to have a hobby where you can slap Golden Girls (pun very much intended) down on the table kinda nice- like at least 21st century regression doesn't affect your hobby...
That is, until you have to use the washroom (depending on what state you live in).
I feel like there's definitely a conversation to be had about theory of mind and how we relate to media or the character within. I already found the FSM conversation exhausting before GW threw a match on the gasoline, however. In my humble opinion, it helps any setting to have characters with a wide range of experiences, bodies, et cetera not because it reflects me (I'm a musclefat 5'9 white person) but because it gives the setting more life.
Case in point. I am a SW fan, though my homebrew is the focus of my tabletop efforts. I want the darker skinned Fenrisians to exist, because it's not simply extrapolative satire or caricature of Scandinavia then. It provides a break from the historical antecedents: "oh, there are a fair number of people of African descent here, it's not 100 percent like our own history". I would suggest people who are more interested in this line of thinking to read Ursula K. LeGuin's introduction to the current (?, it's on Kindle) edition of her Left Hand of Darkness.
The thing about 40k is that no one person can grasp the fullness of it.
MalusCalibur wrote: Marines, and Custodes, are men. There is an in-universe reason for this (incompatibility with the various gene implants etc) and a logical one (if you're going to make super-soldiers, you're going to start with the physically stronger gender template). That's all that should matter - showing no respect to the source material in order to cater to modern identity politics is shallow pandering at best.
"women are weaker" is such an unscientific excuse. look at any number of female strongmen, female martial artists, female sports players. people are so against the idea of strong women that female athletes are being forced onto hormone replacement therapy because they exceed the idea of what men expect of them. biology does not state that women are fundamentally weaker than men, because human biology really doesn't differentiate between men and women all that much (and just look at intersex people for how much this strict sexual binary doesn't even work as a framework). if we're turning to biology to make an argument, then we can look at decades of hormone science to see that the barrier between male and female bodies is remarkably thing and incredibly malleable
Also this is trying to apply logic to a universe 38k years in the future, for where we all know the physical differences have become negligible at best and don’t even apply
Wow this is so fundamentaly wrong from a scientific point of view I just don't know what to say(I say that as evolutionary biologist). The biological and psychological difference between sexes is huge that they are practicly another species. Diseases affect the sexes differently and male and female bodies react differently to medcine. I could go on with similar examples. Hormones do not define sex(or chromosomes). Hormone therapy just feths up your body and most europeen countries have started banning it at least for non adults.And you don't seem to understand what intersex means it is not what you seem to think it is. They always have a sex.
I would recomend some reading before making some statements on what is scientific and what is unscientific.
So, sexual dimorphism is absolutely a thing in humans, and the posters upquote (behind the spoiler tag for brevity) are underselling the differences which do exist. However, you are overselling the differences equally as much, especially when considering large amounts of the observed differences between sexes and genders in humans are partially or entirely ascribable to environmental factors. The degrees to which this is the case for a given observed difference is frequently a topic for debate, but it is obvious how things like cultural factors or defined gender roles might impact disease states. Men are more likely to die of industrial exposures if women are gatekeeped out of industrial roles for cultural reasons, for example. Medicines can differ between sexes, but most such differences are attributable to different weights and sometimes different fat distributions. It is rare that medications are dosed by sex (rather than flat dosing, or based on weight, renal function etc), but it does happen occasionally. I cannot think of any examples off the top of my head though.
To state females are "almost a different species" is a pretty wild claim when a given person is much more likely to be similar to their parent of the opposite sex than a random person globally of the same sex. This is highlighted by transplants being sex-agnostic, but having a much higher chance of compatibility between close family members of any sex.
In addition, whilst sex is obviously about more than hormones, sex hormones are the chief vehicle by which sex is expressed phenotypically in development. Phenotypical sex can absolutely be changed by changing hormones in utero (and onwards) to a very convincing degree.
Finally, the reason that sexual dimorphism is fairly unimportant to 40k is that the polymorphism of the Imperium is much greater. This is very relevant when considering female Marimes, as Marines recruit from a huge variety of sources with seemingly very few differences in the end result, usually selecting for strength of will and determination over physical fortitude. A Blood Angel isn't physically significantly different to a Flesh Tearer. They share the same geneseed, yet Flesh Tearers recruit from feral worlders on Cretacia and Blood Angels recruit rad-damaged waifs from Baal. The latter is likely to be much more physically different from the former than the differences between male and female on each world, because health has an enormous impact on development. Yet both have the same outcome. Despite the huge variety of health and nutritional statuses of Marine recruiting populations, it is very rare for the recruitment stock of a Marine chapter to have some measurable impact on the Marines they produce, and it is more often actually an effect of the environment rather than the humans themselves (such as the high radiation on Nocturne turning Salamanders coal-black). A Chapter like the Imperial Fists doesn't note a significant difference between Marines recruited from malnourished underhivers, low-G voiders, or Terran nobility. The process of implanting geneseed clearly overcomes such major differences and ends up in broadly the same place.
BertBert wrote: I can see people needing this if they have lacked proper attention and care in their lives and, in those cases, they have my deepest sympathies.
Well we live in a heck of a world.
I mean, if you're a woman, you already know you make 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, you're 16% more likely to be killed by your partner (worldwide) and many law makers are currently trying to take away your right to decide what is done to your own body.
If you're trans, things are worse.
And if your sex/ gender overlap with visible ethnicity or disability? All of the sex/gender based gak you have to deal with is ramped up even further.
Those factors are active whether you got attention as a child or not. Having the best parents and family in the world will not allow you to make as much money as a man in the same job, nor will it let you end an entopic preganancy in Arizona. And being bombarded with those unfortunate facts everytime you turn on the news does make it nice to have a hobby where you can slap Golden Girls (pun very much intended) down on the table kinda nice- like at least 21st century regression doesn't affect your hobby...
That is, until you have to use the washroom (depending on what state you live in).
Getting a bit deep here, but class and degree of financial security during upbringing can make a large impact on all of those things, so the experience of a given individual can vary widely. It is more likely to follow the positions you mention, but obviously actual circumstances vary. For example, few wealthy women are actually prevented from treating an ectopic in Arizona, because they can afford to fly out of state.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2024/04/16 14:48:12
ChargerIIC wrote: If algae farm paste with a little bit of your grandfather in it isn't Grimdark I don't know what is.
DeathKorp_Rider wrote: Honestly, do marines or Custodes even need a sex? I am not 100% sure about this but I’m guessing marines don’t go around having sex or anything
The SW do. Or they have one of the most viral aspirants know to man. Lukas the Trickster was known to have sneaked in, beded and sired children with a few jarls women. Now he couldn't have done this being prepubescent, which means he had to do it after he became an aspirant. And plain starter SW aspirants are not allowed to roam around Fenris. Which means he had to be at least blood claw level, which is other chapters scout level. And there were also a few space wolves who were either said to be romanticaly involved with others (in case of Torin we don't even know if those were men or women) and Ragnar definitly had feelings for Gabriela Belisarius. Or at least Ragnar thinks he did in the retrospects. But this is SW we are talking about. I can imagine that in legions where marines are mind locked (iron hands), mind wiped multiple times(GK) or something similar both the want and the need for human interaction is gone. Salamanders, another of the "pro human" chapters, are said to live among their familes and are often the heads of the places. They get very emotional about humans in general.
In the case of custodes we have two groups of them, which divide in to smaller sub groups. The "acting" as guards custodes, both the vault shadow wardens and the throne room guards have 0 human needs and wants. Their job slowly burns them out. The 100 companions are probably the same. In case of the "rank and file", if one can ever say that about such gene crafted demi gods, their interest and their life spans allow them to do and follow many persuits. Valerian for example clearly has a soft heart for Alaya. Now it is not romantical, but he himself is suprised that he does care about her and being in contact with her.
And then there is the second group of custodes the Ephoroi and all the other custodes that left the active service as "rank and file" defenders of the palace and lived out their lifes as eyes of the emperor. For all we know, some of the sensei, could be sired by those custodes. Especialy those with dream powers, which is one of the traits all custodes share.
If you have to kill, then kill in the best manner. If you slaughter, then slaughter in the best manner. Let one of you sharpen his knife so his animal feels no pain.
kodos wrote: those forums pointed out that these people are just haters who don't like the hobby and just want GW to fail and that a true fan is going to support the company no matter what so they can grow and deliver more of models people like
would have been more entertaining to see how todays social media would have reacted to the retcons of 4th Edition or 7th Edi codex writing
I was here and on other forums when the big fluff changes from 4th to 5th occurred. They were very divisive. Not as politically charged, mind you, but a lot of people rage quit (or pretended to). I, personally, stopped following the game after that, in that I stopped buying new codices, bought far fewer minis, and started looking at other options outside of GW.
I was here and on other forums when the big fluff changes from 4th to 5th occurred. They were very divisive. Not as politically charged, mind you, but a lot of people rage quit (or pretended to). I, personally, stopped following the game after that, in that I stopped buying new codices, bought far fewer minis, and started looking at other options outside of GW.
How did necron and the non necron community react to necron going from slaves to their gods to god enslavers/killers? I can only remember the whole tyranid suddenly move fast uproar from 9th ed. But that was mostly big only because it was messing up a lot of the ultramarines dates and lore.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2024/04/16 23:01:18
If you have to kill, then kill in the best manner. If you slaughter, then slaughter in the best manner. Let one of you sharpen his knife so his animal feels no pain.
As I recall the Necron was divided. Some LOVED that they were basically mindless terminator machines that were totally unfathomable; totally unstoppable and just kept coming.
Others liked that the Necrons gained personality and could be something else other than just mindless and that the lore could go deeper.
Personally I liked it because the unfathomable story slot was (and still is) Tyranids and I feel that Necrons evolving has given them even more scope as a faction to do stuff.
Of course they can still be mindless machines - there's more than enough damaged/crippled tomb worlds and crazed upper ranks that yo ucan still have your mindless murder machine - its just got layers to it now.
The entire flavor of the Necron faction changed. In 3.5/4 they were a Lovecraftian Outside-Context-Problem, a darkness looming over everything. The army felt like a horror story in action. Look at the Xenology, or Ciaphas Cain nearly crapping himself at the sight of Necrons to get a feel for how apocalyptic they were.
Then suddenly they were squabbling, comedic, out of touch nobles in space. They were these detached immortals playing internal political games that sometimes meant slaughtering a planet of humans. The flavor was completely different. The menace was gone. The lore for every extant Necron army was destroyed. Years of conversion projects and army building were scrapped to make room for Scooby Doo villain hijinks.
And the people who never liked the Oldcrons insisted this was an improvement. Making Necrons into yet another army of people with essentially human personalities and motivations was a great thing.
To be fair, I think over the years GW was able to make Newcrons work. I’ve enjoyed novels like The Infinite and the Divine. But at the time all people could see was the ending of something that motivated their hobby or the beginning of a new opportunity.
kodos wrote: those forums pointed out that these people are just haters who don't like the hobby and just want GW to fail and that a true fan is going to support the company no matter what so they can grow and deliver more of models people like
would have been more entertaining to see how todays social media would have reacted to the retcons of 4th Edition or 7th Edi codex writing
I was here and on other forums when the big fluff changes from 4th to 5th occurred. They were very divisive. Not as politically charged, mind you, but a lot of people rage quit (or pretended to). I, personally, stopped following the game after that, in that I stopped buying new codices, bought far fewer minis, and started looking at other options outside of GW.
not sure if I was here on dakka, but quit after 5th same as most of the people I played with during that time and some because of the rules coming with 6th, but those returned with 7th, quit again with 8th and now play again with 10th
those who quit because of the background changes never returned
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/04/16 16:16:15
Harry, bring this ring to Narnia or the Sith will take the Enterprise
kodos wrote: A lot of people started Necrons because it was the new gak and a strong army, while a lot of those who played them before quit or changed army
And some people like me started playing 'crons because the new fluff created room for them to have more personality/history/ambition than the old fluff did. Which is kind of analogous to the optimistic outcome of changes like this one. The hope is that someone who might have been uninterested in yet another sausage fest faction might find custodes a bit more approachable/interesting going forward. I'm not sure how likely this change is to actually move anyone's needle, but you can see how they're hoping it works out.
ATTENTION. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
The Necron example is a relatively poor one, because Necrons prior to 5th edition did have personalities, individual goals etc. You just had to go searching in background material beyond the codex for it.
It's a bit like the (still occasionally repeated) claim from the time that 5th edition gave you the opportunity to paint your Necrons a colour other than silver.
Lord Damocles wrote: The Necron example is a relatively poor one, because Necrons prior to 5th edition did have personalities, individual goals etc. You just had to go searching in background material beyond the codex for it.
It's a bit like the (still occasionally repeated) claim from the time that 5th edition gave you the opportunity to paint your Necrons a colour other than silver.
I don’t think anyone can force you to paint your necromancer silver.
Another big problem with the shift was the quality of writing and the understanding of Sci Fi and how it affected the setting. For example, the Oldcron codex is vague on the time scale, but uses terms like age, eon, etcs to convey the rise and fall of Necrontyr society, the War in Heaven and all that took place over enormous spans of time. The Newcron codex had all of the important Necrontyr/Necron history happen in a single generation so the characters could all be present for the big events. It made the setting feel pathetically small, the scale wayyyy off.
Another was the change in FTL. Oldcrons had a tech that put them above the warp, chaos, and all the petty squabbles that humanity considered life and death struggle. They made the Emperor’s webway project look short sighted and doomed in conception alone. The Tyranids back then used the warp as you would expect from a species of psykers. They made sense in the setting, and it neatly tied together the hive mind, the shadow in the warp, zoanthropes, Genestealers, and all that. 5th edition gave them Narvhals, a non-warp FTL that raises a ton of questions and adds complication to a fairly complete part of the background without really expanding the lore in a way that enhances the game for anyone. At the same time, the Necrons lost their FTL and became dependent on the webway, which takes away much of their scale and menace, as well as violating the core theme of the faction.
5th also cemented the dumber take on the Tyranids as the om-nom-nom hangry faction when they used to be the Discovery Channel red-in-tooth-and-claw faction. Earlier depictions of the hive mind portray it as a sapient and calculating mind who sees the other space traveling species as competitors for the galaxy’s resources rather than just meals on wheels. It was less a lion among lambs and more a lion among hyena cubs. A subtle distinction, but one that added a lot to the flavor of the faction.
Tying it back, I found these changes really affected how I planned and built an army, whether I was even interested in them at all, in a much more profound way than a change of genders for the Custodes changes the flavor of the Custodes.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2024/04/16 17:01:02
How did necron and the non necron community react to necron going from slaves to their gods to god enslavers/killers?
I remember hating it. I still do!
We can even look to before that, when the original Necron codex was introduced. You should have seen the uproar from Eldar fans upset that the new Necron lore stepped a bit on Eldar lore.
I do have to point out though, that the introduction of the Necron lore changed nothing about how Eldar operated on the table, while the Necron revision in late 5th ed coincided with knocking a lot of Necron units down a notch or two in relative power levels, and changed how the army played in some pretty fundamental ways.
We can even look to before that, when the original Necron codex was introduced. You should have seen the uproar from Eldar fans upset that the new Necron lore stepped a bit on Eldar lore.
Personally I liked it because the unfathomable story slot was (and still is) Tyranids . . .
The easiest critique of this is to point out just how many "power armored supersoldier" armies there are. Like, more than one faction can obviously occupy a similar story slot.
We can even look to before that, when the original Necron codex was introduced. You should have seen the uproar from Eldar fans upset that the new Necron lore stepped a bit on Eldar lore.
Haha! I'm still a bit upset about it!
Lol. Well there you go!
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/04/16 17:46:27
Personally I liked it because the unfathomable story slot was (and still is) Tyranids . . .
The easiest critique of this is to point out just how many "power armored supersoldier" armies there are. Like, more than one faction can obviously occupy a similar story slot.
The counter argument is that all of them are pretty much either the same (super)faction in different flavors or their spikier corrupted versions in spiker flavors. They stepping on each other's is far less of an issue than with two factions that aren't related at all.
Personally I liked it because the unfathomable story slot was (and still is) Tyranids . . .
The easiest critique of this is to point out just how many "power armored supersoldier" armies there are. Like, more than one faction can obviously occupy a similar story slot.
The counter argument is that all of them are pretty much either the same (super)faction in different flavors or their spikier corrupted versions in spiker flavors. They stepping on each other's is far less of an issue than with two factions that aren't related at all.
Really? Because I would think the opposite. Because Necrons and Tyranids are so different they don't risk stepping on each other, rather they represent polar opposite potential results of the existential endgame.
The Necrons were the science faction, ancient and deeply connected to all the other factions since time immemorial. The Tyranids were the nature faction, new to the galaxy and unknown. The Necron end goal was a quiescent galaxy of human cattle for the entertainment of ancient Star gods. The Tyranid end goal was a dead galaxy stripped of everything that supports life. They were both very different from the goals of the other factions in the game.
kodos wrote: A lot of people started Necrons because it was the new gak and a strong army, while a lot of those who played them before quit or changed army
And some people like me started playing 'crons because the new fluff created room for them to have more personality/history/ambition than the old fluff did. Which is kind of analogous to the optimistic outcome of changes like this one. The hope is that someone who might have been uninterested in yet another sausage fest faction might find custodes a bit more approachable/interesting going forward. I'm not sure how likely this change is to actually move anyone's needle, but you can see how they're hoping it works out.
Okey but this is a male dominated hobby, and it is not like there is a way to stop someone from legaly playing what ever army they want as long as the load outs and bases are correct. Sisters exist in the game and IG got a whole bunch of female heroes and female heads as options, but that didn't bring legions of female players. But it is even more visible in AoS. AoS is new, or at least as new as a GW game can be, and SCE were a faction where half the models were female since like 2ed. There is no huge world wide wave of female players flocking to play, just because here is a faction that has females as both troops and leaders. In fact AoS has female models all across its model lines, at least the new ones. But again this doesn't seem to be causing interst girls/women. It is a bit like gymnastics. I went to school with dudes that did it, some were extremly good at it, but their competions and those that girls/women had was like 1 fan to 10 fans. And women got really in to the competitions too, both the fans and competitors. I think table top gaming is just, not very interesting to people outside of the boys/men. That doesn't mean that there is no females that could be interested in it, but those are very few and far in between. It is like dudes and horseback ridding or women doing weight lifting. They exists, but are very rare. And this is why I think it is very dangerous to take an existing frenchise, with an existing fan base, which pays for the whole merch, to just change it. Many companies tried it and it didn't work. The old fans moved away and fans didn't come. And the table top as a fandom is extremly open comparing to most of the other fandoms. Heck you can do it with zero interaction with other people. So all changes have to be weighted. On one side there is authors/designers trying to be creative and tell a new story, which is understandable, but other hand we have Luke Skywalker sipping on blue milk and the ultimate victory of Palpatine family. It can end bad.
And in this specific example of custodes codex, it really couldn't have been made at a worse time. If custodes were bad and stayed bad, we would have the ad mecha situation. Non popular faction, stays back, and look, it lore got changed too. Who cares? It would be like changing GK to have primaris mid 8th ed. The symbolical 5 GK players around the world wouldn't matter. But this is not the case we have. Custodes are, for now, a very popular army. A ton of people bought in to the army after the sm codex changes. And it doesn't even matter, if people picked up the faction for power reasons or not. The fact is, they had fun before, then they didn't have fun, then GW said they over did the changes, made the army fun again AND THEN they droped a codex which is a mountain sized worse change then the one people got a few months ago. So now the deep change to the lore hits gets amlified. Not only does the army become bad, not only does GW pretend to not notice it. But they also try to retroactivly change reality. You can't have multiple decades of something being X, litteral text written by you that X is X, and then say nah X was Y all along. It just doesn't work on people, that care about a codex power, it doesn't work on people that care about the lore and to use an example from a different thread here, I can bet 250internet $ (we smaller salaries here), that the mention of female custodes is not going to A rise the sales of the book. B make the faction more popular C bring a substantial number of new players to w40k.
If you have to kill, then kill in the best manner. If you slaughter, then slaughter in the best manner. Let one of you sharpen his knife so his animal feels no pain.
