I think the concern here is that for the majority of GW games, and all of the big ones, armour works in the same way whether vs shooting or melee attacks. Due to that, the immersion works and it “feels” correct. To now have a game where armour works completely differently between shooting and melee is… jarring. If done well it’ll just take some getting used to, but we don’t yet have enough info to truly judge yet I think. Done badly ofc it’ll trash the immersion of the game. And that is very bad, as that’s an area where GW games generally shine.

Apple fox wrote:
There is nothing stopping them putting a tough like roll on terminators and other war gear like shields.
This system is far more interesting for CC, Arco flagelent can have a all hits must be used as attacks USR.
Terminators can even have a they gain a free hit, that can only be used as a defence die and must be used first.

It’s why I said GW really kicking there own system without giving us some useful comparesson before. We need some units to see just what’s up.

It is surely a hallmark of good, clean design when the most common figures in the game (MEQ) do not function unless another layer of special rules is added.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
There is nothing stopping them putting a tough like roll on terminators and other war gear like shields.
This system is far more interesting for CC, Arco flagelent can have a all hits must be used as attacks USR.
Terminators can even have a they gain a free hit, that can only be used as a defence die and must be used first.

It’s why I said GW really kicking there own system without giving us some useful comparesson before. We need some units to see just what’s up.

It is surely a hallmark of good, clean design when the most common figures in the game (MEQ) do not function unless another layer of special rules is added.

That's been true since 2nd ed, why would think they'd suddenly change that?

The "comparing dice" system worked fine for HeroScape. Lets see how they make it work here.

After how quickly the Beast Snaggas went, I'm kinda worried about being able to get a box. I'm really looking forward to this one too because it would give me a chance to split it with a friend who is looking to get into 40k.

MaxT wrote:
I think the concern here is that for the majority of GW games, and all of the big ones, armour works in the same way whether vs shooting or melee attacks. Due to that, the immersion works and it “feels” correct. To now have a game where armour works completely differently between shooting and melee is… jarring. If done well it’ll just take some getting used to, but we don’t yet have enough info to truly judge yet I think. Done badly ofc it’ll trash the immersion of the game. And that is very bad, as that’s an area where GW games generally shine.

Space Crusade boardgame handled armour during shooting and close combat differently. You got armour vs. ranged attacks but not in melee.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
So the circle is 2".

Why not just say 2"...

Because GW 's motto has been this for ages:

"Change for the sake of change. Not to improve the game."

The more I think about it, the more it feels to me like armoured models will either be reflected in the HP or they will negate some amount of incoming damage. The Df/Sv stats don't necessary reflect the toughness or the armour save of the model, just how easy or hard it is to hit them by shooting. Armour could add a whole new mechanic into everything.

Already waiting for tomorrow's new reveals, so I suppose WC drip feed is working for them

 Galas wrote:
The "comparing dice" system worked fine for HeroScape. Lets see how they make it work here.

Heroscape had a robust system that (IMO) worked well complete with Keywords and inidivdual unit/model rules. Clever game really.

Finally visited the new KT site to check out the factions list. I think these models shown here are what we will be getting rules for in the Compandium. It's nowhere as comprehensive as I'd like but its a similar start than what happened with KT1. All the fun stuff (IMHO) didnt get added until the Elites expansion dropped, and I'd wager the same will happen here. GW can finetune the next elites expansion better with real-world feedback from the playerbase.

How long did it take for KT1:Elites to get released after the main game? 1 year?

Higher quality armor, better chance of success (5+/3+). Better reaction on the battlefield, more chances at dodging (4 defense dice/6 defense dice). Tougher model, more wounds (7HP/18HP).

Guardsmen are gonna be 4 defence, 5+ save, 7 wounds. Orks are 4 defense, 6+ save, 14 wounds, Marine is probably gonna be 5 defence, 3+ save, 12 wounds.

 Egyptian Space Zombie wrote:
After how quickly the Beast Snaggas went, I'm kinda worried about being able to get a box. I'm really looking forward to this one too because it would give me a chance to split it with a friend who is looking to get into 40k.

I'm also worried about this. I'd love to have Kommandos and would really love that terrain. I'll be checking out the local stores in my new area since I don't expect online orders will last more than a few minutes.

I think they mentioned on the announcement stream that there would be more like Dominion levels of stock.

But the important thing is the ratio of demand to supply. Is there lots of Dominion left about because it wasn’t that popular?

 Strg Alt wrote:


Space Crusade boardgame handled armour during shooting and close combat differently. You got armour vs. ranged attacks but not in melee.

Are you referring to MB's game or the Advanced Space Crusade by GW?

In MB's game a model had an armour value and that was used for both ranged and melee attacks.

What are the odds the individual Teams will be available separately from the box set near launch?

 Insurgency Walker wrote:
What are the odds the individual Teams will be available separately from the box set near launch?

0%

 Flinty wrote:
But the important thing is the ratio of demand to supply. Is there lots of Dominion left about because it wasn’t that popular?

Well they said they'd made a lot of stock beforehand, then had decent stock levels.

Ultimately we don't know, but let's cross our fingers they've made enough of this one to not sell out in under an hour.

 Insurgency Walker wrote:
What are the odds the individual Teams will be available separately from the box set near launch?

Pariah Nexus went up for preorder on February 27th, 2021.
Preorders for the Heavy Intercessors and Flayed Ones as individual releases was May 22nd.

Buuuuuuuuut, I wouldn't expect Kommandos to be unavailable for the codex when that releases (which is at least a month or two out) as an individual thing.

My local FLGS have 72 Dominion sets in stock - a lot more supply than demand. They also got 6 Beastsnagga boxes, which were gone instantly. My guess is that the Killteam box will end up somewhere inbetween - I really hope that the supply will be better than for the Beastsnaggas.

Th Beastsnaggas box was available for preorder for a lot longer than one hour on the maing GW site. I'm pretty sure this KT box will be around at least as long as that.

I'd be less worried about the KT box than the Snagga box. KT is a new edition starter and not faction limited so I would assume GW makes a lot more boxes.

 tauist wrote:
Finally visited the new KT site to check out the factions list. I think these models shown here are what we will be getting rules for in the Compandium. It's nowhere as comprehensive as I'd like but its a similar start than what happened with KT1. All the fun stuff (IMHO) didnt get added until the Elites expansion dropped, and I'd wager the same will happen here. GW can finetune the next elites expansion better with real-world feedback from the playerbase.

How long did it take for KT1:Elites to get released after the main game? 1 year?

Close enough. According to BGG, Elites is listed as "2019", but a month is not given. In my personal notes for the entry, I bought it in May of 2019. Did not make any notations for the Core game ... IIRC, it was leased in July 2018. {Please note that BGG lists the KT Core release as 2018: I think it came out in July, as I did not play a game of it until mid-August, where I decided I liked it enough to buy a rule book, but not the starter.}

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
I've been looking a bit more at recent discussions regarding the no armor saves in combat, and there's two main defenses. One is that your attacks are now your armor saves, which I heavily dislike. Knights wore armor so they could take hits and not die, and a weapon to kill. Not a weapon to act as armor, though blocking was important.
The other defense, and the one that will make or break me buying the starter set, is that armor in close combat is represented by wounds. If this is the case, I'm not playing at all.
Wounds affect close combat and ranged combat roughly equally, but you get armor saves in ranged combat. If wounds are armor in close combat, it neuters ranged, and it will be a shame. I was wondering why a lasgun took so many shots to kill a guardsman, and I hope my worries are unsubstantiated.

You guys are way to twisted up in mechanics. If a marine survives like a marine should and kills like a marine should who gives a flying feth what dice you roll as long as its engaging and fun?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
I've been looking a bit more at recent discussions regarding the no armor saves in combat, and there's two main defenses. One is that your attacks are now your armor saves, which I heavily dislike. Knights wore armor so they could take hits and not die, and a weapon to kill. Not a weapon to act as armor, though blocking was important.
The other defense, and the one that will make or break me buying the starter set, is that armor in close combat is represented by wounds. If this is the case, I'm not playing at all.
Wounds affect close combat and ranged combat roughly equally, but you get armor saves in ranged combat. If wounds are armor in close combat, it neuters ranged, and it will be a shame. I was wondering why a lasgun took so many shots to kill a guardsman, and I hope my worries are unsubstantiated.

You guys are way to twisted up in mechanics. If a marine survives like a marine should and kills like a marine should who gives a flying feth what dice you roll as long as its engaging and fun?

Because mechanics are what make games engaging and fun for people?

Finally read the articles fully. So shooting has one attack roll and one defence roll based on armour. Combat has a combined set of attack and defence rolls based on combat skill. If you add an explicit armour save into combat it adds a whole extra step in the player resolution process, and changes the results distribution. The combat system could have been tweaked to allow for the extra step, but I imagine keeping it to a single opposed roll was the overriding design decision.

Just needs a slight adjustment to thinking to include armour as part of a models’ ability to parry or otherwise avoid damage in combat, or some kind of special rule.

And then whether shooting and combat are balanced can only come with play testing.

Have to say that whilst I'm not rabidly against it it has put me off getting the box - I wasn't bothered about the orc terrain anyway but was looking forward to kill team. Lack of armour in melee, or at least in a way where it obviously feeds in puts me off the rest of the way.

I would have like armour to maybe add a free parry to the more heavily armoured person - so the flow is still the same, just the better armoured person will get 1 parry for free and be able to therefore be more offensive with his normal attacks.

SamusDrake wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:


Space Crusade boardgame handled armour during shooting and close combat differently. You got armour vs. ranged attacks but not in melee.

Are you referring to MB's game or the Advanced Space Crusade by GW?

In MB's game a model had an armour value and that was used for both ranged and melee attacks.

What did I write? Space Crusade or Advanced Space Crusade?

If they produced as many copies of KT as Dominion (which is what they seemed to imply on stream), then I'm not worried about inventory. Everyone is currently swimming in copies of Dominion, to the extent that demand for Kill Team could be double or triple what it was for Dominion and I would guess there would still be an excess of copies available.

I'd expect Kill-Team to sell out a lot quicker than Dominion. AoS is less popular than SW Legion or MCP and everything pales in comparison to 40k. Kill-Team's new version was very popular last time around and the rules previews seem to have been well received enough (except for the symbols). Plus there is enormous positivity and hype around the Krieg models.

Dominion's overabundance of stock might temper some scalpers at least.

The one thing that might put people on edge is cost. At the £125 RRP range I could see it going, but if it's closer to Dark Uprising (£175) a lot of people might be more reluctant, especially because most people don't play at home.

Damn are we really expecting £125? For 20 models?
I forget how expensive GW has become.

I was getting all hyped to paint some Krieg, maybe I'll have to bring this train to a screeching halt.

20 models. plus a bunch of terrain sprues

and all the paper bits which are 'high cost' to gw as they don't make them in house


(although I agree that the main interest for many will be the 20 minis)

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Damn are we really expecting £125? For 20 models?

20 models plus terrain. The current Necromunda box (Hive War) is £90 for 20 models and 2 terrain sprues. The Necromunda: Dark Uprising box was £175 for 26 models and 17 terrain sprues.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I'd expect Kill-Team to sell out a lot quicker than Dominion. AoS is less popular than SW Legion or MCP and everything pales in comparison to 40k. Kill-Team's new version was very popular last time around and the rules previews seem to have been well received enough (except for the symbols). Plus there is enormous positivity and hype around the Krieg models.

Dominion's overabundance of stock might temper some scalpers at least.

The one thing that might put people on edge is cost. At the £125 RRP range I could see it going, but if it's closer to Dark Uprising (£175) a lot of people might be more reluctant, especially because most people don't play at home.

I don't know what to expect as far as selling out is concerned, I think it will sell out, but in the stream they laboured the point that they were making a lot of them.

I'm still weighing up what price I'm willing to pay so I can decide on the day of release. I do really want the Kriegers and would love to get them before they're released separately to try out colour schemes and whatnot.

I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

I mean, it’s your money and if that level of abstraction is off putting than by all means pass it up, but it seems a strange dealbreaker when the entire wargaming hobby is so abstract.

 Sabotage! wrote:
I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

I mean, it’s your money and if that level of abstraction is off putting than by all means pass it up, but it seems a strange dealbreaker when the entire wargaming hobby is so abstract.

A game might be too abstract if two salad forks are a better loadout than one power fist because number of dice is all that matters.


Of course in reality we know the power fist will have crit mortal wounds that can't be parried, which makes the whole system a redundant gimmick, but hey.

I think £125 is probably about right tbh. I reckon the 2 Kill Teams when released separately will be between £30-£35. Rulebook's probably gonna be around £20 ish and there is a lot of terrain in there.

20 models plus terrain. The current Necromunda box (Hive War) is £90 for 20 models and 2 terrain sprues. The Necromunda: Dark Uprising box was £175 for 26 models and 17 terrain sprues.

I was expecting £90.

I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

Personally, if armour was just a health stat I could deal with. It's an abstraction, but a common one and it'd be consistent.

What's jarring for me is that armour is useful for shooting but then suddenly completely useless in melee. Their justification for it doesn't really jive imo "you can aim for weakspots" doesn't hold water when we've had large eras of history where people armoured up for protection in melee. Plus that "weakspot" in power armour might be a well protected armpit or literally the entire Ork, and both of those are equally hard to hit in melee.
I also worry that it will lead to a 'meta' where offence and defence in melee are more or less the same, that'd be lame.

 Sabotage! wrote:
I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

I mean, it’s your money and if that level of abstraction is off putting than by all means pass it up, but it seems a strange dealbreaker when the entire wargaming hobby is so abstract.

As I understand it you don't have defense dice but attack dice you can use for defense instead. With such a system you cannot separate offensive and defensive capability which leads to greater abstraction than the usual 40k system in which armor is a completely separate entity and you can have for instance tanky models with little damage output. Unless the article is a poor representation of the actual rules, in Kill Team you can't have that. If you want good defense, you need equally good offense. Which doesn't just mean tanky stuff is potentially also super killy depending on how you use your dice pool, it also means killy stuff can be super tanky and neither necessarily represents how the model looks or how the background describes the unit. Which may decrease immersion, and that can't be a good thing.

You can't even have tons of dice with minimal individual damage because the large difference in dice compared to your opponent's means you cannot ever be hit and you will have plenty of attacks left over after parrying the opponent's attacks, which will go through automatically for lack of opposing defense dice.

More wounds in melee also means more wounds in ranged combat, where you then also have the normal armor save. That's not really reconcilable and leads to a situation where you either have too many wounds in shooting or too few in melee. If armor saves were decoupled from 40k that might be somewhat workable, but that doesn't seem to be a case which means the armor save is set for any given model and the number of wounds needs to take that into account. Which, again, cannot be consistently applied to both shooting and melee.

I don't know if the system as written works or doesn't work on a purely mechanical basis. Probably will, to some extent. But in terms of immersion, I can't think of a way to make it act as a representation of armor.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I was expecting £90.

Do you see how much terrain's in that box?

I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

sure, but that isn't what they've done. They've given an armour stat and then given what feels like the most asinine reason why it doesn't apply in melee. There are no defense dice, and using health as armour doesn't sound like it will work well when you already have armor for the other pretty important half the combat engine (ranged)

I mean I am usually one of the first to say it is just an abstraction, and will be interested in the full rules, but it is not sounding great so far. As I noted though I was already a bit 'meh' given the orc terrain, so whilst I am a bit put off by the sound of the rules so far, my lack of interest in the box is more than just that.

 Geifer wrote:

 Sabotage! wrote:
I’m really interested as to why people are so concerned about armor in melee. Can’t they just give a model with better armor more defense dice/more wounds? That’s how a lot of games abstract armor and it works fine.

I mean, it’s your money and if that level of abstraction is off putting than by all means pass it up, but it seems a strange dealbreaker when the entire wargaming hobby is so abstract.

As I understand it you don't have defense dice but attack dice you can use for defense instead. With such a system you cannot separate offensive and defensive capability which leads to greater abstraction than the usual 40k system in which armor is a completely separate entity and you can have for instance tanky models with little damage output. Unless the article is a poor representation of the actual rules, in Kill Team you can't have that. If you want good defense, you need equally good offense. Which doesn't just mean tanky stuff is potentially also super killy depending on how you use your dice pool, it also means killy stuff can be super tanky and neither necessarily represents how the model looks or how the background describes the unit. Which may decrease immersion, and that can't be a good thing.

You can't even have tons of dice with minimal individual damage because the large difference in dice compared to your opponent's means you cannot ever be hit and you will have plenty of attacks left over after parrying the opponent's attacks, which will go through automatically for lack of opposing defense dice.

More wounds in melee also means more wounds in ranged combat, where you then also have the normal armor save. That's not really reconcilable and leads to a situation where you either have too many wounds in shooting or too few in melee. If armor saves were decoupled from 40k that might be somewhat workable, but that doesn't seem to be a case which means the armor save is set for any given model and the number of wounds needs to take that into account. Which, again, cannot be consistently applied to both shooting and melee.

I don't know if the system as written works or doesn't work on a purely mechanical basis. Probably will, to some extent. But in terms of immersion, I can't think of a way to make it act as a representation of armor.

Thanks for your explanation of things, I can better understand stand your point.

I guess it doesn’t really bother me. A model that is better at fighting in close combat is generally going to be protecting itself in said combat. Yes you will have models with lots of rules getting lots of parries, but that means horde armies will have to forgo defense to inflict damage in the alternating attack part of the phase. As far as tanky models go, most would generally have a higher wound count against shooting and close combat. Models that don’t (maybe ones that get a CC invulnerable save in 40k) could have a special rule or what not.

I guess after the last edition of KT this seems like a massive improvement thus far to me. Nothing was more immersion breaking to me than having a space marine take 3 flesh wounds from a melta gun after being successfully wounded three times.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I was expecting £90.

Do you see how much terrain's in that box?

Yeah you're right, I hadn't paid the terrain any attention as I'm not even slightly interested in it.

Damn, hopefully I can find an Ork player but I imagine demand for Krieg to significantly outstrip demand for the Orks.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Yeah you're right, I hadn't paid the terrain any attention as I'm not even slightly interested in it.

Damn, hopefully I can find an Ork player but I imagine demand for Krieg to significantly outstrip demand for the Orks.

Ehhh...

Kommandos are Kommandos and will be locked in the box too--probably for at least 3 months. The Krieg stuff is just regular ol' Guardsmen. People will probably trying to sell them at exorbitant prices, but that's always the case.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I was expecting £90.

Do you see how much terrain's in that box?

Yeah you're right, I hadn't paid the terrain any attention as I'm not even slightly interested in it.

Damn, hopefully I can find an Ork player but I imagine demand for Krieg to significantly outstrip demand for the Orks.

I am seeing a lot of interest for the Orks over Krieg, but it’s hard to judge if that’s just chatter or real interest. Orks are more popular as far as I can tell. But lots of people have lots of Orks. And most people like keeping both kidney.


For the CC discussion, there is a lot of design space for CC they could do.
Power, aspect, eavy armor. And such could all offer a auto defence. And it would be super powerful.
For other units with low defence you could mandate all dice hits used as attacks.
Not to mention just adding a singe dice on a 3+ to hit for marines makes them quite durable compared to Krieg as is.
I think you will find marines and other things quite tough.

I think for CC focused army this will be way more engaging, much better if we can ad some ability’s that make a unit able to be more Killy or defensive with some upgrades.

I guess after the last edition of KT this seems like a massive improvement thus far to me. Nothing was more immersion breaking to me than having a space marine take 3 flesh wounds from a melta gun after being successfully wounded three times.

The chance of that is probably so low that it is likely I personally would never see it happen, and flukey things like that I can handle - I mean people have survived falling out of airplanes from great heights. At least it feels like it fits into 40k fiction - the heroic SM who just won't die and no one can seem to do more than melt his fingers 1 at a time

I can well see it being even more likely in the new version that he is wounded by 3 meltas but still alive. Saving enough of the attack dice each time to only take 4 damage per shot and he has 20 hit points or something.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

For the CC discussion, there is a lot of design space for CC they could do.
Power, aspect, eavy armor. And such could all offer a auto defence. And it would be super powerful.
For other units with low defence you could mandate all dice hits used as attacks.
Not to mention just adding a singe dice on a 3+ to hit for marines makes them quite durable compared to Krieg as is.
I think you will find marines and other things quite tough.

Aye, which is why I amm still waiting for the full rules. But, given the reason they gave for ignoring armor doesn't make me hopeful - if they were representing it other ways I'd have expected something being said accordingly; maybe not the actual rules but at least something about how such stuff is dealt with in other ways. That they went to the effort of saying armor is easy to ignore in close quarters makes me thinks they are just ignoring it.

puree wrote:

I guess after the last edition of KT this seems like a massive improvement thus far to me. Nothing was more immersion breaking to me than having a space marine take 3 flesh wounds from a melta gun after being successfully wounded three times.

The chance of that is probably so low that it is likely I personally would never see it happen, and flukey things like that I can handle - I mean people have survived falling out of airplanes from great heights. At least it feels like it fits into 40k fiction - the heroic SM who just won't die and no one can seem to do more than melt his fingers 1 at a time

I can well see it being even more likely in the new version that he is wounded by 3 meltas but still alive. Saving enough of the attack dice each time to only take 4 damage per shot and he has 20 hit points or something.

I can’t recall it happening with a melta gun, but I had it happen several times with plasma guns in just games I played. And let’s not talk about normal weapons that often need to inflict a model’s toughness worth of flesh wounds while that model is in cover. It’s just not fun when it takes 30 minutes of games play to kill three guardsmen in cover when you have an entire team unloading on them. Kill Team in its current iteration is a bad game because it is rules for a mass battle game shoved into a skirmish package. New Kill Team is at least making an attempt to fix that. We’ll see how that turns out.

Also you wouldn’t be rolling attack dice against a melta gun, so you can only cancel out the hits with defense dice and armor saves. Which I’m sure it has enough AP you wouldn’t be getting anyways. Maybe you can use attack dice in melee against one, but we don’t know yet.

 Arbitrator wrote:
AoS is less popular than SW Legion or MCP and everything pales in comparison to 40k. Kill-Team's new version was very popular last time around and the rules previews seem to have been well received enough (except for the symbols).

Careful there, ICV2 is not a measure of popularity, its a measure of sales dollars - long term trends going into the Fall 2020 timeframe had AoS in solid 3rd place behind 40k and the Wizkids D&D minis, ahead of Legion, MCP, and other games. There was a brief moment in time for like 1 year where X-Wing was indicated as more popular than 40k - that never repeated itself after that one quarter. Wait for long-term trends to materialize before determining what games are or aren't more popular than others. The current long term trend is still that AoS is more popular than the two games you indicated.

As it stands, AoS release calendar during the Fall 2020 timeframe was somewhat tight and limited, especially with regards to product shortages and delays. Legion on the other hand launched a number of expansions during the same timeframe quite a few of which were in very high demand and have been perpetually sold out or short on stock since. MCP likewise launched some major expansions during the same timeframe (chiefly Thanos and the first couple waves of X-Men releases). Additionally, because of COVID delays, a large number of products for both MCP and SWL that were ostensibly released earlier in the year did not actually become available in any reasonable quantity until the fall timeframe (in the case of MCP, for example, basically the entire years worth of releases didn't become available in the UK and EU until around October, which meant there was a huge glut of product with a lot of backed-up demand releasing in a very small window of time).

ICV2 is US only?

 kodos wrote:
ICV2 is US only?

Not even. Just what stores happen to respond to their surveys.

I'm getting an impression that the KT designers were told to make gameplay as much like AT as possible, since that rule-set has been praised as a good high-detail, low-model-count wargame. Hence why the main defence only works at range and everything seems to be able to take a huge amount of damage before dying.

puree wrote:
I would have like armour to maybe add a free parry to the more heavily armoured person - so the flow is still the same, just the better armoured person will get 1 parry for free and be able to therefore be more offensive with his normal attacks.

Let’s wait for more rules reveals (or the rulebook), as it may turn out to work just as you wish.

Didn't expect a whole reboot when Pariah Nexus update marine and necron to 9th edition.

Guard probably will took the largest hit with the new format to team building, Guards in old edition was strong because they had so many special weapon unit that they can take. Now look like most of them will be "Veteran". or "Guardsmen" and "Scion". Unless Veteran and normal Guards are allowed to be in the same team

And no Howling Banshee or Incubi for the Eldar.

Chopstick wrote:
Guard probably will took the largest hit with the new format to team building, Guards in old edition was strong because they had so many special weapon unit that they can take. Now look like most of them will be "Veteran".

There's two different Guard factions and we've only seen one of them so far.

 Platuan4th wrote:

Chopstick wrote:
Guard probably will took the largest hit with the new format to team building, Guards in old edition was strong because they had so many special weapon unit that they can take. Now look like most of them will be "Veteran".

There's two different Guard factions and we've only seen one of them so far.

That 'Veteran Guard' is a separate faction is stupid in itself.

 Robert Facepalmer wrote:

 kodos wrote:
ICV2 is US only?

Not even. Just what stores happen to respond to their surveys.

Also distributors and publishers, not just retailers. Supposedly the data for non-GW games is generally pretty good as most games are not self-distributed and the major distributors all share lots of data with icv2 even if the publishers behind them are reluctant to do so themselves. GW on the other hand mostly self-distributes and its unclear to what extent they would provide icv2 with data. In that case the numbers would just come down to whatever data they can get from retailers and the like. Presumably this means that it excludes any sales data from GWs brick and mortar and direct online sales channels, meaning that even if 40k (or Age of Sigmar) was listed in 5th place it could conceivably still in actuality outsell #1-4 combined.

 Crimson wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

Chopstick wrote:
Guard probably will took the largest hit with the new format to team building, Guards in old edition was strong because they had so many special weapon unit that they can take. Now look like most of them will be "Veteran".

There's two different Guard factions and we've only seen one of them so far.

That 'Veteran Guard' is a separate faction is stupid in itself.

I expect this is because they are going to do more “bespoke” Kill Teams for lack of a better word. Kind of like the Kommandos and Krieg or the original Chaos Warcry warbands, where they are an entire team in a box (like a team of Eldar Rangers for example) and they wanted to differentiate those teams from ones built from existing miniature collections.

Hard to say until rules are out, they still used <Keyword> which meant they can both be used on the same team, or as alliance.

 Strg Alt wrote:

What did I write? Space Crusade or Advanced Space Crusade?

Space Crusade. Gotta admit, I never had the pleasure of Advanced Space Crusade. I remember something about Marine scouts boarding a tyranid hive ship and all that jazz.

And let’s not talk about normal weapons that often need to inflict a model’s toughness worth of flesh wounds while that model is in cover. It’s just not fun when it takes 30 minutes of games play to kill three guardsmen in cover when you have an entire team unloading on them. Kill Team in its current iteration is a bad game because it is rules for a mass battle game shoved into a skirmish package. New Kill Team is at least making an attempt to fix that. We’ll see how that turns out.

I don't disagree with current KT being a bit 'meh' - and really want them to ditch the 40k rules; which they are. I was pretty excited at a new KT with its own rules.

I've never really seen what you have though, or not enough to worry about, models going to 3 flesh wounds has been rare - and feels perfectly fine as those heroic times when someone just refused to die. Most of the games I played have been pretty brutal bloodbaths, with sometimes only 1 guy left by by turn 3 or 4. Only 1 game really refused to end when 2 power armor forces with no real melee weapons got into a mass brawl and spent the game slapping each other (and that was actually an hilarious game, and hardly 'unfun').

Chopstick wrote:
Hard to say until rules are out, they still used <Keyword> which meant they can both be used on the same team, or as alliance.

Or it just means that subfaction rules are in.

Cadian Veterans are still Cadians, after all.

puree wrote:

And let’s not talk about normal weapons that often need to inflict a model’s toughness worth of flesh wounds while that model is in cover. It’s just not fun when it takes 30 minutes of games play to kill three guardsmen in cover when you have an entire team unloading on them. Kill Team in its current iteration is a bad game because it is rules for a mass battle game shoved into a skirmish package. New Kill Team is at least making an attempt to fix that. We’ll see how that turns out.

I don't disagree with current KT being a bit 'meh' - and really want them to ditch the 40k rules; which they are. I was pretty excited at a new KT with its own rules.

I've never really seen what you have though, or not enough to worry about, models going to 3 flesh wounds has been rare - and feels perfectly fine as those heroic times when someone just refused to die. Most of the games I played have been pretty brutal bloodbaths, with sometimes only 1 guy left by by turn 3 or 4. Only 1 game really refused to end when 2 power armor forces with no real melee weapons got into a mass brawl and spent the game slapping each other (and that was actually an hilarious game, and hardly 'unfun').

I wish my games had gone that way. Most of the games I have played have involved high model count factions engaging in gunfights across the map, with the resultant games taking well over an hour - some nearly two, even after one side clearly had the upper hand.

I think alternating activation and the way weapon damage works should fix that in this addition. I mean if you are shooting across the map in the current edition with a 5+ to hit (assuming at least -1), a 4+ to wound, a 5+ to save, at a target in cover in cover you have less than a 4% chance of taking that one model out, meaning you very well could have your entire kill team (and yeah it's not really that realistic because some will have different weapons and what not) shoot at the model and not take it out of action. Only a 7% chance to inflict a flesh wound also. The new system should remedy that quite a bit, where your attacks are at least somewhat likely to do something to the target.

 Crimson wrote:
That 'Veteran Guard' is a separate faction is stupid in itself.

They're separate because they have options in their kit that the regular Guard sprue does not have.

 Sabotage! wrote:
A model that is better at fighting in close combat is generally going to be protecting itself in said combat.

No. Just no. There is no way someone with two knives can parry a power fist, or hell, even a power sword or maul. Sure, you can put bandaids like 'you can't parry with that 475923 attacks flagellant' and other nonsense on top but far saner and more elegant solution would be to do what RPGs do - give model dodge/armor values (to better represent agile but unarmored models like genestealers or wyches) and let the player choose which to roll. Then you could use extra space you just got to make some weapons really good against dodge (net) and others against armour (power stuff). What they did instead is just stupid.

And the most insulting and stupid thing is, it's far easier to hit weak point of armour with a gun! What is easier to dodge into exposed neck, a knife you see coming or speed of light laser from someone you can barely see? A maul swing you can follow with your eyes or burst from bolter or shoota hiting dozens of spots at once? The whole 'melee is better' argument is just comical

 Crimson wrote:
That 'Veteran Guard' is a separate faction is stupid in itself.

Why? Veteran team being sent on a mission makes far more sense than usual munchkin 3 veterans with plasma guns then 18 conscripts as meat shield filler you tend to see in WAAAC fluff what's that? teams...

 Irbis wrote:
Insert standard overly emotional Ibris rant.

Yep. No way a space marine with a chainsword is better at defending itself in melee than a guardsman with a lasrifle.

Also, have you ever fired a gun before? Hitting a neck joint at a target running full speed through a densely packed battlefield at 50 yards is not easier than hitting someone in the neck in close combat. Not even remotely.

The big point of this though, is it's abstraction. If you want to play a hyper realistic game, go play one of said aforementioned RPGs. You know one of the ones like Shadowrun where if you take a three round burst from rifle you are dead, crippled, or in shock. Obviously a skirmish game is going to be less detailed.

I mean, the 40k system abstraction is probably worse at capturing CC than this is.
And I think they still have space in the design to represent the different types of units, if they don’t derp it up.
Please GW just put up a space marine so we can see where your going with this.

 Irbis wrote:

 Sabotage! wrote:
A model that is better at fighting in close combat is generally going to be protecting itself in said combat.

No. Just no. There is no way someone with two knives can parry a power fist, or hell, even a power sword or maul. Sure, you can put bandaids like 'you can't parry with that 475923 attacks flagellant' and other nonsense on top but far saner and more elegant solution would be to do what RPGs do - give model dodge/armor values (to better represent agile but unarmored models like genestealers or wyches) and let the player choose which to roll. Then you could use extra space you just got to make some weapons really good against dodge (net) and others against armour (power stuff). What they did instead is just stupid.

And the most insulting and stupid thing is, it's far easier to hit weak point of armour with a gun! What is easier to dodge into exposed neck, a knife you see coming or speed of light laser from someone you can barely see? A maul swing you can follow with your eyes or burst from bolter or shoota hiting dozens of spots at once? The whole 'melee is better' argument is just comical

Sure, but you are building up a straw man to argue about. We do not know how a power fist, power armor, terminator armor or the like will function in this edition. My take is to wait until more is revealed and work out one's opinion based on facts rather than jumping to conclusions.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Chopstick wrote:
Hard to say until rules are out, they still used <Keyword> which meant they can both be used on the same team, or as alliance.

Or it just means that subfaction rules are in.

Cadian Veterans are still Cadians, after all.

I already play KT1 as Open Play (as in, matched play but without the battleforged requirement), don't see why I'd change my approach in KT2 either

"God gave me a gift. I shovel. I shovel really well!"

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/07/20/breaking-devastating-weapon-of-war-spotted-in-new-death-korps-of-krieg-kill-team-footage/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=KillTeamShovel200721&utm_term=KillTeamShovel200721&fbclid=IwAR1nkCEDuiBOT50FQUSZGVAnN46piMDiawjgzIU-lcLrlOEjf0uZGWkXU6o

So what's this then? Are we not getting any more rules previews? GW decided they dont want to reveal just how terrible the new rules are, so now we are back at "look at these fabulous new miniatures!"?

Again, GW's insecurity towards the new rules is showing..

And is it just me or was there only one shovel, and not even hand held?

They only showed one in the article for some reason, but I think I remember someone counting 6 when they showed the sprues.

There were at least two more shovels on the smaller accessory sprue shown in the video.

In terms of today's preview, I think it was simply a bit of fun given how many questions they've had regarding shovels. Pretty sure there's more previews to come.

Steve

Yeah this was just acknowledging and capitalising on the meme.

Sounds stupid but memes are popular, I've seen this article shared in more groups than any of the previous. That includes the melee article that everyone was arguing about re: armour.

It looks, as so far shown, that the single opposed roll system between Combat and Shooting will have almost the opposite problem that Frostgrave used to have.

In 1st editon frostgrave, you could give your wizard a knife. This would increase his combat abilities. Which was just fine - in combat. However the combat statistic was also used to avoid damage from shooting.

So by carrying a knife, your wizard suddenly got better at dodging arrows.

Kill team is avoiding this by having different damage avoidance stats for shooting and combat. Most heavily armoured stuff is fairly dangerous in CC - it's going to be really interesting to see how they represent stuff that's bad at CC but has heavy armour, e.g. battlesuits.

Looking forward to this.

Got nothing against memes in general, but just the "funny" ones that aren't actually funny.. Guess they are funny to millenials.

Dunno why but I find many things millenials consider funny to be .. not really funny, you know?

my problem here is a simple one

usually if you go down to small skirmish games with 10 models per side, the rules get more details to cover minor differences between models and equipment

while the larger the games get the more simplistic and more abstract the rules are to keep the gameplay on time

but here, we have a more detailed per model mechanic in the larger 40k game than in the small KT

if those mechanics were there in 40k to keep things fast, only one roll off and be done instead of 3-4 and KT having the minimum of 3 rolls the get the difference between high agile, high thougness and high armour models done it would be ok

while the machnic itself does not need to be bad (but yeah, its a GW game after all), it is kind off for the wrong game

 Irbis wrote:
And the most insulting and stupid thing is, it's far easier to hit weak point of armour with a gun! What is easier to dodge into exposed neck, a knife you see coming or speed of light laser from someone you can barely see? A maul swing you can follow with your eyes or burst from bolter or shoota hiting dozens of spots at once? The whole 'melee is better' argument is just comical

Being hyperbolically emotional makes it more obvious, not less, that you've never shot a gun at a moving target.

There's room for a defensive melee attribute but yeah armor primarily being of benefit against ranged fire where hit location is essentially random (aim center mass, hope for minute-of-man), while melee is more about who can overpower or outmaneuver the other to stick something sharp in something soft, makes perfect sense.

 tauist wrote:
Got nothing against memes in general, but just the "funny" ones that aren't actually funny.. Guess they are funny to millenials.

Dunno why but I find many things millenials consider funny to be .. not really funny, you know?

Pretty sure it's not millennials who are enamored by a pseudohistorical guard regiment with a shovel fetish

MarkNorfolk wrote:
"God gave me a gift. I shovel. I shovel really well!"

Have to thank you for the Mystery Men quote. A very, very underrated movie.

 kodos wrote:
my problem here is a simple one

usually if you go down to small skirmish games with 10 models per side, the rules get more details to cover minor differences between models and equipment

Well Shadow war Armageddon exist. It's fairly completed game with almost all 40k factions, using a modified rule of Necromunda 1st edition and 40k 2ed. You pretty much could give unit many illegal loadout in normal 40k game, like dual wielding pistol or melee weapons...

SWA is what 8th Ed should have been. New KT may hit or may miss. I will still be interested in the models.

The shovel is fantastic. I would like to see canteens and leather holsters with snaps. The Krieg models are going to look awesome in a combined crew with Necron (robots) for Stargrave and Five Parsecs. I hope there are components that will allow for "tech-role" builds and something on sprue that looks like a launcher. GW is an awesome model company!

 tauist wrote:
Got nothing against memes in general, but just the "funny" ones that aren't actually funny.. Guess they are funny to millenials.

Dunno why but I find many things millenials consider funny to be .. not really funny, you know?

I don't mind memes, but the 40k fanbase has a way of completely beating a meme horse so thoroughly it's nothing more than scraps of DNA.

 Arbitrator wrote:

 tauist wrote:
Got nothing against memes in general, but just the "funny" ones that aren't actually funny.. Guess they are funny to millenials.

Dunno why but I find many things millenials consider funny to be .. not really funny, you know?

I don't mind memes, but the 40k fanbase has a way of completely beating a meme horse so thoroughly it's nothing more than scraps of DNA.

I didn't knew you could beat the moisture out of glue, but by God did they do it.

I actually think close combat will be fairly involved in Killteam.
In 40k you can sort of blast through rolling your ridiculous pile of dice, but in Killteam you'll both have to set your dice aside and take turns declaring what they're doing with them.
I think this is the primary reason for taking out the armour saves as it's quite slow already.

Chopstick wrote:

 kodos wrote:
my problem here is a simple one

usually if you go down to small skirmish games with 10 models per side, the rules get more details to cover minor differences between models and equipment

Well Shadow war Armageddon exist.

which is the reason why I don't see much benefit with the new KT rules yet
having the good 40k skirmish rules at home, no reason to buy new ones if those are worse and running after a limited box just for the models is not a thing either

if GW is not able to provide the new KT stuff for reasonable price outside the launch box, he game won't last very long after the initial hype
and I guess the Ork Kommandos from the box will be available as most just want the Krieg stuff

 kodos wrote:
my problem here is a simple one

usually if you go down to small skirmish games with 10 models per side, the rules get more details to cover minor differences between models and equipment

while the larger the games get the more simplistic and more abstract the rules are to keep the gameplay on time

but here, we have a more detailed per model mechanic in the larger 40k game than in the small KT

if those mechanics were there in 40k to keep things fast, only one roll off and be done instead of 3-4 and KT having the minimum of 3 rolls the get the difference between high agile, high thougness and high armour models done it would be ok

while the machnic itself does not need to be bad (but yeah, its a GW game after all), it is kind off for the wrong game

I'm not sure I agree with you. This "dicepool" mechanism of KT2 is very much a model vs model thing. I can't really see how you'd scale it to a unit vs unit level without slowing down the game to a complete crawl.

In fact, I see multiple model combat being a potential kludge in the KT2 system. Interesting to see how they've solved it.

That is a good point.
Maybe melee can only ever be 1v1, and other models might provide +/- 1s for assistance/interference but can't add attacks or be attacked?
Remember it's AA so multiple units wanting to attack at once isn't a thing so this isn't that crazy.

Or maybe all models add their dice so going 2v1 effectively gives you twice the dice to throw around. That'd make outnumbering your opponent very powerful.

 tauist wrote:

 kodos wrote:
my problem here is a simple one

usually if you go down to small skirmish games with 10 models per side, the rules get more details to cover minor differences between models and equipment

while the larger the games get the more simplistic and more abstract the rules are to keep the gameplay on time

but here, we have a more detailed per model mechanic in the larger 40k game than in the small KT

if those mechanics were there in 40k to keep things fast, only one roll off and be done instead of 3-4 and KT having the minimum of 3 rolls the get the difference between high agile, high thougness and high armour models done it would be ok

while the machnic itself does not need to be bad (but yeah, its a GW game after all), it is kind off for the wrong game

I'm not sure I agree with you. This "dicepool" mechanism of KT2 is very much a model vs model thing. I can't really see how you'd scale it to a unit vs unit level without slowing down the game to a complete crawl.

In fact, I see multiple model combat being a potential kludge in the KT2 system. Interesting to see how they've solved it.

well, I do not disagree
KT2 system with unit vs unit instead of model vs model will work very well on 40k scale
problem here is that GW does not make unit vs unit mechanics but different model vs model mechanics to scale things

but making it simple:
40k: hit roll + wound roll + save roll = agility + thougness + armour
KT2: attack/defence roll = agility/toughness/armour

you would expect the system were agility, thougness and armour are rolled into one value is the large scaled game were the rules that make a different on those is the small scaled game
(you could argue that on a scale like 40k, the difference between models that get not hit because of high agility and get not wounded because of high thougness is not that important and both can be combined into 1 defence roll, were with KT as there are only 10 models such difference would be more important)

that 40k still has mostly per model rules instead of unit rules (with the guideline to ignore some of the rules to roll dice faster) is a different problem

I would suspect that multi model combat will just be, activate and pick target. Roll.
Possibly with a outnumbering bonus, or a combined activation attack to deal with tough units like marines to keep them getting out of hand with lots of dice or crazy defences.

Not super complex, it’s probably closer to Warmachine than 40k.
Also the current rules would enable more interesting expansion like vehicles to play a small part with missions if they choose to go that way.
Kinda like Infinity has light vehicles effectively with its tags.

Special missions like, kill the carnifex. Or everyone get in the Tank and escape. More narrative style missions as well.
That Kill team sorta struggles at currently.

Apple fox wrote:
I would suspect that multi model combat will just be, activate and pick target. Roll.

The problem with this is that attacking someone inherently needs them to also attack you, since attack and defence are the same roll in melee.
That works fine if it's 1v1, but what if you want to attack multiple targets?
I don't think there's any obviously correct solution, and each approach has it's positives and negatives.

I think its likely that all models currently in base contact (or whatever "locked in combat" equivalent is used) roll their dice and they can be assigned to targets as the players see fit.

Imagine I have a combat;
GOG
O
G = Guardsman, O = Ork (K for Krieg and K for Kommando didn't work out )
All are in base contact together, it's the top left Guardsman's turn, he only wants to attack the top Ork.

Do both Orks roll all their attacks, using them to parry/attack as they see fit? This makes attacking when outnumbered total suicide as it's likely all your hits will just be parried. But that's fairly realistic so maybe it is.
Plus, when you add the second Guardsman that's a huge messy combat and a nightmare to resolve with the parry/attack system.

Or maybe the only Ork that gets to react is the top one, as that's the only the Ork declared as a target. In this case the second Ork would probably interfere in some way, and the second Guardsman would assist in some way.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
I would suspect that multi model combat will just be, activate and pick target. Roll.

The problem with this is that attacking someone inherently needs them to also attack you, since attack and defence are the same roll in melee.
That works fine if it's 1v1, but what if you want to attack multiple targets?
I don't think there's any obviously correct solution, and each approach has it's positives and negatives.

There are a number of ways to combat this, could just only respond once. Negative dice each attack made a round. Or a outnumbering bonus, could also stack them.
GW I hope has thought about that, I Hope..

It’s why I think GW has done themselves a bit of a disservice with there hype, as it feels kinda backwards. And just feels we are missing bits needed to see where it’s going.

Apple fox wrote:

It’s why I think GW has done themselves a bit of a disservice with there hype, as it feels kinda backwards. And just feels we are missing bits needed to see where it’s going.

Well, it seems they've stopped doing the rule preview articles.

 Crimson wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

It’s why I think GW has done themselves a bit of a disservice with there hype, as it feels kinda backwards. And just feels we are missing bits needed to see where it’s going.

Well, it seems they've stopped doing the rule preview articles.

I had notice that, could be this was all planned. Or something wasn’t working. But they sorta got the hype going, and then let it drop off.
I feel like they should have just given the book to someone like glass half dead and then highlight a few things they liked and let someone else do videos on it for them to share at his point.
The rules have seen positive response, it’s the unknowns that are getting more negative. And the jokes at the shapes.

Also seen the post above by kirotheavenger.
I agree entirely it’s a issue, but not one I don’t think can’t be built around. We don’t know how powerful they intend a marine to be right now. So it’s up in the air how much of a issue it is or how much of a design space it needs.

Apple fox wrote:

The rules have seen positive response

Have they? That hasn't been my impression. How it seems to me that the previews elicited a negative response so they just stopped doing them.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Imagine I have a combat;
GOG
O
G = Guardsman, O = Ork (K for Krieg and K for Kommando didn't work out )
All are in base contact together, it's the top left Guardsman's turn, he only wants to attack the top Ork.

Do both Orks roll all their attacks, using them to parry/attack as they see fit? This makes attacking when outnumbered total suicide as it's likely all your hits will just be parried. But that's fairly realistic so maybe it is.
Plus, when you add the second Guardsman that's a huge messy combat and a nightmare to resolve with the parry/attack system.

Or maybe the only Ork that gets to react is the top one, as that's the only the Ork declared as a target. In this case the second Ork would probably interfere in some way, and the second Guardsman would assist in some way.

Good example. I don't see it being an issue though. Players roll all the dice for the models in combat, and then they take their turns to assign dice to cause damage or to parry attacks. Simple to implement.

I agree that a guardsman ganged upon in that way is doomed, but it seems reasonable. Doing this kind of gang up may be the only way low level troops can have any chance of beating a beatstick. If the beatstick doesn;t manage to take their target down first time, they are vulnerable to group activations ganking them with increasing assistance, but equally the person being ganged up on might decide to make no defence and try to blast damage through the enemy parries as they come.

So a lone guardsman ganged up on by 2 orks, if the Guardsman somehow is the attacker and the guardsman has 3 successes and the orks have a combined set of 5 successes, then it would be :
G - damage, O - parry, G - damage, then Orks have 4 remaining successes to splat the guardsman.

Given the Guardsman was probably dead anyway, they can suicide out as much damage as possible.

alternatively, if its per-combatant, then it might be :
G - damage, O - parry, O - parry, then Orks have 3 remaining successes to splat the gaurdsman, having limited damage to the orks.

Alternatively, they could do:
G - damage, O damage, O - damage and the guardsman isn't dead already, then it would go on to G - damage, O - damage, O - damage, G damage, O-damage.

 Crimson wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

The rules have seen positive response

Have they? That hasn't been my impression. How it seems to me that the previews elicited a negative response so they just stopped doing them.

I think it depends where you look, if I had to break it up. The movement being glossed over with the shapes and the reinvented ruler was a mistake. Movement is huge in skirmish games, so it should have been important to go over.

Things like how fast units interact with the system, when they said all units use cercle. Is that just in the box, or all factions.
I play systems already that are similar, but not many are going to have factions with the power fantasy of marines. So outnumbering has to be a system that supports it. This wasn’t covered.

So I do think there is positive reception, but since so many players are asking questions. There own marketing has not really met enough of that and fallen a bit flat.
Glass half dead gave more info on how systems may work, than GW did the selves.
They seem to be hyping the box up, but forgetting the game.

Activations article

Most actions cost one AP, including moving, charging, shooting, and fighting in hand-to-hand combat, while falling back costs two – it takes a lot of concentration to disengage when the bullets and power swords start flying, after all.

But here’s the clever bit – most baseline humans and xenos have two AP, allowing them to move and shoot in a single activation, for instance, or charge and fight (though you can’t typically repeat an action). However, Astartes and Chaos Space Marines, as imposing transhuman paragons of war in the 41st Millennium, get a princely three AP per activation* which is a neat way to demonstrate their effortless superiority. Custodes, meanwhile, get four – enough said.

* As do Harlequins for that matter, though not Rubricae.**

** The designers really have thought of everything.

Well that was enlightening.. they could do a little more.
Just a little. Put a few rosters up. Since baseline Xeno seems so vague.

Activation points may help with the problem Elite armies often have in alternate activation games... Looks interesting.

They make it sound like you can only perform an action once, which is probably going to nullify a lot of that one extra AP advantage compared to just bringing more warm bodies who get another shot/swing off in their activation.

Nothing unexpected from this article and nothing really new either. Although it does confirm suspicions.

And, just like the last article that seemed to have new terrain in it, in case anyone started wondering, this:


... is the FW Realm of Battle Landing pad.

CorwinB wrote:
Activation points may help with the problem Elite armies often have in alternate activation games... Looks interesting.

But, it highlights the big issue with to many elite units. That they can kill more than there worth, and other army need something to even the odds. Often being they outnumber.
Until we see marines, the current stats we have gives a big advantage to resilience and powerful units. How much and where it’s spread out is very important to know.

So what’s the point of having 3 or 4 action points if you can’t repeat actions? Sure Move-Charge-Attack or Shoot-Charge-Attack are cool, but you can’t do that every round.

You can almost certainly repeat move actions. This will allow them much greater mobility before and after an attack.
Custodes might even have a rule to shoot twice or something.

 Chairman Aeon wrote:
So what’s the point of having 3 or 4 action points if you can’t repeat actions? Sure Move-Charge-Attack or Shoot-Charge-Attack are cool, but you can’t do that every round.

The new Kill Team rules are far more flexible. Operatives now have a stat called Action Point Limit (APL for short) – and you can spend these points (AP) on any action that’s available to them. Actions include dashing for cover, charging into combat, taking a shot, or using an ability that’s unique to a particular combatant. Here’s a choice selection of a few actions available to your operatives.

That's where it would, likely, come more into play. The Veterans had a few datacards with unique actions.

 Chairman Aeon wrote:
So what’s the point of having 3 or 4 action points if you can’t repeat actions? Sure Move-Charge-Attack or Shoot-Charge-Attack are cool, but you can’t do that every round.

fallback and shoot is a big one as well.
It’s situation related powerful.
Honestly I am surprised to see charge, since that’s a huge one and if marines and such can do both move and charge could make them crazy fast.
It’s a strange choice, and makes me a little hesitant.

My guess is charge is like it is in Warcry where it just moves you into combat range and does grant a free attack. Which still makes marines faster as they can move twice and then melee, but not insanely so.

Who needs repeats (although note they said typically, not never) when a Custodes could:

Shoot
Move
Charge
Fight.

Or
fight (kill enemy)
move (round corner where enemy hiding)
shoot (enemy who no longer hiding)
charge. (a 3rd enemy)

Marines and Custodes etc could be pretty deadly even without repeats.

Custodes: fight - darn he isn't dead.
Fallback
shoot guy in face.

you don't need to do those every round for it to make them feel way better than normal guys.

That they can kill more than there worth

That's seems a daft comment. Any model can kill more than its worth. Equally, Any model will be too powerful overall if not costed right.

Whilst they may get it wrong, I think you have to assume the intent will be to cost stuff by what it can do in terms of winning games.

puree wrote:
Who needs repeats (although note they said typically, not never) when a Custodes could:

Shoot
Move
Charge
Fight.

Or
fight (kill enemy)
move (round corner where enemy hiding)
shoot (enemy who no longer hiding)
charge. (a 3rd enemy)

Marines and Custodes etc could be pretty deadly even without repeats.

Custodes: fight - darn he isn't dead.
Fallback
shoot guy in face.

you don't need to do those every round for it to make them feel way better than normal guys.

That they can kill more than there worth

That's seems a daft comment. Any model can kill more than its worth. Equally, Any model will be too powerful overall if not costed right.

Whilst they may get it wrong, I think you have to assume the intent will be to cost stuff by what it can do in terms of winning games.

In the context I was using is, if you attack a marine with your guard. And it dies, then you charge a second and it’s Likly to just die as well. In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.
It’s a common use in skirmish games, and it’s just referring to ability to trade blows.
Marines probably get more dice, so they are likly to get a extra hit. If they can shrug off more damage they are more able to put those dice towards damage. Even if they are defending.

Apple fox wrote:

In the context I was using is, if you attack a marine with your guard. And it dies, then you charge a second and it’s Likly to just die as well. In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.

This is a problem with combat in Necromunda, since the enemy gets to retaliate in melee every time you attack them, it makes cheap melee fighters pretty useless as you're basically giving the enemy a free opportunity to kill you.

Killteam is in danger of falling victim to the same problem, but I reserve judgement until we've seen all the rules.

In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.

That depends on all sorts of stuff, and could be said about small elite armies being unviable etc. Until we see more info such statements are more or less worthless.

E.g. I often used to play a 3 or 4 figure nid force in kill team, someone one else had a 'massive' guard force, I can't remember how many, but there were a lot of grunts. I often struggled to win against him for the simple reason that I could wipe half his force out for no loss and still be out numbered on objectives. Game with kill points favored me to some extent, games with objectives favored him to some extent. Overall it was fairly good.

puree wrote:

In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.

That depends on all sorts of stuff, and could be said about small elite armies being unviable etc. Until we see more info such statements are more or less worthless.

E.g. I often used to play a 3 or 4 figure nid force in kill team, someone one else had a 'massive' guard force, I can't remember how many, but there were a lot of grunts. I often struggled to win for the simple reason that I could wipe half his force out for no loss and still be out numbered on objectives. Game with kill points favored me to some extent, games with objectives favored him to some extent. Overall it was fairly good.

We actually have enough stats to run some numbers and get some outcomes. It’s more about how far and how elite GW wants marines to be.
It’s part of why I think the response has not been as positive as it could have been, since we are sorta only missing enough to not be able to understand GW, but can already understand the ideas of the game.

From my own experience with AA games having more activations can be a big benefit, as you can leave important fighters until last to react to enemy movements. Often keeping them out of LoS until the enemy has finished, then move out to strike, free from any immediate retaliation.

So the ability for elites to make multiple actions is very significant, they will still fall victim to this. I think the two have the capacity to balance out nicely.

Except stats and numbers are not enough to draw conclusions. Scenarios victory conditons play into it massively. Which is the point I was making.

Stats and numbers could probably have shown my nids were going to tear apart the guardsmen, but so what? if that isn't how you win. The guard grunt horde weren't 'unviable' because they died in droves (as any good guard player expects), as there was plenty of variety in scenarios that meant that small elite armies would struggle in some and be good in others.


I'm pretty sure thinking back that there were scenarios where I started with less models than objectives, never mind ended with.

It might be a special rule for bolt weapons that they can fire twice.

puree wrote:
Except stats and numbers are not enough to draw conclusions. Scenarios victory conditons play into it massively. Which is the point I was making.

Stats and numbers could probably have shown my nids were going to tear apart the guardsmen, but so what? if that isn't how you win. The guard grunt horde weren't 'unviable' because they died in droves (as any good guard player expects), as there was plenty of variety in scenarios that meant that small elite armies would struggle in some and be good in others.


I'm pretty sure thinking back that there were scenarios where I started with less models than objectives, never mind ended with.

Yes, until we know more. It’s why I think they are kicking themselves with such poor articles. People are discussing these, and it’s not like GW is trending unknown ground here.
It’s basic stuff. And we know GW.
Missions can only effect so much, and it’s only a small extra to dice in this system that can make something extremely powerful.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

In the context I was using is, if you attack a marine with your guard. And it dies, then you charge a second and it’s Likly to just die as well. In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.

This is a problem with combat in Necromunda, since the enemy gets to retaliate in melee every time you attack them, it makes cheap melee fighters pretty useless as you're basically giving the enemy a free opportunity to kill you.

Killteam is in danger of falling victim to the same problem, but I reserve judgement until we've seen all the rules.

Your danger is my dream! Hordes of cheap melee fighters have no place in my sci-fi low model count skirmish game. Also stop throwing bodies to speed bump combat monsters.

It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

Blastaar wrote:
It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it as well.. Surely this can't be right?!

If melee goes past armour and you can always reliably get to CC by spending 1 AP, melee specialists will be seriously OP

They didn't say anything about "attempting" actions anymore.. So APL is just a fixed variable which never gets tested? Another missed opportunity..

Can almost guarantee that Charging will be limited to up to your Movement.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

In the context I was using is, if you attack a marine with your guard. And it dies, then you charge a second and it’s Likly to just die as well. In a skirmish game that just makes horde army’s unviable.

This is a problem with combat in Necromunda, since the enemy gets to retaliate in melee every time you attack them, it makes cheap melee fighters pretty useless as you're basically giving the enemy a free opportunity to kill you.

Killteam is in danger of falling victim to the same problem, but I reserve judgement until we've seen all the rules.

There's still an advantage to the attacker in that they choose a die to resolve first. So wimpy models may expect to die even on their activation, but they can guarantee a hit and whittle away the more elite model with their numbers even if the elite model gets a bunch of "free" (in the sense that they take damage in exchange for doing damage) activations. When you have differential points values, "trading" models at a ratio other than 1:1 is normal and expected.

If I were designing the rules, I'd try to use GA (if it's Group Activation) and the "Front-line troopers can act with comrades" snippet from the 5-things article to mean that vanilla chaff-style models (Guardsmen with basic equipment, melee combatants that are only dangerous in swarms like Hormagaunts or cultists, etc.) can activate multiple of the same type of model in one (otherwise) alternating activation. If you then make it so that defenders only roll their melee attack once per activation no matter how many models activate, you can have one 'gaunt not be a threat to, say, a Space Marine, but if they're GA3, they can overwhelm him with their numbers if they're on the attack.

Rihgu wrote:
Can almost guarantee that Charging will be limited to up to your Movement.

Agreed, Charge will most likely be limited by movement. I would also guess there's a limiting factor like "must be in a straight line without obstacles in the path."

Blastaar wrote:
It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

You're assuming you can repeat actions

 tauist wrote:

Blastaar wrote:
It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it as well.. Surely this can't be right?!

What are you guys basing this off of?

Those actions they showed are clearly only brief explanations and not the full rules.

We don't even know any of the specifics about how melee combat works, only the general concept.

 Captain Joystick wrote:

 tauist wrote:

Blastaar wrote:
It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it as well.. Surely this can't be right?!

What are you guys basing this off of?

Oooh now I get it, because the little description says "Move to engage an enemy" without mentioning range they assume you can just teleport into melee from anywhere to anywhere. Pure lol.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Captain Joystick wrote:

 tauist wrote:

Blastaar wrote:
It looks like minis can charge from one side of the board to the other.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it as well.. Surely this can't be right?!

What are you guys basing this off of?

Oooh now I get it, because the little description says "Move to engage an enemy" without mentioning range they assume you can just teleport into melee from anywhere to anywhere. Pure lol.

Hey, it's been known to happen. Pyrovores dying in a table-sized explosion? Deep-striking land raiders?

Of course we need to see the full rules.

 The Red Hobbit wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
Can almost guarantee that Charging will be limited to up to your Movement.

Agreed, Charge will most likely be limited by movement. I would also guess there's a limiting factor like "must be in a straight line without obstacles in the path."

I hope not, kill team boards can be full of terrain so strait line and without obstacles would really be sucky. Considering the movement you lose as well for going over something.

Speed as well really depends if a charge is movement, 6+6 for a move+charge then attack on elite models is a big thing on tiny boards.

Apple fox wrote:

 The Red Hobbit wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
Can almost guarantee that Charging will be limited to up to your Movement.

Agreed, Charge will most likely be limited by movement. I would also guess there's a limiting factor like "must be in a straight line without obstacles in the path."

I hope not, kill team boards can be full of terrain so strait line and without obstacles would really be sucky. Considering the movement you lose as well for going over something.

going by how movement works and weapons rules, I am pretty sure the KT rules are written with an half empty board in mind

If anything the weapon rules suggest a dense board , hence range isn't needed.
The box also comes with a huge amount of terrain relative to the models you get.

There's no problem here, at all, this was just a brief summary of actions and in no way can be analysed in such detail.

I like the idea of models with a bigger GA being able to combine their attack dice against a target. Such a thing would actually make basic grunts with melee weapons a viable option to field. I hope that's the actual implementation, as opposed to something like in Blood Bowl, where an assist just grants a +1 per assisting model.

But regarding the APL, I still hope there is some sort of suppression mechanic onboard which will make spending those AP's more difficult when pinned etc. If Custodes get 4 APL, slower opponents will need something to even out the odds..

Rihgu wrote:
Can almost guarantee that Charging will be limited to up to your Movement.

Considering charge isn't a free move and comes with limitations, at least ending in engagement range, I could see it universally using the 6" range to provide a substantial move distance and set it apart from a normal move.

I hope Killteam does get some sort of suppression mechanic, but from what we've seen so far I very much doubt it.

Mechanically a suppression rule with moderate impact wouldn't be a bad idea. But this is 40k so you'd probably only see Guardsmen suppressed while everyone else gets a special rule that supersedes it to represent everyone being mindless or insane. I don't trust GW to write such a rule without introducing so many exceptions that its existence is basically pointless.

CC seems to be a pretty important part of the "new" KillTeam... my T'au look pretty sad on their shelf

It's waay too early to be discussing balance like that yet, fear not!

 Geifer wrote:
Mechanically a suppression rule with moderate impact wouldn't be a bad idea. But this is 40k so you'd probably only see Guardsmen suppressed while everyone else gets a special rule that supersedes it to represent everyone being mindless or insane. I don't trust GW to write such a rule without introducing so many exceptions that its existence is basically pointless.

Suppression rules already exist in Necromunda: "pinning" is caused by being hit by any weapon, even when not wounded. As Necromunda is very much about action limits too (models can generally make 2 different actions per round, or double actions in some cases like charging and firing heavy weapons), and standing up after being pinned is an action by itself, this is a major part of gameplay. Skills exist that allow models to stand up without using an action or even circumventing being pinned at all - these are very sought after but relatively rare in practice.

But then, the models in Necromunda are (mostly) more-or-less baseline humans with a clear sense of self-preservation. This may not clearly apply to many 40k factions, but I think enough of them would be affected: apart from Guardsmen, Genestealer and Chaos cultists, T'au, Eldar (of all varieties), Kroot, Sisters, Skitarii and even some Orks (esp. Kommandos) should be "sane" enough of most of the time to not want to run into a storm of bullets, and Marines should also be able to realize they're not "immune" to all weapon types. Of course many of them may have other ways of dodging or deflecting bullets that most baseline humans do not, but still. Honestly it would make Marines even more imposing if they couldn't unvoluntarily be pinned while other models had not choice. Doesn't make them immune to any damage, but they've the armour and will to continue despite the rain of ordnance coming their way (unless they'd choose to be pinned voluntarily, of course).

Star Wars Legion has perhaps a better base system to draw from than Necromunda if you want to apply it to a world as diverse as 40k. Necromunda's system is very binary and doesn't work quite so well with the diversity.

In Star Wars Legion every time a unit gets shot at, you gain a suppression token. If you have Suppression equal to your leadership (1-4) you lose an action, if you have Suppression double your leadership you panic and must flee instead of taking any actions.

It works well as you can give massed Guardsman low leadership, forcing them to rely on nearby officers to stop them just immediately fleeing the table.
Whereas you can give Astartes high leadership, forcing the enemy to focus intense fire in order to suppress them.

Although this is just an exercise in "what could have been", we've seen the datasheet and there's no leadership of any kind anywhere.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
In Star Wars Legion every time a unit gets shot at, you gain a suppression token.

It's also an FFG. Every time you do anything you get a token. Sometimes you get tokens for getting tokens.

Marines isn't immune to all weapon type on the tabletop. They got clapped by mass shoota, autogun, lasgun all the time.The only time they got close to immunity to almost every weapon is Terminator in 2E/SWA.

A terminator with a Storm Shield is pretty robust, but that's a moot point for now since Termies wont be in KT2 unless they get added in future expansions.

The sort of suppression mechanic I woulda made would have been something like "1st AP use is always succesful. After the first action, roll a D6 every time you want to spend an AP, modifying -1 for every supression directed against this operative; on a 3+ that action is succesful." Now I haven't given this too much thought, but something along those lines woulda been great. Throw in something like veteran specialists ignoring modifiers, and a melee attack after a succesful charge action always activating.

A succesful AP mechanic with the possibility of fumbling an action could make really interesting (and cruel) moments in a game, an operative moves in to get a better shot at another, but gets supressed after having made their movement (overwatch) and hesitates long enough to miss a chance for making a shot..

So, points are gone, and it's now based on fire teams?

That sounds pretty dumb. I'm sure a sergeant with a laspistol and chainsword is just as good as one with a plasma pistol and power sword. The kommando example is particularly stupid. There are 9 options in addition to the plain boy. And you select up to nine of them, you can't pick any of them except plain boy more than once. So it's just take exactly what's in the box. Unless you want to switch out the grot or squig for a plain boy, if they're obviously worse or something.

"But what if you want even more customisation options? What about special equipment? What about rare equipment you can requisition or even capture as your Kill Team campaign rolls on?
We’ll let you know as soon as we learn more."

Yeah, I lost a lot of hope this week.

Roster selection covered today:
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/07/22/new-kill-team-replaces-points-with-a-fast-finely-balanced-list-building-system/

Oof. If people come up with weird interpretations and questions about 40k equipment, this is going to cause a lot of confusion, I think. I think I see what they're going for, and I'm intensely curious about the execution -- especially with the given examples of Astartes getting one fire team per kill team, and then the implication that Poxwalkers and Death Guard sound like different fire teams. So surely Death Guard get to take 2 fire teams right? Seems odd, if Loyalists only get one.

Also, the fire teams shown available to Guard look like they're divided by unit type, further underscoring the implication (to me, at least) that Poxwalkers and Plague Marines aren't mixed in one fire team, and raising questions about whether that will mean that Loyalist Astartes have to choose whether to field a kill team of, say, exclusively Intercessors or Infiltrators.

I'm intrigued, but definitely need to see more to make a judgement, here.

Build exactly what's in the box.

I said Warcry was the desired endgame for what GW wants their skirmish games to be. This is another step closer.

There's no need for points. It's perfectly balanced that you can bring 7 dudes with lasguns; or 3 dudes with lasguns, 3 dudes with plasma guns, and a sergeant with plasma pistol and power sword. Balanced either way!

Am I reading it wrong or I can only have 1 of each special weapon Guardsmen? This "team building" is even worse than Warcry. With fix number of fighters and no point cost no one will take the cheaper crappier weapons like before to squeeze in more bodies.

No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

The faction pdf for SWA is still up, even the game might not be very fun to play, i still have a blast reading through it and try to build a team,simplified the list building phase is removing half of the fun :(

https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/ShadowWar/SWA_Killteams_ENG.pdf

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

No no. Points don't work. That's why 1st ed. Age of Sigmar launched so successfully.

Chopstick wrote:
The faction pdf for SWA is still up, even the game might not be very fun to play, i still have a blast reading through it and try to build a team,simplified the list building phase is removing half of the fun :(

https://www.games-workshop.com/resources/PDF/ShadowWar/SWA_Killteams_ENG.pdf

There still is a listbuilding phase from what we've seen today. You learn the mission, presumably your opponent's faction, and then build a fireteam out from your roster to best enact the mission. Per game, it seems.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

No, its a common method but not the only method. Some games use "deckbuilding" type approaches, of which there are several different sub-types. One subtype is that your "cards" are what you use, i.e. you can select say 20 cards, and can't take any single card more than 3 times, and then you just fight with whatever those cards work out to be. The cards are all equivalent to one another in terms of power/ability/utility, at least roughly speaking, so its balanced based around that paradigm. The other way of doing that is that your deck forms a subset of options that are available for you to deploy, i.e. you have a "codex" that contains 50 different units, from which you can select 20 of them - some of which may be duplicates but the number of duplicates is limited. Then as the game goes on you can purchase/deploy a limited number of units from that deck of 20.

There are other methods out there as well in terms of strategy video games - and an even more diverse array of balancing mechanics used in tabletop gaming.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
There's no need for points. It's perfectly balanced that you can bring 7 dudes with lasguns; or 3 dudes with lasguns, 3 dudes with plasma guns, and a sergeant with plasma pistol and power sword. Balanced either way!

I disagree. Do a guardsman with a grenade launcher and a guardsman with a plasma gun have the same value? The Kill Team team thinks so.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

no, there are other ways of doing it and "points" are usually just used to agree on a size, like small, medium or large battles

and while there are better ways of using points if you are not able to balance the options for each faction, I am not sure of GW is able to do it

and the other problem is, this game only has one size and does not scale
no small into games or faster medium sized games, 1 size that cannot be changed

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

No no. Points don't work. That's why 1st ed. Age of Sigmar launched so successfully.

Except it did have a points system - it used wound counts in place of a separate point stat. So uhh, nice self-own I guess?

Warcaster: Neo Mechanika actually forgoes the use of points and while its still a small game with a small community the feedback from its competitive community has been overwhelmingly positive.

I wanted to like Kill team but everything I read feels needlessly complicated.
I must be thick as gak because I could not make sense of the unit building rules.
It is very hot today which might explain that.

Yeah this was a real punch in the gut.

You actually lose a lot of flexibility in how you can build Killteams and that's super lame. You're never going to take a laspistol on your sergeant for any reason beyond masochism.

feth, I was so unbelievably hyped when I saw it was AA, but starting with the melee article every one has chipped away at that enthusiasm with another questionable mechanic revealed.

Yeah, I think my 4 lictor Kill Team is probably dead now :/

Which, yknow, admittedly kinda cheesy, probably shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, etc. So probably a good thing for the health of the game overall, but still.

I mean, based on my perusal of the different weapons listed in the datacards Adam flipped through on the stream, the only eye-brow raising wargear "option" I saw was the pistols line -- Las Pistol definitely is sub-par compared to the other two. Depending on what "Balanced" and some of the other keywords do, I could believe most of the other options are of similar value if you're comparing them to the appropriate target(s).

Meltagun vs. Plasmagun vs. Flamer are statted in such a way that I absolutely believe that which is "better" is a matter of what you expect to be shooting at. I don't remember seeing a Grenade Launcher (and if I did, don't remember its stats), but could similarly be convinced that it's got situations that it shines in sufficiently to be worth trading out another of the special weapons Gunners for.

Side note, this proves "GA/Group Allowance" doesn't refer to the number of models you're allowed in a unit.

I'm now pretty sure it's refers to the number of such models you can activate in one turn. So you can activate 3 Guardsman Scrubs at once if you want.
I guess this is intended to let them swarm a little.
Although from my experience of Necromunda 90% of the time that's a bad idea that'd hurt more than help.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

No no. Points don't work. That's why 1st ed. Age of Sigmar launched so successfully.

Except it did have a points system - it used wound counts in place of a separate point stat. So uhh, nice self-own I guess?

That wasn't in the game at launch, that was a player solution that GW later adopted as a suggested way to balance before the first GHB. AoS released with no balancing mechanism what so ever.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Except it did have a points system - it used wound counts in place of a separate point stat. So uhh, nice self-own I guess?

You're right. Three goblins *were* equal to an ogre.

It was such a good points system, that they literally patched actual points back in post-launch.

A further drawback of not using points is that it doesn't scale, at all.
Tight on time so want to bring the numbers down? Nope, there's no way to do that in current list building rules.

Really enjoying the game and want to size it up and use even more toys? Nope, there's no way to do that (unless you work in integer multiples like double).

 Platuan4th wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
No points is really progressive game design from GW. Maybe some of you guys will finally come to understand that there are other means and methods to balance competitive games, and that points in and of themselves are an incredibly poor way of doing so.

But I'm not entirely getting the warm fuzzies from how GW implemented it.

Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

No no. Points don't work. That's why 1st ed. Age of Sigmar launched so successfully.

Except it did have a points system - it used wound counts in place of a separate point stat. So uhh, nice self-own I guess?

That wasn't in the game at launch, that was a player solution that GW later adopted as a suggested way to balance before the first GHB. AoS released with no balancing mechanism what so ever.

IIRC according to James Hewitt that was meant to be included at launch (against his better judgement, but was forced on him by management), but then at the last minute they pulled everything and cut the rules down from a full size rulebook to just 4 pages (again against his better judgement, again forced by management).

 Lord Damocles wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Except it did have a points system - it used wound counts in place of a separate point stat. So uhh, nice self-own I guess?

You're right. Three goblins *were* equal to an ogre.
It was such a good points system, that they literally patched actual points back in post-launch.

But it *is* a points system. And as you've brilliantly illustrated - it sucked and did not produce balanced outcomes. Much like how the current points systems being used by 40k and AoS still don't really produce proper balance - just better balance than using wounds.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
A further drawback of not using points is that it doesn't scale, at all.
Tight on time so want to bring the numbers down? Nope, there's no way to do that in current list building rules.
Really enjoying the game and want to size it up and use even more toys? Nope, there's no way to do that (unless you work in integer multiples like double).

Thats flawed - you *can* scale the game, and also points don't necessarily scale well either. Theres a reason why every game that uses points usually comes with recommended game sizes, these are the range of values at which the points system is scaled to function properly. If you exceed those parameters then balance starts to skew, sometimes aggressively. In general, with GW games that range is around 500 - 2000 points. Going lower than 500 is hard to begin with, but going above 2000 is really easy, but unless you regularly play above maybe 4-5k points you typically don't encounter those issues. In part, this is due to the "synergy" aspect of the game design. aura abilities, strategems, etc. generally don't scale well and are super points efficient at higher point values where you can take more and larger units to leverage them with, as well as potentially more sources to generate them (in the case of characters with aura abilities).

In the case of scaling KT, simply adding more fireteams (so orks would get a second fireteam, whereas guard would get 2 based on how this is presented) would be the equivalent of scaling up. Like a points system, doing so might result in skew as you add more fireteams, but its an option.

Just when you thought they learned their lesson with AoS.

No points…lol

Also it occurs to me that with only 10DKoK in the box vs 10 Kommandos, they didn't actually provide enough guardsmen for a proper game, unless theres a separate roster to draw from for the Veteran Guardsmen from the one shown.

chaos0xomega wrote:


In the case of scaling KT, simply adding more fireteams (so orks would get a second fireteam, whereas guard would get 2 based on how this is presented) would be the equivalent of scaling up. Like a points system, doing so might result in skew as you add more fireteams, but its an option.

So you can double both sides... which I already addressed.
It's still a very limited way of doing things


Automatically Appended Next Post:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Also it occurs to me that with only 10DKoK in the box vs 10 Kommandos, they didn't actually provide enough guardsmen for a proper game, unless theres a separate roster to draw from for the Veteran Guardsmen from the one shown.

But it's been finely balanced! They have an algorithm and everything!

Although in all seriousness, they showed us the army list for Guardsmen. The boxset has Veteran Guardsmen. We can see on the website they're separate factions. I imagine the Veteran Guardsmen have slightly better stats/specialists but fewer models. You can also see the army list they showed doesn't include a lot of the krieg specialists we've already been shown.

Not sure I'm so keen on it for something like Kill team where I'd want to be more individualistic, but really it is a variant of what is quite common in general wargaming.

You get to choose prebaked groups based on historical formations. The game designers can then focus on keeping that pre packed group balanced with other pre packed groups, and not worry about trying to ascribe some 'value' to a specific model or piece of equipment which may vary by what else it is combined with. Only the balance of the group counts.

Switch 'historical' for 40k 'reality', and then argue whether they actually are balanced, but the concept is pretty tried and tested.

puree wrote:
Not sure I'm so keen on it for something like Kill team where I'd want to be more individualistic, but really it is a variant of what is quite common in general wargaming.

You get to choose prebaked groups based on historical formations. The game designers can then focus on keeping that pre packed group balanced with other pre packed groups, and not worry about trying to ascribe some 'value' to a specific model or piece of equipment when combined with different gruops. Only the balance of the group counts.

I agree it's normally a fine approach.
But it really doesn't work for a 40k sub-game where the empthasis has always been "your dudes".

I'm sure veteran guardsmen have a different way to build a roster, but if they don't, Pariah Nexus also exists, where 5 flayed ones vs 5 Heavy Intercessors, iirc, with one commander each was released. They didn't even match points, when the system had points.
I want to finish my Infinity models soon.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
In Star Wars Legion every time a unit gets shot at, you gain a suppression token.

It's also an FFG. Every time you do anything you get a token. Sometimes you get tokens for getting tokens.

That is indeed true, but Bolt Action and Epic did it before it was cool, for this specific instance

But it really doesn't work for a 40k sub-game where the empthasis has always been "your dudes".

.

Aye, I've long wished they'd do something more like with 40k itself - where the larger scale would make sense with that system.

But for a skirmish game of 40k I'd like more freedom. Of course nothing stops me playing how I want, it isn't like I will ever play in a tourney or something.

puree wrote:
Not sure I'm so keen on it for something like Kill team where I'd want to be more individualistic, but really it is a variant of what is quite common in general wargaming.

You get to choose prebaked groups based on historical formations. The game designers can then focus on keeping that pre packed group balanced with other pre packed groups, and not worry about trying to ascribe some 'value' to a specific model or piece of equipment when combined with different gruops. Only the balance of the group counts.

From how it's described in the article, though, you do get to pick specific models/equipment within each team, you're just limited to the number of models you can take and one of each specialist. This is functionally a points system in the same way that AoS's wound-counting was a points system- just as not all wounds were equal in AoS, it is unlikely that all specialists for a given faction will be equal here too. Superficially that might mean factions are balanced against one another, but every Astra Militarum team has (for example) a plasma gunner and a sniper rifle but never ever a comms specialist or meltagun, because some specialists are better than others. That's a balance issue.

For a historical comparison, I'd suggest looking at how Chain of Command does it: Each platoon has a historical composition, as you say, but then an additional bonus point value. Those points are then used before the game to purchase additional support assets, on top of whatever number may be provided by the scenario. So in this way, the platoons are balanced against one another by varying the amount of support they can bring along, and the designers can adjust balance by adjusting those totals. There are no choices to make within a platoon, so the designers can focus on that external balance.

Maybe there'll be a format that dictates that you must have one of each specialist. That could be interesting- but definitely takes away from the 'your dudes' aspect of it.

I'm also far more interested in the campaign system, if this is more just a starting point from which things vary (as they hint at) or one off games then I may be less bothered.

army list is same as the rules

so 40k makes now the better small scale skirmish and KT with little changes (just use units instead of models) will be the better 40k

I'd suggest looking at how Chain of Command does it: Each platoon has a historical composition, as you say, but then an additional bonus point value. Those points are then used before the game to purchase additional support assets, on top of whatever number may be provided by the scenario. So in this way, the platoons are balanced against one another by varying the amount of support they can bring along, and the designers can adjust balance by adjusting those totals.

yup, I've played games like that - choose a main battle group, and then support groups to fill in gaps etc. A couple of Napoleonic games come straight to mind.

I'm not overly bothered about whether people will take weapon A over weapon B all the time in this setup, that is a choice per player; it is balance between factions and groups that is more important IMHO. But the basic setup does prevent total skew lists by the looks, and should keep each group balanced to each other a lot more. It's also generally a lot easier to tweak over time, add an operative, remove the number you can take etc, as you can tweak the specific problem group and not a points value which has impacts across the board.

List composition feels much more similar to how historicals do things!!! That's great!

It occurs to me that while this does look horrendously clunky to describe on paper, it probably streamlines effectively into nice little dropdown menus in their new app.

This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

 Sledgehammer wrote:
List composition feels much more similar to how historicals do things!!! That's great!

not really

I don't know any historical skirmish game that has such limited list building
this is more of mass skirmish or R&F type of list building

Oh dear, this sounds incredibly limiting, boring and tosses out all the amazing creativity people have done with Kill Team.

Everything about this ruleset is beginning to sound like a pig's ear.

jullevi wrote:
This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

Until we see the lists, it's a bit hard to judge.

I will say that the Guard one is...interesting.

jullevi wrote:
This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

I suspect that we'll both see similar kits as future releases, but also that the initial factions' fire teams are arranged so that they (more or less) consist of the options available in existing 40k boxes. Note that the non-Krieg-box-corresponding Guard can take a Scion fire team and a Guardsman fire team that sure looks like every option is included in a single Cadian Shock Troops box.

 The Phazer wrote:
Oh dear, this sounds incredibly limiting, boring and tosses out all the amazing creativity people have done with Kill Team.

Everything about this ruleset is beginning to sound like a pig's ear.

Its very much designed to be 'you can only take what the kit can build.' Just like the DG plague marines in their codex (if a bit more readable).
Except for basic guy (boy or trooper) each gear combination is only selectable once. (With a max of three non-troopers for guard, but not for kommandos)

Not sure about balance. Balance seems to exist because they say it does, not something inherent to the rules or an emergent property of these choice limitations.
In theory a team of all kommando boys is supposed to be just as balanced as a maxed out group of special weapons boys (1 of each), and it seems self-evident that would be nonsense.

I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

As far as the Guard roster goes, I'm pretty happy to see what they did with it, and I'm hoping other factions are similar. Seeing a Guard team that was half-armed with plasma guns was just silly and made no sense from a lore or military structure stand point. It will be nice to have teams that actually look like a military unit.

Hopefully they can get the numbers balanced out amongst the weaker individual models factions, so you don't end up with 14 Guardsmen vs 14 Tau Fire Warriors kind of deal.

Voss wrote:

(With a max of three non-troopers for guard, but not for kommandos)

For normal guard. But then, a Kill Team of them is two Fire Teams, so you can choose each of the six operatives once.

 Sabotage! wrote:
I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

I'm guessing the ones you can take multiple of are the ones with a GA >1, and that's why you *might* take extra over their special weapon counterparts.

Even if the balance of that doesn't fly, and you tell a new player "take up to your limit of limited options, and choose among them what sounds good to you" how is that a *worse* position than current list-building practices, where you aren't *required* to take specialists, but you darn well should? Or taking as many gunners as you're allowed?

It's a bit more constrained in that you can't spam a single option to hit the limit, but I feel like that's got to be a net positive for creativity, not a negative.

Kaffis wrote:

 Sabotage! wrote:
I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

I'm guessing the ones you can take multiple of are the ones with a GA >1, and that's why you *might* take extra over their special weapon counterparts.

Even if the balance of that doesn't fly, and you tell a new player "take up to your limit of limited options, and choose among them what sounds good to you" how is that a *worse* position than current list-building practices, where you aren't *required* to take specialists, but you darn well should? Or taking as many gunners as you're allowed?

It's a bit more constrained in that you can't spam a single option to hit the limit, but I feel like that's got to be a net positive for creativity, not a negative.

Very true. I would rather see a "Veteran Guardsman" style roster composed of a single lasgunner, a medic, a comms op, a harden vet, a plasma gunner, a sniper, a demolitionist, a sarge, etc. than a list with one Sergeant who hides in the back leading 5 plasma gunners and 5 conscripts with nothing. At least the Veteran team feels like a real special ops team on a crucial mission, as opposed to something that would never actually be fielded.

This will harshly homogenize lists.

Basically every faction now has

exactly X number of models
of which Y can be specialists
and you'd be completely insane not to max out on the specialists
and that's literally it

Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

An interesting notion I haven't seen mentioned is that I think (offf the top of my head) a Krieg box can be built as a (non-Veteran) Guardsman fire team, if what we heard about the contents having standard equipment build options instead of their specialty/wargear builds. If so, that means that one could build a two-box Krieg Astra Militarum KT, or a Krieg and Scion KT with no trouble if the Veteran Guardsman option feels too elite at 10 models...

Hmm. A lot less interested now. At least until the fandex point costs get sorted out

One of the nice things about the 1st edition was fiddling with lists.

Every little tidbit that comes out makes it worse. I'm not opposed to a balancing system that doesn't use points. I started with historicals where the forces were dictated by the scenario. However, points or something similar are indicated in a system where players get to choose their own forces from their personal collections like 40k proper. This seems like a weird hybrid where you can choose models, but from a much more limited pool dictated by however GW packages the kits. There's no way this is going to work well. Players will figure out what the best kit is and that'll be that.

You know, on one hand, this is kinda limited system and looks like only kill teams with good sprue (or KT extra sprue, like new kommandos/krieg) will have a lot of flexibility. On the other, the kill teams finally look like they are supposed to in the fluff and the new format finally forces some thinking and picking choices instead of braindead netlisting with 15 plasma guns.

I like the system more than past one, where you often had stupid choices like downgrading equipment on your guys fielding blandest, most boring models to avoid massive penalty (like SM team, where 1 point was often difference between being 19 pts and 1 body down or 1 point above 100 points limit when you tried to take fluffy options) needlessly penalizing teams with expensive troopers.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

Erm, no. Let's give two examples similar to KT - namely, Team Fortress 2 and Wargame. In TF2, competitive scene hard locks your kill team to two builds - either 6 (medic, 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, demoman) or 9 (one of each class) because team of say 6 soldiers would be absurdly broken and hard to kill. They don't bother mucking about with different compositions (even though on different maps something else might be better), they try to make kill teams balanced as a whole against each other, like new KT.

Wargame also features hard locks - you have points, true, but each unit you pick has hard limit, the more the better it is. So, you can pick 1-4 T-72 tanks but 1-8 T-55 tanks (or 1-2 T-90) - to ensure you can't spam your plasma gun trooper, so to say. New KT does pretty much the same thing but dispenses with points because you don't have PC to dynamically calculate them and keeps just the hard lock idea.

Blastaar wrote:
I disagree. Do a guardsman with a grenade launcher and a guardsman with a plasma gun have the same value? The Kill Team team thinks so.

Completely wrong. New KT balances teams, not dudes. Designers know that even if one gun is broken, it will be on one model only (instead of old munchkin 12 plasma party), and opponent will have counterplay (shooting said model) instead of losing by default thanks to inferior options. You also have now real choices - do I pick dude with long las for long range in my gunner slot, or flamer for close range kick (when in old KT neither existed because it was WAAAC 12 plasma time, baby). Do I take melta for short range AT, or grenade launcher for versatility? Answer might change depending on opponent, or map, or scenario - and it's great, now you finally have no idea (well, you know what I mean) what opponent might field and you might see a lot more mixed kill teams that still look fluffy instead of rolling your eyes seeing 12 plasma gunners (and meat shield conscript to make the whole thing look even dumber) every single time.

I find it really funny and ironic that people blame format forcing diversity of options and troopers to somehow not 'being your dudes' when people who like fluff will jump on it and the only ones who won't like it will be dudes who bent fluff into pretzel to justify their 12 plasma copy paste clone gang

 kirotheavenger wrote:
You actually lose a lot of flexibility in how you can build Killteams and that's super lame. You're never going to take a laspistol on your sergeant for any reason beyond masochism.

I have concerns here too but 1) they mentioned requisitions so maybe plasma is end game gear, 2) sarge with actually good gear looks cool and I will take them over bland min-maxed 40K cheapest sarges possible. If anything, it's invitation to have blinged up 'your dude' veteran as leader, which is nice.

It seems like it will be a real pain to rebalance kill teams without points.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
T
Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

Well, the teams in the box are veterans and kommandos. Yes, they're really restricted, but you still have guard and orks as options.

Looking at the normal list for guard you could choose two fire teams of guard or scions or one of each. I suppose other factions have similar options.

Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

Oof. Todays' reveal was a bit of a deal breaker for me. The new fire team system blows hard. Not everyone was playing randos with max plasma spam FFS. Now we will see Kill Teams with 9 troopers and 1 leader, because GA will make troopers viable in melee, and because ranged weapons are less effective than melee when fighting MEQ...

I still want to see all the new rules, and especially the new campaign system (which might still save matters somewhat), but the past few reveals have gotten me thinking about sticking to KT1/Open Play..

What a disappointment. The redesigned rules paradigm was a fresh idea, but now its looking to me like the potential will be wasted by GW half-a$$ery once again.

To me, building a Kill Team involves buying several kits and researching special bits for custom kitbashes. So GW wants me to spend less money now??! Just buy one box and call it a day? Where's this "customizability" you praised in your "5 things we love" article?

RazorEdge wrote:
Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

It's easier to see if you replace "Fire Team" with "GW retail box".

 lord_blackfang wrote:
This will harshly homogenize lists.

Basically every faction now has

exactly X number of models
of which Y can be specialists
and you'd be completely insane not to max out on the specialists
and that's literally it

Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

Wrong. Loading up on specialists might look good on paper, but it's just shooting your own foot depending on map or opponent. Fine, you took melta, now look how all termagant team laughs at it because rapid fire lasgun was better pick. You took flamer on SM instead of bolter? Enjoy short range meaning you won't get to shoot it till turn 3 against competent opponent. Now the system finally encourages thinking and picking good choices, and if you think it will homogenize lists more than 12 plasma clone WAAAC party, I have bridge on Terra for sale.

Even if we assume you're 'technically' right because maxed up kill teams will have same options (except we already know you're completely wrong because you have multiple fire team options so not even two IG teams will necessarily look identical) I will still take two kill teams fielding all weapon options in the game (forcing you to think how to best apply them) over 12 plasma clone WAAAC party and its brainless autoplay. And that's assuming people will max options instead of taking troopers - that ork team you mentioned? For all we know, 5 of the specialists are very situational picks and you will need to think long and hard if you take them over regular kommando. Anything that will change the game from solved equation (like 12 plasma clones to minmax point efficiency) to actual game of skill in picking best choices is good, not bad.

RazorEdge wrote:
Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

I suppose they're part of a modular design of the forces. If we're going with the guardsmen example, they have 7 members. I guess scions won't, let's say they have 5. So you could build a KT of 14 guardsmen, 10 scions or a mixed force of 5 scions and 7 guardsmen. We'll have to see what the other lists look like. Maybe the Marine list isn't as varied as it seems.

 Dryaktylus wrote:
I suppose they're part of a modular design of the forces. If we're going with the guardsmen example, they have 7 members. I guess scions won't, let's say they have 5. So you could build a KT of 14 guardsmen, 10 scions or a mixed force of 5 scions and 7 guardsmen. We'll have to see what the other lists look like. Maybe the Marine list isn't as varied as it seems.

If anything, SM will be more varied, because you have scouts, tacticals, primaris, and deathwatch in one list, each of which sounds like their own fire team - say, 4 scouts, 3 tacticals/primaris, or 2 DW veterans.

 tauist wrote:
To me, building a Kill Team involves buying several kits and researching special bits for custom kitbashes. So GW wants me to spend less money now??! Just buy one box and call it a day? Where's this "customizability" you praised in your "5 things we love" article?

Read the article again. GW wants you to make pool of 20-25 models with which to make fire teams and kill teams on the spot. A pool to which you can add (or convert) if later you have better idea/get rare loot in game. I have no idea how you intend to assemble 25+ custom kitbashed models from one box. Especially seeing old edition and its 12 plasma clones really was buildable from a single box + a few bits because best compositions were solved thanks to rigid point system. So, if anything, your criticism is backwards.

 Flinty wrote:
Hmm. A lot less interested now. At least until the fandex point costs get sorted out

One of the nice things about the 1st edition was fiddling with lists.

Based on what we've seen so far:

Fire Teams are either 840 points (Guardsmen, Scions, probably most FTs) or 1680 points (Astartes, Kommandos, Veteran Guardsmen). Games are 1680 points.
Poxwalkers are 105 pts
Death Guard are 280 pts
Veteran Guardsmen and Kommandos are 168 points
Guardsmen are 120 pts.

Wargear is 0 points, but subject to Fire Team composition restrictions.

Done.

Taking guard specifically, I worry that unless there are more Fire Team options then all Guard lists are going to look very similar. Using the Guardsman Fire team only, and taking two teams, you are always going to choose

7 Regular Troops, 1 of each Operative, and 1 leader, for a total of 14 troops. The only choice is what your leader is equipped with.

Without points there is never a reason to take another Trooper over one of the specialists. If you splash in Scions it might be a bit more varied, but this feels like it's going to be easier to solve for the "best" combo.

I'm hoping there are going to be other types of Fire Teams, like maybe a special weapons Fire team, an Ogryn / Bullgryn Fire Team, and others.

Even looking at the Kommando list, I feel like there are going to be few choices. There are 9 special operatives, and you can select 9 special operatives, so I'm curious how a regular "Boy" is going to be made a valid choice against any of the others. Why would you not just take a leader and the 9 specialists?

Finger crossed the Rustalker Princerp get the dataspike as wargear.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
Without points there is never a reason to take another Trooper over one of the specialists.

I think you guys are making some unfounded assumptions here.

In the PC game Squad, your squad leader gets a special kit, and then everyone else can take either a basic rifleman or one of the various specialists. You could be a medic, grenadier, sniper, machine gunner, anti-tank, and so on. So why would anyone take rifleman?

Simple- he gets an ammo bag that can resupply anyone else, in a game where logistics are pretty important. Suddenly your medics aren't running out of bandages and your anti-tank isn't running out of rockets, and that's a big deal. The basic rifleman is a force multiplier that doesn't get any special weapons or abilities but is still useful to have. And his basic rifle is an all-rounder choice that can situationally be more effective than a specialist in the wrong context (eg a sniper in close quarters).

Let's not jump the gun and assume that the basic trooper will be just a lasgunner and a strict downgrade versus the specialists- this isn't 40K. It remains to be seen what else they get that might make it a legitimate choice.

I need to point out one thing here - the reason this is making your kill teams more homogenous or taking away your freedom of choice or whatever *isnt* because of a lack of points, its because they gave you what is basically a force organization chart to follow.

They could just as easily have given you a master faction list where you can mix and match from Ork Kommandos, Ork Flash Gitz, Ork Tankbustas, and Ork Burnaboys, etc. Likewise, they could easily have given you a more flexible system that let you build your Kill Team from 2-3+ small fireteams of 2-4 models each using this same sort of roster system.

All without points.

But they didn't. Personally, I'm okay with it, but I understand why others are not.

Kommandos can still show up in the standard "Greenskins" list as well. It seems like they might get a different setup though from the Kommandos list.

Everything I've seen so far has been excellent, including the new way to build teams. It reminds me of stargrave crew limits.

The idea that this reduces your ability to use your current 40k collection is plain silly. If you've got a 2k army of any faction, I'm sure you have the models to represent a kill team under this system easily.

People assuming maxed operatives over regular mooks are the way to go 100% of the time are assuming that the way those operatives play will be optimized to the victory condition of every mission.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
Taking guard specifically, I worry that unless there are more Fire Team options then all Guard lists are going to look very similar. Using the Guardsman Fire team only, and taking two teams, you are always going to choose

7 Regular Troops, 1 of each Operative, and 1 leader, for a total of 14 troops. The only choice is what your leader is equipped with.

Without points there is never a reason to take another Trooper over one of the specialists. If you splash in Scions it might be a bit more varied, but this feels like it's going to be easier to solve for the "best" combo.

The reason to field troopers rather than specialists is that you can activate multiple troopers in one turn, as opposed to a single specialist.

That community article title sure is cringey. I get that it's a fluff piece advertising the new rules but it's one dear leader away from DPRK propaganda.

Yeah, I can already hear all these angry screams about death of balance with no use of point system in Kill Team.

Bah, at worst it will justify an extension book by putting points back for "equal game / tournament balance" in one year or two.

Good thing is since they don't bind the rules to 40k's mechanisms anymore, the use of special weapons aren't necessarily better than basic ones. Depends of range and number of attacks, mostly...in Warcry, warriors with lots of attacks were favored because it's a stable death by many cuts. I'm expecting the same for the new Kill Team.

Theoretically I think things can be balanced without points. Flamers, Melta, Plasma all have their roles, and you take the one you need for the mission. In practice, you get situations where why not plasma all the time? And without points, you don’t even get a discount for the flamer.

In a situation where you are picking from a roster, I think it might be a little more feasible to run without points. It’s not like you are building a TAC list blind (where you go plasma, because it’s good almost all the time rather then niche specialist picks like melta/flamers). If you know that you are going into a horde fight, the flamer might be the better call, and be worth the slot that could have been used.

I don’t have a whole lot of faith in GW’s ability to equalize choices though. I suspect we are going to have a few “good” picks that are going to float to the top for play, and the rest just linger on the roster.

But I’ll wait to see the whole picture. They might get it close enough that it’s playable. At least with people not going out of their way to break the system.

 catbarf wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
Without points there is never a reason to take another Trooper over one of the specialists.

I think you guys are making some unfounded assumptions here.

In the PC game Squad, your squad leader gets a special kit, and then everyone else can take either a basic rifleman or one of the various specialists. You could be a medic, grenadier, sniper, machine gunner, anti-tank, and so on. So why would anyone take rifleman?

Simple- he gets an ammo bag that can resupply anyone else, in a game where logistics are pretty important. Suddenly your medics aren't running out of bandages and your anti-tank isn't running out of rockets, and that's a big deal. The basic rifleman is a force multiplier that doesn't get any special weapons or abilities but is still useful to have. And his basic rifle is an all-rounder choice that can situationally be more effective than a specialist in the wrong context (eg a sniper in close quarters).

Let's not jump the gun and assume that the basic trooper will be just a lasgunner and a strict downgrade versus the specialists- this isn't 40K. It remains to be seen what else they get that might make it a legitimate choice.

Except we've seen the basic Veteran Guardsman entry and they ARE just guys with lasguns.

It will be interesting to see if the potential of group activation of mooks is worth the opportunity cost of not taking more specialists.

Cautiously optimistic on the new list building they are introducing. It does make for the pre-battle part of Kill Team lightning fast.

I'm curious to see what the different speciality weapons look like, I'm hopeful they do a good job making every weapon have a purpose. It gets a little tricky if there's no range and now you're balancing weapons with similar roles such as Plasma & Melta or Flamer & Grenade Launcher.

As others have mentioned I'm thinking group activation will be quite useful and will be a reason to bring multiple mooks vice activating one specialist at a time.

It's infuriating that No Model/No Rule now impacts Kill Team composition.

 The Red Hobbit wrote:
Cautiously optimistic on the new list building they are introducing. It does make for the pre-battle part of Kill Team lightning fast.

I'm curious to see what the different speciality weapons look like, I'm hopeful they do a good job making every weapon have a purpose. It gets a little tricky if there's no range and now you're balancing weapons with similar roles such as Plasma & Melta or Flamer & Grenade Launcher.

As others have mentioned I'm thinking group activation will be quite useful and will be a reason to bring multiple mooks vice activating one specialist at a time.

Except that Flamers and Melta *do* have range. Funny, that, almost as if it's by design to differentiate the two groups of weapons with similar roles you highlight. Now, whether it is a well-balanced tradeoff, we have yet to see, but it seems pretty apparent to me that the Meltagun is higher damage output with a 6" range vs. Plasmagun that's full-board, and knowing that Flamers are also 6" range and Torrent makes me suspect that Grenade Launchers will be lower damage potential but able to project their splash damage effect across the board.

Well it’s not much change to playing demons, guess they the lucky ones.

Wait, no 3+ shooting for vet? Wtf is going to make them different from another Guardsmen, wounds, Leadership, what the Hell?

 Irbis wrote:


........................................

Blastaar wrote:
I disagree. Do a guardsman with a grenade launcher and a guardsman with a plasma gun have the same value? The Kill Team team thinks so.

Completely wrong. New KT balances teams, not dudes. Designers know that even if one gun is broken, it will be on one model only (instead of old munchkin 12 plasma party), and opponent will have counterplay (shooting said model) instead of losing by default thanks to inferior options. You also have now real choices - do I pick dude with long las for long range in my gunner slot, or flamer for close range kick (when in old KT neither existed because it was WAAAC 12 plasma time, baby). Do I take melta for short range AT, or grenade launcher for versatility? Answer might change depending on opponent, or map, or scenario - and it's great, now you finally have no idea (well, you know what I mean) what opponent might field and you might see a lot more mixed kill teams that still look fluffy instead of rolling your eyes seeing 12 plasma gunners (and meat shield conscript to make the whole thing look even dumber) every single time.

I find it really funny and ironic that people blame format forcing diversity of options and troopers to somehow not 'being your dudes' when people who like fluff will jump on it and the only ones who won't like it will be dudes who bent fluff into pretzel to justify their 12 plasma copy paste clone gang

........................................

It homogenizes teams. it is unlikely all specialists will have equal in-game value despite this structure valuing all specialists equally. You know full well that, per my example, every guard sergeant in KT will carry a plasma pistol because there is no reason not to. Most likely, each KT will have one build that is most effective, and that will be that. So much for "customizability."

I find it really funny that you choose to be a donkey-cave and argue in bad faith, mischaracterizing peoples' arguments. I haven't seen any people crying that they can't spam plasma. The issue is that this pick X of Y method is very much not "your dudes." I don't have a stake in this because I haven't even fething played KT because its rules suck so badly, and will not be starting with the "reimagined" KT, partly because I can't build interesting squads.

Kaffis wrote:
Except that Flamers and Melta *do* have range. Funny, that, almost as if it's by design to differentiate the two groups of weapons with similar roles you highlight. Now, whether it is a well-balanced tradeoff, we have yet to see, but it seems pretty apparent to me that the Meltagun is higher damage output with a 6" range vs. Plasmagun that's full-board, and knowing that Flamers are also 6" range and Torrent makes me suspect that Grenade Launchers will be lower damage potential but able to project their splash damage effect across the board.

Oh I missed that part, thanks for pointing that out. I went back to the article with the Flamer and Torrent and noticed the distances are in symbols, ugh, that's a crystal clear example as to why these are painful and unnecessary. Which article had the Plasma and Melta?

 The Red Hobbit wrote:

Kaffis wrote:
Except that Flamers and Melta *do* have range. Funny, that, almost as if it's by design to differentiate the two groups of weapons with similar roles you highlight. Now, whether it is a well-balanced tradeoff, we have yet to see, but it seems pretty apparent to me that the Meltagun is higher damage output with a 6" range vs. Plasmagun that's full-board, and knowing that Flamers are also 6" range and Torrent makes me suspect that Grenade Launchers will be lower damage potential but able to project their splash damage effect across the board.

Oh I missed that part, thanks for pointing that out. I went back to the article with the Flamer and Torrent and noticed the distances are in symbols, ugh, that's a crystal clear example as to why these are painful and unnecessary. Which article had the Plasma and Melta?

You have to pause Adam's flip-through on the stream to see the Plasmagun and Meltagun statlines, they haven't been deliberately previewed.

 Nevelon wrote:

But I’ll wait to see the whole picture. They might get it close enough that it’s playable. At least with people not going out of their way to break the system.

Yep. It always terrible when playing what you want out of what's available within the rules of the system might break the game.

Actually that IS terrible. But its not a people problem. Its a design problem.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I need to point out one thing here - the reason this is making your kill teams more homogenous or taking away your freedom of choice or whatever *isnt* because of a lack of points, its because they gave you what is basically a force organization chart to follow.

They could just as easily have given you a master faction list where you can mix and match from Ork Kommandos, Ork Flash Gitz, Ork Tankbustas, and Ork Burnaboys, etc. Likewise, they could easily have given you a more flexible system that let you build your Kill Team from 2-3+ small fireteams of 2-4 models each using this same sort of roster system.

All without points.

But they didn't. Personally, I'm okay with it, but I understand why others are not.

E

Even with a "master faction list" we still wouldn't be able to customize each mini, nor would this address the issue with KT leaders having one profile that is strictly better than the other(s).

I like the idea that if I want to play whatever faction, I can go grab two boxes and be done with it. It makes the game more accessible.

 Egyptian Space Zombie wrote:
I like the idea that if I want to play whatever faction, I can go grab two boxes and be done with it. It makes the game more accessible.

I agree that it is good to be able to play with just a box or two of figures, but I dislike the notion of also being restricted to the contents of a box or two.

I will never understand this stupid "no Weapon in the Sprue, no Option in the Army" policy in Kill Team....

My biggest concern is that troopers will be better than specialists due to having group activation and being able to 2:1 an operative in melee. Wouldn't be the first time GW creates a new rule and it ends up being OP..

The way these leaks are building up, melee will be vastly superior to shooting. If this will be the case, you will see very static lists, guaranteed.

From my experience in Necromunda group activation has only very limited utility. Grunts will normally be best used activated to delay the actions of your specialists, so they can react to enemy moves.

We have no idea how multi-combat works, it could just as easily be like Necromunda where charging enemies with multiple cheap fighters is a great way to get your cheap fighters killed one by one for free.

In most AA games having more activations than your opponent is an advantage, so reducing that by activating multiple Troopers at once is unlikely to be a good thing.

The list building is theoretically fine but it does look to have some problems with how it's implemented. The biggest problem is the drip-feed of information. We don't know enough about the rest of the system to say whether things like Group Activation are a good reason to forgo taking Specialists. We also don't know what the relative power of the different weapons and abilities are in a given scenario but since you seem to pick your force after mission selection it still looks like there's very little reason to take regular guys over Specialists. I think that's going to lead to the optimum Kill Team selection for each faction being pretty easily solvable unless the mission design promotes vastly different types of games.

GW may well have thought about all of this and balanced everything around the holistic game experience but they're not really helping themselves by putting out tiny articles with barely any information in them a couple of days apart. Hopefully they start filling in the blanks sooner rather than later because each new reveal feels like it introduces more questions and problems than answers and solutions.

I really hope at some point you will see an expansion for an Inquisitorial kill team, i.e. Inquisitor & some followers. that would be the one thing to tempt me into buying this sooner.

 The Forgemaster wrote:
I really hope at some point you will see an expansion for an Inquisitorial kill team, i.e. Inquisitor & some followers. that would be the one thing to tempt me into buying this sooner.

But how enjoyable will it be to always field one fixed roster, identical to all other Inquisitor players? Because that's how it's gonna be if they make one.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 The Forgemaster wrote:
I really hope at some point you will see an expansion for an Inquisitorial kill team, i.e. Inquisitor & some followers. that would be the one thing to tempt me into buying this sooner.

But how enjoyable will it be to always field one fixed roster, identical to all other Inquisitor players? Because that's how it's gonna be if they make one.

better than nothing, but even with the current roster than can do a bit. They could have it just be 7 things from this list, can take up to two of each. Could be done and be interesting.

Same way if they put some effort into demons, just since deamonette all the same, doesn’t mean they cannot have 5 different versions. Lash whips and and demonic spines that fly out. And minor psychic singing that melts the mind.
Lots can be done with little effort even going strictly with no model no rules.
And they can have some more advantced teams with a bit extra to buy all the minis.

Apple fox wrote:
better than nothing

Is it? 'Cause this new Kill Team seems to be less "your dudes" and more "these dudes".

Kill Team 2.0 - 'A better wheel!'

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
better than nothing

Is it? 'Cause this new Kill Team seems to be less "your dudes" and more "these dudes".

Kill Team 2.0 - 'A better wheel!'

My bar is very low, I can be optimistic at the least we can get some effort in. and I don’t think currently it’s too bad, even if mechanically game wise you can do weird load outs, there are reasons from a My Dudes perspective that they shouldn’t be.

I also think if GW are thinking about it, it adds way more openings for elites. Since they could add an elites slot for a game without the wonky ness.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
better than nothing

Is it? 'Cause this new Kill Team seems to be less "your dudes" and more "these dudes".

Kill Team 2.0 - 'A better wheel!'

I’m all for “my dudes”, but for me that’s mostly a modelling thing anyway. You may seem to have more choice in current Kill Team but most of that seems illusory to me as everyone was still gravitating towards the same types of lists for most Kill Teams (max out on Gunners, etc.) So while you may have more fixed loadouts per model (though we’ve hardly seen all types of teams so far, and Guard were never particularly customizable anyway), you can still put a lot of personality in your team by choice of specialists and of course in how you model those. But to each his own.

Actually...this new system is interesting for making your own options. You don't have to bother about a fake point cost to give an illusion of balance, you just need to create a new specialist profile. Take the shotgun weapon from Genestealer Cult and switch it with whatever weapon a Guardsman has. And done, new weapon options !

I'm actually worried that this approach makes elites harder to implement.
Presumably they'll have to be your own standalone Fireteams.

So, for marines, you can't have a group of power armour led by a Terminator spearhead, it's 100% Terminator or 0%.

Similarly, if you find Elites are too expensive to field in games of Killteam, you can't just add 50% more points to give yourself more breathing room.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm actually worried that this approach makes elites harder to implement.
Presumably they'll have to be your own standalone Fireteams.

Since they play about the number of Fireteam detachments you can take, I bet when the "Elite" expansion will come or whatever, they'll play about that number.

Like they'll upgrade the number of "normal" detachments you can take and they can say "instead of two normal detachment, you can take one Elite Fireteam detachment" or just allow everyone to take an Elite detachment in addition to the normal ones for "Elite scenarios".

Something like that. At least, that's what I'll do if I want to keep using the current system.

Or maybe it'll be the next edition of Kill Team with a new box in D3+1 years.

For those speculating about whether basic troopers are worth having, I think their group activation and skills tree will definitely be interesting.

It looks like after a few games they definitely could be worth having in your team.


find duplicates online

Problems: some factions already start as limited to a single detachment. It's hard to go down from 1.

Also, not all elites are created equal. Not even by a long shot. Some are barely worthy of being troops (flayed ones), others were troops not so long ago (SM scouts).

Voss wrote:
Problems: some factions already start as limited to a single detachment. It's hard to go down from 1.

Also, not all elites are created equal. Not even by a long shot. Some are barely worthy of being troops (flayed ones), others were troops not so long ago (SM scouts).

Who says they will be all equals ? I'm just talking about the number of Fireteams, not models.

Anyway, we'll know more when GW will make the extension for them. If they do it.

I mean Elites in the Killteam sense, which was specifically stuff like Terminators or Crisis suits.

You're not wrong about them being unequal though but I think it'd be easy enough to balance with numbers.

But that runs into the same problem as the normal troops list building. They're self-contained units that are balanced against other self-contained units, but that gives you no flexibility to mix and match.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

But that runs into the same problem as the normal troops list building. They're self-contained units that are balanced against other self-contained units, but that gives you no flexibility to mix and match.

Yes. They're specific lists per faction. Which doesn't really change from the first Kill Team, since it was the same principle.

We'll care about mix and match when it will actually matter if / when GW add new units in the future. For now, with what we have (meaning, very specific units from 40k like in "base" Kill Team)...there isn't much to mix and match anyway.

I wonder how Space Marines are going to do it. They have 10(!) models available for Killteam, how many types of Fireteam is that going to be?

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm actually worried that this approach makes elites harder to implement.
Presumably they'll have to be your own standalone Fireteams.

So, for marines, you can't have a group of power armour led by a Terminator spearhead, it's 100% Terminator or 0%.

Similarly, if you find Elites are too expensive to field in games of Killteam, you can't just add 50% more points to give yourself more breathing room.

Why? Presumably SM have the same fire team approach as others, I don't see why one fire team can't be '3 marines' and other '1 terminator'. If anything, this system will make elites look like elites because now you can balance that 1 terminator by making him appropriately scary unlike stupid 40K system when even smallest orkstode runt now makes his stats look pathetic in comparison.

And if every kill team has 2 fire teams, you can absolutely add 50% points by running 3 fire teams instead of 2. Yes, GW can still screw this up in implementation but the foundation looks absolutely solid for now.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
better than nothing

Is it? 'Cause this new Kill Team seems to be less "your dudes" and more "these dudes".

Kill Team 2.0 - 'A better wheel!'

Yup, 20+ diverse, converted minis with differing wargear that actually are fluffy are less 'your dudes' than 12 copy paste identical plasma clones, eh?

Let me guess, it's side effect of smoking whatever makes you see new, dynamic posed minis being somehow more identical to each other than totally unique ""multipose"" rigid copy pasters with their slightly rotated head or arm making you double down on being wrong again?

 Irbis wrote:
[
Why? Presumably SM have the same fire team approach as others, I don't see why one fire team can't be '3 marines' and other '1 terminator'. If anything, this system will make elites look like elites because now you can balance that 1 terminator by making him appropriately scary unlike stupid 40K system when even smallest orkstode runt now makes his stats look pathetic in comparison.

And if every kill team has 2 fire teams, you can absolutely add 50% points by running 3 fire teams instead of 2. Yes, GW can still screw this up in implementation but the foundation looks absolutely solid for now.

Those of us who can read already know SM only field 1 fire team. So that has two ways it can go: either they have the most flexible team building rules that make complete horse gak out of all the rest, or you gonna be fielding just 1 type of marine at a time.

So we add an "Elite Fire Team" slot that Elites games open up. So normal Fire Team allowances for normal games, and normal Fire Team allowances plus 1 Elite Fire Team for Elite games.

2 Terminators per Elite FT, or 5 Seraphim, 3 or 4 Vanguard Vets? A Lictor or two... It's all fine. You might even be able to make an Elite FT swappable with a normal FT (with exclusions for factions that are normally 1 FT per Kill Team? Maybe you offer alternate Elite versions of their normal FTs instead) for people who want to play Elite-level games with line troops.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/07/23/create-kill-teams-for-your-faction-of-choice-with-the-kill-team-compendium/

Example datacards for some other factions, showing off a range of power level stuff. Interesting, if hardly enough to sate our inquisitive and eager minds.

Kaffis wrote:
So we add an "Elite Fire Team" slot that Elites games open up. So normal Fire Team allowances for normal games, and normal Fire Team allowances plus 1 Elite Fire Team for Elite games.

If Elite Fireteams aren't the equal of regular fireteams (which they can't be since Fireteams are either 100% or 50% of a team) then you lock people out of all elite Killteams.

It seems there's a consistent 3-5 attacks for stuff.
That tells us about Custodes, yup they're going to vulnerable to melee. Urggh.

Ooh, check out the Storm Shield on the Custodes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Kaffis wrote:
So we add an "Elite Fire Team" slot that Elites games open up. So normal Fire Team allowances for normal games, and normal Fire Team allowances plus 1 Elite Fire Team for Elite games.

If Elite Fireteams aren't the equal of regular fireteams (which they can't be since Fireteams are either 100% or 50% of a team) then you lock people out of all elite Killteams.

It seems there's a consistent 3-5 attacks for stuff.
That tells us about Custodes, yup they're going to vulnerable to melee. Urggh.

I said that for 1-FT factions, you can offer stripped down (and customized up?) versions of their normal FTs as alternative Elite FTs, if adding an Elite slot is the way they go.

Also, 5 dice at 2+, and the opportunity to parry two hits per die spent doesn't sound criminally vulnerable to melee to me.

We at GW know how much you love to buy our Product, so now you can buy not only the rulebook but also the rules for your Kill-Teams as two separate purchases. Wow!

Let's see what excuse the white knights come up with this time. "B-but in 40k you have to buy the core rules and codex separately anyway, y-you're already doing this!"

Forget about the storm shield, look at the wound count.

I'm less certain that GA is "Group Activation" though. Poxwalkers are GA 2 - you would expect a zombie horde to have more GA than a unit of guardsmen, surely? Likewise DA and Custodes are both GA1. I dunno just seems weird.

A poxwalker and a Guardsman are roughly equal, 8 Poxwalkers to a Fireteam and 7 Guardsmen.

Group Activation seems to be more a bonus for 'hordes' than actually representing coordinated group action.

Regarding CC defence, compared to armour save, with the Lethal 5+ on both possible CC weapons thingy means that it will be critting more frequently, which favours both defence and attack.

I think there are enough mechanisms in there to get the feel for well armoured dudes, even without a specific armour save roll. I understand that this will not be the preferred option for some though and could affect enjoyability.

Do we know exactly how parrying works? I thought they only described it in vague terms.

It could be you can only parry a dice equal to the dice you use, rather than attack for attack.

They said parry is use one of your hits to negate one of your opponents. No other details were noted or implied. You might need the Critical or Two Hits to negate a Critical like for shooting.

I’m getting more and more curious about the rules around GA. They can go a long way to balance out the mook models compared to the specialist.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
That tells us about Custodes, yup they're going to vulnerable to melee. Urggh.

Did you miss the stormshield rule?

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Do we know exactly how parrying works? I thought they only described it in vague terms.

It could be you can only parry a dice equal to the dice you use, rather than attack for attack.

We don't know for sure as the description was quite vague. However, it seems to be that you take turns choosing what to do with each success, starting with the attacker. So I think it's possible for both players to decide to go full-on offence and allocate all their successes to doing damage, or vice versa. I assume any defensive use of your dice removes the corresponding dice form the opponent's pool, so a Storm Shield would remove two for each success you choose to use defensively, which would have some weird knock-on effect on the value of that model's successes.

Even without Stormshields, Custodes are going to be very difficult to land a hit on in Melee - they have 5 2+ dice to use as parries if needs be.

Interesting way to run something like a Crisis suit though - give it a low (ish) number of attacks but give it the equivalent rule to the storm shield - it won't hit often, but the hits it does roll can be used as parries. Opens up the "heavy armour but can't do much damage in CC" option.

What I found interesting was that you can run Pox Walkers with Death Guard Marines? Even though marines can normally only run 1 Fire Team?

So effectively, you get the 8 Pox Walkers for free?

The Pox Walkers can never gain advances by the looks of it and struggle with mission objectives but look effective as meat shields.

Also interesting that most line troopers only seem to be able to gain the "shooting" and "move?" advances but Custodes get all 4. That's gonna make for nice, varied members for them.

Deathguard are a separate faction, they get 2 fireteams. I assume their regular fireteam is half the size though.

Yeah, I would guess that a Death Guard fireteam has 3 members, while Marines will have 5 or 6.