Horus Heresy FOC is great! Rites of war really allow you a lot of freedom and thematic lists, and you will have further restrictions imposed to offset the freedoms you gain with any particular RoW.
It's not nearly as unbound like 8th/9th FoC, and doesn't give massive power creep like Decurion style detachments of 7th.
I hope 10th or 11th or whenever the bloated mess requires a total reset, they use the HH2.0 rules as a baseline to build off of.
I certainly wouldn't bring back the old FOC, because its incredibly limiting on how you build an army. This made sort of sense 15 years ago - but the model range is far higher, the average points cost of stuff has tended to fall (although not in all circumstances I admit).
So aside from the usual "change in a vacuum" thing these discussions always bring up, why are limitations a bad thing?
I don't think all limitations are bad - hence supporting the rule of 3.
But the FOC was in an era where books tended to have 2-3 elite/fast attack/heavy support options (some always had a few more). If you wanted to run a highlander (or no more than 2 of the same) you could have most of your collection on the table.
Today most books have 5+ options in each section. Now I guess you can say "that's fine, embrace the 3rd ed cookie cutter, just take 3 of the best unit and forget 80% of the options" - but I think that's awful for the game.
Today most books have 5+ options in each section. Now I guess you can say "that's fine, embrace the 3rd ed cookie cutter, just take 3 of the best unit and forget 80% of the options" - but I think that's awful for the game.
I agree. The old FOC makes sense if you cut down on options and sunset units so it would be more like the old edition.
I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Today most books have 5+ options in each section. Now I guess you can say "that's fine, embrace the 3rd ed cookie cutter, just take 3 of the best unit and forget 80% of the options" - but I think that's awful for the game.
Have is a big word. Who cares if a marine codex comes with 100 tanks in it, when non of them is worth being run. People take the best 3 options, because often it is all their codex has. And some books don't even have 3 options worth taking in each slot, and that would be espcialy true if GW legended all the classic marine stuff. Suddenly the melee/close range army, which is the most popular one in the game is also slow, has no real transports, no tanks and its buff and melee characters have the speed of ground infantry.
What are thee 5+ FA or Heavy support options for Ad Mecha, is there even 5+ elite options for orks etc? And this is big armies with updated model lines. Armies that didn't get a model update in 8th don't even have 3, heck some don't even have 2 for their FA/Elite/Hvy slots.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
The slots things occupy definitely need adjustment, but that's why I like Core, Special, Rare, Hero, and Lord from WHFB. It also changes what you can take based on the size of the game. Core for some armies included things from basic foot soldiers to Heavy Cavalry.
Availability from Infinity is also cool, but I'm not sure how well it would work without many changes, so I'll leave that up to others to discuss.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Dakka posters lack nuance and critical thinking. Any suggestion in this thread has been met with "that idea would never work because it doesn't plug into 9th as is right now." Completely missing the fact that obviously there would be a multitude of changes to support any drastic changes made to the core rules such as the FOC.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Meaningful choices in army building happens with good internal balance, not the FOC. Or would you argue 7th Eldar were great under the old FOC?
The old FOC was a plauge which finally 8th edition freed us from.
It was custom built on imperial factions and terrible for anything different... like anything in those editions.
The current detachment system is striking a good compromise between freedom of choice and consequences of those choices, but indeed the AoS system would probably be better.
I also like Infinity's Availability, where you can only take a certain amount of each unit, and subfactions change the Availability of units.
Yeah thats a much better system that actually allows to control how many of a spammy unit you see depending on how good it is
Instead of adding layers of rules to say you can't bring more than X of a specific unit, they could just change the availability of that unit instead.
They could make Leman Russ AVA 9 to get rid of the useless squadron rules too for example.
You shouldn't be able to bring fewer Voidweavers because they are undercosted, they should just be costed appropriately.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
If FA A is undercosted I will bring 3 of them. If I still want to bring FA B then I can only do it under the current Detachment rules. The current detachment rules are also a really neat way to handle allies, you're not just shoving 30 Guardsmen into your list, you're taking the commander needed to lead them and not just ordering them around with your Space Marine Warlord.
Jidmah wrote: The old FOC did not solve any problems, quite the opposite.
I'd rather see elite, fast attack and heavy support slots going away and be replaced by a new "you can't have infinite amounts of these" slot.
It's not like those slots have any meaning anymore, GW just assigns them to units at random.
Yep, it didn't fix anything and every army had ways around it bc of those issues. Many had ways to take extra units without slots, had ways to turn Elites and FA into troops, and everyone hated the limitations for something or another.
Just give each unit an allocation rating. The rating says how many of that unit can be on the board in your army. Then just plug and play.
For example all named characters would be a "1". Meaning that you can only have one of them in your army. A tank may be a "6" so you can have 6 of them on the table. Some units would be a "U" for unlimited. Subfaction may adjust the rating of various units to comply with their fluff. So white scars may make bike units "U" but tac squads may go from "U" to "3". And tanks may go to "0". (Obviously I'm just making up numbers and adjustments but I'm sure you get the idea).
Leo_the_Rat wrote: Just give each unit an allocation rating. The rating says how many of that unit can be on the board in your army. Then just plug and play.
For example all named characters would be a "1". Meaning that you can only have one of them in your army. A tank may be a "6" so you can have 6 of them on the table. Some units would be a "U" for unlimited. Subfaction may adjust the rating of various units to comply with their fluff. So white scars may make bike units "U" but tac squads may go from "U" to "3". And tanks may go to "0". (Obviously I'm just making up numbers and adjustments but I'm sure you get the idea).
Not sure if you know, but that is basically what Infinity does. Basic troops of a faction have Availability: Total, and most units have an availability number, and named characters are limited to 1, even if they have more than one entry. For example, my Combined Army can bring any amount of Unidron Batroids, as long as it falls within the 15 total order limit, and I can take 4 Daturazi, and Nourkias is a named character, so I can take 1 of him.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: Horus Heresy FOC is great! Rites of war really allow you a lot of freedom and thematic lists, and you will have further restrictions imposed to offset the freedoms you gain with any particular RoW.
It's not nearly as unbound like 8th/9th FoC, and doesn't give massive power creep like Decurion style detachments of 7th.
I hope 10th or 11th or whenever the bloated mess requires a total reset, they use the HH2.0 rules as a baseline to build off of.
No.
HH rules as they exist now are a hodgepodge of 7th edition 40k and Sigmar. It's a house of cards that mostly works because they only have to balance the game for 1 army.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: Horus Heresy FOC is great! Rites of war really allow you a lot of freedom and thematic lists, and you will have further restrictions imposed to offset the freedoms you gain with any particular RoW.
It's not nearly as unbound like 8th/9th FoC, and doesn't give massive power creep like Decurion style detachments of 7th.
I hope 10th or 11th or whenever the bloated mess requires a total reset, they use the HH2.0 rules as a baseline to build off of.
No.
HH rules as they exist now are a hodgepodge of 7th edition 40k and Sigmar. It's a house of cards that mostly works because they only have to balance the game for 1 army.
1 army, including Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Daemons?
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Dakka posters lack nuance and critical thinking. Any suggestion in this thread has been met with "that idea would never work because it doesn't plug into 9th as is right now." Completely missing the fact that obviously there would be a multitude of changes to support any drastic changes made to the core rules such as the FOC.
No, the problem is people who post crap like 'the old FOC tho...' do so imagining some idealized version of it where they can still bring all the fun stuff they want but don't have to deal with 'cheese' (which is generally defined by people who post stuff like that as 'anything my army might lose to').
When people say 'no, that idea is stupid' they're referring to reality, as it exists currently.
Then some dingbat comes in and say people don't understand nuance because they didn't fully build out the idea to whatever arbitrary restrictions or exceptions the posters are imagining (but not STATING) would take place.
We get it, your FOC would be super mega awesome and no cheese and perfectly balanced, we just need the 'nuance' and 'critical thinking'. Ignore the fact that the moment you post anything specific there will be 100 legitimate critiques because your ideas are almost certainly stupid to some degree.
It's an easy way to respond acerbically to criticism without actually needing to expose your own ideas.
You shouldn't be able to bring fewer Voidweavers because they are undercosted, they should just be costed appropriately.
yeah, like they currently are....
Still, limiting people to 3of's is a random limitation that often doesn't work with the fluff of the armies.
Why can't my Night Lords take 4+ squads of raptors?
Why can't Saim-ann take 4+ squads of jetbikes?
etc.
Instead of adding a blanket limitation, this would open up new aspects in the game. Letting a subfaction have more or less of a specific datasheet is a better way to represent them than giving them special rules.
If FA A is undercosted I will bring 3 of them. If I still want to bring FA B then I can only do it under the current Detachment rules. The current detachment rules are also a really neat way to handle allies, you're not just shoving 30 Guardsmen into your list, you're taking the commander needed to lead them and not just ordering them around with your Space Marine Warlord.
So change the rules for allying?
"For each unit you include that doesnt share a keyword with your warlord, pay x additionnal points"
or
"You may include units that do not share a keyword with your warlord if you also add at least one HQ that shares a keyword with that unit"
or
"You may not include units that do not share a keyword with your warlord"
or
"<Imperial guard> units may be added to any <Imperium> armies"
or
anything else really
If you were married to the FOC I'd say you get a modern brigade template, and the mandatory part would be 2 HQ choices and 3 units of troops. Reasonable scope to include a balanced army, but also at least 5 FS & HS and 8 elite choices to be getting on with.
I don't see what balance issue, or "fun" issue is being provided by saying "sure you have 10 FS & HS choices, but you can only have 3. And if you take 3 of the best datasheet that's it." I don't think its a fun choice - its just lame. It was lame for certain bigger factions even back in 3rd.
Leo_the_Rat wrote: Just give each unit an allocation rating. The rating says how many of that unit can be on the board in your army. Then just plug and play.
For example all named characters would be a "1". Meaning that you can only have one of them in your army. A tank may be a "6" so you can have 6 of them on the table. Some units would be a "U" for unlimited. Subfaction may adjust the rating of various units to comply with their fluff. So white scars may make bike units "U" but tac squads may go from "U" to "3". And tanks may go to "0". (Obviously I'm just making up numbers and adjustments but I'm sure you get the idea).
Not sure if you know, but that is basically what Infinity does. Basic troops of a faction have Availability: Total, and most units have an availability number, and named characters are limited to 1, even if they have more than one entry. For example, my Combined Army can bring any amount of Unidron Batroids, as long as it falls within the 15 total order limit, and I can take 4 Daturazi, and Nourkias is a named character, so I can take 1 of him.
I've never had exposure to Infinity. I was thinking more like Warmahordes. PP assigned every card a Force Availability Rating. "C" for character, # for how many or, "U" for unlimited. The # was usually 1 or 2.
TheBestBucketHead wrote:The slots things occupy definitely need adjustment, but that's why I like Core, Special, Rare, Hero, and Lord from WHFB. It also changes what you can take based on the size of the game. Core for some armies included things from basic foot soldiers to Heavy Cavalry.
I'm a fan of this system. I don't hate the old FOC, but having Elites/FA/HS separated out allowed some armies to pull off nasty min-maxing while others struggled with thematic lists. The Core/Special/Rare trifecta makes it easy for the developers to decide which things should be staples of an army and which things should be rarely seen, and also provides a straightforward lever to adjust composition for themed armies.
Edit: It also neatly sidesteps the Ro3 issue of being able to spam similar-but-different datasheets, and means a player can't just cherry-pick all their army's star units. That's a bit more restrictive than the current FOC, but I think the game would be much better for it.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
One thing. Do you want to encourage death stars? As the 3e foc style would do that. Ducy?
Tittliewinks22 wrote: Horus Heresy FOC is great! Rites of war really allow you a lot of freedom and thematic lists, and you will have further restrictions imposed to offset the freedoms you gain with any particular RoW.
It's not nearly as unbound like 8th/9th FoC, and doesn't give massive power creep like Decurion style detachments of 7th.
I hope 10th or 11th or whenever the bloated mess requires a total reset, they use the HH2.0 rules as a baseline to build off of.
No.
HH rules as they exist now are a hodgepodge of 7th edition 40k and Sigmar. It's a house of cards that mostly works because they only have to balance the game for 1 army.
HH rules definitely are broken if your goal is to play tournament cutthroat, what GW rule-set isn't. They are also much closer to the beer/pretzel fun with buds on a weekend time that modern 40k decided to abandon in their mission to placate the ITC crowd. I stand by a statement I made a few months back in another similar thread:
40k needs two different rulesets, one that is more narratively driven, and one that is more bare bones competitive. This current paradigm of adding laughable crusade elements to the competitive ruleset doesn't work, likewise the competitive ruleset is too complex to ever achieve true competitive balance. I firmly believe that a ruleset more akin to HH fills the role-play, "your guys" element really well and having a drastically different ruleset from competitive 40k would probably benefit the hobby as a whole. Of course this will take some actual effort from GW so it's a pipe dream.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Dakka posters lack nuance and critical thinking. Any suggestion in this thread has been met with "that idea would never work because it doesn't plug into 9th as is right now." Completely missing the fact that obviously there would be a multitude of changes to support any drastic changes made to the core rules such as the FOC.
No, the problem is people who post crap like 'the old FOC tho...' do so imagining some idealized version of it where they can still bring all the fun stuff they want but don't have to deal with 'cheese' (which is generally defined by people who post stuff like that as 'anything my army might lose to').
When people say 'no, that idea is stupid' they're referring to reality, as it exists currently.
Then some dingbat comes in and say people don't understand nuance because they didn't fully build out the idea to whatever arbitrary restrictions or exceptions the posters are imagining (but not STATING) would take place.
We get it, your FOC would be super mega awesome and no cheese and perfectly balanced, we just need the 'nuance' and 'critical thinking'. Ignore the fact that the moment you post anything specific there will be 100 legitimate critiques because your ideas are almost certainly stupid to some degree.
It's an easy way to respond acerbically to criticism without actually needing to expose your own ideas.
Thank you for confirming my original assessment of the average dakka user.
In a thread titled "What changes would you like to see?" regarding a future potential hard reset, the merits of an idea are not bound "to reality, as it exists currently" as you put it.
Stop trying to attribute motive to people who suggest things you personally do not like, or if you have some legitimate criticism, maybe don't shoot the ideas down based on your pre-existing knowledge, but rather ask for amplifying information to make a concept more clear.
Don't clog a wish list thread with elitist WAAC mentality. That's what has ruined 40k for a lot of people, hence the abundance of hope for a return to past mechanics/rule sets.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
Fewer slots would, if a faction could it, mean that it would gravitate to more powerful units. If before you could run 3 HQs, maybe a LoWcmd, and then had the option to take another detachment for more HQs, you could pick different ones, maybe a little bit less optimised. If you only have 2 HQ slots, you batcha it is going to be the best of the best 2 HQs out of the entire book. The same would got for the other slots limited to 3.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
Fewer slots would, if a faction could it, mean that it would gravitate to more powerful units. If before you could run 3 HQs, maybe a LoWcmd, and then had the option to take another detachment for more HQs, you could pick different ones, maybe a little bit less optimised. If you only have 2 HQ slots, you batcha it is going to be the best of the best 2 HQs out of the entire book. The same would got for the other slots limited to 3.
Sounds like a WAAC problem. Maybe 40k just isn't suppose to be a competitive game.
Tyel wrote: If you were married to the FOC I'd say you get a modern brigade template, and the mandatory part would be 2 HQ choices and 3 units of troops. Reasonable scope to include a balanced army, but also at least 5 FS & HS and 8 elite choices to be getting on with.
I don't see what balance issue, or "fun" issue is being provided by saying "sure you have 10 FS & HS choices, but you can only have 3. And if you take 3 of the best datasheet that's it." I don't think its a fun choice - its just lame. It was lame for certain bigger factions even back in 3rd.
That is a huge promotion to armies with an extended list of elite, heavy support and FA option and low need to run troops, or outright weak troops. If rule of 3 would stay in effect, it would be a heaven for armies like eldar and some very unfun time for armies that require multiple HQ to run efficiently. It would be a huge nerf for marines, which make up the majority of armies being played. Would also be a back door nerf to armies that don't have those 2+ different option per slot worth running.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Tittliewinks22 806314 11415087 wrote:
Sounds like a WAAC problem. Maybe 40k just isn't suppose to be a competitive game.
How is GW designing armies with 1 option worth taking in a slot , a WAAC problem. WAAC player have no problems like that. They play what is the most optimised army for given rule set. Also if something has winner and a loser at the end, and has an extensive rule set on how to earn points aka how to win, it just became competitive. If w40k was like playing house with dolls, then yes it wouldn't be competitive. But then we wouldn't be talking about rules questions or the viability of a FoC system either.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
Fewer slots would, if a faction could it, mean that it would gravitate to more powerful units. If before you could run 3 HQs, maybe a LoWcmd, and then had the option to take another detachment for more HQs, you could pick different ones, maybe a little bit less optimised. If you only have 2 HQ slots, you batcha it is going to be the best of the best 2 HQs out of the entire book. The same would got for the other slots limited to 3.
And you're telling me that people don't currently gravitate towards more powerful units? Less availability means you need to make decisions about what you take. The issue is that 40k doesn't really do that. It's usually shooting, speed, or melee, and HQs for buffs, but we need to make it so that there's really a choice between units that fill those roles, rather than picking a role and going with the best. Why, when I play Infinity, do I usually pick what I pick? It's because the units I pick play in a style I want them to play. I could go heavy on hacking, melee, shooting, speed, camo, or whatever. Or, I could take a combination of units that do what I need for the mission at hand, specialists to do the mission, and build my army around completing a goal and supporting the other units. When I take a shooty and a stabby unit, the shooty supports the stabby, which makes its way to the big enemy robots, and stabs it to death. The hackers support or deny support, or just shut down certain units. I have to think a lot more about the units and the strategy I want to employ, even just on a small scale.
For instance, I can use a smoke grenade guy to bring a forward observer up to an enemy and target them, so that my missile bot can fire on their shooty guy, then have my forward observer grab the objective.
In 40k, I can move forward, shoot, charge, and try to keep my guys in cover or unseen while collecting points on an objective.
Now, I am purely casual, so I don't have a high level understanding of 40k, but there's little inter-unit, I forget the word, so I'm using collaboration, someone can correct me. Very little inter-unit collaboration that leads to decision making for a force organization chart, and there should be. I haven't play HH 2.0 yet, but I like the idea of pinning stopping reactions, and hope that I can enjoy the game casually, as I do Infinity.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I forgot to include that it's also another balance problem. Just don't have one or two clearly superior choices, and you're better off.
You shouldn't be able to bring fewer Voidweavers because they are undercosted, they should just be costed appropriately.
yeah, like they currently are....
Still, limiting people to 3of's is a random limitation that often doesn't work with the fluff of the armies.
Why can't my Night Lords take 4+ squads of raptors? Why can't Saim-ann take 4+ squads of jetbikes?
etc.
Instead of adding a blanket limitation, this would open up new aspects in the game. Letting a subfaction have more or less of a specific datasheet is a better way to represent them than giving them special rules.
I don't know whether Voidweavers are costed correctly and I wasn't implying one way or another, I know GW increased their price instead of limiting the amount of Voidweavers you can take and I think that was the right call. Well, vehicle units that split up at the start of the game shouldn't be a thing. If you want to take a unit of vehicles they should actually act as a unit the whole game. Otherwise, you're just taking 3 tanks in one slot and we are back to slots meaning nothing.
Night Lords fluff does not say they only use Raptors, so having a limit of 3 units works perfectly fine. Limiting non-Troops units means we don't see armies with only two datasheets, those are boring to look at and play against.
I don't see why Night Lords need to spam Raptors in matched play, there is Crusade and open play if you want to get up to silly stuff, but don't be surprised when someone wants to try out their totally fluffy 7 Plagueburst Crawler list in an environment where those kinds of lists are accepted and you might think you'll catch it but sometimes the points shake out in a way where two units of Terminators that look the same on the surface have vastly different degrees of pts-effectiveness and spamming 7 units of one is problematic. Matched Play is for pick-up games and competitive games. That's the only place Ro3 exists. GW doesn't know whether Plagueburst Crawlers or Raptors are okay to spam because they are incompetent hacks, I don't trust them with the power. They would probably also do a lot of swings in the number of units people can bring and tonnes of people would have their collections and lists totally invalidated because the number of units allowed was changed from 6 to 3 overnight.
Voidweavers needed to be in units bc the Quins army is lacking even though they have many other units that could be added (they have scouts, hqs on bikes, for example). It was a good move to keep VWs as a squad as well. I do not like MCs and Tanks able to split after deployed personally.
Fewer slot, only buff up armies which get stuff like squadrons or multiple good units in multiple slots. If your army before required you running 6 elite units, and GW decided to give you no good heavy support or no good FA, then you are not just losing 3 units which were obligatory to run before, you are now in a situation where you don't have anything to replace them with.
Infinity is impossible to compare to w40k. The number of units alone and how many of them are good is way different. But I guess I could imagine a comperable situation. Lets say CB tomorrow says no links. a hassasin players lives with it, same with the yu jing and pan'o player. Maybe they run more reactionary units, more bots etc They have to adapt, but it is okey. But on the other side you have the Tatars and the US dudes asking, what are we suppose to do now?
a_typical_hero wrote: I've been playing a version of the game alot for the past few months that includes facing.
It's really not rocket science to get them right. I wonder how much of this is based on people just repeating what they read somewhere or exaggerating their memories.
Mind sharing the system? Always interested in seeing what people do there.
I don't see why Night Lords need to spam Raptors in matched play, there is Crusade and open play if you want to get up to silly stuff, but don't be surprised when someone wants to try out their totally fluffy 7 Plagueburst Crawler list in an environment where those kinds of lists are accepted and you might think you'll catch it but sometimes the points shake out in a way where two units of Terminators that look the same on the surface have vastly different degrees of pts-effectiveness and spamming 7 units of one is problematic. Matched Play is for pick-up games and competitive games. That's the only place Ro3 exists. GW doesn't know whether Plagueburst Crawlers or Raptors are okay to spam because they are incompetent hacks, I don't trust them with the power. They would probably also do a lot of swings in the number of units people can bring and tonnes of people would have their collections and lists totally invalidated because the number of units allowed was changed from 6 to 3 overnight.
I don't know maybe people want their armies or the stuff they like to be playable in matched played, because it is the most often way the game is played, and open is just wierd ? NL are the legion that had huge raptor formations and from them the whole raptor cult started, why shouldn't some NL players want to play a Raptor base army. And lets better not get in to why a chaos lord from the NL faction can't even have a jump pack , but somehow a BL character can.
And as lowering the number of models possible to play, GW doesn't care about what players lose. GK got advertised as an army with a cool new codex, where you can synergise two different brotherhoods and run 2 GM NDKs. Well that lasted less then 6 months, and GW removed both options giving nothing back.
Raptors could also be moves to the Troop choice section for Night Lords, like how Grey Knights have Terminators for troops. This would allow for more Raptors to be used.
And, if Infinity were to take away fireteams, nothing of my example would stop working. And there's nothing innate about 40k that means units cannot compliment each other. 40k just needs to be written in a way that's more interactive for things like that to happen. But you're right, Infinity is very different from 40k, so it's not a good example.
HH 2.0 has reactions and ways to keep units from being able to react. It's very different from Infinity, but it's still a reaction system, and other units can support each other, even if less so. So, why can't 40k manage to have a system where one/two units are not at the top of each category, and you pick based on how you want units to interact, rather than units barely affecting one another outside of buffs that usually only come from characters?
There will be a reaction mechanic in 10th, the only question is what form that will take. It could be as small as additional generic stratagems beyond overwatch, up to a whole new system.
I would love a whole system based around reactions, but not how HH does them necessarily. I'd prefer minor reactions you could take, and then more drastic ones that will severely affect how the unit can act on your turn.
For example, Going to Ground might give a cover bonus, but Digging In might give an invulnerable save, but you can't move until after your turn is over. Probably not balanced, but I hope interesting decisions can be made, and without having to wait an hour until you can do your thing.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Raptors could also be moves to the Troop choice section for Night Lords, like how Grey Knights have Terminators for troops. This would allow for more Raptors to be used.
And, if Infinity were to take away fireteams, nothing of my example would stop working. And there's nothing innate about 40k that means units cannot compliment each other. 40k just needs to be written in a way that's more interactive for things like that to happen. But you're right, Infinity is very different from 40k, so it's not a good example.
HH 2.0 has reactions and ways to keep units from being able to react. It's very different from Infinity, but it's still a reaction system, and other units can support each other, even if less so. So, why can't 40k manage to have a system where one/two units are not at the top of each category, and you pick based on how you want units to interact, rather than units barely affecting one another outside of buffs that usually only come from characters?
Then that gives them ObSec if we stay with ObSec, or why even bother at that point with a FoC if you are moving everything around? Just keep factions having some open slots. A FoC with 3 open slots might just be better in general. Or Keep CP for building armies and extra things like 1 CP for an extra slot.
I'd completely redo missions in general, so obsec isn't much of a concern. In addition, moving units around is a completely sensible change, as some armies utilize some choices more. However, as I've said before, WHFB's Force Org was much better for this, with Core, Special, and Rare. Let's say that Raptors and Jump Packs are Special troops normally, but Night Lords can use them as core. Or, if we were using Infinity Availability, they could go from AVA 3 for most Chaos Marine armies, to AVA 6 or Total for Night Lords.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
Fewer slots would, if a faction could it, mean that it would gravitate to more powerful units. If before you could run 3 HQs, maybe a LoWcmd, and then had the option to take another detachment for more HQs, you could pick different ones, maybe a little bit less optimised. If you only have 2 HQ slots, you batcha it is going to be the best of the best 2 HQs out of the entire book. The same would got for the other slots limited to 3.
Sounds like a WAAC problem. Maybe 40k just isn't suppose to be a competitive game.
It has a set winner and loser. It is going to be a competitive game regardless of your defense of badly written rules because muh narrative.
Which by the way the game isn't good for narrative play because of the core rules themselves LOL
What I would like to see? - Free rules - Stratagems culled - Return of the old FoC chart, the detachment rules are too much - Sub factions gone. Ironically, it felt a lot less restrictive back when you didn't have to worry about what <buzzword> your army is. - Some sort of suppression mechanic, ideally tied with morale to give it some more gameplay value. - Units actually falling back when they break instead of several models having a fatal heart attack. Because as we all know, Necrons have weak hearts.
Spoletta wrote: The current detachment system is striking a good compromise between freedom of choice and consequences of those choices...
I disagree. I don't think there are any real consequences in the current system. You can still just take whatever you want with a meagre expenditure of CP.
And I think percentage based systems are awful. That can lead to situations where a unit goes from legal to illegal because of a 1 point difference (or even less than). That kind of arbitrary nonsense should not be in the game.
Like I've said the best system would let you pick any units you'd like in your army. GW would just have to have a number on each datasheet that says the maximum number of those units you are allowed to have. Then just stand back and mix to your heart's content.
Then that gives them ObSec if we stay with ObSec, or why even bother at that point with a FoC if you are moving everything around? Just keep factions having some open slots. A FoC with 3 open slots might just be better in general. Or Keep CP for building armies and extra things like 1 CP for an extra slot.
because shuffling stuff around in the FoC depending on the subfaction adds more flavor than getting +1 ot -1 to certain dice rolls like we currently have
Objective Secured is a bad way to go about it. Instead, models should have a stat to represent a worth holding objectives. Even just using the wound stat would work for that potentially but the idea needs working on.
I agree. It baffles me how a lone eldar guardsman can hold an objective when a Leman Russ MBT is sitting right next to him. I mean really he isn't concerned in the least about being able to overcome a tank? In HtH no less. Ob Sec should be done away with or at least modified to take who is holding vs who is contesting into account somehow.
H.B.M.C. wrote: And I think percentage based systems are awful. That can lead to situations where a unit goes from legal to illegal because of a 1 point difference (or even less than). That kind of arbitrary nonsense should not be in the game.
I'll take those extremely rare edge cases over any system where 10 Boyz are considered totally identical for force composition purposes to 30 Boyz, or a Guard company commander is considered equivalent to a Hive Tyrant. Trying to min-max while coming in under the points limit is something we already deal with, but slot-based systems are overly coarse from the outset and have no provision for the actual value of the unit occupying a slot.
Agreed that the current system isn't remotely constraining enough, but systems like the old FOC affected different armies very differently and I don't think that was ideal either. Specifying that, say, you have to spend 500+ points on Core and can't spend more than 500pts on Rare isn't that hard to deal with.
Then that gives them ObSec if we stay with ObSec, or why even bother at that point with a FoC if you are moving everything around? Just keep factions having some open slots. A FoC with 3 open slots might just be better in general. Or Keep CP for building armies and extra things like 1 CP for an extra slot.
because shuffling stuff around in the FoC depending on the subfaction adds more flavor than getting +1 ot -1 to certain dice rolls like we currently have
Yeah make those free instead of spending CP. That way you get the best of both worlds.
Jidmah wrote: The old FOC did not solve any problems, quite the opposite.
I'd rather see elite, fast attack and heavy support slots going away and be replaced by a new "you can't have infinite amounts of these" slot.
It's not like those slots have any meaning anymore, GW just assigns them to units at random.
So like 2nd edition's percentages? IIRC you needed like 50% of your troops (which included like Terminators and Assault Squads, so wasn't just "Troops" in the sense of today), and then I think it was 25% in support and 25% in characters, and some armies (e.g. Marines) could get 25% of allies (e.g. Guard)
I always felt that was fine. "Troops" encompassed enough to have plenty of themed armies, and the percentages meant you couldn't skew hard into some other things.
Gork, no. Arbitrary percentages are even worse than arbitrary battle roles.
There should be something like commander, sub-commander, core units(units readily available to an army, kind of in the 2nd ed sense of "troops" you described), support units, LoW and fortifications. Some of you with more experience in using broadswords and bows instead of chainswords and bolters might recognize those from somewhere.
If I were the one to write the rules, for combat patrol/incursion/strike force/onslaught it would work something like this: - commanders are warbosses, chaos lords, tau commanders, hive tyrants, overlords, captains, daemon princes etc. It would also include current LoW supreme commanders like Mortarion, the Silent King or Gulliman. - sub-commanders are tech marines, weird boyz, apothecaries, noxious blightbringers and similar characters. In essence, support character which are not likely to lead a larger army. - Each character has a command value, which is the number of units it can command. Core units require a single point to command, support units cost two. LoW and foritfications have bespoke values, an ADL might cost 0 (there is nothing to command), while a stompa might be 4. - An army has 1/2/3/4 warlord slots, putting a commander into such a slot unlocks 2 subcommander slots. Using a sub-commander as your warlord won't unlock any extra slots. - Commanders can be put into sub-commander slots, but this will significantly reduce their command value. - Sub-commanders can have a command value of 0, but most will have enough to support a limited army at 500 points. - A character can have "favored units". For example, an Officer of the Fleet would favor "AERONAUTICA IMPERIALIS", a deffkilla wartrike "SPEED FREEKS" and a Master of Possession "DAEMONKIN". A character can use their command value to support twice as many favored units, effectively getting two core units or one support unit per point. Characters with favored units pay double for non-favored units. - Sub-factions can have favored units as well, but don't pay double for units unless they are explicitly stated as disfavored. - There still should be a separate limit on datasheets and aircraft Bonus points for implementing IGOUGO and requiring the commanders to actually be alive for units to be able to act freely.
Example: An ork army could be lead by a foot warboss with a command value of 7 and no favored units. This allows him to bring 2 mobs of boyz a retinue of nobz and 2 units of mek gunz (2 each = 4). He then adds a mek as sub-commander with command value 2 who favors VEHICLE and adds two units of killa kanz (reduced to 1 each). As his second sub-commander he picks a beastboss who favors BEAST SNAGGAS. Because the beastboss normally is a commander, his command value gets reduced to 3. Despite that, he can now bring 4 units of beastsnagga boyz (reduced to 0.5 each) and a unit of squig riders (reduced to 1).
Disclaimer: All numbers are pulled out of thin air. This is just a concept, not a finished rule, as this is not the suggested rules forum.
Obviously, implementing such a concept would require great understanding of each army and careful testing. Since I'm not delusional, I know GW won't be able to do that, so I'd settle for reducing the battle roles to commander, sub-commander, core units and support units and GW giving us new FOC/CAD/detachments that support the new roles.
Jidmah wrote: The old FOC did not solve any problems, quite the opposite.
I'd rather see elite, fast attack and heavy support slots going away and be replaced by a new "you can't have infinite amounts of these" slot.
It's not like those slots have any meaning anymore, GW just assigns them to units at random.
So like 2nd edition's percentages? IIRC you needed like 50% of your troops (which included like Terminators and Assault Squads, so wasn't just "Troops" in the sense of today), and then I think it was 25% in support and 25% in characters, and some armies (e.g. Marines) could get 25% of allies (e.g. Guard)
I always felt that was fine. "Troops" encompassed enough to have plenty of themed armies, and the percentages meant you couldn't skew hard into some other things.
Gork, no. Arbitrary percentages are even worse than arbitrary battle roles.
There should be something like commander, sub-commander, core units(units readily available to an army, kind of in the 2nd ed sense of "troops" you described), support units, LoW and fortifications. Some of you with more experience in using broadswords and bows instead of chainswords and bolters might recognize those from somewhere.
If I were the one to write the rules, for combat patrol/incursion/strike force/onslaught it would work something like this:
- commanders are warbosses, chaos lords, tau commanders, hive tyrants, overlords, captains, daemon princes etc. It would also include current LoW supreme commanders like Mortarion, the Silent King or Gulliman.
- sub-commanders are tech marines, weird boyz, apothecaries, noxious blightbringers and similar characters. In essence, support character which are not likely to lead a larger army.
- Each character has a command value, which is the number of units it can command. Core units require a single point to command, support units cost two. LoW and foritfications have bespoke values, an ADL might cost 0 (there is nothing to command), while a stompa might be 4.
- An army has 1/2/3/4 warlord slots, putting a commander into such a slot unlocks 2 subcommander slots. Using a sub-commander as your warlord won't unlock any extra slots.
- Commanders can be put into sub-commander slots, but this will significantly reduce their command value.
- Sub-commanders can have a command value of 0, but most will have enough to support a limited army at 500 points.
- A character can have "favored units". For example, an Officer of the Fleet would favor "AERONAUTICA IMPERIALIS", a deffkilla wartrike "SPEED FREEKS" and a Master of Possession "DAEMONKIN". A character can use their command value to support twice as many favored units, effectively getting two core units or one support unit per point. Characters with favored units pay double for non-favored units.
- Sub-factions can have favored units as well, but don't pay double for units unless they are explicitly stated as disfavored.
- There still should be a separate limit on datasheets and aircraft
Bonus points for implementing IGOUGO and requiring the commanders to actually be alive for units to be able to act freely.
Example:
An ork army could be lead by a foot warboss with a command value of 7 and no favored units. This allows him to bring 2 mobs of boyz a retinue of nobz and 2 units of mek gunz (2 each = 4).
He then adds a mek as sub-commander with command value 2 who favors VEHICLE and adds two units of killa kanz (reduced to 1 each).
As his second sub-commander he picks a beastboss who favors BEAST SNAGGAS. Because the beastboss normally is a commander, his command value gets reduced to 3. Despite that, he can now bring 4 units of beastsnagga boyz (reduced to 0.5 each) and a unit of squig riders (reduced to 1).
Disclaimer: All numbers are pulled out of thin air. This is just a concept, not a finished rule, as this is not the suggested rules forum.
Obviously, implementing such a concept would require great understanding of each army and careful testing. Since I'm not delusional, I know GW won't be able to do that, so I'd settle for reducing the battle roles to commander, sub-commander, core units and support units and GW giving us new FOC/CAD/detachments that support the new roles.
That's a very interesting system but I can already hear the cries of anguish of many players that their characters have lower command limits than characters they deem to be lessers. For instance, a Guard Company Commander should have a higher command limit than a Space Marine Captain, just because of how many troops each is supposed to be commanding. It could be worked around and, of course, angry shouting happens whenever you change anything anyways.
Amishprn86 wrote:Old FoC needs to have a way to add more slots no matter what at this point.
Maybe at 3-4K+ point games get one extra slot in each category. IIRC that was similar to what Apocalypse did, but I could be very wrong there.
Jidmah wrote:The old FOC did not solve any problems, quite the opposite.
I'd rather see elite, fast attack and heavy support slots going away and be replaced by a new "you can't have infinite amounts of these" slot.
It's not like those slots have any meaning anymore, GW just assigns them to units at random.
It'd solve a lot of problems, by giving army building a simple, convenient and easy to understand structure to build on, rather than the extremely convoluted mess of the current detachment system.
vict0988 wrote: If 3rd ed was perfect for you then why wouldn't you just want a reprint and have a different game for those that want it? Is it that you want to play with Primaris in 3rd?
I do want a reprint of the 3rd ed. The rulebooks, codexs and supplements were far superior to the ones we have today, cheaper and had more content. As far as primaris go, they'd fit in fine in 3rd, just need a points tweak, especially since regular marines would go back to 1 wound, 15-16ish point models.
ProfSrlojohn wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: Just revert back to 3rd ed. when they had everything fairly right on the money. Remove Titans, Grey Knights, and Custodes from the main game. (But that's really just personal wish.) Except in small support units to SM, IG, Sisters, etc.
I'm curious (as I always am when I see this kind of opinion) how would you redistribute them? Would you roll Inquisition back into grey-knights and Sisters and have them like that? Or wipe them entirely? What about Custodes? etc.
Something like that. 3rd had the whole 'Heroes of the Imperium' codex with units that slotted into SM, IG, and Sisters armies, so a HQ slot could be an Inquisitor, Elite slot for Grey Knight Termies, etc. I'd LIKE to see Custodes and GK wiped out but at least GK had been around in lore sending out small squads to bolster armies in lore, before they got their own army and became the 'if you see us kill demons, we kill you too' faction. So I'd be cool if they stayed as a supplement attachment to other armies, rather than operate as a full-on army alone, which given the 'scope' of 40k are too small of a presence to be a mainline army.
I'd most certainly wipe Titans out of the main game. They have no place in mainline 40K except for being backdrop pieces, terrain or in huge point 5k+ games.
Karol wrote:Most armies, specialy the new ones that never existed under the old FoC system, are not created to function under the 2xHQs, 6xTroops, 3xeverything else.
It wouldn't just require the rewriting of a FoC, but rewriting entire books. Which by GW standards means the non old FoC armies would be, maybe, ready for the new FoC games in 2 editions.
Well 10th is rumored to be a clean sweep edition, so the codexes will be rewritten anyway, or at least indexed and then codified. (Wish we'd never LEFT the indexes) But everything short of titans fits the FoC mold just fine.
I certainly wouldn't bring back the old FOC, because its incredibly limiting on how you build an army. This made sort of sense 15 years ago - but the model range is far higher, the average points cost of stuff has tended to fall (although not in all circumstances I admit).
So aside from the usual "change in a vacuum" thing these discussions always bring up, why are limitations a bad thing?
I don't think all limitations are bad - hence supporting the rule of 3. But the FOC was in an era where books tended to have 2-3 elite/fast attack/heavy support options (some always had a few more). If you wanted to run a highlander (or no more than 2 of the same) you could have most of your collection on the table.
Today most books have 5+ options in each section. Now I guess you can say "that's fine, embrace the 3rd ed cookie cutter, just take 3 of the best unit and forget 80% of the options" - but I think that's awful for the game.
With Legends destroying so many units, the model range really isn't that much bigger. But limits are badly needed right now and would help curb some of the power creep. And points do need a readjustment but that'd happen anyway if it's a clean sweep. So why not go back to the best system in the game? Problem is right now whether it's 3-5 or 10 choices of a category, people are spamming one choice over and over again anyway. But at least bringing back FoC it curbs that spamming down a bit, and forces people to build balanced lists.
Slipspace wrote:
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Exactly, the restrictions would make meaningful and thematic choices more viable, instead of just spam 'x' to win. It's why the WAAC players don't want structure. And yeah, there'd need to be adjustments to post FOC armies, but it wouldn't be that major of an undertaking.
Spoletta wrote:The old FOC was a plauge which finally 8th edition freed us from.
It was custom built on imperial factions and terrible for anything different... like anything in those editions.
The current detachment system is striking a good compromise between freedom of choice and consequences of those choices, but indeed the AoS system would probably be better.
8th was terrible gunk, and 9th is even worse. The game is absolute unplayable, unfun garbage right now.
And no, it wasn't built on the imperial factions, it worked just fine for Orks, Eldar, Nids, etc.
There are no consequences of the current system. Just choose whatever gives the most CP for the points, and spam away. And there's no freedom of choice or tactical thought in army building either.
Amishprn86 wrote:
Yep, it didn't fix anything and every army had ways around it bc of those issues. Many had ways to take extra units without slots, had ways to turn Elites and FA into troops, and everyone hated the limitations for something or another.
Usually though that was for flavor of that particular army, like Ravenwing moving bikes and speeders to troops. IG tank armies, Or Saim Hann gets jetbikes and vypers as troops. While Biel Tan got elite aspects for troops, Or certain Chaos god specific units. All of that is flavor, that makes an entire seperate army playable in a paragraph, in what GW would later bork up into whole standalone superfluous books. No one hated that at all.
If FA A is undercosted I will bring 3 of them. If I still want to bring FA B then I can only do it under the current Detachment rules. The current detachment rules are also a really neat way to handle allies, you're not just shoving 30 Guardsmen into your list, you're taking the commander needed to lead them and not just ordering them around with your Space Marine Warlord.
So change the rules for allying?
Again FoC would allow you to just have a sentence in the army list like "Night Lords: Raptors and Warp Talons may be taken as Troops and FA" And there, you have the entirety of what MAKES the Night Lords' heartbeat in single, easy to read blurb.
Also, best way to fix allies is to do away with them entirely. It's another aspect of the current game that doesn't really belong and convolutes things.
tneva82 wrote:
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
One thing. Do you want to encourage death stars? As the 3e foc style would do that. Ducy?
Myself never been fan of death stars.
FoC didn't make death stars, and you still have issues with death stars even now, except now it's even worse with so many ICs being elite choices.
Karol wrote:
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
Fewer slots would, if a faction could it, mean that it would gravitate to more powerful units. If before you could run 3 HQs, maybe a LoWcmd, and then had the option to take another detachment for more HQs, you could pick different ones, maybe a little bit less optimised. If you only have 2 HQ slots, you batcha it is going to be the best of the best 2 HQs out of the entire book. The same would got for the other slots limited to 3.
Thing is the 2 best HQs for one playstyle aren't going to be/at least in a good rules system 'shouldn't' be the best HQs for another playstyle often within the same army. By having an FoC you have to focus on what your style, flavor, and theme of your army is.
CthuluIsSpy wrote:What I would like to see? - Free rules - Stratagems culled - Return of the old FoC chart, the detachment rules are too much - Sub factions gone. Ironically, it felt a lot less restrictive back when you didn't have to worry about what <buzzword> your army is. - Some sort of suppression mechanic, ideally tied with morale to give it some more gameplay value. - Units actually falling back when they break instead of several models having a fatal heart attack. Because as we all know, Necrons have weak hearts.
Yup this is good, at least return subfactions to paragraph rules that fit on a page in the rulebook. Getting rid of keyword shenanigins would be great. Like, if your army is Salamanders, they are Salamanders, Period. And yes, that could make sniping really fun, bring back the pinning test a sniper shot could cause. And make it effect even fearless units, since seeing a buddy get his head THWAMPED off with a sniper round should still make even a berzerker stop to try and find WHO shot at them and WHERE are they. And again yes. Make units fall back again, break and run, and bring back the fun of sweeping advance, as winning a combat and breaking through deep into enemy territory, riding the momentum always felt so good and thematic.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Meaningful choices in army building happens with good internal balance, not the FOC. Or would you argue 7th Eldar were great under the old FOC?
Why is this an either/or choice? Restrictions and internal balance are both required to improve the game, IMO. I don't think anyone's suggested just bringing back the FOC would be some sort of magic bullet that immediately restores balance to the game. More restrictions on list building might help curb some of the current abuses, though, while also allowing balance to be more easily maintained because every army is working to the same restrictions.
Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
I don't want Blood Angels to be the "Assault Marine spam" chapter, because that is not what they are in the fluff. Give them a jump pack relic, a melee psychic discipline and melee Stratagems and you've got a chapter that does melee better than anyone but still has freaking tonnes of Tactical Marines/Intercessors as they do in the fluff.
Dolnikan wrote: That's a very interesting system but I can already hear the cries of anguish of many players that their characters have lower command limits than characters they deem to be lessers. For instance, a Guard Company Commander should have a higher command limit than a Space Marine Captain, just because of how many troops each is supposed to be commanding. It could be worked around and, of course, angry shouting happens whenever you change anything anyways.
There will be cries of anguish about anything.
And honestly, there is no reason to take the opinion of people into consideration who still haven't understood that the numbers on a datasheet are not an exact representation of the lore, but rather an abstract thing to make the game as a whole look and feel as it should.
In vision a guard company commander should be able to command a proper guard regiment which can take different shapes depending on which sub-commanders he picks. A master of ordnance and a platoon commander would result in an infantry-heavy list with artillery to back it up. A pair of tank commanders would result in an armored spearhead, bringing two officers of the fleet should enable an elysian-style air cavalry list, and so on.
Considering how many different types of officers AM has, it would probably even make sense to allow them to have more sub-commanders than other armies.
On the flip side, a SM captain supported by a sergeant should be sufficient to support any 2000 points army with a healthy balance between core and support and would only require additional sub-commanders if you want to lean heavily into a certain theme.
I kind of feel it just amounts to talking past each other.
The rule of 3 is there to balance the game. It was brought in because there were clear problems when you can spam one datasheet over and over again. Here's my army of Tau Commanders, flying Hive Tyrants, Culexus Assassins etc. Its a shame the rule got brought in just before the DE codex otherwise you'd have had armies of say a dozen Ravagers etc.
Yes GW should balance the datasheets better. Yes GW could go through and carefully curate each datasheet because spamming "bad" datasheets is rarely ever a problem. I doubt 4 units of Raptors would be a problem etc. But GW are useless and this fix works. 3 units of Raptors and 3 units of Warp Talons feels like enough to be getting on with if you love jump pack guys. That can get you up to 1500~ points.
By contrast, with the FOC if you take 3 units of raptors you can take no warp talons, or spawn, bikers etc. That's very boring.
And it's not about balance. Why is balance improved to have say an Ork Army with a unit of Lootas, Killa Kans and a Deff Dread barred from bringing along another unit of say Flash Gitz, but they can take a unit of Koptas or Tankbustas? In fact they could have 3 units of Koptas. But if they do, they better not take any Squighogz or bikes, think of the balance implications?
vict0988 wrote: Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
I don't want Blood Angels to be the "Assault Marine spam" chapter, because that is not what they are in the fluff. Give them a jump pack relic, a melee psychic discipline and melee Stratagems and you've got a chapter that does melee better than anyone but still has freaking tonnes of Tactical Marines/Intercessors as they do in the fluff.
vict0988 wrote: Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
Ah, the good old strawman fallacy. As someone who's advocating for the return of the old FOC, you've utterly failed to describe my motivations or opinions. I don't think anyone should have the ability to ignore the FOC restrictions. NL players can still concentrate on Raptors/Warp Talons but they can't take nothing but those units. Maybe you could argue Warp Talons in general should be Elites. Even if they remain FA, 30 jump pack infantry is plenty to represent NL.
What you're describing about having to choose between 3 units of Scarabs and 3 of Wraiths, or some combination of the two, is the entire point of bringing back the FOC. It's a feature, not a bug.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Why does it encourage Death Stars, and why does the current system of detachments not allow for them?
If you can take only 3 elites for example there's hardly reason to go for MSU elites. You go for few BIG squads.
Aka deathstars.
In current system you generally run out of points before you run out of slots. Even with MSU.
It's basic math. MSU=cheap squads=you fit more=you run out of slots.
So since you can't get multiple cheap squads you go for few big squads. Hello death stars.
Guess you could fill up slots and end up with under point level army...but yeah that's going to work...
Big squads don't necessarily lead to deathstars. If they do, and those deathstars are effective, nothing in the current system prevents them either. Deathstars are a points and balance issue, often exacerbated by the too-permissive FOC because you can easily take all the support models you need for your big deathstar units.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: scarabs probably shouldn't be a fast attack choice to begin with though. They are meant to be the most common part of a necron army.
Ditto for rippers. Both should be an out of FoC unit where they don't take up a slot, but you still have to fill slots to take them.
And what happens when GW sticks their fingers in the pie? Some armies get shafted and lose out on tonnes of army builds while others basically play an unbound army. Better for everyone to play by 9th's psudeo unbound rules with some armies being weaker but at least legal because of the psudeo-random battlefield role they have been assigned.
Removing Scarabs the question then becomes why can I not take 3x3 Wraiths + 3x3 Ophydian Destroyers while you can take 6x5 Raptors? What harm is there in letting me build the list I want to build? It's way less likely to be game-breaking since there are more datasheets so the chance of all of them being OP is far lower. There will be a tonne of spammy lists that are trash (as Raptor spam likely would be) and then some things like Plagueburst Crawler spam was OP. Ro3 curbs that. FOC also curbs it, but there is no reason why some units are in the same battlefield role, they simply don't pose a problem when taken together.
biggest change i would want is weapons options/sideboard. paying for a heavy or special weapon in a squad should just be a cost then choose said weapon at deployment. ditto for deploying a tank with weapons options.
In theory you would probably know what you were facing so imagine knowing there is a chaos knight warband taking over a minor mechanicum refinery planet then a nearby imperial guard regiment is assigned to go to the planet and before disembarking the commisar tells them since they were going to an ork infestation originally they need to keep to that plan and leave the meltas on the ship and take nothing but flamers.
In a perfect world it would be alternate unit deployment returning where the weapons options are chosen at the time of dropping the model or unit.
as for sideboard something like a 20% of the points can be swapped for other units at deployment to fit the battle so long as you do not go over points.
vict0988 wrote: Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
WOW, you're being so disingenuous, just because i only listed 2 examples, you assume i don't want your necrons to get the same treatment?
And no, if i want my whole army to be with jump packs, 3x10 (the actual limit) isn't enough. I want to be able to run some anti-tank squads with melta AND some anti infantry squads with flamers. And to me, bringing squads of 10 is less sneaky than what i envision my NL warband to fight like. Small squads hidden away that pounce on their prey
Anyway, i'll say it again : GET RID OF THE FOC, put a limit on the datasheet themselves, allow subfactions to change the limits of certain units
yeah, 40k and SW:legions are the only games i play that restrict you on unit type rather than the unit themselves.
It feels wrong in both games (little bit less so in Legions since there is not as many unit choices overall anyway).
Being unable to take a spawn because you already have 3 other FA is so stupid.
And not every army works with a rigid FoC so you can't even say its from a fluff perspective (and neither is it from a balance perspective since the game is unbalanced as it is anyway)
I think how Conquest handles it is interesting; each character can take a warband that has it's own composition, and it specifies what units are in his warband, up to 4 units. The choices are separated into Mainstay and Restricted; you can have as many Mainstay units as you want, but you can only have 1 restricted per Mainstay.
What's brilliant though is that the choices aren't uniform; some characters can take units that aren't available to others, and what's restricted to one warband can be mainstay to another.
You can probably do something like that with Subfactions in 40k.
Open FOC but keeping a rule of 3 or other unit cap limit is more restrictive than a FOC with ways to make units take up other slots.
Using the Night Lord Raptor Example:
In current 40k, you can not have more than 3 units of raptors period. Because of the unit cap of 3.
If using a HH style system with a rigid FOC but a Right of War that opens up the options: you could take 3 units of raptors in your 3 FA slots, but also take up to 6 more units in your 6 troop slots!
I think what the staunch anti-FOC fan's are overlooking is that the purpose of slot restriction rather than unit restriction ensure there's more meaningful choice. Sure you have 3 FA slots, and if you fill all 3 with the same unit, you now forgo the other options. If there's one option that is clearly superior then that's not a FOC issue, it's an internal unit balance issue, and lets face it that will happen with GW rules team...
vict0988 wrote: Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
Many Necron players want to do Canoptek armies, so I'm not sure what you're rambling about as most would support this to begin with. Or is this just old man yelling at cloud?
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I'm not quite sure why having more options means that the FoC doesn't work, if the whole idea is to have you make choices. Unless your point is that people will just pick the best options, in which case it's a balance issue first and foremost.
Yeah, it's confusing to me that people complaint he old FOC would be too restrictive, when the whole point of suggesting its return is to introduce some meaningful restrictions (and therefore choices) in army building. If the old FOC did return there would certainly need to be changes to some of the Codexes and the slots some things occupy, but I'd always assumed that was taken as read.
Meaningful choices in army building happens with good internal balance, not the FOC. Or would you argue 7th Eldar were great under the old FOC?
Why is this an either/or choice? Restrictions and internal balance are both required to improve the game, IMO. I don't think anyone's suggested just bringing back the FOC would be some sort of magic bullet that immediately restores balance to the game. More restrictions on list building might help curb some of the current abuses, though, while also allowing balance to be more easily maintained because every army is working to the same restrictions.
It is based on your post.
And no, those restrictions don't actually JUST help. Despite what the other guy I replied to said, Blood Angels ARE an Assault Marine Chapter. Why shouldn't Chapters have a way to access more? 3×10 isn't broken but somehow 4×5 is? The FOC being brought back and GW's arbitrary rule of three are created out of their laziness to balance, not for balance itself.
The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
But a standard FOC would also let you take entirely infantry or entirely vehicle lists in a lot of instances. Or so close to entirely one unit type that it's a moot point. Skew has always existed and always will, until there is an actual gameplay benefit/incentive to take a balanced list of varied unit types.
(I am aware that there are plenty of armies/lists that are doing well competitively that are a healthy mix of unit types, but my point about skew stands)
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
Mostly because of factions with ways around FOC restrictions like squadrons. The fact that it has been broken for the 25yrs shouldn't mean we should get to break it even more.
Moreover percentage based limits should be more effective at preventing such lists.
Afrodactyl wrote: The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
There's nothing convoluted in it, it is a very simple system which offers real choice with effective costs and gains (those who think that 3 CP is not a cost should look at how many competitive lists run more than one detachment). FOC was a terrible system with no choices and one single structure which made zero sense for most non-imperial armies (oh you took 90 points of spore mines? It would be terribly unfluffy to let you play raveners with them), while preventing absolutely nothing in terms of exploits. Let it rest and never name it again.
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
Rites of War is a great way. If you pick X you can take more of Y, but less of Z. It should change around the "FOC" to suit subfactions, with actual restrictions. So for example a speed freak Ork army may get unlimited buggies and such, but can't take any mega armor or things like that.
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
No, Knight different because legs
Guard had troop tanks for a long time, BA could do full dreads as well, and then there was Orks, many times throughout 40k you could 100% be full vehicle lol.
Tyran wrote: The problem with letting us take everything is skew lists.
It doesn't really matter how well balanced a tank is, if you have a list made entirely of tanks then it becomes a question if your opponent brought enough anti-tank, and any anti-infantry weapons would be wasted.
Admittedly this is already an issue because Knights, but a complete lack of restrictions would make it worse.
You'll be surprised to hear this but you could already have had 100% tank armies for the past 25yrs....
No, Knight different because legs
Guard had troop tanks for a long time, BA could do full dreads as well, and then there was Orks, many times throughout 40k you could 100% be full vehicle lol.
I'm more referring to the fact that people just don't like Knights.
I'm more referring to the fact that people just don't like Knights.
It's lingering disdain from the introduction of super heavies into the game proper when being a Lord of War actually had unique features to make it harder to kill, have unique damaging properties (strength D) and in general weren't really designed to be seen in large quantities outside of Apocalypse.
Knights today, where even a strength 1 could chip a wound. Yeah, much different.
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
I don't have the relevant books in front of me, but IIRC Imperial Armor 1 introduced the Armored Battle Group list back around 3e/3.5e (and it may have been in White Dwarf before that, though I can't be certain there). If memory serves, that list allowed for Leman Russes in the Troops slot.
Afrodactyl wrote: The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
There's nothing convoluted in it, it is a very simple system which offers real choice with effective costs and gains (those who think that 3 CP is not a cost should look at how many competitive lists run more than one detachment)
Which means that no one takes Outrider / Vanguard / Spearhead, because those don't give you the CP refund. Also, a single detachment that uses an army organization scheme that everyone uses sounds an awful lot like the old FoC to me.
IIRC, The CP cost was added because players were mixing and matching different detachments with subfactions, and it got real messy real fast. So yeah, it was convoluted in that sense, and now players are just using single detachments anyway, thereby making the other detachments pointless.
Not to mention that the old FoC just required you to take an HQ and 2 troops. Simple. Now you have to choose between Combat Patrol (which is too small), Battalion (which requires you to field 2 HQs and three troops), Brigade (huge requirements, so you probably aren't going to use it) or pay 3 CP (lol, no). Not so simple, not that practical.
What they needed to do was tweak the old FoC to scale better for larger games or release variations of it for armies. Not introduce something that feels even more awkward.
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
I don't have the relevant books in front of me, but IIRC Imperial Armor 1 introduced the Armored Battle Group list back around 3e/3.5e (and it may have been in White Dwarf before that, though I can't be certain there). If memory serves, that list allowed for Leman Russes in the Troops slot.
Yeah, armoured battle group allowed you to field an all vehicle army. They were more of an exception rather than a rule though, normally guard do have to take infantry of some sort.
People are definitely taking Spearhead and Outrider detachments, and some factions can pretty easily fill out a Brigade.
Just because you don't like the thought of paying CP for detachments and not getting it back, doesn't mean it isn't happening. I'm pretty sure double patrol would be up there as one of the most common army compositions if you looked.
And taking different subfactions per detachment doesn't make things messy. All it takes is a small amount of sense and the ability to have a thirty second conversation before a game starts.
"These blue guys have ObSec and a 6++ against MWs, and these red guys can advance and charge and get +1" to move and advance"
Afrodactyl wrote: The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
There's nothing convoluted in it, it is a very simple system which offers real choice with effective costs and gains (those who think that 3 CP is not a cost should look at how many competitive lists run more than one detachment)
Which means that no one takes Outrider / Vanguard / Spearhead, because those don't give you the CP refund. Also, a single detachment that uses an army organization scheme that everyone uses sounds an awful lot like the old FoC to me.
IIRC, The CP cost was added because players were mixing and matching different detachments with subfactions, and it got real messy real fast.
So yeah, it was convoluted in that sense, and now players are just using single detachments anyway, thereby making the other detachments pointless.
Not to mention that the old FoC just required you to take an HQ and 2 troops. Simple.
Now you have to choose between Combat Patrol (which is too small), Battalion (which requires you to field 2 HQs and three troops), Brigade (huge requirements, so you probably aren't going to use it) or pay 3 CP (lol, no). Not so simple, not that practical.
What they needed to do was tweak the old FoC to scale better for larger games or release variations of it for armies. Not introduce something that feels even more awkward.
Or maybe you need to inform yourself instead of talking about stuff you don't know about.
If you take a look at the lists being played you will notice that indeed a single battalion is the most common type of list, but it is by no means the only one. It takes around 60% of the lists, but you see patrols, patrol+outrider, vanguard + outrider, patrol + patrol, brigades, super heavy detachments... in short, there is choice and there is a cost. And it is working well, to the point that the standard choice is common but not too common and many players opt to pay the price to gain flexibility in list construction. This is a lot more than the old FOC offered, which was no choice and no cost, play like a space marine or get out. The current detachment system has very few faction rules which interact with it (Real Space Raid and the knight ones), only in those cases were the faction acts in a really weird way. And even there, it doesn't change what those detachments do, it only alters the CP cost. This is proof that the system is working very well at representing the lists that players want to put on the battlefield.
The old FOC system had more exceptions than rules, because on its own it was a flawed system which completely prevented any sort of thematic list, which also had the problem of tying said thematic list to a named character of some kind, in a game where a lot of people HATE named characters. There was nothing good about it. I can accept those that liked templates, armor facing and so on, but FOC simply cannot be defended it has no merits of any kind.
I've mentioned this before when this topic has come up elsewhere, but I did always like the way Tyranid armies were structured in Epic/2nd Edition Space Marine, specifically the Hive War boxed set.
It was a hexagonal structure, with certain creatures having what were essentially 'hive nodes', and you would attach units to these nodes. A Dominatrix had 6 nodes - one on every side - where as Tyranid Warriors had, I believe, just one. So, you could keep attacking things with hive nodes to things with hive nodes, but most things didn't have them, creating a dead end on the chain.
Meant you had to balance leader beasts alongside everything else, and the more Hive Mind-projecting creatures you had, the larger your army could be.
If each army had a organisation system unique to them, I think that'd be far better than the FOC of 3rd-7th, the "take whatever you want with no real cost or consequence" system of 8th & 9th, and certainly any horrific percentage based system.
The problem with FoC manipulation back in the day was that, similar to how the FoC is now with being able to take whatever you want with no real consequence, you got extra FoC slots by 'giving up' things you might not have wanted to take in the first place.
The classic example is Iron Warriors from the 3.5 Codex. They could get an extra Heavy Support slot, but would have to give up a Fast Attack slot in order to get that. Wow. A whole FA slot, something most Chaos players (let alone Iron Warriors players) were never going to use as FA choices in the 3.5 Codex were quite lacklustre. So, you gave up something you weren't taking anyway, and got a huge boon as a result.
The 4th Ed Marine Codex was similar with its Chapter Traits. You had to take a negative trait to 'balance' the positive ones. One of the negative traits was 'No allies!'. So, if you didn't intend to take any allies (Inquisition, Grey Knights, etc.), you could just take that 'negative' trait and get the bonuses without actually losing anything.
This didn't just apply for FoC manipulation. The 3.5 Guard Codex has a wonderful(ly flawed) Doctrine system that was full of all sorts of amazing things, but if you took a Doctrines army you were forced to give up things like Ogryns and Ratlings and Sanctioned Psykers and Priestss - y'know, the kind of things that basically nobody took in the first place - so you weren't exactly missing out on anything truly vital to get these added bonuses. I mean, do I give all the infantry in my army +1Ld and +1 Initiative for free, or take a unit of Ratlings? Hard choice...
H.B.M.C. wrote: I've mentioned this before when this topic has come up elsewhere, but I did always like the way Tyranid armies were structured in Epic/2nd Edition Space Marine, specifically the Hive War boxed set.
It was a hexagonal structure, with certain creatures having what were essentially 'hive nodes', and you would attach units to these nodes. A Dominatrix had 6 nodes - one on every side - where as Tyranid Warriors had, I believe, just one. So, you could keep attacking things with hive nodes to things with hive nodes, but most things didn't have them, creating a dead end on the chain.
Meant you had to balance leader beasts alongside everything else, and the more Hive Mind-projecting creatures you had, the larger your army could be.
If each army had a organisation system unique to them, I think that'd be far better than the FOC of 3rd-7th, the "take whatever you want with no real cost or consequence" system of 8th & 9th, and certainly any horrific percentage based system.
Like, bring back Guard platoon structure, FFS.
That would be nice, yes. What, you mean to tell me that all of these different alien races have the same army doctrine and composition as everyone else? A lot of units probably shouldn't even take up slots. Stuff like Gretchin, Scarabs, Rippers, spore mines, all of these are supposed to be extremely numerous and an ubiquitous sight. And yeah, Platoons need to come back. They are what made IG felt unique.
H.B.M.C. wrote: The 4th Ed Marine Codex was similar with its Chapter Traits. You had to take a negative trait to 'balance' the positive ones. One of the negative traits was 'No allies!'. So, if you didn't intend to take any allies (Inquisition, Grey Knights, etc.), you could just take that 'negative' trait and get the bonuses without actually losing anything.
Most of those traits cost points. You weren't getting freebies, you were getting options; and as I recall you didn't have to choose negative traits unless you wanted multiple positive traits.
Still better than the current subfaction system, where all bonuses are free regardless of comparative utility and you're tacitly encouraged to Flanderise your army to maximize the buffs.
-Less complication
-Fewer rules
-Use a rule book, codex, and nothing more
Maybe something closer to like 5th edition or HH, but of course it allows flyers, super heavies, and whatever else.
Maybe make charging something different. Like you have your normal movement, but you also have a set distance to your charge move too. For example-
-move ( every unit has their own value/distance )
-shoot
-psychic
-advance or charge ( instead of rolling, your units have their own distance they can advance or charge ), so no failed dice roll, you either just make it or don’t
Maybe instead of turns 1-5, you play it like chess. You choose one unit to do all your normal stuff- move shoot charge fight etc. Then your opponent gets to choose a unit to do the same. I don’t know how units locked in combat would work in this? So maybe once combat is over, each unit is free to break off and do whatever. Also, maybe make it to where you can’t use the same unit twice in a row.
Do you know how fething hard it is to get a community going for a game when those potential players aren't even sure their investment will result in more players? It takes a feth ton of effort and time.
It does, but it's totally doable. Of course, Karol won't do it because Karol's a troll account.
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Wayniac wrote: Honestly in the US especially the game stores essentially control what's allowed to be played. If they don't outright tell you you can't play a game they don't stock then the players will ostracize you because they really do treat the game store like their turf. I have heard people outright say with complete seriousness that it is disrespectful to the game store to play something there that you can't buy there. I've seen people berated simply for saying hey this other store is having a tournament in 2 weeks, the store owner called the guy out and said it was disrespectful to talk about another game store in his establishment
That's the rarity. I've lived in multiple places and store owners that act like that lose customers fast. In the extreme people will play out of their garage instead.
Store owners live on goodwill. They try to be friendly people. The ones who aren't will lose to the ones who are.
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SemperMortis wrote: I'd really like GW to break the mold and do the unthinkable. Hire an Ork player to write ork rules so that way we aren't left with rules which sound good for a SM but are utter garbage for an Ork army. I know, asking too much but hey we can hope right?
Ork players' job is to give SM players easy wins. If they stop doing that they'll nerf them or abandon the army entirely.
Afrodactyl wrote:The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
No it helps build a structure to the theme of the army you're trying to build. And without all the CP/Stratgem/Formation X,Y,Z, Battalion D, and Boxcar 4, hire a rules lawyer to review the list and get it notarized in triplicate current way of army building, it's just BETTER and simpler to bring back the old school way that WORKS.
Also if you wanted a Speed Freaks army there was a sentence of rules that was to the equivalent of Bikes and Buggies are now Troops, and everyone that walks has to have a transport. That was EASY to understand and do. Cause I did it back in 3rd. So no, you could have 6+ Units of bikers, A warboss on a bike, or in the back of a battlewagon with a mob of boyz. And elite choices like burna boyz in trukks.
You also had the Blood Axes getting Kommandos as troops and the ability to take looted Chimeras
Bad Moons got Flash Gitz, Dethskulls got a looted vehicle. All cool flavorful options.
So why go through the trouble of doing all these attachments for CP and to keep Battle forged or whatever when you have a simple and easy to use chart to drop your units into? It's literally a sentence or a paragraph of rules to do compared 1/4 of a book and an algebra class to figure out.
Amishprn86 wrote:Honestly just let us take anything and actually balance units lol.
And then you have to deal with an entire army of Space Marine Chapter Masters, or instead of 3 units of cheese in an army, you have to deal with 15 units of the cheese. There's a certain point where sanity has to come in. And also, still have a 'vision' for how an army is supposed to come together and be utilized.
catbarf wrote:
VladimirHerzog wrote:what are leman russes?
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
They had all Leman Russ armies all the way when 3rd came out, it's in the back of the book in the IG army list. You didn't need opponent's permission either. Only things you ever needed opponent's permission for in 3rd was taking Special/Named characters, which as a rule is something that does SERIOUSLY need to come back in a bad way.
Afrodactyl wrote: The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
There's nothing convoluted in it, it is a very simple system which offers real choice with effective costs and gains (those who think that 3 CP is not a cost should look at how many competitive lists run more than one detachment)
Which means that no one takes Outrider / Vanguard / Spearhead, because those don't give you the CP refund. Also, a single detachment that uses an army organization scheme that everyone uses sounds an awful lot like the old FoC to me.
IIRC, The CP cost was added because players were mixing and matching different detachments with subfactions, and it got real messy real fast.
So yeah, it was convoluted in that sense, and now players are just using single detachments anyway, thereby making the other detachments pointless.
Not to mention that the old FoC just required you to take an HQ and 2 troops. Simple.
Now you have to choose between Combat Patrol (which is too small), Battalion (which requires you to field 2 HQs and three troops), Brigade (huge requirements, so you probably aren't going to use it) or pay 3 CP (lol, no). Not so simple, not that practical.
What they needed to do was tweak the old FoC to scale better for larger games or release variations of it for armies. Not introduce something that feels even more awkward.
Or maybe you need to inform yourself instead of talking about stuff you don't know about.
If you take a look at the lists being played you will notice that indeed a single battalion is the most common type of list, but it is by no means the only one. It takes around 60% of the lists, but you see patrols, patrol+outrider, vanguard + outrider, patrol + patrol, brigades, super heavy detachments... in short, there is choice and there is a cost. And it is working well, to the point that the standard choice is common but not too common and many players opt to pay the price to gain flexibility in list construction. This is a lot more than the old FOC offered, which was no choice and no cost, play like a space marine or get out. The current detachment system has very few faction rules which interact with it (Real Space Raid and the knight ones), only in those cases were the faction acts in a really weird way. And even there, it doesn't change what those detachments do, it only alters the CP cost. This is proof that the system is working very well at representing the lists that players want to put on the battlefield.
The old FOC system had more exceptions than rules, because on its own it was a flawed system which completely prevented any sort of thematic list, which also had the problem of tying said thematic list to a named character of some kind, in a game where a lot of people HATE named characters. There was nothing good about it. I can accept those that liked templates, armor facing and so on, but FOC simply cannot be defended it has no merits of any kind.
But if you got rid of CP as a mechanic, then you don't need to do all the combo this with this or worry about a cost for trying to do mental gymnastics. The old FOC was plenty flexible enough, and easy to use. The exceptions were small flavor or army theme things, and they made sense. You could write out a list for a 2000-point army on a sheet of notebook paper. You can't do that today. But I do agree. I hate named characters in my regular/matched games. They only have a place in narrative games.
H.B.M.C. wrote:The problem with FoC manipulation back in the day was that, similar to how the FoC is now with being able to take whatever you want with no real consequence, you got extra FoC slots by 'giving up' things you might not have wanted to take in the first place.
The classic example is Iron Warriors from the 3.5 Codex. They could get an extra Heavy Support slot, but would have to give up a Fast Attack slot in order to get that. Wow. A whole FA slot, something most Chaos players (let alone Iron Warriors players) were never going to use as FA choices in the 3.5 Codex were quite lacklustre. So, you gave up something you weren't taking anyway, and got a huge boon as a result.
The 4th Ed Marine Codex was similar with its Chapter Traits. You had to take a negative trait to 'balance' the positive ones. One of the negative traits was 'No allies!'. So, if you didn't intend to take any allies (Inquisition, Grey Knights, etc.), you could just take that 'negative' trait and get the bonuses without actually losing anything.
This didn't just apply for FoC manipulation. The 3.5 Guard Codex has a wonderful(ly flawed) Doctrine system that was full of all sorts of amazing things, but if you took a Doctrines army you were forced to give up things like Ogryns and Ratlings and Sanctioned Psykers and Priestss - y'know, the kind of things that basically nobody took in the first place - so you weren't exactly missing out on anything truly vital to get these added bonuses. I mean, do I give all the infantry in my army +1Ld and +1 Initiative for free, or take a unit of Ratlings? Hard choice...
Except the tweaks made sense for those armies. Iron Warriors move as slow as a slug uphill, in inch deep molasses. They are all about artillery and fire support. (Also, it's a crying shame they lost their basilisks.) I also take umbrage with the FA choices in the 3.5 dex being lackluster as the mounted demon units that were FA, and Raptors which at that time were one of the key components of my Red Corsairs. And for Night Lords, Raptors are their bread and butter.
And no allies, didn't have as big a negative as others, iirc there was major bonuses, minor bonuses, and minor negatives and major negatives. And no allies was a minor one. Even still during 3rd and 4th you still had some good options to drop into SM armies, like Grey Knight units and Inquisitors, Preachers, etc. And they just used a slot in the FOC you didn't have to do the detachment truffle shuffle for them.
And the 3.5 Guard dex the only units no one took was the rough riders. Ratlings were pretty strong since they were cheap and could cause pinning. And several army THEMES were built around sanctioned psykers, priests, you even had a prototype for the Adeptus Mechanius armies with the cybernetics doctrine and one of the example armies became an Ad Mech army iirc. Also, that +1LD and initiative came at the cost of getting easily nuked by templates as you had to have everybody touching one another in a neat row. It's not a 'hard' choice if the army I want to build is a scrappy sniper army, or a close quarters pistol and axe army with ogryns marching behind the platoons to clean up assaults. That one book could make 50+ different armies and the current book can't touch it for customization. The 3.5 Chaos book, the Green Ork book, the light blue Eldar book, the 3.5 IG, and the build a chapter Marine dex were ALL vastly superior to the books we got now that are tied to the garbage pail mess of a system we got now.
Garukadon wrote:I would like to see in 10th edition...
-Less complication
-Fewer rules
-Use a rule book, codex, and nothing more
Maybe something closer to like 5th edition or HH, but of course it allows flyers, super heavies, and whatever else.
Maybe make charging something different. Like you have your normal movement, but you also have a set distance to your charge move too. For example-
-move ( every unit has their own value/distance )
-shoot
-psychic
-advance or charge ( instead of rolling, your units have their own distance they can advance or charge ), so no failed dice roll, you either just make it or don’t
Maybe instead of turns 1-5, you play it like chess. You choose one unit to do all your normal stuff- move shoot charge fight etc. Then your opponent gets to choose a unit to do the same. I don’t know how units locked in combat would work in this? So maybe once combat is over, each unit is free to break off and do whatever. Also, maybe make it to where you can’t use the same unit twice in a row.
That’s all I got for now.
Yeah bringing back USRs would cut down on rules bloat for sure. And I'm a big advocate for just needing a rulebook, and army book and nothing else. Though it'd also help to have something similar to the army lists in the back of the book like 3rd started off with. If for any reason to make it easier to know what other armies' rules, and units can do. So, there's not as many surprises.
Oh yeah, going back to old school 3rd would fix that in regard to charges. Randomly rolling for charge distances is pure stupidity. Anywhere random effect rolls can be cut out, that needs to be done. A flat move 6-charge 6 for infantry, move 6-charge 12 for calvary/beasts/nids, move 12-charge 6 for jump packs and bikes, etc.
Also remove overwatch from the game entirely.
I like that tweak on you go, I go way things are done, but if you bring back Initiative and make it play a meaningful factor, like in X-wing, moving last to represent better reactions to opponents moves) but shooting first/melee attacking first (because faster reflexes). I'd be down for something like that.
vict0988 wrote: Except the people that want the FOC chart don't want the same restrictions, they want their special snowflakes to ignore the FOC and everyone else to have far fewer options. Why should you be able to bring 6 Raptors but me not bring 6 Scarabs or even just 3 Scarabs and 3 Canoptek Wraiths. 3x20 Raptors is enough to make a Raptor army. 3x5 Raptors is already quite a bit.
WOW, you're being so disingenuous, just because i only listed 2 examples, you assume i don't want your necrons to get the same treatment?
And no, if i want my whole army to be with jump packs, 3x10 (the actual limit) isn't enough. I want to be able to run some anti-tank squads with melta AND some anti infantry squads with flamers. And to me, bringing squads of 10 is less sneaky than what i envision my NL warband to fight like. Small squads hidden away that pounce on their prey
Anyway, i'll say it again : GET RID OF THE FOC, put a limit on the datasheet themselves, allow subfactions to change the limits of certain units
Why is it a problem when Alpha Legion takes 6 units of Raptors but not a problem when Night Lords do it? Yes I assume Necrons won't get the same treatment, because they haven't had it in the past and it doesn't make sense lore-wise. I'm not being insincere, I'm being pessimistic. What is the point of having limits if you can break several of the limits anyway? If Ophydian Destroyers end up being OP then a cheeser is just going to play the Destroyer dynasty and take 6 units of Ophydian Destroyers. The limit of max 3 Wraiths hardly matters when I cannot afford 4x6 Wraiths + 6x6 Ophydian Destroyers, so you might as well just play Open Play, with all the anti-cheese community building that is necessary to make that work in a casual context. You still have the problem of 6x6 Ophydian Destroyers being boring to play against and monopose models just makes the issue worse, that should be 3 models repeated 12 times.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: In current 40k, you can not have more than 3 units of raptors period. Because of the unit cap of 3.
That's a good thing, I want to play against a collection of different units, not just the same thing over and over again. More CSM jump units would be cool though, it could even be Night Lords only and I would be ok with that. And to the people screaming at me for making strawmen it's pretty clear Tittliewinks thinks that breaking the FOC for certain subfactions is a great idea, so it was not a strawman, it was a Tittliewinksman. KingmanHighborn also thinks that breaking the FOC should be possible and says how easy it was in 3rd. Now I would like people to withdraw their statements that I was making a strawman and say that they only personally feel that FOC should not be broken and accept that people wanting the FOC chart back but also thinking it should have exceptions is a common opinion instead of a strawman.
EviscerationPlague wrote: Many Necron players want to do Canoptek armies, so I'm not sure what you're rambling about as most would support this to begin with. Or is this just old man yelling at cloud?
Considering how often I do it ironically who really knows. But no, I do not think you should be able to take more than 3 units of Scarabs. 90 Scarab Swarms is not an army it's a meme. 27 is already tonnes, it's a fun list to play backed up by Spyders.
Blood Angels ARE an Assault Marine Chapter. Why shouldn't Chapters have a way to access more? 3×10 isn't broken but somehow 4×5 is? The FOC being brought back and GW's arbitrary rule of three are created out of their laziness to balance, not for balance itself.
They absolutely aren't, they have tactical and devastator companies just like everyone else, were you convinced otherwise by the 5th ed codex rules? All restrictions will be somewhat arbitrary, if you don't want any restrictions play open play. It's like the people that hate a max% of the army being spent on a specific battle role, saying that 1 point over makes the list illegal, it's the same thing with 2000 pts, 2001 pts is illegal.
Wayniac wrote: Rites of War is a great way. If you pick X you can take more of Y, but less of Z. It should change around the "FOC" to suit subfactions, with actual restrictions. So for example a speed freak Ork army may get unlimited buggies and such, but can't take any mega armor or things like that.
You are going to have the exact same problems as open play with less freedom only in ways that don't matter and the system will end up being ten times more convoluted than the currently fairly streamlined system. You don't have to make laws against something that no one does, why would you bring mega armour in a buggy list?
H.B.M.C. wrote: I've mentioned this before when this topic has come up elsewhere, but I did always like the way Tyranid armies were structured in Epic/2nd Edition Space Marine, specifically the Hive War boxed set.
It was a hexagonal structure, with certain creatures having what were essentially 'hive nodes', and you would attach units to these nodes. A Dominatrix had 6 nodes - one on every side - where as Tyranid Warriors had, I believe, just one. So, you could keep attacking things with hive nodes to things with hive nodes, but most things didn't have them, creating a dead end on the chain.
Meant you had to balance leader beasts alongside everything else, and the more Hive Mind-projecting creatures you had, the larger your army could be.
If each army had a organisation system unique to them, I think that'd be far better than the FOC of 3rd-7th, the "take whatever you want with no real cost or consequence" system of 8th & 9th, and certainly any horrific percentage based system.
Like, bring back Guard platoon structure, FFS.
Checking list legality would be a nightmare if every faction had this, I think it would be more suited for a single player game where balance is less relevant and deep complex systems are more okay. I think you should post versions for the factions you play in suggested rules, I updated the Necron Decurion for 8th or 9th in this way. Updating the old gold triarch command structure from 3rd for Necrons could be cool as well. Another problem is how oppressive some of these systems could end up being.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: What, you mean to tell me that all of these different alien races have the same army doctrine and composition as everyone else?
No, the balance concerns are just similar. One unit could end up being super undercosted, better not let anyone spam just one datasheet (on top of this being a boring way to play). Taking only fast units or taking only heavily armed and armoured units could end up being OP, give them a CP lovetap so that Battalion/Patrol armies are the standard way to build a list. If you want to build lists according to whatever structure you think is fluffy for Your Dudes then that is possible within this system, but if the rules say you can take up to 1 Ophydian Destroyer per Destroyer Lord then I cannot take 18 Ophydian Destroyers led by an Overlord even if it makes sense within the canon in previous editions and my headcanon for my personal dynasty for example.
And no, those restrictions don't actually JUST help. Despite what the other guy I replied to said, Blood Angels ARE an Assault Marine Chapter. Why shouldn't Chapters have a way to access more? 3×10 isn't broken but somehow 4×5 is? The FOC being brought back and GW's arbitrary rule of three are created out of their laziness to balance, not for balance itself.
The 3x10 vs 4x5 is fair point but as a point...All assault marine army is actually very unfluffy for BA like all bikes for white scars. Both are still codex chapter as a rule of thumb and basic tactical marines(or intercessors these days) still form the basic core. Main battle forces are 2-5 companies of which is 6 regular squads, 2 assault squads and 2 support squads.
The "BA are all about jump packs" came not from fluff but them getting free bonus rules. WAAC min maxing over fluff. If BA had got free rules for heavy weapons players would convince themselves all heavy weapons is BA way. As usual with people glamoring for chapter rules to be represented it's just about desire to have free bonus rules.
@KingmanHighborn I feel like you're being needlessly hostile toward the Detachment system. It isn't complicated and doesn't require mental gymnastics to figure out. Also, there's no need for an algebra class, it's basics maths. But if you can't figure out 6-2 or 6-3 then I suggest you use the calculator that every smartphone comes with.
You're saying to bring back an old system that works, but why bother when we can just keep the system we have now that also works.
And you 100% can write an army list nowadays on a notepad with 0 issue.
I feel like you're just a bit of a grognard that only wants the old way back because it's the old way, not because of anything other reason.
If each army had a organisation system unique to them, I think that'd be far better than the FOC of 3rd-7th,
I like this idea. One thing I'll give GW credit for is that their staff is imaginative when they're allowed to be and I could see them coming up with a lot of good stuff for this. Sure they wouldn't all work or be balanced in the least but honestly I'm well beyond expecting GW to put out any sort of mechanically sound game, but unique army organisation for each faction sounds like it could be a lot more fun than what we have.
If I'm being honest I don't care if 40k is a good game, I only care that it's a fun game and currently it's just an incredibly tedious game to play.
Sim-Life wrote: If I'm being honest I don't care if 40k is a good game, I only care that it's a fun game and currently it's just an incredibly tedious game to play.
Your conditions are wrong if your conditions for what make a good game are different from what makes a game fun. When I say that an effect that reads "on a D6 roll of 4+ the unit suffers D3 mortal wounds" is worse than an effect that says "the target suffers D6-3 mortal wounds" or "roll 4D6, the target suffers 1 mortal wound for each 4+ rolled" (same result math-wise 1 fewer dice roll, the last option has slightly different math) it is not because of some Plato-esque idea of what is good game design, it's because I find pointless dice rolling slows the game down in a bad monotonous way and streamlining dice rolls (like changing Disgustingly Resilient) makes the game more fun.
Sim-Life wrote: If I'm being honest I don't care if 40k is a good game, I only care that it's a fun game and currently it's just an incredibly tedious game to play.
Your conditions are wrong if your conditions for what make a good game are different from what makes a game fun.
No they aren't. I can just understand the difference between an objectively well designed (i.e. "good" in this context) game and a fun game. A good game can also be not a fun game.
I never said they didn't. Of course more HS slots made sense for Iron Warriors. My point was that in order to get that bonus you weren't really giving anything up.
KingmanHighborn wrote: I also take umbrage with the FA choices in the 3.5 dex being lackluster as the mounted demon units that were FA, and Raptors which at that time were one of the key components of my Red Corsairs. And for Night Lords, Raptors are their bread and butter.
Daemonette Cav were good, but that's about it. Raptors could be made good with a lot of points invested into them, something an Iron Warriors player would be better off using on their four heavy support slots. And I wasn't talking about Night Lords. Plus Red Corsairs weren't even a thing in that book, as far as rules went.
KingmanHighborn wrote: And no allies, didn't have as big a negative as others, iirc there was major bonuses, minor bonuses, and minor negatives and major negatives. And no allies was a minor one. Even still during 3rd and 4th you still had some good options to drop into SM armies, like Grey Knight units and Inquisitors, Preachers, etc. And they just used a slot in the FOC you didn't have to do the detachment truffle shuffle for them.
You're right, it was a minor one, not a major one. Even so, the point stands: If you're not actually giving anything up, if your "sacrifice" is something you were never going to take in the first place, then it's not actually a sacrifice.
KingmanHighborn wrote: And the 3.5 Guard dex the only units no one took was the rough riders.
RR's were great unit, but that's not the point...
KingmanHighborn wrote: Ratlings were pretty strong since they were cheap and could cause pinning. And several army THEMES were built around sanctioned psykers, priests, you even had a prototype for the Adeptus Mechanius armies with the cybernetics doctrine and one of the example armies became an Ad Mech army iirc.
I never saw anyone take those, and the Cybernetica Doctrine was a complete waste point points. A colossal waste of points.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Also, that +1LD and initiative came at the cost of getting easily nuked by templates as you had to have everybody touching one another in a neat row.
Totally worth it for the bonuses you got, especially as it was free. Close Order Drill + Iron Discipline was a damned staple of Guard lists.
KingmanHighborn wrote: The 3.5 Chaos book, the Green Ork book, the light blue Eldar book, the 3.5 IG, and the build a chapter Marine dex were ALL vastly superior to the books we got now that are tied to the garbage pail mess of a system we got now.
Of course they were, but you seem to have completely missed the point I was getting at:
If you are forced to give something up in order to get a bonus, and that thing you're giving up was something you were never intending on taking in your list, then you aren't really giving anything up.
It'd be like someone saying that I could have $1 million dollars, but I would have to forgo eating avocados ever again. Well, avocados make me physically ill, so sure, I'll "give them up" for the cool million. What a sacrifice!
H.B.M.C. wrote: The problem with FoC manipulation back in the day was that, similar to how the FoC is now with being able to take whatever you want with no real consequence, you got extra FoC slots by 'giving up' things you might not have wanted to take in the first place.
The classic example is Iron Warriors from the 3.5 Codex. They could get an extra Heavy Support slot, but would have to give up a Fast Attack slot in order to get that. Wow. A whole FA slot, something most Chaos players (let alone Iron Warriors players) were never going to use as FA choices in the 3.5 Codex were quite lacklustre. So, you gave up something you weren't taking anyway, and got a huge boon as a result.
The 4th Ed Marine Codex was similar with its Chapter Traits. You had to take a negative trait to 'balance' the positive ones. One of the negative traits was 'No allies!'. So, if you didn't intend to take any allies (Inquisition, Grey Knights, etc.), you could just take that 'negative' trait and get the bonuses without actually losing anything.
This didn't just apply for FoC manipulation. The 3.5 Guard Codex has a wonderful(ly flawed) Doctrine system that was full of all sorts of amazing things, but if you took a Doctrines army you were forced to give up things like Ogryns and Ratlings and Sanctioned Psykers and Priestss - y'know, the kind of things that basically nobody took in the first place - so you weren't exactly missing out on anything truly vital to get these added bonuses. I mean, do I give all the infantry in my army +1Ld and +1 Initiative for free, or take a unit of Ratlings? Hard choice...
Iron Warriors also had super restricted Fast Attack options to begin with.
First, no Daemons allowed at all at all. That left you with Chaos Bikes and Chaos Raptors. And of those two, Chaos Raptors were a 0-1 for everyone but Night Lords (there may have been another Legion?).
So by trading in two Fast Attack slots for another Heavy Support, one was basically just surrendering Chaos Bikes, which weren’t all that appealing to me in the first place, and even less so in the face of a 4th Defiler and it’s gorgeous Pie Plate Of Marine Squelching Doom.
Afrodactyl wrote: The issue with the FOC approach is that it limits the builds an army can use. If I want to make an Ork Speed Freaks list, I must take X amount of troops and can only take a maximum of 3 units out of warbikes, deffkoptas, buggies, etc? That doesn't seem like a Speed Freaks army, it seems like a bog-standard Ork list with a handful of bikes.
Unless the FOC approach comes with options to change up the slots units take up. Like a Deffkilla Wartrike letting you take 3 buggies as troops/core/whatever or a Warboss on Bike letting you take bikers.
But then we're at the same point as the detachment scenario and we've spent all this time amending the rulebook and changed basically nothing, as I would just take an Outrider detachment and have 6 FA slots.
I don't personally see the issue with the Detachment system, or how it's a 'convoluted mess'. I think it works pretty well for allowing people to make the army they want to make.
If someone here does have an issue with it, please explain. My acceptance of the system may just be out of ignorance of the woes that other factions have.
There's nothing convoluted in it, it is a very simple system which offers real choice with effective costs and gains (those who think that 3 CP is not a cost should look at how many competitive lists run more than one detachment)
Which means that no one takes Outrider / Vanguard / Spearhead, because those don't give you the CP refund. Also, a single detachment that uses an army organization scheme that everyone uses sounds an awful lot like the old FoC to me.
IIRC, The CP cost was added because players were mixing and matching different detachments with subfactions, and it got real messy real fast. So yeah, it was convoluted in that sense, and now players are just using single detachments anyway, thereby making the other detachments pointless.
Not to mention that the old FoC just required you to take an HQ and 2 troops. Simple. Now you have to choose between Combat Patrol (which is too small), Battalion (which requires you to field 2 HQs and three troops), Brigade (huge requirements, so you probably aren't going to use it) or pay 3 CP (lol, no). Not so simple, not that practical.
What they needed to do was tweak the old FoC to scale better for larger games or release variations of it for armies. Not introduce something that feels even more awkward.
Or maybe you need to inform yourself instead of talking about stuff you don't know about.
If you take a look at the lists being played you will notice that indeed a single battalion is the most common type of list, but it is by no means the only one. It takes around 60% of the lists, but you see patrols, patrol+outrider, vanguard + outrider, patrol + patrol, brigades, super heavy detachments... in short, there is choice and there is a cost. And it is working well, to the point that the standard choice is common but not too common and many players opt to pay the price to gain flexibility in list construction. This is a lot more than the old FOC offered, which was no choice and no cost, play like a space marine or get out. The current detachment system has very few faction rules which interact with it (Real Space Raid and the knight ones), only in those cases were the faction acts in a really weird way. And even there, it doesn't change what those detachments do, it only alters the CP cost. This is proof that the system is working very well at representing the lists that players want to put on the battlefield. The old FOC system had more exceptions than rules, because on its own it was a flawed system which completely prevented any sort of thematic list, which also had the problem of tying said thematic list to a named character of some kind, in a game where a lot of people HATE named characters. There was nothing good about it. I can accept those that liked templates, armor facing and so on, but FOC simply cannot be defended it has no merits of any kind.
Whilst I would agree that the FoC had issues and scaled poorly for larger games, the current system isn't that much of an improvement. You still suffer from arbitrary requirements (except it's arguably worst, because you need to to field more models to start with. Great for GW, bad for us). Even for the supplementary detachment you have to fill out requirements. Yes, there's a CP cost, but that was a hasty bandaid slapped over it to try to reign in the broken stratagem system and mix matching detachments. From a list writing perspective it's also a bit of a mess as you have to basically write two lists, one for each detachment. It's just not elegant, and if you need to introduce clunky rules like CP costs and "Rule of Three" to reign it in, then that would indicate something fundamentally wrong with the system, no?
And no, you didn't always have to take a special character for FoC manipulation. Bog standard warbosses allowed you to take nobs as a troops choice, iirc.
When 8th edition promised big changes with simplifications of the cure rules and a blank slate with the indexes, I was excited, because the game really needed streamlining. But they rapidly moved away from that design shift again to the detriment of the game.
1. The rules team need to create a design document they all have to adhere to. Currently it feels like they try to come up with new core mechanics for every codex and it hurts the game.
2. They need to bring back USR's and make all weapon profiles follow them. Right now there are simply too many long paragraphs in the weapon profiles that you have to read and remember.
3. They need to bring back strict FoC. Currently there is too much flexibility in list building and it is clearly difficult to balance.
4. They should cut 90% of stratagems and move to universal stratagems instead, with each faction having one unique.
A bunch of the suggestions about FOC in this thread nearly 1:1 match the Right of War system from HH.
-It allows different army compositions, want a tank company? Allowed. Want a recon party with perks to being forward deployed? Allowed. Want an air Calvary list of fully mechanized drop troops? Yup can do.
-It offers meaningful restrictions beyond just "less FA slots". That tank company list now REQUIRES you to take dedicated transports for any infantry units you bring, fits the theme of an all mechanized/armored company. That recon party forces your heavy support and slower units to be held in reserves turn one, because the recon party is scouting ahead. The air cavalry list requires all of your infantry without jump packs to start in reserves or on a flying transport.
Yes the FOC stock standard with zero changes would have issues. The RoW system is great, and hopefully they adopt it in 10th.
Also there's no CP involved, so they could easily drop stratagems without any worry. If they keep the current 9th FOC/Detachment system then the likelihood of dropping CP/Strats is much lower.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: A bunch of the suggestions about FOC in this thread nearly 1:1 match the Right of War system from HH.
-It allows different army compositions, want a tank company? Allowed. Want a recon party with perks to being forward deployed? Allowed. Want an air Calvary list of fully mechanized drop troops? Yup can do.
-It offers meaningful restrictions beyond just "less FA slots". That tank company list now REQUIRES you to take dedicated transports for any infantry units you bring, fits the theme of an all mechanized/armored company. That recon party forces your heavy support and slower units to be held in reserves turn one, because the recon party is scouting ahead. The air cavalry list requires all of your infantry without jump packs to start in reserves or on a flying transport.
Yes the FOC stock standard with zero changes would have issues. The RoW system is great, and hopefully they adopt it in 10th.
Also there's no CP involved, so they could easily drop stratagems without any worry. If they keep the current 9th FOC/Detachment system then the likelihood of dropping CP/Strats is much lower.
That might be interesting. It could be that HH is a testing ground for 40k rules, sort of like how AoS was a testing ground. Looking at the FoC chart, it does seem to be a modified version of the old chart, just with the Rites of War to mix it up a little.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: You still suffer from arbitrary requirements (except it's arguably worst, because you need to to field more models to start with. Great for GW, bad for us). Even for the supplementary detachment you have to fill out requirements. Yes, there's a CP cost, but that was a hasty bandaid slapped over it to try to reign in the broken stratagem system and mix matching detachments.
From a list writing perspective it's also a bit of a mess as you have to basically write two lists, one for each detachment. It's just not elegant, and if you need to introduce clunky rules like CP costs and "Rule of Three" to reign it in, then that would indicate something fundamentally wrong with the system, no?
I don't think needing an HQ is arbitrary, that HQ is leading that detachment from a logistics standpoint. Generally which detachment a unit joins is irrelevant, what matters is how many CP you start with, you can just write a list, see if it can legally fit into a number of detachments and then write down the cheapest possible combi at the end of your list. The only time you have to actually list who goes where is for the final list you submit to a TO.
The current detachment system with Ro3 and flyer spam prevention leads to a tonne of freedom without compromising much on balance and only making a slight compromise on difficulty. You could write it all out in a way without detachments and just list the CP costs of deviating from a balanced list and that would get rid of the inherent flaws in the system but that would be even more complicated I think, so having the patched up version we have now is great. FOC is too restrictive. Open Play is too prone to abuse and expanded FOC are too difficult to manage without them just turning into open play because of meaningless downsides you get for expanded freedom. Learning 25 different detachments so you can check whether a list is legal would be a hassle, 9th ed detachments have easily memorable patterns, faction detachments might not and if they do have too many patterns then that sort of defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.
Sim-Life wrote: If I'm being honest I don't care if 40k is a good game, I only care that it's a fun game and currently it's just an incredibly tedious game to play.
Your conditions are wrong if your conditions for what make a good game are different from what makes a game fun.
No they aren't. I can just understand the difference between an objectively well designed (i.e. "good" in this context) game and a fun game. A good game can also be not a fun game.
What makes a a game objectively well designed if it does not lead to engaging (fun) experiences?
I don't think needing an HQ is arbitrary, that HQ is leading that detachment from a logistics standpoint.
A HQ, yes. 2-3 HQ? Overseeing a couple of squads? That's a bit excessive, no?
That's not even getting into the "troops" tax.
Overseeing 3-20 units, if you're only taking a couple of squads a Patrol with 1 HQ will do. If you don't want Troops you can just not take them and eat the CP tax for a Spearhead/Outrider. The only system with an actual Troops tax is the old FOC.
I don't think needing an HQ is arbitrary, that HQ is leading that detachment from a logistics standpoint.
A HQ, yes. 2-3 HQ? Overseeing a couple of squads? That's a bit excessive, no?
That's not even getting into the "troops" tax.
Overseeing 3-20 units, if you're only taking a couple of squads a Patrol with 1 HQ will do. If you don't want Troops you can just not take them and eat the CP tax for a Spearhead/Outrider. The only system with an actual Troops tax is the old FOC.
if you want to start with full CP (especially with nephilim), troops ARE a tax unless theyre good
I don't think needing an HQ is arbitrary, that HQ is leading that detachment from a logistics standpoint.
A HQ, yes. 2-3 HQ? Overseeing a couple of squads? That's a bit excessive, no? That's not even getting into the "troops" tax.
Overseeing 3-20 units, if you're only taking a couple of squads a Patrol with 1 HQ will do. If you don't want Troops you can just not take them and eat the CP tax for a Spearhead/Outrider. The only system with an actual Troops tax is the old FOC.
Right, so that's 1 HQ overseeing one troop in a patrol, and 1 HQ overseeing 3 FA/Elite/HS units. That's still 2 HQ. Logistics have nothing to do with it; you'd have to be a pretty inept "warlord" if you can't manage more than 1 unit of infantry, just because the other 3 squads are in another group and they won't speak to you if they don't have their rep. Even in the Grim darkness of the Far Future, there are high school cliques, I suppose. Eating the CP tax is still tax to pay to field a detachment.
Army composition is an important part of the game, and if it's flawed then everything else is flawed as a consequence.
Unless you mean to tell me that "rule of three" and slapping on a CP tax is healthy game design and not a bandaid to cover up problems.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: A bunch of the suggestions about FOC in this thread nearly 1:1 match the Right of War system from HH.
-It allows different army compositions, want a tank company? Allowed. Want a recon party with perks to being forward deployed? Allowed. Want an air Calvary list of fully mechanized drop troops? Yup can do.
-It offers meaningful restrictions beyond just "less FA slots". That tank company list now REQUIRES you to take dedicated transports for any infantry units you bring, fits the theme of an all mechanized/armored company. That recon party forces your heavy support and slower units to be held in reserves turn one, because the recon party is scouting ahead. The air cavalry list requires all of your infantry without jump packs to start in reserves or on a flying transport.
Yes the FOC stock standard with zero changes would have issues. The RoW system is great, and hopefully they adopt it in 10th.
Also there's no CP involved, so they could easily drop stratagems without any worry. If they keep the current 9th FOC/Detachment system then the likelihood of dropping CP/Strats is much lower.
That might be interesting. It could be that HH is a testing ground for 40k rules, sort of like how AoS was a testing ground.
Looking at the FoC chart, it does seem to be a modified version of the old chart, just with the Rites of War to mix it up a little.
HH focuses on bigger games though which is why it works slightly better there.
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
They had all Leman Russ armies all the way when 3rd came out, it's in the back of the book in the IG army list. You didn't need opponent's permission either. Only things you ever needed opponent's permission for in 3rd was taking Special/Named characters, which as a rule is something that does SERIOUSLY need to come back in a bad way.
I have my 3rd Ed codex out and see no such thing. The army list (explicitly named an Infantry Company, no less) ends on p21, then there are rules for Macharius, Yarrick, Nork Deddog, and the Last Chancers, and then the rest of the book is hobby content.
The Armored Company list was released in White Dwarf, I still have the issue. Again, it requires opponent's permission, it's given as experimental rules, and it had a whole bunch of special rules to add extra disadvantages to the Armored Company player, like letting low-S weapons fish for 6s to inflict glancing hits, implementing vehicle morale, and requiring infantry in close support for vehicles to get close to enemy infantry (providing an incentive to take more than just tanks).
I don't know where you folks got the idea that you've always been able to build an army of entirely tanks if you wanted as part of the core rules, but it's just not true. The old FOC was designed to prevent exactly that sort of skew, and when bespoke exceptions made it possible (eg the 5th Ed Guard codex allowing 9 Leman Russes plus Valkyries), it was broken as hell.
8th/9th have made all-vehicle lists less oppressive but the ability to skew is still there, and the gatekeeper nature of infantry hordes or Knights at various points in these editions has come from them being skew that the average TAC list can't effectively deal with.
What makes a a game objectively well designed if it does not lead to engaging (fun) experiences?
Lots of things. I play board games all the time that I can see are super well designed but I just don't like them for whatever reason. Like I can see that stuff like Spirit Island, Brass: Birmingham, Great Western Trail and most recently Ark Nova are all well designed games and are rightly hugely popular and successful in relative terms because they're well designed. But I didn't think they were fun.
Vilgeir wrote: Pages and pages on an FoC change when that's the least problematic issue in 9th edition. Never change, dakka.
This comment makes no sense. You're annoyed at Dakka as a whole for discussiong what changes people would like to see in a thread about discussing what changes people would like to see?
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
It was a White Dwarf Chapter Approved that allowed Armoured Company, and had the "6s auto glance" rule as well. Don't recall the issue, but it was definitely towards the tail end of 3rd. One of the ones that had "Official Rules" tagged on it IIRC. I remember this because I read it and was like WTF
The Armored Company list was released in White Dwarf, I still have the issue. Again, it requires opponent's permission, it's given as experimental rules, and it had a whole bunch of special rules to add extra disadvantages to the Armored Company player, like letting low-S weapons fish for 6s to inflict glancing hits, implementing vehicle morale, and requiring infantry in close support for vehicles to get close to enemy infantry (providing an incentive to take more than just tanks).
What makes a a game objectively well designed if it does not lead to engaging (fun) experiences?
Lots of things. I play board games all the time that I can see are super well designed but I just don't like them for whatever reason. Like I can see that stuff like Spirit Island, Brass: Birmingham, Great Western Trail and most recently Ark Nova are all well designed games and are rightly hugely popular and successful in relative terms because they're well designed. But I didn't think they were fun.
Would you agree that those games lead to engaging experiences for a lot of people? I am not saying it all comes down to your personal subjective opinion, but that absent humans you cannot say whether one game or another is more well-designed. Absent humans most tree leaves would still be green (as in absorbing specific wave-lengths of lights at a greater rate than other wave-lengths of light) and wolves would still howl. A certain leaf can be said to be objectively green, but when it comes to aesthetics at most you can say that most, a lot or some people find the aesthetics of the leaf appealing. I'll try to end my game design philosophizing with this post.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: The issue is that fun is extremely subjective, so a game can be very well done, or poorly done, and how much fun you have depends on you as a person.
A game can be unpolished and fun or polished and unfun. I wouldn't necessarily call polish good design, the gameplay has to be fun for a significant number of people otherwise I think it is unfair to call it well-designed and gets game designers away from what they should be trying to achieve. The reason rules should be fluffy for example is to increase how engaging they are to use.
Vilgeir wrote: Pages and pages on an FoC change when that's the least problematic issue in 9th edition. Never change, dakka.
This comment makes no sense. You're annoyed at Dakka as a whole for discussiong what changes people would like to see in a thread about discussing what changes people would like to see?
I'm just glad it's not a topic we've discussed to death in five previous threads.
What if the goal isn't a fun game? Or a game for a niche group, that most people wouldn't find fun? Is it then bad? Games quality should be determined by how well they achieve their goals.
vict0988 wrote: Why is it a problem when Alpha Legion takes 6 units of Raptors but not a problem when Night Lords do it? Yes I assume Necrons won't get the same treatment, because they haven't had it in the past and it doesn't make sense lore-wise. I'm not being insincere, I'm being pessimistic. What is the point of having limits if you can break several of the limits anyway? If Ophydian Destroyers end up being OP then a cheeser is just going to play the Destroyer dynasty and take 6 units of Ophydian Destroyers. The limit of max 3 Wraiths hardly matters when I cannot afford 4x6 Wraiths + 6x6 Ophydian Destroyers, so you might as well just play Open Play, with all the anti-cheese community building that is necessary to make that work in a casual context. You still have the problem of 6x6 Ophydian Destroyers being boring to play against and monopose models just makes the issue worse, that should be 3 models repeated 12 times.
Because Alpha Legion is about cultists and infiltrating units/guerilla warfare. Night Lords are about raptors as their backbone and terror attacks.
vict0988 wrote:KingmanHighborn also thinks that breaking the FOC should be possible and says how easy it was in 3rd. Now I would like people to withdraw their statements that I was making a strawman and say that they only personally feel that FOC should not be broken and accept that people wanting the FOC chart back but also thinking it should have exceptions is a common opinion instead of a strawman.
I never said that at any time. Don't be disingenuous with your claims. A tweak of the FOC moving certain units around to fit an army's 'theme' and flavor is not breaking it, it's using it as it's intended. A Ravenwing army, a Necron army, and a Tau army can all use the FOC, but have different units and play different ways, organized in a neat chart/roster.
vict0988 wrote: They absolutely aren't, they have tactical and devastator companies just like everyone else, were you convinced otherwise by the 5th ed codex rules? All restrictions will be somewhat arbitrary, if you don't want any restrictions play open play. It's like the people that hate a max% of the army being spent on a specific battle role, saying that 1 point over makes the list illegal, it's the same thing with 2000 pts, 2001 pts is illegal.
5th did give more focus on the Blood Angels having Jump Packs and gave them exclusive rights to the Storm Raven that lasted... like ten minutes. (Metaphorically speaking) But they did have overcharged engines for their rhinos and have always been about getting close and frisky as quick as possible, and even that Devastator company could have people just 'f' it before the battle and join the death company. Points are points though, it's what makes the game fair (in a vacuum)
I never said they didn't. Of course more HS slots made sense for Iron Warriors. My point was that in order to get that bonus you weren't really giving anything up.
You give up the FA slot for the extra HS slot because you're playing Iron Warriors, it's not a sacrifice, it's being what that chapter is.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: I also take umbrage with the FA choices in the 3.5 dex being lackluster as the mounted demon units that were FA, and Raptors which at that time were one of the key components of my Red Corsairs. And for Night Lords, Raptors are their bread and butter.
Daemonette Cav were good, but that's about it. Raptors could be made good with a lot of points invested into them, something an Iron Warriors player would be better off using on their four heavy support slots. And I wasn't talking about Night Lords. Plus Red Corsairs weren't even a thing in that book, as far as rules went.
There was a lot of good stuff besides the Daemonette cav, but they were one of my favs. Khorne hounds, Furies (which were the undivided demons for undivided forces that wanted something more representative of that). And I forgot about bikers which were also really good. But it's fine, Iron Warriors are about the HS, and not those units.
And the Red Corsairs didn't have 'rules' but they were represented in the examples, and the little bit of lore got me interested in them, so they are a 'thing' as much as the other warbands/fallen chapters exampled in the book. You don't have to play named chapters, warbands, etc. You can make your own just fine.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: And no allies, didn't have as big a negative as others, iirc there was major bonuses, minor bonuses, and minor negatives and major negatives. And no allies was a minor one. Even still during 3rd and 4th you still had some good options to drop into SM armies, like Grey Knight units and Inquisitors, Preachers, etc. And they just used a slot in the FOC you didn't have to do the detachment truffle shuffle for them.
You're right, it was a minor one, not a major one. Even so, the point stands: If you're not actually giving anything up, if your "sacrifice" is something you were never going to take in the first place, then it's not actually a sacrifice.
You're still seeing it as a sacrifice, when it's actually the flavor of the chapter your building/want to play.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: And the 3.5 Guard dex the only units no one took was the rough riders.
RR's were great unit, but that's not the point...
eh no one took em' when I used to play, may have been because no one had the $ to convert a bunch of them up. But the consensus was too pricy and too easy to get killed. Though carapace + RR always looked interesting to me.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: Ratlings were pretty strong since they were cheap and could cause pinning. And several army THEMES were built around sanctioned psykers, priests, you even had a prototype for the Adeptus Mechanius armies with the cybernetics doctrine and one of the example armies became an Ad Mech army iirc.
I never saw anyone take those, and the Cybernetica Doctrine was a complete waste point points. A colossal waste of points.
One of the better guard players in our group back then used it to great effect. And it won't that pricy. And it was THE way to play Ad Mech back then. Also yeah, ratlings and other snipers were big until they took pinning out of the game and took that away from snipers. Being able to hurt anything on 4+ and hit on 2+ was great in large numbers. IIRC even Orks through lootas (since they took other SQUAD weapons) could take sniper rifles, which was wonderfully hilarious. (though again iirc they hit on 3+ cause they're still orks.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: Also, that +1LD and initiative came at the cost of getting easily nuked by templates as you had to have everybody touching one another in a neat row.
Totally worth it for the bonuses you got, especially as it was free. Close Order Drill + Iron Discipline was a damned staple of Guard lists.
Some but not all. You don't take that if you're playing Chemdogs, Tallarn, Catachan or Tanith for example.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: The 3.5 Chaos book, the Green Ork book, the light blue Eldar book, the 3.5 IG, and the build a chapter Marine dex were ALL vastly superior to the books we got now that are tied to the garbage pail mess of a system we got now.
Of course they were, but you seem to have completely missed the point I was getting at:
If you are forced to give something up in order to get a bonus, and that thing you're giving up was something you were never intending on taking in your list, then you aren't really giving anything up.
It'd be like someone saying that I could have $1 million dollars, but I would have to forgo eating avocados ever again. Well, avocados make me physically ill, so sure, I'll "give them up" for the cool million. What a sacrifice!
I think you're seeing this wrong. It's like going to a car dealership and buying a red suv instead of a blue sportscar. You're not 'sacrificing' the blue sportscar, you don't need it for what you intend to do, and the goals you want to achieve and since you can't buy both, you get want works for you.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
H.B.M.C. wrote: The problem with FoC manipulation back in the day was that, similar to how the FoC is now with being able to take whatever you want with no real consequence, you got extra FoC slots by 'giving up' things you might not have wanted to take in the first place.
The classic example is Iron Warriors from the 3.5 Codex. They could get an extra Heavy Support slot, but would have to give up a Fast Attack slot in order to get that. Wow. A whole FA slot, something most Chaos players (let alone Iron Warriors players) were never going to use as FA choices in the 3.5 Codex were quite lacklustre. So, you gave up something you weren't taking anyway, and got a huge boon as a result.
The 4th Ed Marine Codex was similar with its Chapter Traits. You had to take a negative trait to 'balance' the positive ones. One of the negative traits was 'No allies!'. So, if you didn't intend to take any allies (Inquisition, Grey Knights, etc.), you could just take that 'negative' trait and get the bonuses without actually losing anything.
This didn't just apply for FoC manipulation. The 3.5 Guard Codex has a wonderful(ly flawed) Doctrine system that was full of all sorts of amazing things, but if you took a Doctrines army you were forced to give up things like Ogryns and Ratlings and Sanctioned Psykers and Priestss - y'know, the kind of things that basically nobody took in the first place - so you weren't exactly missing out on anything truly vital to get these added bonuses. I mean, do I give all the infantry in my army +1Ld and +1 Initiative for free, or take a unit of Ratlings? Hard choice...
Iron Warriors also had super restricted Fast Attack options to begin with.
First, no Daemons allowed at all at all. That left you with Chaos Bikes and Chaos Raptors. And of those two, Chaos Raptors were a 0-1 for everyone but Night Lords (there may have been another Legion?).
So by trading in two Fast Attack slots for another Heavy Support, one was basically just surrendering Chaos Bikes, which weren’t all that appealing to me in the first place, and even less so in the face of a 4th Defiler and it’s gorgeous Pie Plate Of Marine Squelching Doom.
I don't remember if Raptors were 0-1 or not. That's one where time and no longer having the book on hand hurts. But I think if you are foregoing FA options for that 4th Defiler, then you're doing what Iron Warriors are supposed to do. (Though I think more people ran a basilisk and vindicators in Iron Warriors. And games were almost universally played on a 4x4 table so range wasn't an issue or Oblits when you could just choose the weapon you wanted to fire. I miss those days.)
Bonde wrote:When 8th edition promised big changes with simplifications of the cure rules and a blank slate with the indexes, I was excited, because the game really needed streamlining. But they rapidly moved away from that design shift again to the detriment of the game.
1. The rules team need to create a design document they all have to adhere to. Currently it feels like they try to come up with new core mechanics for every codex and it hurts the game.
2. They need to bring back USR's and make all weapon profiles follow them. Right now there are simply too many long paragraphs in the weapon profiles that you have to read and remember.
3. They need to bring back strict FoC. Currently there is too much flexibility in list building and it is clearly difficult to balance.
4. They should cut 90% of stratagems and move to universal stratagems instead, with each faction having one unique.
Yup, moving away from the Indexes was a mistake. And I agree with all of this. Though I'd take it further and do away with stratagems entirely just to streamline and simplify the game more.
Amishprn86 wrote:Guard had troop tanks for a long time
I played Guard from 3rd-5th and have no idea what you guys are talking about. You never could just forgo infantry and take all Russes in that era. And only in 5th could you really mass Russes thanks to squadrons.
Yeah, you could take Armored Fist squads and have lots of Chimeras- not tanks. In 3rd and 4th if you wanted a tank skew, you had to take the Armored Company list by opponent's permission and which came with a bunch of special rules to try to offset the skew.
They had all Leman Russ armies all the way when 3rd came out, it's in the back of the book in the IG army list. You didn't need opponent's permission either. Only things you ever needed opponent's permission for in 3rd was taking Special/Named characters, which as a rule is something that does SERIOUSLY need to come back in a bad way.
I have my 3rd Ed codex out and see no such thing. The army list (explicitly named an Infantry Company, no less) ends on p21, then there are rules for Macharius, Yarrick, Nork Deddog, and the Last Chancers, and then the rest of the book is hobby content.
The Armored Company list was released in White Dwarf, I still have the issue. Again, it requires opponent's permission, it's given as experimental rules, and it had a whole bunch of special rules to add extra disadvantages to the Armored Company player, like letting low-S weapons fish for 6s to inflict glancing hits, implementing vehicle morale, and requiring infantry in close support for vehicles to get close to enemy infantry (providing an incentive to take more than just tanks).
I don't know where you folks got the idea that you've always been able to build an army of entirely tanks if you wanted as part of the core rules, but it's just not true. The old FOC was designed to prevent exactly that sort of skew, and when bespoke exceptions made it possible (eg the 5th Ed Guard codex allowing 9 Leman Russes plus Valkyries), it was broken as hell.
8th/9th have made all-vehicle lists less oppressive but the ability to skew is still there, and the gatekeeper nature of infantry hordes or Knights at various points in these editions has come from them being skew that the average TAC list can't effectively deal with.
I wasn't referencing the codex. I said ARMY LIST. Back of the MAIN 3rd ed. rulebook. Pg. 245. Imperial Guard Appendix.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Because Alpha Legion is about cultists and infiltrating units/guerilla warfare. Night Lords are about raptors as their backbone and terror attacks.
So what if Alpha Legion are about cultists and infiltrating units, what is the problem of an Alpha Legion army with 6 Raptors? What if I am on the way to sabotage some kind of flying thing?
...A tweak of the FOC moving certain units around to fit an army's 'theme' and flavor is not breaking it...
KingmanHighborn wrote: You give up the FA slot for the extra HS slot because you're playing Iron Warriors, it's not a sacrifice, it's being what that chapter is.
I've had a really bad day today, so to avoid taking it out on you by going through your reply line by line and shredding it I'll simply say this:
You've completely missed my point in every conceivable way a person can miss a point. Come back when you understand it.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Because Alpha Legion is about cultists and infiltrating units/guerilla warfare. Night Lords are about raptors as their backbone and terror attacks.
So what if Alpha Legion are about cultists and infiltrating units, what is the problem of an Alpha Legion army with 6 Raptors? What if I am on the way to sabotage some kind of flying thing?
Every game though? That's kinda niche. Something that'd fit for a narrative play more so than a matched point balanced game.
vict0988 wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: ...A tweak of the FOC moving certain units around to fit an army's 'theme' and flavor is not breaking it...
That's exactly what it is.
Ehhh no they are completely different, and you cut off the part explaining it.
H.B.M.C. wrote:
KingmanHighborn wrote: You give up the FA slot for the extra HS slot because you're playing Iron Warriors, it's not a sacrifice, it's being what that chapter is.
I've had a really bad day today, so to avoid taking it out on you by going through your reply line by line and shredding it I'll simply say this:
You've completely missed my point in every conceivable way a person can miss a point. Come back when you understand it.
Right back at you. It's not a competition to win. But if you want to make it like that and then take your ball and go home that's on you. And you can come back when you understand what I wrote.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Because Alpha Legion is about cultists and infiltrating units/guerilla warfare. Night Lords are about raptors as their backbone and terror attacks.
So what if Alpha Legion are about cultists and infiltrating units, what is the problem of an Alpha Legion army with 6 Raptors? What if I am on the way to sabotage some kind of flying thing?
Every game though? That's kinda niche. Something that'd fit for a narrative play more so than a matched point balanced game.
Why is balance an issue for Alpha Legion but not for Night Lords? Raptor spam belongs in narrative play for both legions due to balance concerns and wanting more tactical depth in matched play. Taking 3 units of Raptors and painting them as Night Lords is already a good part of the way to what makes an army into a Night Lords army.
Why is balance an issue for Alpha Legion but not for Night Lords?
its not for either.... 3 vs 6 units of raptors isn't an issue if that's what the dex was designed to accommodate.
Again, switching FoC slots depending on the subfaction is much more fluffy than getting some legion traits/strats like we currently have. Army composition plays a bigger part in getting the feel of a subfaction than the rules.
Oh and this isn't about me wanting to play 60 raptors, its about me wanting to play Raptors, warp talons, dreadclaws and bikers as more than 1-of's (aka : MSU instead of deathstar)
KingmanHighborn wrote: I wasn't referencing the codex. I said ARMY LIST. Back of the MAIN 3rd ed. rulebook. Pg. 245. Imperial Guard Appendix.
Alright, fair enough. For the single year between when 3rd Ed launched and the 3rd Ed Guard codex released, it was possible to run an all-tank skew. Which GW clearly realized was a mistake, and it wasn't until the 5th Ed book in 2009 that you could again spam tanks outside a by-opponent's-permission WD army list. 5th Ed Guard was not exactly a balanced codex, either, but even it didn't let you take tanks to fulfill core requirements.
So I mean, the original argument here- that Guard have always been able to do all-tank skew- is still wrong. And the point is that GW historically has been pretty restrictive of this kind of skew because it does present significant balance issues. 40K is a combined arms game first and foremost and its deployment/army structure handles skew poorly.
I suspect that 10th isn't going to be a hard reset like 7th to 8th was.
I believe there's too much momentum at the moment and it would be foolish for GW to do something so drastic. I think perhaps GW finally realized that the game is heading in a direction they don't like - becoming too competitive, having too great a cognitive load with all of the rules bloat and now having the highest barrier to entry in the games history with all of the rules fragmentation.
I hope it's just going to come with some rather significant changes such as:
Removal of warlord traits and relics.
Removal of stratagems or rather a complete overhaul of the stratagem mechanics.
I've changed my point of view on stratagems a lot over the years; currently I think it would be best to give a few (and a I stress a few) units an ability, on their data sheet, that they can use / is applied during the Command Phase by spending CP's and only if the Warlord is on the battlefield.
...and some other things that I know I'd like to see.
And the point is that GW historically has been pretty restrictive of this kind of skew because it does present significant balance issues. 40K is a combined arms game first and foremost and its deployment/army structure handles skew poorly.
In front of any of the popular mechanical ideas like AA or suppression I am way more I my wrested in fixing the combined arms situation. It should be a normal matched play pickup game situation for an artillery list to run into a fast attack raider list.
The Chapter Approved Armored Company shows it’s possible to balance skew lists. In that case it was somewhat over corrected; it was a slightly weak army due to the units being constantly shaken. It would be very easy to write directly into the army list that if you take three units of Obliterators and four Basiliks your opponent immediate gets some extremely easy objective.
Why is balance an issue for Alpha Legion but not for Night Lords?
its not for either.... 3 vs 6 units of raptors isn't an issue if that's what the dex was designed to accommodate.
Again, switching FoC slots depending on the subfaction is much more fluffy than getting some legion traits/strats like we currently have. Army composition plays a bigger part in getting the feel of a subfaction than the rules.
Oh and this isn't about me wanting to play 60 raptors, its about me wanting to play Raptors, warp talons, dreadclaws and bikers as more than 1-of's (aka : MSU instead of deathstar)
GW cannot design their way out of a wet paper bag, I don't trust them with making spam fun and engaging to play against and you still have the problem of GW's modern kits not being designed to look good when spammed.
How is it more fluffy for Blood Angels to gain the ability to spam Assault Marines instead of getting what they currently have? You end up with a flanderized army either way. The best option would be only Relics and a few Strats, since that would allow Blood Angels to occasionally kick lots of ass in melee without incentivising only melee units by layering melee buffs on them in fifteen different ways or enabling only Blood Angels to field a list that should be just as possible for any chapter to field (Assault Company).
If you take some legionnaires in a Dreadclaw, 3x5 Raptors, 3x5 Warp Talons and 3x3 Bikers you have an insanely mobile Night Lords list, then you can add characters, flyers and legionnaires in Rhinos to pad out the list. No need for another 3 units of Raptors, if you think more Raptors are more cool then that's fine, but you cannot really get around the potential balance issue of having 20-50 datasheets ignore Ro3.
pelicaniforce wrote:The Chapter Approved Armored Company shows it’s possible to balance skew lists. In that case it was somewhat over corrected; it was a slightly weak army due to the units being constantly shaken. It would be very easy to write directly into the army list that if you take three units of Obliterators and four Basiliks your opponent immediate gets some extremely easy objective.
I'd genuinely love to hear what you have in mind for balancing a situation like that. What sort of criteria give your opponent an easy objective?
GW tried to balance skew in 8th/9th by making the specialist formations have associated CP costs, but it just... didn't work out, when it's so easy to just take a Battalion instead and a few tax units.
vict0988 wrote:If you take some legionnaires in a Dreadclaw, 3x5 Raptors, 3x5 Warp Talons and 3x3 Bikers you have an insanely mobile Night Lords list, then you can add characters, flyers and legionnaires in Rhinos to pad out the list. No need for another 3 units of Raptors, if you think more Raptors are more cool then that's fine, but you cannot really get around the potential balance issue of having 20-50 datasheets ignore Ro3.
It's annoying when you can take 3 units of 10-strong Scourges, but not 4 units of 5. In that case Ro3 isn't preventing you from spamming, it's preventing you from MSU.
Want to make an army of Veterans, to represent a unit like Tanith First & Only? Sorry, can't. The Vanguard structure is there for you to base your army on Elites choices, but Ro3 says no, and three units of Veterans is maybe 20% of your 2K army if you really kit them out. But you can take over a dozen Leman Russes if you want. Thanks Ro3, really limiting the spam there.
Ro3 was a mid-edition hack to address a fundamental game structure problem. The old FOC had some of the same negative outcomes, but at least it was explicitly designed around a 'balanced' combined-arms force, rather than purporting to give you unlimited flexibility and then hitting you with a hard limit. 'GW can't design' is a cop-out; just copy-pasting the HH2.0 FOC + Rites of War system would be a major improvement.
If you take some legionnaires in a Dreadclaw, 3x5 Raptors, 3x5 Warp Talons and 3x3 Bikers you have an insanely mobile Night Lords list,
i know, thats my point, i can't make that list without buying an additionnal detachment right now
Yeah, that's 10 FA choices. No single detachment covers that.
catbarf wrote:
pelicaniforce wrote:The Chapter Approved Armored Company shows it’s possible to balance skew lists. In that case it was somewhat over corrected; it was a slightly weak army due to the units being constantly shaken. It would be very easy to write directly into the army list that if you take three units of Obliterators and four Basiliks your opponent immediate gets some extremely easy objective.
I'd genuinely love to hear what you have in mind for balancing a situation like that. What sort of criteria give your opponent an easy objective?
GW tried to balance skew in 8th/9th by making the specialist formations have associated CP costs, but it just... didn't work out, when it's so easy to just take a Battalion instead and a few tax units.
vict0988 wrote:If you take some legionnaires in a Dreadclaw, 3x5 Raptors, 3x5 Warp Talons and 3x3 Bikers you have an insanely mobile Night Lords list, then you can add characters, flyers and legionnaires in Rhinos to pad out the list. No need for another 3 units of Raptors, if you think more Raptors are more cool then that's fine, but you cannot really get around the potential balance issue of having 20-50 datasheets ignore Ro3.
It's annoying when you can take 3 units of 10-strong Scourges, but not 4 units of 5. In that case Ro3 isn't preventing you from spamming, it's preventing you from MSU.
Want to make an army of Veterans, to represent a unit like Tanith First & Only? Sorry, can't. The Vanguard structure is there for you to base your army on Elites choices, but Ro3 says no, and three units of Veterans is maybe 20% of your 2K army if you really kit them out. But you can take over a dozen Leman Russes if you want. Thanks Ro3, really limiting the spam there.
Ro3 was a mid-edition hack to address a fundamental game structure problem. The old FOC had some of the same negative outcomes, but at least it was explicitly designed around a 'balanced' combined-arms force, rather than purporting to give you unlimited flexibility and then hitting you with a hard limit. 'GW can't design' is a cop-out; just copy-pasting the HH2.0 FOC + Rites of War system would be a major improvement.
Yup. But just copy-pasting the entire HH2.0 ruleset would be even better.
I think they need to rethink the five layers of rules:
Core rules
Faction only rules
Subfaction rules
Unit rules (and auras)
Stratagem rules
It's too many levels to keep track of when each level has multiple rules which cross all the categories. I would probably reduce umber of Stratagem and unit rules if fixing 9th.
Vilgeir wrote: Pages and pages on an FoC change when that's the least problematic issue in 9th edition. Never change, dakka.
This comment makes no sense. You're annoyed at Dakka as a whole for discussiong what changes people would like to see in a thread about discussing what changes people would like to see?
Look, I'll break it down for you.
Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
Try playing any army in any game which was designed to take 3-4 of something, which suddenly gets limited to taking 1-2 of those. Especialy when there is a possibility that other factions will not face the same problems. It is exactly the thing that breaks games. It is the same like making a game where a sudden focus suddenly falls on some unit type, which is rare and not well spread among other armies, but you make it super efficient. For w40k it is everything that can fly over terrain as a vehicle or monster. Those units break the game more often then anything else in w40k. A FoC more limiting then the one we have right now, because lets face it how many armies outside of DE or Eldar can actualy run more then one detachment right now in the game, only makes the possibility of such problems bigger ?
Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
40K's rules make listbuilding a pivotal part of the game. The fact that it has such impact while existing entirely outside of the actual match is precisely why it's so worth discussing.
It's not something you can just brush off as a minor detail.
I'd be pleased as pie if they eliminated strategems, or at the very least made strategems 80% generic with like, no more than a page worth of strats per faction, or maybe one strat per unit (as in on their datasheet).
The whole concept of "heres a mishmash of 3-4 pages worth of randomly organized situationally useful additional rules that work on some of the models in your army under certain specific circumstances" doesn't work well, IMO. My memory is good enough to remember that most strategems exist, but not what they are called or their specific wording and application. Huge gameplay slowdown when I'm flipping through the book trying to find the thing that I vaguely remember existing but don't know how to use.
chaos0xomega wrote: I'd be pleased as pie if they eliminated strategems, or at the very least made strategems 80% generic with like, no more than a page worth of strats per faction, or maybe one strat per unit (as in on their datasheet).
The whole concept of "heres a mishmash of 3-4 pages worth of randomly organized situationally useful additional rules that work on some of the models in your army under certain specific circumstances" doesn't work well, IMO. My memory is good enough to remember that most strategems exist, but not what they are called or their specific wording and application. Huge gameplay slowdown when I'm flipping through the book trying to find the thing that I vaguely remember existing but don't know how to use.
Totally agree. The most frustrating thing about 9th is all the rules bloat, and strategems are the worst offender. Each faction having 20-30 is actual insanity; there's no way an average player will remember all the ones from even their own codex, let alone any from their opponent's. Bring it down to 5-6 generic ones and then maybe 3-4 per faction, or even just eliminate them entirely IMO.
Really overall my only hope is that they reduce rules bloat; make it so that I can look at unit's datasheet and get a good idea of how strong they are. As it stands, to even understand the power level of like, a basic squad of intercessors, I have to take in to account so many things not listed on the datasheet; doctrines, subfaction abilities, auras, psychic powers, strategems, all these noodley little ways to buff and change the unit. Just curb that kind of stuff down and honestly I'd be pretty happy.
Vilgeir wrote: Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
Lists affect the match, a lot. List building is also all everybody talks about on the tactics forum so it being a topic of discussion isn't weird.
I guess the point he is trying to make is that the FOC doesn't affect the actual gameplay. Sure, it does affect balance and what units you see on the table, but that isn't really a big problem nephilim, tempest of war or crusade have, right?
The problems are stratagems, layers upon layers of rules, codex creep and dysfunctional codices at the same time, an overabundance of AP invalidating armor, vehicles not being durable at all, counter-counter-counter rules like AoC and daemonic invuls, worthless transports, mediocre terrain rules and probably another few that I missed.
And that is not even touching all the issues with company policies which are ruining people's fun and collections, like legacy, the treatment of FW units and everything related to cutting down unit options.
Complaining about the FOC in that context is pretty much like complaining about bad weather while your house is infested with pests, you have a burst pipe flooding your living room, your dog just dragged in the the carcass of the neighbor's cat and your lunch on the stove just caught fire.
We have discussed all those things before. I'm not good with names so I couldn't tell you what each poster thinks but I could probably tell you all the different arguments for how those problems should or shouldn't be fixed. The arguments for and against the FOC are way more novel to me and lets me think and develop my own position on the issue through arguing.
vict0988 wrote: Remove Core, AoC, HotE, Chapter Tactics, Combat Doctrines, Super Doctrines, faction-Stratagems, faction-secondaries and faction WL traits. Expand universal Stratagems and make selecting which ones you take into battle part of list building. Expand universal WL traits. Rework Relics to never just be +1 dagger as a replacement for the thematic rules Combat Doctrines and Super Doctrines currently provide. Remove the current armies of renown, none of them need to exist.
Rename abilities to universal names. Reduce lethality by going back to 8th edition profiles or some kind of middle ground and remove stacking offensive HQ buffs, making a unit 20% harder to kill, 20% faster, 20% killier is fine but the multiplicative effect of several buffs is an unfixable balance problem.
Debate me on these positions if you want to discuss those issues. The only time you should tell people to stop posting is when they are posting off-topic things. The core rules dictate army construction, therefore army construction rules are on topic for a new edition ruleset.
Vilgeir wrote: Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
Lists affect the match, a lot. List building is also all everybody talks about on the tactics forum so it being a topic of discussion isn't weird.
I guess the point he is trying to make is that the FOC doesn't affect the actual gameplay. Sure, it does affect balance and what units you see on the table, but that isn't really a big problem nephilim, tempest of war or crusade have, right?
The problems are stratagems, layers upon layers of rules, codex creep and dysfunctional codices at the same time, an overabundance of AP invalidating armor, vehicles not being durable at all, counter-counter-counter rules like AoC and daemonic invuls, worthless transports, mediocre terrain rules and probably another few that I missed.
And that is not even touching all the issues with company policies which are ruining people's fun and collections, like legacy, the treatment of FW units and everything related to cutting down unit options.
Complaining about the FOC in that context is pretty much like complaining about bad weather while your house is infested with pests, you have a burst pipe flooding your living room, your dog just dragged in the the carcass of the neighbor's cat and your lunch on the stove just caught fire.
You are right, if the rules bloat and number of stratagems was significantly cut down, then retaining the current flexible FoC rules wouldn't be too bad.
We had close to no real usable stratagems in 8th ed for most armies, often stuff which was gear or rules that units had before. Also armies, aside for eldar, had one or even two fewer over all army rules then they have now. We had detachments and the game was not better then it is right now. Specificaly if you were a majority of the player base marine player. You had to play a tournament list, most units were dead options till 2.0 came out at the end of the edition, and marine win rates were in the dump. Change for sake of change doesn't help anyone. It hurts the armies that come out first, which always is marines. And it gives huge priority to armies GW overloads with multiple valid options both unit wise and faction wise. And then the players get to sit out for 1-3 years waiting for their codex to be updated to the new game. It is one of the reasons a lot of people don't make it to play more then one edition. When you enter a new one and know that in order to have fun, you now have to wait anywhere from a few months to 3 years, and then the new product can be something bad anyway, there is very little entice to stay and play.
chaos0xomega wrote: I'd be pleased as pie if they eliminated strategems, or at the very least made strategems 80% generic with like, no more than a page worth of strats per faction, or maybe one strat per unit (as in on their datasheet).
The whole concept of "heres a mishmash of 3-4 pages worth of randomly organized situationally useful additional rules that work on some of the models in your army under certain specific circumstances" doesn't work well, IMO. My memory is good enough to remember that most strategems exist, but not what they are called or their specific wording and application. Huge gameplay slowdown when I'm flipping through the book trying to find the thing that I vaguely remember existing but don't know how to use.
Totally agree. The most frustrating thing about 9th is all the rules bloat, and strategems are the worst offender. Each faction having 20-30 is actual insanity; there's no way an average player will remember all the ones from even their own codex, let alone any from their opponent's. Bring it down to 5-6 generic ones and then maybe 3-4 per faction, or even just eliminate them entirely IMO.
Really overall my only hope is that they reduce rules bloat; make it so that I can look at unit's datasheet and get a good idea of how strong they are. As it stands, to even understand the power level of like, a basic squad of intercessors, I have to take in to account so many things not listed on the datasheet; doctrines, subfaction abilities, auras, psychic powers, strategems, all these noodley little ways to buff and change the unit. Just curb that kind of stuff down and honestly I'd be pretty happy.
That is basically how AoS does it, your army might have 1 and maybe another one for a subfaction, characters has them, and then you have the core 8, you are looking at an average of 12-15 per army with the 8 core ones.
Vilgeir wrote: Imagine discussing what a full reset of the rules might mean by spending days obsessed with the process of list building.
Like, that's all the FoC does. It happens entirely outside a match. It's absurd.
Lists affect the match, a lot. List building is also all everybody talks about on the tactics forum so it being a topic of discussion isn't weird.
I guess the point he is trying to make is that the FOC doesn't affect the actual gameplay. Sure, it does affect balance and what units you see on the table, but that isn't really a big problem nephilim, tempest of war or crusade have, right?
The problems are stratagems, layers upon layers of rules, codex creep and dysfunctional codices at the same time, an overabundance of AP invalidating armor, vehicles not being durable at all, counter-counter-counter rules like AoC and daemonic invuls, worthless transports, mediocre terrain rules and probably another few that I missed.
And that is not even touching all the issues with company policies which are ruining people's fun and collections, like legacy, the treatment of FW units and everything related to cutting down unit options.
Complaining about the FOC in that context is pretty much like complaining about bad weather while your house is infested with pests, you have a burst pipe flooding your living room, your dog just dragged in the the carcass of the neighbor's cat and your lunch on the stove just caught fire.
Yeah this, FoC honestly doesn't matter for balance as much as codex strength and number of viable units. Example right now if IG took 7 Vends does it matter at all? no, they will lose the game, but you can make a Nids army with only 1 of each unit following a basic FoC and still completely destroy some other armies.
But that is because nids on top of good rules and synergies got the DE treatment with ton of units being anywhere between 5 to 15% undercosted. Which then still doesn't account for stuff like, what happens if a big multi wound monster get superhuman physiology build in.
Armies that require 3+ elite or heavy or FA options to function, and who have no stand ins in other slots, would be devasted if suddenly they got cut to 3 slots of an option.
You mean like Smokescreen or melta bombs, yeah , these strats came with 9th
GK special rules from prior editions were either removed or made in to stratagems, Which at some time in 8th felt really bad, when DW for example had special ammo on all bolters as a rule, while GK had a high cost stratagem that did less for one unit per turn.
What? 8th had a ton of wombo combo stratagems in every factions.
At the start of 8th ed? Only for the eldar soup. Unless by "wombo combo" we understand someone taking relics and traits on your BA cpt and paying even more cp to make him a chapter master. Eldar had combos, yeah, crazy stuff with double dipping with Inari while playing two detachments. But that is how every edition seems to be.
You mean other than marines, right? Eldar had the same amout of rules as every non marine army ( Psychic, relics, traits, chapter tactics)
The difference is that marine stuff what it came out, it was not worth taking. Primaris units till 2.0 came out, were considered worse then classic marine stuff, not that tacticals or Assault Squads were considered good. But it wasn't just a marine thing. GK had no army. Orks had to play green wave, and that is when their codex came out. Tau codex could as well be called codex shield drones. No one knows what GW was thinking when they dropped the csm codex. But any codex that makes you not want to run chaos marines in your csm army, is bad. By the way marines themselfs degenerated to that state too. the 8th ed space marine army, glorious 2 characters, 15 scouts and then everything but space marines in it.
Again not everyone is playing eldar and can be 100% that by the time their book gets updated, at worse, their army will be fun to play. And any changes to core rule sets for books who are both not designed with them in mind, and who then have to wait years to be updated is not worth the effort. The chance that they won't fix anything is huge, while the chance that they will limit the number of options, make the game less fun etc does not.
You mean like Smokescreen or melta bombs, yeah , these strats came with 9th
GK special rules from prior editions were either removed or made in to stratagems, Which at some time in 8th felt really bad, when DW for example had special ammo on all bolters as a rule, while GK had a high cost stratagem that did less for one unit per turn.
What? 8th had a ton of wombo combo stratagems in every factions.
At the start of 8th ed? Only for the eldar soup. Unless by "wombo combo" we understand someone taking relics and traits on your BA cpt and paying even more cp to make him a chapter master. Eldar had combos, yeah, crazy stuff with double dipping with Inari while playing two detachments. But that is how every edition seems to be.
You mean other than marines, right? Eldar had the same amout of rules as every non marine army ( Psychic, relics, traits, chapter tactics)
The difference is that marine stuff what it came out, it was not worth taking. Primaris units till 2.0 came out, were considered worse then classic marine stuff, not that tacticals or Assault Squads were considered good. But it wasn't just a marine thing. GK had no army. Orks had to play green wave, and that is when their codex came out. Tau codex could as well be called codex shield drones. No one knows what GW was thinking when they dropped the csm codex. But any codex that makes you not want to run chaos marines in your csm army, is bad. By the way marines themselfs degenerated to that state too. the 8th ed space marine army, glorious 2 characters, 15 scouts and then everything but space marines in it.
Again not everyone is playing eldar and can be 100% that by the time their book gets updated, at worse, their army will be fun to play. And any changes to core rule sets for books who are both not designed with them in mind, and who then have to wait years to be updated is not worth the effort. The chance that they won't fix anything is huge, while the chance that they will limit the number of options, make the game less fun etc does not.
yeah , Admech Ryza kataphrons deleting two knights per shooting phase, endless cacophony + votlw, the grenade bomb from deathguard and all the other ones that did similar things certainly werent "wombo combos".
Oh so the amount of rules only matter if the army is doing good (like SM were) so wtf is your argument here?
- More tactics, less dice rolling : cut dice rolling tenfold. Rolling 90 dice and not even killing 1 basic Space Marine is ridiculous. One model, one die max (except for characters). Most people I tried getting into the hobby for the last 10 years never understood why I liked this crappy dice rolling fest.
- Designed for 1h30-2h games at 2k points without having to play like you're on cocaïne.
- More tactics, less dice rolling : cut dice rolling tenfold. Rolling 90 dice and not even killing 1 basic Space Marine is ridiculous. One model, one die max (except for characters). Most people I tried getting into the hobby for the last 10 years never understood why I liked this crappy dice rolling fest.
- Designed for 1h30-2h games at 2k points without having to play like you're on cocaïne.
yeah, those two are part of the reason why i find OnePageRules more enjoyable, on average multi-model units will roll 1-2 dice per model
You mean like Smokescreen or melta bombs, yeah , these strats came with 9th
GK special rules from prior editions were either removed or made in to stratagems, Which at some time in 8th felt really bad, when DW for example had special ammo on all bolters as a rule, while GK had a high cost stratagem that did less for one unit per turn.
yeah , Admech Ryza kataphrons deleting two knights per shooting phase, endless cacophony + votlw, the grenade bomb from deathguard and all the other ones that did similar things certainly werent "wombo combos".
Oh so the amount of rules only matter if the army is doing good (like SM were) so wtf is your argument here?
Marines are the biggest army, with the largest number of players. Their sales make it possible for GW to make other projects of course the quality of play time for marine players matters more, then lets say someone who plays inquisition. Why do you think HH exists ? Of course the expiriance of the biggest GW earner matters the most.
But as always we probably have a different definition of wombo combos. To me parking 6 razorbacks inside a G-man bubble is not a wombo combo. But having 5 flyers all at -2 or less to hit with their bases blocking the ability to get on to objectives is. Pink horrors dieing, spliting in to 2 blue horrors and also by the magic of rules also spawning a pox walker is a wombo combo. Inari shining spears using wild ridder stratagems, because the eldar player souped in an eldar detachment that is a wombo combo. Having a dude on a jet pack with a buffed up thunder hammer isn't. There is a difference between army rules, even if they are over done, like lets say liquifires were for some time. And stuff like I park 10 GK paladins in to a building with no walls, and then I cast astral aim on them and start shoting at at the opposing army without an ability to be shot back. One thing is an army rule, the other is the result of either the design team not carring or , I think this is hard to translate in to english, the design team really not carring.
You mean like Smokescreen or melta bombs, yeah , these strats came with 9th
GK special rules from prior editions were either removed or made in to stratagems, Which at some time in 8th felt really bad, when DW for example had special ammo on all bolters as a rule, while GK had a high cost stratagem that did less for one unit per turn.
Thats almost every army.
Yes, but some armies got new stuff in return or other stuff. For example eldar did lose their 33% undercosted wright knights , but instead got soul burst which was a scourg on the game for almost an entire editon. And when 9th book came out, GW even updated their rules to fit all the options for an autarch an eldar player may want to take. While no such thing was made for csm and their jump pack lords, or the orks and their mounted warbosses.
Marines are the biggest army, with the largest number of players. Their sales make it possible for GW to make other projects of course the quality of play time for marine players matters more, then lets say someone who plays inquisition. Why do you think HH exists ? Of course the expiriance of the biggest GW earner matters the most.
But as always we probably have a different definition of wombo combos. To me parking 6 razorbacks inside a G-man bubble is not a wombo combo. But having 5 flyers all at -2 or less to hit with their bases blocking the ability to get on to objectives is. Pink horrors dieing, spliting in to 2 blue horrors and also by the magic of rules also spawning a pox walker is a wombo combo. Inari shining spears using wild ridder stratagems, because the eldar player souped in an eldar detachment that is a wombo combo. Having a dude on a jet pack with a buffed up thunder hammer isn't. There is a difference between army rules, even if they are over done, like lets say liquifires were for some time. And stuff like I park 10 GK paladins in to a building with no walls, and then I cast astral aim on them and start shoting at at the opposing army without an ability to be shot back. One thing is an army rule, the other is the result of either the design team not carring or , I think this is hard to translate in to english, the design team really not carring.
oh got, it, if Marines/GK do it its fine, if any other faction does it, its a wombo combo.
yeah , Admech Ryza kataphrons deleting two knights per shooting phase, endless cacophony + votlw, the grenade bomb from deathguard and all the other ones that did similar things certainly werent "wombo combos".
Oh so the amount of rules only matter if the army is doing good (like SM were) so wtf is your argument here?
Marines are the biggest army, with the largest number of players. Their sales make it possible for GW to make other projects of course the quality of play time for marine players matters more, then lets say someone who plays inquisition. Why do you think HH exists ? Of course the expiriance of the biggest GW earner matters the most.
But as always we probably have a different definition of wombo combos. To me parking 6 razorbacks inside a G-man bubble is not a wombo combo. But having 5 flyers all at -2 or less to hit with their bases blocking the ability to get on to objectives is. Pink horrors dieing, spliting in to 2 blue horrors and also by the magic of rules also spawning a pox walker is a wombo combo. Inari shining spears using wild ridder stratagems, because the eldar player souped in an eldar detachment that is a wombo combo. Having a dude on a jet pack with a buffed up thunder hammer isn't. There is a difference between army rules, even if they are over done, like lets say liquifires were for some time. And stuff like I park 10 GK paladins in to a building with no walls, and then I cast astral aim on them and start shoting at at the opposing army without an ability to be shot back. One thing is an army rule, the other is the result of either the design team not carring or , I think this is hard to translate in to english, the design team really not carring.
You mean like Smokescreen or melta bombs, yeah , these strats came with 9th
GK special rules from prior editions were either removed or made in to stratagems, Which at some time in 8th felt really bad, when DW for example had special ammo on all bolters as a rule, while GK had a high cost stratagem that did less for one unit per turn.
Thats almost every army.
Yes, but some armies got new stuff in return or other stuff. For example eldar did lose their 33% undercosted wright knights , but instead got soul burst which was a scourg on the game for almost an entire editon. And when 9th book came out, GW even updated their rules to fit all the options for an autarch an eldar player may want to take. While no such thing was made for csm and their jump pack lords, or the orks and their mounted warbosses.
DE got things taken away, and abilities that made certain units fun to play or niche gear as stratagems taking away even more options we used to have.
I feel the essence of a wombo combo is... you know, a combo? I.E. take unit. Give it a buff (or three). Then say use a stratagem so it can shoot twice.
Nothing stops you buffing one unit and then having another unit shoot twice - but its obviously less efficient, because that way you are only benefiting from those buffs once rather than twice.
In much the same way that yes, a BA captain with a jump pack and thunder hammer could be made a Knight-killing wombo combo through stacking rules. An Ultramarines Captain, to my knowledge, couldn't get the same combination.
There are units that can just double their shoting without stratagems. If that is a combo then it is a really bad one. Again I will go back to Death Watch and GK. One got special ammo, on every bolter in the army, there is not much of a wombo or combo in GK paying CP to get buffed ammo on one unit.
What combo is there to to, pre codex csm use double shot stratagem on some obliterators?
Even annoying stuff like tau drones in 8th, wasn't much of a combo. It was like having extra inv saves.
To use a MtG example, a draw 2 cards effect is not the same as I draw my entire deck, generate infinite mana, cast stuff, then shuffle my hand in to my deck and then start the whole thing again because I gave myself extra turns. The strenght of the effect and the possibility of counter is very important. The main difference between regular combos and the wombo version, is what the opponet can do with it. If your opponent starts playing soliter, there is a problem, because the thing being played stops being a 2 player game.
Karol wrote: There are units that can just double their shoting without stratagems. If that is a combo then it is a really bad one. Again I will go back to Death Watch and GK. One got special ammo, on every bolter in the army, there is not much of a wombo or combo in GK paying CP to get buffed ammo on one unit.
What combo is there to to, pre codex csm use double shot stratagem on some obliterators?
Even annoying stuff like tau drones in 8th, wasn't much of a combo. It was like having extra inv saves.
To use a MtG example, a draw 2 cards effect is not the same as I draw my entire deck, generate infinite mana, cast stuff, then shuffle my hand in to my deck and then start the whole thing again because I gave myself extra turns. The strenght of the effect and the possibility of counter is very important. The main difference between regular combos and the wombo version, is what the opponet can do with it. If your opponent starts playing soliter, there is a problem, because the thing being played stops being a 2 player game.
Are you saying that Prescience + Veterans of the long War + Endless cacophony + lord reroll on litterally any shooting unit in the codex was not a wombo combo?
a wombo combo is basically anything that uses more than 1 or 2 additionnal rules than what the basic datasheet provides.
Karol just said the experience of Marine players matters more than the experience of other players, and his game knowledge apparently amounts to 'Grey Knights got everything bad, Eldar got everything good'.
I don't know why you guys are still taking him seriously. We're about three posts away from hearing how the best wombo combo is to beat up your opponents in the parking lot before the game, because that's how you do it in wrestling school.
catbarf wrote: Karol just said the experience of Marine players matters more than the experience of other players, and his game knowledge apparently amounts to 'Grey Knights got everything bad, Eldar got everything good'.
I don't know why you guys are still taking him seriously. We're about three posts away from hearing how the best wombo combo is to beat up your opponents in the parking lot before the game, because that's how you do it in wrestling school.
Karol is a valuable example of a player who is stuck in a toxic meta and has no other options when it comes to playing the game ( whivh he has also sunk a lot of his small amount of money into). When people bring up changing your group as a way to solution to a problem with 40k (which happens in almost every thread) we can point to Karol and go "what about him?".
Well if what Karol says is real in any meaningfull sense he should either migrate, have their hobby only online or look for different gamming hobby in his area with a less toxic community.
He can sell his armies online and get back some cash rather than continuing in his sunken cost falacy hobby.
Tyel wrote:I feel the essence of a wombo combo is... you know, a combo? I.E. take unit. Give it a buff (or three). Then say use a stratagem so it can shoot twice.
Nothing stops you buffing one unit and then having another unit shoot twice - but its obviously less efficient, because that way you are only benefiting from those buffs once rather than twice.
In much the same way that yes, a BA captain with a jump pack and thunder hammer could be made a Knight-killing wombo combo through stacking rules. An Ultramarines Captain, to my knowledge, couldn't get the same combination.
Most SM could do some version of the Smash Captain. BA were the best at it, but I think SW and Salamanders could also produce excellent versions. The problem you mention of efficiency and stacking buffs is one I think GW could address without much difficulty. If units could only benefit from one buff per phase that would instantly rein in a huge amount of the lethality in the game and put the emphasis back on a unit's datasheet rather than stacking rules from as many sources as possible.
You'd have to properly define buffs and ideally debuffs too, which would follow the same restrictions. Then maybe get rid if auras so they're all targeted buffs and make them apply in the Command phase rather than whenever you want and you'd instantly get a more nuanced game. It's not the best solution but I think it may be a practical one in the short term.
Karol wrote: There are units that can just double their shoting without stratagems. If that is a combo then it is a really bad one. Again I will go back to Death Watch and GK. One got special ammo, on every bolter in the army, there is not much of a wombo or combo in GK paying CP to get buffed ammo on one unit.
You keep bringing up this DW versus GK comparison, so I feel compelled to point out the two are not the same at all. For DW, Special Issue Ammunition was part of their army special rules, just like GK all being psykers. Psibolt Ammunition was an optional, paid-for upgrade on various GK units, just like meltabombs, flakk missiles or smoke launchers used to be. I would have preferred keeping those wargear items as paid upgrades but it's not really analogous to DW SIA.
Special ammunition was part off GK rules in the past. All units that could take them from the lists in the past were taking them. Saying they were optional, is like saying a chapter master with a jump pack in 8th ed or a farseer for eldar is an optional rule, and there for could be just removed.
But sure I can show inside 8th ed examples. In the write up for the 8th GK codex , mr Navati , I hope I am getting his name right, went on how durning testing GK were super powerful, how they psychic powers had to reign in and there for baby smite was created. And later on he just said that GK players don't get ther results, because they don't know how to play the army and all its options.
Not a fun explanation why your army gets nerfed, but it is what it is. But what did my new in to w40k eyes saw next, army after army, FW units spaming full smite psykers, powerful psychic powers. Almost as if someone wrote the GK codex to be done with it ASAP and then decided to make cool and fluffy things for other amries.
Karol wrote: Special ammunition was part off GK rules in the past. All units that could take them from the lists in the past were taking them. Saying they were optional, is like saying a chapter master with a jump pack in 8th ed or a farseer for eldar is an optional rule, and there for could be just removed.
That's just not true. Psibolt ammunition was very popular on vehicles, yes, because it often gave just the right bonus in Strength to hit a common breakpoint. It was much less common on the basic infantry because the cost rapidly got prohibitive.
You've still missed the point as usual though. There's a fundamental difference between something that is an optional upgrade and something that is just a part of an army's rules.
Vatsetis wrote: Well if what Karol says is real in any meaningfull sense he should either migrate, have their hobby only online or look for different gamming hobby in his area with a less toxic community.
He's like 17 or something and has no money also what the hell who goes straight to "just leave your country bro". Also did you miss the part where I said there are no other communities in his area and thats why he's a great example for when people say exactly what you just said.
Slipspace 806314 11418727 wrote:
That's just not true. Psibolt ammunition was very popular on vehicles, yes, because it often gave just the right bonus in Strength to hit a common breakpoint. It was much less common on the basic infantry because the cost rapidly got prohibitive.
You've still missed the point as usual though. There's a fundamental difference between something that is an optional upgrade and something that is just a part of an army's rules.
yeah well if you want it this way, then yes. GK with actual GK in them wear rather rare. From the lists I have seen the most popular one were 3-6 dreadnoughts, swarm of razorbacks, and 3 man squads of inquisitorial henchmen. with GK being often represented by Draigo or GK techmarine. But in lists that actualy did run GK in their GK army, the psi bolt ammo was not only taken on the dreadnoughts, but also on paladins.
If I see multiple lists, and something is being done with all of them then the option is not an option. It is like saying you can reach olympic levels of sports without a dedicated med staff, because one to two three times every decade you get a mutant who naturaly has the blood cell count of other peoples being doped up.
Are you saying that Prescience + Veterans of the long War + Endless cacophony + lord reroll on litterally any shooting unit in the codex was not a wombo combo?
a wombo combo is basically anything that uses more than 1 or 2 additionnal rules than what the basic datasheet provides.
Yes it is GW playing with numbers. Historicaly you can find examples of stuff doing similar style of damage, aka deleting stuff, where GW were less interested in making people roll a lot. A sun canon armed WK was deleting stuff too. Just there was less rolling. Just because GW has the idea, which maybe is true I ain't no scientists that checked it, that more times spend doing stuff equals fun. It doesn't mean something is mechanicaly a combo.
Having a +3 sv, followed by a +4 sv, followed by another +4 negation of wound could as well be a +2 immunity, it just involved more rolling.
Karol just said the experience of Marine players matters more than the experience of other players, and his game knowledge apparently amounts to 'Grey Knights got everything bad, Eldar got everything good'.
Well I do play that army. But you can't say that marines in 8th ed were in a good state till 2.0 came out. Or that eldar, especialy Inari didn't warp how 8th ed went. SM 2.0 codex, the upping of both damage and marine resiliance was a litteral anwser to what was going on to the factions in 8th. And the eldar get everything good ain't my idea. There was not a single time eldar codex didn't hugely impact an edition of w40k, and the only edition where they weren't the best army for the majority of an edition was the edition where they didn't get a book. And even then they were okey as long as you didn't play against the top of the top books. No army in history of w40k like that. Marines for example, who always get an update, sometimes even two have huge drop off in how playable they are. Even looking at 2.0 marines, they were good for a few months, and then came 9th and only white scar were left. And that was post indomitus, melta changes etc. From what I have seen AoC, doctrines, DeathWatch termintors with SP always on were not game breakers, they often didn't even bring marines to 50% win rates. Other factions had huge drop offs too. Orks, Ad Mecha although here it is also a huge skill level celling . But when eldar come out, you can be sure they will be 60%+ win rates for months. And what is funny, if the stories on prior editions are true. 8th and 9th eldar weren't that bad comparing what they did in prior editions
It's more hilarious if you think of all the people in Karol's tales as orks while Karol is a kunnin' grot trying to get by in burtal ork Poland
Slipspace wrote: Most SM could do some version of the Smash Captain. BA were the best at it, but I think SW and Salamanders could also produce excellent versions. The problem you mention of efficiency and stacking buffs is one I think GW could address without much difficulty. If units could only benefit from one buff per phase that would instantly rein in a huge amount of the lethality in the game and put the emphasis back on a unit's datasheet rather than stacking rules from as many sources as possible.
You'd have to properly define buffs and ideally debuffs too, which would follow the same restrictions. Then maybe get rid if auras so they're all targeted buffs and make them apply in the Command phase rather than whenever you want and you'd instantly get a more nuanced game. It's not the best solution but I think it may be a practical one in the short term.
Yeah I think so. 9th arguably did reduce the number of stratagem-stacking wombo combos in 8th. But the potential buff stack remains very high - partly due to the addition of purity bonuses and generally improved chapter tactics/characters. And "Its fine, I get armour of contempt, hide in dense terrain and pop transhuman etc every turn" is not a well designed solution to resolving this upgrade in probable damage output.
I think the fear though is that 40k would potentially become quite dull if you did take a torch to all that synergy. I think buff characters for instance makes sense - otherwise every character has to be a beatstick. (Which tends to result in "my beatstick is better than yours, so yours is useless.") Impactful chapter tactics feels better than useless ones.
Which is probably why I'm minded to go back towards 8th edition. Have a proper balance patch, get rid of the purity bonuses, roll back the unnecessary upgrades to weapon stats and maybe moderate the number/impact of stratagems. I think having a pool of options isn't a bad mechanic - but it just never seems to have worked out that way. I don't know if AoS does it better or if that turns into "I just always use this ability, because its the best". Having say 6 impactful abilities, that theoretically you'd want to use all the time, but only being able to use say 2 a turn, would seem like a better system. Although equally it feels like something that would become set in stone quite quickly.
Vatsetis wrote: Well if what Karol says is real in any meaningfull sense he should either migrate, have their hobby only online or look for different gamming hobby in his area with a less toxic community.
He's like 17 or something and has no money also what the hell who goes straight to "just leave your country bro". Also did you miss the part where I said there are no other communities in his area and thats why he's a great example for when people say exactly what you just said.
Even younger people migrate their home towns with some frecuency... If I lifed in a cultural, social and empathic wasteland as the one Karol describes I would be leaving ASAP.
I was thinking of Polish legends about Fins and Tatars. But yeah, in the last few months ukrainians call russians that too. We don't we use other names.
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Vatsetis 806314 11418793 wrote:
Even younger people migrate their home towns with some frecuency... If I lifed in a cultural, social and empathic wasteland as the one Karol describes I would be leaving ASAP.
I am in a sports schools and if I pass my exam this year I will go to the sports university in warsaw. If not then I will join the military, unless my mom stops me. I had family members move to Spain in the 90s durning the construction boom. Good pension for working 10 years there.
Dont come to Spain now, Karol... the so called progressive government has destroyed the economy and the society as a whole... also the level of toxicity of our 40K gamming communities is out of the charts... in our main gamming event we protect white supremacist from community criticism and also apply secret painting and modelling scores that can desqualify whole teams without them even knowing expost facto what was their crime.
Nowdays in Spain the novel 1984 is considered a naive representation of the good old days of the mid 20th century.
Disclaimer: the above description might contain some mild elements of hyperbole and sarcasm
Miltary is very good. Stable income, you get a place to stay, salary and you don't have to pay rent,food,etc On top of that you can get driving license for trucks which normaly the exam alone costs a ton of money and most people don't pass them the first time. In the military you just go, get a course for free and at the end of it you get the license to drive everything including 40t trucks. Now they are having a ton of programs for new people wanting to join. Don't have automaticly become a contract soldier.
