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Army Size - What Happened to 40K? @ 2016/09/25 04:33:08


Post by: Peregrine


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Superheavies have been damage-able in the past and they weren't anymore 'balanced' for regular games.


Sure they were. In fact, 4th edition superheavies were arguably too weak to be viable. 5th edition Apocalypse-era superheavies were better, but being able to lose the main gun (for a turn, or permanently) to a single glancing hit was a huge liability.

I mean heck, how does the superheavy company compete with the all-aircraft army?


It puts a model on the table and automatically wins at the end of the first turn?

And yes, it does. Both sides go into the game knowing what to expect - the side with the human wave army expects to lose, and that's fine with them. Conversely, if I'm playing against drop melta spam, I can safely expect my baneblade company to lose. And that's fine with me, too.


That's not negotiation, it's expecting to lose. Obviously you can play whatever you like without any problems if you have people who are fine with getting wiped off the table without any hope of winning. But most people don't enjoy that, especially as more than a one-time "ok, I'll let you use your auto-win combo once so we can see how stupid it is".

Also, in your system, how are superheavies any different than regular tanks except 'bigguh'


Why do they need to be different? A Malcador and a LRBT aren't vastly different units, one is just a bit bigger than the other. 40k's rules bloat where every unit is a special snowflake with a page full of special rules is bad design.


Army Size - What Happened to 40K? @ 2016/09/25 06:50:29


Post by: Vaktathi


One big issue with Superheavies really is that they function sort of inversly from the way they really should. In most games, the bigger something gets, the more detailed and intricate it becomes. In 40k, the opposite is true, mechanics that apply to mundane units like the vehicle damage table, the ability to strip weapons and the like, simply don't apply and the big beasties remain as scary at 1HP as they were at 9HP. In most games it would be the mundane tanks that are less detailed and the big vehicles that would have rules for stripping off weapons and stunning crew and the like.

40k does this to represent the huge resiliency such units are supposed to have, but it's a result of the core game fundamentally really being intended for a couple dozen 28mm infantry (where a tank actually having granularity for losing weapons and the like makes sense) and not strategic asset level units, and so simply making the big guys invulnerable to stuff to represent their resiliency is a pretty ham-fisted approach.

It's really representative of how poorly 40k works trying to cover so many scales.