Honestly, I'm not sure giving all armies an army-wide rule was a great idea in the first place. It works okay for something like tyranids that really ought to have synapse beasties in most or all lists. But for a lot of armies, they might have been better off just expanding on detachment abilities. So instead of giving fate dice to absolutely every eldar faction, you can make that an Ulthwe/Seer Support mechanic, representing the seer council being powerful and organized enough to help micromanage the battle. Meanwhile a Saimhann/We Like Skimmers list could replace the guardian defenders fate dice generation rule with the ability to fight better when working in tandem with a wave serpent or something.
I think there's a misunderstanding here.
Currently, Eldar have Fate Dice as an ARMY RULE, and they have faction rules ON TOP of that.
You don't NEED to get rid of fate dice to have a Saim Hann appropriate detachment rule, because detachment rules co-exist with army rules. It isn't either or- just wait for the dex and you'll likely get some of the detachment rules you're looking for.
The idea that "some" armies should get army rules and others shouldn't is also a problem- just like how only marines and CSM having subfactions that matter is a problem. If armies can't be equal on the size of their ranges because "reasons" they should at least be equal in terms of the types of rules they have access to.
I personally believe 40k should have larger ranges and more subfaction development for neglected factions and fewer editions. These characteristics go hand in hand- increasing the units in a given army, or increasing the number of armies allows new money to come in without an edition reset. If there are fewer new models, editions must get shorter, because it becomes the only way to bring in new money.
This is also one of the problems GW has painted themselves into. the game is to big now with to many factions and the sku bloat is to large. it is why they keep having to turn everything on it's head which has led to all the other problems discussed in this entire topic(the balance boogieman) . PP press suffered the same issue with warmachine. to many units in to many factions that all basically do the same thing. GW brought this on themselves because the only way they can keep the train rolling is new minis to replaces the ones that are no longer selling for various reasons. they have chosen this "easier" route than building communities and solid core rules that draws players to their game.
How many versions of terminators do space marines need? or dreadnoughts? another giant tyranid monster with slightly different rules? they could trash can half the units in all the 10th ed codexes now and nobody would break a sweat in the NU-40K meta community, and lets face it those are the ones who care the most.
Then you add in the limits of the d6/IGOUGO game mechanics and your design space is very limited.
The only other comparable game system that is as old as (and as lore heavy) 40K and still active-classic battle tech- has effectively had the same core rules for over 30 years with only a few minimal tweaks. even better for the players you can use the same minis in any era or setting, or faction(usually a weapons loadout swap) with entire books of official optional rules for the players to swim in and thanks to catalyst fantastic new plastics/rules support. they are not even the original owners as the game has been scattered to the winds after FASA shut down, yet it still persists. the buy in is also ridiculously small for a miniatures game-4-5 minis for $25-$35 is a complete army with thousands of options in mechs, vehicles, VTOLS, aircraft, naval, infantry, support and even space assets to play with.
GW could learn from this, but they won't as long as the current business model keeps working.
Honestly, I'm not sure giving all armies an army-wide rule was a great idea in the first place. It works okay for something like tyranids that really ought to have synapse beasties in most or all lists. But for a lot of armies, they might have been better off just expanding on detachment abilities. So instead of giving fate dice to absolutely every eldar faction, you can make that an Ulthwe/Seer Support mechanic, representing the seer council being powerful and organized enough to help micromanage the battle. Meanwhile a Saimhann/We Like Skimmers list could replace the guardian defenders fate dice generation rule with the ability to fight better when working in tandem with a wave serpent or something.
I think there's a misunderstanding here.
Currently, Eldar have Fate Dice as an ARMY RULE, and they have faction rules ON TOP of that.
You don't NEED to get rid of fate dice to have a Saim Hann appropriate detachment rule, because detachment rules co-exist with army rules. It isn't either or- just wait for the dex and you'll likely get some of the detachment rules you're looking for.
The idea that "some" armies should get army rules and others shouldn't is also a problem- just like how only marines and CSM having subfactions that matter is a problem. If armies can't be equal on the size of their ranges because "reasons" they should at least be equal in terms of the types of rules they have access to.
Nah. You've misunderstood me slightly. What I'm saying is that, if we think of armies as having X amount of "rules budget," some armies might be better off spending more of that budget on detachment-specific rules instead of having to allocate however much of the budget to army-wide rules. So hypothetically if we dropped Strands of Fate as an army-wide rule, that would free up Y% of the rules budget that could then be spent on rules that are specific to each detachment.
So instead of Saim-Hann getting Strands and a small skimmer/jetbike rule, you could instead give them a big (or multiple small) skimmer/jetbike rules. And units like guardians who are currently tied specifically to the Strands rule could have the ability to swap out their "generate fate dice" rule for something else based on the detachment. So for instance, guardians might get a rule that lets them shoot better when hopping out of a transport or lets them hide by hopping back into a transport or whatever.
I'm ok with small arms taking wounds off vehicles, but I'm against any situation where massed D2 weaponry is considered the best option for anti tank, especially when in competition with a traditionally dedicated anti tank weapon such as a lascannon.
We agree there as well. Plasma spam was a problem in 8th, but I think a modest increase in vehicle wounds and/or a tweak to dedicated anti-tank weapons to have a higher minimum damage (d3+3, d6 min 3, etc.) would have been enough of a solution. We sort of got that in 9th, but we also got a bunch of power creep that kind of ruined it.
I think the concern might be that it is harder to balance when some army rules are "less than" by design in order to allow some detachment rules to be "more than" - but balance isn't really a priority for me- important, sure, but certainly not my primary concern.
Rules should be used where needed and as needed. There was nothing wrong with, say, 3rd-4th Ed where Tyranids had a bunch of army specific special rules while Imperial Guard worked mostly out of the rulebook.
What matters is whether the faction fits its background and is fun to play. Trying to accomplish that by stipulating that thou shalt have exactly one (1) army-wide rule is the wrong approach. We're currently seeing the result of this sort of quota-based design, where every faction gets a rule, every detachment gets a rule, nearly every unit gets a rule, and the result is that some armies don't have enough rules, some have rules that are unnecessary or weird for their background, and the stacking layers make it harder to keep track of a unit's capabilities.
Da Boss wrote:No offense meant to GK fans, but I always felt they were a poor choice for a full faction. A faction specialised at killing one other faction is a bit of a poor design choice. They'd work better as an auxillary unit for imperial forces for special scenarios or something. Cool idea in the background, great models, but the old codex where you had to distort the fluff of your army if you were playing against them always really irked me quite a lot.
Indeed they were never meant to be a full faction in the lore either, that is why it was codex demon hunters not grey knights. it would be more appropriate to call it codex ordo malleus. as the entire point is that the GK part of it was the chamber militant of the inquisitional ordo meant to deal with demons and chaos aligned forces. they do work best as an allied force to bulk up an imperial faction like guard. which is why they had a special unique allies rule.
It is why i still prefer the 3rd ed codex because the 5th ed codex did turn them into singular full faction instead of just a part of the inquisition.
Both of these attitudes are examples of the "Horizontal growth inhibitors" that I wrote about earlier.
The 3rd ed Hunter dexes were as they were not because that's all they were intended to be, but because that's all GW could make of them DURING THE 3RD EDITION.
It's funny that we've had almost four decades of edition churn, and people still believe that GW's planning is self contained within a single edition. If you don't think that the Hunter dexes were released as transitional "proof of concept" work prior to larger releases and integration of both Inquisition and the respective chambers militant, I think there might be some "big picture" skills in need of further development.
GW released an entire game about the Inquisition; the Overkill box set was great for Deathwatch; Hexfire for GK and Ashes of Faith is keeping the Inquisition present for 10th. As GW engages media- through WH+ and the Amazon deal, or the once rumoured Eisenhorn show, Inquisition will become more important- if this media pulls new players, they will expect to play what the media depicts. And Inquisition, including their Chambers Militant, are an important part of that- their stories have always been amongst the most intriguing in the Warhammer 40k Universe.
I personally believe 40k should have larger ranges and more subfaction development for neglected factions and fewer editions. These characteristics go hand in hand- increasing the units in a given army, or increasing the number of armies allows new money to come in without an edition reset. If there are fewer new models, editions must get shorter, because it becomes the only way to bring in new money.
I think you give GW way more good faith than you should be considering their history.
Referencing GK in particular, if they intended to make them into a full faction they should support them as a full faction. The same as with any other army they intend to "grow horizontally." You think that GW is such a big picture company that they are still using the Daemon Hunter codex as a launching point for some mythical soon to be released Ordo Xenos sub-faction? If you are honestly arguing that I don't even know how to engage you in conversation that they have a 20+ year plan on faction releases.
It feels like you are arguing that we should care about GW making money because your last paragraph is focused on that in a rather positive light. I couldn't care less how much money GW makes. I want their product that I am invested in to be something that I can continue to enjoy; their profits aren't even a blip on the radar in my considerations for the game and the setting. I can understand that they only care about profits and don't give a damn about me or any other player but the only time I care about the company is where our interest intersect.
I get that you are trying your best to exist within the environment that GW is providing you and work with what is versus what could be but that is such a cynical take on the hobby that I can't understand it; I say that as someone who is cynical about EVERYTHING in great quantities. Cynicism should be about pushing for what could be by understand what is, not accepting what is.
catbarf wrote: Rules should be used where needed and as needed. There was nothing wrong with, say, 3rd-4th Ed where Tyranids had a bunch of army specific special rules while Imperial Guard worked mostly out of the rulebook.
What matters is whether the faction fits its background and is fun to play. Trying to accomplish that by stipulating that thou shalt have exactly one (1) army-wide rule is the wrong approach. We're currently seeing the result of this sort of quota-based design, where every faction gets a rule, every detachment gets a rule, nearly every unit gets a rule, and the result is that some armies don't have enough rules, some have rules that are unnecessary or weird for their background, and the stacking layers make it harder to keep track of a unit's capabilities.
catbarf wrote: Rules should be used where needed and as needed. There was nothing wrong with, say, 3rd-4th Ed where Tyranids had a bunch of army specific special rules while Imperial Guard worked mostly out of the rulebook.
What matters is whether the faction fits its background and is fun to play. Trying to accomplish that by stipulating that thou shalt have exactly one (1) army-wide rule is the wrong approach. We're currently seeing the result of this sort of quota-based design, where every faction gets a rule, every detachment gets a rule, nearly every unit gets a rule, and the result is that some armies don't have enough rules, some have rules that are unnecessary or weird for their background, and the stacking layers make it harder to keep track of a unit's capabilities.
catbarf wrote: Rules should be used where needed and as needed. There was nothing wrong with, say, 3rd-4th Ed where Tyranids had a bunch of army specific special rules while Imperial Guard worked mostly out of the rulebook.
What matters is whether the faction fits its background and is fun to play. Trying to accomplish that by stipulating that thou shalt have exactly one (1) army-wide rule is the wrong approach. We're currently seeing the result of this sort of quota-based design, where every faction gets a rule, every detachment gets a rule, nearly every unit gets a rule, and the result is that some armies don't have enough rules, some have rules that are unnecessary or weird for their background, and the stacking layers make it harder to keep track of a unit's capabilities.
Agreed. I guess what I'm getting at is that detachment rules exist, and people generally seem to like getting detachment/subfaction style rules. We want each detachment to feel viable/valid, and that means making each detachment within a given codex similar in power. So there's sort of an implied "budget" for how impactful/powerful you can make each detachment. I'm basically saying that some armies might be better served by expanding that budget by taking away the army-wide rules that also give them a certain amount of power.
Or put another way, think of all the flavorful, cool with which you could replace something like Strands of Fate. Like, imagine taking the power/impact of Strands of Fate, but then spreading that out across some cool maneuvering mechanics for a Saim-Hann-style detachment, or spirit sight rules for a ghost army detachment or ranger disruption rules for an Alaitoc-esque detachment. But as-is, our hypothetical Saim-Hann/Alaitoc/Iyanden detachments will end up only being roughly as powerful/impactful/complex as the detachment rerolls we get from the current detachment.
Both of these attitudes are examples of the "Horizontal growth inhibitors" that I wrote about earlier.
The 3rd ed Hunter dexes were as they were not because that's all they were intended to be, but because that's all GW could make of them DURING THE 3RD EDITION.
The issue here is that SMs as a whole have had many times more horizontal growth than most other factions combined.
Thus, when it comes to niche units like Grey Knights, it would seem far more logical to have them as allies or specialist units for existing SM/Imperium armies than to try and make them into a standalone codex.
I personally believe 40k should have larger ranges and more subfaction development for neglected factions and fewer editions. These characteristics go hand in hand- increasing the units in a given army, or increasing the number of armies allows new money to come in without an edition reset. If there are fewer new models, editions must get shorter, because it becomes the only way to bring in new money.
I agree with the overall point, though I would argue edition churn is not remotely necessary, even with relatively few new releases.
Currently, Eldar have Fate Dice as an ARMY RULE, and they have faction rules ON TOP of that.
You don't NEED to get rid of fate dice to have a Saim Hann appropriate detachment rule, because detachment rules co-exist with army rules. It isn't either or- just wait for the dex and you'll likely get some of the detachment rules you're looking for.
The idea that "some" armies should get army rules and others shouldn't is also a problem- just like how only marines and CSM having subfactions that matter is a problem. If armies can't be equal on the size of their ranges because "reasons" they should at least be equal in terms of the types of rules they have access to.
I believe the issue is one of design space. If Eldar didn't have a core army ability (or if they had a more minor one like Battle Focus), then that would free up design space so that their subfactions could have additional rules instead.
It would be a way to place more emphasis on the subfactions and their abilities as the defining feature of Eldar armies, rather than Eldar being defined primarily by the Fate Dice mechanic (irrespective of subfaction).
catbarf wrote: Rules should be used where needed and as needed. There was nothing wrong with, say, 3rd-4th Ed where Tyranids had a bunch of army specific special rules while Imperial Guard worked mostly out of the rulebook.
What matters is whether the faction fits its background and is fun to play. Trying to accomplish that by stipulating that thou shalt have exactly one (1) army-wide rule is the wrong approach. We're currently seeing the result of this sort of quota-based design, where every faction gets a rule, every detachment gets a rule, nearly every unit gets a rule, and the result is that some armies don't have enough rules, some have rules that are unnecessary or weird for their background, and the stacking layers make it harder to keep track of a unit's capabilities.
Agreed.
I think it also ties back to a point made earlier that 40k's rules are making it increasingly difficult to differentiate units with stats alone. However, rather than addressing that, designers are just piling more bespoke, special rules onto units.
Wyldhunt wrote: Agreed. I guess what I'm getting at is that detachment rules exist, and people generally seem to like getting detachment/subfaction style rules. We want each detachment to feel viable/valid, and that means making each detachment within a given codex similar in power. So there's sort of an implied "budget" for how impactful/powerful you can make each detachment. I'm basically saying that some armies might be better served by expanding that budget by taking away the army-wide rules that also give them a certain amount of power.
Or put another way, think of all the flavorful, cool with which you could replace something like Strands of Fate. Like, imagine taking the power/impact of Strands of Fate, but then spreading that out across some cool maneuvering mechanics for a Saim-Hann-style detachment, or spirit sight rules for a ghost army detachment or ranger disruption rules for an Alaitoc-esque detachment. But as-is, our hypothetical Saim-Hann/Alaitoc/Iyanden detachments will end up only being roughly as powerful/impactful/complex as the detachment rerolls we get from the current detachment.
I just think the approach GW is taking is very sterile and narrowly focused, and the problem you're highlighting is an artifact of that. The guiding principle of 'make every detachment feel viable/valid' is a perfectly reasonable one, but the implementation is apparently restricted solely to no-cost army-wide special abilities. That's fine for some things, but how about wargear options? Or force org changes? Or stat adjustments? Or unique units? Or special rules significant enough to warrant a points cost, so they don't actually have to all be equally powerful, or 'borrow' power from the army-wide rule?
Point simply being that the need to balance a 'power budget' is an artifact of the rigid design constraints GW has set for themselves. A less formulaic approach could allow stronger detachment abilities in lieu of a faction ability, like you describe, but it could also facilitate a lot more besides that.
Wyldhunt wrote: Agreed. I guess what I'm getting at is that detachment rules exist, and people generally seem to like getting detachment/subfaction style rules. We want each detachment to feel viable/valid, and that means making each detachment within a given codex similar in power. So there's sort of an implied "budget" for how impactful/powerful you can make each detachment. I'm basically saying that some armies might be better served by expanding that budget by taking away the army-wide rules that also give them a certain amount of power.
Or put another way, think of all the flavorful, cool with which you could replace something like Strands of Fate. Like, imagine taking the power/impact of Strands of Fate, but then spreading that out across some cool maneuvering mechanics for a Saim-Hann-style detachment, or spirit sight rules for a ghost army detachment or ranger disruption rules for an Alaitoc-esque detachment. But as-is, our hypothetical Saim-Hann/Alaitoc/Iyanden detachments will end up only being roughly as powerful/impactful/complex as the detachment rerolls we get from the current detachment.
I just think the approach GW is taking is very sterile and narrowly focused, and the problem you're highlighting is an artifact of that. The guiding principle of 'make every detachment feel viable/valid' is a perfectly reasonable one, but the implementation is apparently restricted solely to no-cost army-wide special abilities. That's fine for some things, but how about wargear options? Or force org changes? Or stat adjustments? Or unique units? Or special rules significant enough to warrant a points cost, so they don't actually have to all be equally powerful, or 'borrow' power from the army-wide rule?
Point simply being that the need to balance a 'power budget' is an artifact of the rigid design constraints GW has set for themselves. A less formulaic approach could allow stronger detachment abilities in lieu of a faction ability, like you describe, but it could also facilitate a lot more besides that.
Agreed. The modularity of subfaction (now detachment) bonuses is kind of a weird choice. On one hand, it makes sense that they'd want to make it easy for players to choose their subfaction/detachment rules. However, there really aren't that many of them in 10th, so you'd think they'd prefer to use more bespoke rules for making each detachment feel unique (including using things like points to balance things.) The easily swappable nature of the rules would make more sense if they were expecting to come out with a bunch of additional detachments later on in 10th, sort of like the build-a-bear options in 9th. But even in 9th, they didn't come out with *that many* detachments.
The extent to which detachments are modular seems either underutilized or unnecessary, is what I'm saying.
I think the fact that detachments don't change the structure of your army in any way (battleline, unit restrictions, etc.) is a massively missed opportunity (one of GW's fav things!).
H.B.M.C. wrote: I think the fact that detachments don't change the structure of your army in any way (battleline, unit restrictions, etc.) is a massively missed opportunity (one of GW's fav things!).
What makes you think they've missed it?
They'll need something for their mid-edition design paradigm shift in 11 months.
I personally believe 40k should have larger ranges and more subfaction development for neglected factions and fewer editions. These characteristics go hand in hand- increasing the units in a given army, or increasing the number of armies allows new money to come in without an edition reset. If there are fewer new models, editions must get shorter, because it becomes the only way to bring in new money.
I think you give GW way more good faith than you should be considering their history.
Possibly. But I think some context is also useful here: my first 40k game was Rogue Trader- I've been fairly engaged in this rodeo for a lot of years. So while a lot of people are concerned about this edition or that edition and how balanced they are or how good they are, I'm still thinking about what a large part this IP played in making me the person I am today. I met GW when I was 15 years old. GW gave me a peer group by providing Rogue Trader to the world in 1987, and I was there. The friends I've made, the stories that I've played a part in and written... It'll take more than a bad edition to undo the many things that GW has given me over the past four decades.
And my favourite edition of all time was 9th, so it's not that far in the rearview.
Referencing GK in particular, if they intended to make them into a full faction they should support them as a full faction. The same as with any other army they intend to "grow horizontally." You think that GW is such a big picture company that they are still using the Daemon Hunter codex as a launching point for some mythical soon to be released Ordo Xenos sub-faction? If you are honestly arguing that I don't even know how to engage you in conversation that they have a 20+ year plan on faction releases.
Hold up a sec- here's the context:
I was replying to someone who used the Hunter books as evidence that GW never intended to make full factions out of the Grey Knights, the Deathwatch and the Inquisition. Now I LOVED the Hunter Books, but they always struck me as an experiment and not a finished concept. I ALWAYS expected the Chambers Militant of the Ordos Malleus and Xenos to grow to the size of the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Hereticus... In other words, I expected both Deathwatch and Grey Knights to be as well developed as the Sisters, and I further expected that those three armies would would continue to grow at roughly the same pace from edition to edition. Which is why I said what those Chambers were in the Hunter books is not all they were meant to be: they were as much of what the armies were intended be as GW could give us at the time.
And I do expect another Imperial Agents Codex sometime; we've seen these before, and we could get a new one any time. It could happen this edition, but it might not. But right now, their are more Agent models in print than there have ever been, and they're organized (currently) as Inquisition, Arbites, Navy, Rogue Trader. That's four possible detachments that could be put into a dex. You need a few new HQ models- one for Arbites and one for the Navy, and then you need to add appropriate existing vehicles to each of the lists.
BUT Agent detachments would have been better in a game like 9th, where an army consists of multiple detachments.
Because the problem with Agents as is, really is just that they don't have access to any strats (except BRB), enhancements, and they don't have army or detachment rules that actually buff them. If you could field Greyfax, a generic Hereticus Inquisitor, an Arbites unit in a Repressor, a Henchmen unit in a Rhino and maybe an Enginseer with 4 servitors in an Inquisition Detachment with it's own Strats, enhancements and detachment rule, and also field a detachment of Sisters with its own strats, enhancements and detachment rule... That's about exactly what Inquisition needs to work well with their chamber.
It feels like you are arguing that we should care about GW making money because your last paragraph is focused on that in a rather positive light. I couldn't care less how much money GW makes. I want their product that I am invested in to be something that I can continue to enjoy; their profits aren't even a blip on the radar in my considerations for the game and the setting. I can understand that they only care about profits and don't give a damn about me or any other player but the only time I care about the company is where our interest intersect.
Nope. Once again, context.
Yes, I talk about money- not to celebrate the money making capacity of the company or to excuse any shady business practice that may or may not be happening. I am only interested in the company having as much money as it needs to keep making products. Without revenue coming in, any business will fail, and in this case, that would mean no more game for us.
So what I'm saying is:
When an edition reaches the end of it's codex release cycle, the game designers have to figure out what to do next. If they just leave it, it can coast for a while... But eventually it will die, but without product development, the company will reach a point where anyone who is going to try it has, and anyone who likes it has all the things they need to play. So the company has to do something.
They can do what GW often does: release a new edition. When this happens, they can add some new models to each faction, and every now and again, they can even add a faction every now and again... But because they have to re-invent everything when they do this, a lot of their energy goes into recreating rather than creating.
They could also just do second waves for every faction without rewriting rules, but then the question becomes how to deliver the rules for the second wave models. Free digital distribution is on solution. Campaign books are another. Updating the Codex is another option, but it has to have value for money, and a single new data card is not value for money. So maybe they add new bespoke Crusade content- not to replace existing Crusade content, but add to it. And maybe they do a few tweaks here and there.
The second approach, regardless of how rules for new units are distributed, is more like the concept of horizontal growth as the term has been used in this thread. Reverting GK or DW back to single allied units in other armies, or smaller collections of units than the current range as some have suggested, is the opposite of horizontal growth- it contracts the range and gives GW fewer possibilities for additional model releases without an accompanying edition reset.
None of this is about celebrating capitalism. It's about ensuring the game is here for 40 more years.
I get that you are trying your best to exist within the environment that GW is providing you and work with what is versus what could be but that is such a cynical take on the hobby that I can't understand it; I say that as someone who is cynical about EVERYTHING in great quantities. Cynicism should be about pushing for what could be by understand what is, not accepting what is.
I'm going to play 10th and give it an honest go. I haven't bought in hard- I'm not subsidizing this edition- the only product I have purchased so far is the Tyrannic War Crusade book. I'll wait until I read the Goonhammer review before deciding whether or not to buy the upcoming Pariah Crusade book. I might buy a Tau dex, because Kroot are getting love. We'll see about Sisters, Drukhari and GSC.
But I bought HEAVY into 9th, and even if I have fun with 10th, I know that it'll never replace 9th.
I suspect 11th will actually a 10.5 the same way 9th was actually an 8.5... And it might fix some of 10th's most egregious. Like just imagine 11th giving us back costed equipment, and some of the variety of load out options that we lost- at this point, 50% of what we lost would feel like a goldmine and still avoid the previous levels of "bloat."
Anyway gang, I was going to reply to more people, but this one response has eaten up enough time.
Right now the ultra simplification and parsing down of army rules and unit rules has basically made the game completely uninteresting.
10th is functional. It works. The missions work. It's even probably good at getting new people into it. But it is bland uninteresting flavourless slop.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I think the fact that detachments don't change the structure of your army in any way (battleline, unit restrictions, etc.) is a massively missed opportunity (one of GW's fav things!).
Wasn't this also how GW initially said (or at least heavily implied) that the new system would work?
Either way, I think this approach would have made a lot of sense. If anything, that sort of change would probably be a good deal better than just handing out buffs.
Bosskelot wrote: Right now the ultra simplification and parsing down of army rules and unit rules has basically made the game completely uninteresting.
10th is functional. It works. The missions work. It's even probably good at getting new people into it. But it is bland uninteresting flavourless slop.
This is where I'm at, sadly. For all the faults of past editions, I could usually find something to keep me invested. With 10th, I've yet to find anything that makes me want to build an army or to inspire a conversion project.
vipoid wrote: Wasn't this also how GW initially said (or at least heavily implied) that the new system would work?
It certainly seemed that way when they started talking about detachments in the leadup to 10th.
Then people here started screaming at me for merely suggesting it...
vipoid wrote: Either way, I think this approach would have made a lot of sense. If anything, that sort of change would probably be a good deal better than just handing out buffs.
It could certainly help to rescue things like the 1st Company and Crusher Stampede (not that those detachments don't have their own glaring problems).
vipoid wrote: Wasn't this also how GW initially said (or at least heavily implied) that the new system would work?
It certainly seemed that way when they started talking about detachments in the leadup to 10th.
Then people here started screaming at me for merely suggesting it...
Stu Black mentioned it in at least one interview, specifically in relation to a First Company detachment and Terminators - I believe it was the interview he did with Tabletop Tactics. The First Company detachment is a thing, but obviously no change in role is included in it. Definitely feels like a missed opportunity to me, especially because it's such an obvious change and likely not that impactful in terms of balance. 6 units of Terminators is not likely to break the game.
I've lost my zeal for unit restrictions as of late. I like them in theory, but they just kind of silo players and force collections that don't handle change very well. I think the carrots we've seen so far are enough to make detachments encourage a diverse selection of units as is. No need to ban things entirely.
LunarSol wrote: I've lost my zeal for unit restrictions as of late. I like them in theory, but they just kind of silo players and force collections that don't handle change very well. I think the carrots we've seen so far are enough to make detachments encourage a diverse selection of units as is. No need to ban things entirely.
I disagree. Players sometimes need to have a dreadsock upside the head, it seems. Look at the nonsense with Vanguard Spearhead with No Vanguard units or the people in the Detachments thread complaining that the Skitarii specific detachment encourages you to use Skitarii units.
It ain't 10th edition that's "drained the soul" from anything. The playerbase is a mess and has been for some time.
That's an issue of Vanguard mostly giving bonuses that the Vanguard units either already have or otherwise don't need rather than things that would shore up their weaknesses and encourage you to take them.
LunarSol wrote: That's an issue of Vanguard mostly giving bonuses that the Vanguard units either already have or otherwise don't need
Because they don't know what to do with Vanguard, conceptually, and their tournament-based feedback doesn't seem to wrap around the idea that Vanguard could have been the "control"/"area denial" setup.
FFS, they removed the Incursors' ability to deploy mines and instead turned it into a random attack.
rather than things that would shore up their weaknesses and encourage you to take them.
If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.
Tyran wrote: They can just do what they did with the Tyranid vanguard and add a keyword requirement for benefiting from the detachment rule.
Which isn't the same as actually banning units.
See, that requires it to actually have been intended to be Vanguard from the outset. You can 100% see where they shifted gears from "These detachments should be Chapter specific" to "Make these able to be used by any Chapter; oh and also the Successor Books need to be able to play here too."
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LunarSol wrote: If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.
Maybe, maybe not.
But it at least does not give false positives as to the actual efficacy of the detachments.
vipoid wrote: Wasn't this also how GW initially said (or at least heavily implied) that the new system would work?
It certainly seemed that way when they started talking about detachments in the leadup to 10th.
Then people here started screaming at me for merely suggesting it...
Stu Black mentioned it in at least one interview, specifically in relation to a First Company detachment and Terminators - I believe it was the interview he did with Tabletop Tactics. The First Company detachment is a thing, but obviously no change in role is included in it. Definitely feels like a missed opportunity to me, especially because it's such an obvious change and likely not that impactful in terms of balance. 6 units of Terminators is not likely to break the game.
There used to be a back door option to get six units of Terminators, which was you take 3 squads of ten and then Combat Squad them. Sadly that option's been cut out now too.
LunarSol wrote: If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.
I was going to suggest that detachments could make the units they want to encourage Troops and/or Core.
Then I remembered that neither Troops nor Core exist in 10th.
LunarSol wrote: If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.
I was going to suggest that detachments could make the units they want to encourage Troops and/or Core.
Then I remembered that neither Troops nor Core exist in 10th.
I'm still honestly staggered we didn't see a rule for making battleline units have additional OC and then moving battleline around based on detachment.
I've said this before, but Battleline should not be a keyword. It should be a USR.
"A model with this rule adds +1 to their OC characteristic, and the player may take 6 of that unit rather than the usual 3."
... and nothing in the game has it by default. Then every detachment lists what models get Battleline, and which ones are restricted (where applicable). This means you can have an Armoured Company or Ghostwalker or Deathwing or whatever list, it lets you take more of the core choices those armies should have (Russes, Wraithguad, Deathwing Terminators, etc.) and makes them better at holding objectives.
LunarSol wrote: If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.
I was going to suggest that detachments could make the units they want to encourage Troops and/or Core.
Then I remembered that neither Troops nor Core exist in 10th.
I'm still honestly staggered we didn't see a rule for making battleline units have additional OC and then moving battleline around based on detachment.
Not that you said you wanted this, just that you wouldn’t be surprised, but Objective Secured and force org was a net negative from the first day.
I think Wyzilla and catbarf were talking about the usefulness of bargain/generic units in WHFB. Being screened allows your important units to March move. Having a weak unit join combat for the flanking bonus lets your strong unit crush in close combat. There’s an inherent value to bargain rate, less-strong units. There’s no waiting around for GW to confer OC+1 on a unit or formation, or take it away.
It’s true, Battleline should not be a keyword, or a USR. It’s superfluous, it’s bad.
You could have a Battleline list per detachment, which is probably my favorite option personally, though I'm not wildly fond of encouraging spam and "theme force only" purchases.
pelicaniforce wrote: I think Wyzilla and catbarf were talking about the usefulness of bargain/generic units in WHFB. Being screened allows your important units to March move. Having a weak unit join combat for the flanking bonus lets your strong unit crush in close combat. There’s an inherent value to bargain rate, less-strong units. There’s no waiting around for GW to confer OC+1 on a unit or formation, or take it away.
That approach requires that the core rules are deep enough for those chaff units have value beyond their raw combat ability. It's mchanics like march moves, flanking, rank bonuses, where the raw power of the unit is irrelevant and the fact that you have a unit in position is what matters.
Meanwhile 10th is the edition of stats and special rules being the sole metrics for unit capabilities. There just isn't the framework for chaff to have utility without either relevant combat ability (for the points) or some flavor of objective control.
And honestly, in that context- where so much of the game boils down to min-maxing firepower and stacking layers of buffs- it would have been nice for detachments to be more about army composition and objective control, and less about what conditions let you re-roll 1s.
I think depth is the issue - but its also a questionable subject.
Obviously not played TOW - and don't want to bash TOW. But I think its interesting how a lot of people are saying its a "proper" ruleset.
Yet from the perspective of 2024 - it seems proper only because there are piles and piles of rules. The book that tells you how to play is big enough to kill a man.
But the overwhelmingly majority don't seem to obviously impact decision making - they just determine outcomes of decisions you've already made. So really it feels like a relatively simple game, where the simplicity is obscured with a whole range of noise.
That noise however means there's lots of things you could do - before we get into whether you ever should. Most units as far as I can see remain too slow - and there are too few turns - to dramatically change how you play the game. You can decide what to bring, you decide how to deploy, and from then on your army is kind of a wind up toy. Units are sort of stuck in spacetime from there on. (This isn't to claim there's no decisions - but most of the time its obvious).
The difference I think is that there's no real illusions in 10th edition 40k. I'm not sure for instance there was that much "depth" in say taking 8 guys in a squad rather than 10. Or being able to take a flamer, plasma gun or none. (Whereas now you may get both) with the proviso this gave you a few points to spend elsewhere. Standard compositions were identified and became standard.
But this was something to think about, theorise about, dream about. And now its gone. You don't get that moment of thinking/learning/experimenting "X is good, I should take it" or "Y is a waste of points, I can cut it and get Z instead". Admittedly, in practice I'm not sure how much of a revelation this has been since 5th or even 3rd edition. The bigger impact is that its hard to feel your army is yours - because odds are its identical to someone else's, down to each individual bit of wargear.
Maybe they need to look at the missions again (which very rarely get discussed online). There's a question to be had on whether you should want to consider the missions and design a list - or design a list and select secondaries. This should be where you establish whether unit A is good for objective X but unit B is good for objective Y. Arguably though I think this is the case - but people aren't interested. When we look back at 9th, debates about army composition were rarely objective led.
I guess I just wonder what reactions would be to GW chucking 10th and rolling out 7th 2.0 instead as 11th. Much rules. Much optionality. Much depth? But I thought that the game kind of sucked (can we go back to the last year of 9th instead?) Partly though that was the chronic imbalance and GW making no effort to resolve it. But also because the vast majority of 7th's rules were just noise that made it incomprehensible to a new player, but didn't add much optionality to a veteran.
40k has definitely felt like a game of wind up armies for a while now. At least for me. The "illusion" provided by points and options in the past provide a sense of ownership and choice. It felt like it was *my* windup army clashing with yours, and the fun was in seeing how well my quirky little choices performed.
In 10th, that illusion is gone, and it kind of took the sense of ownership with it. Add the standardized terrain layout to that (if you use those rules), and you have samey missions on samey boards with pre-approved cookie cutter armies going at it.
I feel like the experience we "should" be having with 40k is treating your opponent's army like a puzzle and then figuring out how to solve that puzzle while they solve yours. The IGOUGO structure maybe interferes with this as instead of reacting to your opponent's moves and interfering with their short-term choices with your own, you instead just have to wait for them to take their turn, then send your own wind-up units to do their thing.
Maybe army size is part of the problem. If the default for 40k were 1k games, things like alternating activations or more game turns or added complexities like flanking/crossfire might seem like more viable things to include in the game.
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H.B.M.C. wrote: I've said this before, but Battleline should not be a keyword. It should be a USR.
"A model with this rule adds +1 to their OC characteristic, and the player may take 6 of that unit rather than the usual 3."
... and nothing in the game has it by default. Then every detachment lists what models get Battleline, and which ones are restricted (where applicable). This means you can have an Armoured Company or Ghostwalker or Deathwing or whatever list, it lets you take more of the core choices those armies should have (Russes, Wraithguad, Deathwing Terminators, etc.) and makes them better at holding objectives.
I don't think I like that approach. Right now, OC is helping add value to those units who have OC greater than 1. Slapping it onto wraithguard instead of guardians is a nice little nod to fluff, but wraithguard didn't really need that particular boost, and the guardians might kind of miss it.
That said, I agree that obsec/OC isn't a great rule and has always been a little bit of a bandaid for troop units being weaker than non-troops. My preferred way to remedy this is to give troops a role. Like how they turned guardians into fate dice batteries in 10th. I don't love the Strands of Fate mechanic, but I do like that there's a clear incentive to take guardians even if they're the least killy thing in your army.
Also agreed on letting players take 6 of their detachment's "main" unit instead of 3. As an Iybraesil player, I don't necessarily need 3 squads of overpowered banshees; I just need lots of squads of competent banshees. Similarly you could give saim-hann their bike troops back, Iyanden their wraiths, etc.
Tyel wrote: The difference I think is that there's no real illusions in 10th edition 40k. I'm not sure for instance there was that much "depth" in say taking 8 guys in a squad rather than 10. Or being able to take a flamer, plasma gun or none. (Whereas now you may get both) with the proviso this gave you a few points to spend elsewhere. Standard compositions were identified and became standard.
You open with mechanical depth and on-the-board decision-making, but then talk about older editions of 40K solely in the context of listbuilding. Listbuilding has never been a good source of mechanical depth, it's purely out-of-game decision-making. A good game is one where two players might bring the same list for different reasons and execute them differently on the tabletop, or where the mechanics are sufficiently far removed from raw input/output calculations that picking the 'right' unit is difficult.
It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.
40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules. It used to be that restrictions on weapon types forced you to balance maneuver and firepower. Close combat being a much more reliable way to break enemies meant shooting a unit to soften it up before charging could result in a broken unit and much higher net damage than the raw firepower implied. Vehicles were nigh-invulnerable to small arms but very vulnerable to melee, so positioning was key. Lots of things that didn't boil down to listbuilding or weapon/target pairing, and especially lots more tradeoffs where you had to sacrifice one thing to do another.
I mean, 40K has never really been what I would consider an especially deep game, but the depth arising from core rules has been gradually replaced with special rules and stratagems as the main source of tradeoffs and tactical decision-making. That's not necessarily a bad choice for a game (though whether it's the right choice for a wargame is another matter), it's just different, and has different implications.
All that said I would not like to see a return to the 7th Ed paradigm because I agree entirely with your last sentence. I enjoy playing Horus Heresy, but even after a couple of years of playing it I don't feel like I have a great grasp on the rules, which are byzantine and riddled with minutiae that ultimately doesn't amount to much. GW's best games have always been the specialist titles written by guys who understood that complexity and depth are not the same.
Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.
But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.
Wyldhunt wrote: Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.
But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.
Maybe they are noise to you, because eldar rules got transfered in to 8th in the form of Ynnari faction mixing etc. On the other hand for armies like various marine factions, who had good working rules one their own or could play superfriends lists, they got a bare bone codex that didn't really work. And armies like GK when compared to what they had in 6-7th and what they got in 8th, is like losing melee ability, losing shoting upgrades, losing all special gear. Having str 5 storm bolters on every GK, and having to pay 2CP to get it once per turn on one unit wasn't just losing "noise". And some armies that came from 6-7th builds didn't get a proper list till 9th ed. Heck marines, got theirs at the end of 8th and then promptly got the rules removed when 9th started. And in 10th, playing something else then ultramarines out of vanguard is playing a marine army minus, and if someone is crazy enough to want to play an own detachment army or have a "lore" army, then it gets even worse or in some cases is just impossible to do, like in the case of White Scars.
In 7th maybe playing vs some armies wasn't fun, but at least people had rules to play with and could build working armies of their own. 8th and later editions made it, so that a lot of armies can not just play the game within the given core rules, even vs mid tier armies, and never mind vs the top. And the top armies are so top, that match ups like custodes vs csm or eldar are decided, before any rolls are even made.
It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.
40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules. It used to be that restrictions on weapon types forced you to balance maneuver and firepower. Close combat being a much more reliable way to break enemies meant shooting a unit to soften it up before charging could result in a broken unit and much higher net damage than the raw firepower implied. Vehicles were nigh-invulnerable to small arms but very vulnerable to melee, so positioning was key. Lots of things that didn't boil down to listbuilding or weapon/target pairing, and especially lots more tradeoffs where you had to sacrifice one thing to do another.
^-this
It is the reason i still enjoy 40K as one of many games i play. although 7th ed had a few good ideas i would not want to play it either(formations, bloat, and a few of the core rules killed the edition). it is why our FLGS group went back to 5th which is still the high water mark for the 3rd-7th ed game design. you can take "mismatched" armies and through what you do on the table top (your skill as a general) and the blessings of the dice gods. you have the ability to pull of a victory even if it is a hard fought one.
Wyldhunt wrote: Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.
But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.
Maybe they are noise to you, because eldar rules got transfered in to 8th in the form of Ynnari faction mixing etc. On the other hand for armies like various marine factions, who had good working rules one their own or could play superfriends lists, they got a bare bone codex that didn't really work. And armies like GK when compared to what they had in 6-7th and what they got in 8th, is like losing melee ability, losing shoting upgrades, losing all special gear. Having str 5 storm bolters on every GK, and having to pay 2CP to get it once per turn on one unit wasn't just losing "noise". And some armies that came from 6-7th builds didn't get a proper list till 9th ed. Heck marines, got theirs at the end of 8th and then promptly got the rules removed when 9th started. And in 10th, playing something else then ultramarines out of vanguard is playing a marine army minus, and if someone is crazy enough to want to play an own detachment army or have a "lore" army, then it gets even worse or in some cases is just impossible to do, like in the case of White Scars.
In 7th maybe playing vs some armies wasn't fun, but at least people had rules to play with and could build working armies of their own. 8th and later editions made it, so that a lot of armies can not just play the game within the given core rules, even vs mid tier armies, and never mind vs the top. And the top armies are so top, that match ups like custodes vs csm or eldar are decided, before any rolls are even made.
I was referring more to the edition rules rather than the army-specific rules. Things like rolling to see if you explode to roll for explosion distance to roll for wounds to roll for saves, difficult terrain checks that could be pretty feelsbad, morale tests that were a whole lot of random rolls and fussing about with models with no real chance for interaction from the controller, the mess that was tank shock rules, the special snowflake exceptions for walkers compared to other vehicles, etc... There was just a lot of stuff in 7th that you had to resolve and remember, and a lot of it felt like leftovers from previous editions that didn't necessarily add much to the game.
I disagree with the notion that there was more decision making before 8th.
8th introduced decision making in CC, before that the whole CC phase played itself until o e side was dead without anything you could do about it.
8th also introduced stratagems as a kind of decision making and yes, it still has its flaws but it adds a kind of Ressource management and reactions to break up the static IGOUGO(I'll repeat that I'd focus strats on these kinds of reactions like overwatch or rapid ingress and throw out all "kill more" and "should be a unit equipment" strats).
8th made decisions return when building your army because remember, in 6th and 7th you had to roll for your psychic powers and warlord traits, which was beyond stupid.
The current wound table and AP system is not perfect, but broadened the range of weapons you'd use and where you could shoot them, again, that's additional decision making.
Overall in 6th and 7th I personally had the feeling when playing 40K that the game played itself. It was watching fireworks. Yes, it was fun to clash these armies against each other with all the nerdy special rules and stuff, but in the end you hardly had to think and when it was your opponents turn you could walk away for half an hour because there was nothing to do but roll for saves.
You'd hope for good rolls when placing reserves or blast templates, but there was little player agency (or it was restricted to armies that would just ignore all the randomness).
See, I'm not advocating for 10th being great and without flaws, it can't be when GW decides to rewrite everything every 3 years. But 40K wasn't better since at least 6th edition, and some problems like the very uninteractive CC and IGOUGO plagued the game since 3rd.
8th introduced decision making in CC, before that the whole CC phase played itself until o e side was dead without anything you could do about it.
Going to nitpick this point a bit. While technically true, it's very rare that I find there's a "real" decision to be made in the fight phase. Sure, I get to choose which of my units activates first, but it only matters if we're in a protracted combat (kind of rare) or I have multiple units with always-strikes first. And when the choice does matter, there's usually a clear correct choice. I.e. I want to swing first with the unit that's actually good in melee/stands to kill something significant rather than punching futilely at the dedicated melee unit that charged them.
For the choices in the fight phase to matter, I have to be alternating activations with my opponent (kind of rare) AND I have to be in a position to lose multiple units that also have a good chance of doing significant damage if they survive long enough to swing.
Or put more simply, if my opponent has a smash captain attacking my Drazhar and another smash captain attacking my kabalites, it's pretty much always a no-brainer to swing with Drazhar instead of the kabalites.
As for whether there were more decisions to be made pre-8th, it kind of felt like there were. Like, opting to jink or go to ground definitely felt like a genuine trade-off for any unit you wanted to shoot with on your turn. Turbo-boosting to reposition a significant distance at the cost of your offense felt like a trade-off. Ditto deciding whether to move a little or a lot and having to give up more or less of your vehicles' shooting as a result. Deciding whether to gamble on an enemy unit failing more and getting swept made whether or not I went for a charge more of a conscious decision than just mentally crunching the numbers to determine whether I'll win the war of attrition. Plus, some of the randomness (ex: reserves coming in in places you might not have wanted) made you think on your feet.
Granted, 8th added some good decision points of its own. Being able to intentionally fall back out of combat, while kind of a problem for melee armies, *is* an interesting decision. Trying to screen characters with multiple units in 8th/9th was kind of an interesting (if gamey) decision.
I liked 8th, and I'm not trying to cut it short, but I've definitely felt like 40k is more of a "football play" game in recent editions. That is, you sort of mentally sketch out what every unit is going to do during deployment, and then the next couple of hours are mostly just executing on that without a ton of mid-game changes. Unless you mess up and get surprised by something or your dice flub at a crucial moment, you can probably guess on turn 1 where most units will be on turn 3 and what they'll be doing.
I don't disagree about the minutiae of 8th Ed's implementation of close combat affording some opportunity for player skill, but I would contend that it was
1. Unintended by GW and largely based on loopholes (eg tri-pointing, the consolidation trick),
2. Generally more about whether you know the tricks or not than about making contextually relevant gameplay decisions, and most of all
3. A collection of fiddly mechanics that went against the general scale and conventions of the game (ie, making decisions at a squad level) and instead involved micromanagement of millimeter positioning of individuals models.
So yeah I'll agree that it was there, but it was a bad system and felt more like a gotcha than a deliberate mechanic, so I don't hold it as a like-value replacement for all the decision-based systems thrown out in the 7th->8th transition. The choice of whether to fall back from CC is a better example of a core rules based decision added in 8th, but again GW kinda screwed up that one by making it a no-brainer that defanged melee entirely.
Like I said before, it's not that 8th and onwards don't have decision space for players, it's that the decisions are largely derived from special rules and stratagems, not the core rules. Again, it's a different approach with its own implications.
I'm afraid the following is a bit of a ramble, but I think eventually gets to the point.
catbarf wrote: You open with mechanical depth and on-the-board decision-making, but then talk about older editions of 40K solely in the context of listbuilding. Listbuilding has never been a good source of mechanical depth, it's purely out-of-game decision-making. A good game is one where two players might bring the same list for different reasons and execute them differently on the tabletop, or where the mechanics are sufficiently far removed from raw input/output calculations that picking the 'right' unit is difficult.
It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.
40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that mechanical depth - or decision making on the tabletop - is the issue. Yes - in the old days you couldn't split fire. You couldn't move and shoot heavy weapons. You couldn't rapid fire and charge etc. Some units however could and that was their advantage. (Whether or not they were correctly pointed for this was another question).
But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th. Identifying the best choices to a certain game state still comes down to experience. I don't think its that important whether that game state was a function of core rules or special rules.
Its a bit like flanking being valued in TOW. Yes - it is. But to be in a position to charge in the flank in turn 3/4/5 etc, the unit has to have got there. Which means it must have moved in turns 1 and 2 etc, from being deployed at the start of the game. Which means your opponent has had plenty of time to see it coming. Which in turn means your opponent didn't get flanked because of your skill if that makes sense. Was it a decision for you to crush the rival flanking force and then move in for a decisive charge in the centre of the board? Yes - but what else were you going to do? Your opponent would presumably be doing the same if the dice had turned the combat on that flank differently.
Maybe that leads to strategic considerations. Most people will flank with cavalry/monsters - so maybe you want to guard your flanks with anvil units that have a better chance of weathering a charge. But this must in turn mean you weaken your centre, which could be an issue. But we are back to list building and deployment being important. If you suddenly decide your M4" infantry brick is in the wrong place it will take half the game to rectify.
This is a bit of a strawman/exaggeration - I don't think TOW or 40k is that reductive, or has ever been that reductive. But I'm not sure its that different to how it ever was.
I mean I'd argue the "skill" in 9th was really all about trading units on objectives. Due to the lethality everything died - but since you had cheaper and more expensive units this gave rise to good and bad trades. Did it make it deep though? I think at least on Dakka the take was often quite negative. (The fact 2021 through to about mid 2022 was dominated by overpowered factions perhaps didn't help - but arguably that's been the norm for 40k since year dot).
I'm sort of focusing on list building because I think that's where 10th's real issue lies. People in the hobby have always enjoyed building lists. I know I have. Its far easier (and certainly cheaper) to build a list than actually collect (let alone paint) 2k points and play with it. But its also the springboard for going and collecting stuff.
But as various people have said - building lists in 10th just isn't fun. I'd agree with them. The question therefore is "why?"
This may be me being jaded rather than the wider public - but even the darker days of 7th, 8th, 9th, I often felt the pull of "new year, new army". And I guess I am, sort of, collecting some Ad Mech. But I'm not really enthused. None of the codexes have really inspired me. We can perhaps turn to my main army. The laments of the Dark Eldar mafia no doubt grow tedious to everyone else - but their index is so uncompromisingly boring. They could half the points of everything - and it would be incredibly overpowered. But still boring.
Is it that you can take anything you like subject to rule of 3 etc? Is it that you have a fixed unit size and special equipment loadout? I know some people have argued that. I don't see why that would bother me.
Basically having condemned a lot of rules as noise - I feel I need some noise to have something to latch on to. I don't think for example having a special rule to give elves +1 initiative in the first round of combat in TOW is good design. Especially when they have such high initiative anyway. Just give them +1 initiative on stats and move on with your life. But maybe that's me and someone else out there is really inspired that their elves are super fast. Maybe that's where I need somewhere in the Dark Eldar rules to make the faction interesting again.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that mechanical depth - or decision making on the tabletop - is the issue. Yes - in the old days you couldn't split fire. You couldn't move and shoot heavy weapons. You couldn't rapid fire and charge etc. Some units however could and that was their advantage. (Whether or not they were correctly pointed for this was another question).
But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th. Identifying the best choices to a certain game state still comes down to experience. I don't think its that important whether that game state was a function of core rules or special rules.
Hmm. I'm inclined to agree with you here. Being able to suddenly shift my entire army to the opposite flank by turbo boosting/moving flatout or basically skiping my offense next turn for the protection of a jink save felt like meaningful decision making, but maybe the decisions themselves were sort of obvious. Maybe the difference is that those decisions either visibly changed the board state (i.e. my army is now on the opposite side of the table) or very tangibly altered how units behaved (compare jinking multiple units a turn and thus giving up offense to using a -1 to-hit strat now and still attacking with those units next turn).
I'm sort of focusing on list building because I think that's where 10th's real issue lies. People in the hobby have always enjoyed building lists. I know I have. Its far easier (and certainly cheaper) to build a list than actually collect (let alone paint) 2k points and play with it. But its also the springboard for going and collecting stuff.
But as various people have said - building lists in 10th just isn't fun. I'd agree with them. The question therefore is "why?"
I'm not sure I'd dismiss the mid-game issues entirely, but I do somewhat agree with this. 10th mostly plays fine once I'm actually at the table. It's between games that I have trouble enjoying thinking about possible armies.
The laments of the Dark Eldar mafia...
They're called kabals.
For the sake of identifying the "why," here are the things that I've realized I miss about building DE lists in previous editions compared to now:
* Nasty levels of anti-tank. Obviously the modern dark lance on warriors is doing just fine, but it's a warrior squad's only real anti-tank now that the blaster has been downgraded. Last edition, I could fit 2 blasters and a lance into a raider, and they were all threatening to tanks. In previous editions, it was only 1 blaster and a lance, but the those two special weapons had more anti-tank threat than the 4 special weapons warriors pack today. And prior to this edition, you could always just take a cheap 5-man squad with a single blaster, and that felt like a nice, dangerous little unit for its cost. Basically, warriors always felt like they could really punch above their weight class, being top-heavy with good anti-tank, and now they just can't. And that's not getting into the loss of haywire grenades for both warriors and wyches over the years.
Cost-efficient anti-tank units felt spicy. What we have now feels... nutritious but bland.
* Just sticking characters in with different types of squads. This seems really minor, but I was able to project a ton of fluff onto my succubus choosing to hang out near mandrakes or my haemonculus hanging out with grotesques and not fielding wracks and so forth.
* Character wargear. Drukhari wargear has traditionally been full of evocatively-sinister options. Picking which toys you want to play with was, in and of itself, fun. Like, the Poisoned Tongue relic pistol was never *optimal* (even in 8th when it was quite good), but it was quirky. And giving a succubus a less lethal option like a shardnet + impaler so she could serve as a wandering tarpit was a fun gimmick to pull out here and there. All the little options lost by our sergeant types this edition also probably warrant an honorable mention. I remember writing lists in 5th edition (pre-codex) and thinking how cool it was to have a wych squad with haywire grenades and a poisoned blade succubus (now called a hekatrix). That squad was all about taking down enemies with perfectly tailored weapons, working smarter not harder, heck yeah! Now? No haywires for wyches. The only poison is in their pistols.
* Subfaction options to fit any unit. The 8th/9th subfaction rules had plenty of problems, but there was always an option available to support whatever unit I happened to want to field. Whereas now, the only detachment we have available tells me to field some very specific options in a pretty specific way, and it highly suggests I take some cronos to go with those units. Also, while jumping through the hoops was a pain, a lot of the drukhari subfaction rules, relics, and warlord traits were *really cool*. I absolutely loved the Cursed Blade cult's "stop hitting yourself" rules even though it barely ever seemed to kick in.
Tyel wrote: But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th.
Like I've said repeatedly, I don't think 8th-10th are shallower games than 3rd-7th, so I think you're arguing against a bit of a straw man here. The core rules are shallower, and instead the depth comes from the interplay of army-specific and unit-specific special rules and stratagems.
The reason this tangent came up was a point about whether Battleline and OC are necessary mechanics, when games like WHFB were able to make chaff units viable and useful without being effective in raw combat ability. I argue yes, because the core rules do not provide a framework for points-inefficient chaff to be useful, so the value of those units has to come from external factors like an OC stat. Which is fine.
The relevant difference between 3rd-7th's approach and 8th-10th's approach is the learning curve and cognitive burden imposed by the vast number of special rules and abilities, as opposed to a more 'universal' core ruleset that applies regardless of what army you're facing. But that's not a matter of depth, it's a matter of complexity and learnability, and 7th's byzantine USR soup wasn't really any better in that regard.
I'd also argue that modern 40k (and AOS too) have some mechanics and decisions that make them actively harder to learn and more unintuitive than certain aspects of a game like TOW. Unit/weapon profiles being the big one here, and especially in 10th ed where a lot of previously universal stuff now has bespoke stats depending on the unit it is on. I've played about 70 games of 10th. Played god knows how much of 9th and 8th. The complete lack of consistency over if two lascannons stapled together is two separate shots or just one twin-linked is inherently confusing, as is wondering if a model equipped with two of the same close combat weapon is twin-linked or has some other weirder esoteric statline. I would consider myself a veteran player and it still trips me up, 7 months into the edition.
Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.
And to be clear I don't mind bespoke profiles for equipment and units, but it's the total lack of consistency that actively starts to make 10th difficult to play once you get past the initially "easy" introduction to its rules.
I think the big problem there is really that two separate weapons isn't represented on the datasheet in a way that lets you go down the list of weapons the rest of the time. That one is definitely not ideal and I'd love to see fixed. The Corvus having a twin linked nose cannon and 2 missile launchers drives me nuts.
That said, I think its the kind of thing that's trivially fixed. If GW would stick with the current framework they could definitely fix it. They're not going to, but its definitely not a problem beyond salvaging.
Bosskelot wrote: I'd also argue that modern 40k (and AOS too) have some mechanics and decisions that make them actively harder to learn and more unintuitive than certain aspects of a game like TOW. Unit/weapon profiles being the big one here, and especially in 10th ed where a lot of previously universal stuff now has bespoke stats depending on the unit it is on. I've played about 70 games of 10th. Played god knows how much of 9th and 8th. The complete lack of consistency over if two lascannons stapled together is two separate shots or just one twin-linked is inherently confusing, as is wondering if a model equipped with two of the same close combat weapon is twin-linked or has some other weirder esoteric statline. I would consider myself a veteran player and it still trips me up, 7 months into the edition.
Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.
And to be clear I don't mind bespoke profiles for equipment and units, but it's the total lack of consistency that actively starts to make 10th difficult to play once you get past the initially "easy" introduction to its rules.
I've not seen many of TOW profiles, but I thought great weapon was equivalent to a usr much like an assault weapon in 40k is always an assault weapon. The great weapon can also pick up armourbane etc.
If you are talking WHFB then yes. it is a fixed USR from the main rulebook. great weapon has a strength stat bonus, initiative penalty etc... it doesn't matter what the great weapon is-sword, axe, hammer etc... or what faction it is from.
Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.
Well... yes, but no.
A great weapon is a great weapon.
But a White Lion Axe is a different weapon. So is a Sword of Hoeth. And a Ranger's Glaive. And a Hammerer's Hammer. They all have 'requires two hands,' but NOT all of them strike last, and the strength bonus and the AP is not consistent.
Its very modern GW in that sense. With a bonus head shake for 'strikes last' doesn't mean 'strikes last,' it means I = 1, but can be modified to be higher. Charging White Lions still fight before most every non-elf, despite their 'strike last' weapons.
Having looked at tow rules and loving them, I think a big part is because movement and positioning matter. It's more than "combo stack a unit" or "apply firepower to threat". That's part of what 40k,and AOS, are lacking.
Now 40k never had the depth of maneuvering like WHFB had but from my recollection of previous editions, it had a lot more depth and nuance than current (or from 8th onward)
catbarf wrote: I don't disagree about the minutiae of 8th Ed's implementation of close combat affording some opportunity for player skill, but I would contend that it was
1. Unintended by GW and largely based on loopholes (eg tri-pointing, the consolidation trick),
2. Generally more about whether you know the tricks or not than about making contextually relevant gameplay decisions, and most of all
3. A collection of fiddly mechanics that went against the general scale and conventions of the game (ie, making decisions at a squad level) and instead involved micromanagement of millimeter positioning of individuals models.
So yeah I'll agree that it was there, but it was a bad system and felt more like a gotcha than a deliberate mechanic, so I don't hold it as a like-value replacement for all the decision-based systems thrown out in the 7th->8th transition. The choice of whether to fall back from CC is a better example of a core rules based decision added in 8th, but again GW kinda screwed up that one by making it a no-brainer that defanged melee entirely.
Like I said before, it's not that 8th and onwards don't have decision space for players, it's that the decisions are largely derived from special rules and stratagems, not the core rules. Again, it's a different approach with its own implications.
Do you think it could be saved?
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.
I've noticed more and more that complex core rules are a major barrier to players. They are where all the gotchas come from because in truth, the vast majority of players learned the game on the table and haven't really read the rules. If it wasn't in the demo, it'll come up as a feels bad later.
The other issue is the refresh every 3 years or so means that established players are just getting to grips and then BOOM its all change.
However its worse than a new game because a lot of the elements of the game remain kind of the same with similar names and such. So you can very easily end up getting confused and making mistakes because you're playing something as it was played 2 or 3 editions ago.
You can even see how this impacts the writers of the rules because they leave things out in the flow of the game/description because they just assume everyone will know how X happens because its the same as before. Which is no use to new people and confusing when they made a subtle change to other rules that influence how X works in the flow of the game .
Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own
Overread wrote:The other issue is the refresh every 3 years or so means that established players are just getting to grips and then BOOM its all change.
However its worse than a new game because a lot of the elements of the game remain kind of the same with similar names and such. So you can very easily end up getting confused and making mistakes because you're playing something as it was played 2 or 3 editions ago.
You can even see how this impacts the writers of the rules because they leave things out in the flow of the game/description because they just assume everyone will know how X happens because its the same as before. Which is no use to new people and confusing when they made a subtle change to other rules that influence how X works in the flow of the game .
Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own
I feel this. I've been playing from 5th and was extremely active in 7th and 8th. I took something like a 6 month break during 9th due to life stuff. When I came back, the mental load was just way too much to the point that I kind of hated 9th edition missions with all their moving parts. It felt like I'd missed a critical "training period" where everyone else had gotten used to the missions and changes in 9th.
I haven't played a ton of 10th yet, but found myself just yesterday struggling to remember when a vehicle can and can't shoot out of combat, and what the penalties involved are and just lots of basic stuff that worked similarly or slightly differently at the start of the edition/in 9th.
vict0988 wrote:
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.
Honestly, I feel like 2k point 40k is kind of the worst of both worlds. I think I'd prefer playing actual Apoc for 2k games for the better game flow/lack of a need to juggle minutia. I'd also prefer a version of the game built around something like 500-1000 points where the smaller number of units means we have space to add in things like crossfire mechanics, more nuanced movement, maybe alternating activations, etc.
Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own
It isn't a bug it's a feature, like loot boxes- the focus is change for the sake of model sales. the era of wargaming nerds who created the game for other nerds to play are long gone. GW already flat out told us they are a model company that happens to have a game attached to their model line. the game is just a vehicle to drive model sales as such the 3 year pump and dump cycle makes perfect sense.
catbarf wrote: I don't disagree about the minutiae of 8th Ed's implementation of close combat affording some opportunity for player skill, but I would contend that it was
1. Unintended by GW and largely based on loopholes (eg tri-pointing, the consolidation trick),
2. Generally more about whether you know the tricks or not than about making contextually relevant gameplay decisions, and most of all
3. A collection of fiddly mechanics that went against the general scale and conventions of the game (ie, making decisions at a squad level) and instead involved micromanagement of millimeter positioning of individuals models.
So yeah I'll agree that it was there, but it was a bad system and felt more like a gotcha than a deliberate mechanic, so I don't hold it as a like-value replacement for all the decision-based systems thrown out in the 7th->8th transition. The choice of whether to fall back from CC is a better example of a core rules based decision added in 8th, but again GW kinda screwed up that one by making it a no-brainer that defanged melee entirely.
Like I said before, it's not that 8th and onwards don't have decision space for players, it's that the decisions are largely derived from special rules and stratagems, not the core rules. Again, it's a different approach with its own implications.
Do you think it could be saved?
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.
40K doesn't know what scale it's trying to be, and that's the deep-seated root cause for a significant number of problems with its design. But on the whole, this is a squad-based game depicting company-sized engagements, where the squad is the granular unit of decision-making.
A few examples:
-You declare attacks by squad, against target squads, not sequentially by model and not against specific models
-Casualties are taken on any member of the squad, not individuals, and regardless of range or LOS -Squads are considered to have moved or remained stationary based on whether any model moved, not individuals
-Morale tests are taken per squad, not per model
-Wounds are aggregated across the squad, allocated to a single model at a time as an abstraction, rather than assigned to individual models across the squad
-An entire squad is in LOS if any member of it is
-Stratagems typically apply to squads, not models
There are cases where individual models are considered- determining which models can shoot, for example, or movement- but for the most part, this is a game where the squad is what matters.
Having melee suddenly launch into a minigame where you individually position troopers down to the millimeter is inconsistent with the other phases of gameplay, inconsistent with how melee attacks are still resolved at the squad level rather than between individuals, and downright obnoxious when you have dozens or hundreds of models on the field. Even if the micromanagement weren't largely a byproduct of rules exploits, it would be unsuitable for this type of game.
Save that stuff for Kill Team. Melee in 40K should be unit vs unit, not model vs model. The decisions you make should be at the squad level.
I have not played 40k since 8th Ed; a lot of my dissatisfaction with 10th Ed. is the size of the battlefield, can we just stick to 4'x6' as the norm! The shrinkage of the battlefield made some of the units change their base again, while the models themselves got slightly bigger. Then there is the rules spread out in 7+ places, and the updates of codex every 1.5-2 yrs.
Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own
This is what was so good/interesting about 9th; it made a legitimate effort to address and fix the most obvious issues in 8th. Their entire marketing in the run up to release was basically focused on how it was an iterative edition, keeping what worked (more or less) and fixing what didn't.
Then with 10th they just decided to throw all of that out and start again. Redefining units and T values is fine and justifies an overhaul in that respect, but there was a bunch of other stuff changed and made actively worse for seemingly no reason when it could have just been left alone.
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up with a two and change system. One edition changes everything; the next iterates; the next changes it all.
In the end GW are their own worst enemy in this regard. It's still baffling to me that they will change everything but still won't do an alternate unit activation style of game
I guess this is increasingly me howling in the void - but I don't think 10th did change it all. Certainly the differences between 10th and 9th versus 8th and 7th, or 3rd and 2nd are much smaller.
They needed "a power reset" which probably meant going back to indexes. But losing some strength/AP/attacks etc doesn't I think make for a whole new game.
You then have a new rules language - but for the most part just serves to codify what existed before. Giving rules via USRs rather than all being bespoke isn't really a revolution. Clearly there were rules that have been changed - but that happened in 3rd to 7th. The introduction say of hull points didn't represent a reset of the game system.
This is perhaps a reason in turn why its unsatisfying. To my mind there isn't a fundamental break with 9th. I do not believe that GW sat down and went through every datasheet to turn them into 10th. Whole factions seem to have just been translated essentially by rote. By comparison in 8th they did have to write everything sort of scratch, because there wasn't a 1:1 translation given how fundamental the rules changes were. Which is probably why index 8th felt more balanced on release (aside from certain gremlins that were quickly discovered) and 10th was a joke.
vict0988 wrote:
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.
Honestly, I feel like 2k point 40k is kind of the worst of both worlds. I think I'd prefer playing actual Apoc for 2k games for the better game flow/lack of a need to juggle minutia. I'd also prefer a version of the game built around something like 500-1000 points where the smaller number of units means we have space to add in things like crossfire mechanics, more nuanced movement, maybe alternating activations, etc.
Oooo. Imagine what they could do with a Kill Team-style ruleset based around units? All sorts of fun could be had.
Tyel wrote: I guess this is increasingly me howling in the void - but I don't think 10th did change it all. Certainly the differences between 10th and 9th versus 8th and 7th, or 3rd and 2nd are much smaller.
The difference between 7 and 8 is greater than the difference between 9 and 10 for sure, but I don't know about 2nd-3rd; like they cleaned up hand to hand- no criticals, no fumbles... But aside from that, I don't remember a huge amount of change.
10th killed an entire phase of the game and took subfactions away from everyone except marines and monogod CSM. Whether you think that's a big deal or not, it is.
Converting points to PL was also huge, though as many are likely to point out, we had hints that was coming.
And removing battlefield role? I mean, I know 8th and 9th didn't have the same sort of FOC that we'd been working with since 2nd, but in the detachment system, battlefield role was something that still existed and had meaning.
And if those four HUGE cataclysmic changes, how about deck based missions as a default?
Like, I want to be respectful, but I feel like failing to recognize the impact of these changes undermines absolutely every other observation you might care to make about the game, because I feel like it's as obvious as the noses on our faces to the rest of us. Like, haven't Deny the Witch and Perils of the Warp existed since Rogue Trader? Equipment (at least some of it) has certainly been costed since RT. Battlefield roles have existed since RT.
Don't mean to sound condescending, but just can't get behind your POV.
PenitentJake wrote: Don't mean to sound condescending, but just can't get behind your POV.
Well I'm not offended. I just don't agree.
I mean for me the idea that 2nd and 3rd are not so different is... odd.
To my mind movement was different. Combat was different. Armour was different. These are fairly fundamental things. You couldn't play 40k in the same way as you had done.
By contrast I feel like a lot of the changes in 10th you point out were heralded in 9th. Points to PL - well by the end we had that for various units/whole armies. Making it universal was different, but the door had been opened. The loss of battlefield role would have been significant - but again via say the Arks of Omen detachment it was more or less irrelevant anyway. Not completely to be fair - but again, it felt the herald of the change. Arguably unit role had grown to being vestigial from as early as 8th - FOC was very rarely a limited factor. Equally I don't feel subsuming the psychic phase into other phases is a dramatic shift. Its still the same units doing much the same thing just a bit differently. The specifics are different - but does it matter? Perhaps this is a bias of typically playing factions without psykers.
Deck based missions being default is I think the only significant change from your list - but even this existed. Its not a complete bolt from the blue.
For me 10th is a clear evolution of 9th - not a revolution. 8th and 3rd were much more fundamental changes.
PenitentJake wrote: Don't mean to sound condescending, but just can't get behind your POV.
Well I'm not offended. I just don't agree.
I mean for me the idea that 2nd and 3rd are not so different is... odd.
To my mind movement was different. Combat was different. Armour was different. These are fairly fundamental things. You couldn't play 40k in the same way as you had done.
FOC was introduced. Psychic phase was cut. Huge differences in costs for units. Shooting was different. Cover was different. Ranges were different. Strategy cards were cut. Grenades were different. The turn phase was different. Hell, the dice were different.
Tyel wrote: I guess this is increasingly me howling in the void - but I don't think 10th did change it all. Certainly the differences between 10th and 9th versus 8th and 7th, or 3rd and 2nd are much smaller.
The difference between 7 and 8 is greater than the difference between 9 and 10 for sure, but I don't know about 2nd-3rd; like they cleaned up hand to hand- no criticals, no fumbles... But aside from that, I don't remember a huge amount of change[b].
Other than the system being completely re-built.... you can sort of run RT & 2e together. You can NOT run 2e & 3-7th together. Just like you can't run 3-7th & 8e+ together.
PenitentJake wrote: Converting points to PL was also huge, though as many are likely to point out, we had hints that was coming.
Well, it was more of a system shock to a bunch of people than anything else....
PenitentJake wrote: And removing battlefield role? I mean, I know 8th and 9th didn't have the same sort of FOC that we'd been working with since 2nd, but in the detachment system, battlefield role was something that still existed and had meaning.
We've still got battlefield roles. Characters/Leaders, Battleline, dedicated transport and everything else. As far as the everything else goes? Did the distinction really matter all that much throughout 9th?
PenitentJake wrote: And if those four HUGE cataclysmic changes, how about deck based missions as a default?
Hardly cataclysmic.
And the only reason the deck based missions are default is laziness on the players part. The book gives you 1 very bare bones mission. It then goes on to tell you there's other ways to create missions. It actually doesn't say 1 word about the Mission Deck.
There's 1 Crusade book (& another coming?) - you could just pull a mission from that.
You and your opponent could create your own....
I'm also sure that you could pull out a 9e mission & it'd work just fine.
Most players don't bother with doing any of that though.
Fair enough- it might just be that the memory is hazier about the transition from 2nd to 3rd than 9th to 10th.
It's also a fair point the Arks of Omen transition did slow-walk us toward the changes. In my mind, Arks of Omen has more in common with 10th than 9th, and I guess I don't consider it 9th proper... But it technically is, so yeah... I stand corrected.
But I do stand by my thoughts on the psychic phase- 10th ed doesn't have psychic rules so much as it has weapons with the psychic keyword and precious little else. I feel like you're underestimating the impact of that- although it is fair to say that there's been quite a few variations on the psychic phase throughout the years, and I really shouldn't have expected any consistency.
A dakkanaut who used to be very active in both hobby and discussion forums recently said this about second and third editions:
‘Prior to 3rd Edition, there was no such thing as a "close combat army." There were some close combat troops, and some armies that were a little better at shorter ranges, but even Tyranids could shoot in 2nd Edition.
3rd Edition put an emphasis on quick game resolution, and did it by making close combat twice as dangerous, and making shooting half as effective.’
This hugely changed the character of the tabletop and background. Orks especially became non-threatening because of the correct characterization that in game they predictably have to rush across the table, and in background they’re the chump early game opponents as portrayed in the Dawn of War and Space Marine video games. All the other factions can also be taken less seriously because this default opponent the Orks are less threatening.
The change also reified an impotent filler role for the basic space marine squads. That mk7 silhouette of a basic marine turns on hordes of people to war games, but from 1998 a tactical or assault squad was perceived increasingly as dead weight.
Tyel wrote: I don't feel subsuming the psychic phase into other phases is a dramatic shift.
I'd say the bigger shift was removing psychic powers as a thing from the game completely. Most psychic powers are now just weird guns (and the "psychic" tag is a detriment to the weapon, only ever making them worse), or abilities that nearly only work when the psyker has a squad with them, but otherwise simply cease to function.
Psychic Powers in 10th are "in name only" even moreso than the "points" system.
And removing battlefield role? I mean, I know 8th and 9th didn't have the same sort of FOC that we'd been working with since 2nd, but in the detachment system, battlefield role was something that still existed and had meaning.
Just on this point, I think the bigger issue is that it wasn't replaced by anything.
Force organisation had been increasingly messy since 7th, due to a mix of expanding units (so that the old FOC often felt insufficient), coupled with trials at various different FOCs (which often went the other way, allowing too much spam and resulting in the Rule of 3).
However, whilst the Rule of 3 was initially introduced as a slapdash bandaid, it then just became a core rule and by 10th it's basically the only limiting factor when it comes to army building (with the only modification being that battleline units are 6-of).
The issues with this are made worse by the deeply-flawed dataslate system, which flip-flops back and forth between 'single dataslate with multiple options' and 'every set of options needs its own dataslate'. The latter (coupled with the fact that there are no longer any mandatory battleline/troop units or such) means we can have "armies" that consist of 20+ Marine Captains or half a dozen Necron C'tan.
40k seems to be falling into the same issues that AoS suffers from in that many armies bear no resemblance to armies. I'm sure many will consider this a feature rather than a bug, but for me it's hard to equate this state of affairs to the 40k game I got into and enjoyed.
the main problem with FOC was that some factions got too many different good units in the same slot and only bad ones in the other and the slots given were based on "fluff"
10th somehow created a similar problem with some factions having their good units being a single datasheet with multiple options so being limited to 3 total
while others have multiple datasheets without options so can take more
so the initial problem they wanted to remove with FOC changes, is still there just in a different form
The FOC was a great idea. However it was designed for a much smaller army diversity game. All GW needed to do was update the concept of the FOC
They kind of tried it one edition by letting you take multiple; but they also let you then take multiple from different sub-groups within the same army. So we got that messy period where GW tried to make painting colours colour as official binding parts of your models army subgroup because people did the logical thing.
They put the close combat units in the subgroup with the best close combat bonus; then the ranged ones in the ranged subgroup etc...
Which broke things somewhat and also led to messy tables because you'd have multiple "armies" running around all in the same paint scheme (or at official events in different ones).
It was an ok move to try and sort out the limits of the FOC; but handled badly.
The Force Organisation Chart just needed updating with the potential to change it for different armies or shift things around so that they balanced out better.
That said the Rule of Three isn't a bad choice these days. It's simple, easy to remember and it also works fairly well at making players make choices on what they do and don't take. Plus it makes collecting a much easier prospect and simpler too.
It's not a perfect rule and it has its weaknesses, but I think its a decent attempt at trying to curb spam lists that just repeat the same model over and over.
Plus most armies today have a wealth of choices to pick from.
It also gets around the main weakness of the FOC, which is that sometimes you want to take a little bit of everything from different models. The FOC could hit the problem that you'd not be able to take enough of a certain class of model to take a bit of everything. Eg Tyranids wound up with a lot of elite models, but with so few FOC slots for elite that they couldn't take enough of them so they had to specialise. Rule of 3 at least lets them take lots of different specialists at the same time
I tend to lean towards a general FOC in the core rulebook, but give factions their own custom FOC (instead of the general one) in their Codex - that way you can handle the Tyranid situation by giving them more Elite slots, possibly with a trade for less of slot X.
Don't tie it to a character, just say you can use the core FOC or the codex FOC, and away you go.
Also, before you start, go through and ensure you're happy with the definitions of each slot - Elite seemed to end up acquiring units that just didn't clearly fit elsewhere, without them truly being "Elite" units, for example.
Honestly it felt like they needed a few more slot types as well. Don't just lump everything into elite, create a specialist slot. Don't just lump everything into heavy; add artillery
Honestly I wouldn't even have a generic one in the book. I'd have army specific ones which might even be subfaction specific.
Of course such a system to be balanced would likely take a good while to settle down; which would require GW to keep the same system for several of their edition cycles. Which is the other issue. All this debate is almost a moot point because we all know GW will shake it all up in 3 years time. Even if you landed on a great system GW will likely just change it.
I could well see "rule of 3" vanishing for "Rule of cool" or "rule of 4" or just outright going entirely.
Though its gained some armour because its catchy and snappy as a concept so it might last around just because of that
40k seems to be falling into the same issues that AoS suffers from in that many armies bear no resemblance to armies. I'm sure many will consider this a feature rather than a bug, but for me it's hard to equate this state of affairs to the 40k game I got into and enjoyed.
I think this is actually a really great point. It's not the main reason for me 10th feels like the worst it's ever been but it's probably a big reason.
I would have also rather had the old percentage system back or fantasy core/special/rare.
Dysartes wrote: I tend to lean towards a general FOC in the core rulebook, but give factions their own custom FOC (instead of the general one) in their Codex - that way you can handle the Tyranid situation by giving them more Elite slots, possibly with a trade for less of slot X.
Don't tie it to a character, just say you can use the core FOC or the codex FOC, and away you go.
This could work.
I think the game could definitely do with more restrictions on army-building (the whole point is that you generally can't bring everything you'd like to so compromises have to be made), but I also think the old FOC was a bit outdated in terms of how slots had expanded.
In any case, one thing I'll say is that I think removing mandatory troops/battleline was a huge mistake. A fact not helped by GW crapping on a lot of troops (both individually and with abysmal core rules), so that there's often little incentive to take them when they're not mandated.
Also, before you start, go through and ensure you're happy with the definitions of each slot - Elite seemed to end up acquiring units that just didn't clearly fit elsewhere, without them truly being "Elite" units, for example.
I think it would help, too, if we consider the overall purpose of having slots. For example, if Heavy Support is intended to create a degree of scarcity in an army's long-range, heavy weapons and/or in its tanks or monsters, then you have to be very careful about creating new slots for such things (or allowing those in other slots).
Overread wrote: I could well see "rule of 3" vanishing for "Rule of cool" or "rule of 4" or just outright going entirely.
Remind me - does 10th's "rule of 3" scale by game size, or is it a rule of 3 (or 6 if Battleline) regardless of game size?
If it doesn't scale, that needs to change - even if it is just 2/4 up to 1,000 points, 3/6 up to 2k, 4/8 up to 3k, etc.
It pretty much doesn't scale far as I'm aware. However the game rules are mostly only built for 2K games. I think they work fine up to 3K and beyond that I think you get into the realms of doing things yourself somewhat since that's much rarer. GW hasn't done a new Apoc in a while for the true massive games.
But yeah Rule of 3 is really simple and applies to whatever scale of game.
I think its mostly working because most armies in 40K have quite a wide unit roster to draw from even without bringing in allies. So if you've got 3 of something you often don't "need" to bring more of them. Your troops are covered by being battleline and the 6 limit; whilst your non-troops have enough diversity that if you've got 3 of X then chances are its good to bring some Y or Z instead of more X.
Ultimately Rule of 3 is about reducing the potential for unit-spam skewing the game too heavily one way or the other.
vict0988 wrote:
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.
Honestly, I feel like 2k point 40k is kind of the worst of both worlds. I think I'd prefer playing actual Apoc for 2k games for the better game flow/lack of a need to juggle minutia. I'd also prefer a version of the game built around something like 500-1000 points where the smaller number of units means we have space to add in things like crossfire mechanics, more nuanced movement, maybe alternating activations, etc.
Oooo. Imagine what they could do with a Kill Team-style ruleset based around units? All sorts of fun could be had.
Right?! Readying units to shoot in place of overwatch. You could maybe bring back some sort of challenge mechanic if you wanted to. Crossfire/pinning rules that would be a pain if you had 40 units in play but are quire managable wen you only have 10. When you don't have an extra 1,000 or 1,500 points to juggle, you create more space to bring in slightly more complex but significantly more satisfying mechanics.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
Tyel wrote: I don't feel subsuming the psychic phase into other phases is a dramatic shift.
I'd say the bigger shift was removing psychic powers as a thing from the game completely. Most psychic powers are now just weird guns (and the "psychic" tag is a detriment to the weapon, only ever making them worse), or abilities that nearly only work when the psyker has a squad with them, but otherwise simply cease to function.
Psychic Powers in 10th are "in name only" even moreso than the "points" system.
Maybe a hot take: I like how psychic powers work right now. In the novels, psychic powers aren't failing left and right and constantly getting shut down. They're reliable abilities. Sure, prolonged or especially flashy use of them can end up hurting the psyker, but Ahriman isn't going, "Okay, there's a 25% chance that I'll forget how to see the future, and then a 33% that this wyrd boy is going to stop me from doing so once I get started." And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.
"This power makes your BA librarian grow wings and fly. So we resolve it *after* the Movement phase, and then it sticks around for an extra turn instead of just happening in this turn's movement phase."
And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer. No need to bring DtW or psychic tests into it. Let the psychic null units be immune to it. Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.
I feel like GW's designers got really excited about adding a psychic minigame to the system, and then players kind of came to expect that psychic powers had to be this whole elaborate subsystem and that they should be entitled to shut down a librarian's abilities even though they aren't entitled to shut down a captain's abilities in a similar way. It never felt fluffy to me, and I mostly like how powers are handled at the moment. Although losing your powers when your friends die is weird.
Regarding the FOC, my main problems with it basically boiled down to the org roles being really arbitrary and not actually meaning anything. So you had some factions being forced to pay a troop tax on underpowered units that didn't necessarily fit their army's fluff. And the main goal (as I understand it) of the FOC was to cut down on skew by keeping people from spamming too many broadly similar units (and too many of a given specific unit), but plenty of armies could still run skew anyway. You had guard fielding tanks in pretty much every slot except troops (who could take chimera transports). You had marines running 3 elite dreads, 3 heavy dreads, and some HQ dreads to boot.Tyranids could fit MCs into their HQ, troop, elite, and heavy slots, and I'm guessing there was at least one FA tyranid MC as well.
So basically, the FOC wasn't actually identifying the things that were problematic when spammed and putting limits on those elements; it was just punishing people for fielding armies with inefficient troops and making it harder to run thematic lists unless you were lucky enough to have a designer say, "Nevermind. Your particular subfaction can ignore the limit on its favorite unit. Spam away."
I might have less of an issue with psychic powers being guns or fixed buffs if they hadn't also removed all choice.
Worse still is that we've adopted the godawful mechanic from AoS, wherein a model's spell/psychic power known is determined by their mount.
Thus, an Eldar Farseer is only ever allowed to know Eldritch Storm and Fortune. Unless they plonk their arse on a Jetbike, in which case they immediately forget Fortune and learn Guide instead.
Oh but then Eldrad apparently forgot both of those and instead learned Mind War and Doom.
vipoid wrote: I might have less of an issue with psychic powers being guns or fixed buffs if they hadn't also removed all choice.
Worse still is that we've adopted the godawful mechanic from AoS, wherein a model's spell/psychic power known is determined by their mount.
Thus, an Eldar Farseer is only ever allowed to know Eldritch Storm and Fortune. Unless they plonk their arse on a Jetbike, in which case they immediately forget Fortune and learn Guide instead.
Oh but then Eldrad apparently forgot both of those and instead learned Mind War and Doom.
Yeah.
Psychic weapons as actual weapons? Good.
Appropriate buffs done in the appropriate phases? Good.
No choice of psychic powers at all? Big honkin' bad.
I’ve been going back to earlier editions to really feel the difference between them and 10th, and I feel the biggest standout for me is a current lack of opportunity cost. (And I’m aware much of this started in 8th)
I’ve noticed that under the current rules, units typically do everything you want them to, all the time and with little to no drawbacks. Previously heavy weapons could not move and shoot, now they can do so and charge. You can fall back with little consequence. Heck, even just being able to shoot all weapons on a model is fairly new. Feel free to have a model do a couple flips shooting targets at two ends of the board and still charge a third. There’s no action economy or any attempt to simulate any fog of war, which simplifies gameplay to just “move shoot charge” until one side wins. It also ramps up lethality and makes early turns very long.
This of course extends to listbuilding, which is where I think 10th took it too far for many people, and where now the even the pregame is robbed of opportunity cost. Fixed squads and load outs removed a lot of tinkering for one.
Others have already pointed out the change to the FOC, and where the current rules really don’t enforce any lore considerations but instead just say take whatever you want. For example it is possible (points permitting) to take well over 100 veteran marines even though the first company caps at 100, and I think that’s a shame because it disconnects the game from the lore.
Reimagining the FOC to be tailored per faction, but also enforcing that some models are simply rare or unique and can’t be spammed would be helpful. Using marine first companies as an example again: having more than 1 veteran squad of any type (be it termies, sternguard or vanguard) should be unusual. Likewise, land speeders are also relatively rare, even though they are not elite, and the same could be said for scouts.
Room for exceptional battles can still be there, e.g. defending a fortress monastery does imply all veterans to be present, but that would fall more under narrative rules as opposed to pick up games. Simply requiring permission to bend the rules could be sufficient.
Dandelion wrote: Reimagining the FOC to be tailored per faction, but also enforcing that some models are simply rare or unique and can’t be spammed would be helpful. Using marine first companies as an example again: having more than 1 veteran squad of any type (be it termies, sternguard or vanguard) should be unusual. Likewise, land speeders are also relatively rare, even though they are not elite, and the same could be said for scouts
The (/a) FOC would restrict the number of veteran units available. Then have a Captain in Terminator Armour allow Terminators (assault and standard merged together into one entry) to be taken as Troops choices (with a minimum number which MUST be taken...) and one unit can be upgraded with Command Squad options.
vipoid wrote: I might have less of an issue with psychic powers being guns or fixed buffs if they hadn't also removed all choice.
Worse still is that we've adopted the godawful mechanic from AoS, wherein a model's spell/psychic power known is determined by their mount.
Thus, an Eldar Farseer is only ever allowed to know Eldritch Storm and Fortune. Unless they plonk their arse on a Jetbike, in which case they immediately forget Fortune and learn Guide instead.
Oh but then Eldrad apparently forgot both of those and instead learned Mind War and Doom.
Yeah.
Psychic weapons as actual weapons? Good.
Appropriate buffs done in the appropriate phases? Good.
No choice of psychic powers at all? Big honkin' bad.
Oh sure. I agree with that. But that's a problem with lack of customization/options; not with how psychic powers are being handled in general.
And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.
That awkwardness IS fluffy. Psychic activity is anathema to the standard laws of physical science; it's presence bends reality- THAT is the fluff.
Powers behaving like guns feels like something easily taken for granted or overlooked, both in terms of mechanics at the table and in terms of the way it comes across as a narrative. Psychic powers are supposed to feel abnormal and dangerous, not like a choice between one gun or another. You can point to perceived reliability in the fiction, but typically the characters depicted in the fiction aren't the generic psykers, or the battles depicted aren't psyker vs psyker. And on the table, in 9th at least, there were considerable methods to buff, maximize, focus or otherwise augment both psychic tests, abilities and even equipment.
10th's system often just uses "psychic" to explain a rule that could be present from another source; for example, in the few rare instances when a character has a utility psychic power, it usually takes the place of a datacard rule... Which is not how psychic powers are supposed to work; they are not "instead of" they are "in addition to," and the psychic phase mirrored that fluff.
"This power makes your BA librarian grow wings and fly. So we resolve it *after* the Movement phase, and then it sticks around for an extra turn instead of just happening in this turn's movement phase."
This is the type of ability that is likely to merely take the place of a datacard rule that would otherwise be there. So sure, you could get it to happen in the same movement phase as you cast it, but it would be the only thing you could do, rather than one of the things you could do. And even less fluffy than that is that it's all every other librarian can do too... I mean unless they're wearing different armour. Now sure, that Librarian will also have a psychic shooting attack and a psychic melee attack, but these will also be the same as every other librarian of the same type's abilities, and in some cases these abilities are merely substitutes for weapon for weapon attacks, rather than an additional ability.
And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer.
Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.
Deny the Witch has nothing to do with the fluffiness of the user of a psychic ability; it's about the fluffiness of other psykers in their immediate vicinity. Removing their ability to suppress psychic activity interferes with their fluff, and diminishes the value of all psychic units by removing one of their primary battlefield roles.
I could be convinced to let psychic test go, or perhaps to not require them for all psychic abilities, but they offer us further opportunities to communicate narrative information- equipment can modify psychic tests, psykers can receive modifiers in certain types of psychic tests to represent specialization, modifiers to psychic tests can be conferred as battle honours, and perhaps more importantly, they are the vector for perils of the warp.
And sure, adding hazardous is arguably adequate for representing Perils, but it suffers too- double 1's and double 6's both cause Perils, but in one case the power succeeds and in the other it doesn't- this was fluffy AF: psychic powers are dangerous even when all goes well. And of course, a perils can be modified too- ie. an ability that causes ALL doubles to invoke Perils. And finally, while hazardous works, putting it in it's own phase makes it feel less like a random wound and more like the localized daemonic incursion it was meant to represent.
Absolutely yes, but don't also let that be the only effect of being a null, because in the fluff, it isn't. Nulls make psychics feel ill and interfere with their concentration. Nulls can also weaponize, focus and direct their power. And again, having systems for these abilities allows for modification and customization. Are there levels of nulls- those who only possess the passive abilities, vs. those who have been trained to use them actively? Absolutely.
I feel like GW's designers got really excited about adding a psychic minigame to the system, and then players kind of came to expect that psychic powers had to be this whole elaborate subsystem
See, I feel like the designer went "Okay, in this world we're creating, psychics tear holes in reality to the place where daemons live in order to exert their powers. This means that psykers are misunderstood, hated, revered. Some are hunted to be trained in order to become powerful weapons, others are rounded up by the thousands to be sacrificed in order to allow Imperials to use the daemon realm to travel the vast distances necessary to maintain their besieged empire. Now let's make a system that reflects as much of that as possible, an make it stand out, because it's one of the fundamental themes of the game."
and that they should be entitled to shut down a librarian's abilities even though they aren't entitled to shut down a captain's abilities in a similar way.
A captains abilities are based on experience, chain of command and reputation, and commanders across factions have similar characteristics. Psychic abilities involve tearing a hole in reality and manipulating an energy that is difficult to comprehend without sacrificing part of one's sanity. The skills used to disrupt one of those abilities should bear little to no similarity to those necessary to disrupt the other, and there are plenty of other abilities that do disrupt the captains abilities.
It never felt fluffy to me, and I mostly like how powers are handled at the moment. Although losing your powers when your friends die is weird.
.
It is weird, isn't it? I think the "All Terminator Librarians must have this and only this psychic power" is a bigger mechanical weirdness for me... But their both way weirder and less fluffy than "There's a psychic phase."
Dandelion wrote:
Reimagining the FOC to be tailored per faction, but also enforcing that some models are simply rare or unique and can’t be spammed would be helpful. Using marine first companies as an example again: having more than 1 veteran squad of any type (be it termies, sternguard or vanguard) should be unusual. Likewise, land speeders are also relatively rare, even though they are not elite, and the same could be said for scouts.
Room for exceptional battles can still be there, e.g. defending a fortress monastery does imply all veterans to be present, but that would fall more under narrative rules as opposed to pick up games. Simply requiring permission to bend the rules could be sufficient.
The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before. Having lots of vets/termies present should be rare, but not if you're running a first company list or a Death Wing list, right? Similarly, Wraith Guard ought to be pretty rare, but not in an Iyanden list where they're supposed to make up a huge portion of the force. And Iyanden might be a big enough name to get a special rule saying wraith units can be an exception, but then you have Iybraesil (my canon-but-minor craftworld) that supposedly favors banshees as the heart of its millitary force. Chances are, Iybraesil won't be getting enough attention to have a designer say, "Yeah, go ahead and run as many banshees as you want," even if banshee spam is arguably less of a major change than wraithguard spam.
Additionally, using lore to determine what is and isn't rare is sort of missing the mechanical point of the FOC which is to prevent people from spamming things that are problematic when taken en masse. If we want list building rules that prevent people from fielding skew lists or hyper lethal lists, we need it to detect those traits somehow; not just an FOC that prevents Saim-Hann players from fielding more than 3 windrider squads.
Dysartes wrote: ...possibly with a trade for less of slot X.
Ahh! Trading slots wouldn't work. You just trade away the things you were never going to take anyway (like Fast Attack slots in an Iron Warriors army) to get more of the thing you want to take.
Giving things up is always a problematic thing, as you risk creating situations where the things you are giving up were never important in the first place, so you are sacrificing nothing for an instant gain.
Dysartes wrote: Don't tie it to a character, just say you can use the core FOC or the codex FOC, and away you go.
Weirdly, in the case of Tyranids (and probably Guard, and maybe even Orks), doing it by characters makes the most sense.
I like the idea of faction-specific FOCs. I think to the way that Tyranids were organised in 2nd Ed Space Marine (the Hive War expansion), where it was done hexagonally. So a Dominatrix or Hive Tyrant could have 6 units linked to it, and you could attach other synapse creatures to expand that (so Tyranid Warriors could attach 3 units rather than 6). Taking more Synapse creatures allowed you to take more other things.
It's also more viable now than ever - you could even have things like neurogaunts add more slots so that you get the simulation of adding more synapse without adding big models so you can really go gaunt heavy.
Esp with GW changing synapse around so its less of a "you lose now" when you lose it. Which honestly is fitting; Tyranids should lose potential when losing it; but should still remain highly effective fighters.
And then you give Synapse back to things that lost it (for no fething reason) like the Broodlord and the Parasite. And reinstate units like the Tyrgon Prime, as synapse units that could add other units, but in a more limited fashion than, say, a Hive Tyrant or Tervigon.
The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before. Having lots of vets/termies present should be rare, but not if you're running a first company list or a Death Wing list, right? Similarly, Wraith Guard ought to be pretty rare, but not in an Iyanden list where they're supposed to make up a huge portion of the force. And Iyanden might be a big enough name to get a special rule saying wraith units can be an exception, but then you have Iybraesil (my canon-but-minor craftworld) that supposedly favors banshees as the heart of its millitary force. Chances are, Iybraesil won't be getting enough attention to have a designer say, "Yeah, go ahead and run as many banshees as you want," even if banshee spam is arguably less of a major change than wraithguard spam.
Additionally, using lore to determine what is and isn't rare is sort of missing the mechanical point of the FOC which is to prevent people from spamming things that are problematic when taken en masse. If we want list building rules that prevent people from fielding skew lists or hyper lethal lists, we need it to detect those traits somehow; not just an FOC that prevents Saim-Hann players from fielding more than 3 windrider squads.
Things like all deathwing terminators or banshees are what I want to avoid, at least for matched play. It’s not all too different to an all knight list. Additionally, each sub faction is defined by more than just the same unit over and over. Yes windriders are a staple of saim Hann, but there are also shining spears, vipers, falcons, and bike seers. In addition, saim Hann riders will dismount and fight on foot, and they will bring wraiths, foot aspects and artillery if needed. Reducing them to “lots of windriders” is a disservice to the faction. For a bit of historical analogy: the mongols are famous for horse archers, but they were also extremely proficient at sapping, diverting rivers and building artillery on site.
That said, I don’t mind formation differences, I just think it should very measured.
Anyway thinking back on it, the current system is close to good, it just needs refinement. It should not run off datasheets but maybe a new type of unit keyword (each keyword is shared by similar units), it needs to be more varied than 3 or 6 of each, and it needs to scale somehow.
And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.
That awkwardness IS fluffy. Psychic activity is anathema to the standard laws of physical science; it's presence bends reality- THAT is the fluff.
Nah. Something being fluffed as weird/spooky isn't a reason for the real-world game rules to be clunky. Like, we don't want daemons to shoot in the fight phase and and fight in the movement phase just for the sake of being weird.
Powers behaving like guns feels like something easily taken for granted or overlooked, both in terms of mechanics at the table and in terms of the way it comes across as a narrative. Psychic powers are supposed to feel abnormal and dangerous, not like a choice between one gun or another. You can point to perceived reliability in the fiction, but typically the characters depicted in the fiction aren't the generic psykers, or the battles depicted aren't psyker vs psyker.
I feel like I've read a ton of books featuring librarians, GSC maguses (magi?), eldar seers, and chaos sorcerers, and in none of them do the psykers make constipation faces and then poop their pants instead of making psychic phenomena happen. The "generic psykers" that we see on the tabletop are more often than not extremely good at what they do and perfectly capable of using their powers reliably. Randomly failing to cast powers and then blowing up about it is *maybe* appropriate for like, wyrd boyz and unaugmented human psykers.
And on the table, in 9th at least, there were considerable methods to buff, maximize, focus or otherwise augment both psychic tests, abilities and even equipment.
The fact that they need additional special rules to make psykers reliably cast powers and not die doing so (ghost helms on eldar) strikes me as more of an admission that the basic rules weren't doing a particularly good job of representing psykers in the first place.
10th's system often just uses "psychic" to explain a rule that could be present from another source; for example, in the few rare instances when a character has a utility psychic power, it usually takes the place of a datacard rule... Which is not how psychic powers are supposed to work; they are not "instead of" they are "in addition to," and the psychic phase mirrored that fluff.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. I'm not opposed to psyker units having special rules beyond the ones that represent their powers. That's not an argument I'm making.
"This power makes your BA librarian grow wings and fly. So we resolve it *after* the Movement phase, and then it sticks around for an extra turn instead of just happening in this turn's movement phase."
This is the type of ability that is likely to merely take the place of a datacard rule that would otherwise be there. So sure, you could get it to happen in the same movement phase as you cast it, but it would be the only thing you could do, rather than one of the things you could do. And even less fluffy than that is that it's all every other librarian can do too... I mean unless they're wearing different armour. Now sure, that Librarian will also have a psychic shooting attack and a psychic melee attack, but these will also be the same as every other librarian of the same type's abilities, and in some cases these abilities are merely substitutes for weapon for weapon attacks, rather than an additional ability.
I *think* you're touching on the same note addressed in previous above posts about psykers not having options. Which I agree, stinks. But a lack of versatility or multiple powers on psykers doesn't mean that mobility powers ought to be handled outside the movement phase.
Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.
I mean, lots of things in 40k can be described in cool ways. That doesn't mean we need convoluted rules to handle it, and we certainly don't need to tie every single psychic attack to mortal wounds the way we did in 9th. The avatar of khaine is an unfathomably ancient spirit wrought in iron and given life through the sacrifice of an ancient hero. Sounds cool. His sword is strength X, AP Y, Damage Z, and we don't need a separate phase of the game to represent that.
Deny the Witch has nothing to do with the fluffiness of the user of a psychic ability; it's about the fluffiness of other psykers in their immediate vicinity. Removing their ability to suppress psychic activity interferes with their fluff, and diminishes the value of all psychic units by removing one of their primary battlefield roles.
The thing is, I've read a lot of Black Library novels, and suppressing psykers with your psykers just isn't a huge part of those stories. Sometimes specific psykers like librarians with psychic hoods will tell (not show) that they're doing that sort of thing, but certainly the wyrd boy is never going around saying he's shutting down a farseer's ability to see the future or preventing a librarian from throwing lightning. Rather, we see psykers successfully making psychic effects happen. And we certainly don't see librarians failing to put up a kine field X times out of 10 because he rolled badly on a psychic test.
As for the value of psychic units:
A.) I get plenty of value out of blasting through heavy armor, using precognition to alter dice rolls, and using psychic defenses to keep my units alive. I don't need DtW on top of that for those units to be useful.
B.) And if there really was a worry about the value of psychic units, we literally have a unit of measurement of that value in the form of points. Shave a couple points off if the absence of DtW is really making your librarians useless.
I could be convinced to let psychic test go, or perhaps to not require them for all psychic abilities, but they offer us further opportunities to communicate narrative information- equipment can modify psychic tests, psykers can receive modifiers in certain types of psychic tests to represent specialization, modifiers to psychic tests can be conferred as battle honours, and perhaps more importantly, they are the vector for perils of the warp.
The problem here is that it sounds like you're assuming that the default is that a farseer will fail to see the future X times out of 10. Which just isn't supported by the fluff and feels weird to me. I don't even like that there's currently a 1 in 6 chance that my farseer fails to do his main job right now. I don't particularly mind rules that make psykers more likely to perils or fail to use their powers. I mean, they were annoying when we had things like wolf tail talismans in 5th, but at least that felt like the SW were paying points for a chance to have their cool thing happen rather than psykers just randomly failing to be cool.
And sure, adding hazardous is arguably adequate for representing Perils, but it suffers too- double 1's and double 6's both cause Perils, but in one case the power succeeds and in the other it doesn't- this was fluffy AF: psychic powers are dangerous even when all goes well. And of course, a perils can be modified too- ie. an ability that causes ALL doubles to invoke Perils. And finally, while hazardous works, putting it in it's own phase makes it feel less like a random wound and more like the localized daemonic incursion it was meant to represent.
The double 1 and double 6 thing always worked pretty well. No argument there. But the "random wound" thing has been the case more often than not since I started playing in 5th edition. So if you want to make a pitch for putting a bunch of player-agnostic daemon models on the table 1 in 18 times that a psyker casts a power, I feel like that's a whole other discussion.
Also, I will mention that there was a point in 8th where my warlocks were so likely to explode from casting psychic powers that they felt like more of a liability than an asset. That didn't exactly live up to the fluff.
Absolutely yes, but don't also let that be the only effect of being a null, because in the fluff, it isn't. Nulls make psychics feel ill and interfere with their concentration. Nulls can also weaponize, focus and direct their power. And again, having systems for these abilities allows for modification and customization. Are there levels of nulls- those who only possess the passive abilities, vs. those who have been trained to use them actively? Absolutely.
I'm not opposed to there being some sort of system to let nulls be extra cool. However, the only units in the game that are psychic nulls are what? One assassin and sisters of silence? That seems like something you create a subsystem unique to those units for; not something you need to contort the core rules to represent.
See, I feel like the designer went "Okay, in this world we're creating, psychics tear holes in reality to the place where daemons live in order to exert their powers. This means that psykers are misunderstood, hated, revered. Some are hunted to be trained in order to become powerful weapons, others are rounded up by the thousands to be sacrificed in order to allow Imperials to use the daemon realm to travel the vast distances necessary to maintain their besieged empire. Now let's make a system that reflects as much of that as possible, an make it stand out, because it's one of the fundamental themes of the game."
Hard disagree, man. Because while perils of the warp sort of represented that kind of thing, psychic tests and DtW never did. Librarians making poopy faces while failing to shoot lightning doesn't do a good job of conveying any of the above.
A captains abilities are based on experience, chain of command and reputation, and commanders across factions have similar characteristics. Psychic abilities involve tearing a hole in reality and manipulating an energy that is difficult to comprehend without sacrificing part of one's sanity. The skills used to disrupt one of those abilities should bear little to no similarity to those necessary to disrupt the other, and there are plenty of other abilities that do disrupt the captains abilities.
We're starting to see a smidge more captain disruption in 9th/10th, but we certainly don't have a "Deny the Commander" roll that every autarch, warboss, and royal warden gets to make whenever a captain tries to hand out buffs. And again, as impressive as the mechanisms for wielding psychic power are, regularly failing to make psychic stuff happen just is not part of the lore. Poopy face librarian is not canon.
It never felt fluffy to me, and I mostly like how powers are handled at the moment. Although losing your powers when your friends die is weird.
.
It is weird, isn't it? I think the "All Terminator Librarians must have this and only this psychic power" is a bigger mechanical weirdness for me... But their both way weirder and less fluffy than "There's a psychic phase."
See above about me being in favor of more options for psykers. While I wish 10th edition psykers had more variety and flexibility, the things that they *can* do in 10th are better represented (to me) than they were in 9th. 10th edition librarian might bleed out the nose when he shoots extra big lightning, but he never poops his pants while failing to make lightning in the first place.
I also can't put my finger on it but just the visuals of the game feel "off". I was reading white dwarf from 5th edition and idk why but everything looks so much better than they do today.
Wayniac wrote: I also can't put my finger on it but just the visuals of the game feel "off". I was reading white dwarf from 5th edition and idk why but everything looks so much better than they do today.
Just off the top of my head I think that army aesthetics were more thematically coherent, based more around infantry, and more consistently scaled. And the tables were bigger.
I also think armies looked better on the table when the models are on smaller bases. There's been a base size inflation going on.
Auspex put up a video about the most used Marine armies at recent tournaments. There were some key factors to basically all of them:
1. Vanguard Detachment. 2. Marneus Calgar. 3. Apothecary Biologis. 4. Uriel Ventris 5. A max unit of Aggressors. 6. A max unit of Centurion Devastators w/Lascannons*. 7. Lots of Inceptors.
GW will see this and do one or all of the following:
1. Increase the points of Aggressors. 2. Increase the points of Centurions. 3. Make it so Centurions can't use the Vanguard special rule. 4. Restrict what Ventris can give Deep Strike to (or flat out change it to his unit). 5. Make it so Centurions can't get Infiltrate from Blade Driven Deep. 6. Drastically increase the costs of Apothecary Biologis (like from 55 to 75 or even more). 7. Nerf Inceptors.
If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that are really fething obviously not "Vanguard" units (like Centurions!) weren't something you could take, this kind of problem wouldn't exist.
*A unit that is a victim of the nonsensical and arbitrary twin-linked/not-twin-linked crap that 10th has saddled us with, where a Land Raider's clearly twin-linked guns aren't, yet the two very obviously separate Lascannons on a Centurion are twin-linked.
Wyldhunt wrote: Maybe a hot take: I like how psychic powers work right now. In the novels, psychic powers aren't failing left and right and constantly getting shut down. They're reliable abilities. Sure, prolonged or especially flashy use of them can end up hurting the psyker, but Ahriman isn't going, "Okay, there's a 25% chance that I'll forget how to see the future, and then a 33% that this wyrd boy is going to stop me from doing so once I get started." And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.
Yeah, I don't much care about there being a psychic phase or a psychic "minigame". And I'd argue that right now psychic powers don't work because psychic power is a meaningless distinction that, when it does interact with the rules, only makes the attack/effect worse (remember: the psychic tag is always a bad thing - it actives additional saving throws, and confers no additional benefits). Worse, as I said, some psychic powers cease to function if the psyker doesn't have any friends around to cheer him on. Even psychic hoods stop working if the Libby isn't near people.
Wyldhunt wrote: And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer. No need to bring DtW or psychic tests into it. Let the psychic null units be immune to it. Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.
The fact that it's a psychic flamer or whatever should probably mean something. Right now they're just another gun/melee attack that is less effective against certain targets. It's never more effective. There's no reason for any of these abilities to be psychic abilities.
I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?
Regarding the FOC, my main problems with it basically boiled down to the org roles being really arbitrary and not actually meaning anything. So you had some factions being forced to pay a troop tax on underpowered units that didn't necessarily fit their army's fluff.
That is why when we play our oldhammer games the 4th ed eldar codex is the gold standard because every troop option fits the lore of the craftworlds.
uthwe? dire avengers check
saim hann-guardians on jetbikes-check
even iyanden allows wraithguard as troops but with the restriction that they must be taken in 10 man squads.
etc..
This is born out in many other factions either through FW books or things like index astartes articles etc...
kestral novum has a unique ork big mech army list with lore friendly troops, same with the book for the necrons (a close combat themed force with a tomb world infected by the flayer virus).
The lore friendly tweaked FOC is one of the things that really feels good and appropriate about playing the older editions. when i see an army on the table just by it's compostion i know it is white scars or an iyanden war host or an ork force from the bad moons. this also ties into Wayniacs point as well.
10th edition and really everything since 8th (and some would say parts of 6th onward) are just skin suits wearing a 40K face but are not really 40K in look or feel.
Wyldhunt wrote: The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before.
I don't have a problem with this. I don't think that the rules can cater to every possible variation of every possible list. I think it should take the approach that the Marine Detachments has, using them to show off an archetype or a Chapter (Vanguard is what Raven Guard would be, for example).
In the case of your Banshee example, that would be a "Swordwind" archetype, represented in the fluff by Biel-Tan in the same way a "Ghost Warrior" archetype is represented in the fluffy by Iyanden. And if your chosen army is "Oops! All Avatars!" well then too bad. You chose a theme that's clearly not in keeping with the fluff.
JNAProductions wrote: I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?
I think the logical retort to 'psychic attacks aren't just guns and shouldn't be treated like them' is 'okay, so how are they different?'.
Are they less reliable, more prone to the whims of the warp? Do they incur a cost on the caster that limits how often they can be invoked in a single battle? Do they not require line of sight, or ignore armor, or cause morale effects?
IE if they aren't just Brain Guns, use mechanics that reflect that. Having them functionally be Brain Guns but resolved in their own phase isn't fluffy and thematic, it's just lazy design.
Wyldhunt wrote: Maybe a hot take: I like how psychic powers work right now. In the novels, psychic powers aren't failing left and right and constantly getting shut down. They're reliable abilities. Sure, prolonged or especially flashy use of them can end up hurting the psyker, but Ahriman isn't going, "Okay, there's a 25% chance that I'll forget how to see the future, and then a 33% that this wyrd boy is going to stop me from doing so once I get started." And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.
Yeah, I don't much care about there being a psychic phase or a psychic "minigame". And I'd argue that right now psychic powers don't work because psychic power is a meaningless distinction that, when it does interact with the rules, only makes the attack/effect worse (remember: the psychic tag is always a bad thing - it actives additional saving throws, and confers no additional benefits). Worse, as I said, some psychic powers cease to function if the psyker doesn't have any friends around to cheer him on. Even psychic hoods stop working if the Libby isn't near people.
Wyldhunt wrote: And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer. No need to bring DtW or psychic tests into it. Let the psychic null units be immune to it. Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.
The fact that it's a psychic flamer or whatever should probably mean something. Right now they're just another gun/melee attack that is less effective against certain targets. It's never more effective. There's no reason for any of these abilities to be psychic abilities.
First of all, the whole thing of psychic powers going away when your friends die is weird. I've said as much in recent posts and am not defending that point.
As for the psychic tag always being a drawback...
A.) The *advantage* of psychic weapons is that the model has that weapon at all. Because of his psychic might, my farseer can throw an eldritch storm at the enemy that chews through armor far more easily than most weapons. Without it, he'd be down to his pistol. (And possibly a spear.) In general, psychic shooting attacks are pretty powerful weapons, at least compared to common infantry-portable weapons. The starting point of these weapons is that they hit harder than a conventional weapon does.
B.) Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the more psychic-focused armies got some benefits that target psychic weaponry. Some Grey Knight detachment rule that powers up weapons with the psychic tag or what have you. Actually, I guess Thousand Sons already have exactly that even if it is a little lacklustre.
C.) Why does the existence of a tag have to have some positive advantage tied to it?
D.) I started playing in 5th. From 5th through 7th edition, psychic shooting attacks used normal shooting gun profiles. Powerful guns, but standard guns; usually with some flavorful special rule added on. In some of those editions, they were even resolved in the shooting phase just like guns. It wasn't until 8th edition that psychic powers became tied to Mortal Wounds.
JNAProductions wrote:I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?
Well, the 4th edition eldar codex gave warlocks an always-on "destructor" power that was essentially a heavy flamer. That did a pretty good job of selling the idea that you weren't just getting a flamer's worth of fire out of this power; you were getting a *heavy* flamer's worth! It got the point across and worked well.
And FWIW, the enemies that are supposed to be especially vulnerable to psychic attacks are daemons, but I'm personally not inclined to advocate for an army-wide weakness to psychic weapons for daemons or anything like that.
Wyldhunt wrote: The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before.
I don't have a problem with this. I don't think that the rules can cater to every possible variation of every possible list. I think it should take the approach that the Marine Detachments has, using them to show off an archetype or a Chapter (Vanguard is what Raven Guard would be, for example).
In the case of your Banshee example, that would be a "Swordwind" archetype, represented in the fluff by Biel-Tan in the same way a "Ghost Warrior" archetype is represented in the fluffy by Iyanden. And if your chosen army is "Oops! All Avatars!" well then too bad. You chose a theme that's clearly not in keeping with the fluff.
Great example. So in 8th edition, the Biel-Tan subfaction bonuses were:
* +1 Ld on aspects
* Reroll 1st to hit with shuriken weapons.
The former rule obviously being very low value, and the latter literally not helping about half the aspects at all and also encouraging melee aspects like banshees and scorpions to risk making their charges more difficult by killing nearby models. The Iyanden rules were something like fearless infantry and units with wound brackets count as having double their current remaining wounds. Which meant that the craftworld defined by its lack of warm bodies got a rule that encouraged you to take large squads of warm bodies. Ulthwe had a little counter-intuitive weirdness as well, albeit mostly because their guardian-heavy armies really wanted to be using Biel-Tan's shuriken-buffing rules or Iyanden's fearless rules more than their own FNP rule. All of which I bring up to point out that GW isn't necessarily very good at writing rules that fit a given faction even when they try to.
I agree that handing out detachments doesn't feasibly let you cover every possible army archetype. That's why I feel like the point of an FOC type rule should be to identify and address problematic skew builds, hyperlethal combos, etc; not just restricting any build that doesn't happen to revolve around whatever units are arbitrarily designated as "troops" that edition and then hoping GW throws your army a bone.
(To be clear, I'm not necessarily opposed to something like the detachment system we have now. It's just that the rule of 3 is already prone to targeting some armies more than others, and bringing back the troop tax doesn't automatically help with that.)
EDIT: Maybe what we need is an anti-FOC. That is, rather than a list of rules saying what you are allowed to bring, maybe each faction should have a set of restrictions that specifically tell you what you can't bring in a list. Or at least, tell you a maximum number that you can bring. So rather than telling eldar players they can only bring 3 squads of banshees, maybe you instead put a cap on how many falcons can begin the game with fire dragons embarked inside them or put a cap on what percentage of my army can be units with more than X wounds per model to cut down on tank skew lists or whatever.
I liked the idea of 7th edition formations. Though there balance was not good. It makes sense to me for armies to have a to&e (table of organisation and equipment). Something would need to be done about some specialised formations (SM First Company and IG Armoured Company, for example). While some need to be scrapped. But I don't think that will happen.
Da Boss wrote: In moderation, in some special circumstances, I agree about special formations. I think MESBG goes way overboard because they're catering more to a tournament focused crowd (which is fine - it was the organised play scene that kept that game alive, I'm happy GW is making a game that those people like, it's just not for me). I prefer the simplicity of the blue rulebook.
Part of the problem at least has to be the move away from comparative charts for opposed rolls while keeping the D6 based system and the spread all the way up from a grot to a knight titan in the game. It's not surprising they have to fall back on a lot of bespoke rules with those sorts of limitations on this sort of scope of game.
One of the main issues I also see with nuhammer is that it just coddles players too much in this sense. In a game with a knight and a grot, why should anything be able to wound 'anything'? Units being garbage or lists being weak is fine, because it's logically asinine to think that something like a bunch of guardsmen with no heavy support stand a chance in hell against well, most threats. Same reason why I pine for instant death, and would adhere to nothing being immune to it. I don't care if it's Guilliman, Creed, or Jimmy the generic hero, twice the toughness - instantly dead upon failed save. Was such a simple thing to remember and 'just makes sense' as a wargame. Now instead of opposed WS rolling you just have the ability to get easier to hit rolls in melee, or that anything of any toughness can be wounded by anything of any strength. I feel glad I don't bother with nuhammer anymore tbh, talking about 10e in a gamestore and pointing out how 40k isn't a real wargame anymore led to some of the strangest mental gymnastics I've seen from some current players.
Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.
Fairly sure there was a librarian in the soul drinker books that summoned fire from his finger tips and they heated his gauntlets and burned his hands? Might be misremembering.
Kind of feel the forum's gone round and round on the FOC before and this page is just showing the issues.
I tend to agree that 10th armies can not appear like fluffy armies. (Although most of the competitive ones would have fit into the old FOC without much difficulty, so its unclear the freedom itself is a problem). This has been my criticism of AoS. There's no illusion that this collection of units is an organic force. Its "X is good, Y is good and Z is good, so I took X, Y and Z". I wrote a post about this about 2 months after 10th was released.
To some degree it was always ever thus. At least today no one's claiming their Knight Castellan+loyal 32+3 BA captains force is totally justifiable in the fluff - and look its fine, I've given them all names.
But you end up with the subjectivity of it. "Woops all Avatars" isn't fluffy. Why though? Because GW say it isn't? But that just means they've not created the "woops all Avatars" Craftworld yet. Why is spamming jetbikes or wraithguard fluffy? Is it just that the fluff for these Craftworld's has been with us since 2nd edition, i.e. the last 30 years or so?
We get "the FOC is to stop unit spam."
But this leads to Guard Player: "I like tanks. I'm playing the faction because I like tanks. Let me take tanks."
GW: "Okay then, take all the tanks."
Everyone else: "well if they can spam tanks, why can't we?"
GW: "uh... actually we'd like to sell tanks, so sure, its fine."
I guess you can just say tough, each faction will have 3-6 "detachments" which are fluffy that you have to buy into, with hard restrictions to prevent people getting round them. But I'm not sure that would be so fun. I can't see GW wanting to restrict people's purchases either.
Saying 25% of the force must be Batteline could be a fix - but that's a huge investment for armies that don't have many battleline units. Should every Ad Mech army have to take 60-70~ Skitarii Rangers/Vanguard?
Rites of War would have fixed this. IDK if the new Heresy has it, but having an FOC plus a Rite that changed it both good and bad (e.g. X unit now counts as troops, but you need at least 2 compulsory units of X and every unit requires a transport) would have been way better than what they did before (just FOC and let you take other things) or what they do now (No FOC at all, take whatever crap you want)
It's definitely contributed to armies barely looking like armies. Hell, armies still looked like armies in 5th edition, and I'd say even possibly in 6th and 7th (although formations/detachments were IMHO great ideas executed poorly).
Wayniac wrote:Rites of War would have fixed this. IDK if the new Heresy has it, but having an FOC plus a Rite that changed it both good and bad (e.g. X unit now counts as troops, but you need at least 2 compulsory units of X and every unit requires a transport) would have been way better than what they did before (just FOC and let you take other things) or what they do now (No FOC at all, take whatever crap you want)
It's definitely contributed to armies barely looking like armies. Hell, armies still looked like armies in 5th edition, and I'd say even possibly in 6th and 7th (although formations/detachments were IMHO great ideas executed poorly).
I like Rites of War quite a bit. However, they do have the same limitations as other "special detachment" type rules in that you just have to cross your fingers and hope GW remembered that your personal faction exists. I hate to keep bringing up Iybraesil, but it's a pretty good illustrator of this point. The chances of GW going, "Hey, let's be sure to include a detachment specifically for that craftworld that uses a lot of banshees," is pretty slim.
So Rites of War are great, and I'd love to have them in 40k. However, I'd also be 0% surprised if I ended up just having to find the not-Iybraesil option that sorta kinda fits if you squint.
Tyran wrote:What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I think part of the "this doesn't feel like an army" thing for me is that I don't really have any "core" (for lack of a better term" units that I find myself taking multiples of. Instead, I'm taking hodgepodge lists with one of this, one of that, etc. This is largely because some of my units depend on stratagems to survive, and I'm only allowed to protect a single unit with something like Phantasm or Fire & Fade every turn.
Just the other day, I was considering picking up some more windriders thinking that having a bunch of bike squads at the heart of my army would be a good way to represent an Iybraesil force ranging ahead and searching an area for signs of a relic. But then I realized that any windrider squads I take after the first would just have to sit in place after shooting meaning they'd most likely shoot once and then die.
So I kind of feel like there are incentives in place to avoid taking duplicates of some units, and that in turn kind of makes armies feel like a collection of units that can make the most out of strats instead of an army with a theme/identity. .The army I've played against that felt most "like an army" this edition was probably the eldar army painted like Iyanden that ran a lot of wraiths. I lcould look at it and go, "Yep. That sure is a craftworld that is relying on its dead to do a lot of the heavy lifting."
I’ve noticed that under the current rules, units typically do everything you want them to, all the time and with little to no drawbacks. Previously heavy weapons could not move and shoot, now they can do so and charge. You can fall back with little consequence. Heck, even just being able to shoot all weapons on a model is fairly new. Feel free to have a model do a couple flips shooting targets at two ends of the board and still charge a third. There’s no action economy or any attempt to simulate any fog of war, which simplifies gameplay to just “move shoot charge” until one side wins. It also ramps up lethality and makes early turns very long.
Part of the problem is that its almost impossible to compensate drawbacks when options exist that don't require hard decisions. People like the idea of having to make choices, but when rubber hits the road, you just don't take that stuff in favor of things that aren't quite as strong, but work all the time. Counterplay is great in theory and 40k needs a whole lot more of it, but you have to go to pretty incredibly lengths to compensate for something that might not work at all. One thing that's shown up a fair bit in this thread is things people miss from old editions that didn't really see play. There's a lot of things that we like in theory because they feel like fun decisions to make, but in practice just aren't efficient or convenient enough to see play.
I think another factor is the turn sequence. Because its whole army activations if you're on the tail end of a player having an alpha strike on you; you really can't afford to have wild-card abilities all over the place that suddenly don't work.
So people put pressure on reliability so that when things happen they know they'll happen because their game plan already go thrown out the window in the previous players turn.
I think if it were alternate unit activation there'd be more room for wildcards to happen because you don't quite get that same alpha-strike impact. So you've got room to adjust your plan around the rolls and such whilst also dealing with your opponents wildcards at the same time.
Its subjective - but lets take us away from 40k, to the exciting world of Total War Warhammer (HBMC knows.) In the game you can encounter fairly crazy random armies (and the AI loves a skew). So in that game its not uncommon to have to fight battles against "woops, all Stegadons" or "woops, all artillery".
This is what I mean by being unnatural. How have the Stegadons got there without handlers etc? How has this car park of cannons, rockets and mortars found itself in the middle of nowhere?
Or to pick on AoS - here are two top lists from a smaller tournament a month ago:
Allegiance: Soulblight Gravelords
– Subfaction: Legion of Night
– Grand Strategy: Spellcasting Savant
– Triumphs:
Mannfred von Carstein, Mortarch of Night (400)
– Lore of the Deathmages: Fading Vigour
Cado Ezechiar, The Hollow King (140)**
– Lore of the Vampires: Spirit Gale
Necromancer (100)*
– Lore of Primal Frost: Hoarfrost
Vampire Lord (150)*
– General
– Command Trait: Shaman of the Chilled Lands
– Artefact: Morbheg’s Claw
– Lore of the Vampires: Spirit Gale
Prince Vhordrai (470)**
– Lore of the Vampires: Vile Transference
Vengorian Lord (300)
– Universal Spell Lore: Flaming Weapon
20 x Deathrattle Skeletons (220)**
– Reinforced x 1
3 x Fell Bats (90)**
3 x Fell Bats (90)**
Aethervoid Pendulum (40)
*Andtorian Acolytes
**Battle Regiment
vs.
Army Faction: Idoneth Deepkin
– Army Subfaction: Fuethán
– Grand Strategy: Spellcasting Savant
– Triumphs: Inspired
LEADER
1 x Lotann (110)*
1 x Isharann Tidecaster (130)**
– General
– Command Traits: Teachings of the Túrscoll
– Artefacts: Rune of the Surging Gloomtide
– Spells: Steed of Tides
BATTLELINE
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)*
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)*
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)*
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)*
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)**
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)**
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)**
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)**
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
1 x Akhelian Allopexes (Bloodthirsty Shiver) (450)**
– Razorshell Harpoon Launcher
– Barbed Hooks and Blades
BEHEMOTH
1 x Akhelian Leviadon (400)**
– Mount Traits: Reverberating Carapace
TERRAIN
1 x Gloomtide Shipwreck (0)
I'm sure both of these lists are interesting to play - but there's no way they feel like natural representations of either army.
Its very far away from the idea that you pick an HQ - and that's simultaneously your general and you in the world of 40k. You then have some basic troops from your faction. You get yourself an elite unit, that's maybe a bodyguard for your HQ, maybe something else. You maybe get some fast things and then you have a tank/monster/artillery piece to show off. Maybe this is contrived - but it feels fluff led.
Not "The Yncarne, Night Spinners and a buffed up Wraithguard are still undercosted, so I took the Yncarne, some buffing characters, 3 Night Spinners and rounded my army off with a brick of 10 Wraithguard." You can paint your army yellow but its not changing the issue.
Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.
How do you get an army of artillery?
Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.
I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.
The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.
The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...
The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.
Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.
Funny enough, the one time I felt like 40k on the table felt like proper 40k armies, was 8th edition when the loyal 32 made sure every Imperium list had a chunk and maybe 1 lord of war as a centerpiece with the main army sandwiched in between.
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Overread wrote: I think if it were alternate unit activation there'd be more room for wildcards to happen because you don't quite get that same alpha-strike impact. So you've got room to adjust your plan around the rolls and such whilst also dealing with your opponents wildcards at the same time.
While most of my favorite games are alternating activation, I don't think you'll find it quite works that way. There tends to be more opportunity for counterplay, so anything that telegraphs itself is often very hard to make work. That doesn't mean it can't be done, just that applying alternating activations to a system doesn't really solve all the problems without heavily redesigning around it. One of the biggest mistakes people make is failing to normalize activation value and activation count. Things get very gamey and weird in my experience in alternating activation systems unless both players have around 5 activations each give or take a couple that can be padded with a pass mechanic.
Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.
How do you get an army of artillery?
Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.
Horrible aesthetics aside, the issue with allowing these is that skew generally begets skew. Because now, instead of facing armies that you can expect to be (by and large) well-rounded, you're instead faced with armies composed entirely of artillery or monsters or super-characters.
Thus, anything that can't effectively contribute to killing those things (like, say, a lot of basic troops) gets left on the shelf.
It's the same reason why Imperial Knights should never have existed as a standalone army outside of Apocalypse.
Something like an army of stegadons is a good example of why there should be restrictions, and harsh ones IMHO, to enforce armies "looking like armies" and not skew. Sure you can try to justify it, but these are almost always unfun to play against and just encourage escalating skew until nothing but skew remains.
Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?
You don't get to pick and choose with this. An army's an army, whether you like the concept or not.
Be honest with the reason you lot are complaining about these "skew" lists. It's because they didn't mesh with the TAC approach you seemed to like to play.
Horrible aesthetics aside, the issue with allowing these is that skew generally begets skew. Because now, instead of facing armies that you can expect to be (by and large) well-rounded, you're instead faced with armies composed entirely of artillery or monsters or super-characters.
Thus, anything that can't effectively contribute to killing those things (like, say, a lot of basic troops) gets left on the shelf.
lol, yes. It was the skew that did it! Not the rise of netlists, weird tourney setups, etc.
It's the same reason why Imperial Knights should never have existed as a standalone army outside of Apocalypse.
Kanluwen wrote: Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?
I don't think you're making the point you seem to think you are.
As to your question, this was why the FoC existed. You could have an army that leaned heavily into bikes, with 3 Biker FA units supported by 2 Biker HQs. However, you'd then used up all your FA and HQ slots, and you still needed 2 units of troops. Probably also some more units to fill out remaining points.
Same goes for Terminators and Crisis suits with Elite slots.
You could have armies that leaned heavily into those things but you generally* couldn't have them as your entire army.
*Given the number of editions and the different approaches to army building, I'm sure there have been exceptions (for better or worse), but overall this would seem a good baseline towards avoiding spam armies.
You don't get to pick and choose with this. An army's an army, whether you like the concept or not.
Very true. As we all know, 30 5-star generals charging into a warzone constitutes an army and is every bit as valid as an ""army"" stupidly comprised of artillery, tanks, supporting infantry etc.
Kanluwen wrote: lol, yes. It was the skew that did it! Not the rise of netlists, weird tourney setups, etc.
Tourney lists were a thing at least as far back as 5th, yet they still bore far more resemblance to armies than the garbage of 10th.
It's almost as though the rules for how you build an army and what units you are permitted to bring (/spam) actually affect the composition of armies.
Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.
How do you get an army of artillery?
Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.
I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.
The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.
The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...
The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.
Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.
I'd argue that GW has not always been more open. The 3-7th FOC paradigm was a good framework for army restrictions, and it was kept pretty tight in places. It was a nice standard for setting expectations, created listbuilding tension via cost opportunity, and offered a way to give armies more character by adjusting the FOC in unique ways.
For those weird "anything can be justfied" situations, I'd prefer those builds to be relegated to specific scenarios or "open play". Yes, anything can technically be justified, but playing against surprising hard-skew lists is often not fun. Imo the general meta is better without it.
My take on the "What does an army look like?"
question is that it does depend on the story of the battle. And I know, many of you are wary of that, because you've met TFG, who doesn't design the story and then decide what they need to play it, but rather chooses the combo of the week and makes up a story after the fact to justify the combo.
Those guys exist, for sure... But there are ways to minimize the odds that this will occur, or limit the impact of it if it does happen. Now you're all expecting me to say Crusade, but it's more the stuff that underpins Crusade that you rely on to figure out what an army looks like.
So first, I think campaign play with a roster system with both balanced and asymmetrical missions, and games of multiple sizes. Then you build your roster, based on which of your chosen faction's resources happen to be in the general vicinity of the campaign. Now you think about where the forces on your roster are located and how they are organized. Over the years, GW has given us some guidelines. If you're marines, you might want to think about whether you're working with the whole chapter, or a few companies, or a single company, or an even smaller force.
If you're a craftworld, which Aspect shrines are located on that craftworld? If you're Nids, what stage is the invasion at, and how close is the next wave?
Then you figure out the rhythm of growth v loss. Are you playing straight escalation, straight attrition, or adding a small degree of fluidity within a general escalation or attrition framework? So then, when a situation erupts in your theatre of war, based on the information above, you decide which elements of your roster deploy in order to achieve the mission at hand.
My system is in Pacificus- I chose that location because I wanted my narrative to intersect with the characters from Blackstone Fortress. I generated the planets in the system using the 9th ed Tau Crusade rules. My primary concern was Sisters; a pivotal location is a church dedicated to Saint Katherine on the system's agriworld. Because this world is sparsely populated, the church is supported by a small mission, obviously OoOML.
The schtick is that Katherine herself was present at the consecration of that church- it was dedicated after Katherine's victory over a splinter fleet of Cardinal Bucharis during the Plague of Unbelief that followed on the heels of the Age of Apostasy. As a result, most of the Missions in the system are OoOML- the only exception is that Progenium facilities in the sector are controlled by the Order of the Sacred Rose.
I drew continents for the Agriworld, and placed settlements on those continents. Each settlement was broken into territories, and I placed a guard garrison in the center of every settlement, then distributed the resources of the OoOML Mission between them.
Finally the antagonists: a single Kill Team of Genestealer purestrains, and a single Chaos cult kill team. Also, a Drukhari force that is trying to rebuild a splinter realm in Commorragh, which contains a stable webway gate to the agriworld. Then we placed civilian NPC noble families, who are made up of Necromunda models. So both Cults recruit from Nobles in skirmish KT battles, growing their rosters by adding the casualties they inflict as Brood Brothers or additional Cultists.
So what does an army look like? Well, an early campaign GSC battle is a Kill Team Game. Two or three games in, that Kill Team may have recruited a full unit of Brood Brothers, and one of the Purestrains will have evolved into a patriarch, and the first generation of Acolytes would be gestating in the wings, waiting for their debut.
The Chaos Cult recruits via psychic control, drug addiction and other crimes. Pieces of lore are spread across all the settlements; some lore fragments give locations of long slumbering Daemon Forges, lost to time in the wilderness between the fields, others contain the key to summon daemons. Recovering these fragments of lore is critical to the growth of the Cult.
Both force evade try to evade notice, but every battle has a chance to alert either the guard or the sisters.
So what does an army look like?
Well, it's a roster that contains distinct battlegroups. Those groups are deployed as needed to form an army. Usually, the core would be a patrol, a battalion or a brigade, because those were "Command Detachments" (ie. CP neutral when they include the Warlord). Often this would be accompanied by a secondary Detachment, usually not a Command Detachment. The force could be allied- a Sisters Patrol + a Guard Spearhead, or a Guard Patrol + a Dominion Outrider detachment. But again, based on what's in the settlement at the time of the battle. If all the Mission's Immolators are located in a different settlement, you aren't getting your Dominion Outrider Detachment.
What does an Army look like? Well, if we assume that the relics included in the Triumph of Saint Katherine are kept at each Order's convent and only brought together to form the Triumph in times of battle, isn't it appropriate for each order to send their relic in the company of a detachment? So might the army be the Triumph + 1 detachment from each Order?
TLDR: If you want a fluffy army, build a roster from which a variety of armies can be assembled, and then let the story determine what your armies will look like within the boundaries you have set for yourself.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.
How do you get an army of artillery?
Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.
I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.
The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.
The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...
The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.
Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.
I'd argue that GW has not always been more open. The 3-7th FOC paradigm was a good framework for army restrictions, and it was kept pretty tight in places. It was a nice standard for setting expectations, created listbuilding tension via cost opportunity, and offered a way to give armies more character by adjusting the FOC in unique ways.
For those weird "anything can be justfied" situations, I'd prefer those builds to be relegated to specific scenarios or "open play". Yes, anything can technically be justified, but playing against surprising hard-skew lists is often not fun. Imo the general meta is better without it.
I'd second this, the 3-7 FOC charts were fine and made sense for the most part, perhaps some Fantasy style point percentages could help prevent further silliness at times but it was a good structure. Looking to historicals, listing is how you're supposed to develop an army theme in the first place which is why I don't like faction specific rules either. Why the hell should Blood Angels get +1 attack or Imperial Fists have added accuracy with boltguns at the level of abstraction at a company level force? Those mean nothing at that scale. Lists give themes without need for special rules at all. Night Lords? Your list enables raptors and chosen for days while disavowing all daemonic units outside of princes. Armageddon Steel Legion? Lots of room in your heavy slot. Etc.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
March of the Ancients.
I cannot think of a single time before GW made the meme force in the first place that the 'march of the ancients' was actually a thing. Space Marines deploy as companies, they don't deploy as an exclusively dreadnought force that somehow forgot the infantry, the armor, or the flyers.
So to my personal non-competitive gaze, 10th looks a lot like a 2k game of Kill Team. It's basically to Kill Team what a 2k game is to a 500pt game. It's just the same small units stripped down to its most basic rules. Sure there is a quasi literal megaton of fluff and side rules that CAN be addressed, but it's just small units move, roll shoot, roll, stab, roll, rinse repeat. Nothing actually feels like two major forces clashing on a battlefield. MAybe it's the lack of any large special units like Heavy Tanks or vehicles. Very rarely do I see transports or tanks in 40k these days. About the heaviest thing I saw was a stompa list against a Custodes Bike list, and that was 1k each. The rules are prohibitive against giant slow, single model units. Half the Astartes faction is some form of vehicle. Bikes, Walkers, Flyers, or tanks/Heavy transports. Thats half the main faction that almost never sees the board. Call 7th-9th what you will, at least Bike lists and Lehman Russ list appeared on tables from time to time. Anyone seen White Scar Bike lists lately?
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
That's a step too far imo, there's dozens of minor craftworlds and more again fleets that could use a wraith force, likewise any craftworld could choose to if they wished for some reason or another. Toxic environments, some need for a fight in void conditions, simultaneous engagements with the bulk of the living forces elsewhere etc.
The only reason the colour scheme is remotely relevant was due to subfaction rules (which don't exist now) and mostly thanks to marines hopping between rules to suit whatever was best with the same units that day.
There's no reason to get picky over the colour of a wraith host now and there barely was back then.
I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.
A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.
Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.
Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.
Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.
Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
What the hell is Iyanden paint?
As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....
Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units.
The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+.
And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
What the hell is Iyanden paint?
As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....
Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units.
The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+.
And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.
Every unique army build in the older editions had trade offs. if you wanted to do the Iyanden list and run wraith guard as troops you had to take them in squads of 10 and purchase a wraithseer to lead them (unless you want them to stand around and stare at their toes). this prevented you from putting them in transports because they would not fit. it also as you pointed out was heavy on points cost same thing for the iconic all terminator army, up until the 5th ed GK codex nobody else could do an all terminator list directly but to do so you had to take 3 unit types and nothing else. land raiders, deathwing terminators, and venerable dreads. although they could be led by any member of the inner circle(librarians, interrogator chaplains etc..) including named characters.
As for the paint schemes. if you recall there was once upon a time when GW were not fething GAKwads when it came to in universe creativity. aside from encouraging kitbashing from any available item they also encouraged you to "create your own" chapter/craftworld/ork clan etc... and you could paint it however you liked as long as your opponent knew which army rule set you were using.
Tyran wrote: What is even an "army that looks like an army"?
Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.
What the hell is Iyanden paint? As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....
Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units. The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+. And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.
Iyanden is the only force that notably fields all construct, or at least near all construct armies. And other forces don't have equal numbers of wraith units, in that for proportionality for other craftworlds, armies such as aspect warhosts would for the most part be comprised of elite/mechanized infantry with only a construct here or a construct there. This is where Fantasy's percentage based system could be well applied to 40k as well, as it forces you depending on the list to take 'tax' units to fill out necessary parts of a list unless there's an explicit thematic exception. That's how you create flavor, through restriction rather than the incredibly open system of nuhammer.
Klickor wrote: I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.
A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.
Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.
Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.
Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.
Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.
This feels like a bad idea because it's dealing more with the problem that infests 40k now, where stats are tweaked for asinine reasons that make no logical sense. You don't need to make it so that lists focusing on armor for some reason give a +1 to hit boon against tanks because there's no screening infantry. The rules of the game itself should facilitate that without infantry screening tanks are incredibly vulnerable to anti tank weapons - which for the most part oldhammer did far better than the post 7e system.
This feels like a bad idea because it's dealing more with the problem that infests 40k now, where stats are tweaked for asinine reasons that make no logical sense. You don't need to make it so that lists focusing on armor for some reason give a +1 to hit boon against tanks because there's no screening infantry. The rules of the game itself should facilitate that without infantry screening tanks are incredibly vulnerable to anti tank weapons - which for the most part oldhammer did far better than the post 7e system.
In a better system with more interactive core rules then you wouldn't need to have some special rules like I came up with there of course. Like marines against pure tanks back in the day could crush them easily with short range melta and krak grenades in melee if there was nothing to screen the tanks and thus didn't have a need for such rules. But if GW want players to be able to skew hard in the current rules something like what I wrote is probably a good idea to implement for skew lists.
Making paint a requeriment is silly. You either give Eldar the rules to have Iyanden style Wraith armies or you don't, but don't make paint a requirement.
EDIT: Also none of the above applies to armies like Orks, Daemons or Tyranids that don't operate in anything even approaching the concept of companies or divisions (and in case of Nids can spawn whatever they need as needed).
EDIT#2: Also the whole point of 40k being a galaxy setting is to give freedom for players to come up with their own stuff. There is no rule that only Iyanden can deploy wraith armies because we don't even know how many Craftworlds exist, much less know the details of each and every one.
I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.
My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]
Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.
It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.
Hard FOC impositions may not be the best solution. It would mess with people's collections. A lot of competitive 10th lists would, with a few tweaks, almost certainly meet any minimum requirements either.
So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.
Paint only mattered in that edition where GW allowed you to take multiple FOC and thus multiple "armies" as allies. It then got silly because you'd have (esp marines) taking different chapters under the same army, because one chapter would be better at CC and another at ranged and so forth.
So places tried to force paint as a requirement so that people could tell which marines were which on the table.
But it was silly honestly and in general paint should never be a requirement. No one is going to buy a whole new army or repaint a painted one just to gain access to a different sub-army grouping within a battletome/codex. Marines are a bit of a special case since they have unique models for their sub armies and their sub armies have subsub factions of their own.
Plus lets face it; once you leave the official GW schemes for marines most people don't know other army official paint schemes. Some (eg Daughters of Khanie) are officially so similar you couldn't even tell them apart without being told.
Plus it gave a strange advantage to "custom" paint jobs because anyone who used their own scheme could pick and choose at will.
I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.
My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]
Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.
It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.
Hard FOC impositions may not be the best solution. It would mess with people's collections. A lot of competitive 10th lists would, with a few tweaks, almost certainly meet any minimum requirements either.
So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.
Part of the problem is the missions are all basically the same. There are myriad different combinations of primary, secondary and mission special rule, but they all fundamentally come down to needing mobile units to score primary or various secondaries. The missions based around killing things pretty much take care of themselves. I think more variety in missions and what sort of units are required to do them well would force armies to be more diverse. You'd also have more situations where you need to use sub-optimal units to complete the missions rather than always knowing you can do it with units X. Y and Z.
Klickor wrote:I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.
A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.
Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.
Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.
Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.
Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.
On paper, I like this approach. Not only does it create clear, exploitable weaknesses that can be easily updated for balance, but it makes the tools used to balance things fluffy in their own right. I can enjoy rules that nerf my army as long as they're flavorful rules!
Ideally, we'd find a way to avoid putting too many units into the same FOC slots or requiring a troop tax if we're bringing back some sort of FOC though.
Tyel wrote:
I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.
My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]
Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.
It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.
I do see what you're saying, but I definitely wouldn't want to go back to requiring X number of cost-inefficient troops as the way to make that happen. Some forces (at least on the zoomed-in scale of a 40k battle) just aren't going to be there to hold ground and might not be prone to tossing troops into the machineguns. I could maybe see detachment determining a list of units that you have to have a certain number of (preferably scaling with game size), but I wouldn't want to require that every army go back to fielding underwhelming troops that exist to pay a tax and die.
Or put another way, I can get behind Saim-Hann style detachments needing a minimum number of windriders and/or wave serpents, but I don't want to force Saim-Hann players to field foot guardians and rangers.
So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.
Nah. The only-troops-can-score thing was one of the worst things about 5th edition. It turned games into a race to wipe out the opponent's least threatening units so that they "couldn't hold ground" despite visibly having an overwhelming presence on most of the table. It was both unfun and unfluffy.
"Darn. After taking casualties and slaying every foe in the area, all we have left to hold this ground are 3 full squads of devastators, 25 assault marines, a column of tanks, veteran dreadnaught Obsekius the Ground Holder, and a tech marine who specializes in fortifying positions. But without those two tactical squads we lost, it's all for naught!"
Plus, troops being the only ones to hold objectives screws over factions whose troops don't particularly like sitting still in exposed locations. Heck, OC and the Obsec rule are/were both kind of weird for that reason. Fire warriors and guardian defenders aren't exactly well-suited for jogging out onto an objective that already has an enemy presence and then staying alive long enough to benefit from their OC/obsec. Nor is it particularly fluffy to me that 5 of my guardian defenders are somehow able somehow claim ownership out from under a squad of enemy terminators while 5 of my banshees can't.You'd think the heavily-armored guys would be a lot more concerned about the anti-heavy-armor sword ladies than the struggles-against-heavy-armor millitia unit.
Kanluwen wrote: Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?
You don't get to pick and choose with this.
Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.
More importantly, all three of those examples are functionally heavy infantry spam in terms of defensive profiles, which is not as game-breaking as allowing things like all tanks (which GWdid allow with the Armored Company, but came with a huge slew of drawbacks to try to balance it out).
I don't see any problem with using a stricter FOC but carving out exceptions for atypical but fluffy and balance-able army composition, with appropriate disadvantages to offset the skew as needed. Allowing Deathwing doesn't mean you have to allow Oops, All Baneblades, nor are the balance/design implications the same.
Edit: I also want to point out that there is a difference between 'what company-level forces theoretically exist in the fluff' versus 'what company-level forces make for a fun and balanced game when you're building lists in the dark', and for the sake of keeping the game from breaking it may be necessary to put limits on what players can take. Some systems handle skew better than others- and I can think of a few mechanics I've seen that would make skew less of a problem for 40K- but few wargames will allow you to field anything that might conceivably exist in theater.
Slipspace wrote: Part of the problem is the missions are all basically the same. There are myriad different combinations of primary, secondary and mission special rule, but they all fundamentally come down to needing mobile units to score primary or various secondaries. The missions based around killing things pretty much take care of themselves. I think more variety in missions and what sort of units are required to do them well would force armies to be more diverse. You'd also have more situations where you need to use sub-optimal units to complete the missions rather than always knowing you can do it with units X. Y and Z.
I agree that that's part of the problem, but we have boring, symmetrical, prescriptive terrain layouts and predictable, same-y missions because the sort of unpredictability you're talking about is anathema to the 40K competitive community. There's a strong push for predictability and consistency so that lists can be built to execute pre-planned strategies, rather than having to respond to emergent conditions, and that encourages exactly the sort of min-max lists we see.
Another part of the problem is that the game has a very limited set of things for your units to do besides 'hold objectives' and 'kill the enemy'. The optimal objective-holders for many factions aren't basic troops, they're specialists that can survive on objectives or grab them quickly while also providing credible damage output. Having a high OC stat is less useful than being able to kill whatever might contest your control.
Kanluwen wrote: Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies? All-Terminator armies? All-Crisis Suit armies?
You don't get to pick and choose with this.
Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.
That would be more of an argument if oldhammer didn't had extremely bad faction balance.
Because in practice I remember vehicle skew to be the way to play during 5th (and immediately dying in 6th).
The main issue the game has with missions is simply that its movement is kind of all over the place. For the size of the board, things are very slow and really can't reposition effectively in most situations. On top of that, the charge phase makes things situationally blindingly fast? Most movement also needs to be done before combat begins making it all just not really suit the kind of scenarios people want to see play out.
I'm not really sure what else I'd do for the game. It's very hard to imagine a gameplan that suits say, Nids and Tau. I don't think there's anything really wrong with scenarios whose main goal is just making combat happen, but I'm not really sure how to make that work given the structure of the game.
LunarSol wrote: The main issue the game has with missions is simply that its movement is kind of all over the place. For the size of the board, things are very slow and really can't reposition effectively in most situations. On top of that, the charge phase makes things situationally blindingly fast? Most movement also needs to be done before combat begins making it all just not really suit the kind of scenarios people want to see play out.
I'm not really sure what else I'd do for the game. It's very hard to imagine a gameplan that suits say, Nids and Tau. I don't think there's anything really wrong with scenarios whose main goal is just making combat happen, but I'm not really sure how to make that work given the structure of the game.
This is something else that I think a smaller-scale variation of the game could remedy. Imagine a handful of squads per player fighting on a full-sized table so they have room to spread out, take advantage of cover, etc. You could let units move a bit faster (maybe just make Advancing a flat +6" instead of a role for instance, or let bikes turbo boost again) to better take advantage of the map and get back into the action more quickly after going after an objective on the quiet flank or what have you.
With a small number of units to bookkeep and a Kill Team-esque activation system, you could do things like letting units who held still in movement move after shooting. You could bring back a Hiding mechanic that makes units harder to target in exchange for those units neither attacking nor advancing. Stuff like that.
Basically, a lot of ideas that would just be too much bookkeeping or too powerful en masse in a 2k game could work really well in this hypothetical smaller-scale game.
That is fundamentally what Kill Team does and very well may be the game you're looking for. Granted, for a lot of this stuff I'm happy to play entirely different systems. I would really like to see 1000 points better supported with scenarios suited to the smaller table size and something like Rule of 1 or 2 instead of 3.
Kanluwen wrote: Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?
You don't get to pick and choose with this.
Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.
That would be more of an argument if oldhammer didn't had extremely bad faction balance.
Because in practice I remember vehicle skew to be the way to play during 5th (and immediately dying in 6th).
More importantly, all three of those examples are functionally heavy infantry spam in terms of defensive profiles, which is not as game-breaking as allowing things like all tanks (which GW did allow with the Armored Company, but came with a huge slew of drawbacks to try to balance it out).
I don't see any problem with using a stricter FOC but carving out exceptions for atypical but fluffy and balance-able army composition, with appropriate disadvantages to offset the skew as needed. Allowing Deathwing doesn't mean you have to allow Oops, All Baneblades, nor are the balance/design implications the same.
We have a player in our oldhammer core 5th ed group who is a tread head and he has tried every armored company list GW/FW has rules for.
His list looks good on the table. but it hardly ever wins because he doesn't want to balance it out with infantry. this means he not only suffers from long range AT weapons but the real weakness is when any enemy units get close or into CC with them.
As for 5th ed vehicle skew. as somebody in a large group of oldhammer players that still play that edition. it is a myth based on tournament net lists facing off against each other in tournaments. in friendly local FLGS play most players build take all comers list that can deal with a bit of everything. even if they are thematic like an armored company. especially when table set up/mission type, army set up, first turn and variable game length are all rolled randomly
I played 5th. Vehicle skew definitely wasn't a myth.
It maybe didn't happen outside competitive minded circles, but if a system cannot support competitive minded play without falling apart I have little interest in it.
LunarSol wrote:That is fundamentally what Kill Team does and very well may be the game you're looking for. Granted, for a lot of this stuff I'm happy to play entirely different systems. I would really like to see 1000 points better supported with scenarios suited to the smaller table size and something like Rule of 1 or 2 instead of 3.
I did enjoy past versions of Kill Team, and I picked up the current version recently, so I'm sure I'll be giving it a try! At a glance however, it appears to only really let you field one type of unit at a time. That is, you can play all guardians or all avengers, but you can't mix them like in the previous edition, nor can you play anyything other than the small number of units (usually "troops") currently supported. Which still sounds fun, but it seems like a very different animal than a game where I could have my swooping hawks and fire dragons backing up a couple guardian squads.
aphyon wrote:
We have a player in our oldhammer core 5th ed group who is a tread head and he has tried every armored company list GW/FW has rules for.
His list looks good on the table. but it hardly ever wins because he doesn't want to balance it out with infantry. this means he not only suffers from long range AT weapons but the real weakness is when any enemy units get close or into CC with them.
Does he not just keep his infantry in the tanks so that they count as scoring and stick a couple tanks next to each other so that the can't prevent them from simply back up and continuing to shoot with minimal drawbacks?
As for 5th ed vehicle skew. as somebody in a large group of oldhammer players that still play that edition. it is a myth based on tournament net lists facing off against each other in tournaments. in friendly local FLGS play most players build take all comers list that can deal with a bit of everything. even if they are thematic like an armored company. especially when table set up/mission type, army set up, first turn and variable game length are all rolled randomly
Your mileage may vary. When I started playing, it was 5th edition, and the majority of my games were against parking lots. Playing an S3 army (no punching tank butts to death) without meaningful anti-tank in most of its infantry squads (eldar), the vehicle skew was both real and really frustrating. Passing up non-AT options because I felt like I had to load up on AT was definitely a thing; especially when I branched out into other armies that had more special weapon choices. Rare was the day I'd take a flamer over a melta.
5th Ed vehicle skew (see: leafblower) was real and it could hurt you. But I'm not clear on how this fact is an argument in favor of 'take whatever you want' army composition.
If vehicle skew breaks the game, either you bar it entirely through the force organization mechanic (and accept that your game does not support armored companies), or you curate it to come with a set of disadvantages significant enough to balance it.
Other types of skew that aren't game-breaking may not need the same restrictions.
LunarSol wrote: The main issue the game has with missions is simply that its movement is kind of all over the place. For the size of the board, things are very slow and really can't reposition effectively in most situations. On top of that, the charge phase makes things situationally blindingly fast? Most movement also needs to be done before combat begins making it all just not really suit the kind of scenarios people want to see play out.
Yeah, that comes from a couple of things- five turn limit, charging giving bonus movement, and weapon ranges drastically exceeding movement rates meaning things tend to die before they can cover much ground.
In Apocalypse or Grimdark Future, you either move + shoot, move twice, or move twice and fight in melee (ie charge). This approach allows units to cover more ground when needed, but moving quickly (or charging into melee) sacrifices shooting, so there's a stronger tradeoff, forcing harder decisions about what your units will be doing on any given turn.
It's still generally 12" for pistols and 24" for rifles, but long-range weapons typically max out at 30-36", and very few infantry weapons get > 24". So most units have comparable weapon range to their 40K counterparts, but there are fewer things that can reach across the whole table.
It's weird from a verisimilitude perspective, and I can definitely see how it would be divisive, but in gameplay it does help keep maneuver relevant and make LOS less of the defining factor in whether a unit survives. It also helps that armies are smaller relative to the board size, so you've got more room to breathe.
Epic: Armageddon is a pretty good example of taking that interplay further- most units are 15-45cm range, but have a move of 10-20cm, and can move multiple times in a turn in lieu of fighting. Maneuver is so critical to that game that static gunlines basically don't exist, and the models are so small that elite armies can pack a lot of force into a narrow frontage.
The balance of weapon range, unit movement, board size, army size, and game duration will determine how viable maneuver is and how much of the matchup is determined in deployment. 40K has slowly trended towards longer ranges, bigger armies, smaller boards, and fewer turns- but movement has remained largely unchanged, with the biggest changes being the randomization of charge distances and the expansion of Fleet of Foot from a special rule to game-wide, while retaining the separate-phase weirdness where a unit could potentially move quadruple its normal rate in one turn if it's eligible to charge.
I'll admit to not being aware of all game systems - but I can't see movement ever being key when you have IGOUGO like 40k.
Its too "I can do this, so I will, but you can do that, so you will, so my options next turn are this." Movement/positioning is I think the key skill in 40k - but there's only so much you can do. You don't have the turns for some lengthy game of cat and mouse.
Shorter range but higher movement feels like changing two sides of the same coin. I can get my unit to shoot what I want - and next turn, I can move so I can shoot what else is optimal to shoot. You can low movement and shooting - but that probably just favour assault armies. Those assault units will also be slow (relatively anyway) - but will eventually connect and then its done. (3rd edition arguably was like that - with certain caveats).
A lot of the older editions were more limiting - but I'm not sure they were more fun.
Which I think is the rub. You could easily have rules such that vehicles and monsters can't score - so any list skewed into them is intrinsically doomed (sorry Knights etc) as opposed to someone with lots of infantry who can max out. But this isn't obviously fun for players who like vehicles/monsters. Its not really fun for the player who gets nuked for 5 turns but wins handily on objectives.
Another option is bringing in something like the GSC 9th edition Crossfire rules to the entire game, so lots of infantry get buffed up by other infantry. If you dive your tanks/monsters into a literal horde of infantry, they are going to shot at from all angles and probably destroyed relatively easily. Which I guess leads into "bring back facings" - but I'm not sure that leads you to where you want to go. And I'm sure people would hate tanks/monsters being blown up by lasguns or bolters from the back.
And it might just provoke weird scenarios when people are running balanced lists, which quickly leads to taking no tanks/monsters. Which isn't the objective.
As I've discussed before, the game has become more of a rules first approach, but I also think another aspect that has made it suffer is the 'please everyone' approach that these conversations are discussing.
This is why I hate 'feels bad' as a justification for changing a rule.
By abstracting the game to rules first and gameplay as key, you lose all the context of what the game is representing.
This concept of freely building any army you want is a nonsense that has conflated personal freedom of choice with a free for all army construction.
There are in universe reasons that restrict what some armies can and can't do and the proportions of what they can use. Your freedom of choice should always be beholden to that limiting framework.
Just because you can conceive of a theoretical means of explaining your ridiculous skew list, doesn't mean in the context of the 40k universe that would ever happen.
This combination of game design philosophies have meant the game is disconnected from the setting it represents and the battles you fight don't reflect what actually happens in 40k.
IMO that disconnect is affecting people more than they realise, because the game has always been tied to the setting in a RPG style way that makes everything interdependent. The totality of that milieu is where the enjoyment comes from.
The current tournament abstraction philosophy that is focusing on abstracting mechanics, internal unit vs unit balancing with bespoke abstract special rules, and giving players no bad feelings about restrictions and play style, is really separating the game play from the setting, and people are losing the feels good intangible aspects that that connection brings.
It CAN feel good to work within restrictions, it just feels good from an immersion setting perspective rather than an abstract rules competitiveness perspective.
Wyldhunt wrote: A.) The *advantage* of psychic weapons is that the model has that weapon at all.
And prior to 10th the Farseer could still contribute, but psychic attacks tended to be a bit beyond mundane regular attacks. Now they are actively worse than a standard attack. That Shuiken Pistol you're happy not using doesn't trigger the FNP save your target might have where the psychic power will. That's the problem. A "psychic" weapon just = more protections against it. They are Weapons- rather than Weapons+. And I don't agree that some of them hit harder than regular weapons. So many of them are just bolter with the psychic tag.
Wyldhunt wrote: B.) Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the more psychic-focused armies got some benefits that target psychic weaponry. Some Grey Knight detachment rule that powers up weapons with the psychic tag or what have you. Actually, I guess Thousand Sons already have exactly that even if it is a little lacklustre.
I just don't think GW thought it through. I think they got all excited with their newfound love of USRs (which they hardly use, especially compared to the literal 1000 bespoke special rules the game has), added 'psychic' to things now that there's no psychic phase, and completely forgot that the psychic tag doesn't actually do anything.
Wyldhunt wrote: C.) Why does the existence of a tag have to have some positive advantage tied to it?
Because otherwise what's the point? All psychic does right now is give your targets extra protection. That's bad.
Wyldhunt wrote: D.) I started playing in 5th. From 5th through 7th edition, psychic shooting attacks used normal shooting gun profiles. Powerful guns, but standard guns; usually with some flavorful special rule added on. In some of those editions, they were even resolved in the shooting phase just like guns. It wasn't until 8th edition that psychic powers became tied to Mortal Wounds.
And the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Mortal Wounds, and their overabundance, were a joke (not quite as bad as AoS, but still. Now they've completely flipped it and have taken a very conservative edge with psychic powers (and that's not even factoring in that there's no choice or variety with powers - everything is set in stone with no choice whatsoever).
Wyldhunt wrote: Great example. So in 8th edition, the Biel-Tan subfaction bonuses were: * +1 Ld on aspects * Reroll 1st to hit with shuriken weapons.
I'm thinking back to 3rd Ed Biel-Tan, back when there was a craftworld book, and Biel-Tan meant "Aspect Warriors as Troops". Since my post and your post, GW has put up a preview for Ravenguard, and Outriders gain Battleline (a type of obvious inclusion that they somehow forgot to do for the first four fething books this edition... what morons they are...). This means that a Wraith army could have Wraithguard as Battleline, and a Biel-Tan (or "Swordwind", as they won't limit it to a Craftworld but rather an Archetype) could make Avengers/Dragons/Scorps/Banshees and even maybe Hawks/Spiders into Battleline.
Wyldhunt wrote: (To be clear, I'm not necessarily opposed to something like the detachment system we have now. It's just that the rule of 3 is already prone to targeting some armies more than others, and bringing back the troop tax doesn't automatically help with that.)
Rule of three is stupid, and is a clear example of GW making rules to follow tournament trends and demands without really understanding them (or their own rules, for that matter). It's why they put so much stock in "win rates", and make game-altering changes because some army has 51% rather than 49%. It's why I keep bringing up the Dunning Kruger effect, and how GW are poster children for such a concept. And yes, Rule of 3 hits some armies far harder (Marines are "limited" to 9 Land Raiders, whereas Chaos get 3... wonderful).
Whenever I make suggestions I am always operating from the base of working within the system rather than throwing out the system. I prefer to iterate and improve, only dumping something wholesale when it cannot work. I think 10th can work, and I think that the Detachment system can work, and I think it can (and should, and is about to) be used to change the structure of a list, not just what rule/arbitrarily limited relics/strats you get. GW, in my opinion, aren't using the Detachment system to its fullest potential (and certainly not the potential they advertised it as in the build up to 10th). That's why I make the suggestions I do. If I wanted a better solution of course we could just do something completely different, but I'm not working within those parameters. I want to fix the system from within, not throw the system out and replace it.
Wyldhunt wrote: EDIT: Maybe what we need is an anti-FOC. That is, rather than a list of rules saying what you are allowed to bring, maybe each faction should have a set of restrictions that specifically tell you what you can't bring in a list. Or at least, tell you a maximum number that you can bring. So rather than telling eldar players they can only bring 3 squads of banshees, maybe you instead put a cap on how many falcons can begin the game with fire dragons embarked inside them or put a cap on what percentage of my army can be units with more than X wounds per model to cut down on tank skew lists or whatever.
I don't know if I'd limit the combinations of units (ie. specifically Dragons in Falcons), but I do think that lists should impose limitations as well as removing some.
To simply repeat what I wrote in my last post:
Spoiler:
Me! wrote:Auspex put up a video about the most used Marine armies at recent tournaments. There were some key factors to basically all of them:
1. Vanguard Detachment. 2. Marneus Calgar. 3. Apothecary Biologis. 4. Uriel Ventris 5. A max unit of Aggressors. 6. A max unit of Centurion Devastators w/Lascannons*. 7. Lots of Inceptors.
GW will see this and do one or all of the following:
1. Increase the points of Aggressors. 2. Increase the points of Centurions. 3. Make it so Centurions can't use the Vanguard special rule. 4. Restrict what Ventris can give Deep Strike to (or flat out change it to his unit). 5. Make it so Centurions can't get Infiltrate from Blade Driven Deep. 6. Drastically increase the costs of Apothecary Biologis (like from 55 to 75 or even more). 7. Nerf Inceptors.
None of these really solve the problem. They just move Titanic's deck chairs around a little bit.
If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that obviously shouldn't be part of that army's achetype (ie. obviously non-Vanguard units (like Centurions!) actually being something you couldn't take), this kind of problem wouldn't exist.
vipoid wrote: I don't think you're making the point you seem to think you are.
Can is angry because one of his pet armies (Raven Guard) isn't represented as well as he'd like with Vanguard.
Tyel wrote: I'll admit to not being aware of all game systems - but I can't see movement ever being key when you have IGOUGO like 40k.
most other games with My Turn-Your Turn Structure have movement as key
the difference to 40k is usually shorter threat range and a single unit not being able to destroy a similar other unit in one phase while in addition adding some sort of rules that provide advantage for flanking (be it something simple like Overwatch is only in a single direction that need to set in your turn)
hence why games in the general style of 40k use alternating activation instead of alternating phases or turns as this works better with the 360° kill a unit per activation
which means for 40k that GW does not really know what the game wants to be but try to be everything at once and this does not work
a platoon level mass-skirmish game with single model mechanics and heroic NPC killing power with grand-tactical turn sequences
If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that obviously shouldn't be part of that army's achetype (ie. obviously non-Vanguard units (like Centurions!) actually being something you couldn't take), this kind of problem wouldn't exist.
And that's exactly what Detachments SHOULD have done, IMHO. They should have had restrictions on what you can/can't take within them. Instead, they just give you an army-wide rule, some relics/stratagems, and... that's it?
If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that obviously shouldn't be part of that army's achetype (ie. obviously non-Vanguard units (like Centurions!) actually being something you couldn't take), this kind of problem wouldn't exist.
And that's exactly what Detachments SHOULD have done, IMHO. They should have had restrictions on what you can/can't take within them. Instead, they just give you an army-wide rule, some relics/stratagems, and... that's it?
The problem is that the "focused" ones are often really bad. The White Scar detachment buffs unit types, and has rules/stratagems/etc that do not exist in the codex. It is a detachment that can only work, if GW releases a lot of mounted unit for space marines. Which they are not going to do this edition.
Both the space marine 1st company and DW are terrible, and that is comparing to index factions. Especialy the DA codex feels so bizzar, thankfuly point costs in codex, more often then not, get changed post release. But the person who thought DW knights should cost 295pts per 5, is playing a way different game, then everyone outside of the GW studio.
which means for 40k that GW does not really know what the game wants to be but try to be everything at once and this does not work
a platoon level mass-skirmish game with single model mechanics and heroic NPC killing power with grand-tactical turn sequences
I think GW know it very well, they just don't care. Game quality < Avarge cost of an army, for a company that sells models.
But players have to live with the consequances. People and companies are judged for what they do and what they cause, and not what ever they "worked hard and had good intentions".
If GW can not make something work, then a "not well" stretched over a few editions turns in to a bad idea. And some of their faction choices are always end up bad for the majority of players.
If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that obviously shouldn't be part of that army's achetype (ie. obviously non-Vanguard units (like Centurions!) actually being something you couldn't take), this kind of problem wouldn't exist.
And that's exactly what Detachments SHOULD have done, IMHO. They should have had restrictions on what you can/can't take within them. Instead, they just give you an army-wide rule, some relics/stratagems, and... that's it?
I don't know. I'm not usually super concerned about one or two units being thrown into an army that don't quite fit the rest of the theme. They're usually pretty easy to justify. I don't feel the need to ban vanguard tyranid detachments (focused mostly on sneaky/burrowing/flying stuff) from taking exocrines. In fact, that detachment seems very much like it wants you to take some non-Vanguard stuff to back up your various genestealers and raveners and whatnot.
Rather than rules that tell people they're playing their army wrong, I'm more interested in detachment rules that allow/encourage you to play army themes that aren't well-supported by the codex otherwise. So if you create a detachment all about bikes and transports and give it an interesting combat speed mechanic that doesn't particularly help centurions out, I'm not losing much sleep over there being a squad of centurions splashed in. Using the vanguard detachment as an example again, makes your genestealers suddenly much faster and sneakier than they are in other detachments, and you can give them a knack for sniping out characters to add to the general assassin/disruption theme.
Also worth pointing out: the topic of rules for representing subfactions and the topic of having rules in place to avoid skew lists or otherwise problematic lists are potentially related but not necessarily the same thing. It's fair to want rules that make your Raven Guard feel like Raven Guard and to also want rules that address skew.
Wyldhunt wrote: A.) The *advantage* of psychic weapons is that the model has that weapon at all.
And prior to 10th the Farseer could still contribute, but psychic attacks tended to be a bit beyond mundane regular attacks. Now they are actively worse than a standard attack. That Shuiken Pistol you're happy not using doesn't trigger the FNP save your target might have where the psychic power will. That's the problem. A "psychic" weapon just = more protections against it. They are Weapons- rather than Weapons+. And I don't agree that some of them hit harder than regular weapons. So many of them are just bolter with the psychic tag.
Are there a lot of psychic powers with a bolter profile?
I think we're both aware of where the other is coming from here. I see witchfire powers as decent weapons that happen to be less effective against some units in the game. What innate property common to all witchfire-style psychic powers do you feel the current rules are failing to represent? They're often dangerous to the caster if he pushes himself. They often hit with more oomph than a common mundane weapon. They can be fluffily debuffed/countered with anti-psychic countermeasures. I do not mean to put words in your mouth, but it seems like you just want an extra psychic test roll (that arguably represents the fluff less well than always-available powers) for the sake of giving them a feeling of gravitas.
Witchfires in 7th edition had gun profiles. Do you feel that witchfires were handled well then? If so, what's the crucial difference for you?
Wyldhunt wrote: B.) Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the more psychic-focused armies got some benefits that target psychic weaponry. Some Grey Knight detachment rule that powers up weapons with the psychic tag or what have you. Actually, I guess Thousand Sons already have exactly that even if it is a little lacklustre.
I just don't think GW thought it through. I think they got all excited with their newfound love of USRs (which they hardly use, especially compared to the literal 1000 bespoke special rules the game has), added 'psychic' to things now that there's no psychic phase, and completely forgot that the psychic tag doesn't actually do anything.
It does do something. It lets anti-psychic effects interact with them, and it lets (what few psychic-buffing rules currently exist) buff them. The statlines of the powers themselves describe how they differ from lasguns and bolters.
Wyldhunt wrote: C.) Why does the existence of a tag have to have some positive advantage tied to it?
Because otherwise what's the point? All psychic does right now is give your targets extra protection. That's bad.
That's kind of circular reasoning, no? The point of the tag (for now) is (mostly) to let psychic defenses work against it.
Wyldhunt wrote: D.) I started playing in 5th. From 5th through 7th edition, psychic shooting attacks used normal shooting gun profiles. Powerful guns, but standard guns; usually with some flavorful special rule added on. In some of those editions, they were even resolved in the shooting phase just like guns. It wasn't until 8th edition that psychic powers became tied to Mortal Wounds.
And the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Mortal Wounds, and their overabundance, were a joke (not quite as bad as AoS, but still. Now they've completely flipped it and have taken a very conservative edge with psychic powers
Right. We agree that all mortal wounds all the time weren't great. So they went back to psychic powers having gun stats. Like they did in 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, and I assume earlier. Did you dislike how witchfires were handled in those editions as well? Or did the inclusion of a psychic test make them more acceptable to you?
Wyldhunt wrote: Great example. So in 8th edition, the Biel-Tan subfaction bonuses were:
* +1 Ld on aspects
* Reroll 1st to hit with shuriken weapons.
I'm thinking back to 3rd Ed Biel-Tan, back when there was a craftworld book, and Biel-Tan meant "Aspect Warriors as Troops". Since my post and your post, GW has put up a preview for Ravenguard, and Outriders gain Battleline (a type of obvious inclusion that they somehow forgot to do for the first four fething books this edition... what morons they are...). This means that a Wraith army could have Wraithguard as Battleline, and a Biel-Tan (or "Swordwind", as they won't limit it to a Craftworld but rather an Archetype) could make Avengers/Dragons/Scorps/Banshees and even maybe Hawks/Spiders into Battleline.
Sure. Those possibilities were always on the table. The questions are:
A.) *Will they*, and
B.) What archetypes will they opt not to support or support badly?
Rule of three is stupid... And yes, Rule of 3 hits some armies far harder (Marines are "limited" to 9 Land Raiders, whereas Chaos get 3... wonderful).
Right. And classic FOCs were basically an indirect rule of 3 that also prevented you from taking other units once you hit 3 of something. Ex: If I take 3 squads of windriders, I'm suddenly unable to take their natural fluffy friends the shining spears.
It sounds like you agree that at least some armies should be able to take more than 3 copies of a given unit that is in-line with their theme. One of the downsides of the FOC is that your starting point is that you're making 4+ copies of thematically-similar (FA, HS, Elites) units impossible and thus creating the work of going through and creating a bunch of exceptions for that limitation. Which can work if someone wants to go to that effort, but also framing things through an FOC makes me worry people are going to lose sight of the actual design goals of having army creation rules that help armies be somewhat balanced against one another. Bringing back a troop tax and preventing people from taking 4+ Fast Attack choices doesn't accomplish much if you also let people take an army of nothing but tanks or dreadnaughts or whatever.
Whenever I make suggestions I am always operating from the base of working within the system rather than throwing out the system... I want to fix the system from within, not throw the system out and replace it.
That's fair. I tend to try to keep both options in mind during these discussions. You have your simpler/smaller fixes that are easy to implement, and your bigger, more ideal changes that are fun to talk about if not generally practical to implement.
Yeah, but if transports and bikes are bad, then the entire detachment ends up being very bad too. On the flip side if the units are way above what a unit should be in w40k, giving an index army even more ways to plays and even more rules, is just spreading the negative player expiriance even more. Because now the people, with the factions that got screwed on their rules, are going to ask why they have no valid way to play, while army Y has 3 detachments that can be easily played on top of 1-2 tournament builds.
RG don't work, because the units that would make a "scout" army hit like a wet noodle and have the staying power of a space marine aka not much of a staying power for the points. Venguard works, because , and we can speculate if GW designers thought of it or not, someone thought RG, but the players looked at ultramarines, calgard+bodyguard+a chunky unit, all getting infiltration in an army, with scouts and shoting units marines have.
All non ultra "themes" in the codex work like that. WS don't have units for a detachment that works only with mounted models and nothing else. Marine tanks cost too much and don't have indirect fire to be a real threat. And tanks are somehow Iron Hands. Salamanders are getting punished for that one even when an army with aggressors and flamers did well , but it costs too cheap. The faction marines are similar. Their detachment are so bad, that it is better to play them as X coloured ultramarines, and from playing an ultramarines minus list, is one step to just play ultramarines.
The fun things, and exploring other ways to play, can only work if an army has extremly effcient units and rules to combin with it. Pre nerf custodes had one build like that. But trying to play something else then blocks of 3 units with heroes, always would end bad. And in the upcoming custode codex that is how it is going to go down. The dreadnoughts, jetbikes etc , like all the units in all the other codex, will recive side grades and no real fixes. There technicaly will be X number of detachments, but they are going to be as playable as the WS one is for marines right now.
@Karol:
That sounds more like a combination of datasheets that need a buff and detachments that need a second pass rather than a problem with the core concept.
The main thing I want from detachments is for them to let me play an army in a different-but-similarly-effective way.
The issue with mounted models isn't rules or detachments.
It's models.
Because no model/no rule is such a strong force that impacts every single aspect of GW's output (rules, artwork, fiction), and because Marines are now in a situation they haven't been in in decades - they have gaps in their product line - we end up in situations like the Stormlance Taskforce, a detachment that is clearly geared towards mounted combat when the Codex lacks mounted characters (there's one) and mounted units (Outriders have zero options, as the kit is still the EZ-build kit from last edition).
So you have all these rules that would be great if the army list could support the ambitions of the rules, but it can't because there just aren't the models to do it.
H.B.M.C. wrote: The issue with mounted models isn't rules or detachments.
It's models.
Because no model/no rule is such a strong force that impacts every single aspect of GW's output (rules, artwork, fiction), and because Marines are now in a situation they haven't been in in decades - they have gaps in their product line - we end up in situations like the Stormlance Taskforce, a detachment that is clearly geared towards mounted combat when the Codex lacks mounted characters (there's one) and mounted units (Outriders have zero options, as the kit is still the EZ-build kit from last edition).
So you have all these rules that would be great if the army list could support the ambitions of the rules, but it can't because there just aren't the models to do it.
Not to mentioned they *just* legends'd 3 out of the 6 mounted units, Bikes, attack bikes, and Scout, leaving just outrides, the ATV and chaplain. (because for some reason the chaplain on bike exists but the captain hasn't had an official model since the Khan on bike that I'm aware of)
H.B.M.C. wrote: The issue with mounted models isn't rules or detachments.
It's models.
Because no model/no rule is such a strong force that impacts every single aspect of GW's output (rules, artwork, fiction), and because Marines are now in a situation they haven't been in in decades - they have gaps in their product line - we end up in situations like the Stormlance Taskforce, a detachment that is clearly geared towards mounted combat when the Codex lacks mounted characters (there's one) and mounted units (Outriders have zero options, as the kit is still the EZ-build kit from last edition).
So you have all these rules that would be great if the army list could support the ambitions of the rules, but it can't because there just aren't the models to do it.
You do know that you can spend a max of 1215 pts on mounted stuff alone (without ever dipping into Legends), right?
That's 3 bike chaplains, 3 max units of outriders (counting the invaders), and 3 solo Invaders.
And you can only pick 3/4 of the enhancements.
Let's assume those Chaplains are attached to the outriders.
That's SIX mounted units being supported by this detachment.
And for the remaining 700some pts? I'm sure you're able to find something usefull that these enhancements/strats would benefit.
I'd suggest the various primaris speeders as you're going to need some AT.....
And if you don't have an issue using Legends? You're options dramatically increase.
I've also seen a guy in our Escalation League put this detachment to good use with various jump pack units. So far he's not used a single bike model.
But please, keep on about how there's not enough models to make this detachment work. It's amusing.
ccs wrote: But please, keep on about how there's not enough models to make this detachment work. It's amusing.
3 identical characters and 3 identical 6-man units with zero options. Such variety! Such flavour! The fun train just doesn't have any brakes, now does it?
ccs, do us all a favour: Just say you don't understand my posts. It's quicker and saves us all time.
Yeah, and I miss also separate way of dealing with vehicles distinct from "person" models. "Oh no! My Fire Prism is dead due to too much wounds!" is very strange concept to me lol
Oversimplification is understandable, because GW want this game to be competitive friendly first and foremost & easy way to aid that is streamlining, but it also cause strangeness like wounded tanks and so boring Index for everyone & wait years for a Codex to come out. My theory of the Index being so dull is that GW want people should buy the Codex when it releases - and if you have very quick development schedule this is fine, but GW never does. All that happen for me is I lose interest to play these so boring Index & just play Kill Team instead.
Also why can't Vehicle & Monster leave close combat with small models anymore? This is so silly, my Bloodthirster or Falcon can't allow Guardsman to come too close or he will grab it & my huge monster/ tank can't leave lol
The thing I always hated about the old rules was the effectiveness of single penetrating hits.
Sure, stuff had to pen your armour to hurt you, so no bolter damage or small arms fire.
But as soon as something did pen your armour, it had a 17% to be a one shot kill. And even if it didn't kill, it could render your vehicle ineffective with a single shot.
JNAProductions wrote: “Can fill points” is not the same as “Is worth playing” whether you define that by power or fun.
I think this is sort of the rub. Although I'm probably more on the ccs side of the argument.
I.E. lets say you want to do a Biel-Tan Swordwind formation.
Well... being able to take 6 units rather than 3 banshees is I guess cool if you love Banshees. But I mean you can take 3 units of Banshees, Scorpions, Spiders, Dragons, Hawks... If you want to go "look, all Aspect Warriors" - you can.
In much the same way that sure, you might want to run 6 units of Wraithguard. But you can run 3. And 3 Wraithblades. And 3 Wraithlords. And some Spiritseers. That Wrath flyer thing. Even if kept to a minimum this is most of a 2k points army.
I can see how "I want to run bikes" and there is only one unit of bikes does kind of suck. Much like how having an Ad Mech detachment notionally for robots when you have one unit of robots is limiting. But I think its taking the discussion off at a tangent into issues which I don't see as being a problem. The solution is GW creating new units (or not drafting rules to this effect). I'm not sure "now I can take six units of Outriders/Robots" would serve to make the list more interesting.
The thing I always hated about the old rules was the effectiveness of single penetrating hits.
Sure, stuff had to pen your armour to hurt you, so no bolter damage or small arms fire.
But as soon as something did pen your armour, it had a 17% to be a one shot kill. And even if it didn't kill, it could render your vehicle ineffective with a single shot.
I didn't mind that, but for personal preference, I preferred to see lot of infantry in the wargame and not so much vehicles & this rules stopped people to take vehicles for every unit. I don't know if it made the game more balanced or anything, I just didn't like to see 89323 vehicles every game.
a_typical_hero wrote: Which is something that can be remedied with "Hull points" and a proper implementation of what triggers a vehicle to lose one.
So... wounds and a high toughness? The only remaining gap is "make S less than double T unable to wound" boom, sorted.
Before we get "but shooting guns off!!!!" etc comes up, that's not the armour values, that's the vehicle damage chart and isn't intrinsically tied to it. You could have "roll a d6 every X wounds taken and consult the chart" with results such as "lose Y weapons, lose Z " of move to minimum of 0" etc.
JNAProductions wrote: “Can fill points” is not the same as “Is worth playing” whether you define that by power or fun.
I.E. lets say you want to do a Biel-Tan Swordwind formation.
Well... being able to take 6 units rather than 3 banshees is I guess cool if you love Banshees. But I mean you can take 3 units of Banshees, Scorpions, Spiders, Dragons, Hawks... If you want to go "look, all Aspect Warriors" - you can.
Not only can you run 6 units of a given aspect, they also become more effective at controlling objectives - and, if you're swapping what becomes Battleline, then Guardians become less useful in that role, which shifts the focus within the army.
Dudeface wrote: So... wounds and a high toughness? The only remaining gap is "make S less than double T unable to wound" boom, sorted.
Before we get "but shooting guns off!!!!" etc comes up, that's not the armour values, that's the vehicle damage chart and isn't intrinsically tied to it. You could have "roll a d6 every X wounds taken and consult the chart" with results such as "lose Y weapons, lose Z " of move to minimum of 0" etc.
I wasn't arguing for that in my post, but high toughness alone is not enough to reproduce the feeling of vehicles in older editions. Armor values had to be hit exactly or over. A strength 7 auto cannon was not allowed to roll on the damage chart with just a 5 to wound against a Predator (AV 13, let's assume toughness 13). And if you only hit the value exactly instead of exceeding it, you had less of a chance to do lasting damage.
Dudeface wrote: So... wounds and a high toughness? The only remaining gap is "make S less than double T unable to wound" boom, sorted.
Before we get "but shooting guns off!!!!" etc comes up, that's not the armour values, that's the vehicle damage chart and isn't intrinsically tied to it. You could have "roll a d6 every X wounds taken and consult the chart" with results such as "lose Y weapons, lose Z " of move to minimum of 0" etc.
I wasn't arguing for that in my post, but high toughness alone is not enough to reproduce the feeling of vehicles in older editions. Armor values had to be hit exactly or over. A strength 7 auto cannon was not allowed to roll on the damage chart with just a 5 to wound against a Predator (AV 13, let's assume toughness 13). And if you only hit the value exactly instead of exceeding it, you had less of a chance to do lasting damage.
Sort of, that glancing hit would still remove a hull point however, so you could glancing hit things to death which lead to hydra platforms becoming great antivehicle, and rifleman dreads. The only real differences there is you needed S7/8 and high rate of fire because there were no armour saves involved and you stripped hull points (wounds) off the tank to kill it, possibly with minimal loss in efficiency for the vehicle as a result of these efforts.
The biggest downside of it is rendering a lot of weapons largely irrelevant, although maybe less so in this day and age. It used to be the difference in firing a heavy bolter or an autocannon at a marine was basically none existent if you recall, whereas now there are more stats in play to mean there are different uses for both. But you still end up with "average vehicles armour is X, as long as I take lots of Strength Y I can simply maths vehicles to death" and suddenly you have an optimal spammable value every weapon is measured by.
Dudeface wrote: Sort of, that glancing hit would still remove a hull point however, so you could glancing hit things to death which lead to hydra platforms becoming great antivehicle, and rifleman dreads. The only real differences there is you needed S7/8 and high rate of fire because there were no armour saves involved and you stripped hull points (wounds) off the tank to kill it, possibly with minimal loss in efficiency for the vehicle as a result of these efforts.
The biggest downside of it is rendering a lot of weapons largely irrelevant, although maybe less so in this day and age. It used to be the difference in firing a heavy bolter or an autocannon at a marine was basically none existent if you recall, whereas now there are more stats in play to mean there are different uses for both. But you still end up with "average vehicles armour is X, as long as I take lots of Strength Y I can simply maths vehicles to death" and suddenly you have an optimal spammable value every weapon is measured by.
Glancing vehicles to death by automatically removing a hull point in addition to the damage roll was something a lot of people (myself included) were not really fond of. For exactly the reasons you described. And I wouldn't propose to add that back into the game.
I'm not sure having a best anti-tank weapon in the game (and then measuring others by it) is in itself a problem.
Melta was the best to deal with vehicles of all sorts and - if you wanted to have reliable odds - necessary against AV14 like Monoliths, Land Raiders and Leman Russes. But melta had a really low range, so your melta units had to get close and expose themselves in turn. Lascannons have a solid profile for most vehicles and are safe to use from a long distance, but would struggle to penetrate AV14 reliably. Missile launchers do triple duty as an anti-horde weapon, anti-MEQ weapon (with just the right profile values to kill a Marine, not inflating cost with unused values) and are still good against lighter vehicles. Auto cannons are there for suppression (through glances) and reliability (through two shots).
So melta was best, simply speaking from a damage POV, but other weapons have uses where some were more or less workable with your army.
Give vehicles hull points that are not automatically lost when they take damage but instead can be spent to neutralise a damaging hit, with more devastating results (immobilised, destroyed, explodes, annihilated) requiring progressively more hull points to be spent to cancel.
Or maybe they can be spent to shift a result down by 1 for each point spent.
Dudeface wrote: Sort of, that glancing hit would still remove a hull point however, so you could glancing hit things to death which lead to hydra platforms becoming great antivehicle, and rifleman dreads.
Which was a bad thing.
The point of the old AV system was to
1. Establish a minimum threshold to damage a given vehicle, something the current SvT system cannot do, and
2. Model vehicle damage by effects, with them being incapacitated by losses in mission capability or outright destruction instead of bleeding to death
Giving vehicles wounds in the form of hull points circumvented point #2. I would have preferred a system where each penetrating hit causes a cumulative +1 to all future rolls on the damage table, with the damage effects scaled back slightly (eg shift all the results 'down' one). You'd get vehicles that are less likely to blow up on the first hit, but also less likely to survive a half dozen penetrating hits in a row, without being able to knock out a tank by just glancing it until it gives up.
Dudeface wrote: Sort of, that glancing hit would still remove a hull point however, so you could glancing hit things to death which lead to hydra platforms becoming great antivehicle, and rifleman dreads.
Which was a bad thing.
The point of the old AV system was to
1. Establish a minimum threshold to damage a given vehicle, something the current SvT system cannot do, and
2. Model vehicle damage by effects, with them being incapacitated by losses in mission capability or outright destruction instead of bleeding to death
Giving vehicles wounds in the form of hull points circumvented point #2. I would have preferred a system where each penetrating hit causes a cumulative +1 to all future rolls on the damage table, with the damage effects scaled back slightly (eg shift all the results 'down' one). You'd get vehicles that are less likely to blow up on the first hit, but also less likely to survive a half dozen penetrating hits in a row, without being able to knock out a tank by just glancing it until it gives up.
I can only imagine in todays rapid response tourney-centric game balance that pointing vehicles that have a chance to survive a dozen hits or die from a single one would break the writers though. I'm happy enough sticking with SvT and wounds but admittedly there is more that can be done regards degradation and protection against small arms, although personally I can count on one hand in the last 6 years or so how many times a bolter firing at a tank has made any impact anecdotally.
I'm unsure if it could be possible to implement an AV system without radically modifying the current S/T.
We also would need to figure out how AP and Damage would interact with AV and Vehicle Damage and how the many different USRs would impact vehicles.
To be blunt it so not worth it because you cannot slap an AV system onto something that isn't designed for it.
Mechanically wise a vehicle with a 2+ save is pretty much immune to small arm fire. Sure it is possible to fish for 6s, but it in practice it would just be wasting dice.
Eh, I think the current system is working pretty well. Vehicles in 10th feel like they hold up against small arms fire and demand more dedicated weaponry to deal with. Honestly, I think they're in a really good place.
My one gripe with the current system is just that all the minor T variances make 4+ pretty rare when it's one of the few really usable sides. I'd have to map out the whole chart to see if there's a better breakdown, but only wounding on 5+ or 3+ with no in between feels like an oversight.
I can only imagine in todays rapid response tourney-centric game balance that pointing vehicles that have a chance to survive a dozen hits or die from a single one would break the writers though. I'm happy enough sticking with SvT and wounds but admittedly there is more that can be done regards degradation and protection against small arms, although personally I can count on one hand in the last 6 years or so how many times a bolter firing at a tank has made any impact anecdotally.
The issue isn't breaking the writers; the issue is that players don't take unreliable models. When we had the old system and monsters that use the new system, people took monsters but left vehicles in the garage. People might like the concept of that system, but in practice it was the source of constant complaints.
LunarSol wrote: Eh, I think the current system is working pretty well. Vehicles in 10th feel like they hold up against small arms fire and demand more dedicated weaponry to deal with. Honestly, I think they're in a really good place.
I think the system is okay functioning but just weird as a concept, but I don't think any alternative exist that can make consistent good results in the same way this one. So I guess my Falcon will just have to wear band-aid on his boo-boos.
Now we need only to fix this "single Guardsman locks giant MBT in close combat with punching the hull" and we have good system.
I can only imagine in todays rapid response tourney-centric game balance that pointing vehicles that have a chance to survive a dozen hits or die from a single one would break the writers though. I'm happy enough sticking with SvT and wounds but admittedly there is more that can be done regards degradation and protection against small arms, although personally I can count on one hand in the last 6 years or so how many times a bolter firing at a tank has made any impact anecdotally.
The issue isn't breaking the writers; the issue is that players don't take unreliable models. When we had the old system and monsters that use the new system, people took monsters but left vehicles in the garage. People might like the concept of that system, but in practice it was the source of constant complaints.
Yep, gotta agree there, you'd need to create some variation to apply to monsters, but when you're then tracking multi-wound stuff all over the place the game sizes are too large to make that reasonable imo.
catbarf wrote:
Giving vehicles wounds in the form of hull points circumvented point #2. I would have preferred a system where each penetrating hit causes a cumulative +1 to all future rolls on the damage table, with the damage effects scaled back slightly (eg shift all the results 'down' one). You'd get vehicles that are less likely to blow up on the first hit, but also less likely to survive a half dozen penetrating hits in a row, without being able to knock out a tank by just glancing it until it gives up.
While I'm always opposed to bringing back AV because of what it does to skew lists, this would have been a pretty solid way to do things. One of the complaints about 5th was that vehicles often just spent the whole game being stunlocked instead of dying if you flubbed your vehicle damage rolls. This would encourage people to take at least some proper anti-tank weapons to get that first penetrating hit or two on an enemy vehicle, but then mid-strength weapons would still be able to finish them off as subsequent glancing hits, modified by the number of previous penetrating hits, would be able to wreck vehicles more efficiently.
Turnip Monster wrote:
Now we need only to fix this "single Guardsman locks giant MBT in close combat with punching the hull" and we have good system.
Honestly, I'm not sure there would be much harm in just letting vehicles shoot (and charge?) after falling back at this point. I used to be opposed to the idea because charging the artillery pieces to silence the enemy guns was an interesting form of counterplay. But now tanks are shooting the guys crawling on their hulls while still tossing shots downrange at other targets. It's not particularly fluffy for a grot to be able to pin a tank in place. If we're not going to use the limitations to create interesting counterplay, we may as well be fluffy.
LunarSol wrote: The issue isn't breaking the writers; the issue is that players don't take unreliable models. When we had the old system and monsters that use the new system, people took monsters but left vehicles in the garage. People might like the concept of that system, but in practice it was the source of constant complaints.
When I look at tournament data and the prevalence of netlists, people just take whatever is undercosted this month.
Wyldhunt wrote: Honestly, I'm not sure there would be much harm in just letting vehicles shoot (and charge?) after falling back at this point. I used to be opposed to the idea because charging the artillery pieces to silence the enemy guns was an interesting form of counterplay. But now tanks are shooting the guys crawling on their hulls while still tossing shots downrange at other targets. It's not particularly fluffy for a grot to be able to pin a tank in place. If we're not going to use the limitations to create interesting counterplay, we may as well be fluffy.
I don't even think it's matter for fluff; counterplay enriches a game system & to have "Artillery" as separate model type like it used to be would allow for such thing, but having some basic dudes trap some big monster or big tank is just silly. I saw batrep of a guy who did some casual GT with a Titanicus army (that is, single Warhound & 900pts of dudes) & he said he had to be careful of CC with the Titan in case it got locked down & slowly killed or just not able to fully affect the game. I understand that Titan units is maybe not some kind of "average army" that game system could or should build around, but this wider point extrapolates to all vehicles & monsters. Someone earlier said that "players don't take unreliable units" & I think this rules makes a problem of reliability for vehicles & monsters.
I have to qualify all these by saying I didn't play too much 10th Edition so I can't be an authority - but the things I said in this thread & some of the things I read here, and my perception of this game now, are some reason WHY I didn't play it & stick to Kill Team. If someone who played more explains why it has to be this way or why it make sense then I maybe can change my mind.
Dudeface wrote: I can only imagine in todays rapid response tourney-centric game balance that pointing vehicles that have a chance to survive a dozen hits or die from a single one would break the writers though. I'm happy enough sticking with SvT and wounds but admittedly there is more that can be done regards degradation and protection against small arms, although personally I can count on one hand in the last 6 years or so how many times a bolter firing at a tank has made any impact anecdotally.
The issue isn't breaking the writers; the issue is that players don't take unreliable models. When we had the old system and monsters that use the new system, people took monsters but left vehicles in the garage. People might like the concept of that system, but in practice it was the source of constant complaints.
Yep, gotta agree there, you'd need to create some variation to apply to monsters, but when you're then tracking multi-wound stuff all over the place the game sizes are too large to make that reasonable imo.
For me, the degrading profile approach works reasonably well for MONSTER units over n starting wounds - I just think you want more than a single step in how their profile degrades. 50% wounds lost and 75% wounds lost, probably, rather than 33% and 66%.
The thing I always hated about the old rules was the effectiveness of single penetrating hits.
Sure, stuff had to pen your armour to hurt you, so no bolter damage or small arms fire.
But as soon as something did pen your armour, it had a 17% to be a one shot kill. And even if it didn't kill, it could render your vehicle ineffective with a single shot.
Well, the trick was getting that penetrating hit in the first place.
Lascannon (S9 AP2) vs Predator (AV13) back in 5th. BS4 hits on 3s. S9 pens on 5s, glances on 4s. So 4/6×2/6×2/6= 16/216 or 7.4% chance that the predator is knocked out (3.7% wrecked, 3.7% exploded). If that Predator was "obscured " then those odds would be cut in half by a 4+ cover save.
Melta was preferred because AP1 added 1 to the damage roll in addition to rolling 2d6 for pen at half range making the whole sequence more reliable.
Vehicles were resilient enough in 5th that it led to hull points in 6th which completely inverted the meta. Suddenly Razorbacks that were tanking shots in 5th were dead after three glancing hits in 6th. So melta became less preferred and things like autocannons found favor. Hull points mutated into wounds in 8th, but it sounds like massed medium strength weapons are still preferred over dedicated AT weapons today.
The hull point system was literally punishing players for bringing vehicles by adding in 2 damage systems to the game. AT became meaningless for the damage results table because you could literally just tickle a vehicle to death as they had absurdly low numbers of hull points that were stripped on both penetrating and glancing hits. on top of that they made the damage table more lethal to begin with in the same edition.
The idea of a wound system isn't bad if it were done correctly, but as always GW doesn't. DUST 1947 has the system implemented the way it should be-
facings for vehicle mounted weapons is still there, but the armor is a class not a facing and when you go heavy enough on the armor class scale (medium, heavy and super heavy ) small arms stop being effective all together and AT weapons lose number of shots/resulting damage wounds as the armor scale goes up. but the vehicles also track wounds, with a reasonable number to make them viable. there is no performance degradation system unless you and your opponent wish to use the optional critical hit system.
As for damage charts 5th is still the best with the right level of survivability and lethality especially when the AP1 modifier is thrown in. It also makes intuitive sense to a human player. vehicles could suffer outright death or be systematically degraded through weapon/mobility destruction.
We also addressed the issues of stun lock/turn participation by adding a couple house rules fixes to our 5th ed games-namely snap fire for non-template weapons from 6th/7th so a vehicle that is stunned can still do something to contribute the turn it is stunned as well as reverting the defensive weapon strength to 5 from 4th ed.
In our 5th ed game group have all sorts of army lists and factions and dealing with vehicles is never a problem for any of us, without also making them not useful.
@Turnip Monster. we use the old 3rd ed rules for titans as they were actually designed for normal 40K games, with player permissions. my warhoud titan with plasma blast gun and vulcan mega bolter clocks in at a heavy 810 points and is mostly there to be a centerpiece model that draws fire. at most it can attack 2 units a turn so not exactly game breaking. also in the old rules superheavy walkers cannot be locked in close combat by anything that is not also a superheavy walker or gargantuan creature. they can literally just stride away from anything else.
For me, the degrading profile approach works reasonably well for MONSTER units over n starting wounds - I just think you want more than a single step in how their profile degrades. 50% wounds lost and 75% wounds lost, probably, rather than 33% and 66%.
The problem with the way these are always done is they tend to be a global debuff that has a lot more impact than it needs to. The idea is you're creating value in attacking something you can't kill (good!) similar to what happens when you attack infantry (also good!) but the way its done often does nothing meaningful (bad!) or catastrophic (very bad!).
What they effectively need to do, particularly now that vehicles get their support weapons for free, is have specific weapons break as damage is taken. 3 wounds off a Redemptor? No more rocket pod. Chip away so that when you've finally blown off its main gun, that last wound is charging in to make do with the fist.
For me, the degrading profile approach works reasonably well for MONSTER units over n starting wounds - I just think you want more than a single step in how their profile degrades. 50% wounds lost and 75% wounds lost, probably, rather than 33% and 66%.
The problem with the way these are always done is they tend to be a global debuff that has a lot more impact than it needs to. The idea is you're creating value in attacking something you can't kill (good!) similar to what happens when you attack infantry (also good!) but the way its done often does nothing meaningful (bad!) or catastrophic (very bad!).
What they effectively need to do, particularly now that vehicles get their support weapons for free, is have specific weapons break as damage is taken. 3 wounds off a Redemptor? No more rocket pod. Chip away so that when you've finally blown off its main gun, that last wound is charging in to make do with the fist.
In theory I like that idea, but in practice I wonder if 40K hasn't become a little too big in model scope at 2K points for that kind of thing to really work beyond super-heavies. Super heavies it could certainly work because you might only have 1 or 2 in a whole army. But for regular heavy units that could get a little annoying/slowing down the gameplay and introduce a lot of book-keeping. Esp for armies that take a lot of vehicles/monsters in them.
It might also be that it would work in a very streamlined game that ran smoothly and simply and then had it as a layer of complexity.
For me, the degrading profile approach works reasonably well for MONSTER units over n starting wounds - I just think you want more than a single step in how their profile degrades. 50% wounds lost and 75% wounds lost, probably, rather than 33% and 66%.
The problem with the way these are always done is they tend to be a global debuff that has a lot more impact than it needs to. The idea is you're creating value in attacking something you can't kill (good!) similar to what happens when you attack infantry (also good!) but the way its done often does nothing meaningful (bad!) or catastrophic (very bad!).
What they effectively need to do, particularly now that vehicles get their support weapons for free, is have specific weapons break as damage is taken. 3 wounds off a Redemptor? No more rocket pod. Chip away so that when you've finally blown off its main gun, that last wound is charging in to make do with the fist.
In theory I like that idea, but in practice I wonder if 40K hasn't become a little too big in model scope at 2K points for that kind of thing to really work beyond super-heavies. Super heavies it could certainly work because you might only have 1 or 2 in a whole army. But for regular heavy units that could get a little annoying/slowing down the gameplay and introduce a lot of book-keeping. Esp for armies that take a lot of vehicles/monsters in them.
It might also be that it would work in a very streamlined game that ran smoothly and simply and then had it as a layer of complexity.
It's all in how you present it I'd think. Like if you do it the way you have it now with the Damaged chart, I agree, total disaster. If on the ranged weapon list it just says things like Heavy Flamer (Damaged: 8 wounds) or something you would see when you're running through the list I think it could work.
Of course, if they made an app with damage tracking or just.... one with a play option in general that filtered to your actual loadout, the things you could do are pretty endless.
I think tracking lots of damage during a game could work if GW made a game-mat/board product which could hold an expandable number of game cards.
A simple metal sheet for the game board and then each card atop. A magnet game counter could then be placed upon the card to mark damage and so forth.
Warmachine did pretty well with their damage tracking on warmachines and Hordes beasts that way.
The big issue is that you either have to use an app or have a constantly updated game card system for reference and GW just don't do either of those well. Apps are too bare bones and game cards GW just doesn't keep in stock for it to work.
In-game information tracking has to be scaled to the game and the tools provided and if the tools are user made or really simple then tracking has to be simple too.
The thing I always hated about the old rules was the effectiveness of single penetrating hits.
Sure, stuff had to pen your armour to hurt you, so no bolter damage or small arms fire.
But as soon as something did pen your armour, it had a 17% to be a one shot kill. And even if it didn't kill, it could render your vehicle ineffective with a single shot.
Well, the trick was getting that penetrating hit in the first place.
Lascannon (S9 AP2) vs Predator (AV13) back in 5th. BS4 hits on 3s. S9 pens on 5s, glances on 4s. So 4/6×2/6×2/6= 16/216 or 7.4% chance that the predator is knocked out (3.7% wrecked, 3.7% exploded). If that Predator was "obscured " then those odds would be cut in half by a 4+ cover save.
Melta was preferred because AP1 added 1 to the damage roll in addition to rolling 2d6 for pen at half range making the whole sequence more reliable.
Vehicles were resilient enough in 5th that it led to hull points in 6th which completely inverted the meta. Suddenly Razorbacks that were tanking shots in 5th were dead after three glancing hits in 6th. So melta became less preferred and things like autocannons found favor. Hull points mutated into wounds in 8th, but it sounds like massed medium strength weapons are still preferred over dedicated AT weapons today.
The ability to do it at all is a problematic rule to balance though and it's why people preferred monster profiles, because at T6 you were immune to instant death, until later editions added special exceptions to that.The gameplay is much harder to balance when units interact with the rules in fundamentally different ways like this.
What irks me the most about people preferring the AV system is that a lot of it was just descriptive words rather than rules. The mechanic of rolling a d6 to get X+ was the same as toughness. A S7 weapon needed a 3+ to affect an AV10 tank, just as a S7 weapon would a T10 monster, the words used are irrelevant to the mechanical outcome.
There were really only two key features of the AV system that separated them from normal Toughness, two wound results and variable wound outcomes.
IF you wanted you could apply special exceptions to units while still retaining the current system, but having something like: GLANCING: If a vehicle or monster is wounded that rolled the minimum value needed to wound (S8 vs T8 = 4+), then the hit is reduced to 1 wound.
You can also have the damage table as a crit table - a critical wound roll requires a roll on the crit table to see what effect the target has.
The fact that monsters couldn't lose their legs and be immobile, or lose their guns and not be able to shoot, was also a problem of the AV era. There is nothing intrinsically different between a monster's legs and a vehicle's tracks (or robot legs) that mean damaging them would immobilise one and not the other.
I would point out that those damage effects on vehicles were extremely critical, tactically speaking. The fact that you could suppress a Leman Russ without destroying it, allowing for A: Other units to spend their shooting efforts elsewhere, and B: Maneuver against it while it couldn't shoot back at you, was such great gameplay.
Other features I liked under that system? Using vehicle wrecks as obstacles and cover. It really meant something when an armored column got stuck on itself behind damaged vehicles, or your troops could take cover behind your own strategically placed vehicles that later turned to wrecks. It made for a more dynamic experience overall.
They were randomised though, so you couldn't guarantee anything. People were shooting to do as much as they could and had to settle for whatever they rolled.
The game allowed unit stunning in general, with pinning and morale tests. That game play concept was a good one but it was always designed in a way that made it hard to plan to do. When you shoot something, you expect to see some casualties. But when you glanced or shot with pinning weapons, you were hoping for that outcome rather than expecting it.
It was only desperation shots like bolters up the rear that you hoped for something minimal rather than nothing at all.
40k should definitely have suppression rules so it's not a game of who can murder the fastest, but IMO they never implemented it very well as a legit tactic you planned for.
It was always a fortuitous consequence you attempted to take advantage of after the fact.
I woukdn't say Stunning/Morale/Pinning wasn't something you planned for, because it still effected target choices and things like firing order. It couldn't be relied upon, just like one can't rely on rolling a 6 to Pen AV 14, but you could set yourself up to take advantage if it happened. And when it did? Good times indeed!
Like any game (or life) really, you set yourself up to take advantage of those lucky breaks, and that's part of the skillset.
My argument is that something that unreliable is not something that can be tactically critical.
it's opportunistic reactionary. Which is fine, but I don't think it had the tactical importance you ascribe in the game.
You accepted stunning a vehicle over killing it because that's what you got, not because that's what you were trying to get.
There's no advantage stunning a vehicle provides that destroying it didn't, except in 3rd glancing tables where you already knew you weren't going to be able to kill it, so you were hoping for the next best thing.
Being able to pivot when your desired result doesn't materialise is a great skill, but I don't think it reflects the likelyhood of vehicle stunning into the game.
Hellebore wrote: My argument is that something that unreliable is not something that can be tactically critical.
it's opportunistic reactionary. Which is fine, but I don't think it had the tactical importance you ascribe in the game.
You accepted stunning a vehicle over killing it because that's what you got, not because that's what you were trying to get.
There's no advantage stunning a vehicle provides that destroying it didn't, except in 3rd glancing tables where you already knew you weren't going to be able to kill it, so you were hoping for the next best thing.
Being able to pivot when your desired result doesn't materialise is a great skill, but I don't think it reflects the likelyhood of vehicle stunning into the game.
I think the issue you're alluding to is that the odds of Stunning (1/6 on any Pen) are actually equal or WORSE than the odds of destroying it (1/6 if you roll 1d6, but for each point of bonus it increases the odds by a further 1/6).
If you rolled 2d6 on the damage chart and had it like so:
That's a 60-70% chance of any given damage roll Stunning, while not even a 3% chance of wrecking it with no bonuses.
GIve it +2 to have a chance of exploding, and the odds change-but it's still majority Stunned.
Hellebore wrote: What irks me the most about people preferring the AV system is that a lot of it was just descriptive words rather than rules. The mechanic of rolling a d6 to get X+ was the same as toughness. A S7 weapon needed a 3+ to affect an AV10 tank, just as a S7 weapon would a T10 monster, the words used are irrelevant to the mechanical outcome.
There were really only two key features of the AV system that separated them from normal Toughness, two wound results and variable wound outcomes.
IF you wanted you could apply special exceptions to units while still retaining the current system, but having something like: GLANCING: If a vehicle or monster is wounded that rolled the minimum value needed to wound (S8 vs T8 = 4+), then the hit is reduced to 1 wound.
You can also have the damage table as a crit table - a critical wound roll requires a roll on the crit table to see what effect the target has.
The fact that monsters couldn't lose their legs and be immobile, or lose their guns and not be able to shoot, was also a problem of the AV era. There is nothing intrinsically different between a monster's legs and a vehicle's tracks (or robot legs) that mean damaging them would immobilise one and not the other.
"There are no differences if you ignore them"
A non-vehicle model used a completely different to wound chart. S7 against AV10 is not the same as S7 against T10. For AV10 you have to roll a 3 to glance or 4+ to penetrate. Which results in different damage tables (or likelyhood for a given result). S7 against T10 is not a 3+ and never was. I can't recall the chart off the top of my head, but you had to roll a 5+ or even a 6+ to wound.
If the unit had an AV value, it means facings mattered for it. For each AV value and for the firing arc of their own weapons. A tank could not shoot people in its back, unless it was a turret mounted weapon. Some tanks couldn't even shoot at something straight in front of them if the target was too close.
Having AV meant the unit did not care about leadership tests and it could potentially do a tank shock maneuver. And it meant the unit did not have an armor save and thus did not care about AP values. It had its own set of rules what weapons it could or could not fire depending on how far it moved. Very few had an invul save.
You can implement most of these things without an AV system, but don't say that a lot of it was just descreptive. Vehicles were treated differently from other models.
I think it's safe to say that the vehicle damage chart was indeed a part of "the soul of 40k" despite its flaws, and has been sucked out of the game.
Maybe Nuhammer has sold its soul to shed its flawed yet storied past to ascend and become a card game.
To me the nail in the coffin of 10th edition is that grenades are now strategems. That is just completely bone headed for Throne's sake.
Hellebore wrote: My argument is that something that unreliable is not something that can be tactically critical.
it's opportunistic reactionary. Which is fine, but I don't think it had the tactical importance you ascribe in the game.
You accepted stunning a vehicle over killing it because that's what you got, not because that's what you were trying to get.
There's no advantage stunning a vehicle provides that destroying it didn't, except in 3rd glancing tables where you already knew you weren't going to be able to kill it, so you were hoping for the next best thing.
Being able to pivot when your desired result doesn't materialise is a great skill, but I don't think it reflects the likelyhood of vehicle stunning into the game.
I consider it tactically critical because it meant that I could accept a temporary "not-fire' from a vehicle and opt to move to the next target. Like, of course it would be nice if I just blew up every Leman Russ I pointed my guns at, but that wasn't going to happen at all. What the non-destroyed options provided was a way of effectively suppressing vehicles without committing more firepower to get a kill that turn, giving me a better chance at suppressing multiple targets. I compare that to nowadays where you can't suppress a vehicle, and in order to remove its counterfire you have to commit enough weaponry to fully kill it. What Shaken, Stun, Weapon Destroyed did was provide a way for the total firepower of your army to potentially shut down larger number of critical targets through suppression.
Like, if I had 9 Lascannons worth of firepower, and it took an average of 9 Lascannons to destroy a tank, but an average of 3 to prevent it from firing, I could maneuver to aim for stunning all three Russ's rather than just killing one and have the other two firing their horrible pie plates at my beloved Space Marines. And preferably through maneuvering and order of fire, allow for target adjustments as the results of the dice swung one way or another. Because you could choose to optimize to suppress more than you would likely kill I see it as providing a very critical tactical option.
For whatever reason I played a lot against Guard, Chaos and Orks (with looted vehicles) in 3rd and 4th edition. Managing opposing Ordinance was a big deal, so I was trying to leverage Stun/Shaken all the time.
aphyon wrote: in the old rules superheavy walkers cannot be locked in close combat by anything that is not also a superheavy walker or gargantuan creature. they can literally just stride away from anything else.
This is how it should be, I think, and not just for Superheavy but ALL such large units. I don't understand why the Keeper of Secrets or the Dreadnought stand in one place to fight against some Neophytes unless you do Fall Back, and lose turn for your important model. Seems like bad idea to bring this model if someone can just make it useless with crap chaff unit forever.
And yes, I understand tarpitting, but this is to deal with normal-sized unit that is good at CC. It make no sense for the 400-ton Dreadnought can't barge through this chaff, or the 18ft-tall Greater Daemon can't just laugh & step over this idiots who try to do fisticuffs with her.
The fact that monsters couldn't lose their legs and be immobile, or lose their guns and not be able to shoot, was also a problem of the AV era. There is nothing intrinsically different between a monster's legs and a vehicle's tracks (or robot legs) that mean damaging them would immobilise one and not the other.
Others have addressed your other points about the AV system in older editions so I'll just address this one. I think the impulse to treat mechanical things differently from biological things in the rules was sound. Mechanical things tend to break in ways that biological ones don't. Despite the generally more simulationist approach of the older editions, I don't think they felt that degrading MC capabilities in response to damage was something worth exploring. After all if they aren't doing it for a 3 wound chapter master why bother with a 4 wound carnifex?
OK I'll bite because I am curious wayniac. If 10th doesnt 'feel' like 40k to you, What does/should 40k 'feel' like? What makes 40k40k?
I would like to take a crack at this. I think it is a layered discussion that combines aspects of the lore, the game, GW, and the community.
I was not an Oldhammer player. While I've enjoyed 40k for a fair bit of time, I didn't start into the hobby proper until a year or two ago. That being said, I certainly feel some dissatisfaction going from my brief encounter in 8th to 9th edition codex and now to the least satisfying 10th. This prompted me to go back and take a look at the old editions of 40k. I do not have any rose tinted goggles for them because I am a newcomer, thus I had no experience with them prior.
I will be making comparisons between Oldhammer, Modernhammer (9th & 10th), and the MESBG.
From a lore standpoint, I think it is entirely fair to say that the Gathering Storm, the introduction of Primaris, the Indomitus, and the return of the Primarchs have considerably been at odds with the tone of the 41st Millennium. The lore books of the grinding, grimdark battlefields on countless worlds and billions of lives whose names shall not be remembered shifted suddenly to a focus upon a handful of characters. Introducing Guilliman was like adding Superman to WW1. Don't get me wrong, a Primarch's return is absolutely a massive event - but then the writers proceeded to have Guilliman go on to invade Nurgle's Garden, beat Mortarian, fight Magnus on the moon, and suddenly give the Imperium Space Marine Legion-level reinforcements after the loss of a single planet.
I think we can both agree this wildly changes the setting, if not from a perspective of scale or tone, at least from a perspective of.. well.. perspective. Individual battles or campaigns like Vraks are still there, but they are considerably dwarfed compared to what the new Regent of the Imperium is up to. Even as more Primarchs are added, the focus will just be upon these superhuman demigods that move and shake the entire setting. As far as I can tell, and at least certainly for myself, its a jarring change in the direction compared to what came before. Personally, I would much rather have had 100 stories like Dawn of War & Winter Assault than a single Gathering Storm that springboards changes to the entire setting.
From a gameplay standpoint, I believe that 40k as a tabletop game has lost its "soul" to some because it has shifted its focus and attention away from simulation of a battle and more towards being a game.
You might raise the counterpoint that 40k was never a good nor realistic depiction of a battle. I would agree with you, but I do not think the quality of that simulation detracts from the fact that this was the intent.
As I have read the older editions (3rd, 5th, 6th, and even a fan edition of Oldhammer), the consistent thing that I have noticed between those editions which is absent from newer editions of 40k is what I would like to dub "Fumbly Nerdstuff".
To define the term: Fumbly Nerdstuff is when a game takes a considerable amount of time to account for various factors and consequences of an action taken in a nerdy game (ie D&D or Warhammer) for the purposes of simulating a narrative of what happens before, during, and as a result of that action.
As an example: If I swing a sword and hit an Orc in an RPG, adding modifiers of my relative position to the Orc from heightened terrain to the location which I hit the Orc on his body to rolling a result on a table of what happens to the Orc when I hit him with my sword is an example of "Fumbly Nerdstuff". You can absolutely have way too much Fumbly Nerdstuff in a game, and I think everyone's tolerance level for Fumbly Nerdstuff is different.
Older editions of 40k definitely seem to be more interested in the battle you are playing be more of a battle than a game. There are numerous rules differentiating a walker from a tank to a biker and how they interact with movement or attacking. Vehicles react differently to being wounded than an infantry unit and a destroyed vehicle can become another piece of terrain on the map. Melee combat is described in terms of advancing or retreating lines. Movement and shooting has more direct interaction.
And I would not say this is unique to 40k, because I will draw upon what most consider to be GW's best game: MESBG. MESBG's entire rulebook is written in a way where the designers clearly want the player to be approaching the game as a simulated battle or a relived moment from the movies involving characters rather than just "minis on a board". The rules account for being knocked prone, being pushed and falling off ledges, jumping chasms. Combats are written in terms of duelists having a cinematic clash where one assumes parries and strikes. Arrows have to account for terrain and blocking enemy models getting in the way of the shot. There's a fair bit of this Fumbly Nerdstuff written for the intent of a simulated clash between two forces in Middle-Earth.
9th edition introduced, imo, one of the better ideas GW has had in 40k, the Crusade gameplay mode. The most fun I've had with 40k is writing up a story with a bunch of characters matched against an army that my friend made, tweaking the lists to give every unit a personality and a particular role in the army, and then simulating those engagements against my friend who has done the same, then the various post-game Crusade mechanics and written battle reports which followed - along with the story that created. However, Crusade is merely one aspect and largely handled outside of the actual battles.
10th edition by far has the least amount of this trait than any previous edition in 40k. Morale is barely considered beyond Battleshock, and Battleshock serves no real purpose in terms of storytelling but rather is a purely gameplay mechanic revolving around standing on objective circles. The objective circles themselves are largely interacted with in two ways: Standing on them or standing on them and doing "an action". Armies are not constructed by any real logical structure that would be sensible in a battle; you simply grab what you minis you want and put them on the table. Army loadouts are internally balanced and limited to what comes in the packaged GW box rather than encouraging players to kitbash, to build their particular squad in a different manner to alter what role they play on a battlefield, or other opportunities of creative expression. Yes, there is still some of that where I give a unit of Rubrics flamers or bolters or equip Legionnaires with boltguns or chainswords, but you have to admit that those options have been considerably reduced as editions have progressed and it is only getting more and more homogenized. A unit's role is largely predetermined and GW is doing more and more to reduce any potential deviation from that predetermined role.
All of that makes for a perfectly fine tournament game, but the heart of 40k was not as a tournament game. Tournaments always existed, sure, but you can't deny they have become more and more a central focus of the game's community. Tournament performance is more of a determining factor for an army's rules than it used to be. How much of a factor it is can be debated, but you cannot deny that this difference exists.
The game is moving further away from simulation and more into the realm of being purely a marketed game for wider accessibility. It is no longer about "a battle between the Red Corsairs and the Craftworld Drehanon over the fate of the planet Moreldain" and more so about "2k points CSM raider detachment vs Aeldari wraith detachment". The community itself has changed as well reflecting this change in focus.
That is what makes 40k40k and why the game has felt like it has less soul than it used to.
Tyran wrote: It wasn't worth exploring when a Carnifex was the biggest monster around.
It is very worth exploring when you are dealing with Tyrannofexes*, Riptides, Wraithknights, Greater Daemons, etc.
Older editions were simply not designed to manage the scope and scale creep monsters enjoyed since early 5th edition.
I thought they were all ok at 6 wounds. I see a wraithknight now at 18 wounds and it just seems like more of GW chasing their tail on lethality vs survivability. And I'm not impressed by the reduction in OC value and -1 to hit when it is reduced to 6 wounds or less. That's some very fine chrome there. Totally evokes the feeling that it lost an arm or leg!
The game is moving further away from simulation and more into the realm of being purely a marketed game for wider accessibility. It is no longer about "a battle between the Red Corsairs and the Craftworld Drehanon over the fate of the planet Moreldain" and more so about "2k points CSM raider detachment vs Aeldari wraith detachment". The community itself has changed as well reflecting this change in focus.
A lot in that previous post that I agree with, and the excerpt here really gets to the crux of it imo. 40K seems to have gone in a direction where it’s cranked up the bid to excise what my pals and I call the “Roleplay that gak” aspect of the game. There’ve always been people who approach the game more, or less, competitively, but certain aspects of 9E and 10E seem to be leaning harder and harder into catering exclusively to the tournament/competitive mindset and that in turn, in my experience, seems to be leading to it being increasingly the only way players are interested in approaching it, even those who aren’t anywhere near being high-end competitive types.
On another note, I’ve been lurking in this thread since its inception and, given that 10E was the push I needed to jump off the Official 40K churny-go-round and start cooking up my own homebrew rules, thanks to everyone whose comments on rules stuff in here has given me food for thought.
40k used to be:
WARgame
Even if it wasn't very "milsim" in the first place.
40k now is:
warGAME
Now it's just a glorified collectible card game with expensive cards that take a while to build & paint(hopefully before they're legended or otherwise deleted)
Havic1137 Post exalted and well explained. as a veteran i simply put it this way (effectively the same thing you explained just much shorter)
40K was always about epic battles in the 40K universe. forces are not supposed to be "balanced" for tournament play. they are supposed to be thematic and fit the way the armies fight in the universe. as such your job as the general during the actual game is to exploit your enemies weaknesses and play to your own armies fighting style/strength. so that both players have a fun time. in fact that last part used to be in GW rule books.
Which is why our oldhammer group while using 5th edition as the core rules set allows players to use whichever 3rd-7th ed codex they want as it best fits the feel of how their army should be in the setting. needless to say there is a high favorability for 3rd and 4th ed codexes.
On another note, I’ve been lurking in this thread since its inception and, given that 10E was the push I needed to jump off the Official 40K churny-go-round and start cooking up my own homebrew rules, thanks to everyone whose comments on rules stuff in here has given me food for thought.
Depending on what edition you want to base it off of both Mezmorki and myself have done a bunch of work in this area. his is based on 7th ed and mine is off 5th ed.
I mostly, or sort of half, agree with Havic1137's post. My view on modern 40k is that during 8th and 9th I much preferred its approach compared to older editions because I never thought those editions did a particularly good job of being a simulation and the way the rules and missions were constructed led to very static, boring games, oftentimes focused on camping in deployment zones and just tabling people. The strength of 8th and especially 9th is that they focused more on being capital G Games, rather than trying to present some sort of accurate simulation of warfare and were better for it, with the mission systems pulling a lot of weight in this respect.
The problem with assigning general dissatisfaction with the edition on how abstract it is because holding objective points is weird or actions are too vague ignores that you have people like me, who loved 9th edition but who increasingly cannot stand 10th. Many of these people are not old grognards either; I know a pretty large amount of people who started in 8th or 9th and who are basically abandoning 10th. These people range from relatively casual-narrative players to very comp-focused ones.
What it comes down to is that even though they were much more abstracted, 8th and 9th still allowed for loads of flavour and customisation. They were allowed to have depth in their mechanics and present crunchy rules systems for individual armies, that also did a good job of making many armies feel more varied from one another and allowed people to play into the fantasy of their chosen faction overall relatively well.
The core design ethos of 10th's indexes and codexes does not allow for that. There used to be more complicated factions who would make use of more in-depth or abstract rules. Now everyone gets 1 faction rule, and it's often something very bland. Ways to customise and play your characters in interesting ways are completely gone. I'm thinking about all the crazy silly ways I could run Farseers in 9th and how now they do One Thing only, and that Thing changes if they sit on a bike. For some reason. I love how the Supreme Ruler of the Necron Race, a being a staggering importance with an equally impressive and complex model gets to... choose One Thing to do at the start of your command phase and that is pretty much the sum-total of all of his rules. It is all so unfathomably BLAND.
GW basically heard the vocal minority of garagelord 1-game-every-3-month dadgamers complaining about "complexity," got spooked by some of 9th's crazy balance issues, and then massively overcorrected for 10th. It's a rules system designed for new players, and the aforementioned garagehammer players, and to its credit it does a good job of appealing to both. But if you're anyone else? I just don't see what the game has to offer currently.
The problem with assigning general dissatisfaction with the edition on how abstract it is because holding objective points is weird or actions are too vague ignores that you have people like me, who loved 9th edition but who increasingly cannot stand 10th. Many of these people are not old grognards either; I know a pretty large amount of people who started in 8th or 9th and who are basically abandoning 10th. These people range from relatively casual-narrative players to very comp-focused ones.
As an example, myself! I started turn of 9th edition, and have gone near completely to 3rd or HH. Only games of 10th I play at this point is when It's all I can get a game for. I played a bunch of 10th when it came out, as I was part of tabletop-sim crusade group. I think i have upwards of 60 games of 10th under my belt at this point? (I was unemployed at the time meaning I had large amounts of free time.) What struck me was how much 10th felt like it was fighting me at every turn. Eveything I wanted to do was bad. Build a skew list? Too bad, you over committed. Build a balanced list? Bad, that's what you get for trying to follow the old Force Org chart layout for units. Follow fluff or your own lore? Shame, should a run 3 Gladiators. On, and on, and on. Gameplay too. The strats were simultaneously fiddly and too broad. (Faction strats are specific at best and incredibly narrow at worst, generic strats are similar besides Grenades, smoke, overwatch and that one where you interrupt the melee order) The List building is simultaneously restrictive but also far to lose.
10th was just a hot mess and i quit playing it, and I found systems that were more of the best parts of 9th to me. 3rd, Heresy, Star Wars legion, etc.
So many of 10ths issues in my opinion, is that it's tying to distance itself from what it was while trying to retain it's old customer base. As harsh as it was, I think fantasy did it right by stripping off the bandaid and starting from scratch to make a new game. Customers that were still interested were retained, those that were moved on to Conquest, Kings of War, ASoIF, etc. 40k either needs to go back, or do the same. "Warhammer 43k" Where they skip forward a few years and basically restart the universe. I think it's the only way to prevent 40k from being in this weird limbo it's in now. I probably wouldn't follow it, but it would allow GW to actually do what they're tryng to do and not just string it's community along only harvesting ill-will for their IP.
Havoc is mostly pretty spot on, but i think where I might disagree with them is that I don't think the "Core rules" are fully to blame for sucking the soul out of the game. Instead I think it's the design of the units themselves and the way army building works, coupled with the scenario system. I think the game would be vastly improved if it brought back FOCs (hell, I'd go a step further and say to steal the FOC system used by FoW/Team Yankee) instead of this nebulous (up to 3 of any unit, 6 if it has battleline) nonsense we have now. Working within constraints and building around something that's tangibly representative of the doctrinal approach used by forces within the setting is fun. Saying "you can take whatever you want in almost whatever quantity you want at any time" is not - it results in bizzaro world army lists divorced entirely from anything that looks remotely representative of what would actually be fielded by these forces, unless a player goes out of their way to try to adhere to some semblance of a TOE.
Bring back points per model - a land raider Crusader holds 16 models, but I can't take a unit of 16 models to fill it, nor can I take a unit of 8 Terminators. I mean the option is there, but who in their right mind would pay for a 20 model unit of BT crusaders but only field 16 of them? Sure, I can take a unit of 6 termies and add characters to it - but at most you can only do 2 so you end up with unused capacity unless you have an unattached character. The best you can do really is a unit of 10 minis, a unit of 5, and a characte, but that's pretty limiting, especially in an army where there's a unit option that could in theory fill the transport on its own if you were only allowed to field it in such a way.
Likewise, as many probably recall I am not a fan of wargear points because they are arbitrary, trivial, aren't really a balancing mechanism like most believe, etc. but its clear that unlimited options don't work and just results in people min-maxing basically. My recommendation would be to have a separate wargear points budget, and have upgrades and weapon swaps paid for separately out of that. That way GW can maintain the streamlined beginner friendly system while preventing everyone from thing every possible option available without limitation.
I think that alone would add back some of that soul to the game that were all missing and make for a vastly improved experience for everyone.
The fact that monsters couldn't lose their legs and be immobile, or lose their guns and not be able to shoot, was also a problem of the AV era. There is nothing intrinsically different between a monster's legs and a vehicle's tracks (or robot legs) that mean damaging them would immobilise one and not the other.
Others have addressed your other points about the AV system in older editions so I'll just address this one. I think the impulse to treat mechanical things differently from biological things in the rules was sound. Mechanical things tend to break in ways that biological ones don't. Despite the generally more simulationist approach of the older editions, I don't think they felt that degrading MC capabilities in response to damage was something worth exploring. After all if they aren't doing it for a 3 wound chapter master why bother with a 4 wound carnifex?
Because they bothered with a dreadnought, sentinel and Killa Kan? Carnifex and wraithlord legs are entirely equivalent in that comparison.
A wraithlord and war walker were not only the same size but they literally carry the same weapons. From a background perspective they're also made of the same materials.
Mount a brightlance on a wraithlord and it's immune to being destroyed. Put the same weapons on a war walker and suddenly it can be. 'but wraithlords should be vehicles anyway ' was a cry at the time - showing how subjective the rules are to begin with.
The game doesn't use that many mechanics that the distinction is necessary. If one model can be designed to lose its gun or stop moving, so can something else that fills the equivalent space in another army. Argument from tradition, or simply personal preference shouldn't enter into it.
The better question there is "Should the Wraithlord have been a Monstrous Creature at all?" when, as you point out, it is both functionally and materially an Eldar Dreadnought (and, prior to 3rd, was literally an Eldar Dreadnought)...
as I recall the old WD articles about it, the decision was the Eldar already had walkers and while it should have been a walker too they did not want to have to very different in style in the same book
so it was given other rules to make it more different
Because they bothered with a dreadnought, sentinel and Killa Kan? Carnifex and wraithlord legs are entirely equivalent in that comparison.
I don't think they are. The dread, kan, and sentinel are crewed vehicles so they use the vehicle rules. The carnifex is a living creature, essentially a very large infantry model so it uses the same basic rules. The wraithlord is like a golem. It is a construct animated by the soul of a dead eldar. Deciding to not use vehicle rules for it seems entirely reasonable to me.
Still, I don't understand the particular hang up about monstrous creatures. Why not insist on the same degradation mechanic for all multiwound models? Like let's make it so that Eldrad loses one psychic power when he goes from 3 wounds (4th ed) to 2. And then when he gets to one wound he takes psychic tests at LD-2. Wouldn't that be flavorful and cool (and fair to the oppressed class of vehicles)?
The game doesn't use that many mechanics that the distinction is necessary. If one model can be designed to lose its gun or stop moving, so can something else that fills the equivalent space in another army. Argument from tradition, or simply personal preference shouldn't enter into it.
So every game that has ever treated vehicles differently from other classes of models is wrong?
With some luck, a lascannon could one-shot pretty much any vehicle. It couldn't one shot a Wraithknight regardless of how many 6s you rolled. While on the other hand of the spectrum, the Wraithknight will operate at 100% efficiency until the last wound is lost.
It is hilarious people argue for a more simulationist system and yet don't see the issue with MC rules. They argue for the importance of maneuvering and suppressing for counterplay and yet don't see the issue with a unit rules that didn't allow anything of that.
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Arschbombe wrote: Like let's make it so that Eldrad loses one psychic power when he goes from 3 wounds (4th ed) to 2. And then when he gets to one wound he takes psychic tests at LD-2. Wouldn't that be flavorful and cool (and fair to the oppressed class of vehicles)?
Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.
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Arschbombe wrote: I see a wraithknight now at 18 wounds and it just seems like more of GW chasing their tail on lethality vs survivability. And I'm not impressed by the reduction in OC value and -1 to hit when it is reduced to 6 wounds or less. That's some very fine chrome there. Totally evokes the feeling that it lost an arm or leg!
It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.
It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.
To Tyran's point with a few exceptions most MCs are susceptible to small arms fire from any direction in the older edition, most vehicles are not. As nearly all MCs are T6 (with the exception of an upgraded carnifex from 4th or a wraith lord). meaning that even a las gun can wound them on a 6+ all vehicles in the game had a minimum of 10 armor(some even higher) on the rear meaning you had to have a bolter or stronger weapon to hurt them. you also had to maneuver into position to get that sweet back shot. on the flip side-force weapons can one shot a MC.
It is really a trade off that makes them different from vehicles with different tactics employed to deal with them. it also gives AT weapons a defined role in the setting. as a general of the force you need to fight the right fight. bring the right tools to get the job done and put them into a position where they can. overall it enriches the setting and the feel of the game.
Yeah I thought the MC rules were reasonably balanced for the early editions (3-4th). If I had to go back though, I'd recalibrate MCs and introduce a Damage mechanic, which would open up more room for the bigger things that appeared in the later editions.
Once High AP spam really took off in 5th ed, the Classic MCs looked weak, encouraging an MC inflation with bigger and tougher MCs. But once you had those, classic anti-MC weapons like Lascannons got less and less useful, and it spiralled out of control.
A dreadnought or any other vehicle would get one shot by a 4 lascanon. Meanwhile a MC eldar dreadnought with its high T and multiple wounds would still be alive. From what I have seen in the old edition rules, MC were vastly superior to tanks or walkers.
Karol wrote: A dreadnought or any other vehicle would get one shot by a 4 lascanon. Meanwhile a MC eldar dreadnought with its high T and multiple wounds would still be alive. From what I have seen in the old edition rules, MC were vastly superior to tanks or walkers.
That statement doesn't take into account the AV of the vehicle in question. It was totally possible to have 4 Lascannons do nothing to a high AV target.
Like a Destroyed result from a successful Lascannon hit against AV 14 was 1/12ish. A Krak Missile? 1/36. And S7 and below couldn't scratch it.
Against a Wrathlord it's a sucessful Lascannon Wound on a 2/3 chance. A Krak Missile 50%. And you had to go down to S4 to be impervious.
aphyon wrote: To Tyran's point with a few exceptions most MCs are susceptible to small arms fire from any direction in the older edition, most vehicles are not. As nearly all MCs are T6 (with the exception of an upgraded carnifex from 4th or a wraith lord). meaning that even a las gun can wound them on a 6+ all vehicles in the game had a minimum of 10 armor(some even higher) on the rear meaning you had to have a bolter or stronger weapon to hurt them. you also had to maneuver into position to get that sweet back shot. on the flip side-force weapons can one shot a MC.
It is really a trade off that makes them different from vehicles with different tactics employed to deal with them. it also gives AT weapons a defined role in the setting. as a general of the force you need to fight the right fight. bring the right tools to get the job done and put them into a position where they can. overall it enriches the setting and the feel of the game.
Leaving all aside the very real balance issues that made MC rules dominate vehicles from 6th all the way into HH 2.0. It is a very gamey trade off, not a simulationist one.
To be blunt it comes kinda hypocritical that you want vehicles to have highly simulationist rules but are fine for MCs to only get to be blatantly gamey rules.
^I can see where that view comes from, but I do think damage to machines tends to manifest differently than damage to living creatures, and their reaction is different. Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically.
I get why degradation of MCs is a desired thing too, mind you. I just think it's fine that the two things are different.
Insectum7 wrote: ...Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically...
Regular machines might not, but lest we forget we are talking about 40k machines, some of which might be daemonically possessed and/or have self-healing metal surfaces (note: I don't recall the exact rules for daemonic possession/necrodermis, they may have had some special rule to account for that w/r/t damage). Besides, on the scale of the game itself, I don't think there's any point distinguishing between a shattered femur that will heal over time and a metal spar that will need external repair. A shot leg is a shot leg is a shot leg.
That said, I'm not averse to having a separate damage table or set of effects for MCs (there would necessarily be some overlap for things like damaged weapons and immobilization, ofc), and I wouldn't even mind MCs getting a chance to repair some of the damage naturally in later rounds to account for adrenaline/regeneration/etc, so long as it was balanced. For my part, the issue is that vehicles can be degraded/mission killed without dying whereas MCs are magically perfect until they very suddenly aren't.
Kanluwen wrote: Adrenaline isn't going to keep you swinging a severed limb as though it's still attached.
That's true, but I think there's many a hunter that can tell a story about an animal getting shot and running off before succuming to their wounds later. Likewise a number of war stories about similar occurences involving humans.
Insectum7 wrote: ...Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically...
Regular machines might not, but lest we forget we are talking about 40k machines, some of which might be daemonically possessed and/or have self-healing metal surfaces (note: I don't recall the exact rules for daemonic possession/necrodermis, they may have had some special rule to account for that w/r/t damage). Besides, on the scale of the game itself, I don't think there's any point distinguishing between a shattered femur that will heal over time and a metal spar that will need external repair. A shot leg is a shot leg is a shot leg.
That said, I'm not averse to having a separate damage table or set of effects for MCs (there would necessarily be some overlap for things like damaged weapons and immobilization, ofc), and I wouldn't even mind MCs getting a chance to repair some of the damage naturally in later rounds to account for adrenaline/regeneration/etc, so long as it was balanced. For my part, the issue is that vehicles can be degraded/mission killed without dying whereas MCs are magically perfect until they very suddenly aren't.
Back in the day those semi-magical or high tech vehicles specifically had rules to ignore or mitigate various damage effects. Like Daemonic Posession allowed a Vehicle to ignore Stunned/Shaken results, iirc.
Tyran wrote: Leaving all aside the very real balance issues that made MC rules dominate vehicles from 6th all the way into HH 2.0 . . .
Eh, I think this depends heavily on the "monster" in question.
I use quotation marks because, if we're honest, about 80% of the issues were with units that should by all rights have been vehicles but that were instead made into monsters. *cough* Dreadnight *cough* Riptide *cough*.
These units were what really changed the scope of monsters. Previously, while monsters seemed more resilient than vehicles in that they didn't suffer immobilised, weapon destroyed etc., they tended to be a lot more fragile in other ways. Tyranids, for example, had 3+ or 2+ armour saves but no invulnerable saves at all (I believe the best they could get for ages was a 6++ on the Hive Tyrant). This meant that even their 6-wound monsters were highly vulnerable to AP1-3 weapons.
The alternative was Daemons, which tended to be the reverse - only having invulnerable saves (so less vulnerable to high-AP weapons but more vulnerable to poor-AP, high RoF weapons.
But then we saw units like the Dreadknight, which was allowed a 2+ armour save *and* a 5++ invulnerable that could be further upgraded to 4++ with a psychic power.
It just seems like clear examples of designers not wanting their pet units to have any drawbacks or weaknesses.
Insectum7 wrote: Back in the day those semi-magical or high tech vehicles specifically had rules to ignore or mitigate various damage effects. Like Daemonic Posession allowed a Vehicle to ignore Stunned/Shaken results, iirc.
I'd say that this also became something of an issue because (IMO) the ability to ignore results on the damage table became far too widespread. Thus, the whole point of having those results (i.e. being able to take a vehicle out of commission for a turn without needing to outright destroy it) became moot. Instead, we ended up with damage tables where the first 3-4 results did absolutely nothing.
Dysartes wrote:The better question there is "Should the Wraithlord have been a Monstrous Creature at all?" when, as you point out, it is both functionally and materially an Eldar Dreadnought (and, prior to 3rd, was literally an Eldar Dreadnought)...
I literally discuss that. The argument proves just how subjective the application of different rule types is.
Tyran wrote:With some luck, a lascannon could one-shot pretty much any vehicle. It couldn't one shot a Wraithknight regardless of how many 6s you rolled. While on the other hand of the spectrum, the Wraithknight will operate at 100% efficiency until the last wound is lost.
It is hilarious people argue for a more simulationist system and yet don't see the issue with MC rules. They argue for the importance of maneuvering and suppressing for counterplay and yet don't see the issue with a unit rules that didn't allow anything of that.
You've made no argument except 'it wouldn't '. A a lacannon through the power source will kill a wraithknight.
In 2nd ed wraithlords could be struck that way no problem.
Because they bothered with a dreadnought, sentinel and Killa Kan? Carnifex and wraithlord legs are entirely equivalent in that comparison.
I don't think they are. The dread, kan, and sentinel are crewed vehicles so they use the vehicle rules. The carnifex is a living creature, essentially a very large infantry model so it uses the same basic rules. The wraithlord is like a golem. It is a construct animated by the soul of a dead eldar. Deciding to not use vehicle rules for it seems entirely reasonable to me.
Still, I don't understand the particular hang up about monstrous creatures. Why not insist on the same degradation mechanic for all multiwound models? Like let's make it so that Eldrad loses one psychic power when he goes from 3 wounds (4th ed) to 2. And then when he gets to one wound he takes psychic tests at LD-2. Wouldn't that be flavorful and cool (and fair to the oppressed class of vehicles)?
The game doesn't use that many mechanics that the distinction is necessary. If one model can be designed to lose its gun or stop moving, so can something else that fills the equivalent space in another army. Argument from tradition, or simply personal preference shouldn't enter into it.
So every game that has ever treated vehicles differently from other classes of models is wrong?
To your first, you're making a false equivalence based on a rule assumption we're specifically disagreeing on, so I reject your premise entirely.
A character is not the equivalent of a monster. Before you assign mechanics you decide how things should be treated, and a monster fills the same game niche as a vehicle/robot, not as an infantry character.
As to your 2nd point, you are again working from faulty premises. I never made any claim about any other game. The way 40k treated monsters and vehicles was not actually different enough to warrant different rules systems to cover them.
Every single argument I've seen so far on this is starting inside the premise that these rules should already be like this.
I am saying, step back, look at the units, there roles and functions and use that to determine the mechanic. There is no need to have special minigames inside the rules to deal with one type of unit. Or if there is, then it should apply to all things that fill that game role.
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Insectum7 wrote: ^I can see where that view comes from, but I do think damage to machines tends to manifest differently than damage to living creatures, and their reaction is different. Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically.
I get why degradation of MCs is a desired thing too, mind you. I just think it's fine that the two things are different.
At the scale we are discussing I don't think it is different. Vehicles have driven with smashed drive shafts, destroyed wheels, engines on fire etc.
You can justify anything in this subjective space.
It's also trivially easy to counter your position in a set of rules if you want to. Special critical effects simply represent a damage that can't be adrenaline-ignored, or any minor damage effect is where you lump the broken wheel/adrenaline ignoring effects.
While we're on the topic, I for one think 40k would be a more interesting game with unique systems for wounding vehicles, monsters, and infantry. A lot of us like the armor penetration table for crewed vehicles and a degrading statline feels more organic for giant creatures.
Of course with 40k there are outliers and exceptions and room for special rules but I still think it's worth doing for the fun factor. If properly balanced, Tyranid could have been the army of monsters and Tau the army of vehicles. (Battlesuits should be vehicles, obviously.) Necron could be a mixture and rely on their Living Metal special rule to stand out.
What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?
Dominar_Jameson_V wrote: While we're on the topic, I for one think 40k would be a more interesting game with unique systems for wounding vehicles, monsters, and infantry. A lot of us like the armor penetration table for crewed vehicles and a degrading statline feels more organic for giant creatures.
Of course with 40k there are outliers and exceptions and room for special rules but I still think it's worth doing for the fun factor. If properly balanced, Tyranid could have been the army of monsters and Tau the army of vehicles. (Battlesuits should be vehicles, obviously.) Necron could be a mixture and rely on their Living Metal special rule to stand out.
What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?
Then I'd argue they'd need to be a lot cheaper or would simply bot be taken as those are too harsh. It wound depend what you did to vehicles as well ofc, but I think you just birthed infantryhammer.
Insectum7 wrote: ^I can see where that view comes from, but I do think damage to machines tends to manifest differently than damage to living creatures, and their reaction is different. Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically.
I get why degradation of MCs is a desired thing too, mind you. I just think it's fine that the two things are different.
At the scale we are discussing I don't think it is different. Vehicles have driven with smashed drive shafts, destroyed wheels, engines on fire etc.
You can justify anything in this subjective space.
It's also trivially easy to counter your position in a set of rules if you want to. Special critical effects simply represent a damage that can't be adrenaline-ignored, or any minor damage effect is where you lump the broken wheel/adrenaline ignoring effects.
Not sure how a vehicle drives with a non-functioning drive shaft, but yeah miracles happen there too. Like that F-15 that flew back to base without a wing.
My point isn't that you can't homogenize the two, but rather that the separation of rules by unit type isn't necessarily just "gamey". Though many are high tech, many more of the core vehicles in 40K are very unsophisticated things trundling about, and having them feel different is meaningful. It's less about "game" and more about the character of the units. The tanks couldn't punch you but they could try to drive over or ram you. They left a big block of cover when they died. They exploded upon death. They got immobilized and you could maneuver away from their lodged firing arcs. You could flank them because they're more predictable in their movements than a big monster. Those are great "This is a tank" characteristics.
"That thing is a big animal, I have to engage it like X. That other thing is a big vehicle and I have to use different tactics Y." Or it's a 6th-7th edition Riptide and you mostly spend a lot of time swearing at the thing.
Dominar_Jameson_V wrote: What if the core rules had made degrading profile the standard for monsters, starting with half movement, -1 to hit, -1 to wound when at half health, and then d3", 6 to hit and 6 to wound at quarter health?
Then I'd argue they'd need to be a lot cheaper or would simply bot be taken as those are too harsh. It wound depend what you did to vehicles as well ofc, but I think you just birthed infantryhammer.
If that's too harsh then they could just be -1 to hit at half and then also -1 to wound at quarter health.
Or maybe save two-tier wounding for gargantuan monsters and all smaller creatures just suffer one disability at half health.
My point was that it was interesting to have vehicles use the armor pen test and it could have been balanced against wounded monsters.
I first got into 40k in 8th edition and was surprised it wasn't what I was expecting from a tabletop wargame. Then I looked into previous editions, saw blast templates and vehicle facings, and said, "oh, there's the wargame I was expecting."
All those systems may have been clunky or problematic, especially blast templates, but I think they should have been improved upon, not discarded.
And why is there still no friendly fire in 40k? "The risk of hitting your own troops is too high"?! Clearly the rules team did not ask the orks for their opinion on the matter.
I'd rather raise the point of why MC's or infantry was special to begin with. One of the better ways to speed up the game isn't to remove AV, but to just replace armor saves with AV and to hand out multi sided armor to monsters as well. The argument of 'well a monster isn't a vehicle' doesn't really make all that much sense when a lascannon punching a hole through the circulatory system of a Carnifex isn't all that much less lethal than the ammunition or nuclear reactor of a tank being struck and going kaboom. Plus if have AV and start ablatively rolling invuls like ward saves in fantasy so they actually mean a damn thing, the game should go at a quicker pace since penetration is just decided by the attacking player instead of the defending player also needing to roll, for some reason. Personally I'm all in favor of Guardsmen with AV 6 or 7 Flak armor, or AV 8 Mesh armor.
Wyzilla wrote: I'd rather raise the point of why MC's or infantry was special to begin with. One of the better ways to speed up the game isn't to remove AV, but to just replace armor saves with AV and to hand out multi sided armor to monsters as well. The argument of 'well a monster isn't a vehicle' doesn't really make all that much sense when a lascannon punching a hole through the circulatory system of a Carnifex isn't all that much less lethal than the ammunition or nuclear reactor of a tank being struck and going kaboom. Plus if have AV and start ablatively rolling invuls like ward saves in fantasy so they actually mean a damn thing, the game should go at a quicker pace since penetration is just decided by the attacking player instead of the defending player also needing to roll, for some reason. Personally I'm all in favor of Guardsmen with AV 6 or 7 Flak armor, or AV 8 Mesh armor.
So as a fun thought exercise, a lot of the bipedal nids have the most armour on their back, so this would facilitate either monsters that have to walk backwards and assumingly they'd gain weapon facings so could no longer shoot, or would be most vulnerable when performing their intended functions.
On another note, I’ve been lurking in this thread since its inception and, given that 10E was the push I needed to jump off the Official 40K churny-go-round and start cooking up my own homebrew rules, thanks to everyone whose comments on rules stuff in here has given me food for thought.
Depending on what edition you want to base it off of both Mezmorki and myself have done a bunch of work in this area. his is based on 7th ed and mine is off 5th ed.
Best of luck-build community and you will have a great time.
Cheers – I've clocked both of those and found them a useful source of stuff to consider. I'm currently in the first-draft stage and am kinda throwing together a cherry-picked mix of my favourite elements of 2nd–4th, 8th and 9th, with a unit activation mechanic loosely-based on – but heavily inspired by – X-Wing and some mad old gak I've just cobbled together myself.
Bosskelot wrote:
GW basically heard the vocal minority of garagelord 1-game-every-3-month dadgamers complaining about "complexity," got spooked by some of 9th's crazy balance issues, and then massively overcorrected for 10th. It's a rules system designed for new players, and the aforementioned garagehammer players, and to its credit it does a good job of appealing to both. But if you're anyone else? I just don't see what the game has to offer currently.
Interestingly, I'm very close to being part of the demographic you reference here – I played pretty regularly in 9E but found the amount of stuff to keep track of quite a pain – but I absolutely can't *stand* 10E. I would have been quite happy with Index 8E with a few of the core rules tweaks of 9E tbh (ones that specifically come to mind are detachment/army comp rules) and terrain rules that were more in-depth than 8 and less wildly convoluted than 9.
Personally, I feel like jettisoning the "3 ways to play" concept in favour of an attempted one-size-fits-all approach was a mistake and has kind of resulted in a worst-of-both-worlds situation, but I think the writing on the wall was there for that when Chapter Approved went from "here's some fun optional rules" in 8E to "constantly-churning tournament rules tweaks" in 9.
aphyon wrote: To Tyran's point with a few exceptions most MCs are susceptible to small arms fire from any direction in the older edition, most vehicles are not. As nearly all MCs are T6 (with the exception of an upgraded carnifex from 4th or a wraith lord). meaning that even a las gun can wound them on a 6+ all vehicles in the game had a minimum of 10 armor(some even higher) on the rear meaning you had to have a bolter or stronger weapon to hurt them. you also had to maneuver into position to get that sweet back shot. on the flip side-force weapons can one shot a MC.
It is really a trade off that makes them different from vehicles with different tactics employed to deal with them. it also gives AT weapons a defined role in the setting. as a general of the force you need to fight the right fight. bring the right tools to get the job done and put them into a position where they can. overall it enriches the setting and the feel of the game.
Leaving all aside the very real balance issues that made MC rules dominate vehicles from 6th all the way into HH 2.0. It is a very gamey trade off, not a simulationist one.
To be blunt it comes kinda hypocritical that you want vehicles to have highly simulationist rules but are fine for MCs to only get to be blatantly gamey rules.
The way i see it, your trying to turn MCs into vehicles and GW did the opposite turning vehicles into MCs and it didn't turn out well. in my experience it isn't enough of an issue in the older editions to need to make any changes.
Insectum7 wrote:
Kanluwen wrote: Adrenaline isn't going to keep you swinging a severed limb as though it's still attached.
That's true, but I think there's many a hunter that can tell a story about an animal getting shot and running off before succuming to their wounds later. Likewise a number of war stories about similar occurences involving humans.
Insectum7 wrote: ...Machines don't have adrenaline surges or keep functioning even though damage will prove fatal later, they tend to fail abruptly and mechanically...
Regular machines might not, but lest we forget we are talking about 40k machines, some of which might be daemonically possessed and/or have self-healing metal surfaces (note: I don't recall the exact rules for daemonic possession/necrodermis, they may have had some special rule to account for that w/r/t damage). Besides, on the scale of the game itself, I don't think there's any point distinguishing between a shattered femur that will heal over time and a metal spar that will need external repair. A shot leg is a shot leg is a shot leg.
That said, I'm not averse to having a separate damage table or set of effects for MCs (there would necessarily be some overlap for things like damaged weapons and immobilization, ofc), and I wouldn't even mind MCs getting a chance to repair some of the damage naturally in later rounds to account for adrenaline/regeneration/etc, so long as it was balanced. For my part, the issue is that vehicles can be degraded/mission killed without dying whereas MCs are magically perfect until they very suddenly aren't.
Back in the day those semi-magical or high tech vehicles specifically had rules to ignore or mitigate various damage effects. Like Daemonic Posession allowed a Vehicle to ignore Stunned/Shaken results, iirc.
3.5 chaos codex. it made chaos vehicles super durable but also expensive- mutated hull=+1 AV to all facing up to 14, parasitic possession=regrow immobilized results and destroyed weapons on a 4+, but you had to give up shooting the turn it makes the attempt. and demonic possession as noted previously, of course none of that helps against being dead from a penetrating destroyed result.
The past few pages of the thread have been a bit odd to me.
People write about how much they miss being able to suppress vehicles, without remembering what it felt like being suppressed.
It's going to be a great game, I've got 5 vehicles I'm really proud of can easily become- Well, first turn one was destroyed by a single penetrating hit, two were prevented from moving, one lost its main gun for the rest of the game- also in some cases, the result of single penetrating hits.
Agreed, the ability to just nullify a tank for a whole turn is huge in a game that only has at most around 6 turns and of those turns 2-4 are going to be the big impact ones. so that's 3 turns where things really count. Get shaken two or three times on a tank and its basically sat there for half the game doing nothing.
Degrading profiles is far more fun because the unit remains viable - it can DO something. It can fire back or limp into hiding or at least respond to the attack.
I remember having my tanks stunned. I'll take that over the height of 9th Ed lethality, where half of them were gone after turn one, any day.
Having your units temporarily incapacitated may be a '''feels bad''', but at some point you need to accept that this is a wargame where your units will take damage and are not guaranteed a chance to shine before they are mission killed. At least when your tanks were suppressed for a turn, they might do something useful next turn.
Besides, if you're upset because IGOUGO alpha striking is incapacitating all your tanks before you have a chance to do anything, or because the entire game boils down to just two or three turns, your complaint isn't really about the existence of damage effects. They're just exposing a deeper problem.
catbarf wrote: I remember having my tanks stunned. I'll take that over the height of 9th Ed lethality, where half of them were gone after turn one, any day.
The is the two aren't mutually exclusive. We can agree that the height of insane lethality where an alpha strike can easily wipe out half an army in a single turn; and that shaking tanks into a useless state - are both BAD things.
I think tank shock would be more fun if you have a lot more tanks on the field and perhaps if the game had a lot more turns. I just don't feel that 40K offers either of those options; with the former only being a potential if you take a massive tank core in some armies.
GMGs DA Codex supplement review has some good analysis on the topic, starts around 37:20 with summing ip his thoughts on the Codex but starts going into a broader analysis and critique around 38:30.
Ironically, this really brought me back to late 4th and early 5th edition which had the same issues. Starting with the 4th edition Dark Angels (!) book GW moved in the direction of blandness and simplification with its Codex design (ie units and army construction) ostensibly because Jervis Johnsons kid wasn't smart enough to figure out how to build an army. Ashs comments reminded me of that era of the game a lot, and it seeks the pendulum really has swung back in that direction internally. Good news is, we only have to wait another 2.5 years for that to be resolved probably.
PenitentJake wrote: People write about how much they miss being able to suppress vehicles, without remembering what it felt like being suppressed.
It's going to be a great game, I've got 5 vehicles I'm really proud of can easily become- Well, first turn one was destroyed by a single penetrating hit, two were prevented from moving, one lost its main gun for the rest of the game- also in some cases, the result of single penetrating hits.
Being suppressed wasn't fun, sure. But nor was having your vehicles blown out from under you, which is all we've been offered instead.
If you want to look for intermediaries, perhaps instead of shaken/stunned, damage could be a cumulative effect. e.g. each 'wound' could give -3M, -1WS/BS (maybe also +1 on the damage table, if one is used).
Still a blow but you need 2-3 such results to fully most vehicles, rather than just 1. If you get a certain number of them, you get an additional effect similar to weapon destroyed or immobilised (e.g. losing a weapon, having movement permanently halved). More still and a vehicle is destroyed.
Vehicles could shake some or all wounds (but not weapon destroyed/crippled movement) at the end of their turn.
(Obviously this would be based on the old AV system, not the current wounding system.)
I'm just spitballing, obviously, but I'm trying to think of how to maintain the spirit while making the mechanics less all-or-nothing.
What frustrated me the most in those days wasn't so much the immobilization, but the frequency with which it was inflicted by single penetrating hits.
When 3 units focus fire to bring down a vehicle, sure it sucks to lose the vehicle. But when the first die a dude roles blows up your vehicle or makes it's primary weapon useless... That's what used to get me.
It's true though that both systems have advantages and disadvantages, and like so many of the things we discuss here, it is a matter of personal taste.
Vipoid's suggesting a fusion of the two systems has a lot of potential.
I still haven't played 10th; it's coming soon, but I haven't done it yet. Two big work projects should be coming off my plate this week, and that's going to be a game changer for me.
Vehicle Damage Table D6 - Result
1 - Nothing happens
2 - Nothing happens
3 - Temporary weapon damage - The vehicle suffers a -1 to hit roll penalty. Stacks with itself. Lasts until the end of the model's next activation. Also applies to passengers.
4 - Temporary engine damage - The vehicle reduces its movement speed by 1/3 of the starting profile value. Stacks with itself and Engine damage. Completely immobilised vehicles can’t move anymore. Lasts until the end of the model's next activation. Also applies to passengers.
5 - Weapon destroyed - The owner of the vehicle chooses a weapon which cannot be used for the rest of the game. If all weapons are destroyed already, the vehicle instead suffers a “Structural damage” result.
6 - Engine damage - The vehicle reduces its movement speed by 1/3 of the starting profile value for the rest of the game. Completely immobilised vehicles can’t move anymore. If the movement speed cannot be reduced any further, the vehicle instead suffers a Structural damage result.
7 - Structural damage - The vehicle loses 1 Hull point.
8 - Heavy structural damage - The vehicle loses 1 Hull point. Roll one more time on the vehicle damage chart. The second roll does not benefit from the +2 bonus from a penetrating hit.
A glancing hit means your roll does not get any bonus on the table apart from the "Anti-Tank" value of your weapon.
A penetrating hit means your rolls gets a bonus of +2 on the table in addition to your "Anti-Tank" value for the first roll.
Vehicles in cover reduce the "Anti-Tank" value (or the penetration bonus) by 1, to a minimum of 1.
We use the old AV values. Front 10-11 gets 2 Hull points. Front 12-13 gets 3 Hull points. Front 14 gets 4 Hull points.
A missile launcher got "Anti-Tank 1", a lascannon got "Anti-Tank 2" and a multi-melta in melta range got "Anti-Tank 3".
"Additional armor" makes you ignore the first temporary damage result each round.
Works very well in practice in a system with alternate activation.
Overread wrote:The is the two aren't mutually exclusive. We can agree that the height of insane lethality where an alpha strike can easily wipe out half an army in a single turn; and that shaking tanks into a useless state - are both BAD things.
Yes, but the presence of temporarily incapacitating effects allows the designers to strike a middle ground- vehicles can be made very tough to permanently eliminate, but much easier to stun.
It was extremely difficult to kill an AV14 vehicle when an autocannon couldn't even scratch it and the best a missile launcher could do is glance. That's changed, and while 10th makes vehicles an awful lot tougher than they were in 9th, the susceptibility to being whittled down by mid-strength firepower is an unavoidable result of how vehicles are now modeled. Either they die when you throw enough firepower at them, or they're too hard to kill- there's no incremental erosion of capability, especially when damage effects have been watered down to little more than -1 to hit when it's about to die.
So yes, I genuinely much prefer being suppressed- with the ability to redeploy my forces to cover the stunned vehicle and/or deal with anti-armor threats, to ensure that it's back up next turn- over the more straightforwardly bland implementation of numbers popping out the top of the Leman Russ until it suffers critical existence failure like a 90s RTS.
I would also go so far as to extend that principle to the rest of the game, where having my troops take 25% casualties and flee from a failed morale test was more interesting than having them take 50% casualties, flub a Battleshock, and suffer nothing of consequence. Interim effects of fire beyond a binary fine/dead allows the game to be less lethal while still having stuff actually happen. This isn't rose-tinted glasses. I still play Oldhammer as well as more modern games that have those sorts of effects.
Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.
No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.
It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.
It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.
40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.
On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.
I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?
Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.
No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.
It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.
It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.
40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.
On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.
I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?
Not better per se, but fairer.
PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).
Overread wrote: Agreed, the ability to just nullify a tank for a whole turn is huge in a game that only has at most around 6 turns and of those turns 2-4 are going to be the big impact ones. so that's 3 turns where things really count. Get shaken two or three times on a tank and its basically sat there for half the game doing nothing.
Degrading profiles is far more fun because the unit remains viable - it can DO something. It can fire back or limp into hiding or at least respond to the attack.
We fixed that problem by importing snap fire into 5th ed from 6th and 7th so that they can at least contribute something while being stunned. so it is something akin to temporary degradation to BS1 without being a permanent effect. so the vehicle is still a threat to be dealt with next turn.
waefre_1 wrote: I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).
It'll've been during whichever edition introduced Hull Points - suddenly vehicles (in general) had few "wounds", but no save, and still had a damage table on top. Was the start of when mid-range high-ROF weapons started to become reliable vehicle killers, outside of the few bricks with AV14 all around.
catbarf wrote: I would also go so far as to extend that principle to the rest of the game, where having my troops take 25% casualties and flee from a failed morale test was more interesting than having them take 50% casualties, flub a Battleshock, and suffer nothing of consequence. Interim effects of fire beyond a binary fine/dead allows the game to be less lethal while still having stuff actually happen. This isn't rose-tinted glasses. I still play Oldhammer as well as more modern games that have those sorts of effects.
The sad thing is that effects like Pinning exist in 10th. However, rather than being a USR, it's a bespoke special rule for the Night Spinner (and I think the Death Jester?).
Seems a massive waste of an idea.
I'd also agree that units running away was more interesting and thematic than spontaneously combusting (8th-9th) or being worse at holding objectives (10th).
Eldrad lost a wound to a lascannon and he died because instant death.
No, he didn't. The lascannon wound gets allocated to a Guardian/Dire Avenger/Warlock hanging out the the 'Drad.
It isn't trying to be a simulationist ruleset and yet it still does more than the supposedly simulationist oldhammer.
It really highlights how incomplete MC rules were in an otherwise "simulationist" game.
40k was not designed in a vacuum. The designers had exposure to other game systems. With regard to armored vehicles the approach always started with "how do we model damage on an armored vehicle?" and the answer is always "well, first, you have to penetrate the armor." Entity level games like Squad Leader, Tobruk, GHQ Micro Armor, the Yaquinto games (Armor, Panzer, 88), FASA's Centurion all took this approach with varying levels of fidelity in modeling effects behind the armor. So it was natural that 40k followed suit. And it worked well for a couple of decades until GW screwed it up a little in 5th with the GK baby carrier followed by a lot with the Wraithknight and Riptide in 6th because the hull point mechanic made vehicle a much worse choice than an MC for a unit profile. I think the armor penetration approach is still fundamentally valid.
On the monster side, I think the designers were influenced by things like D&D where monsters had lots of hit points and you had to reduce them to zero to kill them and there weren't any steps in between full health and dead. In 40k the same system was fine for multiple editions. I don't recall any arguments for MC damage tables back in the day. But now apparently there was always a need.
I think it's ironic that the solution to MC being more resilient than vehicles in 6th (and maybe 7th) was to ditch vehicles entirely and make everything a monstrous creature in 8th. It's a typically sloppy GW fix. A Baal Predator has 11 "wounds" and the only thing that happens to it in a game is that it goes -1 to hit after losing 7 "wounds." It never loses firepower, never gets immobilized, never gets stuck facing the wrong way. And you all think that's better?
Some thoughts:
40k wasn't originally designed in a vacuum, but it often feels like the current design studio haven't played another wargame in years or are only tangentially familiar with competitor games.
The armor penetration system of yore was just not good game design as it used a bespoke and separate resolution mechanics from the standard "roll to wound" utilized by the majority of models in the game, and did so by attempting to co-opt the same stat used to engage meaty fleshbags. It might have been a good abstract simulation in terms of helping forge narratives, and there's certainly merit to that, but it created many problems from a mechanical standpoint and pushed the system to its breaking limit by making it difficult to balance weapon statlines and capabilities against different types of targets. The emergence of monstrous creatures superiority was a consequrnce of that and was a longstanding and obvious potential issue from pretty early on, but wasn't as apparent to many due to the relative rarity of MCs until 4th/5th edition when they started becoming more and more accessible to more and more armies. That's not to say that it couldn't work or continue to be used without tweaks, just that as it existed at the time it was pretty fundamentally flawed and poorly implemented.
PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).
As already noted, that was 6th edition when hull points were introduced as a corrective to the vehicle dominance in 5th. As I understand it the story goes like this:
3rd. Rhino rush is a thing.
4th. As a corrective to Rhino rush, destroyed transports can entangle their passengers and can kill them all outright with a vehicle annihilated result. There are three damage tables: glancing, penetrating, and ordnance penetrating. Glances can destroy vehicles. Any penetration of a transport will cause passengers to disembark.
5th. One damage table. Glances resolve at -2 so can no longer destroy vehicles. Best they can do is immobilize. Vehicles can potentially survive every hit they take. Penetrations that do not destroy a transport will not cause passengers to get out.
6th. As a corrective to the resilient parking lots of 5th, hull points are introduced. Glances remove a hull point. So a Rhino or a dreadnought dies after three glances. Sentinels and War Walkers go down after 2. Penetrations remove a hull point and roll on the damage table. AP2 adds +1. AP1 adds +2 to the roll. Wraithknight and Riptide are introduced as MC when they probably should have been vehicles. Vehicle rules are too punishing for the new shiny centerpiece models so MC it is.
7th. Not sure what changes were made in 7th.
8th. Removes the AV system entirely. And there was much rejoicing.
PS - While I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, I do recall a fair amount of discontent from treadheads that their vehicles could be stunned or one-shot right away when most/all MCs had to be taken down one single wound at a time unless you could Instant Death them (reasonable enough when it came to T4, but once you hit T5 you needed to throw S10 at it before it could be ID'd and depending on your army that could be pretty hard to pull off. Also, ID could be outright ignored by Eternal Warrior, so you weren't even guaranteed that as an option). I suspect the gripes ticked up pretty hard at the switchover to 6e, but I want to say it was still present in 5e (and probably before that, but I got into 40k in 2006 so I wouldn't have seen it before then).
As already noted, that was 6th edition when hull points were introduced as a corrective to the vehicle dominance in 5th. As I understand it the story goes like this:
3rd. Rhino rush is a thing.
4th. As a corrective to Rhino rush, destroyed transports can entangle their passengers and can kill them all outright with a vehicle annihilated result. There are three damage tables: glancing, penetrating, and ordnance penetrating. Glances can destroy vehicles. Any penetration of a transport will cause passengers to disembark.
5th. One damage table. Glances resolve at -2 so can no longer destroy vehicles. Best they can do is immobilize. Vehicles can potentially survive every hit they take. Penetrations that do not destroy a transport will not cause passengers to get out.
6th. As a corrective to the resilient parking lots of 5th, hull points are introduced. Glances remove a hull point. So a Rhino or a dreadnought dies after three glances. Sentinels and War Walkers go down after 2. Penetrations remove a hull point and roll on the damage table. AP2 adds +1. AP1 adds +2 to the roll. Wraithknight and Riptide are introduced as MC when they probably should have been vehicles. Vehicle rules are too punishing for the new shiny centerpiece models so MC it is.
7th. Not sure what changes were made in 7th.
8th. Removes the AV system entirely. And there was much rejoicing.
Decent rundown. Imo 4th ed was the best. The only thing I would adjust is the auto-Pinning mechanic was a little too harsh. If it was a less binary suppression sort of thing that would have been better.
Reading that summary, the thought occurs to me that distinguishing vehicles from MCs (with regards to wraithknights and riptides) is a bit pointless, as what defines a vehicle (to me) is that it's crewed - but if you dont really track the status of the crew in a meaningful way or allow them to dismount, then there's no point treating them as anything different than any other model or a monstrous creature, etc. As such, "vehicles" really stopped being conceptually relevant as a distinct category after 2nd edition. The abstract crew shaken/stunned (and presumably also immobilized/weapon destroyed results, if you think about them in terms incapacitating drivers and gunners) were a clever way of streamlining and simplifying that in some respects, but in other ways were just an unnecessary vestigial artifact that had outlasted any reason for them to continue existing in the face of other changes.
You weren't really tracking crew status at that point, you were tracking vehicle status in an arbitrary and opaque matter which pretended to care about the crew inside without actually delivering any meaningful verisimilitude pertaining to crewed weapon systems. Shaken and stunned results became frighteningly common and basically the default outcome for most attempts at engaging a vehicle, despite the fact that in the real world crew incapacitation (crew shaken/stunned) and/or losses (theoretical possibility for immobilized/weapon destroyed) in modern armored combat vehicles are relatively rare and often the result of a mission kill or hard kill. Spall liners and composite armors have limited the risk to crew from glancing hits on even very lightly armored vehicles and largely reduced the risk to penetrative damage, and even if they didn't a glance from small arms (a very common occurrence in 3rd-7th) wasn't going to produce any such effects that would harm the crew.
Likewise the threshold of lethality needed to engage a vehicle was dramatically lowered as armor values dropped from being as high as 26-28 down to 10-14, while the penetrative capabilities of weapons arguably increased in relative terms - a heavy bolter went from 5+d6+d4 to 5+d6, but the front armor value of a rhino went from 20 to 11 (yes in 2nd edition rhinos had track AV 15 and weapon AV 12, but in total you had a 7.64% chance of damaging a rhino hit by a heavy bolter in 2nd ed, vs a 16.67% chance in 3rd/4th - the probability more than doubled). Add to this that there was no means by which crew could be targeted or harmed directly (not even open topped vehicles) nor did weapons offer the potential of doing direct damage to the crew (I like the example of warp spiders death spinners being able to shoot inside a vehicle and kill the crew without damaging the vehicle), to my recollection weapons that allowed you to auto shake/stun/immobilize/weapon destroy a vehicle were a rarity to represent that capability were an absolute rarity if they existed at all.
So the "crewed" nature of the vehicles truly had no real mechanical or gameplay relevance any longer and the shoehorned attempt of inclusion was actually the downfall of the system as it resulted in vehicles being expensive and maybe not "fragile", but difficult to get value out of because they were very easily mitigated and managed (ie - "soft killed") by an opponent. Higher armor values and/or separate strength/ap stats for antivehicle attacks could have mitigated this alongside a modification to the glancing hit table such that say a 1-4 produced no effect, a 5 shook, and a 6 stunned - a damage result modifier stat could have been used to render small arms incapable of shaking or stunning on a glancing while increasing the likelihood of a glanced battle cannon of spalling the crew or immobilizing/destroying weapons (say on a result of a 7/8 such that only certain weapons could achieve this).
Even then though, without making "crew" anything more than a narrative byword to describe what are actually vehicle statuses, there would be no point to really distinguishing a vehicle from a monstrous creature. If a carrier having an arm or leg shot off isn't worth tracking, or losing a turn because it's wincing in pain from taking a powerful to the ribs, then there's no point holding vehicles to that same level of detail. Likewise if you aren't having your infantry suffer amputations or meaningful psychology, then why bother holding vehicles to an arbitrary standard of greater detail? The remedy then is to give vehicles crew points which are used to purchase actions (movement, attacks, special actions) - each shaken result then becomes -1 crew point for the duration of the turn, stunned a -1 crew point until a successful ld check is made to get them back into operation (or something), and crew killed is a permanent -1 crew for the duration of the game, or until the vehicle is recrewed from another vehicle (or infantry trained in vehicle operations for marine style flavor). Now crew actually matters and there's a point to differentiating vehicles from a monstrous creature.
I guess any involvement in this conversation is a bit dishonest, as I'm very much in the camp of "they got rid of AV and there was much rejoicing". I don't think 40k has ever really been stimulatory, and I think that's just confusing mechanics that were in existence for nearly 2 decades for trying to be a simulation.
But... with that said, I think any historic run down has to consider points. The issue in 5th was partly that they tuned up the rules, while vehicles were still so cheap. I.E. Rhinos were 50 points in 3rd. I think in 4th (certainly 5th) they were down to 35. Blowing up individual vehicles in 5th wasn't that hard. Although, the nature of the table meant vehicles did have an effective invul save, which I think a lot of people didn't like. The issue was that you could bring a parking lot without it really impacting the rest of your army. 6 Rhinos for instance is only about 15% of a 1500 point army.
Leafblower was obnoxious - but I don't remember killing it being the issue. It was more that if they went first, they were odds on to delete a large section of your army. Especially if it was slow and infantry based. Arguably it was better at higher points levels where you had to pile your army up into good targets for pie plates.
I never remember there being a problem with AV in 2nd and 3rd (and 4th? IIRC hull points were added in 5th?). Not saying there wasn't, but it certainly didn't seem like anyone had an issue with getting lucky/unlucky and oneshotting a Predator or Leman Russ or whatever.
hull points were 6th, and no even when people complain about 5th being a parking lot, there was plenty of AT weapons to counter balance it. it was never a problem to kill anything short of AV 14 from range. the latter being beaten by outflanking side armor or getting close with melta or assaulting it.
aphyon wrote: hull points were 6th, and no even when people complain about 5th being a parking lot, there was plenty of AT weapons to counter balance it. it was never a problem to kill anything short of AV 14 from range. the latter being beaten by outflanking side armor or getting close with melta or assaulting it.
One aspect was the damage tables.
In 6th-7th, they made it increasingly difficult to get 'vehicle destroyed' results (IIRC, you couldn't destroy a vehicle on a glancing hit without AP1).
This was presumably intended to balance Hull Points. However, they neglected that not all armies had Autocannons, Shuriken Cannons etc, to turn to instead. Dark Eldar, for example, had Dark Lances and . . . more Dark Lances. These were the worst of both worlds, having neither the strength or AP to consistently penetrate vehicles and get destroyed results, nor the rate of fire to efficiently strip Hull Points.
As an aside, this is another reason why Corsairs in 7th felt like 'Dark Eldar: Good Version' - because, as well as the standard Dark Lances, they could also bring Fusion Guns (for more reliable penetration at close range) and/or Shuriken Cannons and Scatter Lasers (for stripping hull points from light vehicles).
I feel this is the rub though.
As the DE player, you always felt your dark lances didn't do anything. Failed to penetrate or when you do its crew shaken and why bother etc. Opponents meanwhile remembered the first short being a hit, rolling a 5 or 6 for a pen and then another 6 for vehicle explodes on their brand new Land Raider.
aphyon wrote: hull points were 6th, and no even when people complain about 5th being a parking lot, there was plenty of AT weapons to counter balance it. it was never a problem to kill anything short of AV 14 from range. the latter being beaten by outflanking side armor or getting close with melta or assaulting it.
One aspect was the damage tables.
In 6th-7th, they made it increasingly difficult to get 'vehicle destroyed' results (IIRC, you couldn't destroy a vehicle on a glancing hit without AP1).
This was presumably intended to balance Hull Points. However, they neglected that not all armies had Autocannons, Shuriken Cannons etc, to turn to instead. Dark Eldar, for example, had Dark Lances and . . . more Dark Lances. These were the worst of both worlds, having neither the strength or AP to consistently penetrate vehicles and get destroyed results, nor the rate of fire to efficiently strip Hull Points.
As an aside, this is another reason why Corsairs in 7th felt like 'Dark Eldar: Good Version' - because, as well as the standard Dark Lances, they could also bring Fusion Guns (for more reliable penetration at close range) and/or Shuriken Cannons and Scatter Lasers (for stripping hull points from light vehicles).
I mean they could strap blasters or dark lances to nearly anything and they were one of the few armies with reasonable access to haywire early and whilst I'm not saying they were good or anything heat lances were a available as well. It's not like dark lances were the only option or hard to come across.
I'd say the old facings and AP system and penetration mechanics just don't work for the scale of 40k anymore. If they made an inbetween system with 500-1250 points, by all means, throw in all those simulationist rules and an activation system to deepen the game. Facings for everyone, not just vehicles. Suppression, crossfire and a table for shokk attack guns beaming snotlings into terminators. But 2000+ points with superheavies and Flyers and giant monsters? We don’t really need that. Apokalypse with additional special rules and a little detail on squad equipment is/ would be enough. If they got the stratagem system to work finally as a way of breaking up IGOUGO and not just as a "kill even betterer" mechanic it'd be good enough for me.
Apocalypse doesn't use IGOUGO. Epic has both an alternating activation system and crossfire mechanics. Team Yankee/FOW have varying armor values.
These concepts aren't off-limits to large-scale games. It's bad, chrome-focused, overly fiddly implementation that's unsuitable for large-scale games. As an example- figuring out 90-degree armor quadrants was always a pain, but figuring out a simple front/back by drawing a line across the front of the vehicle is not.
If you want to streamline for the current scale of 40K, it's the amount of game-critical data that is unit-specific and cannot be reasonably inferred from the models that represents a greater speed-of-play burden than effects-focused, staple wargame mechanics.
Wayniac wrote: I never remember there being a problem with AV in 2nd and 3rd (and 4th? IIRC hull points were added in 5th?). Not saying there wasn't, but it certainly didn't seem like anyone had an issue with getting lucky/unlucky and oneshotting a Predator or Leman Russ or whatever.
I mean, what you just described was a problem. You could "get lucky" and one-shot a predator or leman russ, but you couldn't "get lucky" and one-shot a carnifex or a wraithlord.
This was presumably intended to balance Hull Points. However, they neglected that not all armies had Autocannons, Shuriken Cannons etc, to turn to instead. Dark Eldar, for example, had Dark Lances and . . . more Dark Lances. These were the worst of both worlds, having neither the strength or AP to consistently penetrate vehicles and get destroyed results, nor the rate of fire to efficiently strip Hull Points.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Dark Lances were S8 and reduced target AV to 12 - lances always had a 33% chance of scoring a penetrating hit against almost every vehicle in the game (there were a handful of exceptions that had immunity to the lance rule). Likewise heat lances (iirc) were S6 AP1 with 2d6 armor penetration and the lance rule (AV12 max) which made them pretty effective at penetrating many targets, but also gave them a good chance of destroying vehicles on a glance in the rare instance where they didn't just wreck them outright. IIRC Blasters also had a lot of game as AT weapons, and they were cheap and plentiful and a dime a dozen in every DE list. And then there was also plenty of haywire access as well.
Most factions had access to meltaguns or equivalents that gave them s8 + 2d6 armor pen in pretty sufficient quantities. What often hurt more was a lack of true long-range "reach out and touch someone" weapons with high S and low AP. Many factions basically had to rely on lascannons if they weren't spamming meltagun type weapons, which couldn't be taken in significant enough quantities and were only really reliable to AV12. Or they were like tyranids and just wrecked vehicles by throwing a bunch of S8/9/10 attacks at them in melee which auto-hit rear armor, which made them absolutely devastating against everything except a handful of vehicles like land raiders that were AV14 all around. Even most walkers topped out at AV12 front armor, so there was limited advantage to their supposed benefit of using their front armor in melee.
catbarf wrote: Apocalypse doesn't use IGOUGO. Epic has both an alternating activation system and crossfire mechanics. Team Yankee/FOW have varying armor values.
These concepts aren't off-limits to large-scale games. It's bad, chrome-focused, overly fiddly implementation that's unsuitable for large-scale games. As an example- figuring out 90-degree armor quadrants was always a pain, but figuring out a simple front/back by drawing a line across the front of the vehicle is not.
If you want to streamline for the current scale of 40K, it's the amount of game-critical data that is unit-specific and cannot be reasonably inferred from the models that represents a greater speed-of-play burden than effects-focused, staple wargame mechanics.
I know all of that. My post was written in a hurry so not all that clear. What I meant to say was I could see 40K going two different ways. Either a more detailed Apokalypse or a deeper 10th edition with improved stratagem mechanics and morale rules. (HH 2.0 is also interesting because of its reaction mechanics improving the stale IGOUGO but I haven't gotten around to read these rules in detail so I don’t have a qualified opinion on them).
Either way I'm fine with the reduction of the bloated vehicle rules I experienced in 6th and 7th that didn't serve a purpose but to make vehicles bad and the game slower.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Dark Lances were S8 and reduced target AV to 12 - lances always had a 33% chance of scoring a penetrating hit against almost every vehicle in the game (there were a handful of exceptions that had immunity to the lance rule).
Which sounds great until you realise that 90% of the vehicles in the game are already AV12 or lower.
And then you remember that this is objectively inferior to a Lascannon's S9 against almost every target (the Lascannon is only worse against AV14).
Moreover, 33% penetration rate is horrible for an anti-vehicle weapon that relies on penetration to be remotely effective.
In 7th, it would take 27 Dark Lance shots (1125pts of Ravagers) to average a single 'Vehicle Destroyed' result on a 65pt Chimera.
(Sorry, this is something of a bugbear for me - I hate the degree to which the Lance rule was lauded, despite being a godawful rule that seems to only have existed to justify DE's anti-vehicle weapons remaining perpetually godawful.)
I'm not sure this is accurate. Dark Lances were S8 and reduced target AV to 12 - lances always had a 33% chance of scoring a penetrating hit against almost every vehicle in the game (there were a handful of exceptions that had immunity to the lance rule).
Which sounds great until you realise that 90% of the vehicles in the game are already AV12 or lower.
And then you remember that this is objectively inferior to a Lascannon's S9 against almost every target (the Lascannon is only worse against AV14).
Moreover, 33% penetration rate is horrible for an anti-vehicle weapon that relies on penetration to be remotely effective.
In 7th, it would take 27 Dark Lance shots (1125pts of Ravagers) to average a single 'Vehicle Destroyed' result on a 65pt Chimera.
(Sorry, this is something of a bugbear for me - I hate the degree to which the Lance rule was lauded, despite being a godawful rule that seems to only have existed to justify DE's anti-vehicle weapons remaining perpetually godawful.)
But... it's not god awful? That chimera has 3 hull points, you need what, 9 shots to kill it regardless? The lascannon needs 8 hits as a minimum to kill it by comparison which is not that far removed. The lascannon has a marginally higher chance to get a penetration, but not so much higher that it totally outstrips the usefulness of the dark lance like you're saying.
Yeah, as a craftworld eldar main from 5th through end of 6th/early 7th when I basically quit (until 8th came along and fixed every problem I had with 6th/7th), I can't say I ever had an issue popping vehicles, and I don't think craftworld eldar had nearly as many tools to deal with vehicles as DE did.
In fact, I basically had the opposite problem where the only thing that could consistently beat me we horde armies that could choke out my ability to maneuver around the table and had significantly more bodies than I could reasonably hope to kill over the course of a typical game. Green Tide lists in particular were the bane of my existence.
Sgt. Cortez wrote:I'd say the old facings and AP system and penetration mechanics just don't work for the scale of 40k anymore. If they made an inbetween system with 500-1250 points, by all means, throw in all those simulationist rules and an activation system to deepen the game. Facings for everyone, not just vehicles. Suppression, crossfire and a table for shokk attack guns beaming snotlings into terminators. But 2000+ points with superheavies and Flyers and giant monsters? We don’t really need that. Apokalypse with additional special rules and a little detail on squad equipment is/ would be enough. If they got the stratagem system to work finally as a way of breaking up IGOUGO and not just as a "kill even betterer" mechanic it'd be good enough for me.
I have to call this incorrect. you are comparing 2 different rule sets. originally FW designed flyers and superheavies to be used in normal games, with opponents permission as at the time no such thing as apocalypse existed. as such superheavies while somewhat more durable, were super expensive centerpiece models you brought for the rule of cool. baneblades specifically were very easy to kill because they had no void shields. i have recently shot/assaulted them with dreadnoughts for one turn kills that strip all 3 structure points. hitting front AV 14. flyers additionally are glass cannons in the original rules most being AV 10 and immobilizing them is a destroyed result the same as an actual damage result of the same.
Using the rules made for normal games as originally designed they are not a problem at all.
a couple of the guys in our oldhammer group did this game last weekend using the original warhound titan rules-
Spoiler:
remember there were no such thing as D weapons. twin turbo laser destructors were 2 small blast templates with las cannon stats.
The thing the way they were running it was probably the best all around loadout- BS 3, 810 points, 3 structure points, 2 void shields (come back online on a 5+ at the start of every turn after they go down) plasma blast gun-5" template 12-54" S8 AP2 2d6 armor pen. vulcan mega bolter 12-36" 10 shots twin linked S6 AP4 with rending. as well as an onboard tech priest that can make repairs on a 5+- it didn't do much damage the entire game and it also lost its plasma blast gun. but what it did do was distract the space marine player who threw a ton of shots at it including from his land raider terminus ultra (designed to kill titans), instead of shooting at the guardsman that allowed the guard to win the game.
Not only was it not game breaking or overpowered it adds depth to the setting because the original design of 40K was for fun epic battles, not powergaming tournament dreams.
chaos0xomega wrote:Yeah, as a craftworld eldar main from 5th through end of 6th/early 7th when I basically quit (until 8th came along and fixed every problem I had with 6th/7th), I can't say I ever had an issue popping vehicles, and I don't think craftworld eldar had nearly as many tools to deal with vehicles as DE did.
In fact, I basically had the opposite problem where the only thing that could consistently beat me we horde armies that could choke out my ability to maneuver around the table and had significantly more bodies than I could reasonably hope to kill over the course of a typical game. Green Tide lists in particular were the bane of my existence.
Well in the lore that kind of fits for facing orks. the active eldar players in my area never had problems dealing with vehicles the doom of mymeara book from FW is also a popular craftworld or corsair list to play. as a small elite army like most otheres they tend to strugle against hordes.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Dark Lances were S8 and reduced target AV to 12 - lances always had a 33% chance of scoring a penetrating hit against almost every vehicle in the game (there were a handful of exceptions that had immunity to the lance rule).
Which sounds great until you realise that 90% of the vehicles in the game are already AV12 or lower.
And then you remember that this is objectively inferior to a Lascannon's S9 against almost every target (the Lascannon is only worse against AV14).
Moreover, 33% penetration rate is horrible for an anti-vehicle weapon that relies on penetration to be remotely effective.
In 7th, it would take 27 Dark Lance shots (1125pts of Ravagers) to average a single 'Vehicle Destroyed' result on a 65pt Chimera.
(Sorry, this is something of a bugbear for me - I hate the degree to which the Lance rule was lauded, despite being a godawful rule that seems to only have existed to justify DE's anti-vehicle weapons remaining perpetually godawful.)
I have to ask how you liked Dark Lances in 3rd-4th, when the Vehicle Damage Table was more punishing for vehicles? Our DE guy was terrifying with those things, and if I recall the basic Warriors squad could get two of them in a ten man squad for like, 110 points or something?
I remember comparing that to my 5 man Lascannon Tactical squad for 90 points and feeling very outmatched for AT ability in my troops.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask how you liked Dark Lances in 3rd-4th, when the Vehicle Damage Table was more punishing for vehicles? Our DE guy was terrifying with those things, and if I recall the basic Warriors squad could get two of them in a ten man squad for like, 110 points or something?
I remember comparing that to my 5 man Lascannon Tactical squad for 90 points and feeling very outmatched for AT ability in my troops.
I'm afraid 3rd and 4th were before my time, at least when it comes to Dark Eldar. I only started collecting them in 5th, so I missed out on that particular era.
Dark Lances were alright in 5th from what I remember. Mainly because the vehicle damage table hadn't been written by a man with a pickaxe lodged in his skull.
Honestly, though, looking at 10th just makes me nostalgic for 5th. I'm sure if I played it again I'd find no shortage of niggles and bugbears, but it just had so much more life than 10th.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I'd say the old facings and AP system and penetration mechanics just don't work for the scale of 40k anymore. If they made an inbetween system with 500-1250 points, by all means, throw in all those simulationist rules and an activation system to deepen the game. Facings for everyone, not just vehicles. Suppression, crossfire and a table for shokk attack guns beaming snotlings into terminators.
Facings for everyone seems a bit much. The games that do that are much smaller scale skirmish affairs like Infinity. I think someone around here as done a total conversion of 40k to Infinity...
I think scale has always been a problem for 40k. We maneuver squads around, but we have to be careful about individual model placement. It was worse when pie plates were a thing because the model placement really mattered. In some editions model placement would affect how casualties are taken. The assault move rules have always been a mess. I think it's the models that are the root cause of this problem. If 40k was a board game that came with carboard chits for units, there wouldn't be this need to account for each model and make it special. 40k could pick a scale and stick with it.
Bolt Action is essentially oldhammer in WWII and seems to fit what you suggest. It retains the AV system and damage table and seems like a hybrid of 4th/5th edition while having 2nd edition army sizes. There are no monstrous creatures so there's no complaints about how the AV system is unfair. But it has few vehicles in standard lists, usually just one or two. There is a Tank War supplement that lets you use more tanks, but I don't have any experience with it.
But 2000+ points with superheavies and Flyers and giant monsters? We don’t really need that. Apokalypse with additional special rules and a little detail on squad equipment is/ would be enough. If they got the stratagem system to work finally as a way of breaking up IGOUGO and not just as a "kill even betterer" mechanic it'd be good enough for me.
I'd argue that moreso than the AV system, flyers and superheavies were bad for 40k. I think GW figured out sometime in 4th or early 5th that players would pay more for bigger kits because of the illusion of value that came with those kits. Nevermind that the plastic was just as cheap. So we got flyers, the baby carrier, trygon, wraithknight, riptide and storm surge et al. We also started seeing more artsy kits that were cool looking but basically impractical for tabletop play. The winged tyrant is entirely too large, for example. Anybody wanna try playing with the new Flugrim model? We've got all these oversized models and the board is now smaller making things even more cluttered.
Because of this discussion I have started to suspect that the debacle of flyers in 6th was a result of the hull point system. I think they probably playtested the new kits as skimmers, as they had been in 5th and found them to be very fragile. So they created the flyer mechanics to make them more survivable and thus desirable. I always hated them and felt they were totally inappropriate at this scale. It didn't help that I had to add an imperial bastion with a quad gun manned by a crack shot fire dragon exarch to be able to shoot them down. So thematic.
Flyer rules existed as far back as 3rd via FW the 6th edition tweaked their movement a bit but also made them way to durable. a combination of the movement rules from 6th with the original FW flyer rules actually puts them right were they need to be.
I love facing, but its very hard on games with large units. It's also really hard to implement in a satisfying way and not just something that punishes players for not dragging the game out micromanaging.
Infinity is the only game where it REALLY works and that mostly has to do with the terrain density and ability to make the choice of taking the short route or spending more resources to take a safer path.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I'd say the old facings and AP system and penetration mechanics just don't work for the scale of 40k anymore. If they made an inbetween system with 500-1250 points, by all means, throw in all those simulationist rules and an activation system to deepen the game. Facings for everyone, not just vehicles. Suppression, crossfire and a table for shokk attack guns beaming snotlings into terminators.
Facings for everyone seems a bit much. The games that do that are much smaller scale skirmish affairs like Infinity. I think someone around here as done a total conversion of 40k to Infinity...
I think the early versions of Epic used a facing mechanic even on it's little tank models. IIrc it was just bisecting the model through the middle to give a front and back, and then applying a -1 save reduction to the rear. Lots of models on the table too.
I think facing could work fine on MCs as well as Vehicles, it just needs to be quick and easy. Front/Back or Quad templates. Infantry definitely don't need it, but a crossfire mechanic would be great.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I'd say the old facings and AP system and penetration mechanics just don't work for the scale of 40k anymore. If they made an inbetween system with 500-1250 points, by all means, throw in all those simulationist rules and an activation system to deepen the game. Facings for everyone, not just vehicles. Suppression, crossfire and a table for shokk attack guns beaming snotlings into terminators.
Facings for everyone seems a bit much. The games that do that are much smaller scale skirmish affairs like Infinity. I think someone around here as done a total conversion of 40k to Infinity...
I think the early versions of Epic used a facing mechanic even on it's little tank models. IIrc it was just bisecting the model through the middle to give a front and back, and then applying a -1 save reduction to the rear. Lots of models on the table too.
I think facing could work fine on MCs as well as Vehicles, it just needs to be quick and easy. Front/Back or Quad templates. Infantry definitely don't need it, but a crossfire mechanic would be great.
There are games out there which put an emphasize on leader models from which you draw LOS etc (Mantics Firefight I think?). You could probably use them to determine facings on infantry.
Probably wouldn't really serve a purpose if you had crossfire and suppression already
Infantry I'd look for a Crossfire where you can draw lines between opposition forces through a squad, because I don't want to worry about the facing of individual forces, I just want to know that they're being engaged from multiple directions.
For vehicles and Monsters I'm more inclined to go with something that uses the actual rotation of the model because
A: It's a bigger model to start with
B: I don't want to be able to enable Crossfire on a vehicle using units that can't hurt it in the first place.
C: I allows for more oblique opportunities to gain a flanking bonus. Like you might have flanked it's position, but because you don't have a squad or unit is the right spot opposite, you couldn't take advantage of it.
When thinking about these mechanics I think a range limit to Crossfire could be important too, as units should be in "engagement range" is some form or another. But I wouldn't want a flanking maneuver against a vehicle to be range limited, and AT weapons often have much higher ranges.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Probably wouldn't really serve a purpose if you had crossfire and suppression already
This, pretty much, and those are better mechanics for this scale of play. You only model individual facings when individual facing is what matters.
In a small-scale skirmish wargame, like Kill Team or Infinity, tracking facing and flanking at the level of individuals makes sense. In a larger-scale wargame, tracking facing of individual vehicles with varying armor protection and relatively slow reaction times makes sense.
At a squad level, though, what we care about is the disposition of the squad. A scale-appropriate abstraction is to assume that the squad will array itself to best make use of cover, so what matters is when fire is coming from multiple directions and the squad can't adequately defend itself. Crossfire mechanics are more elegant than constantly modeling facing, and avoid some annoying edge cases, like how discrete turns allow you to simply walk around a unit and shoot it in the back.
I think armor facings for vehicles are still appropriate for 40K, just not with the clunky implementation of working out 90-degree quadrants. Even 6mm to 15mm wargames still frequently model armor facing, they just use simple abstractions like drawing a line across the front of a vehicle to determine front armor vs flank armor.
A 28mm wargame having tanks scoot sideways up the board while shooting from their exhaust stacks is demonstrating a serious crisis of scale.
I think you could determine crossfire fairly simply for a game of 40k scale. For example, you could define the minimum angle needed between two firing units, let's say 90 degrees, and simply have a cone-shaped template with that angle at the tip you can place on the table, if necessary use laser pointers to extend it the sides if it is marginal, and a lot of the time I would imaginei t would be obvious without needing the template.
Baragash wrote: I think you could determine crossfire fairly simply for a game of 40k scale. For example, you could define the minimum angle needed between two firing units, let's say 90 degrees, and simply have a cone-shaped template with that angle at the tip you can place on the table, if necessary use laser pointers to extend it the sides if it is marginal, and a lot of the time I would imaginei t would be obvious without needing the template.
Would you need 90 degrees or just do the "If you can draw a line through the taget unit between two of your units."?
I really don't get the arguments about facings because deciding what facing is being shot at is extremely trivial when you are playing a game which requires a tape measure. If your opponent is being a dumbass, it ain't hard to literally draw a physical line from the model shooting to the armor facing. Even better if you carry around a laser pointer keychain or the like.
Yeah, but the issue is more that it adds a lot of time to a game that already takes quite a lot of hours to play. Plus with the size of the table and models and the requirements for terrain; a lot of the time you're not going to have room to position tanks easily into a good angle for firing realistically.
In games where I see facings being important it tends to be skirmish games with very few models; or naval games where to be honest the board is often much much more open; but also the models are often much thinner (because they are ships) so there's more scope to actually have them turn to show a broadside and so forth.
For 40K it could easily become a situation where certain tanks are heavily superior to others. A lot of those big chunky Imperial tanks might even end up really poor choices compared to a lot of sleeker Xenos.
At the same time a lot of Xenos tanks and such don't have side guns.
In the end I think it can be a cool mechanic, but its not a good one to have in a modern 2K points 40K game. It slows things down; encourages less terrain use and could be a nightmare for some factions over others.
