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I'm currently in the middle of the exhaustive process of revamping the entire base around which 40K is mounted on, gameplay-wise, into something more resembling M:tG and Heroes of Might and Magic, where players take turns activating a single unit at a time and performing available actions with it, as well as dealing with a damage mechanic overhaul that allows for a much more interesting range of weapons and defenses. The main goals are to: Make the game easier to play with more people at a time, make the game more interactive for all players involved, and expand the basic tactical decisions available to pretty much every unit at any given time.

Does anyone know of sites or resources that can aid in developing wargames, including helping to find playtesters (we'd be using Vassal 40K for its model selection), or lists of common mistakes I should be looking out for? I have a thread up in Proposed Rules here on DakkaDakka, but I feel like I should be expanding my horizons, as I don't feel the usual poster in said thread is looking in the same general direction as me (he likes WW2 wargames and I can't fault him for that, it's just not the thematic direction I'd prefer taking a setting such as 40K).

Any and all help appreciated

What you're talking about seems rather similar to Malifaux.

Having seen it played a couple of times, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed myself. In the end, you're just coming up with different window dressing around a game whose main mechanic is determined by chance (cards in malifaux and MTG, dice in 40k and a variety of other games).

If you want to make 40k a serious strategy game, you have to remove all elements of luck from the game.

That's actually something that can be done with a little bit of help from tables with the direction I'm going; one of the most important reasons dice are used, however, is that it reinforces the belief that the game is somehow more fair. People blame the dice instead of each other when things go wrong.

With what I've got so far, I've seriously reduced the impact of dice in most situations - even-or-under attacks will hit on 3+, and hit on 4+ until dramatic differences in defensive stats appear (one needs to have 5 more Evasion than the firer's Ballistics Skill to be hit on a 5+ - for Humans having a 5's across statline, this means they're hitting things on 4+ all the way up to an Evasion of 10, which is approaching Harlequin tricksiness levels.)

Morale is on 3D6 with an average morale of around 13 and heroic morales around 16. Damage and Armour don't even need dice as they are right now, though Armour currently benefits more from dice than Damage does in most cases.

The main shift in focus for dice has been moved to characteristics tests, which I hope to make more prevalent - in terms of traps, wargear, and even vehicle damage when passengers want to embark or disembark.

I've also been working on a pseudo fog-of-war mechanic, where units have a Sight statistic after which opponents get Evasion bonuses.

Overall, the system LOOKS like it will be fairly modular - similar to creating custom cards for Magic the Gathering, once you've looked over the core mechanics you should be able to mutilate them fairly freely.

Ailaros wrote:What you're talking about seems rather similar to Malifaux.

Having seen it played a couple of times, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed myself. In the end, you're just coming up with different window dressing around a game whose main mechanic is determined by chance (cards in malifaux and MTG, dice in 40k and a variety of other games).

If you want to make 40k a serious strategy game, you have to remove all elements of luck from the game.

I don't see why. Wargames have been played with dice since Napoleon and probably further. The problem I see with 40k is that there's so much more luck involved than decision-making, that in the end you don't feel that it's a strategic wargame. It's just a feeling, really, because there's still strategy involved, but since feelings are pretty damn important when your supposed to enjoy playing-out the strategy more than enjoy the dice-throwing...

Abstracting more the tests, like making shooting-wounding one test, or maybe wounding-saving (that might make more sense) would already go a long way.

I've been toying with the idea of moding 40k for a while, but I wanted to wait until 6th to see if the design studio might make the game more enjoyable. I was thinking of :

1) d10.
2) Dividing tests as Skill tests (apply modifiers, roll against a skill, try to get lower) and Combat tests (for close combat, both opponents rolls the # Attacks for the # of dice, like in Risk)
3) Activation done as a Momentum grab : Beginning of the turn both players declare which unit they want to activate, then roll with +1 for whoever as higher Ini. Whoever wins get to activate his unit and do an Action, the loser gets to do a Reaction.
4) Everything a unit can do is divided in Actions/Reactions, like mentionned previously. Actions are better than Reactions, but only slightly so (for example, Aimed fire is an action, Snapshot would be a reaction)
5) Unopposed Attacks in a Combat are used for additionnal Combat actions (exemple : Model A has 3 Attacks combat Model B who has 1, after beating B he can use one of his two remaining Attack dice to do Combat Action Push, letting him move 2 inches toward an enemy model, and then his remaining dice to do a Combat Attack)

And a whole lot more I wrote down somewhere and don't remember right now...

How does having dice make it not a serious strategy game?

chrisrawr wrote: People blame the dice instead of each other when things go wrong.

Not true at all. I've had games where I have been spot on on all non luck based tactics, had better positions, held important objectives, had air superiority, was winning the battle. Then my rolls turn to crap. Need to make 12 cover saves on a 3+, I'll fail them all. Need to make 3 wounds on a 2+, Roll 3 1's, twice in a row (lost me that game by one victory point.) Hit with my lascannons and need to glance a rhino on a 2+ to wreak, roll a one. Did that 4 times with 4 separate lascannons in one turn. IN THE SAME GAME!

I've also had games where I was losing and my dice caught fire and I pulled a win out of no where. Rolled 24 BS 3 Lasguns against a marine squad, 20 hit, 16 wounded. Took out a landraider with a lascannon before it puked out is choas marines (it was a nurgle LR with a mouth as the door)

Luck plays a big part in this game. You can play the odds, but sometimes it just comes up snake eyes.

I'd really like to move away from the idea of a "to-wound" roll; applying Saves (with rolls) against a standardized 20 damage Tic has proven to be an incredibly fast and easy mechanic of damage resolution, and it increases the overall dramatic feel of shooting, while still letting players feel that they've worked towards "protecting" their models.

In regards to your points,

1) Would be really great to use if the game came with a large number of D10's - natural 10's could even be critical hits! Unfortunately, D10's are expensive, comparatively, and the expense scales with your army's expense: The more models you have, the more D10's you need! Almost everyone has some D6's lying around, and players often pool these together instead of buying new sets - at least until they see a set they really like! Even then, D6's are cheap :C

2) Characteristics tests are moving towards something like this - I've got something called "Target Scores" which you have to beat or exceed on a number of D6 + the appropriate Characteristic. Sometimes it'll be something simple, like "Open a busted door on S+2D6 vs TS10" and even humans will have no problem with it. Other times it might be something like "Dodge an incoming boobytrap on I+1D6 vs 12" - something Humans can't even do under normal circumstance.

3) Since my gaming community is rather large and we fancy multiplayer games, i'd intended to have the system more streamlined and involve less rolling - players simply roll-off on 2D6 at the start of each round, and the winner dictates the Active Player. Activation moves clockwise from then - allowing canny players to either get the jump, or save their activations for last.

4) Everything units do is definitely actions; Reactions are simply Actions with special clauses stating they can be done in response to something. The idea is to keep the burden of knowledge relatively low - Actions will hopefully be able to include reminders, like "Watch out, your opponent might Overwatch you!" Otherwise, there's little need for a true Reaction system, like in Infinity, as each Player will be activating one unit at a time. This might grant a potential bonus to armies that tend towards MSU's, but I'm also hoping to minimize the impact of MSU's through the fact that a well-placed blast can inflict significant damage to them, as well as through morale factors.

5) Actually, I like the way 6th edition does CC in this respect - their wording for when units strike and when they pile in could use some revamping, but in general I feel that what you want and what 6e has done are along the same lines of reasoning - making sure your many-attack models get to use all of their attacks. (If you haven't read that far yet in 6e, when a model reaches its initiative step, it gets to pile in 3" before making its attacks. This is incredibly useful for those overwhelming explosive victories where you whipe out 20 guardsmen and are clamoring for more >: D )

Overall, I think we're sort of moving in the same direction here... Though in terms of Damage vs Wounding, if you've ever played Heroes of Might and Magic, you'll know how smooth and simple their attack/damage/defense/health/stack size system works - that is, very well. 20-Tic is a simple way to imitate it.


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ObliviousBlueCaboose wrote:

chrisrawr wrote: People blame the dice instead of each other when things go wrong.

Not true at all. I've had games where I have been spot on on all non luck based tactics, had better positions, held important objectives, had air superiority, was winning the battle. Then my rolls turn to crap. Need to make 12 cover saves on a 3+, I'll fail them all. Need to make 3 wounds on a 2+, Roll 3 1's, twice in a row (lost me that game by one victory point.) Hit with my lascannons and need to glance a rhino on a 2+ to wreak, roll a one. Did that 4 times with 4 separate lascannons in one turn. IN THE SAME GAME!

I've also had games where I was losing and my dice caught fire and I pulled a win out of no where. Rolled 24 BS 3 Lasguns against a marine squad, 20 hit, 16 wounded. Took out a landraider with a lascannon before it puked out is choas marines (it was a nurgle LR with a mouth as the door)

Luck plays a big part in this game. You can play the odds, but sometimes it just comes up snake eyes.

Those are some rather extreme examples, but I will grant you that they hold true. I've standardized Damage for the most part, while allowing players to retain the illusion of protecting their models via the Save roll - but To-Hit has been much more greatly linked in to what unit you have and what unit they're using, as well as the state of your units' Morale and their units' positioning, rather than simply what your BS is. It could even go farther, having 2+ to hit being the 'standard' - all that has to move is the Damage.

You could go so far as to have things be autohit with a few minor tweaks, and then use percentile dice for things like total hits vs cover vs fog of war. Since the Damage system doesn't really care outside of a statistical average, and right now I have no unit profiles done up outside of a vague desire for things to represent more closely their fluff than they currently do, you could potentially remove the save roll (as I'd said earlier) and easily have a game almost entirely reliant on unit vs unit vs terrain interactions - using points cost and unit size as the entire army choice determinants.

To be fair it was a rather extreme example, but it happened just last night and I really wish I had stuck with making a Battle Report so I could have pictures of it. It was just an example of how luck does play a part in the game.

I absolutely agree - The main showcase of the system I want to do is directly convert an HoMM faction and put it up against a detachment space marines on Vassal for battle reps - using completely different resolution, model, and army purchasing mechanics. This is to show that yes, the game can be easily altered with a couple minutes of player input to suit how YOU want to play the game.

Though I'm mainly going to be working on a "core" module for 40K players looking for something different, I'll probably release quick mods for Modern or World War-Gaming, as well as (obviously) Heroes of Might and Magic - all which should be playable over Vassal with little trouble.

RxGhost wrote:How does having dice make it not a serious strategy game?

In a serious strategy game, the person who wins is the person with the most player skill. As such, even the most infinitesimal amount of skill over your opponent will still allow you to win most games.

In a game of chance (if there's ANY amount of chance, it doesn't matter how much of what kind of die rolling you do), you introduce the fact that a worse player can win by virtue of being luckier, not because they were necessarily better. 40k uses a coarse system (D6's), wherein the result of almost every important decision is ultimately determined by chance. As such, 40k is really a complicated game of craps, rather than a proper test of skill between two players.

Serious strategy games are ones where players play in a completely balanced system where they pit player skill directly against each other, and the better player wins. Chess, go, mankala, checkers, stratego, and a whole host of games fit all three of these requirements. 40k fits none.

Making a new game that is still based on randomness doesn't make it necessarily more strategic than 40k.

Ailaros, while I don't entirely agree with your assessment of what a serious strategy game entails, or how player skill should factor into a game, or even what you might think player skill is (i.e. you've given us no qualitative assessment of what quantifies as "skill", and if you did, it would be a subjective matter because skill can only be measured by success, and if you then go on to measure how a person came about their success, and quantifying that as skill, you've quantified luck right into the definition of skill.)

I have to agree that minimizing dice rolls is an important aspect of gaming to players who dislike the idea of randomness. However, I don't personally feel that simply including these chunks of probability in the damage a weapon does or the number of shots it has is something that creates dynamic, interactive gameplay. Players like rolling to hit because players like hitting - there exists a subset of people who don't receive some form of gratification from rolling lots of dice, and for them the option of diceless gaming exists - and can even be played with in the same game as a player using dice, if one so pleases.

Chess has been solved, so there's an element of chance when two supercomputers are playing - that is, whichever one goes first.

Go will be solved when our computing power increases by a ridiculous exponent; it's been solved for a 6 by 6 table the last time I checked.

Checkers has been solved for a while and is a really bad example in comparison to chess and go - it's almost as bad as x's and o's.

Also, we're using the wrong terminology here; the only real strategy in 40K is picking your army, and to a lesser extent, checking out your opponents' army before deployment. After that, you're down to tactics. A small distinction, but an important one - unless you're playing in the 8-12k points bracket, there simply isn't enough going on for the game to evolve into strategy, and most players can easily play down the tactical to a T.

But again, I impress upon you - what I am doing can be adapted to no-dice, and since there seems to be a lot of push for it, I'll probably release the no-dice variant as a direct attachment to the core rules - of course, all players will still have to agree to one or more players participating with no dice, and the players intending to play without dice would still have to put up with their opponents' dicerolling barbarism, but I'm sure it's more acceptable to all parties?

Ailaros wrote:In a serious strategy game, the person who wins is the person with the most player skill. As such, even the most infinitesimal amount of skill over your opponent will still allow you to win most games.

No. Being a good strategist means that you can also plan for a certain amount of luck in your game. Or that you can correct your initial plan once luck or opponent has blown it. Wargames have always been strategy games, and have, by large, included dices since the beginning of their existence. You can rate wargames from the cinematic to the strategical - anyone who isn't a fanboy will tell you that Warmachine is more strategical than 40k, since good strategy can most of the time overcome really bad odds.

Kovnik Obama wrote:

Ailaros wrote:In a serious strategy game, the person who wins is the person with the most player skill. As such, even the most infinitesimal amount of skill over your opponent will still allow you to win most games.

No. Being a good strategist means that you can also plan for a certain amount of luck in your game. Or that you can correct your initial plan once luck or opponent has blown it. Wargames have always been strategy games, and have, by large, included dices since the beginning of their existence. You can rate wargames from the cinematic to the strategical - anyone who isn't a fanboy will tell you that Warmachine is more strategical than 40k, since good strategy can most of the time overcome really bad odds.

Warmachines only tactic is to kill the warcaster. You do that, you win the game. You could have a mangled jack and a war caster with 1 hp left and I could have my whole army, Then you somehow get a lucky blow in and kill my warcaster, and you would win. I outnumber you, I still have more infantry, and they arn't controlled by the caster, but I guess they get scared or something and run away.

ObliviousBlueCaboose wrote:Warmachines only tactic is to kill the warcaster. You do that, you win the game. You could have a mangled jack and a war caster with 1 hp left and I could have my whole army, Then you somehow get a lucky blow in and kill my warcaster, and you would win. I outnumber you, I still have more infantry, and they arn't controlled by the caster, but I guess they get scared or something and run away.

No, you'd be more correct if you had said that it's the only objective, and even that would not true. There's hundreds of tactics you can use to get to accomplish a caster assassination. And because there's always this win condition available, even a general with a mangled army may be able to use strategy to pull a win, and even a general with an overpowered army must be wary of overcommitting it's troop. A lot of people like to bash on the warcaster kill condition, but don't seem to understand that it's an incredibly effective way of balancing the game. Now you can find some midway solution ; making the game objective based, with 'objective' meaning something else than 'holding this point'. For example, ''Each player rolls 3 objectives on the objective chart, the 1st one to accomplish 2 wins'' with objective being stuff like 'get a HQ in your opponent's deployment phase', 'wipe all your opponents logistical officers', 'assassinate an HQ in close combat'... etc...

PP was never worried about realism when they designed their game; Matt Wilson explained he wanted to make a wargame that felt like a strategy videogame, and I feel they did it very well.

Ailaros wrote:

RxGhost wrote:How does having dice make it not a serious strategy game?

In a serious strategy game, the person who wins is the person with the most player skill. As such, even the most infinitesimal amount of skill over your opponent will still allow you to win most games.

In a game of chance (if there's ANY amount of chance, it doesn't matter how much of what kind of die rolling you do), you introduce the fact that a worse player can win by virtue of being luckier, not because they were necessarily better. 40k uses a coarse system (D6's), wherein the result of almost every important decision is ultimately determined by chance. As such, 40k is really a complicated game of craps, rather than a proper test of skill between two players.

Serious strategy games are ones where players play in a completely balanced system where they pit player skill directly against each other, and the better player wins. Chess, go, mankala, checkers, stratego, and a whole host of games fit all three of these requirements. 40k fits none.

Making a new game that is still based on randomness doesn't make it necessarily more strategic than 40k.

I think that's too simplistic a way to look at it. Having random factors doesn't necessarily exclude a game from having strategic value, certainly not in the way 40K is set up. See, the way it is, it isn't random. Every model's has a percent chance of success (that is a known quantity to all players) that a player can manage and maneuver during the course of the game. Being able to force these odds in your favor is a huge part of the strategy, heck, taking chances in the face of (again, known) less than desirable odds and positions is also a big part of the strategy.

If your argument is that the only strategic value of a game is how you move the pieces on the board (chess, go, mankala, checkers, stratego...though I have some issues with that example) then you're not looking at the whole strategy inherent in the game.

That's like telling people there's no strategy in poker. Heck, I read an article the other day about a mathematician who figured out the printing algorithm on the scratch and win lottery tickets and won big four times...sounds like a strategy to me.

To clarify, what I mean by player skill and direct competition here is the the only determiner of any particular event is completely controlled by the player. As such, a proper strategy game pits the decisions a player makes directly against the decisions made by the other player. That's what a strategy game is.

I'm not saying that playing odds isn't a skill. What I am saying is that proper strategy games pit skill against skill, rather than a small amount of skill against a small amount of skill where most of it is determined by luck.

I mean, seriously. List the top 10 strategy games by which ones you consider to be the best for strategy. How many of them had die rolls or cards?

For me, my top 10 would include such things as counterstrike, starcraft, go, civilization, chess, stratego, free cell, and others, virtually none of which have any luck involved whatsoever.

The more random elements you include in the game, the more the winner of the game is determined randomly, not by strategic acumen of the player.

CS and SC use randomization for player spawn placement; the skill used to get around this randomization is scouting.

WH uses randomization for to-hit rolls; the skill used to get around this randomization is redundancy planning.

Again, though, your initial example is flawed - the only way you can compare two players' skills directly at something is by determining their success rates and the context surrounding those successes, not by direct comparisons; if a player with a .640 success rate is pitted against a player with a .641 success rate, each out of a thousand games those players will have equal skill even if the .641 loses 2/3 games miserably - the games say nothing about his skill, they speak only about themselves. If we go out to context and find out that the two strategies being used are both some of the most powerful strategies in the game, but both mutually exclusive, and that it was simple luck that one player played one way, and the other player played the other, it reduces again to a game, not of skill, but of luck.

But you're talking about really tiny random elements in an otherwise overwhelmingly non-random games.

And you're trying to push a point that has already been addressed; the game can be played without dice. It involves an additional table for easy reference on how to reduce damage in various situations (Mostly what happens at the various Defensive Stat levels).

You know, I think something like the Gunnery tables in Battlefleet Gothic would probably do very well as a framework for those.

I played MTG for years and years (before Ice Age) and really, it's a game of luck.
Look at card games like VS (A card game where even if you have bad draws, it's all on how you play), or mini games like Hero Clix (where the number of points counts to how many moves you get per turn)

@Ric, uh... M:tG has very much changed from what you may remember and any biases you may have had towards it - but M:tG's card mechanic is not what I'm pulling from it. The Stack, Phasing distinction, Timing, and Resolution are the important things.

If you do develop a game that allows for simultaneous turns, you have to be careful about how you balance things.

Armies that can field a large number of small units have an advantage, because they can activate only a few inconsequential units and out-activate their opponent before committing with the rest of their army.


My best advice for creating a new game is to read the rulesets for multiple different games in the same genre. They may have ideas or concepts you hadn't thought of. Reading players reactions to those rules may be helpful as well since it will let you know what works on paper and what works on the table.

As I'd said, The real problem I've been having has been implementing a proper morale system; On the one side, I have wargamers from historical wargaming wanting heavy suppression systems, which would greatly favour players who like fielding lots of small units (who can thereby simply suppress everyone else and take over). On the other side, I have players who dislike any form of morale, preferring to have brave and fearless heroes who stride through gunfire and carnage without flinching.

The spin side to MSU's, however, is the increased damage output and more decisive resolution I intend to be sort of 'standard' - Mechanics like Sweeping Advance, which really exemplifies the fact that squadrons surrender long before they've received a large casualty count will be something that are kept from 40K - with units dealing lots of damage, and less restrictions on who's able to split their fire (I honestly have nothing against units allocating fire on a model/model basis), there should be little advantage in MSU army building.

With aid from a poster on BoardGameGeeks, I intend to build the Morale system around units taking casualties, with the ATTACKING player allocating suppressive results -

Units are afraid of attacks that deal unsaved damage to them. When X unsaved damage is received by a unit (X determined by morale grade), Roll 2D6 + (modifier based on total damage done), and apply a number of effects to suppress your opponent.

And then have options such as,

Opponent's Morale:
Poor (You gain 1 SCARY if your roll is 7 or better, and another SCARY for each 2 your roll exceeds 7).

Average (You gain 1 SCARY if your roll is 8 or better, and another SCARY for each 3 your roll exceeds 8.

and so on; and then the Morale Types would list effects that you can spend SCARY on. Opponents then make Morale Checks of exactly the same type each beginning phase, with the modifiers switched - the better a unit's morale, the easier it removes SCARY effects.


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In regards to Blast Weapons and Deepstriking for the diceless game - I can now have Blast Weapons simply not scatter, dealing less damage - but how should I go about deepstriking? Should I simply make the ability more expensive, and remove the scatter entirely? That seems like the easiest way to me.

Ailaros wrote:To clarify, what I mean by player skill and direct competition here is the the only determiner of any particular event is completely controlled by the player. As such, a proper strategy game pits the decisions a player makes directly against the decisions made by the other player. That's what a strategy game is.

I'm not saying that playing odds isn't a skill. What I am saying is that proper strategy games pit skill against skill, rather than a small amount of skill against a small amount of skill where most of it is determined by luck.

Nothing in this prevents luck being a factor. And a strategy game isn't just a game determined by skill. By that account, golf would be a strategic game, since its a game pitting the skills of players against each other. A strategy game is a game in which you have to plan out your actions according to your objective and your ressources, and adapt all following actions according to the evolving setting of the game. Luck can play a huge part in that evolving setting.

I mean, seriously. List the top 10 strategy games by which ones you consider to be the best for strategy. How many of them had die rolls or cards?

I don't need to name ten, I just need to name one good wargame with randomisation : Medieval Total War, Stainless Steel mod. No one in their right mind would claim that not knowing the number of enemy troops felled under one volley makes this something else than a strategy game. Or that it makes it a lesser strategy game. In fact, knowing exactly the number of troops felled would take away a large part of the enjoyment.

The more random elements you include in the game, the more the winner of the game is determined randomly, not by strategic acumen of the player.

Only if there's no way to counter balance the randomisation.

I'd prefer if this thread didn't turn towards the definitions of strategy/tactics, or whether dice or table comparison is a better mechanic for determining damage - Mostly, I'm still looking at this

Chrisrawr wrote:Does anyone know of sites or resources that can aid in developing wargames, including helping to find playtesters (we'd be using Vassal 40K for its model selection), or lists of common mistakes I should be looking out for? I have a thread up in Proposed Rules here on DakkaDakka, but I feel like I should be expanding my horizons, as I don't feel the usual poster in said thread is looking in the same general direction as me (he likes WW2 wargames and I can't fault him for that, it's just not the thematic direction I'd prefer taking a setting such as 40K).

as the main direction of the thread (so as to keep it on-topic for general discussion, and such.)

If you'd like to discuss which directions I can be taking this game in, the link to the proposed rules thread is here

What I'm Looking For:
What are your favourite parts of playing a wargame?

What sort of issues do you have with current wargames that I can avoid?

What sort of Morale or Combat systems would you like to see included (Special attacks, fear modifiers, different effects, and such).

What sort of movement modes should I include, outside of normal, hovering, flying, teleporting, (the usual), etc.?

Would you play a game with paper cutouts or legos, or other unstandardized representations? (Papercraft looks like the most interesting route for this!)

What are some of the most important features you'd like to see included?

Ailaros wrote:

RxGhost wrote:How does having dice make it not a serious strategy game?

In a serious strategy game, the person who wins is the person with the most player skill. As such, even the most infinitesimal amount of skill over your opponent will still allow you to win most games.

In a game of chance (if there's ANY amount of chance, it doesn't matter how much of what kind of die rolling you do), you introduce the fact that a worse player can win by virtue of being luckier, not because they were necessarily better. 40k uses a coarse system (D6's), wherein the result of almost every important decision is ultimately determined by chance. As such, 40k is really a complicated game of craps, rather than a proper test of skill between two players.

Serious strategy games are ones where players play in a completely balanced system where they pit player skill directly against each other, and the better player wins. Chess, go, mankala, checkers, stratego, and a whole host of games fit all three of these requirements. 40k fits none.

Making a new game that is still based on randomness doesn't make it necessarily more strategic than 40k.

This, to be brutally frank, is nonsense. Ignoring the obvious fact that 40k is a tactical game anyway, which renders comparisons with games of abstract strategy moot, the presence of an element of randomness does not preclude player skill from being the dominant factor. Obviously, this being 40k, the horrible lack of balance between army lists is also a significant factor, and indeed one which in particular cases overshadows player skill. However, a game does not need to be an abstract one of perfect information, like Go (or Hive, or Blokus) with no random component to still rely predominantly on player skill. If you don't believe me, next time you play 40k, use a scatter dice to move your units, and to chose their targets, and see how well you do. For that matter, poker, by your rationale, should be a matter of nothing but luck, and yet professional players continue to take the shirts off the backs of rubes who believe just that.

Moreover, you are wilfully ignoring the fact that not only are probabilities on a number of d6 laughably easy to compute in one's head, but that most of the time in 40k, the players will be rolling buckets of dice which - following the Law of large numbers - will pertain towards the average. This doesn't mean that startling failures or successes (Black swan events, if you want the mathematicians' term) are impossible, nor that they will not affect the game's outcome to some degree, but nonetheless most of the time, the numbers of dice rolled are sufficiently large that their results will match prediction to within an acceptable margin of error.

Exalted, nailed it exactly.