A post from the Daemon discussion reminded me of something I have been considering for some time.
Why don't models in 40k do cool, interesting, unique things? Or rather, why so rarely they do such things.
The post in question was proposing some new daemon types:
Khorne could have more Gladiator oriented Bloodletters types. Nurgle could have a ranged unit, spitting vomit at people. Slaanesh could push off the knockers box, and have muscular body builder type heavy infantry. Tzeentch could have dragons of some kind.
Nothing wrong with that in the context of 40k but...isn't it just daemons that attack, daemons that attack, daemons that attack and daemons that attack? If the attack and defense values are the only thing that differentiates models, no wonder you run out of design space pretty quickly. But this seems to be the only way for GW.
Units seem to only have two things they do that matter- how strong they attack and how well they survive. I don't play 9th, but when I read how new units are advertised on Warhammer Community, the only selling point seems to be how many dice the unit throws and how many it can survive. If they have special rules, they are about making them killier or more survivable (rerolls for example) or offer the same thing under different names (for example dealing extra wounds that way or another). The game sounds so one dimensional as a result.
In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
-push or pull other models (note that in WM every inch matters a lot as ranges are short!)
-teleport friendlies or enemies, also to turn them around, so that they can't see the way they want
-knock models down or freeze them or blind them to disable them for a turn
-put them on fire or cover them with acid for persistent damage
-create clouds that block LOS -create other types of terrain, like forests or magical walls (made of fire for example)
-put markers in areas where they provide covering fire
-gather and distribute souls or corpses of dying troopers to power their abilities
-make other models untargettable by spells or shooting or just plain Incorporeal
-return dead models to play
-take control of enemy models
-slam or throw other models at other models
the list goes on and on and is far from being exhausted here.
The result is that players are given a deep toolbox and can come up with multiple solutions for problems, sometimes extremely sophisticated and complex - the more experienced and creative they are, the more chance of coming up with something that deals with the problem at hand in the best way possible. It gives the game this feel of a fencing duel, where you come up with smart counters and unpreditable ripostes to every move. In comparison 40k feels more like two heavyweight dudes taking turns smashing each other on the head with sledgehammers (in this metaphore the name of the game aptly sums up the subtlety of gameplay).
So going back to the example of daemons - why not just 'attacs while it defends', but something cooler, more unique, deepeining the toolbox instead of just making more of the same?
Slaanesh daemons that lure enemies forcing them to charge even if the enemy would rather not do that?
Nurgle daemons that put 'Languid' tokens (making models slower and sluggish) on enemies fighting them, so even if the enemies manage to win or break from combat, they will be severely hindered for the rest of the game?
Tzeentch daemons that can create areas of magical fire on the battlefield to block access to certain areas they want to defend?
etc
Cyel wrote: A post from the Daemon discussion reminded me of something I have been considering for some time.
In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
-push or pull other models (note that in WM every inch matters a lot as ranges are short!)
-teleport friendlies or enemies, also to turn them around, so that they can't see the way they want
-knock models down or freeze them or blind them to disable them for a turn
-put them on fire or cover them with acid for persistent damage
-create clouds that block LOS -create other types of terrain, like forests or magical walls (made of fire for example)
-put markers in areas where they provide covering fire
-gather and distribute souls or corpses of dying troopers to power their abilities
-make other models untargettable by spells or shooting or just plain Incorporeal
-return dead models to play
-take control of enemy models
-slam or throw other models at other models
the list goes on and on and is far from being exhausted here.
The result is that players are given a deep toolbox and can come up with multiple solutions for problems, sometimes extremely sophisticated and complex - the more experienced and creative they are, the more chance of coming up with something that deals with the problem at hand in the best way possible. It gives the game this feel of a fencing duel, where you come up with smart counters and unpreditable ripostes to every move. In comparison 40k feels more like two heavyweight dudes taking turns smashing each other on the head with sledgehammers (in this metaphore the name of the game aptly sums up the subtlety of gameplay).
etc
I'm not entirely sure if it was literally all of it, but close to everything on that list existed in 2nd edition of WH40k, but it was removed piece by piece as the editions progressed, mostly because GW maintained that it made games take forever, which was sort of true - at the time the model count was much, much smaller, and it increased with every edition. Other than that, some of the stuff on that list directly lead to some of the most broken lists of all time, for example the dread FZORGL, aka Lash of Submission.
Long story short: due to sticking to the IGOUGO turn structure, moving enemy units or making/deleting terrain is considered too powerful by today's standards, and GW thinks that making units move involuntary is 'unfun' and have mostly removed that from the game as well. All of this leads to the 'Sledgehammer' playstyle you mentioned, but GW thinks that's a feature, not a bug.
To expand on Tsagualsa's response, the wackier you get with your mechanics, the more difficult the game becomes to balance. It increases the risk of units feeling broken or gimmicky. This is less of an issue with less popular games because people don't play them enough to really expose the flaws.
I think the answer is much simpler: when Warhammer became popular it was trying very hard to be a WWII game, and in a WWII game you don't have a wide range of things doing weird cinematic video-game-y things, and despite all the bloat that's been piled on top of it since it is really still the skeleton of a WWII game underneath.
artific3r wrote: To expand on Tsagualsa's response, the wackier you get with your mechanics, the more difficult the game becomes to balance. It increases the risk of units feeling broken or gimmicky. This is less of an issue with less popular games because people don't play them enough to really expose the flaws.
It also adds a lot of rolls and bookkeeping if you use more than a couple of these things at a time - in 2nd edition you could have smoke grenades whose effects could shrink, vanish, expand and wander each turn, with sequences of multiple rolls, models under the influence of e.g. hallucinogens that had random movements, jump pack units where each model did individually scatter, out-of-control vehicles that did random turns and movements, models on fire that had to roll, and so on and so on. It certainly was cinematic in some way, but it also slogged down games considerably if you insisted on using all of that stuff at once. It works much, much better for a game on the scale of Necromunda, with about two dozen models in total at most.
I was also thinking about the scale, but really it's not that much of a difference for most of these effects - instead of blinding a single model, you blind a unit, instead of setting a single model on fire, you set the entire unit on fire etc. It also shouldn't be more of a lengthy process than just performing attacks - with GW's long and tedious resolution it can actually be quicker.
AnomanderRake wrote: I think the answer is much simpler: when Warhammer became popular it was trying very hard to be a WWII game, and in a WWII game you don't have a wide range of things doing weird cinematic video-game-y things, and despite all the bloat that's been piled on top of it since it is really still the skeleton of a WWII game underneath.
WW2 games tend to have more 'stuff to do' than 40K does, though. And a big part of it is that 40K has systematically stripped out many of the mechanics that differentiate units in a historical wargame beyond 'kills more' and 'doesn't die'.
Rapid-fire weapons that suppress the enemy so you can maneuver? Nope.
Indirect fire weapons that pin the enemy in cover? Not a thing.
Crossfire, so that a relatively weak unit but with good ability to position can act as a force-multiplier? No.
Good morale allowing a unit to stick in the fight longer? Gone, especially since morale is now just 'more models die'.
Cowardly units that aren't guaranteed to throw themselves into the fight, or frenzied units that must attack and can be baited into suboptimal positions? Tournament players hate not having perfect control of their troops, so no.
Better fieldcraft enabling you to go to ground more effectively? Nah.
Engineers that can interact with the battlefield, like removing obstacles? Hell no, any interaction with the tabletop beyond occupying it is verboten.
Better command and control, or faster ability to react to the enemy, or extensive ammunition supplies? Concepts that don't even exist in this game system.
Even basic things like some weapons being anti-infantry while others are anti-tank have been watered down by the changes to core mechanics creating a lot of overlap in weapon roles. Plus increasing mobility and weapon range combined with reduced board size have made range less of a limiting factor in employing fires.
So yeah, go figure that every unit is some flavor of 'kills more' and 'doesn't die'. Aside from mobility and a handful of gimmicks (eg deep strike), that's all there is to it, and the tactics you see invariably boil down to how you get a unit to kill more than it's own value before it gets wiped off the board, with units often proclaimed good or terrible on the basis of simple math.
OP is using an overtly gameplay-first fantasy game as comparison so it's easy to dismiss it as 'things a realistic game wouldn't let you do', but the core observation that units in 40K tend to be pretty one-dimensional is spot on. Units just don't have any interaction besides shooting or punching each other.
i'm not 100% sure i fully understand the question here, but in regards to chaos here's my 2 cents
i think they do chaos wrong. completely
chaos demons and chaos marine codexes are stupid imho
i think there should be codex khorne, nurgle, tzeench, slanesh, and unaligned.
khorne would include khorne deamons, WEs, and khorne cultists/traitor guard for example.
Part of the issue is that most other game systems get 1 set of rules and polish it over time. GW instead throws the rules out every edition and starts over, keeping some bits, changing others and shifting stuff around. That and their rules writing system is built more for casual than serious play. They've improved, but there are still legacy issues.
Another factor that you notice if you compare ot Warmachine is game size in terms of how many models and units. Warmachine was a skirmish game built around the idea of a smaller number of units, but each unit having more options to perform.
40K/Warhammer are built around the idea of having way more models on the table and as such having less complexity per model so that the game can flow more easily and quickly because you are dealing with way more models. Esp in 40K where you can't really use movement trays like you could in old world - so if you've got 90 Termagaunts on the table (very easily done that's only 3 squads of 30) you've got to move all 90 - whilst in a rank and file game that might be just 3 blocks to move.
So in some parts its inherent issues with GW's style of gameplay, game and structure that they go for.
Another is simply a factor of difference in scale of the games in terms of how many models and how you interact with those models.
Heck Warmachine even hit an issue with this somewhat as the game got steadily bigger and bigger and got trapped between wargame and skirmishgame
artific3r wrote: T This is less of an issue with less popular games because people don't play them enough to really expose the flaws.
This is the worst defence of 40k's genericness I've ever seen. Especially in a conversation involving a comparison to Warmachine, a game notorious for it's competitive player base.
40k USED to have a lot of fun stuff in it even up till 5th Ed. Matt Ward, for all the gak he gets thrown at him was great at coming up with flavourful rules for units. Like how lichguard shields could reflect shots back at their attacker, jump-pack Blood Angels dreadnaughts, psychically empowered bolter shells for Grey Knights. All great, flavourful stuff. The problem is GW just didn't bother balancing their game at the time so fans got SUPER pissy when these cool rules ended up OP and they squarely blamed it solely on Ward. I think this is a lot of the reason Robin "King Of Bland" Cruddace is in charge now. His rules are so boring and inoffensive and safe that they're easy to balance but lose any sense of individuality or character and thats what GW wants 40k to be. Inoffensive. Because if the game is too much of a grey goo of rules for armies that are barely distinguishable from one another then no one can really complain too much about any specific thing without complaining about the game as a whole.
i think there should be codex khorne, nurgle, tzeench, slanesh, and unaligned.
khorne would include khorne deamons, WEs, and khorne cultists/traitor guard for example.
Bloat for the Bloat God!
There's no need for five different books for Chaos, any more than there is for a dozen for different colours of Loyalists.
An adaptable Chaos Marines [/Mortals] and Chaos Daemons, and better rules for allying different books is all that should be necessary.
i think there should be codex khorne, nurgle, tzeench, slanesh, and unaligned.
khorne would include khorne deamons, WEs, and khorne cultists/traitor guard for example.
Bloat for the Bloat God!
There's no need for five different books for Chaos, any more than there is for a dozen for different colours of Loyalists.
An adaptable Chaos Marines [/Mortals] and Chaos Daemons, and better rules for allying different books is all that should be necessary.
Having stuff to sell is the final point of everything, the game is only relevant in so far that it helps to sell more and bigger things. They'd lose no sleep over introducing the Purselords of Spendmoneya as an additional faction if that was necessary to hit annual goals
Cyel wrote: *snip*
In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
-push or pull other models (note that in WM every inch matters a lot as ranges are short!)
-teleport friendlies or enemies, also to turn them around, so that they can't see the way they want
-knock models down or freeze them or blind them to disable them for a turn
-put them on fire or cover them with acid for persistent damage
-create clouds that block LOS -create other types of terrain, like forests or magical walls (made of fire for example)
-put markers in areas where they provide covering fire
-gather and distribute souls or corpses of dying troopers to power their abilities
-make other models untargettable by spells or shooting or just plain Incorporeal
-return dead models to play
-take control of enemy models
-slam or throw other models at other models
the list goes on and on and is far from being exhausted here.
The result is that players are given a deep toolbox and can come up with multiple solutions for problems, sometimes extremely sophisticated and complex - the more experienced and creative they are, the more chance of coming up with something that deals with the problem at hand in the best way possible. It gives the game this feel of a fencing duel, where you come up with smart counters and unpreditable ripostes to every move. In comparison 40k feels more like two heavyweight dudes taking turns smashing each other on the head with sledgehammers (in this metaphore the name of the game aptly sums up the subtlety of gameplay).
*snip*
Just about every single thing on this list existed in multiple different forms back in 2nd edition 40k, where there was a bespoke rule for just about every interaction in the game:
-push/pull (or pick up and drop for fall damage) - assail psychic power
-teleportation - multiple psychic powers, personal warp jump generators
-freezing and blinding - web weapons, photon flash grenades
-persistent fire - every flame weapon used to do this, setting models on fire resulted in them running in random directions until they died or the flames went out
-clouds - blind grenades
-can't remember ever creating terrain, but you could destroy terrain with the right gear (anti plant missiles etc)
-covering fire - og overwatch
-soul gathering - every chaos god (bar Khorne) had a psychic power that would generate a new daemon for every X models killed, am sure there were others. Lots of chaos army mechanics such as the brand new world eaters blood tithes still operate on this kind of principle.
-invisibility had been a psychic power up until end of 7th, everyone hated it
-various incarnations of medics have been in 40k for ever, still exist
-controlling enemy units still exists, things like polymorphine used to be cool too
-throwing used to exist (assail and I think more), still does with imperial knights
It used to be easier to have loads of bespoke rules in 40k, back when there were fewer factions with fewer units, almost no faction specific rules and smaller game sizes (by model count). These days there is so much going on that too much can feel like bloat pretty quickly. I'd like it though if smaller form factor versions of 40k like kill team and boarding actions brought a lot of this style back - but big games need to be streamlined.
It used to be easier to have loads of bespoke rules in 40k, back when there were fewer factions with fewer units, almost no faction specific rules and smaller game sizes (by model count). These days there is so much going on that too much can feel like bloat pretty quickly. I'd like it though if smaller form factor versions of 40k like kill team and boarding actions brought a lot of this style back - but big games need to be streamlined.
Throwing existed with Ork Lifta-Droppa/Traktor weapons
The Legion of the Damned had a special character Sgt. Centurius that could collect souls and revive fallen Damned Legionaires with them.
I don't think proper morale rules and pinning negatively affected the game in the past. If anything, pinned and falling-back units speed the game up because they don't do as much.
Now morale is a side note that kills a handful of models at worse.
The layered re-rolls are much worse for gameplay speed IMO. Adding some depth to gameplay whilst cutting down on all the reroll proliferation would be beneficial.
Haighus wrote: I don't think proper morale rules and pinning negatively affected the game in the past. If anything, pinned and falling-back units speed the game up because they don't do as much.
Now morale is a side note that kills a handful of models at worse.
The layered re-rolls are much worse for gameplay speed IMO. Adding some depth to gameplay whilst cutting down on all the reroll proliferation would be beneficial.
I agree and think that psychology and related stuff are a huge area of design space GW is underutilizing or failing to utilize at all.
From their point of view, there are a few reasons that were given from time to time for why they've removed so much of it:
- Pinning units, units that do have to act a certain way, are hindered from acting at all etc. are 'unfun' and not well-liked by players in their imagination
- With their limited range of morale values and the way they resolve it, too much hinges on a single 2D6 roll that can make or break whole battle plans
- Due to the limited range of morale values, you can't do much with modifiers in either direction too, so morale in general is not very 'interactive'
- In contrast, re-rolls are nice from a purely game-design-mathematical point of view, because they can be calculated exactly and the shift in probability can be adequately mapped; they do not, in general, bring such a make-or-break situation, but rather shift curves and are easier to incorporate in battle plans
Of course, that's mostly due to arbitrary limits they set themselves and could be done away with, but in this case they chose the lazy path.
Eh, my primary army is one traditionally vulnerable to morale effects with low-average Ld (Imperial Guard).
I think constructing a list to mitigate that or have sufficient redundancy for fleeing units was interesting. Some of my most memorable moments in 40k were also from morale tests, like when the battered survivors of the third wave of conscripts passed their test against the odds to hold the game winning objective (avenging the 130+ of their dead fellows...), or when one of my Chimeras tank-shocked a full ten-strong squad of Chaos Terminators off the board and destroyed them all.
I agree it could be swingy, but it was fun swingy IMO.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
Funnily enough, my conscript example above was fighting Night Lords. The remnants of the first two waves of 50 conscripts each had fled the board screaming in terror...
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
Funnily enough, my conscript example above was fighting Night Lords. The remnants of the first two waves of 50 conscripts each had fled the board screaming in terror...
And the final wave defied the odds and held? Yes, I agree that is the kind of " swingy" that is fun. I quite enjoy games like that, even if the "swing" causes me to lose. Guardsmen rallying in the face of their losses and Holding the Line is very thematic and cool. Sounds like it was a fun game.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
Funnily enough, my conscript example above was fighting Night Lords. The remnants of the first two waves of 50 conscripts each had fled the board screaming in terror...
And the final wave defied the odds and held? Yes, I agree that is the kind of " swingy" that is fun. I quite enjoy games like that, even if the "swing" causes me to lose. Guardsmen rallying in the face of their losses and Holding the Line is very thematic and cool. Sounds like it was a fun game.
Exactly. I think I had about 13 or so left in the squad that had gone to ground on the objective. I could find out exactly how many, all the survivors got a medal glued on
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
This bias is ok, esp considering 30k has fun things like pinning & morale that isnt...just lose more models.
At the flgs Flea Market the other day I snagged all three RT rulebooks and was enjoying reading the rules that we both did/didn't use when we played BITD. But then immediately followed by lamenting how diluted the game has become in the search for more minis on the table at once plan.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
Funnily enough, my conscript example above was fighting Night Lords. The remnants of the first two waves of 50 conscripts each had fled the board screaming in terror...
And the final wave defied the odds and held? Yes, I agree that is the kind of " swingy" that is fun. I quite enjoy games like that, even if the "swing" causes me to lose. Guardsmen rallying in the face of their losses and Holding the Line is very thematic and cool. Sounds like it was a fun game.
Exactly. I think I had about 13 or so left in the squad that had gone to ground on the objective. I could find out exactly how many, all the survivors got a medal glued on
It was a fun game.
I absolutely love that. That's really "telling Your Guys story", IMHO
Racerguy180 wrote:
Spoiler:
Gadzilla666 wrote: I personally find the more impactfull morale rules, including Pinning, in 30k to be much more fun than the weak 40k morale rules.
But I'm probably a bit biased.
This bias is ok, esp considering 30k has fun things like pinning & morale that isnt...just lose more models.
At the flgs Flea Market the other day I snagged all three RT rulebooks and was enjoying reading the rules that we both did/didn't use when we played BITD. But then immediately followed by lamenting how diluted the game has become in the search for more minis on the table at once plan.
Ehhhh.....I really don't think it's a "model count" issue. As you point out, we have loads of these "crunchy" rules in 30k. Pinning, morale, AV, Facings. But the "average" 30k list is 3000 points, and yet generally plays faster than a game of 9th with two 2000 point lists. It's entirely possible to have these kinds of rules with high model counts
@EviscerationPlague: Preaching to the choir buddy.
artific3r wrote: T This is less of an issue with less popular games because people don't play them enough to really expose the flaws.
This is the worst defence of 40k's genericness I've ever seen. Especially in a conversation involving a comparison to Warmachine, a game notorious for it's competitive player base.
40k USED to have a lot of fun stuff in it even up till 5th Ed. Matt Ward, for all the gak he gets thrown at him was great at coming up with flavourful rules for units. Like how lichguard shields could reflect shots back at their attacker, jump-pack Blood Angels dreadnaughts, psychically empowered bolter shells for Grey Knights. All great, flavourful stuff. The problem is GW just didn't bother balancing their game at the time so fans got SUPER pissy when these cool rules ended up OP and they squarely blamed it solely on Ward. I think this is a lot of the reason Robin "King Of Bland" Cruddace is in charge now. His rules are so boring and inoffensive and safe that they're easy to balance but lose any sense of individuality or character and thats what GW wants 40k to be. Inoffensive. Because if the game is too much of a grey goo of rules for armies that are barely distinguishable from one another then no one can really complain too much about any specific thing without complaining about the game as a whole.
Don't think we're disagreeing on anything here. Weird how much you seem to want to make this an argument though. I don't know anything about war machine but the fact is, balance simply doesn't matter as much for smaller games with less moving parts, fewer players, and comparatively niche competitive scenes. For a game the size of 40k, in an age of YouTube, social media, and professionally paid, competitive streamers, balance matters a lot. GW can't have little Timmy tuning in to his favorite 40k discord and finding out his chosen faction has basically zero chance of ever winning a game. That's just bad for business.
Some of that stuff does happen in other side-games though.
You want wacky things to happen? Take a look at the rulesets for...
Necromunda - all sorts of status effects can happen, grenades can bounce off walls, your guys can end up needing to crawl back to cover or get run over by a dune buggy.
Blood Bowl - plenty of push-and-pull mechanics, knocking people prone or killing them outright, and all so you can get a little spikey ball from one side of the board to the other.
Titanicus - Titans being knocked around, forced to turn, having weapons blown up, having reactors melt down, having to manage your power and shields, all things that are actually really well employed and a lot of fun to have happen in a game.
Warcry - For as quick and brutal as the game is, there's all sorts of little things that make units and factions unique. The latest Khorne Karanak Claws guys have an ability that lets them suplex an enemy and move them into a new position so their friends can beat on them.
Age of Sigmar - You like bringing models back to life? Welcome to the entire Death faction, where that sort of thing happens as a FEATURE, including free summons for a variety of armies, spells that you summon and can control, and all sorts of other wild things.
Those games are all fantastic, and that's just within the realm of what GW produces. I'm sure many other games would have other crazy things in them.
40k is GW's flagship product so they're gunna play it safe to keep from scaring people off while also creating as many situations to use your models as possible without breaking the game.
Don't think we're disagreeing on anything here. Weird how much you seem to want to make this an argument though. I don't know anything about war machine but the fact is, balance simply doesn't matter as much for smaller games with less moving parts, fewer players, and comparatively niche competitive scenes. For a game the size of 40k, in an age of YouTube, social media, and professionally paid, competitive streamers, balance matters a lot. GW can't have little Timmy tuning in to his favorite 40k discord and finding out his chosen faction has basically zero chance of ever winning a game. That's just bad for business.
I'm arguing because if anything balance in smaller games matters MORE and just because a game is smaller doesn't mean people don't spot broken builds within hours of new rules being released. 40k and GW have coasted on inertia for a LONG time at this point. The gameplay isn't great and codex balance internally is objectively bad and externally not great depending on your groups meta. If 40k got launched fresh today, with its rules as is now it would falter and die within months. Small games NEED to have good gameplay and balanced rules in order to stand a chance at surviving in the market.
Warmachine was not a "niche" game. During its peak in the last few years of 7th Ed 40k it was probably selling on par with 40k and had a reputation as being a more competitive, better balanced game. But PP botched the rules of its 3rd edition right as GW released 40k 8th edition and continued to make mistakes from there and it basically killed the game. Because the rules were bad. If a wargame isn't 40k levels of popular they live and die on their ruleset and anyone who likes tabletop games enough to branch out into non-GW games tends to be able to spot bad rules (hence why they've moved away from 40k).
Sim-Life wrote: I'm arguing because if anything balance in smaller games matters MORE and just because a game is smaller doesn't mean people don't spot broken builds within hours of new rules being released.
It does, because smaller game means far less people bruteforcing and theorycrafting every single possible build to find most broken wombo combo. It also means you're playing it with buddy, making incentives to not go straight for cheese much bigger, unlike 40K terrainless board tryhard scene, and much less inane whining like 'assault gun rules don't work' because such issues are ignored by everyone with working brain in smaller rulesets.
Incidentally, I found small solo game ruleset a few weeks ago and had tons of fun with it - despite rules being really not that clear (say, opposing Inquisitor detection abilities or possibility of cheesing power generation depending on rules interpretation). There was also the fact rules invite you to roleplay a bit (say, evil choices being strong pick, but one that would logically make NPC faction hate you, even though it's just mentioned in passing without 20 tables spelling out bad consequences of such choice).
If similar ruleset was released for 40K, though? I am strangely sure screeching about rules being 'broken' and rule interpretations based on word definitions from another planet to squeeze maximum amount of WAAAC that aren't even in sane rule readings to begin with would start pretty much instantly. Add copious amounts of inane fanon and claims of army generation being 'solved' because build XYZ is 0.001% more efficient than the rest (despite it being nonsense in DoaDL because said army generation there is really open ended to account for individual player tastes and even the planet the game is played on) and you have perfect mix of issues plaguing current 40K that wouldn't be the case in any other game, pretty much. Go figure...
Sim-Life wrote: 40k USED to have a lot of fun stuff in it even up till 5th Ed. Matt Ward, for all the gak he gets thrown at him was great at coming up with flavourful rules for units. Like how lichguard shields could reflect shots back at their attacker, jump-pack Blood Angels dreadnaughts, psychically empowered bolter shells for Grey Knights. All great, flavourful stuff. The problem is GW just didn't bother balancing their game at the time so fans got SUPER pissy when these cool rules ended up OP and they squarely blamed it solely on Ward.
And the worst part is, they weren'tOP. 5th was the most balanced edition in history with every book having multiple viable builds. It was also the most usable one, having ditched the stupid, broken, page flipping nonsense that is armory in favour of individually balanced options. Yes, 3rd and 4th edition books with bad rules struggled to compete but it wasn't the fault of 5th edition in any way, shape or form.
Really, the idiotic screeching about Ward was all due to single line of fluff (that he didn't even wrote, that was Phil Kelly) that upset 4chan grade special snowflakes and is one of the best proofs that loud whiny minority screaming the hardest about nonissues should be completely ignored, not catered to (see also new SW)
There's no need for five different books for Chaos, any more than there is for a dozen for different colours of Loyalists.
An adaptable Chaos Marines [/Mortals] and Chaos Daemons, and better rules for allying different books is all that should be necessary.
Wrong. It would mean less, not more books, because you could do Khorne book instead of current separate Khorne Daemons, WE, Khornekin (or whatever the faction was called), and Khornate CSM. It would also mean you could make proper Khornate mortals list, not the extremely narrow space lobotomized WE allow, and make subfactions more logical (say, WE being one of the subfactions, not dozen subfactions of just WE alone).
Cyel wrote: In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
This is why I like Necromunda, Infinity, Warmachine, Adeptus Titanicus, basically anything that isn't 40k, better than 40k as an actual ruleset. 40k has the coolest models and full battles on a painted table look amazing, but the game itself is just bland. I've had more memorable moments in my current Necro campaign than I have in 25 years of playing 40k. We were talking about this at my local Warhammer store last week because guys were playing Necromunda, Titanicus, Warcry, Underworlds, AoS and 30k but nobody was even thinking of playing 40k at the moment. We're all waiting for 10th and ready to just play specialist games if it's as bad as 7th-9th have been.
Cyel wrote: In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
This is why I like Necromunda, Infinity, Warmachine, Adeptus Titanicus, basically anything that isn't 40k, better than 40k as an actual ruleset. 40k has the coolest models and full battles on a painted table look amazing, but the game itself is just bland. I've had more memorable moments in my current Necro campaign than I have in 25 years of playing 40k. We were talking about this at my local Warhammer store last week because guys were playing Necromunda, Titanicus, Warcry, Underworlds, AoS and 30k but nobody was even thinking of playing 40k at the moment. We're all waiting for 10th and ready to just play specialist games if it's as bad as 7th-9th have been.
To be fair, Necromunda, infinity and adeptus titanicus are all skirmish scale, so giving your models more special stuff is feasible, never played warmachine so i can't judge that one.
I'm not saying its impossible to achieve, just that its harder in a game with the scale of 40k
artific3r wrote:To expand on Tsagualsa's response, the wackier you get with your mechanics, the more difficult the game becomes to balance. It increases the risk of units feeling broken or gimmicky. This is less of an issue with less popular games because people don't play them enough to really expose the flaws.
AnomanderRake wrote:I think the answer is much simpler: when Warhammer became popular it was trying very hard to be a WWII game, and in a WWII game you don't have a wide range of things doing weird cinematic video-game-y things, and despite all the bloat that's been piled on top of it since it is really still the skeleton of a WWII game underneath.
All the things the OP wants were in the game, he just has to go back and find a group playing an older edition of his choosing.
The attitude towards the game is much different today than it was then. it was much less about balance and far more about epic battles of unique factions that behaved in the manner they were portrayed in the lore. this carried over to an extent from 2nd ed when it went from a skirmish game system to 3rd when it became squad or army level battles. GW has expanded the factions and model lines to such an extent that the elusive balance that tournament minded players are after is nigh impossible to reach.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
Cyel wrote: In comparison, in my preferred Warmachine, models can, apart from killing, surviving and offering a plethora of standard buffs or debuffs to every stat:
This is why I like Necromunda, Infinity, Warmachine, Adeptus Titanicus, basically anything that isn't 40k, better than 40k as an actual ruleset. 40k has the coolest models and full battles on a painted table look amazing, but the game itself is just bland. I've had more memorable moments in my current Necro campaign than I have in 25 years of playing 40k. We were talking about this at my local Warhammer store last week because guys were playing Necromunda, Titanicus, Warcry, Underworlds, AoS and 30k but nobody was even thinking of playing 40k at the moment. We're all waiting for 10th and ready to just play specialist games if it's as bad as 7th-9th have been.
To be fair, Necromunda, infinity and adeptus titanicus are all skirmish scale, so giving your models more special stuff is feasible, never played warmachine so i can't judge that one.
I'm not saying its impossible to achieve, just that its harder in a game with the scale of 40k
Yeah, I think you can see some of the scale pains by looking at some of the mechancis that were dropped in recent editions. We had Challenges for a bit and mechanics like Jain Zar being able to disarm a specific model nearby. So in theory, it was neat to have Jain knock aside an enemy's power sword to bully him with impunity. But in practice, zooming in to resolve challenges slowed the game down and got a bit annoying when you had the rest of the fight phase to resolve. Similarly, the vehicle damage chart was a cool bit of detail that added to the "narrative" of the game, but tracking 12+ shaken/stunned/immobilized/weapon destroyed results across an entire parking lot of tanks could result in a lot of bookkeeping.
I really feel like 40k is better off at smaller game sizes where you just have 2 or 3 vehicles and a healthy mix of non-vehicles on each side and there's enough empty space on the table for units to maneuver. My mandrakes fading into the shadows and popping up to attack you from behind is pretty cool, but in practice there's rarely a decent place to land them behind enemy lines because the board is so choked with bodies. Plus, at smaller game sizes you could introduce things like crossfire, terrain manipulation, etc. without having all your brain power used up by the 1000 extra points of rules you brought to the table.
AnomanderRake wrote:
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
Kind of agree, but to some extent this is just what happens with any game that "rewards" some form of game mastery, right? My first multiplayer game of Star Craft was us goofing off, exploring the options, and making some inefficient-but-memorable plays. My hundredth multiplayer game of Star Craft is just trying to rush out my build of choice as quickly as possible while barely looking at the battlefield. My first few days playing a fighting game, I'm having fun stumbling into cool moves and enjoying the pretty colors. Then eventually you know your moves too well to have much fun against the computer, and matches against humans requires you know how to reliably execute the ultimate 20 step super combo where the other guy barely gets a chance to fight back.
As much as we discuss wanting tactical depth in 40k on this forum, some days I wish the game rules focused on making matches more even regardless of list building so you and your opponent could just bash models together and have fun seeing how it turns out.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
More model to model interactions in 40k would be nice. But it would require GW to make 10th into a much smaller game as people have mentioned skirmish ruleset vs army ruleset. Personally I reckon 30k v2 does large scale army fantastically. 3K points is pretty standard for a lotta people and that lets you have tank formations, infantry formations and a couple specialists and big models stomping around. I dunno how but it manages to make things feel powerful, things feel tough and other things feel fancy while not having the table wiped by turn 3. (more missions would be nice though)
40K being somewhere between the small 6 model skirmish games and the big cinematic conflicts of 30k would be good.
But yes, the question is, how do you stop fancy rules becoming busted in the right hands.
A lot of it just comes down to age. 40k comes from an era where "roll and see what happens" was a perfectly acceptable game design. The 40k turn sequence is really about execution more than decision making. Its a checklist of things that need to be done to get to where you roll to see what happens.
8th added a lot of strategic layers to the system. A resource to manage and objectives more clearly designed around making movement matter. It just struggles because the core turn sequence and dice mechanics just aren't particularly well suited to modification. It's very hard to define locations when a unit may move somewhere between 5-15+ inches a turn, and a single d6 really only functions off the 4+/-1 values before weird things happen to the curve.
I think there's room to make things work though. There's definitely room for strategems to be moved to the unit datasheet rather than being their own thing. I suspect this is more of a codex issue than anything. I think there's probably ways to do more. Certainly mid game deployment has been worked on extensively between all the drop rules and more recently Genestealers. It's just hard and GW seems very unmotivated to change that core dice off system that defines the game.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
One of the problems with 40k is that it's a game that doesn't know what scale it wants to be. On one hand, it clearly wants to be a mass battle game where you have serious numbers of troops running around that range from tiny grots to superheavies and knights. At the same time, it tries to track the individual differences between differently shaped melee weapons and almost every shot fired (while not doing much in the way of truly special abilities because they get out of hand very quickly and take up even more time and mental space).
So they basically have to make a choice. Do they want 40k to be a skirmish game or a mass battle game? If it's meant to be a skirmish game, they should drastically cut the size of the game which gives the space for more unique effects than inflicting mortal wounds. If they want a mass battle game they should standardise and get rid of a lot of the irrelevant little details that only take up time and mental space without a significant effect on the game. Both however come with their downsides so they instead keep going with a mixture of both approaches.
Dolnikan wrote: One of the problems with 40k is that it's a game that doesn't know what scale it wants to be. On one hand, it clearly wants to be a mass battle game where you have serious numbers of troops running around that range from tiny grots to superheavies and knights. At the same time, it tries to track the individual differences between differently shaped melee weapons and almost every shot fired (while not doing much in the way of truly special abilities because they get out of hand very quickly and take up even more time and mental space).
So they basically have to make a choice. Do they want 40k to be a skirmish game or a mass battle game? If it's meant to be a skirmish game, they should drastically cut the size of the game which gives the space for more unique effects than inflicting mortal wounds. If they want a mass battle game they should standardise and get rid of a lot of the irrelevant little details that only take up time and mental space without a significant effect on the game. Both however come with their downsides so they instead keep going with a mixture of both approaches.
False dilemma, GW already has Kill Team as a skirmish game and Apocalypse as a mass battle game, WH40k sits in the middle as it should and shouldn't be either Kill Team or Apocalypse, if you want to play a 40k skirmish game go play Kill Team, if you want to play a 40k mass battle game go play Apocalypse.
Dolnikan wrote: One of the problems with 40k is that it's a game that doesn't know what scale it wants to be. On one hand, it clearly wants to be a mass battle game where you have serious numbers of troops running around that range from tiny grots to superheavies and knights. At the same time, it tries to track the individual differences between differently shaped melee weapons and almost every shot fired (while not doing much in the way of truly special abilities because they get out of hand very quickly and take up even more time and mental space).
So they basically have to make a choice. Do they want 40k to be a skirmish game or a mass battle game? If it's meant to be a skirmish game, they should drastically cut the size of the game which gives the space for more unique effects than inflicting mortal wounds. If they want a mass battle game they should standardise and get rid of a lot of the irrelevant little details that only take up time and mental space without a significant effect on the game. Both however come with their downsides so they instead keep going with a mixture of both approaches.
False dilemma, GW already has Kill Team as a skirmish game and Apocalypse as a mass battle game, WH40k sits in the middle as it should and shouldn't be either Kill Team or Apocalypse, if you want to play a 40k skirmish game go play Kill Team, if you want to play a 40k mass battle game go play Apocalypse.
... if you want to play a good game play something else
I think it does come down to the scale of the game.
40K is designed for larger scale scraps. As such, its basic rules are fairly straight forward. You don’t need to overly worry about facings, turning, manoeuvring etc.
Compare to AT, where manoeuvring and movement are key to victory. As well as guns for stripping shields and guns for killing Big Stuff? You have more tactical stuff to choose from. For instance, the Macro Cannon has a reasonable chance to alter its targets facing. That ability alone can change the shape of a battle, should the target be thrown out of LoS / LoF for its intended target. If you’re clever, you can work that chance in to your overall plan, and potentially keep that model off-kilter, contributing far less than your opponent hoped for.
Necromunda? You need to wield your Gang as a squad, but also keep an eye out for individual opportunities. This might involve getting two relatively disposable Gangers in the right place to drop Smoke Grenades, messing with your opponent’s LoS. And you really need to make good use of terrain and cover, as getting that right drastically improves your survival chances. And in a campaign, it can be risky to focus on levelling up just a handful, as if I job just one or two on a permanent basis, down the rankings your Gang will tumble. If you spec into your Gang’s archetype, you may find an opposing Gang becoming your Achilles heel, so whilst such Speccing can bring a lot of useful skills, there’s a lot to be said for a more balanced approach.
40K no longer has those concerns. And I’m not especially convinced it should just for the sake of having them.
for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
This is awesome. I am glad to hear that you've got an FLGS that supports your hobby your way and it's awesome that you found a like minded group. Never let that go. I had a lot of fun with 3-5, for all the frustrations I had about my armies being somewhat ignored, or in the case of GSC, being completely excluded. I also found the integration of smaller games into the main system a bit more problematic... But none of that means the games wasn't fun.
I absolutely understand why people prefer this era to the current version, even though I personally do not.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K.
You can't actually. Since what is bad, good, better or best is entirely subjective, what you CAN say without reservation is that you and your group like that game better. If you want to get specific and define objectively observable and measurable game elements and compare them, as others have done, you will certainly be able to point out some areas where the editions of the 3-5 era score better, just as those who prefer the more recent editions will be able to find other game elements in which the current game scores higher. Whether either version is "good" or "bad" depends entirely upon whether a given player prioritizes the elements in which the version scores high.
there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again.
Fair, and true. But these are the qualities associated with an unsupported game, not a superior one. If rumours are true, in another 6-10 months, we'll be able to say all of this about 9th, and we can already say it about 8th, despite the fact that I still used a lot of 8th ed source material in 9th ed.
In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
Cool. Now go back through not just the past month, but through the entire time you've been playing Oldhammer. How many games has your group played with SoB, SoS (or even Talons as a whole), GSC, or Deathwatch? For me, a game that doesn't include support for these factions is currently not as fun as a version that does... But again, that's for me, and I don't expect others to share my preferences and priorities.
Note: I do know that SoB at least could be played during 3-5: I did it. The Witch Hunter dex worked in that era, and it does remain one of my personal favourite GW books of all time, though I do prefer the current version of SoB. Also: I didn't mention the BSF oddities like the Negavolts, Beastment, etc. even though I used them in 8th and continue to do so in 9th. I didn't mention the Votann, because I personally don't play them- I like them well enough, and in a perfect world, I'd have a small force, but these days one must prioritize hobby spending.
Dolnikan wrote: One of the problems with 40k is that it's a game that doesn't know what scale it wants to be. On one hand, it clearly wants to be a mass battle game where you have serious numbers of troops running around that range from tiny grots to superheavies and knights. At the same time, it tries to track the individual differences between differently shaped melee weapons and almost every shot fired (while not doing much in the way of truly special abilities because they get out of hand very quickly and take up even more time and mental space).
So they basically have to make a choice. Do they want 40k to be a skirmish game or a mass battle game? If it's meant to be a skirmish game, they should drastically cut the size of the game which gives the space for more unique effects than inflicting mortal wounds. If they want a mass battle game they should standardise and get rid of a lot of the irrelevant little details that only take up time and mental space without a significant effect on the game. Both however come with their downsides so they instead keep going with a mixture of both approaches.
Well, since the scale of the game has been pretty much the same for decades....
And they've generally kept the differentiation between the small stuff....
I'd say GWs made a clear choice.
Because 40k has no way to interact with opposing forces other than killing them.
With the exception of a couple of psychic powers, everything else present in the game is just a way to kill enemies. Even leadership modifiers are merely ‘kill moar’ with an extra step. While this kind of depth makes sense for a kids board game like risk, in an actual wargame it leads to an incredibly shallow gameplay experience.
The solution is, fortunately, as simple as it is unlikely to happen: Give 40k some actual depth via meaningful gameplay and non-fatal means of interaction. Preferably while also cutting the bloated complexity which 40k uses to give the illusion of actual depth.
morganfreeman wrote: Because 40k has no way to interact with opposing forces other than killing them.
With the exception of a couple of psychic powers, everything else present in the game is just a way to kill enemies. Even leadership modifiers are merely ‘kill moar’ with an extra step. While this kind of depth makes sense for a kids board game like risk, in an actual wargame it leads to an incredibly shallow gameplay experience.
The solution is, fortunately, as simple as it is unlikely to happen: Give 40k some actual depth via meaningful gameplay and non-fatal means of interaction. Preferably while also cutting the bloated complexity which 40k uses to give the illusion of actual depth.
Technically, there is one other chief way in which units can interact- some variation on holding ground/objectives.
I think actions as a concept are one of the best additions to modern 40k. Unfortunately, they have frequently been implemented in a way that does not provide much interaction with the opposing player. It would be really neat if pinning could interrupt actions, for example. Unfortunately pinning is no more...
Dolnikan wrote: One of the problems with 40k is that it's a game that doesn't know what scale it wants to be. On one hand, it clearly wants to be a mass battle game where you have serious numbers of troops running around that range from tiny grots to superheavies and knights. At the same time, it tries to track the individual differences between differently shaped melee weapons and almost every shot fired (while not doing much in the way of truly special abilities because they get out of hand very quickly and take up even more time and mental space).
So they basically have to make a choice. Do they want 40k to be a skirmish game or a mass battle game? If it's meant to be a skirmish game, they should drastically cut the size of the game which gives the space for more unique effects than inflicting mortal wounds. If they want a mass battle game they should standardise and get rid of a lot of the irrelevant little details that only take up time and mental space without a significant effect on the game. Both however come with their downsides so they instead keep going with a mixture of both approaches.
False dilemma, GW already has Kill Team as a skirmish game and Apocalypse as a mass battle game, WH40k sits in the middle as it should and shouldn't be either Kill Team or Apocalypse, if you want to play a 40k skirmish game go play Kill Team, if you want to play a 40k mass battle game go play Apocalypse.
I agree with you, but if you tell 40K players that they are no longer getting special rules for different shapes of sword or that their intercontinental ballistic missile will no longer be fieldable in a company-sized engagement, they lose their gak.
morganfreeman wrote:Because 40k has no way to interact with opposing forces other than killing them.
With the exception of a couple of psychic powers, everything else present in the game is just a way to kill enemies. Even leadership modifiers are merely ‘kill moar’ with an extra step. While this kind of depth makes sense for a kids board game like risk, in an actual wargame it leads to an incredibly shallow gameplay experience.
The solution is, fortunately, as simple as it is unlikely to happen: Give 40k some actual depth via meaningful gameplay and non-fatal means of interaction. Preferably while also cutting the bloated complexity which 40k uses to give the illusion of actual depth.
It's doubly annoying because even mechanics that boil down to 'kill more/kill less' can still be interesting if they give you choices to make on the tabletop. Crossfire rewards positioning, reduced firepower on the move forces you to consider giving up killing now for better positioning, going to ground in response to fire is giving up fire in return for durability, and so on.
Without all that, and particularly in a game where most units can shoot across the board and move/shoot at full effectiveness, armies tend to slug it out at spreadsheet efficiency.
I think pinning was too random, go to ground would be neat, the only downside was having to ask whether the enemy would go to ground every time. Make "pinning" weapons ignore cover saves (which I think should be brought back) to incentivise units to go ground, but still ultimately leave the decision to the players. I know my desire for player agency is beyond the norm and I don't really want to go debate agency and randomness in this thread.
morganfreeman wrote: Because 40k has no way to interact with opposing forces other than killing them.
With the exception of a couple of psychic powers, everything else present in the game is just a way to kill enemies. Even leadership modifiers are merely ‘kill moar’ with an extra step. While this kind of depth makes sense for a kids board game like risk, in an actual wargame it leads to an incredibly shallow gameplay experience.
The solution is, fortunately, as simple as it is unlikely to happen: Give 40k some actual depth via meaningful gameplay and non-fatal means of interaction. Preferably while also cutting the bloated complexity which 40k uses to give the illusion of actual depth.
I would say move-blocking, zoning out deep strikes and tagging units in melee to prevent them from shooting are ways to non-lethally prevent optimal usage of enemy units. Then there is staying out of enemy threat ranges, which is pretty obvious, but harder than ever if you play on GW's tiny boards. I really like the lack of randomness with melee in modern editions, now it is more tactical than simply hoping melee has the desired result but having few ways to impact that result, making shooting equally tactical would be great for the game I think. Since most 40k units are ranged and since 9th is ridiculously lethal, you do see a lot of games in 9th edition devolve to shooting kills the enemy, end of story.
Cool. Now go back through not just the past month, but through the entire time you've been playing Oldhammer. How many games has your group played with SoB, SoS (or even Talons as a whole), GSC, or Deathwatch? For me, a game that doesn't include support for these factions is currently not as fun as a version that does... But again, that's for me, and I don't expect others to share my preferences and priorities.
Note: I do know that SoB at least could be played during 3-5: I did it. The Witch Hunter dex worked in that era, and it does remain one of my personal favourite GW books of all time, though I do prefer the current version of SoB. Also: I didn't mention the BSF oddities like the Negavolts, Beastment, etc. even though I used them in 8th and continue to do so in 9th. I didn't mention the Votann, because I personally don't play them- I like them well enough, and in a perfect world, I'd have a small force, but these days one must prioritize hobby spending.
GSCs had a Citadel journal Army list, and Deathwatch do exist as a unit regular marines can take, I don't think it's a 0-1 option either, so the only thing that doesn't really transfer over is the Corvus Blackstar. Talons is really the only outlier there.
Cyel wrote: I was also thinking about the scale, but really it's not that much of a difference for most of these effects - instead of blinding a single model, you blind a unit, instead of setting a single model on fire, you set the entire unit on fire etc. It also shouldn't be more of a lengthy process than just performing attacks - with GW's long and tedious resolution it can actually be quicker.
You are talking about status effects from video or tabletop skirmish games. The majority of 40K players don´t like to keep track of those which is a shame imo.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
Accusing somebody of having their perception clouded by time and then coming back with essentially 'I remember how that era was, I don't need to have played it recently' is kinda hypocritical. Just saying.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
Accusing somebody of having their perception clouded by time and then coming back with essentially 'I remember how that era was, I don't need to have played it recently' is kinda hypocritical. Just saying.
It's not hypocritical. I don't need to play 7th Edition AdMech vs 4th edition Marines to know it's a bad game.
The fewer separate group type of rules GW gets to write the lower chance of them doing something wrong. Would it be nice and fun, if units did something more then hit stuff or stand on objectives? Sure. But then reality kicks in and the GK demon slayer warlord trait first doesn't work on demons from the demon codex for a few months, then gets "fixed" and now it doesn't work on demons from outside of the demon codex. Too often GW "cool" is not really that, but either something game breaking or something you wish your army didn't have.
I believe these sorts of mechanics are largely missing due to the Games Workshop's decision to streamline the game with third edition. There was clearly a desire to scale the game up from platoon level games to company level games which necessitated cutting out a lot of the in depth (and perhaps overly detailed) rules as a concession to making games playable in a reasonable amount of time. I'm sure to some extent this was driven by a desire to sell more models to existing players and to make the game more approachable to new players.
Some stuff has come back over the years, but the scale 'issue' really makes it difficult to add these sorts of things without making games drag on way too long. Fundamentally they just take too long to resolve in the scale of game that GW intends people to play at.
It's not hypocritical. I don't need to play 7th Edition AdMech vs 4th edition Marines to know it's a bad game.
Pretty authoritative statement from somebody who wasn't there.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive
They were actually all quite fun and very close games. the only time admech actually won was the previous month against 3.5 chaos in a kill points game. my 3.5 dark angels fared quite a bit better with a general list.
The fact that your focus on "unbalanced" is your key concern tells me that classic 40K just isn't the game for you. it is meant to be epic and thematic and fun. your skill as a general on the table is how you balance things as far as how likely you are to win....dice rolls aside. Winning itself isn't even the most important thing. having a close fun game were both players have a good time is. winning is just a little "icing on the cake".
The entire point of this was that Cyel's original post was a desire for things that already existed and were removed from the game that he perhaps did not know existed.
How many games has your group played with SoB, SoS (or even Talons as a whole), GSC, or Deathwatch? For me, a game that doesn't include support for these factions is currently not as fun as a version that does... But again, that's for me, and I don't expect others to share my preferences and priorities.
I have not had a full SOB army since 4th, however i do have units from both demon hunter and witch hunter codexes i use as allies for my other imperial forces. and one of the guys is actually currently building an inquisitorial strike force around the demon hunter codex. That aside considering we allow all codexes from 3rd-7th to be played in our games. GSCs, deathwatch, SOB, custodes/SOS and even imperial knights all had 7th ed codexes that are compatible and allowed. the problem is that most of those armies are not very popular among our players. most people want to play nids instead of GSCs and only one player actually has an imperial knight army.
It's not hypocritical. I don't need to play 7th Edition AdMech vs 4th edition Marines to know it's a bad game.
Pretty authoritative statement from somebody who wasn't there.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive
They were actually all quite fun and very close games. the only time admech actually won was the previous month against 3.5 chaos in a kill points game. my 3.5 dark angels fared quite a bit better with a general list.
The fact that your focus on "unbalanced" is your key concern tells me that classic 40K just isn't the game for you. it is meant to be epic and thematic and fun. your skill as a general on the table is how you balance things as far as how likely you are to win....dice rolls aside. Winning itself isn't even the most important thing. having a close fun game were both players have a good time is. winning is just a little "icing on the cake".
The entire point of this was that Cyel's original post was a desire for things that already existed and were removed from the game that he perhaps did not know existed.
If those were "close games", some of you are just bad players, simple as that. It reeks of the attitude of people that will do a charge that they shouldn't, because of how fluff bunnies operate.
Your games are not any more skillful than current games. If anything, they're less skillful.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
You did not just seriously say this. At least throw out the "anecdotal" card but don't try to pretend you have a better memory of how an edition you last played 20 years ago plays compared to someone who played it last week.
catbarf wrote: (Truncated for brevity)...OP is using an overtly gameplay-first fantasy game as comparison so it's easy to dismiss it as 'things a realistic game wouldn't let you do', but the core observation that units in 40K tend to be pretty one-dimensional is spot on. Units just don't have any interaction besides shooting or punching each other.
Oh, sure, but I think there's a spectrum of games where historical wargames are on one end, with gameplay complexity created largely by the core rules and units having limited unique shiny/video-game-y shenanigans, and something like Warmachine or Malifaux on the other end, with relatively bare-bones core rules and a tremendous wealth of weird and interesting unit rules to worry about. Even if you look at better-designed historical wargames where things like suppression do come into play individual unit rules tend to still be very bare-bones. Warhammer is trying to cram both ends of the design spectrum together without really parsing how they interact.
That said I also think a big part of their issue with units not really doing anything is that GW decided somewhere along the line that they need to let anyone play whatever combination of minis they want all the time without really thinking about the consequences. If you can't count on players having a mix of different unit types, because you can let them spam whatever they want, then it becomes really hard to design a game in which a variety of roles other than just kill people are relevant and useful. Other game companies have gotten around this in a variety of ways but off the top of my head every game I can think of has either hard or soft list-building restrictions to control edge-case spam lists (Infinity has SWC, X-Wing has ship minimums and maximums, Warmachine has warjack points and warcaster Focus/Fury limits...), because they want to be able to build the game assuming that players will be taking a range of tools, not just spamming the most efficient thing. GW, alone amongst all people making minis games, seems to be slowly drifting towards "no, just spamming the most efficient thing is fine" and they're removing more and more list-building restrictions over time. If you're trying to make a game in which one player could be doing, I don't know, termagaunt-spam and the other player could be playing a single Warlord Titan and that's a desirable game state to the writers (because then one player bought a bajillion termagaunts and the other player bought a Warlord Titan...), then trying to design the game around units having roles on the table other than straight damage output is sort of futile, because all lists are so wildly different you can't plan for players having the stuff to fill the roles.
tl;dr: GW thinks making gameplay interesting is too much of a barrier to people buying models.
(Disclaimer: I have no evidence for this, but it is an explanation that fits the facts.)
If those were "close games", some of you are just bad players, simple as that. It reeks of the attitude of people that will do a charge that they shouldn't, because of how fluff bunnies operate.
Your games are not any more skillful than current games. If anything, they're less skillful.
Yet another claim about something you know nothing about, you did not know the objectives, the army makeups, the terrain and most importantly
don't try to pretend you have a better memory of how an edition you last played 20 years ago plays compared to someone who played it last week.
Your fluff bunny comment also says loads about what kind of gamer you are. if i wanted to play-
"no, just spamming the most efficient thing is fine"
Then i do not need 40K, i do not need the universe, the immersion or any of the reasons what keeps me interested in the game/universe i could go buy a cheap set of green army men and just play that.
I do NOT play just to win, i play for social activity, to have fun with friends, roll dice and move models. the lore of the universe is what drives and keeps me playing many game systems including oldhammer.
From your comments, it appears this is not the game for you, you dislike it, and you prefer something more tournament minded. that's fine, you do you. it is just the complete opposite of why i love to play miniature war games and why i have been actively playing for over 20 years. perhaps Cyel is after something similar to what i enjoy, after all he is the one who started this topic about 40K.
Give generic actions that arent tied to scenarios (suppressive fire, anyone?)
Make scenarios that require actions be made by specific unit types (Infantry,elite, monster/vehicles come to mind)
Its a great way to lower lethality but is mostly just dodged by players either by doing them on pure chaff or by being able to do an action and still shoot.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
You did not just seriously say this. At least throw out the "anecdotal" card but don't try to pretend you have a better memory of how an edition you last played 20 years ago plays compared to someone who played it last week.
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
I do NOT play just to win, i play for social activity, to have fun with friends, roll dice and move models. the lore of the universe is what drives and keeps me playing many game systems including oldhammer.
Then you don't even need the rules you're defending. Just make gun noises and whomever makes the best noises wins.
IMHO it was a much better game when it was just epic battles in the 41st millennium. instead of now where i see charts and tables reflecting the effectiveness of points/performance of dice averages between unit A and unit B as to which one is better to take. instead of-this faction would use unit B because that is how they fight-, and then your job on the table as the general commanding the force is how to work that to your advantage using terrain and tactics.
The rose tinted glasses are strong in this post
Perhaps you could say that if you are far removed from the editions by years of lack of first hand experience. for my part my FLGS has a strong active community of oldhammer players and we still regularly (nearly every weekend) get in games of primarily mixed 3rd-5th ed.
Hands down i can say without reservation that it is a far better game to play than current 40K. there is no churn there is no chasing codex creep, there is no meta, there are no balance passes or seasons, GW will never mess with it again. Above all it is epic 40K battles and it is fun for all involved. In about the last month we have had the following games-
.7th ed admech VS 4th ed DIY marines
.7th ed admech VS 3rd ed IG armored company
.3rd ed IG armored company VS 5th ed IG .5th ed dark eldar VS 5th ed IG.
I started in late 3rd/early 4th. I was that era, thanks.
And those games sound absolutely awful and more unbalanced than current 40k, which is pretty impressive.
You did not just seriously say this. At least throw out the "anecdotal" card but don't try to pretend you have a better memory of how an edition you last played 20 years ago plays compared to someone who played it last week.
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
Sure, it's a slow day, please enlighten us. Share with us your great wisdom concerning a version of a game you don't play.
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
It is a reasonable match when you play all the codexes within the framework of 5th edition core rules which is what we do. they are completely compatible since they are all based on the same core rules. a few house rules (IE only using 5th ed USRs, using the fixed movement profiles that existed for all unit types all through 3rd-5th ed etc..) and all the problems with the game are removed. Unlike you i have active and current experience, not conjecture about what the game would be like. additionally we have a group of something like a dozen players who are playing the older editions and having fun doing it, who find the old rules not only reasonable but functional. with tactical game play for a miniature war game system that both works and adds an extra layer of depth that encourages lore/thematic based play.
you are free to have whatever opinion you want about the games editions, however it has no bearing on the reality i am currently experiencing in real time.
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
It is a reasonable match when you play all the codexes within the framework of 5th edition core rules which is what we do. they are completely compatible since they are all based on the same core rules. a few house rules (IE only using 5th ed USRs, using the fixed movement profiles that existed for all unit types all through 3rd-5th ed etc..) and all the problems with the game are removed. Unlike you i have active and current experience, not conjecture about what the game would be like. additionally we have a group of something like a dozen players who are playing the older editions and having fun doing it, who find the old rules not only reasonable but functional. with tactical game play for a miniature war game system that both works and adds an extra layer of depth that encourages lore/thematic based play.
you are free to have whatever opinion you want about the games editions, however it has no bearing on the reality i am currently experiencing in real time.
I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field? In other words being horrendously awful people all-round. :p
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
It is a reasonable match when you play all the codexes within the framework of 5th edition core rules which is what we do. they are completely compatible since they are all based on the same core rules. a few house rules (IE only using 5th ed USRs, using the fixed movement profiles that existed for all unit types all through 3rd-5th ed etc..) and all the problems with the game are removed.
LOL Compatible core rules to write codices =/= compatible games between different editions of codices. Lemme guess, your local player with the 3rd edition codex for Daemon Hunters had a close game with the guy running Skitarii?
I can find the rules for older editions online. Do you expect some breakdown of why 4th edition Marines aren't a reasonable match for a 7th edition codex of any kind?
It is a reasonable match when you play all the codexes within the framework of 5th edition core rules which is what we do. they are completely compatible since they are all based on the same core rules. a few house rules (IE only using 5th ed USRs, using the fixed movement profiles that existed for all unit types all through 3rd-5th ed etc..) and all the problems with the game are removed. Unlike you i have active and current experience, not conjecture about what the game would be like. additionally we have a group of something like a dozen players who are playing the older editions and having fun doing it, who find the old rules not only reasonable but functional. with tactical game play for a miniature war game system that both works and adds an extra layer of depth that encourages lore/thematic based play.
you are free to have whatever opinion you want about the games editions, however it has no bearing on the reality i am currently experiencing in real time.
I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field? In other words being horrendously awful people all-round. :p
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
Never mentioned either caac, banning things or making 40k 'good', but you know, keep tilting at those windmills. You're good at it. Thumbs up!
And for the record, there's a massive gulf between two players collaboratively game-building, (or even just staying away from known toxic builds of older editions )and caac. The latter is just as bad as competitive-at-all-cost though this isn't the thread to dive down into that.
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
Never mentioned either caac, banning things or making 40k 'good', but you know, keep tilting at those windmills. You're good at it. Thumbs up!
Literally what I quoted:
"I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field?"
If you have to fix the game via modifying rules and telling people what they can and can't do, and then tell people that the game is fine when you do that.....it's not a good game. As well, the CAAC comes from your "reasonable" comment.
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
Never mentioned either caac, banning things or making 40k 'good', but you know, keep tilting at those windmills. You're good at it. Thumbs up!
Literally what I quoted:
"I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field?"
If you have to fix the game via modifying rules and telling people what they can and can't do, and then tell people that the game is fine when you do that.....it's not a good game.
I'd say that's how the majority of players handled any edition of 40K to fix rules oversights, balance issues or bad scenario rules.
Balance for casual and balance for competitive are two very different things. GW has been focusing on balance for competitive, which is why communities like r/warhammerCompetitive and Goonhammer are generally really happy with the current state of the game.
Dakka definitely skews towards casual/narrative play, and a thread like this is an even greater filter for anti-competitive types.
It's pointless arguing about which style of play is better. It's even more exceptionally stupid to attack each other over it.
Literally what I quoted:
"I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field?"
If you have to fix the game via modifying rules and telling people what they can and can't do, and then tell people that the game is fine when you do that.....it's not a good game. As well, the CAAC comes from your "reasonable" comment.
He says whilst tilting at more windmills.
Then your reading comprehension is poor, even when you quote me twice and project inaccurately even more both times! Where did I say it was 'fine'?
Where did I say 40k was a 'good' game? Quote me. We all know it's a clunky poorly balanced mess, at best.
And your caac comment is also horrendously misplaced and innaccurate. Retract it. Ill repeat - I'm not caac. And resent the projection, thank you very much. suggesting staying away from.the broken builds is not caac, especially when you want to see the other 96% of gsme options that aren't a tournament build(not that theres anything wromg with them either, especially agsinst similarly powerful builds). Everything has its place.
I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field? In other words being horrendously awful people all-round. :p
Since you never know which codex you might be fighting a well rounded army that can deal with a bit of everything is usually ideal, unless somebody requests something specific. even superheavies are not that big of a deal since we are using the old IA rules when they were made for games of regular 40K.
As far as the gimmick army lists go, back in the time when 4th and 5th were the current edition we had a guy who liked to copy/paste the tournament lists to throw at us. so it isn't anything we have trouble with-lash prince, nidzilla, one of our current chaos players runs the "dreaded" 3.5 iron warriors list. it is always a good fight i have beaten it several times.
Turns out obliterators do not like grav cannons.
Most often though people tend to favor thematic lists. 3rd ed imperial guard armored company is a popular one. i had a fantastic game a couple months back where i put my 3.5 dark angels up against a 5th ed blood angels armored company/mechanized styled themed list.
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
It is no surprise that you cannot understand a group of players who have been at this for decades can look at the game and decide the core 5th ed rules work best in most cases but can also look at things like snap fire, overwatch and grenade throwing from 7th and think hey that would make a great addition to 5th to really add some interesting game play, or conversely realize the 5th ed wound allocation rule is dumb and decide to use the 4th ed version instead.
And for the record, there's a massive gulf between two players collaboratively game-building, (or even just staying away from known toxic builds of older editions )and caac.
I'd say that's how the majority of players handled any edition of 40K to fix rules oversights, balance issues or bad scenario rules.
indeed, our group sat down one game night and spent a couple hours deciding which edition had the best overall core mechanics and "fixing" the few items that were a problem by using the rules from a previous or later edition. We then codified it in an official 5th ed rules set with a list of those minor changes. It makes every codex compatible and also makes the game quite fun.
I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field? In other words being horrendously awful people all-round. :p
Since you never know which codex you might be fighting a well rounded army that can deal with a bit of everything is usually ideal, unless somebody requests something specific. even superheavies are not that big of a deal since we are using the old IA rules when they were made for games of regular 40K.
As far as the gimmick army lists go, back in the time when 4th and 5th were the current edition we had a guy who liked to copy/paste the tournament lists to throw at us. so it isn't anything we have trouble with-lash prince, nidzilla, one of our current chaos players runs the "dreaded" 3.5 iron warriors list. it is always a good fight i have beaten it several times.
Turns out obliterators do not like grav cannons.
Most often though people tend to favor thematic lists. 3rd ed imperial guard armored company is a popular one. i had a fantastic game a couple months back where i put my 3.5 dark angels up against a 5th ed blood angels armored company/mechanized styled themed list.
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
It is no surprise that you cannot understand a group of players who have been at this for decades can look at the game and decide the core 5th ed rules work best in most cases but can also look at things like snap fire, overwatch and grenade throwing from 7th and think hey that would make a great addition to 5th to really add some interesting game play, or conversely realize the 5th ed wound allocation rule is dumb and decide to use the 4th ed version instead.
And for the record, there's a massive gulf between two players collaboratively game-building, (or even just staying away from known toxic builds of older editions )and caac.
I'd say that's how the majority of players handled any edition of 40K to fix rules oversights, balance issues or bad scenario rules.
indeed, our group sat down one game night and spent a couple hours deciding which edition had the best overall core mechanics and "fixing" the few items that were a problem by using the rules from a previous or later edition. We then codified it in an official 5th ed rules set with a list of those minor changes. It makes every codex compatible and also makes the game quite fun.
AKA you proved my point. If you take only parts you want to see and take out stuff you just don't like AND tell people what they're allowed to run, you're not playing the supposed "tactical" game you're claiming you are. You're playing "me and my friend's game we played a long time ago and cant let go of it", not an older edition that, as you claimed, is more tactically in depth.
For aphyon to have proved your point, you would first have to make a point - not just lash out on reflex at someone who has found a way of playing (and a group of players) that they enjoy, that just happens to be different from how you think things should be.
AKA you proved my point. If you take only parts you want to see and take out stuff you just don't like AND tell people what they're allowed to run, you're not playing the supposed "tactical" game you're claiming you are. You're playing "me and my friend's game we played a long time ago and cant let go of it", not an older edition that, as you claimed, is more tactically in depth.
Are you making the claim that GW's rules writing has always been perfect? And that GWs balance has been perfect? Are you making the claim that modifying the game in any way is sullying the absolute perfection of GWs products?
That appears to be a corollary of your accusations here.
AKA you proved my point. If you take only parts you want to see and take out stuff you just don't like AND tell people what they're allowed to run, you're not playing the supposed "tactical" game you're claiming you are. You're playing "me and my friend's game we played a long time ago and cant let go of it", not an older edition that, as you claimed, is more tactically in depth.
You don’t seem to have a point.
40k has always been best played with house rules. Literally every edition. Often times because one or more core rules straight up do not work without some slight tweaks.
I can only assume your (attempted) point is that any iteration of modified 40k isn’t ‘real’ 40k and should be dismissed because it’s not what the competitive scene uses…. To which I’d point out that the same thing has existed in the competitive scene. Forever. ITC was a multi-edition structure of house rules to make tournaments actually semi playable. Rule of 3 was a house rule for tournaments to, surprise surprise, make 40k remotely playable for anything other than elder flyer spam.
AFAIK 9th is the first edition to ever not have house rules built into the tournament scene; and that’s entirely because GW is actively collaborating with dais tournament scene and allowing them to actively assist in writing said rules. Which is good on the one hand, and would be a lot better if 9th ed wasn’t a dumpster fire of an edition.
I presume you're also not inflicting the most broken builds of those eras on your mates, and you know, doing things like being reasonable in what you field? In other words being horrendously awful people all-round. :p
Since you never know which codex you might be fighting a well rounded army that can deal with a bit of everything is usually ideal, unless somebody requests something specific. even superheavies are not that big of a deal since we are using the old IA rules when they were made for games of regular 40K.
As far as the gimmick army lists go, back in the time when 4th and 5th were the current edition we had a guy who liked to copy/paste the tournament lists to throw at us. so it isn't anything we have trouble with-lash prince, nidzilla, one of our current chaos players runs the "dreaded" 3.5 iron warriors list. it is always a good fight i have beaten it several times.
Turns out obliterators do not like grav cannons.
Most often though people tend to favor thematic lists. 3rd ed imperial guard armored company is a popular one. i had a fantastic game a couple months back where i put my 3.5 dark angels up against a 5th ed blood angels armored company/mechanized styled themed list.
You mean being CAAC makes it look like it's a good game? "Nooooo the game totally works you're just not allowed to do X, Y, and Z, oh and A, B, and C".
The fact you bought that just now is great.
It is no surprise that you cannot understand a group of players who have been at this for decades can look at the game and decide the core 5th ed rules work best in most cases but can also look at things like snap fire, overwatch and grenade throwing from 7th and think hey that would make a great addition to 5th to really add some interesting game play, or conversely realize the 5th ed wound allocation rule is dumb and decide to use the 4th ed version instead.
And for the record, there's a massive gulf between two players collaboratively game-building, (or even just staying away from known toxic builds of older editions )and caac.
I'd say that's how the majority of players handled any edition of 40K to fix rules oversights, balance issues or bad scenario rules.
indeed, our group sat down one game night and spent a couple hours deciding which edition had the best overall core mechanics and "fixing" the few items that were a problem by using the rules from a previous or later edition. We then codified it in an official 5th ed rules set with a list of those minor changes. It makes every codex compatible and also makes the game quite fun.
AKA you proved my point. If you take only parts you want to see and take out stuff you just don't like AND tell people what they're allowed to run, you're not playing the supposed "tactical" game you're claiming you are. You're playing "me and my friend's game we played a long time ago and cant let go of it", not an older edition that, as you claimed, is more tactically in depth.
That's a joke, right? Older editions obviously had more "tactical depth" than the glorified board game that is 8th/9th. Stacking buffs and trying to keep your units within some character's "reroll bubble" isn't "tactics".
An example of what I consider to be cool things that are fairly common to me:
My Seraphim deep strike, raining fire from above (Deadly Descent 1CP), take aim as they hit the ground and fire off a standard shot while singing to the Emperor that they may reach his foes and rend the survivors (Miracle dice to pass the 9" charge).
My Missionary utters a war hymn as he charges into battle with his Arcoflagellants, uttering the Extremis Trigger Word (1CP) as they hit the enemy in a storm of implanted blades and flails.
People who play competitively and even some casuals hate strats because of how they skew the all-important balance. That's fair, but if you actually use them as narrative tools at the appropriate moments, rather than using them exclusively as tools to win, they can be fluffy and cool as feth.
Crusade adds even more cool things- some of them are long term, like becoming a Saint, or conquering territory for influence in Commorragh, or taking over planets and even whole systems, but often they are more immediate.
For example, let's say you've got a unit of sisters, and in the game before, they let you down in some way- that's up to you; maybe they failed to defend an objective, maybe they all fell in the battle, maybe they failed to eliminate a key target... Whatever. They can swear a Penitent Oath and become Repentia. You play with them as Repentia until they've redeemed themselves, at which point they are purified and return to their sisters at a higher rank.
I don't doubt that 2K Matched competitive games have standard optimized builds that feel dull and detached from the lore but my small Crusade games tell better stories now than they have in any edition since Rogue Trader, which was almost an RPG with warbands of miniatures.
I applaud the efforts of earlier editions which at least paid some attention to campaign play by adding Kill Team and Combat Patrol protoype mini-games. In their time, they were fun and I imagine they still are, but they provide nothing like the amount of narrative content available via Crusade.
I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
This is my issue with stratagems for basic stuff. If popping smoke is a choice and a trade off, it makes all of zero sense that only one tank can do it. And that popping smoke somehow inhibits my Chaplain's ability to speak properly.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
If you try out Open Play, there's no cap on the number of time a phase you can use a stratagem, unless noted in the strat.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
If you try out Open Play, there's no cap on the number of time a phase you can use a stratagem, unless noted in the strat.
Sure there is: the amount of CP that I have available. Nah, I'll stick with HH and older editions. Where my guys have the abilities and equipment that I paid for all of the time, instead of trying to play "resource management", instead of worrying about unit placement, movement, etc. Also: Initiative, AV, Facings......soooo nice to have back
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
But I do acknowledge that all of these arguments are based on my own personal preferences, and that your personal preference is just as valid as mine- and again, in the environs of Dakka, certainly more common than mine. I express my preferences and opinions not in the hope of changing anyone's mind- that's impossible. Instead, I do it to point out that other points of view do exist. What is a forum if not a place for the expression of multiple perspectives?
May 10th be as fun for you as 9th was for me brother. The wheel spins.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
But I do acknowledge that all of these arguments are based on my own personal preferences, and that your personal preference is just as valid as mine- and again, in the environs of Dakka, certainly more common than mine. I express my preferences and opinions not in the hope of changing anyone's mind- that's impossible. Instead, I do it to point out that other points of view do exist. What is a forum if not a place for the expression of multiple perspectives?
May 10th be as fun for you as 9th was for me brother. The wheel spins.
All of my Night Lords having Night Vision for a standard price is "unfluffy"? Interesting POV, I must say.
And if the ability/equipment is too powerful to be always on? Change or remove it.
And I think that I'll just stick with HH. 10th is looking to be just as much of a burning dumpster fire as 8th and 9th have been.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
But I do acknowledge that all of these arguments are based on my own personal preferences, and that your personal preference is just as valid as mine- and again, in the environs of Dakka, certainly more common than mine. I express my preferences and opinions not in the hope of changing anyone's mind- that's impossible. Instead, I do it to point out that other points of view do exist. What is a forum if not a place for the expression of multiple perspectives?
May 10th be as fun for you as 9th was for me brother. The wheel spins.
All of my Night Lords having Night Vision for a standard price is "unfluffy"? Interesting POV, I must say.
And if the ability/equipment is too powerful to be always on? Change or remove it.
And I think that I'll just stick with HH. 10th is looking to be just as much of a burning dumpster fire as 8th and 9th have been.
Have fun with HH.
Since you don't play 40k, I guess I'll be seeing less of your posts in the 40k areas of Dakka then. Considering how much of a dumpster fire you see 8th and 9th to be.
Blndmage wrote: Have fun with HH.
Since you don't play 40k, I guess I'll be seeing less of your posts in the 40k areas of Dakka then. Considering how much of a dumpster fire you see 8th and 9th to be.
A lot of us who post but don't play would like to enjoy 40k but can't because the rules are trash. We're not going to stop posting because hall monitor Blndmage doesn't want us here.
Blndmage wrote: I've been loving the game the last 2 editions, as do many I play with. Doesn't seem like trash to me.
Some people like Mcdonald's and others prefer to cook at home, objectively only one of those groups is consuming good food. 40k is the fast food of TT Wargames, it's easy, it's everywhere, and it takes more effort to have anything else.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
But I do acknowledge that all of these arguments are based on my own personal preferences, and that your personal preference is just as valid as mine- and again, in the environs of Dakka, certainly more common than mine. I express my preferences and opinions not in the hope of changing anyone's mind- that's impossible. Instead, I do it to point out that other points of view do exist. What is a forum if not a place for the expression of multiple perspectives?
May 10th be as fun for you as 9th was for me brother. The wheel spins.
All of my Night Lords having Night Vision for a standard price is "unfluffy"? Interesting POV, I must say.
And if the ability/equipment is too powerful to be always on? Change or remove it.
And I think that I'll just stick with HH. 10th is looking to be just as much of a burning dumpster fire as 8th and 9th have been.
Have fun with HH.
Since you don't play 40k, I guess I'll be seeing less of your posts in the 40k areas of Dakka then. Considering how much of a dumpster fire you see 8th and 9th to be.
I will and you will, except for these various "what you want to see in 40k" threads.
But that means I won't be having your back when the Aecus Decimus of the world come at you. Have fun with that. And your lack of thanks in those instances is noted.
Gadzilla666 wrote: I don't hate stratagems because they screw up balance, I hate them because of how silly they are from a narrative standpoint. Only one tank can use its smoke launchers. Only one unit of Loyalist Scum remembers that it's "transhuman". Only one unit of CSM are VotLW (and the next turn another is). Yuck. Give me abilities and equipment that I pay for and stick with the unit. Trophies of Judgment. Bloody Murder. Preysight. I want my guys to be what they should be all the time, not just when I spend some ephemeral resource.
Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
But I do acknowledge that all of these arguments are based on my own personal preferences, and that your personal preference is just as valid as mine- and again, in the environs of Dakka, certainly more common than mine. I express my preferences and opinions not in the hope of changing anyone's mind- that's impossible. Instead, I do it to point out that other points of view do exist. What is a forum if not a place for the expression of multiple perspectives?
May 10th be as fun for you as 9th was for me brother. The wheel spins.
All of my Night Lords having Night Vision for a standard price is "unfluffy"? Interesting POV, I must say.
And if the ability/equipment is too powerful to be always on? Change or remove it.
And I think that I'll just stick with HH. 10th is looking to be just as much of a burning dumpster fire as 8th and 9th have been.
Have fun with HH.
Since you don't play 40k, I guess I'll be seeing less of your posts in the 40k areas of Dakka then. Considering how much of a dumpster fire you see 8th and 9th to be.
I will and you will, except for these various "what you want to see in 40k" threads.
But that means I won't be having your back when the Aecus Decimus of the world come at you. Have fun with that. And your lack of thanks in those instances is noted.
Ya know what?
I apologize
I've been having a rough day at snapped at you.
Sorry.
Back on topic:
I'm sure we have a bunch of different actions units can take, but they're usually tied to a specific play mode. We'd need to expand actions to a generic list perhaps.
PenitentJake wrote: Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
That also goes for 40k which is why you roll to hit, then to wound, and then they roll a save. Do enough wounds and you always score a kill.
So if you load the special ammo you should be able to buy with points the ones that hit should always fo their special thing unless that special thing involves needing to wound.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
40k is over the top enough that every soldier that makes it to the tabletop would probably show up in a history book IRL.
Apologie accepted. And I agree: actions are an entirely underutilized piece of 8th/9th edition 40k. I'd like to see them used more. And I hope your day gets better, Blindmage.
The thing with strategems is there's 40-80 of them per faction. 40 to 80. So the implication is to play my faction at a basic level I have to have a rough idea of all my units, all their abilities, all the strategems, then on top of that all the strategems of the other player. If I don't it's very easy to get into a "gotcha" situation where the opponent plays a card I didn't know they had and deals a decisive blow. It's just not fun. Strategems are, to my mind, the absolute worst thing about 40Ks design.
Someone mentioned Boxing before. I teach Boxing. I teach in total 7 punches. Straight high and low, uppercut, cross, overhand, and two forms of body rip. That combines with movement for a sport that has no skill ceiling. A lot of complexity could be removed from 40k and if anything it would improve the skill factor of games, while allowing for things other than killing/defending.
I only need to know the stratagems for the models I'm using, in the list I'm using. If we're even using stratagems. They're not a mandatory part of the game, they're in the Advanced Rules section.
Blndmage wrote: I only need to know the stratagems for the models I'm using, in the list I'm using. If we're even using stratagems. They're not a mandatory part of the game, they're in the Advanced Rules section.
They're factually a standard part of the game. That's just reality.
Sure, you could agree to play without them, but I'd consider them a basic, stock standard part of the game. You could just know a small number, but that puts you at an inherent disadvantage. 9th ed 40K is designed with strategems in mind.
Beast_of_Guanyin wrote: The thing with strategems is there's 40-80 of them per faction. 40 to 80.
Certainly true, but I've never gone into a game with more than 15 strat cards chosen before the first turn, and while playing, the other 25-65 haven't bothered me in the slightest, because I didn't have to think about or look at any of them. But the trick is that the 15 (or fewer) that I do choose change from game to game based on the story, so I'm happy that the options are there on the occasions when the story is going to demand them.
So the implication is to play my faction at a basic level I have to have a rough idea of all my units, all their abilities, all the strategems, then on top of that all the strategems of the other player. If I don't it's very easy to get into a "gotcha" situation where the opponent plays a card I didn't know they had and deals a decisive blow.
Yes, but you do understand that your opponent is under the exact same obligation, and just as likely to get gotcha'd by you, right? And that either way, the moment would certainly contribute to the narrative of the battle. Also, in a Crusade game winning is far from everything- I'd prefer to lose a battle, but achieve two agendas and fufill my Penitent Vow, or pass a Saintly trial, or seize a territory than win and have none of that other stuff happen.
It's just not fun. Strategems are, to my mind, the absolute worst thing about 40Ks design.
At least you acknowledge it as an opinion, rather than claiming it's an objective fact- and a perfectly valid opinion it is BTW. Like I said, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind.
Someone mentioned Boxing before. I teach Boxing. I teach in total 7 punches. Straight high and low, uppercut, cross, overhand, and two forms of body rip. That combines with movement for a sport that has no skill ceiling.
Yeah- Kendo is similar. Three primary targets that are always valid, two others that are situational and one that is too dangerous to attempt if you're below a certain skill threshold.
But the thing is, we combine those strikes into techniques don't we?
Like I might jab to someone's head to raise their guard so I can pound the wind out of them with body shot and if I knock them back I can shuffle in to get more power in the follow through.
From my perspective, combinations in boxing, or waza in kendo are like stacking a strat with Miracle die or an aura and a bespoke subfaction trait. For some challenges you might need to stack 4 or 5 complimentary abilities to achieve the desired results- sometimes 2 will do it, just like you might need a four punch combination to get through somebody's guard and sometimes a quick one-two will do it.
But then, that's my opinion, and no more or less valid than your own.
A lot of complexity could be removed from 40k and if anything it would improve the skill factor of games, while allowing for things other than killing/defending.
A lot of complexity could be removed, but that wouldn't necessarily improve the skill factor, it would more likely just work a different set of skills.
And again, I can't emphasize this enough: my opinion is partially a product of the fact that winning a battle is seldom my highest priority when I play- I almost always care more about achieving Agendas or achieving other effects that advance longer term story goals, and I'm usually trying to achieve more than one of those things in a game, which means I'm making choices with both list building and tactics that are optimized to do a variety of different things that more competitive players are uninterested in exploring.
On a side note, I didn't actually start this thread from the narrative vs competitive point of view. I play my wargames in different kinds of environments - both tournaments and weird campaigns or megabattles at home. I think an interesting rules system benefits all kinds of players.
But I play mostly for these moments of intellectual satisfaction (or admiration for my opponent's). In other words, moments like "I thought I was done for, but after thinking hard I came up with a solution. Damn I'm smart!" or "That was an awesome move! I would have never come up with something so clever!"
A deep, varied toolbox offering several dimensions of valid interactions (like WM&H) provides such moments aplenty. I love thinking there's nothing I could do but then coming up with a veritable Rube Goldberg Machine of a plan which works! It gives me these moments of intellectual achievement, the feeling of being a clever and creative problem solver.
What made me disillusioned with Wh40k was realising that the only real plan I will ever form will be "I need more dice to throw at this thing to kill it". And that's just disapppointing, shallow gameplay experience.
Gadzilla666 wrote: Apologie accepted. And I agree: actions are an entirely underutilized piece of 8th/9th edition 40k. I'd like to see them used more. And I hope your day gets better, Blindmage.
gw40k is basically missed opportunities since 8th galore.
Keywords? underused and lacking.
Stratagems? simultaniously badly implemented, former equipment choices or autopicks ontop of wierd ressource management system.
Equipment limitations? completly arbitrary at this stage.
Streamlining? yes but not in a way that makes sense and is undermined by special rules only and bloated stratagem choices.
A big problem with stratagems is that if you don't know that the opponent have transhuman effects or can suddenly give the unit an invulnerable save or turn off your rerolls or make your unit fight last or only some of the models in the unit get to fight at all etc at any point with a stratagem you can just spend half your turn buffing up your unit with various characters and your own stratagems and then you charge after having spent half your army's turn doing so and then they pay like 1-2cp and completely negate it and win the game.
Or suddenly that buffed up Sanguinary Guard squad that might not be very sturdy but hits like a truck now heroic intervened twice as far as what any of your characters can even do and wiped out important stuff in your turn.
Or "oh so you can get guaranteed rolls and have stratagems that modify your miracle dice so even though you don't have 3 sixes right now you can still be 100% sure to charge something 23" away with your M6 unit and wipe out my expensive unit and support characters I thought safe behind 3 ruins half the table away?" Edit: (I remember this wrongly. This isn't a stratagem but a model ability. Strats only works on hit, wound and save rolls and not on charge or advance)
Or haven't played against Blood Angels before and they charge at you T1 after having moved 26" with fly and then charge you a further 2d6+1" with a full DC company squad that is buffed up with up to 25 TH(could be more than 5 thunderhammers in a unit) attacks that hit on 2+ or 3+ with full rerolls to hit(potentially even extra hits on 6s) and +1 to wound with bonus ap from doctrine bonus and an additional 6-30 chain sword hits that wound T7 on 4+ and have ap2. That could wipe out multiple vehicles/monsters and a small unit or two at the same time 35" away on average rolls (this after both Forlorn Fury and Death Company was heavily nerfed in 9th compared to 8th).
If strats only made it so you got +-1 to rolls or stats it wouldn't matter too much if you knew your opponents strats or not but some strats can in some situations create point swings worth hundreds of points of models on the table that leads to a snowball effect that in fact decides the entire game just because one player wasn't aware of one strat that in the right moment can decide it all.
KT ploys are easily implemented as they are just a couple of options. They also don't seem to have too much impact, so remembering them is a nice bonus, but forgetting about them is hardly gamebreaking.
I am in the middle on this. I loved stragems in Cities of Death, or Planetstrike, or Apocalypse, where it felt like you were using the stratagem to pay for something tangible that you could work into your strategy. High command had allocated you an ammunition stockpile or a heavy weapons emplacement or an orbital bombardment, or your troops had specifically trained to take advantage of plunging fire or combat engineering or something. These are absolutely narrative, and help reinforce the story of a game. There were others that made sense midgame too. I think current stratagems that do pre-game stuff fall into this category, and I am broadly fine with these as a concept. Deployment shenanigans are also great as an idea. These all represent resources being allocated by high command to your force.
However, strategems that are pieces of standard equipment make no sense and harm the narrative for me. Why does every sergeant carry a meltabomb, but they can only use it if the army commander has enough favours to call in from high command? A squad just has to leave the meltabomb hanging from their belt and get annihilated by the dreadnought because the commander used their favours on something else earlier in the battle. Likewise for smoke launchers- not enough favours left so your tank is going to stay in the open and die, no you are not allowed to press the smoke button! These should all return to being standard equipment.
I also find the multitude of strategems that just make stuff more killy or more durable etc to be a bit much. Many of them are individually lore friendly and can be worked into a narrative, but it is weird that they are both so limited in scope across the army if they are so effective, yet too many buffs can be layered onto the same unit to make it ridiculously powerful.
So from my perspective I put current strategems in the same category as actions- good concept, poorly realised.
Cyel wrote: KT ploys are easily implemented as they are just a couple of options. They also don't seem to have too much impact, so remembering them is a nice bonus, but forgetting about them is hardly gamebreaking.
True dat, but its like half a dozen ploys per team, and multiple teams - and all written with the usual flowery gw verbiage. I lost interest in wmh and infinity because of the amount of book keeping involved and 'activated' abilities. I'd really rather not engage in that again.
Thdt said, we can find commin groynd. Wouldnt mind 3 or 4 'generic/universal' ploys (shoot/fight more than once, last stand, cover bonus) that everyone uses - rather than everyone having bespoke content. But iid really rather they were rare and limited.
PenitentJake wrote: Here's the thing: if you box, you know not every punch is a knock out; if you fence you know not every hit is a point, if you shoot, you know that not every hit is a killshot.
Abilities that are always on are the things that are unfluffy, bs bolter porn. Moments of true heroism being rare? That's fluffy as feth. Not every soldier gets a medal.
The 'knockout' and 'killshot' are when you pass your checks and roll your 6s, not when you suddenly in a moment of divine inspiration declare 'I'm going to be effective now!' and throw a punch with three times the weight behind it. I know not every hit is a killshot, but why would I be the one deciding when it is or isn't by activating a special power?
I remember the time a last surviving Guardsman miraculously passed three armor saves and then took the last two wounds off a Greater Daemon. That's a 'moment of true heroism' and he earned his medal.
I don't remember all the times I activated Canned Stratagem #347 and got a bonus to my offensive power. Nobody gets a medal for loading the special ammo because Command told them to use it for the next five minutes. Heroism on demand isn't interesting.
PenitentJake wrote: And for what it's worth, it's hard to understand complaints about lethality and wombo combo in one breath, and a desire for those abilities to be always on in the next.
And finally, if anything, the cost system for strats is a greater cost, than paying for always-on abilities for points, and it's paid on the batlefield in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles as a part of the narrative rather than at the list building stage.
1. It is possible to simultaneously rework abilities to be always-on and also tune the game to reduce lethality. There's zero contradiction there, those are separate things.
2. The 'wombo combo' complaint comes specifically from those abilities being powerful but temporary, which encourages you to stack them on the same unit to devastating effect. If you have a stratagem that lets you re-roll misses and another that gives you MW on 6s and another that gives exploding hits, activating all of those on the same unit is a wombo combo. That unit just natively getting to re-roll 1s wouldn't be nearly as impactful and, more importantly, wouldn't be something that allows a single squad to suddenly triple their firepower without warning.
3. Abilities paid for by points are thus accounted in the points total, meaning an ability-heavy unit costs more. This is part of that 'reduce lethality' thing. Abilities coming out of your points total means you aren't getting 2000pts of troops and then a bunch of freebie force-multipliers on top of that.
4. The current structure of the stratagem system tacitly encourages you to blow all your CP up front on optimal recipients, which can often be determined at the listbuilding stage. AOS's implementation is significantly better in terms of using abilities in response to emergent opportunities and obstacles. Having stratagems geared more towards command abilities and less towards 'do more damage' would considerably help as well.
I wish stratagems would do the "cool activities" thing better. They seem to be the perfect concept for this: have a variety of cool stuff to enable heroic moments, with a reasonably easy system to manage them. Sadly that is not how it turned out.
Maybe this will get reworked in 10th, who knows. Something I would like is a set of generic stratagems for all armies to use, with more specific ones being worked into the unit datasheets. That way it might be more balanced, and each unit could get something specific to them to shine once or twice a game. I am sure GW would mess it up, but I like the idea anyway.
A lot of the problems with "cool things" is that the mechanical levers these "cool things" should interact with have been removed from the core game engine.
While I haven't gone through every book, common equipment Stratagems shouldn't be stratagems - Smoke Launchers should just be 1/game/unit, while Meltabombs should give the option to replace that model's attacks against VEHICLE/MONSTER/BUILDING, say.
Dysartes wrote: A lot of the problems with "cool things" is that the mechanical levers these "cool things" should interact with have been removed from the core game engine.
While I haven't gone through every book, common equipment Stratagems shouldn't be stratagems - Smoke Launchers should just be 1/game/unit, while Meltabombs should give the option to replace that model's attacks against VEHICLE/MONSTER/BUILDING, say.
Smoke I agree. Much prefer them as 1/game/tank. When you have a line of rhinos rushing across no mans land to deliver their cargo, makes no sense that only one of them would pop smoke.
I’m sorta torn on metlabombs though. For me, they were always handed out at the end of list building. So one, or maybe two squads would get one. If I was lucky, and the right squad was in the right place, I might get to use it. When it happened, it was glorious, where the marine with the 5 point upgrade stood on the smoking ruins of a significantly more expensive tank. But from an army feature POV, almost never came up. As a strat, it’s more representative that marines carry demo charges for just these situations. So that aspect of the army sees play.
Of course, I think GW dropped the ball on meltabombs in 8/9th in general. And krack grenades to a lesser extent. Should be able to use them in melee. Or at least “shoot” them like a pistol.
Cyel wrote: KT ploys are easily implemented as they are just a couple of options. They also don't seem to have too much impact, so remembering them is a nice bonus, but forgetting about them is hardly gamebreaking.
I lost interest in wmh and infinity because of the amount of book keeping involved and 'activated' abilities.
i agree with the message but bookkeeping in infinity? Theres barely any of it, unless you mean keeping track of what camo is what unit and the status effects (which are all just tokens so not really mentally draining)
Cyel wrote: KT ploys are easily implemented as they are just a couple of options. They also don't seem to have too much impact, so remembering them is a nice bonus, but forgetting about them is hardly gamebreaking.
I lost interest in wmh and infinity because of the amount of book keeping involved and 'activated' abilities.
i agree with the message but bookkeeping in infinity? Theres barely any of it, unless you mean keeping track of what camo is what unit and the status effects (which are all just tokens so not really mentally draining)
Infinity was more the tracking of weapon profiles and constant math kind of book keeping. Found myself with my head in the book for 90% of the time and I wasn't actually 'enjoying' the games. Neither was my group.
Once you get the long and short orders figured out it is pretty simple, however i think they have really ruined the game starting in N3.
They copied the modern approach and added bloat in the hacking department with variant hacking devices with each one having a list of programs instead of a single generic hacking device that everybody had access to that did the same 7 things.
This i could see as a problem of having your nose in the book.
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I was fortunate enough to have all my army lists printed out on the fan army builder that used to be around called "infinity pool" that listed all the stats on the army list so you didn't even need the book.
Then they added the command token/point system among other things.
Having gone back and played an N2 game last weekend i can say it what much more entertaining, easy to follow and exciting compared to where N4 is today.
johnpjones1775 wrote: i'm not 100% sure i fully understand the question here, but in regards to chaos here's my 2 cents
i think they do chaos wrong. completely
chaos demons and chaos marine codexes are stupid imho
i think there should be codex khorne, nurgle, tzeench, slanesh, and unaligned.
khorne would include khorne deamons, WEs, and khorne cultists/traitor guard for example.
"Chaos is done wrong, they should be rigidly forced to fight only with like-minded and similar individuals" lol, the take just keeps getting dumber.
johnpjones1775 wrote: i'm not 100% sure i fully understand the question here, but in regards to chaos here's my 2 cents
i think they do chaos wrong. completely
chaos demons and chaos marine codexes are stupid imho
i think there should be codex khorne, nurgle, tzeench, slanesh, and unaligned.
khorne would include khorne deamons, WEs, and khorne cultists/traitor guard for example.
"Chaos is done wrong, they should be rigidly forced to fight only with like-minded and similar individuals" lol, the take just keeps getting dumber.
GW' mindset that is failing at chaos since early 2000's has started to infect the players, sadly.
The problem is the way chaos should be handled, as a singular customizable book covering marked and unmarked forces /legions and warbands etc daemons and cults, is not the way GW makes the most reccuring money. That gw makes by incrimentally cutting out books from the main book and putting them up as standalones barely worth their price 2/3rds of the time.
a_typical_hero wrote: I don't think splitting Chaos into 5 books (4 cults + undivided) would be a problem, if they could be allied / mixed with less restriction.
It is a problem though, because to split them out they get flanderised because GW insited on splitting out the CULT legions and doing so in the worst possible and most stupid way. Also on the allied part, remember that nowadays you require a whole other book to field a plague marine. It's just bad from a custommer perspective.
Hence why desptie being a khornate at heart the WE codex just is a tragedy. Predictably they fethed it up severly. No view of khorne as a god of war in general that values discipline just as much as a form of strength. No full unit roster, indeed if we would play a mechanically deeper edition in 40k this book would be plenty DOA on the rules side aswell thanks to a "roster" that is basically CSM - everything not melee.
Key units are missing, Red Butchers f.e., Khornes teeth havocs, etc. Yet we get possessed but +1 and more possessed. (also where are the non-zerker WE? you know those that exist since not all got the nails?) Not even interesting possessed but just melee possessed.
Bloodpact / blooded traitorguard instead of cultist rabble nr 3? Nope, feth that, despite khorne cults being some of the most militant and organised cults there are. Here take a bunch of junkies instead.
And the same can be stated about TS, even moreso.. And DG.
So not even if they insist on the god-csm-design ethos for all 4 + the rest they just failed once again. After failing the first time with TS and barely making DG interesting.
And funnily enough they not just cut options out of the CSM dex to flanderise the cult legions, nope, they also managed to print on the front page a chaos lord that you can't even legally field due to cutting out even more options from the lord entry.
I understand all your points, but they are not related to Chaos being split up. I mean... not directly.
You could have one big book of Chaos where everything that annoys you is still there and you could have separate books where every entry is exactly how you want it.
It is more a problem with how the codex authors and/or model designers handle the faction.
Read over the 3.5th Chaos 'dex at the weekend. What a masterpiece. I can see why a lot of players are disappointed with modern GW list writing.
To be honest, most of the 3rd ed codices are very flavourful, would have been great if they stuck to that pattern. Started slipping as quickly as 4th edition...
a_typical_hero wrote: I understand all your points, but they are not related to Chaos being split up. I mean... not directly.
You could have one big book of Chaos where everything that annoys you is still there and you could have separate books where every entry is exactly how you want it.
It is more a problem with how the codex authors and/or model designers handle the faction.
The splitting out is why these dexes require such "distinction marks " that activly sabotage the factions and make them flanderised messes in the first place. How you can state that this is not directly an issue is personally beyond me.
But you have a point, simply pulling everything back into one book will not fix what has been broken by the flanderised structure and you are right aswell on the differing writers / designers being more problematic.
Haighus wrote: Read over the 3.5th Chaos 'dex at the weekend. What a masterpiece. I can see why a lot of players are disappointed with modern GW list writing.
To be honest, most of the 3rd ed codices are very flavourful, would have been great if they stuck to that pattern. Started slipping as quickly as 4th edition...
Yep that is why all our chaos players just use the 3.5 codex as the codex of choice in our retro games. 4th still had quite a few great dexes, nids, orks, black templar and tau come to mind.
Someone mentioned Boxing before. I teach Boxing. I teach in total 7 punches. Straight high and low, uppercut, cross, overhand, and two forms of body rip. That combines with movement for a sport that has no skill ceiling. A lot of complexity could be removed from 40k and if anything it would improve the skill factor of games, while allowing for things other than killing/defending.
You don't teach them how to place oneself in such a way that a judge doesn't see a headbutt or how it is done to make as if the other dude is making the headbutt and not you? how to feign injury, spit out the protector after soft punch, a large chunk of the training in combat sports is knowing how bending the rules or outright cheating is done, because when someone semi proficient at it does it in a match and you did not train for it, you will get destroyed or even badly injured. Even in technicaly non contact sports it is done, as long as there is a second person on the field, the trainers always go over how you can get got. Sports are incomperable to table top games, because losing a game of w40k will never mean you are never going to be able to play w40k properly again. Save maybe if someone manages to stab you in an eye ball with one of those blue pointy tapes measures from starter sets.
The idea of skill being the determinant in table top games is all nice and well. But it breaks apart as soon as we enter the zone of GW writing and designing their rules. Often, what GW thinks is cool non kill/defend rule, ends up never used or worse a detriment to the armies strenght. And it only get broken up, by times when GW does cool stuff for specific armies and it ends up being like Votan grudge points pre nerf or the cool and characterful rules Inari had in 8th with double dipping on stratagems etc.
I don't think it even works in HH, because the armies, while most marines, are still different enough to create tiers of armies, units and builds. And cool rules, in the form of lets say giving player the option to go full mechanized soon end up very bad for the balance of the game.
GW' mindset that is failing at chaos since early 2000's has started to infect the players, sadly.
The problem is the way chaos should be handled, as a singular customizable book covering marked and unmarked forces /legions and warbands etc daemons and cults, is not the way GW makes the most reccuring money. That gw makes by incrimentally cutting out books from the main book and putting them up as standalones barely worth their price 2/3rds of the time.
I would be theoretically okay with putting all of Chaos in one big book under the caveat that I could still comfortably play Daemons without CSM. I do not in any shape or form give a single gak about taking spiky marines with my greater daemons.
