OrdoSean wrote:

gungo wrote:
Should a glass army just stand in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and say come shoot me bro?

The drukari list was built around first turn assault got first turn and failed to assault and left themselves vulnerable in the open with no protection. Then rolled poorly on saves from str 5/6 range weapons with bs4+ shooting and ap1/2 weapons. And then got folllowed up with a bunch of easy charge rolls….I mean this list has been around for 3 months and it’s not exactly tearing up the tournament scene.

My point is similar drukari lists are literally winning most tournaments, besting similar ork lists along the way and achieving absurd 70%+winrates. There are going to be blowouts when someone plays poor, rolls poorly even if they are playing the current fotm net list especially When they face a bad matchup. Sounds to me like someone simply got outplayed because even with this 1 fringe case I can list about a dozen other tournaments where drukari are winning vs similar freebooter lists. It’s not even close drukari are literally tearing up the meta right now with 70%+ win rates…, not orks… and this type of freebooter ork list has been out for 3 months and played in nearly every major tournament since and you know what faction has been winning most of those tournaments? Drukari….

I mean drukhari are a strong army. But they’re winning events by avoiding Orks. Or playing bad ork lists. They aren’t tearing up ork lists. Also they’re win percentage has dropped in the high 50’s low 60’s the last few months. Admech are the king of win percentage right now and largely one of the few armies that can use their regular build to beat Orks.

Anyway. People can argue I made a mistake. Or I left myself out there. Really I don’t care. But the ork player had already turn one or turn 2 crushed two other drukhari players who both had more guns and higher toughness vehicles than I. So I could have run out and hoped to pass an overwhelming number of saves and then make some charges and still get tabled by the way. Or I could hide and still get tabled. Or really do whatever and still get tabled. One of those choices would be over the fastest while presenting the highest chance of victory. So I took it.

Also if you think my list was built for turn one assaults you’re wrong. My list doesn’t do real turn one damage. It’s a counter play charge list built in incubi combat. Which by the way does nothing to ork vehicles.

It was a bad matchup. Likely the most lopsided game of 40K I’ve ever been involved in. And sadly speaks to a style of 40K I don’t particularly enjoy. Because the counter measures for me involve playing lists that are boring. But it is what it is.

I appreciate you taking the time to provide further insight to the game.

a_typical_hero wrote:
I don't think that even under perfect conditions, one army should be able to wipe out 90% of another army.

Like Spoletta, I see the bigger issue here being the lack of available counterplay, with the high lethality taking the second place.

Both should be looked at, but the former is the more pressing issue.

What do you guys think? Would it help if flyers could not start the game on the board?

My personal opinion on flyers is that they should basically be a form of nearly-unassailable but unreliable fire support.

Make them flimsier in terms of wounds, tough and save, but give them back the old 'hit me on 6s unless youre a dedicated anti-air or another plane' rule, and instead of starting on the board they have to roll to see if they come on each turn, and then they just appear, anywhere on the battlefield they want to be.

then your opponent gets 1 turn to respond to them if they want to, and then theyre back in reserves rolling to see if they come on again, because theyre not actually moving around on the game board, theyre shooting by making strafing runs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

OrdoSean wrote:

gungo wrote:
Should a glass army just stand in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and say come shoot me bro?

The drukari list was built around first turn assault got first turn and failed to assault and left themselves vulnerable in the open with no protection. Then rolled poorly on saves from str 5/6 range weapons with bs4+ shooting and ap1/2 weapons. And then got folllowed up with a bunch of easy charge rolls….I mean this list has been around for 3 months and it’s not exactly tearing up the tournament scene.

My point is similar drukari lists are literally winning most tournaments, besting similar ork lists along the way and achieving absurd 70%+winrates. There are going to be blowouts when someone plays poor, rolls poorly even if they are playing the current fotm net list especially When they face a bad matchup. Sounds to me like someone simply got outplayed because even with this 1 fringe case I can list about a dozen other tournaments where drukari are winning vs similar freebooter lists. It’s not even close drukari are literally tearing up the meta right now with 70%+ win rates…, not orks… and this type of freebooter ork list has been out for 3 months and played in nearly every major tournament since and you know what faction has been winning most of those tournaments? Drukari….

I mean drukhari are a strong army. But they’re winning events by avoiding Orks. Or playing bad ork lists. They aren’t tearing up ork lists. Also they’re win percentage has dropped in the high 50’s low 60’s the last few months. Admech are the king of win percentage right now and largely one of the few armies that can use their regular build to beat Orks.

Anyway. People can argue I made a mistake. Or I left myself out there. Really I don’t care. But the ork player had already turn one or turn 2 crushed two other drukhari players who both had more guns and higher toughness vehicles than I. So I could have run out and hoped to pass an overwhelming number of saves and then make some charges and still get tabled by the way. Or I could hide and still get tabled. Or really do whatever and still get tabled. One of those choices would be over the fastest while presenting the highest chance of victory. So I took it.

Also if you think my list was built for turn one assaults you’re wrong. My list doesn’t do real turn one damage. It’s a counter play charge list built in incubi combat. Which by the way does nothing to ork vehicles.

It was a bad matchup. Likely the most lopsided game of 40K I’ve ever been involved in. And sadly speaks to a style of 40K I don’t particularly enjoy. Because the counter measures for me involve playing lists that are boring. But it is what it is.

That is largely not the point of the thread. The general argument here is that when lethality in the game has reached the level where a one-turn table is possible, youve shifted such a huge percentage of the game's skill expression to the list building/strategy side that it almost doesnt matter what decisions you make on the tabletop in a lot of matchups.

If the way you position your models on the table in a wargame can take their points return from ~5-10% to ~30-40% depending on range, cover, movement, maybe even rotation, then a player's skill is expressed by how they make those good situations happen.

If the way you position your models on the table is only ever 0% points return (out of range/cant see) or 50-60% if they can see+range at all, then everything basically just comes down to list building.

tneva82 wrote:
If it takes less than 3x points to delete unit game is too lethal as a rule of thumb.

Agreed. And this is a weakness with the 2000 pts format. Since HQ often are somewhere between 200 and 400 points, the real effect of going from 1500 to 2000 pts is increasing army size with about 40%. With the way warhammer works with cummulative shooting, not enough terrain to hide a larger army behind, more specialized units like lascannon spam, and exponetially increases the strenght and effect of buffs (since more units are receiving), it makes it easier to delete the opponents army.

Truth is, 40k is a shallow game, where re-rolls and rock-paper-scissors style armies are substitutes for real strategy.

I think a start would be for tournaments to play 1500 points armies, and a single batallion detatchment. The way multiple detatchment works in most tournaments we are pretty much at "grab whatever you'd like". Giving similar build - structure for armies, i.e. 2-3 hqs, 3-6 troops, and 0-3 HS, elites, and fast attacks, and 0-1 flier would remove some of the rock-paper-scissor effects we see today.

Just saying.

Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

OrdoSean wrote:
Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

Do you really think a competitive drukhari or admech list could not also remove nearly 2000pts of an enemy army in a single turn if they were given free and open access to that player's army to attack it? Because I play Drukhari and I feel REALLY confident I could basically entirely table an opposing army if you set me up 24" away on an empty board.

And that's not even to mention the less competitive army setups that are already just not present in the game at higher levels. Your average admech flyer list could quite easily put an opponent relying on such silly and outdated concepts as 'defending your units with high toughness and Sv rather than Invulns and to-hit mods' in the exact same situation the ork list put you in, just by taking a decent number of stratoraptors and laschickens. I'd hazard a guess that on a board without Obscuring terrain on it an admech list could probably take out 2500-3000pts of Astra Militarum vehicles.

I would be really curios about the results of a 1500 point tournament. I think that 2000 isn't really a good army size for 40K. Too slow and too much fat allowed.

Try and get the tourney scene to change though. GW would have to change first in their events. Tried to get people to do a tourney with less locally, but no its either 1000pt doubles or 2000 regular...

Forgetting the ability of planes for the moment, I personally think the Freebooter trait is completely out of whack. You kill a sacrificial unit and all of a sudden your entire army becomes 50% more effective in hitting their targets. Buggies, planes etc are pretty damn cheap for what firepower they deliver (and durability with ramshackle), but that is offset by mostly being BS5. Now the entire army hits on 4s? Yeah, we're going to see results like this.
My buddy picked up on this with the Ork Codex immediately and I played against it the week after the codex hit with my Dark Angels. My Ravenwing units were basically all eliminated Turn 1 with exception of Talon Master and Apothecary who had protection from nearby Deathwing units (I went second) and the only reason I was able to continue the game (but was always playing uphill in a losing battle) was because I had several Deathwing units that could tank a lot of the hits (much harder for him to get Freebooter trait working Turn 2+, but it didn't matter at that point).
My first thought on the matter was that the trait needed changing, it's just too good. maybe it should be an aura only...units within 6" of the one that killed an enemy unit get +1 to hit.

 bullyboy wrote:
Forgetting the ability of planes for the moment, I personally think the Freebooter trait is completely out of whack. You kill a sacrificial unit and all of a sudden your entire army becomes 50% more effective in hitting their targets. Buggies, planes etc are pretty damn cheap for what firepower they deliver (and durability with ramshackle), but that is offset by mostly being BS5. Now the entire army hits on 4s? Yeah, we're going to see results like this.
My buddy picked up on this with the Ork Codex immediately and I played against it the week after the codex hit with my Dark Angels. My Ravenwing units were basically all eliminated Turn 1 with exception of Talon Master and Apothecary who had protection from nearby Deathwing units (I went second) and the only reason I was able to continue the game (but was always playing uphill in a losing battle) was because I had several Deathwing units that could tank a lot of the hits (much harder for him to get Freebooter trait working Turn 2+, but it didn't matter at that point).
My first thought on the matter was that the trait needed changing, it's just too good. maybe it should be an aura only...units within 6" of the one that killed an enemy unit get +1 to hit.

Freebootas has literally existed very much close to current form since the 8th ed ork dex came out...I've been using it this entire time and it's never been an issue before. previously it was *technically* a 24-inch range aura around the unit that killed an enemy unit but 99% of the time just a tiny bit of tactical decision making and it was board-wide.

The overtuning of the vehicles people are taking it with is obviously the problem. squigbuggies basically doubled their damage and stayed at the same points cost.

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:
Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

Do you really think a competitive drukhari or admech list could not also remove nearly 2000pts of an enemy army in a single turn if they were given free and open access to that player's army to attack it? Because I play Drukhari and I feel REALLY confident I could basically entirely table an opposing army if you set me up 24" away on an empty board.

And that's not even to mention the less competitive army setups that are already just not present in the game at higher levels. Your average admech flyer list could quite easily put an opponent relying on such silly and outdated concepts as 'defending your units with high toughness and Sv rather than Invulns and to-hit mods' in the exact same situation the ork list put you in, just by taking a decent number of stratoraptors and laschickens. I'd hazard a guess that on a board without Obscuring terrain on it an admech list could probably take out 2500-3000pts of Astra Militarum vehicles.

Well seeing as I played this kind of scenario out in two games no. I played the dark angels death wing terminator list twice. And legitimately took my whole army minus maybe 200 points to kill 10 terminators. Which were 1/3 roughly of his army. Maybe 1/4. He had 30 terminators 6 blade guard and a few characters. So yeah most of my killing power killed 1/4 of his army. That seems like a reasonable rate of return.

Similarly in admech matches I ran my army up and he killed 4-5 venoms and maybe 1/3 of the contents. That seems a reasonable rate of loss for me as well.

Take a Dakkajet.
8th edition:
18 shots, S6 AP-1. +1 to hit if they all target the same thing.

Today, first Speedwaagh turn, its 42 shots, S6, AP-2. Second turn its a more modest 36 shots (...) but still S6 AP-2.

Shooting say Intercessors with the Freebooter buff on both and you are doing 2.3 times as much damage in 9th as you were in 8th. You can say the Dakkajet wasn't exactly good before - but this is an absurd buff.

And comparable increases occur all through the 9th edition books, hence why almost every army is composed of glass.

So lethality in 40K has gotten ridiculous, and it's questionable how suited the game is for competitive play.

I mean we are still talking about a list of mainly bs4+ str 5/6 ap1/2 dam 1 with mostly 18-24in range rapid fire/Dakka weapons… this type of “bolter spam” isn’t exactly a problem for a lot of armies. Not to mention these types of freebooter lists have been around for 3 months already without much of a problem until today.

The reason Sean couldn’t engage was deployment and setup and bad flyer rules…
He took an assault list that couldn’t assault.
He was faced with
Row 1- flyers (can’t assault)
Row 2- buggies with flyers in front and a buggy row behind
Row 3- more buggies
All of which sandwiched between terrain and the board edges or out of movement range

His only real path was trying to squeeze around 3 Mek guns blocking the path to the left…

4 flyers with big bases you can’t normally assault is alot. This is part of the problem… the other being flyer bases blocking assault range. If I had to nerf something it would be to limit flyers to 1 per patrol, brigade, battalion detachment and remove the flyer detachment… and allow units to ignore flyer bases for movement and assault range. I mean the bases really shouldn’t prevent you from moving onto them.

gungo wrote:
I mean we are still talking about a list of mainly bs4+ str 5/6 ap1/2 dam 1 with mostly 18-24in range rapid fire/Dakka weapons… this type of “bolter spam” isn’t exactly a problem for a lot of armies. Not to mention these types of freebooter lists have been around for 3 months already without much of a problem until today.

The reason Sean couldn’t engage was deployment and setup and bad flyer rules…
He took an assault list that couldn’t assault.
He was faced with
Row 1- flyers (can’t assault)
Row 2- buggies with flyers in front and a buggy row behind
Row 3- more buggies
All of which sandwiched between terrain and the board edges or out of movement range

His only real path was trying to squeeze around 3 Mek guns blocking the path to the left…

4 flyers with big bases you can’t normally assault is alot. This is part of the problem… the other being flyer bases blocking assault range.

The new ramshackle rule is also amazing considering the most popular weapon profile is damage 2 to deal with marines and similar types.

Honestly the ork player could have put his 3 indirect buggies in the front. Told me he wouldn’t shoot me turn one and let me assault him kill those three buggies and pile into his army…. And still tabled me. Maybe by turn 3 in that case but still.

He couldn’t fall back and shoot with the buggies as freebooter and this list only had 9 buggies. If you killed 3 and piled into 3 more you would have removed most of the buggies from combat. (Which they are fairly poor in melee anyway).

Fortunately a lot of weapons with dam 2 or higher is str 8 or higher to ignore ramshackle… but I agree it’s a nice ability on a bunch of low toughness 6 vehicles.

OrdoSean wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:
Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

Do you really think a competitive drukhari or admech list could not also remove nearly 2000pts of an enemy army in a single turn if they were given free and open access to that player's army to attack it? Because I play Drukhari and I feel REALLY confident I could basically entirely table an opposing army if you set me up 24" away on an empty board.

And that's not even to mention the less competitive army setups that are already just not present in the game at higher levels. Your average admech flyer list could quite easily put an opponent relying on such silly and outdated concepts as 'defending your units with high toughness and Sv rather than Invulns and to-hit mods' in the exact same situation the ork list put you in, just by taking a decent number of stratoraptors and laschickens. I'd hazard a guess that on a board without Obscuring terrain on it an admech list could probably take out 2500-3000pts of Astra Militarum vehicles.

Well seeing as I played this kind of scenario out in two games no. I played the dark angels death wing terminator list twice. And legitimately took my whole army minus maybe 200 points to kill 10 terminators. Which were 1/3 roughly of his army. Maybe 1/4. He had 30 terminators 6 blade guard and a few characters. So yeah most of my killing power killed 1/4 of his army. That seems like a reasonable rate of return.

Similarly in admech matches I ran my army up and he killed 4-5 venoms and maybe 1/3 of the contents. That seems a reasonable rate of loss for me as well.

I think it's pretty safe to say that MOST armies do not have access to...what is it, T4 W3 sv2+ 5++ models that can only be wounded on 4+ for 38pts per model.

While killing 25% of an opposing army per turn might be acceptable for that ONE extreme durability-skew list its pretty disingenuous to suggest that that is a normal setup.

....and also its pretty funny that you bring up that extreme durability skew list and then note that you still got a 25% points return in what's supposed to be a 5-turn game

Is it the goal that every game should end in a tabling before the final turn? Is that good, healthy game design right there?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:
Take a Dakkajet.
8th edition:
18 shots, S6 AP-1. +1 to hit if they all target the same thing.

Today, first Speedwaagh turn, its 42 shots, S6, AP-2. Second turn its a more modest 36 shots (...) but still S6 AP-2.

Shooting say Intercessors with the Freebooter buff on both and you are doing 2.3 times as much damage in 9th as you were in 8th. You can say the Dakkajet wasn't exactly good before - but this is an absurd buff.

And comparable increases occur all through the 9th edition books, hence why almost every army is composed of glass.

yeah man its almost like the increasing shots from 18 to 42 might be the problem here and not the freebootas trait.

the_scotsman wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:
I don't think that even under perfect conditions, one army should be able to wipe out 90% of another army.

Like Spoletta, I see the bigger issue here being the lack of available counterplay, with the high lethality taking the second place.

Both should be looked at, but the former is the more pressing issue.

What do you guys think? Would it help if flyers could not start the game on the board?

My personal opinion on flyers is that they should basically be a form of nearly-unassailable but unreliable fire support.

Make them flimsier in terms of wounds, tough and save, but give them back the old 'hit me on 6s unless youre a dedicated anti-air or another plane' rule, and instead of starting on the board they have to roll to see if they come on each turn, and then they just appear, anywhere on the battlefield they want to be.

then your opponent gets 1 turn to respond to them if they want to, and then theyre back in reserves rolling to see if they come on again, because theyre not actually moving around on the game board, theyre shooting by making strafing runs.

Huh, sounds exactly like the 4th edition flyer rules; weird, that.

Anyways,

This is an expression of bad game design, through and through, and this isn't the first time this has happened, either.

It's not once in a thousand games, it's twice in two major tournament Grand Finals (out of what, 24?). An opponent conceded in the other opponent's Turn 1 Shooting Phase because of ridiculous damage output that crippled their army beyond the ability to compete.

Yes, yes, there's lots to quibble about ("the first guy only lost the most critical 800 points of his army, had he not been tired he could've played on" / "it was the fault of the terrain/players/dogs/lunch caterers/TO, not game design!" / "GW is perfect in every way, so something ELSE must be the cause of this!" etc.) but, fundamentally, 9th edition isn't functioning that well.

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:
Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

Do you really think a competitive drukhari or admech list could not also remove nearly 2000pts of an enemy army in a single turn if they were given free and open access to that player's army to attack it? Because I play Drukhari and I feel REALLY confident I could basically entirely table an opposing army if you set me up 24" away on an empty board.

And that's not even to mention the less competitive army setups that are already just not present in the game at higher levels. Your average admech flyer list could quite easily put an opponent relying on such silly and outdated concepts as 'defending your units with high toughness and Sv rather than Invulns and to-hit mods' in the exact same situation the ork list put you in, just by taking a decent number of stratoraptors and laschickens. I'd hazard a guess that on a board without Obscuring terrain on it an admech list could probably take out 2500-3000pts of Astra Militarum vehicles.

Well seeing as I played this kind of scenario out in two games no. I played the dark angels death wing terminator list twice. And legitimately took my whole army minus maybe 200 points to kill 10 terminators. Which were 1/3 roughly of his army. Maybe 1/4. He had 30 terminators 6 blade guard and a few characters. So yeah most of my killing power killed 1/4 of his army. That seems like a reasonable rate of return.

Similarly in admech matches I ran my army up and he killed 4-5 venoms and maybe 1/3 of the contents. That seems a reasonable rate of loss for me as well.

I think it's pretty safe to say that MOST armies do not have access to...what is it, T4 W3 sv2+ 5++ models that can only be wounded on 4+ for 38pts per model.

While killing 25% of an opposing army per turn might be acceptable for that ONE extreme durability-skew list its pretty disingenuous to suggest that that is a normal setup.

....and also its pretty funny that you bring up that extreme durability skew list and then note that you still got a 25% points return in what's supposed to be a 5-turn game

Is it the goal that every game should end in a tabling before the final turn? Is that good, healthy game design right there?

Well in that army example I can’t kill anything turn one. Then I kill 1/4 on turn 2. Then he kills stuff then I kill 1/4 again then he kills stuff. Then I don’t kill 1/4. Then he kills stuff so by game end we both have sub 1/4 or 1/8 of our armies left yeah I’d say that’s pretty much how the game should go.

Thats kind of the problem. There's no easy "one stop shop" for GW to try and dial the deadliness back. Theyve amped it up across the board, mostly through individual unit buffs and weapon buffs and by adding the extra layer of army-wide rules in the Doctrine-equivalent purity bonuses.

And their solution to that is, apparently, also trying to hand out layers of durability like candy. Here you go, thousand sons, try a 5++ on everything. Here you go, Dark Angels, army-wide transhuman. Here you go, BTs, 5++ on everything but also its not even one of your chapter traits, its just your bonus thingy thing.

Did that work? No? people are still getting tabled turn 3 as a norm, but now if you DONT have crazybonkers firepower we've just got these few army builds that cant be scratched at all? Weird, I wonder how other wargames do it, maybe having the difference between "Firing at maximum range at an enemy i can see 1% of 1 model" and "Firing at 2" away at an enemy standing completely out in the open" be ZERO, NOTHING, ITS THE GOD DAMN SAME was a bad idea.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Forgetting the ability of planes for the moment, I personally think the Freebooter trait is completely out of whack. You kill a sacrificial unit and all of a sudden your entire army becomes 50% more effective in hitting their targets. Buggies, planes etc are pretty damn cheap for what firepower they deliver (and durability with ramshackle), but that is offset by mostly being BS5. Now the entire army hits on 4s? Yeah, we're going to see results like this.
My buddy picked up on this with the Ork Codex immediately and I played against it the week after the codex hit with my Dark Angels. My Ravenwing units were basically all eliminated Turn 1 with exception of Talon Master and Apothecary who had protection from nearby Deathwing units (I went second) and the only reason I was able to continue the game (but was always playing uphill in a losing battle) was because I had several Deathwing units that could tank a lot of the hits (much harder for him to get Freebooter trait working Turn 2+, but it didn't matter at that point).
My first thought on the matter was that the trait needed changing, it's just too good. maybe it should be an aura only...units within 6" of the one that killed an enemy unit get +1 to hit.

Freebootas has literally existed very much close to current form since the 8th ed ork dex came out...I've been using it this entire time and it's never been an issue before. previously it was *technically* a 24-inch range aura around the unit that killed an enemy unit but 99% of the time just a tiny bit of tactical decision making and it was board-wide.

The overtuning of the vehicles people are taking it with is obviously the problem. squigbuggies basically doubled their damage and stayed at the same points cost.

Correct, but the units that it was able to be used with in 8th were pretty pants. The units themselves have become extremely lethal (which is good right, we all wanted to see more orks on the table), but has become silly when combined with the freebooterz trait. So yeah, one of the two probably needs to be adjusted. Do you lean heavily into points adjustments for buggies and planes? Probably gonna suck, but oh well. Or do you address the freebooter trait itself? My guess, they go with points adjustments, but that won't happen for awhile.

OrdoSean wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

OrdoSean wrote:
Normally I would agree that movement and tactics on the table are the number one pieces of victory. As long as your list is competent and you pick reasonable secondaries.

However in this matchup with the Orks. There were no correct choices for me to make. I was going to be tabled with nearly no interaction at all.

And that said my list had beaten 3+ flyer admech 3 rounds in a row at this event. Had beaten drukhari.

Tha shooting and durability of the ork list is on a very different level.

Do you really think a competitive drukhari or admech list could not also remove nearly 2000pts of an enemy army in a single turn if they were given free and open access to that player's army to attack it? Because I play Drukhari and I feel REALLY confident I could basically entirely table an opposing army if you set me up 24" away on an empty board.

And that's not even to mention the less competitive army setups that are already just not present in the game at higher levels. Your average admech flyer list could quite easily put an opponent relying on such silly and outdated concepts as 'defending your units with high toughness and Sv rather than Invulns and to-hit mods' in the exact same situation the ork list put you in, just by taking a decent number of stratoraptors and laschickens. I'd hazard a guess that on a board without Obscuring terrain on it an admech list could probably take out 2500-3000pts of Astra Militarum vehicles.

Well seeing as I played this kind of scenario out in two games no. I played the dark angels death wing terminator list twice. And legitimately took my whole army minus maybe 200 points to kill 10 terminators. Which were 1/3 roughly of his army. Maybe 1/4. He had 30 terminators 6 blade guard and a few characters. So yeah most of my killing power killed 1/4 of his army. That seems like a reasonable rate of return.

Similarly in admech matches I ran my army up and he killed 4-5 venoms and maybe 1/3 of the contents. That seems a reasonable rate of loss for me as well.

I think it's pretty safe to say that MOST armies do not have access to...what is it, T4 W3 sv2+ 5++ models that can only be wounded on 4+ for 38pts per model.

While killing 25% of an opposing army per turn might be acceptable for that ONE extreme durability-skew list its pretty disingenuous to suggest that that is a normal setup.

....and also its pretty funny that you bring up that extreme durability skew list and then note that you still got a 25% points return in what's supposed to be a 5-turn game

Is it the goal that every game should end in a tabling before the final turn? Is that good, healthy game design right there?

Well in that army example I can’t kill anything turn one. Then I kill 1/4 on turn 2. Then he kills stuff then I kill 1/4 again then he kills stuff. Then I don’t kill 1/4. Then he kills stuff so by game end we both have sub 1/4 or 1/8 of our armies left yeah I’d say that’s pretty much how the game should go.

Fantastic, works great.

..........for that one setup of your extremely damage-skewed army vs that one extremely durability-skewed army.

Unfortunately, those are not the only available army builds that exist in 40k. So while theyve created maybe a workable...if really boring and tactically shallow situation with the super-indestructible space marines vs the super blendery drukhari, theyve now just dropped two armies into the game that most armies especially older armies just have zero tools to deal with. I dont have access to something with the damage output of say Hellions or Incubi in my GSC list, or my Eldar list. I dont have access to something with the defenses of those Terminators in my...any list except maybe Thousand Sons now that can withstand what those Incubi or Hellions or whatever can lay down.

I'm scared to see what will happen with Imperial Guard.

Transhuman on... normal humans?

Invuln saves?

Or will everyone have to buy 500 infantry models to fill out a normal list?

Oh, and the damage? "The humble lasgun has always been the staple of the Imperial Guard, and it has an advantage in getting around all those silly durability rules!" - Warhammer Community, as my 10 man Guard Squad rolls 120 dice through the roll to see if you get to roll to see if you get to make the enemy roll to save process which results in inflicting 2 wounds.

...idk they could just finally, finally bring resurrection mechanics to 40k.

"Send in the next wave!" and all that.

And this problem is only going to get worse... and I don’t think GW has much incentive. I bet that ork codex and a bunch of ork models sold like hot cakes on launch. GW has too big an incentive to keep making it worse.

 the_scotsman wrote:
Thats kind of the problem. There's no easy "one stop shop" for GW to try and dial the deadliness back. Theyve amped it up across the board, mostly through individual unit buffs and weapon buffs and by adding the extra layer of army-wide rules in the Doctrine-equivalent purity bonuses.

And their solution to that is, apparently, also trying to hand out layers of durability like candy. Here you go, thousand sons, try a 5++ on everything. Here you go, Dark Angels, army-wide transhuman. Here you go, BTs, 5++ on everything but also its not even one of your chapter traits, its just your bonus thingy thing.

Did that work? No? people are still getting tabled turn 3 as a norm, but now if you DONT have crazybonkers firepower we've just got these few army builds that cant be scratched at all? Weird, I wonder how other wargames do it, maybe having the difference between "Firing at maximum range at an enemy i can see 1% of 1 model" and "Firing at 2" away at an enemy standing completely out in the open" be ZERO, NOTHING, ITS THE GOD DAMN SAME was a bad idea.

Disagree. The situation with 9th is getting out of hand, but the amount of changes needed to dial it back is surprisingly small.

Few point changes to DE and Admech (especially planes), Freebooter applies to non-vehicles or to CORE only, moderate point changes to Morven Vahl and Celestine, drastic point increase on Dreadknights.

Those alone would completely level the meta down to SM/Necron/DG level.

 the_scotsman wrote:
...idk they could just finally, finally bring resurrection mechanics to 40k.

"Send in the next wave!" and all that.

lol.

Man, someday I just want armies to be able to interact without killing each other. In 40k there are two binary options right now:
1) Ignore your army and just focus on me scoring mine, with the only interaction being "roll saves to avoid death"
or
2) Kill your army

there's no option to suppress critical units for a juncture that opens up more maneuver space (but only temporarily!) or use obscurants to facilitate an assault across open ground or pile on degrades via morale loss / shock.

Heck, even modern 40k's morale is just "more things die"

EDIT:
It would be megasuperironic for Imperial Guard to get suppression mechanics as their gimmick, actually.

The only army that feels fear and behaves on the battlefield like a real army is also the only one that can inflict that state upon others. XD That would be bigbrain move from GW.

Slipspace wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
On the one hand, the losing player made a gross tactical miscalculation and was severely punished for it. That is what *should* happen.

That's not what happened. It wasn't a gross miscalculation. According to the player himself, the commentators and several fairly knowledgeable people that was literally his only chance to win. So his options were to go with a very risky play and have a shot at winning or not do that and lose pretty much straight away.

He made a decision to make a risky play and it didn't land - and then not only did it not land but it resulted in a stunning defeat. Thats the definition of a tactical miscalculation.

Slipspace wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
My general philosophy is that no game is unwinnable, some are just more difficult to win than others.
In this case, my take is that he looked at the matchup and decided that his best option to win was to go as aggressive as possible on his first turn in hopes of getting a strong alpha strike off. He was unsuccessful and he paid the price for it. Is it possible that he might have been blown off the table if he didn't go all out on turn 1? Possibly, but we won't know because thats not the course of action that he took - if he had and still lost 1800 points of minis on turn 1, then the situation would be different and it would be clearer cut that this was indicative of a gross failure to properly design and balance the game....
But he didn't - and to me, the reason he didn't was a tactical miscalculation he made that indicated that a defensive strategy was doomed to failure and that the rewards of pursuing an aggressive offensive play instead outweighed the risks.

So you're saying one of the best players in the world, along with every commentator, and the consensus of the viewers in chat, is wrong and you're right? Seems like a convenient excuse to me. Since we can never know for sure how the game would have gone had the Orks gone first, or had Sean played more defensively, you can just continue to claim whatever you want.
I don't know how you can claim the situation would be clearer cut and "indicative of a gross failure to properly design and balance the game" only if the other scenario had also played out. Does that mean you think it's fine to be able to remove 90% of an opponent's army in a single turn? Why is that good design under any set of circumstances?

I don't know how you can't comprehend the concept of an outlier event. As someone else commented "Should a glass army just stand in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and say come shoot me bro?" The game is designed with the expectation that players will utilize cover to block and limit line of sight and to claim cover where they can't in order to maximize their own survivability and minimize their opponents lethality. In this case, the defending army parked itself in the open at close shooting range of the opposing army, in the process minimizing their survivability and maximizing their opponents lethality. Simply put, the game interaction and board state was what would be atypical, and thus not something from which you can derive meaningful or statistically significant data. It would be like trying to argue that game balance is broken using data pulled from games played on a table with no terrain whatsoever. You can pull data from that, but the data is worthless as a means of deriving meaningful and relevant conclusions about the nature of game balance.

Now, it should be pretty obvious at this point that the reason why the results would be more meaningful had he played more defensively is because terrain would have been a factor which may or may not have tempered the orks lethality - which is a critical component of the game design and an expected feature on the part of the designers that can tip the scales of balance back and forth in either direction. Had he been in terrain to claim cover or blocked line of sight, that 1800 pts lost might have been, say 500 pts instead, which is still a lot but more in line with what people expect when they have "one really good turn" in a game, and is more illustrative of what I would consider an uncommon but not atypical outcome of gameplay.

1 Flyer slot in a battalion, none in the specialized detachments (vanguard, outrider, spearhead) and simply remove the pure flyer detachment (does it still exist in 9th? donno don't play flyers).

It does, costs a CP IIRC.

My personal opinion on flyers is that they should basically be a form of nearly-unassailable but unreliable fire support.
Make them flimsier in terms of wounds, tough and save, but give them back the old 'hit me on 6s unless youre a dedicated anti-air or another plane' rule, and instead of starting on the board they have to roll to see if they come on each turn, and then they just appear, anywhere on the battlefield they want to be.
then your opponent gets 1 turn to respond to them if they want to, and then theyre back in reserves rolling to see if they come on again, because theyre not actually moving around on the game board, theyre shooting by making strafing runs.

Nobody would ever take something that spends more time sitting on the sideboard than it does on the table itself. Various other games work(ed) flyer rules these way and inevitably they don't get taken and/or the rules eventually get reworked to make them more persistent on the table, otherwise you're stuck in a situation where you can't price them appropriately because they either end up too expensive for something that only shows up randomly (and might not even show up at all pending on the circumstances), or too cheap for something which when it does show up can easily remove something that costs more than its own points value (or even a multiple thereof). If this is the way you were designing flyers, I think you'd have to realistically make them free as far as matched play points are concerned, but then charge a hefty fee in CP to actually be able to bring them on the table. Even still, I doubt anyone would really take them as those CP could be better spent elsewhere on something that is more reliable.

 gorgon wrote:
So lethality in 40K has gotten ridiculous, and it's questionable how suited the game is for competitive play.

Been saying it for years but nobody listens, nobody cares. The competitive players complaining the loudest about this are still going to show up to competitive events and log their ITC scores regardless.

OrdoSean wrote:

Well in that army example I can’t kill anything turn one. Then I kill 1/4 on turn 2. Then he kills stuff then I kill 1/4 again then he kills stuff. Then I don’t kill 1/4. Then he kills stuff so by game end we both have sub 1/4 or 1/8 of our armies left yeah I’d say that’s pretty much how the game should go.

What you described is at least a 4 turn game, maybe longer. The competitive community said they wanted a game that played faster so they could complete games with a more definitive result within the time allotted for gameplay by event organizers (which is itself dictated by the realities of scheduling 3+ back to back games), instead of having to end the game prematurely when both players have half their armies on the table and the outcome of the game could very well change "if we only had time for one more round".

This is the outcome of that. GW made the game faster playing, to do that they had to make the game more lethal. If you want the game to truly be playable in a competitive environment, I think this is basically what it has to look like, because "we ended the game on turn 3 but we each still had about 1500 pts of minis on the table" evidently resulted in too much "feels bad man".

Stop framing this as an outlier event.

It's the second time that a Major Tournament Grand Final was decided in one of the players' first shooting phase in a month.

This isn't some fluke occurrence where the stars aligned to make everyone's dice roll a 1 or sap the "how to play 40k" knowledge from their brains.

Let's at least not be disingenuous about the DA durability list (as such as I know as I've been trying to build something for the past few weeks for an event). Yes, DA terminators are incredibly tough....but if you lean so heavy on them you will have no decent offensive firepower and serious mobility issues. Plasma redemptor/ Cyclone missiles...which you can only get 1 for every 200+ pt unit. You have to balance that with offensive capability, and that's generally been Ravenwing, but even that is now easily removed from the game with these strong alpha strike lists (especially if they go second and have to rely on the 5++).
I do think it's clear that some of the ultra top tier lists need some of their wings clipped, but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I don't know how you can't comprehend the concept of an outlier event.

We've had turn 1 tablings at 2 major GT finals in the last month now so I don't think we can call it an outlier. Even if it was I don't know how you can't comprehend that the game allowing 90% of an army to be removed in one turn is just flat-out bad regardless of the scenario. There should be no situation or match-up where that should happen. Go back to earlier editions of 40k (3rd or 4th) and it just wouldn't happen due to the lethality being so much lower, mainly because ranges were shorter, movement was more restricted and moving and shooting at full effectiveness was much less common.

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

This isn't about "my faction is bigger than your faction" - more that the odds are such that dice are producing blowout games that end too quickly.
Because really 1800 points in a turn is exceptional - relying on good luck and bad luck.
But as said, even 1000 points would still almost certainly be game ending.

And equally doing it at the top of turn 2 as DE lists tend to is just as bad I think for the game - even if not for the competitive scene per se - as that.

Tyel wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

.

Right, but it's specific units or traits, not entire factions.
Address these and we start to get somewhere, but we know that GW changes are mostly 6 months behind (except the most egregious cases)

 bullyboy wrote:

Tyel wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

.

Right, but it's specific units or traits, not entire factions.
Address these and we start to get somewhere, but we know that GW changes are mostly 6 months behind (except the most egregious cases)

I mean, it's pretty much entire factions.

I killed a wrathknight in one turn of shooting with Chimeras.

That's literally some least effective weapons possible against the target type and I still got like, a 30% points return (400 points vs like 1200 pts of Chimeras)

Man, what a waste of time to set up all that terrain, unpack all your miniatures, and have your game end like that.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

Tyel wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

.

Right, but it's specific units or traits, not entire factions.
Address these and we start to get somewhere, but we know that GW changes are mostly 6 months behind (except the most egregious cases)

I mean, it's pretty much entire factions.

I killed a wrathknight in one turn of shooting with Chimeras.

That's literally some least effective weapons possible against the target type and I still got like, a 30% points return (400 points vs like 1200 pts of Chimeras)

Chimera FP is not OP, that's silliness. The WK sucks....this is practically known by everyone.

 bullyboy wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

Tyel wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

.

Right, but it's specific units or traits, not entire factions.
Address these and we start to get somewhere, but we know that GW changes are mostly 6 months behind (except the most egregious cases)

I mean, it's pretty much entire factions.

I killed a wrathknight in one turn of shooting with Chimeras.

That's literally some least effective weapons possible against the target type and I still got like, a 30% points return (400 points vs like 1200 pts of Chimeras)

Chimera FP is not OP, that's silliness. The WK sucks....this is practically known by everyone.

I mean, a WK is a pretty cheap source of T8 wounds, relatively. And yeah, Chimeras are bad at shooting, relatively. Isn't that basically the point that Unit is making?

Also I'm sorry but LMAO, the idea of that happening in-universe is so hilarious. Honestly, I hope Gav Thorpe doesn't see this thread, I could see him putting it in one of his books...

Yeah, that's my point.

Casual units (Chimeras) have pretty extreme lethality in 9th, even though they're one of the least lethal units in the game.

A WK has the same defensive profile as an Imperial knight, against Chimeras. So sub in an Imperial Knight if the WK is "too bad" for my point to get through.

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

Tyel wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
but no one is looking for massive nerfs across the board.

Fairly sure the Scotsman does want such nerfs - to produce a generalised reduction in damage output across the whole game.

.

Right, but it's specific units or traits, not entire factions.
Address these and we start to get somewhere, but we know that GW changes are mostly 6 months behind (except the most egregious cases)

I mean, it's pretty much entire factions.

I killed a wrathknight in one turn of shooting with Chimeras.

That's literally some least effective weapons possible against the target type and I still got like, a 30% points return (400 points vs like 1200 pts of Chimeras)

Chimera FP is not OP, that's silliness. The WK sucks....this is practically known by everyone.

I mean, a WK is a pretty cheap source of T8 wounds, relatively. And yeah, Chimeras are bad at shooting, relatively. Isn't that basically the point that Unit is making?

Also I'm sorry but LMAO, the idea of that happening in-universe is so hilarious. Honestly, I hope Gav Thorpe doesn't see this thread, I could see him putting it in one of his books...

But exactly what is different between this in 9th and 8th edition? Hvy bolters going to D2. Are we really saying this is a problem?
I'd like to know what was shooting at he WK and break it down to see how typical the result was.
The WK is a terrible source of T8 wounds, 3 wraithlords are far cheaper and provide 30 wounds.
It's just laughable that we think this is an example of the game being too lethal.

the game was too lethal in 8th edition too and has been for a long, long time... probably since 5th

yeah I wouldn't be surprised if it was an uncommon result.

I just think it’s laughable that we are arguing whether or not the edition is too lethal when we have this tournament discussion about how one of the top 40k tourney players got tabled in the opponents first round of shooting while simultaneously a discussion is being had in the general discussions about how you need the board oversaturated with LOS blocking terrain to survive a round of shooting and another thread in the general discussions briefing a new player that yes it is fairly typical to be shot off the board in the first round of shooting. And other whole discussions are being had about how the edition is too lethal. And other discussions are being had about other problems that ultimately keep coming back to the conclusion that the edition is too lethal.
The simplest explanation is that the game is too lethal.

1200 points of chimeras do not down a WK. I know that mathammer is a dumb approach, but sometimes it is better if you take a page from it.

1200 points are 16 chimeras with double heavy bolter. That's 64 heavy bolter shots, which inflicts 12 wounds on a WK. Care to tell me just how many buffs have you considered to double the output?

Spoletta wrote:
1200 points of chimeras do not down a WK. I know that mathammer is a dumb approach, but sometimes it is better if you take a page from it.

1200 points are 16 chimeras with double heavy bolter. That's 64 heavy bolter shots, which inflicts 12 wounds on a WK. Care to tell me just how many buffs have you considered to double the output?

They had HK missiles too (and Augur Arrays to reroll the HK missile hit), though I use multilaser and not HB in the turrets. Three had twin Heavy Flamers.

I guess I will do the maths too:

12 HK missiles do 14 wounds on average
Multilasers do a wound or two
Heavy Bolters do about 4 wounds
Heavy Flamers do about 4 wounds.

So a total of about 25 wounds on average. Not too far off doing 24.

(Participants are 12 chimeras with Augur Arrays/HK missiles, 9 of them have Multilaser/Heavy Bolter and 3 of them 2x have Heavy Flamers). I guesstimate this at about 1200 points of chimeras.

EDIT:
1110 points of chimeras, back of the napkin

Ok, but that runs counter to your point (which by the way had no reason to be demonstrated, lethality is too high, you just brought a bad example).

You are saying that that 1200 points of unit can reach a 33% return in the turn they use their one time only attack against a good target (HK are decent weapons against WK). Ok, that seems perfectly fine too me.

Spoletta wrote:
Ok, but that runs counter to your point (which by the way had no reason to be demonstrated, lethality is too high, you just brought a bad example).

You are saying that that 1200 points of unit can reach a 33% return in the turn they use their one time only attack against a good target (HK are decent weapons against WK). Ok, that seems perfectly fine too me.

Does it?

You and I have different definitions of fine.

Chimeras are uncompetitive. HK missiles on them make them more uncompetitive, not less (unless HKs started being spammed at tournaments and I missed the memo).

Yet they still take down a WK (or, equivalently, an IK) in a single shooting phase. If you think that's "fine" then ... well, agree to disagree I guess.

Its 12 missiles...of course that's ok AT vs a Knight. An IK can get a 4+ vs that, and a shielded WK should also be able to....but they're crap, as I stated before.
I'm not seeing a problem of lethality overload here.

Slipspace wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
I don't know how you can't comprehend the concept of an outlier event.

We've had turn 1 tablings at 2 major GT finals in the last month now so I don't think we can call it an outlier. Even if it was I don't know how you can't comprehend that the game allowing 90% of an army to be removed in one turn is just flat-out bad regardless of the scenario. There should be no situation or match-up where that should happen. Go back to earlier editions of 40k (3rd or 4th) and it just wouldn't happen due to the lethality being so much lower, mainly because ranges were shorter, movement was more restricted and moving and shooting at full effectiveness was much less common.

What were the conditions of the other turn 1 tabling? Was it another case of "a glass army just standing in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and saying come shoot me bro?". Because, if so, its still an outlier. Thats not the way you are supposed to play the game. If you do that, you should expect to have a significant piece of your army shot off the board. If the basis of design calls for a certain percentage of your force to be protected by terrain, cover, and other mechanics in order to mitigate lethality, and you do none of that, the problem is not the game design.

Simply put, if the game is designed to encourage the use of cover and terrain, then you can expect the game to have a very high degree of lethality - thats how the design of the game incentives and encourages the use of terrain and cover. Look at infinity for an example of this. If you set up all your minis in the open, you can also very easily be tabled on turn 1 there too (hell, you can be tabled on your own turn if you don't play the way the game is designed to be played and just charge up in the open). Anyone who plays infinity would say that its a pretty well balanced game (if not incredibly dense and crunchy), yet being tabled in a single turn is an entirely possible outcome if you don't play to the design basis of the game. Pointing at 1800 pts of minis being removed in a single phase as evidence of some fault in the game design, when the player essentially did everything that one shouldn't do in order to enable that to occur, does not produce any valid data to base judgement on. Whether or not the player "had a choice" in the matter is a somewhat separate discussion, and perhaps you should be more focused on that rather than the fact that 1800 pts of unprotected and poorly positioned models got shot off the table. IMO, the bigger takeaway here seems to be that just about everyone is in concurrence that the outcome of a supposedly competitive game between two of the most skilled players in the world was 100% decided entirely on listbuilding and not any actual amount of skill or decisions made - at least as far as a number of the posters here seem to be concerned.

^ This.

The issue isn't the fact that after losing a bet the DE list was wiped out in quick order.
The issue is that the DE list was FORCED to take that bet.

That's what's bad about all this.
And it would have been bad even if the orks got totally slaughtered, because if the game boils down to "We roll these dices and see who wins", then there is something fundamentally wrong.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
I don't know how you can't comprehend the concept of an outlier event.

We've had turn 1 tablings at 2 major GT finals in the last month now so I don't think we can call it an outlier. Even if it was I don't know how you can't comprehend that the game allowing 90% of an army to be removed in one turn is just flat-out bad regardless of the scenario. There should be no situation or match-up where that should happen. Go back to earlier editions of 40k (3rd or 4th) and it just wouldn't happen due to the lethality being so much lower, mainly because ranges were shorter, movement was more restricted and moving and shooting at full effectiveness was much less common.

What were the conditions of the other turn 1 tabling? Was it another case of "a glass army just standing in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and saying come shoot me bro?". Because, if so, its still an outlier. Thats not the way you are supposed to play the game. If you do that, you should expect to have a significant piece of your army shot off the board. If the basis of design calls for a certain percentage of your force to be protected by terrain, cover, and other mechanics in order to mitigate lethality, and you do none of that, the problem is not the game design.

Simply put, if the game is designed to encourage the use of cover and terrain, then you can expect the game to have a very high degree of lethality - thats how the design of the game incentives and encourages the use of terrain and cover. Look at infinity for an example of this. If you set up all your minis in the open, you can also very easily be tabled on turn 1 there too (hell, you can be tabled on your own turn if you don't play the way the game is designed to be played and just charge up in the open). Anyone who plays infinity would say that its a pretty well balanced game (if not incredibly dense and crunchy), yet being tabled in a single turn is an entirely possible outcome if you don't play to the design basis of the game. Pointing at 1800 pts of minis being removed in a single phase as evidence of some fault in the game design, when the player essentially did everything that one shouldn't do in order to enable that to occur, does not produce any valid data to base judgement on. Whether or not the player "had a choice" in the matter is a somewhat separate discussion, and perhaps you should be more focused on that rather than the fact that 1800 pts of unprotected and poorly positioned models got shot off the table. IMO, the bigger takeaway here seems to be that just about everyone is in concurrence that the outcome of a supposedly competitive game between two of the most skilled players in the world was 100% decided entirely on listbuilding and not any actual amount of skill or decisions made - at least as far as a number of the posters here seem to be concerned.

London GT was a Deathwatch army with 6 dreadnoughts they couldn't hide (terrain was bad, no one disputes that) getting them all removed inside their deployment zone by an Admech army.

So durable units from across the table.

And I believe the Ork player from Socal did basically the same to another DE army in the semi finals.
Another game was Admech destroying a DE army in 2 turns.
ect
ect

And you can't hide behind terrain from flyers. They can hit any point on the table turn 1 because they are fast and have huge models where the tip of a wing can unleash their entire payload.

9th edition is to lethal. Period. full stop.

Also last time I played Infinity it had reaction fire and alternate activation. Both of which help a lot in lethal environments because you can do something back before you lose everything and your opponent loses nothing.

Spoletta wrote:
^ This.

The issue isn't the fact that after losing a bet the DE list was wiped out in quick order.
The issue is that the DE list was FORCED to take that bet.

That's what's bad about all this.
And it would have been bad even if the orks got totally slaughtered, because if the game boils down to "We roll these dices and see who wins", then there is something fundamentally wrong.

Its not "in quick order" though - it was a turn.

The game shouldn't be so lethal that if you can put what you want into the right stuff, you have a reasonable chance to delete essentially a whole army in a turn.
As I think Sean said - its not like the Ork player wouldn't almost certainly have won if he'd killed 1000 points of stuff. But at least you'd play it out to see.

It would be interesting to crunch the odds on that outcome to see how likely it is - but I doubt its that absurdly unlikely. If its happened once, it will happen again.

Luck is a fundamental part of 40k. I'll always remember another game with Nayden where he played Siegler in the 2020 LVO semi final. Shining Spears go in, kind of bounce. Intercessor Sergeant with Thunder Hammer turns around and kills 3 (IIRC), which I think wiped the Spears rather unexpectedly. Big unexpected swing in the points, probably cost Nayden the game. (Not exactly, because lots of other things could have happened - but a big swing versus where the probability would get you).

But that's the sort of... hotness you expect out of dice. Not "oh sorry, the dice were kind to me, so it looks like you don't have an army any more".

chaos0xomega wrote:
What were the conditions of the other turn 1 tabling? Was it another case of "a glass army just standing in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and saying come shoot me bro?". Because, if so, its still an outlier.

It was a SM army, mainly consisting of Dreads. Not to worry though, I'm sure you can come up with another justification to explain how everything is just fine and working as expected.

chaos0xomega wrote:
If the basis of design calls for a certain percentage of your force to be protected by terrain, cover, and other mechanics in order to mitigate lethality, and you do none of that, the problem is not the game design.

If the game allows you to have near 100% offensive efficiency in scenarios that are likely to happen then the problem really is with the game design. Hell, 90% efficiency under absurdly optimised conditions is bad game design.

As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

Hammering nails with a wrench actually works though, contrary to this edition XD

I still haven't had a chance to play my Orks with the new codex but wow! 1800pts destroyed in the shooting phase of all things.

I'm fortunate in that the armies I've been playing in 9th the most have been very durable so I'm a little blown away by nearly an entire board getting wiped like that in turn 1. The lethality sure is cranked up to 11. To answer the original question, I would enjoy 40k more if you could lose no more than a quarter of your army per round in a 5 round game. I find it's a lot more fun when you don't experience mass cas in Round 1 as well.

Spoletta wrote:
I would be really curios about the results of a 1500 point tournament. I think that 2000 isn't really a good army size for 40K. Too slow and too much fat allowed.

We play 1500 at the meta at my college club. It speeds up games for sure, and makes some units more critical, especially if you build around them. You can afford to make less mistakes in the movement phase and during positioning for objectives and vp, while the enemy can punish your mistakes or build somewhat less than in 2k games. Bonus for less logistics in transporting your army and quicker setup as well.

It has to be coupled with rules for a single detachment though, imo. Without it, you can still meet lists that spams units you just didnt bring the tools to meet. Making for the disappointing experience of setting up terrain, objective markers, setting the mission and secondary objectives, and deploying on the table, just to discover you cant hurt his all flier list with a few invisible invul rerolling assassins that can only be hit on 6+ hiding somewhere on the table or some similar BS.

Lords of War, Superheavies, Fliers, Tank only lists etc, have no place in regular 40k the way I see it. If you know your oppponent has to build around a battallion detatchment, you can roughly prepare for how the game will unfold.

Take units that dont need LOS to shoot. How fun is it to meet 6 of those at a game? I know I dont have a good time. Even at tournaments its BS, pseud strategy pretending someone did something interesting with the game by bringing units that simply camps and shoots whatever unit it wants on the game, like basilisk spam at the start of 9th (?).

Boo Hiss.

Join the 1500 games. They are fun.

Tune in later for my sales pitch pimping the 750 point games, and how fun they are

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

Exactly this, but apparently a large portion of the player base ignores this or refuses to accept it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 triplegrim wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
I would be really curios about the results of a 1500 point tournament. I think that 2000 isn't really a good army size for 40K. Too slow and too much fat allowed.

We play 1500 at the meta at my college club. It speeds up games for sure, and makes some units more critical, especially if you build around them. You can afford to make less mistakes in the movement phase and during positioning for objectives and vp, while the enemy can punish your mistakes or build somewhat less than in 2k games. Bonus for less logistics in transporting your army and quicker setup as well.

It has to be coupled with rules for a single detachment though, imo. Without it, you can still meet lists that spams units you just didnt bring the tools to meet. Making for the disappointing experience of setting up terrain, objective markers, setting the mission and secondary objectives, and deploying on the table, just to discover you cant hurt his all flier list with a few invisible invul rerolling assassins that can only be hit on 6+ hiding somewhere on the table or some similar BS.

Lords of War, Superheavies, Fliers, Tank only lists etc, have no place in regular 40k the way I see it. If you know your oppponent has to build around a battallion detatchment, you can roughly prepare for how the game will unfold.

Take units that dont need LOS to shoot. How fun is it to meet 6 of those at a game? I know I dont have a good time. Even at tournaments its BS, pseud strategy pretending someone did something interesting with the game by bringing units that simply camps and shoots whatever unit it wants on the game, like basilisk spam at the start of 9th (?).

Boo Hiss.

Join the 1500 games. They are fun.

Same feeling. 1500 points is by far my favorite format. 44'' x 60'' tables and 12 + 1/turn CPs are more suited for 1500 than 2000, and there's no real room for overly expensive units at 1500. Also listbuilding now involves making some actual hard choices. That's real peak 40k .

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

 Ordana wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

It does, but it also depends on the nature of the imbalance. For example, in 8th the Eldar flyer spam list was extremely powerful but your chances of running into it in casual games was pretty low. Most Eldar players didn't own the 6-7 planes needed and it's the sort of list you know is broken if you're going to run it. SM 2.0, OTOH, was broken pretty much across the board so any game against SM with any of the slightly weaker armies in 8th was a miserable experience. I stopped playing my SM at the end of 8th for that very reason.

At the moment I think AdMech and DE are in the same category as SM 2.0. They're just undercosted across the board and taking fairly normal lists from those Codices will result in very powerful armies that many people will have no answer for. Orks are borderline, I think. The Freebooterz terror is basically a Speed Freaks list, just with a bit more spamming of certain fast options.

I'm not saying GW shouldn't do a much better job at balance - they absolutely should. But I think some people don't see a problem with some armies because the nature of what makes them broken is often only going to be encountered at tournaments. Eventually GW's terrible balance catches up with them though, and we get that imbalance ruining regular games.

 bullyboy wrote:
I'm not seeing a problem of lethality overload here.

So what is your definition of too lethal? Probably useful to say, otherwise if you have a radically different definition you are just at cross purposes and getting nowhere.

I would say for me in 'modern' wargames optimal attack positions vs optimal targets should result in at most a third of the enemy being removed (others can be fleeing, broken, disrupted etc.) early game. Later on after some manoeuvre it can be higher (and especially with some historical stuff which is often vying for the winning position then executing the attack) and indeed the majority of the enemy, but that is then the result of in game decisions, not bad deployment or lists.

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns. You can play as casually as you want. I've introduced a hell of a lot of new players to 40k and there's almost always at least one moment of "Wait. What? It's just dead? Just like that?"

40k is a TERRIBLE casual game. I can slap together a game of Apocalypse and teach a new player how to play in minutes, and we can have great fun throwing down our armies and duking it out over 6, 7 turns, end the game with 20-30% of our armies still on the table. 40k is 3 turns of competitive manual tax filing where one player sits there for an hour and scoops models off the table while their opponent recites rules to them.

A typical Freebooters + Speedfreaks list, aka made without spamming stuff, is not OP at all. Bringing 4+ planes and 9+ buggies is.

I mostly play Freebooters Speedwaaagh and several of my opponents who play 9th edition factions run more powerful lists.

Ad mech and Drukhari (especially) are more of an issue because one average collection of models is already a very solid base. So were 8th SM 2.0. Orks without skewing are ok at best, even Freebooters Speadfreaks.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:


IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns.

I thought it was 5. Need to double check my rulebook then.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
I'm not seeing a problem of lethality overload here.

So what is your definition of too lethal? Probably useful to say, otherwise if you have a radically different definition you are just at cross purposes and getting nowhere.

I was talking specifically about the interaction of the 12 chimeras vs wraithknight example, not the game in general.
Yes, for the most part, this game is too lethal.

A lot of people only play 40k and it shows. In a game like Flames of War (which is mechanically very similar to pre-8th edition 40k), if I know my opponent's list I can tailor mine to explicitly counter theirs as viciously as possible. If the opponent runs a gamble hail mary to try and take me out and fails, their failure WILL be punished by my counter-play. They likely will lose the game because of it.

But it still would be nearly impossible to destroy 90% of their units in a single turn. Range, cover, unit type, number of shots available (do we REALLY need to be rolling 40+ dice at a time?), all make units in that game much more survivable. The result would be my opponent on a serious back foot, struggling to score points and eke out a draw even. But we still would have a game to play.

 Ordana wrote:
I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

Imbalance hurts casual play for a certain; GSC have been essentially unplayable for all of 9th and most of 8th. But at least in casual play, you have breathing space for things like nonstandard missions and boards, handicap points, houserules, and gentlefolks'-agreements like "look, I'm not gonna bring any flyers, and only a couple buggies, tops."

40k is a janky ruleset* when it comes to casual play and pick-up matches. It falls apart utterly when you try to make it into a competitive game of skill.


* To be fair, the real problems have never been in the core rules--40k is always destroyed in the codexes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Las wrote:
A lot of people only play 40k and it shows. In a game like Flames of War (which is mechanically very similar to pre-8th edition 40k), if I know my opponent's list I can tailor mine to explicitly counter theirs as viciously as possible. If the opponent runs a gamble hail mary to try and take me out and fails, their failure WILL be punished by my counter-play. They likely will lose the game because of it.

But it still would be nearly impossible to destroy 90% of their units in a single turn. Range, cover, unit type, number of shots available (do we REALY need to be rolling 40+ dice at a time?), all make units in that game much more survivable. The result would be my opponent on a serious back foot, struggling to score points and eke out a draw even. But we still would have a game to play.

To illustrate, in Flames of War you have to spend your entire first turn maneuvering, and don't come into effective shooting range until turn 2 at the earliest. As far as I'm concerned, that's a bare-minimum standard of "pretty okay game design."

Even "basic infantry" in most 40k factions have weapon ranges that cover most of the table, and can engage from one deployment zone to the other without moving. That is axiomatically bad game design, and things only get worse from there.

You don't have to reduce ranges to have an effective game design either.

Chain of Command uses a 1/120 ground scale (the minis can be anywhere from 6mm to 28mm, with the devs recommending 20mm; my group uses 28)... anyways

That means that a 6 foot table is only 240 yards from end-to-end. A good marksman with a World War II rifle could easily shoot that far - and indeed, most weapons have infinite range in COC (though there are some exceptions obviously).

However, the Patrol Phase + Jump Off Point mechanics means that armies rarely shoot on their first opportunity to do so, and if they do it's because their opponent made a mistake (or is deliberately provoking them into shooting to serve their ends). This plus actually good terrain rules means you can combine realistic weapon ranges but still have a normal, fun game.

The whole balancing/nerf ork codex freak out is annoying. Even goon hammer is screaming nerf orks… https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-many-magnificent-majors/

the nonsense about the obvious bias is he lists all the top 10 finishes over the last week tournaments. In just the majors tournaments they are primarily won by drukari or ad mech. With ad mech and drukari also filling up most of the top 10 rankings (7x grey knights and 6x adeptus soritas placing too). There is 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and like 2 other freebooter lists on the bottom 10 of those 5 major tournaments and the dude is posting nonsense like
"Beyond that, it floods the board with vehicles and takes the opponent off the table in double time. You know this stuff. I am starting the feel the angry spirit of JONK overtaking me, so let’s congratulate on the podium finish and move on."

47 players listed in 5 majors tournaments 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and 2 other in bottom 10 and the dude is crying about Orks. There are 22 admech/drukari lists out of 47 players who placed... and he's crying about orks!!! It's a freak out about 1 ork list winning 1 tournament and that ork list even went 8-1 losing a game during that same tournament on a codex that’s been out for 3+ months… but ya know nerf orks!!

gungo wrote:
The whole balancing/nerf ork codex freak out is annoying. Even goon hammer is screaming nerf orks… https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-many-magnificent-majors/

the nonsense about the obvious bias is he lists all the top 10 finishes over the last week tournaments. In just the majors tournaments they are primarily won by drukari or ad mech. With ad mech and drukari also filling up most of the top 10 rankings (7x grey knights and 6x adeptus soritas placing too). There is 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and like 2 other freebooter lists on the bottom 10 of those 5 major tournaments and the dude is posting nonsense like
"Beyond that, it floods the board with vehicles and takes the opponent off the table in double time. You know this stuff. I am starting the feel the angry spirit of JONK overtaking me, so let’s congratulate on the podium finish and move on."

47 players listed in 5 majors tournaments 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and 2 other in bottom 10 and the dude is crying about Orks. There are 22 admech/drukari lists out of 47 players who placed... and he's crying about orks!!! It's a freak out about 1 ork list winning 1 tournament and that ork list even went 8-1 losing a game during that same tournament on a codex that’s been out for 3+ months… but ya know nerf orks!!

The Goonhammer team have called for Drukhari and Admech nerfs as well, in the past, and as far as I know are still calling for them.

No, it's bad game design/balance. Warhammer always has bad balance. It's terribly balanced. It isn't even vaguely designed to be balanced. Stuff comes out all the time that, when 'optimised' by competitive players, totally ruins games.

It would be utter stupidity to try and play this game 'competitively' and expect balance. The only thing you'll achieve is breaking the game.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns. You can play as casually as you want. I've introduced a hell of a lot of new players to 40k and there's almost always at least one moment of "Wait. What? It's just dead? Just like that?"

40k is a TERRIBLE casual game. I can slap together a game of Apocalypse and teach a new player how to play in minutes, and we can have great fun throwing down our armies and duking it out over 6, 7 turns, end the game with 20-30% of our armies still on the table. 40k is 3 turns of competitive manual tax filing where one player sits there for an hour and scoops models off the table while their opponent recites rules to them.

I don't think we really disagree. To me, 40K doesn't seem to be doing anything particularly well. The rules writing has gone the way it has, but the core design philosophy doesn't prioritize competitive play. Truly designing for competitive play means seeking real balance, and they can't achieve that with endless and layered special rules, army lists that sprawl on for 30 pages, etc. Competitive 40K would have very lawyer-y rules, but also be a far leaner game designed for faster play.

And the thing is, GW has in recent years designed both good competitive games and good casual games. AT is definitely a casual game and the rulebook is written in a classic GW narrative style. But because the game isn't overly complex, has good flow, feels intuitive, places emphasis on in-game decision-making rather than list-building, the factions are subdued in terms of special rules, etc...yeah, you can get a new player up and running pretty well in a couple turns of play. Likewise I think a new player can get their head around the basics of Underworlds pretty quickly, and that game is designed for competition. So the state of 40K is...intentional, driven a lot by the need to be a cash cow and weighed down with decades of baggage.

But again...it's obviously still very popular, so even if it baffles me I can't really call GW or the players 'wrong'. It's just not my cup of tea anymore.

 the_scotsman wrote:


1. so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn?

2. Is this healthy for a competitive game?

3. What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

Broke it down for clarity.

1. With the caveat that the Dark Eldar player put his proverbial junk on the table in his gambit to grab objectives and perhaps lock up units and failed, yes. Risk/Reward.

2. In normal circumstances, no. In this exact example, yes.

3. 1/4 to 1/3 on planet bowling ball. Don't play on planet bowling ball.

 kronk wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:


1. so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn?

2. Is this healthy for a competitive game?

3. What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

Broke it down for clarity.

1. With the caveat that the Dark Eldar player put his proverbial junk on the table in his gambit to grab objectives and perhaps lock up units and failed, yes. Risk/Reward.

2. In normal circumstances, no. In this exact example, yes.

3. 1/4 to 1/3 on planet bowling ball. Don't play on planet bowling ball.

Do you seriously believe that in the current game, with a reasonably competitive list, you couldnt remove more than 1/4 to 1/3 of an opposing army in one turn on planet bowling ball?

I'm fairly confident I could take out at the very least 1000pts with, say, my Thousand Sons which are generally considered fairly middle of the road after their recent 'dex. And I could definitely do basically the same on planet "entirely covered in low cover that isn't Obscuring". Put enough Light Cover on the table to give 100% of my opponent's infantry and beast units +1 to their save, it won't matter one bit, I'll shred through them like a hot knife through butter.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hankovitch wrote:

* To be fair, the real problems have never been in the core rules--40k is always destroyed in the codexes.

I don't believe you. In the current game's core rules there is almost no difference between "Most Optimal firepower" and "Least Optimal Firepower."

If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

That's a core rules problem, and it's exactly why GW has to layer all the crap like rotating army rules (doctrines/canticles/etc), special rules that make Ork weapons extra effective at half range, stratagems that spike a unit's effectiveness, auras, relics, etc etc. The core rules give basically no space for an engagement between Unit X and Unit Y to go any differently based on circumstances, so we have to make sure Unit X and Unit Y have a million army-wide rules, auras, stratagems, potential relics/special traits and such to add depth.

Thats a core rule problem. The codexes as they are now are a natural offshoot to the need to keep things interesting because there's just not that much there in the core rules.

I don't think the issue is that units do 100% of their output if they can see 1% of the enemy unit. I think its just the codex synergy maths is too good. If you have a unit where you'd expect a 65%+ return on your points on average dice - which can happen with Ad Mech and Ork Speedwaaagh Shooting and way above that with DE combat (and various other factions) well if you roll high, and they roll low, there are going to be outcomes where that's 100%+.

The difference is that if the average expected return was say 25%, a "hot" return would be say 40%. Its much more moderate.

There's this solution of "omg we need to ban flyers" - but that just seems lazy. Because if say a Tau player turned up with 3 Sun Sharks are you going to scream OP?

 the_scotsman wrote:
If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

Exalted. This is the one thing that really bugs me about 40k, it instantly rips you out of the experience where if you can see a single piece of a model is visible then you can throw buckets of dice at the entire unit. Really kills the versimilitude for me. When I introduce the game to new players it's something they get hung up on a lot since they may have thought they maneuvered smartly but unfortunately you can still leverage 100% of your firepower with 100% accuracy because Trooper Bigguy has a bulging bicep exposed and now the whole unit is being peppered with fire.

 The Red Hobbit wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

Exalted. This is the one thing that really bugs me about 40k, it instantly rips you out of the experience where if you can see a single piece of a model is visible then you can throw buckets of dice at the entire unit. Really kills the versimilitude for me. When I introduce the game to new players it's something they get hung up on a lot since they may have thought they maneuvered smartly but unfortunately you can still leverage 100% of your firepower with 100% accuracy because Trooper Bigguy has a bulging bicep exposed and now the whole unit is being peppered with fire.

The rules are a mixture of:

-exceedingly casual, loosey-goosey mechanics and fanciful sci-fi names

-and then all of a sudden HYPER-specific, HYPER-complex mechanics that punish you SUPER SUPER HARD if you don't keep them in mind AT ALL TIMES (see: Cover, Obscuring, the flow of the fight phase selection order where the active player goes first in the 'charged' round and the inactive player goes first in the 'normal' round

-and then a billion-and-one different options and interactions that you have to remember or they create gakky 'gotcha' scenarios - whoops, you deep struck against one of the armies that has a stratagem for that, your dudes are deleted. Whoops, you forgot that this subfaction of space marines has a stratagem to make all their units pile in, your dudes are deleted. Whoops, this unit can deal 6 mortal wounds to you if you get moved over, your dudes are deleted.

It is basically the least friendly game system to try and introduce a new player to or to play casually ever conceived of. Warmahordes might be worse what with its 'insta-lose' mechanic of taking out the caster but its less obtuse.

Remember when deep strike mishaps were still a thing? When those existed, it was possible for a player to play very aggressively and with sufficiently bad luck wipe themselves out. It was also possible for the other player (expecting deep strikes) to arrange their forces so that the deep striking force essentially had to deep strike aggressively.

Suppose you've got a Slaanesh daemon player vs. a marine player and the Slaanesh player runs their entire army into bolter rapid fire range. Suicide by bolter isn't something GW can do anything to prevent.

 solkan wrote:
Remember when deep strike mishaps were still a thing? When those existed, it was possible for a player to play very aggressively and with sufficiently bad luck wipe themselves out. It was also possible for the other player (expecting deep strikes) to arrange their forces so that the deep striking force essentially had to deep strike aggressively.

Suppose you've got a Slaanesh daemon player vs. a marine player and the Slaanesh player runs their entire army into bolter rapid fire range. Suicide by bolter isn't something GW can do anything to prevent.

...Of course, "Rapid Fire Range" now being 30" on a 44" table, that's foolishly exposing your forces to...the 2/3 of the board that contains any of the opposing army.

Yeah really just a massively avoidable error.

And also, why would they do anything but that? Cover literally doesn't do anything, diddly freakin' squat, for slaanesh daemons. They can't benefit from it, they might as well just run headlong at the enemy if theyre not cowering behind obscuring raising banners.

The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

I really hope they don’t do that. That is literally the absolute worst solution anyone could think of

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

Then do it also to SM doctrines .

 Blackie wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

Then do it also to SM doctrines .

They more or less did. Instead of 'fixing' doctrines they forced you to move on to the next one so armies could no longer realistically build around Dev doctrine.

GW decided to make terrain rules vitally important to 9th's design and balance and then in the Ork and Admech books decided to make a load ofcheap, spammable, ultra-lethal units that completely ignore them.

It is what is known as a "whoopsie."

 Ordana wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

Then do it also to SM doctrines .

They more or less did. Instead of 'fixing' doctrines they forced you to move on to the next one so armies could no longer realistically build around Dev doctrine.

Not the same thing. SM doctrines work the entire game, it just switches targets. Speedwaaagh bonus only lasts two turns and second turn already has just half bonus. Preventing from using it in turn one is too punishing. SM doctrines also work no matter what HQ the SM player chooses to bring, Speedwaaagh only works with a specific (mediocre) codex HQ and a specific FW one.

I think the issue is Sean is a nice guy and a well respected player who got absolutely man handled in this game by taking a win at all cost tactic that backfired because he felt he had no
Other Choice. He claims even if he fell back and counter charged later he would have still been tabled (maybe turn 3) and he’s probably right.

But that’s not necessarily the ork codex fault… Sean took an army with low antitank but extreme assault and fragile. It was hard countered by a shooty vehicle spam list that Sean had no answer for… is this the ork codex fault? Or Sean list building fault? Does drukari not have anti tank in thier codex? They do btw…

So we are back to the jist of the complaints people don’t like rock, paper, scissors play that even one of the best players can’t overcome because they lose during list building when they make a skew army to combat 2 wound elite squads instead of anti tank. They don’t like the fact even when someone places themselves in the absolute worst position possible they can lose 75% of thier army from making a bad decision that backfired. And I’m not saying Sean had a lot of choice here. I’m saying he could not have made a worst list and placed it in a worst position if he tried vs this ork build.

The bottom line is this.. orks have a balanced 50% win rate, orks have a high to mid high range in placing in major tournaments.. orks are still less then 10% of all placings. And most importantly outside of drukari orks are not wiping out most armies off the table… the vast majority of other competitive codexs ad mech, greyknights, space marines, adeptus soritas, deathguard, t-sons, etc are all tough fights for orks. Heck admech hard counters buggy spam, in fact this list lost vs admech this same tournament.

However currently drukari make up ~25% of all tournament placings.. currently drukari have a ~60%+ win rate… and when an ork list gets to the top tables as it did in this 1 tournament where the player faced 3x drukari armies in a row the ork codex and it’s 1 competitive build seems a lot more powerful Becuase they hard counter drukari… that is the issue…and people lost thier freakin minds afterwards.

And I’m not saying squigbuggies and dakkajets can’t go up 10-15pts. But that’s not going to solve any of the above issues. Personally I’d like to see aircraft base rules change so they don’t screen out assault to you it’s immediately behind them… but that’s unlikely to happen.

Don't even bother gungo, you'll be dismissed as not knowing anything or being a GW simp

 gorgon wrote:
So lethality in 40K has gotten ridiculous, and it's questionable how suited the game is for competitive play.

GW games have never been suited for fair and balanced competitive play. It's great for fun cinematic games with your wardollies and friends on an afternoon . But it's not designed to be balanced. Its designed to sell the new products. That's why it's the market leader in sales.

It's a square peg rammed into a round hole. Always has been, always will be.

Actually we would probably just copy and paste one of sctosman’s many posts in this thread alone that state that any matchup with 90% efficiency in one turn even under the most optimized of conditions, and mentions of a lack of granularity between shooting someone at full range with one tiny piece of the model in the squad showing vs shooting a squad at point blank out in the open.

Probably share a link to the dozens of threads discussing dozens of other issues in 40k that have come up whose discussions keep going back to the game is too lethal.

That one explanation does an amazing job of explaining a lot of 40k’s problems and resolving that is a relatively simple solution vs the million other problems we try to abstract this issue to be.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Don't even bother gungo, you'll be dismissed as not knowing anything or being a GW simp

The reason that opinion would be dismissed is because it fails to address the core problem that it's even possible to remove 90% of an army in one turn.

Do you think a well balanced game should allow that sort of lethality?

The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

Again, I direct you towards Infinity. Infinity is a game where you can be tabled in a single turn - even theoretically your own turn - if you don't play it according to the way its intended to be played.

90% of an army being destroyed on a turn is an entirely meaningless metric absent any sort of qualitative contextualization. It tells you an incomplete story without reference to any of the factors that made it possible. Any game designed to be played around the use of heavy terrain in order to mitigate lethality will require the game to be highly lethal in order for it to function properly - otherwise what you have is a game where you roll lots and lots of dice but accomplish nothing, as the level of lethality is inadequate in relation to the defensive mechanisms implemented in order to counterbalance it.

40k 9th ed. is that type of game that requires heavy use of terrain as a means of counterbalancing lethality (though it doesn't go nearly as far as other such games in that respect). If you don't utilize the mechanical systems built into the game to mitigate lethality the way they are intended to be used (like, say, placing your entire army in the open within firing range of your opponent), then you're going to have a bad time and lose 90% of your army in a single go. If you do use the mechanical systems the way they are intended, then that 90% becomes something more like 30-40% - which is still probably too high, but not dramatically so.

So yes, I do think a well balanced game could allow that sort of lethality. We already have extant examples of games that do, like Infinity and various historicals where breaking cover without suppressing the opposite side or obscuring your movement using smoke, etc is an instantaneous death sentence.

Slipspace wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Don't even bother gungo, you'll be dismissed as not knowing anything or being a GW simp

The reason that opinion would be dismissed is because it fails to address the core problem that it's even possible to remove 90% of an army in one turn.

Do you think a well balanced game should allow that sort of lethality?

Do you honestly think Sean list was well balanced when he himself said he had nothing in his list to handle vehicle spam like the buggy list?
Here is the thing speedwaagh lists do not regularly remove 90% of an opponents army.. in fact it has a hard time with ad mech, certain space marines (iron hands, grey knights, deathwatch all do well vs them), and deathguard (which is another counter to speedwaagh no one talks about)… (or you know any list that remotely tries to bring a decent amount of anti tank)…

What you fail to address is the core problem is that ork speedwaagh only hard counters drukari assault infantry spam which just happens to be a major meta army list. Do you think a well balanced game should be built to appease a single skew list?

The funny thing about this mass freak out of players is that a week ago nearly everyone had the ork codex listed as a high mid tier codex that was ranked behind admech drukari greyknights somewhere between sisters, deathguard, t-sons, aldaeri, iron hands… and all of a sudden the mass freak out about them winning 1 tournament has begun with multiple threads of nerfing orks…massive change in both people’s assessment of the codex and reaction to the dex because of 1 tournament where a guy spammed planes to block assault.

The problem with all this is ... is it even considered fun? Because a game is supposed to be about having fun right?

Is it fun to arrive, spend the time setting up the terrain, placing the models. And then removing 80% of your army in one turn, after which you might as well concede.

Even for the person playing the list. Is it fun? Your shooting is so devastating it has the ability to remove 80% of your opponent's army in one turn. What kind of genius tactical gameplay was required? Shooting priority? Does secondaries, objectives, VP even matter anymore at that point?

Even if we removed the list building factor and made it a mirror match. Would it be a fun one? Because its about who gets that first turn and wipes out so much of the other side that it just snow balls from there. So the whole game is literally decided on who goes first.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
The problem with all this is ... is it even considered fun? Because a game is supposed to be about having fun right?

Is it fun to arrive, spend the time setting up the terrain, placing the models. And then removing 80% of your army in one turn, after which you might as well concede.

Even for the person playing the list. Is it fun? Your shooting is so devastating it has the ability to remove 80% of your opponent's army in one turn. What kind of genius tactical gameplay was required? Shooting priority? Does secondaries, objectives, VP even matter anymore at that point?

Even if we removed the list building factor and made it a mirror match. Would it be a fun one? Because its about who gets that first turn and wipes out so much of the other side that it just snow balls from there. So the whole game is literally decided on who goes first.

First off mirror matches with speedwaagh happens all the time and it’s NEVER a turn 1 wipe out… you are theorizing about stuff that doesn’t exist. Furthermore This list has a 50% win rate regardless of who goes first or second. In fact the game everyone is crying about the speedwaagh went second and took almost no casualties since the drukari couldn’t make it into combat.
you act as if speedwaagh just annihilates everyone turn 1. They don’t.. this kind of brutal first turn only happens if the opposing playing allows it. If you took a tau gunline and purposefully ran it into assault turn 1 without any protection and lost 75% of your army whose fault is it? Now if you take an assault list without any protection and park it in full rapid fire range of a gun line and lose 75% of an army whose fault is it? You are saying it shouldn’t have happened I agree… and once Sean failed his advance rolls and failed to get his army locked in combat he knew he lost… had he made that roll he probably wouldnt have… had the aircraft not blocked the buggies from assault he should not have lost either, but that was a weakness of his list… (and bad flyer base rules)
But go for it raise squigbuggies and dakkajets up ~15 points. It will not change anything that happens during this game. Sean would have still lost the way that game was played.

Voss wrote:

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions.

Depend on how old, it was a problem in 5th to 7th.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
The problem with all this is ... is it even considered fun? Because a game is supposed to be about having fun right?

Is it fun to arrive, spend the time setting up the terrain, placing the models. And then removing 80% of your army in one turn, after which you might as well concede.

Even for the person playing the list. Is it fun? Your shooting is so devastating it has the ability to remove 80% of your opponent's army in one turn. What kind of genius tactical gameplay was required? Shooting priority? Does secondaries, objectives, VP even matter anymore at that point?

Even if we removed the list building factor and made it a mirror match. Would it be a fun one? Because its about who gets that first turn and wipes out so much of the other side that it just snow balls from there. So the whole game is literally decided on who goes first.

I'd say this is the most important question. I wouldn't find it fun to be on either side of it. Heck, taking an army out of your transport case can be a big enough pain as it is, how anticlimactic is it to spend 30 minutes setting up terrain and pulling out an army for the game to be over so soon. While others may decide to debate whether the odds of losing 80% of your models is even possible outside niche scenarios I think the overall point is valid. When the game is hyper lethal it really adds a lot "this sucks factor" when your setup time is almost equal to the play time.

Both can be true...lethality can be over the top in 40K and this particular case can be an extreme example.

Too much survivability can create problems too, but at least you can play out the game to round 5. I faced an army of 30 deathwing terminators before. It feels really futile to shoot and kill 2 and a half deathwing terminators sitting on cover in the center and then on their turn, they just heal one back to full and rez another one.

But it turned out to be a 5 round game where we both got 90+ points and the game was decided on round 5. Because I took one look at his army, and I took engage, ROD, priority target.

He wasn't interested to even venture into my side of the board plus I moved blocked him by feeding him one unit each turn.

I mean, it still feels futile seemingly shooting at something that just won't die. But at least its a game.

Having a big chunk of your army just removed in one turn so that you are playing 50 to 80% down just feels bad. Now the general lethality is already high in the game right now. Its probably too late to dial back the lethality. And trying to boost the resilience results in the other extreme end where a normal army struggle to even dent an unkillable bloc.

However, terrain was supposed to be the big mitigating factor. Like it doesn't matter how lethal your units are if I can at least hide them behind obscuring to protect them. But you can't hide from flyers and you can't hide from guns that shoot out of line of sight. So, when you make flyers as well as guns that shoot out of line of sight so deadly... you will have games like this one.

I mean, the guard codex is not even out, but if they made the Guard artillery and manticores as lethal as ork ones ... it will be the same thing. Park 3 vendettas in front so you can't charge me turn 1, and then my turn, just shoot you with flyers and artillery that don't care about the terrain at all.

also, having terrain mitigate lethality work if the terrain actually does that, but the only kind of terrain that can actually help is Obscuring, and Obscuring doesn't actually prevent you from being killed; it simply postpones it.

Sean himself pointed this out: if he simply hid, he'd be dead later, but still dead.

The only thing it does is reverse the lethality equation, e.g. a player can hide and then pop out and table the ENEMY on their own turn! Huzzah! But that's ... not really a reduction in lethality. It's a binary "can interact with" or "cannot interact with"

Those terminators that can't be killed are more interactive than a unit behind Obscuring, unless flyers or NLOS are present (in which case obscuring does literally nothing).

Voss wrote:
The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

I disagree. Even in 3rd a SM/AM list that was tailored against orks could table the greenskins within a couple of turns.

Problem with this specific game with drukhari vs orks is that both lists were extremely skewed. Orks tailored against drukhari and drukhari took a full melee army. If both, or even one of those list, were more TAC oriented (like the vast majority of lists in casual gaming) that drukhari debacle would have never happened.

An average optimized list could have easily defeated the ork one. The specific ork list could have struggled a lot against other factions, instead it got to face drukhari three times in a row. The drukhari player decided to gamble in listbuilding and got a bad match up, the ork one went full anti drukhari and had the luck to fish 3 drukhari armies in a row. They both gambled and only one of them was rewarded. It happens with that rock/paper/scissor mentality in mind, it happened very frequently even in older editions.

Games like this one are not even remotely near the standard lethality of 40k, which might be too high in 9th (I think it is) but removing 1800 points, or even "just" 800+, in one turn is something exceptional, that may only happen if players make hard mistakes during deployment or by getting bad matchups, for one side, between extreme lists.

I have to question if some of these posts even play 40k, not even at a high competitive level. Just in general.

That Ork list and some of those Admech lists are not going to be countered by TAC ones. Anyone trying to defend them is unironically just being a simp for their specific army. You're no better than Drukhari players saying "the meta just needs to adjust!" or "take autocannons!"

These are lists with cheap, spammable, highly lethal units that ignore practically all of the terrain rules built into the game and on top of that are absurdly resilient for their cost. They are inherently problematic and more importantly totally uninteractive and unfun to play against. Bringing up Ork winrates is deflection from the real issue. Of course Orks as a whole aren't a problem because not everybody has the willingness or money to take that many buggies. No-one is advocating to nerf Boyz or Killa Kanz. It's this type of list archetype that is the problem.

And that's the big thing that everyone here seems to be missing: this is not some unique occurrence. This type of thing has happened multiple times since the Ork dex dropped and it's happened multiple times with Admech too. The first time with Orks was Mani's 18 buggies list which got first turn against a completely obscured Drukhari army and removed 1500 points in the first turn. There was no risky play or lack of anti-tank or whatever else these absurd posts are trying to argue. A few weeks ago at the LGT you had a first turn roll-off deciding the entire finals because the shooting on both sides was so overwhelming, but especially on the Admech side because it could just ignore what little terrain there was. I know Custodes players who have lost 1k points in the first turn to these types of lists. Try playing your TAC Marine or Necron lists into buggy spam or 6 Admech flyers and see how well you do; we're all excited to see you show us how it's done. Even fething Death Guard with a flat -1 D damage gets absolutely rinsed by these buggy lists.

And yet WR for those super OP buggy spam based lists, not orks in general, is not far from 50%.... How many GTs did they win so far? As you said they're not even likely to show up in casual games, so it looks like some posters are definitely overreacting. With a balanced drukhari list that 1800 points of stuff removed in one turn wouldn't have happened. If those kind of orks lists were so OP we would see them dominating the tables, which doesn't happen.

Note that I don't have any sympathy for spammy lists, and I despise lists that take 4 flyers and/or 10+ buggies, but numbers don't support your theory. My fix for example doesn't involve points hikes, rather limiting the amount of those models people can take: by allowing flyer every 1000 points and by removing squadrons from the buggies datasheets (why models with a base that is almost knight size or regular tanks are allowed to be in squadrons anyway?). In fact even with point hikes a list like that would have had -1 flyer and -1 buggy at most (-210 points in total in case of massive points hikes for those units). And since drukhari also deserves points hike nothing would have changed.

At the same time Freebooters trait and Speedwaaagh bonus are far from being OP, the former must be triggered and shines when the whole army shares the same klan, which makes it one sided, with no threatening melee, while the latter required a meh HQ to be triggered and only lasts a couple of turns. Those interactions shouldn't be touched. SM doctrines are far more OP.

Units like boyz and killa kanz need massive buffs my friend, while it seems like you're suggesting they're fine and the best ork units should be put on par with those trash units.

I mean this list wasn’t spam or squadroned he took 3 single unit detachments of 2 buggies and 2 of a buggy that was essentially nerfed this codex from last and 1 of another buggy that’s rarely taken since it’s a weak anti-infantry buggy (which just happens to do well vs drukari). 9 buggies and 4 unique models.

Also the nonsense of this happens regularly is pretty much bull crap… up until a week ago everyone was listing orks as a high second tier tier codex. Even goonhammer whose calling for a nerf as well had orks listed below admech, drukari, greyknights, sisters and then orks. A week before this tournament…. And now all of a sudden you are trying to claim orks have been doing this regularly? You guys are so freakin full of it… https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-silver-surge/ the only difference is ork only placed as a 5th and 2x 8th places in the 3 major last week so you guys were fine with it then.

The irony is even this past week just like goonhammer said, ad mech, drukari, grey knights and sisters all had better win records in the majors..(death guard and t-sons are also a problem for these buggy spam lists but you wouldn’t know that listening to the peanut gallery) orks won 1, grabbed a 3rd place and 2x 10th places in 5 majors, 4 placings out of 47 listed players and ork buggy spam is now a problem? Just man up to what it is you all freaked out due to 1 lopsided tournament win because 2 players played Rock Paper Scissors and one lost.

Yeah, people who can't read tournament data typically overreact. As always numbers are not information, it's the (correct) analysis of data that provides the information.

They read the whole story as: Freebooters with lots of buggies and planes can easily remove 1800 points of one of the most powerful factions in the game.

On the contrary I'd like orks to received buffs rather than nerfs so they can finally bring non spammy lists like pretty much any other major faction in the game which can field an average collection of models and turn into a fairly optimized list with just some minor tweaks, or even no tweaks at all.

It'd be nice if the Ork players in this thread didn't leap to the defense of their faction out of some kind of knee-jerk response to a misunderstanding.

"40k is too lethal" has nothing to do with winrates or faction balance. A faction can both be too lethal and be 100% balanced.

Arguing that Orks don't need a nerf should be reserved for the threads where people are saying Orks need a nerf.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
It'd be nice if the Ork players in this thread didn't leap to the defense of their faction out of some kind of knee-jerk response to a misunderstanding.

"40k is too lethal" has nothing to do with winrates or faction balance. A faction can both be too lethal and be 100% balanced.

Arguing that Orks don't need a nerf should be reserved for the threads where people are saying Orks need a nerf.

If the entire premise to your “40K is too lethal” didn’t revolve around a single ork win at a single tournament and then go into multiple rounds on how orks need a nerf and are first turn wiping out most armies (which isn’t even remotely true) ork players wouldn’t need to keep throwing stats and tournament results up over and over showing that’s just not true.

Played vs a version of this list yesterday, only 1313pts, with my DA (regular opponent). He still had 6 buggies, dakkajet, beast snagga boss on squigosaurs. ghaz and mek in Battlewagon and 10 Gretchin.
Luckily, I won 1st turn and got an alpha strike off, killing 2 buggies and the boss on squigosaurs (combination of fire from black knights, attack bikes, Sammy and a talon master).
The counter punch was still devastating. 4/5 black knights, 3 Attack Bikes and my LS vengeance destroyed. The sheer number of shots and firepower is insane. I did end up winning the game, but it was close. I was mostly fortunate that ghaz bounced off my DW terminators.
I hate to have seen what would have happened if I went second.
However, I don't want a knee jerk reaction, there just needs to be some points adjustments. That many shots hitting on 4s has to be accounted for. Dakkajet and buggies going up is a must, but not by crazy amounts. 20pts on the jet and 10pts per buggy is probably where I would start.

gungo wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
It'd be nice if the Ork players in this thread didn't leap to the defense of their faction out of some kind of knee-jerk response to a misunderstanding.

"40k is too lethal" has nothing to do with winrates or faction balance. A faction can both be too lethal and be 100% balanced.

Arguing that Orks don't need a nerf should be reserved for the threads where people are saying Orks need a nerf.

If the entire premise to your “40K is too lethal” didn’t revolve around a single ork win at a single tournament and then go into multiple rounds on how orks need a nerf and are first turn wiping out most armies (which isn’t even remotely true) ork players wouldn’t need to keep throwing stats and tournament results up over and over showing that’s just not true.

It doesn't rely on that alone though. There are multiple data points from YouTube battle reports, tournament games (including non-finals games from this tournament itself), and casual anecdotes.

In fact, even just among supermajor GT finals (a tiny sample set) this isn't the first time this has happened (as pointed out multiple times in this thread). The London GT final was also a single-shooting-phase win for the victor.

 Blackie wrote:

Voss wrote:
The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

I disagree. Even in 3rd a SM/AM list that was tailored against orks could table the greenskins within a couple of turns.

'Within a couple turns' is an entirely different metric. Tabling halfway through a game isn't great, but its a world of difference to multiple instances of single-shooting phase wins. Which is what people are actually talking about, no matter how often people jump in to insist that this particular instance doesn't matter because reasons.

gungo wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
It'd be nice if the Ork players in this thread didn't leap to the defense of their faction out of some kind of knee-jerk response to a misunderstanding.

"40k is too lethal" has nothing to do with winrates or faction balance. A faction can both be too lethal and be 100% balanced.

Arguing that Orks don't need a nerf should be reserved for the threads where people are saying Orks need a nerf.

If the entire premise to your “40K is too lethal” didn’t revolve around a single ork win at a single tournament and then go into multiple rounds on how orks need a nerf and are first turn wiping out most armies (which isn’t even remotely true) ork players wouldn’t need to keep throwing stats and tournament results up over and over showing that’s just not true.

There are the other aforementioned cases, the two threads on terrain in these general discussions, and many other discussions that regularly come back to the conclusion that 40k is too lethal, like most discussions making the case for alternating activation. Do you even read this thread and do you even read anything else on dakka? Or are you just here to troll?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Like other anecdotes mentioned in this thread...

How many times does it need to be stated that this was not an isolated experience and in fact happens regularly whenever this type of list plays?

Sorry that you don't actually play the game regularly or pay that much attention to the competitive scene but it's a very clear and present problem and has been going on for 3 months now. Longer if you include the specific Admech build too.

 Bosskelot wrote:
GW decided to make terrain rules vitally important to 9th's design and balance and then in the Ork and Admech books decided to make a load ofcheap, spammable, ultra-lethal units that completely ignore them.

It is what is known as a "whoopsie."

Sorry, you mistyped: Terrain RULE. Obscuring. The only one orks/admech can ignore, but luckily, the only one that matters even one little tiny bit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

Voss wrote:
The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

I disagree. Even in 3rd a SM/AM list that was tailored against orks could table the greenskins within a couple of turns.

'Within a couple turns' is an entirely different metric. Tabling halfway through a game isn't great, but its a world of difference to multiple instances of single-shooting phase wins. Which is what people are actually talking about, no matter how often people jump in to insist that this particular instance doesn't matter because reasons.

Nah actually I think tablings turn 4 being super common is a problem if you want the game to be a 5-turn game.

current lethality levels would be fine, if they were PEAK lethality levels - as in, something you might achieve at a difficult to get to range, with no cover, no obscurement, etc. The problem is that it's super super freaking easy to be getting army-wide shots off with 33% or better points returns, which means games are decided in a single, or two, critical turns.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 Bosskelot wrote:
GW decided to make terrain rules vitally important to 9th's design and balance and then in the Ork and Admech books decided to make a load ofcheap, spammable, ultra-lethal units that completely ignore them.

It is what is known as a "whoopsie."

Sorry, you mistyped: Terrain RULE. Obscuring. The only one orks/admech can ignore, but luckily, the only one that matters even one little tiny bit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

Voss wrote:
The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

I disagree. Even in 3rd a SM/AM list that was tailored against orks could table the greenskins within a couple of turns.

'Within a couple turns' is an entirely different metric. Tabling halfway through a game isn't great, but its a world of difference to multiple instances of single-shooting phase wins. Which is what people are actually talking about, no matter how often people jump in to insist that this particular instance doesn't matter because reasons.

Nah actually I think tablings turn 4 being super common is a problem if you want the game to be a 5-turn game.

current lethality levels would be fine, if they were PEAK lethality levels - as in, something you might achieve at a difficult to get to range, with no cover, no obscurement, etc. The problem is that it's super super freaking easy to be getting army-wide shots off with 33% or better points returns, which means games are decided in a single, or two, critical turns.

Indeed. The problem could be attributed to the the lack of "Degrade" mechanics in 40k.

There's basically no way to degrade an enemy's shooting effectiveness.

-1 to-hit doesn't stack, so any given source of -1 doesn't matter. Good reflexes? Nah, it was the dense terrain. Did the enemy heavy weapon team do a quadruple backflip and 720 noscope their lascannon off of a 6' high ledge through a dense forest? Well, you used SMOKESCREEN so it's literally identical to them aiming carefully from a superior vantage point. around the forest.

+1 to saves is basically irrelevant in a game where your basic infantry weapons reach -2 fairly reliably.

The only shooting degrade that matters is Obscuring because it turns shooting off COMPLETELY. Which is super binary and easily played around.

Hey, who knows....maybe the new Speed Freeks army of renown will make the buggy list even more killy than the freebooterz one!

Voss wrote:

 Blackie wrote:

Voss wrote:
The 'competitive play' 'counter' posts are utterly asinine.

This (the lethality) is _just_ as much a problem in 'casual play.'

It was also largely NOT a problem in older editions. There were glaring exceptions (particularly for certain factions/models), but everyone was able to recognize them.

It is absolutely a design problem that 90% lethality is even achievable, no matter how you play. No matter how many supposed 'TFGs' you exile from your local store meta, its still a massive problem for the game.

I disagree. Even in 3rd a SM/AM list that was tailored against orks could table the greenskins within a couple of turns.

'Within a couple turns' is an entirely different metric. Tabling halfway through a game isn't great, but its a world of difference to multiple instances of single-shooting phase wins. Which is what people are actually talking about, no matter how often people jump in to insist that this particular instance doesn't matter because reasons.

Not really. Even in older editions a game could have been decided after one or two shooting phases when tailored lists and bad rolls were involved. In 3rd an army that could spam anti tank shots, anti infantry blasts and templates had the potential to table an optimized ork army in no time, and in 3rd due to many problems in models' availability (half of the ork roster had no official model and lots of necessary upgrades, starting with the nobz and special weapons in the regular infantry squads, had to be bought separately in blisters) it was extremely hard to field actual optimized ork lists while other armies could do it easily.

I don't really see a significant difference if a game is decided in one or two turns to be honest. Conceding in turn two means only one turn of actual play for the losing player. The vast majority of the games I play lasts 4-5 turns.

 the_scotsman wrote:
Nah actually I think tablings turn 4 being super common is a problem if you want the game to be a 5-turn game.

current lethality levels would be fine, if they were PEAK lethality levels - as in, something you might achieve at a difficult to get to range, with no cover, no obscurement, etc. The problem is that it's super super freaking easy to be getting army-wide shots off with 33% or better points returns, which means games are decided in a single, or two, critical turns.

Depends on the design really. If one (or both) armies are meant to be really dead by turn 5, the curve almost surely means you will get them completely dead by turn 4 a substantial amount of time.

The problem we've got is armies which on average dice expect to do about 60-70%~ of their points worth of damage if they get to attack. Which is unsurprisingly producing outcomes where they get collectively lucky and spike up to hit 90%. It doesn't matter whether its Ad Mech/Ork shooting, or all the turn 2 charges from DE. Its bad for the game.

I think GW's concern (if they think about such matters) is that if damage was much weaker - and everyone ran less glasshammer lists, and it was more about bringing bodies onto objectives, where possible skulking behind (non-GW) terrain for defensive bonuses to deny LOS - games could take a long time, as nothing dies.

Sure, but GW is very obviously throwing terrain at the wall in a desperate bid to get tournament games to look like games instead of coin flips. The only game-functional terrain that GW actually sells right now is the sector imperialis stuff, and everything else basically is worthless and doesn't show up on their terrain table setups anyway - surely that indicates a problem.

Personally, I expect some kind of durability-oriented mid edition rule change with the upcoming CA much like we had in mid-8th when it became clear that turn 1 deep strike and no limitation on unit spam was just not working.

Maybe then we'll get a few scant months of games feeling like games before the inevitable Space Marines 4.0: Youve Heard of Chapter Tactics, Youve Heard of Doctrines, Youve Heard of Super-Doctrines, Now Get Ready for Super Duper Ultra Codex Primarch Tier Super Saiyan Space Marines! Once per game space marines can choose 1 battle round where stratagems are not limited to one use per phase AND the cost of all stratagems is 0, to reflect the space marines super superior tactical prowess!

Also coming soon, at an unspecified date: the new CSM codex to make them not W1!

 the_scotsman wrote:
Sure, but GW is very obviously throwing terrain at the wall in a desperate bid to get tournament games to look like games instead of coin flips. The only game-functional terrain that GW actually sells right now is the sector imperialis stuff, and everything else basically is worthless and doesn't show up on their terrain table setups anyway - surely that indicates a problem.

Personally, I expect some kind of durability-oriented mid edition rule change with the upcoming CA much like we had in mid-8th when it became clear that turn 1 deep strike and no limitation on unit spam was just not working.

Maybe then we'll get a few scant months of games feeling like games before the inevitable Space Marines 4.0: Youve Heard of Chapter Tactics, Youve Heard of Doctrines, Youve Heard of Super-Doctrines, Now Get Ready for Super Duper Ultra Codex Primarch Tier Super Saiyan Space Marines! Once per game space marines can choose 1 battle round where stratagems are not limited to one use per phase AND the cost of all stratagems is 0, to reflect the space marines super superior tactical prowess!

Also coming soon, at an unspecified date: the new CSM codex to make them not W1!

I don’t even want a new chaos space marine codex anymore. I want a new index edition...

macluvin wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
Sure, but GW is very obviously throwing terrain at the wall in a desperate bid to get tournament games to look like games instead of coin flips. The only game-functional terrain that GW actually sells right now is the sector imperialis stuff, and everything else basically is worthless and doesn't show up on their terrain table setups anyway - surely that indicates a problem.

Personally, I expect some kind of durability-oriented mid edition rule change with the upcoming CA much like we had in mid-8th when it became clear that turn 1 deep strike and no limitation on unit spam was just not working.

Maybe then we'll get a few scant months of games feeling like games before the inevitable Space Marines 4.0: Youve Heard of Chapter Tactics, Youve Heard of Doctrines, Youve Heard of Super-Doctrines, Now Get Ready for Super Duper Ultra Codex Primarch Tier Super Saiyan Space Marines! Once per game space marines can choose 1 battle round where stratagems are not limited to one use per phase AND the cost of all stratagems is 0, to reflect the space marines super superior tactical prowess!

Also coming soon, at an unspecified date: the new CSM codex to make them not W1!

I don’t even want a new chaos space marine codex anymore. I want a new index edition...

Same, with the upcoming Tau codex in January.
I'm hopefully going to have 6 months of fun with the FOTM Tau list until CA drops and nerfs it, then I'm going to wait for 10th to reset everything.

 the_scotsman wrote:
Personally, I expect some kind of durability-oriented mid edition rule change with the upcoming CA much like we had in mid-8th when it became clear that turn 1 deep strike and no limitation on unit spam was just not working.

Be interesting to see what they come up with.
Unclear why they got rid of prepared positions - even if it wouldn't have helped in this case.

Knowing GW, it would be something like:

Concealed Positions: All units with fewer than 18 wounds cannot be targeted in the first battle round unless they move.

Tyel wrote:
Depends on the design really. If one (or both) armies are meant to be really dead by turn 5, the curve almost surely means you will get them completely dead by turn 4 a substantial amount of time.

Is that a healthy expectation, though?

If each side reduces the other by 25% each turn, then you get a curve like this:

End of turn 1- 75% remaining
End of turn 2- 56% remaining
End of turn 3- 42% remaining
End of turn 4- 32% remaining
End of turn 5- 24% remaining

Is that really so bad, ending the game with less than a quarter of either army left on the board? Of course this assumes both sides are damaging each other equivalently; if one side takes no casualties then they table their opponent at the end of turn 4.

But here's the relevant thing: Not every unit can fight optimally and at full effectiveness every turn.

Suppose on any given turn, half of your army can fight at full effectiveness, a quarter can fight at half effectiveness (some weapons out of range, suboptimal targets, cover, etc), and a quarter can't fight at all (not in melee, no LOS, advancing instead of fighting, performing actions, etc). That means overall, at any given time your army is operating at 62.5% efficiency.

In order to inflict 25% army casualties at that efficiency, each unit needs to have a typical return of 40% its cost when fighting at full effectiveness. That's already a pretty high casualty rate; if I manage bring my whole army to bear at optimal efficiency, I can kill nearly half of yours in one turn.

But to have tabling on turn 2 or 3 as a fairly common occurrence- meaning, something that happens even when you can't bring your whole army to bear at once- you need a level of lethality way beyond this. 60%? 80%? 1800pts dead in one turn is 90% returns for the whole army.

I don't think there's anything wrong with armies not wiping each other out by turn 5 on the regular. Very high lethality really just is not sustainable in a pure IGOUGO system.

 catbarf wrote:
But here's the relevant thing: Not every unit can fight optimally and at full effectiveness every turn.

Suppose on any given turn, half of your army can fight at full effectiveness, a quarter can fight at half effectiveness (some weapons out of range, suboptimal targets, cover, etc), and a quarter can't fight at all (not in melee, no LOS, advancing instead of fighting, performing actions, etc). That means overall, at any given time your army is operating at 62.5% efficiency.

In order to inflict 25% army casualties at that efficiency, each unit needs to have a typical return of 40% its cost when fighting at full effectiveness. That's already a pretty high casualty rate; if I manage bring my whole army to bear at optimal efficiency, I can kill nearly half of yours in one turn.

But to have tabling on turn 2 or 3 as a fairly common occurrence- meaning, something that happens even when you can't bring your whole army to bear at once- you need a level of lethality way beyond this. 60%? 80%? 1800pts dead in one turn is 90% returns for the whole army.

I don't think there's anything wrong with armies not wiping each other out by turn 5 on the regular. Very high lethality really just is not sustainable in a pure IGOUGO system.

Well all things being equal - and I realise they aren't, a 40% return would see people more or less tabled in 3 turns.

2000 vs 2000.
Player 1 kills 800 points. The 1200 hits back for 480.
1520 vs 1200.
Player 1 kill a further 608 points. The remaining 592 points hits back to kill 236.
1284 vs 592.
Player 1 attacks, leaving player 2 with just 78 points. Its not a tabling technically - but its close.

If we adopt 25% then at the end of turn 5 however, player 1 has 995 points left, and player 2 still has 200.

In practice obviously we need something to stop this happening, or all games would purely be a function of going first - but as you can see, tablings become relatively expected as you turn that dial.

Well, the point of Catbarf's post is that you want a unit to be at 40% when it is operating at max capability, then you want a bunch of degrades to reduce it to appx. 25% when averaged across the whole army.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Well, the point of Catbarf's post is that you want a unit to be at 40% when it is operating at max capability, then you want a bunch of degrades to reduce it to appx. 25% when averaged across the whole army.

Which 40k...kind of comes close to, but not quite.

By my estimation, if you could make Cover and Dense modifiers a little bit easier to achieve, and then maybe add in one more (I'd love a Long Range penalty) then you might be able to be in a good place.

The problem is, I feel like GW toned down the spiky lethality from a lot of strat combos and then as a pat on their own back added in a third layer of army-wide rules (Doctrines and doctrine-alikes) that were also primarily based on increasing lethality and also amped up the consistent damage a lot of units put out.

And where that resulted is where previously in the 8th ed you had 'most units deal about 25% points returns, but one unit can put out THREE HUNDRED PERCENT points return' you now have 'everything can dish out 50-60% points returns"

For those curious, I've created a thread with a tweaked terrain system replacing the current 'oodles of different keywords' with a more unified system that would ideally make more terrain pieces more useful. its over in Proposed Rules.

 the_scotsman wrote:
so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn? Is this healthy for a competitive game? What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn? Is this healthy for a competitive game? What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game.

It is. The last time something similar to this occurred was actually on a recent stream from the GW official GT they had, where a Black Templar army (with a contemporary competitive setup, I might add) got very nearly tabled in a single turn by an admech skew list.

The reason why this is notable and why I brought it up is not because this is some kind of crazy freak occurrence (like the oft- reposted meme image of the guy insta-tabling his opponents null deploy army using Kroot) but because the norm from the game has shifted from the 'turn 5 tablings routine, turn 4 tablings uncommon, turn 3 tablings unusual' state of 8th to 'turn 3 tablings routine, turn 2 tablings uncommon, turn 1 tablings unusual' state of 9th, and people are rightfully pointing out that it is actually crap game design, as it places a much greater importance on stupid, fiddly micro-positioning errors (See the recent huge post in General where a new player tried to play a 500pt teaching game and his largest unit ended up wiped in a single shot because one gun barrel was poking out from behind Obscuring terrain) and makes it essentially impossible to tell compelling narratives with the game beyond the riveting tale of how that one time sgt. skippy and his squad of heroic space marines leapt out from behind the building they were cowering behind (as every space marine does always), shot and instantly blew something up, and then got immediately vaporized by return fire.

Its interesting to try and calculate just how many games of 40k would have to be played to have two tournaments effectively decided turn 1 a few months apart.

Realistically its not one in a million, its not even one in a hundred.

The main issue is that a couple of broken rules interactions end up tearing the meta, as always, but now balance patches happen only twice a year (if at all).
If GW were more aggressive and acted quickly in fixing these kind of combos (we are talking about flyer spam in general and few overtuned factions, ie AdMech Drukhari Orks and arguably GK), the end result would be much more bearable.
During 8th ed there were similar issues but erratas and balance patches were much more frequent. Instead now we get 6-12 months of stale meta where a couple of builds dominate and make the game much more boring for everyone else.

Imho we would all be happier if the FOTM builds were toned down and the other units in those codices were buffed, in order to have a better internal balance.
I think Ork players would be happier if they were able to run Ork Boyz en masse, GK players their terminators, and so on. Or at least if they were not facing an obvious choice when list building.

My worst ever wargaming experience was going to a game store for my first ever non club 'pick up game' with a stranger during 8e wfb. I had a fully painted night goblin army, he had some partially assembled and half primed daemons. He basically tabled my army on turn 2 with a wizard on a disc firing an irresistable force vortex right down my battle line that killed everything that failed an I test. I basically spent more time unpacking and repacking my army into foam than I did playing. I never played wfb again after that and never bothered with pick up games either. I'm too busy to waste my time with that quality of experience.

So I reckon this silly level of lethality may spell problems for player retention. Dunno if that will bother GW if enough new blood comes in, by all reports they're doing very well.

 Da Boss wrote:
So I reckon this silly level of lethality may spell problems for player retention.

Apparently not that much, if GW still has you as a customer.

Fair, yeah. Though that experience ended my warhammer fantasy purchases for nearly a decade, and my 40k purchases dried up soon after for a similar amount of time. I've recently come back to GW miniatures with the start collecting sets which are reasonably good value, but I'm not playing GW games and remain pretty unlikely to do so based on what I see here. But yeah, I am still a customer, but those experiences impacted in what way and caused a significant and protracted drop in my custom, and contributed to me no longer being a player of their games at all.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn? Is this healthy for a competitive game? What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game.

You call it greater then 1 in 2.5 million. I call it 'the same thing happened in the semi finals where he effectively tabled a Drukhari in 2 turns, rather then 1 because that opponent didn't take the big turn 1 gamble that Sean did". And who knows in how many other games he did the same that weren't streamed.

Here are the two words that would fix this crap.

Alternative activations.

Simple. 40k has ramped up the level of leathel ranged attacks, reduced tactical options (no more pinning, no more units fleeing, just kill). Rapid Fire weapons lost what made them a balance (stationary 2 shots at 12" or once at max range, move 1 shot at 12"). Heavy Weapons are now able to move and shoot.

Oh and the table got smaller...

Best stick to 3rd edition using the lists in the back.

Tyel wrote:
Well all things being equal - and I realise they aren't, a 40% return would see people more or less tabled in 3 turns.

2000 vs 2000.
Player 1 kills 800 points. The 1200 hits back for 480.
1520 vs 1200.
Player 1 kill a further 608 points. The remaining 592 points hits back to kill 236.
1284 vs 592.
Player 1 attacks, leaving player 2 with just 78 points. Its not a tabling technically - but its close.

If we adopt 25% then at the end of turn 5 however, player 1 has 995 points left, and player 2 still has 200.

In practice obviously we need something to stop this happening, or all games would purely be a function of going first - but as you can see, tablings become relatively expected as you turn that dial.

Right. That 'something' is the contingencies that prevent an army from operating to its full potential every turn- things like range, suboptimal targets, blocked LOS, not being in melee, etc- so that we hopefully don't see armies ever getting 40% returns on Turn 1, but something more reasonable.

In the rare event that a player does get everything aligned, a 40% return in one go is pretty crippling, but it's still a far cry from the 90% in the OP.

My point was that even with 40% optimal return- pretty high by the standards of most wargames- having a tabling by the end of turn 5 is unlikely. The much more likely outcome is two armies down to a fraction of their original strength but still slugging it out. As long as the game is 5 turns, I don't think they should design around expecting one side or the other to be tabled. It's just too much damage for a pure IGOUGO game.

I think GW was going for the "If everyone is super, then no one will be super" concept. But somehow, it ended up with the situation where certain armies became super OP while most of the rest of the armies just have little chance at all against those few dominant army builds.

Tyel wrote:
Its interesting to try and calculate just how many games of 40k would have to be played to have two tournaments effectively decided turn 1 a few months apart.

Realistically its not one in a million, its not even one in a hundred.

Well, no, that's not how statistics work. But the poker comparison is nonsense, since 40k isn't drawing from a fixed deck of 52 cards. Instead people are building to roll hundreds of dice each round (with rerolls and modifiers), and push the envelope further and further towards 'statistically likely,' if not setting the needle directly to 'expected average outcome.'
That's where the lethality problem comes in. As you pour more-and-more dice in (and simultaneously, by the way, raise point cost per model slightly, so there are fewer models on a smaller battlefield), with the 'best' armies you're just pre-gaming likely outcomes.

If weapon profiles were dialed back (specifically # of shots, as well as # of melee attacks on unit profiles), there wouldn't be half as many problems. When you can throw 100 dice for a single unit (and do this multiple times), you've reached the realm of utterly crap game design.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn? Is this healthy for a competitive game? What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game.

It is. The last time something similar to this occurred was actually on a recent stream from the GW official GT they had, where a Black Templar army (with a contemporary competitive setup, I might add) got very nearly tabled in a single turn by an admech skew list.

The reason why this is notable and why I brought it up is not because this is some kind of crazy freak occurrence (like the oft- reposted meme image of the guy insta-tabling his opponents null deploy army using Kroot) but because the norm from the game has shifted from the 'turn 5 tablings routine, turn 4 tablings uncommon, turn 3 tablings unusual' state of 8th to 'turn 3 tablings routine, turn 2 tablings uncommon, turn 1 tablings unusual' state of 9th, and people are rightfully pointing out that it is actually crap game design, as it places a much greater importance on stupid, fiddly micro-positioning errors (See the recent huge post in General where a new player tried to play a 500pt teaching game and his largest unit ended up wiped in a single shot because one gun barrel was poking out from behind Obscuring terrain) and makes it essentially impossible to tell compelling narratives with the game beyond the riveting tale of how that one time sgt. skippy and his squad of heroic space marines leapt out from behind the building they were cowering behind (as every space marine does always), shot and instantly blew something up, and then got immediately vaporized by return fire.

Ugh.

Apples to apples, please, and no cherry picking. If you're going to quote points lost, do it for both games. If you're going to point to the competitive strength of players, do so in each example. And if you're saying it happens frequently, please point to more than 2 games. If the sample you are concerned about is is 2 out of all the competitive games played, GW has still designed a great game.

The odds don't need to be 1 in 2.5 million for it to matter, as long as it's better than the odds of dying in a lightning strike (1 in ~138k) it's still just good play. It's not Candyland, where the outcome of each game is determined by the shuffle of the cards before anyone moves. It's a very complex game where outcomes are influenced by unit selection, placement on the board, use of special rules and fundamental mechanics. Any sophisticated player is going to use the rules to their advantage, and this will naturally lead to certain matchups where one player finds themselves at a serious disadvantage early on.

I often play skew lists. In 8th, it was Black Legion gunlines loaded up with lascannons, then Bloodletter Bombs, then Daemon Primarchs supported by a Nurgle detachment. Way back in 5th, it was spawn rush - 35 spawn supported by a Chaos Lord and 2 squads of CSM. These lists work great, they're designed to exploit an aspect of the game opponents don't commonly defend against. There are times I remove half an opponent's army in the first turn.

But then someone comes up with a hard counter. Or a FAQ drops and nerfs some key units. Or a new Codex drops that makes the skew meaningless. Or a new edition comes along and I need to rethink the game entirely.

At worst, imbalances have a limited shelf life. 40k is always a work in progress and people like Mike Brandt are looking out for serious problems reflected in tournament results. Saying outcomes are predetermined by the strength of individual factions - especially in terms of winning in the first round - is not supported by tournament outcomes.

https://www.40kstats.com/faction-vs-faction

You can look at how Orks have performed against Drukhari, they only win 44% of games. Admech have a 71% win rate against Black Templars, but they've only fought 7 battles total - which is too small a sample size to draw conclusions from.

If you can point to something that suggests players or equal skill levels are commonly losing 90% of their army turn 1, would love to hear it. But I haven't seen anything that suggests this is anything aside from mistakes on one side / good play on the other.

Well, it does seem like increasingly, the outcomes are decided at the list building stage rather than what you can actually do ingame. I understand your examples of the blood letter bomb and even the lascannon spam. But taking those two examples, they can be mitigated by good play. The lascannon gunline can be faced by hiding behind obscuring terrain. Devastating charges from deep strike like the blood letter bomb can be mitigated by good play in screening.

Something like super shooty flyers and super powerful out of line sight shooting cannot be mitigated by smart play or terrain.

I actually loved 9th edition the most when it first came out. The focus on primary objectives plus secondary objectives meant that trying to kill your opponent was not as important as trying to get more VP. But somehow, we have now reached a stage where the lethality is starting to be so high that they overshadow primaries and secondaries.

 techsoldaten wrote:


You can look at how Orks have performed against Drukhari, they only win 44% of games. Admech have a 71% win rate against Black Templars, but they've only fought 7 battles total - which is too small a sample size to draw conclusions from.

If you can point to something that suggests players or equal skill levels are commonly losing 90% of their army turn 1, would love to hear it. But I haven't seen anything that suggests this is anything aside from mistakes on one side / good play on the other.

Thank you.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Eldenfirefly wrote:
Well, it does seem like increasingly, the outcomes are decided at the list building stage rather than what you can actually do ingame.

It only happens when skew lists meet each other at competitive play. Take the game from this thread, the drukhari player brought a list that was not even remotely optimized: durkhari have access to one of the most successful shooting phase in the game and he went full melee. If he had an optimized list he would have had all the tools to counter the ork list that tabled him.

If you play rock/paper/scissor 40k it's obvious that this kind of situations happens. It doesn't matter what fixes and what nerfs GW introduces, with this concept in mind it is very possible to get extremely good or bad match ups quite frequently, hence games screwed turn 1 with no possible counter play. Just stick with reasonably TAC armies and we're back at "royal flush" odds for something like that to happen.

Eldenfirefly wrote:
Well, it does seem like increasingly, the outcomes are decided at the list building stage rather than what you can actually do ingame.

And GW goes: "just as planned".

If it wasn't the GW's goal of changing what's good and bad so that the tournament meta-chasers go buy new armies constantly wouldn't work as well as it does.

It's not bug of the game but intentional feature. GW learned long time ago how to exploit the tournament players for loadsa cash.

(funny thing is players themselves don't actually want balance)

Eldenfirefly wrote:
Well, it does seem like increasingly, the outcomes are decided at the list building stage rather than what you can actually do ingame. I understand your examples of the blood letter bomb and even the lascannon spam. But taking those two examples, they can be mitigated by good play. The lascannon gunline can be faced by hiding behind obscuring terrain. Devastating charges from deep strike like the blood letter bomb can be mitigated by good play in screening.

Something like super shooty flyers and super powerful out of line sight shooting cannot be mitigated by smart play or terrain.

I actually loved 9th edition the most when it first came out. The focus on primary objectives plus secondary objectives meant that trying to kill your opponent was not as important as trying to get more VP. But somehow, we have now reached a stage where the lethality is starting to be so high that they overshadow primaries and secondaries.

Good points.

I'm not saying list building doesn't matter, or that flyers / indirect shooting / terrain aren't powerful. I am saying destroying 90% of an opponent's army turn 1 is not a widespread problem or an indicator of poor game design.

WRT list building, AdMech and Drukhari seem to be dominating tournaments right now. If choosing this Ork list pre-determines the outcome of games, why don't results reflect that fact? Why are we not seeing Ork Speedfreak lists at the top of every tournament? Competitive players tend to emulate success.

Voss wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Its interesting to try and calculate just how many games of 40k would have to be played to have two tournaments effectively decided turn 1 a few months apart.

Realistically its not one in a million, its not even one in a hundred.

Well, no, that's not how statistics work. But the poker comparison is nonsense, since 40k isn't drawing from a fixed deck of 52 cards. Instead people are building to roll hundreds of dice each round (with rerolls and modifiers), and push the envelope further and further towards 'statistically likely,' if not setting the needle directly to 'expected average outcome.'
That's where the lethality problem comes in. As you pour more-and-more dice in (and simultaneously, by the way, raise point cost per model slightly, so there are fewer models on a smaller battlefield), with the 'best' armies you're just pre-gaming likely outcomes.

If weapon profiles were dialed back (specifically # of shots, as well as # of melee attacks on unit profiles), there wouldn't be half as many problems. When you can throw 100 dice for a single unit (and do this multiple times), you've reached the realm of utterly crap game design.

I'm not saying 40k is the wargaming equivalent of poker. 40k is a much more complex game with very different dynamics.

I am saying outcome distribution matters for this argument, and anecdotal reactions to single games don't mean much. Show me something that suggests a significant number of games result in one side destroying 90% of an opponents army turn 1 and I'm happy to explore it with you.

40k has it's problems, but pre-determined outcomes isn't one of them. Issues with the game tend to be much more mundane and get dealt with via FAQs / new Codexes / new editions / creativity within the player base.

A very important thing regarding meta lists and why you aren't always seeing them all over the place is that they aren't always that easy to get or to play.

For example Orks werent allowed to use their new rules or models until they were officially released at quite a few tournaments so despite the codex being out in that special box players couldn't use it at events for some time.

A lot of the best units are new units or units that most ork players didn't have from earlier so they have to get the rules, then buy the models and then paint up the models. Supply and shipping times have been a bit problematic lately so not everyone have been able to buy the new goodies or get them delivered in time.

If they can even afford the new list since an ork player with thousands of points of models might still need to buy models for hundreds of euros/dollar to get the meta list. 9 buggies and 4 planes is about 500euros. Some of the other new models that are top tier like the Killrig and boss on squigosaur costs about 90 and 36 euro each. If you don't even have any orks to begin with it will be even more expensive. The list in the OP costs something like 7-800 euro.

The above alone is enough to lower the amount of players playing the new ork lists. Then you also run the risk of this particular list being nerfed quite hard and all your money and time spent building/painting goes wasted.

Why armies like marines when they are good becomes so annoying is because lots of people already have them and don't really mind getting a few more marines if they lack the one or two units that are currently meta. You spend 100 euros on 1-2 boxes and raid your bitbox for the right special weapons and play with the new best supplement and suddenly you went from a bottom tier army to a top tier one without too much effort. Drukhari and Ad-mech is in some ways much the same. Lots of undercosted things that are good that many people already have or don't mind buying more off so even if it gets slightly nerfed later they dont mind too much. But for non speedfreak ork players the new top lists could as well have been another faction entirely and if it gets nerfed too hard they are left with nothing of their investment.

GK have like 5 data sheets so if you played GK you probably already were 80% on the way to the meta lists. If not you now have 50% of a "complete" GK army so unless they nerf the whole army to the ground some stuff will still be playable for GK.

Without knowing what percentage of Ork players are running Speedwaaagh variants universal considerations of the Ork win rate are meaningless. If someone brings their greentide list and gets stomped it doesn't tell us anything about the relative power of Ork flyers and buggies.

With factions like DE you don't have this issue, because everything is at the top of the power curve. GK as said have almost no units - if NDKs and Interceptors (and to a degree basic Strike squads) are powerful, the faction is powerful.

Over time competitive Ork players are likely to evolve their collections into the best units - and you will see a convergence on what works. Arguably I think you can see this in Goonhammer's Glicko score - with Orks showing a steady rise, compared with other factions enjoying a one-off explosive jump with the new codex and then becoming stable. The win rate in bigger tournaments also seems to be higher than the faction as a whole.

At the other end you have factions which don't seem to have a viable competitive build - and are therefore abandoned by the best players. Friends don't let friends play Necrons, unless its for fun.

Arguably this is why basing balance purely on win percentage can be misleading - even if it tends to be a good guide.

Double post.

Klickor wrote:
A very important thing regarding meta lists and why you aren't always seeing them all over the place is that they aren't always that easy to get or to play.

For example Orks werent allowed to use their new rules or models until they were officially released at quite a few tournaments so despite the codex being out in that special box players couldn't use it at events for some time.

A lot of the best units are new units or units that most ork players didn't have from earlier so they have to get the rules, then buy the models and then paint up the models. Supply and shipping times have been a bit problematic lately so not everyone have been able to buy the new goodies or get them delivered in time.

That implies it's just a matter of time until Ork Speedfreak lists dominate all tournaments.

Okay. Let's wait a few months and see if that prediction holds.

As far as I know, there have not been interruptions in selling or shipping these models.

Klickor wrote:
If they can even afford the new list since an ork player with thousands of points of models might still need to buy models for hundreds of euros/dollar to get the meta list. 9 buggies and 4 planes is about 500euros. Some of the other new models that are top tier like the Killrig and boss on squigosaur costs about 90 and 36 euro each. If you don't even have any orks to begin with it will be even more expensive. The list in the OP costs something like 7-800 euro.

Maybe it's true that not everyone can afford the newest and the shiniest, but top players play the most competitive lists.

Look at Nick Navanti, he cycles through multiple factions depending on which one produces the best outcomes given the current ruleset. He doesn't put a lot of effort into painting his models, there's a few videos where he states this.

So I'm not sure what holds for players generally can also be applied to top competitive players. If there was a list that could regularly remove 90% of your opponents army turn one, I think top competitive players would be finding a way to get the models for that army.

Klickor wrote:
The above alone is enough to lower the amount of players playing the new ork lists. Then you also run the risk of this particular list being nerfed quite hard and all your money and time spent building/painting goes wasted.

The argument isn't about the number of people playing Orks. It's about whether the game regularly allows you to destroy 90% of your opponent's army turn one, which would be a serious design flaw.

I don't see evidence that's happening. Ork armies are the fifth most played in tournaments. Surely more than a couple armies would be built around speed freaks.

https://www.40kstats.com/faction-breakdown-report

If the criticisms in this thread are valid, they would be reflected in the W/L record. Orks win about 56% of match ups, which is nothing special. Just under half the factions have won more than 50% of their games.

Klickor wrote:
Why armies like marines when they are good becomes so annoying is because lots of people already have them and don't really mind getting a few more marines if they lack the one or two units that are currently meta. You spend 100 euros on 1-2 boxes and raid your bitbox for the right special weapons and play with the new best supplement and suddenly you went from a bottom tier army to a top tier one without too much effort. Drukhari and Ad-mech is in some ways much the same. Lots of undercosted things that are good that many people already have or don't mind buying more off so even if it gets slightly nerfed later they dont mind too much. But for non speedfreak ork players the new top lists could as well have been another faction entirely and if it gets nerfed too hard they are left with nothing of their investment.

GK have like 5 data sheets so if you played GK you probably already were 80% on the way to the meta lists. If not you now have 50% of a "complete" GK army so unless they nerf the whole army to the ground some stuff will still be playable for GK.

Not sure about the assertion Space Marine armies could be made top tier through simple upgrades.

The only Space Marine factions who have won more than 50% of their games are Iron Hands, Black Templars, Grey Knights and Deathwatch. Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Ultramarines, White Scars, Raven Guard, Imperial Fists, etc have all had a harder time.

Are those players just not able to afford a couple boxes to improve their competitiveness? There's probably other factors driving these outcomes.

I agree about Grey Knights, I have every model I need to run any list I want.

But the same is not true for Deathwatch, a lot has changed from previous editions. Heavy Intercessors are the most expensive infantry models available from GW, Dreadnought Castles are pretty expensive, the top lists I've see that do involve Veterans tend to be frag-cannon heavy - 20 of them. You get one with a 5 man Veteran kit.

So I don't see a direct relationship between cost of models and outcomes on the tabletop. Sure, Orks got a lot of new stuff, and it's expensive. And sure, Admech and Drukhari players might have a lot of the models they need from previous editions.

But are the only winning factions the ones that have not received a recent model refresh? Nah. Orks and Sisters wish to contest that point.

People also want some fun which I have already seen more than one good player use as an explanation over using Drukhari over AM for example. AM is insanely strong but it is also stressful to play compared to Drukhari so unless the winrate difference isnt too big they rather play the more relaxed and fun army.

The ork list doesnt seem to be that fun to play with or against so even if they are slightly stronger than the other top meta lists it might not be enough for players to swap over.

In europe the artillery trukk is out of stock and even though I haven't heard orks in particular have had shipping difficulties I know lots of wargame related products beind delayed here and there so not unlikely that some players haven't gotten theirs as fast as they would had in pre covid, pre brexit times. The latest release for MESBG in the US is temporarily lacking one of the faction dice sets while in Europe we had no troubles ordering it.

When I mentioned marines I was more talking about 8th marines 2.0 with supplements. Not current marines. You had over just a few weeks marine participation going from single digits % to over 1/3 of the field in my area. You could just take any old marine army and buy just a few units and swap some equipment and play the chapter that best suited your army and go stomp most of the field. Like 10-20% of the investment needed compared to speed waagh lists and your marine army was suddenly better than any non marine army in the game. For orks you are mostly just getting shared top spots. So ofc you wont see too many orks compared to other armies even if they might be a problem.

Sisters players have bought a lot of models lately but they don't really run the risk of the whole identity of their list being nerfed. What is good in sisters is mostly what you would have bought anyway as a sister player. Maybe you would have bought one unit less of repentia if they werent so good but overall sisters are not really one dimensional skew lists and the core what is played today will most likely be played tomorrow. You can't really be sure of that with buggie lists. A good example is the Death Korps cavalry we saw a lot of at some australia events a couple of months ago. They were probably all recasts from china so relative to a normal 40k list it wasn't so expensive for them. They were(maybe even still are) great units but they are insanely expensive if buying legit and you would be crazy to pay MSRP for those even if a top meta chaser for something that might only work for a little time. Hence you didn't see them that much despite being great.

Klickor wrote:
People also want some fun which I have already seen more than one good player use as an explanation over using Drukhari over AM for example. AM is insanely strong but it is also stressful to play compared to Drukhari so unless the winrate difference isnt too big they rather play the more relaxed and fun army.

The ork list doesnt seem to be that fun to play with or against so even if they are slightly stronger than the other top meta lists it might not be enough for players to swap over.

In europe the artillery trukk is out of stock and even though I haven't heard orks in particular have had shipping difficulties I know lots of wargame related products beind delayed here and there so not unlikely that some players haven't gotten theirs as fast as they would had in pre covid, pre brexit times. The latest release for MESBG in the US is temporarily lacking one of the faction dice sets while in Europe we had no troubles ordering it.

Sure. This is on my radar now, genuinely looking forward to seeing how Orks perform going forward.

I guess there could be a supply chain issue stopping adoption of new units. But you'd agree that's a bottleneck that gets resolved with time, right?

Klickor wrote:
When I mentioned marines I was more talking about 8th marines 2.0 with supplements. Not current marines. You had over just a few weeks marine participation going from single digits % to over 1/3 of the field in my area. You could just take any old marine army and buy just a few units and swap some equipment and play the chapter that best suited your army and go stomp most of the field. Like 10-20% of the investment needed compared to speed waagh lists and your marine army was suddenly better than any non marine army in the game. For orks you are mostly just getting shared top spots. So ofc you wont see too many orks compared to other armies even if they might be a problem.

Yeah, that did happen. NuMarines battered my Bloodletter Bomb list, everybody suddenly had a couple units that could prevent charges from deep strike. Made me switch to Daemon Primarchs.

But I don't agree cost is the driver for top competitive players. Could be wrong, but they always seem to have a way to get the models.

Remember, this is a discussion about obliterating your opponent in turn 1. Can't believe they would ignore a list that can do that regularly.

Klickor wrote:
Sisters players have bought a lot of models lately but they don't really run the risk of the whole identity of their list being nerfed. What is good in sisters is mostly what you would have bought anyway as a sister player. Maybe you would have bought one unit less of repentia if they werent so good but overall sisters are not really one dimensional skew lists and the core what is played today will most likely be played tomorrow. You can't really be sure of that with buggie lists. A good example is the Death Korps cavalry we saw a lot of at some australia events a couple of months ago. They were probably all recasts from china so relative to a normal 40k list it wasn't so expensive for them. They were(maybe even still are) great units but they are insanely expensive if buying legit and you would be crazy to pay MSRP for those even if a top meta chaser for something that might only work for a little time. Hence you didn't see them that much despite being great.

Eh... will have to take your word for it. Would be surprised to learn cost is a deterrent for putting together a winning list.

So is it fair to sum up that no one in the thread thinks 40k is not lethal enough and that we all agree with various caveats that lethality is too high?

The_Real_Chris wrote:
So is it fair to sum up that no one in the thread thinks 40k is not lethal enough and that we all agree with various caveats that lethality is too high?

Some of us simply think complaints about lethality are overblown.

Well how many games you end with no real forces left at the turn 5? Ideally close to zero.

(0% is hard to get seeing dice roll are involved. If you roll 100 1's to save rolls in a row hard to keep army alive)

 techsoldaten wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
So is it fair to sum up that no one in the thread thinks 40k is not lethal enough and that we all agree with various caveats that lethality is too high?

Some of us simply think complaints about lethality are overblown.

So you think 40k lethality is fine and not too high? I only ask as most people seem to be agreeing to some degree or another and its becoming harder to work out what the actual bones of contention are (beyond people commenting on worse case match ups vs best case scenarios and saying the latter though are a bit lethal).

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn? Is this healthy for a competitive game? What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game.

It is. The last time something similar to this occurred was actually on a recent stream from the GW official GT they had, where a Black Templar army (with a contemporary competitive setup, I might add) got very nearly tabled in a single turn by an admech skew list.

The reason why this is notable and why I brought it up is not because this is some kind of crazy freak occurrence (like the oft- reposted meme image of the guy insta-tabling his opponents null deploy army using Kroot) but because the norm from the game has shifted from the 'turn 5 tablings routine, turn 4 tablings uncommon, turn 3 tablings unusual' state of 8th to 'turn 3 tablings routine, turn 2 tablings uncommon, turn 1 tablings unusual' state of 9th, and people are rightfully pointing out that it is actually crap game design, as it places a much greater importance on stupid, fiddly micro-positioning errors (See the recent huge post in General where a new player tried to play a 500pt teaching game and his largest unit ended up wiped in a single shot because one gun barrel was poking out from behind Obscuring terrain) and makes it essentially impossible to tell compelling narratives with the game beyond the riveting tale of how that one time sgt. skippy and his squad of heroic space marines leapt out from behind the building they were cowering behind (as every space marine does always), shot and instantly blew something up, and then got immediately vaporized by return fire.

Ugh.

Apples to apples, please, and no cherry picking. If you're going to quote points lost, do it for both games. If you're going to point to the competitive strength of players, do so in each example. And if you're saying it happens frequently, please point to more than 2 games. If the sample you are concerned about is is 2 out of all the competitive games played, GW has still designed a great game.

The odds don't need to be 1 in 2.5 million for it to matter, as long as it's better than the odds of dying in a lightning strike (1 in ~138k) it's still just good play. It's not Candyland, where the outcome of each game is determined by the shuffle of the cards before anyone moves. It's a very complex game where outcomes are influenced by unit selection, placement on the board, use of special rules and fundamental mechanics. Any sophisticated player is going to use the rules to their advantage, and this will naturally lead to certain matchups where one player finds themselves at a serious disadvantage early on.

I often play skew lists. In 8th, it was Black Legion gunlines loaded up with lascannons, then Bloodletter Bombs, then Daemon Primarchs supported by a Nurgle detachment. Way back in 5th, it was spawn rush - 35 spawn supported by a Chaos Lord and 2 squads of CSM. These lists work great, they're designed to exploit an aspect of the game opponents don't commonly defend against. There are times I remove half an opponent's army in the first turn.

But then someone comes up with a hard counter. Or a FAQ drops and nerfs some key units. Or a new Codex drops that makes the skew meaningless. Or a new edition comes along and I need to rethink the game entirely.

At worst, imbalances have a limited shelf life. 40k is always a work in progress and people like Mike Brandt are looking out for serious problems reflected in tournament results. Saying outcomes are predetermined by the strength of individual factions - especially in terms of winning in the first round - is not supported by tournament outcomes.

https://www.40kstats.com/faction-vs-faction

You can look at how Orks have performed against Drukhari, they only win 44% of games. Admech have a 71% win rate against Black Templars, but they've only fought 7 battles total - which is too small a sample size to draw conclusions from.

If you can point to something that suggests players or equal skill levels are commonly losing 90% of their army turn 1, would love to hear it. But I haven't seen anything that suggests this is anything aside from mistakes on one side / good play on the other.

I won't, because you don't give a gak. You decided before asking your initial setup what you believe, and the fact that you switch from 'Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million' to 'yeah well ok this second example is cherry picking' when no, in fact, pointing out that a thing happens twice in a very short period of time (that we know of) is kind of all the proof you need to dispel "1 in 2.5 million" because there have been a WHOOOOLE lot fewer than 2.5 million competitive 40k games played in the past month.

I answered your question with all the proof your hyperbolic statement required to disprove. You're not allowed to settle back in your armchair and play Internet Logic Lord Checkmate Atheists when your initial claim was "prove it's happening more than 1 in 2.5 million games." One additional example (at the top tables of a large, Games Workshop officially sponsored event) is PLENTY to bring up as a counter-example.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 techsoldaten wrote:

I'm not saying list building doesn't matter, or that flyers / indirect shooting / terrain aren't powerful. I am saying destroying 90% of an opponent's army turn 1 is not a widespread problem or an indicator of poor game design.

Damn, this is impressive, it's moving faster than I can keep up! we're already to "90% casualties in a single turn is good game design actually"

how do you feel about the fact that sean, who was actually in the thread commenting on this earlier, mentioned that if his ork opponent had gone first, he would have just done exactly what he did in his previous game vs drukhari and removed roughly 1000pts of models top of 1? Is that also good game design, one player starting their first turn with half their models?

 techsoldaten wrote:

Klickor wrote:
People also want some fun which I have already seen more than one good player use as an explanation over using Drukhari over AM for example. AM is insanely strong but it is also stressful to play compared to Drukhari so unless the winrate difference isnt too big they rather play the more relaxed and fun army.

The ork list doesnt seem to be that fun to play with or against so even if they are slightly stronger than the other top meta lists it might not be enough for players to swap over.

In europe the artillery trukk is out of stock and even though I haven't heard orks in particular have had shipping difficulties I know lots of wargame related products beind delayed here and there so not unlikely that some players haven't gotten theirs as fast as they would had in pre covid, pre brexit times. The latest release for MESBG in the US is temporarily lacking one of the faction dice sets while in Europe we had no troubles ordering it.

Sure. This is on my radar now, genuinely looking forward to seeing how Orks perform going forward.

I guess there could be a supply chain issue stopping adoption of new units. But you'd agree that's a bottleneck that gets resolved with time, right?

Klickor wrote:
When I mentioned marines I was more talking about 8th marines 2.0 with supplements. Not current marines. You had over just a few weeks marine participation going from single digits % to over 1/3 of the field in my area. You could just take any old marine army and buy just a few units and swap some equipment and play the chapter that best suited your army and go stomp most of the field. Like 10-20% of the investment needed compared to speed waagh lists and your marine army was suddenly better than any non marine army in the game. For orks you are mostly just getting shared top spots. So ofc you wont see too many orks compared to other armies even if they might be a problem.

Yeah, that did happen. NuMarines battered my Bloodletter Bomb list, everybody suddenly had a couple units that could prevent charges from deep strike. Made me switch to Daemon Primarchs.

But I don't agree cost is the driver for top competitive players. Could be wrong, but they always seem to have a way to get the models.

Remember, this is a discussion about obliterating your opponent in turn 1. Can't believe they would ignore a list that can do that regularly.

Klickor wrote:
Sisters players have bought a lot of models lately but they don't really run the risk of the whole identity of their list being nerfed. What is good in sisters is mostly what you would have bought anyway as a sister player. Maybe you would have bought one unit less of repentia if they werent so good but overall sisters are not really one dimensional skew lists and the core what is played today will most likely be played tomorrow. You can't really be sure of that with buggie lists. A good example is the Death Korps cavalry we saw a lot of at some australia events a couple of months ago. They were probably all recasts from china so relative to a normal 40k list it wasn't so expensive for them. They were(maybe even still are) great units but they are insanely expensive if buying legit and you would be crazy to pay MSRP for those even if a top meta chaser for something that might only work for a little time. Hence you didn't see them that much despite being great.

Eh... will have to take your word for it. Would be surprised to learn cost is a deterrent for putting together a winning list.

In the long run the supply issues would be gone but then the meta will also have changed and it isn't that far now until the next chapter approved that will change mostly everything once again.

This game is already expensive and people play the game mostly for fun. Almost no one ever breaks even in money on an event even if they were to win it so shelling out 500-1000 euros/dollars and dozens if not hundreds of hours painting/practicing just to get 1% better chance to win is something not even most top meta chasers would do. They probably already heave a good Drukhari or Ad-mech list by now so what they get out after spending that money is barely anything. Time better spent practicing and perfecting their current lists more and save that money for a plane ticket to the next event instead. If Orks were released as first army of this year instead after Drukhari, Ad-mech and Sisters you would probably have seen almost everyone at the top jump over to Orks because the gap between Orks and the other armies at the time would have been massive. Lots of people would be willing to pay 500-1000$+ to get 10-20% extra win chance against the field. But if you do the jump now its 1/10th the advantage.

It is quite easy to swap armies or borrow what is needed if the top army uses lots of older or popular units. You can easily borrow from all your friends collections or buy it cheap used. But for more rare armies or newer armies it isnt as easy. Harlequins placed rather well for most of 8th and was even top army for first 6months of this edition yet very few people played them. They are quite skill intensive to paint well so lots of people feel daunted even buying them so you don't see a lot of spare Harlequins laying around making the effort to put together a complete and painted Harlequin list much more of an effort than an Astra militarum list or a SM list. If Greentide were as good as speed waagh right now you would probably see a much larger Ork attendance and win % compared to now because anyone who played orks in 8th or even 9th up to this codex release had that list and could play it from the start with 0 additional investment.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
So is it fair to sum up that no one in the thread thinks 40k is not lethal enough and that we all agree with various caveats that lethality is too high?

Some of us simply think complaints about lethality are overblown.

So you think 40k lethality is fine and not too high? I only ask as most people seem to be agreeing to some degree or another and its becoming harder to work out what the actual bones of contention are (beyond people commenting on worse case match ups vs best case scenarios and saying the latter though are a bit lethal).

Not sure I would say it's fine, just that it's not the problem being portrayed in this thread.

 the_scotsman wrote:
I won't, because you don't give a gak. You decided before asking your initial setup what you believe, and the fact that you switch from 'Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million' to 'yeah well ok this second example is cherry picking' when no, in fact, pointing out that a thing happens twice in a very short period of time (that we know of) is kind of all the proof you need to dispel "1 in 2.5 million" because there have been a WHOOOOLE lot fewer than 2.5 million competitive 40k games played in the past month.

I answered your question with all the proof your hyperbolic statement required to disprove. You're not allowed to settle back in your armchair and play Internet Logic Lord Checkmate Atheists when your initial claim was "prove it's happening more than 1 in 2.5 million games." One additional example (at the top tables of a large, Games Workshop officially sponsored event) is PLENTY to bring up as a counter-example.

I've been clear about the significance of outcome probability. Just because something can happen doesn't mean it happens often.

We differ on the significance of an exceptional outcome, I happen to think it doesn't make a difference if you're tabled turn 1 or turn 5. Hard counters are a thing, the Drukhari player ran into one and it ended quickly.

You haven't demonstrated turn one devastation is a widespread phenomenon and now you're just calling people names. Perhaps you are letting your emotions get the best of you here, there's better ways to make your point.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

I'm not saying list building doesn't matter, or that flyers / indirect shooting / terrain aren't powerful. I am saying destroying 90% of an opponent's army turn 1 is not a widespread problem or an indicator of poor game design.

Damn, this is impressive, it's moving faster than I can keep up! we're already to "90% casualties in a single turn is good game design actually"

how do you feel about the fact that sean, who was actually in the thread commenting on this earlier, mentioned that if his ork opponent had gone first, he would have just done exactly what he did in his previous game vs drukhari and removed roughly 1000pts of models top of 1? Is that also good game design, one player starting their first turn with half their models?

Don't have feelings about it either way.

My thoughts about the video you posted is that the Drukhari player was very aggressive in his first move and left himself exposed. He paid a steep price. Were I playing that army, knowing that Orks are very strong against Drukhari right now, I probably would have put a few units in reserve and focused on defending against the Speed Waagh without getting tabled. If he was playing against my current army (Deathwatch), the game would have been a lot tougher for the Orks.

The point being: both players made choices that lead to this outcome. Other choices could have lead to different outcomes. If this is happening frequently, it might mean Orks and / or Drukhari need to be FAQed. But an interfactional imbalance is not evidence of general poor game design, it might be evidence something needs to be tweaked.

Wow, this is like being on a religious or political debate forum with all the gymnastics going on to willfully deny obvious truths.

I know it's sometimes a bit taboo to suggest people are religiously or cultishly devoted to GW but damn...

Just for those reading along, we've gone from

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 2.5 million chance, astronomical"

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 135,000 chance, like being struck by lightning."

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is fine, its the same as an army being tabled turn 5, there's no problem in game design there."

to

"You need to demonstrate that armies losing a huge number of models turn 1 is a Widespread Phenomenon"

I'm not really in the business of pretending that I'm some perfectly logical, emotionally detached internet lord - everyone is primarily driven by emotion, and we're talking about how we'd like to see a company design a fairly childish, cartoonish game here. I'm pretty much 100% consistent that the reason I hate the level of lethality in 40k is because it feels wrong, and doesn't actually reflect the way that the 40k universe is supposed to feel (being an epic story about heroic, larger-than-life characters and units engaging in big cinematic battles).

I'll put the example out there again from earlier in the thread: If you designed a star wars game, and every jedi model would instantly kill basically anything they touched in close combat including another jedi, but they had basically zero armor and died the second you shot at them with anything, that *could* be worked into a balanced game design, but you'd have made an almost undeniably gakky Star Wars game that would not allow people to recreate battle scenes that felt like Star Wars.

That wouldn't make for a very fun Star Wars game. I'm also surprise anyone who has played 9th thinks that lethality isn't an issue in 9th.

 the_scotsman wrote:
Just for those reading along, we've gone from

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 2.5 million chance, astronomical"

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 135,000 chance, like being struck by lightning."

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is fine, its the same as an army being tabled turn 5, there's no problem in game design there."

to

"You need to demonstrate that armies losing a huge number of models turn 1 is a Widespread Phenomenon"

I'm not really in the business of pretending that I'm some perfectly logical, emotionally detached internet lord - everyone is primarily driven by emotion, and we're talking about how we'd like to see a company design a fairly childish, cartoonish game here. I'm pretty much 100% consistent that the reason I hate the level of lethality in 40k is because it feels wrong, and doesn't actually reflect the way that the 40k universe is supposed to feel (being an epic story about heroic, larger-than-life characters and units engaging in big cinematic battles).

I'll put the example out there again from earlier in the thread: If you designed a star wars game, and every jedi model would instantly kill basically anything they touched in close combat including another jedi, but they had basically zero armor and died the second you shot at them with anything, that *could* be worked into a balanced game design, but you'd have made an almost undeniably gakky Star Wars game that would not allow people to recreate battle scenes that felt like Star Wars.

No, we have not. You are misquoting me to make your bellyaching seem like legitimate criticism.

I did not make any claims about the odds of a specific event occurring in a 40k game. I did say extraordinary events happen rarely and challenged you to provide examples to prove this is happening frequently. You mentioned another game without providing comparative details other than your impressions of the list, which means nothing.

Orks mostly lose to Drukhari in 9th edition competitive games. This is a fact anyone can look up for themselves.

https://www.40kstats.com/faction-vs-faction

Game design refers to the underlying mechanics that lead to specific outcomes. If the game is as "poorly designed" as you claim, we should be seeing Orks steamroll Drukhari on a regular basis - since there's no way to keep up with losing 1000+ points of your army to the almighty Speed Waagh first turn.

But we don't, because that is only happening in your imagination. That sad, lonely place, where basic math has never visited.

 techsoldaten wrote:

Game design refers to the underlying mechanics that lead to specific outcomes.

No, it doesn't. Thanks for playing.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
Just for those reading along, we've gone from

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 2.5 million chance, astronomical"

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is a 1 in 135,000 chance, like being struck by lightning."

to

"An army losing a huge number of its models such that the game is effectively over turn 1 is fine, its the same as an army being tabled turn 5, there's no problem in game design there."

to

"You need to demonstrate that armies losing a huge number of models turn 1 is a Widespread Phenomenon"

No, we have not. You are misquoting me to make your bellyaching seem like legitimate criticism.

I did not make any claims about the odds of a specific event occurring in a 40k game. I did say extraordinary events happen rarely and challenged you to provide examples to prove this is happening frequently. You mentioned another game without providing comparative details other than your impressions of the list, which means nothing.

Direct quotes I'm referring to, for the curious, in case you're interested in deciding for yourself whether I am misquoting or accurately summarizing claims made:

 techsoldaten wrote:


"This game is evidence of great game design. Outcome distribution matters.

In Poker, a Royal Flush beats everything. The odds of a royal flush are about 1 in 2.5 million. The odds of a high card hand - where you win because neither you or a single opponent have a suit of any kind, but you do have a better card - is about 17%. That means the distribution of crap outcomes is about 1 in 5 hands, while there's this very remote chance of blowing everyone out of the water that might happen once in your entire life. It's part of what makes Poker fun to play.

In this game, the Ork player got something like a Royal Flush. Nearly every Drukhari unit was positioned for a perfect counterattack, the Ork player rolled above average, deployment made a big difference, etc. This didn't look that much like some top table match up, it looked like a sacrifice.

What are the odds of this kind of outcome occurring in any game of 40k? Probably very remote, greater than 1 in 2.5 million. And it takes specific decisions from your opponent for it to occur. ​

If you want to argue this is happening more frequently and provide examples, be my guest. Otherwise, someone had a great game."

to

"The odds don't need to be 1 in 2.5 million for it to matter, as long as it's better than the odds of dying in a lightning strike (1 in ~138k) it's still just good play. It's not Candyland, where the outcome of each game is determined by the shuffle of the cards before anyone moves. It's a very complex game where outcomes are influenced by unit selection, placement on the board, use of special rules and fundamental mechanics. Any sophisticated player is going to use the rules to their advantage, and this will naturally lead to certain matchups where one player finds themselves at a serious disadvantage early on."

to

"I'm not saying list building doesn't matter, or that flyers / indirect shooting / terrain aren't powerful. I am saying destroying 90% of an opponent's army turn 1 is not a widespread problem or an indicator of poor game design."

to

"I've been clear about the significance of outcome probability. Just because something can happen doesn't mean it happens often.

We differ on the significance of an exceptional outcome, I happen to think it doesn't make a difference if you're tabled turn 1 or turn 5. Hard counters are a thing, the Drukhari player ran into one and it ended quickly.

You haven't demonstrated turn one devastation is a widespread phenomenon and now you're just calling people names. Perhaps you are letting your emotions get the best of you here, there's better ways to make your point."

It really seemed to me like a VERY SPECIFIC claim about the odds of an occurrence like this happening was initially made, which then got walked back by a factor of...let's see, 18.5x, to the much safer motte and bailey route of "it's just rare, OK, you now have to prove it's common and I decide what Common means and even if it is common i've repeatedly reserved the right to just say that It's Good Actually anyway."


Automatically Appended Next Post:
in fact, this statement "Hard counters are a thing, the drukhari player ran into one and it ended rather quickly" was largely the point of the thread.

In my opinion, the ability to set up one's army such that a counter hard enough to remove what is for all intents and purposes the ENTIRE opposing army in the space of one single turn, during which time the opponent's ability to respond is severely limited to the possibility of a couple of 3" moves, a couple of defensive stratagems and a couple of close combat attacks dictated almost entirely by the opponent, is not in fact, "great game design."

the existence of hard-counters of that magnitude, where nothing done on the tabletop matters at all, and we're not dealing with crazy above-average or below-average rolling (last I checked, a 2000pt ork list rolls a LOT of dice, so i'd be really surprised to hear about any instances of mega-ultra-yahtzee occurring on the ork player's part) is in fact, an indicator of somewhat poor game design.

 techsoldaten wrote:
I did not make any claims about the odds of a specific event occurring in a 40k game.

Yes you absolutely did, when you asserted that a player losing virtually their entire army on turn 1 is an astronomically rare event and therefore evidence of good game design. Your entire argument about it actually being a good thing hinges on the assertion that it's a rare event.

Now you're expecting everyone else to prove to you that something that has happened multiple times within a very small pool of games is actually common and not a one-in-several-million outlier.

 the_scotsman wrote:
It really seemed to me like a VERY SPECIFIC claim about the odds of an occurrence like this happening was initially made, which then got walked back by a factor of...let's see, 18.5x, to the much safer motte and bailey route of "it's just rare, OK, you now have to prove it's common and I decide what Common means and even if it is common i've repeatedly reserved the right to just say that It's Good Actually anyway."

Wow. You got me, forgot about that previous comment.

I did make a claim that losing 90% of your army to an opponent on turn 1 is very rare. That was a guess, I put the odds about those of a royal flush, dependent on the actions of your opponent. Could be wrong, but would not put them above those of dying from a lightning strike.

On the other hand, you provided a single example of this happening. The other example you cited, 1000 points, is not 1800 points. There's a big difference between 50% and 90% of an army.

So let me say it again. You are dramatically overstating the risk of a skilled player losing 90% of their army first turn and have provided no evidence it happens frequently. A single game is an outlier, statistics contradict your claims.

It's not that it can't happen, and it's not that a player can't engage in some wild all-or-nothing offensive gambit that goes South. It's that the game is designed to make this outcome unlikely.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
It really seemed to me like a VERY SPECIFIC claim about the odds of an occurrence like this happening was initially made, which then got walked back by a factor of...let's see, 18.5x, to the much safer motte and bailey route of "it's just rare, OK, you now have to prove it's common and I decide what Common means and even if it is common i've repeatedly reserved the right to just say that It's Good Actually anyway."

It's that the game is designed to make this outcome unlikely.

What, specifically, about the current 9th edition game design makes this unlikely? Back up your claims please.

I mean this argument about speedwaagh lethality (which I currently don’t think is as common or bad as the people freaking out claim) is soon to be moot. Gw is literally upgrading the speedwaagh next week. With both a boost to speedfreaks which may just be an evil Sun army of renown and blood axe codex which is already one of the best buggy klans and kommandos are already awesome. Either way I think the freebooter current iteration of speedwaagh is soon to change.
This might mean soeeedwaagh is no longer as shooty or freebooter is no longer preferred klan. It also may mean speedwaagh would actually need a bigger nerf. Either way I still think flyer rules need to change to stop the gakky assault blocking bull crap that happened at socal and the real reason Sean had novchoice and was left out on the open to get shot at.

Go to any major tournament with a decent number of games, and you'll see Ad Mech/Speedwaaagh lists obliterating people in a single turn of shooting. See what DE lists can do on turn 2 if every unit gets out the boats and charges something.

Haggling over the exact 1800 points is just being internet contrarian. If you kill 1000 points in a turn, the game is frankly over. It really doesn't matter beyond absurdity whether its 1000 or 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800.

The game can be balanced if every faction has a list that can do that - but its not very fun. Its just glorified rock paper scissors and who can go first.

Tyel wrote:
Go to any major tournament with a decent number of games, and you'll see Ad Mech/Speedwaaagh lists obliterating people in a single turn of shooting. See what DE lists can do on turn 2 if every unit gets out the boats and charges something.

Haggling over the exact 1800 points is just being internet contrarian. If you kill 1000 points in a turn, the game is frankly over. It really doesn't matter beyond absurdity whether its 1000 or 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800.

The game can be balanced if every faction has a list that can do that - but its not very fun. Its just glorified rock paper scissors and who can go first.

I mean this literally wasn’t even happening this past 2 weeks. Orks weren’t blowing up the majors. 5 majors and all we had were 1x first place, 1x 3rd place and 2x 10th place sure doesn’t look like speedwaaagh obliterating the tables. Heck it’s only 8% of the top 10 placings. Your idea of obliterating sure is extremely encompassing.

So what I’m getting is that if I make a huge tactical miscalculation in a competitive game, leaving my army of tissue paper elves standing right in the optimal range of a gun line with the optimal tools to kill me I should just be able to stand there and take it without mass casualties?

How do people keep trying to sell this as a tactical miscalculation?

Unless they mean that Nayden should've just conceded before placing models down, avoiding the whole fiasco.

Rihgu wrote:
How do people keep trying to sell this as a tactical miscalculation?

Unless they mean that Nayden should've just conceded before placing models down, avoiding the whole fiasco.

Put some stuff in reserves, then hide. Sure, squigbuggies and jets can get around cover but he could have mitigated losses for sure.

There’s also the fact that he was relying on melee to not instantly get squished for shooting. Relying on a turn 1 melee to be entirely safe is honestly kinda stupid.

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
So what I’m getting is that if I make a huge tactical miscalculation in a competitive game, leaving my army of tissue paper elves standing right in the optimal range of a gun line with the optimal tools to kill me I should just be able to stand there and take it without mass casualties?

Did you read the thread or just pop in to repeat a useless, distracting, and unhelpful question?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
So what I’m getting is that if I make a huge tactical miscalculation in a competitive game, leaving my army of tissue paper elves standing right in the optimal range of a gun line with the optimal tools to kill me I should just be able to stand there and take it without mass casualties?

Did you read the thread or just pop in to repeat a useless, distracting, and unhelpful question?

I’ve been reading this entire thread and I’m addressing how people are talking about the lethality. I think that if your entire glass cannon army is parked in a bad spot in front of a gun line, it should die very very fast.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
It really seemed to me like a VERY SPECIFIC claim about the odds of an occurrence like this happening was initially made, which then got walked back by a factor of...let's see, 18.5x, to the much safer motte and bailey route of "it's just rare, OK, you now have to prove it's common and I decide what Common means and even if it is common i've repeatedly reserved the right to just say that It's Good Actually anyway."

It's that the game is designed to make this outcome unlikely.

What, specifically, about the current 9th edition game design makes this unlikely? Back up your claims please.

Good question.

Hard to articulate a positive response, simpler to say 'it's not happening frequently between skilled players so that's part of the design (even if it's not intentional.)' If it wasn't a design characteristic, we'd see more games where someone is losing 1,800 points first turn.

But it is an interesting question. If I had to give a list of specific constraints: deployment, movement, shooting, wounds, toughness and saves. There are limits on each which affect the aggressor and defender, the aggressor would generally need to be able to cause wounds in excess of 90% the total wounds available to the defender. For a pair of specific lists, the probability of achieving this specific outcome - 90% wounds in the first turn - would be a fairly simple visualization.

Thinking about my Grey Knights, Deathwatch, Chaos Knights, Chaos Deamons, Chaos Space Marines and Death Guard armies - the odds of destroying 90% of any opponent's army first turn would be very low for most, impossible for others. Like with the Grey Knights, they literally don't have the shooting to cause anything more than a few wounds at > 24". My Chaos Knights might have a chance against a forward deployed elite army if they rolled all 6s.

On the other hand, the odds of losing 90% of my army first turn would be very low for most, impossible for others. Just the fact that I put some units in reserve each game would stop this from happening.

So I'm not sure a bullet point list could precisely answer your question. It is possible to create a meaningful visualization of the probability of specific outcomes occurring, and possibly to model some lists that demonstrate how unlikely this would be.

gungo wrote:
I mean this literally wasn’t even happening this past 2 weeks. Orks weren’t blowing up the majors. 5 majors and all we had were 1x first place, 1x 3rd place and 2x 10th place sure doesn’t look like speedwaaagh obliterating the tables. Heck it’s only 8% of the top 10 placings. Your idea of obliterating sure is extremely encompassing.

You are myopically obsessed with Speedwaaagh. The thread is about the game's lethality being too high.

"Uh my Speedwaaagh list got one-shoot by Ad Mech so its fine" isn't actually you know, fine.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
It really seemed to me like a VERY SPECIFIC claim about the odds of an occurrence like this happening was initially made, which then got walked back by a factor of...let's see, 18.5x, to the much safer motte and bailey route of "it's just rare, OK, you now have to prove it's common and I decide what Common means and even if it is common i've repeatedly reserved the right to just say that It's Good Actually anyway."

It's that the game is designed to make this outcome unlikely.

What, specifically, about the current 9th edition game design makes this unlikely? Back up your claims please.

Good question.

Hard to articulate a positive response, simpler to say 'it's not happening frequently between skilled players so that's part of the design (even if it's not intentional.)' If it wasn't a design characteristic, we'd see more games where someone is losing 1,800 points first turn.

But it is an interesting question. If I had to give a list of specific constraints: deployment, movement, shooting, wounds, toughness and saves. There are limits on each which affect the aggressor and defender, the aggressor would generally need to be able to cause wounds in excess of 90% the total wounds available to the defender. For a pair of specific lists, the probability of achieving this specific outcome - 90% wounds in the first turn - would be a fairly simple visualization.

Thinking about my Grey Knights, Deathwatch, Chaos Knights, Chaos Deamons, Chaos Space Marines and Death Guard armies - the odds of destroying 90% of any opponent's army first turn would be very low for most, impossible for others. Like with the Grey Knights, they literally don't have the shooting to cause anything more than a few wounds at > 24". My Chaos Knights might have a chance against a forward deployed elite army if they rolled all 6s.

On the other hand, the odds of losing 90% of my army first turn would be very low for most, impossible for others. Just the fact that I put some units in reserve each game would stop this from happening.

So I'm not sure a bullet point list could precisely answer your question. It is possible to create a meaningful visualization of the probability of specific outcomes occurring, and possibly to model some lists that demonstrate how unlikely this would be.

First of all, how much of an opponent's army do you consider surviving the first turn to be "optimal"? Should an army kill 1000 points? 500? 1500? What is "good game design" as a general rule?

I suppose we should agree on that before you say "well, against these armies, you can only kill 50% in one turn, so that's totally acceptable and fine"

Tyel wrote:

gungo wrote:
I mean this literally wasn’t even happening this past 2 weeks. Orks weren’t blowing up the majors. 5 majors and all we had were 1x first place, 1x 3rd place and 2x 10th place sure doesn’t look like speedwaaagh obliterating the tables. Heck it’s only 8% of the top 10 placings. Your idea of obliterating sure is extremely encompassing.

You are myopically obsessed with Speedwaaagh. The thread is about the game's lethality being too high.

"Uh my Speedwaaagh list got one-shoot by Ad Mech so its fine" isn't actually you know, fine.

I mean I literally replied to a post of you mentioning “admech/speedwaagh lethality” not the games lethality.
Stay focused you are all over the place and don’t even know what you are posting half the time. Is this already the third time you been called out for your inability to remember what you posted.