Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible?
I think I can describe my beef with Stratagems as follows:
In previous editions, in particular 3-5th, I could more or less look at the table and understand very easily what each unit was capable of, and create a plan to interact with it. The number of variables was limited, and the really major "unforseeable" variable involved was dice.
Strats (and bespoke rules bloat) add an additional layer of capabilities on top of the basic layer of stats and weapons, and make it much harder to guage the potential vectors of attack each unit has to offer, and it is an incredibly potent layer of additional stuff. Thus, the "CCG" label. It's interactivity that has less to do with inherent abilities of the unit and feel more like "off table powers" that are affecting the battle in game winning ways.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
Sure, I guess that's a fair criticism, but when evidence is presented it seems to be roundly ignored.
I get a lot of the criticism coming from people who played a different flavor of 8th, but a lot has changed.
I played a succession of games where we used special rules to beat each other. In my case re-rolling the variable firepower on Catachan vehicles and for various opponents remembering a plethora of special rules. In every game I and my various opponents forgot rules. There wasn’t much manoeuvre but a lot of dice rolling and use of strats to ignore stuff like vehicle damage, restrictions after leaving combat etc.
Afterwards we all played snake oil (lots of laughter and merriment) and ticket to ride (five happy wargamers enjoying plastic train laying). We are all dyed in the wool GW fanatics. Conversion drifted around model releases, kill team, etc. But 40k wise fun was notably absent for a lot of the evening despite us all wanting to play and wanting to enjoy it.
"The only reason someone could disagree with me is because they don't actually play the game!" is a pretty damn arrogant stance to take. Granted, it's not outright insulting like Jid's "The only reason someone could disagree with me is because they're a drooling illiterate dimwit!", but it's not that much better.
AnomanderRake wrote: All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
C'mon man! Give Dae a break. After all, he stopped bothering with this thread... other than all the posts he's made since. Like the last one. And the one before that.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.
Maybe it's just a community thing but me and my opponents have to look up Stratagems pretty often to make sure we get the CP cost or units it can apply to or whatever right, you also sometimes get a hunch you might want to use a Stratagem and then have to look through your Stratagems to see if the Stratagem you think applies is right for the situation. 7th was also too complex in some areas, 9th is only too complex in the Stratagem and chapter tactics/combat doctrines department, but that department just seems to grow and grow since the launch of 8th. The looking things up metric is an interesting way to judge the complexity of 40k and I definitely see things from your point of view now because looking rules up is rarer for me now than in previous editions as well.
In previous editions, in particular 3-5th, I could more or less look at the table and understand very easily what each unit was capable of, and create a plan to interact with it. The number of variables was limited, and the really major "unforseeable" variable involved was dice.
I think this is mostly a problem with datasheets' bloat. I mean do you see how many datasheets are now included in codexes belonging to the biggest factions? 3rd edition SM had somethig like 30 datasheets, now they have 200. Same with orks. I haven't had problems memorizing the best stratagems from enemy armies so far, but I can't possibly remember all the enemy units and weapons profiles. If I may mistakes it's because of that, not because I wasn't aware of a hidden tool to enhance a unit or cripple an opponent's one.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
Sure, I guess that's a fair criticism, but when evidence is presented it seems to be roundly ignored.
I get a lot of the criticism coming from people who played a different flavor of 8th, but a lot has changed.
You can't provide "evidence" that someone's subjective experience is wrong. If you want to try and convince someone to view their subjective experience of the game differently you might want to start from the position that their subjective experience is based on things that actually happened to them rather than jumping from "your subjective experience is different from mine" straight to "well I guess you didn't actually play the game."
My subjective experience of playing 9th consists largely of being on one side or the other of 2-3 turn tablings, and then being told "well, if people bought different models the game would have gone differently." You can explain to me at great length that 2-3 turn tablings are actually supremely unlikely because the game is much more balanced than that and if I engaged properly with the game and bought different models I'd find it's actually incredibly fun, and you could be completely right, except for the fact that I don't want to buy different models, I want to use my models, all of which GW has arbitrarily decided need to be garbage for a while. The reason you're having fun and I'm not isn't that one of us is an idiot or is making things up rather than actually having played the game or is in some way "wrong", it's that we have a different set of priorities for the game. My priorities include the basic requirement that I shouldn't have to lose games purely by liking the wrong models, because I didn't feel like I did in 7th and before, and I've never felt that way in any other minis game, but I feel that way constantly in 8th/9th.
I'm not interested in trying to convince you your subjective experience of the game is wrong. You're having fun, that's great, woo, good for you. What I want is for the people who like 9th to stop trying to prove to me that my subjective experience is "wrong" and 9th is an objectively superior game, because it's not. It's better at executing your priorities than other editions/other games, sure, but it's really kind of awful at executing any of my priorities. And I'm still sitting here grumbling because I think this pervasive myth that 9e is objectively superior to all the competition is horribly destructive to tabletop gaming as a whole; I keep seeing people quit wargaming entirely or never start at all because of this idea that if 40k isn't for them and 40k is the best wargaming has to offer there's no point looking at anything else because it'll be worse.
Being punished for picking a specific army or specific is probably the worse thing about w40k. Worse then the cost or any other thing, I can think off. Specially when combined with the advice people give, about picking what you like the looks to play etc.
There should be no, you picked tau, enjoy spending 700+ dollars on an army which will be bad for a year plus. It really doesn't work for anyone who can't just throw 700-800$ every few months to pick an army.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
Sure, I guess that's a fair criticism, but when evidence is presented it seems to be roundly ignored.
I get a lot of the criticism coming from people who played a different flavor of 8th, but a lot has changed.
You can't provide "evidence" that someone's subjective experience is wrong. If you want to try and convince someone to view their subjective experience of the game differently you might want to start from the position that their subjective experience is based on things that actually happened to them rather than jumping from "your subjective experience is different from mine" straight to "well I guess you didn't actually play the game."
My subjective experience of playing 9th consists largely of being on one side or the other of 2-3 turn tablings, and then being told "well, if people bought different models the game would have gone differently." You can explain to me at great length that 2-3 turn tablings are actually supremely unlikely because the game is much more balanced than that and if I engaged properly with the game and bought different models I'd find it's actually incredibly fun, and you could be completely right, except for the fact that I don't want to buy different models, I want to use my models, all of which GW has arbitrarily decided need to be garbage for a while. The reason you're having fun and I'm not isn't that one of us is an idiot or is making things up rather than actually having played the game or is in some way "wrong", it's that we have a different set of priorities for the game. My priorities include the basic requirement that I shouldn't have to lose games purely by liking the wrong models, because I didn't feel like I did in 7th and before, and I've never felt that way in any other minis game, but I feel that way constantly in 8th/9th.
I'm not interested in trying to convince you your subjective experience of the game is wrong. You're having fun, that's great, woo, good for you. What I want is for the people who like 9th to stop trying to prove to me that my subjective experience is "wrong" and 9th is an objectively superior game, because it's not. It's better at executing your priorities than other editions/other games, sure, but it's really kind of awful at executing any of my priorities. And I'm still sitting here grumbling because I think this pervasive myth that 9e is objectively superior to all the competition is horribly destructive to tabletop gaming as a whole; I keep seeing people quit wargaming entirely or never start at all because of this idea that if 40k isn't for them and 40k is the best wargaming has to offer there's no point looking at anything else because it'll be worse.
I mean, i am an outspoken opponent of stratagems and the new subfaction bloat, especially since GW still avoids putting an actual pricetags on these things in pts and therefore will forever fail to balance them.
I also am an opponent to the believe that stratagems somehow make an army work more closely to how it should on the tabletop/ faction how it operates, because the disbalance due to no pointscost will make opportunity costs to take the next best thing skyrocket and therefore kill off a lot of such narrative inclination.
Also half the stratagems are just necessary equipment, considering f.e AA missiles... but since the game got streamlined anyways down...
However 9th is vastly better to 8th.... IF you have the corresponding dex and ut content DLC..
HOWEVER:
The phenomenon you describe is pretty much indicative on the near monopolistic nature of exposure and size of the Community of GW which i agree with is a detriment overall. There's also the debate about getting other games started and often how insignificant the chances are that something other sticks around, that has to do with the upper part, because the percived domination makes investment secure.
IoW, it's less the quality of games and more the size of the GW community pool that allows it to maintain its stranglehold.
And its also this that allows GW to get away wih BS like drukhari or admech and cut content DLC:
AnomanderRake wrote: My priorities include the basic requirement that I shouldn't have to lose games purely by liking the wrong models, because I didn't feel like I did in 7th and before, and I've never felt that way in any other minis game, but I feel that way constantly in 8th/9th.
That entirely depends on what your models are. In 7th I had 10k points of orks and 90% of the lists I could make with my collection was pure garbage. Tabled at top of turn 3 at the very best. Now I have 6-7k points of orks and countless different builds that work, only a few models are actually shelved for good. Same with drukhari, now I can play whatever list I want while in 7th a large chunk of my models were useless. I also halved my SW collection in the meanwhile, from 8k to 4k, for the very same reason. And I'm talking about casual games, I never went to a tournament.
If you have an army that was shaped with the 7th codex in mind of course it would be good then and not now. But most of the average collections of models, those with a big of everything instead of spamming a few units that used to be good, are in a much better state in 9th than in 7th.
If someone wants to put effort into it, I'm confident the result would be, that the internal balancing of units for 9th codizes is vastly superior to prior editions.
Only helps you if you already got your book, but that is another issue in itself.
Blackie wrote: If you have an army that was shaped with the 7th codex in mind of course it would be good then and not now. But most of the average collections of models, those with a big of everything instead of spamming a few units that used to be good, are in a much better state in 9th than in 7th.
I have no idea how GK armies looked in 7th. But what was considered the only viable stuff in 8th ed, is now the only stuff viable again. 8th armies that were considered good spamed NDKs, strikes and interceptors and always run Draigo. And the new codex armies spam strikes, NDKS, always run draigo and maybe run interceptors or purifires. It doesn't feel nice when what you like is termintors. And it is odd too, because GW could make termintors good for DA. Plus waiting 4 years to get the same kind of a list again, doesn't feel well. Rule set of 9th maybe better, but the end expiriance is codex dependent. Ain't even a GK or me thing. Doubt necron players, even those that started in 9th, are very happy right now. And they know they won't get any updated for years to come.
In previous editions, in particular 3-5th, I could more or less look at the table and understand very easily what each unit was capable of, and create a plan to interact with it. The number of variables was limited, and the really major "unforseeable" variable involved was dice.
I think this is mostly a problem with datasheets' bloat. I mean do you see how many datasheets are now included in codexes belonging to the biggest factions? 3rd edition SM had somethig like 30 datasheets, now they have 200. Same with orks. I haven't had problems memorizing the best stratagems from enemy armies so far, but I can't possibly remember all the enemy units and weapons profiles. If I may mistakes it's because of that, not because I wasn't aware of a hidden tool to enhance a unit or cripple an opponent's one.
There's definitely bloat in many dimensions, but I'd argue that's not it, because the amount of meaningful unit variation that's been added is pretty negligible outside of superheavies (and bespoke rules). Datasheet (and weapon) additions are most of the time sitting in between (or on top of) previously existing units in terms of design space, and therefore still predictable/model-able. Stratagems are a different sort of asset to "model" in our brain. The closest thing to their effects in prior editions might be psychic powers, which function fairly similarly in terms of their effect (modifying stats, causing mortal wounds, etc.) but Psychic powers were generally more limited in their variation and usually confined to specific models, as well as built for in army design and paid for with points. Overall Psychic powers were more limited because of these factors, and because they were more limited, the game didn't revolve around them unless one player forced the issue with a very psyker-heavy army (which in turn probably meant that they suffered in some other area, since psykers cost points).
Stratagems are unavoidable though, in terms of their utility and potency. They're this whole other layer of "off table" interaction that requires attention.
There is a difference between units that are just bad or in the "why bother" tier like Servitors or SM Scouts and "it isn't best in slot but it works outside of tournaments", which imho most 9th edition units fall into. Examples being Plague Marines, Tactical Marines and GK Terminators.
Necrons are absolutely fine competitive wise, as their 4 top 4 finishes last month showcase.
I'd say 3 out of 4 lists used different kind of unit combinations to pilot to victory, so outside of tournaments, you have some good selection of units, too.
Funny enough servitors are a main stay of GK armies. Two units in a ton of armies.
Also as an off topic , bloat is not always bad. It is a safety thing too. when you the "200 datasheets" the chance of 10 of them making a good army, is much higher, then when you have 30. That doesn't mean that 30 datasheets armies are bad. There was a time when knights were are good with like 5. But lots of units is good, for casual play. In that you don't get locked in to a bad army.
Tau for example. Technically a horrible, horrible army in 8th. When run without commanders and drones. With those, maybe a bit boring, but good to play with.
Harlis or Inari on the other hand, are either extremly over tuned or really bad.
a_typical_hero wrote: If someone wants to put effort into it, I'm confident the result would be, that the internal balancing of units for 9th codizes is vastly superior to prior editions.
Only helps you if you already got your book, but that is another issue in itself.
I'd take that bet. Maybe its true for like Space Marines because they have SO MANY units but the Necron book has loads of dud units, as does the Sisters book. Just skimming the Sisters tactics thread it seems like everyone thinks all the tanks are terrible except for Rhinos which is really some mean feat to make not even ONE good tank in a codex. Paragon warsuits are apparently terrible from what people have been saying in the other thread. Most lists seem to spam either rets, dominions or repentia with a few mortifiers and a minimum amount of basic Sisters.
I've not looked at the Necron threads recently but I remember that it was absolutely underwhelming and again, had loads of dud units.
I've not even bothered looking at the AdMech codex yet because both Sisters and Necrons were so bleh in terms of rules for me.
I look forward to the 9th Ed Tyranid codex to see which single good unit we'll have to spam this edition.
200 Space Marine datasheets is bad, because about 2/3 are just copies of some other unit.
Which is better? Tacticals or Intercessors? They both do the same thing in the same way, they're never both going to be viable.
Which is exactly what we've seen. In 8th Tacticals did it better, now Intercessors do it better.
Sim-Life wrote: I'd take that bet. Maybe its true for like Space Marines because they have SO MANY units but the Necron book has loads of dud units, as does the Sisters book. Just skimming the Sisters tactics thread it seems like everyone thinks all the tanks are terrible except for Rhinos which is really some mean feat to make not even ONE good tank in a codex. Paragon warsuits are apparently terrible from what people have been saying in the other thread. Most lists seem to spam either rets, dominions or repentia with a few mortifiers and a minimum amount of basic Sisters.
I've not looked at the Necron threads recently but I remember that it was absolutely underwhelming and again, had loads of dud units.
I've not even bothered looking at the AdMech codex yet because both Sisters and Necrons were so bleh in terms of rules for me.
I look forward to the 9th Ed Tyranid codex to see which single good unit we'll have to spam this edition.
We have to differentiate between "bad units", "okay units" and "this is what you should bring to tournaments". People in tactica threads are most likely looking for optimisation of their list. Statements like "this isn't the best unit for the job, but I like it and it works for me" have no place there, as had been stated in the past from participants of these threads. Vehicles without any inbuilt defensive mechanism like -1d or -1 to hit or invul saves across the board are lacklustre this edition, that is true. infantry though is - in my perception - mostly fine.
TangoTwoBravo wrote:I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.
I look at the shooting rules, vehicle rules, blast templates etc and I see a more streamlined game than the editions before 8th Edition.
As far as the core rules go I would agree. I think they maybe went a bit too far in streamlining things but the basic rules are pretty easy to understand and I rarely have to refer to them during a game.
I completely disagree that I spend less time digging through rulebooks in 9th though. Between double-checking unit special rules and flicking back and forth through the list of stratagems to confirm the CP cost, whether it applies in this situation and to the appropriate unit or whether it even exists at all I spend way more time looking at my rulebook or cycling through datacards than I did pre-8th edition. It doesn't help that GW seem to have a magical ability to layout their Codices exactly wrong. I don't know how they do it but regardless of the method they choose and the order of the rules it always seems like all the rules are as inconvenient to find as possible in a Codex.
TangoTwoBravo wrote:
I quite like Stratagems. I know the ones I am intending to use, and I have familiarity with other Codexes but not memorization. In the interests of disclosure I do play fairly regularly, although the winter and spring saw lockdown interruptions. My first real games post-3rd lockdown were in a local tourney. No rules issues. My opponent on Saturday asked me ahead of time if I could bring my Astra Militarum since he not faced them in some time. It was my first game with my AM in months (and 2nd AM game in 9th), so I did a little reading and planning ahead of time and knew which Stratagems I intended to use. No brain meltdown and no issues during the game. I also managed my own expectations.
Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible? You might lose the game? OK - so you won't get caught out by that again. I don't like gotchas myself, to be clear, and most players will offer a quick rundown of their Strats at the start of the game if their opponent has not faced their list. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that regular posters here enjoy investing their time in thinking about the game since they are clearly invested enough to write about it? So read about some other faction's money-making Stratagems from time to time?
One of the problem is that the effect of stratagems can range from changing a dice roll from failure to success all the way up to making a fairly innocuous unit absolutely monstrous. While you can probably give a quick rundown of the most common strats you might use there are always situations where a previously unexplained one might suddenly be the perfect choice. The problem for me is how uninteractive the whole system is and how it doesn't feel like it's a test of player skill at times because it's really just about your opponent applying a (known or otherwise) set of stratagems to inflate the power of their army beyond what you can see just from reading the rules for their units. It removes player agency and becomes about setting up your combos before your opponent can.
As an example of the difference in approach, WM/H was fairly well known for its at-times insane combos. The difference for me is that a WM/H army is usually a fairly small number of units, it uses a pretty solid USR system and (almost) all the rules for the models are available on the unit cards themselves. So while there are some truly silly combos you can pull off in that game all the moving parts for those combos are freely available to both players at all times. I don't have to worry there's a whole extra list of spells not on their card that their caster has access to, for example. The same is true in X-Wing. All the rules your opponent is going to use are on the cards in front of them and it's usually pretty obvious if they're trying to set up some super-combo so the skill comes from trying to avoid or execute that combo while both players have full knowledge of its existence.
One of 40k's other problems is many stats just let you break the normal rules in ways that doesn't promote skill or interactive gameplay. The much-maligned AdMech Enriched Rounds strat, for example, is hardly a skilled move on the AdMech player's part. It's just a giant damage buff for no effort. The same is true of the many shoots/fights twice strats that GW are gradually phasing out.
Daedalus81 wrote:
The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.
There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.
You've already been told more than once that this utter bullgak assertion is utter bullgak. Instead of setting up your row of strawmen you could try to engage with the arguments.
Sim-Life wrote: I'd take that bet. Maybe its true for like Space Marines because they have SO MANY units but the Necron book has loads of dud units, as does the Sisters book. Just skimming the Sisters tactics thread it seems like everyone thinks all the tanks are terrible except for Rhinos which is really some mean feat to make not even ONE good tank in a codex. Paragon warsuits are apparently terrible from what people have been saying in the other thread. Most lists seem to spam either rets, dominions or repentia with a few mortifiers and a minimum amount of basic Sisters.
I've not looked at the Necron threads recently but I remember that it was absolutely underwhelming and again, had loads of dud units.
I've not even bothered looking at the AdMech codex yet because both Sisters and Necrons were so bleh in terms of rules for me.
I look forward to the 9th Ed Tyranid codex to see which single good unit we'll have to spam this edition.
We have to differentiate between "bad units", "okay units" and "this is what you should bring to tournaments". People in tactica threads are most likely looking for optimisation of their list. Statements like "this isn't the best unit for the job, but I like it and it works for me" have no place there, as had been stated in the past from participants of these threads. Vehicles without any inbuilt defensive mechanism like -1d or -1 to hit or invul saves across the board are lacklustre this edition, that is true. infantry though is - in my perception - mostly fine.
We have to differentiate between "bad units", "okay units" and "this is what you should bring to tournaments". People in tactica threads are most likely looking for optimisation of their list. Statements like "this isn't the best unit for the job, but I like it and it works for me" have no place there, as had been stated in the past from participants of these threads. Vehicles without any inbuilt defensive mechanism like -1d or -1 to hit or invul saves across the board are lacklustre this edition, that is true. infantry though is - in my perception - mostly fine.
Exactly this. And even if we just consider tournaments the internal balance between codexes is already pretty high. Taking a look at lists that placed at GTs so far we can see a wide range of units represented. Some are present everytime, some are more uncommon but even a few units that are considered lackluster can be part of a top list, and in fact tournaments results are showing that. It couldn't be possible in editions like 7th.
Orks even had results by using the Blood Axe klan which is unviersally considered as garbage. And yet someone could make it work. Most of the stuff that people consider bad isn't actually bad, it just requires more attention, experience and synergies. Sometimes they're worse than other units, but not significantly worse.
Sisters codex is a good example of that. There's only a few datasheets that will likely be shelved in this edition. The vast majority of their codex is playable.
It's not fun discussing with you if you want to be a donkey.
"The internal balance is much better than in previous editions" is not at odds with or "moving goalposts" when you categorise a codex' units into "bad (=makes you worse for using the unit)", "okay (=for casual and competitive)" and "best in slot (=for tournament)". It is a way how to measure the initial statement.
It's not fun discussing with you if you want to be a donkey.
"The internal balance is much better than in previous editions" is not at odds with or "moving goalposts" when you categorise a codex' units into "bad (=makes you worse for using the unit)", "okay (=for casual and competitive)" and "best in slot (=for tournament)". It is a way how to measure the initial statement.
You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
I guess what it really boils down to is that 9th edition is UNNECESSARILY complicated (unwieldy, bloated, etc.). It's not that you can't easily learn it, but some things could be so much easier. I'm gonna use Orks as an example, simply because its the army I know most about.
I'm not even talking about strats (which I absolutely loath, but to each their own), but about stuff like:
You add a new unit (in this case Beast Snagga boyz) where you could use an existing concept ('ardboyz)
introduce a whole new keyword (which, again, is unnecessary)
Introduce a "Not-Powerklaw" and a "Not-Bigshoota"
Why do Orks have to have 3 versions of a Powerklaw? Why do Beastsnaggas have to have their own unique Keyword (and why is the Painboss in here???)? You could even argue that Beastsnaggas fullfill almost the same role as the common Choppa/Slugga Orkboy so why add them in the first place.
And this is just one example. The new Black Templar "Not-Heavy Flamer" is the same thing!
EDIT: Im aware that a "new" player wouldn't know about 'ardboyz and the fact that beastsnaggas are new, but unnecessary keyword interaction still can lead to more questions than a simply absolute statement like "all ork infantery"
Sim-Life wrote: You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
"Okay units" can still work in a tournament, they are just not "best in slot", as only one unit can be that by definition. If I gave the impression that "okay" is for casual only, I apologise. That was not my intention.
Exactly this. And even if we just consider tournaments the internal balance between codexes is already pretty high. Taking a look at lists that placed at GTs so far we can see a wide range of units represented. Some are present everytime, some are more uncommon but even a few units that are considered lackluster can be part of a top list, and in fact tournaments results are showing that. It couldn't be possible in editions like 7th.
Orks even had results by using the Blood Axe klan which is unviersally considered as garbage. And yet someone could make it work. Most of the stuff that people consider bad isn't actually bad, it just requires more attention, experience and synergies. Sometimes they're worse than other units, but not significantly worse.
Sisters codex is a good example of that. There's only a few datasheets that will likely be shelved in this edition. The vast majority of their codex is playable.
That does depend on the army though. You are not going to see a lot of GK armies build with terminators in it, instead of strikes. Or running paladins or dreadnoughts, instead of NDKs. I doubt anyone will ever use a non NDK GM too. It all boils down to what rules a faction gets from GW, and if there is enough very powerful stuff to carry a list.
Sim-Life wrote: You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
"Okay units" can still work in a tournament, they are just not "best in slot", as only one unit can be that by definition. If I gave the impression that "okay" is for casual only, I apologise. That was not my intention.
But if some units are overwhelmingly good that they render other units not worth taking then the internal balance isn't that good. And "better than previous editions" isn't really much of a defence. Drinking pee is better than eating poo but it doesn't make drinking pee good just because you don't have to eat the poo anymore.
moreorless wrote: I do think people who go to events at all are probably a bit over represented here as that kind of involvement is also I'd imagine likely to push you towards an online community
I suspect there are still large numbers of GW's customers were gaming is between a small group of friends, maybe with some small local organisation that I think that is actually part of the reason for the love of depth of stat like rules. 40K isnt a massively complex game in its core rules and well suited to casual gaming but I think you have a very large depth of variables that can allow for variety of games even between the same faction. If I have a say Ultramarines and my friend has Orks and we play each other once a fortnight theres a lot of potential for those two armies against each other to play differently via troop choice, loadouts, strats, etc.
That depends on the army. My Slaanesh Daemons lists can't really vary much - they have a single troops choice, a plethora of HQs (the hardest slot to proliferate in a list), one Elite, like 2 Fast Attack, and 2 Heavy Support (which are "chariot" and "bigger chariot"). If you add in "generic" daemons that can be Slaanesh allegiance, you get one more of each choice except troops and elites, which remain only a single option.
If, in a hypothetical local meta, my friends find a way to trounce my Daemons (or alternatively refuse to change when getting beaten repeatedly) then our games simply aren't going to be fun, as I am incapable of changing without buying a whole different army.
I'd agree its not really balanced and certain generally more popular factions do have a lot of variability built into them but the idea is the same, the large number of variables for certain factions do mean that if your playing mostly games between the same ones you still have a lot of variables. In that situation as well its also much more likely your going to get to know the other faction well and can make more informed choices rather than a player having to face many different factions in events.
I do tend to think thats always really been GW's core market as well and what they target a lot of their devolpment at.
Sim-Life wrote: You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
"Okay units" can still work in a tournament, they are just not "best in slot", as only one unit can be that by definition. If I gave the impression that "okay" is for casual only, I apologise. That was not my intention.
But if some units are overwhelmingly good that they render other units not worth taking then the internal balance isn't that good. And "better than previous editions" isn't really much of a defence. Drinking pee is better than eating poo but it doesn't make drinking pee good just because you don't have to eat the poo anymore.
I think it is fair to say 9th is better than 7th.
I also think that doesn't refute that 9th is flawed.
Your post hits it on the head - a lot of the posts saying "9th isn't bad" are doing so by implicitly setting 7th as the goalpost for "good" (and then being like "so because 9th isn't that bad, the only way you could dislike it is if you don't play!" or some variation).
It is possible for a player to dislike the game at the end of 7th AND dislike 9th edition.
"At least your gak sandwich is on rye, not on wheat" is unconvincing.
Most 'oldhammer' people hold up 5th as the best 40k has ever been, not 7th.
I see 7th; particularly all it did wrong with stuff like formations, held up almost as a strawman by proponents of 9th more often than people saying they dislike 9th.
kirotheavenger wrote: Most 'oldhammer' people hold up 5th as the best 40k has ever been, not 7th.
I see 7th; particularly all it did wrong with stuff like formations, held up almost as a strawman by proponents of 9th more often than people saying they dislike 9th.
Not only that, there was A LOT of broken combos that didn't involve formations. Of course formations played a huge role in making 7th one of the worst editions ever, but it wasn't just that. Summoning, re-rollable invulns, weapons with high rof that automatically wounded vehicles on 6s, invisibility, D weapons, etc... other than overpowered units were a problem. Power creep was much higher than now, even without formations. Especially for those armies that didn't have any of those broken combos or even a single powerful formation. Orks say hi .
Weren't formation an equlizer intreduced to balance the fact that eldar armies were running around with death machines that were 100-150pts undercosted, and the only way to balance this was for GW to give other more free points. Plus it drove sells of stuff, as everyone needed to buy models for those free things formations gave.
Eldar got some of the best formations.
What's that? I get 2+ WS/BS on all my Aspect Warriors if I just spam Warp Spiders like I was going to do anyway? Boy I love fluffy rules!
7th really empthasised the "Forge the Narrative". As in, it's all about a fun and fluffy time, balance isn't important.
A lot of formations were really fluffy. It encouraged Marines to run a balanced mechanised battle company for example.
They were just hideously OP because balance was never the point. Their idea for how to encourage a balanced mechanised Battle Company was to give you all the transports for free if you took a battle company. That could never be exploited in any way, right?
Some formations were utter gash. Throwing together units that barely synergised at all and handing out negligible buffs as an incentive.
It's part of why I say balance is so important regardless. Arguably the worst 40k has ever been was when they put narrative first instead of balance.
Sim-Life wrote: But if some units are overwhelmingly good that they render other units not worth taking then the internal balance isn't that good. And "better than previous editions" isn't really much of a defence. Drinking pee is better than eating poo but it doesn't make drinking pee good just because you don't have to eat the poo anymore.
We are not talking overwhelmingly good. For your casual game you can take MM Devastators (in a pod), or you can take Eradicators or you can take MM attack bikes or Sternguard with combi-melta (in a pod) and they will all perform good enough. If you go to a tourney your first pick would be the MM attack bikes, as they are (determined by mathhammer or experience) the superior choice. You can use the others, but they are less "point and click" and/or require a specific sub-faction to work as well. The 1st place Iron Hands player of this month's Into the Hellstorm tournament for example took 2 squads of MM Devastators for all their melta needs.
Personally I think 5th had the best codizes in terms of options and flavour so far, so that is my standard to compare it to. 5th was good, but not everybody had an updated codex and 4th edition codizes just plain sucked.
That is intersting. I only know pre 8th stuff from stories. In the end, if someone starts in 8th, 9th or 10th, it is not going to matter too much for them that 7th or 6th were way worse.
Yep, 9th is the better edition. Now my Corsairs army can finally... oh. Right.
kirotheavenger wrote: Eldar got some of the best formations.
What's that? I get 2+ WS/BS on all my Aspect Warriors if I just spam Warp Spiders like I was going to do anyway? Boy I love fluffy rules!
7th really empthasised the "Forge the Narrative". As in, it's all about a fun and fluffy time, balance isn't important.
A lot of formations were really fluffy. It encouraged Marines to run a balanced mechanised battle company for example.
They were just hideously OP because balance was never the point. Their idea for how to encourage a balanced mechanised Battle Company was to give you all the transports for free if you took a battle company. That could never be exploited in any way, right?
Some formations were utter gash. Throwing together units that barely synergised at all and handing out negligible buffs as an incentive.
It's part of why I say balance is so important regardless. Arguably the worst 40k has ever been was when they put narrative first instead of balance.
In terms of building a fluffy army, I certainly preferred the Formations and particularly super-Formations (like the Necron Decurion) to 8th and 9th's mess of different detachments.
Of course, as you say, where it fell apart was the balance. Not helped, I imagine, by the fact that GW completely changed how Formations worked about halfway through the edition. So the early books had massive formations with minute benefits, whilst later books gained colossal bonuses. As an example, the Necron book (printed after the change) had a super-formation that gave +1 to RP rolls (effectively giving almost every model 4+++ FNP+1), and this was in addition to the effects of individual formations - like Destroyers rerolling all to-wound and armour penetration rolls and Wraiths being able to get RPs. Meanwhile, the DE book (produced before the change) had a formation that basically dictated your entire 2000pt army (including many dubious options) and in return you got . . . +1 to the garbage PfP table, which you lost if your regular, T3, no Eternal-Warrior Archon died. That was it. It wasn't comprised of smaller formations, so you didn't get the benefits of those as well. It was just one massive formation with a really crap bonus.
In spite of all that, I still think it's a shame that Formations have disappeared altogether as I really liked the structure of the later Formations. Could have been nice to see that without such game-changing buffs.
We have Armies of Renown, which are the same kinda thing as Formations. You don't see them because they're pretty much all gash.
They dictate which units you take, they cost CP to use, and they don't even give any benefits; just offer a couple of strats which you can spend even more CP on.
30k has a pretty good interpretation of Formations.
Their army doctrines can be very limiting but also give good buffs.
There are definitely still bad formations, but there aren't any OP ones.
I did say same kind if thing.
I even explained in that very comment how they were nothing like formations.
Lets not fall into that classic internet trap of just looking to prove someone wrong and be civil about this.
They do the same kind of thing is to say that they lay out the structure of an army (or a portion thereof) with restrictions and/or requirements, and give some benefit for complying with that.
I don't feel that 40k is *complex* per say, but it is cluttered. The pieces are simple but they are scattered, disorganized, and labelled in counterintuitive ways.
Sim-Life wrote: You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
"Okay units" can still work in a tournament, they are just not "best in slot", as only one unit can be that by definition. If I gave the impression that "okay" is for casual only, I apologise. That was not my intention.
But if some units are overwhelmingly good that they render other units not worth taking then the internal balance isn't that good. And "better than previous editions" isn't really much of a defence. Drinking pee is better than eating poo but it doesn't make drinking pee good just because you don't have to eat the poo anymore.
I think it is fair to say 9th is better than 7th.
I also think that doesn't refute that 9th is flawed.
Your post hits it on the head - a lot of the posts saying "9th isn't bad" are doing so by implicitly setting 7th as the goalpost for "good" (and then being like "so because 9th isn't that bad, the only way you could dislike it is if you don't play!" or some variation).
It is possible for a player to dislike the game at the end of 7th AND dislike 9th edition.
"At least your gak sandwich is on rye, not on wheat" is unconvincing.
7th edition almost killed 40k. No one anywhere is saying that 7th is a standard for 'good'.
Sim-Life wrote: You said internal balance was better than previous editions then moved your stance to its better than previous editions IF YOU PLAY CASUALLY. There was a very clear goalpost shift.
"Okay units" can still work in a tournament, they are just not "best in slot", as only one unit can be that by definition. If I gave the impression that "okay" is for casual only, I apologise. That was not my intention.
But if some units are overwhelmingly good that they render other units not worth taking then the internal balance isn't that good. And "better than previous editions" isn't really much of a defence. Drinking pee is better than eating poo but it doesn't make drinking pee good just because you don't have to eat the poo anymore.
I think it is fair to say 9th is better than 7th.
I also think that doesn't refute that 9th is flawed.
Your post hits it on the head - a lot of the posts saying "9th isn't bad" are doing so by implicitly setting 7th as the goalpost for "good" (and then being like "so because 9th isn't that bad, the only way you could dislike it is if you don't play!" or some variation).
It is possible for a player to dislike the game at the end of 7th AND dislike 9th edition.
"At least your gak sandwich is on rye, not on wheat" is unconvincing.
7th edition almost killed 40k. No one anywhere is saying that 7th is a standard for 'good'.
Then why is "it's better than 7th" supposed to excuse 9th?
You've already been told more than once that this utter bullgak assertion is utter bullgak. Instead of setting up your row of strawmen you could try to engage with the arguments.
I did. I gave pretty elaborate examples and they were just ignored.
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H.B.M.C. wrote: "The only reason someone could disagree with me is because they don't actually play the game!" is a pretty damn arrogant stance to take. Granted, it's not outright insulting like Jid's "The only reason someone could disagree with me is because they're a drooling illiterate dimwit!", but it's not that much better.
AnomanderRake wrote: All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.
C'mon man! Give Dae a break. After all, he stopped bothering with this thread... other than all the posts he's made since. Like the last one. And the one before that.
I'm not really putting any more vigor into it was my point.
Yes, my assertion was insulting. More than I intended it to be, but the reason is because I continually see people referencing 8th edition issues. Things that are addressed.
What else can I do, but point out that the judgment is using incomplete information?
That doesn't apply to *every* post here, of course.
I must say as someone who likes to defend 9th I get the impression that people who criticize it imply that 3rd - 7th were somehow less bloated with rules or had better balance, which is simply not true in my eyes. It might have been a different experience, more like a warsimulation, that I can get. But it wasn't very tactical since it also had 40Ks main problem of IGOUGO, it always had a much more bloated main rulebook than 9th, it just had lighter codizes instead (sometimes), but balance was all over the place which I don't feel is as bad anymore if you compare 9th codizes with each other.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I must say as someone who likes to defend 9th I get the impression that people who criticize it imply that 3rd - 7th were somehow less bloated with rules or had better balance, which is simply not true in my eyes. It might have been a different experience, more like a warsimulation, that I can get. But it wasn't very tactical since it also had 40Ks main problem of IGOUGO, it always had a much more bloated main rulebook than 9th, it just had lighter codizes instead (sometimes), but balance was all over the place which I don't feel is as bad anymore if you compare 9th codizes with each other.
In my experience imbalance and complexity are a linked trend; I started in early 4th, and every edition since has been more complex and less balanced than the last. The reason I bring up 7th so often is that that was the last time I feel like there was an underlying structure that I could use to produce a fun game with a few tweaks; if you play single-CAD-only (so no formations), 30k D rules, 30k Invisibility, no relics, and cap points spent on a single model at 25% of the game's points limit 7th works pretty well. I can't "fix" 8th or 9th for casual play with a few quick patches that way because the combo-based design means that unit stats, weapon stats, stratagems, relics, WTs, sub-faction traits, and super-faction traits exist in an impenetrable interconnected soup such that I'd probably have more luck burning it down and starting over than trying to disentangle what's actually broken from that mess.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I must say as someone who likes to defend 9th I get the impression that people who criticize it imply that 3rd - 7th were somehow less bloated with rules or had better balance, which is simply not true in my eyes. It might have been a different experience, more like a warsimulation, that I can get. But it wasn't very tactical since it also had 40Ks main problem of IGOUGO, it always had a much more bloated main rulebook than 9th, it just had lighter codizes instead (sometimes), but balance was all over the place which I don't feel is as bad anymore if you compare 9th codizes with each other.
In my experience imbalance and complexity are a linked trend; I started in early 4th, and every edition since has been more complex and less balanced than the last. The reason I bring up 7th so often is that that was the last time I feel like there was an underlying structure that I could use to produce a fun game with a few tweaks; if you play single-CAD-only (so no formations), 30k D rules, 30k Invisibility, no relics, and cap points spent on a single model at 25% of the game's points limit 7th works pretty well. I can't "fix" 8th or 9th for casual play with a few quick patches that way because the combo-based design means that unit stats, weapon stats, stratagems, relics, WTs, sub-faction traits, and super-faction traits exist in an impenetrable interconnected soup such that I'd probably have more luck burning it down and starting over than trying to disentangle what's actually broken from that mess.
I don't think that all of that stuff is as inextricable as you think. It just changes the balance, much like single-CAD-only, 30k D rules, 30k invisibility, no relics, and cap points spent on a single model at 25% of game points changes the balance. Some units that "depend" on stratagem support or sub-faction traits or whatever will be worse to use, just like units that relied on relics, invisibility, D rules, or whatever would be worse to use in your version of 7th ed.
But the other problem is that those strategems and traits and stuff are the game.
If you strip those out you're left with the 5 pages of core rules, which is pretty much a straight forward "roll dice, remove enemy models" attack resolution and nothing else.
That's not a good game.
kirotheavenger wrote: But the other problem is that those strategems and traits and stuff are the game.
If you strip those out you're left with the 5 pages of core rules, which is pretty much a straight forward "roll dice, remove enemy models" attack resolution and nothing else.
That's not a good game.
That’s a conscious design choice though. Interestingly it was a total flop with apocalypse even though h the at turned the various design trends up to 11.
Rihgu wrote: ...I don't think that all of that stuff is as inextricable as you think. It just changes the balance, much like single-CAD-only, 30k D rules, 30k invisibility, no relics, and cap points spent on a single model at 25% of game points changes the balance. Some units that "depend" on stratagem support or sub-faction traits or whatever will be worse to use, just like units that relied on relics, invisibility, D rules, or whatever would be worse to use in your version of 7th ed.
If you try playing 9e with statlines only and no stratagems, WTs, etc., etc., you'll find that GW couldn't do the math when they were writing the statlines in the Indexes, and there are a lot of really basic things about the statlines (wound counts/damage counts, the to-wound table, how saves and AP are allocated, where stats cap out, what has an Invulnerable save, the relationship between ranges and move stats...) that are pretty badly broken from day zero. There are bits of subsequent bloat (the Blast rule, damage reduction) that exist only to avoid having to fix some of the bad math on the statlines. On top of that once you strip out the combo-game you're just playing Sigmar; you don't need to maneuver to get all your attacks off, everything's pretty uniformly effective against all targets, so we put our models down on the table and roll dice until someone dies.
I don't like the combo-play game in 9th, but it's also holding the game together at a pretty fundamental level. Quickly stripping off some of the bloat off of 7th makes it better, quickly stripping the bloat off of 9th just makes it worse.
...I'm suddenly wondering if the issue isn't that 9th is more complex than earlier editions but that the complexity is way less optional than it was before.
AnomanderRake wrote: On top of that once you strip out the combo-game you're just playing Sigmar; you don't need to maneuver to get all your attacks off, everything's pretty uniformly effective against all targets, so we put our models down on the table and roll dice until someone dies.
I'm sorry, but this is insanely out of touch. As NinthMusketeer put it
Heh, how to tell when someone doesn't play AoS.
Also the indices are from 8th edition, so I don't see how they relate to 9th. Hasn't every army been updated from the indices? Every army I play has changed quite a bit from the indices, between stat lines and rules (not even counting sub factions, relics, stratagems, etc)
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I must say as someone who likes to defend 9th I get the impression that people who criticize it imply that 3rd - 7th were somehow less bloated with rules or had better balance, which is simply not true in my eyes. It might have been a different experience, more like a warsimulation, that I can get. But it wasn't very tactical since it also had 40Ks main problem of IGOUGO, it always had a much more bloated main rulebook than 9th, it just had lighter codizes instead (sometimes), but balance was all over the place which I don't feel is as bad anymore if you compare 9th codizes with each other.
In my experience imbalance and complexity are a linked trend; I started in early 4th, and every edition since has been more complex and less balanced than the last. The reason I bring up 7th so often is that that was the last time I feel like there was an underlying structure that I could use to produce a fun game with a few tweaks; if you play single-CAD-only (so no formations), 30k D rules, 30k Invisibility, no relics, and cap points spent on a single model at 25% of the game's points limit 7th works pretty well. I can't "fix" 8th or 9th for casual play with a few quick patches that way because the combo-based design means that unit stats, weapon stats, stratagems, relics, WTs, sub-faction traits, and super-faction traits exist in an impenetrable interconnected soup such that I'd probably have more luck burning it down and starting over than trying to disentangle what's actually broken from that mess.
Easiest fix for casual 40k has always been to avoid the most powerful and oppressive units, it's much better than changing rules. Works perfectly even in 9th.
AnomanderRake wrote: On top of that once you strip out the combo-game you're just playing Sigmar; you don't need to maneuver to get all your attacks off, everything's pretty uniformly effective against all targets, so we put our models down on the table and roll dice until someone dies.
I'm sorry, but this is insanely out of touch. As NinthMusketeer put it
Heh, how to tell when someone doesn't play AoS.
Also the indices are from 8th edition, so I don't see how they relate to 9th. Hasn't every army been updated from the indices? Every army I play has changed quite a bit from the indices, between stat lines and rules (not even counting sub factions, relics, stratagems, etc)
There are a lot of numbers and assumptions about numbers (the narrow T7/3+ or T8/3+ of almost every vehicle, for instance) that were wrong in the Indexes that haven't changed at all.
As to Sigmar I've never played it with people who are serious about it; every time a new edition happens some people at the game store I hang out at get all excited and we all pull our armies out and give it a go, and the shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay feels a lot like 8e WHFB somehow, and then we all get bored and stop. I'm sure if you're playing at a tournament level and only playing with the most optimal stuff there's a game there, but at a casual level it's really dull. Though you could tell me that it's a great game if I just bought different models, somehow I think I'd laugh my ass off at that.
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Blackie wrote: ...Easiest fix for casual 40k has always been to avoid the most powerful and oppressive units, it's much better than changing rules. Works perfectly even in 9th.
But the most powerful and oppressive things in 7th were specific rules, so we could find them easily and turn them off. The most powerful and oppressive things in 9th are combos, which you need to understand thoroughly to figure out what actually makes it OP and how to fix it. I feel like I'd have to become a tournament player to gain the knowledge and expertise to be able to play 9th casually, which sort of defeats the point of wanting to play casually at all, which is why I keep accusing 9th of being written for the tournament players.
kirotheavenger wrote: But the other problem is that those strategems and traits and stuff are the game.
If you strip those out you're left with the 5 pages of core rules, which is pretty much a straight forward "roll dice, remove enemy models" attack resolution and nothing else.
That's not a good game.
That’s a conscious design choice though. Interestingly it was a total flop with apocalypse even though h the at turned the various design trends up to 11.
Actually pretty much everyone that I've spoken to that's played 40k thought it would be a better 40k ruleset than 40k is.
I remember several discussions, including on Dakka, hoping that many of the mechanics would be brought into 9th edition and I still see some of them mentioned today.
Apocalypse flopped for a lot of reasons; it was an expensive box of nothing but cardboard. Most people just don't have the means to play apocalypse games either. The core rules being bad doesn't appear to be one of the reasons though.
But the most powerful and oppressive things in 7th were specific rules, so we could find them easily and turn them off.
Unless you played eldar or tau .
You can always avoid 9th powerful combos. Stratagem X makes unit Y overpowered? Play unit Y, don't use stratagem X, broken combinations can easily be avoided. Avoiding the most powerful traits, stratagems, psychic powers it's the same than avoiding units and it's easier than making house rules and convince other players to accept them.
kirotheavenger wrote: But the other problem is that those strategems and traits and stuff are the game.
If you strip those out you're left with the 5 pages of core rules, which is pretty much a straight forward "roll dice, remove enemy models" attack resolution and nothing else.
That's not a good game.
That’s a conscious design choice though. Interestingly it was a total flop with apocalypse even though h the at turned the various design trends up to 11.
Actually pretty much everyone that I've spoken to that's played 40k thought it would be a better 40k ruleset than 40k is.
I remember several discussions, including on Dakka, hoping that many of the mechanics would be brought into 9th edition and I still see some of them mentioned today.
Apocalypse flopped for a lot of reasons; it was an expensive box of nothing but cardboard. Most people just don't have the means to play apocalypse games either. The core rules being bad doesn't appear to be one of the reasons though.
I've played the new Apocalypse a few times, and every time it took us longer to get models out and put them away than it did to actually play. It's a ruleset for playing Epic, not for the time and effort it takes to collect, build, paint, and transport a full-size Apoc army.
kirotheavenger wrote: But the other problem is that those strategems and traits and stuff are the game.
If you strip those out you're left with the 5 pages of core rules, which is pretty much a straight forward "roll dice, remove enemy models" attack resolution and nothing else.
That's not a good game.
Probably. One thing I'm keen to try at one point is a game of 9th where each strat is only useable once per game, just to see if that pushes it more towards decisions on the table being more important than burning through a dozen CPs in a single turn. I suspect it won't improve things much but it's something I'm willing to try.
But the most powerful and oppressive things in 7th were specific rules, so we could find them easily and turn them off.
Unless you played eldar or tau .
You can always avoid 9th powerful combos. Stratagem X makes unit Y overpowered? Play unit Y, don't use stratagem X, broken combinations can easily be avoided. Avoiding the most powerful traits, stratagems, psychic powers it's the same than avoiding units and it's easier than making house rules and convince other players to accept them.
I'm not talking about the tournament people who refuse to consider doing anything other than playing tournament missions with tournament armies. I'm talking about the casual crowd that are happy to try and play softer lists, or accept some house rules, or do a homebrew mission or whatever, and then find that we're still getting in one-sided table wipes anyway because the gulf between good units and bad units in 40k is so vast that weak units from a strong Codex are going to steamroll over strong units from a weak Codex.
But the most powerful and oppressive things in 7th were specific rules, so we could find them easily and turn them off.
Unless you played eldar or tau .
You can always avoid 9th powerful combos. Stratagem X makes unit Y overpowered? Play unit Y, don't use stratagem X, broken combinations can easily be avoided. Avoiding the most powerful traits, stratagems, psychic powers it's the same than avoiding units and it's easier than making house rules and convince other players to accept them.
I'm not talking about the tournament people who refuse to consider doing anything other than playing tournament missions with tournament armies. I'm talking about the casual crowd that are happy to try and play softer lists, or accept some house rules, or do a homebrew mission or whatever, and then find that we're still getting in one-sided table wipes anyway because the gulf between good units and bad units in 40k is so vast that weak units from a strong Codex are going to steamroll over strong units from a weak Codex.
Balance is out of context for this thread about Complexity in 40k, there are balanced complex games and balanced simple games, there are imbalanced complex games and imbalanced simple games. Tau have gone 7/1 at a GTs and Genestealer Cults have gone 4/1 at a GT, that is weak armies taking their best units and going against the best armies. I've won all 4 of my casual games against Tau Empire in 9th edition, but you can make some really quick fixes to help Tau along, like just not allowing people to take faction-objectives against them since Tau lack faction-objectives, you can also just give Tau free points or victory points.
That is true, but everything can be scaled. If lets say tau win 1 event every 3 months, and have a high placing every month or so, then they are not on the same level as an army which has top placings each week and a top 4 or tournament win every 2-3 weeks.
It is just not the same. I remember in 8th some genius dude winning two GT with GK year after year. I was mind blown by it, and how could he have done it. And even more so, when his list was more or less what everyone else was running.
Trends are important just as singular event wins. Of course the really bad things happen, when no one can win a GT with a faction or the faction is just not played.
To be honest I am not sure what is worse, being below 50% on a consistant manner or being something like Crimson Fists, where you practically don't have data on them.
Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Games are rarely balanced, even with angelic intentions it's hard, many games have bad intentions as they try to sell this or that. The only time GW should be criticized is when they are doing obviously stupid stuff like making rules changes without considering the points value change the rule needs to be balanced or more or less randomly changing points for a new edition instead of just testing things out with the old points and seeing what happens. All GW needed to do was say that the points limit for Strike Force games are 1750 if they wanted smaller games, instead of increasing the points costs of 3 point models and 18 point models by 2 points or some random garbo like that, then they could have taken stock after 3 months and seen which way the wind was blowing, come out with beta points and then release a final version after a year, but we still suffer from all the terrible mistakes made in CA2020, it should have just been thrown out.
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Balance is subjective. To me 40k is already balanced enough that doesn't need a single tweak. But sometimes a player can have a collection of models that really struggles, can't invest more or he doesn't have battle ready models to make changes immediately and then I don't see any issue in playing against him by using some tweaks.
As to Sigmar I've never played it with people who are serious about it; every time a new edition happens some people at the game store I hang out at get all excited and we all pull our armies out and give it a go, and the shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay feels a lot like 8e WHFB somehow, and then we all get bored and stop. I'm sure if you're playing at a tournament level and only playing with the most optimal stuff there's a game there, but at a casual level it's really dull. Though you could tell me that it's a great game if I just bought different models, somehow I think I'd laugh my ass off at that.
This is so far removed from what AoS is about, even at a casual level. Sounds like a description of 1st edition AoS mind.
Regarding 40k, it's not complicated but it is a convoluted mess. When 9th dropped, I dropped 40k as a tournament game and play only occasionally and against like-minded opponents I know and trust. Much prefer AoS at the minute... although it does have it's own issues.
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Games are rarely balanced, even with angelic intentions it's hard, many games have bad intentions as they try to sell this or that. The only time GW should be criticized is when they are doing obviously stupid stuff like making rules changes without considering the points value change the rule needs to be balanced or more or less randomly changing points for a new edition instead of just testing things out with the old points and seeing what happens. All GW needed to do was say that the points limit for Strike Force games are 1750 if they wanted smaller games, instead of increasing the points costs of 3 point models and 18 point models by 2 points or some random garbo like that, then they could have taken stock after 3 months and seen which way the wind was blowing, come out with beta points and then release a final version after a year, but we still suffer from all the terrible mistakes made in CA2020, it should have just been thrown out.
But why should GW do things reasonably if so many people endorse their bad practices by playing a garbage game?
If you are corporation and can get rich doing the minimum because your fan base is so deep into the sunken cost fallacy that they almost behave as cult followers and your position on your niche market is so dominant that is almost a monopoly what is the incentive to do things properly?
Is the challenging games those that have to do things in a smart and effective manner.
GW can manage its flagship with the same level of ***** as the F35 jet.
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Games are rarely balanced, even with angelic intentions it's hard, many games have bad intentions as they try to sell this or that. The only time GW should be criticized is when they are doing obviously stupid stuff like making rules changes without considering the points value change the rule needs to be balanced or more or less randomly changing points for a new edition instead of just testing things out with the old points and seeing what happens. All GW needed to do was say that the points limit for Strike Force games are 1750 if they wanted smaller games, instead of increasing the points costs of 3 point models and 18 point models by 2 points or some random garbo like that, then they could have taken stock after 3 months and seen which way the wind was blowing, come out with beta points and then release a final version after a year, but we still suffer from all the terrible mistakes made in CA2020, it should have just been thrown out.
But why should GW do things reasonably if so many people endorse their bad practices by playing a garbage game?
If you are corporation and can get rich doing the minimum because your fan base is so deep into the sunken cost fallacy that they almost behave as cult followers and your position on your niche market is so dominant that is almost a monopoly what is the incentive to do things properly?
Is the challenging games those that have to do things in a smart and effective manner.
I don't believe fixing the game would cost more money and I think GW would grow faster if they tightened things up.
a_typical_hero wrote: In my observation that is usually because of bad movement on one of the player's side and coupled with high lethality of most stuff.
Can you elaborate where you saw these kind of tablings? I'm especially interested in examples between 9th edition armies.
When I was a defender during 8th edition I was told the casual meta doesn't matter, because GW doesn't balance the game based on casual games. Please stop using your fluffy wuffy perfect care bear meta where people can bring a list of pyrovore spam and still compete because everyone is just so gosh darn friendly and sporting as representation of the 40k meta. Thank you.
Also the last game I watched was Space Marines vs Druhkari, DE got first turn and the SM player was out of the game on DE turn 2 due to melee charges. He was tabled top of 4 I think? Our meta is also casual btw.
Easiest fix for casual 40k has always been to avoid the most powerful and oppressive units, it's much better than changing rules. Works perfectly even in 9th.
What if the units you like the most are the ones that become broken? I've used genestealers in my nids armies for years, even when they were crap I stuck with them, then they became good in 8th. So I should just stop using them? How is that fair? If screamer killer become insanely OP should I just put the 8 I own on the shelf because GW's blindfolded throw of the Dart Of Unintentional Brokeness happened to land on them?
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Games are rarely balanced, even with angelic intentions it's hard, many games have bad intentions as they try to sell this or that. The only time GW should be criticized is when they are doing obviously stupid stuff like making rules changes without considering the points value change the rule needs to be balanced or more or less randomly changing points for a new edition instead of just testing things out with the old points and seeing what happens. All GW needed to do was say that the points limit for Strike Force games are 1750 if they wanted smaller games, instead of increasing the points costs of 3 point models and 18 point models by 2 points or some random garbo like that, then they could have taken stock after 3 months and seen which way the wind was blowing, come out with beta points and then release a final version after a year, but we still suffer from all the terrible mistakes made in CA2020, it should have just been thrown out.
But why should GW do things reasonably if so many people endorse their bad practices by playing a garbage game?
If you are corporation and can get rich doing the minimum because your fan base is so deep into the sunken cost fallacy that they almost behave as cult followers and your position on your niche market is so dominant that is almost a monopoly what is the incentive to do things properly?
Is the challenging games those that have to do things in a smart and effective manner.
I don't believe fixing the game would cost more money and I think GW would grow faster if they tightened things up.
You are probably right... But GW dont have an incentive to do so at the moment because a significant part of the community endorse its bad practices... Therefore they can behave like an abussive husband with impunity.
a_typical_hero wrote: In my observation that is usually because of bad movement on one of the player's side and coupled with high lethality of most stuff.
Can you elaborate where you saw these kind of tablings? I'm especially interested in examples between 9th edition armies.
When I was a defender during 8th edition I was told the casual meta doesn't matter, because GW doesn't balance the game based on casual games. Please stop using your fluffy wuffy perfect care bear meta where people can bring a list of pyrovore spam and still compete because everyone is just so gosh darn friendly and sporting as representation of the 40k meta. Thank you.
Also the last game I watched was Space Marines vs Druhkari, DE got first turn and the SM player was out of the game on DE turn 2 due to melee charges. He was tabled top of 4 I think? Our meta is also casual btw.
Lol, are you alright mate? What has your incoherent rambling to do with the question I asked a different poster? Do you really have the audacity to dictate me what questions I ask on a forum? What has my local meta to do with this at all? For reasons unknown, you seem to have a little hate boner going on. Chill.
Well a question about tabeling in 9th, seems to be kind of an open question. Why wouldn't anyones expiriance be invalide here?
And you are not going to tell me that when pre nerf DE were a thing, you haven't played or seen games, which on turn 2 looked like this. Either I move on to objectives and he charges and shots you with the entire army. And then you lose on points on turn 4. Or you do not do it, he scores for two turns and the gap is now so big between you and him, that the game is done on turn 2, because there is no coming back from a 40+VPs difference vs an intact good or very good army.
Seeing stuff like that has nothing to do with hate or no hate for w40k. It is just things that happned and will happen in the future. Maybe not all armies have the option to do it. But a lot of players and game testers, say that there is an underlining problem of good armies in 9th playing soliter.And not really being very interactive with the opponent or even requiring to interact with the opponent. You just score max points for doing stuff you would already do, often double or triple dipping on something, or your armies mobility is so high that you ignore stuff like terrain.
There is also a huge problem of faction secondaries which for some armies are a bit too easy to do, while some factions have bad ones or worse, they don't have them at all, because their codex is planed for mid 2022.
I'm not dismissing Sim-Life's experience, I'm asking what
When I was a defender during 8th edition I was told the casual meta doesn't matter, because GW doesn't balance the game based on casual games. Please stop using your fluffy wuffy perfect care bear meta where people can bring a list of pyrovore spam and still compete because everyone is just so gosh darn friendly and sporting as representation of the 40k meta. Thank you.
has to do with me asking about the circumstances of the tabling. I didn't say anything in defense of the game when I asked, did I?
a_typical_hero wrote: In my observation that is usually because of bad movement on one of the player's side and coupled with high lethality of most stuff.
Can you elaborate where you saw these kind of tablings? I'm especially interested in examples between 9th edition armies.
When I was a defender during 8th edition I was told the casual meta doesn't matter, because GW doesn't balance the game based on casual games. Please stop using your fluffy wuffy perfect care bear meta where people can bring a list of pyrovore spam and still compete because everyone is just so gosh darn friendly and sporting as representation of the 40k meta. Thank you.
Also the last game I watched was Space Marines vs Druhkari, DE got first turn and the SM player was out of the game on DE turn 2 due to melee charges. He was tabled top of 4 I think? Our meta is also casual btw.
Lol, are you alright mate? What has your incoherent rambling to do with the question I asked a different poster? Do you really have the audacity to dictate me what questions I ask on a forum? What has my local meta to do with this at all? For reasons unknown, you seem to have a little hate boner going on. Chill.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Sim-Life wrote: You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Maybe you are confusing two threads with each other, but this one here is about how complex the game is. Apart from a sidetrack on internal balance on units in 9th armies, my contribution so far has been that personally, I don't feel it is too complex and I elaborated why and how others could approach the situation to trim down the perceived complexity / bloat of rules to know before and during the game.
And please provide some stats on how many groups are strictly "Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof" compared to the rest of the playerbase, or stop telling me my opinion doesn't matter, thank you. Be so kind and do it in a PM, as that is off-topic.
Well even if we asume someone only plays casual. Which isn't nothing special, I played in my last even over a year ago, and before that over 2 year ago. You would have play open or some really modified version of narrative, and I mean like really modified, to not run in to serious problems while playing 9th ed. Which I still considered a lot better then 8th by the way. Just play a game of casual csm vs casual DE or AD mecha, and it is automaticly visible. Armies like tau or knights have been designed mechanically to work within the 8th ed rule set, and have problems adjusting to 9th. Specially if someone doesn't go all out for some top tier tournament list. And we assume that the normal state for casual play is all people playing casual and not just people with new or good books, and everything else bringing their GT winning clone lists.
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a_typical_hero 800120 11205701 wrote:And please provide some stats on how many groups are strictly "Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof" compared to the rest of the playerbase, or stop telling me my opinion doesn't matter, thank you. Be so kind and do it in a PM, as that is off-topic.
In forums all around the world and on YT and Twitch you have people talk more about matched played games then about any other way of playing. If open or narrative was the way majority of how people play, there would be a lot more material about it. And I mean around the world.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Most of the extraneous rules that people have been complaining about are rules that you get when you battleforge your armies.
When you don't battleforge, these rules do not apply.
I understand that the tournament scene doesn't do open play. I realize your local group might not do open play. Neither of these things are directly under GW's control. Whenever one of us points out that there are three ways to play in the core book, we get accused of telling you how to play, but that doesn't change the fact that the BRB includes a version of the game where your CP are limited to 1 per turn, strats are limited to the generic ones and neither subfaction nor army purity rules apply.
You don't need to modify a single printed rule to make it happen. You just have to stop battleforging your armies.
And hell, if you use the open war deck, you don't even need to worry about secondaries!
Now if you know all this already, and the issue is that you can't find anyone who plays that way, maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe the people with whom you are seeking games aren't as unhappy with the Strat/ Subfaction/ Faction rules as you think they are.
My problem is it's not up to me.
Sure, I can stop using a battleforged army. But my opponent isn't going to oblige so I'd just be slitting my own throat before the game has even started.
As to Sigmar I've never played it with people who are serious about it; every time a new edition happens some people at the game store I hang out at get all excited and we all pull our armies out and give it a go, and the shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay feels a lot like 8e WHFB somehow, and then we all get bored and stop. I'm sure if you're playing at a tournament level and only playing with the most optimal stuff there's a game there, but at a casual level it's really dull. Though you could tell me that it's a great game if I just bought different models, somehow I think I'd laugh my ass off at that.
Even in the first days of AoS, before it had points and when it had silly rules like pretending to ride a horse to get bonuses to hit, I have never played a game like this. I've played maybe 3 "serious" games of AoS in my life (and even then, that was at a doubles tournament at NOVA against such serious players as the guy who purposefully made his Nagash walk off the board edge and lost the game) and ever since 3.0 came out every game has been Narrative/Open War which have even less objectives than usual and are almost always focused towards killing and even then the game has never had a "shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay". This experience is just so far removed from what me or anybody else I know has experienced that I can't even really figure out where the disconnect could be, UNLESS by "I've never played with people who are serious about it" means you've only played with people who specifically seek out and perform "shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay". In which case I'd hardly rate that as a game problem. Like, sure, if all you do is shove-minis-in-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies, that's... that's what the game is going to be for you.
I don't even know what models you've bought. I've never met a player who brought the most optimal stuff, except maybe a Khorne player in 2e at the local store who has always been fairly unpleasant to play against in every game system.
But the most powerful and oppressive things in 7th were specific rules, so we could find them easily and turn them off. The most powerful and oppressive things in 9th are combos, which you need to understand thoroughly to figure out what actually makes it OP and how to fix it. I feel like I'd have to become a tournament player to gain the knowledge and expertise to be able to play 9th casually, which sort of defeats the point of wanting to play casually at all, which is why I keep accusing 9th of being written for the tournament players.
You really don't need to understand thoroughly? I don't see why 9th edition is any different than 7th edition in this regard. Oh, D-weapons feel too strong? Okay, let's use a nerfed version of D-weapons. Did that really require you to have a deep understanding of WHY D-weapons were too strong? Why does "stratagems feel too strong, let's not use them" require any more of a deeper understanding? It feels like there is some sort of mental block going on here where 9th is "too complex to change" for arbitrary reasons and 7th is not even though it's the same concept.
In forums all around the world and on YT and Twitch you have people talk more about matched played games then about any other way of playing. If open or narrative was the way majority of how people play, there would be a lot more material about it. And I mean around the world.
Go ask in a hardware enthusiast forum about their PC specs. Compare the result with what people are actually using on Steam.
Matched play is neither at odds with a casual approach nor does it automatically mean "2k tournament lists, RAW only". For example threads in the past showed how divided people on Dakka are about handing out 10 VP for a fully painted army. So all of those people who don't use the rule aren't playing "Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof" already. So the opinion of half (made up number) of all the posters from those threads are irrelevant? Bold
And if we want to take this forum as representitive, don't forget the other thread about point sizes being played. It was far from "2k only".
Vatsetis wrote: Ok, so if you tweak and tweak 40K after adquiring great knowledge of the system nuances and with a great investment of time, effort and good faith by all the players suddenly you have a sonewhat functional and balanced game.
Seems reasonable. :(
Games are rarely balanced, even with angelic intentions it's hard, many games have bad intentions as they try to sell this or that. The only time GW should be criticized is when they are doing obviously stupid stuff like making rules changes without considering the points value change the rule needs to be balanced or more or less randomly changing points for a new edition instead of just testing things out with the old points and seeing what happens. All GW needed to do was say that the points limit for Strike Force games are 1750 if they wanted smaller games, instead of increasing the points costs of 3 point models and 18 point models by 2 points or some random garbo like that, then they could have taken stock after 3 months and seen which way the wind was blowing, come out with beta points and then release a final version after a year, but we still suffer from all the terrible mistakes made in CA2020, it should have just been thrown out.
Gw doesn't set what players play though. Gw says x points, players keep playing.
Also in case you lived under the rock when points changed it wasn't flat increase same for all. If it was you would know 100% sure increases were wrong.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Because the implication is that I would be the only one doing it, not my opponent. Meaning that you're putting forward that I should deliberately hobble myself in order to enjoy the game, which makes no sense.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Because the implication is that I would be the only one doing it, not my opponent. Meaning that you're putting forward that I should deliberately hobble myself in order to enjoy the game, which makes no sense.
No. I'm implying that is YOUR responsibility to find someone to play Open play with, if that's the system you prefer. Games Workshop can make a book that contains 3 ways to play and 4 game sizes on top of that for a total of 12 combinations.
They can't reasonably be expected to introduce you to players so that you can play your prefered option.
Monopoly can take up to 5 players: if you personally feel that 4 player games are awesome and that 2 player games are dull, it is up to YOU to find 3 other people to play with, not Milton Bradley.
Some people play chess with turn timers, some do not. If you like timers but nobody you play with likes to use them, that's unfortunate for you, but it doesn't make chess a bad game.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Because the implication is that I would be the only one doing it, not my opponent. Meaning that you're putting forward that I should deliberately hobble myself in order to enjoy the game, which makes no sense.
No. I'm implying that is YOUR responsibility to find someone to play Open play with, if that's the system you prefer. Games Workshop can make a book that contains 3 ways to play and 4 game sizes on top of that for a total of 12 combinations.
They can't reasonably be expected to introduce you to players so that you can play your prefered option.
Monopoly can take up to 5 players: if you personally feel that 4 player games are awesome and that 2 player games are dull, it is up to YOU to find 3 other people to play with, not Milton Bradley.
Some people play chess with turn timers, some do not. If you like timers but nobody you play with likes to use them, that's unfortunate for you, but it doesn't make chess a bad game.
This is something you "40k is fine if you just find the right players" guys keep trotting out like we haven't TRIED to do this. You live in constant denial that maybe not everyone has a vibrant and varied community of gamers with easy travel distance. You think Karol hasn't tried to find other players? The fact that he still plays despite living in a WAAC hell hole is a testament to the guy that I don't think people give him enough credit for. The whole reason I quit 40k is because no one wants to play anything except 9th Ed RAW 2k Matched and the next nearest group is a 2 hour round trip to get to (I think, might be 3 hours). Even my CURRENT group is often nearly an hours drive time depending on who is hosting.
Its actually easier to wait out GW fixing their game than find other players.
If you try playing 9e with statlines only and no stratagems, WTs, etc., etc., you'll find that GW couldn't do the math when they were writing the statlines in the Indexes, and there are a lot of really basic things about the statlines (wound counts/damage counts, the to-wound table, how saves and AP are allocated, where stats cap out, what has an Invulnerable save, the relationship between ranges and move stats...) that are pretty badly broken from day zero. There are bits of subsequent bloat (the Blast rule, damage reduction) that exist only to avoid having to fix some of the bad math on the statlines. On top of that once you strip out the combo-game you're just playing Sigmar; you don't need to maneuver to get all your attacks off, everything's pretty uniformly effective against all targets, so we put our models down on the table and roll dice until someone dies.
I don't like the combo-play game in 9th, but it's also holding the game together at a pretty fundamental level. Quickly stripping off some of the bloat off of 7th makes it better, quickly stripping the bloat off of 9th just makes it worse.
...I'm suddenly wondering if the issue isn't that 9th is more complex than earlier editions but that the complexity is way less optional than it was before.
I think it's quite the opposite with the math on units so far in 9th.
Remember how everyone was "melta, melta, melta" early on? Now there's barely any.
You could play without strats. The game just wouldn't be as engaging, in my opinion.
And the units outside the curve aren't setting the game on fire.
Plus, there is no reason Matched Play should be painful to play.
GW can improve their game, even the aspects that people choose to ignore. They should be pushed to improve the game, imo, and that comes in the form of critique.
I could play Crusade all day everyday and be super enjoying it and it would still be okay to me to say "Matched Play can be improved, because it is lacking in these ways".
Even in the first days of AoS, before it had points and when it had silly rules like pretending to ride a horse to get bonuses to hit, I have never played a game like this. I've played maybe 3 "serious" games of AoS in my life (and even then, that was at a doubles tournament at NOVA against such serious players as the guy who purposefully made his Nagash walk off the board edge and lost the game) and ever since 3.0 came out every game has been Narrative/Open War which have even less objectives than usual and are almost always focused towards killing and even then the game has never had a "shove-minis-into-the-center-then-roll-dice-until-someone-dies gameplay".
We had the same mini's meet in the middle and fight experience. If we wanted that would have played an ancients game and had neat blocks of troops...
I think the mistake was still using the same terrain set ups as fantasy battle, we thought it might be good if the terrain went to skirmish level density as then manoeuvre would be more important. For a while Kings of War took over, then things faded away until the new ranges brought in new players, but there are 1-2 games every few weeks now, not the half dozen 40k or even specialist games/alternative games (song of ice and fire, naval, etc.) that take place every week.
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Sim-Life wrote: The whole reason I quit 40k is because no one wants to play anything except 9th Ed RAW 2k Matched and the next nearest group is a 2 hour round trip to get to (I think, might be 3 hours). Even my CURRENT group is often nearly an hours drive time depending on who is hosting.
Its actually easier to wait out GW fixing their game than find other players.
Agreed. Even if 40k standardised at 1000 points for tournies it would be a massive improvement, at least then if a game wasn't going well it would be over relatively quickly...
In forums all around the world and on YT and Twitch you have people talk more about matched played games then about any other way of playing. If open or narrative was the way majority of how people play, there would be a lot more material about it. And I mean around the world.
Go ask in a hardware enthusiast forum about their PC specs. Compare the result with what people are actually using on Steam.
Matched play is neither at odds with a casual approach nor does it automatically mean "2k tournament lists, RAW only". For example threads in the past showed how divided people on Dakka are about handing out 10 VP for a fully painted army. So all of those people who don't use the rule aren't playing "Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof" already. So the opinion of half (made up number) of all the posters from those threads are irrelevant? Bold
And if we want to take this forum as representitive, don't forget the other thread about point sizes being played. It was far from "2k only".
I'm with you here. Matched, 2kplay without legends and only on min sized tables only is something I only expect from tournaments, but outside of these I don't think it's the norm. Yes, I only have my personal experience where I don't know anyone who plays that assumed "tournament standard", but I'm pretty sure my group can't be the only one. I do get that this style of play gets the most focus when discussing balance or tactics, because then everybody assumes the same basis from which to compare units. It doesn't mean that it's the most common way to play though. I mean, noone in their right mind would actually "shelf" units because GW provides their rules for free instead of in an expensive book (legends). People play what they have painted or what fits their theme or the narrative, or what was in their starterbox and yes, they might also consider what's strong, but that's just one of many boxes to tick.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Unless you seriously believe the only way the majority play 40k is the tournament scene, you're full of crap on this.
kirotheavenger wrote:My problem is it's not up to me.
Sure, I can stop using a battleforged army. But my opponent isn't going to oblige so I'd just be slitting my own throat before the game has even started.
I think the real question is, why are you playing them?
No one is forcing you to play anyone. If you don't have a permissive group, that sucks. But does it suck more than playing against donkey-caves, you make that determination.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Because the implication is that I would be the only one doing it, not my opponent. Meaning that you're putting forward that I should deliberately hobble myself in order to enjoy the game, which makes no sense.
No. I'm implying that is YOUR responsibility to find someone to play Open play with, if that's the system you prefer. Games Workshop can make a book that contains 3 ways to play and 4 game sizes on top of that for a total of 12 combinations.
They can't reasonably be expected to introduce you to players so that you can play your prefered option.
Monopoly can take up to 5 players: if you personally feel that 4 player games are awesome and that 2 player games are dull, it is up to YOU to find 3 other people to play with, not Milton Bradley.
Some people play chess with turn timers, some do not. If you like timers but nobody you play with likes to use them, that's unfortunate for you, but it doesn't make chess a bad game.
This is something you "40k is fine if you just find the right players" guys keep trotting out like we haven't TRIED to do this. You live in constant denial that maybe not everyone has a vibrant and varied community of gamers with easy travel distance.
I'm not in denial; I'm just saying it's not GW's fault, nor is it 40k's fault. I feel for you. It bums me out that you can't have fun with this game. Your problem is real, and I'm not in denial at all. But it doesn't make 40k a bad game.
I used to play Magic and my favourite format was emperor style- two teams of 3 players; each team has a leader and a right hand general and a left hand general. You had to take out one of the generals before you could get to the leader, and knocking out the enemy leader was the only way to win. Very few of the people I played with preferred this style of play, and it was never easy to get six players. So most of the time, I played their way. But every so often, we'd get to play my way- one out of every 5-8 games. It was enough.
It would never have crossed my mind to suggest mangling the other versions of the game that other people liked just because it was hard to set up an emperor game. Nor did I blame the game or its designers.
You think Karol hasn't tried to find other players? The fact that he still plays despite living in a WAAC hell hole is a testament to the guy that I don't think people give him enough credit for.
I've actually made similar comments myself. I've seen folks on Dakka go at Karol pretty hard sometimes, and it amazes me that he just seems to take it in stride; the kid is tough as nails. I enjoy reading his posts, even though he and I seldom agree on anything. And I'll be the first one in line to give him props for sticking it out.
But I don't blame GW or 40k for the jerks he has to play with. On a side note, I'm not sure Open play would be a solution for Karol, even if he could find people to play with- his issues with the game aren't the same as yours or Unit's and he seldom proposes the same solutions that you guys do. He doesn't seem to complain that strategems, faction rules and army purity rules exist- merely that those for his faction don't match the tools available to his opponents. I don't think I've ever seen him say he thinks the game would be better without them, though I could be wrong; I like the guy, but I don't take notes every time he posts.
The whole reason I quit 40k is because no one wants to play anything except 9th Ed RAW 2k Matched and the next nearest group is a 2 hour round trip to get to (I think, might be 3 hours). Even my CURRENT group is often nearly an hours drive time depending on who is hosting.
Do you ever get to host? And when you do, does that give you an opportunity to suggest something different for that one, single games night? Have the people that refuse to play open with you ever tried it?
You say you've stopped playing 40k, but you're still in a group, so it's not like 2k Matched is all they play; if they're willing to play Dust, or WMH or whatever you're currently playing, they are willing to play other things. Seems odd that you can talk them into playing a whole other system, but you can't talk them into playing a different version of 40k.
I'm not doubting you- I believe you. I'm just saying it seems weird to me.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Plus, there is no reason Matched Play should be painful to play.
The issue is that for a lot of other people, it ISN'T as painful as it is for you. If it was, 2k Matched wouldn't be their preferred style of play. They obviously like it enough as it is. For you to suggest changes to the version they prefer to play when you have a different version which I assume is a better fit for your needs based on the fact that it contains far fewer of the things you cite as problems... It just seems like you're fighting a battle that you don't need to fight.
GW can improve their game, even the aspects that people choose to ignore. They should be pushed to improve the game, imo, and that comes in the form of critique.
Sure, and you can propose whatever changes you like. But when you propose nuking all but the BRB strats, nuking army purity and subfaction rules and you suggest that secondaries are somewhat problematic, you shouldn't be surprised that people suggest a system that appears right in the BRB you already own that already takes all of those suggestions.
It would be like me complaining that the problem with Matched is that it doesn't include a progression system and being shocked and surprised when people suggest I try Crusade.
Why should people who like matched play accept the validity of suggestions that would make matched more like open or crusade when open and crusade already exist? I mean, if they're civil folks interested in debate, they may respond to some of your suggestions with varying degrees of approval or disapproval, but that tends to happen when suggestions are more subtle than removing all strats.
I could play Crusade all day everyday and be super enjoying it and it would still be okay to me to say "Matched Play can be improved, because it is lacking in these ways".
Again, you could. Of course it's your right to express your opinion, but why would you bother?
To me, posting and reading consistently negative negative content is exhausting. It's nowhere near as fun as posting negative things.
I'm also I guy who prefers to look at solutions that I have available to me, rather than putting the onus on someone else to fix the problem. If I had a choice between ranting and raving about what the company can do to make me happy, or just play a different version of the game which already exists that would make me happy, I'd definitely go with the second option.
If the issue was that I couldn't find opponents to play my prefered version, every single time a thread came up that was full of people bitching about a different version, I would join the chorus of people telling complainers that my preferred version has none of the problems they mention rather than joining the discussion about changes that need to be made to the other version. It just makes more sense.
PenitentJake wrote: You know, it just occurred to me that if you don't battleforge your armies, you get one CP per turn, no detachment or army purity rules.
Huh. Paint one dude a different colour and half the problems that everyone's been complaining about... just disappear.
Go figure.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a joke.
I'm not sure why.
Most of the extraneous rules that people have been complaining about are rules that you get when you battleforge your armies.
When you don't battleforge, these rules do not apply.
I understand that the tournament scene doesn't do open play. I realize your local group might not do open play. Neither of these things are directly under GW's control. Whenever one of us points out that there are three ways to play in the core book, we get accused of telling you how to play, but that doesn't change the fact that the BRB includes a version of the game where your CP are limited to 1 per turn, strats are limited to the generic ones and neither subfaction nor army purity rules apply.
You don't need to modify a single printed rule to make it happen. You just have to stop battleforging your armies.
And hell, if you use the open war deck, you don't even need to worry about secondaries!
Now if you know all this already, and the issue is that you can't find anyone who plays that way, maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe the people with whom you are seeking games aren't as unhappy with the Strat/ Subfaction/ Faction rules as you think they are.
Open Play does not have primary objectives on the table nor secondary objectives you have to choose, both things I want.
An Unbound Army does not generate CP unless both players agree and they can agree to any amount of CP :clown face: yay AOS V1 do whatever you like, make fart noises at each other to see who wins. That means no Stratagems, I think Stratagems are super neat, I just think there shouldn't be more than 200.
I don't want to play against a hodgepodge of different armies, if my opponent uses allies I want them to pay a price for it since I cannot get them while playing Necrons and I want my opponent to include Eradicators in his Astra Militarum army not because "duhhh they're better than the anti-tank I have in my codex" but because they genuinely like the models and/or rules.
Finally, I want balanced games and I hate PL. Open Play does not seem like the right thing for me.
tneva82 wrote: Also in case you lived under the rock when points changed it wasn't flat increase same for all. If it was you would know 100% sure increases were wrong.
Scouts, Tacs, Intercessors, Immortals, Kabalite Warriors, Wracks and Wyches all went up 3 points, some units didn't get hit the same way, but you can see a tonne of changes that were made based on an algorithm that didn't take rules changes into account, then a smattering of changes were made where even GW noticed the algorithm produced awful results. https://www.goonhammer.com/the-9th-edition-munitorum-field-manual-points-review/ this article goes into a lot of the changes CA2020 made and how it seems to have been made. Is there evidence of nerfs to vehicles and buffs to flyers or much of anything that 9th made better or worse? Does there seem to have been taken account of which units were undercosted or overcosted in 8th? CA2020 was garbage and it CA19 was better. CA2021 pretty much only made improvements on CA2020 so it's hard to criticize as much, even if there are still huge balance holes.
Sim-Life wrote: This confuses me. You seem to think its not GWs job to keep us happy.
It is. But that doesn't mean you have to sit idle and wait for it to happen.
I'm not, I'm criticising GW publically and adding my voice to those unsatisfied with 9th and have stopped buying their products in the hopes that they'll fix their game if we become loud enough.
Sim-Life wrote: I'm not, I'm criticising GW publically and adding my voice to those unsatisfied with 9th and have stopped buying their products in the hopes that they'll fix their game if we become loud enough.
I honestly think if you would write them emails more often, your voice might be heard by the right person instead of posting on a board that GW might or might not even read. That's the point of PenitentJake, at least I believe it is.
The whole reason I quit 40k is because no one wants to play anything except 9th Ed RAW 2k Matched and the next nearest group is a 2 hour round trip to get to (I think, might be 3 hours). Even my CURRENT group is often nearly an hours drive time depending on who is hosting.
I'm not resentful at all, but I hope the irony is not lost on you that you tell me my opinion is useless to the discussion because I'm playing 40k in a specific way when you quit playing it altogether. ^_~ No hard feelings.
I really doubt that direct e mails will change anything... GW produces the 40K ruleset they want to deliver... Its not an accident its very intentional.
Anyway I think the design team is putting some real effort to create interesting codexes for 9th edition... But their power is limited.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Unless you seriously believe the only way the majority play 40k is the tournament scene, you're full of crap on this.
1.5k to 2k matched play is by far and away what i see at almost any gameshop I have ever been to or played at.
Everything otherwise has been in a campaign setting that requires a lot more coordination, commitment and leadership.
Most people are not toning down lists and forming impromptu rules in their games with strangers during pick up games.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Unless you seriously believe the only way the majority play 40k is the tournament scene, you're full of crap on this.
1.5k to 2k matched play is by far and away what i see at almost any gameshop I have ever been to or played at.
Everything otherwise has been in a campaign setting that requires a lot more coordination, commitment and leadership.
Most people are not toning down lists and forming impromptu rules in their games with strangers during pick up games.
You are correct - 95% of all 40k is actually played in the tournament setting. Yet - most of those games are considered casual...
Sim-Life wrote: I'm not, I'm criticising GW publically and adding my voice to those unsatisfied with 9th and have stopped buying their products in the hopes that they'll fix their game if we become loud enough.
I honestly think if you would write them emails more often, your voice might be heard by the right person instead of posting on a board that GW might or might not even read. That's the point of PenitentJake, at least I believe it is.
Yes, corporations often pay heed to the random emails of anonymous strangers. But I'm quite happy on my soapbox in the public forum, thanks.
I'm not resentful at all, but I hope the irony is not lost on you that you tell me my opinion is useless to the discussion because I'm playing 40k in a specific way when you quit playing it altogether. ^_~ No hard feelings.
I've mostly been facetious about that. Like I said, when I defended 8th I was told frequently that casual play doesn't matter for whatever argument was being made because there is no sort of statistical data like there is for tournament play. Its just fun to be on the other side.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Unless you seriously believe the only way the majority play 40k is the tournament scene, you're full of crap on this.
1.5k to 2k matched play is by far and away what i see at almost any gameshop I have ever been to or played at.
Everything otherwise has been in a campaign setting that requires a lot more coordination, commitment and leadership.
Most people are not toning down lists and forming impromptu rules in their games with strangers during pick up games.
You are correct - 95% of all 40k is actually played in the tournament setting. Yet - most of those games are considered casual...
But where do you get that number from? I'll take your 95% and raise my guestimation of 70% of players not caring about tournament play and the according "standard" at all. I made that number up exactly as much as you did.
You keep refering to your group and about how casual and friendly it all is. This is not the normal experience people will have with 40k, most people will have to play randoms, not have the choice to play anything but Matched 2k no house rules, opponents won't tone down lists or any combination thereof, therefore your opinions on the game and the meta are of no use to the discussion. It's pretty simple.
Unless you seriously believe the only way the majority play 40k is the tournament scene, you're full of crap on this.
1.5k to 2k matched play is by far and away what i see at almost any gameshop I have ever been to or played at.
Everything otherwise has been in a campaign setting that requires a lot more coordination, commitment and leadership.
Most people are not toning down lists and forming impromptu rules in their games with strangers during pick up games.
You are correct - 95% of all 40k is actually played in the tournament setting. Yet - most of those games are considered casual...
But where do you get that number from? I'll take your 95% and raise my guestimation of 70% of players not caring about tournament play and the according "standard" at all. I made that number up exactly as much as you did.
He means like tournaments, most casual games use the most recent scenarios, rukes and points and are usually Matched 2k.
Back in 4th edition, we didn't have 3 ways to play, didn't have an app, didn't have super easy ways to organize games ahead of time.
You know what we did have?
Narrative campaigns, Tournaments, casual organized play, and Pick Up Games.
The only reason to split the game into 3 ways to play is to ... I don't know, but that shouldn't be necessary. I honestly can't think of why it is better to split the player base this way.
I shouldn't have to say "I want to play my crusade army" and have the response be "ok, 2k points matched" and then do some algorithm to figure out how many more CP they get (Crusade Points / 2, round up) or whatever. (And then end up playing a regular mission anyways because the Crusade missions aren't balanced enough for the 2k Matched player).
The game used to be playable in ALL ways to play using a single format. The fact that it is NOT like that now is a problem that should be rectified, not a strength that needs reinforcing.
EDIT:
And yes I know balance was never super good so sometimes narrative armies were trounced by tournament armies in 4th, but I am not talking about balance. I am talking about Three Ways To Play and why that should be unnecessary. Balance is a tangential conversation (40k can fail to be balanced or succeed to be balanced whether there is one way to play, three ways to play, or eighty one ways to play).
You could make an argument that GW only has to provide the Matched Play rules. Free-spirited groups will do what they want anyway, and those so-called Narrative players will narrate away.
I think Open Play was a way to have slimmed down Core Rules were you could bust out the Free PDF and datasheets and have a game. Crusade offered a progressive ladder system with a bit of structure. Time will tell if that truly catches on. My experience, admittedly limited to a tiny corner of the meta, is that Matched Play is the most common way that people have a game in the FLGS, and that is even with COVID requirements of all games being pre-arranged for contact tracing.
I think we are miles away from complexity.
Anything can be taken too far, but I like having variety. I like having some chrome on my game. I enjoy having choices in my list design, even if some would say that they are false choices. I like thinking ahead on what Stratagems to employ, making sacrifices between pre-game buffs and situational boosts/panic buttons.
I also get that other people won't like those things, or would prefer some things that I don't. I guess the invisible hand of the market has a part to play, albeit in an imperfect way given the nature of the tabletop wargaming market.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: Anything can be taken too far, but I like having variety. I like having some chrome on my game. I enjoy having choices in my list design, even if some would say that they are false choices. I like thinking ahead on what Stratagems to employ, making sacrifices between pre-game buffs and situational boosts/panic buttons.
Had an interesting chat with Jervis many years ago where he talked about chrome. In essence it boiled down to having to add that to engage players, while some of the game design he would like to do would have stripped a lot more of it out.
Sledgehammer wrote: 1.5k to 2k matched play is by far and away what i see at almost any gameshop I have ever been to or played at.
Everything otherwise has been in a campaign setting that requires a lot more coordination, commitment and leadership.
Most people are not toning down lists and forming impromptu rules in their games with strangers during pick up games.
I totally believe this is true for pickup games. I don't think it applies to gaming clubs where the same people play each other regularely and consider their opponents something friend-like.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Back in 4th edition, we didn't have 3 ways to play, didn't have an app, didn't have super easy ways to organize games ahead of time.
You know what we did have?
Narrative campaigns, Tournaments, casual organized play, and Pick Up Games.
The only reason to split the game into 3 ways to play is to ... I don't know, but that shouldn't be necessary. I honestly can't think of why it is better to split the player base this way.
I shouldn't have to say "I want to play my crusade army" and have the response be "ok, 2k points matched" and then do some algorithm to figure out how many more CP they get (Crusade Points / 2, round up) or whatever. (And then end up playing a regular mission anyways because the Crusade missions aren't balanced enough for the 2k Matched player).
The game used to be playable in ALL ways to play using a single format. The fact that it is NOT like that now is a problem that should be rectified, not a strength that needs reinforcing.
Wasn't it in 4th edition where "crusade light" was introduced, even? Or was that in 3rd edition already? It was a small system where units could gain XP and veteran skills iirc. It vanished afterwards again with the next edition.
I have to say the introduction of an official Crusade system is taking alot of work off of my shoulders in regards to making a narrative campaign. You don't have to make up ALL the rules, even if it isn't a full campaign system out of the box.
My only two complaints about it are:
- Not everybody got their own Crusade rules, yet.
- There isn't enough Crusade content in the books.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: Anything can be taken too far, but I like having variety. I like having some chrome on my game. I enjoy having choices in my list design, even if some would say that they are false choices. I like thinking ahead on what Stratagems to employ, making sacrifices between pre-game buffs and situational boosts/panic buttons.
Had an interesting chat with Jervis many years ago where he talked about chrome. In essence it boiled down to having to add that to engage players, while some of the game design he would like to do would have stripped a lot more of it out.
An example of that line of thinking was 1997 Epic and see how that turned out. As tasty as a bowl of sand. Heaven forbid we engage players!
Back in 4th edition, we didn't have 3 ways to play, didn't have an app, didn't have super easy ways to organize games ahead of time.
You know what we did have?
Narrative campaigns, Tournaments, casual organized play, and Pick Up Games.
Yep, we did. We had one set of rules that was made for casual, organized play and we forced it to do all the other things by house ruling, engaging in conversation and compromise. Oh, every once in a while, GW would throw us something- the combat patrol and kill team mini-games, things like Planet Strike and City Fight. It was enough to whet our appetites, and explore the potential of playing the game in different ways, but it was always an extra, or a substitute.
You'd almost think they were watching what we did- which extra bits we played, what we liked and what we didn't- to figure out what they might give us next time.
The only reason to split the game into 3 ways to play is to ... I don't know, but that shouldn't be necessary. I honestly can't think of why it is better to split the player base this way.
Hey, remember a sentence ago where you said this: You know what we did have? Narrative campaigns, Tournaments, casual organized play, and Pick Up Games?
Kinda implies that the community was already divided into three ways to play, right? So GW publishing three ways to play in 8th didn't really split the player base at all. It's kinda like they saw the player base was already divided and tried to give each part of that player base some attention, right out of the BRB
I shouldn't have to say "I want to play my crusade army" and have the response be "ok, 2k points matched" and then do some algorithm to figure out how many more CP they get (Crusade Points / 2, round up) or whatever. (And then end up playing a regular mission anyways because the Crusade missions aren't balanced enough for the 2k Matched player).
I can agree with you here; I don't think that GW's solution to a mixed mode game is particularly elegant either. I haven't been in the situation yet, but what I'd do is just play my army without any of its Crusade perks, using secondaries, but I'd track all of my non-agenda tallies, I'd still claim an RP for playing, I'd still mark a unit for greatness and I'd give XP to the units that achieved the secondary.
Matched player gets exactly what they want, and I get enough of what I want that I don't feel like wasted my time by indulging someone who didn't know what they were missing or was nervous about stepping out of their comfort zone.
The game used to be playable in ALL ways to play using a single format. The fact that it is NOT like that now is a problem that should be rectified, not a strength that needs reinforcing.
Did it really though?
Because if it had, would the ITC secondaries that 9th is based on even exist?
I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?
H.B.M.C. wrote: I still don't understand the purpose of "Open Play".
To tacitly acknowledge that they need a separate "this is where you can just put your models on the table and have fun!" zone because you can't just put your models on the table and have fun in any of the other zones?
Back in 4th edition, we didn't have 3 ways to play, didn't have an app, didn't have super easy ways to organize games ahead of time.
You know what we did have?
Narrative campaigns, Tournaments, casual organized play, and Pick Up Games.
Yep, we did. We had one set of rules that was made for casual, organized play and we forced it to do all the other things by house ruling, engaging in conversation and compromise.
You mean like we have now? Or are all these pregame conversations and group-finding and houseruling solutions that have been proposed in this very thread something different somehow?
PenitentJake wrote: Because if it had, would the ITC secondaries that 9th is based on even exist?
You mean the thing developed in 7th while I was talking about 4th? Yeah, totally... (????)
PenitentJake wrote: I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?
Quite well, given that I didn't HAVE to do that (but rather chose to). In fact, better than 9th, because I could just throw a special rule down ("you get Preferred Enemy (X) but your opponent gets Feel No Pain and Stubborn")
What if the units you like the most are the ones that become broken? I've used genestealers in my nids armies for years, even when they were crap I stuck with them, then they became good in 8th. So I should just stop using them? How is that fair? If screamer killer become insanely OP should I just put the 8 I own on the shelf because GW's blindfolded throw of the Dart Of Unintentional Brokeness happened to land on them?
A single unsupported units has never been broken even with OP stats. Just don't spam it. Take melta marine units: 3-6 eradicators or 1-2 attack bikes are powerful but won't break the game, 9+ eradicators or 6-9 assault bikes probably would. All units that were OP in the past were never a problem if taken in small-medium numbers.
And I think that skew lists that spam a few units are a cancer anyway. Love your genestealers? Feel free to bring 20-40 of them anytime, regardless of how good or bad they are. Just avoid fielding 60+ models if they become too OP.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I still don't understand the purpose of "Open Play".
Nor do I. It's some sort of weird official ruling that you don't have to follow any of their official rules. I think it's probably because "2 ways to play" doesn't sound very impressive so they added on the third to make it sound better.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I still don't understand the purpose of "Open Play".
Nor do I. It's some sort of weird official ruling that you don't have to follow any of their official rules. I think it's probably because "2 ways to play" doesn't sound very impressive so they added on the third to make it sound better.
The open war cards are a fun way to play (I think I played more games with these than matched play missions in 8th), but I agree, you don't need a "game Mode" that says, use these Cards or do what you want.
Had an interesting chat with Jervis many years ago where he talked about chrome. In essence it boiled down to having to add that to engage players, while some of the game design he would like to do would have stripped a lot more of it out.
An example of that line of thinking was 1997 Epic and see how that turned out.
Epic 3rd ed may have featured in the conversation... (he really liked it), including slight bafflement as to why the same system was so liked in BFG. Interestingly there Andy Chambers later decided he didn't like it and had started on a different version of BFG using dice pools (he liked large amounts for engagement and averages) that would have modifiers applied, rather than the firepower mod chart. Wrote about it a bit then went off to pastures new.
I enjoy the Open War cards, but I always play them in Matched Play. In fact, I've played in two separate groups that used the Open War cards in tournaments.
The divide between Narrative, Open, and Matched seems so pointless. Every group I've been in has ignored it, applying Matched play balancing concepts (such as strat limits) regardless of anything else.
This gets to the complexity issue as well, because not only do I have the normal stuff to track but now I also need to plan for 3 different games:
1) matched play 2k (can't use any of my crusade stuff, gotta figure out what to include beyond my roster, gotta consider the wide variety of enemy threats they could offer to build a good list)
2) Crusade (gotta keep track of tons of special rules, in gameplay gotta track agendas instead of secondaries, XP mini game, building a list for narrative rather than in consideration of threats, constrained by the roster)
3) open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)
Unit1126PLL wrote: Open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)
It sounds like you're confusing Open War (a set of cards used to generate missions, marketed to Open Play but perfectly usable outside of it) and Open Play (the 'mode' which ignores a few balancing rules for convenience but otherwise adds nothing).
I think it's a useful distinction because the Open War cards can be used perfectly well for Matched play as well. In my opinion (which is shared by many in my local groups) they're better than the dedicated 9th edition missions as they mean people can play without the faff of secondaries.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)
It sounds like you're confusing Open War (a set of cards used to generate missions, marketed to Open Play but perfectly usable outside of it) and Open Play (the 'mode' which ignores a few balancing rules for convenience but otherwise adds nothing).
I think it's a useful distinction because the Open War cards can be used perfectly well for Matched play as well. In my opinion (which is shared by many in my local groups) they're better than the dedicated 9th edition missions as they mean people can play without the faff of secondaries.
Ah yes I meant open play, how silly of me to confuse Open War with Open Play. You are quite correct.
PenitentJake wrote: I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?
Quite well, given that I didn't HAVE to do that (but rather chose to). In fact, better than 9th, because I could just throw a special rule down ("you get Preferred Enemy (X) but your opponent gets Feel No Pain and Stubborn")
I honestly don't see what's so different between this and "You get to re-roll 1s to hit but your opponent shrugs damage on 5+ and doesn't add their losses to Morale tests". Is having an official short hand name for a bonus that strong of a point in another edition's favor?
PenitentJake wrote: I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?
Quite well, given that I didn't HAVE to do that (but rather chose to). In fact, better than 9th, because I could just throw a special rule down ("you get Preferred Enemy (X) but your opponent gets Feel No Pain and Stubborn")
I honestly don't see what's so different between this and "You get to re-roll 1s to hit but your opponent shrugs damage on 5+ and doesn't add their losses to Morale tests". Is having an official short hand name for a bonus that strong of a point in another edition's favor?
Preferred Enemy in 4th meant you hit on a 3+ regardless of your opponent's weapon skill in close combat, and would gently encourage said army to enter combat (or else lose the buff). I used this at the time to encourage attackers to actually move, rather than simply sit back and blast away (typically the attackers had higher combat power than the enemy and some incentives were required to move the game along, this was just one of them). Given that weapon skill comparisons don't exist in 9th, it would be difficult to replicate this rule (given that most units hit on a 3+ already, and the ones that hit on a 2+ would actively hate it unless I added an exception for them). I could just give the army +1 weapon skill but compared to Preferred Enemy (the narrative is in the title!) that doesn't seem to be meaningful and just sounds arbitrary.
The "shrugs on 5+" is fine, but in 4th, Feel No Pain interacted with other rules ("ignores armor saves" and "instant death") in ways that are lost in 9th - giving one side Feel No Pain is another way to encourage the other side to enter combat, as most power weapons "ignored armor saves" and therefore would ignore Feel No Pain. In 9th, you could write "5+ shrug except in close combat against weapons with AP-2 or higher" but then you get Marines with chainswords in assault doctrines, etc and if you said -3 or higher you'd ignore Power Axes (and even -2 ignores Power Mauls....).
Not adding losses to morale tests isn't REMOTELY the same thing as stubborn. Stubborn most readily made your units more resistant to getting swept in combat - I used this rule to try to mitigate the "enemy sweeps up all the defenders in 1 round" that plagued 4th edition as people consolidated from combat to combat. In 9th, it would be something like "you can't fall back" but in this edition it's actually a DRAWBACK....
<I'm sure in 25 pages someone has made this point already... but whatever, adding my $.02>
If using too complex to mean "too many things to keep track of" then yes. If not treating 40k as a dedicated primary hobby, it's way too complex.
When I have the moments in my life when I can buckle down and really read through every codex, daily stay up on the meta, and catch and analyze the updates as they come in... it's manageable. But even then (and I've won an Adepticon Medal in a 40k event in the 26 years I've been playing, so I've been in decent tournament form before) it's too much for anyone who's not playing in that top 5% of all players.
It's silly when games are won, not because of superior list play or tactics, but because someone had knowledge of a buried-army specific rule and its combination with other rules and the opponent simply was unaware of the possibility of that interaction... not because they weren't clever enough, but because they hadn't been able to digest all of the different rules, updates, chapter approveds, etc.
Special rules, strategms (which I hate), army construction bonuses, etc need to have significantly less game effect. This will make balance easier to percieve and reward good gameplay instead of rewarding game knowledge. Beat me because you played the game better on the table... not because you tailored a list to some giant if-then-else combo that I would have/could have easily stopped, but didn't buy that book 1 book of the 35+ that could show up in competitive play.
That's bloat beyond compare
It's also why almost everyone locally prefers Grimdark from 1pagerules over GW official rules. You have to play the statlines in that game and all the rules are free and trimmed of bloat (and I might add, balanced as point costs are based on a construction system not a dart board and a "feeling").
TLDR: use your 40k models to play a system with balanced rules and streamlined gameplay, like Grimdark Future
Beat me because you played the game better on the table... not because you tailored a list to some giant if-then-else combo that I would have/could have easily stopped, but didn't buy that book 1 book of the 35+ that could show up in competitive play.
That's bloat beyond compare
You're talking about 8th edition, which ended more than a year ago. Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.
I don't think we have anything comperable to what Inari at the start of 8th could do with flocks and dark reapers procing of them, getting multiple soul bursts per turn. Not saying there are no combos, because they of course are, but show me something comperable to IH chaplain dread in an army of 2.0 IH with stone tanking shots it can ignore or heal, redirecting shots it doesn't want to get hit with to intercessors, and then getting healed back up in a single turn.
Blackie wrote: Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.
You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?
Yeah I do. A few examples of those combos that break the game? I play SW and orks and can't think about anything. I regularly face evertyhing but custodes, knights, gen cult, blood angels, slaanesh and thousand sons armies and I don't remember a real gotchas in this edition so far. Basically only armies with lots of "fight first" units gave me some sort of gotchas. And I never read anything in advance to prepare games vs my opponents, no articles no enemy codexes.
Blackie wrote: Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.
You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?
Yeah I do. A few examples of those combos that break the game? I play SW and orks and can't think about anything. I regularly face evertyhing but custodes, knights, gen cult, blood angels, slaanesh and thousand sons armies and I don't remember a real gotchas in this edition so far. Basically only armies with lots of "fight first" units gave me some sort of gotchas. And I never read anything in advance to prepare games vs my opponents, no articles no enemy codexes.
Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.
Slipspace wrote: Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.
I guess that depends how you define Combo Wombo.
Deepstriking Slaanesh Obliterators that get Prescience, Cac and VotLW is that, surely.
Vanguard that deepstrike and then improve their shooting profile isn't, really. Now separately they might have an armor bonus or ignore blast, but these are not combos - especially not in the "gotcha" sense are they?
Blackie wrote: Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.
You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?
I don't. Certainly not in the context described on the forum often.
9th does have hero-hammer aspects, but those aren't used terribly often ( does anyone remember the crazy DAHQ that was going to crush everyone? ) and are typically just extending their ability rather than producing a gotcha.
My exalted uses scrolls to calls a spell on a 9 thereby granting an extra undeniable cast through his trait. So there's two or three things that go into doing that, but the end result is that he casts another spell and in a way that I have to inform my opponent as to exactly why it is happening.
There are potential scenarios like that DA character that are a silly combo of traits, relics, psychic, prayers, and so on that are almost universally unviable, because putting that much effort into a single model doesn't have the same desired impact on the other end.
I think at the end of the day a lot of stuff comes down to attitude, rather than the contents of the actual rules, and a lot of the contents of the actual rules are being pointed at and blamed when really you're seeing an attitude shift.
Like it or don't, 9th edition is the most clearly defined, nailed down, un-interpretable edition of warhammer 40,000 ever. However, in my experience at least, the people playing it are constantly testing that clarity and actively seeking to exploit ambiguities to gain advantage far more regularly than previously used to be done.
I think a lot of it comes from how seeking out glitches and holes in the programming of video games has kind of seeped into wider gaming culture. I know it's not an entirely new thing - 'munchkins' in DND being an old a joke as it is - but it definitely seems like you somehow have two groups. Over here you've got some old-school historical wargamers playing some lesser known system that, were someone to try and come in and use the same attitude they use with 40k to exploit it, they'd be able to ABSOLUTELY EXPLODE, and somehow it doesn't happen, while over in 40k, people are constantly complaining that it's the worst system ever built it's so janky and busted and everythings incredibly imbalanced oh god its all on fire.
I think at the end of the day it's just: People playing historical games are trying to win as hard as they can, but also trying to create situations that feel like the picture they have in their head of a historical battle play out, and people playing 40k are trying to win as hard as they can, period. Whatever their models and dice and list has to do to make that happen, they want to win.
A few months ago I got involved with a historical ww2 game with a fairly similar structure to 40k, but to give you a few examples of rules 'whoopsies' present in the system:
-units of infantry move in groups but all vehicles move individually. A single unit can never be out of squad coherency RAW which is all models 1/2" away. A german infantry squad is 6 men and they are transported on 2 bikes. What happens if the two bikes (which RAW move individually) move apart, which RAW theyre allowed to do?
-Various units have typos in their statlines as bad as a model having a strength of "2" when it's supposed to have "12" and guns having strength values like "Short/Medium/Long 13/12/1" and " Front/Side/Rear 14/1/12"
-The same unit in various different supplements will have different rules, e.g. a medic tent may just not have the rule that lets it revive a wounded soldier in one supplement but it does in the other
Despite all that, though, nobody in the group has anything significantly above or below a 50% winrate. Nobody is 'the unstoppable guy that always wins' or 'the guy that always loses becuase his army sucks.' Nobody has discovered that hey actually it turns out finnish machine gun teams have like 60 shots when all other machine guns in the game have 6, and they show up to the next game night with a list that's just 45 finnish machine gun squads.
No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.
Ah so it is like my school. Perfect Italian design. Spacious, advanced for the time it was build. It only has one small problem. It was build with southern Italy climate in mind and was build in northern Poland.
Who knows maybe w40k is perfect the way it is not, you just have to play it with specific people, in specific places with a specific mind set and specific , mainly 9th ed updated armies. And then it is okey.
Slipspace wrote: Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.
I guess that depends how you define Combo Wombo.
Just go and watch any batrep with AdMech in it and see how much of their damage output and defensive capabilities come from rules not on a unit's datasheet. Also, check out how long the Command phase takes compared to other armies.
I guess if you define combos as "whatever I feel like" then they don't exist in 9th but I'm not sure yours is a sentiment many people share, particularly when it comes to AdMech. There are other offenders but I think they're probably the worst.
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a_typical_hero wrote: No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.
Cleanly written? From a technical writing and editing POV 9th is a joke. Just go look how clumsily written many of the rules are. How many times do GW repeat the word "unit" and "attack" in a single rule?
I agree the rules are generally a little clearer than in 8th but I wouldn't call them clean. I'd define the text as pretty clumsy. It's like they're written by someone who's heard about tight, unambiguous rules language but only third hand and in a foreign language so they haven't really grasped the concept.
I appreciate Scotsman's post but there is one unstated assumption in it:
That it is impossible for well-written rules themselves to "create situations that feel like the picture they have in their head of a historical battle play out".
With games like Chain of Command, if you play your hardest, meanest, assholishist tactics and lists... you generally get how armies actually behaved on the battlefield. There is no border between "narrative (or in this case historical)" and "competitive (or in this case playing to win)" because the game rules themselves reward tactical play the same way reality rewarded tactical maneuver historically.
It isn't like historical armies weren't trying their hardest to win - just the reality of the times (the 'game rules' as it were) constrained what they could do.
Similarly, 40k *could* be written in a way that, by playing to win, you are also playing to your army's strength in the setting and you and your troops are also behaving the same way they would in the setting. But this doesn't seem to be the case - so while the Imperial Guard fields entire regiments of mechanized infantry mounted in Chimeras that are renowned for executing speedy and effective armored assaults... Well... let's just say fielding pure mech guard with the Steel Legion default loadout probably isn't a recipe for success.
Edit:
The fact that *some* wargames (yes. Even historicals!) also fail at this does not excuse 40k.
Slipspace wrote: Just go and watch any batrep with AdMech in it and see how much of their damage output and defensive capabilities come from rules not on a unit's datasheet. Also, check out how long the Command phase takes compared to other armies.
I guess if you define combos as "whatever I feel like" then they don't exist in 9th but I'm not sure yours is a sentiment many people share, particularly when it comes to AdMech. There are other offenders but I think they're probably the worst.
Well, in this video the Command Phase took a minute. VG got +6" and an AP as well as ignore AP1/2. So when I cast -1 to hit and a 4++ on one of my units and then warp time them and give one model +2S and +1A - is that particularly burdensome? Are any of those things on the unit's datasheet?
Does Admech have a psychic phase? What is problematic about considering the Command Phase to be their Psychic Phase? If you think of the Magus casting a spell on a unit it's really not very different outside chance for failure.
a_typical_hero wrote: No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.
Yeah, that Death Guard equipment option entry is a prime example of clean writing.
I care mostly about effect. What is the effect of the rules and rules-writing on my gaming experience. Is the game spent looking up rules and having discussions about interpretations? Or is the game spent moving models, measuring ranges and rolling dice? For me, 40K 9th Edition has few if any trips to the rulebook. I might have to look up stats (like Wounds on a character or Toughness on a vehicle), but that's it. I figure I have a fairly average memory for a wargamer. I know my Strats and the most likely/most dangerous ones that my opponent has in his book. And if I don't then I learn them from hard experience!
I agree that 9th Edition has more "legalese" in the rules where they try to make it as clear as possible to understand their intent. Makes the rules longer, but we aren't having to look them up in-game in my experience. I am OK with somewhat lengthy, involved construction rules, for instance, since that occurs before the game with the luxury of time to read and digest.
Having said that, Necron Command Protocols are a "swing and a miss" in terms of rules. They are needlessly involved with a negative effect on the gaming experience. No doubt there are other examples out there.
Sim-Life wrote: Yeah, that Death Guard equipment option entry is a prime example of clean writing.
Ironically, it is a perfect example of what Scotsman said. There is no confusion of what you can take in the unit, is there? The wording is clear and leaves no room for it to be abused. Don't confuse extensive with clean.
That might be "clean" (sic)... But is just another overesized block of text to understand... And it gives no flavour or tactical options... It only exist for the sake of IP defense.
9th might be "straight forward" for WAAC, rules lawyers and ultradedicated tournament players... Yes its not like brain surgery or piloting a jet fighter... But is very cumbersome and unnecesarilly wordy for what is in essence a light hearted and cheesy tabletop scifi game.
Vatsetis wrote: That might be "clean" (sic)... But is just another overesized block of text to understand... And it gives no flavour or tactical options... It only exist for the sake of IP defense.
9th might be "straight forward" for WAAC, rules lawyers and ultradedicated tournament players... Yes its not like brain surgery or piloting a jet fighter... But is very cumbersome and unnecesarilly wordy for what is in essence a light hearted and cheesy tabletop scifi game.
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Vatsetis wrote: That might be "clean" (sic)... But is just another overesized block of text to understand... And it gives no flavour or tactical options... It only exist for the sake of IP defense.
9th might be "straight forward" for WAAC, rules lawyers and ultradedicated tournament players... Yes its not like brain surgery or piloting a jet fighter... But is very cumbersome and unnecesarilly wordy for what is in essence a light hearted and cheesy tabletop scifi game.
a_typical_hero wrote: No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.
Yeah, that Death Guard equipment option entry is a prime example of clean writing.
When I say "clean" primarily I mean "without wiggle room"
To give another example from my recent game RE: equipment options: Submachine Guns and Rifles are the two different weapons that infantry can be armed with, they have different rules. The rules for which solders may take submachine guns are
"most nations involved in the mid to late stages of the war used submachine guns. Typically there was about enough for one in each squad, typically the NCO, to have one, but some units were entirely armed with submachine guns and others were entirely bereft. Submachine guns must always be modeled on units."
It's basically just a guideline that assumes you are going to look up what the concentration of SMGs in your theater for your faction are, and arm them according to historical accuracy.
Racerguy180 800120 11207488 wrote:
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Imagine an item which takes you 2-3 months of adult salaries in the US to buy, which means adjusted for living costs, getting it takes it between a few months to few years. And then it still requires maintance to be paid for with time and money. There are very few people who are not going to take it serious.
Racerguy180 800120 11207488 wrote:
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Imagine an item which takes you 2-3 months of adult salaries in the US to buy, which means adjusted for living costs, getting it takes it between a few months to few years. And then it still requires maintance to be paid for with time and money. There are very few people who are not going to take it serious.
Well, yeah. I think the point is that it'd be nice if GW took it that seriously.
Racerguy180 800120 11207488 wrote:
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Imagine an item which takes you 2-3 months of adult salaries in the US to buy, which means adjusted for living costs, getting it takes it between a few months to few years. And then it still requires maintance to be paid for with time and money. There are very few people who are not going to take it serious.
Well, yeah. I think the point is that it'd be nice if GW took it that seriously.
No, that's not the point of the comment. At all.
Over the years we've seen some incredibly bad behavior & attitudes during games.
At the end of the evening? No matter how much you've paid for this stuff, no matter how long it took to collect, no matter how long it took you to assemble/paint/etc?
You're still just playing a game with toys. Remember that.
Racerguy180 800120 11207488 wrote:
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Imagine an item which takes you 2-3 months of adult salaries in the US to buy, which means adjusted for living costs, getting it takes it between a few months to few years. And then it still requires maintance to be paid for with time and money. There are very few people who are not going to take it serious.
Well, yeah. I think the point is that it'd be nice if GW took it that seriously.
They haven't yet, almost 35yrs on.
Seems like they've made their mind up on how to take their game. They view it as a leisure product.
Karol, It's freakin expensive, it always has been outside of boxed sets or army builder deals. At least your army didn't get squatted, like mine did at your age. How would you feel then??? Trust me It would suck more.
Maybe this is a my part of the world expiriance, but if someone where I live told a western rich guy that he should act chill, because the sail boat he ordered, from one of the shipyards here, is a luxury product for a hobby, there would be bad things happning.
Labeling something this or that way has, in my opinion, less impact on how people think about the cost of anything. Same way, It could be a lot worse, is not much of an argument to feel better about anything.
People do take hobbies serious, because they matter to them. If it didn't they would just quit. The money aspect is, for me, very important or even crucial, but I can also imagine someone reacting to changes in GW games the same way lots of people reacted to how Star Wars changed its lore etc.
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ccs 800120 11207530 wrote:
No, that's not the point of the comment. At all.
Over the years we've seen some incredibly bad behavior & attitudes during games.
At the end of the evening? No matter how much you've paid for this stuff, no matter how long it took to collect, no matter how long it took you to assemble/paint/etc?
You're still just playing a game with toys. Remember that.
There are places in Poland where you can get stabbed for wearing the wrong colour of neckerchief. Thanks to YT, I know that in US, the same can happen to you, if you were the wrong colour or type of a cap in the wrong district. Scarf and caps or their colours seem to be even less important then toys. Yet somehow they generate enough strong emotions for other people to want to off you, without knowing you at all.
People not interested, mostly women, say that football is just men runing around with a ball for an hour. Oddly enough people create hooligan gangs, spaning entire countries, have wars etc Just for being a member of group activity you technically don't need to perform to be alive.
For God Sake Karol... STOP describing Poland as if it was Mad Max... Its a medium income country, part of the UE and the NATO!!!!
40K is not something you do for a living, is not olimpics sport competition... Is just a hobby, its MENT to be fun and relaxing.
If its very expensive for you... Look at other cheaper alternatives (even playing 40k with 3rd party miniatures)... If your group only like hardcore 40k perhaps you should stop hanging with them and play non sociopathic people on line... Anything is better than what you are doing.
Stop being a trol / drama queen... This is far beyond a farce :(
PD: Hooligans dont behave violent because of football... They use football as an excuse for getting drunk and violent... 99% of football followers arent hooligans... Perhaps you shouldnt aspire to imitate or justify sociopathic attitudes (or psicopathic which is a very common trend amongst CEO / boat owners).
Racerguy180 800120 11207488 wrote:
Yup, 100% agree. People take it waaaaayyyyyyy too seriously. Like 1000% more than GW do.
Imagine an item which takes you 2-3 months of adult salaries in the US to buy, which means adjusted for living costs, getting it takes it between a few months to few years. And then it still requires maintance to be paid for with time and money. There are very few people who are not going to take it serious.
Sounds like a house.
There's 'serious' Karol and there's 'obsessive'. Just like how icarus flew too close to the sun, some people get far too close and unhealthy a relationship/attachment with their hobby. Even worse, people can burn out and rather than take a break,they double down. 'Serious' can be both healthy and unhealthy, depending onnyour approach. I think the notion that to be 'serious', you have to obsess over all aspects to the nth degree, and every little detail is ultimately self destructive. Serious is many things.
I mean, I take my hobby 'seriously' Karol. Ive spent a lot of money on this hobby since way before you were born. I invest time in the models I paint/convert, significant effort, currency. And yes, I have a lot of pride in a hobby I enjoy. I have 2 display cases for over a thousand individual models. And a £200 limited edition print in my hobby room.I have no shame in a hobby I enjoy. I have no shame in showing it to people- I don't hide it away. I've learned the hard way how to find that balance.
My 'seriousness' is relatively healthy. I can also relax with my hobby and enjoy it immensely. I surround myself with like minded people. I can take a step back quite easy from the nuts and bolts, especially the bits that we do not like.
Vatsetis wrote: For God Sake Karol... STOP describing Poland as if it was Mad Max... Its a medium income country, part of the UE and the NATO!!!!
40K is not something you do for a living, is not olimpics sport competition... Is just a hobby, its MENT to be fun and relaxing.
If its very expensive for you... Look at other cheaper alternatives (even playing 40k with 3rd party miniatures)... If your group only like hardcore 40k perhaps you should stop hanging with them and play non sociopathic people on line... Anything is better than what you are doing.
Stop being a trol / drama queen... This is far beyond a farce :(
PD: Hooligans dont behave violent because of football... They use football as an excuse for getting drunk and violent... 99% of football followers arent hooligans... Perhaps you shouldnt aspire to imitate or justify sociopathic attitudes (or psicopathic which is a very common trend amongst CEO / boat owners).
So according to the HDI Poland is number 35 out of almost 200 countries... Please, stop insulting the inteligence of the fellow posters.
Ireland is 2nd on that list and is also in the EU. Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one. Ireland is a tax haven for tech companies, the citizens rarely see any of the money as the Government likes to keep the money in Dublin. The infrastructure outside cities is abysmal. My house literally does not have a landline telephone line running to it let alone broadband. Some flats in the towns just run multiple power lines in through a window from a single pole outside. There is no public transport to speak of. The Government are actively trying to shut down the nearest hospital and directing more and more people to hospitals an hour or so away. The land isn't good enough for crop farming so all the farmers have to raise cattle, which they can only sell at a near loss due to EU regulations and they can't start any counter-industry because the disposal of meat production leftovers is run by a single man who happens to own the facilities to dispose of said leftovers. The taoiseach pays himself more than the president of the US. The Government is considered the 19th most corrupt in the world. Just because Karol lives in a country that is statistically not a shithole does not make that country not a shithole.
Karol relating his experiences isn't trolling, he obviously lives somewhere relatively cut off from dense population hubs where poverty and isolation are very real issues.
Vatsetis wrote: For God Sake Karol... STOP describing Poland as if it was Mad Max... Its a medium income country, part of the UE and the NATO!!!!
40K is not something you do for a living, is not olimpics sport competition... Is just a hobby, its MENT to be fun and relaxing.
If its very expensive for you... Look at other cheaper alternatives (even playing 40k with 3rd party miniatures)... If your group only like hardcore 40k perhaps you should stop hanging with them and play non sociopathic people on line... Anything is better than what you are doing.
Stop being a trol / drama queen... This is far beyond a farce :(
PD: Hooligans dont behave violent because of football... They use football as an excuse for getting drunk and violent... 99% of football followers arent hooligans... Perhaps you shouldnt aspire to imitate or justify sociopathic attitudes (or psicopathic which is a very common trend amongst CEO / boat owners).
So according to the HDI Poland is number 35 out of almost 200 countries... Please, stop insulting the inteligence of the fellow posters.
Ireland is 2nd on that list and is also in the EU. Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one. Ireland is a tax haven for tech companies, the citizens rarely see any of the money as the Government likes to keep the money in Dublin. The infrastructure outside cities is abysmal. My house literally does not have a landline telephone line running to it let alone broadband. Some flats in the towns just run multiple power lines in through a window from a single pole outside. There is no public transport to speak of. The Government are actively trying to shut down the nearest hospital and directing more and more people to hospitals an hour or so away. The land isn't good enough for crop farming so all the farmers have to raise cattle, which they can only sell at a near loss due to EU regulations and they can't start any counter-industry because the disposal of meat production leftovers is run by a single man who happens to own the facilities to dispose of said leftovers. The taoiseach pays himself more than the president of the US. The Government is considered the 19th most corrupt in the world. Just because Karol lives in a country that is statistically not a shithole does not make that country not a shithole.
Karol relating his experiences isn't trolling, he obviously lives somewhere relatively cut off from dense population hubs where poverty and isolation are very real issues.
In fairness, as an Irish guy myself, its annoying how Cork and Dublin are the 2 main hubs of the country, but your painting of our homeland is a bit bleak- you're presenting something like out of Angela's ashes. I'm from the arse end of it myself (and my dad is from where people in the arse end refer to the other arse end) and for the most part it was grande, certainly a far cry from 'Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one'. That's a very unfair depiction.
For the record, when it comes to hooliganism, living in Scotland as I do, you see a very strong sectarian component to the rangers/cleric rivalry which is one of the most infamous, hate filled and bad-blooded football rivalries in the world. It's genuinely nasty and can easy turn vicious. I have no problem accepting the notion people get sucked into their tribe and lash out at the other tribes, doesn't mean its right or healthy or should be presented for how the world is, absent of any other perspectives or should be viewed as what 'serious' fans should do.
Vatsetis wrote: For God Sake Karol... STOP describing Poland as if it was Mad Max... Its a medium income country, part of the UE and the NATO!!!!
40K is not something you do for a living, is not olimpics sport competition... Is just a hobby, its MENT to be fun and relaxing.
If its very expensive for you... Look at other cheaper alternatives (even playing 40k with 3rd party miniatures)... If your group only like hardcore 40k perhaps you should stop hanging with them and play non sociopathic people on line... Anything is better than what you are doing.
Stop being a trol / drama queen... This is far beyond a farce :(
PD: Hooligans dont behave violent because of football... They use football as an excuse for getting drunk and violent... 99% of football followers arent hooligans... Perhaps you shouldnt aspire to imitate or justify sociopathic attitudes (or psicopathic which is a very common trend amongst CEO / boat owners).
So according to the HDI Poland is number 35 out of almost 200 countries... Please, stop insulting the inteligence of the fellow posters.
Ireland is 2nd on that list and is also in the EU. Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one. Ireland is a tax haven for tech companies, the citizens rarely see any of the money as the Government likes to keep the money in Dublin. The infrastructure outside cities is abysmal. My house literally does not have a landline telephone line running to it let alone broadband. Some flats in the towns just run multiple power lines in through a window from a single pole outside. There is no public transport to speak of. The Government are actively trying to shut down the nearest hospital and directing more and more people to hospitals an hour or so away. The land isn't good enough for crop farming so all the farmers have to raise cattle, which they can only sell at a near loss due to EU regulations and they can't start any counter-industry because the disposal of meat production leftovers is run by a single man who happens to own the facilities to dispose of said leftovers. The taoiseach pays himself more than the president of the US. The Government is considered the 19th most corrupt in the world. Just because Karol lives in a country that is statistically not a shithole does not make that country not a shithole.
Karol relating his experiences isn't trolling, he obviously lives somewhere relatively cut off from dense population hubs where poverty and isolation are very real issues.
In fairness, as an Irish guy myself, its annoying how Cork and Dublin are the 2 main hubs of the country, but your painting of our homeland is a bit bleak- you're presenting something like out of Angela's ashes. I'm from the arse end of it myself (and my dad is from where people in the arse end refer to the other arse end) and for the most part it was grande, certainly a far cry from 'Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one'. That's a very unfair depiction.
For the record, when it comes to hooliganism, living in Scotland as I do, you see a very strong sectarian component to the rangers/cleric rivalry which is one of the most infamous, hate filled and bad-blooded football rivalries in the world. It's genuinely nasty and can easy turn vicious. I have no problem accepting the notion people get sucked into their tribe and lash out at the other tribes, doesn't mean its right or healthy or should be presented for how the world is, absent of any other perspectives or should be viewed as what 'serious' fans should do.
Funnily enough I came from Scotland to Ireland and the sectarian violence isn't really seen outside of Glasgow. Also nothing I've said is untrue. Rural Ireland is insanely under-developed. Cavan isn't even that far from Dublin and moving from Dundee to Cavan was a huge culture shock.
Vatsetis wrote: For God Sake Karol... STOP describing Poland as if it was Mad Max... Its a medium income country, part of the UE and the NATO!!!!
40K is not something you do for a living, is not olimpics sport competition... Is just a hobby, its MENT to be fun and relaxing.
If its very expensive for you... Look at other cheaper alternatives (even playing 40k with 3rd party miniatures)... If your group only like hardcore 40k perhaps you should stop hanging with them and play non sociopathic people on line... Anything is better than what you are doing.
Stop being a trol / drama queen... This is far beyond a farce :(
PD: Hooligans dont behave violent because of football... They use football as an excuse for getting drunk and violent... 99% of football followers arent hooligans... Perhaps you shouldnt aspire to imitate or justify sociopathic attitudes (or psicopathic which is a very common trend amongst CEO / boat owners).
So according to the HDI Poland is number 35 out of almost 200 countries... Please, stop insulting the inteligence of the fellow posters.
Ireland is 2nd on that list and is also in the EU. Doesn't mean its a good place to live unless you live in one of the big cities or work in one. Ireland is a tax haven for tech companies, the citizens rarely see any of the money as the Government likes to keep the money in Dublin. The infrastructure outside cities is abysmal. My house literally does not have a landline telephone line running to it let alone broadband. Some flats in the towns just run multiple power lines in through a window from a single pole outside. There is no public transport to speak of. The Government are actively trying to shut down the nearest hospital and directing more and more people to hospitals an hour or so away. The land isn't good enough for crop farming so all the farmers have to raise cattle, which they can only sell at a near loss due to EU regulations and they can't start any counter-industry because the disposal of meat production leftovers is run by a single man who happens to own the facilities to dispose of said leftovers. The taoiseach pays himself more than the president of the US. The Government is considered the 19th most corrupt in the world. Just because Karol lives in a country that is statistically not a shithole does not make that country not a shithole.
Karol relating his experiences isn't trolling, he obviously lives somewhere relatively cut off from dense population hubs where poverty and isolation are very real issues.
Well Im certainly not defending the living standards of the working class people in the neoliberal EU (which should be obvious just by doing a Google search of my Nickname).
But leaving in Poland (even in a working class neigbourhood or town) is no excuse to endorse 40K with the same toxic attitude of a Football Hooligan.
Football hooligans were called the salt of earth and the real patriots. There was even a new military force created, something kin to US national guard, because not all of the existing army were demeed fully loyal to the new goverment. There is training, ton of cash going to support it. Giving older hooligan associations members a different career oportunity then joing the local mob or police.
Why do you think Cracow is called the city of knives? Cracovia and Visla have been at war since pre WWI, when in the 90s all the hooligan clubs representatives signed a treaty that "hardware" (axs, knifes,etc) are not going to be used in sanctioned inter group fights, both representatives from Cracov refused to sign the packt.
Also there is a gigantic difference between what we call Poland A and Poland B (borders of it more or less follow the borders of the Russian/Prussian occupation). In Warsaw the income needed to survive, not live good, is close to what you need to live in a western city. On the other hand if you live in Goldap or Bialystok, you need a lot less. You also get a lot less, which is also a problem. So yeah parts of Poland very much look like mad max. villages in the east where the only people living there are small children and 40+ people. Ex coal mine areas. Ex communist kolchoz areas that didn't get bought up by some rich dude. People living in dense forests that remember the times where whole europe was govered by it, to a point where some people living in Bieszczady didn't knew that WWII happened. And as a bonus we have places like reeducation camps for problematic german youths in my area, and a constant war between mobs organising smuggling from Ukraine and Belarus. And I can tell you that their land vehicles look a bit like those in mad max. Minus the flamers.
I mean last year, I was digging holes and filling them with spikes to help my grandad kill boars that raided his potato fields. Not all Poland is Warsaw. Just as not all of Spain is Bilbao, some people live in the mountain regions in the north.
I dont know men, I live in one of the most depress districts of Madrid... I could tell you horrible stories of survival and crime... But we also have nice gardens, an excellent public library and a very neat LGS.
So please stop being this sickening and sad drama Queen... Your live is not harder than many other fellow posters... You simply have decided to view things in a negative form because you think is cool for your internet persona... But you dont fool no one.
Vatsetis wrote: I dont know men, I live in one of the most depress districts of Madrid... I could tell you horrible stories of survival and crime... But we also have nice gardens, an excellent public library and a very neat LGS.
So please stop being this sickening and sad drama Queen... Your live is not harder than many other fellow posters... You simply have decided to view things in a negative form because you think is cool for your internet persona... But you dont fool no one.
Yes. Wild boars are a big problem in most metropolitan cities. You need to lay off Karol, I could tell you horrible stories from Dundee but the standard of living in a street populated with heroin dealers in a city was still higher than the dilapidated farmhouse I live in now (technically, I love it here but it lacks a lot of things like the internet or a shop closer than 5 minutes drive away).
Vatsetis wrote: You simply have decided to view things in a negative form because you think is cool for your internet persona... But you dont fool no one.
Spain is one of the countries with the most desolated rural areas of all Europe... I understand the huge difficulties for the hobby that leaving outside main cities mean... But how exactly does that justify engaging the hobby in a Grimm and Dark mode??
Funnily enough I came from Scotland to Ireland and the sectarian violence isn't really seen outside of Glasgow. Also nothing I've said is untrue. Rural Ireland is insanely under-developed. Cavan isn't even that far from Dublin and moving from Dundee to Cavan was a huge culture shock.
Never said it was untrue, I said it was bleak, and an unfair representation.
As an Irish guy who lived for ten years in Edinburgh, I heard my fair share of 'fenian' slurs. Especially at the football- my wife's a jambo - which puts me in the very wrong place when we had season tickets. :p
And My dad's side of the family is from South kerry. Next stop is where luke skywalker was hiding out from the empire. And incidentally one of the last places in the country to have electricity brought to them. And I'm a country boy. Trust me, I know all about under developed rural economy. Hell the term 'rural flight' could have been coined for South kerry.
Saying its 'not a good place to live' is extremely unfair.
In terms of hobbying and getting back a bit more on topic, I was 100% of my gaming population when I first got into 40k. Didn't play a game for about 3 years. Just lonely me and my paint brush! I could still enjoy what I did and I'm still optimistic about stuff- and it sure as hell wasn't a bad place to grow up in.
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