One of the things that has really turned me away from 40K is the buckets of dice lethality that has mired the game in endless rolls. I despise that marines have been moved to 2 wounds, and overall would like to see the amount of dice rolling greatly reduced.

Personally, I'd like to see the standard infantry models go down to a stat line where they make ONE attack, and can survive ONE wound. The one attack represents enough time to take focus to get off a single shot or 3-shot burst from an automatic weapon.

That doesn't preclude some guns (or skilled characters) getting more shots/attacks - I can certainly see the likes of Assault cannons getting two, maybe three shots or the same with Heavy stubbers/Heavy bolters.

Same with wounds - monsters, vehicles, bikes, heroes and everything else bigger than a trooper could be rated for more wounds. Tweak the toughness stat where possible to change the chance of getting a significant wound that removes the model from the table, rather than just plopping extra wounds on the target. D2 and higher wound weapons could then be fewer in number (perhaps changing D2 weapons to have higher Strength instead?) and more significant as anti-tank weapons. And personally, I'd prefer if blast weapons could only hit a target once (split tank guns into multiple profiles - say, HEAT for anti-personnel & AP for anti-vehicle/monster).

I also think that too many dice are rolled in current edition of 40k, but I dislike the concept of "one model, one shot, one wound". Back in 3rd, 4th and 5th editions dice rolling was significantly lower and yet multiwounds models and multi shots weapons were common.

I'm ok with a tank (razorback for example) firing 12 assault cannons shots, I'm not ok with an infantry model (say an aggressor) rolling 18 dice or a tank firing with countless weapons, like the primaris tanks.

Re-rolls, generated extra shots and firing/fighting twice mechanics should be removed completely.

To each their own.

The thing about rolling a single die is it's all or nothing- you either succeed absolutely or fail absolutely. Rolling a dice pool generally creates fewer instances of absolute failure or absolute success, and more instances of the nuanced spectrum that falls between.

This is why the core mechanics for World of Darkness were better than the core mechanics of D&D- though I haven't checked recent editions of WoD.

Definitely too much rolling.

I'd like attacks to be roll-to-hit, roll-to-wound, done.

I actually like rolling a load of dice at once. Avenger Gatling Cannon anyone?

Attack bloat is out of control but I don't agree with infantry only having 1 attack/shot. Shoota Boyz with assault 2 for example is fine as they replace accuracy with volume of fire. Same with certain melee units being better at close combat so they get 2-3 melee attacks vs your more ranged focused units which might have 1-2 melee attacks. Special weapons should have some mix of volume of shots and/or enhanced strength/armor penetration properties.

Also all or nothing situations feel really crappy when your banking everything on 1 attack to get through which over the course of 3-4 rounds of combat could very easily have done 0 killing or it's maximum potential. Volume does allow for the dice to better average out so you don't get completely ruined by 3-4 rolls. I'm sure many people know the feeling of watching their unit of terminators get cut in half because they rolled three out of five 1's for their armor saves.

I think there are better ways to reduce the amount of dice rolls than just making every unit 1 wound and 1 attack. That just takes so much diversity out of the game.

A Space Marine is supposed to be a lot harder to take down than a Guardsman or an Ork Boy. Custodes even more so. And to represent units like that you really need multi-wound profiles. Same goes with attacks. Orks just wouldn't feel like Orks if they would only get one attack. You just need these stats to be able to do justice to the great variety of different factions in 40K.

feth it, let's stop playing all together, let's just put our minis on the board and flip a coin he who wins the coin flip wins the game!


in all seriousness I'm not sure how dumbing the game down to the OPs suggestion would improve the game, differant amounts of wounds are an important way to diffrentiate between a space marine, a custodes and a guardsman

Both flagship games could use a "what scale of conflict is this" overhaul.

What complexity there is being contained to your ccg style pre game combo execution and skirmish level miniature minutia is a big turn off for me.

I'd much rather they adopted an Epic/Armageddon approach.

A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy. The 2W Marine paradigm is bleh.

40K has a design philosophy that is enamored with resolving the abstract in the physical world. So much of the abstract components of the game are front loaded into codex and army construction, that almost all of the tactics and strategy are contained therein. What happens on the table is that the game ends up focusing so much more time on rolling dice, rerolling, and special rules that your time actually strategizing becomes dwarfed by them. From a design perspective I think the game is in a lot of ways just an excuse to roll dice. It takes up a disproportionate amount of time, and you can look at the lists to determine the winners in most cases. Without the dice rolling, it's barely a game.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eldarain wrote:
Both flagship games could use a "what scale of conflict is this" overhaul.

What complexity there is being contained to your ccg style pre game combo execution and skirmish level miniature minutia is a big turn off for me.

I'd much rather they adopted an Epic/Armageddon approach.

40k suffers a lot from trying to make a company scaled game work in 28mm.

Epic Armageddon works because 6mm is best mm, AND it's what i consider an "elegant" ruleset. What i mean by that is the rules are simple, but lead to emergent behavior that creates a depth larger than the rules seemingly provide at first glance. LOTR is another "elegant" system.

Epic Armageddon is also a combined arms wargame at heart which helps as well. I can actually use my guardsmen to advance on a position after artillery bombarded it yay!!!!

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy. The 2W Marine paradigm is bleh.

This.


I don't think 1-wound, 1-shot, 1-attack is necessary (e.g. 2 attacks is generally how melee units are/were defined) but we definitely didn't need so many non-character infantry units to go up to 2-3 wounds. Nor, I think, should basic infantry be putting out 4-5 shots or attacks each.

I would also suggest that there's far too much 'rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice' in the game. If a weapon currently has d3 shots just give it 2 shots. And then you've the absolute mess that is Psychic powers. Just look at all the pseudo-Smite powers and their desperate attempts to be different by rolling slightly different combinations of dice to still end up with near-identical results.

And for the love of God, stop having dedicated dice-rolls for stuff that only works on 6s. An ability that triggers when a model rolls a 6 to hit/wound/save is fine. That was a roll you were going to make anyway. But giving models 6+ FNP is just a time-wasting mechanic.

The superfluous dice roll stuff really kicked in then rerolls were introduced as well as rolling for amount of attacks per attack.
Looking at arco flagellate. Oh they get d3 attacks per attack and there's a priest nearby, so they've got 3d3 attacks each and there's 9 models. Roll 27 do just to find out how many attacks they have; then roll 80+do to hit. Oh they get reroll to hit, so let's reroll the 50 that missed.
Granted they don't roll for attack number any more; but still, rerolls shouldn't be in the game.

Are there too many dice rolls? Yes. Do I agree with your stance that models should have one attack and one wound each? Absolutely not.

The problem with the too many dice rolls isn't that models have too many attacks or too many wounds, its that each attack requires multiple rolls to resolve - roll to hit, potential rerolls, roll to wound, potential rerolls, armor saves, potential rerolls, on top of things like feel no pain, etc. which add additional rolls into the resolution chain. Don't get me started with models and weapons that have variable numbers of attacks and variable stats (strength, AP, and now damage too).

I don't mind rolling a bucket of dice, theres something satisfying about it sometimes. The problem is that after the bucket is rolled it then needs to be rolled again a few more times to find out what happens.

I think rerolls are fine in moderation.

The issue is that they've gone from being relatively rare to being a standard ability (with most armies' basic auras letting all nearby units reroll 1s to hit or wound).

Incidentally, I really, really hate auras. I can understand wanting non-psyker HQs to have utility beyond hitting stuff in the face but this really doesn't seem like the way to go about it. For the vast majority of models, it's flavourless, it causes a ton of issues, and it adds almost nothing because these auras are always on and involve no choice or meaningful decisions.

I sincerely hope auras are removed from the game in 10th, and that instead stratagems are reworked to be HQ-centric mechanics, rather than feeling like someone spilled Yugioh on 40k..

 vipoid wrote:
I think rerolls are fine in moderation.

The issue is that they've gone from being relatively rare to being a standard ability (with most armies' basic auras letting all nearby units reroll 1s to hit or wound).

Incidentally, I really, really hate auras. I can understand wanting non-psyker HQs to have utility beyond hitting stuff in the face but this really doesn't seem like the way to go about it. For the vast majority of models, it's flavourless, it causes a ton of issues, and it adds almost nothing because these auras are always on and involve no choice or meaningful decisions.

I sincerely hope auras are removed from the game in 10th, and that instead stratagems are reworked to be HQ-centric mechanics, rather than feeling like someone spilled Yugioh on 40k..

If they changed Stratagems to basically be the might system from LOTR it would make the game a lot more interesting. Different HQs having access to different strategems and helping to distinguish characters that "lead from the front" from those that focus more on tactics. All while grounding the system to the game while its being played on the board. Taking out a commander would be more impactful, and the system would feel more integral to the game as a whole.

 Blackie wrote:
I also think that too many dice are rolled in current edition of 40k, but I dislike the concept of "one model, one shot, one wound". Back in 3rd, 4th and 5th editions dice rolling was significantly lower and yet multiwounds models and multi shots weapons were common.

I'm ok with a tank (razorback for example) firing 12 assault cannons shots, I'm not ok with an infantry model (say an aggressor) rolling 18 dice or a tank firing with countless weapons, like the primaris tanks.

Re-rolls, generated extra shots and firing/fighting twice mechanics should be removed completely.

Same. Lots of things just got out of hand, but it wasn't really the basics (for the most part).

That said, recently a lot of weapons have gotten too many base shots. Re-rolls, bonuses on 6, and the MORE! strats are just bonkers.
I'd honestly like to dump strats and traits in a fire and haul army-wide and unit-specific rules back to 1-2 max, with a lot of stuff with zero special rules at all (ie, have stuff to function as a baseline).

as Others said, I like the idea of HQs giving some benifits to represent their ability to lead. re-rolls themselves? I'm eh on.

back befor 8th edition I was a proponent of taking the Imperial Guard orders system and expending it, to one degree or another, EVERY army in 40k. I mean obviously the orders list would be differant from army to army, but the idea of :HQ makes LDR check, and nearby squad can shoot better, has appeal. expand on that system a bit and you can greatly reduce strats and remove the re-roll auras.

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy. The 2W Marine paradigm is bleh.

Disagree. Space Marines were harder to take down than Guardsmen, but not by much. Certainly not enough to do justice to the lore. MEQ should never be cannon fodder, and that is pretty much what basic tactical marines had devolved into.

As someone else pointed out already, it is not the wounds that make the game require so many dice rolls, it is all the rolls and re-rolls you have to make for every single attack.

 Sledgehammer wrote:
If they changed Stratagems to basically be the might system from LOTR it would make the game a lot more interesting. Different HQs having access to different strategems and helping to distinguish characters that "lead from the front" from those that focus more on tactics. All while grounding the system to the game while its being played on the board. Taking out a commander would be more impactful, and the system would feel more integral to the game as a whole.

I very much agree with this.
LotR is a really elegant system and I have been hoping for years that they'll change 40K to be a bit more like it. My friends and I once even made a basic system to convert 40K units to LotR unit profiles so we could play 40K with LotR rules.

Part of the problem is the D6. With just D6 and the nominally 10-point stat range for 40k, there really isn't any room to fit a regular human, a Space Marine and an Ork to different stats and be able to make something slightly tougher than a regular human but not as tough as a Space Marine. That pretty much leaves introducing rerolls (whether it's rerolling failures or just 1's or 2's).

It would be nice, though, if the rules authors admitted that the process was really: Roll to hit, roll to wound, roll regular save, and roll special save.

It's not the human vs marine vs orks vs eldar that's the issue. It's the fact that the game has both grots and Knights in the same game, or, let's ignore vehicles. Grots vs Deamon Prince, or even grots vs Custodes.

Also there's a whole untapped section of, say, rerolling all successful saves, or similar. It's so weird that making your opponent reroll successes isn't a thing.

 Blndmage wrote:
It's not the human vs marine vs orks vs eldar that's the issue. It's the fact that the game has both grots and Knights in the same game, or, let's ignore vehicles. Grots vs Deamon Prince, or even grots vs Custodes.

Also there's a whole untapped section of, say, rerolling all successful saves, or similar. It's so weird that making your opponent reroll successes isn't a thing.

I mean, 7th felt like it did a pretty good job overall of integrating aircraft, super heavies, and vehicles. Monsterous creatures were the black sheep there. Even Epic Armageddon does some of this stuff as well. You don't need 100 special rules. Most vehicles just have a re-rollable save to account for increased armor. It also shows that shoot, wound, save isn't needed. You can condense the rolls down to hitting and saving.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy. The 2W Marine paradigm is bleh.

Disagree. Space Marines were harder to take down than Guardsmen, but not by much. Certainly not enough to do justice to the lore. MEQ should never be cannon fodder, and that is pretty much what basic tactical marines had devolved into.

A boltgun had about 3x effectiveness vs. Guard than a Marine.

Even in pure "marineland" the two wounds is weird. At 1w apice it took 10 boltgun shots (5 Marines RFing) to kill a Marine. At 2w it takes 10 Marines RFing. That's crazy.

As for "cannon fodder" most "cannons" do D2 anyways.

Plus it's pumped Marines up in poor ways against other troops (Necron Warriors/Orks) and to compensate now we have, if I'm not mistaken, T5 Orks which puts us in the even stranger spot where Boltguns etc. are no better at killing Orks than Lasguns.

It's all goofy.

Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

I agree that 40k rolls too many dice these days, but reducing weapons to 1 shot or attack except for rare exceptions is not the way to fix that.

Nah, I'm happier with the current system.

Yeah, there's way, way too much rolling in the current. Used to be you move a set amount (unless through cover). Not every army had access to a second move. You'd roll to hit, roll to wound, and maybe your opponent would get an armor save.

Now for the most part it's roll to hit, re-roll to hit, roll to wound, re-roll to wound, calculate how many armor saves have to be taken because of things like exploding 6's, take your armor save because most things get an armor save now and even if you have the AP there's always invul saves which have been handed out like candy, reroll your armor save, calculate how many wounds are taken to what, then roll more FNP's...

I've seen some battle reports where one unit shooting at another can take upwards of 5 minutes.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy. The 2W Marine paradigm is bleh.

Disagree. Space Marines were harder to take down than Guardsmen, but not by much. Certainly not enough to do justice to the lore. MEQ should never be cannon fodder, and that is pretty much what basic tactical marines had devolved into.

As someone else pointed out already, it is not the wounds that make the game require so many dice rolls, it is all the rolls and re-rolls you have to make for every single attack.

Ignoring that S4 weapons are anti tank weapons and that the armies space marines are facing are supposed to be every bit as tough and competent as they are, the extra wounds don't exactly help with re-rolling. At the very least, it takes twice as much dice rolling to kill the same amount of unit. There's also shenanigans with weapons that may or may not do D2 based on, you guessed it, dice rolling. For the most part, doubling a model's wounds doubles everything you'd use those wounds for. FNP, invul saves, etc.

How is your Mom's spaghetti, OP?

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I mean, 7th felt like it did a pretty good job overall of integrating aircraft, super heavies, and vehicles.

I would have to disagree on this point.

Unless you were lucky enough to have Grav or D-weapons, playing against Knights felt like your opponent was making up the rules as you went along.

"Yeah, my army ignores this rule, and that rule, oh and that rule as well, oh, and they're immune to everything short of "explodes", and even that doesn't kill them. Oh no, even though they're the size of a skyscraper, you still can't shoot them lest you hit the guardsmen in melee with them. But they can still shoot while in combat and can also make melee attacks against stuff in the vicinity. Oh and it's as fast as a DE skimmer, because why wouldn't it be?"

And then you had the joys of fliers which, once again, required specialised equipment if you wanted to do anything more than plink away at them ineffectually.

"Cool, so your Helldrake can basically go anywhere it likes, damaging 1-2 of my transports each turn whilst also barbequing any units inside them, and if I want to kill it I would need to somehow spend my 2000pts entirely on Ravagers and have every single one of them fire at it. Truly this is a fun and balanced concept that fits neatly into the game."

Sorry but these are some of the worst-integrated and unfun elements to ever make it into 40k.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

I can understand moving away from the FNP save (which can be a real pain with D2 weapons against multi-wound infantry). However, the replacement is a little odd in that it seems to be antithetical to the idea of Plague Marines. My understanding was that they were supposed to be especially resilient against small-arms fire but still able to be taken out with heavier ordnance, yet the new rules are almost the opposite - giving no protection against small arms and instead only helping against heavy weapons.

Tbh, I find myself wondering whether a simpler solution would have been to give Plague Marines an extra wound (and other stuff more wounds as appropriate). So with the current rules, Plague Marines would have 3 wounds, though ideally they'd have two and all other non-Primaris Marines would go back to 1. It would have made them much more resilient against low-damage weapons (especially since they're also T5), whilst still leaving them vulnerable to heavier weapons.

(Note: when I suggest that Plague Marines have 2 wounds and all other Marines 1, this would also be with the assumption that a bunch of weapons, like Heavy Bolters, wouldn't have been upgraded to D2 in order to deal with 2-wound Marines.)

Reducing granularity almost never works out well. This would favor horde armies as you've lessened the gap between horde infantry and elite infantry, meanwhile sheer numbers still grants the "buckets of dice" you're complaining about.

Under a 1-1-1 rule how would you balance a 10-man tactical squad against say, a 40-man conscript blob?

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

 Stormonu wrote:
One of the things that has really turned me away from 40K is the buckets of dice lethality that has mired the game in endless rolls. I despise that marines have been moved to 2 wounds, and overall would like to see the amount of dice rolling greatly reduced.

Personally, I'd like to see the standard infantry models go down to a stat line where they make ONE attack, and can survive ONE wound. The one attack represents enough time to take focus to get off a single shot or 3-shot burst from an automatic weapon.

That doesn't preclude some guns (or skilled characters) getting more shots/attacks - I can certainly see the likes of Assault cannons getting two, maybe three shots or the same with Heavy stubbers/Heavy bolters.

Same with wounds - monsters, vehicles, bikes, heroes and everything else bigger than a trooper could be rated for more wounds. Tweak the toughness stat where possible to change the chance of getting a significant wound that removes the model from the table, rather than just plopping extra wounds on the target. D2 and higher wound weapons could then be fewer in number (perhaps changing D2 weapons to have higher Strength instead?) and more significant as anti-tank weapons. And personally, I'd prefer if blast weapons could only hit a target once (split tank guns into multiple profiles - say, HEAT for anti-personnel & AP for anti-vehicle/monster).

I agree with the poll question, i don't agree with "one model one shot one wound".

GW should start by removing rerolls, double shots, ability to shoot during another phase than shooting, AP being given by doctrines, stratagems or abilities.

Then we will see.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Specially because everytime someone does this comparison they use the bolter as a comparison. The bolter was a weapon to kill chaff infantry. What people used to obliterate space marines was the insane amount of high AP firepower the game has had for more than 15 years.

I don't care that it took 20 bolters rounds to kill a marine vs 5 to an ork boy/guardsmen. My space marines didn't spend the last 10 years dying like flyes to flasguns and bolters.


The sames goe to the typical "back in the day an ork boy killed X marines and now..." Ork boyz are horde units with light attacks. They excel at killing other chaff units like space marines can't. Of course they aren't good to kill space marines and haven't been for decades.

I quite like the old one shot distant, two shots close small arms encouraging mobility. But yes the dice are out of control at times, I remember the first time I faced a primaris tank in 8th and it took five minutes to run through all of the different guns, rerolls, and stratagems for that one vehicle shooting.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Only when you factor in things like cover, special weapons, and artillery.

In 3e-4e an exchange of small arms between marines and guard would favour the marines 3-1 in points value (something like 8 dead guardsmen per marine), and those odds would improve as the guard lost extra models to morale and missed out on shots due to range - much easier to get 10 marines within 12" of a guard blob than 80 guardsmen within 12" of a marine squad.

But how relevant that is ties into how important the chaff troops units are on the table, and how many bigs guns they'll typically be presented with.

Altima wrote:


Ignoring that S4 weapons are anti tank weapons and that the armies space marines are facing are supposed to be every bit as tough and competent as they are...

but thats the problem. 40k is so bonkers that what would be light anti-vehicle weaponry in a "real life" setting is the baseline small arm. Superhumans in power armour wielding fully automatic grenade launchers are the baseline for the games power curve, not regular humans with weapons equivalent to a modern assault rifle. they have been since the game started.

and because of this, everyone is geared towards fighting enemies with that level of toughness because they are exceedingly common. I remember 3rd ed eldar armies loaded with AP3 starcannon plasma weapons in every squad, vast numbers of armour ignoring power swords, etc, and other anti-marine nonsense. No one was killing marines with bolt fire, they were using 8 marines to cover the 2 special/heavy weapons guys that had the marine killing weaponry.

that might be part of the problem. A 3rd ed tac squad would have a single plasma gun, maybe a plasma pistol on the sgt, and a heavy bolter or missile launcher. now we have hellblasters and eradicators running around with more dedicated anti-MEQ firepower than some 3rd ed armies in a single squad.

but i think the others have it right, its not the base "hit, wound, save" rolls that are the problem, the problem is all the bells and whistles that go on around it as factions try to cave a design niche out of a very crowed design space. I was in a game yesterday, and got charged by space wolf assault intercessors twice, once when the SW player could deploy all his tricks and a 2nd time he couldn't. dispite having a greater number of attacks being thrown at me, the latter charge took about half as long as the 1st, because their was no re-rolling of X, no exploding hits on Y, and no +1 because it was a full moon, or the skald was on the 3rd verse of the saga while Jupiter was ascending, etc etc. All because grey marines need to find a way to be "good at melee" without standing on red marines toes, or the other red marines toes, or the orks, etc, etc.


if i was given total creative freedom on the next 40K*, there would be a full scale-shift of re-rolls back to being a rarity, something that only HQ could have themselves and only grant 1 or 2 total to another unit... make their use much more strategic, rather than automatic.


*i'd also likely cause a mass exodus of 40K fans as destroyed the game they love, but hey, i'd have fun doing so.

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I mean, 7th felt like it did a pretty good job overall of integrating aircraft, super heavies, and vehicles.

I would have to disagree on this point.

Unless you were lucky enough to have Grav or D-weapons, playing against Knights felt like your opponent was making up the rules as you went along.

"Yeah, my army ignores this rule, and that rule, oh and that rule as well, oh, and they're immune to everything short of "explodes", and even that doesn't kill them. Oh no, even though they're the size of a skyscraper, you still can't shoot them lest you hit the guardsmen in melee with them. But they can still shoot while in combat and can also make melee attacks against stuff in the vicinity. Oh and it's as fast as a DE skimmer, because why wouldn't it be?"

And then you had the joys of fliers which, once again, required specialised equipment if you wanted to do anything more than plink away at them ineffectually.

"Cool, so your Helldrake can basically go anywhere it likes, damaging 1-2 of my transports each turn whilst also barbequing any units inside them, and if I want to kill it I would need to somehow spend my 2000pts entirely on Ravagers and have every single one of them fire at it. Truly this is a fun and balanced concept that fits neatly into the game."

Sorry but these are some of the worst-integrated and unfun elements to ever make it into 40k.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

I can understand moving away from the FNP save (which can be a real pain with D2 weapons against multi-wound infantry). However, the replacement is a little odd in that it seems to be antithetical to the idea of Plague Marines. My understanding was that they were supposed to be especially resilient against small-arms fire but still able to be taken out with heavier ordnance, yet the new rules are almost the opposite - giving no protection against small arms and instead only helping against heavy weapons.

Tbh, I find myself wondering whether a simpler solution would have been to give Plague Marines an extra wound (and other stuff more wounds as appropriate). So with the current rules, Plague Marines would have 3 wounds, though ideally they'd have two and all other non-Primaris Marines would go back to 1. It would have made them much more resilient against low-damage weapons (especially since they're also T5), whilst still leaving them vulnerable to heavier weapons.

(Note: when I suggest that Plague Marines have 2 wounds and all other Marines 1, this would also be with the assumption that a bunch of weapons, like Heavy Bolters, wouldn't have been upgraded to D2 in order to deal with 2-wound Marines.)

I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

The weaponry in 40k is so strong if you get hit by anything your toughness really shouldn't be saving you. It's your armor. I'd rather the game have a higher baseline damge and allow for more ways to modify your defences via terrain and positioning.

 Galas wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Specially because everytime someone does this comparison they use the bolter as a comparison. The bolter was a weapon to kill chaff infantry. What people used to obliterate space marines was the insane amount of high AP firepower the game has had for more than 15 years.

I don't care that it took 20 bolters rounds to kill a marine vs 5 to an ork boy/guardsmen. My space marines didn't spend the last 10 years dying like flyes to flasguns and bolters.


The sames goe to the typical "back in the day an ork boy killed X marines and now..." Ork boyz are horde units with light attacks. They excel at killing other chaff units like space marines can't. Of course they aren't good to kill space marines and haven't been for decades.

"Shpeeeesh Maaahreeeeenns!"

Galas I don't think I could disagree with you more. Imo you are the very face of the problem with modern balance between troops.

I don't think the game as a whole has too many rolls. I do think it has too many rerolls but that may be a separate topic

I also think that certain units have absurd amounts of dice to throw around like Aggressors and Space Marine Grav Tanks. I don't mind when a Gorkanaught throws a bucket of dice at someone, I find it weird when a space marine tank has infinite dakka. Not really their swim lane in my opinion.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Reducing granularity almost never works out well. This would favor horde armies as you've lessened the gap between horde infantry and elite infantry, meanwhile sheer numbers still grants the "buckets of dice" you're complaining about.

Under a 1-1-1 rule how would you balance a 10-man tactical squad against say, a 40-man conscript blob?

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Then that's a points issue not a fundamental design issue with the games systems........

I also have never seen a guard squad effectively advance or take out other infantry. I've only ever seen plasma vets do that. Most standard infantry exist to stand there in cover on an objective, or to literally die as cannon fodder. I'm not sure that's conducive to dynamic gameplay.

Furthermore rolling 40 dice to hit, then rolling 20 dice, then your opponent rolling 7 dice, then calculating the final results which are statistically going to be 2-3 wounds IS far too many dice for negligible results.

I voted yes BUT

I think 40k's thing is rolling loads of dice all at once. It feels good. The issue is stuff like rerolls and rolling to see how many rolls you make. It slows a lot of stuff down, especially when you're picking 1s out of the aforementioned loads of dice then rolling additional dice for each 6 you rolled then rerolling any of THOSE dice that were a 1.

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

Ah yes, clearly it's my fault as a player that GW gave my army 0 anti-knight weapons.

My sincere apologies for "trying to ignore a part of the game" by not playing Eldar or Space Marines.

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

Ah yes, clearly it's my fault as a player that GW gave my army 0 anti-knight weapons.

My sincere apologies for "trying to ignore a part of the game" by not playing Eldar or Space Marines.

Echoing this point. Heavily.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

Ah yes, clearly it's my fault as a player that GW gave my army 0 anti-knight weapons.

My sincere apologies for "trying to ignore a part of the game" by not playing Eldar or Space Marines.

Echoing this point. Heavily.

Which again isn't a fundamental design flaw or a problem with the philosophy of how units should interact. It's a codex problem that can be changed and should have been addressed back then.


However I do have problems fundamentally with all knight lists. An army of all superheavies, is just something that shouldn't happen, and the same holds true for an army of all supersonic aircraft. They break the idea of a combined arms game which is where I'd like to see 40k go.

If knights were heavy support options like free blades kind of are in the lore they'd be fine. A whole army of them is just asking for games to be determined by what you bring to them.

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I mean, 7th felt like it did a pretty good job overall of integrating aircraft, super heavies, and vehicles.

I would have to disagree on this point.

Unless you were lucky enough to have Grav or D-weapons, playing against Knights felt like your opponent was making up the rules as you went along.

"Yeah, my army ignores this rule, and that rule, oh and that rule as well, oh, and they're immune to everything short of "explodes", and even that doesn't kill them. Oh no, even though they're the size of a skyscraper, you still can't shoot them lest you hit the guardsmen in melee with them. But they can still shoot while in combat and can also make melee attacks against stuff in the vicinity. Oh and it's as fast as a DE skimmer, because why wouldn't it be?"

And then you had the joys of fliers which, once again, required specialised equipment if you wanted to do anything more than plink away at them ineffectually.

"Cool, so your Helldrake can basically go anywhere it likes, damaging 1-2 of my transports each turn whilst also barbequing any units inside them, and if I want to kill it I would need to somehow spend my 2000pts entirely on Ravagers and have every single one of them fire at it. Truly this is a fun and balanced concept that fits neatly into the game."

Sorry but these are some of the worst-integrated and unfun elements to ever make it into 40k.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

I can understand moving away from the FNP save (which can be a real pain with D2 weapons against multi-wound infantry). However, the replacement is a little odd in that it seems to be antithetical to the idea of Plague Marines. My understanding was that they were supposed to be especially resilient against small-arms fire but still able to be taken out with heavier ordnance, yet the new rules are almost the opposite - giving no protection against small arms and instead only helping against heavy weapons.

Tbh, I find myself wondering whether a simpler solution would have been to give Plague Marines an extra wound (and other stuff more wounds as appropriate). So with the current rules, Plague Marines would have 3 wounds, though ideally they'd have two and all other non-Primaris Marines would go back to 1. It would have made them much more resilient against low-damage weapons (especially since they're also T5), whilst still leaving them vulnerable to heavier weapons.

(Note: when I suggest that Plague Marines have 2 wounds and all other Marines 1, this would also be with the assumption that a bunch of weapons, like Heavy Bolters, wouldn't have been upgraded to D2 in order to deal with 2-wound Marines.)

I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

The weaponry in 40k is so strong if you get hit by anything your toughness really shouldn't be saving you. It's your armor. I'd rather the game have a higher baseline damge and allow for more ways to modify your defences via terrain and positioning.

7th edition had tanks die in one hit and immobilize themselves on small bushes. People think that just because it had shooting rules that made it really difficult to tell exactly what a wave serpent or venom or nightscythe was allowed to shoot, that it was somehow less game-y than the current system. It wasn't, it was just even crueler to vehicles than the current edition is.

People pay 80pts for Rhinos in a lot of lists now. In 7th they were only a consideration whent they were FREE.

ERJAK wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I mean, 7th felt like it did a pretty good job overall of integrating aircraft, super heavies, and vehicles.

I would have to disagree on this point.

Unless you were lucky enough to have Grav or D-weapons, playing against Knights felt like your opponent was making up the rules as you went along.

"Yeah, my army ignores this rule, and that rule, oh and that rule as well, oh, and they're immune to everything short of "explodes", and even that doesn't kill them. Oh no, even though they're the size of a skyscraper, you still can't shoot them lest you hit the guardsmen in melee with them. But they can still shoot while in combat and can also make melee attacks against stuff in the vicinity. Oh and it's as fast as a DE skimmer, because why wouldn't it be?"

And then you had the joys of fliers which, once again, required specialised equipment if you wanted to do anything more than plink away at them ineffectually.

"Cool, so your Helldrake can basically go anywhere it likes, damaging 1-2 of my transports each turn whilst also barbequing any units inside them, and if I want to kill it I would need to somehow spend my 2000pts entirely on Ravagers and have every single one of them fire at it. Truly this is a fun and balanced concept that fits neatly into the game."

Sorry but these are some of the worst-integrated and unfun elements to ever make it into 40k.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

I can understand moving away from the FNP save (which can be a real pain with D2 weapons against multi-wound infantry). However, the replacement is a little odd in that it seems to be antithetical to the idea of Plague Marines. My understanding was that they were supposed to be especially resilient against small-arms fire but still able to be taken out with heavier ordnance, yet the new rules are almost the opposite - giving no protection against small arms and instead only helping against heavy weapons.

Tbh, I find myself wondering whether a simpler solution would have been to give Plague Marines an extra wound (and other stuff more wounds as appropriate). So with the current rules, Plague Marines would have 3 wounds, though ideally they'd have two and all other non-Primaris Marines would go back to 1. It would have made them much more resilient against low-damage weapons (especially since they're also T5), whilst still leaving them vulnerable to heavier weapons.

(Note: when I suggest that Plague Marines have 2 wounds and all other Marines 1, this would also be with the assumption that a bunch of weapons, like Heavy Bolters, wouldn't have been upgraded to D2 in order to deal with 2-wound Marines.)

I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

The weaponry in 40k is so strong if you get hit by anything your toughness really shouldn't be saving you. It's your armor. I'd rather the game have a higher baseline damge and allow for more ways to modify your defences via terrain and positioning.

7th edition had tanks die in one hit and immobilize themselves on small bushes. People think that just because it had shooting rules that made it really difficult to tell exactly what a wave serpent or venom or nightscythe was allowed to shoot, that it was somehow less game-y than the current system. It wasn't, it was just even crueler to vehicles than the current edition is.

People pay 80pts for Rhinos in a lot of lists now. In 7th they were only a consideration whent they were FREE.

Yes, you should fear anti tank weapons in a tank. The trick is to take them out with a different unit and then move them in. That's not a problem, that's a feature.

I agree on difficult terrain.

 Sledgehammer wrote:


Furthermore rolling 40 dice to hit, then rolling 20 dice, then your opponent rolling 7 dice, then calculating the final results which are statistically going to be 2-3 wounds IS far too many dice for negligible results.

You're assuming this is 30k where everything has the same profile. Those 40 dice to hit deal 2-3 wounds on armored tough guys, but 10+ on cheaper models.

Fire proper anti elite weapons against armored models and you won't have negligible results .

 Blackie wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:


Furthermore rolling 40 dice to hit, then rolling 20 dice, then your opponent rolling 7 dice, then calculating the final results which are statistically going to be 2-3 wounds IS far too many dice for negligible results.

You're assuming this is 30k where everything has the same profile. Those 40 dice to hit deal 2-3 wounds on armored tough guys, but 10+ on cheaper models.

Fire proper anti elite weapons against armored models and you won't have negligible results .

That's just an illustration of guardsmen shooting marines. Of course it shouldn't be effective. That was my point. My other point is that we do be rolling a lot of dice, often times for negligible effect. Look at the orks, they always have them throw tons of dice around only for very little to hit home, and that is across the board for that faction. There are better ways of doing resolving damage that could take less time.

Orks rolls tons of dice since decades, and no one complained about dice rolling in 3rd or 5th. Even now in 9th it's not guardsmen or orks that annoy people with endless dice rolling.

In fact I also play a SM chapter and I've got the feeling that I'm rolling way more dice with then, rather than orks.

If you want granularity, and armies with very different stats, you need something like guardsmen or orks shooting/fighting, again it's not 30k where everything is an elite unit .

 Blackie wrote:
Orks rolls tons of dice since decades, and no one complained about dice rolling in 3rd or 5th. Even now in 9th it's not guardsmen or orks that annoy people with endless dice rolling.

In fact I also play a SM chapter and I've got the feeling that I'm rolling way more dice with then, rather than orks.

If you want granularity, and armies with very different stats, you need something like guardsmen or orks shooting/fighting, again it's not 30k where everything is an elite unit .

Let me be more specific then. Do we need a to wound roll to have a necessary amount of granularity? Is there something that can supplement it? Could you expand the armor save system with more modifiers? You could effectively eliminate 33% of the dice rolls if you got rid of the to wound roll.

 Blackie wrote:
...If you want granularity, and armies with very different stats, you need something like guardsmen or orks shooting/fighting, again it's not 30k where everything is an elite unit .

Adsecularii, Auxilia infantry, Militia infantry, Militia conscripts...

Lemons. Yes, too many dice but worse problems, and the suggested solution doesn’t address any of those so… thanks for the fish.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Galas wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Specially because everytime someone does this comparison they use the bolter as a comparison. The bolter was a weapon to kill chaff infantry. What people used to obliterate space marines was the insane amount of high AP firepower the game has had for more than 15 years.

I don't care that it took 20 bolters rounds to kill a marine vs 5 to an ork boy/guardsmen. My space marines didn't spend the last 10 years dying like flyes to flasguns and bolters.


The sames goe to the typical "back in the day an ork boy killed X marines and now..." Ork boyz are horde units with light attacks. They excel at killing other chaff units like space marines can't. Of course they aren't good to kill space marines and haven't been for decades.

"Shpeeeesh Maaahreeeeenns!"

Galas I don't think I could disagree with you more. Imo you are the very face of the problem with modern balance between troops.

I mean, ideally all troops should be competitively balanced, having a place in most lists.

If you are curious, the troops (If one unit here is not a troop, I would make it one) I feel, by stats (Thats mean 1vs1 because by points it should not exist a "better" troop)) should be and feel more powerfull than marines (Marine Troops and most "troop like" units like assault, devastators, reivers, etc...) are Nobz (in meele), Tyranid Warriors (everything), Inmortals (Range and resilience), Custodes (everything), Katapron Servitors (range and resilience), Plague marines (everything), Rubric Marines (Range and resilience), Sonic Marines (Range) , Khorne Berzerkers (Meele), Harlequin Troopes.

The troops I feel should feel as powerfull as marines are Dire Avengers, CSM, and Genestealers (much faster and deadly in meele but much squishier and 0 shooting).

I'm probably forgetting something. Everything else, sisters, imperial guard, tau troops, ork boyz, necron warriors, etc... should not be able to go 1vs1 and in many times not even 1vs2 or 1vs3 agaisnt a marine (points and balance should account for all of that).

But stuff like and Imperial Guardsmen will never be as good as killing marines as marines killing him, because marines are or should be bullies of weaker stuff, and cheap infantry without ways to hurt heavy infantry should be, by pure balance, innefective agaisnt them. But just give a guardsmen squad a plasma gun and see how they recover half their cost in a single shooting phase. And that was the problem with marines.

 Galas wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Galas wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Specially because everytime someone does this comparison they use the bolter as a comparison. The bolter was a weapon to kill chaff infantry. What people used to obliterate space marines was the insane amount of high AP firepower the game has had for more than 15 years.

I don't care that it took 20 bolters rounds to kill a marine vs 5 to an ork boy/guardsmen. My space marines didn't spend the last 10 years dying like flyes to flasguns and bolters.


The sames goe to the typical "back in the day an ork boy killed X marines and now..." Ork boyz are horde units with light attacks. They excel at killing other chaff units like space marines can't. Of course they aren't good to kill space marines and haven't been for decades.

"Shpeeeesh Maaahreeeeenns!"

Galas I don't think I could disagree with you more. Imo you are the very face of the problem with modern balance between troops.

I mean, ideally all troops should be competitively balanced, having a place in most lists.

If you are curious, the troops (If one unit here is not a troop, I would make it one) I feel, by stats (Thats mean 1vs1 because by points it should not exist a "better" troop)) should be and feel more powerfull than marines (Marine Troops and most "troop like" units like assault, devastators, reivers, etc...) are Nobz (in meele), Tyranid Warriors (everything), Inmortals (Range and resilience), Custodes (everything), Katapron Servitors (range and resilience), Plague marines (everything), Rubric Marines (Range and resilience), Sonic Marines (Range) , Khorne Berzerkers (Meele), Harlequin Troopes.

The troops I feel should feel as powerfull as marines are Dire Avengers, CSM, and Genestealers (much faster and deadly in meele but much squishier and 0 shooting).

I'm probably forgetting something. Everything else, sisters, imperial guard, tau troops, ork boyz, necron warriors, etc... should not be able to go 1vs1 and in many times not even 1vs2 or 1vs3 agaisnt a marine (points and balance should account for all of that).

But stuff like and Imperial Guardsmen will never be as good as killing marines as marines killing him, because marines are or should be bullies of weaker stuff, and cheap infantry without ways to hurt heavy infantry should be, by pure balance, innefective agaisnt them. But just give a guardsmen squad a plasma gun and see how they recover half their cost in a single shooting phase. And that was the problem with marines.

There are a lot of ways to go with space marines in both the lore and on the table top. In the first and 2nd Gaunt's Ghosts books, guardsmen are taking down Chaos Space Marines with lasguns on highpower. In other books, Space Marines are taking on entire planets with a single squad. The question we have to ask ourselves when choosing between the two ends of the spectrum, is what is more fun in a wargame, and what is more profitable for a company? I personally don't think running around with just a couple of models is conducive to either more fun, or more profit.

As for troops, I'd rather see small arms get much deadlier across the board, restrict specialist weapons so that, you know they are "specialist" and / or tighten their effectiveness toward a narrower path. Standard infantry and rifles play a frustratingly small role in the game.

Back in my day my Guard had tons of squads, because we still had the platoon structure, and Guard squads existed to stand around firing their heavy and special weapons all game, and sometimes swarming into HTH to either beat things with overwhelming numbers, or stall things whilst everyone pulled back to a new firing line.

No idea how Guard work now...

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Curiosity question for people who agree with the OP here, how do you feel about the change to Disgustingly Resilient moving it away from an army wide FNP?

GW's sudden move away from army-wide FNP is no doubt a way to speed things up. The problem with what they did with DG is two-fold however:

1. DG armies aren't usually that big unless you are just spamming Poxwalkers, so removing this from their limited amounts of Marines, Terminators and a few other things wasn't strictly necessary.
2. Their replacement helps make them more resilient against higher damage weapons, but D1 weapons still affect them in the same way (yes, I know they have W2 now, but that's an all-Marine thing, not a DG thing).

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

Ah yes, clearly it's my fault as a player that GW gave my army 0 anti-knight weapons.

My sincere apologies for "trying to ignore a part of the game" by not playing Eldar or Space Marines.

Fliers are even funnier since they introduced an entirely new class of models and then introduced ANOTHER entirely new class of anti-air models so you could deal with them. Good luck if neither of type of model was introduced for your army!

So basically 3rd edition

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
I'd rather have a system that punishes players for trying to ignore a part of the game rather than have flamers attacking aircraft., grav tanks ramming aircraft, and tanks being shot to shreds by small arms.

Ah yes, clearly it's my fault as a player that GW gave my army 0 anti-knight weapons.

My sincere apologies for "trying to ignore a part of the game" by not playing Eldar or Space Marines.

Fliers are even funnier since they introduced an entirely new class of models and then introduced ANOTHER entirely new class of anti-air models so you could deal with them. Good luck if neither of type of model was introduced for your army!

it's almost like factions should get AA if they don't have it, rather than claiming that a system that rewards hovering in the back lines, or moving as slowly as possible to remain away from enemy troops (In other words, behaving in the exact opposite as to how aircraft act. You know, flying around the battlefield.) is anything but worse. Lets advocate for a system where flamers, small arms, and jet pack infantry can either assault Aircraft, or hit them with a -1! It's not like they're traveling at supersonic speeds and odd angles!

Who doesn't have any AA ability except maybe chaos demons? Failure for a codex is not failure for a system.

From a Necron perspective, marines are no longer a list I even think about when I try to design a list.

No matter how GW rearranges the stats on marines, they can't seem to break their awesome fluff/terrible tabletop paradigm for marines.

Marines suffer from being vulnerable to every attack vector in the game save units protected by transhuman. It's hard to not see DG as just marines that work correctly at this point.

 Sledgehammer wrote:
There are a lot of ways to go with space marines in both the lore and on the table top. In the first and 2nd Gaunt's Ghosts books, guardsmen are taking down Chaos Space Marines with lasguns on highpower. In other books, Space Marines are taking on entire planets with a single squad. The question we have to ask ourselves when choosing between the two ends of the spectrum, is what is more fun in a wargame, and what is more profitable for a company? I personally don't think running around with just a couple of models is conducive to either more fun, or more profit.

Gaunt's Ghosts and whatever story in which Space Marines take on an entire planet with a single squad are aberrations. In most lore Space Marines aren't represented like that. We shouldn't choose between these two outer ends of the spectrum, rather we should simply ignore these outliers and assume that on average a Space Marine is equal to about 5-10 unaugmented soldiers (and for gameplay balance I'd suggest to stick with 5).

And I think the success of the Custodes shows that low model count armies can definitely work and be fun. And properly balanced Space Marines would still have a lot more models than the Custodes, so I don't think there is a problem here.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
There are a lot of ways to go with space marines in both the lore and on the table top. In the first and 2nd Gaunt's Ghosts books, guardsmen are taking down Chaos Space Marines with lasguns on highpower. In other books, Space Marines are taking on entire planets with a single squad. The question we have to ask ourselves when choosing between the two ends of the spectrum, is what is more fun in a wargame, and what is more profitable for a company? I personally don't think running around with just a couple of models is conducive to either more fun, or more profit.

Gaunt's Ghosts and whatever story in which Space Marines take on an entire planet with a single squad are aberrations. In most lore Space Marines aren't represented like that. We shouldn't choose between these two outer ends of the spectrum, rather we should simply ignore these outliers and assume that on average a Space Marine is equal to about 5-10 unaugmented soldiers (and for gameplay balance I'd suggest to stick with 5).

And I think the success of the Custodes shows that low model count armies can definitely work and be fun. And properly balanced Space Marines would still have a lot more models than the Custodes, so I don't think there is a problem here.

Yup that's pretty much my point. I'm not sure I agree that for every platoon of guard there should be one five man tac squad either....

I'm against armies being THAT elite because they don't really feel like an army anymore. An army on the Table top should aim to have around 40 models at 2,000 points at the very least. Anything less just doesn't quite feel right.

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Orks rolls tons of dice since decades, and no one complained about dice rolling in 3rd or 5th. Even now in 9th it's not guardsmen or orks that annoy people with endless dice rolling.

In fact I also play a SM chapter and I've got the feeling that I'm rolling way more dice with then, rather than orks.

If you want granularity, and armies with very different stats, you need something like guardsmen or orks shooting/fighting, again it's not 30k where everything is an elite unit .

Let me be more specific then. Do we need a to wound roll to have a necessary amount of granularity? Is there something that can supplement it? Could you expand the armor save system with more modifiers? You could effectively eliminate 33% of the dice rolls if you got rid of the to wound roll.

Do we need an armor save roll? If a soldier gets wounded, obviously their armor failed to protect them.

A.T. wrote:
Only when you factor in things like cover, special weapons, and artillery.

Not at all. My factor is ppm. 2 guardsmen are more durable than 1 marine against most weapons, point for point.

This entire thread concept is basically a exercise in how little people understand the power of horde armies in a low rof game.

 Dysartes wrote:
How is your Mom's spaghetti, OP?

My mom passed away last October during the middle of this Covid mess, thank you.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

A.T. wrote:
Only when you factor in things like cover, special weapons, and artillery.

Not at all. My factor is ppm. 2 guardsmen are more durable than 1 marine against most weapons, point for point.

This entire thread concept is basically a exercise in how little people understand the power of horde armies in a low rof game.

The removal of blast and templates as well. Shooty hordes are kept in check by the missions in 9th. Melee hordes... we're about to see.

 Galas wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Galas wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
A Space Marine was already harder to take down than a Guardsman or Ork Boy.

Point for point, this has historically been false.

Specially because everytime someone does this comparison they use the bolter as a comparison. The bolter was a weapon to kill chaff infantry. What people used to obliterate space marines was the insane amount of high AP firepower the game has had for more than 15 years.

I don't care that it took 20 bolters rounds to kill a marine vs 5 to an ork boy/guardsmen. My space marines didn't spend the last 10 years dying like flyes to flasguns and bolters.


The sames goe to the typical "back in the day an ork boy killed X marines and now..." Ork boyz are horde units with light attacks. They excel at killing other chaff units like space marines can't. Of course they aren't good to kill space marines and haven't been for decades.

"Shpeeeesh Maaahreeeeenns!"

Galas I don't think I could disagree with you more. Imo you are the very face of the problem with modern balance between troops.

I mean, ideally all troops should be competitively balanced, having a place in most lists.

If you are curious, the troops (If one unit here is not a troop, I would make it one) I feel, by stats (Thats mean 1vs1 because by points it should not exist a "better" troop)) should be and feel more powerfull than marines (Marine Troops and most "troop like" units like assault, devastators, reivers, etc...) are Nobz (in meele), Tyranid Warriors (everything), Inmortals (Range and resilience), Custodes (everything), Katapron Servitors (range and resilience), Plague marines (everything), Rubric Marines (Range and resilience), Sonic Marines (Range) , Khorne Berzerkers (Meele), Harlequin Troopes.

The troops I feel should feel as powerfull as marines are Dire Avengers, CSM, and Genestealers (much faster and deadly in meele but much squishier and 0 shooting).

I'm probably forgetting something. Everything else, sisters, imperial guard, tau troops, ork boyz, necron warriors, etc... should not be able to go 1vs1 and in many times not even 1vs2 or 1vs3 agaisnt a marine (points and balance should account for all of that).

But stuff like and Imperial Guardsmen will never be as good as killing marines as marines killing him, because marines are or should be bullies of weaker stuff, and cheap infantry without ways to hurt heavy infantry should be, by pure balance, innefective agaisnt them. But just give a guardsmen squad a plasma gun and see how they recover half their cost in a single shooting phase. And that was the problem with marines.

A Necron Warrior should be equal to a Marine. That's how they were in the past, they've become weaker and weaker as time has moved on.

 Galas wrote:

I mean, ideally all troops should be competitively balanced, having a place in most lists.

If you are curious, the troops (If one unit here is not a troop, I would make it one) I feel, by stats (Thats mean 1vs1 because by points it should not exist a "better" troop)) should be and feel more powerfull than marines (Marine Troops and most "troop like" units like assault, devastators, reivers, etc...) are Nobz (in meele), Tyranid Warriors (everything), Inmortals (Range and resilience), Custodes (everything), Katapron Servitors (range and resilience), Plague marines (everything), Rubric Marines (Range and resilience), Sonic Marines (Range) , Khorne Berzerkers (Meele), Harlequin Troopes.

The troops I feel should feel as powerfull as marines are Dire Avengers, CSM, and Genestealers (much faster and deadly in meele but much squishier and 0 shooting).

I'm probably forgetting something. Everything else, sisters, imperial guard, tau troops, ork boyz, necron warriors, etc... should not be able to go 1vs1 and in many times not even 1vs2 or 1vs3 agaisnt a marine (points and balance should account for all of that).

I largely agree. However, there's the obvious question of how wide the gaps between these units should be. e.g. should Marines be better than Orks because they have a much better armour save and can deplete them at range, but can still be overwhelmed by them in melee (as it was previously)? Or should they just be better than Orks in every way and able to mow them down not only at range but also in melee, which the Orks supposedly specialise in?

Another example - it used to be that Marines and Necrons were very similar. Necrons were more resilient against many weapons (same toughness and save but they had WBB) and their basic weapons were slightly better but they couldn't take special weapons or melee weapons and, despite Ld10, were quite vulnerable to morale - especially in melee. However, as editions went by, Necron Warriors got gradually weaker while Marines got stronger and stronger, to the point where Marines are now better in basically every way.

There's also another issue in that the core rules for 9th are so vapid and shallow that it's very hard to actually make units exceed Marines without just making them even tougher. How does one make Dire Avengers roughly on par with Marines without just turning them into Marine-equivalents? It seems all you can really do is make them glass-cannons and compensate for their lack of durability with a drastic increase in firepower.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Fliers are even funnier since they introduced an entirely new class of models and then introduced ANOTHER entirely new class of anti-air models so you could deal with them. Good luck if neither of type of model was introduced for your army!

Even if you did have fliers, it was still no guarantee that you'd be able to deal with enemy ones. IIRC it would take about 1500pts of Voidravens to kill a single Helldrake.

But yeah, even in the best case scenario, it's hard to think of a mechanic that felt more tacked-on than Fliers.

IIRC the 40k flyer rules were more or less copy/pasted from Forgeworld's apocalypse flyer rules. Although they obviously had to mess it up.

- In apocalypse both players bringing aircraft and/or AA was not unreasonable. 40k games were small enough that investing in AA would be a noticable chunk of points. Not to mention it was a brand new tacked on mechanic that wasn't even tacked onto all armies. Many people couldn't get AA, and many others simply didn't want to buy a new expensive and ugly model.

- Forgeworld flyers were typically only AV10-11. 40k flyers were often AV12, not unreasonable when they were just fast skimmers, but now they're flyers they're extremely resilient to the quintessential S7 autocannon AA.

Most of this thread is about people who clearly don't play 9th edition trying to solve problems that 9th edition doesn't have...

Too many dice rolls are mainly a problem due to an overabundance of re-rolls (counter-acted by the introduction of CORE and in general getting cut down with 9th codices), FNP everywhere (only selected units in 9th codices), a bunch of time consuming special rules with little to no effect (many getting curbed with new codices) and the trend of giving new models a smattering of different weapons that you need to roll separately.

Looking at the beast snagga rules, the last point is the only one that remains a problem in 9th, but there is no easy fix to that except to stop doing it.

I also, once again, would like to point out that "flamers are AA" is the very same as saying "I have no experience in 8th or 9th and should not be talking about either".

Although I do agree that 9th has gone some way to curb the extent of rerolls, they have by no means removed a lot of them.

Speaking as a Space Marine player, rerolling dice is the default character effect, annoying 6+ FNPs are still easy to get, random 'blasts' and damage are still pretty common.

9th is a step back in the right direction, but we've not entirely there.

Agree, but I think this is a marine/early codex problem. Other codices usually have only character, if any at all handing out re-rolls to maybe one or two units.

Of course, since half the players are marines, every marine problem is a 40k problem...

Problem with dice rolling is not the volume of dice itself. I mean rolling 60 shots from a unit of 10 ork bikers seems a lot of dice rolling, but what it actually slows down the game is units like the repulsor which have tons of different guns that need to be resolved separately. One volley of rolls doesn't really slow down anything as long as it belongs to the same "batch".

Ork buggies with 3-4 weapons each and acting like single models once deployed is another perfect example of dice rolling that slows down the game, with the new codex all shots of the same type from the same squadron can be rolled together thankfully. Same for mek gunz. Resolving the firepower from 6 scrapjets or 6 smasha gunz used to take forever for 660 and (especially) 240 points units.

The existence of different weapons' profile is another thing that slows down the game: in 3rd orks had something like 15 profiles for ranged weapons and that was it. Now they have a ton, and there are also rules that allow to alter the values of those weapons. All things that need to be double checked frequently. How many different anti tank weapons do SM have now?

I agree up to a point, I don't like ever having to roll more than a handful of dice at a time, ideally only a comfortable handful, no dice spilling out!
Which is only a couple dozen, maybe a little more.

I totally agree on weapons though, this is made so much worse by the trend that every unique sculpt needs a unique profile. I wish they just conglomerated things a little more.
In Star Wars Legion, my AAT has about 4 different weapons which are all condensed into one "defence lasers" profile.
In 40k I'm sure they'd be 3 different weapons with at least 2 distinct profiles.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
In 40k I'm sure they'd be 3 different weapons with at least 2 distinct profiles.

And even if they have the same profiles, they get different BS so you can't roll them together anyways. Yes, I'm looking at you, scrapjet and squigbuggy.

I am on team auras need to go. It slows down the games giving out boatloads of rerolls and kills balance. how do you balance a unit of say devastators points wise? do you just assume they will be rerolling hit and wound rolls and bake that into the cost of the devastators? how bout the captain or chapter master and LT? Do you point adjust them as if they were allowing rerolls on 4 units at a time or just 1? Personally I think all "aura" abilities should be changed "to choose a unit in each phase that unit can *insert aura ability)

Regarding auras, something I was thinking about recently was that 40k doesn't have any common or universal mechanics beyond the most basic elements of the game (movement shooting, melee etc.), and the closest things it does have to common or universal mechanics are completely non-interactive.

What do I mean by this?

Well, it might be easier to start with a counter-example. In Warmahordes, every army is built around a central warlock or warcaster and a battlegroup of warbeasts or warjacks. The casters have pools of fury/focus which are used to cast spells, to boost their attacks and to protect themselves, though they can also be distributed to their battlegroup to help them boost rolls or activate certain abilities.

Obviously I'm simplifying here but the point is that you have a central resource-management mechanic that applies to all armies. Different warlocks and warcasters will have different abilities (some might be powerful melee characters in their own right, with others being entirely support-oriented) but all are spellcasters, using the same spellcasting mechanic. What's more, you also have a lot of ways of interacting with this mechanic - there are many abilities that can protect from spells in some way or which can remove buff/debuff spells from enemy units or other such.


To return to 40k, there isn't anything resembling a common ability or interaction of this kind. Some armies in 40k have psykers but others don't (and so have to basically just skip an entire phase of the game). Some armies have defining abilities (Resurrection Protocols, Acts of Faith, Power from Pain etc.) but there's no commonality between these elements. Acts of Faith work in an entirely different way to Resurrection Protocols and both work in an entirely different way to Power from Pain, with zero overlap or interactivity.

The closest thing 40k has to a universal mechanic is CPs and Stratagems. The issue, however, is that these aren't tied to any physical models (HQs aren't needed to 'cast' them, for example), so they feel totally disconnected from anything happening on the board. Further, there exists maybe a single stratagem-countering-stratagem in the entire game. Hence, whilst there is some tactical input on the part of the player using them, there exists basically no counterplay for the opponent.

Whilst not quite as universal, auras are similar in that there is very little that interacts with them. Though, unlike stratagems, they don't even require any sort of resource-management (making them even less interactive, as it means neither player has any control over them).

I bring this up because I wonder if it would help for 40k to pick a mechanic and build it into the core abilities for factions, rather than every faction having abilities that work in entirely different ways (making them very difficult to balance and also meaning that there is no 'jumping off point' for designers). For example, take Command Points but tie them to HQ/unit abilities instead of a CCG. Or maybe take Acts of Faith and give each army a pool of dice that it can spend on an appropriate ability.

I don't know, just musing to myself really.

I'm not so sure, I'd actually say 40k has many such central mechanics; strategems, psykers, auras.

The problem is they have no discipline and hardly any central vision.
Every faction needs to be newer and shiny than the one before, that's why you have all these crazy unique rules like Power from Pain or Miracles.

However, to many, this is the selling point. I know someone that buys pretty much every new thing shown because he loves the new unique rules for them.
That's what GW cares about, they don't care about grognards like me because we don't buy much in comparison.

In terms of cutting down dice rerolls would definitely be the first step, along with reroll-like dice (excessive FnP and other wound ignoring rolls, exploding dice, etc)

A while back I played around with the idea of a streamlined 40k and ditched the basic armour saving throws as well (folded into the wound mechanic). Not tested enough to determine if it was a step too far but it was a lot less dice to roll.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

A.T. wrote:
Only when you factor in things like cover, special weapons, and artillery.

Not at all. My factor is ppm. 2 guardsmen are more durable than 1 marine against most weapons, point for point.

As mentioned in the previous post, it was 3-1 in the marines favour in points (and 8-1 in models) if a guard unit shot a marine unit ~3-4th edition, with just their basic weapons. Unless i've mis-added somewhere. Perhaps you were thinking of a different edition/ruleset, or different kind of comparison.

I see people saying 'it's not the number of shots, it's rerolls/abilities/different guns/etc', but I've never played another game that has me doing as much borderline pointless dice rolling.

Even without any special abilities or Orders or rerolls or anything my basic Infantry Squad is throwing 19 dice in rapid fire range. Shooting at Marines requires an average of 32 dice rolls for an average result of one measly wound dealt. So we're rolling about 60 dice collectively for each model removed from the field.

It's at least a little better when he shoots back. A unit of Intercessors rapid-firing against Guardsmen results in an average of 42 dice rolls and 7 models removed. So 6 dice per model eliminated.

Throw in rerolls, stratagems, and other abilities and the number of dice goes up dramatically.

Compare to something like Dust, where an infantryman typically throws one die, hitting on the equivalent of a 5+. If he's staying stationary he gets to reroll it. If he hits, the target may get a save. And that's it. Or look at Apocalypse, where a unit of 30 models may roll fewer then ten dice to resolve the entire attack.

It doesn't have to be a carved-in-stone rule that each model only gets one die; it's the sequential process of each individual model rolling to hit -> rolling to wound -> rolling saves, not to mention multi-wound infantry, that produces a very high ratio of dice rolled to models removed. It fits the style of a skirmish game but feels out of place in a system with 50+ models per side.

 catbarf wrote:
...Or look at Apocalypse, where a unit of 30 models may roll fewer then ten dice to resolve the entire attack...

On the extreme end of the scale in Black Powder Epic your infantry regiment is 100 men on five bases, and they're usually rolling three dice at range and six to eight in melee. It makes for a game that looks very big and very dramatic, but you can also play it in two hours easily enough. (They're also tightly-packed 15mm guys, so you can fit two thousand models in one box.)

 catbarf wrote:
I see people saying 'it's not the number of shots, it's rerolls/abilities/different guns/etc', but I've never played another game that has me doing as much borderline pointless dice rolling.

Even without any special abilities or Orders or rerolls or anything my basic Infantry Squad is throwing 19 dice in rapid fire range. Shooting at Marines requires an average of 32 dice rolls for an average result of one measly wound dealt. So we're rolling about 60 dice collectively for each model removed from the field.

It's at least a little better when he shoots back. A unit of Intercessors rapid-firing against Guardsmen results in an average of 42 dice rolls and 7 models removed. So 6 dice per model eliminated.

Throw in rerolls, stratagems, and other abilities and the number of dice goes up dramatically.

Compare to something like Dust, where an infantryman typically throws one die, hitting on the equivalent of a 5+. If he's staying stationary he gets to reroll it. If he hits, the target may get a save. And that's it. Or look at Apocalypse, where a unit of 30 models may roll fewer then ten dice to resolve the entire attack.

It doesn't have to be a carved-in-stone rule that each model only gets one die; it's the sequential process of each individual model rolling to hit -> rolling to wound -> rolling saves, not to mention multi-wound infantry, that produces a very high ratio of dice rolled to models removed. It fits the style of a skirmish game but feels out of place in a system with 50+ models per side.

I'm sure I remember a little note back in the 3rd or 4th edition rulebook that talked about the way they use dice.

It basically said "Yeah, we know weapons like Assault Cannons fire far more shots than they roll dice but it makes more sense to just roll 4 dice that hit on 3s, rather than throwing 16 dice that only hit on 6s."

Presumably that philosophy was lost somewhere along the line.

 vipoid wrote:
I'm sure I remember a little note back in the 3rd or 4th edition rulebook that talked about the way they use dice.

It basically said "Yeah, we know weapons like Assault Cannons fire far more shots than they roll dice but it makes more sense to just roll 4 dice that hit on 3s, rather than throwing 16 dice that only hit on 6s."

Presumably that philosophy was lost somewhere along the line.

I choose to believe that the number of dice is abstract/representative even in its current incarnation, because the idea of Rapid Fire literally representing two shots is nonsensical on its own and has absurd implications for the rest of the game.

Depending on the system, one die could be used to represent a burst of a few aimed shots, a soldier's entire fire output for a given timestep, or a fireteam's combat effectiveness- it all depends on chosen scale. 40K seems to hover around that first level, which is more common to skirmish games than mass battle ones, where the second or third are more common.

 catbarf wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
I'm sure I remember a little note back in the 3rd or 4th edition rulebook that talked about the way they use dice.

It basically said "Yeah, we know weapons like Assault Cannons fire far more shots than they roll dice but it makes more sense to just roll 4 dice that hit on 3s, rather than throwing 16 dice that only hit on 6s."

Presumably that philosophy was lost somewhere along the line.

I choose to believe that the number of dice is abstract/representative even in its current incarnation, because the idea of Rapid Fire literally representing two shots is nonsensical on its own and has absurd implications for the rest of the game.

Depending on the system, one die could be used to represent a burst of a few aimed shots, a soldier's entire fire output for a given timestep, or a fireteam's combat effectiveness- it all depends on chosen scale. 40K seems to hover around that first level, which is more common to skirmish games than mass battle ones, where the second or third are more common.

It's not so much that one dice currently equals one shot. Rather, it was the philosophy of trying to actually cut down on the number of dice needed to resolve a given weapon.

I've often toyed with the idea of a system which would use 2d6 (or some other suitable dice range), the BS of the unit, the number of models firing and the fire rate of the weapon to calculate the number of hits rather than rolling for all shots.

Though actually producing a working system from that has proven to be much more challenging

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've often toyed with the idea of a system which would use 2d6 (or some other suitable dice range), the BS of the unit, the number of models firing and the fire rate of the weapon to calculate the number of hits rather than rolling for all shots.

Though actually producing a working system from that has proven to be much more challenging

Isn't this basically how Battletech does it? I haven't played in years but that's how I vaguely remember it working.

Rihgu wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've often toyed with the idea of a system which would use 2d6 (or some other suitable dice range), the BS of the unit, the number of models firing and the fire rate of the weapon to calculate the number of hits rather than rolling for all shots.

Though actually producing a working system from that has proven to be much more challenging

Isn't this basically how Battletech does it? I haven't played in years but that's how I vaguely remember it working.

Battletech is a little... different.

Basically to find the target number (rolled on with 2D6), you take the Gunnery Skill of the pilot, add your Movement Modifier (based on how you moved, +1 for Walk, +2 for Run, +3 for Jump), add their Movement Modifier (based on how far they moved, 3-4 is +1, 5-6 is +2, etc), add Range Modifier (Short is usually 0, Medium +2, Long, +4), and then insert any other modifications provided by weapons (ex. Pulse Lasers do a -2) other equipment (ex.Targeting Computer provides a -1 for direct fire weapons; Stealth Armor add +1 to Medium Range, +2 for Long Range), or terrain (ex. Light Woods are +1, Heavy Woods are +2).

If the target number goes in to 13, it is unhittable.

So short-hand would one could put it as:

BS+Shooter Movement+Target Movement+Range+Equipment+Terrain = Target number. Roll 2D6 to hit or exceed.

 catbarf wrote:
I see people saying 'it's not the number of shots, it's rerolls/abilities/different guns/etc', but I've never played another game that has me doing as much borderline pointless dice rolling.

Yeah I think the message is being lost a bit here. Rerolls are exacerbating the underlying issue of having to work through 3 separate rolls to resolve an attack. Its great that 9th is cutting back on rerolls as Jidmah pointed out somewhat up the page - that doesn't change the fact that the resolution system still requires an unnecessarily large number of rolls to be rolled regardless (and that doesn't even begin to go into all the additional dice rolls like attrition in other parts of the game. I generally assume that people focus on the reroll aspect because they aren't necessarily familiar with other games and don't realize that other games offer other methods which accomplish the same thing without needing to make a multitude of rolls to do so.

I voted Lemon Curry cause I don't know what it means but the other 2 didn't quite fit. I do believe things are a bit too much but also that 1 model 1 shot is too much in the other direction.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've often toyed with the idea of a system which would use 2d6 (or some other suitable dice range), the BS of the unit, the number of models firing and the fire rate of the weapon to calculate the number of hits rather than rolling for all shots.

Though actually producing a working system from that has proven to be much more challenging

That's not as 'out there' as you might think, considering 2D6 combat resolution is a staple of hex-and-paper wargames. What you can do for 40K is plot the bell curve of a particular test and roughly map it to the results of a 2D6 roll.

For example, say I'm firing 6 dice at BS4+. The results look like this:
0 hits- 1.56%
1 hit- 9.38%
2 hits- 23.44%
3 hits- 31.25%
4 hits- 23.44%
5 hits- 9.38%
6 hits- 1.56%

Nice symmetrical bell curve. If I plot that to 2D6 as:
2: 0 hits
3: 1 hit
4-5: 2 hits
6-8: 3 hits
9-10: 4 hits
11: 5 hits
12: 6 hits

Then the odds are:
0 hits- 2.8%
1 hit- 5.6%
2 hits- 19.4%
3 hits- 44.4%
4 hits- 19.4%
5 hits- 5.6%
6 hits- 2.8%

Notice that this implementation is a bit more predictable than the 'real thing', aside from greater chance of 0 hits or 6 hits (not by much, though). You can plot the outcome in different ways to achieve different levels of reliability. So, the next step would be to make a chart with a discrete number of columns like the above, and set gradations- eg maybe you use the above table if you have a 'firepower' of 5-7 models firing. Greater or lesser BS would result in either a different method of counting (eg Marines count their numbers as 1.5x or whatever), or lateral shifts if the column layout is structured so that the firepower represented by a column is a fixed multiple of the one before it.

But really, once you've come to terms with the loss of granularity imposed by this type of resolution, it's not so far-fetched to apply the same sorts of shortcuts to the rest of the fire sequence. You can consolidate the attacker's firepower with the defender's resilience and any external factors to determine what column to roll on, and then use a single 2D6 roll as your bell curve result generator. Eg you're shooting on the above column, and you're in Rapid Fire range so you get a right column shift, but your target is Orks and they're tough so they impose a left column shift, and they're in cover so that's another shift left, but you're under Take Aim and that's a shift right, and it all cancels out to just rolling on the above table so throw your 2D6 and see what happens. Rather than layer in additional checks and re-rolls, those attributes that either increase or decrease your effectiveness mutually cancel, keeping the resolution quick.

Or just zoom out a little and take the Apocalypse approach. It's okay to roll individual dice to hit if you're rolling two dice for a Guard squad, rather than 37.

I remember when the Punisher Gatling Cannon came out which caused a stir with it's 20 shots, 5x as much as the theoretically similar assault cannon. Now that looks rather normal.

Granularity is a common argument for sticking with the same system, but the difference between 2 dice and 3 dice resolution is only a % or two any given direction, that's just not a noticable loss.

Similar to Dust, Starwars Legion has 2 dice in a roll. Attacker rolls to hit then defender rolls to save. Yet using very simple special rules they manage to make things feel interesting and unique.

 fraser1191 wrote:
I voted Lemon Curry cause I don't know what it means but the other 2 didn't quite fit. I do believe things are a bit too much but also that 1 model 1 shot is too much in the other direction.

Did the same. Likewise, no idea what Lemon Curry is, but it sounds like it could be delicious.

One approach I'd like to see GW try is using something like a hybrid of the Apocalypse and existing degrading monster/vehicle mechanic for large units with lots of shots.

For example, Orks (pre-9th anyway) could fire 60 shots, then get DDD on around 10 of those, which is a lot of rolling and fishing for results. Instead of a linear approach where 1 more guy equals X more shots, just have a rule that a unit of 11-20 gets 2 hits per hit and 21-30 gets 3? You could further tune it to only work against infantry if you wanted. Similar approaches could work for SM Aggressors, who really don't need to be throwing 72 dice with re-rolls to hit and wound.

The only way we can reduce the dice rolling at this point is if GW adopt a system that doesn't blindly just add more shots as you get more guns. there are other ways to increase effectiveness. There are so many weapons out there with 3+ shots on fairly basic infantry models that we need a seismic shift on how the game resolves large units shooting. I don't see that happening any time soon. GW seems to think more dice equals more fun.

If we can accept the abstraction that the number of shots fired by a given weapon only represents those subset of rounds fired that have a high probability of hitting the target, then we could/should be able to accept the abstraction that after a point adding more guns increases the probability of those shots hitting instead of adding more shots. I.E. after 10 guys you no longer add dice to your pool, instead you go +1 to hit, and after 20 you go to +2 instead, etc.

Problem is there are already a lot of other sources for +1 to hit out there, so I don't think its a workable approach without a rewrite of a lot of other rules and a recalibration of how the team approaches handing out those types of abilities.

40k has too many dice rolls for sure. 40k's bigger problem is that it wants to be a company or battalion level wargame in terms of model count, with strategic level units and abilities, and tactical or roleplay level detail and stats. It wants everything in the 40k universe to be both present and playable on the same small cramped battlefield, with every model being its own unique game piece and statline. As a result, in attempting to cover all those bases while also trying to keep everything unique, we got tons of stat bloat and ever increasing reasons to need to roll dice and larger dice pools.

It's wanting everything to be unique.
If people were just okay with their Ultramarines playing the same as their White Scars, or with their Dire Avengers feeling pretty much like Tempestus Scions we wouldn't have a lot of this problem.

I genuinely think you could map the majority of 40k to a Star Wars Legion type system rather well if you didn't mind a few units feeling essentially like some other units.

I think armies feeling different is probably a good thing? The armies being extremely different is one of the biggest appeals of 40k over other systems. 30k being a marine-fest with none of that diversity is the biggest reason even the marine players in my group have no interest in 30k.

I've believed the layers of free rules based on how you painted your minis was a huge mistake.

I'd be perfectly happy with it returning to an aesthetic/lore preference.

Coming up on four years of "reroll failed morale" as my lone paint benefit might have influenced my stance a bit.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I think armies feeling different is probably a good thing? The armies being extremely different is one of the biggest appeals of 40k over other systems. 30k being a marine-fest with none of that diversity is the biggest reason even the marine players in my group have no interest in 30k.

Armies can feel different with similar units.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I think armies feeling different is probably a good thing? The armies being extremely different is one of the biggest appeals of 40k over other systems. 30k being a marine-fest with none of that diversity is the biggest reason even the marine players in my group have no interest in 30k.

Armies can feel different with similar units.

Depends what you mean, since that statement can mean anything. "Dire Avengers being basically the same unit as Tempestus Scions" doesn't sound appealing to me, for example. I think diversifying unit profiles (IE Immortals being fully incomparable to marine troops now, whereas before they were basically the same unit with a better gun but fewer options) was one of the better changes 9th made.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I think armies feeling different is probably a good thing? The armies being extremely different is one of the biggest appeals of 40k over other systems. 30k being a marine-fest with none of that diversity is the biggest reason even the marine players in my group have no interest in 30k.

Armies can feel different with similar units.

Depends what you mean, since that statement can mean anything. "Dire Avengers being basically the same unit as Tempestus Scions" doesn't sound appealing to me, for example. I think diversifying unit profiles (IE Immortals being fully incomparable to marine troops now, whereas before they were basically the same unit with a better gun but fewer options) was one of the better changes 9th made.

The differences between units' rules can be more subtle yet still make them unique.

If you want everything to be totally unique, I'm not faulting you - that's a subjective opinion.
But 40k is a game so vast it's impossible to make every army that unique without the current level of rules bloat.

Personally, I hate the rules bloat and would gladly take more subtle differences between units and factions.

Plenty of games manage to create unique units from fewer stats than 40k uses, often with no, or one, special rule to differentiate similar units. It seems to be a peculiarly 40k thing to believe you need all this bloat just to make units different. There's also the fact that the combination of units taken as a whole gives armies their character, not looking at each one in a vacuum.

I think that's what 40k's lost sight of. It's all the more annoying because 40k includes a bunch of background information in each Codex that would allow them to point out the difference between various units from a fluff perspective while maintaining rules consistency and reducing bloat.

As a practical example, let's take the SM Incursor, Infiltrator and Tactical Marine units. Specifically, let's look at their standard guns. They all have Bolters. But GW have decided instead of 1 gun with a special rule on the unit modifying them very slightly, we need 3 different weapons with a different name and the same profile. That's pointless bloat. The special rules would exist whichever way you write those rules but doing it the GW way gives you 2 extra weapons in your 4-and-a-half page list of ranged weapons.

I'd love armies to be very different.

I don't like however having multiple units from a single codex that are basically the same thing. What's the point of having terminators, centurions, aggressors and bladeguard veterans? What's the point of having 5 or 6 different battle tanks? Or ork buggies? Make one single datasheet and give that unit/vehicle a few options in order to be able to play it in different ways.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slipspace wrote:


As a practical example, let's take the SM Incursor, Infiltrator and Tactical Marine units. Specifically, let's look at their standard guns. They all have Bolters. But GW have decided instead of 1 gun with a special rule on the unit modifying them very slightly, we need 3 different weapons with a different name and the same profile. That's pointless bloat. The special rules would exist whichever way you write those rules but doing it the GW way gives you 2 extra weapons in your 4-and-a-half page list of ranged weapons.

Exactly, that's a perfect example of pointless bloat.

I'm pretty sure it would be more rules text for all three units to carry a "Boltgun" but then having to specify in the special abilities section if that boltgun has AP-1 or whatever.

Or, you could just give all of them bolters and it would have next to no effect on most games.

Slipspace wrote:
It seems to be a peculiarly 40k thing to believe you need all this bloat just to make units different.

Hit the nail on the head.

Horus Heresy is far from perfect, but it does show how you can make armies composed of basically the same units play very differently from one another through:
A. A few unique units per faction.
B. Simple faction-wide special rules.
C. Enough flexibility in listbuilding to let you take advantage of A and B and build to distinct archetypes.

An army of drop pod assault Night Lords and an army of gunline Imperial Fists feel and play differently even though they're the same basic statline.

This is generally how historicals work, too. A German Gefreiter with a Kar98 and a Soviet Yefreytor with a Mosin-Nagant are both enlisted soldiers with bolt-action rifles and comparable training. On an individual basis they may not be that different. But a German platoon with a pair of MG42s in every squad, able to divide into fireteams with independent frontage, plays very differently from a Soviet platoon equipped entirely with rifles that must operate as a single cohesive unit. It is not necessary to come up with minute stat variations between German soldiers and Soviet soldiers to make them play distinctly.

Or look at Epic. Because the game isn't infantry-focused there isn't that much of a difference, stat-wise, between squads of Guard, Orks, or Marines. What makes them feel different is that Marines are elite and much harder to remove by morale and have great C&C, while Orks are dangerous and cheap but have awful C&C so getting them to do what you want is a struggle, and Guard are more or less average but have access to lots of organic fire support. Chaos Marines are, by the stats, the same as loyalists, but they lack ATSKNF and that makes them far more susceptible to morale, so they aren't nearly as stalwart as their loyalist counterparts. These are just some very simple, straightforward rules leveraging existing rules constructs (ie C&C and morale rules that actually matter), distinguishing units and armies from one another in flavorful ways without getting bogged down in minutiae.

I would agree with the idea that you don't strictly need Dire Avengers and Tempestus Scions to have radically different stats and abilities just to make Eldar and Guard feel distinct. It's a particularly apt example since the structure of those armies is so different- by design, Guard are going to be the slow rolling sledgehammer faction while Eldar are fast and surgical, so the way 'medium elite infantry with a short-ranged gun' fits into those paradigms will differ. Layer on some simple traits to reflect the character/flavor of each faction and you're good to go.

I don't begrudge anyone who enjoys the current amount of detail in some of the mechanics, but this is certainly not the only way to differentiate the factions. Particularly when some of the major distinctions aren't modeled in the first place- why should we care about the exact differences between a shoota and a bolter when an Ork Boy and a Space Marine are equally reactive and coordinated on the battlefield?

Completely agree with the above, I could easily see Dire Avengers and Tempestus Scions have very similar stats and weapon profiles.

I would love if 40k was more of "simple rules for your faction" to make them distinct instead of "six layers of rules for your faction oh and half your army is flooded with rules bloat". While complexity can be nice and is a fast route to depth, it also is a fast way to making the game difficult, slow, or obtuse to a newcomer.

Space Wolves being Space Marines that were good at the ol'counterattack was a fine differentiation. Since then we have a lot, lot, more options mechanically to make them different and GW is currently using every tool in the toolbox to do so. Makes for a fun betatesting environment but I think 40k would play a lot better if they were far more limiting in which levers they choose to pull when they try to make armies different.

Overly simple example: All Space Marines armies have the same unit and weapon profiles the difference comes from the <stratagems/rites of battle> they have access to.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I'm pretty sure it would be more rules text for all three units to carry a "Boltgun" but then having to specify in the special abilities section if that boltgun has AP-1 or whatever.

Nope, it's exactly the same amount of special rule text since you just move it from the weapon to the unit. What you do get though is one third of the number of different weapons across the units since they all now wield Bolters. TBH, I'd probably go further and just delete the special weapon rules from Infiltrators and Incursors anyway. They already have niches that they fill with their other abilities and equipment, they don't need special rules for their weapons too.

Slipspace wrote:
TBH, I'd probably go further and just delete the special weapon rules from Infiltrators and Incursors anyway. They already have niches that they fill with their other abilities and equipment, they don't need special rules for their weapons too.

This is what I would do, why does every unit need it's own bespoke bolter or bolt pistol?
I used to be able to remember every weapon profile by heart, now I need to check "did they get the bolter that's +1 AP, or +6 range?" every time.

Well its interesting comparing the old system to today's.

Originally a Guardsman with a lasgun was 0-12" range +1 to hit, -1 armour save. All other stats equal.
That is at close range a 11.1% chance of wounding a marine.
At long range a 8.3% chance.

Today its rapid fire, no save mod.
Close range the same - 11.1%
Long range worse - 5.6%

But there are fewer modifiers so a simpler calculation to do.

But yes overall I would love to roll less dice. I love playing epic and while you get big loads of dice that means say one or 2 dozen (and there is no wound roll). In 40k to fire my lasgun squad at close range using orders I have 36 lasgun shots and D6 grenade shots.

Why can't first rank second rank order be changed to something like the wall of fire means it is impossible for the enemy to avoid being caught in the web of laser bolts. All lasguns auto hit.

Statistically that is the same result (18 hits) as rolling 36 dice, and I still have to do all the wound and armour stuff. But hey, that is starting to speed things up.

Currently things have got a little mental. This is a legitimate potential firing process.
Calculate number of shots and any modifiers. Roll shots. Roll to wound. Choose best armour save. Roll armour save. Roll damage. Roll feel no pain save.

It honestly seems like 40k assumes the dice rolls being the game in and of themselves.
The game is about positioning buff characters and utilising strategems to push your attacks and/or defence as far as you can.

This dominates every level of the game from army lists to tactics. There's very little opportunity to do much besides.

When playing Legion I have much more to consider; C&C, suppression, etc.
Yet also far less to keep track of; auras, strats, etc.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
It honestly seems like 40k assumes the dice rolls being the game in and of themselves.
The game is about positioning buff characters and utilising strategems to push your attacks and/or defence as far as you can.

This dominates every level of the game from army lists to tactics. There's very little opportunity to do much besides.

When playing Legion I have much more to consider; C&C, suppression, etc.
Yet also far less to keep track of; auras, strats, etc.

That's the main reason I don't view 40k as any sort of tactical experience and I'm generally sceptical of any claims about the depth and skill in the game. Other games require you to use positioning, movement and factors other than straight-up damage to win. 40k lacks almost any of that, barring some very superficial aura positioning and standing on objectives, most of which is just a case of remembering to do stuff. Too much of the game revolves around the dice rolls themselves, rather than having those rolls be the reward of utilising other mechanics like positioning and suppression.

Agreed with you slipspace.

Elite close combat units were always a bit crap in wh and 40k if they only had one attack so i can see the argument for them having 2 though. Largely agree with OP though.

Dai wrote:
Elite close combat units were always a bit crap in wh and 40k if they only had one attack so i can see the argument for them having 2 though. Largely agree with OP though.

2 is fine, I think. The problem we have now is we're getting up to 3, 4 or even more attacks per model in close combat. I remember when the Indomitus box was being previewed and the designer was talking about the SM Outriders and explaining how great it was that they get 6 attacks each when they charge. I rolled my eyes so hard at that. In 3rd edition I don't think there were many models that got more than 3 or 4 attacks, and those were things like SM Captains or Hive Tyrants. Now some random biker gets 6 attacks. If he's a Blood Angels Outrider Sgt he gets 8 attacks in assault doctrine. It's just such an unsophisticated way to represent a unit's increased melee power.

Slipspace wrote:

Dai wrote:
Elite close combat units were always a bit crap in wh and 40k if they only had one attack so i can see the argument for them having 2 though. Largely agree with OP though.

2 is fine, I think. The problem we have now is we're getting up to 3, 4 or even more attacks per model in close combat. I remember when the Indomitus box was being previewed and the designer was talking about the SM Outriders and explaining how great it was that they get 6 attacks each when they charge. I rolled my eyes so hard at that. In 3rd edition I don't think there were many models that got more than 3 or 4 attacks, and those were things like SM Captains or Hive Tyrants. Now some random biker gets 6 attacks. If he's a Blood Angels Outrider Sgt he gets 8 attacks in assault doctrine. It's just such an unsophisticated way to represent a unit's increased melee power.

Exactly this.

This is how you get so so many more dice thrown around. 'Attack' creed is certainly a thing.

It's even worse when you get horde units like Orks throwing around 4 attacks per grunt that you see just how mind bogglingly bad the problem has become.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
It's even worse when you get horde units like Orks throwing around 4 attacks per grunt that you see just how mind bogglingly bad the problem has become.

I'd like to point out that a unit of ork boyz has never thrown about less attacks on average than it has in 9th.

In 5th getting your entire mob in combat was extremely easy, and they had 2 attacks base, one for charging and one for slugga+choppa. Throwing 80 dice plus nob was super easy.

In 9th you get only 10-12 models to fight on average, they have get an extra attack from the choppa and maybe one from being above 20. With the new codex you only get 4 attacks when the right kind of Waaagh! is called.

So, the number of dice you roll for boyz has almost halved - the only mind boggling part about this is how people still haven't understood that a good portion of melee horde units are just ablative wounds.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
It's even worse when you get horde units like Orks throwing around 4 attacks per grunt that you see just how mind bogglingly bad the problem has become.

Nah, due to the fighting phase rules it's very hard to get more than 10 dudes into engagement range. So in real life a 10 man SM squad rolls the same dice of a 30 man boyz squad. Typically 40 attacks at most. That's also my experience, my 10 Blood Claws typically rolls the same amount of dice (4 per model, hitting on 2s and with AP-1 or AP-2 on basic free stuff) of horde squads, if not more as boyz not always get their 4th attack.

10 man squads of wyches can have even more attacks though.

I practise it's not the horde squads that typically make players roll a ton of dice, it's the elite squads!! 6 Aggressors roll many more dice than 30 shoota boyz as another example, up to 108 vs 60+exploding 6s (or 90/60 if using the upcoming codex). Of course with much higher BS, AP in 1-2 turns and also access to re-rolls.

 Jidmah wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
It's even worse when you get horde units like Orks throwing around 4 attacks per grunt that you see just how mind bogglingly bad the problem has become.

I'd like to point out that a unit of ork boyz has never thrown about less attacks on average than it has in 9th.

In 5th getting your entire mob in combat was extremely easy, and they had 2 attacks base, one for charging and one for slugga+choppa. Throwing 80 dice plus nob was super easy.

In 9th you get only 10-12 models to fight on average, they have get an extra attack from the choppa and maybe one from being above 20. With the new codex you only get 4 attacks when the right kind of Waaagh! is called.

So, the number of dice you roll for boyz has almost halved - the only mind boggling part about this is how people still haven't understood that a good portion of melee horde units are just ablative wounds.

That's pretty much missing the point of what's being discussed. Attack inflation is a thing in 40k and it's fairly stupid that any unit could potentially throw 80 attack dice for any reason. Even 30 or 40 is unnecessary IMO. There are more elegant mechanics that could be used to represent the same thing as we have now.

Definitely. A lot of attacks per model can work in a system where you have limitations on how many models can attack.

For instance in WHFB, Witch Elves each had 3 attacks (1 base, +1 for 2 weapons, +1 for Frenzy). But only the models actually in base contact with an enemy model are able to make those 3 attacks. The rest either cannot attack or can only make 1 attack, depending on their position relative to a model in base contact.

LOTR has a similar situation when it comes to models equipped with spears. They can attack by being in base contact with a friendly model in base contact with an enemy, but can only make 1 attack when they do so, regardless of how many attacks they otherwise would have.

Ah I thought Orks used to be 1 attack base and forgot about the bonus for charging.
So that particular problem has always been there

 kirotheavenger wrote:
It's even worse when you get horde units like Orks throwing around 4 attacks per grunt that you see just how mind bogglingly bad the problem has become.

During 5th Ed when we starting veering off from GW's rules we changed the ork profile. We dropped an an attack, gave them Strength 4 and let them re-roll 1's To Hit in combat. Overall, it made them slightly better but it dropped quite a bit of dice rolling, even with re-rolling 1's. I never understood why people are so enamored with extra die-rolling as a solution. When people were proposing a 6+ Feel No Pain at one point it boggled my mind why anyone would want such a tedious method to increase a unit's survivability.

Slipspace wrote:
That's pretty much missing the point of what's being discussed. Attack inflation is a thing in 40k and it's fairly stupid that any unit could potentially throw 80 attack dice for any reason. Even 30 or 40 is unnecessary IMO. There are more elegant mechanics that could be used to represent the same thing as we have now.

You should go look up the word "inflation". If a unit is making half or less attacks than it did in almost all previous editions, that's not an "inflation", that's the opposite.

The attack inflation is mostly happening for shooting models which get many more shots, extra rules and a pile of guns stapled to them.

Claiming that horde units have gotten more attacks is just flat out wrong.


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 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Definitely. A lot of attacks per model can work in a system where you have limitations on how many models can attack.

For instance in WHFB, Witch Elves each had 3 attacks (1 base, +1 for 2 weapons, +1 for Frenzy). But only the models actually in base contact with an enemy model are able to make those 3 attacks. The rest either cannot attack or can only make 1 attack, depending on their position relative to a model in base contact.

LOTR has a similar situation when it comes to models equipped with spears. They can attack by being in base contact with a friendly model in base contact with an enemy, but can only make 1 attack when they do so, regardless of how many attacks they otherwise would have.

9th edition pretty much does the same, the 1/2" within 1/2" rule is fairly restrictive.

 Jidmah wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
That's pretty much missing the point of what's being discussed. Attack inflation is a thing in 40k and it's fairly stupid that any unit could potentially throw 80 attack dice for any reason. Even 30 or 40 is unnecessary IMO. There are more elegant mechanics that could be used to represent the same thing as we have now.

You should go look up the word "inflation". If a unit is making half or less attacks than it did in almost all previous editions, that's not an "inflation", that's the opposite.

The attack inflation is mostly happening for shooting models which get many more shots, extra rules and a pile of guns stapled to them.

Claiming that horde units have gotten more attacks is just flat out wrong.

That depends on the timescale in question. There are more horde units in the game than just Ork Boyz. Just because one unit hasn't seen that kind of inflation doesn't mean it isn't a thing. My comment above doesn't even specifically call out hordes as the main beneficiaries of this inflation. The comment you replied to mentioned 80 attack dice as an example of the stupid numbers in the game. The fact one unit has had that number potentially reduced (from an already ridiculous ceiling) doesn't alter the basic point that number of dice has massively increased over time...or inflated, if you prefer.

Sure, name one horde unit throwing more dice in combat now than it did 10 years ago. I genuinely don't know a single one, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

I can't think of one either, but that's because the main inflation was from 2nd to 3rd. Shooting dice have certainly massively increased. If you actually read my statement again it's a general comment about attack dice inflation, not specifically about hordes. My point about hordes was how inelegant a solution it is to continue with this 1-to-1 association with statline to attacks when base models can get 4 attacks each.

You jumped on a comment that was calling out wrong information. If anything, you missed the point.

 Jidmah wrote:
Sure, name one horde unit throwing more dice in combat now than it did 10 years ago. I genuinely don't know a single one, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

IG squads with Straken and a priest?

 vipoid wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Sure, name one horde unit throwing more dice in combat now than it did 10 years ago. I genuinely don't know a single one, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

IG squads with Straken and a priest?

Not really a horde unit, and definitely less attacks than blobbed up platoons. So while they did get 10 extra attacks compared to before because of a character (from the priest being buffed), a unit that has the same max unit size as marines hardly counts.

 vipoid wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Sure, name one horde unit throwing more dice in combat now than it did 10 years ago. I genuinely don't know a single one, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

IG squads with Straken and a priest?

By my count, in 7th and IG squad joined by Straken + Priest gets 31 attacks.
In 9th, an Infantry Squad with Straken + Priest buffs get 32 attacks.

So technically correct, but only barely so. If you equip them the same (Power sword instead of chainsword), they're even.

I suppose you have to spend a CP to make the infantry squad 20 models strong...

Or use conscripts.

Catachan Conscript - 30 strong, hit on 5's, Str 4, 1 attack, +1 from Stracken, +1 from priest.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I suppose you have to spend a CP to make the infantry squad 20 models strong...

Or use conscripts.

Catachan Conscript - 30 strong, hit on 5's, Str 4, 1 attack, +1 from Stracken, +1 from priest.

You are still very unlikely to have more than 10-12 models in engagement range.

Unlikeliness doesn't change it. That's like saying unit x is OP unless I blow it up

 fraser1191 wrote:
Unlikeliness doesn't change it. That's like saying unit x is OP unless I blow it up

But it does change it.

Under the old Codex rules, with Dakka Dakka Dakka, four Shoota boys could kill a Land Raider in Overwatch.

Is that something we should care about?

 fraser1191 wrote:
Unlikeliness doesn't change it. That's like saying unit x is OP unless I blow it up

Units normally not being able to fight with all their models in real games due to rules specifically designed to do that and opponents actively trying to influence that changes everything when the topic of discussion is that models are rolling too many dice.

Of course, if you are a pure armchair general mathhammering units in a vacuum and assuming that everything is in range of everything, you don't know that.

 Jidmah wrote:


You are still very unlikely to have more than 10-12 models in engagement range.

I had it explained to me last night the old base sizes are unfair because I can have 2 models in range to attack for every guy in contact, as the old bases are less than 1" in diameter, hence you can form three ranks...

I liked this up and until I thought about the old Conscript blobs of 7th. 40 guns, with FRFSRF, that's a lot of 1 model, 1 wounds.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


You are still very unlikely to have more than 10-12 models in engagement range.

I had it explained to me last night the old base sizes are unfair because I can have 2 models in range to attack for every guy in contact, as the old bases are less than 1" in diameter, hence you can form three ranks...

Feel free to go back to that person and tell them that you can't form three ranks under 9th edition's rules. Models that are not within 1" need to be 1/2" within a model that is within 1/2" of the target itself.
If anything, my experience with mobs on larger bases is that it's easier to get more models within 1/2" of the first rank, as the "area" which can be occupied by the second rank is larger.

If in doubt, provide them with 10 bases of both sizes and let them demonstrate the issue to you. In most cases, they will fiddle with the bases for minutes to fit one additional model in a perfect geometrical construction that will never, ever happen in actual games. If they still doubt you force them to make a proper charge move and pile in, not just put down models.