WH40k is becoming increasingly difficult to balance. Recently, a lot of armies are getting stacking buffs, and I feel like this makes it more difficult to balance the game because the value of a unit ranges widely depending on the buffs available. This has always kind'of been in the game, but it's getting increasingly "more". I say more because I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, it just is.
Here's an example: Repentia
Repentia are not, in themselves, broken; in fact, they're super mediocre with their base statline; however, you can make them broken:
1. Bloody Rose Benefits (+1 attack, -1ap)
2. Bloody Rose stratagem (+1 to wound)
3. The passion (Exploding 6s on unmodified wound rolls)
4. Missionary (+1 attack)
5. Desperate for Redemption (Fight twice)
6. Triumph of St. Katherine (+1 to hit)
7. Palatine/Superior (Re-roll wound rolls of 1)
You're not likely to have every single one of these go off at the same time, but it is something that if you could pull this off, you can one-hit anything in the game barring a warwound titan.
The problem is, just going on the unit's stats it isn't, in itself, broken. It's when you combo everything together that it gets out of hand.
And there's other stuff in the game that does this: Ork Boyz
1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the solution isn't simply to increase the points of the unit, because what's making the unit good isn't the unit itself in many cases, but the thing buffing it. This makes it difficult to gauge the value of a unit on paper because there's so many external modifiers making the unit work. It also becomes an issue that the same buffs might break something else. Any Sister of Battle unit that gets released in the future has the potential to use most of the stuff that buffs Repentia, like the new Celestian Sacrosents. Same thing with Orkz. Any Ork infantry in the future can use waagh banner, ghazghkull and clan traits, so that has to be kept in mind when balancing those units.
I don't think this is bad for the game, but I do think it makes balancing an issue; and I feel like the game is adding a lot more of these things because most armies are getting a combat doctrine-like ability
You're not likely to have every single one of these go off at the same time, but it is something that if you could pull this off, you can one-hit anything in the game barring a warwound titan.
The problem is, just going on the unit's stats it isn't, in itself, broken. It's when you combo everything together that it gets out of hand.
Yes, and it is extremely funny that some people think that 8th and 9th got rid of the problems 7th had. 40k has always been a mess, GW have never been interested in making the game consistent, structured, minimal (as opposed to bloated) and balanced. Also, the thing is that you cannot blame the players for seeking those crazy combos. They are playing the game correctly, finding optimal strategies and lists, combining the most efficient things. It is what players do in every game - they look for the most efficient ways to play. Forcing an ethic on them that would go something like 'don't be that guy, come on, you're not here to win games' is ridiculous (I have known cases where people actually proposed that). That's why I agree that this is a flaw of the game.
As for what we can do, I am at a loss. Making up our own rules requires a lot of effort and it would make newcomers confused. 40k is really going down hill. It was bad and now it is getting worse (T5 orks anyone?).
And there's other stuff in the game that does this: Ork Boyz
1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
Well, the whole Ghaz + 30boyz + banner nob combo costs 638 points, which is far more expensive than an imperial knight. Plus those stratagems costs 3, 1 and 3 CPs respectively. So the entire combo is utterly expensive, both points and CP wise, and melee only. I don't really see any issue if this combination has the potential to bring down a knight, in fact I'd be disappointed if it couldn't.
cjmate8 wrote: 1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the solution isn't simply to increase the points of the unit, because what's making the unit good isn't the unit itself in many cases, but the thing buffing it. This makes it difficult to gauge the value of a unit on paper because there's so many external modifiers making the unit work. It also becomes an issue that the same buffs might break something else. Any Sister of Battle unit that gets released in the future has the potential to use most of the stuff that buffs Repentia, like the new Celestian Sacrosents. Same thing with Orkz. Any Ork infantry in the future can use waagh banner, ghazghkull and clan traits, so that has to be kept in mind when balancing those units.
I don't think this is bad for the game, but I do think it makes balancing an issue; and I feel like the game is adding a lot more of these things because most armies are getting a combat doctrine-like ability
I cut the sisters because I have no clue about that army. You also got some rules wrong, but I think the point you are trying to make is clear.
In regards to boyz, the big hole in your argument is that those buffs are neither free (points or opportunity costs), nor do the they have infinite range, nor are they unconditional, nor is that unit guaranteed to be able to apply all that power to something worth the trouble, nor are you guaranteed to even attack once with many of those models despite them reaching combat unwounded.
And even then, I don't that think 240+300+85 points and 4 CP being able to one-round a castellan/knight tyrant when all the stars align is a problem whatsoever.
What is a balance problem is the green tide stratagem because free models are bad. I fully expect it to be gone or severly limited in the next codex.
The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
Well, the whole Ghaz + 30boyz + banner nob combo costs 638 points, which is far more expensive than an imperial knight. Plus those stratagems costs 3, 1 and 3 CPs respectively. So the entire combo is utterly expensive, both points and CP wise, and melee only. I don't really see any issue if this combination has the potential to bring down a knight, in fact I'd be disappointed if it couldn't.
PS: I don't play greentides .
If a unit costs more points than another unit, it doesn't mean it is stronger in every respect and should win all brawls on average. Points don't reflect the 'power' of a unit, they are a tool to limit and frame list building. A horde of orks that costs 600 points might be deadly for infantry, but helpless against a big-ass tank. At least it's how things are supposed to be. The game in its current state operates just like you said, a unit is just a bunch of numbers with very minor qualitative differences between unit types. So in that case of course you're upset a greentide can't take on a knight. But in a good game, you shouldn't be.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
This is an excellent point which is really the driving factor behind codex creep.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models.
Hey, let's be fair: GW has been adding more rules to things in 9th, but it hasn't been completely additive, and they also have been altering core statlines and reducing auras in favor of targeted abiliites, which are much more balance-able in that the model giving the ability and in some cases, just the ability itself can have a point cost in and of itself.
If the "ignore ap-1/ap-2" ability from admech does turn out to be broken, GW can now increase the cost of specifically that ability, which is a better balancing lever than if it was just there, present as an open-ended aura literally any unit could use stapled onto a model.
Within GW's self-imposed arbitrary restrictions (no changey rules only changey point costorinos) the new way theyve been doing stuff in 9th is, technically, more healthy than in 8th and especially in late-stage 8th ie Psychic Awakening.
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities. The game would be infinitely healthier if GW had just said "Whoops, sorry, Narrative play only" when the 2.0dex was as busted as it turned out to be, and then they'd just abandoned the idea of purity bonus rules instead relying on the simple, effective CP penalty to limit souping in 9th.
Cut Blade Artists, Combat Doctrines, Warp Tides, Contagions, Necron Programs, etc and apply some point balance from there (I'm aware Marines would need a boost to compensate for losing the MUCH stronger doctrine bonuses) and the game would be in a much much healthier spot.
Welcome to 40k, OP. This is why chaos cultists were hit with multiple nerf bats. Can you imagine why a model that is Str 3, WS4, BS 4, T3, 1W firing a str 3 AP0 gun with a paper 6+ can get hit by multiple nerf bats?
Because of exactly what you said in your post. Its not the model or unit itself, its the various buffs, strategems, etc that can be applied to a unit.
Eldenfirefly wrote: Welcome to 40k, OP. This is why chaos cultists were hit with multiple nerf bats. Can you imagine why a model that is Str 3, WS4, BS 4, T3, 1W firing a str 3 AP0 gun with a paper 6+ can get hit by multiple nerf bats?
Because of exactly what you said in your post. Its not the model or unit itself, its the various buffs, strategems, etc that can be applied to a unit.
Neither of those examples are truly OP, because they would require a large number of support models.
Those Repentia need Rhinos for one. Desperate for Redemption is 3CP at the end of the fight phase so if your Repentia with T3 and almost no save survive it might be worth it.
Eldenfirefly wrote: Welcome to 40k, OP. This is why chaos cultists were hit with multiple nerf bats. Can you imagine why a model that is Str 3, WS4, BS 4, T3, 1W firing a str 3 AP0 gun with a paper 6+ can get hit by multiple nerf bats?
Because of exactly what you said in your post. Its not the model or unit itself, its the various buffs, strategems, etc that can be applied to a unit.
Neither of those examples are truly OP, because they would require a large number of support models.
Those Repentia need Rhinos for one. Desperate for Redemption is 3CP at the end of the fight phase so if your Repentia with T3 and almost no save survive it might be worth it.
No, a better example would be Obliterators, which are priced as if they'll be getting VOTLW + Cacophony on them every turn. Support units not needed as they'll be deploying via deep strike.
The increased difficulty of balancing doesn't matter because they aren't properly accounting for even the basic factors to begin with. At this point it is about as likely to help as it is to hurt in any given instance.
cjmate8 wrote: 1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the solution isn't simply to increase the points of the unit, because what's making the unit good isn't the unit itself in many cases, but the thing buffing it. This makes it difficult to gauge the value of a unit on paper because there's so many external modifiers making the unit work. It also becomes an issue that the same buffs might break something else. Any Sister of Battle unit that gets released in the future has the potential to use most of the stuff that buffs Repentia, like the new Celestian Sacrosents. Same thing with Orkz. Any Ork infantry in the future can use waagh banner, ghazghkull and clan traits, so that has to be kept in mind when balancing those units.
I don't think this is bad for the game, but I do think it makes balancing an issue; and I feel like the game is adding a lot more of these things because most armies are getting a combat doctrine-like ability
I cut the sisters because I have no clue about that army. You also got some rules wrong, but I think the point you are trying to make is clear.
In regards to boyz, the big hole in your argument is that those buffs are neither free (points or opportunity costs), nor do the they have infinite range, nor are they unconditional, nor is that unit guaranteed to be able to apply all that power to something worth the trouble, nor are you guaranteed to even attack once with many of those models despite them reaching combat unwounded.
And even then, I don't that think 240+300+85 points and 4 CP being able to one-round a castellan/knight tyrant when all the stars align is a problem whatsoever.
What is a balance problem is the green tide stratagem because free models are bad. I fully expect it to be gone or severly limited in the next codex.
I don't think any of this is bad, or that people shouldn't do it, I just wanted to point out that it's more complicated than people presume. For example, repentia aren't being ran in non-bloody rose. If Repentia are broken, a points increase just further incentivizes people not to run them in other factions. The issue is in the things that buff them, which are increasingly more complicated. I don't think this is bad, just complicated, and it seems to be getting more complicated.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
They've actually been changing a ton of profiles in 9th - as a Necrons player I can attest to suddenly having a lot more T5 to play with than before.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
They've actually been changing a ton of profiles in 9th - as a Necrons player I can attest to suddenly having a lot more T5 to play with than before.
That wasn't what I meant. Also its still additive and not solving the problems that 40k has with dozens of rules scattered everywhere.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
They've actually been changing a ton of profiles in 9th - as a Necrons player I can attest to suddenly having a lot more T5 to play with than before.
That wasn't what I meant. Also its still additive and not solving the problems that 40k has with dozens of rules scattered everywhere.
....improving a unit's statline and base rules isn't what you meant by "rather than just altering the model's rules"?
What would be the 'win condition' for GW here, then, for the 9th ed codexes to be a good thing?
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
They've actually been changing a ton of profiles in 9th - as a Necrons player I can attest to suddenly having a lot more T5 to play with than before.
That wasn't what I meant. Also its still additive and not solving the problems that 40k has with dozens of rules scattered everywhere.
....improving a unit's statline and base rules isn't what you meant by "rather than just altering the model's rules"?
What would be the 'win condition' for GW here, then, for the 9th ed codexes to be a good thing?
Piling buffs onto the unit statline/base rules doesn't address the fact that GW's approach to "balance" is to "buff things at random to counter whatever the last thing they screwed up by buffing was", no.
WH40k is becoming increasingly difficult to balance. Recently, a lot of armies are getting stacking buffs, and I feel like this makes it more difficult to balance the game because the value of a unit ranges widely depending on the buffs available. This has always kind'of been in the game, but it's getting increasingly "more". I say more because I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, it just is.
Honestly, if you think it's bad now, you should have seen 7th. 8th/9th have NOTHING on 7th. lol Units that were literally un-hit-able because they were off the table and couldn't be targeted, but COULD themselves grant buffs. Invis, 2++ re-rollable saves ...
9th isn't perfect, but it's a breath of fresh air comparatively speaking.
Sim-Life wrote:
The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
The problem with this line of thought though, is that altering the model's rules, will often have the same knock-on effect as the additive fixes you mention. We know this, because that's what's happened when they've tried it. There are also units where, they are good because of a buff they get from another unit. Simple solution right? That model simply can't buff the problem unit anymore. But now BOTH units are useless.
I think you're right in that they probably too often jump to a sort of additive design where it feels almost lazy. "Oh - that unit's under-performing. Ummmmm ...... +1 in CC! FIXED IT", but I think you need to have a wholistic approach to the fixes that they don't always have.
Sim-Life wrote: The problem with GWs approach to balance is that they take an additive approach rather than a reductive. To fix units they just pile on more +1s and rerolls or release models with an aura rather than actually just fix the issues with models. Thinking about this I remember the moment I think I was done with 40k was the Tyranid PA where they added in a bunch of strats for underperforming units rather than just altering the models rules. It was something they could have FAQ'd but they decided to go about it in the worst way possible in order to sell another book.
They've actually been changing a ton of profiles in 9th - as a Necrons player I can attest to suddenly having a lot more T5 to play with than before.
That wasn't what I meant. Also its still additive and not solving the problems that 40k has with dozens of rules scattered everywhere.
....improving a unit's statline and base rules isn't what you meant by "rather than just altering the model's rules"?
What would be the 'win condition' for GW here, then, for the 9th ed codexes to be a good thing?
Piling buffs onto the unit statline/base rules doesn't address the fact that GW's approach to "balance" is to "buff things at random to counter whatever the last thing they screwed up by buffing was", no.
yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
NinthMusketeer wrote: The increased difficulty of balancing doesn't matter because they aren't properly accounting for even the basic factors to begin with. At this point it is about as likely to help as it is to hurt in any given instance.
Exactly.
It might be hard to achieve perfect balance. It is not hard to do basic things like...calculate the average damage increase of a 1point stratagem compared to other ones. If one Averages 3 mortal wounds and another 6...there is a clear issue. If a stratagem turns a str 3 into the most deadly weapon the in the game...yeah...something is off. Scientism not even required here. GW is failing over and over at very basic things. At this point it cant be considered failing. They are actually succeeding at giving us the unbalanced rules that they want. Only explanation.
the_scotsman wrote: ...yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
GW does hike the prices on things that see too much tournament play, yes, and occasionally rewords a stratagem. They buff things way more than they nerf them, however, and I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes), so the overall trend is power creep piled upon power creep.
NinthMusketeer wrote: The increased difficulty of balancing doesn't matter because they aren't properly accounting for even the basic factors to begin with. At this point it is about as likely to help as it is to hurt in any given instance.
Exactly.
It might be hard to achieve perfect balance. It is not hard to do basic things like...calculate the average damage increase of a 1point stratagem compared to other ones. If one Averages 3 mortal wounds and another 6...there is a clear issue. If a stratagem turns a str 3 into the most deadly weapon the in the game...yeah...something is off. Scientism not even required here. GW is failing over and over at very basic things. At this point it cant be considered failing. They are actually succeeding at giving us the unbalanced rules that they want. Only explanation.
As has probably been pointed out in the past, there actually isn't an entirely clear issue.
Let's take the whole 'x strat does Y mortal wounds while Y strat does Z mortal wounds, CLEARLY AND OBVIOUSLY OP!!!" - it never seems to actually examine the circumstances of how and why the number of mortal wounds from the strat are achieved.
How many points of models/upgrades/whatever do you have to put on a unit in order to make the stratagem work?
Is the action that generates the mortal wounds putting the unit in a situation it wants to be in, or a situation it doesn't want to be in? A stratagem that generates mortal wounds for a close combat unit that requires that close combat unit to charge is obviously going to be inherently more useful than a stratagem that generates mortal wounds for a shooting unit that requires that shooting unit to charge.
You actually make the argument less compelling the more you simplify the situation and make it seem like 'a no brainer'.
By default, most stratagems that generate mortal wounds basically on-demand tend to have a value of 2MW for 1CP on average. Since it's a super recent codex, let's use the Drukhari "Haywire Grenade" stratagem as a template for that baseline - it's slightly limited (only works on vehicles) but achieving it is very easy (basically any INFANTRY unit in the codex needs to be within grenade range, and the codex is full of fast open topped transports.)
Similar point of comparison, the stratagem "Hellfire Round" or "Hellfire Bolt" or whatever the D3 from a heavy bolter is called in the marine 'dex. Achieving it is low cost (include 1 Infantry-borne 15pt weapon upgrade anywhere in your list and be within 36" range) and on average it gives slightly lower than 2mw, but in its somewhat more limited form, it gives 2mw on average (2/3 chance to cause 3MW = 2mw on average vs monsters)
The outlier we are discussing here, I presume, is the new version of the Wrath of Mars stratagem, which is 1CP for any unit under 10PL, which includes basically any of the unit combinations that can with average rolls get it to its cap of 6mw - 10 sicarian infiltrators, 10 skystalkers, 20 skitarii of either type, etc.
Given that in order to generate 3mw from this stratagem, you need to put down 27 shots on average, the amount of investment to get up to the cap is fairly substantial, but it seems like the PL cap for the stratagem to go from 1cp to 2cp is what's off.
Changing the cap from 10PL to 8PL would allow a min-size squad of Kataphron Destroyers with Grav and Phosphor, which generate a little under 2MW with the strat. 15 skitarii vanguard might still potentially be a problem as those could generate 5mw from the stratagem, so you could either bump up that unit's Power Level rating in particular, or lower the cap down to 6 and just accept that it won't be good with Kataphrons.
the_scotsman wrote: ...yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
GW does hike the prices on things that see too much tournament play, yes, and occasionally rewords a stratagem. They buff things way more than they nerf them, however, and I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes), so the overall trend is power creep piled upon power creep.
Kastelan Robots went from shooting twice to +1 BS, Repulsors went from shooting twice to +1 to hit, the skitarii doggos went from 3W to 2W, the skitarii bird dudes lost their MW grenade thingies.
I have almost no doubt that if you were to take a competitive imperial soup list from the Castellan meta of 8th, and play a game where that list follows all the rules that would have applied at the time vs a current tournament competitive list from the new admech 'dex, the Castellan list would rock the Admech list's socks right off.
In fact, I'd be really curious to see how that would play out, maybe I'll try running that on TTS or something, see how much power creep there actually has or hasn't been.
the_scotsman wrote: ...yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
GW does hike the prices on things that see too much tournament play, yes, and occasionally rewords a stratagem. They buff things way more than they nerf them, however, and I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes), so the overall trend is power creep piled upon power creep.
They just axed a wound from the admech dogs. The exception that proves the rule, I guess.
The statline changes have primarily been survival based.
Nurglitch wrote: All GW can do is either increase a unit's deadliness or its survivability, and that's basically all a unit can do.
Mobility and utility.
Utility too often ends up having been the issue they need to fix in the first place and mobility? In any other edition, I'd agree with the mobility thing, but in 9th? What do you need to get to that you currently can't? I would agree on the bigger boards that it mattered, but I still laugh when I hear "OH! It's all about the movement now!" No it's not. It's about "Let me bum-rush the objectives" or "Let me hold off and THEN bum-rush the objectives". Everything can pretty much reach everything at this point, so with the possible exception of making a unit so slow as to have it become useless, they've kind of painted themselves into a corner on mobility imo.
It's more because of table size and mission design than anything inherent to the core rules, but yeah - unless you're talking about edge cases like giving the Monolith or Impulsors the ability to "fly" again, for the most part, with the current table size/mission design, changing mobility isn't likely to solve a lot. Unfortunately.
the_scotsman wrote: ...yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
GW does hike the prices on things that see too much tournament play, yes, and occasionally rewords a stratagem. They buff things way more than they nerf them, however, and I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes), so the overall trend is power creep piled upon power creep.
Kastelan Robots went from shooting twice to +1 BS, Repulsors went from shooting twice to +1 to hit, the skitarii doggos went from 3W to 2W, the skitarii bird dudes lost their MW grenade thingies.
I have almost no doubt that if you were to take a competitive imperial soup list from the Castellan meta of 8th, and play a game where that list follows all the rules that would have applied at the time vs a current tournament competitive list from the new admech 'dex, the Castellan list would rock the Admech list's socks right off.
In fact, I'd be really curious to see how that would play out, maybe I'll try running that on TTS or something, see how much power creep there actually has or hasn't been.
I said statline nerfs, I'll give you the cav but the rest of those look like special rules nerfs.
AnomanderRake wrote: ...I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes)...
Which goalpost moved?
I guess if you really just define the sum of a unit's rules by their WS, BS, T, whatever, then yep that's rarely a thing that changes that much and more often gets buffed rather than nerfed.
The things that tend to get nerfed are combos, stratagems (if they dont just get totally removed), special rule interactions, auras, soup combos, etc etc etc, while the core stats of units tend more frequently to be increased.
One might call this "A Good Thing". When I look back at 'What made a competitive army crazy' in the past it's stuff like:
-Using a trait, 3 stratagems, and a relic to make a space marine captain oneshot a knight
-Using character rule interactions to make an army untargetable past an army of Culexus Assassins
-Using the old Ynnari rules to make anything from the eldar factions double their firepower
-Using soup to provide an infinite CP battery to a hyper-powerful relic on an undercosted superheavy
-Using unit and strat interactions to make a unit of cultists hyper-powerful
-Using old busted flyer interactions to make a hyper mobile firebase army that can still do ojbectives and screen your stuff away from objectives
One of the biggest things that bugs me about 8e/9e is that there are numbers on the statlines that are straight-up wrong because GW didn't bother to do any math in the 8e Indexes, and has been frantically trying to patch them with special rule bloat so they can avoid admitting they screwed up and having to actually go back and do math. The whole "shoots twice" special rule was a half-assed patch to try and address the fact that they didn't understand how they wanted blast weapons to work in the new system and accidentally made them bad against units and good against armour, and tried to fix their performance against units while making them even better against armour instead of actually trying to fix the problem.
You could call the nerfs to stratagem combos a good thing; the problem I have is that the stratagem combos only exist because GW screwed up on the statlines and isn't interested in fixing them.
AnomanderRake wrote: ...I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes)...
Which goalpost moved?
I guess if you really just define the sum of a unit's rules by their WS, BS, T, whatever, then yep that's rarely a thing that changes that much and more often gets buffed rather than nerfed.
The things that tend to get nerfed are combos, stratagems (if they dont just get totally removed), special rule interactions, auras, soup combos, etc etc etc, while the core stats of units tend more frequently to be increased.
One might call this "A Good Thing". When I look back at 'What made a competitive army crazy' in the past it's stuff like:
-Using a trait, 3 stratagems, and a relic to make a space marine captain oneshot a knight
-Using character rule interactions to make an army untargetable past an army of Culexus Assassins
-Using the old Ynnari rules to make anything from the eldar factions double their firepower
-Using soup to provide an infinite CP battery to a hyper-powerful relic on an undercosted superheavy
-Using unit and strat interactions to make a unit of cultists hyper-powerful
-Using old busted flyer interactions to make a hyper mobile firebase army that can still do ojbectives and screen your stuff away from objectives
So you agree that they added too many special rules all over the place and its resulting in unintended interactions that's screwing with the game balance?
NinthMusketeer wrote: The increased difficulty of balancing doesn't matter because they aren't properly accounting for even the basic factors to begin with. At this point it is about as likely to help as it is to hurt in any given instance.
Exactly.
It might be hard to achieve perfect balance. It is not hard to do basic things like...calculate the average damage increase of a 1point stratagem compared to other ones. If one Averages 3 mortal wounds and another 6...there is a clear issue. If a stratagem turns a str 3 into the most deadly weapon the in the game...yeah...something is off. Scientism not even required here. GW is failing over and over at very basic things. At this point it cant be considered failing. They are actually succeeding at giving us the unbalanced rules that they want. Only explanation.
As has probably been pointed out in the past, there actually isn't an entirely clear issue.
Let's take the whole 'x strat does Y mortal wounds while Y strat does Z mortal wounds, CLEARLY AND OBVIOUSLY OP!!!" - it never seems to actually examine the circumstances of how and why the number of mortal wounds from the strat are achieved.
How many points of models/upgrades/whatever do you have to put on a unit in order to make the stratagem work?
Is the action that generates the mortal wounds putting the unit in a situation it wants to be in, or a situation it doesn't want to be in? A stratagem that generates mortal wounds for a close combat unit that requires that close combat unit to charge is obviously going to be inherently more useful than a stratagem that generates mortal wounds for a shooting unit that requires that shooting unit to charge.
You actually make the argument less compelling the more you simplify the situation and make it seem like 'a no brainer'.
By default, most stratagems that generate mortal wounds basically on-demand tend to have a value of 2MW for 1CP on average. Since it's a super recent codex, let's use the Drukhari "Haywire Grenade" stratagem as a template for that baseline - it's slightly limited (only works on vehicles) but achieving it is very easy (basically any INFANTRY unit in the codex needs to be within grenade range, and the codex is full of fast open topped transports.)
Similar point of comparison, the stratagem "Hellfire Round" or "Hellfire Bolt" or whatever the D3 from a heavy bolter is called in the marine 'dex. Achieving it is low cost (include 1 Infantry-borne 15pt weapon upgrade anywhere in your list and be within 36" range) and on average it gives slightly lower than 2mw, but in its somewhat more limited form, it gives 2mw on average (2/3 chance to cause 3MW = 2mw on average vs monsters)
The outlier we are discussing here, I presume, is the new version of the Wrath of Mars stratagem, which is 1CP for any unit under 10PL, which includes basically any of the unit combinations that can with average rolls get it to its cap of 6mw - 10 sicarian infiltrators, 10 skystalkers, 20 skitarii of either type, etc.
Given that in order to generate 3mw from this stratagem, you need to put down 27 shots on average, the amount of investment to get up to the cap is fairly substantial, but it seems like the PL cap for the stratagem to go from 1cp to 2cp is what's off.
Changing the cap from 10PL to 8PL would allow a min-size squad of Kataphron Destroyers with Grav and Phosphor, which generate a little under 2MW with the strat. 15 skitarii vanguard might still potentially be a problem as those could generate 5mw from the stratagem, so you could either bump up that unit's Power Level rating in particular, or lower the cap down to 6 and just accept that it won't be good with Kataphrons.
the_scotsman wrote: ...yeah GW certainly never nerfs things that appear frequently in competitive play, Certainly not within the last, I guess 15-20 minutes?
GW does hike the prices on things that see too much tournament play, yes, and occasionally rewords a stratagem. They buff things way more than they nerf them, however, and I can't recall them ever nerfing a statline (except by accident when they didn't do any math before writing the 8e Indexes), so the overall trend is power creep piled upon power creep.
Kastelan Robots went from shooting twice to +1 BS, Repulsors went from shooting twice to +1 to hit, the skitarii doggos went from 3W to 2W, the skitarii bird dudes lost their MW grenade thingies.
I have almost no doubt that if you were to take a competitive imperial soup list from the Castellan meta of 8th, and play a game where that list follows all the rules that would have applied at the time vs a current tournament competitive list from the new admech 'dex, the Castellan list would rock the Admech list's socks right off.
In fact, I'd be really curious to see how that would play out, maybe I'll try running that on TTS or something, see how much power creep there actually has or hasn't been.
@ Scottsman
Seems to me you are too focused on the averages and not enough on the fact that 1cp strats that are limited to 3 max mortals compared to one maxed at 6. Even if they averaged the same number of mortals the max 6 is better because...despite what people like to claim - above average rolls are actually quite common. Though - just a 10 man ranger squad will do more mortals than a 20 man warrior blob on average with 1 cp stratagem AND the admech stratagem can be used on 20 man blobs for 2 cp and do double the damage...which just makes it flat better - with 0 discussion necessary further. It is a better stratagem - it is not necessary for 1 to have restrictions and not the other. This is the definition of OP. They are not even trying to balance the game - they are trying to unbalance it.
So you agree that they added too many special rules all over the place and its resulting in unintended interactions that's screwing with the game balance?
I am not sure if that is always the case, there are stratagems that plain represent gear options. And sometimes it gets really wierd. 1ksons get inferno bolts on their dudes. GK have blessed ammo on their dudes, but only in lore. In game terms they have it on one unit per turn, if they have the CP to pay for it. That is a substential game difference. Same with DE and their archons huskblade/dijn blade. Something that should be an Xpts weapon is turned in to a stratagem giving relics.
AnomanderRake wrote: ...stratagem combos only exist because GW screwed up on the statlines...
Stratagems also help to bring narrative into the game and if well-balanced could help balance out the snowballing effect of losing units. Since you don't lose CP because of your opponent's actions your CP will always provide you however much benefit they provide. A unit cannot provide a benefit if it is shot off the table T1. Stuff like shoot twice for the Exocrine exists because GW wanted to make mission packs, they probably thought they had to get rules in there, so they "fixed" bad units since they had to print rules anyway.
Nurglitch wrote: All GW can do is either increase a unit's deadliness or its survivability, and that's basically all a unit can do.
Mobility and utility.
May you elaborate and explain how these don't just dovetail with the deadliness or survivability elements?
Increasing a unit's mobility could let it get unto an objective and score VP that you would otherwise have been unable to score, it could also help complete a charge and tie up a unit and prevent it from shooting at a second unit of yours. In terms of utility you could have a redeploy Stratagem allowing you to change your strategy and focus on a different part of the board than your initial deployment would have allowed.
I think you risk sounding too reductionistic if you try to reduce these things I've brought up as deadliness or survivability, in the same vein I could say that every game is a question of probability management, now Go and Tic Tac Toe are suddenly the same and we cannot have a meaningful discussion. I'll admit I'm a huge fan of Stratagems, just not as they are laid out right now.
I am working on a new mission set and updating my Stratagem/Chapter Tactics rework for 9th, but without a set of points to go along with them they are kind of useless, without playtesting points are kind of useless and I doubt I will ever get to playtest so it's hard to prioritize it over doing the CSM Crusade update I am homebrewing and other silly stuff. I think the hobby would benefit greatly if FLG produced their own Chapter Approved to overhaul the game. Evil man Reecio has admitted that he thinks the bloat is over the top, even a super simple DA Terminator spam army becomes complicated because of the layers and layers of rules.
Tycho wrote: ...changing mobility isn't likely to solve a lot...
I totally agree and I didn't mean to say that it would, just that Stratagems and unit design cannot be shoved into these two boxes. 95% of the time when 40k has a problem it is damage or durability related.
AnomanderRake wrote: ...stratagem combos only exist because GW screwed up on the statlines...
Stratagems also help to bring narrative into the game and if well-balanced could help balance out the snowballing effect of losing units. Since you don't lose CP because of your opponent's actions your CP will always provide you however much benefit they provide. A unit cannot provide a benefit if it is shot off the table T1. Stuff like shoot twice for the Exocrine exists because GW wanted to make mission packs, they probably thought they had to get rules in there, so they "fixed" bad units since they had to print rules anyway...
Shoot twice exists because GW wasn't paying attention when writing the new rules for things that used to be blast weapons, and accidentally made all d6-shot artillery bad at killing infantry and decent at killing armour. Instead of fixing the blast weapons properly they threw a special rule in and ran away. The damage creep of 9th is largely because GW noticed that they'd made blast artillery better AT than dedicated AT by accident, and couldn't be bothered to address it; the "reduce incoming damage by 1" special rules, similarly, are half-assed attempts to patch the fact that they got the damage/wounds values of the whole game badly wrong and spamming D2/Dd3 is better AT than taking dedicated AT weapons.
Nurglitch wrote: All GW can do is either increase a unit's deadliness or its survivability, and that's basically all a unit can do.
Mobility and utility.
May you elaborate and explain how these don't just dovetail with the deadliness or survivability elements?
Increasing a unit's mobility could let it get unto an objective and score VP that you would otherwise have been unable to score, it could also help complete a charge and tie up a unit and prevent it from shooting at a second unit of yours. In terms of utility you could have a redeploy Stratagem allowing you to change your strategy and focus on a different part of the board than your initial deployment would have allowed.
I think you risk sounding too reductionistic if you try to reduce these things I've brought up as deadliness or survivability, in the same vein I could say that every game is a question of probability management, now Go and Tic Tac Toe are suddenly the same and we cannot have a meaningful discussion. I'll admit I'm a huge fan of Stratagems, just not as they are laid out right now.
I am working on a new mission set and updating my Stratagem/Chapter Tactics rework for 9th, but without a set of points to go along with them they are kind of useless, without playtesting points are kind of useless and I doubt I will ever get to playtest so it's hard to prioritize it over doing the CSM Crusade update I am homebrewing and other silly stuff. I think the hobby would benefit greatly if FLG produced their own Chapter Approved to overhaul the game. Evil man Reecio has admitted that he thinks the bloat is over the top, even a super simple DA Terminator spam army becomes complicated because of the layers and layers of rules.
It seems more realistic to reduce it to the ability to take or to hold objectives then. I'm trying to represent every possible permutation they're going to err on one side or the other, so that all else being equal some armies will have an advantage in the shoving match over objectives.
You're not likely to have every single one of these go off at the same time, but it is something that if you could pull this off, you can one-hit anything in the game barring a warwound titan.
The problem is, just going on the unit's stats it isn't, in itself, broken. It's when you combo everything together that it gets out of hand.
Yes, and it is extremely funny that some people think that 8th and 9th got rid of the problems 7th had.
40k has always been a mess, GW have never been interested in making the game consistent, structured, minimal (as opposed to bloated) and balanced.
Also, the thing is that you cannot blame the players for seeking those crazy combos. They are playing the game correctly, finding optimal strategies and lists, combining the most efficient things. It is what players do in every game - they look for the most efficient ways to play. Forcing an ethic on them that would go something like 'don't be that guy, come on, you're not here to win games' is ridiculous (I have known cases where people actually proposed that). That's why I agree that this is a flaw of the game.
As for what we can do, I am at a loss. Making up our own rules requires a lot of effort and it would make newcomers confused.
40k is really going down hill. It was bad and now it is getting worse (T5 orks anyone?).
Not as funny as people who think 8th or 9th's problems are even a 10th of what 7th's were. If you were here for that and honestly believe THIS is somehow 'getting worse' than 7th, the problem is with you getting whiny-er not the game.
40K isn't a wargame anymore. The entire game is designed around rules interactions rather than battlefield prowess. Of course balance isn't a priority. The game is the meta.
cjmate8 wrote: WH40k is becoming increasingly difficult to balance. Recently, a lot of armies are getting stacking buffs, and I feel like this makes it more difficult to balance the game because the value of a unit ranges widely depending on the buffs available. This has always kind'of been in the game, but it's getting increasingly "more". I say more because I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, it just is.
Here's an example: Repentia
Repentia are not, in themselves, broken; in fact, they're super mediocre with their base statline; however, you can make them broken:
1. Bloody Rose Benefits (+1 attack, -1ap)
2. Bloody Rose stratagem (+1 to wound)
3. The passion (Exploding 6s on unmodified wound rolls)
4. Missionary (+1 attack)
5. Desperate for Redemption (Fight twice)
6. Triumph of St. Katherine (+1 to hit)
7. Palatine/Superior (Re-roll wound rolls of 1)
You're not likely to have every single one of these go off at the same time, but it is something that if you could pull this off, you can one-hit anything in the game barring a warwound titan.
The problem is, just going on the unit's stats it isn't, in itself, broken. It's when you combo everything together that it gets out of hand.
And there's other stuff in the game that does this: Ork Boyz
1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the solution isn't simply to increase the points of the unit, because what's making the unit good isn't the unit itself in many cases, but the thing buffing it. This makes it difficult to gauge the value of a unit on paper because there's so many external modifiers making the unit work. It also becomes an issue that the same buffs might break something else. Any Sister of Battle unit that gets released in the future has the potential to use most of the stuff that buffs Repentia, like the new Celestian Sacrosents. Same thing with Orkz. Any Ork infantry in the future can use waagh banner, ghazghkull and clan traits, so that has to be kept in mind when balancing those units.
I don't think this is bad for the game, but I do think it makes balancing an issue; and I feel like the game is adding a lot more of these things because most armies are getting a combat doctrine-like ability
One thing I want to see across both major GW systems is total abolishment of dice rerolls. They slow down the game, make the game horribly unfun and generally muddle everything. Look at the new Admech. Having your foot sloggers get hit on a 2+ AND reroll 1's might as well just replace the hit with "This weapon always hits its target" and move on. I think getting rid of rerolls entirely is the way to move forward.
ERJAK wrote: ...Not as funny as people who think 8th or 9th's problems are even a 10th of what 7th's were. If you were here for that and honestly believe THIS is somehow 'getting worse' than 7th, the problem is with you getting whiny-er not the game.
I forgot to include that on my list of "useless platitudes the 40k community likes to spout". "But it's better than 7th!" isn't a justification for anything, even in the rare cases where it's true.
AnomanderRake wrote: Shoot twice exists because GW wasn't paying attention when writing the new rules for things that used to be blast weapons...
Shoot twice was created for CSM to give Slaanesh marked units something special, Khorne are the choppy ones so they get fight twice, Tzeentch is the tricky one so they get an extra psychic power, Nurgle is the tough one so they get healing, Slaanesh got shooting, most likely because of Noise Marines.
It seems more realistic to reduce it to the ability to take or to hold objectives then. I'm trying to represent every possible permutation they're going to err on one side or the other, so that all else being equal some armies will have an advantage in the shoving match over objectives.
Wouldn't it be silly to boil down a soccer player to how much they help their team score more goals? It's true, yes, but there is also dribbling, passing, throw-ins, penalty kicks, speed, endurance, there is a difference between an excellent dribbler and an excellent penalty kicker, same as there is a difference between a unit that shoots twice, one that gets transhuman, one that shoots and then moves, a unit that shuts off enemy auras, a unit that advances twice without shooting or fighting, even if they all help you score VP.
Sledgehammer wrote: 40K isn't a wargame anymore. The entire game is designed around rules interactions rather than battlefield prowess. Of course balance isn't a priority. The game is the meta.
It was never a simulation, otherwise, Space Marines would be outnumbered hundreds to one.
AnomanderRake wrote: Shoot twice exists because GW wasn't paying attention when writing the new rules for things that used to be blast weapons...
Shoot twice was created for CSM to give Slaanesh marked units something special, Khorne are the choppy ones so they get fight twice, Tzeentch is the tricky one so they get an extra psychic power, Nurgle is the tough one so they get healing, Slaanesh got shooting, most likely because of Noise Marines...
Sorry. "Shoot twice if you don't move too fast the special rule that got stuck onto loads of tanks that were very bad in the Indexes" exists because GW wasn't paying attention when writing the new rules for things that used to be blast weapons.
vict0988 wrote: It was never a simulation, otherwise, Space Marines would be outnumbered hundreds to one.
Very true. It's more designed as a tool for story telling, though many seem to prefer the competitive side (and I don't mind that side all that much honestly) but to me the game doesn't really get fun through trying to out play the other person but through the moments you can tell stories about after the game is finished.
Still remember a friend of mine years ago who managed to finish off a Warhound Titan with a heavy bolter. Heck, I still remember my first game playing against an Eldar Avatar, hitting it with a melta and asking my my opponent what I needed to roll to wound it and being told "7". A dick move to not tell me that when he knew I was running Sisters and didn't have much to hurt it with, but funny even years later.
ERJAK wrote: ...Not as funny as people who think 8th or 9th's problems are even a 10th of what 7th's were. If you were here for that and honestly believe THIS is somehow 'getting worse' than 7th, the problem is with you getting whiny-er not the game.
I forgot to include that on my list of "useless platitudes the 40k community likes to spout". "But it's better than 7th!" isn't a justification for anything, even in the rare cases where it's true.
Just want to add that 7th was a bloated mess by the end of the edition due to GW's runaway power creep but at least the game had some depth of mechanics and attempted to create some interesting mechanics through it's formations. GW was (and still is) out of it's league in terms of ability to attempt to balance the game but at least they sorta scraped together something that was entertaining despite the horrible balance. 8th and 9th still has excessive power creep going on and poor balance despite having a fraction of the game complexity and is frankly far more boring to play.
6th and 7th balance issue could be mitigated by talking with your opponent to come up with a roughly fair matchup. Can't fix 8th or 9th from being as shallow as a fountain without writing a new edition yourself.
Sorry but I just hate it when 7th gets ragged on as justification for how newer 40k is somehow better when it's still a sub par mess of a game but with even fewer redeeming qualities.
Amen to that.
7th had issues like allies, insane formation bonuses, uncapped modifiers (invisible deathstars) and most importantly it had no regular FAQs, Erratas or point updates.
The game had better rules though, way more interesting than the shallow game of 8th and 9th.
Isn't this just a rehash of the canned strategy debate? Should you have to take character A with unit B using Relic C using strategem D to do massive damage? Or should you just be able to take Character A and unit B in isolation and they have no rules synergy between each other at all? (Also ban stratagems because apparently 4 years in they are still too complicated or something.)
In practice I'm not sure its an issue of "balance", unless the combo is out of whack with other combos employed across the game. The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
I see 7th edition is far enough in the rearview mirror that people are unironically nostalgic about formations now
You know, formations. The thing they made that gave your army a bunch of extra rules (hell, a bunch of extra points if you were lucky) if you ran a specific set of units and oh look GW is selling a bundle that has the formation's units in it now isn't that nice of them to make it so convenient for us to purchase product.
Tyel wrote: The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
Being able to run literally anything is far cry than running more than variations of 1-3 lists which is what happens when things get out of whack, there is a huge middle ground here. Being unable to run units in specific chapters is a terrible problem because in the fluff those chapters use those units, even if they are most proficient in other areas. Like Blood Angels Devastator Squads and Imperial Fists Assault Squads. What you are doing smells a lot like wiping GW's backside because they are too lazy to do it themselves. Yes, every SM Chapter should be able to run Devastator Squads and Assault Squads, the Codex Astartes demands they exist, but I am supposed to believe they never partake in an important battle?
Vankraken wrote: 6th and 7th balance issue could be mitigated by talking with your opponent to come up with a roughly fair matchup.
Nonsense. In 6th and 7th the only way for a low tier codex to defeat a high tier codex was by giving massive point advantages.
Sorry but I just hate it when 7th gets ragged on as justification for how newer 40k is somehow better when it's still a sub par mess of a game but with even fewer redeeming qualities.
7th might be your favorite edition, but was objectively a horrible game. The lack of proper FAQs, having to play money for single datasheets, rules being spread to dozens of sources, free buffs for favored armies with zero support for others, completely untested books with dysfunctional rules, invincible/invisible deathstars, a horribly bloated psychic system that completely fell apart to psychic armies, a smattering of USR that all did similar things and the whole IC/confer mess.
Oh, and before you start to tell me how your group fixed all that - that's no different from "writing an new edition yourself".
I'll take the 30k people's word for saying that the 7th edition core rules were a solid foundation that you apparently can build a good game on (30k would be dead otherwise). But 7th edition definitely was nothing short of a giant mountain of gak on that solid foundation.
Late 8th and 9th might have problems, but outside the stupid release cycle issues, most of those do not affect your regular garage hammer games - unlike 7th whose issue ruined the game for everyone.
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Aenar wrote: Amen to that.
7th had issues like allies, insane formation bonuses, uncapped modifiers (invisible deathstars) and most importantly it had no regular FAQs, Erratas or point updates.
The game had better rules though, way more interesting than the shallow game of 8th and 9th.
7th edition isn't just the BRB though. It's the BRB plus all codices plus all supplement plus all other rule sources GW pulled out of their arse at that time.
The BRB didn't make me quit 40k. The codices, supplements and formations did.
And there was nothing interesting in getting tabled T1 or the enemy army simply losing 0 models because invisible.
I liked 7th edition to be honest, outside competitive gaming, but other than power creep and rules/codex bloat I'm glad that several core mechanics like AV for vehicles, damage table on vehicles, inability to fall back in combat, blasts/templates, invisibility, low S weapons with high rate of fire that glanced vehicles on 6 regardless of their AV values, initiative, re-rollable invulns, AP that was all or nothing, deathstars, alliances with no drawback etc... are now gone and don't exist anymore.
Aenar wrote: Amen to that.
7th had issues like allies, insane formation bonuses, uncapped modifiers (invisible deathstars) and most importantly it had no regular FAQs, Erratas or point updates.
The game had better rules though, way more interesting than the shallow game of 8th and 9th.
I don't get this sentiment. 7th had more rules. Not better. There were so many rules, tomes of them. And half of them almost never even came up.
I remember when three different units, from three different armies, had three different rules, all of which shared the name "Crack Shot." Oh boy was that fun! I remember hours upon hours of arguments about template position, arguments over the damage table, what counted as "in cover." I'll take the simplicity of AoS and 8th edition 40K any day over the nightmare mess that was 6th and 7th editions.
cjmate8 wrote: WH40k is becoming increasingly difficult to balance. Recently, a lot of armies are getting stacking buffs, and I feel like this makes it more difficult to balance the game because the value of a unit ranges widely depending on the buffs available. This has always kind'of been in the game, but it's getting increasingly "more". I say more because I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, it just is.
Here's an example: Repentia
Repentia are not, in themselves, broken; in fact, they're super mediocre with their base statline; however, you can make them broken:
1. Bloody Rose Benefits (+1 attack, -1ap)
2. Bloody Rose stratagem (+1 to wound)
3. The passion (Exploding 6s on unmodified wound rolls)
4. Missionary (+1 attack)
5. Desperate for Redemption (Fight twice)
6. Triumph of St. Katherine (+1 to hit)
7. Palatine/Superior (Re-roll wound rolls of 1)
You're not likely to have every single one of these go off at the same time, but it is something that if you could pull this off, you can one-hit anything in the game barring a warwound titan.
The problem is, just going on the unit's stats it isn't, in itself, broken. It's when you combo everything together that it gets out of hand.
And there's other stuff in the game that does this: Ork Boyz
1. Ghazghkull (+1 attack)
2. Choppa (+1 attack)
3 20+ unit (+1 attack)
4. Goffs (Re-rolling hit rolls of 1 + 6s generate extra attacks)
5. Waagh Banner/Lukky Stikk (+1 to hit)
6. Get Stukk in Ladz (Fight twice)
7. Skarboyz (+1 strength)
8. Overwhelming Green Tide (Bring the unit make at full size)
This isn't particularly broken because choppas don't have ap, but if they had ap, a unit of 30 doing this would one-hit a knight without the fight twice stratagem. Without any of these buffs, though, the unit is mediocre.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the solution isn't simply to increase the points of the unit, because what's making the unit good isn't the unit itself in many cases, but the thing buffing it. This makes it difficult to gauge the value of a unit on paper because there's so many external modifiers making the unit work. It also becomes an issue that the same buffs might break something else. Any Sister of Battle unit that gets released in the future has the potential to use most of the stuff that buffs Repentia, like the new Celestian Sacrosents. Same thing with Orkz. Any Ork infantry in the future can use waagh banner, ghazghkull and clan traits, so that has to be kept in mind when balancing those units.
I don't think this is bad for the game, but I do think it makes balancing an issue; and I feel like the game is adding a lot more of these things because most armies are getting a combat doctrine-like ability
I don't know it makes it that much harder. At least not for Sisters.
I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
That's just wargear
Sort of, but a little more flexible. Rather than purchasing the wargear for a specific unit, you purchase the strat for the army and it can be used on any unit capable of using it, and only once per battle, whereas wargear is purchased for a specific unit to use and only that unit.
Transhuman for example, it could be bough pre-game for x points and used at any point by any unit eligible to use it.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
That's just wargear
Sort of, but a little more flexible. Rather than purchasing the wargear for a specific unit, you purchase the strat for the army and it can be used on any unit capable of using it, and only once per battle, whereas wargear is purchased for a specific unit to use and only that unit.
Transhuman for example, it could be bough pre-game for x points and used at any point by any unit eligible to use it.
There's already enough dud options in the books, no need to add more.
Synergy between units is great, but imo 9th goes way too far.
You need the right unit, with the character buff, with the right warlord trait, with the right relic, and you need to buy the right pre-game strategem, and you need to pop the right strategem at the right time.
You used to just be able to fire up Battlescribe, at a few units. You selected characters that complemented your units and you selected units that mutually supported one another, but you could take list building at face value.
That also meant you could take your opponent's army at face value.
I think that's very important. I might only play that particular army once until it gets a major update, it's just not possible for me to get a good understanding of what my opponent is capable of in 9th, like not even remotely possible.
I need to bring a printed reference sheet to every game just so I can get an idea of my own faction, since I don't play enough to memorise the two dozen strategems my army could feasibly use, and thats after cutting out the ones I won't.
kirotheavenger wrote: Synergy between units is great, but imo 9th goes way too far.
You need the right unit, with the character buff, with the right warlord trait, with the right relic, and you need to buy the right pre-game strategem, and you need to pop the right strategem at the right time.
You used to just be able to fire up Battlescribe, at a few units. You selected characters that complemented your units and you selected units that mutually supported one another, but you could take list building at face value.
That also meant you could take your opponent's army at face value.
I think that's very important. I might only play that particular army once until it gets a major update, it's just not possible for me to get a good understanding of what my opponent is capable of in 9th, like not even remotely possible.
I need to bring a printed reference sheet to every game just so I can get an idea of my own faction, since I don't play enough to memorise the two dozen strategems my army could feasibly use, and thats after cutting out the ones I won't.
you could ask the other player? Their Codex is open information. Take the time to read it pregame if it helps make the game better
Yeah, that maybe works if you play at home and have infinite time to play the game. When you play at the store, and the tables have reservations or on top of that you have to pay for the table use by the hour, you do not have the 60-120min time to read through the entire codex and noticing and memorising all rules interaction. Specially those that are less obvious. No to even mention what happens if your opponent plays a chaos or eldar soup army.
Karol wrote: Yeah, that maybe works if you play at home and have infinite time to play the game. When you play at the store, and the tables have reservations or on top of that you have to pay for the table use by the hour, you do not have the 60-120min time to read through the entire codex and noticing and memorising all rules interaction. Specially those that are less obvious. No to even mention what happens if your opponent plays a chaos or eldar soup army.
you don't need to remember all the rules. Just the big ones. Skim the book to find the concealed gems. Or just let them tell you, save time
I can spent easily an hour at home before a game revising my own army.
If I have to ask my opponent to explain everything to me it'll take ages.
Not only that, but it'll go totally over my head, so even if my opponent explains that character A gives buff N to unit X just gets lost amongst the noise of mediocre abilities until I get slapped by it and lose a crucial unit I 'knew' was safe, or similar.
You didn't need to bother with that in 5th edition (I avoid saying 6/7th because they had similar shenigans) because everything was much simpler. An anti-infantry unit was good against infantry, it couldn't pop a strat and suddenly compete with most anti-tank units for melting heavy armour.
I don't think that makes the game any the lesser. In fact, I think that's so much better because it's down to who can use their units better, not who can stack the best buffs and/or strats.
Karol wrote: Yeah, that maybe works if you play at home and have infinite time to play the game. When you play at the store, and the tables have reservations or on top of that you have to pay for the table use by the hour, you do not have the 60-120min time to read through the entire codex and noticing and memorising all rules interaction. Specially those that are less obvious. No to even mention what happens if your opponent plays a chaos or eldar soup army.
you don't need to remember all the rules. Just the big ones. Skim the book to find the concealed gems. Or just let them tell you, save time
Yeah, go try to "skim" the three books needed to play GK and remember the interactions. And why should the opponent tell you the army rules before the game? They are not required to do it, they only have to anwser specific asked questions. They can even tell you that a unit moved 6" , if you just ask for the movment stat, not mentioning to you that they play Lucius and the character behind the unit you just asked about can teleport them anywhere on to the table not closer then 9" away from your dudes. And if your opponent says he didn't know you could do that, it is first of all their turn, which means it is too late for take backs, plus they can always say that they thought the rule was so abviouse the question was there as a joke, to play the clock or ment to make them. Try going through the FAQ, errata spread over multiple section, a WD with Inari rules and a codex for CWE in a shorter time then an hour. Specially when you play against the army the first time. You can't even list check them, because lists checks are done after the game.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
That's just wargear
Sort of, but a little more flexible. Rather than purchasing the wargear for a specific unit, you purchase the strat for the army and it can be used on any unit capable of using it, and only once per battle, whereas wargear is purchased for a specific unit to use and only that unit.
Transhuman for example, it could be bough pre-game for x points and used at any point by any unit eligible to use it.
That's still just wargear.
The whole point of stratagems is that they are decisions made during the game, based on the game state, rather before the game based on math and internet wisdom. You are trying to take that away.
Karol wrote: Yeah, that maybe works if you play at home and have infinite time to play the game. When you play at the store, and the tables have reservations or on top of that you have to pay for the table use by the hour, you do not have the 60-120min time to read through the entire codex and noticing and memorising all rules interaction. Specially those that are less obvious. No to even mention what happens if your opponent plays a chaos or eldar soup army.
you don't need to remember all the rules. Just the big ones. Skim the book to find the concealed gems. Or just let them tell you, save time
Yeah, go try to "skim" the three books needed to play GK and remember the interactions. And why should the opponent tell you the army rules before the game? They are not required to do it, they only have to anwser specific asked questions. They can even tell you that a unit moved 6" , if you just ask for the movment stat, not mentioning to you that they play Lucius and the character behind the unit you just asked about can teleport them anywhere on to the table not closer then 9" away from your dudes. And if your opponent says he didn't know you could do that, it is first of all their turn, which means it is too late for take backs, plus they can always say that they thought the rule was so abviouse the question was there as a joke, to play the clock or ment to make them. Try going through the FAQ, errata spread over multiple section, a WD with Inari rules and a codex for CWE in a shorter time then an hour. Specially when you play against the army the first time. You can't even list check them, because lists checks are done after the game.
check strats, relevent psy powers, warlord trait and relic plus any unit you have no idea about and the army rules.
Getting it done in a timely and effective way is a skill and a harder one to master, but it's a better use of time than learning all the books.
They don't have to give you complex details, but asking the right questions (e.g. how quickly can this unit cross the table?) and being painful enough to spend 10 minutes before a game learning their rules should hopefully be enough to get to a point that you can both enjoy the game. Rather than losing/winning to dodgy wombo combo that someone tricked into pulling off.
kirotheavenger wrote: You need the right unit, with the character buff, with the right warlord trait, with the right relic, and you need to buy the right pre-game strategem, and you need to pop the right strategem at the right time.
It's like GW took a look at the bloated, top-heavy mess that 3rd Ed was right before it's end and said "Let's start 9th that way!".
ERJAK wrote: ...Not as funny as people who think 8th or 9th's problems are even a 10th of what 7th's were. If you were here for that and honestly believe THIS is somehow 'getting worse' than 7th, the problem is with you getting whiny-er not the game.
I forgot to include that on my list of "useless platitudes the 40k community likes to spout". "But it's better than 7th!" isn't a justification for anything, even in the rare cases where it's true.
To be fair, the Fists only suck in comparison to the Night Lords and the Blood Angels.
Lammia 798722 11139498 wrote:]check strats, relevent psy powers, warlord trait and relic plus any unit you have no idea about and the army rules.
Getting it done in a timely and effective way is a skill and a harder one to master, but it's a better use of time than learning all the books.
They don't have to give you complex details, but asking the right questions (e.g. how quickly can this unit cross the table?) and being painful enough to spend 10 minutes before a game learning their rules should hopefully be enough to get to a point that you can both enjoy the game. Rather than losing/winning to dodgy wombo combo that someone tricked into pulling off.
You are assuming the other person wants to co operate and give up his armies strenghts. They can very well just say, if you don't want to play, I can play someone that wants to play.
And you know very well, that it is not 10min before the game. Going over the GK codex, GKFAQ, the PA book for GK takes a lot longer and that is before any changes in CA and similar stuff. There is no core stuff you can just skim over, you have to go over tides, character changes including a whole new psychic power tree only characters can use. And this is no combos just strickt one army rules spread over multiple books. It takes time to check even if you have expiriance with the game. If you have little or non, then to do it in 10min, you are asking for eidetic memory as a pre requisit to start playing w40k.
Lammia 798722 11139498 wrote:]check strats, relevent psy powers, warlord trait and relic plus any unit you have no idea about and the army rules.
Getting it done in a timely and effective way is a skill and a harder one to master, but it's a better use of time than learning all the books.
They don't have to give you complex details, but asking the right questions (e.g. how quickly can this unit cross the table?) and being painful enough to spend 10 minutes before a game learning their rules should hopefully be enough to get to a point that you can both enjoy the game. Rather than losing/winning to dodgy wombo combo that someone tricked into pulling off.
You are assuming the other person wants to co operate and give up his armies strenghts. They can very well just say, if you don't want to play, I can play someone that wants to play.
And you know very well, that it is not 10min before the game. Going over the GK codex, GKFAQ, the PA book for GK takes a lot longer and that is before any changes in CA and similar stuff. There is no core stuff you can just skim over, you have to go over tides, character changes including a whole new psychic power tree only characters can use. And this is no combos just strickt one army rules spread over multiple books. It takes time to check even if you have expiriance with the game. If you have little or non, then to do it in 10min, you are asking for eidetic memory as a pre requisit to start playing w40k.
Sure they can, if they are that bent on WaaC then there's not much you can do to make them a better player and you have to choose wether or not it's worth playing that game.
Being aware of Tides, strats for units taken and what the powers that have been taken do is all I need to play a good game vs GK. It's a big learning curve to figure out in an reasonable time, I wouldn't expect someone with little experience with the game to know.(which is why I tey to tell them the important stuff beforehand) But the good news is players can learn and grow
Tyel wrote: Isn't this just a rehash of the canned strategy debate? Should you have to take character A with unit B using Relic C using strategem D to do massive damage? Or should you just be able to take Character A and unit B in isolation and they have no rules synergy between each other at all? (Also ban stratagems because apparently 4 years in they are still too complicated or something.)
In practice I'm not sure its an issue of "balance", unless the combo is out of whack with other combos employed across the game. The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
Yes, ban all of those things. That kind of game design is just strategy being dictated and outlined to the player through rules interactions. The strategy becomes those interactions, and thus the games conclusion become increasingly determined in the list building and theory crafting stage. Balance is even worse now than it was before, because the game itself is designed in order to create a meta, and cater to the kinds of players interested in that.
They want people to continue to interact with their rules even when they're not playing them. Implementing a meta is a great way to do that, as it gives players a problem to "solve". However once that problem is solved, there needs to be a shakeup or the "meta becomes stale". They intentionally create metas and then change them, not only to create more sales, but also to prevent "the problem" from being solved for too long. Just look at the predominant conversations on this forum. It's all about theory crafting and meta discussion.
I had way more fun with 7th, bar cheesy lists, psycher shenanigans, and formations it was at it's core a better ruleset. I attribute that to a central philosophy that was not all about unique special rules for everything in the game. Just look at epic armageddon and tell me a gw40k game can't have character and differentiation between the factions and still be a game that focuses on battlefield prowess.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
I don't agree on stratagems being costed that way, but I would argue that there should be some kind of points cost associated with sub-faction rules. Like for a very loose example: Ultramarines adding a 50 point charge to the army, while Iron Hands might cost 60.
Karol wrote: Yeah, that maybe works if you play at home and have infinite time to play the game. When you play at the store, and the tables have reservations or on top of that you have to pay for the table use by the hour, you do not have the 60-120min time to read through the entire codex and noticing and memorising all rules interaction. Specially those that are less obvious. No to even mention what happens if your opponent plays a chaos or eldar soup army.
you don't need to remember all the rules. Just the big ones. Skim the book to find the concealed gems. Or just let them tell you, save time
Yeah, go try to "skim" the three books needed to play GK and remember the interactions. And why should the opponent tell you the army rules before the game? They are not required to do it, they only have to anwser specific asked questions. They can even tell you that a unit moved 6" , if you just ask for the movment stat, not mentioning to you that they play Lucius and the character behind the unit you just asked about can teleport them anywhere on to the table not closer then 9" away from your dudes. And if your opponent says he didn't know you could do that, it is first of all their turn, which means it is too late for take backs, plus they can always say that they thought the rule was so abviouse the question was there as a joke, to play the clock or ment to make them. Try going through the FAQ, errata spread over multiple section, a WD with Inari rules and a codex for CWE in a shorter time then an hour. Specially when you play against the army the first time. You can't even list check them, because lists checks are done after the game.
Because if I'm going to spend 3+ hours playing a game, being open about the rules we're using and potential "gotchas" will make for a more interesting and fun game than just slapping people with surprises they weren't expecting? Plus close games are more fun for both players than curb stomping someone with a rules combo they didn't expect.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
I don't agree on stratagems being costed that way, but I would argue that there should be some kind of points cost associated with faction rules. Like for a very loose example: Ultramarines adding a 50 point charge to the army, while Iron Hands might cost 60.
Not a bad idea in theory, but I don't think universally applying that point cost is a good idea at all. Not all units are going to be as affected to the same degree by the sub factions rules, some might not even be affected at all. I like the idea, but gw can't get points costs right as is, imagine trying to add another thing to put points onto.
Anyway, you'd just be shifting the focus from best sub faction, to most points efficient sub faction.
mrFickle wrote: Does anyone believe 40K can be balanced wi the out a total overhaul.
Balance should be simply achieve by consistent application of points to units but that for some reason isn’t achievable
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers needed a rules adjustment to work, as do many units gathering dust on people's shelves. If it was statlines alone, sure you could just slap points changes onto things, but the more rules interactions a model can have the harder it is to dial in balance. Take the Repentia example, if they're only that good in Bloody Rose slapping a points hike on them doesn't really make sense when they're so much worse in other armies. The unit doesn't need to be charged for the strength of the sub-faction rules, but rather the army as a whole if we talk points balancing.
Tyel wrote: Isn't this just a rehash of the canned strategy debate? Should you have to take character A with unit B using Relic C using strategem D to do massive damage? Or should you just be able to take Character A and unit B in isolation and they have no rules synergy between each other at all? (Also ban stratagems because apparently 4 years in they are still too complicated or something.)
In practice I'm not sure its an issue of "balance", unless the combo is out of whack with other combos employed across the game. The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
Yes, ban all of those things. That kind of game design is just strategy being dictated and outlined to the player through rules interactions. The strategy becomes those interactions, and thus the games conclusion become increasingly determined in the list building and theory crafting stage. Balance is even worse now than it was before, because the game itself is designed in order to create a meta, and cater to the kinds of players interested in that.
They want people to continue to interact with their rules even when they're not playing them. Implementing a meta is a great way to do that, as it gives players a problem to "solve". However once that problem is solved, there needs to be a shakeup or the "meta becomes stale". They intentionally create metas and then change them, not only to create more sales, but also to prevent "the problem" from being solved for too long. Just look at the predominant conversations on this forum. It's all about theory crafting and meta discussion.
I had way more fun with 7th, bar cheesy lists, psycher shenanigans, and formations it was at it's core a better ruleset. I attribute that to a central philosophy that was not all about unique special rules for everything in the game. Just look at epic armageddon and tell me a gw40k game can't have character and differentiation between the factions and still be a game that focuses on battlefield prowess.
I hate to break it to you, but games always have a meta. They don't have to design it to have one, one will naturally arise as players seek to optimize their playstyles and counter other player's playstyles.
40k is not a simulation game, which seems like what you want, and honestly I'd argue that it's better that way. When a game gets too in the weeds trying to simulate things on the table top you spend more time looking up charts than you do actually playing. I'd argue 40k now is more of a strategy wargame. You pick secondaries and strategy to build a strategy around, while not focusing on the more simulation elements (such as which way a vehicle is facing, or if a template clips that fifth model or not). Simulations work better on computers because a lot of the work load is taken out of the player's hands allowing them to focus on other things.
And 7th was very much about special rules and rules combos. We just called them "deathstars" back then. You need to take the rose tinted glasses off if you're going to be critical about the faults of the game now compared to those in the past.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
I don't agree on stratagems being costed that way, but I would argue that there should be some kind of points cost associated with faction rules. Like for a very loose example: Ultramarines adding a 50 point charge to the army, while Iron Hands might cost 60.
Not a bad idea in theory, but I don't think universally applying that point cost is a good idea at all. Not all units are going to be as affected to the same degree by the sub factions rules, some might not even be affected at all. I like the idea, but gw can't get points costs right as is, imagine trying to add another thing to put points onto.
Anyway, you'd just be shifting the focus from best sub faction, to most points efficient sub faction.
There is no perfect answer. And it's not like we can expect GW to print points sheets for every subfaction seperately, so a surcharge to the army as a whole would be the most realistic way to try and balance things if we look to points to reign in outliers over rewriting out of bounds rules.
mrFickle wrote: Does anyone believe 40K can be balanced wi the out a total overhaul.
Balance should be simply achieve by consistent application of points to units but that for some reason isn’t achievable
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers needed a rules adjustment to work, as do many units gathering dust on people's shelves. If it was statlines alone, sure you could just slap points changes onto things, but the more rules interactions a model can have the harder it is to dial in balance. Take the Repentia example, if they're only that good in Bloody Rose slapping a points hike on them doesn't really make sense when they're so much worse in other armies. The unit doesn't need to be charged for the strength of the sub-faction rules, but rather the army as a whole if we talk points balancing.
Tyel wrote: Isn't this just a rehash of the canned strategy debate? Should you have to take character A with unit B using Relic C using strategem D to do massive damage? Or should you just be able to take Character A and unit B in isolation and they have no rules synergy between each other at all? (Also ban stratagems because apparently 4 years in they are still too complicated or something.)
In practice I'm not sure its an issue of "balance", unless the combo is out of whack with other combos employed across the game. The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
Yes, ban all of those things. That kind of game design is just strategy being dictated and outlined to the player through rules interactions. The strategy becomes those interactions, and thus the games conclusion become increasingly determined in the list building and theory crafting stage. Balance is even worse now than it was before, because the game itself is designed in order to create a meta, and cater to the kinds of players interested in that.
They want people to continue to interact with their rules even when they're not playing them. Implementing a meta is a great way to do that, as it gives players a problem to "solve". However once that problem is solved, there needs to be a shakeup or the "meta becomes stale". They intentionally create metas and then change them, not only to create more sales, but also to prevent "the problem" from being solved for too long. Just look at the predominant conversations on this forum. It's all about theory crafting and meta discussion.
I had way more fun with 7th, bar cheesy lists, psycher shenanigans, and formations it was at it's core a better ruleset. I attribute that to a central philosophy that was not all about unique special rules for everything in the game. Just look at epic armageddon and tell me a gw40k game can't have character and differentiation between the factions and still be a game that focuses on battlefield prowess.
I hate to break it to you, but games always have a meta. They don't have to design it to have one, one will naturally arise as players seek to optimize their playstyles and counter other player's playstyles.
40k is not a simulation game, which seems like what you want, and honestly I'd argue that it's better that way. When a game gets too in the weeds trying to simulate things on the table top you spend more time looking up charts than you do actually playing. I'd argue 40k now is more of a strategy wargame. You pick secondaries and strategy to build a strategy around, while not focusing on the more simulation elements (such as which way a vehicle is facing, or if a template clips that fifth model or not). Simulations work better on computers because a lot of the work load is taken out of the player's hands allowing them to focus on other things.
And 7th was very much about special rules and rules combos. We just called them "deathstars" back then. You need to take the rose tinted glasses off if you're going to be critical about the faults of the game now compared to those in the past.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
I don't agree on stratagems being costed that way, but I would argue that there should be some kind of points cost associated with faction rules. Like for a very loose example: Ultramarines adding a 50 point charge to the army, while Iron Hands might cost 60.
Not a bad idea in theory, but I don't think universally applying that point cost is a good idea at all. Not all units are going to be as affected to the same degree by the sub factions rules, some might not even be affected at all. I like the idea, but gw can't get points costs right as is, imagine trying to add another thing to put points onto.
Anyway, you'd just be shifting the focus from best sub faction, to most points efficient sub faction.
There is no perfect answer. And it's not like we can expect GW to print points sheets for every subfaction seperately, so a surcharge to the army as a whole would be the most realistic way to try and balance things if we look to points to reign in outliers over rewriting out of bounds rules.
In no way shape or form am I asking for advanced squad leader. I'm asking for a ruleset that attempts to focus on the game, not on what you bring to it. 40k has swung way too hard toward buffs, on buffs on buffs, and this unit interacting with this specific unit in your army to make them 40% more powerful. 7th was not like that at all except for UNINTENTIONAL rules interactions.
You're absolutely right about 7th edition having death stars, but the game wasn't intentionally designed around them. Formations and death stars were also easier to restrict as they weren't the kind of interactions that the game was fundamentally based around. 40k is currently all about the kind of interactions that lead to the very worst parts of 7th, except instead of trying to fix them, they gave up and just dialed it up to 11.
ClockworkZion wrote: ...if I'm going to spend 3+ hours playing a game, being open about the rules we're using and potential "gotchas" will make for a more interesting and fun game than just slapping people with surprises they weren't expecting? Plus close games are more fun for both players than curb stomping someone with a rules combo they didn't expect.
Karol doesn't play for fun, he plays for the sunk cost fallacy.
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers...
Just increase the cost of Dark Technomancer weapons, in the same way Characters used to pay more for storm shields. This risks that flamers that are supposed to be good on Salamanders ends up being bad because of the extra cost.
ClockworkZion wrote: ...if I'm going to spend 3+ hours playing a game, being open about the rules we're using and potential "gotchas" will make for a more interesting and fun game than just slapping people with surprises they weren't expecting? Plus close games are more fun for both players than curb stomping someone with a rules combo they didn't expect.
Karol doesn't play for fun, he plays for the sunk cost fallacy.
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers...
Just increase the cost of Dark Technomancer weapons, in the same way Characters used to pay more for storm shields. This risks that flamers that are supposed to be good on Salamanders ends up being bad because of the extra cost.
Not impossible but then we'd need to split off stuff like melee units under melee chapter tactics for the same reason. Like it makes sense, but we have to give up some level of complexity when we have to do all the book keeping ourselves.
mrFickle wrote: Does anyone believe 40K can be balanced wi the out a total overhaul.
Balance should be simply achieve by consistent application of points to units but that for some reason isn’t achievable
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers needed a rules adjustment to work, as do many units gathering dust on people's shelves. If it was statlines alone, sure you could just slap points changes onto things, but the more rules interactions a model can have the harder it is to dial in balance. Take the Repentia example, if they're only that good in Bloody Rose slapping a points hike on them doesn't really make sense when they're so much worse in other armies. The unit doesn't need to be charged for the strength of the sub-faction rules, but rather the army as a whole if we talk points balancing.
Tyel wrote: Isn't this just a rehash of the canned strategy debate? Should you have to take character A with unit B using Relic C using strategem D to do massive damage? Or should you just be able to take Character A and unit B in isolation and they have no rules synergy between each other at all? (Also ban stratagems because apparently 4 years in they are still too complicated or something.)
In practice I'm not sure its an issue of "balance", unless the combo is out of whack with other combos employed across the game. The fact running unsupported Repentia in the wrong chapter is "bad" isn't necesarilly a balance problem. Reductio ad absurdium perhaps - but I think the logic for it being bad ultimately leads to "I should be able to bring 2k points of anything and have a 50% chance to win versus 2k points of anything" - and that can't happen unless there are no real choices.
Yes, ban all of those things. That kind of game design is just strategy being dictated and outlined to the player through rules interactions. The strategy becomes those interactions, and thus the games conclusion become increasingly determined in the list building and theory crafting stage. Balance is even worse now than it was before, because the game itself is designed in order to create a meta, and cater to the kinds of players interested in that.
They want people to continue to interact with their rules even when they're not playing them. Implementing a meta is a great way to do that, as it gives players a problem to "solve". However once that problem is solved, there needs to be a shakeup or the "meta becomes stale". They intentionally create metas and then change them, not only to create more sales, but also to prevent "the problem" from being solved for too long. Just look at the predominant conversations on this forum. It's all about theory crafting and meta discussion.
I had way more fun with 7th, bar cheesy lists, psycher shenanigans, and formations it was at it's core a better ruleset. I attribute that to a central philosophy that was not all about unique special rules for everything in the game. Just look at epic armageddon and tell me a gw40k game can't have character and differentiation between the factions and still be a game that focuses on battlefield prowess.
I hate to break it to you, but games always have a meta. They don't have to design it to have one, one will naturally arise as players seek to optimize their playstyles and counter other player's playstyles.
40k is not a simulation game, which seems like what you want, and honestly I'd argue that it's better that way. When a game gets too in the weeds trying to simulate things on the table top you spend more time looking up charts than you do actually playing. I'd argue 40k now is more of a strategy wargame. You pick secondaries and strategy to build a strategy around, while not focusing on the more simulation elements (such as which way a vehicle is facing, or if a template clips that fifth model or not). Simulations work better on computers because a lot of the work load is taken out of the player's hands allowing them to focus on other things.
And 7th was very much about special rules and rules combos. We just called them "deathstars" back then. You need to take the rose tinted glasses off if you're going to be critical about the faults of the game now compared to those in the past.
endlesswaltz123 wrote: I personally advocate changing stratagems to having a point cost, and you have to purchase them in advance pre-game. You can still only use one of each stratagem per turn/phase and to use it multiple times, you have to purchase it multiple times, with a max cap o 10% of game point total being on strats (100pts at 1000pt games etc).. It reduces the complexity of balancing command points, and how they can be refunded etc during a game/pre-game and with point cost, just make it all the same cost system. You still want to use all your cool toys and not reduce model count in a game? Fine, reduce all models points cost across all factions to accommodate this change, you then can have the same size armies at 2000pts with 200pts of strats to use.
It may not be popular but it's a hell of a lot easier to balance. I'd also throw away all re-roll based strats as well and turn them into a buff to hit/wound to speed up the game.
I don't agree on stratagems being costed that way, but I would argue that there should be some kind of points cost associated with faction rules. Like for a very loose example: Ultramarines adding a 50 point charge to the army, while Iron Hands might cost 60.
Not a bad idea in theory, but I don't think universally applying that point cost is a good idea at all. Not all units are going to be as affected to the same degree by the sub factions rules, some might not even be affected at all. I like the idea, but gw can't get points costs right as is, imagine trying to add another thing to put points onto.
Anyway, you'd just be shifting the focus from best sub faction, to most points efficient sub faction.
There is no perfect answer. And it's not like we can expect GW to print points sheets for every subfaction seperately, so a surcharge to the army as a whole would be the most realistic way to try and balance things if we look to points to reign in outliers over rewriting out of bounds rules.
In no way shape or form am I asking for advanced squad leader. I'm asking for a ruleset that attempts to focus on the game, not on what you bring to it. 40k has swung way too hard toward buffs, on buffs on buffs, and this unit interacting with this specific unit in your army to make them 40% more powerful. 7th was not like that at all except for UNINTENTIONAL rules interactions.
You're absolutely right about 7th edition having death stars, but the game wasn't intentionally designed around them. Formations and death stars were also easier to restrict as they weren't the kind of interactions that the game was fundamentally based around. 40k is currently all about the kind of interactions that lead to the very worst parts of 7th, except instead of trying to fix them, they gave up and just dialed it up to 11.
If you stripped away everything that currently bloats 9th (subfaction traits, purity bonuses, crazy strat combos, heck throw relics and traits in there if you wanna) and stripped away everything that bloated 7th (formations, decurions, and lets say relics and traits since we included those in 9th/8th too)
you'd end up with 7th ed being a system that mechanically...
1) relies almost entirely on "all or nothing" arbitrary breakpoints that essentially end discussion. The AP stat is either completely useless, or completely denies armor saves. you either get cover, or your opponent has the very common ignores cover USR that completely denies it. You either can take hits up until your Wounds stat, or your Wounds stat gets completely invalidated by instant death or getting doubled out. You pen a vehicle, you've got a 1 in 6 chance (or better) of instantly blowing it off the map.
2) has its best mission set in the completely random Maelstrom of War card deck. Hope you don't draw "secure the objective on your opponent's side of the map" while he draws "secure the objective you're already on"!
3) features the ever-popular 300pt breakpoint of "you are a superheavy now, you get 56,230,235 special rules that make you utterly invincible and capable of killing god" where 1 300pt wraithknight can easily take on 3-4 270pt gorkanauts. and don't forget your old pal everyone's favorite Strength D!
4) has a totally random psychic power system that features powers that vary in effectiveness from "functional invulnerability to almost anything" (Invisibility) to "basically does nothing at all" (several different powers)
5) incredibly samey statlines for a whole swathe of units in the game, leading to a system that is incredibly easy to 'solve' via the optimal statline of "many shots, strength 6, AP-"
9th at its core in my opinion, obviously others are allowed to have their own opinions and this is just mine, but in my opinion is fundamentally a better, healthier game than 7th. Both have their pointless layers of gakky bloat that I wish I could just blast away with a torch (and frequently do, when my opponents dont mind just ignoring some of the layers of rules) but when you do that to 7th, you're just left with kind of a gakky, arbitrary, bad game system at its core.
Any system I prefer in 7th (morale, for example) Gw basically subverted and made pointless in such a way that you can't easily strip back. For the morale system, you've got the fact that baaaaaaaaasically every faction in the entire game just ignored it. So even if I dislike the core concept of 9ths morale system, at least it's...like, something? it's there? it may matter at some point and isn't just something you INCREDIBLY easily deal with in the strategy phase of the game so that it never comes up tactically?
ClockworkZion wrote: ...if I'm going to spend 3+ hours playing a game, being open about the rules we're using and potential "gotchas" will make for a more interesting and fun game than just slapping people with surprises they weren't expecting? Plus close games are more fun for both players than curb stomping someone with a rules combo they didn't expect.
Karol doesn't play for fun, he plays for the sunk cost fallacy.
Not all balance can be achieved through points adjustments. For example Dark Technomancers...
Just increase the cost of Dark Technomancer weapons, in the same way Characters used to pay more for storm shields. This risks that flamers that are supposed to be good on Salamanders ends up being bad because of the extra cost.
Not impossible but then we'd need to split off stuff like melee units under melee chapter tactics for the same reason. Like it makes sense, but we have to give up some level of complexity when we have to do all the book keeping ourselves.
Yep, feth this solution.
The Drukhari subfaction traits are vastly better designed than most codexes' traits because of this subdivision.
Almost every wych trait is based around either mobility, or melee damage. Two factors. Covens, you've got durability, or melee damage. Kabals, you've got some shooting damage, some mobility, and some slight utility stuff like Range and better PFP.
That means a liquifier is a liquifier is a liquifier. No need to factor in this trait or that trait or this thing or that thing, it can just....be balanced and worthwhile at its point value.
Every unit that can receive a wych cult trait and cares about it meaningfully, gets some benefit from mobility, and some benefit from melee damage. That makes it vastly easier to balance Reavers, Hellions, Wyches and Succubi than like, blood angels Eliminators or Imperial Fists Assault Intercessors. There's no wych cult where any of the wych cult units are automatically bad, or automatically super crazy bonkers OP. Almost every unit enjoys some benefit and some trade-off no matter what trait you pick.
Strength D was basically the value above ten, where Gw just shrugged and said "I dunno, it's like super powerful and strong and kills things ultra good I guess."
Instead of rolling to wound normally, you'd roll on a special table:
1 - "Lucky Escape: The model is unharmed"
2-5 - "Solid Hit: The model suffers a penetrating hit that causes it to lose D3 Hull Points instead of 1." (Below it says that cover and invulnerable saves may be taken against a Solid Hit.)
6 - "Devastating Hit: The model suffers a penetrating hit that causes it to lose D6+6 Hull Points instead of 1. No saves of any kind are allowed against this hit."
(in 7th edition in their infinite wisdom gw decided every vehicle in the entire game should have 2, 3, or 4 hit points in addition to the Magical Table of Did You Just Instantly Explode, so rolling a 2+ on a D weapon would almost always instantly demolish whatever you were chucking it at)
Anything past the 300-point "Superheavy Line" didn't necessarily have access to Strength D weaponry, most did like the Knight chainsword and glove were both D, the big cannons and the sword on the wraithknight were D, the stompa's chainsword was D, many of the big guns on the baneblade chassis were D, but ALL superheavies would explode with a pie plate that was literally no exaggeration like a plate you would see at a dinner table.
It had three rings, the center one which was the size of a normal large blast weapon, was Strength D. Also, all superheavies after making their normal melee attacks, would make D3 "Stomp Attacks".
Stomp attacks were not Strength D but instead used their own fun table, of which the result for a 6 was literally "everything the small blast template is touching is removed from play, no saves or abilities allowed"
This, and the durability rules superheavies got that made them totally immune to the vehicle damage table, was why 1 300 point wraithknight or like 350 point imperial knight, could easily get into a fistfight with 3-4 not-quite-superheavies like giant nid monsters, orkanauts, dreadknights whatever and easily beat in their faces. The knight would roll up to them, make 2 of its Strength D attacks against each one, go "welp, look, I rolled a 2+ on both hits, so you take 2d3 hull points off your total of....three, and I get two extra rolls on the damage table with a 50% chance of instantly killing you as well!" and then because it was immune to the VDT and the gorkanaut's melee weapons could only ever do 1hp of damage no matter what, it would survive and then just make D3 stomp rolls fishing for the 6 result of "you're instantly dead no rules allowed"
EDIT: Missed that it was answered well before I saw the post.
^you're thinking of earlier editions like fifth, where strength D was literally just "boop you're dead" on a 2+. I believe if it hit a vehicle it automatically caused an Explodes result, and the only way you could even possibly survive would be by being another superheavy, where you're immune to the vehicle damage table.
In 7th, they softened up the rules for D, and consequently gave it to a looooooooooooooooot more gak, mostly every weapon the eldar had called "D-something" because "hurr durr da lore says it be a D weaponz, how could dat be imbalance????"
of course, you also had stuff like the old ork shokk attack table, where the "12" result was "everything under a large blast template is instantly removed from play no rules allowed" as well.
Oh, and Sweeping Advances in melee, too. After any round of melee, if you happened to have the misfortune of being one of the few factions/units that cared about morale, you'd roll 2d6, subtracting the amount of casualties you took, and if you failed it you'd roll off with your opponent and if he won, you'd get the whole unit instantly kersploded.
I remember my favorite "holy gak" moments from 7th edition was with a Harlequin Solitaire charging a guard conscript platoon blob. in 7th to ignore the morale portion of the game, every large unit of guardsmen would always have either a commissar or a ministorum priest attached, because they gave you morale immunity and they were like 30pts. My solitaire charges in, and of course he's gonna refuse the challenge so I don't bother to issue one, and instead I try using one of 7th ed's many extremely niche, almost totally ignorable special rules - "Precision Blows" which allows you to pick the target in your opponent's unit if your melee attacks hit on a 6. I get enough 6s with his attacks to kill the commissar and like 2-3 more guardsmen, and then the solitaire survives their return swings with 1 wound left and sweeping advances instantly killing 42 guardsmen off the map.
Me and my opponent were basically in tears laughing at how stupid it was for this one little clown to just be leaping and bouncing through an entire platoon of guardsmen, murdering every single one in a fraction of a second.
A lot of this seems to boil down to "GW can't make up its mind if it wants to neuter everything or make everything bonkers powerful." Although there are ways to balance/change things that GW hasn't attempted yet. Discounting units that cannot be deployed for X turns or that automatically dissolve after X turns for example. Certain factions/subfactions/warlords can be better at it or offer a variety of options to match their lore. Instead we have 40 different ways to reroll things.
Ah. Thanks for explaining. That does sound powerful. Well at least the game had to be very fast with all armies throwing instant kill on +2 stuff around.
Still must have made people that like to paint really unhappy. paint for 2-3 months, remove it from the table after 5 min on turn 1.
Well the thing is the good ones more or less are a free. A combo made out of units you would take anyway, with gigantic return on investment aren't really costs. Real costs, if they exist, are only for bad armies and bad stuff. And then they are a double handicap, because they come with a cost and have to face armies who work without them.
It is like taking a castellan, loyal 32 and some scouts with BA characters. Neither of the parts of the army was a cost, and even the tax units had their specific use like early objective grabing or CP generation or screen creation.
Karol wrote: Ah. Thanks for explaining. That does sound powerful. Well at least the game had to be very fast with all armies throwing instant kill on +2 stuff around.
Still must have made people that like to paint really unhappy. paint for 2-3 months, remove it from the table after 5 min on turn 1.
See, the thing is 7th was more absurd on both ends of the spectrum. Offense and defense.
I briefly mentioned Invisibility - that was a psychic power that almost any psyker in the game could attempt to roll for (you used to randomly roll for your powers, so a 2-power psyker would have a bit above a 1/3 chance of getting invis in the partiuclar discipline it was in) and what it did was "the psyker and the unit he is attached to may only be shot with Snap Shots (always only hit on a 6 no matter your BS) and may not be targeted with template weapons"
so if your opponent had a D-cannon, which was a Strength D blast, and you had invisibility, congratulations! You have complete, total immunity to that D cannon as long as he doesn't peril the cast. It just came down to that good good random roll right at the beginning of the game. And people think who goes first in 9th swings the game a lot, LOL.
You also had multiple popular combos that would allow you to get a unit up to a re-rollable 2++ invulnerable save - 35/36 chance to save. So mathmatically, you could get a unit of screamers plus a lord of change to the point where it could literally stand in front of the entire opposing army, tanking all of its fire and doing nothing for a full 6 turns, and have a decent chance of survival.
I always forget about the immunity to templates portion of invisibility. That's so weird to me, AOE is the way you hit invisible enemies in basically every other game.
@the_scotsman must be my brain getting old and mixing up the old edition again. Thanks for the correction!
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skchsan wrote: Wow. 4th page of balance related post without a mention of "AA solves everything" argument.
There is hope afterall.
FWIW, I don't see a particular issues with wombo combos as long as they're not (practically) free.
Initially I read that as "Anti-Air solves everything" and was confused because they needed flyers to be easier to shoot.
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Arachnofiend wrote: I always forget about the immunity to templates portion of invisibility. That's so weird to me, AOE is the way you hit invisible enemies in basically every other game.
Stuff like that is what I point at when people say Matt Ward was the worst rules writer. They were doing this stuff well after he left and yet people hate Ward more.
7th was a disaster, all the accumulated stupidity finally reached boiling point. It's why they did a hard reset in 8th.
This is how GW games work - bloat bloat bloat bloat until it collapses in on itself and they do a hard reset. Then things are temporarily better for a while, until the bloat starts building up again. We're currently four years into the cycle, so we've probably got at least another 5 years to go before the next hard reset. Though who knows, with the pace GW is putting out bloat, we might get the hard reset in 10th this time around.
yukishiro1 wrote: 7th was a disaster, all the accumulated stupidity finally reached boiling point. It's why they did a hard reset in 8th.
This is how GW games work - bloat bloat bloat bloat until it collapses in on itself and they do a hard reset. Then things are temporarily better for a while, until the bloat starts building up again. We're currently four years into the cycle, so we've probably got at least another 5 years to go before the next hard reset. Though who knows, with the pace GW is putting out bloat, we might get the hard reset in 10th this time around.
I don't agree on them bloating as much as 7th did. GW has been removing some stratagem for example instead of just laying on more and more rules.
That said, they desperately need to prune the Marine codex. Over a hundred datasheets in a single book (without even talking about all the stuff in the supplements) is not good for balance or game health.
Well, except that you now have a core rulebook. Then a grand tournaments pack. Then a codex. Then a campaign book. And the codex now typically has three layers of rules, depending on the purity of your army. Plus CORE for every army (with a different definition in each one). Plus usually at least one other keyword besides core that also has big impacts on the army. Plus possibly an army of renown from your campaign book on top of all that.
The layering of rules is as bad as it's ever been IMO.
yukishiro1 wrote: Well, except that you now have a core rulebook. Then a grand tournaments pack. Then a codex. Then a campaign book. And the codex now typically has three layers of rules, depending on the purity of your army. Plus CORE for every army (with a different definition in each one). Plus usually at least one other keyword besides core that also has big impacts on the army. Plus possibly an army of renown from your campaign book on top of all that.
The layering of rules is as bad as it's ever been IMO.
Campaign books are optional, GT pack is only intended for competetive play, and do you really need the core rulebook past the list building phase?
Like you don't have to invest morr than you want to in this game.
Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
Well if your not playing competetively you can completely ignore the GT packs. If you are playing tournaments then you don't need the core rulebook past the list building stage unless you need to double check a rule since the GT missions and secondaries replace the core ones.
The amount of rules you have to I teach with are not that out of control, especially compared to the rules bloat of 7th. Tyranids had like core rulebooks just to play their full army IIRC
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
Are you required to appoint an arbiter with the authority to change rules on the fly to play Warhammer?
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
You know that the rules bloat is so bad that in single codexes the rules are bloated right? Like in the new Sisters codex a single unit could potentially be effected by:
- factions trait
- warlord trait
- battleforged trait
- hymns or whatever they are (I dunno if this is the same as the battleforged trait)
- acts of faith
- stratagems
- its own special rules
- other misc character auras
-relic auras
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
You know that the rules bloat is so bad that in single codexes the rules are bloated right? Like in the new Sisters codex a single unit could potentially be effected by:
- factions trait
- warlord trait
- battleforged trait
- hymns or whatever they are (I dunno if this is the same as the battleforged trait)
- acts of faith
- stratagems
- its own special rules
- other misc character auras
-relic auras
I think thats everything?
That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
It's odd really because I've seen talk about preferring the complexity of past editions, but when it's the current edition people seem to treat any complexity as "bloat". Is this a rose colored glasses bias in effect, or just a group who prefered a more complex game versus one who thinks the game was better when it was the indexes?
Frankly I don't know. I do know that despite the very vocal minority decrying how "bloated" the game is 8th edition was the most popular edition since 5th, and 9th took the best parts of 8th, refined some of the weaker parts and seems to be working to keep things balanced within the edition (I feel admit the 9th vs 8th games are generally skewed more towarss 9th but from what I've been hearing 9th vs 9th books are fairly well balanced against each other and Dark Eldar shows that GW are more than willing to address major issues with the game).
I'm starting to think some of the complaints aimed at 8th and 9th are more due to personal preference for past editions that were more geared towards the simulation end of the spectrum versus the current shift towards abstraction, but based on the growth of the game it's sitting in a good place for new players and far more people enjoy the current game than dislike it.
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
You know that the rules bloat is so bad that in single codexes the rules are bloated right? Like in the new Sisters codex a single unit could potentially be effected by:
- factions trait
- warlord trait
- battleforged trait
- hymns or whatever they are (I dunno if this is the same as the battleforged trait)
- acts of faith
- stratagems
- its own special rules
- other misc character auras
-relic auras
I think thats everything?
Faction trait - a thing only one faction enjoyed in the previous two editions, now opened up to everyone. Great!
Warlord trait - a thing that existed in 7th and before.
Battleforged Trait - literally just obsec.
"purity bonus trait" - the only thing I would actually remove/agree with you here. I think GW should never have implemented doctrines/taken doctrines out to where "Specialist Detachments' eded up rather than shoehorning this in with everyone. The new CP system was all that was needed to curb souping.
Acts of Faith - An army-wide rule various concepts of which have kicked around since sisters' inception. The new version is extremely easy to manage, and is not really 'a rule affecting a unit'
Relic Auras - again a thing from previous editions.
So we've added...stratagems, purity bonuses, and uh...that's it really. Character abilities existed in previous editions. special rules existed in previous editions. It seems like the mental real estate that was taken up by formations and challenges and other mechanics has been shifted to keeping track of strats and subfaction bonuses. I like subfaction bonuses way better than formations because they're not just blatantly a sales ploy.
yukishiro1 wrote: Uh ok yeah, I guess you can just ignore some of the rules of the game, if you're not playing competitively and you want to. I'm not really sure how that refutes the rules bloat, though.
IDK are you required to own every supplement that exists for the current edition to play dnd?
You know that the rules bloat is so bad that in single codexes the rules are bloated right? Like in the new Sisters codex a single unit could potentially be effected by:
- factions trait
- warlord trait
- battleforged trait
- hymns or whatever they are (I dunno if this is the same as the battleforged trait)
- acts of faith
- stratagems
- its own special rules
- other misc character auras
-relic auras
I think thats everything?
Faction trait - a thing only one faction enjoyed in the previous two editions, now opened up to everyone. Great!
Warlord trait - a thing that existed in 7th and before.
Battleforged Trait - literally just obsec.
"purity bonus trait" - the only thing I would actually remove/agree with you here. I think GW should never have implemented doctrines/taken doctrines out to where "Specialist Detachments' eded up rather than shoehorning this in with everyone. The new CP system was all that was needed to curb souping.
Acts of Faith - An army-wide rule various concepts of which have kicked around since sisters' inception. The new version is extremely easy to manage, and is not really 'a rule affecting a unit'
Relic Auras - again a thing from previous editions.
So we've added...stratagems, purity bonuses, and uh...that's it really. Character abilities existed in previous editions. special rules existed in previous editions. It seems like the mental real estate that was taken up by formations and challenges and other mechanics has been shifted to keeping track of strats and subfaction bonuses. I like subfaction bonuses way better than formations because they're not just blatantly a sales ploy.
I quit playing in 7th because it was rubbish so all you're doing is proving my point. Also the battleforged trait was not "just obsec". I forget the name of it but it was an additional set of random rules you got for taking all SoBs. You either rolled two randomly or chose one.
Just to further elaborate my point in a game of 8th my basic SoB squad would usually be effected by:
- Our Martyred Lady trait
- +3 to Deny The Witch tests
- Canoness reroll aura
- Imagifier aura
- general universal army rules
Thats 4 additional rules on a BASIC squad without me even really doing anything else other than taking very basic unit choices. That is bloat. In previous editions I only had the last one to worry about.
ClockworkZion wrote: ...That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions...
Really? How many of those existed in 7th? (Three, by my count. Four if you were Space Marines and had sub-factions.)
Are we really pretending we couldn't stack rules onto single units like a Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiances? Because that is complete BS if we are.
Just because where the rules come from and how they can be applied has changed doesn't mean that it's really that different than what we've seen before.
Besides, at least stratagem have a built in limited resource associated with them meaning they can't be as freely spent as some other buffs are.
Automatically Appended Next Post: And while we lacked Order traits in previous editiins, characters still buffed Sisters,the Imagifier still buffed the army and we had Uses as well as various versions of Acts of Fait, some of which failed to scale with game size.
Seriously, the bias right now is large enough to park a bus in.
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
Considering almost every rule complained about in the Sisters army above has been pointed out to already have existed in some.form (and Sacred Rites previously existed in 2nd and made a come back for mono faction builds) I'm going to hard disagree with that.
Is it complex? Yes. But I'd say it's no complex than any other game that allows you to build combos to improve the abilities of your units to include past editions of 40k.
In a lot of ways, despite the complaints here about bloat and the hyperbole of calling rules "needless nonsense" regardless of how they add to the flavor of the army and help create variety in lists (Dark Eldar players for example have one of the modt well rounded books that allow for a wide range of interesting and still good builds for example), 9th edition has been far easier for people to pick up and run with than nearly every edition before it (including 8th since it clarified rules that 8th struggled with).
So I disagree about the bloat claims unless we start talking about how bloated C:SM is because that needs a pruning bad. No codex should have 100+ individual datasheets. And even if you combine some of the duplicate units with different wargear into a single datasheet the book is in some desperate need of jettisoning some units.
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
True, 9th rules and some of 8th for some armies units can have literally 10 different buffs. When sisters, marines, etc.. has pages of rules for 1 unit thats insane.
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
True, 9th rules and some of 8th for some armies units can have literally 10 different buffs. When sisters, marines, etc.. has pages of rules for 1 unit thats insane.
Can we stop acting like all those buffa are free? FFS the amount of nonsense in this thread is getting out of hand.
How about adding up how many points and CP you have to pour into some of these "bloat" combos people are complaining about?
ClockworkZion wrote: ...Are we really pretending we couldn't stack rules onto single units like a Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiances? Because that is complete BS if we are...
No. We're pretending that the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences has somehow improved in 8th/9th, when it's at least as complex as the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences that was 7th, and frequently worse.
I don't think it matters whether they're free or not.
If we've got Marine rules, Doctrines, Chapter rules, War Lord trait aura, Relic auras, psychic powers, Chaplain stuff, strats and then unit special rules all rubbing up against each other there is a point where you have to go "ENOUGH!".
I don't think it matters whether they're free or not.
If we've got Marine rules, Doctrines, Chapter rules, War Lord trait aura, Relic auras, psychic powers, Chaplain stuff, strats and then unit special rules all rubbing up against each other there is a point where you have to go "ENOUGH!".
Bull fething gak. Marines set the bar, others meeting that bar should not be treated as being excessive. All I'm seeing is a circljerk about how much we want to pretend GW is doing more than the used to do and pretending it's only alright for Marines to have set the bar and all others being able to be on the same level as them.
ClockworkZion wrote: All I'm seeing is a circljerk about how much we want to pretend GW is doing more than the used to do and pretending it's only alright for Marines to have set the bar and all others being able to be on the same level as them.
I'll take your word for it that that is all you are seeing, but it isn't anybody else's fault that you're misreading what other people are writing. Literally nobody here has said that, or even anything like it. People are complaining about the bloat across the whole game, marines included. Nobody is saying "I'm so mad ad mech have the same rules bloat that marines do!"
It's hard to have a serious conversation with someone who insists on arguing with a straw man.
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
Is it fluffy, engaging, and appropriate to the faction?
Would CSM players like marks to do something again?
Would a challenge system for CSM fit the faction?
A boons table people can use?
Should Raptors be 'scary'? Should Bezerkers bear greater distinction from Chosen beyond just extra strength?
Should Abaddon interact with the army beyond murdering stuff?
Does it make sense to have a model that can pray to the gods?
Psychic powers?
Daemon weapons?
Icons?
ClockworkZion wrote: All I'm seeing is a circljerk about how much we want to pretend GW is doing more than the used to do and pretending it's only alright for Marines to have set the bar and all others being able to be on the same level as them.
I'll take your word for it that that is all you are seeing, but it isn't anybody else's fault that you're misreading what other people are writing. Literally nobody here has said that, or even anything like it. People are complaining about the bloat across the whole game, marines included. Nobody is saying "I'm so mad ad mech have the same rules bloat that marines do!"
It's hard to have a serious conversation with someone who insists on arguing with a straw man.
Maybe I am misunderstanding his point, but quite honestly this stuff was already in the game the only difference is how it's expressed. The only new thing you have in 8th and 9th you didn't have before were stratagems and you pay CP for those. All this crying about how bloated the rules are now compared to before is complete nonsense when that is the ONLY real addition to 8th and we also saw rules REMOVED going from 7th to 8th and aura abilities in 9th being tightened up so they're less abusive.
The "bloat" being complained about is merely just the fact people have a toolbox that they can make on the fly tactical decisions with instead of committing their entire army plan at list creation. Oh no, people might be able to play against bad match ups because they have stratagems and secondary options that allow them to participate in the game instead of watching their opponent rack up a massive lead and then table them at the end of turn 3 when they've maxed their score out.
All I'm seeing with this "bloat" argument is more of the "old is good, new is bad" mindset that seems to crop up and then wildly misrepresent past editions in order to create a narrative that those old editions where somehow "more tactical" or "less bloated" or otherwise "better" than what is clearly been the most popular editions of 40k since Rogue Trader. Is it perfect? No. Are the books a lot stronger than the books of last edition due to more options for secondaries, updated statlines and weapon profiles, as well as more finely tuned stratagems? Yes. Is the game "bloated" just because you can't predict your entire opponent's playstyle solely on the army list they brought and have to actively think about what they're doing and how to respond to them at the table? Definitely not.
And the arguement that points don't matter, let's run through something really quick by taking a unit of Repentia and give them every. single. buff. they can take and I'll even be generous and keep it as cheap as possible totaling it all under the 2021 CA points for fairness since it all changes in a week anyways (buffs will be in parenthesis with explanations for unique ones explained after the name of the rule):
4 Repentia (Acts of Faith, Sacred Rites, Shield of Faith, Zealot, Solace in Anguish (5+ FnP), Order of the Bloody Rose (Improve melee weapon AP by 1, +1 attack during first round of combat))
Repentia Superior (Drive Onwards (re-roll advance/charge rolls and re-roll wound rolls of 1 for Repentia within 6")
Missionary (Sacred Hymns (+1 attack within 6"))
Triumph of Saint Katherine (The Fiery Heart (auto pass morale within 6"), Petals of the Bloody Rose (+1 to hit within 6"), Icon of the Valorous Heart (perform a bonus act of faith on a unit within 6" even if they did an act of faith already), Simulacrum of the Argent Shroud (can add or subtract 1 when a unit within 6" performs an act of faith))
Celestine (Saintly Blessings (unit within 6" improves Shield of Faith save by +1 to a max of 4++)
Rhino (to carry the Repentia, Repentia Superior, Missionary safely)
Grand Total Investment: 671 points to buff 4 models. The more models you want to buff, the more those points go up and the more Rhinos you need to get them into position safely since we're talking about units with a 5++ and 5+++ if they're within 6" of Celestine which means they're incredibly squishy.
Acts of Faith can't be used to long bomb the Repentia on a charge either as all of the buffs coming from other units require the unit to stay within 6" which means either making short charges with the 4 models to keep the cost down, or taking 10 models so you can make longer charges but not need to push the buff pieces forward.
This is why I said that people really should sit down and tally up what they're talking about. Sure you can add four more units to the Repentia to make them this week's episode of "Will it Blend?" but it's not realistic, it's unwieldly and two of the pieces can't even hide in the Rhino to benefit from the extra protection.
Well what about stratagems then? Which ones can Repentia realistically use for buffs?
Final Redemption (1CP) 4+ to do 1 Mortal Wound per Repentia model killed in the unit.
Desperate for Redemption (3 CP) Allows Repentia within 1" of an enemy unit fight as if it were the fight phase
Holy Rage (1 CP) can charge if advanced this turn
Tear Them Down (1 CP) +1 to the wound roll
So for all that you'd spend 6 CP to buff one unit. Assuming you start with 12 CP that means you're spending half of your resources to buff one unit one time. Not a great investment in points unless you REALLY need something dead.
So basically this is why I don't buy the bloat complaint. The "omg look how many buffs a unit can get" is hampered by aura distances and points, and stratagem buffs are limited by your CP pool. In past editions you wouldn't have to worry about aura positions as you'd be able to just slap the characters into the units and always have them on, but now it matters and it prevents you from just adding everything under the sun to try and make a single unit death ball.
ClockworkZion wrote: Marines set the bar, others meeting that bar should not be treated as being excessive.
Completely not the point I was making.
They're all excessive. I don't care who came first, or that others should match the first. None of them should be at that multi-layered level of endless piled on rules.
ClockworkZion wrote: All I'm seeing is a circljerk about how much we want to pretend GW is doing more than the used to do and pretending it's only alright for Marines to have set the bar and all others being able to be on the same level as them.
I never said anything of the sort. Get the straw out of your face.
Daedalus81 wrote: Would CSM players like marks to do something again? Would a challenge system for CSM fit the faction? A boons table people can use? Should Raptors be 'scary'? Should Bezerkers bear greater distinction from Chosen beyond just extra strength? Should Abaddon interact with the army beyond murdering stuff? Does it make sense to have a model that can pray to the gods? Psychic powers? Daemon weapons? Icons?
We had that in the past, and it was never anything like the bloat of 9th Ed.
yeah going over some 5th, 6th, and 7th rule books its insane the amount of rules some units can get.
Example when you combine all the possible rules (and I have been able to do this before as its not that hard when a few of the auras are +3", another aura is a 12" fly unit) Repentia can get;
Run and charge
Re-roll runs and charge
Miracle dice (so don't need re-roll charges even lol)
Gain +1 to hits
Gain +1 atks Gain +1 to str Gain +1 to wounds
re-roll all hits
re-roll wounds of 1
bonus ap exploding hits
exploding MW's on death
Gain MD on death and when they kill
Gain + to their invuls
Has a 5+++
ClockworkZion wrote: That's hardly more bloated than other armies, much less past editions.
That's flat out wrong.
They multiple, multiple layers of rules in 9th is awful. I still say that 7th Ed formations were worse (anything that gave your army 400-600 points of "free stuff" for no drawback is obviously worse), but the endless bloat in 9th is just insane now.
I mean, the AdMech book alone just makes me cringe with the sheer amount of needless nonsense in there.
Is it fluffy, engaging, and appropriate to the faction?
Would CSM players like marks to do something again?
Would a challenge system for CSM fit the faction?
A boons table people can use?
Should Raptors be 'scary'? Should Bezerkers bear greater distinction from Chosen beyond just extra strength?
Should Abaddon interact with the army beyond murdering stuff?
Does it make sense to have a model that can pray to the gods?
Psychic powers?
Daemon weapons?
Icons?
Most of that stuff is a "yes", but Challenges and the Boon Table can both go burn somewhere. Always hated those. And if we get meaningful marks back, I want Veteran Abilities that you can max out if you DON'T take a mark. Like in 3.5. That way Night Lords can be the godless veterans they're supposed to be again.
H.B.M.C. wrote: We had that in the past, and it was never anything like the bloat of 9th Ed
Well, we never really had warlord traits ( way back ). Should those go away?
The important questions to me are:
1) Do these things feel like Warhammer
2) Can GW make the book reasonably balanced
All the things we're talking about are Warhammer at its core. This is what 40K has wanted to be for ages.
Is it difficult to manage? You bet. But it is also fun. If they can continue to make the changes/adjustments they've made recently then they appear to be more competent than they've ever been in the past.
ClockworkZion wrote: ...Are we really pretending we couldn't stack rules onto single units like a Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiances? Because that is complete BS if we are...
No. We're pretending that the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences has somehow improved in 8th/9th, when it's at least as complex as the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences that was 7th, and frequently worse.
From my perspective the difference here is that one is baked into the fundamental game design, whereas in 7th edition formations, psychic shenanigans, and death stars could be much more easily mitigated by a community.
All of those death stars were easy to spot net lists and were NEVER taken to any of the campaigns i was in; formations were banned, and Invisibility was modified.
Saying "all 8th and 9th have that is new is strats," even if it were accurate - which it isn't - really isn't a very good argument. Having to be aware of and take into account 20ish stratagems for every faction in the game adds a tremendous amount of rules bloat to the game - literally hundreds of new rules you have to remember, many of which can lose you the game if you are not aware of even a single time.
I'm not saying that makes strats terrible or that I'd do away with them completely (though I'd certainly remove the plethora of stupid "makes bad unit less bad" strats out there, and just fix the units directly). But they are absolutely a significant source of rules bloat.
What prevents you from modifying Stratagems, banning chapter tactics, faction objective and combat doctrines?
Breadth. "Use 30k Invisibility, CAD only, one superheavy per 2k, 30k D table, no (whatever that one Daemon relic that made the 2++ deathstar work was), one upgrade gun per three in Windrider units" is a really short set of patches that fixes almost all the problem lists in 7th. The most unbalanced things in 8th/9th are combos rather than individual things, so you can't do a straightforward "no [this one thing]" patch to them, and you have to dig through every Codex looking for the broken stuff (thereby inevitably leading to arguments) while in 7th the vast majority of the broken things are core patches that apply universally to everyone.
What prevents you from modifying Stratagems, banning chapter tactics, faction objective and combat doctrines?
Because those things are fundamental to the design of the codex and the edition in general. If i have to do that, then why am I playing the game? Furthermore that would require I even knew ALL OF THEM, and purchased ALL OF THE BOOKS.
Changing one psychic spell, and banning formations (which were tacked on and not integral to a codex), as well as the very easy to spot net lists is completely different to essentially trying to change the whole game.
What prevents you from modifying Stratagems, banning chapter tactics, faction objective and combat doctrines?
Breadth. "Use 30k Invisibility, CAD only, one superheavy per 2k, 30k D table, no (whatever that one Daemon relic that made the 2++ deathstar work was), one upgrade gun per three in Windrider units" is a really short set of patches that fixes almost all the problem lists in 7th. The most unbalanced things in 8th/9th are combos rather than individual things, so you can't do a straightforward "no [this one thing]" patch to them, and you have to dig through every Codex looking for the broken stuff (thereby inevitably leading to arguments) while in 7th the vast majority of the broken things are core patches that apply universally to everyone.
also, this. What you just described is pretty damn close to what our group actually did.
yukishiro1 wrote: Saying "all 8th and 9th have that is new is strats," even if it were accurate - which it isn't - really isn't a very good argument. Having to be aware of and take into account 20ish stratagems for every faction in the game adds a tremendous amount of rules bloat to the game - literally hundreds of new rules you have to remember, many of which can lose you the game if you are not aware of even a single time.
I'm not saying that makes strats terrible or that I'd do away with them completely (though I'd certainly remove the plethora of stupid "makes bad unit less bad" strats out there, and just fix the units directly). But they are absolutely a significant source of rules bloat.
I like how you go back to jumping on the bloat argument and ignored my point that they help players have more tactical options to ensure there are less bad match ups. This insistance on turning tactical depth into "bloat" just proves how biased you are about this entire thing.
Frankly I'm done at this point. It's clear that no matter what points are raised or how often it's proven the complaints being made are incredibly insane (like who is spending nearly 700 points and 6 CP to buff a single unit of Repentia? Just because you can do something with the rules doesn't mean you will or even should. Look, I get it's hard to change people's minds when they've decided to take a stance on something, but the amount of doubling down on things or even claiming that things like points don't matter when discussing how much you can do thus ignoring the feasibility of doing such a thing meaning that such combos are going to be rare, if not never seen.
But go on, you and everyone else making up these claims about "bloat" can chalk it up as a win because I'm not wasting my time trying to put a window in my wall using my forehead.
H.B.M.C. wrote: We had that in the past, and it was never anything like the bloat of 9th Ed
Well, we never really had warlord traits ( way back ). Should those go away?
The important questions to me are:
1) Do these things feel like Warhammer
2) Can GW make the book reasonably balanced
All the things we're talking about are Warhammer at its core. This is what 40K has wanted to be for ages.
Is it difficult to manage? You bet. But it is also fun. If they can continue to make the changes/adjustments they've made recently then they appear to be more competent than they've ever been in the past.
Disagree with basically all of that (except the idea that warlord traits should go away).
They aren't Warhammer at its core. They're bolt on additions on bolt on additions on bolt on additions to a system that at its core is relatively simple. And doesn't need all that crap.
Whatever '40K wanted to be' (and I suspect you'll get 40K answers to that question), it isn't a leaning pile of bloat.
What you find fun and competent just gets a cocked eyebrow from me.
yukishiro1 wrote: Saying "all 8th and 9th have that is new is strats," even if it were accurate - which it isn't - really isn't a very good argument. Having to be aware of and take into account 20ish stratagems for every faction in the game adds a tremendous amount of rules bloat to the game - literally hundreds of new rules you have to remember, many of which can lose you the game if you are not aware of even a single time.
I'm not saying that makes strats terrible or that I'd do away with them completely (though I'd certainly remove the plethora of stupid "makes bad unit less bad" strats out there, and just fix the units directly). But they are absolutely a significant source of rules bloat.
I like how you go back to jumping on the bloat argument and ignored my point that they help players have more tactical options to ensure there are less bad match ups. This insistance on turning tactical depth into "bloat" just proves how biased you are about this entire thing.
Frankly I'm done at this point. It's clear that no matter what points are raised or how often it's proven the complaints being made are incredibly insane (like who is spending nearly 700 points and 6 CP to buff a single unit of Repentia? Just because you can do something with the rules doesn't mean you will or even should. Look, I get it's hard to change people's minds when they've decided to take a stance on something, but the amount of doubling down on things or even claiming that things like points don't matter when discussing how much you can do thus ignoring the feasibility of doing such a thing meaning that such combos are going to be rare, if not never seen.
But go on, you and everyone else making up these claims about "bloat" can chalk it up as a win because I'm not wasting my time trying to put a window in my wall using my forehead.
You could have saved a lot of space by just saying "I don't want to talk about this any more" and not typing out all the contentless personal insults because people disagreed with you on the internet. It is evidently the right call for you to step back from the thread in order to cool down a bit.
vict0988 wrote: You would still be able to spam grav cannons, take Nobs in Nauts and summon an unlimited amount of Daemons.
This was literally never a problem. Probably because after we had established a series of minimal changes in order to help balance the game more, it set forth certain expectations in the community for how to behave.
How game design reinforces certain behavior is another topic however.
vict0988 wrote: You would still be able to spam grav cannons, take Nobs in Nauts and summon an unlimited amount of Daemons.
I played the daemon-summoning list for a bit, it wasn't anything like as broken as people like to claim it was. If you don't have access to the 2++ deathstar to fill space you lose Horrors too fast to actually snowball. Grav-spam is good, but without 550pts of free Razorbacks and on a table that's dense enough that vehicles can get cover it's far from game-breaking. I don't know why you're that worried about Nobs in 'Nauts, if you can't deal with that any mechanized army in the game will wipe the floor with you.
H.B.M.C. wrote: We had that in the past, and it was never anything like the bloat of 9th Ed
Well, we never really had warlord traits ( way back ). Should those go away?
The important questions to me are:
1) Do these things feel like Warhammer
2) Can GW make the book reasonably balanced
All the things we're talking about are Warhammer at its core. This is what 40K has wanted to be for ages.
Is it difficult to manage? You bet. But it is also fun. If they can continue to make the changes/adjustments they've made recently then they appear to be more competent than they've ever been in the past.
Disagree with basically all of that (except the idea that warlord traits should go away).
They aren't Warhammer at its core. They're bolt on additions on bolt on additions on bolt on additions to a system that at its core is relatively simple. And doesn't need all that crap.
Whatever '40K wanted to be' (and I suspect you'll get 40K answers to that question), it isn't a leaning pile of bloat.
What you find fun and competent just gets a cocked eyebrow from me.
After living through twenty five years of rules additions, and edition changes, I find it completely hilarious for anyone to make a statement about "Warhammer at its core" while complaining about rules additions.
What prevents you from modifying Stratagems, banning chapter tactics, faction objective and combat doctrines?
Because those things are fundamental to the design of the codex and the edition in general. If i have to do that, then why am I playing the game? Furthermore that would require I even knew ALL OF THEM, and purchased ALL OF THE BOOKS.
Changing one psychic spell, and banning formations (which were tacked on and not integral to a codex), as well as the very easy to spot net lists is completely different to essentially trying to change the whole game.
What prevents you from modifying Stratagems, banning chapter tactics, faction objective and combat doctrines?
Breadth. "Use 30k Invisibility, CAD only, one superheavy per 2k, 30k D table, no (whatever that one Daemon relic that made the 2++ deathstar work was), one upgrade gun per three in Windrider units" is a really short set of patches that fixes almost all the problem lists in 7th. The most unbalanced things in 8th/9th are combos rather than individual things, so you can't do a straightforward "no [this one thing]" patch to them, and you have to dig through every Codex looking for the broken stuff (thereby inevitably leading to arguments) while in 7th the vast majority of the broken things are core patches that apply universally to everyone.
also, this. What you just described is pretty damn close to what our group actually did.
But that spell was a core rule and Formations are literally part of a codex..... GW decided to fa grenades rather than Invis, its not like they didn't know about it. Thats like saying "Supplements for Marine codex shoul dbe ban like IH b.c its too strong" yes it was too strong and not "rule marines codex" but it was a rules for that codex.
AnomanderRake wrote: I played the daemon-summoning list for a bit, it wasn't anything like as broken as people like to claim it was. If you don't have access to the 2++ deathstar to fill space you lose Horrors too fast to actually snowball.
With a "fair" list? Don't think so.
Grav-spam is good, but without 550pts of free Razorbacks and on a table that's dense enough that vehicles can get cover it's far from game-breaking.
Yeah, it's not game-breaking, just OP. So you still have a game with crap balance after implementing your house rules because the damage some weapons do is just mathematically nuts (and I think you've noticed this about 9th edition profiles). In 9th you can take an MSU list, that will nerf a lot of Stratagems and combos and then you can just not take the busted psychic powers, relics, WL traits and chapter tactics. Whatever your preference of core rules the codexes are bloated and badly balanced in 7th and 9th and if you want casual games you have to set expectations as two players playing a game or as a community for a period of time. I think it would be great if those discussions became easier to have and were less required, even if I enjoy game design and balancing things I don't think everybody does or should have to. But in casual gaming it's like a fourth pillar of the hobby (aside from building, painting and playing) to know which lists are OP or UP so you can create balanced games, it wasn't easy in 7th and it isn't easy in 9th.
MTG has the excuse that it has to be part of their business model to sell chaff and have lottery cards in their packs, but 40k doesn't need that, if the game was balanced people would buy what they like and expand their armies to try different tactics and counter their local or the greater meta as those metas evolve. I am pretty sure a lot of sales are getting killed by unfortunate rules writing. How many Gladiators have been sold? How many Gladiators could GW have sold if Gladiators were exactly as strong, but with different strengths and weaknesses from the best units Space Marines have available?
I don't know why you're that worried about Nobs in 'Nauts, if you can't deal with that any mechanized army in the game will wipe the floor with you.
GW made a boxed set with Nobs and a Gorkanaut and suggested it was great because you could move up the Naut, disembark and then charge. GW forgot that Gorkanauts weren't Assault Vehicles, just a classic GW blunder of not knowing their game and why Gorkanauts were useless as transports when Ork vehicles by default were Assault Vehicles and had to purchase an upgrade to lose it.
If someone wants to critic 8th and 9th editions, they are free to do so and I will be glad to read their points on the matter.
But if someone tries to do that while defending 7th... no, that's not something I can accept. It is not something that can be done in good faith.
Even with all the bans mentioned, the game would be utterly unplayable on competitive level. Sure, 7th could be good for fun and casual games if there is a good social contract between the two players, but that is true for all editions, no matter how much of a mess they were.
External balance was atrocious, and the only thing worse than that was the internal balance. The game was won or lost before you even needed to deploy, just a quick read to the lists already told you who won. The only cases where you couldn't do that, was if both players had brought insanely cheesy lists.
Oh look, I brought guards/nids/csm and he brought Necrons/CWE... I really wonder who's gonna win!
I mean, we are talking about an edition where pyrovores and wraithguards with D-scythes had the same cost...
I don't know why you're that worried about Nobs in 'Nauts, if you can't deal with that any mechanized army in the game will wipe the floor with you.
GW made a boxed set with Nobs and a Gorkanaut and suggested it was great because you could move up the Naut, disembark and then charge. GW forgot that Gorkanauts weren't Assault Vehicles, just a classic GW blunder of not knowing their game and why Gorkanauts were useless as transports when Ork vehicles by default were Assault Vehicles and had to purchase an upgrade to lose it.
...Wait...so you're complaining that my suggested ban-list doesn't prevent the existence of bad things in the game?
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Spoletta wrote: If someone wants to critic 8th and 9th editions, they are free to do so and I will be glad to read their points on the matter.
But if someone tries to do that while defending 7th... no, that's not something I can accept. It is not something that can be done in good faith...
I am, in good faith, trying to claim that 8th/9th are no better than 7th because I'm tired of people telling me "no matter how awful anything is now 7th was worse." I don't think it was.
I don't know why you're that worried about Nobs in 'Nauts, if you can't deal with that any mechanized army in the game will wipe the floor with you.
GW made a boxed set with Nobs and a Gorkanaut and suggested it was great because you could move up the Naut, disembark and then charge. GW forgot that Gorkanauts weren't Assault Vehicles, just a classic GW blunder of not knowing their game and why Gorkanauts were useless as transports when Ork vehicles by default were Assault Vehicles and had to purchase an upgrade to lose it.
...Wait...so you're complaining that my suggested ban-list doesn't prevent the existence of bad things in the game?
yukishiro1 wrote: Saying "all 8th and 9th have that is new is strats," even if it were accurate - which it isn't - really isn't a very good argument. Having to be aware of and take into account 20ish stratagems for every faction in the game adds a tremendous amount of rules bloat to the game - literally hundreds of new rules you have to remember, many of which can lose you the game if you are not aware of even a single time.
I'm not saying that makes strats terrible or that I'd do away with them completely (though I'd certainly remove the plethora of stupid "makes bad unit less bad" strats out there, and just fix the units directly). But they are absolutely a significant source of rules bloat.
Just to point out, in 7th space marines had access to more psychic powers than they have stratagems now, spread across five books.
It's also worth noting that claiming that you need both the BRB and the GT pack and the Crusade Mission packs as proof of bloat is completely dishonest. Might as well claim that you need 30k books to play 7th. The core rules, one mission pack, your codex (+supplement if marines) and possibly two campaign books are still a trivial amount of rules compared to 40+ rules sources in 7th you had to get just to have all the rules for marines.
Claiming 9th is more bloated than 7th is objectively false, ClockworkZion is absolutely on spot here. You are allowed to like whatever you want, but if you seriously claim that 7th was better than 8th or 9th in regards of rules, you either are badly informed or flat out lying.
ClockworkZion wrote: ...Are we really pretending we couldn't stack rules onto single units like a Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiances? Because that is complete BS if we are...
No. We're pretending that the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences has somehow improved in 8th/9th, when it's at least as complex as the Jenga tower of Negative Play Experiences that was 7th, and frequently worse.
From my perspective the difference here is that one is baked into the fundamental game design, whereas in 7th edition formations, psychic shenanigans, and death stars could be much more easily mitigated by a community.
All of those death stars were easy to spot net lists and were NEVER taken to any of the campaigns i was in; formations were banned, and Invisibility was modified.
... aaand here we have it. "You cant play 9th without heavily changing it! 7th was much better! We just had to put house rules in place which completely changed 7th."
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AnomanderRake wrote: I am, in good faith, trying to claim that 8th/9th are no better than 7th because I'm tired of people telling me "no matter how awful anything is now 7th was worse." I don't think it was.
Even if you think so, you are mostly ignoring Zion's arguments while making strawmen - for example always going back to the claim that the pile of repentia buffs that never actually comes up in games are more "bloated" than super-hero IC units from 7th or psychic armies which spent 15 minutes rolling for all their powers on dozens of tables. Counting every aura separately also is very dishonest - I'd bet there are more ICs conferring stuff in every codex of 7th than auras in 8th or 9th. Last but not least, it's very telling that 8th edition codices are picked as examples to show how much bloat auras and buff stratagems are causing in 9th, when GW is clearly cracking down on aura and buff stratagem availability in 9th edition codices.
So, if you really want to discuss this honestly and in good faith, I suggest addressing all of the opposing side's arguments and trying to avoid logical fallacies.
I don't know why you're that worried about Nobs in 'Nauts, if you can't deal with that any mechanized army in the game will wipe the floor with you.
GW made a boxed set with Nobs and a Gorkanaut and suggested it was great because you could move up the Naut, disembark and then charge. GW forgot that Gorkanauts weren't Assault Vehicles, just a classic GW blunder of not knowing their game and why Gorkanauts were useless as transports when Ork vehicles by default were Assault Vehicles and had to purchase an upgrade to lose it.
...Wait...so you're complaining that my suggested ban-list doesn't prevent the existence of bad things in the game?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Spoletta wrote: If someone wants to critic 8th and 9th editions, they are free to do so and I will be glad to read their points on the matter.
But if someone tries to do that while defending 7th... no, that's not something I can accept. It is not something that can be done in good faith...
I am, in good faith, trying to claim that 8th/9th are no better than 7th because I'm tired of people telling me "no matter how awful anything is now 7th was worse." I don't think it was.
So what was it you actually liked about 7th ed ? Or do/did you just hate 8th and 9th so badly that for you, all three editions were equally worthless ? For me, 7th was the edition that nearly killed the game, and I saw many players jump to warmastuff. I was really scared for my 5 armies, that I would be soon out of opponents to play with. Also I didn't blame the players jumping ship: as was said here in this thread, internal and external balance was so bad I thought they just made up codex and supplement rules (the base rules for 7th were not that bad) with 5 vodkas and 10 whiskeys in the belly, laughing out madly at how miserable they were going to make it for the players. I even suspected sabotage at some point, that the devs would then all join PP after sabotaging GW.
Because those things are fundamental to the design of the codex and the edition in general. If i have to do that, then why am I playing the game? Furthermore that would require I even knew ALL OF THEM, and purchased ALL OF THE BOOKS.
Changing one psychic spell, and banning formations (which were tacked on and not integral to a codex), as well as the very easy to spot net lists is completely different to essentially trying to change the whole game.
Not true at all. Strategems, chapter traits, etc... are all additions to the core game, you don't need any of those rules to play the missions.
Ignoring them is much easier than changing something.
Those who defend 7th are probably people who had a strong codex in 7th and the models to play the army at competitive levels, then their codex sucked in the following edition(s) or they were forced to change their lists drastically in order to stay competitive and couldn't or didn't want to do it.
I think it's a bit unfair to defend 8th/9th by comparing it to 7th, which is taken by a lot of people to be the worst 40k has ever been.
I think 7th had far too much bloat and wombo combos as well. So all the arguments of "Well 9th only has slightly more than 7th!" just reads like a massive admission that it's too much.
I can honestly say I feel like I only know about 75% of what my army can do at the moment, there's just too much for my little mind to receive, process, and understand despite my generally having a pretty good ability to grasp rules.
I've never had this problem in another game or edition, except for 7th.
I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline. And less because they are faction A, in a chapter B detachment, in a pure faction A army, with a nearby warlord C wielding Relic D and Buffbot E while using stratagems E, F and G.
I think it is undoubtedly harder to know what "all" factions can do now than it was all the way back in say 3rd. I can't say it was true of 7th though, because my group regularly found ourselves having to look up certain unusual keywords despite playing it for years.
Maybe its just the way my mind works, but I don't think knowing one faction, and retaining a mental list of commonly used stratagems is *that* difficult. If need be write a cheat-sheet listing them by phase. If anything the whinge is usually that stratagem use is too mechanistic. I.E. you know you are going to use a pool of 3-4 every opportunity you can, and the rest are far more situational so rarely ever employed.
But really this debate seems to have moved into "what sort of game do you like" rather than "balance". I feel 9th is far more balanced than 7th ever was just because GW is at least vaguely following along. For example DE have been nerfed after 2 months - not left to rule the roost for years. (Admittedly GSC players may feel differently - but its not as bad as it was.)
kirotheavenger wrote: I think it's a bit unfair to defend 8th/9th by comparing it to 7th, which is taken by a lot of people to be the worst 40k has ever been.
I think 7th had far too much bloat and wombo combos as well. So all the arguments of "Well 9th only has slightly more than 7th!" just reads like a massive admission that it's too much.
I can honestly say I feel like I only know about 75% of what my army can do at the moment, there's just too much for my little mind to receive, process, and understand despite my generally having a pretty good ability to grasp rules.
I've never had this problem in another game or edition, except for 7th.
Ok, fair.
Honestly, I found 3rd(?) Edition harder to understand. But I was younger and played less often
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline. And less because they are faction A, in a chapter B detachment, in a pure faction A army, with a nearby warlord C wielding Relic D and Buffbot E while using stratagems E, F and G.
I totally agree, I don't like that type of game. Although I know others do.
Tyel wrote: I don't think knowing one faction, and retaining a mental list of commonly used stratagems is *that* difficult.
The problem is there isn't really a common list of strategems.
Sure, I can (and have) produced a cheat sheet of all my commonly used strategems. It's a full A4 page and two thirds of that is strategems that I don't often use but need to know because they'll be super helpful when they are helpful.
But beyond a couple, "character fights after dying" type stuff, there's really nothing in common. When I play other armies I very rarely get hit by a strategem that's similar to my own. Even when the strategem does have shades of similiarity, it's often different enough to be completely different in use.
I quite liked strategems at the start of 8th. They were simple, few, and minor but appreciated buffs. Needless to say, it all got out of hand pretty damn quickly, and although GW has slightly toned it down in 9th it's barely taken the edge off and in some ways they've made it worse. Now there's more strategems tied to niche uses or only certain units which just adds to it all.
If someone is really arguing that 40k is not super bloated and heading into the range of megabloat town, I think we are looking at a different game.
You can like the bloat, you can love the bloat like a sultry great unclean one you are ready to lube up for a long hard ride in passions embrace. That doesn't mean it isn't bloated however, as it is.I dread to imagine what it'll feel like when the new psychic awakening starts to drop. We are already getting day 1 DLC rules so by the time they PA us we may be swimming in our rules bloat.
The problem is and has been they cut down way too much on units rules, made them feel suck, then instead of adding it back in they put them all in strats and the boys. At first it wasn't too bad, but they've grown and will continue to grow and grow and grow.
Smoke launchers shouldn't be a strat, Flakk missiles shouldn't be a strat, etc, etc, some things shouldn't be strats. Some units should be buffed with bonuses baked in as opposed to strats pressed to infinity and beyond.
Personally I'd be fine with losing warlord traits and cutting back on relics, ditching most strats but making most units feel intuitive again. ( Hey look we brought enough smoke for everyone again ! ) It's just a little silly to me and I still say before the end of this edition formations are coming back in a big way. They won't be the formations of old though, they'll be these special detachments which will end up as pretty much the same thing.
Saying this is far better than 7th well that is true. However it will most always be true when you take the darkest time/s of 40k and compare it to a mere meh time in 40k. It's easy to look good when comparing yourself to something that sucks.
Like if some random nerd, a zombie and a spider walk into a bar to get a date, all of a sudden even the most unskilled pick up artist will seem like a Don Quan compared to the competition.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline. And less because they are faction A, in a chapter B detachment, in a pure faction A army, with a nearby warlord C wielding Relic D and Buffbot E while using stratagems E, F and G.
I totally agree, I don't like that type of game. Although I know others do.
Tyel wrote: I don't think knowing one faction, and retaining a mental list of commonly used stratagems is *that* difficult.
The problem is there isn't really a common list of strategems.
Sure, I can (and have) produced a cheat sheet of all my commonly used strategems. It's a full A4 page and two thirds of that is strategems that I don't often use but need to know because they'll be super helpful when they are helpful.
But beyond a couple, "character fights after dying" type stuff, there's really nothing in common. When I play other armies I very rarely get hit by a strategem that's similar to my own. Even when the strategem does have shades of similiarity, it's often different enough to be completely different in use.
I quite liked strategems at the start of 8th. They were simple, few, and minor but appreciated buffs. Needless to say, it all got out of hand pretty damn quickly, and although GW has slightly toned it down in 9th it's barely taken the edge off and in some ways they've made it worse. Now there's more strategems tied to niche uses or only certain units which just adds to it all.
Sooo... it's a third of a page of commonly used Strategems and the rest of the page filled with nice ones to know if they ever come up?
I'm not being critical, writing out my unit statlines once helped me memorise them after a decade of not playing. But I would argue that having a few generally useful and then a bunch of useful when they are strats is actually an ideal situation.
If it was just that third, and that third was common to all armies rather than just the specific list that I run, I'd agree.
I should also note that I exclusively play Firstborn, using Primaris would practically double that number.
But those are two thirds are something I need to know, otherwise I'll miss out on that opportunity to get those critical rerolls or whatever.
It's also not just my army, I need to know my opponent's army as well.
Even if my opponent had been super helpful and prepared me a cheat sheet as well, my cheatsheet wouldn't held my theoretical opposing self much. He wouldn't know the significance of half of those abilities until it was either explained to me or shown to me on the table. Life's too short to explain everything before hand and it's too much to memorise, so we're down to the latter.
However, back in ~5th edition, my opponent would just say "this unit has Rage, the character confers Infiltrate". Cool, I understand entirely because I too have Rage and Infiltrate in various places.
It applies to that specific unit, always and only.
kirotheavenger wrote: If it was just that third, and that third was common to all armies rather than just the specific list that I run, I'd agree.
I should also note that I exclusively play Firstborn, using Primaris would practically double that number.
But those are two thirds are something I need to know, otherwise I'll miss out on that opportunity to get those critical rerolls or whatever.
It's also not just my army, I need to know my opponent's army as well.
Even if my opponent had been super helpful and prepared me a cheat sheet as well, my cheatsheet wouldn't held my theoretical opposing self much. He wouldn't know the significance of half of those abilities until it was either explained to me or shown to me on the table. Life's too short to explain everything before hand and it's too much to memorise, so we're down to the latter.
However, back in ~5th edition, my opponent would just say "this unit has Rage, the character confers Infiltrate". Cool, I understand entirely because I too have Rage and Infiltrate in various places.
It applies to that specific unit, always and only.
Don't try to know and understand everything, it's too much - always has been.
Filter to the important stuff in a useful packet "my Kraken genestealers can cross the board and fight you turn 1" is more useful to the other player than explaining the statline for every unit in the army.
I agree; if you have a good opponent they'll tell you that.
Referencing a recent topic of conversation; are they likely to tell you "my Poxwalkers can throw out a bunch of mortal wounds" at the start?
Probably not, because that ability generally isnt that strong. Until it is. And now they've munched through your Terminator squad and you didn't even see it coming.
So it's not a silver bullet.
I don't even know my army well enough, i still have games where I realise later "oh gak, i had that really niche ability that would have been super useful in that moment!".
If I can't remember all of that how the hell is my opponent, who likely has never played my army before and won't again for at least four months, going to know what's going on?
Referencing a recent topic of conversation; are they likely to tell you "my Poxwalkers can throw out a bunch of mortal wounds" at the start?
Probably not, because that ability generally isnt that strong. Until it is. And now they've munched through your Terminator squad and you didn't even see it coming.
So it's not a silver bullet.
I don't even know my army well enough, i still have games where I realise later "oh gak, i had that really niche ability that would have been super useful in that moment!".
If I can't remember all of that how the hell is my opponent, who likely has never played my army before and won't again for at least four months, going to know what's going on?
They aren't going to know everything. But that's always going to be true of every game. Random chance is only going to add to that
It's seemed odd to me that we don't consider how much we learn about sub-faction choices. Classic example is BR/VH lists telling people where a unit will/should be going
Disagree with basically all of that (except the idea that warlord traits should go away).
They aren't Warhammer at its core. They're bolt on additions on bolt on additions on bolt on additions to a system that at its core is relatively simple. And doesn't need all that crap.
Whatever '40K wanted to be' (and I suspect you'll get 40K answers to that question), it isn't a leaning pile of bloat.
What you find fun and competent just gets a cocked eyebrow from me.
What brings people to Warhammer? What keeps them?
Would 40K be more or less fun if CSM with straight a copy of SM, but with literally just spikes ( as the meme goes )?
AngryAngel80 wrote: If someone is really arguing that 40k is not super bloated and heading into the range of megabloat town, I think we are looking at a different game.
You can like the bloat, you can love the bloat like a sultry great unclean one you are ready to lube up for a long hard ride in passions embrace. That doesn't mean it isn't bloated however, as it is.I dread to imagine what it'll feel like when the new psychic awakening starts to drop. We are already getting day 1 DLC rules so by the time they PA us we may be swimming in our rules bloat.
The problem is and has been they cut down way too much on units rules, made them feel suck, then instead of adding it back in they put them all in strats and the boys. At first it wasn't too bad, but they've grown and will continue to grow and grow and grow.
Smoke launchers shouldn't be a strat, Flakk missiles shouldn't be a strat, etc, etc, some things shouldn't be strats. Some units should be buffed with bonuses baked in as opposed to strats pressed to infinity and beyond.
Personally I'd be fine with losing warlord traits and cutting back on relics, ditching most strats but making most units feel intuitive again. ( Hey look we brought enough smoke for everyone again ! ) It's just a little silly to me and I still say before the end of this edition formations are coming back in a big way. They won't be the formations of old though, they'll be these special detachments which will end up as pretty much the same thing.
Saying this is far better than 7th well that is true. However it will most always be true when you take the darkest time/s of 40k and compare it to a mere meh time in 40k. It's easy to look good when comparing yourself to something that sucks.
Like if some random nerd, a zombie and a spider walk into a bar to get a date, all of a sudden even the most unskilled pick up artist will seem like a Don Quan compared to the competition.
Bloat is an accurate term, but it also feels loaded. It carries with it the connotation that these rules don't have something to offer the player.
So, I suppose I like bloat. I will enjoy it more if it offers me the opportunity to field an army that is evocative of the mental picture of my dudesmen.
Relics / Wargear has always been crucial to building that personalized feeling. WLTs are just an extension of that.
Totally disagree about Smokescreen. It is an actual strategic choice to make rather than an all or nothing that was almost never worth using. I feel similarly about Flakk. You could make it an upgrade, but then people aren't going to take it on the off chance there is an aircraft to shoot. Now they can still listbuild and reserve the resources needed should the cause arise.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...
Totally disagree about Smokescreen. It is an actual strategic choice to make rather than an all or nothing that was almost never worth using. I feel similarly about Flakk. You could make it an upgrade, but then people aren't going to take it on the off chance there is an aircraft to shoot. Now they can still listbuild and reserve the resources needed should the cause arise...
Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally? Back when the Vehicle Damage Chart was a thing, it was great for protecting vehicles that were repositioning and either moved too fast to fire or couldn't fire effectively (out of range, under a to-hit malus, etc), or for vehicles that had taken some damage but would be fine next turn if nothing worse happened (Shaken/Stunned). Making it a strat just means you have to pay twice for it, once when adding the vehicle to the list and then again to use it (and if you think there was little point using smoke when it was wargear, why would having to pay twice for it now that its a strat make it more attractive?).
I do agree with you re: Flakk, but I think there are more options than "have it as a Strat" or "have it as an upgrade". It could be a standard option a la Frag/Krak, or it could be limited to special weapons systems that get it for free. GW could also take a page out of older editions and lock Super-heavy/Lord of War/Flyer to lists over, say, 1500 or 2000 pts - that wouldn't explicitly solve the "do I buy Flakk on the off-chance I see a flyer or save the points and hope I don't", but it would remove the concerns in smaller lists where the flakk upgrade takes up a bigger chunk of the list.
Wide ability to find oponnents and places to play. Large community that can do promo work for free. And the investment of both time and money makes people stay for a very long time. In case of people that started at the same time as me, most of the people stayed till the end of 8th ed. They more or less quit, when they were face with the prospect of being forced to buy 6-9 attack bikes, two units of venguard vets as blade guards were impossible to get here, and all their intercessors, centurions, eliminators etc were suddenly something you never want to use in an army. The prospect of having to rebuy the entire army, or having an army that no longer works, like it was in case of IG and Tau players, was the thing that made people quit. Before good or bad balance people played with the 2000pts they had.
Wide ability to find oponnents and places to play. Large community that can do promo work for free. And the investment of both time and money makes people stay for a very long time. In case of people that started at the same time as me, most of the people stayed till the end of 8th ed. They more or less quit, when they were face with the prospect of being forced to buy 6-9 attack bikes, two units of venguard vets as blade guards were impossible to get here, and all their intercessors, centurions, eliminators etc were suddenly something you never want to use in an army. The prospect of having to rebuy the entire army, or having an army that no longer works, like it was in case of IG and Tau players, was the thing that made people quit. Before good or bad balance people played with the 2000pts they had.
Ok and what makes someone stay when they haven't been chewing on Dakka cynicism for their whole life? I'll bet you that people can still use Intercessors, Centurions, and Eliminators just fine. Maybe people should stop following the flavor of the month and noodle out how to make their current army work with the least number of changes.
Dark Angels - the king of MM attack bikes is running an under 50% WR most of the time.
Wide ability to find oponnents and places to play. Large community that can do promo work for free. And the investment of both time and money makes people stay for a very long time. In case of people that started at the same time as me, most of the people stayed till the end of 8th ed. They more or less quit, when they were face with the prospect of being forced to buy 6-9 attack bikes, two units of venguard vets as blade guards were impossible to get here, and all their intercessors, centurions, eliminators etc were suddenly something you never want to use in an army. The prospect of having to rebuy the entire army, or having an army that no longer works, like it was in case of IG and Tau players, was the thing that made people quit. Before good or bad balance people played with the 2000pts they had.
Ok and what makes someone stay when they haven't been chewing on Dakka cynicism for their whole life? I'll bet you that people can still use Intercessors, Centurions, and Eliminators just fine. Maybe people should stop following the flavor of the month and noodle out how to make their current army work with the least number of changes.
Dark Angels - the king of MM attack bikes is running an under 50% WR most of the time.
Nah dude. you will legit lose for taking centurians. The other 2 are good enough to take though.
If you get tabled a few times, there is very little reason to drive the bus to the other town over, to hope to find an opponent, who will beat your army, because his army works better.
And I am talking about people in general here. You don't think, that I with my GK termintor army, was following the flavour of the month.
As attack bikes comment goes, some sort of melta is needed. We didn't get indomitus here. And the MM bikes worked perfectly fine against most armies. Same way venguard vets did, instead of blade guards.
In the end it comes down to this. In places where people can afford 1 army most of the time, and collecting one takes a year or more, the prospect of rebuying an army, just so it gets nerfs or stays bad, is not something that entices people that played an entire edition already. And bit turn over of new players doesn't even seem to be a very my part of the world specific thing. When your 15 you would rather get a PC or a consol, then pay the same money for models and be forced to paint them against, just to not auto lose because of the core rules. I guess it is different when you are late 20s or 30+year old. But I really don't care much about people twice my age, their problems are not my, and my problems aren't theirs.
Karol wrote: If you get tabled a few times, there is very little reason to drive the bus to the other town over, to hope to find an opponent, who will beat your army, because his army works better.
And I am talking about people in general here. You don't think, that I with my GK termintor army, was following the flavour of the month.
As attack bikes comment goes, some sort of melta is needed. We didn't get indomitus here. And the MM bikes worked perfectly fine against most armies. Same way venguard vets did, instead of blade guards.
In the end it comes down to this. In places where people can afford 1 army most of the time, and collecting one takes a year or more, the prospect of rebuying an army, just so it gets nerfs or stays bad, is not something that entices people that played an entire edition already. And bit turn over of new players doesn't even seem to be a very my part of the world specific thing. When your 15 you would rather get a PC or a consol, then pay the same money for models and be forced to paint them against, just to not auto lose because of the core rules. I guess it is different when you are late 20s or 30+year old. But I really don't care much about people twice my age, their problems are not my, and my problems aren't theirs.
The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
"Everyone used to play with the 2k points they had (except those times that I claimed all my opponents had the perfect fotm meta eldar army) but once space marines went from 65% wr to 50% wr we...we...sniffle...just couldnt PLAY anymore.."
Daedalus81 wrote: ...Maybe people should stop following the flavor of the month and noodle out how to make their current army work with the least number of changes...
I had five armies at the start of 8th. The "least number of changes" for every one of them was "throw that garbage out and buy a different army of models you don't like."
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the_scotsman wrote: "Everyone used to play with the 2k points they had (except those times that I claimed all my opponents had the perfect fotm meta eldar army) but once space marines went from 65% wr to 50% wr we...we...sniffle...just couldnt PLAY anymore.."
Winrate can go feth itself. I'd settle for my Deathwatch army being anything other than a slightly more complicated way to be mathematically equivalent to playing Space Marines with no Chapter Tactics.
waefre_1 wrote: Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally?
That's a tactical choice, not a strategic one. It'd be strategic if you had planned it out ahead of time.
And it doesn't make sense that only one unit can use their smoke launchers at a time.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
You mean the same 8th/9th that has a mission format that allows you to win games merely by taking up board space?
Sure it won't be easy, but you can win games without killing a single model.
waefre_1 wrote: Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally?
That's a tactical choice, not a strategic one. It'd be strategic if you had planned it out ahead of time.
waefre_1 wrote: ...it was great for protecting vehicles that were repositioning and either moved too fast to fire or couldn't fire effectively (out of range, under a to-hit malus, etc)...
I included that portion to cover both "Oh gak, I'm out of targets! Better book it to the other flank!" and stuff like APC rushes or covering for short-range assault vehicles where you plan to use the smoke launchers (eg. suicide Hellhouds/Heavy Flamer Sentinels that you know won't be in range T1). Also, that was the terminology Daedalus used, and I didn't feel like quibbling over that in the response.
H.B.M.C. wrote: And it doesn't make sense that only one unit can use their smoke launchers at a time.
I agree. I think anything that is a piece of kit being used as intended shouldn't be a strat (in general, at least - throwing a single grenade has no business being a strat, but a strat to have a whole squad throw grenades at least has some argument in its favor), and both smoke launchers and flakk missiles fall squarely in that category.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
You mean the same 8th/9th that has a mission format that allows you to win games merely by taking up board space?
Sure it won't be easy, but you can win games without killing a single model.
Not if you bring bad models. If you try to take up space with the kind of stuff that's horrendously squishy for its cost that makes up my minis collection you can take up space until you get tabled on or about turn three. Two, if your opponent got the first go and is playing heavy Deep Strike.
I think to a certain extent, I would agree with the opening poster. While some units are more guilty of all the buff stacking than others. But with each 9th edition codex release, we do see more and more rules getting added to each new 9th ed army. And increasingly, it seems like all the news special rules given to the newer armies makes any one unit potentially really scary.
So, if you are the sort that is literally following 40k news and all new releases closely, you sort of know some of the newest combos and hot armies that are coming out. But it would still be a challenge to know the tricks of all the possible 40k armies out there.
A newbie or casual player would just struggle though, especially if facing the newer 9th ed codexes. Like he looks at a 20 man ranger or vanguard blob and thinks, they are toughness 3 troops, they are probably just there for primary objective holding. Then they are shocked when that unit uses one or two strategems and literally shoots his most elite unit off the board. And then turn 2 a 20 man blob teleports to his backlines and again obliterates stuff. They see an admech tank, and two units of ironstriders, and they shoot the tank instead. Then they are shocked when the ironstriders obliterate their anti tank with a few strategems.
Same against other newer 9th ed codexes. Like a newbie wouldn't think Drukhair was scary. Because it just looks like mostly transports on turn 1. Then they are shocked when those transportt darklances kill their anti tank and they are further shocked when all the stuff inside charges out so far on turn 2, and even one single unit of wyches can murder so much stuff on the charge and then they get tabled by turn 3.
The more special rules they add on, the harder newbies and casuals are going to find it play against a seasoned 40k player. They simply have no idea how lethal or how tanky some innocent looking units are, or how some strategems can literally wreck their entire strategy. Like even if you look at Elite units. A 3 man Bladeguard squad is just 3 models. But with Transhuman and backed up by support, I think a newbie could easily underestimate how hard it is to kill even 3 transhuman Bladeguard. Or like against DG, like hey, that's just 3 Deathshroud (3 models), it can't be that scary! Then that 3 Deathshroud murder their unit.
Casuals and newbies are likely to forget the special rules to even their own armies. And they will not know or dare to challenge if the other side is using their special rules wrongly. Like applying buffs to the entire army even if its not all core units, applying buffs to characters, or whatever type those rules are supposed to apply to.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline.
I get where this is coming from, but such a game would almost exclusively decide the game by listbuilding and dice, with very little player agency.
And less because they are faction A, in a chapter B detachment, in a pure faction A army, with a nearby warlord C wielding Relic D and Buffbot E while using stratagems E, F and G.
For the first part - marines already had chapter traits as long as I can remember. The only difference is that everyone gets them now. It's also worth noting that for the majority of games people aren't mixing factions or sub-factions in 9th.
For the later part it's also very similar - there is a reason why people keep point to two 8th edition codices for an example. The problem has been acknowledged and is being solved by GW with the 9th edition, with a movement speed of d6 and halved advances.
In most games with DG you dedicate a buff character to a unit and they stick with that unit for most of the game unless they get wiped out or the situation makes a jump to another unit necessary - much like ICs operated since 5th, with the exception that not every character that couldn't join units was automatically garbage tier. Of course, there are situations where a chaos lord buffs a helbrute and two units of plague marines for a turn, this is far from the norm.
And while you could pile on tons and tons of stratagems to crank up a unit's damage, most of those stratagems provide very minor buffs or are 2CP now. CP are much better used to react to your opponent's actions than blown on flat damage boosts.
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Eldenfirefly wrote: Same against other newer 9th ed codexes. Like a newbie wouldn't think Drukhair was scary. Because it just looks like mostly transports on turn 1. Then they are shocked when those transportt darklances kill their anti tank and they are further shocked when all the stuff inside charges out so far on turn 2, and even one single unit of wyches can murder so much stuff on the charge and then they get tabled by turn 3.
The more special rules they add on, the harder newbies and casuals are going to find it play against a seasoned 40k player. They simply have no idea how lethal or how tanky some innocent looking units are, or how some strategems can literally wreck their entire strategy. Like even if you look at Elite units. A 3 man Bladeguard squad is just 3 models. But with Transhuman and backed up by support, I think a newbie could easily underestimate how hard it is to kill even 3 transhuman Bladeguard. Or like against DG, like hey, that's just 3 Deathshroud (3 models), it can't be that scary! Then that 3 Deathshroud murder their unit.
None of those examples have anything to do with stacking buffs, my friend. Raiders, Wyches and Deathshroud get their powers from nothing but their stats blocks, and transhuman is a single stratagem.
To be fair Wyches have a significant amount of stacking buffs that improve their base values: Combat Drug, Power From Pain effect, Blade Artists, Wych Cult Obsession, the eventual upgrade to Bloodbrides and possible auras from some characters or the cronos. Plus some stratagems.
Same against other newer 9th ed codexes. Like a newbie wouldn't think Drukhair was scary. Because it just looks like mostly transports on turn 1. Then they are shocked when those transportt darklances kill their anti tank and they are further shocked when all the stuff inside charges out so far on turn 2, and even one single unit of wyches can murder so much stuff on the charge and then they get tabled by turn 3.
A single lance doesn't kill anything valuable, and by this logic a razorback with twin lascannon should be extremely scary. Wyches are a glass cannon unit, don't forget that we're talking about a unit that costs 100-150 points, depending on the upgrades, and has 10W T3 6++ (4++ in combat); it's extremely easy to shoot it off the board or significantly cripple it at least.
Blackie wrote: To be fair Wyches have a significant amount of stacking buffs that improve their base values: Combat Drug, Power From Pain effect, Blade Artists, Wych Cult Obsession, the eventual upgrade to Bloodbrides and possible auras from some characters or the cronos. Plus some stratagems.
I've played quite a few games against drukhari recently and not once did any of the units need a stratagem to kill my stuff.
Almost all the other things have been available to them since 5th, only blade artist and obsessions are new.
True, although the effects from both Power From Pain and the Bloodbrides upgrade changed significantly from previous editions. Combat Drugs have almost the same effects as in the past but the mechanics to choose them have changed.
Art of the Kill from Book of Rust is a very powerful stratagem on wyches (re-roll all wound rolls for 2CPs or 3 if the unit is 11+ models), which may have a huge impact if they fight against units with high T, W and saves since wyches typically strike "only" at S4-5 AP-1. Invigorated by Evisceration for 1CP, also from the same supplement, can be nice as well (4++ also vs shooting if the unit destroys something in CC). In the codex there's also a stratagem that doubles the Combat Drug effect.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline.
I get where this is coming from, but such a game would almost exclusively decide the game by listbuilding and dice, with very little player agency.
Why do you reckon?
As I see it these rules put the emphasis on list building. Because there's a major difference in output to compiling all your bonuses together and not doing so. (To a degree you have execution on the table, but that's largely just character buffs.)
For example take your properly buffed up unit of Bloody Rose Repentia (I mean you won't have all the buffs they can get - but you'll have a few).
Then... idk, compare with someone who has a Sacred Rose Sister's army cos they painted them that way, and bought some Repentia because they liked the models.
Points are the same but what they can plausibly be expected to accomplish on the table is massively different.
Now you can argue - not unreasonably - that this listbuilding exercise to maximise synergy is part of 40k (or at least being good at 40k). Its not overly difficult to learn - and some people really enjoy it. For instance I do - I like looking through a codex and looking for combos. I don't want it to be got rid of entirely. Special rules are fun.
But at the same time I think there's a question of *how far* the difference should be. Should you have combos that double or triple the offensive output of a unit? The concern would be that GW seems to be exaggerating these rules. I don't think shrinking this gap would reduce player agency. In theory it would allow for less cookie cutter builds and more varied meta. It should also produce an easier to balance game.
Sure, I can (and have) produced a cheat sheet of all my commonly used strategems. It's a full A4 page and two thirds of that is strategems that I don't often use but need to know because they'll be super helpful when they are helpful.
But beyond a couple, "character fights after dying" type stuff, there's really nothing in common. When I play other armies I very rarely get hit by a strategem that's similar to my own. Even when the strategem does have shades of similiarity, it's often different enough to be completely different in use.
.
Plus those stratagems aren't always the same. Someone tells you that rule X works just like transhuman phisology, but theirs works for both phases, or comes with additional buffs. So the only thing similar is -3 fails to wound part.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline.
I get where this is coming from, but such a game would almost exclusively decide the game by listbuilding and dice, with very little player agency.
Why do you reckon?
As I see it these rules put the emphasis on list building. Because there's a major difference in output to compiling all your bonuses together and not doing so. (To a degree you have execution on the table, but that's largely just character buffs.)
Both characters and stratagems are conditional. You can plan around super-buffing a unit of melee plague marines (to get away from those 8th edition codices): - Lord (re-roll ones) - Tallyman (+1 to hit) - Pyker (-1 to hit, +1S/+1T) - Foul blightspawn (fight last aura) - Plague surgeon (6+++, heal wounded models) - Bologus putrifier (Mortal Wounds on sixes, better grenades) - Marines with 2 flail of corruption, 2 mace of contagion, 2 great plague cleaver, 2 bubonic axes, an icon and powerfist/sword for the champion. - Plague Marine Champion gets the Plague Bringer relic sword for 1 CP
There are also some stratagems which can be used by those super-plague marines: - Trench Fighters (extra attack with plague knives) - Creeping Blight (6s to wound have AP-4) - Haze of Corruption (excess damage is not lost) - Eternal Hatred (+1 to wound) - The Blightening (3 grenades lose blast, auto-hit and become pistol 6) So, essentially 600+ points of "kills anything it touches" if you invest 8 CP.
Now the game starts. Those marines then get shot off the table, and you can't just switch all those buffs to another unit because those characters can't be everywhere and cannot buff everything. Your opponent can snipe your characters, deny the powers or switch off your auras. Characters get left behind because of bad advance rolls or charges or terrain chokepoints. Your opponent can delay them by calling an orbital bombardment in their path or simply feed that super-block of stuff a few cheap units to delay them or even hand over one or two objectives to them and hold all the others. By the time they actually get to fight anything they don't steam-roll already you might even have run out of CP.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption. What actually happens in a real game is that you pick one character, for example the biologus and stick them with your melee unit. Depending on who you are fighting you might use one of the stratagems to help you with that specific type of opponent (haze vs hordes or hatred vs vehicles, for example). There might be some opportunities where a plague caster or tallyman who is not dedicated to that unit have lost their subjects or just happen to be nearby and buff them as well. But at that point we are no longer talking about list building.
In reality, there is no point in stacking all those buffs, because stacking them makes your army worse, not better. If if your plague marines, repentia unit or ork boyz can in theory one-shot the castellan on the other side of the board, guess what that castellan is going to shoot first? Instead they provide choice - you pick one support character or two and buff them with a stratagem where necessary.
For example take your properly buffed up unit of Bloody Rose Repentia (I mean you won't have all the buffs they can get - but you'll have a few). Then... idk, compare with someone who has a Sacred Rose Sister's army cos they painted them that way, and bought some Repentia because they liked the models.
Points are the same but what they can plausibly be expected to accomplish on the table is massively different.
I don't want to handwave your argument, because it's a valid one, but I do want to point out that painting space marines red has made them more powerful in combat for pretty much all of 40ks history.
That said, I don't play sisters and rarely face them, so I don't know if -1 AP and an extra attack is vastly more powerful for them than it would be for orks or marines. I'll just assume it's in the same ballpark. I'll just say that it should be possible to properly balanced then anyways, if the baseline repentia is a solid assault unit, an extra AP and strength is not going to make them over the top insane everything shredders. In a perfect world, the different orders should all provide benefits of similar power, so the sisters army, as a whole, should be of similar power - one will hit harder in combat, the other ignores attrition, has more miracle dice and better overwatch.
Now you can argue - not unreasonably - that this listbuilding exercise to maximise synergy is part of 40k (or at least being good at 40k). Its not overly difficult to learn - and some people really enjoy it. For instance I do - I like looking through a codex and looking for combos. I don't want it to be got rid of entirely. Special rules are fun.
I'm kind of arguing the opposite though. In older editions most support characters were just unit upgrades bought at the start of the game, now they are separate units and while they often die along with their unit, more often than not you have some of them hanging around on the battlefield with no real job to, resulting in situations where a character just buffs a different unit because theirs is out of targets, the biggest value of a biologus putrefier comes from being able to chuck grenades or where a weird boy and a nob waaagh! banner tag-team a unit of intercessors. Essentially, if you build your list to maximize synergies, you are assuming that everything goes right, but more often than not it doesn't. In 9th I pretty much build 60-70% of my army to follow *The Plan* and the rest is for when everything goes south. I don't need units of 20 poxwalkers to hold objectives if my terminators crush everything in their path, but I as sure as hell need them if my opponent dodged the wall of cataphract armor and wants to take my backfield objectives.
But at the same time I think there's a question of *how far* the difference should be. Should you have combos that double or triple the offensive output of a unit? The concern would be that GW seems to be exaggerating these rules. I don't think shrinking this gap would reduce player agency. In theory it would allow for less cookie cutter builds and more varied meta. It should also produce an easier to balance game.
It is worth noting that all the examples in this thread are melee units. Even if you can buff your unit to ten times its output, it doesn't really matter when you can't apply all that damage or it is lost to overkill. There also is the cost of opportunity to consider when you blow that many points and CP on one combo - spreading those out will likely add up to a much better result. GW is cracking down hard on stacking ranged buffs and units that can very reliably apply their combat damage (good riddance, Smash Captains). As long as there is counter-play beyond "hope for dice" available to your opponent, I don't see an issue with stacking buffs.
The problem with balancing these buff-bombs is their power can vary dramatically between competitive and casual play.
A casual player is unlikely to get the perfect buff combination, although its possible they will.
A tournament player almost certainly will.
40k is stuck catering to audiences with wildly different expectations; if you match balance for tournament players and assume every unit is going to have the optimum buffs, casual players will suffer.
Or vice versa.
As someone who runs VH Repentia (lol) unbuffed they still work in a casual setting, they aren't top table and require a bit more judgement to use. But still work.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline.
I get where this is coming from, but such a game would almost exclusively decide the game by listbuilding and dice, with very little player agency.
Why do you reckon?
As I see it these rules put the emphasis on list building. Because there's a major difference in output to compiling all your bonuses together and not doing so. (To a degree you have execution on the table, but that's largely just character buffs.)
Both characters and stratagems are conditional. You can plan around super-buffing a unit of melee plague marines (to get away from those 8th edition codices):
- Lord (re-roll ones)
- Tallyman (+1 to hit)
- Pyker (-1 to hit, +1S/+1T)
- Foul blightspawn (fight last aura)
- Plague surgeon (6+++, heal wounded models)
- Bologus putrifier (Mortal Wounds on sixes, better grenades)
- Marines with 2 flail of corruption, 2 mace of contagion, 2 great plague cleaver, 2 bubonic axes, an icon and powerfist/sword for the champion.
- Plague Marine Champion gets the Plague Bringer relic sword for 1 CP
There are also some stratagems which can be used by those super-plague marines:
- Trench Fighters (extra attack with plague knives)
- Creeping Blight (6s to wound have AP-4)
- Haze of Corruption (excess damage is not lost)
- Eternal Hatred (+1 to wound)
- The Blightening (3 grenades lose blast, auto-hit and become pistol 6)
So, essentially 600+ points of "kills anything it touches" if you invest 8 CP.
Now the game starts. Those marines then get shot off the table, and you can't just switch all those buffs to another unit because those characters can't be everywhere and cannot buff everything. Your opponent can snipe your characters, deny the powers or switch off your auras. Characters get left behind because of bad advance rolls or charges or terrain chokepoints. Your opponent can delay them by calling an orbital bombardment in their path or simply feed that super-block of stuff a few cheap units to delay them or even hand over one or two objectives to them and hold all the others. By the time they actually get to fight anything they don't steam-roll already you might even have run out of CP.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption. What actually happens in a real game is that you pick one character, for example the biologus and stick them with your melee unit. Depending on who you are fighting you might use one of the stratagems to help you with that specific type of opponent (haze vs hordes or hatred vs vehicles, for example).
There might be some opportunities where a plague caster or tallyman who is not dedicated to that unit have lost their subjects or just happen to be nearby and buff them as well. But at that point we are no longer talking about list building.
In reality, there is no point in stacking all those buffs, because stacking them makes your army worse, not better. If if your plague marines, repentia unit or ork boyz can in theory one-shot the castellan on the other side of the board, guess what that castellan is going to shoot first?
Instead they provide choice - you pick one support character or two and buff them with a stratagem where necessary.
For example take your properly buffed up unit of Bloody Rose Repentia (I mean you won't have all the buffs they can get - but you'll have a few).
Then... idk, compare with someone who has a Sacred Rose Sister's army cos they painted them that way, and bought some Repentia because they liked the models.
Points are the same but what they can plausibly be expected to accomplish on the table is massively different.
I don't want to handwave your argument, because it's a valid one, but I do want to point out that painting space marines red has made them more powerful in combat for pretty much all of 40ks history.
That said, I don't play sisters and rarely face them, so I don't know if -1 AP and an extra attack is vastly more powerful for them than it would be for orks or marines. I'll just assume it's in the same ballpark.
I'll just say that it should be possible to properly balanced then anyways, if the baseline repentia is a solid assault unit, an extra AP and strength is not going to make them over the top insane everything shredders. In a perfect world, the different orders should all provide benefits of similar power, so the sisters army, as a whole, should be of similar power - one will hit harder in combat, the other ignores attrition, has more miracle dice and better overwatch.
Now you can argue - not unreasonably - that this listbuilding exercise to maximise synergy is part of 40k (or at least being good at 40k). Its not overly difficult to learn - and some people really enjoy it. For instance I do - I like looking through a codex and looking for combos. I don't want it to be got rid of entirely. Special rules are fun.
I'm kind of arguing the opposite though. In older editions most support characters were just unit upgrades bought at the start of the game, now they are separate units and while they often die along with their unit, more often than not you have some of them hanging around on the battlefield with no real job to, resulting in situations where a character just buffs a different unit because theirs is out of targets, the biggest value of a biologus putrefier comes from being able to chuck grenades or where a weird boy and a nob waaagh! banner tag-team a unit of intercessors.
Essentially, if you build your list to maximize synergies, you are assuming that everything goes right, but more often than not it doesn't. In 9th I pretty much build 60-70% of my army to follow *The Plan* and the rest is for when everything goes south. I don't need units of 20 poxwalkers to hold objectives if my terminators crush everything in their path, but I as sure as hell need them if my opponent dodged the wall of cataphract armor and wants to take my backfield objectives.
But at the same time I think there's a question of *how far* the difference should be. Should you have combos that double or triple the offensive output of a unit? The concern would be that GW seems to be exaggerating these rules. I don't think shrinking this gap would reduce player agency. In theory it would allow for less cookie cutter builds and more varied meta. It should also produce an easier to balance game.
It is worth noting that all the examples in this thread are melee units. Even if you can buff your unit to ten times its output, it doesn't really matter when you can't apply all that damage or it is lost to overkill. There also is the cost of opportunity to consider when you blow that many points and CP on one combo - spreading those out will likely add up to a much better result.
GW is cracking down hard on stacking ranged buffs and units that can very reliably apply their combat damage (good riddance, Smash Captains). As long as there is counter-play beyond "hope for dice" available to your opponent, I don't see an issue with stacking buffs.
This should be required reading.
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kirotheavenger wrote: The problem with balancing these buff-bombs is their power can vary dramatically between competitive and casual play.
A casual player is unlikely to get the perfect buff combination, although its possible they will.
A tournament player almost certainly will.
40k is stuck catering to audiences with wildly different expectations; if you match balance for tournament players and assume every unit is going to have the optimum buffs, casual players will suffer.
Or vice versa.
Being casual doesn't mean they're incapable of learning and growth. That experience should spur a renewed vigor to go back to the drawing table.
kirotheavenger wrote: The problem with balancing these buff-bombs is their power can vary dramatically between competitive and casual play.
A casual player is unlikely to get the perfect buff combination, although its possible they will.
A tournament player almost certainly will.
You got it backwards.
A tournament player will almost definitely dismantle such a combo and you will auto-lose.
A casual player is less likely to know how to counter such things, but they are also less likely to face one. Even in the worst case, these combos are still one-trick ponies.
In the end, an army that is aiming to stack that many buffs on one unit is extremely weak on the table.
Tyel wrote: I think its fair to say some people (I'd probably number amongst them) would prefer unit's "power" to be rooted in their statline and their weapons statline.
I get where this is coming from, but such a game would almost exclusively decide the game by listbuilding and dice, with very little player agency.
Why do you reckon?
As I see it these rules put the emphasis on list building. Because there's a major difference in output to compiling all your bonuses together and not doing so. (To a degree you have execution on the table, but that's largely just character buffs.)
Both characters and stratagems are conditional. You can plan around super-buffing a unit of melee plague marines (to get away from those 8th edition codices):
- Lord (re-roll ones)
- Tallyman (+1 to hit)
- Pyker (-1 to hit, +1S/+1T)
- Foul blightspawn (fight last aura)
- Plague surgeon (6+++, heal wounded models)
- Bologus putrifier (Mortal Wounds on sixes, better grenades)
- Marines with 2 flail of corruption, 2 mace of contagion, 2 great plague cleaver, 2 bubonic axes, an icon and powerfist/sword for the champion.
- Plague Marine Champion gets the Plague Bringer relic sword for 1 CP
There are also some stratagems which can be used by those super-plague marines:
- Trench Fighters (extra attack with plague knives)
- Creeping Blight (6s to wound have AP-4)
- Haze of Corruption (excess damage is not lost)
- Eternal Hatred (+1 to wound)
- The Blightening (3 grenades lose blast, auto-hit and become pistol 6)
So, essentially 600+ points of "kills anything it touches" if you invest 8 CP.
Now the game starts. Those marines then get shot off the table, and you can't just switch all those buffs to another unit because those characters can't be everywhere and cannot buff everything. Your opponent can snipe your characters, deny the powers or switch off your auras. Characters get left behind because of bad advance rolls or charges or terrain chokepoints. Your opponent can delay them by calling an orbital bombardment in their path or simply feed that super-block of stuff a few cheap units to delay them or even hand over one or two objectives to them and hold all the others. By the time they actually get to fight anything they don't steam-roll already you might even have run out of CP.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption. What actually happens in a real game is that you pick one character, for example the biologus and stick them with your melee unit. Depending on who you are fighting you might use one of the stratagems to help you with that specific type of opponent (haze vs hordes or hatred vs vehicles, for example).
There might be some opportunities where a plague caster or tallyman who is not dedicated to that unit have lost their subjects or just happen to be nearby and buff them as well. But at that point we are no longer talking about list building.
In reality, there is no point in stacking all those buffs, because stacking them makes your army worse, not better. If if your plague marines, repentia unit or ork boyz can in theory one-shot the castellan on the other side of the board, guess what that castellan is going to shoot first?
Instead they provide choice - you pick one support character or two and buff them with a stratagem where necessary.
For example take your properly buffed up unit of Bloody Rose Repentia (I mean you won't have all the buffs they can get - but you'll have a few).
Then... idk, compare with someone who has a Sacred Rose Sister's army cos they painted them that way, and bought some Repentia because they liked the models.
Points are the same but what they can plausibly be expected to accomplish on the table is massively different.
I don't want to handwave your argument, because it's a valid one, but I do want to point out that painting space marines red has made them more powerful in combat for pretty much all of 40ks history.
That said, I don't play sisters and rarely face them, so I don't know if -1 AP and an extra attack is vastly more powerful for them than it would be for orks or marines. I'll just assume it's in the same ballpark.
I'll just say that it should be possible to properly balanced then anyways, if the baseline repentia is a solid assault unit, an extra AP and strength is not going to make them over the top insane everything shredders. In a perfect world, the different orders should all provide benefits of similar power, so the sisters army, as a whole, should be of similar power - one will hit harder in combat, the other ignores attrition, has more miracle dice and better overwatch.
Now you can argue - not unreasonably - that this listbuilding exercise to maximise synergy is part of 40k (or at least being good at 40k). Its not overly difficult to learn - and some people really enjoy it. For instance I do - I like looking through a codex and looking for combos. I don't want it to be got rid of entirely. Special rules are fun.
I'm kind of arguing the opposite though. In older editions most support characters were just unit upgrades bought at the start of the game, now they are separate units and while they often die along with their unit, more often than not you have some of them hanging around on the battlefield with no real job to, resulting in situations where a character just buffs a different unit because theirs is out of targets, the biggest value of a biologus putrefier comes from being able to chuck grenades or where a weird boy and a nob waaagh! banner tag-team a unit of intercessors.
Essentially, if you build your list to maximize synergies, you are assuming that everything goes right, but more often than not it doesn't. In 9th I pretty much build 60-70% of my army to follow *The Plan* and the rest is for when everything goes south. I don't need units of 20 poxwalkers to hold objectives if my terminators crush everything in their path, but I as sure as hell need them if my opponent dodged the wall of cataphract armor and wants to take my backfield objectives.
But at the same time I think there's a question of *how far* the difference should be. Should you have combos that double or triple the offensive output of a unit? The concern would be that GW seems to be exaggerating these rules. I don't think shrinking this gap would reduce player agency. In theory it would allow for less cookie cutter builds and more varied meta. It should also produce an easier to balance game.
It is worth noting that all the examples in this thread are melee units. Even if you can buff your unit to ten times its output, it doesn't really matter when you can't apply all that damage or it is lost to overkill. There also is the cost of opportunity to consider when you blow that many points and CP on one combo - spreading those out will likely add up to a much better result.
GW is cracking down hard on stacking ranged buffs and units that can very reliably apply their combat damage (good riddance, Smash Captains). As long as there is counter-play beyond "hope for dice" available to your opponent, I don't see an issue with stacking buffs.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption.
Basically: Power Pairs > Megabuffstars
Seriously, keeping the buffs small and simple keep you from putting too many eggs in one basket while still adding efficiency to units. It's honestly the better way to approach modern 40k.
The problem is some units don't need supporting characters. They just need one or two strategems to go off, and they still do massive damage.
20 man rangers, two strategems. One to make their guns rapid fire 2, and the other called wrath of mars so that 6s to wound do mortal wounds. Within rapid fire range of a 30 inch gun (which is 15 inches), that 20 man blob will now almost certainly do 6 MW, plus whatever 80 shots of AP 1 is going to do (hint, a lot).
20 man vanguard blob. Use enriched rounds strategem. Fire off your 60 shots and hits of 4 will auto wound. So, without any rerolling or even any support characters. That's still 30 wounds on average dice.
Whatever support they have is just icing on the cake at that point.
Thanks! Dogemata just clicked in my head as a stupid joke I had to make.
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Eldenfirefly wrote: The problem is some units don't need supporting characters. They just need one or two strategems to go off, and they still do massive damage.
20 man rangers, two strategems. One to make their guns rapid fire 2, and the other called wrath of mars so that 6s to wound do mortal wounds. Within rapid fire range of a 30 inch gun (which is 15 inches), that 20 man blob will now almost certainly do 6 MW, plus whatever 80 shots of AP 1 is going to do (hint, a lot).
20 man vanguard blob. Use enriched rounds strategem. Fire off your 60 shots and hits of 4 will auto wound. So, without any rerolling or even any support characters. That's still 30 wounds on average dice.
Whatever support they have is just icing on the cake at that point.
Strats are limited by CP which is a limited resource making it an opportunity cost you need to budget for.
Strats are limited by CP which is a limited resource making it an opportunity cost you need to budget for.
When 1CP for one army does 1MW and 1CP for another army does 2MW then that makes balance more difficult. It also stacks with any other buffs a unit might have. If a 100 pt value unit fights twice then that's one thing, if a 200 pt value unit fights twice then that's a lot better. the same Stratagem used on units from different chapters can have different impacts. Blood Angels smash Captains with relic, WL trait and two different Stratagem buffs getting to swing another time versus a random Ultramarine Captain nobody with no relic or WL trait or other Stratagems, yes that's a problem, even if "CP is a limited resource".
Stacking 3 buffs isn't really that hard, Daemon Prince with Prescience, DS 3 Obliterators near him and use the Slaanesh Stratagem Endless Cacaphony on them to shoot twice. 1 Obliterator inflicts 1x worth of damage on average. Buffed by re-roll 1s is 1,17x, buffed by Prescience is 1,25x, buffed by Endless Cacaphony is 2x. Buff 3 Obliterators with all three and you get 8,75x.
A Chapter Master and Chaplain giving a MM Attack Bike unit a good luck kiss before they go isn't hard to do either and can be done on a unit that is benefitting from a Chapter Tactic and Super Doctrine to make the unit a lot better than its baseline in a multiplicative, not additive way.
If people were really just using their character to buff one unit at a time then buffs could simply work on the same vector or non-multiplicative vectors by making them better at different things, rather than just better. This could mean all SM character giving re-rolls to hit and never bonuses to hit or to wound and never re-roll wounds or extra attacks or it could mean one character buffing damage versus vehicles while another buffed them against monsters or infantry.
Karol wrote: Ah. Thanks for explaining. That does sound powerful. Well at least the game had to be very fast with all armies throwing instant kill on +2 stuff around.
Still must have made people that like to paint really unhappy. paint for 2-3 months, remove it from the table after 5 min on turn 1.
See, the thing is 7th was more absurd on both ends of the spectrum. Offense and defense.
I briefly mentioned Invisibility - that was a psychic power that almost any psyker in the game could attempt to roll for (you used to randomly roll for your powers, so a 2-power psyker would have a bit above a 1/3 chance of getting invis in the partiuclar discipline it was in) and what it did was "the psyker and the unit he is attached to may only be shot with Snap Shots (always only hit on a 6 no matter your BS) and may not be targeted with template weapons"
so if your opponent had a D-cannon, which was a Strength D blast, and you had invisibility, congratulations! You have complete, total immunity to that D cannon as long as he doesn't peril the cast. It just came down to that good good random roll right at the beginning of the game. And people think who goes first in 9th swings the game a lot, LOL.
You also had multiple popular combos that would allow you to get a unit up to a re-rollable 2++ invulnerable save - 35/36 chance to save. So mathmatically, you could get a unit of screamers plus a lord of change to the point where it could literally stand in front of the entire opposing army, tanking all of its fire and doing nothing for a full 6 turns, and have a decent chance of survival.
Invisibility really fethed over my Guard army. Suddenly all my leman russ tanks and artillery was useless. What did I do instead? Saved the points on the Russes, took 3 primaris psykers for my own invisibility, 3 ministorum priests for fearless, took 3 blobs of 50 guardsmen and just annoyed that player.
I remember another time, I bought the hardcopy cards for powers. I asked an opponent if I could just shuffle the cards, have them break it, and then just take the ones I drew. They said yes. I drew invisibility and they literally accused me of cheating. The TO came over and told me I had to roll. So I did, and got invisibility anyway.
I have been playing Kings of War lately and it have shown me that 40k is really bloated. Outside some special characters that might have an unique rule the game have a few pages of Universal special rules that all armies use, one spell list and 2 item lists that are also shared between all factions. Besides some names special characters there are at most 1 rule unique for a faction and that one comes as a unit upgrade for some of the core units of that faction, costs points and usually is as relevant as a point of extra Leadership or extra ap on 6s to wound in 40k.
Like a single Astartes model can have more rules text on them than the 4 different 1500pts armies with literally hundreds of models clogging the table had combined like in a game I played last month. Yet the ratkins/Skaven, orcs, elves and KoM/Empire all felt like 4 different armies while sharing common rules.
Bloated special rules just adds superficial "character" to models and factions. The important part should be in how models are used and feel like on the tabletop. Not what their A4 of special rules tell you. All the extra rules even removes character from certain factions.
Like they have removed a few of the ways Blood Angels could ensure charges from deepstrike and move around the table. In itself it wouldn't be much of a problem but lots of other factions now have access to charge bonuses(+1 to charge and advance abilities are really common) and extra dice on charges. If I understood correctly ad mech can now deepstrike more reliably than Blood Angels with jump packs and also have +1 to wound in combat. White Scars also do not only run over the table faster than Blood Angels but they even deepstrike with Jump packs better. Raven guard also does jump packs better than BA and not just infiltrate better. Only reason BA do any jumping at all is because their unique units (mostly SG are cheap for being such an elite unit) are still good. Here we have rules bloat unintentionally undermining faction identity due to combo stacking making some subfractions do things better than what is part of the primary identity of others.
I would if I could remove like 90% of all the special rules. Be it bolter variations, warlord traits, relics, stratagems, chapter tactics, doctrines or just word salad on the data sheets. Then change stat lines for lots of things instead. Like remove moral mitigation by increasing base leadership, remove shock assault and just add 1 base attack to most marine units, add toughness and wounds to monsters and vehicles and remove most defensive rules they have etc. Then give like 1 rule at most to differentiate elite/special units from the troop equivalents and then a handful of rules, like 5-10 rules in total between stratagems and tactics and not a dozen pages of them, in total to subfractions to make them different from the base faction(that also only get a handful of rules).
If every unit have 5+ rules that modifies a units behaviour from what can be glanced from their statline, how do you indentify what that unit really does and make it different from another unit in another faction that also have a bunch of rules that make them do the same thing just with different names? As it is now it might just be the model and names itself that are different because all the superficial rules just dilutes their flavour from other similar units.
If every unit have 5+ rules that modifies a units behaviour from what can be glanced from their statline, how do you indentify what that unit really does and make it different from another unit in another faction that also have a bunch of rules that make them do the same thing just with different names?
Generaly if you can't find it out on your own, you just check 2-3 big tournaments from 2-3 different countries, and if the top army seem to be running a specific unit in all or most of those events, then you know that it is different from other units, because it is spamed or it is not taken at all, and you know this way, that it is bad. There is really no need to reinvent the wheel each time someone builds an army. There is a ton of people that can do it for you. And as for the how a unit works it is generally very obvious, and for more specific ways of handling a unit, a person can just watch some event streams and showcase games alongside reading some reports. The rest has to be learned by playing.
When 1CP for one army does 1MW and 1CP for another army does 2MW then that makes balance more difficult. It also stacks with any other buffs a unit might have. If a 100 pt value unit fights twice then that's one thing, if a 200 pt value unit fights twice then that's a lot better. the same Stratagem used on units from different chapters can have different impacts. Blood Angels smash Captains with relic, WL trait and two different Stratagem buffs getting to swing another time versus a random Ultramarine Captain nobody with no relic or WL trait or other Stratagems, yes that's a problem, even if "CP is a limited resource".
In theory it shouldn't be a problem. Armies have their own strenghts and weaknesses so it's perfectly reasonable that the same mechanic (Smash Captain for a specific chapter or an equivalent stratagem applied to two different armies) is more powerful for faction A compared to faction B, even way more powerful, as long as the whole set of rules puts both factions on a comparable level.
I mean a BA captain SHOULD be more killy than an ultramarine one as BA have always been close combat oriented marines and one of the most effective chapters in melee, both in rules and lore. Ultramarines should have others strenghts that BA don't get access though.
So the concept isn't a problem, and I actually think it's good as variety is always welcome. Sometimes there are some disparities that have gone too far though, but nothing that really can't be fixed if GW wants to do it.
Perfect balance is impossible to achieve if factions are designed with different rules and stats, we're not playing chess where both players have exactly the same models and exactly the same rules. A reasonable balance is what we're seeking, but "reasonable" is a subjective concept. In fact IMHO we already have it, while for other players the game is extremely unbalanced.
If every unit have 5+ rules that modifies a units behaviour from what can be glanced from their statline, how do you indentify what that unit really does and make it different from another unit in another faction that also have a bunch of rules that make them do the same thing just with different names?
Generaly if you can't find it out on your own, you just check 2-3 big tournaments from 2-3 different countries, and if the top army seem to be running a specific unit in all or most of those events, then you know that it is different from other units, because it is spamed or it is not taken at all, and you know this way, that it is bad. There is really no need to reinvent the wheel each time someone builds an army. There is a ton of people that can do it for you. And as for the how a unit works it is generally very obvious, and for more specific ways of handling a unit, a person can just watch some event streams and showcase games alongside reading some reports. The rest has to be learned by playing.
Or, you just try out yourself what works and accept that you don't always win all the time
I have played almost everything but some of the named characters I don't own from the ork codex at least once, and am quite sure what each unit really does.
Strats are limited by CP which is a limited resource making it an opportunity cost you need to budget for.
When 1CP for one army does 1MW and 1CP for another army does 2MW then that makes balance more difficult. It also stacks with any other buffs a unit might have. If a 100 pt value unit fights twice then that's one thing, if a 200 pt value unit fights twice then that's a lot better. the same Stratagem used on units from different chapters can have different impacts. Blood Angels smash Captains with relic, WL trait and two different Stratagem buffs getting to swing another time versus a random Ultramarine Captain nobody with no relic or WL trait or other Stratagems, yes that's a problem, even if "CP is a limited resource".
With all due respect, but I think this the wrong way of looking at things. It doesn't really matter whether the blood angel captain is doing the exact same amount of damage as the ultramarine captain.
In the end what matters is whether a blood angel army with a captain has the same chance of winning a game as an ultramarine army with a captain. Same goes for the stratagems dealing Mortal wounds, for example it's ok for DG to deal more mortal wounds than others because they tend to have vastly less shooting than other armies.
Stacking 3 buffs isn't really that hard, Daemon Prince with Prescience, DS 3 Obliterators near him and use the Slaanesh Stratagem Endless Cacaphony on them to shoot twice. 1 Obliterator inflicts 1x worth of damage on average. Buffed by re-roll 1s is 1,17x, buffed by Prescience is 1,25x, buffed by Endless Cacaphony is 2x. Buff 3 Obliterators with all three and you get 8,75x.
I think it has been stated multiple times that this kind of stacking is not healthy for the game and unlikely to survive the 9th edition CSM codex. My bet is that Endless Cacophony will be limited to noise marines, if it survives as shoot twice at all.
A Chapter Master and Chaplain giving a MM Attack Bike unit a good luck kiss before they go isn't hard to do either and can be done on a unit that is benefitting from a Chapter Tactic and Super Doctrine to make the unit a lot better than its baseline in a multiplicative, not additive way.
Would you still think this is a problem if those attack bikes were sporting heavy bolters? Or if the buffed unit is any other bike unit? I think the MM is the problem here, not the ability of 200 points of characters doubling the output of a CORE unit.
If people were really just using their character to buff one unit at a time then buffs could simply work on the same vector or non-multiplicative vectors by making them better at different things, rather than just better. This could mean all SM character giving re-rolls to hit and never bonuses to hit or to wound and never re-roll wounds or extra attacks or it could mean one character buffing damage versus vehicles while another buffed them against monsters or infantry.
Multiplicative buffs are fine if the factor is low enough. With cacophony out of the picture, prescience, chaos lord aura and VotLW would end up at significantly less than double damage, for quite a huge investment (two HQs and 2CP according to Codex: DG).
You know that is something someone that owns a FLGS or GW stock would say.
Just buy 6k of models and find out if it works, or if it doesn't. Not a problem when most of the stuff works and you end up with an army, or even multiple armies to play with. It is a totaly different can of worms, when you end up twice or three times as much money spend as someone with one lists and face the harsh truth of , this faction was not ment for this edition. And that is assuming the army has extra stuff to buy. How many knights does a knight player need ? For custodes and harlequins the armies more or less come pre build. And it is nice that this edition both armies work well.
Plus there is also the end game of collecting an army over the regular edition build, and not being happy with it for years, and then GW pulling a bretonia on you. I can only imagine how someone who spend a few thousand dollars on GW models and books, because they like knights, feels after their army gets squated with no warrning too.
Karol wrote: You know that is something someone that owns a FLGS or GW stock would say.
Just buy 6k of models and find out if it works, or if it doesn't. Not a problem when most of the stuff works and you end up with an army, or even multiple armies to play with. It is a totaly different can of worms, when you end up twice or three times as much money spend as someone with one lists and face the harsh truth of , this faction was not ment for this edition. And that is assuming the army has extra stuff to buy. How many knights does a knight player need ? For custodes and harlequins the armies more or less come pre build. And it is nice that this edition both armies work well.
Plus there is also the end game of collecting an army over the regular edition build, and not being happy with it for years, and then GW pulling a bretonia on you. I can only imagine how someone who spend a few thousand dollars on GW models and books, because they like knights, feels after their army gets squated with no warrning too.
TTS is 20€, 10€ if it's on sale which is like every other month.
Borrowing models is free, as is proxying and using card-board cut-outs.
By your own claims, you haven't made a single change to your army ever, so you don't get to complain about your sixth edition army not working in 9th edition.
I can only imagine how someone who spend a few thousand dollars on GW models and books, because they like knights, feels after their army gets squated with no warrning too.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption.
Basically: Power Pairs > Megabuffstars
Seriously, keeping the buffs small and simple keep you from putting too many eggs in one basket while still adding efficiency to units. It's honestly the better way to approach modern 40k.
^this.
If the buff from a particular admech character becomes problematic, that character's points can be increased. If a particular holy order's buff is too powerful, that's also go a point cost.
Admech might be strong (honestly, in the games I've played against them with my less competitive armies I'm not really convinced personally? They seem fine, but my first outing against them I brought GSC and won pretty handily...) but everything in them is at least built with the levers necessary to be balanceable.
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities.
And also really painful for factions where souping in is either encouraged or at least half the army's arsenal, especially with the 9ed objective structure. (Imperial knights being an example of the former, and GSC being an example of the latter.) For knights, while they can function, they really need some form of infantry support to function well, and for GSC, while Brood Brother's have never been especially worth taking, some of these purity rules will really hurt them more.
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities.
And also really painful for factions where souping in is either encouraged or at least half the army's arsenal, especially with the 9ed objective structure. (Imperial knights being an example of the former, and GSC being an example of the latter.) For knights, while they can function, they really need some form of infantry support to function well, and for GSC, while Brood Brother's have never been especially worth taking, some of these purity rules will really hurt them more.
being gsc though the purity bonus will be like:
"if 100% of your army is <cult> keyword and does not contain any GENESTEALERS units, why, because shut up that's why there's no room for genestealers in genestealer cults you dumb idiot, then one PSYKER keyword model in your army can once per game deny 1 additional psychic power, and one model in your army can reroll 1 hit roll once per battle, and your VEHICLE keyword models can move and shoot heavy weapons.
Also, you can take one single Aberrant model at a point value that a sane human being came up with, but you have to use the lobotomized rhesus monkey value for the rest of them."
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities.
And also really painful for factions where souping in is either encouraged or at least half the army's arsenal, especially with the 9ed objective structure. (Imperial knights being an example of the former, and GSC being an example of the latter.) For knights, while they can function, they really need some form of infantry support to function well, and for GSC, while Brood Brother's have never been especially worth taking, some of these purity rules will really hurt them more.
It's worth noting that GW gave AdMech a free pass to bring one knight and similar things have been done for assassins and inquisitors. It's not unlikely that GSC will gain their bonus as long as the entire army is Cult or Blood Brothers.
Both characters and stratagems are conditional. You can plan around super-buffing a unit of melee plague marines (to get away from those 8th edition codices):
Spoiler:
- Lord (re-roll ones) - Tallyman (+1 to hit) - Pyker (-1 to hit, +1S/+1T) - Foul blightspawn (fight last aura) - Plague surgeon (6+++, heal wounded models) - Bologus putrifier (Mortal Wounds on sixes, better grenades) - Marines with 2 flail of corruption, 2 mace of contagion, 2 great plague cleaver, 2 bubonic axes, an icon and powerfist/sword for the champion. - Plague Marine Champion gets the Plague Bringer relic sword for 1 CP
There are also some stratagems which can be used by those super-plague marines: - Trench Fighters (extra attack with plague knives) - Creeping Blight (6s to wound have AP-4) - Haze of Corruption (excess damage is not lost) - Eternal Hatred (+1 to wound) - The Blightening (3 grenades lose blast, auto-hit and become pistol 6) So, essentially 600+ points of "kills anything it touches" if you invest 8 CP.
Now the game starts. Those marines then get shot off the table, and you can't just switch all those buffs to another unit because those characters can't be everywhere and cannot buff everything. Your opponent can snipe your characters, deny the powers or switch off your auras. Characters get left behind because of bad advance rolls or charges or terrain chokepoints. Your opponent can delay them by calling an orbital bombardment in their path or simply feed that super-block of stuff a few cheap units to delay them or even hand over one or two objectives to them and hold all the others. By the time they actually get to fight anything they don't steam-roll already you might even have run out of CP.
So my answer to "how do you balance this?" is "you don't need to". These super-buff constellations look powerful on paper, in a vacuum, but are extremely unwieldy in practice because they are both expensive and vulnerable to disruption. What actually happens in a real game is that you pick one character, for example the biologus and stick them with your melee unit. Depending on who you are fighting you might use one of the stratagems to help you with that specific type of opponent (haze vs hordes or hatred vs vehicles, for example). There might be some opportunities where a plague caster or tallyman who is not dedicated to that unit have lost their subjects or just happen to be nearby and buff them as well. But at that point we are no longer talking about list building.
Most balance discussions focus on comparative points for units. They typically start and stop at the point of list building.
This approach to balance ignores the complexity of the rest of the game. What stands out to me the most is dependencies between units. There are too many situations where removing a key unit diminishes the abilities of the rest of the army, making points comparisons less relevant.
I'm traditionally a Chaos player, since about 6th edition CSM armies have depended on one or more HQs to get any kind of performance out of our troops (Abaddon, Sorcerer, DP, Dark Apostle, etc.) Remove one of them, the performance of the remainder drops heavily in comparison with Imperial counterparts. The design of 9th edition limits the number and type of HQs that can be taken in a CSM detachment. How do you balance for that, where do formations, auras, and tabletop-situations play a role in discussions of balance?
They don't have a place. We ignore them because we can't get past points comparisons between different factions.
Deathwatch are the best place to see this. You can pay the points for very expensive Kill Teams that are every bit as fragile as their standard counterparts in other factions. But the army size is limited, and you *really* need the right mix of buffs / artefacts / Stratagems / placement of cover / execution to be successful with your Deathwatch army.
Deathwatch is not limited to 3 or 4 troop choices, there are permutations of standard line troops that can be used in Kill Teams. Trying to balance the game off points alone is probably impossible so long as Deathwatch exist, they're literally a different army depending on what goes into those Kill Teams.
Which brings up an interesting question. If it's impossible to balance the game based on points, what other metric(s) should be considered for the purpose of balance? If there's not a reliable alternative metric, what should be done? Should DW be taken out of the game because it's not possible to balance? Should auras / effects be eliminated because they throw off points balance?
I don't know. But I don't think it's possible to balance 40k on points alone.
Balance is not a formula that you can solve for the one balanced state.
Balance is a model that needs to be iterated over and over again. Each step either brings you closer or further away from balance, you keep the things that work and change those that don't.
Eventually the game will be sufficiently balanced that the difference will matter no more than dice, player skill or having a good/bad day.
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities.
And also really painful for factions where souping in is either encouraged or at least half the army's arsenal, especially with the 9ed objective structure. (Imperial knights being an example of the former, and GSC being an example of the latter.) For knights, while they can function, they really need some form of infantry support to function well, and for GSC, while Brood Brother's have never been especially worth taking, some of these purity rules will really hurt them more.
It's worth noting that GW gave AdMech a free pass to bring one knight and similar things have been done for assassins and inquisitors. It's not unlikely that GSC will gain their bonus as long as the entire army is Cult or Blood Brothers.
This is mostly a joke, based on the fact that the latest GSC codex essentially took every possible, conceivable design restriction from the entirety of 8th edition and slapped them all onto one of the most limited model ranges in the game.
It was like a weird "best of hits" album of all the arbitrary 8th ed restrictions:
-subfaction traits that are only applicable to one optional upgrade available to one squad
-subfaction traits that don't apply to vehicles, and also don't apply to various random subgroups of units for an extremely shaky "Because Fluff"
-limits on the number of times you can take particular units (i.e. all characters in the codex)
-limits on which units can use the special rules that every unit pays extra points for
-limits on the number of times you can use particular stratagems
I can't wait for GSC to be the last codex of 9th edition, and for GW to leave all those restrictions in place while also applying their hilarious nightmare zone datasheet virus to kits like Atalan Jackals.
Can you fething imagine what the atalan jackal datasheet will look like when GW starts applying the "only what's in the kit" restrictions to them? The Atalan Jackals kit has bits with rules that appear
-in the model's hands
-sculpted onto the model's waist
-in the saddlebags of the bike
-some bits scaled to fit the female models on the sprue, some bits scaled to fit the male models on the sprue
The only element that frustrates me in 9th specifically is the addition of the stupid, stupid purity bonus rules, which are just clear bloat and compound in complexity with the new stanard of every single subfaction trait being 2 separate abilities.
And also really painful for factions where souping in is either encouraged or at least half the army's arsenal, especially with the 9ed objective structure. (Imperial knights being an example of the former, and GSC being an example of the latter.) For knights, while they can function, they really need some form of infantry support to function well, and for GSC, while Brood Brother's have never been especially worth taking, some of these purity rules will really hurt them more.
It's worth noting that GW gave AdMech a free pass to bring one knight and similar things have been done for assassins and inquisitors. It's not unlikely that GSC will gain their bonus as long as the entire army is Cult or Blood Brothers.
If I recall, they still have to pay the three CP, since the strategem that changes it to Admech, rather than ImperialKnights only applies to the stratagem, and not any other rules interactions.
This is mostly a joke, based on the fact that the latest GSC codex essentially took every possible, conceivable design restriction from the entirety of 8th edition and slapped them all onto one of the most limited model ranges in the game.
It was like a weird "best of hits" album of all the arbitrary 8th ed restrictions:
-subfaction traits that are only applicable to one optional upgrade available to one squad
-subfaction traits that don't apply to vehicles, and also don't apply to various random subgroups of units for an extremely shaky "Because Fluff"
-limits on the number of times you can take particular units (i.e. all characters in the codex)
-limits on which units can use the special rules that every unit pays extra points for
-limits on the number of times you can use particular stratagems
I can't wait for GSC to be the last codex of 9th edition, and for GW to leave all those restrictions in place while also applying their hilarious nightmare zone datasheet virus to kits like Atalan Jackals.
Can you fething imagine what the atalan jackal datasheet will look like when GW starts applying the "only what's in the kit" restrictions to them? The Atalan Jackals kit has bits with rules that appear
-in the model's hands
-sculpted onto the model's waist
-in the saddlebags of the bike
-some bits scaled to fit the female models on the sprue, some bits scaled to fit the male models on the sprue
Indeed, it's gonna be great!
Can't wait until we get our obligatory new HQ, to add yet more options to the slot. Not like a hardy Troops option would be appreciated, don't need those at all!
I think you are right that they are trying to pull back on shooting buffs. Its a bit early days - but it looks like Retributors have taken a hit in the new Sisters Codex for instance.
Really I don't think its a balance issue (which I think can be brought into reasonable line via points) but a philosophical one. How powerful should chapter tactics be, how powerful should stratagems be etc. Because you could have a game where most factions approach a 50% win rate with high-impact stratagems and low impact-stratagems.
This is sort of becoming devils advocate because I'm not really bothered either way. I feel GW has tried to balance the 9th chapters more than they did the 8th ones.
Its worth noting that its 9th edition. Retributors can absolutely move and shoot. And if its at something behind dense cover, it doesn't even matter.
And if they're Argent Shroud, it never matters, even if they advance. So if anyone wants to dump the whole hog on mobile Retributors, they absolutely can. And pick up a free reroll per unit as part of the bargain.
Its another unit that benefits heavily from detachments color-coded by role. Red for stabby things, Silver for shooty things.
Voss wrote: Its worth noting that its 9th edition. Retributors can absolutely move and shoot. And if its at something behind dense cover, it doesn't even matter.
And if they're Argent Shroud, it never matters, even if they advance. So if anyone wants to dump the whole hog on mobile Retributors, they absolutely can. And pick up a free reroll per unit as part of the bargain.
Its another unit that benefits heavily from detachments color-coded by role. Red for stabby things, Silver for shooty things.
They can move and shoot but at -1 unless they're Argent Shroud where they can sprint and shoot with no penalty (there are other ways as well, like Heavy Bolter Rets with the bolter minor trait that ignores penalties to hit, but Argent Shroud are the current favorite for people who like their Ret spam.
Honestly I'm more partial to OML but that's because I expect things to die a lot and want more miracle dice than is reasonable in the process.
No, it doesn't, the recent FAQ carves out a special exception for anything arriving as reinforcements and says those never count as being stationary even if they have a rule that says they always do.
yukishiro1 wrote: No, it doesn't, the recent FAQ carves out a special exception for anything arriving as reinforcements and says those never count as being stationary even if they have a rule that says they always do.
9th edition, folks! Ain't it great?
Ah, I missed that. I guess it's to sort out some abuses of some kind. Honestly if they're doing it to balance the game more I can live with it.
You also can't use both cherubins in a single phase now.
I've got my sister's dex yesterday, and there are quite a few nerfs hidden here and there. (There are rules even in the glossary!) Been trying to make some lists (Sacred Rose fan here), and there really is nothing obvious. Feels like the marine dex, where the only thing you know is that non suit vehicles should stay in the book.
Spoletta wrote: You also can't use both cherubins in a single phase now.
I've got my sister's dex yesterday, and there are quite a few nerfs hidden here and there. (There are rules even in the glossary!)
Been trying to make some lists (Sacred Rose fan here), and there really is nothing obvious. Feels like the marine dex, where the only thing you know is that non suit vehicles should stay in the book.
Where does it say you can only use them once per phase? The datasheet says they are once per battle for each one you have.
waefre_1 wrote: Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally?
That's a tactical choice, not a strategic one. It'd be strategic if you had planned it out ahead of time.
waefre_1 wrote: ...it was great for protecting vehicles that were repositioning and either moved too fast to fire or couldn't fire effectively (out of range, under a to-hit malus, etc)...
I included that portion to cover both "Oh gak, I'm out of targets! Better book it to the other flank!" and stuff like APC rushes or covering for short-range assault vehicles where you plan to use the smoke launchers (eg. suicide Hellhouds/Heavy Flamer Sentinels that you know won't be in range T1). Also, that was the terminology Daedalus used, and I didn't feel like quibbling over that in the response.
H.B.M.C. wrote: And it doesn't make sense that only one unit can use their smoke launchers at a time.
I agree. I think anything that is a piece of kit being used as intended shouldn't be a strat (in general, at least - throwing a single grenade has no business being a strat, but a strat to have a whole squad throw grenades at least has some argument in its favor), and both smoke launchers and flakk missiles fall squarely in that category.
Couldn't disagree more that smoke and Flakk should be CP using one unit a turn choices. Sure, keep them as choices to use for CP but why not make them options you can pay for as well. I'd much rather pay for them but not need to spend cp for one vehicle a turn to pop smoke, or one unit to fire at flyers. I'd rather waste the points sometimes than use more precious CP on making sure someone loaded their gear and guns for something that should be able to be plentiful.
waefre_1 wrote: Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally?
That's a tactical choice, not a strategic one. It'd be strategic if you had planned it out ahead of time.
waefre_1 wrote: ...it was great for protecting vehicles that were repositioning and either moved too fast to fire or couldn't fire effectively (out of range, under a to-hit malus, etc)...
I included that portion to cover both "Oh gak, I'm out of targets! Better book it to the other flank!" and stuff like APC rushes or covering for short-range assault vehicles where you plan to use the smoke launchers (eg. suicide Hellhouds/Heavy Flamer Sentinels that you know won't be in range T1). Also, that was the terminology Daedalus used, and I didn't feel like quibbling over that in the response.
H.B.M.C. wrote: And it doesn't make sense that only one unit can use their smoke launchers at a time.
I agree. I think anything that is a piece of kit being used as intended shouldn't be a strat (in general, at least - throwing a single grenade has no business being a strat, but a strat to have a whole squad throw grenades at least has some argument in its favor), and both smoke launchers and flakk missiles fall squarely in that category.
Couldn't disagree more that smoke and Flakk should be CP using one unit a turn choices. Sure, keep them as choices to use for CP but why not make them options you can pay for as well. I'd much rather pay for them but not need to spend cp for one vehicle a turn to pop smoke, or one unit to fire at flyers. I'd rather waste the points sometimes than use more precious CP on making sure someone loaded their gear and guns for something that should be able to be plentiful.
I think mostly its just that current smoke is way way more functional than it used to be on everything that's not a rhino.
I actually use smoke launchers on my gak now. I practically auto-use it since I rarely take more than one vehicle with my deathwatch.
My only guess on why they wanted to make it a strat is they got tired of seeing a mechanized Imperium army (usually Marines) move all their Rhinos up as far as they can in one turn and then popping smoke.
That or because of how many other armies don't have access to something like smoke launchers they wanted it to feel more special.
But that's just a guess, not something I know for sure.
ClockworkZion wrote: My only guess on why they wanted to make it a strat is they got tired of seeing a mechanized Imperium army (usually Marines) move all their Rhinos up as far as they can in one turn and then popping smoke.
That or because of how many other armies don't have access to something like smoke launchers they wanted it to feel more special.
But that's just a guess, not something I know for sure.
Or, because they were just utterly worthless on vehicles that had ANY kind of guns, but it was too potent to allow it to just grant an army-wide once per game -1 to hit for..whatever, five points or something.
IDK, I think a defensive stratagem to punish an opposing army from concentrating fire on a single target is something basically every army should get. Transhuman+Smoke Launchers is great, Lurk in the Shadows+Lightning Reactions for Drukhari is great. Heck, I even like the combo GSC is working with at this point - any INFANTRY unit can pull a "nope you can only shoot me if im closest" and every vehicle can ignore AP-1/AP-2. Less universally useful, but tricksier, and when it does work it works really well.
ClockworkZion wrote: My only guess on why they wanted to make it a strat is they got tired of seeing a mechanized Imperium army (usually Marines) move all their Rhinos up as far as they can in one turn and then popping smoke.
That or because of how many other armies don't have access to something like smoke launchers they wanted it to feel more special.
But that's just a guess, not something I know for sure.
Or, because they were just utterly worthless on vehicles that had ANY kind of guns, but it was too potent to allow it to just grant an army-wide once per game -1 to hit for..whatever, five points or something.
IDK, I think a defensive stratagem to punish an opposing army from concentrating fire on a single target is something basically every army should get. Transhuman+Smoke Launchers is great, Lurk in the Shadows+Lightning Reactions for Drukhari is great. Heck, I even like the combo GSC is working with at this point - any INFANTRY unit can pull a "nope you can only shoot me if im closest" and every vehicle can ignore AP-1/AP-2. Less universally useful, but tricksier, and when it does work it works really well.
Pretty sure the GSC one requires the unit to be wholly within cover, which makes it massively less useful.
I absolutely LOVE that my tanks have their own In Midnight Clad to go along with my infantry now. No one used smoke launchers on anything that actually qualified as a tank, because you didn't want to give up a turn of using all those guns you paid for. Smokescreen is also a good way of increasing the survivability of vehicles in an edition where many are convinced that they are useless. Anything that can help is welcome.
ClockworkZion wrote: My only guess on why they wanted to make it a strat is they got tired of seeing a mechanized Imperium army (usually Marines) move all their Rhinos up as far as they can in one turn and then popping smoke.
That or because of how many other armies don't have access to something like smoke launchers they wanted it to feel more special.
But that's just a guess, not something I know for sure.
Or, because they were just utterly worthless on vehicles that had ANY kind of guns, but it was too potent to allow it to just grant an army-wide once per game -1 to hit for..whatever, five points or something.
IDK, I think a defensive stratagem to punish an opposing army from concentrating fire on a single target is something basically every army should get. Transhuman+Smoke Launchers is great, Lurk in the Shadows+Lightning Reactions for Drukhari is great. Heck, I even like the combo GSC is working with at this point - any INFANTRY unit can pull a "nope you can only shoot me if im closest" and every vehicle can ignore AP-1/AP-2. Less universally useful, but tricksier, and when it does work it works really well.
Pretty sure the GSC one requires the unit to be wholly within cover, which makes it massively less useful.
yep, it does. I dont usually use it for the big huge unit that my opponent is definitely going to be trying to focus fire on, typically its not easy to get them away from being the closest anyway. Typically this gets used to keep a smaller unit that's doing an action or something like a 10-man who has just hopped from a transport and killed something from getting shot.
Voss wrote: Its worth noting that its 9th edition. Retributors can absolutely move and shoot. And if its at something behind dense cover, it doesn't even matter.
And if they're Argent Shroud, it never matters, even if they advance. So if anyone wants to dump the whole hog on mobile Retributors, they absolutely can. And pick up a free reroll per unit as part of the bargain.
Its another unit that benefits heavily from detachments color-coded by role. Red for stabby things, Silver for shooty things.
They can move and shoot but at -1 unless they're Argent Shroud where they can sprint and shoot with no penalty (there are other ways as well, like Heavy Bolter Rets with the bolter minor trait that ignores penalties to hit, but Argent Shroud are the current favorite for people who like their Ret spam.
Honestly I'm more partial to OML but that's because I expect things to die a lot and want more miracle dice than is reasonable in the process.
Yea I don't mind them moving and shooting. Just so long as they need to move and I can put their desired target in a place that gets them out of cover.
Spoletta wrote: You also can't use both cherubins in a single phase now.
I've got my sister's dex yesterday, and there are quite a few nerfs hidden here and there. (There are rules even in the glossary!)
Been trying to make some lists (Sacred Rose fan here), and there really is nothing obvious. Feels like the marine dex, where the only thing you know is that non suit vehicles should stay in the book.
Where does it say you can only use them once per phase? The datasheet says they are once per battle for each one you have.
Mmm, yea, I can't see where that limit is.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Nice. Penitent Engines are 2x5 instead of 3x5 now.
waefre_1 wrote: Using Smoke Launchers was still a strategic choice when it was a piece of wargear, though - do I sacrifice a turn of shooting to protect my vehicle, or do I move/shoot normally?
That's a tactical choice, not a strategic one. It'd be strategic if you had planned it out ahead of time.
waefre_1 wrote: ...it was great for protecting vehicles that were repositioning and either moved too fast to fire or couldn't fire effectively (out of range, under a to-hit malus, etc)...
I included that portion to cover both "Oh gak, I'm out of targets! Better book it to the other flank!" and stuff like APC rushes or covering for short-range assault vehicles where you plan to use the smoke launchers (eg. suicide Hellhouds/Heavy Flamer Sentinels that you know won't be in range T1). Also, that was the terminology Daedalus used, and I didn't feel like quibbling over that in the response.
H.B.M.C. wrote: And it doesn't make sense that only one unit can use their smoke launchers at a time.
I agree. I think anything that is a piece of kit being used as intended shouldn't be a strat (in general, at least - throwing a single grenade has no business being a strat, but a strat to have a whole squad throw grenades at least has some argument in its favor), and both smoke launchers and flakk missiles fall squarely in that category.
Couldn't disagree more that smoke and Flakk should be CP using one unit a turn choices. Sure, keep them as choices to use for CP but why not make them options you can pay for as well. I'd much rather pay for them but not need to spend cp for one vehicle a turn to pop smoke, or one unit to fire at flyers. I'd rather waste the points sometimes than use more precious CP on making sure someone loaded their gear and guns for something that should be able to be plentiful.
That's what I said (or intended to say - apologies if that was unclear). Note the close paren.
Also, I'm genuinely confused how Smoke is better now that its a strat - did some FAQ somewhere change how it worked? Isn't it still "once per game, trade the ability to shoot for enemy fire taking a -1 to hit"?
waefre_1 wrote: Also, I'm genuinely confused how Smoke is better now that its a strat - did some FAQ somewhere change how it worked? Isn't it still "once per game, trade the ability to shoot for enemy fire taking a -1 to hit"?
It is not. You may use it multiple times on the same unit over the course of a game. You still get to shoot.
Spoletta wrote: You also can't use both cherubins in a single phase now.
I've got my sister's dex yesterday, and there are quite a few nerfs hidden here and there. (There are rules even in the glossary!)
Been trying to make some lists (Sacred Rose fan here), and there really is nothing obvious. Feels like the marine dex, where the only thing you know is that non suit vehicles should stay in the book.
Where does it say you can only use them once per phase? The datasheet says they are once per battle for each one you have.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
Man I don't know. I've been as critical of 9th (more the missions than the rules honestly) as anybody, but I do feel like if I bring the worst army I can possibly bring (even one of my armies that doesn't have a 9th codex) I still have a better chance in 9th than I did with some of my strongest armies in 6th/7th.
That was by far the worst. Playing Taudar? The game could be determined by a look-up chart - "Did YOU bring Taudar? if "yes" then see who rolls the dice better. If "no" then go ahead and conceed now because your boned." lol
They weren't the only example but there were so many things that just acted as hard counters to the wrong list. I don't ever feel like there's 0 chance in 9th. I DID feel that way at times in 6th/7th.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
Man I don't know. I've been as critical of 9th (more the missions than the rules honestly) as anybody, but I do feel like if I bring the worst army I can possibly bring (even one of my armies that doesn't have a 9th codex) I still have a better chance in 9th than I did with some of my strongest armies in 6th/7th.
That was by far the worst. Playing Taudar? The game could be determined by a look-up chart - "Did YOU bring Taudar? if "yes" then see who rolls the dice better. If "no" then go ahead and conceed now because your boned." lol
They weren't the only example but there were so many things that just acted as hard counters to the wrong list. I don't ever feel like there's 0 chance in 9th. I DID feel that way at times in 6th/7th.
I mean, sure, it sounds like you've managed to have a different experience than I have, but in 8th and 9th every game I've played has been pretty purely decided by the matchup lookup chart (usually either a "play army X -> you lose" or "play matchup Y -> you lose", not even "who rolled dice better?" )
The bit of the lookup chart I particularly hate is "use Forge World models -> lose"; I like Forge World models.
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
Man I don't know. I've been as critical of 9th (more the missions than the rules honestly) as anybody, but I do feel like if I bring the worst army I can possibly bring (even one of my armies that doesn't have a 9th codex) I still have a better chance in 9th than I did with some of my strongest armies in 6th/7th.
That was by far the worst. Playing Taudar? The game could be determined by a look-up chart - "Did YOU bring Taudar? if "yes" then see who rolls the dice better. If "no" then go ahead and conceed now because your boned." lol
They weren't the only example but there were so many things that just acted as hard counters to the wrong list. I don't ever feel like there's 0 chance in 9th. I DID feel that way at times in 6th/7th.
I mean, sure, it sounds like you've managed to have a different experience than I have, but in 8th and 9th every game I've played has been pretty purely decided by the matchup lookup chart (usually either a "play army X -> you lose" or "play matchup Y -> you lose", not even "who rolled dice better?" )
The bit of the lookup chart I particularly hate is "use Forge World models -> lose"; I like Forge World models.
That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is?
Tycho wrote: ...That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is?
I suspect the difference between me and the people who like 8th/9th better is that I tend to gravitate towards weird edge-case things that nobody at GWHQ has or likes, so they forget they exist and they get no support, and I'm left feeling like I have to sacrifice my creativity and build a netlist if I want to participate. In 7th and before the rules didn't fluctuate wildly on an annual basis and stats/rules/points were often more consistent, so if I had something that had sensible rules once the inertia let it remain functional, while the 8e Indexes didn't provide a stable foundation on which to build in the same way that the older rules did. (I did try building a Primaris army at the beginning of 9th in hopes that GW wouldn't just nerf them immediately, but I made the mistake of picking Deathwatch, so GW almost immediately decided that I needed a slightly more complicated way of playing the game with no Chapter Tactics instead of actual rules.)
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
Man I don't know. I've been as critical of 9th (more the missions than the rules honestly) as anybody, but I do feel like if I bring the worst army I can possibly bring (even one of my armies that doesn't have a 9th codex) I still have a better chance in 9th than I did with some of my strongest armies in 6th/7th.
That was by far the worst. Playing Taudar? The game could be determined by a look-up chart - "Did YOU bring Taudar? if "yes" then see who rolls the dice better. If "no" then go ahead and conceed now because your boned." lol
They weren't the only example but there were so many things that just acted as hard counters to the wrong list. I don't ever feel like there's 0 chance in 9th. I DID feel that way at times in 6th/7th.
I mean, sure, it sounds like you've managed to have a different experience than I have, but in 8th and 9th every game I've played has been pretty purely decided by the matchup lookup chart (usually either a "play army X -> you lose" or "play matchup Y -> you lose", not even "who rolled dice better?" )
The bit of the lookup chart I particularly hate is "use Forge World models -> lose"; I like Forge World models.
...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
the_scotsman wrote: ...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
They're very careful to make sure nothing I own is ever a staple of competitive play. The 30k SM units are either unplayable or don't have rules (for some reason (*cough*nokitnorules*coughcough*) loyalists are allowed to use their Cataphractii and Chaos isn't), the resin Knights are paying a huge tax for being resin, and the Mechanicum stuff straight-up has no rules. WhatFW models are staples of competitive play?
Tycho wrote: ...That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is?
I suspect the difference between me and the people who like 8th/9th better is that I tend to gravitate towards weird edge-case things that nobody at GWHQ has or likes, so they forget they exist and they get no support, and I'm left feeling like I have to sacrifice my creativity and build a netlist if I want to participate. In 7th and before the rules didn't fluctuate wildly on an annual basis and stats/rules/points were often more consistent, so if I had something that had sensible rules once the inertia let it remain functional, while the 8e Indexes didn't provide a stable foundation on which to build in the same way that the older rules did. (I did try building a Primaris army at the beginning of 9th in hopes that GW wouldn't just nerf them immediately, but I made the mistake of picking Deathwatch, so GW almost immediately decided that I needed a slightly more complicated way of playing the game with no Chapter Tactics instead of actual rules.)
What do you try running if you don't mind me asking?
Tycho wrote: ...That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is?
I suspect the difference between me and the people who like 8th/9th better is that I tend to gravitate towards weird edge-case things that nobody at GWHQ has or likes, so they forget they exist and they get no support, and I'm left feeling like I have to sacrifice my creativity and build a netlist if I want to participate. In 7th and before the rules didn't fluctuate wildly on an annual basis and stats/rules/points were often more consistent, so if I had something that had sensible rules once the inertia let it remain functional, while the 8e Indexes didn't provide a stable foundation on which to build in the same way that the older rules did. (I did try building a Primaris army at the beginning of 9th in hopes that GW wouldn't just nerf them immediately, but I made the mistake of picking Deathwatch, so GW almost immediately decided that I needed a slightly more complicated way of playing the game with no Chapter Tactics instead of actual rules.)
What do you try running if you don't mind me asking?
I've sold a lot of this off because I couldn't do what I wanted to with it, but over the course of 8th/9th I've had a Corsairs army (soft-squatted in 8th and hard-squatted in 9th), an Ordo Malleus army (the Inquisition stuff is just useless at this point, so it's half a GK army I can't really use because I want to use the PAGK instead of playing whatever the one Paladin deathstar/Dreadknights netlist GW decided to make actually work is, and half a Guard army I couldn't really use because I refuse to buy a whole new army of Guard vehicles), a Mechanicum/Knights army (which I can't really use without buying a whole new army because GW's decided to fix the army by adding new horrendously expensive kits instead of fixing what was already there, and because the FW Mechanicum stuff never got 8e rules), an Alpha Legion army (which was supposed to be 30k/40k dual-purpose, which isn't possible anymore given how bad the CSM book is if you aren't searching out Daemon-based combo builds), a Thousand Sons army (same), a Deathwatch army (selling that off was more of a ragequit because I hate their 9e supplement), and a Custodes army (which wasn't unplayable, just incredibly random/boring to play).
Daedalus81 wrote: ...The gap between what is bad and what is good isn't the same as previous editions.
It's often much worse now. In older editions I could bring bad models and still play a game (i.e. move models around, throw dice, kill things, and get the general impression I was meaningfully contributing to something), in 8th/9th if you bring bad models you do nothing and then get tabled. The durability gap and the damage gap between bad things and good things is horrendous.
Man I don't know. I've been as critical of 9th (more the missions than the rules honestly) as anybody, but I do feel like if I bring the worst army I can possibly bring (even one of my armies that doesn't have a 9th codex) I still have a better chance in 9th than I did with some of my strongest armies in 6th/7th.
That was by far the worst. Playing Taudar? The game could be determined by a look-up chart - "Did YOU bring Taudar? if "yes" then see who rolls the dice better. If "no" then go ahead and conceed now because your boned." lol
They weren't the only example but there were so many things that just acted as hard counters to the wrong list. I don't ever feel like there's 0 chance in 9th. I DID feel that way at times in 6th/7th.
I mean, sure, it sounds like you've managed to have a different experience than I have, but in 8th and 9th every game I've played has been pretty purely decided by the matchup lookup chart (usually either a "play army X -> you lose" or "play matchup Y -> you lose", not even "who rolled dice better?" )
The bit of the lookup chart I particularly hate is "use Forge World models -> lose"; I like Forge World models.
...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
There are a select few FW things that are good. Everything else tends to be utter crap.
the_scotsman wrote: ...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
They're very careful to make sure nothing I own is ever a staple of competitive play. The 30k SM units are either unplayable or don't have rules (for some reason (*cough*nokitnorules*coughcough*) loyalists are allowed to use their Cataphractii and Chaos isn't), the resin Knights are paying a huge tax for being resin, and the Mechanicum stuff straight-up has no rules. WhatFW models are staples of competitive play?
As far as I recall, wraithseers, hornets, death riders, everything nids, the FW castelian dreads or whatever theyre called, at least a couple of the fw knights, lots of custode stuff...
...my fw knight appeaers to pay a supremely modest tax for the extra gak it gets to do. 30pts more than a warden for 25% more shots, 2 more wounds, and a main sword thats more effective vs heavy infantry.
AnomanderRake wrote: I've sold a lot of this off because I couldn't do what I wanted to with it, but over the course of 8th/9th I've had a Corsairs army (soft-squatted in 8th and hard-squatted in 9th), an Ordo Malleus army (the Inquisition stuff is just useless at this point, so it's half a GK army I can't really use because I want to use the PAGK instead of playing whatever the one Paladin deathstar/Dreadknights netlist GW decided to make actually work is, and half a Guard army I couldn't really use because I refuse to buy a whole new army of Guard vehicles), a Mechanicum/Knights army (which I can't really use without buying a whole new army because GW's decided to fix the army by adding new horrendously expensive kits instead of fixing what was already there, and because the FW Mechanicum stuff never got 8e rules), an Alpha Legion army (which was supposed to be 30k/40k dual-purpose, which isn't possible anymore given how bad the CSM book is if you aren't searching out Daemon-based combo builds), a Thousand Sons army (same), a Deathwatch army (selling that off was more of a ragequit because I hate their 9e supplement), and a Custodes army (which wasn't unplayable, just incredibly random/boring to play).
Thanks. That helps me understand your perspective more. What did you keep? A good portion of those should be reasonable capable armies.
the_scotsman wrote: ...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
They're very careful to make sure nothing I own is ever a staple of competitive play. The 30k SM units are either unplayable or don't have rules (for some reason (*cough*nokitnorules*coughcough*) loyalists are allowed to use their Cataphractii and Chaos isn't), the resin Knights are paying a huge tax for being resin, and the Mechanicum stuff straight-up has no rules. WhatFW models are staples of competitive play?
As far as I recall, wraithseers, hornets, death riders, everything nids, the FW castelian dreads or whatever theyre called, at least a couple of the fw knights, lots of custode stuff...
...my fw knight appeaers to pay a supremely modest tax for the extra gak it gets to do. 30pts more than a warden for 25% more shots, 2 more wounds, and a main sword thats more effective vs heavy infantry.
The Dreadnaughts work great in loyalist Codexes where "Dreadnaught" is a keyword, so there are stratagems that work on them. In Chaos GW has chosen to interpret "Helbrute" as the name of the Helbrute datasheet in the CSM book so the Dreadnaughts get zero stratagems. As to Wraithseers, Hornets, Death Riders, and Tyranid units we're back in "buy a different army to play the game" territory, I sold off my Custodes because they were incredibly boring to play, and I had two of the other FW Knights who were paying a ~100pt handicap for being resin, not that one.
AnomanderRake wrote: I've sold a lot of this off because I couldn't do what I wanted to with it, but over the course of 8th/9th I've had a Corsairs army (soft-squatted in 8th and hard-squatted in 9th), an Ordo Malleus army (the Inquisition stuff is just useless at this point, so it's half a GK army I can't really use because I want to use the PAGK instead of playing whatever the one Paladin deathstar/Dreadknights netlist GW decided to make actually work is, and half a Guard army I couldn't really use because I refuse to buy a whole new army of Guard vehicles), a Mechanicum/Knights army (which I can't really use without buying a whole new army because GW's decided to fix the army by adding new horrendously expensive kits instead of fixing what was already there, and because the FW Mechanicum stuff never got 8e rules), an Alpha Legion army (which was supposed to be 30k/40k dual-purpose, which isn't possible anymore given how bad the CSM book is if you aren't searching out Daemon-based combo builds), a Thousand Sons army (same), a Deathwatch army (selling that off was more of a ragequit because I hate their 9e supplement), and a Custodes army (which wasn't unplayable, just incredibly random/boring to play).
Thanks. That helps me understand your perspective more. What did you keep? A good portion of those should be reasonable capable armies.
Most of what I can still use in 30k (the Mechanicum and the CSM). I'm not planning to come back to playing 9th, but I'd love to hear your logic for how largely mechanized Undivided CSM with no daemons are "reasonably capable"; last time I asked someone how that worked I got a long spiel about abusing the AL closest-target stratagem with magic box terrain that sounded incredibly theorycrafted.
Almost all of your stuff also seems to be lacking their corresponding 9th edition codices, so things might start to look a lot better for you when GK, TS, CSM and Custodes get their books.
My impression of 9th edition codices is that their internal balance has improved by a lot, so you have decent shot at playing good game if you play TAC vs TAC, even if you don't use the most efficient build from the book.
Not Online!!! wrote: I'd not be as optimistic Jid. They already fethed up and we all know how well csm got supported the last time around...
How did they feth up? Because they missed combos in the books? That happens to companies which are hundred times more professional than GW in their rules design - nobody is perfect. The important part is that they fixed it within a reasonable timeframe.
It's also worth noting that many of the problems you read and hear about don't really apply to your regular gaming tables, because people don't just go out, buy and paint huge piles of models that are the flavor of the month. And from what I can tell, AnomanderRake doesn't seem like the kind of guy who is looking for tournament wins.
Every one in our group is happy with their 9th edition codices, a first since ever. The elephant in the room, of course, is the huge gap between 8th and 9th edition codices, but that problem will solve itself eventually.
Not Online!!! wrote: I'd not be as optimistic Jid. They already fethed up and we all know how well csm got supported the last time around...
How did they feth up? Because they missed combos in the books? That happens to companies which are hundred times more professional than GW in their rules design - nobody is perfect. The important part is that they fixed it within a reasonable timeframe.
It's also worth noting that many of the problems you read and hear about don't really apply to your regular gaming tables, because people don't just go out, buy and paint huge piles of models that are the flavor of the month. And from what I can tell, AnomanderRake doesn't seem like the kind of guy who is looking for tournament wins.
Every one in our group is happy with their 9th edition codices, a first since ever. The elephant in the room, of course, is the huge gap between 8th and 9th edition codices, but that problem will solve itself eventually.
Truly? Reasonable timeframe?
Gw already did first day DLC including cut content.
We already had DE and the DLC being of lackluster quality controll like in ye olden day, ie none.
I can guarantee you that if you only have a few comp minded people in a small group that you will see an increase in the power gap that makes casual gaming rather annoying.
And the power gap could've been resolved long time ago, needless to say that minimal board standards and the 9th ruleset are gak especially for more wargame side of players.
there's 0 indication as to what CSM will get that looks even remotly sensible.
There's 0 indication what CWE will get which he may be able to use the corsairs for.
Every one in our group is happy with their 9th edition codices, a first since ever. The elephant in the room, of course, is the huge gap between 8th and 9th edition codices, but that problem will solve itself eventually.
Agree, and some people may have forgotten than also in the past editions there was a gap between updated codexes and old ones, but it used to take much more time for GW to update codexes. An ork one touched 4 editions between 4th and 7th. Now it's 2 at most, and for everyone. Not to mention the regular releases of FAQs to fix some imbalance.
Every one in our group is happy with their 9th edition codices, a first since ever. The elephant in the room, of course, is the huge gap between 8th and 9th edition codices, but that problem will solve itself eventually.
But it won't be solved. As soon as the last 9th codex is released, we'll be onto the repeat cycle of 10th and there's the same problem all over again - just old 9th vs new 10th codices. It's a problem that will never go away with GW and it' release cycle linking to profits.
But if the gap between old and new codex isn't extremely hight and every army has its codex updated withing 3 years this is not really a problem. Releasing everything at the beginning of an edition would be the ideal result yes, but I don't think the current state of codexes releasing and power creep is bad, it's actually one of the highest moments in 40k's history about this matter.
Every one in our group is happy with their 9th edition codices, a first since ever. The elephant in the room, of course, is the huge gap between 8th and 9th edition codices, but that problem will solve itself eventually.
But it won't be solved. As soon as the last 9th codex is released, we'll be onto the repeat cycle of 10th and there's the same problem all over again - just old 9th vs new 10th codices. It's a problem that will never go away with GW and it' release cycle linking to profits.
That's just your assumption, friend. For all we know 10th might move to a digital ruleset where changing one army at time is less advantageous than changing all armies at once more often because they can shift more models that way.
They shift one army at a time so they don't overwhelm people's salary.
If they released all faction rules at the same time, chances are a lot of people would only buy 1-2 things as that's all they could afford that month, and by the time it rolls around to next month a lot of the hype has died.
The progressive release means they maintain the hype and new things to buy every month.
kirotheavenger wrote:They shift one army at a time so they don't overwhelm people's salary.
If they released all faction rules at the same time, chances are a lot of people would only buy 1-2 things as that's all they could afford that month, and by the time it rolls around to next month a lot of the hype has died.
The progressive release means they maintain the hype and new things to buy every month.
This^.
Blackie wrote:But if the gap between old and new codex isn't extremely hight and every army has its codex updated withing 3 years this is not really a problem. Releasing everything at the beginning of an edition would be the ideal result yes, but I don't think the current state of codexes releasing and power creep is bad, it's actually one of the highest moments in 40k's history about this matter.
And most importantly this^.
9th edition dexes being on a different level to 8th edition ones is a false narrative which has never been proven with data.
Currenly all factions sit comfortably between 45% and 55% win ratio, with Tau and IK being outliers and only at 40% (which is still terribly high for the worst faction) and obviously DE being really high until we start seeing the effects of the nerf.
When I say that they are all between 45 and 55, I don't mean that the 9th edition ones are gravitating toward the top of that range and the 8th edition ones toward the bottom. They are perfectly mixed in there.
9th edition dexes are 100% better than the 8th edition ones, but better doesn't mean more powerful. They sport a really good internal balance and express the fluff and playstyle much better. In regards to the external balance though, they are about on level with 8th edition ones... barring DE obviously.
Tournament data is difficult to pass judgements like that.
45% winrate is really bad, since tournaments match players of equal wins together, after the first few games of an event it's just losers vs losers and winners vs winners - thus everything trends to 50%.
Additionally, a lot of what you see in tournaments I would describe as gimmicks. Tyranids spamming Dimacharions (/whatever) and doing well isn't really representative of the faction.
Balance is definitely better than 7th, but our resident generic chaos marine player is not having a good time.
kirotheavenger wrote: Tournament data is difficult to pass judgements like that. 45% winrate is really bad, since tournaments match players of equal wins together, after the first few games of an event it's just losers vs losers and winners vs winners - thus everything trends to 50%.
Additionally, a lot of what you see in tournaments I would describe as gimmicks. Tyranids spamming Dimacharions (/whatever) and doing well isn't really representative of the faction.
Balance is definitely better than 7th, but our resident generic chaos marine player is not having a good time.
Not just chaos marines - playing orks into something like dark angels or drukhari isn't a lot of fun either, and playing DG against craftworld, guard, TS or pre-codex drukhari genuinely feels like baby seal clubbing.
It's nowhere near the level of imbalance that 7th edition's codices showed amongst codices of the very same edition, as there still usually is a top build that can eek out wins - but the difference is very much present in a "my stuff vs your stuff" game. It just feels bad when you have to run the one tournament builds your army has while the other codex can just bring any coherent army and still do just as well as you are doing.
kirotheavenger wrote: Tournament data is difficult to pass judgements like that.
45% winrate is really bad, since tournaments match players of equal wins together, after the first few games of an event it's just losers vs losers and winners vs winners - thus everything trends to 50%.
Additionally, a lot of what you see in tournaments I would describe as gimmicks. Tyranids spamming Dimacharions (/whatever) and doing well isn't really representative of the faction.
Balance is definitely better than 7th, but our resident generic chaos marine player is not having a good time.
Not just chaos marines - playing orks into something like dark angels or drukhari isn't a lot of fun either, and playing DG against craftworld, guard, TS or pre-codex drukhari genuinely feels like baby seal clubbing.
It's nowhere near the level of imbalance that 7th edition's codices showed amongst codices of the very same edition, as there still usually is a top build that can eek out wins - but the difference is very much present in a "my stuff vs your stuff" game. It just feels bad when you have to run the one tournament builds your army has while the other codex can just bring any coherent army and still do just as well as you are doing.
I think I have a different perspective, as I've got currently what is basically the best of the best army in town (dark eldar) and two of the absolute bottom of the pits worst ones (thousand sons and gsc) as welll as some pretty heavily purposefully handicapped meme lists, like "foot eldar with one of every aspect warrior squad plus an avatar" and "2000pts of only grot units and characters".
Switching between those armies is not NEARLY , not anywhere CLOSE as bad as in the previous edition, going from one of my factions that had already gotten its codex to one that was waiting semi-eternally for that update like orks and gsc. My worst armies have their combo moments right now where people playing new codexes have to sit back and go 'woah, my army can't do that gak', like thousand sons double shooting with +1 to wound on a squad for a total of 2cp.
Okey but that is based on the idea of switching and being able to switch to a good army in the first place. And possibly your opponents being able to do that too.
If your closest playgroup consists of a 3xmarine , DG, DE, 2xSoB and a GSC player, the GSC player is not going to think that the differences between armies are minimal. Plus that argument works only for people that knew editions prior 9th or 8th. If someone started in 9th, then telling them that imbalance was worse in the past, doesn't really sound that convincing. Because people don't generally care about times, they did not play in.
And If on top of that GSC is your only army for 9th, I can tell you that the player does not feel happy about it, and no amount of telling them that they just should play a list with tyranids and 3 scythboys fixs that. I actually seen that in action, same with tau players.
Karol wrote: Okey but that is based on the idea of switching and being able to switch to a good army in the first place. And possibly your opponents being able to do that too.
If your closest playgroup consists of a 3xmarine , DG, DE, 2xSoB and a GSC player, the GSC player is not going to think that the differences between armies are minimal. Plus that argument works only for people that knew editions prior 9th or 8th. If someone started in 9th, then telling them that imbalance was worse in the past, doesn't really sound that convincing. Because people don't generally care about times, they did not play in.
And If on top of that GSC is your only army for 9th, I can tell you that the player does not feel happy about it, and no amount of telling them that they just should play a list with tyranids and 3 scythboys fixs that. I actually seen that in action, same with tau players.
Sure, the fact that I can switch armies is nice. What I'm saying is that the games I play as Drukhari, and the games I play as GSC, I feel like my army that I am playing is closer and more like two things that exist in the same game system than when, for example, I used to play Orks and Necrons in 7th edition, and my Necrons had access to the Decurion super-formation while my orks didnt have gak for formations at all, or in mid-8th switching between my drukhari after they got a codex and my harlequins or gsc before they had gotten one.
Playing vs a person who got subfaction traits, got stratagems other than the cp reroll and interrupt, got relics, and got WLTs other than the 6+FNP was such an utterly miserable experience, playing my GSC now vs an army like DG doesnt even come close to as bad. it's annoying, sure, it's annoying that the DG player has an ability to make me -1T when he gets me within 3" or whatever, and I get no ability to compensate for that, and also I don't have chapter traits on my vehicles still for no real reason. GSC's current rules state is irritating as hell, but I can still recognize what we're playing as the same edition of the same game, unlike playing my formation-having necrons one game and my formation-less orks the next in 7th.
I am not saying it is not nice. But saying that the over all difference balance in the game is small, is only defendable, if between one game of GSC you can fit a game of something that at least kind of a works, and every 4th or 5th game in between, being something like a game with DE.
But again I don't really have much of an idea how a meta game functions, when a substential number of people have multiple armies to go back to. What I know is what happens when you wait for 2-3 years for an update, having one army. And it is generally not a very fun thing to go through, if the army is bad. If the army is good, it is actually fun.
I'm sure people who play with 33% or less of their collections could easily enjoy 9th edition, even if they have to stick with 8th codexes, regardless of their armies' rate.
If you have the models to change your lists you don't need to wait 2-3 years. Not in 8th or 9th editions of 40k.
Blackie wrote: Having one army with not many models, actually.
I'm sure people who play with 33% or less of their collections could easily enjoy 9th edition, even if they have to stick with 8th codexes, regardless of their armies' rate.
If you have the models to change your lists you don't need to wait 2-3 years. Not in 8th or 9th editions of 40k.
I often have extremely limited model swaps available for any of my armies. I'm a 'built to 2k, move on to another army' kind of player usually.
I dont have significantly different winrates with GSC/Tsons and Drukhari/Deathwatch. the armies I have that have 8th ed dexes do not win way less than the armies I have 9th ed dexes for, regardless of what faction im playing against.
Mostly, it has to do with opponent. I have opponents I generally win vs, and opponents I generally lose vs, and the faction theyre currently playing being good or bad usually doesn't make much of a difference. The only time I have seen a new book take an opponent I'd generally consider 'an easier matchup' to 'a harder matchup' is marine 2.0 taking our local ih player from baby seal you had to avoid clubbing to basically unbeatable.
I haven't played our local admech+knight player since the new dex dropped. He's always been relatively competitive, and I lose vs him as much as I win, but given that I don't think he actually owns more than 10 skitarii I don't expect him to be super crazy hot gak with the new book.
Blackie wrote: Having one army with not many models, actually.
I'm sure people who play with 33% or less of their collections could easily enjoy 9th edition, even if they have to stick with 8th codexes, regardless of their armies' rate.
If you have the models to change your lists you don't need to wait 2-3 years. Not in 8th or 9th editions of 40k.
Which is a crux of a problem for people, who wait a year to get an army to 2000s and then, if the army is bad, don't have much incentive to pay money to update it, specially in 9th when it involved painting it too. And if the army is good there is even less incentive to invest and buy new stuff either, because why spend money, when the thing works perfectly fine.
And if the game is 2000pts, having it be 33% of your collection often implies years of playing. Probably over multiple editions. Making it not really an option for a new player either. Unless of course someone can splurge 2-3k $ in one go, but if you can do that, the problems in your life are probably way different then, why does my GSC army not work in 9th ed.
I dont have significantly different winrates with GSC/Tsons and Drukhari/Deathwatch. the armies I have that have 8th ed dexes do not win way less than the armies I have 9th ed dexes for, regardless of what faction im playing against.
You know, I am not interested in examples that are hard to translate to the over all population of the game. I don't know what armies you, play what are the opposing armies and who are the opponnts. What I do know is that having a GSC army have the same win rate over multiple games as a DE one would require some very rare circumstances. And very rare isn't very helpful for other people. Because then the whole thing comes down to two people spending money, one saying they are happy, so changes are not needed, and the other not being happy and being suppose to do what? spend more money, quit game and take a 1000$ or higher hit. Because I am really not seeing the argument line being able to spread to more generic terms of playing w40k in this edition or in 8th.
the_scotsman wrote: ...which is pretty weird, given just how many forgeworld models are currently staples of competitive tournament play.
They're very careful to make sure nothing I own is ever a staple of competitive play. The 30k SM units are either unplayable or don't have rules (for some reason (*cough*nokitnorules*coughcough*) loyalists are allowed to use their Cataphractii and Chaos isn't), the resin Knights are paying a huge tax for being resin, and the Mechanicum stuff straight-up has no rules. WhatFW models are staples of competitive play?
What 30k CSM units are you using that are "unplayable"? If it's a Typhon, I get you. Removing their ability to double their range by not moving was a nasty and arbitrary move. But pretty much everything else is quite good, and better than it was. Contemptors are reasonably tough, and can be equipped to be either good for ranged offense or straight up vicious in melee. Leviathans are the same, and hard as nails. Sicarans are fast as most bikes and have good ranged output, while being tougher than most tanks in their weight class thanks to their 2+ save. The Achilles and Proteus are both what all Land Raiders should be, and either a Fellblade or Falchion offer massive firepower in a tough platform. Martial Legacy is a bitter pill to swallow, but the diminished CP pool can be worth it. And all of these can be buffed by our sorcerers, DAs, and Chaos Lords. CORE isn't currently a problem for CSM.
You're Alpha Legion sounds a lot like my Night Lords: no daemons, lots of fw. It can work. It does work. What have you tried, and what problems are you seeing?
And if the game is 2000pts, having it be 33% of your collection often implies years of playing. Probably over multiple editions. Making it not really an option for a new player either.
I think this kind of mentality is terrible for the game. As a kid it took me 5ish years to complete a 2500ish points collection and play at the standard format (1500 back then) with a functioning list and game knowledge, so what's the problem? I played with proxies or smaller games when I couldn't field enough models for a standard game, I've done it for years, like pretty much all the other guys my age that I knew that started in my same period.
A new player should be focussed on learn the rules, the game mechanics, how to paint, etc... which takes a lot of time, as it should. When I started the hobby, and even several years after that, to paint something like half Indomitus it would have taken me approx 6 months. A new player should NOT be focussed on maximizing his/her investment into the hobby and become a competitive player almost immediately.
Trend with current young people is demanding EVERYTHING NOW!!!! (and forever) which is toxic.
And if the game is 2000pts, having it be 33% of your collection often implies years of playing. Probably over multiple editions. Making it not really an option for a new player either.
I think this kind of mentality is terrible for the game. As a kid it took me 5ish years to complete a 2500ish points collection and play at the standard format (1500 back then) with a functioning list and game knowledge, so what's the problem? I played with proxies or smaller games when I couldn't field enough models for a standard game, I've done it for years, like pretty much all the other guys my age that I knew that started in my same period.
A new player should be focussed on learn the rules, the game mechanics, how to paint, etc... which takes a lot of time, as it should. When I started the hobby, and even several years after that, to paint something like half Indomitus it would have taken me approx 6 months. A new player should NOT be focussed on maximizing his/her investment into the hobby and become a competitive player almost immediately.
Trend with current young people is demanding EVERYTHING NOW!!!! (and forever) which is toxic.
I think there is a divide in certain age groups. Players like us who started young and developed with the game and players currently their early 20s who jumped in and didn't build that same kind of appreciation. I sound like a crotchety old man, but I'm technically a millennial.
And if the game is 2000pts, having it be 33% of your collection often implies years of playing. Probably over multiple editions. Making it not really an option for a new player either.
I think this kind of mentality is terrible for the game. As a kid it took me 5ish years to complete a 2500ish points collection and play at the standard format (1500 back then) with a functioning list and game knowledge, so what's the problem? I played with proxies or smaller games when I couldn't field enough models for a standard game, I've done it for years, like pretty much all the other guys my age that I knew that started in my same period.
A new player should be focussed on learn the rules, the game mechanics, how to paint, etc... which takes a lot of time, as it should. When I started the hobby, and even several years after that, to paint something like half Indomitus it would have taken me approx 6 months. A new player should NOT be focussed on maximizing his/her investment into the hobby and become a competitive player almost immediately.
Trend with current young people is demanding EVERYTHING NOW!!!! (and forever) which is toxic.
I think there is a divide in certain age groups. Players like us who started young and developed with the game and players currently their early 20s who jumped in and didn't build that same kind of appreciation. I sound like a crotchety old man, but I'm technically a millennial.
Yeah, i get you lol. Every single new person who asks 'hey what should I do to collect' I give the advice "GO. SLOWLY. LEARN THE GAME AS YOU GO." but then i see them in 2 weeks playing with an all-grey extremely skewed 2k list that's going to either be nearly nonfunctional out of the gate or soon to be nerfed into oblivion.
Given the justified complaints of Chaos players, I'm really hoping they are the next dex after GK/ Ksons.
CWE and Guard need range updates and love, it's true, but the Chaos situation is pretty terrible. The fact that they haven't updated to 2W yet means they clearly aren't going to until the dex drops, so it's got to be coming soon.
Even if all the announced dexes were all supposed to be out by the end of this month (which we have very good reason to believe they were), that would still mean CSM wouldn't have been out until July (assuming they are the next dex).
And going from October til July on uneven footing with loyalist was a bad idea, and bad planning. Even if I like 9th (which I do) I cannot deny this.
Sure, CSM are Heretics, and undeserving of the Emperor's mercy, but there are limits to the suffering that even they should have to endure.
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