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As 40k has progressed there is an increasing amount of unpractical weapons and war gear in all armys. Take Heavy Bolters. A great weapon in 3rd edition but it has not been cost effective since 4th. Part of the problem is that GW has reduces the point cost of just about everything. So if the max cost for a Space Marine infantry heavy weapon is 20 then other weapon have to under that price point and given GW desire to base most cost in powers of five it leave very little wiggle room. Even in the shooty world of 6th edition a Heavy Bolter is a great gun. But why would you take it when for 5 more points you can get a Plasma cannon or missile launcher? But you can't very well lower the price because if you drop the price of a Heavy Bolter by the requisite 5 then it is the same cost as Storm Bolter which it is clearly superior too.

It seems to me to make it possible to have diverse choices in weaponry and war gear there has to be a more precise point system with more flexibly in pricing. What if in 7th GW jump to a 1 point in 6th edition = 2.5 points in 7th. That way a 2000 point game in 6ths would be a 5000 point game in 7th. That way you could price things more effectively. For example in 7th edition Marines would be 35 points and infantry heavy weapons would cost something like the following:
Las Cannon: 50
Plasma Cannon: 45
Missile Launcher: 40 (Flakk rounds +5)
Multi melta: 30
Heavy Bolters: 20

or something like that.

What do you think? Would this be a good move for the game or damaging? Or should we just stop basing every thing on 10 and 5? (Which would make lists done with pen and paper more tricky).

problem is they'd have to massivly FAQ EVERYTHING. not sure they'd wanna do that. it'd take a fair bit of work.

a better approuch would be to begin to give special weapons to make weapons more specialist

Hello 7th edition!

40k in general right now has many of the same issues 2E developed, in part lots of wacky zany rules and some serious confusion about what scale it wants to play at. The game doesn't know if it wants to be a small scale skirmish game with RPG elements or a company level wargame replete with what would amount to tactical representations of operational or even strategic level support, and everything has to have special rules. As a result we have unit types that don't make sense, weapons that aren't effective unless taken as cheap extras on vehicles, armies of a couple dozen models and more special rules than you can shake a stick at fighting armies with 200+ models and a ton of things to keep track of, etc.

40k currently is a very messy game system.

I agree with Vaktathi.
The 40k game system need to be re -evaluated , to get a concise and intuitive rules set written with clarity , brevity and elegance.

AND ONLY then can PV be applied in a meaningful accurate way.

So complete re -write focusing on the INTENDED game play , BEFORE trying to fix PV.

I dislike the 40k rules system, I think it's long past reevaluation and just needs to be put out of its misery with a complete rewrite. I was considering a "patch" to balance the codices but decided against it due to the cumbersome and outdated mechanics at its core. Instead I'm working on a conversion for the upcoming Deadzone to make 40k armies playable with it. It's skirmish scale rather than 40+ model scale though. Probably wouldn't mean anything to you if you're not following Deadzone, but here's the Deadzone 40K article here on dakka, with google spreadsheet links to the very rough rules atm.

I love your suggestion to roughly double points costs of things to get a bit more room to reflect items better.

It reminds me of when 3rd Ed turned up and halved all the point costs, so my edging on 2000 pts of Chaos at the time became barely over 1000.

Truly there is nothing knew under the sun...

The problem with this approach is that you're fine-tuning the difference between (in 6th edition terms) a 5-point upgrade and a 7.5-point upgrade when the whole unit is worthless since another unit in that FOC slot is 50 points too cheap and the rules are such a bloated mess that nothing works very well anyway. A new version of 40k with the proper point difference between a heavy bolter and a lascannon is still going to be a terrible game.

Yep, agree whole heartedly Peregrine. A Dakka sponsored community patch to 40k could make the game a lot better and get the acceptance required to be a widely accepted thing, but it would still be cumbersome imo and GW should just balance the stuff properly themselves.

A simple patch along the lines of:
- Vendetta +20 points - transport capacity.
- Night scythe +20 points.
- Lychgarde/Praetorians -10 points

and so on would make the game so much better... but getting wide acceptance would be pretty difficult I guess ; p

That "simple patch" would fix the most obvious balance problems (though you'd also need to deal with re-rollable 2+ invulnerable saves and half of the Tau and Eldar codices), but it wouldn't change the fundamental problems with the core rules. To be a decent game 40k needs a complete re-write from the beginning that throws out 99% of the current rules, not just a bare-minimum balance patch.

 Peregrine wrote:
but it wouldn't change the fundamental problems with the core rules. To be a decent game 40k needs a complete re-write from the beginning that throws out 99% of the current rules, not just a bare-minimum balance patch.

Agreed 100%. We can make the patch though and since so many of us still play 40k it would probably be worth it, we can't remake the game though and can't trust GW to do either. But yes, thats why I decided not to bother and to just add rules for 40K to deadzone, which seems like a much better ruleset. I'm hoping with some substantial work balancing it, it'll result in a great skirmish scale 40k on a 2x2 - 6x4 scale, with ~5-20 MEQ, and 15-50 GEQ quantities of troops.

 Peregrine wrote:
That "simple patch" would fix the most obvious balance problems (though you'd also need to deal with re-rollable 2+ invulnerable saves and half of the Tau and Eldar codices), but it wouldn't change the fundamental problems with the core rules. To be a decent game 40k needs a complete re-write from the beginning that throws out 99% of the current rules, not just a bare-minimum balance patch.

And arguably the new Daemon Prince not to mention rumours of the fun times of the Inquisitors. Also, the whole entire psyker thing is an absolute mess. It's actually become a dramatic aspect (which I don't hate in and of itself but it's done so horridly it matters not) of the game and only because of how gakky it is. Biomancy is devestating.... only on MC. Divination is just generally arguably the best. Telepathy is pretty good but the rolls are random. Pyromancy, telekenesis, etc are things you'd usually prefer to just skip past and not look at a second time. Tzeentch's spells generally are pretty darn crummy as well. Blessings are amazing while witchfire is generally considered vastly inferior (the only somewhat competitive one I can think of is flickering fire of tzeentch and that's more of because you need to use it). The game's assault units are all over the place in terms of reliability and bad units from previous editions are still bad. The meta hardly touches vehicles besides the chimera, flying vehicles, and certain skimmers. In short, the game is an absolute mess at the moment and the allies system only makes things worse by making combos that really probably shouldn't have existed into real things. In general, you can try to edit certain immediate problems and patch them up.... but this is like when you have to turn in your major project and it has been ripped into bits and crumpled. You can try to tape it back together and flatten it, but the creases are there and the tear is not going to leave. No, for 40k to be a decent game for anything besides its general 40k fluff and models it's going to require a total rehaul which GW has about a 1% chance of ever thinking to do.

 Vaktathi wrote:
40k in general right now has many of the same issues 2E developed, in part lots of wacky zany rules and some serious confusion about what scale it wants to play at. The game doesn't know if it wants to be a small scale skirmish game with RPG elements or a company level wargame replete with what would amount to tactical representations of operational or even strategic level support, and everything has to have special rules. As a result we have unit types that don't make sense, weapons that aren't effective unless taken as cheap extras on vehicles, armies of a couple dozen models and more special rules than you can shake a stick at fighting armies with 200+ models and a ton of things to keep track of, etc.

40k currently is a very messy game system.

Another problem is that they don't balance between Editions. 40 Point Shield Terminators were fine in 3rd-5th. 6th? No, and that's not even getting into the issue of the standard terminator. Same with Weapons.

IF a 40k game system was written to with focusing on attaining a 'reasonable level of balance'.
As opposed to the current short term sales focus GW currently has.

I think focusing on modern warfare, (an equal blend on mobility, firepower and assault,) and detailed UNIT interaction would be the place to start.
IF you wanted to keep the current 'battle game' size.


if you want to play a skirmish game in 40k universe, there are tons of great skirmish games you can convert to use your 40k minis in.
(No need to write a new rule set, just adapt a existing good one.)

Quite frankly, there are better rules for playing a battle game with your 40k minis as well.

Mantic's warpath, for instance, is straight up a better game despite essentially being a beta

 Peregrine wrote:
That "simple patch" would fix the most obvious balance problems (though you'd also need to deal with re-rollable 2+ invulnerable saves and half of the Tau and Eldar codices), but it wouldn't change the fundamental problems with the core rules. To be a decent game 40k needs a complete re-write from the beginning that throws out 99% of the current rules, not just a bare-minimum balance patch.

And as we all know, the chances of that happening are somewhere between zero and an amoeba. This is what happens when a hobby focused company stumbles into success in wargaming, and then tries to straddle the two worlds. Personally I would be happy if they just went back to the first few editions, because with all the wacky rules and ridiculous characters one could immediately tell that it was not mean to be a serious game system. Every edition since then have tried to make the game more tactical and only added onto the bloated ruleset, resulting in a game that still isn't particularly competitive.

I think its important to remember who the target audience is. Competitive gamers ar not and have never been GWs priority.
As a more competitive minded chap I would prefer the points cost of things to be updated in a meaningful and logical way but the cost involved would be fairly high. Maybe with the increased use of electronic codexes they could be updated as and when required pretty easily... we are probably quite a distance from this though

One of the problems is that units and models keep getting cheaper, but lots of weapons have stayed the same cost since 3rd edition. As has been said before, even the between-editions balance is horrible.

For 6th edition to be different, you would have to require a drastic re-write akin to the 2nd/3rd edition rules change. And it would still be GW rules.

Like mentioned above, after 25 years, 40K still doesn't know what it's supposed to cater towards when it comes to the size of forces on the table.

fluffstalker wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
That "simple patch" would fix the most obvious balance problems (though you'd also need to deal with re-rollable 2+ invulnerable saves and half of the Tau and Eldar codices), but it wouldn't change the fundamental problems with the core rules. To be a decent game 40k needs a complete re-write from the beginning that throws out 99% of the current rules, not just a bare-minimum balance patch.

And as we all know, the chances of that happening are somewhere between zero and an amoeba. This is what happens when a hobby focused company stumbles into success in wargaming, and then tries to straddle the two worlds. Personally I would be happy if they just went back to the first few editions, because with all the wacky rules and ridiculous characters one could immediately tell that it was not mean to be a serious game system. Every edition since then have tried to make the game more tactical and only added onto the bloated ruleset, resulting in a game that still isn't particularly competitive.

Fluff, the point was that the community could make the patch to fix GWs mistakes because GW certainly won't. A big group like Dakka - the biggest 40k community? could get enough support behind it to make a patch that will get substantial use to make it reach critical mass and get use worldwide. People won't agree 100% on all of the changes, but it should substantially improve the game for everyone overall.

The problem with trying to accurately assign points values in 6th ed 40k.Is there is a lack of proportional results, and far too much randomness for randomness sake.

AND BEFORE PEOPLE start saying' well rolling dice gives random results'.A dice roll gives a set range of values , (probability.)

Poor ' random rule' writing does stuff like 'On the roll of a 6 ignore the rest of the game rules'.Or 'on the roll of a 1 severely handicap your entire army.'

IF 40k lost ALL of its special rules ,that contradict or ignore core game mechanics, then maybe we could get more accurate PV allocation.

But what would be left?Standard infantry fighting on planet bowling ball?

40k needs a rule set written for 40k game play.(Not a WHFB mutation.)EG start by listing ALL the units in the game , and writing INCLUSIVE rules that cover ALL units with the same resolution methods .Like every other great game does.So special abilities are few and far between, eg ACTUALY special,and not an over used crutch used to support poor game development.

PS Dakkamite, Warpath II is more of a skirmish sized game IMO.(Great game though!)

(Warpath I was abandoned by Alessio ,as KoW in Space was just a bad idea, based on how badly WHFB in space has devolved over the last 15 years. )


In short GW should ditch PV completely if 40k is supposed to be narrative driven. And just release senarios in narrative campain books.IMO.

Good discussion.

I see Deadzone's beta is available for free.

But I'd have to buy Warpath here, right?

Honestly I think GW needs a "system" for points costing things. Basically something that says that X should cost Y because it has A, B, C. It could even be based off the cost of the Space Marine by making it work off of what a basic Tactical Marine costs and going from there. Likewise do the same with the Rhino for transports, the basic Predator for tanks, Dreadnought for walkers and the Stormtalon for flyers.

It'd keep the Space Marines as the yardstick for the game as a whole while properly solving the points balancing issue.

40k is going to be fixed by fandexes? Seems unlikely. Seems less likely than it being fixed by people who have been spending all this time writing the rules in the first place.

Anyways, the 40k points system has two problems:

- It's too coarse. Because of points deflation over time, you're now dealing with very small numbers, numbers that are insufficiently able to display subtle differences. For example, both a chaos cultist and an ork boy cost 5 points. That's just absurd given how much better the boy is than the cultist. But what if you made the cultists 4 points? Now you're saying that they're only 2/3rds as good as a guardsman, and that isn't right either.

40k could really go for a renumeration. Say, for example, increase all points costs across the board by a factor of 10. If boyz cost 50 points apiece, then you could make cultists cost, say, 47. This would be a better ratio, and something you couldn't achieve with low points values (you can't have a cultist cost 4.7 points each).

- The FOC. Points used to be balanced under the assumption that you could only take so many of something. Not only FOC restrictions, but they also used to be more exacting than that. Imperial guard veterans, for example, used to be a 0-1 choice. Even if they had a terrible points cost, then, there were ways of keeping them in check.

Now we sort of don't. Leman russes can be taken in squads, and tau-tau can take 4 riptides. More or less the only thing keeping it in check is points cost, but that's outside of the scope of what points cost alone can handle. That is, of course, you drastically re-costed things to take into account what happens when you spam them.

Put another way, 40k has the same problems that apocalypse has always had. There are solutions to this, but the game needs to actually implement them (and abandon FOC altogether), or keep things the same and then add back in all the old extra restrictions.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I think GW needs a "system" for points costing things. Basically something that says that X should cost Y because it has A, B, C. It could even be based off the cost of the Space Marine by making it work off of what a basic Tactical Marine costs and going from there. Likewise do the same with the Rhino for transports, the basic Predator for tanks, Dreadnought for walkers and the Stormtalon for flyers.

It'd keep the Space Marines as the yardstick for the game as a whole while properly solving the points balancing issue.

I agree about the yardstick idea but it is still tricky when you try to address balance. In theory 150 points of Space Marines, Firewarriors, and Ork Boys should all be roughly equal in usefulness. But each unit is suppose to be superior in a certain aspect of the game. Given the right set of circumstances each of these units should be able to defeat the others. But my how much?

So 150 points of Firewarriors in cover trading shots with 150 points of Space Marines in the open should win a fire fight. But by how many losses should the Firewarriors sustain on average before wiping out the Marines? 25%, 50%, 90%? How many losses should suffer from the same scenario against Ork Boys? Should it be greater or lesser than Marines and if so then by how much?

Ask three different 40K players and you are likely to get 3 different answers.

Zookie wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I think GW needs a "system" for points costing things. Basically something that says that X should cost Y because it has A, B, C. It could even be based off the cost of the Space Marine by making it work off of what a basic Tactical Marine costs and going from there. Likewise do the same with the Rhino for transports, the basic Predator for tanks, Dreadnought for walkers and the Stormtalon for flyers.

It'd keep the Space Marines as the yardstick for the game as a whole while properly solving the points balancing issue.

I agree about the yardstick idea but it is still tricky when you try to address balance. In theory 150 points of Space Marines, Firewarriors, and Ork Boys should all be roughly equal in usefulness. But each unit is suppose to be superior in a certain aspect of the game. Given the right set of circumstances each of these units should be able to defeat the others. But my how much?

So 150 points of Firewarriors in cover trading shots with 150 points of Space Marines in the open should win a fire fight. But by how many losses should the Firewarriors sustain on average before wiping out the Marines? 25%, 50%, 90%? How many losses should suffer from the same scenario against Ork Boys? Should it be greater or lesser than Marines and if so then by how much?

Ask three different 40K players and you are likely to get 3 different answers.

Oh I understand circumstances can heavily change how good one thing is versus another but at least on paper if they equivalent based on the same scale then we've got somewhere to go from. At the very least it'd solve the large number of "balance" issues people see in the game and put the focus on using tactics to create those imbalances you'd need to win those exchanges between units.

 Ailaros wrote:

- It's too coarse. Because of points deflation over time, you're now dealing with very small numbers, numbers that are insufficiently able to display subtle differences. For example, both a chaos cultist and an ork boy cost 5 points. That's just absurd given how much better the boy is than the cultist. But what if you made the cultists 4 points? Now you're saying that they're only 2/3rds as good as a guardsman, and that isn't right either.

Just wanted to point out

Guardsmen are 5 ppm, Boyz are 6 ppm, cultists are 4.

Oh, then they were already making the mistake I'm talking about, even with my mistaken numbers.

Because if you thought those numbers weren't fair, what could you possibly do about it? At the resolution of the points scale... not much.

 Ailaros wrote:
Oh, then they were already making the mistake I'm talking about, even with my mistaken numbers.

Because if you thought those numbers weren't fair, what could you possibly do about it? At the resolution of the points scale... not much.

That is a large part of the issue, the points scale GW works off of needs to be adjusted. Maybe bump double FOC to 3k plus, make Tact Marines 24 points and aim for the real balance point being 2k instead?

No reason you couldn't do a factor of 10, though. That way would be super easy - just add a zero to the end of all of the numbers for every codex that came out before the change. The only real difference was that you'd be playing a 15,000 point game instead of a 1,500 point one.

And it would give you an order of magnitude better resolution, without being THAT much more unwieldy than the current system is.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Zookie wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I think GW needs a "system" for points costing things. Basically something that says that X should cost Y because it has A, B, C. It could even be based off the cost of the Space Marine by making it work off of what a basic Tactical Marine costs and going from there. Likewise do the same with the Rhino for transports, the basic Predator for tanks, Dreadnought for walkers and the Stormtalon for flyers.

It'd keep the Space Marines as the yardstick for the game as a whole while properly solving the points balancing issue.

I agree about the yardstick idea but it is still tricky when you try to address balance. In theory 150 points of Space Marines, Firewarriors, and Ork Boys should all be roughly equal in usefulness. But each unit is suppose to be superior in a certain aspect of the game. Given the right set of circumstances each of these units should be able to defeat the others. But my how much?

So 150 points of Firewarriors in cover trading shots with 150 points of Space Marines in the open should win a fire fight. But by how many losses should the Firewarriors sustain on average before wiping out the Marines? 25%, 50%, 90%? How many losses should suffer from the same scenario against Ork Boys? Should it be greater or lesser than Marines and if so then by how much?

Ask three different 40K players and you are likely to get 3 different answers.

Oh I understand circumstances can heavily change how good one thing is versus another but at least on paper if they equivalent based on the same scale then we've got somewhere to go from. At the very least it'd solve the large number of "balance" issues people see in the game and put the focus on using tactics to create those imbalances you'd need to win those exchanges between units.

I wonder if someone more mathematically inclined then me could create a formula for where you can plug a weapon's strength, AP, range and type and it would spit out a point cost.