Crunch enables you to feel the fluff manifesting on the tabletop. That's it.
Let's condense the model and rules range of 40k back to a single model: A tactical Space Marine (from 3rd edition).
That is the model and the rule everybody has to use, even though in the fluff some people play Guard, some play Orks, some Tyranids and so on.
Pretty gakky for immersion, innit?
So we add a new model, the imperial Guardsman.
Now at least we can already have Marines, Renegades, Imperial Guard and Traitor Guard visually distinct on the battlefield, even if they all play the same.
What's worse, it doesn't feel right that the much smaller looking Guard model got the same save like the Marine, the same weapon, even though the fluff makes a big fuss about how much better a Bolter is to a Lasgun and all across the same stats.
The logical next step is to give the Guard model different stats from the Marine, to make it feel right.
If we introduce the fluff that one kind of Marine is super sneaky and one is super fighty, it wouldn't feel right to have it represented by the exact same statline, would it? At least for me it would not.
The reason we need rules distinction for (sub)factions in a nutshell.
a_typical_hero wrote: Crunch enables you to feel the fluff manifesting on the tabletop. That's it.
Let's condense the model and rules range of 40k back to a single model: A tactical Space Marine (from 3rd edition).
That is the model and the rule everybody has to use, even though in the fluff some people play Guard, some play Orks, some Tyranids and so on.
Pretty gakky for immersion, innit?
So we add a new model, the imperial Guardsman.
Now at least we can already have Marines, Renegades, Imperial Guard and Traitor Guard visually distinct on the battlefield, even if they all play the same.
What's worse, it doesn't feel right that the much smaller looking Guard model got the same save like the Marine, the same weapon, even though the fluff makes a big fuss about how much better a Bolter is to a Lasgun and all across the same stats.
The logical next step is to give the Guard model different stats from the Marine, to make it feel right.
If we introduce the fluff that one kind of Marine is super sneaky and one is super fighty, it wouldn't feel right to have it represented by the exact same statline, would it? At least for me it would not.
The reason we need rules distinction for (sub)factions in a nutshell.
Nobody said they need to be competitive, though.
Right, but all this is secondary.
Lets take your example and start with the 3rd edition Space Marine. Everyone has to play him, no matter what army identity they choose. During the turn, they can:
1) Do backflips, which makes him lose his armor bonus but gain +3" of vertical movement.
2) Suppress the enemy with his gun, which makes the enemy 3rd Edition Space Marines a little upset but has no impact.
3) Set himself on fire to protest the current suffering by xenos everywhere, which gives his own 3rd Edition Space Marines -1 morale but makes Xenos 3rd Edition Space Marines reroll successful hits against his squad out of sympathy
etc.
None of it makes any sense. If you add imperial guardsmen to this, make his gun strength 3 and armor 5+, it still doesn't make any sense. The core rules have to be sufficiently immersive and realistic BEFORE we worry about adding in differentiation, otherwise you get... well, what we have now. A whole bunch of well-represented factions that are unable to do basic gak like suppress the enemy, interfere with the enemy's command-and-control infrastructure, or react when the enemy moves out right before their eyes.
a_typical_hero wrote: Crunch enables you to feel the fluff manifesting on the tabletop. That's it.
Let's condense the model and rules range of 40k back to a single model: A tactical Space Marine (from 3rd edition).
That is the model and the rule everybody has to use, even though in the fluff some people play Guard, some play Orks, some Tyranids and so on.
Pretty gakky for immersion, innit?
So we add a new model, the imperial Guardsman.
Now at least we can already have Marines, Renegades, Imperial Guard and Traitor Guard visually distinct on the battlefield, even if they all play the same.
What's worse, it doesn't feel right that the much smaller looking Guard model got the same save like the Marine, the same weapon, even though the fluff makes a big fuss about how much better a Bolter is to a Lasgun and all across the same stats.
The logical next step is to give the Guard model different stats from the Marine, to make it feel right.
If we introduce the fluff that one kind of Marine is super sneaky and one is super fighty, it wouldn't feel right to have it represented by the exact same statline, would it? At least for me it would not.
The reason we need rules distinction for (sub)factions in a nutshell.
Nobody said they need to be competitive, though.
Right, but all this is secondary.
Lets take your example and start with the 3rd edition Space Marine. Everyone has to play him, no matter what army identity they choose. During the turn, they can:
1) Do backflips, which makes him lose his armor bonus but gain +3" of vertical movement.
2) Suppress the enemy with his gun, which makes the enemy 3rd Edition Space Marines a little upset but has no impact.
3) Set himself on fire to protest the current suffering by xenos everywhere, which gives his own 3rd Edition Space Marines -1 morale but makes Xenos 3rd Edition Space Marines reroll successful hits against his squad out of sympathy
etc.
None of it makes any sense. If you add imperial guardsmen to this, make his gun strength 3 and armor 5+, it still doesn't make any sense. The core rules have to be sufficiently immersive and realistic BEFORE we worry about adding in differentiation, otherwise you get... well, what we have now. A whole bunch of well-represented factions that are unable to do basic gak like suppress the enemy, interfere with the enemy's command-and-control infrastructure, or react when the enemy moves out right before their eyes.
I guess it's a question of what you want out of the game.
I'm also playing Oathmark, which is probably what you would like for 40K. It's a miniature agnostic system that features humans, orks, elves, Goblins, dwarfs and undead, each with their own statlines but very similar profiles. It doesn't matter though if your humans are vikings, gondorians, empire troops, romans, Samurai, whatever, they're just humans, either militia or elite. It also doesn't matter if you use Lotr Orks or Warhammer Orks, or these huge Conquest guys, they're all just Orks. This is basically fine but we realized after some games you just want to personalize your kingdom in some way, so that your ranked Phalanx spearmen are somehow different to the barbarians they're facing. Guess what, the game gives you the option to add formations to your roster, so the barbarian guy adds the option to add javelins, and the spearmen guy adds a better Phalanx rule to his troops et voilà, already you have some narrative difference between the two kingdoms of the same faction.
What I'm getting at, a strong base rule is always fine but 40K never had that, so in my opinion it's okay that 40K at least gives you the option now to really dive into the subfaction rules to personalize your army (granted, it would be even better if GW hadn't introduced their stupid no model no rules Dogma but it's what it is). Unfortunately on dakka many seem to see these rules as bloat. I have to say though, just yesterday I had a look at the onepage 40KCSM rules and realized, they didn't even feature marks of Chaos, let alone legions, which I think is a huge miss.
a_typical_hero wrote: If we introduce the fluff that one kind of Marine is super sneaky and one is super fighty, it wouldn't feel right to have it represented by the exact same statline, would it? At least for me it would not.
The fluff suggests that your Marine should have an easier time hitting a Titan standing right in front of him than a Grot two miles away, yet in the crunch they are both exactly a 67% chance. If that doesn't bother you, but a lack of special rules to differentiate sneaky-Marine from fighty-Marine does, then clearly there is more to this than how well the rules mechanically represent the fluff.
Particularly when the scale of the game is such that differences in doctrine and force composition between the two subfactions probably matter a lot more than their individual stats. As Daedalus keeps pointing out, this isn't a historical wargame- in a setting with alien bug monsters, space elves, and animated fungus hooligans, is being a fighty-but-also-sneaky Marine really so different from being a sneaky-but-also-fighty Marine that it needs special rules? Or should it maybe matter more that the fighty Marines are all armed with melee weapons and riding APCs, while the sneaky Marines are carrying sniper rifles and deploying from ambush?
40k is a bloated game to the point that is barely functional... Yesterday I played a 1K tournament... No game went beyond turn 3 because lack of time... Many rules were forgotten... 80% of rolls were pointless... I felt a complete lack of agency... Even when I won.
GW can go along with this inertia of a bloated mess because how huge it is... But mechanically the current 40k is one of the worst miniature wargames in the market.
If the reason 40k has to be so bloated is because of the whacky-impossible-unreality (WIU) gubbins, then if there are complicated mechanics, they should be to differentiate said WIU stuff from the "normal guys" stuff.
Instead, most of the bloat comes from "disease marines are muchly different from magic marines who are muchly different from sneak marines who are muchly different from stab marines who are muchly different from the other stab marines who are muchly different from the OTHER stab marines who are muchly different from the OTHER psychic marines" (i.e. a bunch of different iterations of guys with guns and tanks) while Slaanesh Daemons and Tyranids are distinguishable only because one faction has more units with invulnerable saves.
I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
Though I have to admit a Grot and a Marine hitting equally well would bother me more than not having modifiers for long range and big/small targets. I remember them from 7.edition WHFB, sure why not.
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
Vatsetis wrote: 40k is a bloated game to the point that is barely functional... Yesterday I played a 1K tournament... No game went beyond turn 3 because lack of time... Many rules were forgotten... 80% of rolls were pointless... I felt a complete lack of agency... Even when I won.
GW can go along with this inertia of a bloated mess because how huge it is... But mechanically the current 40k is one of the worst miniature wargames in the market.
I observe the same among my folks who don't play regularly or started recently.
Honest question: How often do you get to play and and how experienced with 9th would you describe yourself?
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
The rules are largely the same since 3rd edition though. They did immerse me enough back then, they still do now.
Some stratagems should be regular wargear, but that's largely it. I know that you may counter now with a plethora of small details were the game is different from 3rd like armour facing. But if you know how to play 3rd, you know - in general - how to play 9th. You call out that you are a narrative player. Do you have the impression I'm not?
Unit1126PLL wrote: 1) Why is "there is a huge amount of minutiate you have to worry about to differentiate roughly similar units" alluring?
2) Those look pretty much the same for me, colors aside. I don't know WHY the lower of the three photos needs to be its own thing - they still have some pretty creepy mutations, and the one guy with the stylized flamethrower looks like the dripping fuel was painted the wrong color. Oh, and there's a good mix of wicked looking melee weapons in both photos. Nothing - outside the color - of the lower unit screams to me "THESE ARE DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHER UNIT". If you painted the red unit in green, or the green unit in red, I'd be hard pressed to tell a thematic difference at a glance.
I guess perhaps for the same reason you might find that ( warning : horrible generalizations ahead ) the Japanese are really bad at tanks and guns, but really good at ships, air, and morale where as Russians are a meat grinder and efficient medium tanks. People come to the table with some base level expectation that fits the popularized representation of how armies fought in WW2.
I think you're highlighting the issue for me ( as I read it ). You are hard pressed to find an immediate thematic difference, but the rules play much differently and that can be crucial to how a player connects to the army. If you were to look at GW promo images for those units you'd be able to distinctly differentiate the two even though you could sense they're somewhat related.
Vatsetis wrote: 40k is a bloated game to the point that is barely functional... Yesterday I played a 1K tournament... No game went beyond turn 3 because lack of time... Many rules were forgotten... 80% of rolls were pointless... I felt a complete lack of agency... Even when I won.
GW can go along with this inertia of a bloated mess because how huge it is... But mechanically the current 40k is one of the worst miniature wargames in the market.
I observe the same among my folks who don't play regularly or started recently.
Honest question: How often do you get to play and and how experienced with 9th would you describe yourself?
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
The rules are largely the same since 3rd edition though. They did immerse me enough back then, they still do now.
Some stratagems should be regular wargear, but that's largely it. I know that you may counter now with a plethora of small details were the game is different from 3rd like armour facing. But if you know how to play 3rd, you know - in general - how to play 9th. You call out that you are a narrative player. Do you have the impression I'm not?
I played quite a lot of 8th...not that much of 9th... To the point Im back to being turned into a noob... Which in itself is a testament to the sad state of the game :(
Point is, there wasnt much positives to make me like to play the game again in a competitive setting.
It wasnt functional and it wasnt fun either... Is clunky.
a_typical_hero wrote: If we introduce the fluff that one kind of Marine is super sneaky and one is super fighty, it wouldn't feel right to have it represented by the exact same statline, would it? At least for me it would not.
The fluff suggests that your Marine should have an easier time hitting a Titan standing right in front of him than a Grot two miles away, yet in the crunch they are both exactly a 67% chance. If that doesn't bother you, but a lack of special rules to differentiate sneaky-Marine from fighty-Marine does, then clearly there is more to this than how well the rules mechanically represent the fluff.
Particularly when the scale of the game is such that differences in doctrine and force composition between the two subfactions probably matter a lot more than their individual stats. As Daedalus keeps pointing out, this isn't a historical wargame- in a setting with alien bug monsters, space elves, and animated fungus hooligans, is being a fighty-but-also-sneaky Marine really so different from being a sneaky-but-also-fighty Marine that it needs special rules? Or should it maybe matter more that the fighty Marines are all armed with melee weapons and riding APCs, while the sneaky Marines are carrying sniper rifles and deploying from ambush?
This feels like complexity for the sake of it. Why does it need to be that you can more easily hit the titan? Wouldn't it track that hitting the titan in a vulnerable spot is much harder to do when it's imminently going to crush the life out of you than shooting at a grot? The thematics of a titan or other such large model are it's blistering weapons. Obviously titans are not well represented in that regard in 40K, but they shouldn't really be part of the game ( knights are okay-ish ).
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Unit1126PLL wrote: while Slaanesh Daemons and Tyranids are distinguishable only because one faction has more units with invulnerable saves.
That argument is getting ahead of us a little since they've not had the 9th edition treatment. Slaanesh could see a lot of ways to get the enemy units to act against their own interests. Tyranids could find themselves with a greater sense of a instinctual hive minded army. Time will tell.
I've adored Rubric Marines since the day I laid eyes on them and I connected with the fluff. GW now firmly represents them as I felt they should be. Last edition was decent. This one is pretty great.
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Vatsetis wrote: I played quite a lot of 8th...not that much of 9th... To the point Im back to being turned into a noob. :(
Point is, there wasnt much positives to make me like to play the game again in a competitive setting.
It wasnt functional.
People had a very uneven experience with 8th. For those of us living under the ITC umbrella things got smoothed out. For everyone else it was kind of a huge hit or miss endeavor. Now that everything is unified people can mostly experience the game in a similar capacity ( as long as they use good terrain ).
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
Yeah, well, 30K rules aren't solid, though, they're the bloated mess of 7th Edition. Forgeworld made them work a bit, but it's still a barely functional, overcomplicated game in my eyes. The only thing 30K handles better than 9th edition is morale, really. Strange that you mention 30K as it has even more rules to differentiate Marine legions from one another.
A grot is already harder to hit than a Titan, Knight, Baneblade, or [INSERT TITANIC UNIT HERE], because it can benefit from cover and HIDE if it wants to. You're not hiding any TITANIC unit, unless you have some very big terrain, and none of them can benefit from cover.
Vatsetis wrote: 40k is a bloated game to the point that is barely functional... Yesterday I played a 1K tournament... No game went beyond turn 3 because lack of time... Many rules were forgotten... 80% of rolls were pointless... I felt a complete lack of agency... Even when I won.
GW can go along with this inertia of a bloated mess because how huge it is... But mechanically the current 40k is one of the worst miniature wargames in the market.
I observe the same among my folks who don't play regularly or started recently.
Honest question: How often do you get to play and and how experienced with 9th would you describe yourself?
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
The rules are largely the same since 3rd edition though. They did immerse me enough back then, they still do now.
Some stratagems should be regular wargear, but that's largely it. I know that you may counter now with a plethora of small details were the game is different from 3rd like armour facing. But if you know how to play 3rd, you know - in general - how to play 9th. You call out that you are a narrative player. Do you have the impression I'm not?
I played quite a lot of 8th...not that much of 9th... To the point Im back to being turned into a noob... Which in itself is a testament to the sad state of the game :(
Point is, there wasnt much positives to make me like to play the game again in a competitive setting.
It wasnt functional and it wasnt fun either... Is clunky.
How? If you played "quite a lot" of 8th, you must have found it "functional". 9th is just 8th edition with a few rules changes here and there. Which of those changes makes 9th feel more "clunky" than 8th?
I played quite a lot of 8th...not that much of 9th... To the point Im back to being turned into a noob. :(
Point is, there wasnt much positives to make me like to play the game again in a competitive setting.
It wasnt functional.
I'm sorry to hear that, man.
The game can be great under the right circumstances and just as easily be horrible under the wrong one's.
You should give a laid back Crusade campaign a try if you can and that's your thing.
It feels different from the standard matched play. Using a 9th edition codex is a big factor, too imho.
Certainly Crusade looks as the best way to play 40k nowadays.
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Gadzilla666 wrote: A grot is already harder to hit than a Titan, Knight, Baneblade, or [INSERT TITANIC UNIT HERE], because it can benefit from cover and HIDE if it wants to. You're not hiding any TITANIC unit, unless you have some very big terrain, and none of them can benefit from cover.
Vatsetis wrote: 40k is a bloated game to the point that is barely functional... Yesterday I played a 1K tournament... No game went beyond turn 3 because lack of time... Many rules were forgotten... 80% of rolls were pointless... I felt a complete lack of agency... Even when I won.
GW can go along with this inertia of a bloated mess because how huge it is... But mechanically the current 40k is one of the worst miniature wargames in the market.
I observe the same among my folks who don't play regularly or started recently.
Honest question: How often do you get to play and and how experienced with 9th would you describe yourself?
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
No, but you did make it clear that you are fine with it being all janked up and screwy so long as stab marines get differentiated from stealth marines.
For me, as a narrative player, it's the other way around - make the rules make sense/immerse me in the world, and THEN (once that is done) put in a touch of faction differentiation to encourage certain playstyles in alignment with what that faction is known for.
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
The rules are largely the same since 3rd edition though. They did immerse me enough back then, they still do now.
Some stratagems should be regular wargear, but that's largely it. I know that you may counter now with a plethora of small details were the game is different from 3rd like armour facing. But if you know how to play 3rd, you know - in general - how to play 9th. You call out that you are a narrative player. Do you have the impression I'm not?
I played quite a lot of 8th...not that much of 9th... To the point Im back to being turned into a noob... Which in itself is a testament to the sad state of the game :(
Point is, there wasnt much positives to make me like to play the game again in a competitive setting.
It wasnt functional and it wasnt fun either... Is clunky.
How? If you played "quite a lot" of 8th, you must have found it "functional". 9th is just 8th edition with a few rules changes here and there. Which of those changes makes 9th feel more "clunky" than 8th?
Those "few" rules changes mean misions are completelly new (including microscopic table sizes), and armies have new bespoke rules... So its a lot of extra noise... It really felt as a completelly different game that you have to learn all over again.
Surely not complex or deep in any sense... But clunky, slow and heavy as hell.
And I think that 9th core rules are better than 8th... But 40k is bloated beyond salvation regarding game mechanics is like a great unclean one rotting in legacy, inertia and the need to add "new things" every week to justify new minis purchases.
It dosent help that the rules are dispersed over a significant amount of faqued documents.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Yeah, well, 30K rules aren't solid, though, they're the bloated mess of 7th Edition. Forgeworld made them work a bit, but it's still a barely functional, overcomplicated game in my eyes. The only thing 30K handles better than 9th edition is morale, really. Strange that you mention 30K as it has even more rules to differentiate Marine legions from one another.
7th was bloated because of everything EXTERNAL to the core rules, just like 9th. The core rules were flawed in a few significant ways, and the 30k rulebook (which is actually different than 7th) fixes many of those. Could you give an example of the overcomplication you're talking about?
H.B.M.C. wrote: I think some people are trying very hard to make excuses for a rule set that is absurdly unwieldy and bloated.
I'm seeing a bit of this.
If a player named Albert goes to tournaments and has played enough games to know the rules well, that's great for them, they spent a lot of time with the ruleset.
But that's not only anecdotal, it misses a lot of key data points needed to turn opinion into hypothesis.
How many read-throughs did Albert have to go through the rules? How many games had to be played until the core rulebook was no longer needed? And the same questions would have to be asked of the Codexes involved.
Tournament players HAVE to have a handle on the rules so they can play fast, because time matters. Casual gamers that want to get into the game, that see the overly complicated rules interactions, may decide it's just not worthwhile to commit to the same 10-30 games needed to get the core rules down pat. And that's a big part of the issue.
And yeah, there may not be a consensus, but if you go back and look at the poll results, I think we can see that there's definitely a skew.
A Dakka poll and $1.85 CAD are worth a coffee. Before delivery etc
Do we really find the rules of 40K 9th too hard to understand? I am just not seeing it out in the wild. If someone finds 9th too dense to penetrate then heaven help them with editions before 8th.
I am seeing it out in the wild. Gamers that were big into 8th edition are now feeling like 9th edition isn't very appealing to them. Now, that's for more reasons than just complexity, and I know my situation is anecdotal, but when a whole gaming group does a 180 and shifts to Age of Sigmar, I think that hints at something.
But, I didn't really make this poll to argue about anecdotal evidence. I made it because I saw what I saw above and wondered if other people felt the same way. I think I've got a pretty good answer at this point. It seems that people that like the competitive aspect are happy and people that don't aren't so happy.
kodos wrote: so you need competitive rules to play the narrative in 40k?
Hmm? No. Competitiveness aside the new Death Guard feel like Death Guard should. That feeling is evocative and it what can drive people's interest.
It's not much different than when I was a kid and I saw some cool miniature and I could envision how it would act in real life as I made pew pew noises.
Id rather they didn't cater to your desire to make pew pew noises and made solid rules instead. Go buy some Legos if that's all you want.
Death guard don't feel anything like death guard should. DG should shrug off small arms fire (oops, lost that) and shoot people with guns. Not strive to run into melee and knife them because they're magically less resilient because a DG model is standing nearby.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I think some people are trying very hard to make excuses for a rule set that is absurdly unwieldy and bloated.
I'm seeing a bit of this.
If a player named Albert goes to tournaments and has played enough games to know the rules well, that's great for them, they spent a lot of time with the ruleset.
But that's not only anecdotal, it misses a lot of key data points needed to turn opinion into hypothesis.
How many read-throughs did Albert have to go through the rules? How many games had to be played until the core rulebook was no longer needed? And the same questions would have to be asked of the Codexes involved.
Tournament players HAVE to have a handle on the rules so they can play fast, because time matters. Casual gamers that want to get into the game, that see the overly complicated rules interactions, may decide it's just not worthwhile to commit to the same 10-30 games needed to get the core rules down pat. And that's a big part of the issue.
And yeah, there may not be a consensus, but if you go back and look at the poll results, I think we can see that there's definitely a skew.
A Dakka poll and $1.85 CAD are worth a coffee. Before delivery etc
Do we really find the rules of 40K 9th too hard to understand? I am just not seeing it out in the wild. If someone finds 9th too dense to penetrate then heaven help them with editions before 8th.
I am seeing it out in the wild. Gamers that were big into 8th edition are now feeling like 9th edition isn't very appealing to them. Now, that's for more reasons than just complexity, and I know my situation is anecdotal, but when a whole gaming group does a 180 and shifts to Age of Sigmar, I think that hints at something.
But, I didn't really make this poll to argue about anecdotal evidence. I made it because I saw what I saw above and wondered if other people felt the same way. I think I've got a pretty good answer at this point. It seems that people that like the competitive aspect are happy and people that don't aren't so happy.
Your poll is hardly a scientific poll from which definite conclusions can be made - the thread is a collection of anecdotes. You found some people on Dakka who are not happy with 40K. Congratulations?
It is unfortunate that your group is not feeling 9th Ed. This certainly contrasts with my area. What about 9th Ed is more complicated than 8th Ed? Sure, there are terrain rules now, but those make the game better. Do you really think that 9th is so much more complicated than 8th that people would walk away for that reason?
kodos wrote: so you need competitive rules to play the narrative in 40k?
Hmm? No. Competitiveness aside the new Death Guard feel like Death Guard should. That feeling is evocative and it what can drive people's interest.
It's not much different than when I was a kid and I saw some cool miniature and I could envision how it would act in real life as I made pew pew noises.
Id rather they didn't cater to your desire to make pew pew noises and made solid rules instead. Go buy some Legos if that's all you want.
Death guard don't feel anything like death guard should. DG should shrug off small arms fire (oops, lost that) and shoot people with guns. Not strive to run into melee and knife them because they're magically less resilient because a DG model is standing nearby.
* shrug * if you say so. DG weren't really known for weapons beyond melta/flamer/bolter/phospor and the HH legion carried scythes and kukras. I don't quite see a problem with S3 weapons being "as good" as S4 when they have W2, so, they only got magically less resilient if you completely ignore that.
And...the rules are pretty solid, but to each their own.
The fluff suggests that your Marine should have an easier time hitting a Titan standing right in front of him than a Grot two miles away, yet in the crunch they are both exactly a 67% chance.
Sort of?
A model's silhouette has value because it determines how likely it is to benefit from cover; no matter where on the battlefield the Titan is, provided it's in range, it will likely be targetable; the same is not true of the grot. You don't need a target size mechanic because the interactions between silhouettes and cover represent the difference between models of different sizes on their own.
If that doesn't bother you, but a lack of special rules to differentiate sneaky-Marine from fighty-Marine does, then clearly there is more to this than how well the rules mechanically represent the fluff.
When we use Marines as an example, sure those differences sound absurd- why wouldn't they? Marines have 100+ datacards and have had snowflake dexes or supplements in every edition from second on.
But if we look at, say, sisters... Who have never had and are never getting an Argent Shroud codex, suddenly it doesn't sound so absurd because that bespoke Order Trait, WL Trait, Relic and Strat really go a long way toward defining something for us when no one ever considered our army worthy of such attention before.
People have wanted and received sub-faction differentiation since 2nd. At first, it was a Marines only club. in various other editions, some factions received a degree while others did not, and from edition to edition, some lost it after having it for a time while others picked it up. And through it all, Marines always had the greatest degree.
The only difference with 8th and 9th is that they finally started paying attention to everyone's sub-factions, instead of just those that belong to a handful of lucky factions.
Particularly when the scale of the game is such that differences in doctrine and force composition between the two subfactions probably matter a lot more than their individual stats.
I think you just meant factions here, not subfactions; doctrine and army compostition between subfactions ARE somewhat similar.
As Daedalus keeps pointing out, this isn't a historical wargame- in a setting with alien bug monsters, space elves, and animated fungus hooligans, is being a fighty-but-also-sneaky Marine really so different from being a sneaky-but-also-fighty Marine that it needs special rules?
If you are creating subfactions in the fiction and the background that are distinct enough to be spoken of as separate from other subfactions, then yes, it does make sense for them to behave in different ways on the table. And again, it matters more to the factions who have never had the degree of support that marines have had since second edition.
Or should it maybe matter more that the fighty Marines are all armed with melee weapons and riding APCs, while the sneaky Marines are carrying sniper rifles and deploying from ambush?
It would if dexes represented an army and not a faction.
But because dexes represent factions- large, broad organizations which often have to function without support from outside their own faction- they all need tools for every job, even if they are known for doing some jobs better than others. This is why datasheet exclusions are not an ideal solution to faction and subfaction diversity. Some limitations are okay, but the more limits you put on unit access, the harder it's going to get for people to play the models they want to play.
As a Sisters player, I'd love an aircraft with rules that were different from other aircraft rather than be told that not having an aircraft at all is one of the distinguishing features of my faction.
a_typical_hero wrote: I never argued that the BS and WS system is perfect as is, did I?
If your core rules are relatively solid, faction rules don't have to do much to change the way they play. Look at 30k - most factions have 2-5 pages of rules including their title page, and yet you have a diverse game with a large variety of different tactics and strategies between the various Legions.
A HUGE false equivalency. Almost all factions in 30k are some flavour of marine, and even the few that aren't are some flavour of human. Not to mention that this level of focus on IOM reduces or entirely eliminates subfaction differentiation.
30k with sisters would be like OoOML VS Bloody Rose, and yeah, each of those could get by with two pages of rules because there aren't subfactions of OoOML or subfactions of Bloody Rose.
Death guard don't feel anything like death guard should. DG should shrug off small arms fire (oops, lost that) and shoot people with guns. Not strive to run into melee and knife them because they're magically less resilient because a DG model is standing nearby.
Well I would say the defining characteristic of Deathguard is NEITHER shrugging off small arms fire NOR shooting with guns. I'd say it's disease.
And here's the thing about being dedicated to a god of disease; he probably wants you to... You know, spread disease. Last time I checked, it's easier to do that when you're inside engagement range (ie. not social distancing) than when you're at max bolter range (ie. socially distanced).
Funny thing too: when disease makes you look and smell so bad that those nearby can't concentrate on defending against you because they're struggling to hold down their breakfast, it does tend to mean they take and fall to more hits... So it's not really a magical presence of a nearby model, it is a rule that represents the impact of disease.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Yeah, well, 30K rules aren't solid, though, they're the bloated mess of 7th Edition. Forgeworld made them work a bit, but it's still a barely functional, overcomplicated game in my eyes. The only thing 30K handles better than 9th edition is morale, really. Strange that you mention 30K as it has even more rules to differentiate Marine legions from one another.
7th was bloated because of everything EXTERNAL to the core rules, just like 9th. The core rules were flawed in a few significant ways, and the 30k rulebook (which is actually different than 7th) fixes many of those. Could you give an example of the overcomplication you're talking about?
Nearly all vehicle rules for example. They are made useless by the fact that hull points exist, turning tanks into very squishy units. 30K reacts to that by giving every tank options like armoured ceramite that let's them ignore antitank rules. 30K also uses lots of superheavies that outright ignore most vehicle rules. The walkers of the Mechanicum aren't actually walkers, but most of them are monstrous creatures because again, the vehicle rules just don't work. And that’s not only because of tank shock.
Unit types. 7th Edition has a load of unit types that most of the time are a complicated way to say: this unit moves more than 6inches.
Ap-system. In a game where most armies are Marines having a 3+, every weapon with an AP of 4 or less is practically useless if it doesn't also have lots of shots or high strength.
psychic phase. I won't say much here because it could be it got totally reworked in 30K, not sure. But 7th psychic rules were terrible, denying was impossible and most psykers were reduced to being batteries.
CC and challenges. CC is complicated and as a player there's nothing you can do once it started, you roll dice until one side is dead. Challenges are cool as a concept, but they turned most small characters into a liability.
Wound allocation. Yes, it's not 5th edition shenanigans anymore, but taking Casualties from the front was a bad idea in a game where CC is very prevalent. Once you add blast rules it also creates very strange situations, killing models that aren't under the template.
WS system. A whole table to tell you that any unit hits either on a 3 or a 4. If it falls to fear it hits on 5s.
Note I'm not saying 9th couldn't do with some more unit types than fly and not fly, and having no USRs left because of 7th was a bad idea, too. I also like that 7th/30K is not as deadly and hope in the end of 9th we'll be there again due to many things having more wounds or higher T then. But overall 7th/30K just had a lot of unnecessarily complicated rules that served no purpose but slowing the game down. After years of playing I still had to look up the unit types or movement rules of tanks in every single game.
I guess perhaps for the same reason you might find that ( warning : horrible generalizations ahead ) the Japanese are really bad at tanks and guns, but really good at ships, air, and morale where as Russians are a meat grinder and efficient medium tanks. People come to the table with some base level expectation that fits the popularized representation of how armies fought in WW2.
and this is a problem, people want to armies to play like in Hollywood movies and not how they really fought their battles
but you don't need any fancy special rules to make Germans different from Russians, the doctrine of mobile combat with combined forces was the same for both
the main difference was the available weapons and resources
Morale is a thing, but does not exist in a game like 40k, so no need for it
I know there are people around who think a Civil War unit needs different rules because they the units wore different colored uniforms (because otherwise they are just regular units with different uniforms), or that Stalins ideas of overwhelming mass need to represented on a platoon level game (were the only thing it mattered was army level)
in a game like 40k were every kind of simulation is removed from the core rules, Marines should be just like that, different colored uniforms were all Marines can do the same but difference comes from available weapons and resources
that Stalins ideas of overwhelming mass need to represented on a platoon level game (were the only thing it mattered was army level)
It was used on a brigade and lower level too. Most often to kill off troops and officers Stalin wanted to get rid off. Stalin let Poles get slaughtered at Lenio, just because the rank and file came straight out of Gulagas, and were not politically correct. Then durning the Warsaw uprising they let parts of the 3ed infantry divisions cross Vistuals, only to abandon them the same, claiming it was impossible to cross the river or deliver supplies. Oddly enough all the troops and officers for that operation were hand picked and were told that the rest of the Berling Army is going to be deploying straight after them.
Durning the fights near Studzianki the 1st Polish Armoured Brigade was suppose to be reinforce the 8th Guard Division in its defense of a river crossing. The defence was suppose to perfmored by wave attacks. Somehow the 8th Guard forgot to mention that the tactics is being changed, which left the polish brigade cut off after they went in the 2ed wave, and the soviet forces pulled back letting the poles be encircled by 3 german divisions, the 1st Hermann Göring ,the 19th armoured divsions and the 45th Volksgrendarier Division . And there is a ton more example of similar operations being done in Polish territory up to 1950s. Ending with operation Vistula, where soviet NKWD officers made polish army forces attack ukrainian nationalists in waves. Just so both could be bleed dry. As a bonus they managed to get the soviet appointed general killed, at the very start of the operation.
A lot of subfaction rules just go too far. On this scale/breadth of game there's just no room for this stuff.
It's non-sensical that two of the same model painted differently are mechanically more different than completely different units in other factions.
It's also problematic if GW's vision and rules don't quite match your own vision of that subfaction.
If you saw your army as a highly mobile combined arms faction, but GW decided to give you -1 to hit at long range, now there's a strong disconnect between the rules and your vision.
Well it is better to have a subfaction rules be too good. Specially for the long live perspective of playing something. When a faction is overloaded with good options, even the initial nerfs will bring it down much. While on the other hand if you got a balances codex, those don't age that well. Just look at necron.
And it would take you 30 seconds to understand new rules from another army.
When I explain Rituals to someone who hasn't seen them before I say, "I gain points each turn for abilities from extra damage to auto-cast or undeniable. They cost from 4 to 9 points each. Your best way to interact with this rule is to kill my units - these are what each unit provides."
If your opponent doesn't do this then your question is - "How do I stop you from using these abilities?"
My rule of thumb is to clarify what chapters (or their equivalents) bonuses the army gets, brief description of psychic powers (if present) and what warlord traits and relics do. It really takes 30-60 sec. Anything else doesn't really matter.
I'm currently playing with the new ork codex, which will be released in september/october and lots of players don't know anything about it except maybe that infantries got +1T; all I need to explain is that my first detachment is Goffs and their models get double hits on 6 to hit, that the second detachment is Bad Moons which increased weapons range and adds -1AP on 6 to wound, that my first WT and relic just make the warboss killier in combat and that my second WT and relic just make the big mek tankier and give him an heavy bolters with many shots. Anything else is not important, and honestly I think that even those quick pre-game explanations aren't really necessary.
I don't need to know all the combos from the other army, I should know that a melee specialist unit would likely have tools to increase damage and/or to charge more reliably than usual, I should know that unit A is dedicated ranged anti tank or anti infantry, or an army like GK or TS would likely have powerful psykers etc... Example: even if I don't know that Eradicators can double tap and don't suffer the penalty if they move I should know that they're scary melta guys, so I want them to stay away from my bigger models and kill them as soon as possible if ranged anti tank is what could really cripple my army in early turns. Another example: drukhari melee heavy hitters. I don't need to know the details about succubus, drazhar, wyches or incubi and the possible buffs they get; I should know that they are very capable fighters and react as a consequence. If I underestimate those Eradicators or those charging drukhari fighters and they wipe out my valuable units it would be my fault, not a gotcha moment.
Most of the so called gotcha moments are really a consequence of inexperience.
I also don't get the analogy with other games like X-Wing or Warmachine, are those games as wide as 40k? Is there the same amount of varietry between the different factions? In 30k most common armies are power armour guys, terminator guys, and the same tanks profiles.
that Stalins ideas of overwhelming mass need to represented on a platoon level game (were the only thing it mattered was army level)
It was used on a brigade and lower level too. Most often to kill off troops and officers Stalin wanted to get rid off.
on the smaller level the Germans did that too, having a Soviet unit of "mass soldiers" to sacrifice is not different from a German Bewährungsbataillon at a platoon level game
having special rules to represent iconic themes of an army were the basic rules of the game are already missing the parts that made those possible is what causes the bloat in 40k and it is in each Edition the same, core rules remove options that made units different and Codex rules must bring them back to keep the flavour
And it would take you 30 seconds to understand new rules from another army.
When I explain Rituals to someone who hasn't seen them before I say, "I gain points each turn for abilities from extra damage to auto-cast or undeniable. They cost from 4 to 9 points each. Your best way to interact with this rule is to kill my units - these are what each unit provides."
If your opponent doesn't do this then your question is - "How do I stop you from using these abilities?"
I also don't get the analogy with other games like X-Wing or Warmachine, are those games as wide as 40k? Is there the same amount of varietry between the different factions? In 30k most common armies are power armour guys, terminator guys, and the same tanks profiles.
You know the whole problem with 40k is that its TOO wide right? Don't act like 40k is incomparable to other games just because it has enough SKUs to make Asmodee blush.
Blackie wrote: I also don't get the analogy with other games like X-Wing or Warmachine, are those games as wide as 40k? Is there the same amount of varietry between the different factions?
the difference between the X-Wing factions is bigger than the difference between the 40k factions yet it is very different as there are less factions in X-Wing but with nearly endless variation in army lists and you can have a tournament with everyone playing the same faction but no one is playing similar lists
while in 40k, most armies have 1 list with minor differences and if you want to play a different list you chose a different sub-faction because those are doing that list better
comparing 40k to other games, all of the factions in 40k are the same play style with different "gotcha" effects
a_typical_hero wrote: Each to their own. I like the variety and in some places it doesn't go far enough for me.
Examples:
- The wargear list for Inquisitors should be a few pages long.
- No model no rules is gak. Give me back my options. I'll kitbash it myself.
Some things should and could be consolidated, like all the Marine Captains.
there is a difference between variety for flair and options for gameplay
a 2 page wargear list for a single hero adds a lot of flair to the game, without adding the same amount of different playstyles to the army
40k offers not enough options to add flair, not enough to change gameplay, but manage at the same time having too many option to keep rules balanced and tight
Sgt. Cortez wrote:People keep saying 40K is unique in that, I'd say they should try Star Trek Attack Wing (or I assume X-Wing), where your base model only gives you a hint what it can do, while the real strength comes from the equipment.
There are probably over a hundred million potential combinations of ships and upgrades possible in X-Wing but that's irrelevant since all I care about is what I'm playing against at this moment. I know exactly what that is because all the rules are presented in front of me on the cards themselves. There are no hidden abilities to consider. A very large number of the cards are available to all factions so players will likely be very familiar with them already but even if they aren't I can still just read what's in front of me and know what everything does. The same cannot be said of 40k. I'm not even sure I'd be 100% confident explaining to my opponent all the possible rules and abilities that could apply to even a single squad in my army. With all the strats, character buffs and so on I'd almost certainly miss something.
Blackie wrote:
I also don't get the analogy with other games like X-Wing or Warmachine, are those games as wide as 40k? Is there the same amount of varietry between the different factions? In 30k most common armies are power armour guys, terminator guys, and the same tanks profiles.
The width (let's just call it bloat, since that's what it is) is one of the problems with 40k. The number of different units or factions is irrelevant next to giving each of those a distinct playstyle and restraint to add only what is required is the mark of a good game designer, as is putting in place the core framework in your core rules and sticking to it. We're about to get the 4th iteration of loyalist stabby Marines. I really don't think that's necessary and the niches GW are trying to squeeze their sub-factions into are becoming increasingly small. It seems to be a unique feature of 40k players that they require special rules to differentiate factions and sub-factions rather than more structural changes. Blood Angels, for example, used to just get two unique units (Death Company and Honour Guard) in 2nd edition, then got an army-wide special rule - the Furious Charge USR, which was well-known to all players - and a buff to the speed of their vehicles in 3rd edition, along with Assault Marines as Troops. They played very differntly to Ultramarines or Dark Angels but they didn't need 10 pages of special rules, strats and relics to do so. The designers used pre-existing rules, and very minor tweaks to some units to push BA players towards a characterful army. That's elegant game design.
To take X-Wing as an example again, the next release is 3 new ships, one for the Resistance and 2 for First Order. Every single one of the ships and upgrades use previously templated rules to create their effects. There are no brand new concepts but each ship, unique pilot and upgrade is distinct even within that framework. That's good game design. It allows players to quickly parse the rules even on unfamiliar and new cards because everything refers back to the core rules. They didn't invent a whole new system to represent the First Order bombers yet they look like they'll play very differently to their Empire counterparts even with the same upgrades.
If GW had designed X-Wing I'm pretty sure they'd have added a dozen entirely new upgrade types and rules systems and created rules to differentiate the Rebel forces from a New Hope from those on Hoth.
kirotheavenger wrote: It really is amazing how many different things 40k has that all feel exactly the same.
There really just isn't the depth of core rules to differentiate stuff properly.
Considering that a lot the special rules, like stratagems for example, are copy pasted with a name change it is not a suprising thing. Plus from the looks of the armies, GW really tries to avoid the situation where the core of the army is the basic trooper run multiple times. It works for some armies like DEs or Ad mecha or GK. But for a lot of others like marines,DG,1ksons or orks the whole list building part is based around high cost kits run in multiples. The marine army nowadays feels as if the basic trooper in it was a blade guard or a vengaurd veteran. The basic orkish model, for the moment, is a buggy. For DG , and I think for 1ksons, the basic trooper is a termintor of some sort. With only two ways to build armies, even if some rules are different the game play is going to feel very much the same. If tomorrow a CWE codex came out , and suddenly the eldar army was all about running 9 vypers and 6+ horents, and a bunch of specialists. It would be a different army from orks, and it would have differences in game play and unit stats. But it would at the same time feel as if someone was playing with orks that can fly.
Karol wrote: But is it really wide? Some armies have 60 or more datasheets in their book, and maybe 10 are ever being taken.
I rarely, if ever, agree with Karol, but he is absolutely right on this. The vast majority of armies are following one of the archetypes drawn from a codex, and while a few support 3-4, most just have one way to build a functional army.
Add that many datasheets are just variants of each other or permutations of wargear and defensive profiles shared with other models, the game perceived complexity completely collapses.
If GW had designed X-Wing I'm pretty sure they'd have added a dozen entirely new upgrade types and rules systems and created rules to differentiate the Rebel forces from a New Hope from those on Hoth.
And is this supposed to a bad thing? I can't stand 30k because all armies to me look too similar to each other just to make another example. I don't think I'd like a game with just two factions that even don't differentiate much from each other, I'd play chess then.
Having lots of different factions, with different units/wargear profiles is an extremely good thing. Variety adds longevity. So is the chance to differentiate the same faction by using a different subfaction, aka chapters and their equivalents.
Rules bloat is a different thing. Multiple units/wargear that do the same job and rules scattered among different pages if not different books, that's rules bloat. Having a different profile for a marine bolter and an ork shoota is not rules bloat. Rules bloat has also nothing to do with gotcha moments, if anything makes listbuilding more problematic. Which is irrelevant once players meet each other and start playing.
And again, how many real examples of gotcha moments do 40k actually have in 9th edition? Super crazy gamebreaking combos are long gone with 8th edition codexes.
Blackie wrote: I also don't get the analogy with other games like X-Wing or Warmachine, are those games as wide as 40k? Is there the same amount of varietry between the different factions?
the difference between the X-Wing factions is bigger than the difference between the 40k factions yet it is very different as there are less factions in X-Wing but with nearly endless variation in army lists and you can have a tournament with everyone playing the same faction but no one is playing similar lists
while in 40k, most armies have 1 list with minor differences and if you want to play a different list you chose a different sub-faction because those are doing that list better
comparing 40k to other games, all of the factions in 40k are the same play style with different "gotcha" effects
You're talking about competitive gaming. Which is just a single specific way of playing games. I think the attitude towards gaming has a huge impact, most people who complain about gotcha moments are those who want to prove something while playing, they want to become or be considered good players. They're all competitive players that would like to win games exclusively because they're more skilled than the opponents, which is a way of seeing the game that I dislike. What I like about 40k is the huge variety of models and the randomness of the dice rolling, I couldn't care less about anything that doesn't share a strong "beer and pretzels" vibe. Maybe X-Wing has a good design for those kind of players, to me it's super boring.
Blackie this whole thread only have full sense in a competitive setting... were 40K is just a great piece of hot garbaje.
In narrative play it dosent really matter, since for starters time is probably not an issue and you can use most of your game time checking books at a calm pace.
40K has always been a narrative game that somehow is played in a pseudo competitive mode by certain people.
sorry I did not know that this discussion was about not matched-play 40k
with open play missions and narrative scenarios things are quite different
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Vatsetis wrote: 40K has always been a narrative game that somehow is played in a pseudo competitive mode by certain people.
40k had competitive rules only until 8th with the open and narrative play officially added to the game
you did not need the official rules to play non-competitive, but saying it has always been non-competitive is wrong with those being the only official rules
It dosent matter what it said on the paper work... 40K has never been and was never ment to be played as a competitive game as a matter of fact... its as efficient as the US industrial military complex in fighthing insurgency... it is done constantly but in the most clunky and costly manner and with subpar results.
Anybody that believes otherwise is simply inside a sunk cost fallacy.
Almost everyone plays matched play, I've met very few people that play fully narrative armies.
Even those that play Crusade generally play it like an extension of matched play.
The idea that matched play is "wrong" is a ridiculous notion.
kirotheavenger wrote: Almost everyone plays matched play, I've met very few people that play fully narrative armies.
Even those that play Crusade generally play it like an extension of matched play.
The idea that matched play is "wrong" is a ridiculous notion.
Same here. In the context of this discussion it's also pointless to discuss anything other than Matched Play. In Narrative or Open you can freely modify any rules you don't like and make up entirely new ones. I think one of the reasons 40k isn't commonly used for those types of games is because they require a solid foundation, which 8th and 9th's core rules sorely lack.
if the game ends up with either of the players being able to say who the winner and who the loser is, based on the in game rule set, then it automaticly becomes competitive. throwing bonets, running with wife on your back and spiting is competitive where I live. As is speed eating of dumplings.
The material, the quality or type of rule set etc don't matter if one checks for something is or isn't competitive. The only thing to check is if you can find out at the end of the game who wins and who loses. Playing house, is a non competitive thing. Because while it has rules, there is no way to know if you won or lost at playing it.
Karol wrote: But is it really wide? Some armies have 60 or more datasheets in their book, and maybe 10 are ever being taken.
I rarely, if ever, agree with Karol, but he is absolutely right on this. The vast majority of armies are following one of the archetypes drawn from a codex, and while a few support 3-4, most just have one way to build a functional army.
Add that many datasheets are just variants of each other or permutations of wargear and defensive profiles shared with other models, the game perceived complexity completely collapses.
You really need to get over this idea that we're still talking about complexity when it was established in the first page of the thread that that isn't the correct word to use.
40K is only competitive in the very broad sense Karol described.
But its a very ill suited game for tournament play.
Which is the main focus of this poll... Because if you are just doing friendly games you can basically ignore most of the bespoke rules and clumpsiness.
I very much disagree that casual play allows you to ignore stuff.
We briefly had a Crusade campaign running here.
I hated it, it was like coming home from a fun day out and realising you had a bunch of homework to do. Because that's exactly what it was.
The same is true, to a lesser extent, in regular 40k. See the advice given up thread of needing to look up tactica for the army you were about to face so you didn't run into any gotchas.
Gotchas exist and can definitely spoil a game if they get you good.
As a casual player I don't want to be investing the sort of time and mental energy it takes to create and understand an army in 40k. This volume of stuff is, imo, anathema to casual play.
Good casual game are simple and easy to understand and still result in fan and varied gameplay. 40k is absolutely not simple and easy to understand.
If GW had designed X-Wing I'm pretty sure they'd have added a dozen entirely new upgrade types and rules systems and created rules to differentiate the Rebel forces from a New Hope from those on Hoth.
And is this supposed to a bad thing? I can't stand 30k because all armies to me look too similar to each other just to make another example. I don't think I'd like a game with just two factions that even don't differentiate much from each other, I'd play chess then.
X-Wing has 7 factions, all distinct. There's a wide spectrum between every little sub-faction getting their own rules and only having 2 factions and nobody's argued for reducing 40k down to 2 factions or even spoken about one so let's just dispense with that strawman right now.
Your attitude is one I see a lot nowadays and it truly saddens me as it's the culmination of the GW marketing campaign to turn "The Hobby" into only what they say it is. You don't need specific rules to differentiate armies from one another. Do we really need separate rules for Flesh Tearers as well as Blood Angels? Or three different weapons that are all bolters except two have a single extra rule, necessitating yet another bolt weapon entry in the SM weapon list? What you need is flexibility in army building with core rules and core army rules allowing for expressions of various different styles of army.
Back before the madness of 8th and its endless sub-factions I'd see much more creativity from people who were concerned with theme and individuality. You didn't need special rules, just a willingness to use the tools at your disposal. So while all IG armies used the same Codex, for example, I saw people using Steel Legion armies without any sub-faction bonuses using just the units every other IG player had access to (crazy, right?) They just made sure all their infantry squads were mounted in Chimeras and took close support tanks instead of artillery. Or the Flesh Tearers player who took minimum-sized Tactical and Devastator squads to account for their relative lack of numbers and always maxed out on Assault and Death Company marines. In WHFB I ran a Dark Elf Witch Cult army purely using the basic rules presented in the Army Book and restricting myself to only Witch units, Assassins and Executioners. I'd argue all of those are much more creative and much more interesting to face than what GW currently produces.
To take another problem with the current GW approach, imagine you're a Word Bearers player. Playing CSM is bad enough, but the one sub-faction you're really hyped about has had crap rules ever since GW gave them sub-faction rules. That sucks. GW are really bad at balance and adding in even more combinations to worry about just make the problem worse. At least if CSM were at least somewhat balanced you could probably put together a Word Bearers army roughly following the background but now you're just making life infinteily harder for yourself and I'd argue the WB rules don't even really push you that far down a thematically accurate path to building the army anyway.
It all comes down to meaningful differences. You can create as many bespoke sub-faction rules as you want but what you should be striving for is distinctiveness on the tabletop. GW mostly fails at that. One Necron dynasty plays very similarly to the next, just as all Tau armies, except possibly Farsight, play almost exactly the same way. Quite often the only thing that distinguishes a sub-faction in 40k is how broken their unique WLT, strat or Relic is. That's hardly immersive.
Well I ment casual by ignoring most of the bloat and reduce the game to something manageble by agreement with your friends.
If you pretend to play "full" 40K its just dull homework as you described it... No matter the type of game mode you are own.
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Nurglitch wrote: True, but if GW put out a rule book and that's all you needed people would pronounce the game 'dead' because of the lack of ongoing 'support.'
Not true... Just look at any other tabletop wargame in the market.
Certainly 40k is prisioner of having to deal with the dead weight of almost 30 years of history...
Nurglitch wrote: True, but if GW put out a rule book and that's all you needed people would pronounce the game 'dead' because of the lack of ongoing 'support.'
Why are the only options to have the game be as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle or Babby's First Wargame?
Nurglitch wrote: True, but if GW put out a rule book and that's all you needed people would pronounce the game 'dead' because of the lack of ongoing 'support.'
Why are the only options to have the game be as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle or Babby's First Wargame?
It's weird isn't it? I think it has something to do with the economics of games, and related to the fact that 40k fans love buying things.
Nurglitch wrote: True, but if GW put out a rule book and that's all you needed people would pronounce the game 'dead' because of the lack of ongoing 'support.'
Why are the only options to have the game be as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle or Babby's First Wargame?
It's weird isn't it? I think it has something to do with the economics of games, and related to the fact that 40k fans love buying things.
No, that was me asking why you only present us with the option of what we have or something so simple the game is dead. Why do you not give us the option of a well written, decently balanced game? Something GW could absolutely make but choose not to.
Sim-Life wrote: No, that was me asking why you only present us with the option of what we have or something so simple the game is dead. Why do you not give us the option of a well written, decently balanced game? Something GW could absolutely make but choose not to.
That's just it, a 'broken' game can be patched, fixed, and all the problems fixed with a new edition. In the meantime all those flaws and imperfections keep it front of mind, and intersect with collecting widgets. A perfect, affordable game will be sold once and people will quickly lose interest when something new comes along.
Tyel wrote: Matched play isn't the same as competitive play.
Exactly this and it saddens me a lot that there are people who can't understand that. In all my posts I've always had matched play games in mind. And that's basically the only kind of games I play myself.
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Vatsetis wrote: Well I ment casual by ignoring most of the bloat and reduce the game to something manageble by agreement with your friends.
If you pretend to play "full" 40K its just dull homework as you described it... No matter the type of game mode you are own.
Well if you're only interested in overly competitive tournament games you really need to know like 5% of the rules considering all sources of rules, probably even less, as you'll only face the most effective combos available. And at that point just read a well written review about an army, keep note of the best combos they get and you're good to play. Other stuff shouldn't bother you if occasionally shows up as you'll be play a competitive list against a non competitive one.
Do we really need separate rules for Flesh Tearers as well as Blood Angels? Or three different weapons that are all bolters except two have a single extra rule, necessitating yet another bolt weapon entry in the SM weapon list? What you need is flexibility in army building with core rules and core army rules allowing for expressions of various different styles of army.
We don't. But how is this related to gotcha moments?
To take another problem with the current GW approach, imagine you're a Word Bearers player. Playing CSM is bad enough, but the one sub-faction you're really hyped about has had crap rules ever since GW gave them sub-faction rules. That sucks. GW are really bad at balance and adding in even more combinations to worry about just make the problem worse. At least if CSM were at least somewhat balanced you could probably put together a Word Bearers army roughly following the background but now you're just making life infinteily harder for yourself and I'd argue the WB rules don't even really push you that far down a thematically accurate path to building the army anyway.
I'm an ork player. Not a goffs or bad moons one. I have no problem switching klans just to try different tactics and combinations. World Bearers player should do the same, he's a Chaos SM player actually and if he wants to be restricted to one minor subfaction it's his choice.
It all comes down to meaningful differences. You can create as many bespoke sub-faction rules as you want but what you should be striving for is distinctiveness on the tabletop. GW mostly fails at that. One Necron dynasty plays very similarly to the next, just as all Tau armies, except possibly Farsight, play almost exactly the same way. Quite often the only thing that distinguishes a sub-faction in 40k is how broken their unique WLT, strat or Relic is. That's hardly immersive.
I agree with you actually, there is rules bloat and some weapons/units are just the same thing with different names. But ork profiles are very different to SM or aeldari or tyranids ones. You won't have the same kind of variety across the different factions in many other games. And I can't really say about all other factions but ork klans are quite distinctive to each other in terms of optimized lists and gameplay.
That argument is getting ahead of us a little since they've not had the 9th edition treatment. Slaanesh could see a lot of ways to get the enemy units to act against their own interests. Tyranids could find themselves with a greater sense of a instinctual hive minded army. Time will tell.
That argument is getting ahead of us a little since they've not had the 9th edition treatment. Slaanesh could see a lot of ways to get the enemy units to act against their own interests. Tyranids could find themselves with a greater sense of a instinctual hive minded army. Time will tell.
Case in point:
That is kind of crazy that you posted this right before that preview... what else do you need to tell us, Daed?
This is a cool little ability, I look forward to learning about the other effects. I will say though, it's still unclear to me how this all works. First of all, in that example image, the Hive Tyrant base is partially outside the range of the synaptic link. Probably intentional (and reflecting that the ability is not a "wholly within" ability), but interesting nonetheless. Secondly, how does the buff actually work? The Neurothrope one being an aura makes it simple, but the Broodlord one seems to apply to a specific unit (and they actually mention Genestealers in the flavor text, even though the article says any unit can be affected.)
Hopefully the actual rules for the mechanic aren't too fiddly. It feels a little fiddly now but there's still lots to learn.
Gene St. Ealer wrote: That is kind of crazy that you posted this right before that preview... what else do you need to tell us, Daed?
I wish I had more!
Though just based on the way new books have been going they definitely seem keen to hone in on what makes each faction special ( this is where marines suffer for their loyalty ).
This is a cool little ability, I look forward to learning about the other effects. I will say though, it's still unclear to me how this all works. First of all, in that example image, the Hive Tyrant base is partially outside the range of the synaptic link. Probably intentional (and reflecting that the ability is not a "wholly within" ability), but interesting nonetheless. Secondly, how does the buff actually work? The Neurothrope one being an aura makes it simple, but the Broodlord one seems to apply to a specific unit (and they actually mention Genestealers in the flavor text, even though the article says any unit can be affected.)
Hopefully the actual rules for the mechanic aren't too fiddly. It feels a little fiddly now but there's still lots to learn.
Given the diagram it seems all units in synapse will benefit from the ability. The little logistics chain you can make is pretty neat. You could have a couple effects on the board and then you suddenly "rewire" your army so that the distant battlefield is suddenly dealing with a new problem.
Tyranid Warriors are going to be pretty popular if these are good.
I just hope they don't phone in too much since this is a stop gap instead of a codex.
kirotheavenger wrote: It really is amazing how many different things 40k has that all feel exactly the same.
There really just isn't the depth of core rules to differentiate stuff properly.
I'd agree with this.
I also think there's a general problem in that so many of the rules that supposedly exist to differentiate units actually end up doing the opposite. If you want an example, just look at how many subfaction rules are "models reroll 1s to hit/wound/psychic/pick their noses" or get a single reroll or something else along those lines.
These rules add nothing because they make no fundamental difference to how a given unit plays. A SM Devastator unit that rerolls 1s to hit is not suddenly going to run across the field and try to beat the enemies to death in melee with their Lascannons. No, they'll sit in cover and fire their Lascannons every turn, which is exactly what they'd be doing if they didn't reroll 1s to hit.
There are also issues with subfactions getting rules that end up being counter-intuitive. For example, Poison Tongue get +1 to wound with Poison Weapons. Ignoring for now that (in spite of what their name might imply) they're supposed to be about more than just poison, this seems appropriate, right? And if I was to tell you that DE have some poison-specialist assassins, you might well think that these would be especially thematic in a Poison Tongue army. Nope. See, their weapons are already Poison 2+ and thus they gain no benefit whatsoever from being in a PT army. Nor do any other units/weapons with Poison 2+, which includes the relic unique to PT.
But even if we leave aside that sort of anti-synergy, how many subfaction (and other) rules actually alter the way an army/unit/model plays on the table? Because surely that should be the objective?
I don't personally understand the idea that a faction rule should only exist if it fundamentally changes the way units are played, that seems to just completely misunderstand what they are? They're rules to reward taking units and a playstyle that fits the background of whatever subfaction you're playing, so you don't HAVE to just pretend that your steel legion are steel legion, you have rules that represent and reward that line of play. This isn't just a 40k thing either, I see a lot of people quote HH as being better than 9th but they have rules that run along this exact line. I play IH in HH, and when I take Company of Bitter Immortals it encourages and rewards me for taking Immortals, makes them a bit better at their job, but doesn't fundamentally change the unit at all, and it comes from rules that aren't on their datasheet. I also think it's really really strange to expect to do well at a game where you don't know your opponents rules, thats just not how any game works, if you're scared of gotchas just ask your opponent what they can do in X situation if you're worried about it. If you're in a beer and pretzels setting, then who cares if you lose? Isn't the game barely the point at all in that setting? This game is REALLY simple, it's not hard
But even if we leave aside that sort of anti-synergy, how many subfaction (and other) rules actually alter the way an army/unit/model plays on the table? Because surely that should be the objective?
If GW had any sense they'd use Faction rules as a way to alter how you build an army like by changing which units have the CORE keyword or how you build your detachments. That would be far more thematic and interesting than just copy/pasting every faction ability and calling it a day.
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Gores wrote: If you're in a beer and pretzels setting, then who cares if you lose? Isn't the game barely the point at all in that setting?
Why even bother playing then? Just spend an hour or so setting up the game then roll dice to determine what order you pack your stuff in. I mean the game is basically that already but if it doesn't matter if you win or lose then why bother with objectives or anything? In fact I feel like a lot of the people who play Mathhammer on here would prefer it that way.
Yeah if you reduce anything down to its basest level, it does sound stupid, you're right! Every wargame in the entire world is spending X time setting up then rolling dice to determine what order you pick up your models in. Most super casual players I've met don't play with objectives and just play Kill Each Other as they hang out and talk gak, that seems to be what everyone here is advocating for.
Gores wrote: Yeah if you reduce anything down to its basest level, it does sound stupid, you're right! Every wargame in the entire world is spending X time setting up then rolling dice to determine what order you pick up your models in. Most super casual players I've met don't play with objectives and just play Kill Each Other as they hang out and talk gak, that seems to be what everyone here is advocating for.
It was you saying that winning and losing doesn't matter. If it doesn't then why play a game at all? I don't feel like I should still be having to say this but here goes; the objective is to win, the aim is to have fun.
Also most people are advocating for a BETTER game, NOT a simpler one. I don't know why that is bad or difficult to understand.
kirotheavenger wrote: It really is amazing how many different things 40k has that all feel exactly the same.
There really just isn't the depth of core rules to differentiate stuff properly.
I'd agree with this.
I also think there's a general problem in that so many of the rules that supposedly exist to differentiate units actually end up doing the opposite. If you want an example, just look at how many subfaction rules are "models reroll 1s to hit/wound/psychic/pick their noses" or get a single reroll or something else along those lines.
These rules add nothing because they make no fundamental difference to how a given unit plays. A SM Devastator unit that rerolls 1s to hit is not suddenly going to run across the field and try to beat the enemies to death in melee with their Lascannons. No, they'll sit in cover and fire their Lascannons every turn, which is exactly what they'd be doing if they didn't reroll 1s to hit.
There are also issues with subfactions getting rules that end up being counter-intuitive. For example, Poison Tongue get +1 to wound with Poison Weapons. Ignoring for now that (in spite of what their name might imply) they're supposed to be about more than just poison, this seems appropriate, right? And if I was to tell you that DE have some poison-specialist assassins, you might well think that these would be especially thematic in a Poison Tongue army. Nope. See, their weapons are already Poison 2+ and thus they gain no benefit whatsoever from being in a PT army. Nor do any other units/weapons with Poison 2+, which includes the relic unique to PT.
But even if we leave aside that sort of anti-synergy, how many subfaction (and other) rules actually alter the way an army/unit/model plays on the table? Because surely that should be the objective?
I fail to understand how core rules would change what you'd outlined here. If tanks have facings then how does that differentiate tanks?
To me a Forgefiend feels completely different from a Redemptor or a Predator. These are all things that shoot guns so stating that they feel the same, because they shoot things seems reductive. There's only so many combinations of shoot, melee, and psychic that you can have on models. A heavy flamer Baal Predator plays totally differently to a regular Predator. A FF's weapons are distinct enough from a Vindicator or Predator that you would specifically choose it over them for a purpose.
In the TS book both the Predator and the FF have a 5++. The FF has an extra wound and heals. The Predator moves a lot faster and can use Smoke and Gargoyles and is eligible to be healed by a psyker. Plasma FF has 6 S7 AP3 D3. Destructor has 4 S7 AP1 D3, 6 S5 AP1 D2, D6 S5 AP0, and 2/4 S4 AP2. Forgefiend will benefit from the use of Death Hex ( Twist of Fate ) with it's higher AP where the Predator produces a lot more variety of shots that don't care about invulnerable saves as much and can handle multiple different threats.
Either of these choices will have an impact on how you will interface with the opponent, choose targets, and allocate support.
What is it exactly that you want to happen to the Lascannon squad in your example? Do you want them to suddenly be able to be effective against infantry?
Poison Tongue is not counter intuitive. You just reject the notion of overbuffing things that don't need it to make PT useful. PT also affect combat attrition tests, which would be quite useful on some of the recently redone armies. And indeed PT isn't just about poison and it has the ability to redeploy units. There is even a secondary that scores points for models that flee, A perfect candidate for that type of army. gak Raiders with -2LD and poison weapons that wound most everything on 3s on top of an attrition mod that is activated by killing just a single model and lasts the turn so any other Kabal can do the remaining damage and force a hugely painful test.
Vatsetis wrote: Not true... Just look at any other tabletop wargame in the market.
You mean the ones that are created, last a couple of years, and end up in remainder bins while people move onto the next game?
Yes men, thats it... 40k is the only fish in the ocean.
It's not the only one, but it is the biggest one by an order of magnitude. Mind you, apparently there's a supply chain snafu occurring that's going to wipe out a lot of small game producers, so who knows how these things will look in a couple of years?
I don't feel like I should still be having to say this but here goes; the objective is to win, the aim is to have fun.
For most people, I'd say you're right.
I am a noted exception- often, one of my agendas lead to unlocking story events in the narrative campaign. I will be fighting to achieve that Agenda and advance the story, often at the expense of winning the battle.
The best success I ever had in a game was an Apocalypse battle that a group of us fought back in 2008- 3 players per side, 3k armies for each player. My team suffered a major defeat, but my Palatine managed to discover the Praesidium Protectiva buried beneath the Chapel of Saint Katherine's Aegis. Didn't matter that we lost the battle- Jahalla Athebraxis returned a priceless relic to the Imperial fold. It was the last time she was fielded as a palatine; the discovery earned her the title of Canoness.
I fully acknowledge that I don't play the game the way most people play it. Even for me, the likelihood of winning being my objective increases when I play a stand-alone game- I just don't play stand-alone games very often. A game without context is an empty thing to me- I might as well play chess. (Not to say chess is an empty game- I like it. But it is generic and abstract in nature, which is how stand-alone games feel to me).
Gores wrote: Yeah if you reduce anything down to its basest level, it does sound stupid, you're right! Every wargame in the entire world is spending X time setting up then rolling dice to determine what order you pick up your models in. Most super casual players I've met don't play with objectives and just play Kill Each Other as they hang out and talk gak, that seems to be what everyone here is advocating for.
It was you saying that winning and losing doesn't matter. If it doesn't then why play a game at all? I don't feel like I should still be having to say this but here goes; the objective is to win, the aim is to have fun.
Also most people are advocating for a BETTER game, NOT a simpler one. I don't know why that is bad or difficult to understand.
I'm going to take the risk of going a step further with this one and try to define "fun," based on long experience of playing and arguing about a variety of games with a variety of people. "Fun" is not winning, losing, rolling dice and pushing models around. Fun is composed of three elements: 1) the sense that the game happening on the table lines up with the thing happening in your head in an immersive way. This is the roleplayer's fun, the narrative fun, the fun of seeing dice rolled and translating that into a movie in your head of pew-pew-explosions and epic music and cheesy dialogue. 2) The sense that your choices had an impact on what happened. This is the idea that you won because of something you did, not because you bought better stuff. 3) Close games. This is why we have weight classes in combat sports and leagues for team sports; we don't pay to watch professional teams beat up on college teams, we pay to watch college teams play college teams and professional teams play professional teams, because it's more exciting when you don't know the outcome.
These factors are of different importance to different people. People who don't care that much about #2 might play netlists/netdecks/whatever, people who don't care that much about #1 see nothing wrong with taking the most powerful things without paying much attention to story, people who don't care that much about #3 see one-sided games as a necessary consequence of bad play. Different proportions, however, don't change the fact that everyone I've ever played a game with or argued about games with has defined "fun" in terms of some combination of these three factors.
You might say "yes, Anomander, that's all well and good, but what's GW supposed to do about any of this, whether or not you have a sense of the narrative is up to you, your choices always matter, and whether or not you have close games depends on who you're playing with!", and those are all valid points. GW has no control over any of these, but they have influence over all of them, and I find their approach to writing army books often damages all three. They don't have a consistent sense of what stats mean, which means through their writing they don't communicate to us a consistent sense of what stats mean, so the numbers we're given and the results of those numbers on the table feel like they were chosen by dartboard rather than any attempt to make the game world feel alive. They pull big levers constantly without much forethought when writing new books and releasing/rebalancing units, which means often all your other choices are drowned under the overwhelming choice of "did you choose to like the right models?" And they try and set up their releases to encourage people to buy new armies while their old ones are languishing at the bottom of the heap by setting old books up to get steamrolled by new books, which makes one-sided games way more frequent than they would be otherwise.
I think this discussion gets so contentious for a few reasons; there are people for whom a simpler game is better than a more complex one, because of Fun Principle #2 (their decisions only matter if they understand what they mean), so asking for more complexity back is violating their principles of fun. There are people for whom the over-the-top cartooniness of Warhammer is Warhammer, so asking for a more grounded historical-y approach like in older editions violates their Fun Principle #1 (changing Warhammer like that would no longer be Warhammer to them).
There are things GW could do to make the game universally better for everyone; not in terms of pushing my specific priorities, but in terms of balancing the game such that the gulf between good models and bad models wasn't so vast, or in terms of balancing release schedules such that Xenos players weren't stuck with such a drought of new stuff and Marine players weren't constantly flooded with Slightly Different Primaris Unit #47, or in terms of giving everyone smaller updates more frequently so everyone got to participate in the game at the same pace rather than a rotating small section of the playerbase were dealing with huge changes while everyone else was playing the same matchups over and over again, but their marketing strategies and business model seem reliant on not making the game better, so I think we're sort of stuck with it.
I think if there's going to be any solution to these problems it has to be in the fragmenting of the community. If more of us break off and play other games, even other GW games (I've seen the suggestion that GW's going to try to position 30k with more support as a more advanced game for the more simulation-minded players who don't like 9th's card games, and I'd applaud that as a really good decision on their part), it gives the people who enjoy 9th the opportunity to play without grouchy people like me floating around the edges of the community whining about how it's not the game we'd like it to be, and it gives the grouchy people floating around the edges of the community the opportunity to break off and do something they do enjoy. 40k isn't for everyone. Trying to make it into a game for everyone is only going to break it, but as long as we're all sitting around assuming it's the game for everyone and needs to be hammered into a shape we like more GW has no incentive to change (because we're all hovering around 40k instead of doing something else, so they've won tabletop wargames) and we don't get to play games that we might like more (because everyone looks at something they might like better and says to themselves "nah, nobody plays that, I'll just play 40k").
TL;DR: Fun has universal properties. 40k can fulfill those properties for someone else while not fulfilling it for you, and it'd be better for all of us if we all tried to play games we did enjoy instead of trying to argue about which of us has a better theory about how to make 40k perfect for everyone, because at the end of the day they are all wrong.
AnomanderRake wrote: I think this discussion gets so contentious for a few reasons; there are people for whom a simpler game is better than a more complex one, because of Fun Principle #2 (their decisions only matter if they understand what they mean), so asking for more complexity back is violating their principles of fun. There are people for whom the over-the-top cartooniness of Warhammer is Warhammer, so asking for a more grounded historical-y approach like in older editions violates their Fun Principle #1 (changing Warhammer like that would no longer be Warhammer to them).
I think people might misinterpret my position to be in this group where it is not. I want a complex game that isn't needlessly complex and I want what makes Warhammer it's own thing. Vehicle facings? Sure, as long as it doesn't cause confusion. Different morale? Sure, as long as it isn't overly punishing, because of AA.
But I largely think some systems won't bring a wildly better game. Most people here won't get the dynamic they're looking for unless 40K moves to AA. I get the sense that they want to feel like they've out maneuvered / out thought their opponent without having to employ additional rules, but all that stuff in older editions was something that permitted by the army you chose. T'au has JSJ and many couldn't really respond to it. Eldar were just simply faster than everyone. Orks just tried to survive to initiative step 1.
And the old editions were more about killing models than 8th was!
Daedalus81 wrote: ...but all that stuff in older editions was something that permitted by the army you chose. T'au has JSJ and many couldn't really respond to it. Eldar were just simply faster than everyone. Orks just tried to survive to initiative step 1...
I do want to zero in on this for a moment; I've never objected to different factions having different mechanics, what I object to in 9th is the feeling that whether I won is down to the army I chose rather than any decisions I made after picking the right or the wrong army book.
Yeah, I think the objection I have to 9th is that my flowchart of "Use Keeper of Secrets yet: Y/N?" is basically entirely predetermined.
The game becomes "Can I successfully execute my flowchart, or does my opponent have a stratagem to break one of the links?"
You can say that position matters in 9th because it is more objective based, and I generally agree, but you just include needing or not needing an objective in the flowchart decision tree you build before the game.
There's no need to have tactical flexibility (unless you don't know what to expect from your opponent, i.e. don't know his rules).
This notion that the game is any more or less flowchart than any other game is terribly misleading, I think.
Mechanized infantry coming over a hedge against dug in and gone to ground MG/PZF? Whoops. Forgot to bring smoke for your tanks? Whoops.
When you have perfect knowledge of what is coming towards you before the unit would actually see it your decision is going to be based on that information. Only with AA or real time movement and fog would you get a sense of actual tactical choices, but even those are going to go to a flow chart. And in the case of tabletop your decisions will be further decided by the outcome of dice rolls.
To take it to the extreme - all of human thought can eventually be made a flow chart.
I have taken Linebreaker, Pierce, and Deploy Teleport Homers. I use the redeploy to shift my army to the weakest side of their table. I teleport the mutalith to block the center. The heldrakes clear a landing zone and move block reinforcements. Risen Rubricae are deployed close to where I need to go to provide additional removal if I need it. On turn 2 the Termie Sorc pierces, the Scarabs deploy, and together they do linebreaker. By turn 3 I will score 24 secondary points. If I need to I drop the second unit of Scarabs. You absolutely must move to deal with me, which reduces what you can send to my side of the table still giving me a way to grip on to primaries.
This is my "flow chart". Also known as a strategy with tactical choices to help achieve it.
Spoiler:
Does it always work? No. Some opponent's have so much junk that I can't. Some maps don't afford the right cover or objective placement. That's why I have to actively make decisions about what will work best against my opponent and what happens if things go wrong. And if I can't be consistent I go back to the drawing board. If I get bored I switch to a new strategy.
The biggest problem with 40k is the number of designers over the years. I've been playing since 2nd edition. GW has ran off too many great game designers. The new designers then have to make a new system to prove they deserve to stick around. GW put model sales before making a great and balanced game. Now GW is too busy inflating prices and trying to dump as muchproduct on the market as possible because they have driven so many of their past customers away. GW needs to decide if they want to keep their current customer base or drive it away.
Pointer5 wrote: The biggest problem with 40k is the number of designers over the years. I've been playing since 2nd edition. GW has ran off too many great game designers. The new designers then have to make a new system to prove they deserve to stick around. GW put model sales before making a great and balanced game. Now GW is too busy inflating prices and trying to dump as muchproduct on the market as possible because they have driven so many of their past customers away. GW needs to decide if they want to keep their current customer base or drive it away.
They've had more customers than ever and tournaments have never been so well attended, so not sure what you're driving at.
Daedalus81 wrote: This notion that the game is any more or less flowchart than any other game is terribly misleading, I think.
Mechanized infantry coming over a hedge against dug in and gone to ground MG/PZF? Whoops. Forgot to bring smoke for your tanks? Whoops.
When you have perfect knowledge of what is coming towards you before the unit would actually see it your decision is going to be based on that information. Only with AA or real time movement and fog would you get a sense of actual tactical choices, but even those are going to go to a flow chart. And in the case of tabletop your decisions will be further decided by the outcome of dice rolls.
I think you're wrong here. The key difference between a game like 40k and one like, say, Epic or X-Wing is that the non-IGOUGO nature of those games means any flowchart is operating with incomplete information. The problem with 40k is I know literally everything except dice rolls (and even then the way various auras and strats interact mean many dice rolls are pretty much pre-determined). I can measure any and all ranges at any time, I know how many CP I and my opponent have and I know which strats and psychic powers we both have access to. There are a small number of caveats to consider, like failing psychic powers or if your opponent uses some strat at a certain time, but all of those can easily be accounted for because they're all pass/fail scenarios and you still have complete control over your own forces at the point your flowchart branches.
In a game like Epic I need to consider that I don't know the order my opponent will activate their detachments. The order I take my activations likely affects their subsequent activations as well. I also need to consider that in Epic there's much more variance in outcomes related to dice because most attacks are at best 4+ to succeed and there are no rerolls available most of the time. In a game like X-Wing you're even more removed from any flowchart because you both secretly assign moves to each ship that are locked in once assigned and then activated in a specific order so you have very little confirmed information about your opponent's moves when plotting yours and no ability to react once ships start moving. The same is true when attacking and defending. Because you do that in a specific order you won't always know whether spending a token to modify offensively is better than saving it for a defensive mod. There's no flowchart for that, only statistical likelihoods, but even those are modified by the game state in non-linear ways.
You will very, very rarely be able to create a flowchart for these games that gives a definite "right" move. All you get is varying degrees of statistical improvement or reduction in your win chances.
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Your point was about GWs customer retention or at least the end of your post was, which made it seem like that was the overall point, he was responding to that specifically.
You're both right in a way. 40k got a HUGE surge after 8th released and it's still coasting on that wave, but also I think more people are recognizing that GW is still pulling the abusive spouse act of "I've changed baby, I promise." and then continuing to act in the same way they always have. They're just better at hiding it now. Combine that with sunk cost and you get people who insist on continue to play a game they clearly don't enjoy because they've invested a lot of time and money into it already. GW's current boom will peak eventually, but I don't think it'll be for a while yet.
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
Because most people don't have an option to play other table top games? That is like asking why there isn't a company beating out amazon or apple, when they both create bad and over priced products.
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
I think it is tapping into a wider market, and that market is different to the older style players? A fair few comment on how its more like Magic and co (and remember its not been like a historical wargame for a long time) and they are bigger markets. I think the attraction of a complicated game that rewards immersion and detailed decision making when assembling and purchasing models is clearly very high, its just not something the older guard perhaps care as much about, or they already did that and expect more?
I still buy and collect the models with various wild game and conversion schemes in my head, even if I am only playing small crusade games now, and if that is a common experience that would soften any fall in popularity. But it appears they are far better off with the type of customer who likes their current incarnations of the core games than the old ones - who they now incidentally are often retaining with a better catalogue of alternative games.
The_Real_Chris wrote: I think it is tapping into a wider market, and that market is different to the older style players? A fair few comment on how its more like Magic and co (and remember its not been like a historical wargame for a long time) and they are bigger markets. I think the attraction of a complicated game that rewards immersion and detailed decision making when assembling and purchasing models is clearly very high, its just not something the older guard perhaps care as much about, or they already did that and expect more?
I still buy and collect the models with various wild game and conversion schemes in my head, even if I am only playing small crusade games now, and if that is a common experience that would soften any fall in popularity. But it appears they are far better off with the type of customer who likes their current incarnations of the core games than the old ones - who they now incidentally are often retaining with a better catalogue of alternative games.
There's an interesting point, with all the alternate game products offered by GW they're replicating something of the board game market where people have a variety of games to play depending on the company and everyone's mood.
kodos wrote: being the first one, marketing and having your own stores were people cannot play something else helps with popularity a lot
that the worse product is more popular is nothing special, but arguing that popularity must have something to do with quality is
Having your own stores doesn't help if the demand isn't there. I think it's well known that GW tested demand with independent retailers before going to the effort of setting up their own shops in areas, and relocating those shops when the demand didn't justify the cost of rent. As for marketing, GW is likewise notorious for not using mainsteam marketing channels; although maybe that's actually a marketing success story.
As for the argument that more popular products are worse is one of those weird arguments that I think needs unpacking, although it might take us way too far off-topic. I think if we run with it, that popular products are naturally inferior, then who is buying it all, and why? I mean, I bought some Genestealers and some Bloodletters recently, for my Pulp Alley games. Maybe it goes back to The_Real_Chris's point that we don't have to play Warhammer with Warhammer models?
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
I don't see why it's confusing. Why do soap operas run for dozens of season (or in the case of British soap operas, literally constantly)? Why do they make new FIFA/NFL/NBA games EVERY year? Why is chart music so awful and generic? Lowest common denominator.
40k appeals to a LOT because 40k hits almost everything you could want from a game in some way, how well aimed that hit is is arguable but it has something that will appeal to just about anyone and it's INCREDIBLY easy to find information on and is incredibly accessable at a basic level. A lot of people now have also come back to The Hobby after leaving during earlier editions and in mean time the hobby and the games have flourished, however those don't know those games. They know GW and 40k and it's their comfort zone, so they stay in that zone because they don't have the time or money to branch out. A lot of people I know say they don't want to play other games because if they get an evening to themselves to play a game they want to play something where they get to use their expensive minis (someone in my group chat said exactly that recently).
Personally I recognized that GW and 40k no longer meets what I want from a game, so I booted it and play board games mainly now. Which, incidentally I thought were a waste of time when I was a big Warhammer player (this was around 5th/6th) compared to something like 40k or WHFB until I actually played some. I didn't think a board game could match the variety or engagement of Warhammer so I never bothered to try any until recently (about 3 years ago?) and I found I was so incredibly wrong.
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
Well by that metric "Big Brother" oath to be one of the greatest quality TV show ever... But quality and popularity dont always match.
40k is popular in spite of its cumbersome gameplay mechanics (lore, art, marketing, miniatures, loyal fan base...) .
And regarding the magic sauce... Just like with cocacola or any other popular brand you cannot just replicate the success ussing a blueprint...Time and Oportunity are everything.
Good to see we have similar views on the game play mechanics of 40k
I fail to understand how core rules would change what you'd outlined here. If tanks have facings then how does that differentiate tanks?
I think you may have misread my post because I never once said (or even implied) that core rules would change that.
What I said was that, in addition to the problem of core rules being shallow, there is also an issue that most of the rules added to the game to differentiate units or subfactions make no difference to how a unit or army actually plays.
I think you guys just miss what the game wants to do or lets you do.
My guess is that more than half of 40K players are actually garagehammer types of people that do more collecting than playing. For these people 8th and 9th edition is okay. The base rules are straightforward so you can easily remember them even when playing only once per month and the Codizes really go into depth to put every nonsense from the fluff on the table through faction rules and stratagems. Just like prior editions it's not a deep game but even more than prior editions it plays into 40K just being a Michael Bay movie on the tabletop. If you want 40K as a historical Simulation you probably look at Onepage 40K or anything else with alternating activations.
40K is about Goblins in Space fighting Knights in Space fighting giant robots fighting Aliens fighting aircraft hitting things with your Sword and firing cruise missiles at point blank range.
40K thrives through its huge amount of factions and models, there's some Sci-Fi trope in there for everyone to fight any other Sci-Fi trope and that’s awesome. Does this work as a highly tactical, even competitive game? Well it does for some apparently but I don't think it's the point of the game.
Joseph McCollough said about 50% of the hobby are just inside your head, you plan your army, or campaigns, or make lists, or invent scenarios or whatever. And for that 9th's "complexity" is great. You have internally balanced Codizes giving you loads of playstyles (If you have a new Codex, that is, I'm not denying GW also messed up a lot of things organizing 9th), you have crusade to develop your dudes, you get mission Pack DLCs, you can read BL books to inspire you, and again, you just have more factions than any other game.
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
So, what exactly is it that turned you off from 8th? Sorry if you've mentioned it before - it takes me a while to associate stuff to posters I don't see often.
Why if not would you mention the popularity of 40k in a debate about the quality of the ruleset... Or to be more specific, how clumpsy the ruleset actually is???
Well, here's the thing. How is it that 40k sucks if it's so popular? Which is to assume, contrary to the usual assumption, that something being more popular means it is actually better. Me, I don't like 40k. I stopped playing in 8th. But I am absolutely fascinated by how it seems to get worse (from my perspective) as a game, and better as a commercial product (from the perspective of sales). It's something of a paradox how the game is virtually unplayable for so many, including myself, and the best version yet for so many others. Heck, even for myself getting back into the game after taking a hiatus in 3rd and back in the end of 4th, and each edition seeming to get better and better until near the end of 8th when I couldn't face playing another game. So when there's questions raised like 'Is Warhammer 40k too complex?' I distrust my own personal feelings about it, and I'm very curious about the apparent dichotomy.
And, if I can figure out the secret sauce, maybe I can apply it to my own game.
So, what exactly is it that turned you off from 8th? Sorry if you've mentioned it before - it takes me a while to associate stuff to posters I don't see often.
I've been trying to figure that out for years. The best I can come up with is (a) Knights and other big models, (b) designing and developing a kind of Warhammer methadone (which is just an amusing way of saying 'my own game').
Nurglitch wrote: I've been trying to figure that out for years. The best I can come up with is (a) Knights and other big models, (b) designing and developing a kind of Warhammer methadone (which is just an amusing way of saying 'my own game').
Ah. Knights are really muted right now. They're a big question mark for 9th. Good luck with making a game though!
It's less that the Knights are buffed or nerfed, it's that they're boring. But thank you, the game is made. I don't think you have to make a game though, as The_Real_Chris points out, you just need to find something that gives you that Warhammer fix but better. There's lots of other great board games out there.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I think you guys just miss what the game wants to do or lets you do.
What the game wants is at odd with what we want. We are the customers, the game is supposed to cater to us, not us to it.
My guess is that more than half of 40K players are actually garagehammer types of people that do more collecting than playing. For these people 8th and 9th edition is okay.
Probably more like 75-80% of players. And thats a big generalisation there. I know of two garagehammer groups that dropped 40k entirely after 8th
The base rules are straightforward so you can easily remember them even when playing only once per month and the Codizes really go into depth to put every nonsense from the fluff on the table through faction rules and stratagems.
The first part is correct. The second is just an total fabrication. 40k armies do not feel fluffy at all. They all feel homogenised because they all use the same few reroll/modifier effects over and over again. Most faction traits are copy/pasted.
Just like prior editions it's not a deep game but even more than prior editions it plays into 40K just being a Michael Bay movie on the tabletop.
Michael Bay is not the bar you should be aiming for. Just because previous editions were not that deep doesn't make it okay for 9th to not be deep.
If you want 40K as a historical Simulation
No one said this.
you probably look at Onepage 40K or anything else with alternating activations.
Thats nice. How do you get the Matched Play 2000pts Only drones to go along with it?
40K is about Goblins in Space fighting Knights in Space fighting giant robots fighting Aliens fighting aircraft hitting things with your Sword and firing cruise missiles at point blank range.
40K thrives through its huge amount of factions and models, there's some Sci-Fi trope in there for everyone to fight any other Sci-Fi trope and that’s awesome. Does this work as a highly tactical, even competitive game? Well it does for some apparently but I don't think it's the point of the game.
Joseph McCollough said about 50% of the hobby are just inside your head, you plan your army, or campaigns, or make lists, or invent scenarios or whatever. And for that 9th's "complexity" is great. ,
No it isn't. Every unit feels the same because the rules that differentiate them are lackluster and bland. How does a space marine with +1 to hit in melee because he's spent a lifetime training in melee combat any different from on ork with +1 to hit in melee because he pokes squigs in his spare time? How does the -1 from a camo cloak feel different to a -1 to hit because a harlequin is flipping out like a ninja? It doesn't. They're the same rules used to represent vastly different things and it makes everything feel the same.
You have internally balanced Codizes
Do we now?
giving you loads of playstyles
Do we now?
(If you have a new Codex, that is, I'm not denying GW also messed up a lot of things organizing 9th),
Thats two things we agree on now.
you have crusade to develop your dude
If by that you mean extra book keeping, more of the samd crap to keep track of that killed the base game for me/us and extra homework for a hobby
you get mission Pack DLCs,
Thats not a point in GWs favor. Paying for basic stuff like scenarios is some EA microtransaction gak.
you can read BL books to inspire you,
This has nothing to do with the 40k game or its issues.
and again, you just have more factions than any other game.
Not necceserily a good thing.
I really don't want to respond to this because I'm posting on a phone mostly but I have to cause I'm dumb and can't help myself.
I fail to understand how core rules would change what you'd outlined here. If tanks have facings then how does that differentiate tanks?
I think you may have misread my post because I never once said (or even implied) that core rules would change that.
What I said was that, in addition to the problem of core rules being shallow, there is also an issue that most of the rules added to the game to differentiate units or subfactions make no difference to how a unit or army actually plays.
Right - I didn't mean to misattribute. That was part of Kiro's point that you supported and I just lumped it all together.
Back on the subject of complexity though, recently I made an update to my game and the result was that players found it much easier to use a particular part. What part? Doesn't matter. What matters is that instead of having players divide one number by another, following a sorting procedure, instead I had players add one number to another using the same sorting procedure. Complexity-wise, nothing changed, but generally speaking people find addition to be less 'complex' than division.
Which is a long-winded way to say that maybe the people saying the game is no more complicated than it used to be are right, and maybe it's just a case of the complexity being shifted around to suit some people more than others.
Which might explain the popularity as that complexity is now shaped like the much more popular hobby of MTG and less like the less popular hobby of historical wargaming. I think other people have said this in the thread, but having related it back to something I'm more familiar with I think they're onto something.
@sim-life I'm also on the phone, but I'm too stupid to do these split up quotes. I thought we just have to agree to disagree, for me it doesn't matter if something gives you the same effect as something in another codex. I mean, 8th and 9th took the unnecessary approach to name every single kind of former "deep strike" differently, despite them all being the same and always having been the same. And I don't feel that's a problem. Same with your examples, though I'd also like a USR for that -1 to hit. To me the factions actually do feel much more differently than earlier. I mean, from 4the to 7th edition there was no difference between any of the Chaos legions and the CSM themselves also were, aside from their marks and Daemon engines, also pretty close to SM. Now every Legion has its subfaction rules, DG and TS even have subsubfaction rules that also allow for different playstyles (like an army with a psyker focus, a Zombie horde, a mechanized list, a Terminator list, or flamers for DG, all supported by their own subfactions). You say you don't see that difference but I don't know why you don't. Could you give examples of what you'd have in mind to differentiate the factions more? I'd get the complaint if we were talking about Lotr, which, despite having superior and more tactical core rules, has very similar factions. A Gondorian is basically the same as an Easterling and a Haradhrim is the same as a Rohan guy. You just have different Heroes to lead them, maybe one or two special rules but that’s it. You don't have a huge roster to change your list and you have very few and restricted faction rules. 40K since 8th really tries to give you loads of ways to differentiate the factions (too bad they took away equipment options at the same time).
Nurglitch wrote: Back on the subject of complexity though, recently I made an update to my game and the result was that players found it much easier to use a particular part. What part? Doesn't matter. What matters is that instead of having players divide one number by another, following a sorting procedure, instead I had players add one number to another using the same sorting procedure. Complexity-wise, nothing changed, but generally speaking people find addition to be less 'complex' than division.
Which is a long-winded way to say that maybe the people saying the game is no more complicated than it used to be are right, and maybe it's just a case of the complexity being shifted around to suit some people more than others.
Which might explain the popularity as that complexity is now shaped like the much more popular hobby of MTG and less like the less popular hobby of historical wargaming. I think other people have said this in the thread, but having related it back to something I'm more familiar with I think they're onto something.
I don't think that's true. The Dice Tower did a recent Top 10 list of good games with one annoying rule and one of Tom's (I think) was Mandala Stone, which had a rule where you pick up tokens in a clockwise order around a point then reverse the order of the stack, when they could have just said "pick up the token counter-clockwise", it's not complex, it's just poor rules writing. GWs rules are incredibly simple, though they do often explain themselves in incredibly convoluted ways to try and take a stab at legalise (also see stuff like AdMech and DG equipment lists which honestly melt my brain a bit). And again, it's not the complexity of the rules, it's the amount of them and how they're resented thats more of an issue.
I haven't read this thread, but oh boy, do I agree with the premise. I quit 40K after 5th edition because it's just too difficult to follow the rules, errata, updates, codexes, FAQs, and so on. I still build and paint the models and love the lore, love the few good video games, and so on - but the actual tabletop game is easily the worst part of 40K in my opinion.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: @sim-life I'm also on the phone, but I'm too stupid to do these split up quotes. I thought we just have to agree to disagree, for me it doesn't matter if something gives you the same effect as something in another codex. I mean, 8th and 9th took the unnecessary approach to name every single kind of former "deep strike" differently, despite them all being the same and always having been the same. And I don't feel that's a problem. Same with your examples, though I'd also like a USR for that -1 to hit. To me the factions actually do feel much more differently than earlier. I mean, from 4the to 7th edition there was no difference between any of the Chaos legions and the CSM themselves also were, aside from their marks and Daemon engines, also pretty close to SM. Now every Legion has its subfaction rules, DG and TS even have subsubfaction rules that also allow for different playstyles (like an army with a psyker focus, a Zombie horde, a mechanized list, a Terminator list, or flamers for DG, all supported by their own subfactions). You say you don't see that difference but I don't know why you don't. Could you give examples of what you'd have in mind to differentiate the factions more? I'd get the complaint if we were talking about Lotr, which, despite having superior and more tactical core rules, has very similar factions. A Gondorian is basically the same as an Easterling and a Haradhrim is the same as a Rohan guy. You just have different Heroes to lead them, maybe one or two special rules but that’s it. You don't have a huge roster to change your list and you have very few and restricted faction rules. 40K since 8th really tries to give you loads of ways to differentiate the factions (too bad they took away equipment options at the same time).
This is the tabletop wargaming equivalent of Kids demanding to have a meal at Burger King (with huge amounts of combos and fancy named options) rather than eating at a proper restaurant (with much less "optipns" in the menu but actual variety in flavours).
Sgt. Cortez wrote: . Could you give examples of what you'd have in mind to differentiate the factions more?.
GW have the system in place to make the factions feel more different, they just can't be arsed using it. Probably because it would actually take effort to balance.
Why give GSC a specific rule for deep strike which is the exact same as everyone else, why not give them a special deep strike that allows them to be closer than usual?
Why are Imperial Guard snipers with a bit of training and a few battles under their belt exactly as sneaky as Eldar snipers, who've had likely hundreds of years of experience and several lifetimes of training and have more advanced equipment equally as sneaky? Why can't pathfinders break the -1 modifier limit rule to reflect this difference?
Why do lychguard shields, which are thousands of years more advanced than normal storm shields act exactly like one? Why don't the reflect shots back at attackers like they used to?
Why have pyrovores NEVER had good rules? Why are GW so tied to them being a really expensive flamer? Why not just give them some kind of anti-infantry spore mine? Speaking of which, why did tyranids forget how to make different kinds of spore mines? We used to get three different kinds, which the hive mind just forgot about?
Why did obliterators become ork lootas with random guns stats (probably because GW thinks people play the game to roll dice, more dice rolling means more strategy right?) rather than just being allowed to choose a gun to manifest from the basic autocannon/lascannon/plasma cannon etc profiles?
If you want to make factions feel different why not just have them remove the Core rules from certain units and grant them to others and change how detachments work in regards to them. You want to make a melee focussed space marine army? Give Assault Marines and Termies Core, have them count as Troops for the purpose of filling out your detachment. This is ignoring the fact that just about every unit in the space marine army already has core, which was a really stupid move.
I mean I could go on, but there's so many ways they could make units feel unique and fluffy which they don't bother with. In a lot of cases they DID have unique, thematic rules but they took them away in an ill-begotten attempt to appeal to the competitive crowd.
I mean, in 40k units sort of feel different from each other but they do so I ways that are not very relevant, dont add that much to tactical depth and is presented in the very cumbersome manner of bespoke rules and stratagems.
I mean those it really matter if Kroots, Strike teams, breacher teams and Tau pathfinders are all distinct from each other if at the end of the day they are all chaff/red shirts that basically exist to protect your valuable units, made paperwork (IE- Actions) and luckily as a speed dumb???
There are duplicate rules from dex to dex, true enough. Many aura abilities are similar, for example.
But to say factions feel the same is kinda missing the forest for the trees.
Sisters are the only faction with Miracle Dice.
Only flavours of marines get combat squads and bolter discipline.
Only Admech detachments can include a knight.
Only Drukhari can take multiple patrols without losing CP.
If each of those factions also has a way to confer +1 to hit and melee and a way to reroll hits, that doesn't make the armies play the same because the HUGE differences between them that I listed above still exist.
Vatsetis wrote: I mean, in 40k units sort of feel different from each other but they do so I ways that are not very relevant, dont add that much to tactical depth and is presented in the very cumbersome manner of bespoke rules and stratagems.
I mean those it really matter if Kroots, Strike teams, breacher teams and Tau pathfinders are all distinct from each other if at the end of the day they are all chaff/red shirts that basically exist to protect your valuable units, made paperwork (IE- Actions) and luckily as a speed dumb???
T'au is a book in need of love, but Breachers and Pathfinders both have distinct value over the others than can't be dismissed.
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Vatsetis wrote: This is the tabletop wargaming equivalent of Kids demanding to have a meal at Burger King (with huge amounts of combos and fancy named options) rather than eating at a proper restaurant (with much less "optipns" in the menu but actual variety in flavours).
So you won't acknowledge the differences and just decide to dismiss it with elitism? Neat.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: . Could you give examples of what you'd have in mind to differentiate the factions more?.
GW have the system in place to make the factions feel more different, they just can't be arsed using it. Probably because it would actually take effort to balance.
Why give GSC a specific rule for deep strike which is the exact same as everyone else, why not give them a special deep strike that allows them to be closer than usual?
Why are Imperial Guard snipers with a bit of training and a few battles under their belt exactly as sneaky as Eldar snipers, who've had likely hundreds of years of experience and several lifetimes of training and have more advanced equipment equally as sneaky? Why can't pathfinders break the -1 modifier limit rule to reflect this difference?
Why do lychguard shields, which are thousands of years more advanced than normal storm shields act exactly like one? Why don't the reflect shots back at attackers like they used to?
Why have pyrovores NEVER had good rules? Why are GW so tied to them being a really expensive flamer? Why not just give them some kind of anti-infantry spore mine? Speaking of which, why did tyranids forget how to make different kinds of spore mines? We used to get three different kinds, which the hive mind just forgot about?
Why did obliterators become ork lootas with random guns stats (probably because GW thinks people play the game to roll dice, more dice rolling means more strategy right?) rather than just being allowed to choose a gun to manifest from the basic autocannon/lascannon/plasma cannon etc profiles?
If you want to make factions feel different why not just have them remove the Core rules from certain units and grant them to others and change how detachments work in regards to them. You want to make a melee focussed space marine army? Give Assault Marines and Termies Core, have them count as Troops for the purpose of filling out your detachment. This is ignoring the fact that just about every unit in the space marine army already has core, which was a really stupid move.
I mean I could go on, but there's so many ways they could make units feel unique and fluffy which they don't bother with. In a lot of cases they DID have unique, thematic rules but they took them away in an ill-begotten attempt to appeal to the competitive crowd.
I think I get what you're saying and I'm even with you on criticizing the very careful approach GW took with 9th in that some base rules aren't broken with the next best codex. There always was someone in prior editions who broke the Deep strike restrictions and more often than not the factions left out but which would have been fitting, too, felt bad. usually SM, especially Blood Angels had some way around the restrictions or Drop pods while CSM are left with their Rhinos since 3rd Edition However, I don't think more interesting unit rules and the more interesting faction rules we have now aren't mutually exklusive. Many of these special rules have been moved to strats(Lychguard shields I think) - you don't like that, I'm okay with it. I also think the whole aspect of moving core around... Well, this was interesting in 5th when there was a fixed foc, now just build the army you consider to be interesting, there are very little restrictions how you organize your army, still, Ravenwing pretty much has what you want, no? So it's not out of question we see more of that.
Also you don't have three Spore mines anymore, instead you got 3 carnifexes or 3 battlewagon types, looks like a sidestep to me.
You also hint at the lack of fluff representation between Xenos especially Eldar and Imperium rules and on that I agree, too. i mean, none of those stupid assassins should be better than a Death jester... But that's not a new problem unfortunately, I'd say Primaris just made it even more apparent.
Vatsetis wrote: I mean, in 40k units sort of feel different from each other but they do so I ways that are not very relevant, dont add that much to tactical depth and is presented in the very cumbersome manner of bespoke rules and stratagems.
I mean those it really matter if Kroots, Strike teams, breacher teams and Tau pathfinders are all distinct from each other if at the end of the day they are all chaff/red shirts that basically exist to protect your valuable units, made paperwork (IE- Actions) and luckily as a speed dumb???
T'au is a book in need of love, but Breachers and Pathfinders both have distinct value over the others than can't be dismissed.
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Vatsetis wrote: This is the tabletop wargaming equivalent of Kids demanding to have a meal at Burger King (with huge amounts of combos and fancy named options) rather than eating at a proper restaurant (with much less "optipns" in the menu but actual variety in flavours).
So you won't acknowledge the differences and just decide to dismiss it with elitism? Neat.
Its not elitism to say that the difference between an UM Heavy Intercessor and an IF Intercessor are of a similar nature to eating your Mc Nuggets with BBQ sauce rather than chicken wings with honey mustard souce... Thats the nature of corporate branding.
At least Mc Donalds dosent imposse a premium price on their mass produced products.
Anyway, whats elitist in eating at a cheap non franchise restaurant were you eat actual home made food rather than mass produced product?
Its not elitism to say that the difference between an UM Heavy Intercessor and an IF Intercessor are of a similar nature to eating your Mc Nuggets with BBQ sauce rather than chicken wings with honey mustard souce...
You're right, it's not elitism to say that. It's actually just plain wrong.
UM Chapter Tactic:
- +1 LD - can fall back and shoot at - 1
IF Chapter Tactic:
- defenders can't use light cover against them
- score an extra hit with bolt weapons on 6's to hit
Stats:
HI's have more toughness and wounds than intercessors
Load out:
Not a single weapon in common between the two. Intercessor weapons cluster around rapid fire and assault. Heavy Intercessor weapons cluster around heavy.
So their Chapter tactics are different, their stats are different, their loadouts are different. The bespoke WL traits for those armies are quite different too, but neither of these models can take one, so it's a bit moot. You picked two chapters without supplements too; had you compared two chapters with supplements, you'd also be looking at collections of different bespoke strats and relics ON TOP OF all the differences cited above.
I'm not really sure how much more different two units need to be in order to classify as "actual restaurant food," but there are three types of differences between the two units you chose as an example of sameness- not just three differences, mind you, three TYPES of differences.
I'm all for letting people have their opinions: "This game doesn't appeal to me based on my preferences" - that's an opinion. I can let that go.
"A UM Intercessor and an IF Heay Intercessor are so similar that the only difference is the sauce?"
That's not an opinion. It is observably, categorically untrue.
Vatsetis wrote: Its not elitism to say that the difference between an UM Heavy Intercessor and an IF Intercessor are of a similar nature to eating your Mc Nuggets with BBQ sauce rather than chicken wings with honey mustard souce... Thats the nature of corporate branding.
At least Mc Donalds dosent imposse a premium price on their mass produced products.
Anyway, whats elitist in eating at a cheap non franchise restaurant were you eat actual home made food rather than mass produced product?
Yea you missed the point of UM and IF and you got the unit selection wrong, which isn't surprising.
IF is actually a melee / ranged hybrid that is quite good at cover and durability and at taking on vehicles. They were often used as all shooting, because that worked well in 8th with an overstated super doctrine.
UM are good at manipulating the doctrine, generating CP, being flexible, and working in tandem through HI and overwatch.
Thanks pals, you have brilliantly demostrated my point (even doe both of you have misquoted and misunderstood my analogy).
Actually I would argue that the las two posters have got so stuck in the sunk cost fallacy of GW "Hobby" (IE Branding) that they cannot see beyond the corporate framing.
BTW, I sometimes eat at McDonalds and watch reality shows... Nothing wrong with neither, but I dont fool myself when I do so.
Vatsetis wrote: Thanks pals, you have brilliantly demostrated my point (even doe both of you have misquoted and misunderstood my analogy).
Actually I would argue that the las two posters have got so stuck in the sunk cost fallacy of GW "Hobby" (IE Branding) that they cannot see beyond the corporate framing.
BTW, I sometimes eat at McDonalds and watch reality shows... Nothing wrong with neither, but I dont fool myself when I do so.
And you'd be as wrong about that (with me anyway) as you were about UM Intercessors and IF Heavy Intercessors being similar.
I am not bull^&*%ing you when I tell you 9th is my favourite edition.
We done yet, or is there anything else you'd like to be wrong about?
Vatsetis wrote: Thanks pals, you have brilliantly demostrated my point (even doe both of you have misquoted and misunderstood my analogy).
Actually I would argue that the las two posters have got so stuck in the sunk cost fallacy of GW "Hobby" (IE Branding) that they cannot see beyond the corporate framing.
BTW, I sometimes eat at McDonalds and watch reality shows... Nothing wrong with neither, but I dont fool myself when I do so.
Likely because the analogy as an extension of the original premise ( that nothing has any meaning, because it's all "fast food" anyway ) wasn't very good to begin with. It was demonstrated untrue and you still failed to appreciate any of it and insist that it's only branding.
Vatsetis should enlight the dumb plebs that we are on how real differences in a proper tabletop restaurant look.
Because so far he's just talking crap.
I think it was supposed to be an analogy about the difference between the quantity of choice and the quality of choice that's hard to back up in practice because the "quality of choice" is so subjective, and because the analogy carried so much baggage of snobbishness with it.
However, I don't think more interesting unit rules and the more interesting faction rules we have now aren't mutually exklusive. Many of these special rules have been moved to strats(Lychguard shields I think) - you don't like that, I'm okay with it. I also think the whole aspect of moving core around... Well, this was interesting in 5th when there was a fixed foc, now just build the army you consider to be interesting, there are very little restrictions how you organize your army, still, Ravenwing pretty much has what you want, no? So it's not out of question we see more of that.
Also you don't have three Spore mines anymore, instead you got 3 carnifexes or 3 battlewagon types, looks like a sidestep to me.
Wargear and rules that should be always on are really stupid to have as strats. I'm pretty confident you're in a minority there.
I think you misunderstood me about the Core keyword though. You know how characters that have abilities that only effect unit with the CORE keyword? I can't use Marines as a great example because they the CORE keyword got sprayed around that codex like crazy, but lets say you want a kanoptek based Necron army filled with scarabs, wraiths, spyders etc.
You pick the a sub-faction trait that says:
Models with the Canoptek keyword also gain the Core keyword. Models with the Dynasty keyword lose the Core keyword. Canoptek Scarabs count as Troops as well as Fast Attack for the purpose of detachment requirements.
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ONLY AM EXAMPLE, DO NOT SIDETRACK THIS DISCUSSION ABOUT HOW THIS EXAMPLE WOULD BREAK THE GAME UNDER THE CURRENT CODEX
Its a few less layers of themeless, minor buffs to remember during the game and it encourages you to build your army into the theme of the sub-faction.
As for the bit about spore mines and carnifexes, carnifexes are also unfluffy as they suddenly use their arms worse if you give them crab claws and suck at what they're famed for doing (killing tanks).
Only Drukhari can take multiple patrols without losing CP.
I feel obliged to point out that this rule only exists because the DE book was designed by a haddock (and a lazy haddock at that).
Thus, rather than giving the army its own feel (like the vastly better 7th edition Corsairs book it was pilfered from), it's instead only there to solve a problem that never should have existed in the first place.
Well certainly we are speaking about subjective opinions here.
Why is it snob to say that in fast food franchise restaurants there is the illusion of choice but the tastes are rather similar and the quality of the food is not the best? Its is sort of a truism.
GW wants 40K to be in the exact place of the BigMac or the Whopper... Its done by design, nothing bad with it perse. But just like most of the dice rolls in 40k are meaningless (rerolling for hitting, factoring explosive dice, rerolling for injury, save and then ignore wound its a very cumbersone way to decide an outcome) much of the "variety" between 40K units is sort of pointless (if only because 80% of the datasheet
Are sub par for competitive play).
Are you tellin me that McNuggets, Big Macs, Fish Sandwiches, Chicken Sandwiches, fries, apple slices, and salads are an illusion of choice because they're all rather similar?
Or are you saying that if you ignore most of the menu and compare only hamburger/cheeseburger options it's an illusion of choice because they're all rather similar?
Hey, can we drop the fast food analogy and stick to 40k? Because I'm having trouble figuring out if a milkshake is a codex, datasheet, or subfaction trait.
Rihgu wrote: Are you tellin me that McNuggets, Big Macs, Fish Sandwiches, Chicken Sandwiches, fries, apple slices, and salads are an illusion of choice because they're all rather similar?
Or are you saying that if you ignore most of the menu and compare only hamburger/cheeseburger options it's an illusion of choice because they're all rather similar?
Hey, can we drop the fast food analogy and stick to 40k? Because I'm having trouble figuring out if a milkshake is a codex, datasheet, or subfaction trait.
He is saying that there is no difference between Void Raven Bombers, Ork Boys and Drop Pods, at the end of the day they all have wounds. The game would be much more interesting if Ork Boys had more abstract rules that required the controlling player to hip fire an airsoft gun to determine the outcome of the shooting attack, that's what the sophisticated games do.
Vatsetis wrote: Well certainly we are speaking about subjective opinions here.
Why is it snob to say that in fast food franchise restaurants there is the illusion of choice but the tastes are rather similar and the quality of the food is not the best? Its is sort of a truism.
GW wants 40K to be in the exact place of the BigMac or the Whopper... Its done by design, nothing bad with it perse. But just like most of the dice rolls in 40k are meaningless (rerolling for hitting, factoring explosive dice, rerolling for injury, save and then ignore wound its a very cumbersone way to decide an outcome) much of the "variety" between 40K units is sort of pointless (if only because 80% of the datasheet
Are sub par for competitive play).
gak! So, when I have to roll a 7 to hit in Flames of War to do so I need to roll a 6 then a 5. I thought it was just to deal with varying probabilities of success, but all this time it was just because FoW is the Applebees of WW2 games! Thanks!
Actually hitting on 7s is a recent addition of FOW copied from old 40k editions... Its actually pretty lame (its basically wasting your time trying a hail mary pass with a 1/18 success rate in a company size game)
But what in the worst version of FOW is an exception... In one of the best 40K editions is just the norm (throwing dice in mostly un eventfull ways and follow the flow charts to remove minis from the table).
Everything can be made a flow chart. That's why AI exists.
I shoot my Panzerfaust at tanks! OMG flow chart! I shoot my MGs to pin you! AHHH! When will the simple uneventful rolls stop?!
Why can't I just play a game where I use my big brain to deftly outmaneuver everyone and then declare their units dead - not with dice, but by my cunning prowess! Silly plebs.
The lack of a pinning or proper morale system in 40k/9th alone... Clearly undermines the whole game... That you can only (with exceptions) neutralice an enemy unit by wiping it show the limits of the system.
Vatsetis wrote: The lack of a pinning or proper morale system in 40k/9th alone... Clearly undermines the whole game... That you can only (with exceptions) neutralice an enemy unit by wiping it show the limits of the system.
I like choosing when my units fall back or take cover, I don't want to simulate what would happen if 50 Marines faced 100 Orks (hint: it'd be a slaughter). I want to play a game where I can choose what to do with my units and have some randomness to keep me on my toes and to give the underdog a chance. Saying that you have to wipe a unit out to neutralize it isn't really true since you can put enough firepower or a big enough melee threat into an area that your enemy might hide until they can saturate the area with enough units, you can also enter melee with a unit to force it to shoot the unit in melee rather than your other units or in some cases entirely stop the unit from shooting or prevent units from disembarking or falling back.
But that’s just a function of the fantasy of 40k. We have melee units. Expecting suppressing fire to pin units in place like real life is perhaps too much? Our version is to charge disposable infantry in to pin things.
Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
kirotheavenger wrote: Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
bUt YoU cAn'T dO tHaT iN 40k iF yOu Do YoUr OpPoNeNt Is A bAd PlAyEr AnD yOu NeEd MoRe TeRrAin
kirotheavenger wrote: Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
Hope some one mods Legion rules to use 40k minis/fluff... That would be marvellous.
Warpath, Deadzone, SW Legion, Dirtside, Stargrunt, Cold War Commander, Bolt Action etc.
but "this" does not work in 40k because it has always been different and it cannot work unless GW adds a broken version of this rules to the game (than it is the best thing ever no matter how bad the implementation is)
kirotheavenger wrote: Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
Hope some one mods Legion rules to use 40k minis/fluff... That would be marvellous.
why?
I mean you can use the core rules to use 40k stuff, but to get this working you would also need to remove all the multiple entries of the same unit and than people get pissed because their special Marine unit is now the same as the other 4 special scouts units
people did this with all kind of rule sets (40k Bolt Action being very popular during 7th Edi) and it never worked because to remove the bloat from 40k you actually need to remove things
and people do not accept such changes unless GW makes them
Warpath FireFight was explicit written to make a 40k version of Warpath and people were angry because not every single unit from 40k was taken over and the 2000 points + free units from 7th edi formations was not a 2000 points lists (so people could not take 4000 points of units in a 1500 point game)
the same would happen with Legion, people want to play all their units with all the differences and than you end with something that does not work better than 40k does and people go back to the original (this is why OpenPageRules work, they are a 1:1 copy of 40k with some minor changes but without removing the bloat)
Kodos is right, most people aren't willing to sacrifice their special rules regardless.
I'd be tempted to give it a go if I felt it would be popular in my circle. But people here get genuinely angry at the suggestion of doing something like that (I suggested similar for Aeronautica using Blood Red Skies rules).
Love every single facet of 40k or GTFO is the message.
yeah, it is sometimes easier to get people into buying complete new armies for a new game than using different rules for 40k
which is kind of unique to the 40k community, no problem to get people using Warhammer or AoS stuff with other rules, or get people from historical games to switch, but 40k is different here
kodos wrote: Warpath, Deadzone, SW Legion, Dirtside, Stargrunt, Cold War Commander, Bolt Action etc.
but "this" does not work in 40k because it has always been different and it cannot work unless GW adds a broken version of this rules to the game (than it is the best thing ever no matter how bad the implementation is)
kirotheavenger wrote: Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
Hope some one mods Legion rules to use 40k minis/fluff... That would be marvellous.
why?
I mean you can use the core rules to use 40k stuff, but to get this working you would also need to remove all the multiple entries of the same unit and than people get pissed because their special Marine unit is now the same as the other 4 special scouts units
people did this with all kind of rule sets (40k Bolt Action being very popular during 7th Edi) and it never worked because to remove the bloat from 40k you actually need to remove things
and people do not accept such changes unless GW makes them
Warpath FireFight was explicit written to make a 40k version of Warpath and people were angry because not every single unit from 40k was taken over and the 2000 points + free units from 7th edi formations was not a 2000 points lists (so people could not take 4000 points of units in a 1500 point game)
the same would happen with Legion, people want to play all their units with all the differences and than you end with something that does not work better than 40k does and people go back to the original (this is why OpenPageRules work, they are a 1:1 copy of 40k with some minor changes but without removing the bloat)
Well I suppose kids hate many restaurants because they dont have the happy meal toy and instead of nuggets they hace to eat some sort of meat that can be easily identified with chicken and the selection of sauces is limited.
Commercially my idea of a 40K Legion mod ia not viable but Its something I would love to give it a try.
Vatsetis wrote: Well I suppose kids hate many restaurants because they dont have the happy meal toy and instead of nuggets they hace to eat some sort of meat that can be easily identified with chicken and the selection of sauces is limited.
kodos wrote: yeah, it is sometimes easier to get people into buying complete new armies for a new game than using different rules for 40k
It isn't. I've tried breaking groups away from Warhammer multiple times. Never works.
Yep, getting some people to play even with houserules can be a nightmare, they are really very heavily wedded to playing 40k in one way only (to get ready for tournaments)
Or maybe, people are enjoying the game and see no reason to change.
If no one sees the problem but you, there is a non-zero chance that you are the problem.
But sorry, I didn't want to disturb the black knight party high fiving each other over how everyone playing 40k are dumb sheep blindly following the rules of the establishment.
And don't forget, McDonald's is garbage food for children. Noo, this isn't elitism, you can go get a fried egg AND 2 slices of bacon from a REAL diner for 5 dollars. That's home cooked! Children hate it!
I'm so lost in this analogy, none of it makes any sense. Is Star Wars Legion the cheap diner? Or is it a fancy restaurant? If GW is McDonald's then why is it more expensive than many of the alternatives? Is GW a McDonald's that prices itself like a Michelin 5 Star? Why is different sauces an illusion of choice? Is Buffalo Wild Wings a "lesser" restaurant because 99% of the menu is just different sauces for chicken?
Which tabletop game is Buffalo Wild Wings? Is Subway superior to McDonald's because they make the food in front of you? If I just want a burger and fries and decide to go to McDonald's instead of Charlie's Steakhouse am I a child?
I'm so glad that the "black knights" as Jidmah puts it understand this so clearly
kirotheavenger wrote: Star Wars Legion has melee units and pinning mechanics.
In Legion you need to be a little smarter with melee units though, you can't just yeet them 24" across the board and pet yourself on the back.
bUt YoU cAn'T dO tHaT iN 40k iF yOu Do YoUr OpPoNeNt Is A bAd PlAyEr AnD yOu NeEd MoRe TeRrAin
Hi, Mr. Opponent. Do you have any methods to do a turn 1 charge?
You do?
Ok, I will make a contentious decision to not deploy in a manner that makes the choice easy for you either by feeding you chaff, as that has been a thing for a very long time in 40K, or by setting my models back or opting to use more reserves.
Thanks, Mr. Opponent. It's almost like I have choices and asking a quick question helps me prevent getting tabled.
Jidmah wrote: Or maybe, people are enjoying the game and see no reason to change.
If no one sees the problem but you, there is a non-zero chance that you are the problem.
But sorry, I didn't want to disturb the black knight party high fiving each other over how everyone playing 40k are dumb sheep blindly following the rules of the establishment.
So I wasn't the only one getting that vibe I didn't want to write it this time as they seemed so happy about one thing, finally.
Rihgu wrote: And don't forget, McDonald's is garbage food for children. Noo, this isn't elitism, you can go get a fried egg AND 2 slices of bacon from a REAL diner for 5 dollars. That's home cooked! Children hate it!
I'm so lost in this analogy, none of it makes any sense. Is Star Wars Legion the cheap diner? Or is it a fancy restaurant? If GW is McDonald's then why is it more expensive than many of the alternatives? Is GW a McDonald's that prices itself like a Michelin 5 Star? Why is different sauces an illusion of choice? Is Buffalo Wild Wings a "lesser" restaurant because 99% of the menu is just different sauces for chicken?
Which tabletop game is Buffalo Wild Wings? Is Subway superior to McDonald's because they make the food in front of you? If I just want a burger and fries and decide to go to McDonald's instead of Charlie's Steakhouse am I a child?
I'm so glad that the "black knights" as Jidmah puts it understand this so clearly
You are just being silly. The analogy is very straight forward, you dont have to accept it but is no hard to understand it.
40k can be popular and "fun" for many in spite of their subpar rules.
That dosent turn anyone with criticism into a "black knight"... Look at the poll results 58/60 % find the current encarnation of the game complex/cumbersome so its not something that happens in isolation.
Rihgu wrote: And don't forget, McDonald's is garbage food for children. Noo, this isn't elitism, you can go get a fried egg AND 2 slices of bacon from a REAL diner for 5 dollars. That's home cooked! Children hate it!
I'm so lost in this analogy, none of it makes any sense. Is Star Wars Legion the cheap diner? Or is it a fancy restaurant? If GW is McDonald's then why is it more expensive than many of the alternatives? Is GW a McDonald's that prices itself like a Michelin 5 Star? Why is different sauces an illusion of choice? Is Buffalo Wild Wings a "lesser" restaurant because 99% of the menu is just different sauces for chicken?
Which tabletop game is Buffalo Wild Wings? Is Subway superior to McDonald's because they make the food in front of you? If I just want a burger and fries and decide to go to McDonald's instead of Charlie's Steakhouse am I a child?
I'm so glad that the "black knights" as Jidmah puts it understand this so clearly
You are just being silly. The analogy is very straight forward, you dont have to accept it but is no hard to understand it.
40k can be popular and "fun" for many in spite of their subpar rules.
That dosent turn anyone with criticism into a "black knight"... Look at the poll results 58/60 % find the current encarnation of the game complex/cumbersome.
Yes. I find the current incarnation of the game complex/cumbersome, and I think it has subpar rules and isn't fun. But I don't think it is a Big Mac, or that people are children for preferring different sauce flavors for their chicken.
There's a difference between criticism and "everybody who DOES like this is comparable to a child who only likes bbq sauce chicky nuggs, instead of an adult with a refined pallet who eats the finest salmon and steak".
Jidmah wrote: Or maybe, people are enjoying the game and see no reason to change.
If no one sees the problem but you, there is a non-zero chance that you are the problem.
But sorry, I didn't want to disturb the black knight party high fiving each other over how everyone playing 40k are dumb sheep blindly following the rules of the establishment.
I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Sim-Life wrote: I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Have you talked with that person about the lack of enthusiasm? There is a lot to consider before blaming core rules for it. Maybe they don't feel they have a fighting chance? Maybe they have no interest in 40k anymore in general? Maybe they had a bad day? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par codex? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par list?
Sim-Life wrote: I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Have you talked with that person about the lack of enthusiasm? There is a lot to consider before blaming core rules for it. Maybe they don't feel they have a fighting chance? Maybe they have no interest in 40k anymore in general? Maybe they had a bad day? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par codex? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par list?
Nah at that point I ask do you want to play something else and we go have fun with some silly game (I think the defacto wind down post evening gaming game current is Skull).
Rihgu wrote: And don't forget, McDonald's is garbage food for children. Noo, this isn't elitism, you can go get a fried egg AND 2 slices of bacon from a REAL diner for 5 dollars. That's home cooked! Children hate it!
I'm so lost in this analogy, none of it makes any sense. Is Star Wars Legion the cheap diner? Or is it a fancy restaurant? If GW is McDonald's then why is it more expensive than many of the alternatives? Is GW a McDonald's that prices itself like a Michelin 5 Star? Why is different sauces an illusion of choice? Is Buffalo Wild Wings a "lesser" restaurant because 99% of the menu is just different sauces for chicken?
Which tabletop game is Buffalo Wild Wings? Is Subway superior to McDonald's because they make the food in front of you? If I just want a burger and fries and decide to go to McDonald's instead of Charlie's Steakhouse am I a child?
I'm so glad that the "black knights" as Jidmah puts it understand this so clearly
You are just being silly. The analogy is very straight forward, you dont have to accept it but is no hard to understand it.
40k can be popular and "fun" for many in spite of their subpar rules.
That dosent turn anyone with criticism into a "black knight"... Look at the poll results 58/60 % find the current encarnation of the game complex/cumbersome.
Yes. I find the current incarnation of the game complex/cumbersome, and I think it has subpar rules and isn't fun. But I don't think it is a Big Mac, or that people are children for preferring different sauce flavors for their chicken.
There's a difference between criticism and "everybody who DOES like this is comparable to a child who only likes bbq sauce chicky nuggs, instead of an adult with a refined pallet who eats the finest salmon and steak".
I think you missunderstood my POV... Anyway, whats the problem with 40K being like a Big Mac? ... They are products marketed in a very similar manner (altought GWs ask premium rather than basic prices)... Its a crime or a shame to eat a Fastfood Franchise restaurant? ... I do it with some frecuenfy.
For me the analogy falls flat as I connect "questionable quality or nutritional value for a relatively cheap price, but a great taste" with fast food, where the actual quality of the models that you buy is either among the market leader, or is the market leader. And you pay for that. A lot. And the taste of those models is rather bland.
Maybe it's just that 40k isn't for some people anymore, and they're trying to post hoc rationalize that it's bad rather than move on? I know I have difficulty moving on, hence me posting here...
I think you missunderstood my POV... Anyway, whats the problem with 40K being like a Big Mac? ... They are products marketed in a very similar manner (altought GWs ask premium rather than basic prices)... Its a crime or a shame to eat a Fastfood Franchise restaurant? ... I do it with some frecuenfy.
I think you missunderstood my POV... Anyway, whats the problem with 40K being like a Big Mac? ... They are products marketed in a very similar manner (altought GWs ask premium rather than basic prices)... Its a crime or a shame to eat a Fastfood Franchise restaurant? ... I do it with some frecuenfy.
You are very clearly looking down on it, saying it is akin to children. Last time I checked, "childish" wasn't a positive remark to describe somebody. Also, is 40k like a Big Mac or is it like McDonald's? If 40k is a Big Mac, why is SW Legion a cheap diner? Why are we comparing an entire menu to a single item? What about the nugget sauces? How do those fit in again?
Again - people can prefer different flavors, or eat at whatever restaurants and order whatever they'd like. I'm not going to yuck their yum. I personally am not a fan of 9th edition 40K. The difference between me and a black knight is I don't make tortured analogies to fast food to degrade other people's preferences.
a_typical_hero wrote: For me the analogy falls flat as I connect "questionable quality or nutritional value for a relatively cheap price, but a great taste" with fast food, where the actual quality of the models that you buy is either among the market leader, or is the market leader. And you pay for that. A lot. And the taste of those models is rather bland.
The analogy was regarding the rules (also very expensive) not the models.
I think you missunderstood my POV... Anyway, whats the problem with 40K being like a Big Mac? ... They are products marketed in a very similar manner (altought GWs ask premium rather than basic prices)... Its a crime or a shame to eat a Fastfood Franchise restaurant? ... I do it with some frecuenfy.
You are very clearly looking down on it, saying it is akin to children. Last time I checked, "childish" wasn't a positive remark to describe somebody. Also, is 40k like a Big Mac or is it like McDonald's? If 40k is a Big Mac, why is SW Legion a cheap diner? Why are we comparing an entire menu to a single item? What about the nugget sauces? How do those fit in again?
Again - people can prefer different flavors, or eat at whatever restaurants and order whatever they'd like. I'm not going to yuck their yum. I personally am not a fan of 9th edition 40K. The difference between me and a black knight is I don't make tortured analogies to fast food to degrade other people's preferences.
But you didnt understand nothing... I degrade nothing because there is nothing bad in fast food perse... Or in 40K as an accesible, cheesy, clumsy but shallow tabletop wargame... Both can have their public and everyone can taste them once in a while.
What is childish is to get stuck on your "tasty" Mc Nuggets (40K) and not address the value of the wider world of restaurants and tabletop wargames.
A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
Well even if it is cheaper and better, and maybe even it could be more fun. Not everyone wants to go in to a game, spend money and then find out no one else wants to spend money on it too.
You get a better chance at waiting with w40k. For example, if someone bought the meta army for GK in 8th ed. Then it consisted of Draigo, strikes and NDKs. Codex for 9th comes out, and all those 3 are the meta choices for playing GK. If someone bought the army 3-4 years ago, now they have an improved, and very possibly fun to play army.
Of course assuming they somehow got their hands on the codex.
Sim-Life wrote: I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Have you talked with that person about the lack of enthusiasm? There is a lot to consider before blaming core rules for it. Maybe they don't feel they have a fighting chance? Maybe they have no interest in 40k anymore in general? Maybe they had a bad day? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par codex? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par list?
They're bored. I know the concept that someone might just not like 40k but still play it because of sunk cost is alien to you but thats all it is. As I said, we've played other games and I've seen them having more fun and more engaged but they insist on 40k for some reason. You really need to understand that sometimes you can't just talk people into your way of thinking.
kirotheavenger wrote: A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
Well they can try different games using GW miniatures. Unless a significant part of their investment consists in GW rules.
Most players I know (and I put myself in this lot as well) that don't have any interest in trying anything else do that because they're not wargamers. They're main hobby isn't playing games, is spending time with GW products. Painting models, reading/watching lore AND playing the game. That's why it's hard for them (us ) to even play something different but using the same miniatures. And the game is good enough to be ok with it.
Sim-Life wrote: They're bored. I know the concept that someone might just not like 40k but still play it because of sunk cost is alien to you but thats all it is. As I said, we've played other games and I've seen them having more fun and more engaged but they insist on 40k for some reason. You really need to understand that sometimes you can't just talk people into your way of thinking.
You are not supposed to talk to the person to convince them that they aren't bored and indeed having fun, you are supposed to talk to find out why they aren't enjoying it anymore. Maybe a solution or compromise can be found. There must be a reason they lost interest. If you know why, you can try to accomodate.
kirotheavenger wrote: A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
And yet an army can be easily sold on eBay for just about what you paid for it. I don't see any barrier to people leaving at all.
Sim-Life wrote: I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Have you talked with that person about the lack of enthusiasm? There is a lot to consider before blaming core rules for it. Maybe they don't feel they have a fighting chance? Maybe they have no interest in 40k anymore in general? Maybe they had a bad day? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par codex? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par list?
They're bored. I know the concept that someone might just not like 40k but still play it because of sunk cost is alien to you but thats all it is. As I said, we've played other games and I've seen them having more fun and more engaged but they insist on 40k for some reason. You really need to understand that sometimes you can't just talk people into your way of thinking.
"Guy who hates Warhammer has plays people who end up hating Warhammer." No connection at all. Nope.
Sim-Life wrote: They're bored. I know the concept that someone might just not like 40k but still play it because of sunk cost is alien to you but thats all it is. As I said, we've played other games and I've seen them having more fun and more engaged but they insist on 40k for some reason. You really need to understand that sometimes you can't just talk people into your way of thinking.
You are not supposed to talk to the person to convince them that they aren't bored and indeed having fun, you are supposed to talk to find out why they aren't enjoying it anymore. Maybe a solution or compromise can be found. There must be a reason they lost interest. If you know why, you can try to accomodate.
The reason they don't enjoy it is that 40k currently sucks. Its a boring game about rolling dice constantly and all the decision making is about how to best mitigate said dice rolls via +1 bonuses and rerolling 1s. I'm perfectly happy not playing 40k. Me and my wife play board games. I'm going to teach her Malifaux at some point. I have a gaming outlet I actually enjoy. Their reasons for sticking with it are nothing to do with me.
kirotheavenger wrote: A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
And yet an army can be easily sold on eBay for just about what you paid for it. I don't see any barrier to people leaving at all.
Sim-Life wrote: I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me. When the people NOT playing the game are having fun and the person playing is just quietly moving stuff and looking up to inform their opponent of rules or dice rolls with no passion or enthusiasm then there's a problem. And its not because they're engaged in the game, I've seen them engaged in other games and there's a big difference between when a game gives them interesting decisions and 40k.
Have you talked with that person about the lack of enthusiasm? There is a lot to consider before blaming core rules for it. Maybe they don't feel they have a fighting chance? Maybe they have no interest in 40k anymore in general? Maybe they had a bad day? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par codex? Maybe they are stuck with a sub-par list?
They're bored. I know the concept that someone might just not like 40k but still play it because of sunk cost is alien to you but thats all it is. As I said, we've played other games and I've seen them having more fun and more engaged but they insist on 40k for some reason. You really need to understand that sometimes you can't just talk people into your way of thinking.
"Guy who hates Warhammer has plays people who end up hating Warhammer." No connection at all. Nope.
Ah, I took your sentence "I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me" to mean you were playing them, but on a second read you were in the vicinity. My apologies.
I play way more than Warhammer as I suspect most people here do. Wingspawn is a fantastic game and I highly recommend it even if the theme doesn't suit a wargamer's sensibilities. Then there's Root, Through the Ages, Scythe, Castles of Burgundy, etc.
They all fill a different niche. Warhammer offers generalship of an army. Few games provide that at this scale and quantity and it's more than rolling dice - especially in 9th.
Ah, I took your sentence "I can LITERALLY see them not enjoying the game across the table from me" to mean you were playing them, but on a second read you were in the vicinity. My apologies.
I play way more than Warhammer as I suspect most people here do. Wingspawn is a fantastic game and I highly recommend it even if the theme doesn't suit a wargamer's sensibilities. Then there's Root, Through the Ages, Scythe, Castles of Burgundy, etc.
They all fill a different niche. Warhammer offers generalship of an army. Few games provide that at this scale and quantity and it's more than rolling dice - especially in 9th.
I actually have played Wingspan with one of them. He enjoyed it. I also played War Of The Ring, Forbidden Stars, Arkham Horror 2nd and Argent: The Consortium, all of which he also enjoyed. I also roped one of the very staunch "GW only" guys into a game of Dead Men Tell No Tales and he was more engaged in that than I've ever seen him in a game of 40k. But they still keep going back to 40k. The funny thing is if I hadn't seen how much those games engaged them I probably wouldn't have noticed the difference in attitudes.
Sim-Life wrote: I actually have played Wingspan with one of them. He enjoyed it. I also played War Of The Ring, Forbidden Stars, Arkham Horror 2nd and Argent: The Consortium, all of which he also enjoyed. I also roped one of the very staunch "GW only" guys into a game of Dead Men Tell No Tales and he was more engaged in that than I've ever seen him in a game of 40k. But they still keep going back to 40k. The funny thing is if I hadn't seen how much those games engaged them I probably wouldn't have noticed the difference in attitudes.
My demeanor is different when I'm playing 40K just as it's different playing Secret Hitler just as it's different playing Wingspan.
40K offers something that those boardgames won't and that's a larger degree of freedom to make choices, which is both a boon and a detriment to 40K. I think a lot of people struggle with losing. Some may feel like they've got the wrong army, but in my opinion of 9th that problem seems to be getting a lot more muted.
This thread seems to have drifted drastically from its original intent, and we just have people ridiculing anyone who thinks 40k is too complex/bloated/unwieldy/whatever.
Considering people can't whack each other physically this seems to be the most efficient way of dealing with other side arguments, assuming one wants to do it at all.
Argument is moot, because there is no commonly accepted definition of what would be considered as complex or not complex w40k.
It is like asking if w40k is good right now or if it is fun. One does have to say it is a good source of learning new words.
kirotheavenger wrote: A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
Well they can try different games using GW miniatures. Unless a significant part of their investment consists in GW rules.
Most players I know (and I put myself in this lot as well) that don't have any interest in trying anything else do that because they're not wargamers. They're main hobby isn't playing games, is spending time with GW products. Painting models, reading/watching lore AND playing the game. That's why it's hard for them (us ) to even play something different but using the same miniatures. And the game is good enough to be ok with it.
I'd say if you bought the rules those are a significant investment!
It's about £100 for rules, including the rulebook, codex, one supplement/campaign book, and chapter approved.
I do agree that Warhammer is the hobby for a lot of people, and anything outside of that isn't an option to them.
kirotheavenger wrote: A lot of people cling to 40k because they spent so much money and time on it, they don't want to discover that this other wargame is more fun and cheaper.
And yet an army can be easily sold on eBay for just about what you paid for it. I don't see any barrier to people leaving at all.
It is not easy to sell an army for what you paid for it, especially if you also include all the time that took. Not even close.
H.B.M.C. wrote: This thread seems to have drifted drastically from its original intent, and we just have people ridiculing anyone who thinks 40k is too complex/bloated/unwieldy/whatever.
I feel like people are trying to gaslight me into thinking that 40k being bad is my fault.
It is not easy to sell an army for what you paid for it, especially if you also include all the time that took. Not even close.
It's flat out impossible, unless it's a mid sized collection of optimized 2000-3000 points and painted on a pro level. Getting back 40-50% of the investment is quite realistic though, and not a bad deal considering the amount of time that the hobby entertained the seller.
H.B.M.C. wrote: This thread seems to have drifted drastically from its original intent, and we just have people ridiculing anyone who thinks 40k is too complex/bloated/unwieldy/whatever.
I feel like people are trying to gaslight me into thinking that 40k being bad is my fault.
People have their own opinions and those must be respected. It's totally fine to completely dislike 40k.
But I think people who posted here have a very different idea about their hobby: you seem to be a wargamer, someone who doesn't care about brands but only cares to have fun playing board/tabletop games. Other posters don't necessarily aim to play games at any cost, and the expectations of their favorite (only?) wargame are much lower. For example to me it's like I'm playing 40k as long as I enjoy it, and when I'm not I'm doing something different as I have other hobbies. I don't have to play other wargames if I quit 40k, in fact I'm in the hobby since late 90s, only played 40k and WHFB, and took several breaks. While on those breaks I never even had the idea of trying another game, I didn't feel the need. Someone who really loves playing games could have definitely tried another game instead.
Daedalus81 wrote: Everything can be made a flow chart. That's why AI exists.
I shoot my Panzerfaust at tanks! OMG flow chart! I shoot my MGs to pin you! AHHH! When will the simple uneventful rolls stop?!
Why can't I just play a game where I use my big brain to deftly outmaneuver everyone and then declare their units dead - not with dice, but by my cunning prowess! Silly plebs.
H.B.M.C. wrote: This thread seems to have drifted drastically from its original intent, and we just have people ridiculing anyone who thinks 40k is too complex/bloated/unwieldy/whatever.
I feel like people are trying to gaslight me into thinking that 40k being bad is my fault.
Meanwhile, you are telling everyone that they should hate 40k as much a you do and that enjoying it is wrong.
H.B.M.C. wrote: This thread seems to have drifted drastically from its original intent, and we just have people ridiculing anyone who thinks 40k is too complex/bloated/unwieldy/whatever.
I feel like people are trying to gaslight me into thinking that 40k being bad is my fault.
Meanwhile, you are telling everyone that they should hate 40k as much a you do and that enjoying it is wrong.
Where have I done that? I argue that the game is bad but I don't tell anyone that they're having fun wrong. On the other hand I've been told that I've just not found the right 40k, if I just talked about it then they're sure we could work out a way for me to like 40k, that I'm dumb for finding the rules convoluted and tedious and that I'm the reason my friends don't enjoy 40k.
Sim-Life wrote: Where have I done that? I argue that the game is bad but I don't tell anyone that they're having fun wrong. On the other hand I've been told that I've just not found the right 40k, if I just talked about it then they're sure we could work out a way for me to like 40k, that I'm dumb for finding the rules convoluted and tedious and that I'm the reason my friends don't enjoy 40k.
Why do you frame the bolded part as negativ? You claim that one guy who you are not even playing with, is unhappy about the game because the rules suck. Asking the person what the actual problem is and seeing if there is a way to accomodate for it is somehow the wrong thing? And an example of people gaslighting you?
I think you don't want to have a discussion, you want to state your opinion. Sorry, I have mistaken your intent.
Today I played a SW Legion tournament (a game in which Im a noob unlike with 40K)... if I compared this weekend experience with the previous weekend 40K tournament I attend is like comparing eating Dog Food under a bridge (40K IE; a bloated and clumpsy mess almost unplayable) with eating a beef bourguignon at a nice Bistro (SW Legion IE an enjoyable commercial tabletop wargame).
Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
Unit1126PLL wrote: Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
If enjoyment is your goal, there are many things you can to to crumble that perceived complexity of 9th edition to the small simple game it actually is.
There actually were some posters giving advice in that direction in this thread, but those have been ignored or verbally attacked. It has become clear that most people here are not interested in solutions, but in proclaiming their opinion as undeniable truth.
I saw some great suggestions to play without stratagems, do core rules only, or just don't bother trying to learn your opponent's rules and accept that you'll be blindsided from time to time.
While those may be practical solutions, they don't really demonstrate that the complexity is merely perceived rather than an actual and substantial obstacle to play.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
If enjoyment is your goal, there are many things you can to to crumble that perceived complexity of 9th edition to the small simple game it actually is.
There actually were some posters giving advice in that direction in this thread, but those have been ignored or verbally attacked. It has become clear that most people here are not interested in solutions, but in proclaiming their opinion as undeniable truth.
And you ignored the response that for a lot of people their group is "9th as printed or nothing".
catbarf wrote:I saw some great suggestions to play without stratagems, do core rules only, or just don't bother trying to learn your opponent's rules and accept that you'll be blindsided from time to time.
While those may be practical solutions, they don't really demonstrate that the complexity is merely perceived rather than an actual and substantial obstacle to play.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
If enjoyment is your goal, there are many things you can to to crumble that perceived complexity of 9th edition to the small simple game it actually is.
There actually were some posters giving advice in that direction in this thread, but those have been ignored or verbally attacked. It has become clear that most people here are not interested in solutions, but in proclaiming their opinion as undeniable truth.
And you ignored the response that for a lot of people their group is "9th as printed or nothing".
See, this is what I am talking about. It IS iMPosSIble tO lEArn 9th! iTs ToO CoMpLEx To leARN!
You don't have to change a single thing about 9th to play it as the simple game it is, and doing so takes a lot less effort than writing your average list, painting miniatures or even packaging your army to go play somewhere.
Instead of doing an hour or two of research and making a list of the few gotchas each codex has (or just taking one of the many lists that already exist!) people prefer to spend weeks worth of their time whining on dakka about stratagems.
But you aren't interested in solutions, you want the world to change to accommodate you.
Only making a list doesn't take an hour or two. If the anwser to the question of , what am I suppose to do with my army when it is not fun to play, because of rules changes in a codex, is buy multiple boxs or buggies, flyers to replace your infantry army, then the whole thing can take months if not longer. And by the time you do have it, there is no garentee that with other codex droping, the army you just bought is going to be fun to play.
Plus the solutions are only valid when the opposing side okeys them. If you go ask someone who is happy with how their army functions, the chance that you can convince them to make their armies worse hinges on some outside of game factors, like people being your family or your friends, and being willing to spend time and money, just so you cna have fun at their cost.
The solution is to avoid skew lists. Orks greentide were strong with the 8th codex but nerfing one unit means nerfing the entire army so they were never an option to me. I mean I had the models to play it but I would have never suggested anyone interested in starting orks to go for that build. Or to spam mek gunz as another example: get 3-6 if you really like them, not 10+. Take a bit of everything instead. Do you like vehicles? Instead of buying 10+ buggies get a few of them, then a BW, dreads and planes with the same budget. This way you'll never be able to field the flavour of the month but you'll never be trash either.
I basically field the same ork list (lots of vehicles of different kind, small amount of infantries) I played in 8th now, with just a few tweaks to suit the new codex better. No way I'm going to add new snagga units to my collection regardless of how competitive they are, as I don't like the models.
Everyone should do that, unless we're talking about people insterested in owning collections worthy of several thousands of points who would have bought multiples of the same units anyway.
No one would play the flavour of the month, no one would be trash tier either. Win win for everyone.
Okey. I was playing a non skew ork list in 8th ed, then?
Because I can tell you that I played a non skew, list in 8th. Litterally took the opposit of what was good aside for 2 HQs. Then under PA my dudes got better, but I didn't get to play much because of covid. And now the new codex reverted all the changes that made my army fun, and the army that was good at the start of 8th is again the top build for my faction. That is 4 years, to get a codex which makes your army bad and not very fun to play.
As far as the limiting the number of models you buy, I am not sure it is always an option. I guess you could buy less of support stuff, but how is a DE army suppose to work without 4-6 raiders? a GK army started from scratch begins with buying of 5 boxs of strikes and 4 boxs of NDKs. You don't have middle options. stuff like dreads went up in points, but is way weaker then a NDK.
I am not even sure if marines have multiple builds, because they all seem to run the same type of units, with only the support stuff being changed depending on the chapter. I don't think many people are not going to take a bike or jump pack apothecary, just because they are a meta choice. And in case of some armies like custodes or harlis, am not sure they even can not take the meta option and not get a borderline unplayable list. But maybe I am wrong, besides GK, I don't really a lot about some armies, as they are not played here at all. No idea what a tau player does nowadays to have fun.
I don't know how to telly you, a DE army works perfectly with 1-2 raiders or even with none of them.
Average collections of marines made from starters kit are already a solid base.
Not sure about GK but I don't think their current optimized lists are much different than what they used to bring 10 years ago.
Custodes and harlequins play the same stuff since their release as standalone armies. Especially with these factions that have limited options getting a bit of everything is always a good thing. If you build a list based on 18+ bikes (or 5 riptides just to make a tau example), because in that moment they were OP, without having the models to eventually change it and then it suddenly turns out unplayable that's on you.
catbarf wrote:I saw some great suggestions to play without stratagems, do core rules only, or just don't bother trying to learn your opponent's rules and accept that you'll be blindsided from time to time.
While those may be practical solutions, they don't really demonstrate that the complexity is merely perceived rather than an actual and substantial obstacle to play.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
If enjoyment is your goal, there are many things you can to to crumble that perceived complexity of 9th edition to the small simple game it actually is.
There actually were some posters giving advice in that direction in this thread, but those have been ignored or verbally attacked. It has become clear that most people here are not interested in solutions, but in proclaiming their opinion as undeniable truth.
And you ignored the response that for a lot of people their group is "9th as printed or nothing".
See, this is what I am talking about. It IS iMPosSIble tO lEArn 9th! iTs ToO CoMpLEx To leARN!
You don't have to change a single thing about 9th to play it as the simple game it is, and doing so takes a lot less effort than writing your average list, painting miniatures or even packaging your army to go play somewhere.
Instead of doing an hour or two of research and making a list of the few gotchas each codex has (or just taking one of the many lists that already exist!) people prefer to spend weeks worth of their time whining on dakka about stratagems.
But you aren't interested in solutions, you want the world to change to accommodate you.
Firstly, again you've said people are saying its too complex when a majority of people have said that the issue is not complexity, its bloat and rules spread over too many sources. Please stop beating that strawman.
Secondly I am interested in a solution. The solution is for GW to write a better game that has meaningful decisions to make during the game that doesn't require homework or foreknowledge of every rules combo of every faction to play a fun game.
catbarf wrote:I saw some great suggestions to play without stratagems, do core rules only, or just don't bother trying to learn your opponent's rules and accept that you'll be blindsided from time to time.
While those may be practical solutions, they don't really demonstrate that the complexity is merely perceived rather than an actual and substantial obstacle to play.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Okay so I don't like 40k all that much but some of this is outright mean. I still do play it, and while the game in general is somewhat complex and boring, there are still flashes of epic moments (a Keeper of Secrets dueling a Hive Tyrant, a Baneblade running down Intercessors, etc).
I want it to improve, not die in a ditch or to upset everyone that plays it
If enjoyment is your goal, there are many things you can to to crumble that perceived complexity of 9th edition to the small simple game it actually is.
There actually were some posters giving advice in that direction in this thread, but those have been ignored or verbally attacked. It has become clear that most people here are not interested in solutions, but in proclaiming their opinion as undeniable truth.
And you ignored the response that for a lot of people their group is "9th as printed or nothing".
See, this is what I am talking about. It IS iMPosSIble tO lEArn 9th! iTs ToO CoMpLEx To leARN!
You don't have to change a single thing about 9th to play it as the simple game it is, and doing so takes a lot less effort than writing your average list, painting miniatures or even packaging your army to go play somewhere.
Instead of doing an hour or two of research and making a list of the few gotchas each codex has (or just taking one of the many lists that already exist!) people prefer to spend weeks worth of their time whining on dakka about stratagems.
But you aren't interested in solutions, you want the world to change to accommodate you.
Firstly, again you've said people are saying its too complex when a majority of people have said that the issue is not complexity, its bloat and rules spread over too many sources. Please stop beating that strawman.
Secondly I am interested in a solution. The solution is for GW to write a better game that has meaningful decisions to make during the game that doesn't require homework or foreknowledge of every rules combo of every faction to play a fun game.
Complex: 1. consisting of many different and connected parts.
Stratagems constitute those many different and connected parts, Stratagems are complex, bloat is overcomplication.
A complicated form might need you to fill out 20 different things, filling out your name, birth date, HS graduation date, employment history etc. might all be pretty simple, but a form requiring 20 different things is a complex form. No game is going to require quadratic equations on the fly, if that's your bar for a complicated game then no mass market game is going to reach that.
Blackie wrote: You already don't need foreknowledge of every rules combo of every faction to play a fun game, just a very specific and limited selection of those.
You don't know what you don't know, hobbies should not require homework. GW should just make a set of universal Stratagems and balance the game around those instead of having a shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Vanguard and another shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Rangers, which is basically the same unit with a different weapon.
Blackie wrote: You already don't need foreknowledge of every rules combo of every faction to play a fun game, just a very specific and limited selection of those.
You don't know what you don't know, hobbies should not require homework. GW should just make a set of universal Stratagems and balance the game around those instead of having a shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Vanguard and another shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Rangers, which is basically the same unit with a different weapon.
I don't disagree that GW could do a lot more with making more elements generally universal and improve the communication of their game. Heck in AoS Slaanesh there's two units that have the same ability with different names for that ability and that's just within one book. GW could very much lose a touch of their "fluffy" aspect to rules and have more generic stats and abilities and achieve what they want.
That said the idea that hobbies "should not require homework" is flawed. All hobbies require a level of investment in time and learning; and the more you want to "up your game" within that hobby the more of that work is required. If you want to get a camera and point-shoot happy snaps you can do that. If you want to make really fantastic photos then you're like as not going to have to spend time learning; reading books, practicing, talking to others etc... in order to advance your understanding of what you're doing and how you might best achieve what you want.
40K is no different, its just that the rules change every few years and the way GW writes them makes it counter-productive for easy learning.
You don't know what you don't know, hobbies should not require homework. GW should just make a set of universal Stratagems and balance the game around those instead of having a shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Vanguard and another shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Rangers, which is basically the same unit with a different weapon.
Lol, reading opponents' codexes is already homework, and also a heavy one which involves paying for a lot of money for stuff you don't play. Why is it ok to read all possibile opponents' codexes but not a review about best combos in the game? It would also be much faster, don't you think? Stratagems are not the only thing to consider but also chapter traits, warlord traits, relics, psychic powers, auras, units datasheets, etc...
The problem for me WRT 9th is less so "being blindsided" (at this point I just accept my suffering in that arena), but rather the amount of time it takes to explain everything.
Like my example provided earlier, explaining the difference between those two Keepers of Secrets is kind of a long conversation, especially if my opponent asks how to counter them or what is meaningful about them. Even the poster who claimed to know a lot didn't really understand the significance there. Compound this a whole lot for every unit in my army (for example, the differences in ways that Friends and the Contorted Epitome prevent fall back and the different methods of countering them), and it starts to kind of be a slog.
For things like 9th edition AdMech, it is even a slog during battle reports, where players are on their best behavior and are trying to remember things sometimes with a cameraman/stream runner to help.
There are no rules in photography, look at Chess. You read the rules and you can play, you can study how best to operate within those rules by studying common moves, but a knight is a knight whether it is black or white, your opponent cannot sacrifice a pawn to move more than 3 spaces using a chess supplement out last week.
You don't know what you don't know, hobbies should not require homework. GW should just make a set of universal Stratagems and balance the game around those instead of having a shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Vanguard and another shooty Stratagem for Skitarii Rangers, which is basically the same unit with a different weapon.
Lol, reading opponents' codexes is already homework, and also a heavy one which involves paying for a lot of money for stuff you don't play. Why is it ok to read all possibile opponents' codexes but not a review about best combos in the game? It would also be much faster, don't you think? Stratagems are not the only thing to consider but also chapter traits, warlord traits, relics, psychic powers, auras, units datasheets, etc...
Your army list (which you must provide to your opponent) lists what WL traits, Relics and psychic powers you have, your opponent can then ask what each of those di and can ask what the stats and abilities of the units in your list are. Just knowing the stats and points costs is not enough to know what to target anyway, that requires knowing damage to durability ratios between your units and your opponent's units. That leaves summonable units and stratagems, only the latter gets used so Stratagems are 40k's biggest source of hobby homework, followed by errata to Stratagems.
The friendly way of handing Stratagems is warning your opponent of what Stratagems you might use and reminding them before they decide to plonk something in range of an auspex scan, then there's the competitive guess who method of asking questions that force your opponent to reveal their Stratagems like "can you use any Stratagems that increase your melee unit's threat range" and finally there is "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gotcha".
Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
To avoid gotchas just read a dedicated article, it's way faster than explaining stuff from the opponent and fast enough to be considered. Take the new ork codex for example: what do you really need to know to avoid gotchas? Maybe how the kill rig works and the Ramming Speed stratagem, that's it.
What about the infamous Drukhari codex? Keep in mind that Strife models fight first, Incubi can make you fight last, and that hellions/reavers have a stratagem to inflict mortal wounds just by flying over a model. Done. It really isn't hard to avoid gotchas, there are so few of them possible with 9th codexes.
Blackie wrote: Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
To avoid gotchas just read a dedicated article, it's way faster than explaining stuff from the opponent and fast enough to be considered. Take the new ork codex for example: what do you really need to know to avoid gotchas? Maybe how the kill rig works and the Ramming Speed stratagem, that's it.
What about the infamous Drukhari codex? Keep in mind that Strife models fight first, Incubi can make you fight last, and that hellions/reavers have a stratagem to inflict mortal wounds just by flying over a model. Done. It really isn't hard to avoid gotchas, there are so few of them possible with 9th codexes.
I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
As always the important thing to remember is this: all kinds of people play 40k for all kinds of different reasons. There is no simple way of making an objective judgement on the quality of a game without first understanding the specific type of player playing it, and more importantly, what they want out of it.
Blackie wrote: Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
To avoid gotchas just read a dedicated article, it's way faster than explaining stuff from the opponent and fast enough to be considered. Take the new ork codex for example: what do you really need to know to avoid gotchas? Maybe how the kill rig works and the Ramming Speed stratagem, that's it.
What about the infamous Drukhari codex? Keep in mind that Strife models fight first, Incubi can make you fight last, and that hellions/reavers have a stratagem to inflict mortal wounds just by flying over a model. Done. It really isn't hard to avoid gotchas, there are so few of them possible with 9th codexes.
I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
Exactly. Why is homework of this kind a good thing? Why are people defending it? It doesn't lead to a more tactically engaging game or increase meaningful decision making. Many other games manage to have diverse factions and units without resorting to byzantine collections of disparate systems to do so.
The Slaanesh example earlier shows how bad GW are at writing their rules. One of Slaanesh's defining traits in 40k is denying Fall Back, which is fine. A couple of their units can do it but both do it in different ways. Why? Not only does that approach require more work from GW, it increases the possibility of a feels-bad gotcha because an opponent may get the two abilities mixed up even if they remember they exist. I cannot figure out why people would think this is a desirable trait in a game.
As always the important thing to remember is this: all kinds of people play 40k for all kinds of different reasons. There is no simple way of making an objective judgement on the quality of a game without first understanding the specific type of player playing it, and more importantly, what they want out of it.
Well, in this regard, I play Tabletop Wargaming, not "sit at home and read so I can prepare for the tabletop, at which point I execute a series of simple and pre-programmed instructions developed earlier" wargaming. Other people may find that fun, but 40k has never had that to the degree it seems to now. (And when it did, it was rightly criticized, e.g 7th Edition formations).
As always the important thing to remember is this: all kinds of people play 40k for all kinds of different reasons. There is no simple way of making an objective judgement on the quality of a game without first understanding the specific type of player playing it, and more importantly, what they want out of it.
Well, in this regard, I play Tabletop Wargaming, not "sit at home and read so I can prepare for the tabletop, at which point I execute a series of simple and pre-programmed instructions developed earlier" wargaming. Other people may find that fun, but 40k has never had that to the degree it seems to now. (And when it did, it was rightly criticized, e.g 7th Edition formations).
Which is perfectly OK! I suspect most people prefer to play it that way. I know I do. But I also know a lot of people who love the research, list building, and theorycrafting. For them the "game" starts long before any dice are rolled, and the actual dice rolling is more of a final experiment that tests the validity of their list building skills. You'll see lots of examples of these kinds of players among the competitive crowd.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
Then you haven't played a lot of games then. WarmaHordes is replete with this. X-Wing pretty much requires you to know what possible cards your opponent MAY be able to use so you can have cards to exploit or counter them. Most games that have seen regular growth for a decade or more have this concept as the developers add new things to be keep them fresh. Heck, even Battletech has this if one allows certain tech areas to be explored. That doesn't even consider the other Warhammer games of Fantasy and Age of Sigmar.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
Then you haven't played a lot of games then. WarmaHordes is replete with this. X-Wing pretty much requires you to know what possible cards your opponent MAY be able to use so you can have cards to exploit or counter them. Most games that have seen regular growth for a decade or more have this concept as the developers add new things to be keep them fresh. Heck, even Battletech has this if one allows certain tech areas to be explored. That doesn't even consider the other Warhammer games of Fantasy and Age of Sigmar.
But neither of those games have army sizes you can expect to see in 40k and also have consistent keywords, USRs and language across the rules. All things 40k lacks.
40k has a clunkier system than both of those combined with larger armies, so even more moving parts to keep track of. It is utterly mind-boggling (not to mention bores me to tears) how much you are expected to keep track of in 40k compared to other games of similar-sized armies.
I think you are right. Sometimes it sounds as if people wanted to have both a dynamic rule set like infinity, with a lot of over laying rules and traits and options, but with ease of playing draughts at the same time.
Big multi model games should be less focused on stuff like true LoS and what happens to one specific model on the table, when both armies run around with 50+ per side. The flexibility, special rules for unique models etc should be limited to games like kill team.
Sim-Life wrote: Firstly, again you've said people are saying its too complex when a majority of people have said that the issue is not complexity, its bloat and rules spread over too many sources. Please stop beating that strawman.
YOu sAId "ComPLeX", sO youR arGUMenT dOeSN'T coUNT!
Who is the one strawmanning here? I don't give a feth what label you put on your whining.
Secondly I am interested in a solution. The solution is for GW to write a better game that has meaningful decisions to make during the game that doesn't require homework or foreknowledge of every rules combo of every faction to play a fun game.
And there we have it. There are easy ways around the problem, but you simply reject them. I'd also like to point out how silly it is to whine about one or two hours of "homework" in a game that forces you to spend hundreds of hours on painting and building rules.
You are simply not interested in any solution but your own. And this is the problem. In this thread, and most likely in your games.
Since the world won't change for you and you are refusing to adapt, the only logical consequence for you should be to abandon the game. Anything else is just self-inflicted pain.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
Then you haven't played a lot of games then. WarmaHordes is replete with this. X-Wing pretty much requires you to know what possible cards your opponent MAY be able to use so you can have cards to exploit or counter them. Most games that have seen regular growth for a decade or more have this concept as the developers add new things to be keep them fresh. Heck, even Battletech has this if one allows certain tech areas to be explored. That doesn't even consider the other Warhammer games of Fantasy and Age of Sigmar.
But neither of those games have army sizes you can expect to see in 40k and also have consistent keywords, USRs and language across the rules. All things 40k lacks.
40k has a clunkier system than both of those combined with larger armies, so even more moving parts to keep track of. It is utterly mind-boggling (not to mention bores me to tears) how much you are expected to keep track of in 40k compared to other games of similar-sized armies.
I was about to say this. People keep saying you can ask your opponent what their stuff does bit in 40k if you want a really comprehensive explantion you'll be sitting there a while and god help you trying to remember the one hour verbal lecture. Warmachine you're dealing with maybe 2 or 3 units with WYSIWYG, a solos/CAs that grants a USR or two. 40k has armies two or three times the size with units with variable wargear that isn't always represented.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to know all rules of the game, you need to invest some time to learn them.
Imagine a MtG player complaining about an opponent playing a card he didn't know. He would be laughed out of the community.
The thing is... in 9th, just like in MtG, you don't need to know every single card or stratagem. You just need to know what is possible in general and what to look out for.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I think in general this topic would be much more valuable for everyone involved if we were to switch to sharing solutions for the "I don't want to run into gotchas" problem instead of people just whining about how unsolvable the problem is.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to know all rules of the game, you need to invest some time to learn them.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I think in general this topic would be much more valuable for everyone involved if we were to switch to sharing solutions for the "I don't want to run into gotchas" problem instead of people just whining about how unsolvable the problem is.
It's really amazing how you manage to keep misinterpreting what people say. No one WANTS to have to know all the rules. The entire point people are trying to make is the exact opposite of what you seem to think it is. 40k is NOT a game for having extensive rules knowledge, it's a game for mucking about.
Also, MtG is a false comaparison. It has MASSIVE tournaments, multiple official varients that are widely accepted by the community, ban lists etc It's a totally different beast. When GW runs tournaments with $50,000+ prizes and just outright bans certain units from being used, then you'd have a point.
As always the important thing to remember is this: all kinds of people play 40k for all kinds of different reasons. There is no simple way of making an objective judgement on the quality of a game without first understanding the specific type of player playing it, and more importantly, what they want out of it.
Im starting to believe there is a strong overlap between people who love the current incarnation of 40k, corporate layers and BDSM aficionados.
Blackie wrote: Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
To avoid gotchas just read a dedicated article, it's way faster than explaining stuff from the opponent and fast enough to be considered. Take the new ork codex for example: what do you really need to know to avoid gotchas? Maybe how the kill rig works and the Ramming Speed stratagem, that's it.
What about the infamous Drukhari codex? Keep in mind that Strife models fight first, Incubi can make you fight last, and that hellions/reavers have a stratagem to inflict mortal wounds just by flying over a model. Done. It really isn't hard to avoid gotchas, there are so few of them possible with 9th codexes.
I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
Exactly. Why is homework of this kind a good thing? Why are people defending it? It doesn't lead to a more tactically engaging game or increase meaningful decision making. Many other games manage to have diverse factions and units without resorting to byzantine collections of disparate systems to do so.
The Slaanesh example earlier shows how bad GW are at writing their rules. One of Slaanesh's defining traits in 40k is denying Fall Back, which is fine. A couple of their units can do it but both do it in different ways. Why? Not only does that approach require more work from GW, it increases the possibility of a feels-bad gotcha because an opponent may get the two abilities mixed up even if they remember they exist. I cannot figure out why people would think this is a desirable trait in a game.
As always the important thing to remember is this: all kinds of people play 40k for all kinds of different reasons. There is no simple way of making an objective judgement on the quality of a game without first understanding the specific type of player playing it, and more importantly, what they want out of it.
I think the problem is that GW doesn't seem prepared to acknowledge that all kinds of different people play their game. They've tried to position 40k as everything to everyone, but all they seem to manage to do is irritate tournament players with a continuing lack of interest in balance, irritate new players with price hikes, irritate old players with edition churn and a lack of updates for any of their stuff, and irritate narrative players with no model->no rules and a seeming push towards tournament-focused design. I know their sales figures are going up but I'm increasingly reading that as the Steam game with high sales and a tiny percentage of people with any actual play-time; there are people who decide to start and then realize all the minis they liked are terrible and don't play, people who had no intention of playing, people who start playing on their kitchen table with a heavily doctored version of the rules and never make the transition to playing with other people, and the small core of hardcore tournament people who spend all their spare time gushing about how this is the best edition ever while buying a new army ever six months.
I don't think I can objectively judge 40k as "good" or "bad" in quality; those are wild oversimplifications. I do think GW's pattern of rules writing feels exactly the same to me right now as it did at the absolute nadir of 7th; bloat for bloat's sake, updates uneven in quality and quantity, trying to sell old minis by bundling them with new minis, edition churn for edition churn's sake. I think their rising sales figures have more to do with the fact that they've figured out how to sell the game without having to put any more effort into the rules than they did before: if they can get the loud voices in the competitive community on the Internet on side people will figure the game is good without ever having to read anything about it. And I think, objectively, the game is made worse for everyone by trying to be all things to all people and it'd be better for all of us (even for GW) if they were to acknowledge that 40k is "for" the tournament people and put more effort into the specialist games sphere (things like SWA, 30k, and KT) to try and give people who don't like the current direction of 40k something to do other than sit around the fringes of the community whining or buying other companies' games.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
The homework might be fast, easy, fun even, but it's still a requirement I don't think anyone is denying - and that sets it apart from other games in a way that some people didn't sign up for and would prefer not exist.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to know all rules of the game, you need to invest some time to learn them.
Imagine a MtG player complaining about an opponent playing a card he didn't know. He would be laughed out of the community.
The thing is... in 9th, just like in MtG, you don't need to know every single card or stratagem. You just need to know what is possible in general and what to look out for.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I think in general this topic would be much more valuable for everyone involved if we were to switch to sharing solutions for the "I don't want to run into gotchas" problem instead of people just whining about how unsolvable the problem is.
I find Infinity's way, way heavier on mechanics that should lead to "gotcha" moments than 40k (public list vs. private list, Hidden Deployment where you write down where the model is rather than actually placing it, camo markers that could be any of a number of things) but it feels a lot fairer to me because almost nothing is faction-locked and you can interact with every mechanic in more ways. In 40k you have things like the miracle dice/fate dice where one faction has this huge, powerful dice-fixing mechanic that their opponents can't imitate without buying that army and can't interact with at all so it just feels like you're getting a big middle finger from the rules writers. Having an Oniwaban pop out of hidden deployment with a dodge-engage and monofilamenting your TAG down on the next reaction looks like a gotcha, but at least for me the reaction is "I guess I should have swept that bit of the board" rather than "what the hell was I supposed to do about that, then?"
Blackie wrote: Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
Were factions identical in the 1st-7th edition? If people could pick their own Stratagems from a set of generic Stratagems armies would get more flavour options, not less. If you wanted to study the best combinations of units and Stratagmes in that system you still could, but you only need to read the core rules and the matched play rules, not 20 codexes and 15 supplements. Tonnes of people want Knights gone because they're too different, too hard to balance, I think they can work as long as they are below A tier in terms of competitiveness. For me the line stops at 200 Stratagems, anything more than that is too much and I'd prefer the number to be around 30 and each one after that needs to have a damn good reason for existing.
What about the infamous Drukhari codex?...
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I suppose the standout for me is that 40k is the only game where this sort of homework is "required" (if I want to avoid gotchas) despite the existence of many other games that also have diverse and distinct factions.
It's super required in Yugioh, there are so many lines of text in a deck's worth of cards that unless you know all 300 cards in the meta then games will go at a snail's pace. I quit Yugioh for other reasons, keeping up wasn't so bad, but getting back in? Not going to happen. I suppose the same is true for comp 40k, I don't see myself going back to that until points are balanced and someone curbs the Stratagem bloat.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Undercosted as an explanation has its limits though. There is a point where a lot of things could become good by being undercosted. Make a termintor 12pts, and suddenly they will become the best unit marine can take. DE may cost less, then what other armies get for their points, but they also have very powerful rules. A wych unit that would just be cheap, wouldn't be as important, as wych unit which is cheap and can trade up thanks to the rules it has. Same with succubi or Drazh.
GK have a, potential, librarian build which turns him to a super nova for a turn. But it costs pts, requires casts, which can fail etc. He is still very good for the points he costs. But it is no where near to the old succubi with infinite number of attacks.
Ther is also the question of balance, in the aspect of what it is balanced against. If DE go down from almost 70% win rate to low 60%, which is still huge, but are considered balanced only against armies with similar rule sets and win rates, then players get in to trouble, if they play one of those unupdate armies, or they play something that is not a pre build list decied by GW how faction X should be run. The don't worry about DE, Ad Mecha will fix them, is not a fun thing to expiriance, if you don't play either of armies.
I find Infinity's way, way heavier on mechanics that should lead to "gotcha" moments than 40k (public list vs. private list, Hidden Deployment where you write down where the model is rather than actually placing it, camo markers that could be any of a number of things) but it feels a lot fairer to me because almost nothing is faction-locked and you can interact with every mechanic in more ways. In 40k you have things like the miracle dice/fate dice where one faction has this huge, powerful dice-fixing mechanic that their opponents can't imitate without buying that army and can't interact with at all so it just feels like you're getting a big middle finger from the rules writers. Having an Oniwaban pop out of hidden deployment with a dodge-engage and monofilamenting your TAG down on the next reaction looks like a gotcha, but at least for me the reaction is "I guess I should have swept that bit of the board" rather than "what the hell was I supposed to do about that, then?"
When all or most factions are OP, then no faction is OP. The problem with w40k is that often the difference between a good army and a bad army is very big. To a point where casual lists from good codex are better then tournament lists of other factions. And this shouldn't happen, people shouldn't be forced to play a super optimised specific list, because nothing else out of their codex works. And it goes both ways. For armies which are or were bad, or armies which had that one golden build, like tau drone farms, and everything else being not worth taking.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
So why not have a million Stratagems? Why not make up new Stratagems as you play? What's the right amount?
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
The "gotcha" in 40k is "this army is just better than mine and there's nothing I can do about it" more often than it's "this army has this one weird trick and I have tools I can counter it with next time," at least for me.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
So why not have a million Stratagems? Why not make up new Stratagems as you play? What's the right amount?
Because a million is a "bit" too many to remember, and probably wouldn't fit in all of the books . And, probably for the same reason you don't get to make up your units stats on the fly? Somewhere between "more than 1, but less than a million".
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
The "gotcha" in 40k is "this army is just better than mine and there's nothing I can do about it" more often than it's "this army has this one weird trick and I have tools I can counter it with next time," at least for me.
That isn't a "complexity" problem, it's a balance problem. And I agree with you it's a problem.
vict0988 wrote: If people could pick their own Stratagems from a set of generic Stratagems armies would get more flavour options, not less. If you wanted to study the best combinations of units and Stratagems in that system you still could, but you only need to read the core rules and the matched play rules, not 20 codexes and 15 supplements.
I really like the fact that all factions have sub-factions and that those factions and subfactions all play differently, so I was inclined to react negatively to this. I thought about it a bit more before I posted, re-read your post a few times. If strategems are your bugbear, I suppose there are ways you could tame them down- after all, it doesn't seem like you're also suggesting removing the other pieces of the faction/ sub-faction uniqueness equation.
If we kept our subfaction and army rules, a bespoke WL trait, and a bespoke relic, each subfaction could still have enough to feel different than the others. Maybe we have the generic list + one bespoke one for each subfaction, and maybe a pool of four bespoke strats to choose from at the faction level.
Now that strats have become such a part of faction/ sub faction identity, I'd very much miss them. Blessed bolts, deadly descent, defenders of the faith... Those are awesome bespoke strats that give certain units the power to perform truly heroic actions. I think a lot would be lost by eliminating these, and they are too powerful to be datacard abilities, so leaving them the way there are is the easiest solution, even if you did end up shunting many of the others into a generic list.
On a sidenote, for all the complaints strats seem to generate, it might be interesting to poll how many different strats the average player actually uses. For most, I bet it's leass than 10, and for many, it's probably five or less.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife.
-1 to hit (or any other way to reduce/avoid damage) on a bike/fast unit and re-roll wounds (or any other way to increase damage) for a close combat oriented unit? Who doesn't have those? You should expect something like that even without knowing a single thing about that army.
Gotchas really are extremely limited in 40k. And someone who plays more than a game per month should quickly learn them, even without reading anything but his own rules before playing.
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Tyel wrote: Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.
No more than 3-4 per faction, really. And that's an overestimate to be sure to include everything.
Charistoph wrote: Then you haven't played a lot of games then. WarmaHordes is replete with this. X-Wing pretty much requires you to know what possible cards your opponent MAY be able to use so you can have cards to exploit or counter them. Most games that have seen regular growth for a decade or more have this concept as the developers add new things to be keep them fresh. Heck, even Battletech has this if one allows certain tech areas to be explored. That doesn't even consider the other Warhammer games of Fantasy and Age of Sigmar.
But neither of those games have army sizes you can expect to see in 40k and also have consistent keywords, USRs and language across the rules. All things 40k lacks.
40k has a clunkier system than both of those combined with larger armies, so even more moving parts to keep track of. It is utterly mind-boggling (not to mention bores me to tears) how much you are expected to keep track of in 40k compared to other games of similar-sized armies.
I can count on one had the number of units in WarmaHordes who have only the consistent keywords on their cards, to say nothing about the variety each individual Battlegroup Controller provide to the army.
Each of the major factions also has more skus than any faction in 40K, aside from the Astartes. Thankfully, the hyper-competitive meta helps reduce the need to know all of them, as so many are considered trash tier that one will rarely see them on the table, except when it is someone new.
While the number of models may be smaller in WMH, the number of cards/datasheets are actually closer than you are thinking when comparing a Steamroller army to a 40K Tournament army.
I don't dismiss how clunky 40K is, I'm just saying that 40K isn't the only one that demands a fair bit of homework to avoid gotchas.
Sim-Life wrote:I was about to say this. People keep saying you can ask your opponent what their stuff does bit in 40k if you want a really comprehensive explantion you'll be sitting there a while and god help you trying to remember the one hour verbal lecture. Warmachine you're dealing with maybe 2 or 3 units with WYSIWYG, a solos/CAs that grants a USR or two. 40k has armies two or three times the size with units with variable wargear that isn't always represented.
And you can ask in WMH, too. And you dismiss everything the Battlegroup Controller provides along with their Jacks, and especially any Warbeasts (who add more spells to the Controller's list) as well as the Theme bonuses they are running with. While the number of models IS most definitely higher, one is more likely to be spamming units in 40K than WMH where one generally doesn't have the point structure to do so (aside from a few exceptions like Skorne's Exalted). However, the number of unique cards one will see in WMH is closer to the number of unique datasheets one will see in 40K than you are assuming.
vict0988 wrote:
Blackie wrote: Chess is a game using mirror "factions", 40k is a game involving completely different factions. Is there someone who really wants identical factions just for the sake of balance and to avoid "homework?".
Were factions identical in the 1st-7th edition? If people could pick their own Stratagems from a set of generic Stratagems armies would get more flavour options, not less. If you wanted to study the best combinations of units and Stratagmes in that system you still could, but you only need to read the core rules and the matched play rules, not 20 codexes and 15 supplements. Tonnes of people want Knights gone because they're too different, too hard to balance, I think they can work as long as they are below A tier in terms of competitiveness. For me the line stops at 200 Stratagems, anything more than that is too much and I'd prefer the number to be around 30 and each one after that needs to have a damn good reason for existing.
This reminds me of how Horus Heresy players would go on about how balanced it is compared to regular 40K. Then I'd just point out to them that they are largely dealing with the same units available per side with some minor variations. It just doesn't have the disparity between Custodes and Guardsmen that it has to worry about. At most it is closer to C:SM vs CA/C:BA/C:SW.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
The "gotcha" in 40k is "this army is just better than mine and there's nothing I can do about it" more often than it's "this army has this one weird trick and I have tools I can counter it with next time," at least for me.
That isn't a "complexity" problem, it's a balance problem. And I agree with you it's a problem.
The complexity's led GW into doing a bunch of things I've never seen another minis game try and do, like the paint minis this colour->get free buffs to everything we clearly didn't consider the consequences of faction traits, because by being more complex they've made it even harder to balance.
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Charistoph wrote: ...This reminds me of how Horus Heresy players would go on about how balanced it is compared to regular 40K. Then I'd just point out to them that they are largely dealing with the same units available per side with some minor variations. It just doesn't have the disparity between Custodes and Guardsmen that it has to worry about. At most it is closer to C:SM vs CA/C:BA/C:SW.
In a literal sense 30k does have the Custodes/Guardsmen disparity to worry about; there are Custodes, Guardsmen in many shapes and sizes, Daemons, the wackiness that is the 30k Mechanicum, and even Knights once you get outside of the Legions lists that are all written for 30k and at least theoretically balanced for 30k. Though I am kind of amused by the fact that the "30k is the most balanced thing ever!" people are usually the first to complain if you try and put a Cybernetica list down (your Troops are T7/4W/3+/5++ MCs), despite the fact that Cybernetica vs. SM is still more balanced than any game of 9th I've ever played...
(30k isn't "the most balanced thing ever," it just looks really balanced next to its contemporaries (6e-9e 40k) because the writers have been really disciplined about keeping stat creep under control, and because the external balance is actually pretty good even if the internal balance is pretty screwy in places.)
Its interesting that people are using WMH as a comparison actually since that game is basically dead due to a lot if the same things GW is guilty of.
Subfactions giving unique bonuses resulting in terrible balance? Check.
Uneven updates for each faction? Check.
Individual rules on every unit? Check.
SKU bloat? Check.
Lots of homework to be able to be comptetitive? Check.
Overpriced models? Check.
Annual changes to scenarios? Check.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Alternative systems within the company are better written but receive less attention? Check
Anything I forgot? I gave up on WMH after it they invalidated all my favourite lists by forcing me to play in their terrible themes so I'm not 100% up to date on stuff.
Unit1126PLL wrote: The problem for me WRT 9th is less so "being blindsided" (at this point I just accept my suffering in that arena), but rather the amount of time it takes to explain everything.
Like my example provided earlier, explaining the difference between those two Keepers of Secrets is kind of a long conversation, especially if my opponent asks how to counter them or what is meaningful about them. Even the poster who claimed to know a lot didn't really understand the significance there. Compound this a whole lot for every unit in my army (for example, the differences in ways that Friends and the Contorted Epitome prevent fall back and the different methods of countering them), and it starts to kind of be a slog.
Please don't spread false information. Look it up, if you can't remember it.
You provided two extreme examples of a unit that could gather a page worth of extra rules. I summarised what every rule did very shortly and then gave a short rundown of what the unit does without going into detail like "this is a +x to y". YOU even corrected the general summary, but it wasn't substantially longer, just showing that it IS possible to do instead of reading all of the idk 10 abilities word for word from the codex. Between the two extreme examples with their idk again, 17? special rules combined, there is ONE actual gotcha ability. You broadly overestimate the amount of detail your opponent needs to make a meaningful decision on how to approach your Keepers. Both are dangerous and both need dedicated firepower or melee presence to clear. It really doesn't matter much if after all the special rules, one takes 24,76% less damage from shooting and the other is 38,32% more effective in melee. And for a third time, those are extreme examples. How complex are CSM or SM characters for example?
You guys in the "I need to know every rule of every unit of every army and all the stratagems and combos in order to have fun and don't get blindsided" camp really need to have an actual (non-tournament) game once in a while. Or maybe opponents who aren't donkey caves, I don't know?
I tell people who play with me if they are about to make a tactical mistake or forget a rule. I tell/remind them (just happened today) about Auspex Scan before they put the unit down. I let them cast a spell after they already shot with their first unit if they forgot about it.
Maybe it is just my local scene that is the outlier where I'm living in happy 40k land where the game is actually fun, while the rest of the world is playing in a Polish hellhole and the game just sucks. In that case I apologise to everybody
Sim-Life wrote: Its interesting that people are using WMH as a comparison actually since that game is basically dead due to a lot if the same things GW is guilty of.
Subfactions giving unique bonuses resulting in terrible balance? Check.
Uneven updates for each faction? Check.
Individual rules on every unit? Check.
SKU bloat? Check.
Lots of homework to be able to be comptetitive? Check.
Overpriced models? Check.
Annual changes to scenarios? Check.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Alternative systems within the company are better written but receive less attention? Check
Privateer must've done something else wrong since GWs been guilty of most of what you list before WMH ever existed.
Sim-Life wrote: Its interesting that people are using WMH as a comparison actually since that game is basically dead due to a lot if the same things GW is guilty of.
Subfactions giving unique bonuses resulting in terrible balance? Check.
Uneven updates for each faction? Check.
Individual rules on every unit? Check.
SKU bloat? Check.
Lots of homework to be able to be comptetitive? Check.
Overpriced models? Check.
Annual changes to scenarios? Check.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Alternative systems within the company are better written but receive less attention? Check
Privateer must've done something else wrong since GWs been guilty of most of what you list before WMH ever existed.
I imagine a key difference is that 40k is much older and well-established, and stemmed from a time when there was far less competition. Hence, it's far better known and far more people are likely to have invested in it in some manner.
There are also other aspects, e.g. (notwithstanding godawful recent policies) 40k was a lot more conversion-friendly, encouraging people to create custom models (which they'll likely feel much more attached to and inclined to use than off-the-shelf models). Plus it had extensive lore that (from what I've seen) seems to grip people much more than WMH's lore.
Charistoph wrote: ...This reminds me of how Horus Heresy players would go on about how balanced it is compared to regular 40K. Then I'd just point out to them that they are largely dealing with the same units available per side with some minor variations. It just doesn't have the disparity between Custodes and Guardsmen that it has to worry about. At most it is closer to C:SM vs CA/C:BA/C:SW.
In a literal sense 30k does have the Custodes/Guardsmen disparity to worry about; there are Custodes, Guardsmen in many shapes and sizes, Daemons, the wackiness that is the 30k Mechanicum, and even Knights once you get outside of the Legions lists that are all written for 30k and at least theoretically balanced for 30k. Though I am kind of amused by the fact that the "30k is the most balanced thing ever!" people are usually the first to complain if you try and put a Cybernetica list down (your Troops are T7/4W/3+/5++ MCs), despite the fact that Cybernetica vs. SM is still more balanced than any game of 9th I've ever played...
(30k isn't "the most balanced thing ever," it just looks really balanced next to its contemporaries (6e-9e 40k) because the writers have been really disciplined about keeping stat creep under control, and because the external balance is actually pretty good even if the internal balance is pretty screwy in places.)
At the time I was having those conversations, not even the Adeptus Mechanicus was out, so there were no rules for the Custodes. While I suppose one could use the Imperial Guard with the normal codex, I didn't hear of a lot of people using them in that setting.
ccs wrote:
Sim-Life wrote: Its interesting that people are using WMH as a comparison actually since that game is basically dead due to a lot if the same things GW is guilty of.
Subfactions giving unique bonuses resulting in terrible balance? Check.
Uneven updates for each faction? Check.
Individual rules on every unit? Check.
SKU bloat? Check.
Lots of homework to be able to be comptetitive? Check.
Overpriced models? Check.
Annual changes to scenarios? Check.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Alternative systems within the company are better written but receive less attention? Check
Privateer must've done something else wrong since GWs been guilty of most of what you list before WMH ever existed.
Well there was poor distribution practices which provided anti-incentives for people to carry it in the store. There was also the tournament-only crowd who pushed out everyone else (and I've seen this happen to local 40K groups, too).
Stratagems have largely killed 40k for me. Too many things to remember and I feel like the time they tried to save on is now replaced by having to search through the rule book for stratagems to use.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Trying not to post in this thread too much because I'm reaching my toxicity threshold. I'm trying not to read it but it's like a train wreck and I can't look away. This line in particular frustrated me.
Here's a link to the post that polled Dakkanauts on how they play:
And it is true (being Dakka General) that the Matched and Grand Tourney players do outnumber Crusaders and Open war players, but we are not statistically insignificant.
I had expected someone sensitive enough to comment about feeling Gaslit a page back to also be sensitive enough to acknowledge the existence of other members of the player base...
Sim-Life wrote: Its interesting that people are using WMH as a comparison actually since that game is basically dead due to a lot if the same things GW is guilty of.
Subfactions giving unique bonuses resulting in terrible balance? Check.
Uneven updates for each faction? Check.
Individual rules on every unit? Check.
SKU bloat? Check.
Lots of homework to be able to be comptetitive? Check.
Overpriced models? Check.
Annual changes to scenarios? Check.
Alternative methods of play no one cares about beyond a set way to play that is considered "standard"? Check.
Alternative systems within the company are better written but receive less attention? Check
Privateer must've done something else wrong since GWs been guilty of most of what you list before WMH ever existed.
I imagine a key difference is that 40k is much older and well-established, and stemmed from a time when there was far less competition. Hence, it's far better known and far more people are likely to have invested in it in some manner.
There are also other aspects, e.g. (notwithstanding godawful recent policies) 40k was a lot more conversion-friendly, encouraging people to create custom models (which they'll likely feel much more attached to and inclined to use than off-the-shelf models). Plus it had extensive lore that (from what I've seen) seems to grip people much more than WMH's lore.
In the end a lot comes down to models. Dakka likes to put many thoughts on rules but the most important aspect of a wargame are usually the models. And most WMH models look pretty crappy, are made from metal, are even more expensive than GW and are monopose. Add to that a focus on competitive play that's also not interesting for many people. WMH had good times because 6th and 7th Edition of 40K were pretty bad, but with 8th edition and bad decisions from PP it fell apart quickly.
Tyel wrote: Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.
I dosent matter is the list is "short" (like in the few dozens) because it has to be updated every few weeks with every new update... 40K mutates faster than a XXXXXXX Virus!
Tyel wrote: Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.
You mean supporting arguments with proof and looking for realistic solutions to help people enjoy the current version of 9th edition?
Silly Tyel, that's not what this thread is for. You are supposed to just blindly hate everything GW and personally attack everyone who thinks otherwise!
Tyel wrote: Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.
I dosent matter is the list is "short" (like in the few dozens) because it has to be updated every few weeks with every new update... 40K mutates faster than a XXXXXXX Virus!
Uh-huh.
Remind me of all the wombo-combos gotchas in Codex: Orks?
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
So why not have a million Stratagems? Why not make up new Stratagems as you play? What's the right amount?
Because a million is a "bit" too many to remember, and probably wouldn't fit in all of the books . And, probably for the same reason you don't get to make up your units stats on the fly? Somewhere between "more than 1, but less than a million".
Are we done being silly and hyperbolic now?
Between 1 and 1000000 is way too big a spread, I've said around 30, max 200. I just want you to tell me what is so great about having 500 Stratagems, how that makes the game better and why going up to 1000 is no problem. You think 1000000 is too many to remember, but I am sure there are people that would be able to memorize them and you don't need to remember them do you? You can just learn new things every game, continuing to get gotcha'd. On the other hand there are people like me who find 500 Stratagems too much, so where is your goldy-locks zone?
vict0988 wrote: If people could pick their own Stratagems from a set of generic Stratagems armies would get more flavour options, not less. If you wanted to study the best combinations of units and Stratagems in that system you still could, but you only need to read the core rules and the matched play rules, not 20 codexes and 15 supplements.
I really like the fact that all factions have sub-factions and that those factions and subfactions all play differently, so I was inclined to react negatively to this. I thought about it a bit more before I posted, re-read your post a few times.
Thanks a lot for giving me the benefit of the doubt, I really appreciate that, although I am afraid I do want to remove chapter tactics, super doctrines and unit Stratagems except in cases where they are needed. Let's say taking 1 Imperial Knight is meta, but taking 4 Imperial Knights is trash for some reason, GW can make a Specialist Detachment with some strong Stratagems to allow taking more than just 1 Imperial Knight viable without making the solo Imperial Knight overpowered. I would also generalize WL traits, because there are way too god damn many WL traits that are useless, the only thing I would leave alone is Relics. So if you play Ultramarines you have access to the Space Marine Specialist Detachments and Relics, Ultramarines relics Specialist Detachments and any unique Ultramarine characters, but you can take any combination of 5 generic Stratagems and use one of the generic WL traits.
That means you can take all-rounder Stratagems and a support WL trait if you play Ultramarines, or melee Stratagems and a fighter WL trait if your army is led by a great fighter and your Company are melee specialists relative to the average Ultramarine army.
a_typical_hero wrote: You guys in the "I need to know every rule of every unit of every army and all the stratagems and combos in order to have fun and don't get blindsided" camp really need to have an actual (non-tournament) game once in a while. Or maybe opponents who aren't donkey caves, I don't know?
I only play those games and for the most part I have tonnes of fun, but more thanks to me and my opponents working together to make the game fun than the rules themselves making the game fun. I am just lamenting that I cannot play competitively because of the amount of homework I would need to do to get into it, that's why I say all the time that 9th is the casual edition. I am also mad at how close the game is to being what I would consider perfect, a single Chapter Approved book banning regular Stratagems, WL traits, Chapter Tactics, Combat Doctrines, faction objectives and introducing a new set of Stratagems and WL traits and then a new balanced set of points that has been properly tested. It's not that large a project and GW have gotten the playtesting manpower for free, they don't have to keep deferring to the opinions of the janitorial staff on what should be buffed or nerfed.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife.
-1 to hit (or any other way to reduce/avoid damage) on a bike/fast unit and re-roll wounds (or any other way to increase damage) for a close combat oriented unit? Who doesn't have those? You should expect something like that even without knowing a single thing about that army.
Necrons don't have that, they have defensive gotcha Strats for Skorpekh Destroyers and Flayed Ones and LFR works on Incubi that aren't all that fast either, it doesn't work on their monsters which are faster than Incubi IIRC. Exactly how a Stratagem works also matters, whether it is -1 to hit, can only be wounded on 4+, +1 invulnerable, +1 Sv, matters more or less depending on whether you are firing S10 AP-5, S5 AP- or S4 AP-1 with BS 2+, 3+ or 5+.
And it is true (being Dakka General) that the Matched and Grand Tourney players do outnumber Crusaders and Open war players, but we are not statistically insignificant.
I play at three separate groups that play Crusade and/or Open War using Matched play rules.
That poll doesn't leave room for that sort of thing so I'm simply recorded as "Open War" which would imply I play open play when I don't.
Most of those who only play matched and grand tourney are 100% casual players, those formats are simply the most common ones and probably the best for pick up games.
Players who go to actual tournaments are a tiny minority in the community.
Blackie wrote: Most of those who only play matched and grand tourney are 100% casual players, those formats are simply the most common ones and probably the best for pick up games.
Players who go to actual tournaments are a tiny minority in the community.
The Big Corporations are a tiny amount of the business and they dont even employee that many people... But they essentially mark the trends in the market and forced almost everybody to follow.
Ophrah or Taylor Swift are just two women but their opinions have much more impact than a thousand random people.
Cuantitative size and cualitative impact are different metrics.
Blackie wrote: Most of those who only play matched and grand tourney are 100% casual players, those formats are simply the most common ones and probably the best for pick up games.
Players who go to actual tournaments are a tiny minority in the community.
The Big Corporations are a tiny amount of the business and they dont even employee that many people... But they essentially mark the trends in the market and forced almost everybody to follow.
Ophrah or Taylor Swift are just two women but their opinions have much more impact than a thousand random people.
Cuantitative size and cualitative impact are different metrics.
In the tournament players case though it's more like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
You forgot lightning-fast reactions and re-roll wounds for Cult of Strife. Drukhari aren't strong because of gotcha stuff anyway, they are just undercosted.
Who is? The faction with the newest codex? But after they "gotcha" once, it doesn't work anymore, because you remember it after that. You touched a hot stove, you got burnt, you don't do that anymore. It's just memorization, and nothing helps your memory more than watching your favorite unit get nuked because you didn't know [FACTION (X)] can do (Y). The more you learn the better you get, that's true for games and life in general.
So why not have a million Stratagems? Why not make up new Stratagems as you play? What's the right amount?
Because a million is a "bit" too many to remember, and probably wouldn't fit in all of the books . And, probably for the same reason you don't get to make up your units stats on the fly? Somewhere between "more than 1, but less than a million".
Are we done being silly and hyperbolic now?
Between 1 and 1000000 is way too big a spread, I've said around 30, max 200. I just want you to tell me what is so great about having 500 Stratagems, how that makes the game better and why going up to 1000 is no problem. You think 1000000 is too many to remember, but I am sure there are people that would be able to memorize them and you don't need to remember them do you? You can just learn new things every game, continuing to get gotcha'd. On the other hand there are people like me who find 500 Stratagems too much, so where is your goldy-locks zone?
We don't really need to talk about hypotheticals. For 9th edition, pretty much every codex (except marines, of course) is getting roughly the same three to four pages of stratagems plus another one per sub-faction. For example, orks get 25+7 stratagems, Death Guard have 32+7.
Those can be broken down as follows: - There are a few ones (at least two, up to six) which you never need to care about because they are just list building options or work on deployment. Your opponent will tell you about them when presenting their army and it's written on their list or informs you what they are deploying something in a special way. - Minor buffs like re-rolls, extra AP, more reliable charges, more damage and the like. Most of these are on a level that they slightly fudge the odds in your favor, similar to 8th edition style command re-roll, none of these need to be remembered in detail. - Direct damage. Almost every army has some way to use stratagems to deal a small number of mortal wounds to something. You really don't need to know much more than that. - There are a whole lot of unit or wargear specific stratagems. As many posters never tire to say, these should just be activated abilities on their respective datasheets and can just be memorized as such. Which means that you don't have to know about any stratagems that are specific to units that aren't used. Which means that you can flat out ignore all stratagems that are for units which are not on the board, just like you don't need to know what a psychic power does that your opponent didn't bring. - Major buffs. Mostly 2 CP stratagems, with a few outliers. These are the ones you should be aware of, as they might cause you to under-estimate what a unit does and cause you to make bad decisions. You don't need to know what the buff is in detail is though. "MANz have a major buff stratagem for melee" or "blightlords have a major buff for shooting and melee" is all you really need to remember, if the details matter, just ask your opponent. Worst case, just assume that every unit has such a buff stratagem. For any 9th edition codex, you also don't need to worry about major buffs stacking too much, for most codices GW has either made these things impossible or very inefficient. - Reactionary defensive stratagems. Lightning fast reflexes, transhuman, smoke launchers, exhaust cloud etc. Yes, you hands down need to know what these do and which units can use them, no way around it. Otherwise you will use your movement phase to set up a shooting phase under false premises. Luckily, these are just 1-2 for most armies and usually are very binary good or trash, so you probably know all of the relevant ones after playing against any army for two turns. - Actual gotcha stratagems. These are usually very situational stratagems which enable a unit to do things way beyond their usual capabilities or allow units to act out of turn or deal a great number of mortal wounds under the right circumstances. Auspex scan, exploding poxwalkers or orks is never beaten come to mind. While you don't need to know the effect of these in detail, you do need to know what triggers them. These aren't as high in number as people would expect either, DG as the grand masters of gotcha have eight of those, orks have five. - Actual wombo-combos. With many 8th edition codices still around and CSM probably getting their new codex only just in time for the actual horus heresy, some of these will stick around some more. However, you usually have read about them, and there really are just 3 or four 4 in the entire game.
And of course, across all these you have a bunch of stratagems that are too bad or too situational to ever come up.
So, what DO you need to know about an opponent's army's stratagems? 1) What defensive stratagems they have, when they can use them and what their effect is. 2) The triggers of their gotcha stratagems. 3) Which units can have major buffs to shooting/fighting/charges/movement to plan accordingly.
For DG the answer to these would be: 1) Cloud of Flies, used at the start of your opponent movements phase, protects an infantry unit from shooting unless it's the closest enemy unit or you are within 12". 4CP for terminators. MBH can reduce the shots of weapons aimed at them by 1. 2) If you are locked in combat with DG during their turn they can grenade you in the face and shower you with mortal wounds. DG can make any multi-damage weapons "jump" like the flails did in the past. For 2 CPDG can spread their nasty plague fleet contagions from any one unit they wish. Poxwalker can do mortal wounds on sixes. Drones can do 6" heroic interventions. Inexorable units can reduce your charge distance by 2 after you have selected a target. After you have finished a charge move, all Mortarion's Anvil units can make a heroic intervention. Or, as a more simply summary - getting close to DG is a bad idea. 3) This is rather simple. All bubotnic astartes units can get major damage buffs, as well as the PBC for its mortar. All other units either get minor buffs or nothing.
For orks: 1) Beast snaggas that are not the two rigs can get transhuman. Grot shield make it impossible to target a unit until the gretchin unit is dead. Cloud of Smoke gives a buggy or kopta unit a 6" -1 to hit aura for other buggies and koptas. If your opponent has a KFF, he can destroy it to gain a 9" 5++ for one turn. 2) If you kill an ork character he can fight or shoot one more time. All kinds of boyz can make 6" pile-ins and consolidates. Orks can ignore reductions to their charge range. Snakebites can gain a DTW roll for 1 CP. Freeboota infantry can gain obSec at will. 3) MANz and burnas have major buffs for melee, beast snaggas can have mutiple major buffs against vehicle and monsters, deff skulls core and characters just against vehicles.
Once you abandon the idea of stubbornly having to learn a number of stratagems, it's really not hard to keep the hand full of stratagems relevant to your game in mind.
If we are talking stratagems I am no longer sure which ones are current for my Imperial Guard army given its rules are a mix of two editions with some of the last no longer counting.
And it really isn't a 'casual' game because the special rules are in multiple publications and not knowing them means you will lose to someone who either has them in one new codex or knows them all.
Obviously all games are like that, not knowing the rules always puts you at a disadvantage, but few games make it quite so hard to find yours.
My go to comparison is always Epic A. All the rules I need in one location (http://epic-uk.co.uk/wp/), all the army rules in one two page quick reference doc, I can know mine and the enemies special rules in a minute. And the armies often match their background fluff better than the 40k ones.
So GW can definitively do it, they just won't for 40k and its a damn shame because I like the models and background and really want to like the game.
The_Real_Chris wrote: If we are talking stratagems I am no longer sure which ones are current for my Imperial Guard army given its rules are a mix of two editions with some of the last no longer counting.
And it really isn't a 'casual' game because the special rules are in multiple publications and not knowing them means you will lose to someone who either has them in one new codex or knows them all.
Obviously all games are like that, not knowing the rules always puts you at a disadvantage, but few games make it quite so hard to find yours.
My go to comparison is always Epic A. All the rules I need in one location (http://epic-uk.co.uk/wp/), all the army rules in one two page quick reference doc, I can know mine and the enemies special rules in a minute. And the armies often match their background fluff better than the 40k ones.
So GW can definitively do it, they just won't for 40k and its a damn shame because I like the models and background and really want to like the game.
100% agree. But if you are caught between a rock (GW being GW) and a hard place (your group sticking with 40k), there always is the option to compile those things yourself or at least search the web for someone who has already done so.
H.B.M.C. wrote: "40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."
I mean do you not hear yourself?
Haha, well put, and a perfect example of what the disconnect is.
H.B.M.C. wrote: "40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."
I mean do you not hear yourself?
Thanks for completely misrepresenting my argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.
But clearly I used too many words, so here the the TL;DR for people who also feel like counting is too complex: Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Can't help people who reject solutions and demand that the world changes for them instead.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Jidmah wrote: Thanks for completely misrepresenting [the] argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.
EDIT: I also question the need for 39 stratagems if only 7 or 8 are have enough impact to worry about. If the other 31 or 32 have such little impact in the game that your opponent can safely completely ignore them without harming their chances of victory, then perhaps they shouldn't've been printed?
Blackie wrote: Most of those who only play matched and grand tourney are 100% casual players, those formats are simply the most common ones and probably the best for pick up games.
Players who go to actual tournaments are a tiny minority in the community.
I do think people who go to events at all are probably a bit over represented here as that kind of involvement is also I'd imagine likely to push you towards an online community
I suspect there are still large numbers of GW's customers were gaming is between a small group of friends, maybe with some small local organisation that I think that is actually part of the reason for the love of depth of stat like rules. 40K isnt a massively complex game in its core rules and well suited to casual gaming but I think you have a very large depth of variables that can allow for variety of games even between the same faction. If I have a say Ultramarines and my friend has Orks and we play each other once a fortnight theres a lot of potential for those two armies against each other to play differently via troop choice, loadouts, strats, etc.
Blackie wrote: Most of those who only play matched and grand tourney are 100% casual players, those formats are simply the most common ones and probably the best for pick up games.
Players who go to actual tournaments are a tiny minority in the community.
I do think people who go to events at all are probably a bit over represented here as that kind of involvement is also I'd imagine likely to push you towards an online community
I suspect there are still large numbers of GW's customers were gaming is between a small group of friends, maybe with some small local organisation that I think that is actually part of the reason for the love of depth of stat like rules. 40K isnt a massively complex game in its core rules and well suited to casual gaming but I think you have a very large depth of variables that can allow for variety of games even between the same faction. If I have a say Ultramarines and my friend has Orks and we play each other once a fortnight theres a lot of potential for those two armies against each other to play differently via troop choice, loadouts, strats, etc.
That depends on the army. My Slaanesh Daemons lists can't really vary much - they have a single troops choice, a plethora of HQs (the hardest slot to proliferate in a list), one Elite, like 2 Fast Attack, and 2 Heavy Support (which are "chariot" and "bigger chariot"). If you add in "generic" daemons that can be Slaanesh allegiance, you get one more of each choice except troops and elites, which remain only a single option.
If, in a hypothetical local meta, my friends find a way to trounce my Daemons (or alternatively refuse to change when getting beaten repeatedly) then our games simply aren't going to be fun, as I am incapable of changing without buying a whole different army.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Jidmah wrote: Thanks for completely misrepresenting [the] argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.
EDIT:
I also question the need for 39 stratagems if only 7 or 8 are have enough impact to worry about. If the other 31 or 32 have such little impact in the game that your opponent can safely completely ignore them without harming their chances of victory, then perhaps they shouldn't've been printed?
Agreed. Effectively Jidmah has admitted the game is too bloated, which is exactly the point he's been arguing against the whole time.
The other problem with this sort of approach is that you don't know what you don't know, so asking the right questions becomes a gotcha in itself, where you're relying on your opponent accurately answering a potentially vague question. I've explained stuff to my opponent at the start of a game only to remember something much later, which isn't a great experience for them. Yet again, I'd point out that numerous other games completely avoid this problem by having all (or at least most of) the relevant rules presented to players at the start of each game and available throughout.
Jidmah wrote: ... people who also feel like counting is too complex
Jidmah wrote: ... which no human alive could possibly all remember
Jidmah wrote: If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
The pot called. He says you're black.
Putting aside that you are the only one going out of their way to insult everyone in the most ass-hole-ish way you can muster, let's look at the actual important bit of your post that wasn't just rampant insults and attempts to demean:
Jidmah wrote: Out of ... 39 different strats ... you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas...
So why even have the rest? You've failed to see the woods 'cause of all them pesky trees getting in the way.
My point stands: If you say that it's not complex and then proceed to list just how simple 39 separate rules divided into 7 categories are (and that's just for one army), then your own words defeat your base premise.
You may resume being a completely un-self aware jerk to everyone.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I also question the need for 39 stratagems if only 7 or 8 are have enough impact to worry about. If the other 31 or 32 have such little impact in the game that your opponent can safely completely ignore them without harming their chances of victory, then perhaps they shouldn't've been printed?
Despite my better judgement, I'll assume that this an honest question and that you are actually interested in the response.
So my answer is yes and no.
Yes, because a fair number of them don't need to be printed, that is true. I think especially codex DG has six or something (not double-checking) stratagems which are essentially "plague marines deal a tiny bit more damage for 1CP". Especially the stratagems I put in the "minor buff" section could probably just be kicked from the game an replaced with point changes or slight datasheet adjustments, almost everything the direct damage section could be replaced with wargear or rules or simply cut.
Outside of that, no that is not the case. As an opponent, you never need to keep stratagems like Champions of Disease or Tellyporta in mind simply because you don't interact with them. Your opponent will tell you that some champion has a relic or that his unit will arrive via deep strike, the stratagem itself doesn't matter. For other stratagems they don't matter because the units they are attached to are not part of the battle, but they do matter when they are brought.
So yes, 40k could do with a lot less stratagems. I have the habit of always putting stratagems I use on top of my datacard deck, which results into less used cards traveling to the back, while the constantly used ones pick up wear and marks. Looking at my ork deck from last edition roughly a third of those cards seem regularly played, while two thirds are essentially in mint condition. Anecdotal, but I'm sure that it's the same for many other people.
Either way, it doesn't matter because 9th is what it is, and neither you, nor H.B.M.C, nor Sim-Life, nor me can do anything about it. Stratagems won't be going away for at least another three years, if ever, and all further codices will follow the same design paradigm in that regard as the ones we have seen so far and worst case we get another pile of stratagems shoveled on top in roughly one and a half year when the successor of PA roars its ugly head to herald the next edition.
Which leaves everyone with just four options - just memorize everything, accept that you will be walking into stratagems you knew nothing about at least once, quit 9th edition for another game or edition or break down the complexity into manageable chunks. In the post above I described my approach for the last option, as the loudest voices in this thread want to continue playing for various reasons but neither want to do "homework" nor walk into gotchas.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
H.B.M.C. wrote: My point stands: If you say that it's not complex and then proceed to list just how simple 39 separate rules divided into 7 categories are (and that's just for one army), then your own words defeat your base premise.
That you assume that the list is just for one army is a dead give away that you haven't even bothered to read the post before being a dick about an honest attempt to break down complexity for people. You are usually better than this.
"There is no bloat" to "There totally is bloat, but you can't do anything about it so shut up"?
This is without going into the argument about interactivity/the role of the player vs. the role of the cards in the game - or the idea that "I don't have to know a stratagem because that unit didn't show up to this game" which is farcical because I can't just learn and then forget things on a whim; I either know it for all occasions on the off chance it arises or I don't know it at all. Or it doesn't matter in the game enough that I need to know it, in which case - senseless bloat.
Jidmah wrote:Sigh, that's what you get for giving people the benefit of doubt
How else am I supposed to interpret:
Jidmah wrote:So yes, 40k could do with a lot less stratagems. I have the habit of always putting stratagems I use on top of my datacard deck, which results into less used cards traveling to the back, while the constantly used ones pick up wear and marks. Looking at my ork deck from last edition roughly a third of those cards seem regularly played, while two thirds are essentially in mint condition. Anecdotal, but I'm sure that it's the same for many other people.
Either way, it doesn't matter because 9th is what it is, and neither you, nor H.B.M.C, nor Sim-Life, nor me can do anything about it. Stratagems won't be going away for at least another three years, if ever, and all further codices will follow the same design paradigm in that regard as the ones we have seen so far and worst case we get another pile of stratagems shoveled on top in roughly one and a half year when the successor of PA roars its ugly head to herald the next edition.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Or play Chess, Go, a horde of cardgames, Epic, Warmaster, King of the Battlefield, most wargames currently commercially available etc etc.
My go to comparison is MtG for current 40k, except you don't need to assemble and build models...
Warhammer underworlds is a great model and card game. 40k... could do with (for me and others like me), being more of a wargame.
But as has been noted... GW sales seem to be fine with the MtG style of gaming, so more power to them. Doesn't change my opinion that 40k as it stands is needlessly complicated but not at all complex.
"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
kodos wrote: "Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
Someone tried that with a fast food analogy, and Jid and Dae spent several pages heckling anyone who agreed with it.
"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
kodos wrote: "Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
Someone tried that with a fast food analogy, and Jid and Dae spent several pages heckling anyone who agreed with it.
More like dae and me trying to offer solutions which thousands of players are already using daily, while a bunch of poster are screeching about how the problem is unsolvable unless they personally re-write the game rules in their image.
"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
I did not know that DakkaDakka is a fan page were you are not allowed to discuss questions
as the topic is still "Is Warhammer 40k Too Complex? " and not "40k is not complex!!!!!!1111elf"
so if someone starts a topic "is Transformers the best movie ever made?", you will have a hard time defending that it is the best movie
no matter if you are on Facebook or in Dakka
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
How do you entice the change for the game to be the way you want it, if you don't happen to work or be a big investor for GW? The only way people can influance GW is to make the situation so unbearable to everyone, that the sells start to drop, and then will react. The only question is how long it takes to do. From what I understand SoB have been a bad army since like for ever. If 20 or 30 years ago, people that wanted to play the faction just all quit, and the SoB were never mentioned again, they wouldn't have a good codex right now. CWE, and eldar players in general, give show to their displeasure about the state of their model line. They do it every time, a new codex drops or new units drop. They even ignore the fact that their faction or factions are doing above avarge well comparing to others, as far as being fun to play. I don't see other CWE or eldar players jumping in to those threads saying that GW will update the model lines, when it will update it, and till then people should shut the hell up and only talk about how good and fun the game is.
To give a move example. If people haven't been out spoken angry about Justice League, there would be no Snyder Cut. Blizzard told WoW players that they "think they want WoW classic, but they don't". And here we are with WoW being carried by the classic subs for BC.
"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
I did not know that DakkaDakka is a fan page were you are not allowed to discuss questions
as the topic is still "Is Warhammer 40k Too Complex? " and not "40k is not complex!!!!!!1111elf"
so if someone starts a topic "is Transformers the best movie ever made?", you will have a hard time defending that it is the best movie
no matter if you are on Facebook or in Dakka
None of that... makes any sense. What exactly is your metaphor supposed to represent?
Which leaves everyone with just four options - just memorize everything, accept that you will be walking into stratagems you knew nothing about at least once, quit 9th edition for another game or edition or break down the complexity into manageable chunks.
Jidmah wrote: No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
I like transformers, I don't like Rosie Huntington. You tell me the time stamps for all the times Rosie Huntington appears in Transformers 3 so I can close my eyes, that's just not a great solution. Megan Fox spitting on Michael Bay is IMO another reason she should have been brought back for the third movie. No, with my budget and skills I cannot retroactively add Megan Fox to Transformers 3, but I can still imagine how much better the movie would have been with Megan Fox in the movie and discuss it in the Transformers forum. Nobody asked for your solutions, we are discussing whether Rosie Huntington was good in Transformers 3 and you've admitted that Megan Fox was a better love interest for Sam.
So what is your solution?
Play casually until GW fixes the game or I bother doing my hobby homework.
The "gotcha" in 40k is "this army is just better than mine and there's nothing I can do about it" more often than it's "this army has this one weird trick and I have tools I can counter it with next time," at least for me.
I'd like to take a moment to highlight this past week's results.
Spoiler:
WG Open- Summer Slaughter. England. 78 Players. 5 Rounds.
Orks 5-0
White Scars 5-0
Imperium(Knights/Custodes) 4-1
Drukhari 4-1
Deathwatch 4-1
Ad Mec 4-1
Iron Hands 4-1
Death Guard 4-1
Death Guard 4-1
Aeldari 4-1
Adeptus Custodes 4-1
Emperor’s Children 4-1
Genestealer Cult 4-1
The Gateway Open GT. Collinsville, IL. 55 Players. 5 Rounds.
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
I didn't spend 20+ years of my life and thousands of currency on the Transformers movie though.
Jidmah wrote: None of that... makes any sense. What exactly is your metaphor supposed to represent?
this is a discussion and not a fanpage, there is no argument to shut the discussion down just because it does not fit your narrative and you have no arguments left
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
This comparison is pure genius . And ironically Transformers is the only movie I've ever watched that I couldn't manage to finish, worst movie ever IMHO. Haven't watched the sequels though .
Playing 40k nowadays feels like im getting tested at school with all the memorisation there is going on. Yes, most factions only have 2-3 strats you should know but i'm the kind of player that wants to know every possibilities before taking any decisions. Problem is : i'm bad at memorizing stuff. Give me "logic-based exams" over "memorisation-based exams" anyday.
When i first started playing 40k and started showing interest in other wargames like infinity, people always clamored that it was overly complex for no reason. In reality, it's much more simple to grasp all the rules (learn one faction and you basically know what most others can possibly do). Yet all these factions play very differently because of what skill combination their units have. In 40k, i don't get the same feel that my factions play like they should. Are my dudes a bit more different because they get to reroll 1's to hit vs 1's to wound?
40k is in dire needs of a return to USRs to simplify it IMO (but yeah, thats for another discussion).
Do i have fun while playing the game? Yeah, i just feel like i would have more fun if all these superfluous strats that do "almost the same thing but not quite" either weren't in the game or were all fused into a single one that did the same thing. (Lightning fast reactions vs Smokescreen for example)
With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.
However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?
Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.
Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?
How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?
How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?
I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.
And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.
I apologize to anyone I have offended and will bow out of this discussion. I see no point these fruitless discussions, but I respect that this is what you want to do.
I suggest tagging threads accordingly in the future.
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.
This comparison is pure genius . And ironically Transformers is the only movie I've ever watched that I couldn't manage to finish, worst movie ever IMHO. Haven't watched the sequels though .
It's probably some form of art. Every movie manages to be even worse than the previous one.
"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"
With the occasional, "There was no sequels to the Transformers movie because they killed off Optimus Prime and gave his role to a whiny brat."
Yes, I'm a bigger fan of the animated movie from the 80's, and moved off of modern 40K a while back to another game that has a more complex rule structure, and loving my Battletech nights.
H.B.M.C. wrote: "40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."
I mean do you not hear yourself?
Thanks for completely misrepresenting my argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.
But clearly I used too many words, so here the the TL;DR for people who also feel like counting is too complex:
Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Can't help people who reject solutions and demand that the world changes for them instead.
Men, 40K is not complicated in a broad sense... Its not rocket science or an esoteric literary piece... But is clumpsy as hell and needs a huge effort for a game that can be reduce to "throw a bucket of dice and your opponent withdraws minis from the table... Rense and repeat during 2 or 3 hours".
Its the contradiction between the awfull amount of moving parts and things to learn and the naive (almost silly) nature of the activity itself what creates the cognitive disosiation.
vipoid wrote: Creeping Blight, Haze of Corruption, Fire Fever, Vermid Whispers, Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators.
Creeping Blight: Plague Weapons become Rending in melee.
Haze of Corruption: damage spills over instead of being lost.
Fire Fever: Helbrute +1 to hit/wound if all shooting is pointed at one unit.
Vermid Whispers: +1 to hit for Terminators in melee.
Diseased Effluent: Character suffers 1 mortal wound to deal D3 mortal wounds to a unit in engagement range, double damage against non-characters.
Befouled Incubators: a Character's attacks causes enemy models destroyed to damage their own unit.
I don't fault you Sim-Life, but I also don't think the system would be better if the names made more sense. Whether you call it Lightning-Fast Reactions or Aeldari Dodge, if I know it exists, I know, if I don't know, then I don't. It seems clear that these Stratagems are just bloat for the bloat throne, +1 to hit for Terminators in melee isn't a thematic effect for DG at all. Past a point you stop enhancing flavour and you just print Stratagems to fill page space and off-load power from datasheets to Stratagems and by doing this you actually move focus away from the focus of the faction to what should be the focus of other factions, this is most notable with Space Marines because of the number of Stratagems they have combined means that GW has had to explore every bit of design space available, leaving nothing unique to other factions, so the point of faction Stratagems isn't even there anymore, it's just a snake eating its own tail.
vipoid wrote: With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.
However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?
Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.
Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?
How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?
How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?
I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.
And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.
Literally no one references rules by their proper name unless they're also explaining what it does.
H.B.M.C. wrote: "40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."
I mean do you not hear yourself?
Thanks for completely misrepresenting my argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.
But clearly I used too many words, so here the the TL;DR for people who also feel like counting is too complex:
Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.
If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.
Can't help people who reject solutions and demand that the world changes for them instead.
Men, 40K is not complicated in a broad sense... Its not rocket science or an esoteric literary piece... But is clumpsy as hell and needs a huge effort for a game that can be reduce to "throw a bucket of dice and your opponent withdraws minis from the table... Rense and repeat during 2 or 3 hours".
Its the contradiction between the awfull amount of moving parts and things to learn and the naive (almost silly) nature of the activity itself what creates the cognitive disosiation.
Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!
vipoid wrote: With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.
However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?
Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.
Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?
How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?
How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?
I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.
And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.
Literally no one references rules by their proper name unless they're also explaining what it does.
Well, the famous ones like Veterans of the long war, death to the false Emperor and common faction specific rules or often used stratagems are usually called with their official names, no?
Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!
i would 100% take MTG-level rules for 40k instead of the incoherent mess that we have right now.
Jidmah wrote: Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.
By my count there are some 21 full factions in the game. If you have to know just three or four stratagems per faction (other than your own), that's 60-80 stratagems. That's not even getting into subfaction traits, specific unit abilities and combos, and other elements of complex interactions that go well beyond stratagems.
Earlier you suggested that the game only requires an hour or two of 'homework'. Two hours split across all the factions amounts to six minutes per faction. What are you going to learn, understand, and retain in six minutes? Is that even enough time to skim the Goonhammer review, let alone take notes?
I genuinely have to wonder how many of the people saying it's not that hard to learn are playing against a limited player pool with only a handful of factions represented, with consistent army builds and subfactions. Because if there were only 4-8 factions in the game, without the dizzying variety of supplements and subfactions that can radically change how an army plays, then I could see it being pretty reasonable to learn. But as it stands if you are playing pick-up games against random opponents there is a ton of stuff to learn if you want to be able to play the game without your opponent needing to walk you through what everything does.
Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!
i would 100% take MTG-level rules for 40k instead of the incoherent mess that we have right now.
As would I. I was more taking a swipe at the assertion that as MTG has an encyclopedic wealth of data amongst it, then that is also fine for 40k, despite the games being structured differently and (IME, certainly pre 8th) attracting different kinds of people. There's a reason I, and several others round here (jokingly) call it Tragic the Saddening. Very rarely do the groups mix.
If GW wants to attract the MTG crowd then they'd best make the rules that reflect that.
Grimtuff wrote:
Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!
I feel like now that Jidmah insulted everyone and conceded his point and we're all just slagging MtG now this thread will get locked soon. I'm surprised it hasn't already honestly after the page 16-19 shitshow.
Well if GW has created a huge mess out of its flagship game just because they reject to organize their rules up to the industry standard and instead opted to double down on the bloat so that the whole gamming experience has turn into the hobby equivalent of a ponzy scheme (IE: its a fraud that can only be sustained by denial and running forward) its all but inevitable that some level of negativity starts to spread.
Ah yes, comparing a literal crime that has ruined lives to check notes a game having more rules than you personally can understand. Clearly it's the other side that is being virulent here
Tyel wrote: Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.
I'm not going to make a list, but I'll point out one of my favorites from recent memory. Iirc there was a series of buffs that amounted to a TH Terminator Squad being able to take out FOUR Knight Errants in CC in one round of combat. This was the good 'ol Marines 8.5 dex. I believe this was without much/any character support as well. Like there was still room to continue buffing.
Arachnofiend wrote: Ah yes, comparing a literal crime that has ruined lives to check notes a game having more rules than you personally can understand. Clearly it's the other side that is being virulent here
Would it be possible for your side to make an argument without deflecting, deliberately misrepresenting the argument or implying that the other side is stupid?
I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.
I look at the shooting rules, vehicle rules, blast templates etc and I see a more streamlined game than the editions before 8th Edition.
I quite like Stratagems. I know the ones I am intending to use, and I have familiarity with other Codexes but not memorization. In the interests of disclosure I do play fairly regularly, although the winter and spring saw lockdown interruptions. My first real games post-3rd lockdown were in a local tourney. No rules issues. My opponent on Saturday asked me ahead of time if I could bring my Astra Militarum since he not faced them in some time. It was my first game with my AM in months (and 2nd AM game in 9th), so I did a little reading and planning ahead of time and knew which Stratagems I intended to use. No brain meltdown and no issues during the game. I also managed my own expectations.
Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible? You might lose the game? OK - so you won't get caught out by that again. I don't like gotchas myself, to be clear, and most players will offer a quick rundown of their Strats at the start of the game if their opponent has not faced their list. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that regular posters here enjoy investing their time in thinking about the game since they are clearly invested enough to write about it? So read about some other faction's money-making Stratagems from time to time?
If Stratagems really make you angry then maybe play Open War without them? When I am playing a teaching game I will suggest that we just use core rules and datasheets.
I have seen some other game systems keep core rules complex between editions while streamlining lists (Flames of War, Space Marine to Epic). The result was disastrous. What some call bloat others call flavour.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.
I look at the shooting rules, vehicle rules, blast templates etc and I see a more streamlined game than the editions before 8th Edition.
I quite like Stratagems. I know the ones I am intending to use, and I have familiarity with other Codexes but not memorization. In the interests of disclosure I do play fairly regularly, although the winter and spring saw lockdown interruptions. My first real games post-3rd lockdown were in a local tourney. No rules issues. My opponent on Saturday asked me ahead of time if I could bring my Astra Militarum since he not faced them in some time. It was my first game with my AM in months (and 2nd AM game in 9th), so I did a little reading and planning ahead of time and knew which Stratagems I intended to use. No brain meltdown and no issues during the game. I also managed my own expectations.
Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible? You might lose the game? OK - so you won't get caught out by that again. I don't like gotchas myself, to be clear, and most players will offer a quick rundown of their Strats at the start of the game if their opponent has not faced their list. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that regular posters here enjoy investing their time in thinking about the game since they are clearly invested enough to write about it? So read about some other faction's money-making Stratagems from time to time?
If Stratagems really make you angry then maybe play Open War without them? When I am playing a teaching game I will suggest that we just use core rules and datasheets.
I have seen some other game systems keep core rules complex between editions while streamlining lists (Flames of War, Space Marine to Epic). The result was disastrous. What some call bloat others call flavour.
The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
. And, probably for the same reason you don't get to make up your units stats on the fly? Somewhere between "more than 1, but less than a million".
