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 Tyran wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

List building isn't tactics.

It's strategy.

I will say, though, I don't want list-building to be of excessive importance. Like, I don't mind if it's possible to build a bad list, but it should be easy to build a good list. And the difference between a good list and an optimized to the gills list shouldn't be very large.

If anything list building is logistics


but listbuilding is always a big part of wargaming. getting your tools into the right place and the right time means nothing if you havn't brought the tools in the first place.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
If anything list building is logistics

Spoiler:

The planning and coordination of the movement of materials, and other details of any large activity, such as a business or a political campaign

but listbuilding is always a big part of wargaming. getting your tools into the right place and the right time means nothing if you havn't brought the tools in the first place.

I think we can all agree that there's been points in 40k where list building was TOO important.

Say what you will about 10th, but it's pretty well balanced. A decent list can go up against a hard list without player skill and luck becoming irrelevant. That wasn't always true. For all my nostalgia for 7th... Yeah, balance was not strong.

 Da Boss wrote:
Looking at it now, with a fully complete range, it seems far more attractive to me to play 3e or 4e. At the time I was extremely annoyed that we didn't have our main battle tank available as a kit you could buy for over a decade. It's all well and good to say "You're an Ork player! You're supposed to love kitbashing!" but like, it doesn't say that anywhere in the published materials does it? It doesn't say "you're a second rate faction, we won't be properly supporting you with a complete model range, just do it yourself!" or even have articles in WD showing how to kitbash a battlewagon or what the dimensions should be, or a note in the codex about it or anything.

From that perspective, as a game at the time, it felt very incomplete. And seeing Marine Codex after Marine Codex come out (even in the Armageddon codex, a campaign entirely about fighting Orks, there was 1 Ork list and 3 Imperial, 2 of which were Space Marines!) with new variants and so on was really salt in the wound.

That's why 5e was my favourite time actually playing the game, though I agree about a lot of it's rules issues - I got a battlewagon miniature and updated trucks and an update to the plastic kit to actually include the rokkits that were so essential to playing the army.

But like I said, as an old fart now looking back at the editions, I think I'd quite like to give some 3e or 4e a go with my complete collection.

I totally get it. Despite the updates in C: Armageddon and Chapter Approved, that book felt very left behind after the 3.5 books for other factions came out, and then more option-laden books of early 4th. I think it was close to 10 years before Orks they got a new codex? Amusingly (or not) my brothers second army was Dark Eldar. . . Another book that didn't get updated forever. He stayed competetive with both, but the frustration was real.

For kits, a lot of armies started out with missing models. The Land Raider, Wave Serpent and Defiler didn't release for a while. I remember a WD article about how to convert your own Wave Serpent at some point. But I think those all were released by the time 4th came around? The Battlewagon took its time!

 catbarf wrote:

Insectum7 wrote:Sure, boyz were 9 points, but they hit hard with their 4 attacks on the charge+deny saves better than 4+.

A friendly reminder also that when Boyz were 9pts, Guardsmen were 8pts. All the chaff infantry got significantly reduced in cost in 4th Ed, so it wasn't just Orks that got horde-ier.

I totally forgot about them bein 8 points, hah.I dunno the exact dates, but I think it was 3.5 Where the Guardsman squad went to 60 base. The cheaper Ork didn't come around until almost the end of 4th edition. Maybe 4-5 years later? That 60 point squad came with the (cool AF) platoon structure though, yeah? So mandatory command that you didn't purchase before. I don't know how that all shook out balance-wise. I'd like to think GW figured out quuckly that the 8 pt Guardsman didn't make too much sense, while the 9 point Choppa Ork was worth its 9, or close enough.

Insectum7 wrote:Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

Yeah, the problem in implementation was that when about half the factions are 3+, and those factions were played by a disproportionate percentage of the playerbase, there was direct incentive to optimize against 3+ and just grit your teeth when you play someone else. It's a great example of how meta can skew balance, much like how Knights being the boogeyman in 8th left the door open for horde armies to win against players optimized to kill Knights.

So like I said earlier I think this is one area where the diversity of your local meta could have a lot of impact on your perceptions of earlier editions. If you had a wide variety of opponents then the AP system meant you needed a variety of tools to deal with various threats. If you mostly fought MEQs, then you took AP3 where possible and relegated worse AP weapons to being situational at best. If your experience was the former, then recent editions can feel more bland in that there are less hard counters and more generically effective weapons. If your experience was the latter, then recent editions can feel more liberating in that weapons that used to be ineffective due to not reaching a relevant breakpoint now have more utility.

I've toyed over the years with the idea of a system that is neither all-or-nothing nor linear modifiers, but rather logarithmic/exponential. Eg instead of an autocannon completely denying a 4+ save but doing nothing to a 3+ save, maybe it drops the 4+ to a 6+, but the 3+ to a 4+. The problem is just finding a way to implement that without requiring an AP-vs-save chart, bespoke armor penetration profiles per weapon, or some other solution that might approach mathematical perfection while being obnoxiously inelegant to actually play.

Big time agree that meta will shape your perceptions. Thankfully, mine was quite diverse for all of the 3-4 era. Orks, Nids, DE, Eldar, Guard, Chaos, Tau and Necrons. I was sometimes the only loyalist player (several played Chaos).

On AP3+, that made playing with Necrons kind of interesting for me, since they didn't have much access to AP 2-3. I spent a lot of dice bouncing off Terminators trying to find otherways to mitigate their effectiveness. Also, if Armor3+ skew is an issue, kinda ironic that HH sticks with that paradigm for all its hot SM on SM action.

On system design: I know your pain, I've tried it myself! Let me know if you come up with something Save mods with very constrained modifier stats feels like the best start, but I hate losing some of the weapon distinction at the low end. Shifting model stats around more aggressively is acceptible but starts pushing required rolls around in ways I don't like, etc etc. D6s require things to be very tight, and I don't want to move to other dice for loss of accessibility.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
AP could only work in a game environment where armor saves had a similar distribution across the factions. Think Battletech, where no one side has a monopoly on mechs. They have flavors and fighting styles, but the energy/heat/ammo interaction is the same for everyone (though tech can vary).

GW deliberately created factions with certain levels of armor in order to differentiate them, and that creates a lot of skew, which is further exacerbated by the fact that 3+ saves are the flagship of the game, and disproportionately represented.

Yeah that's why the whole idea fell flat. If every army had a mix of low-save chaff, mid-save regulars, and high-save elites then there would be tactical depth in bringing the right weapons to bear against the right targets. But the factions were designed the opposite way: an Ork army was barely anything other than 6+, SM barely anything but 3+. So in practice you would use your flamers and plasma guns exactly the same: either shooting flamers into marines or plasma guns into boyz, because their optimal target just wasn't in the game.

Playing rock-paper-scissors with list building is poor substitute in my view. Okay I tell my friend I want to play my Orks next week, so he tools his list to have all flamers and whirlwinds and wipes me off the table with no casualties. Or I bring a bunch of terminators to game night and then try to find the guy who brought Necrons and challenge him knowing they struggle with 2+ saves. Is that "strategic depth"? Well yes, but it's also unsportsmanlike and doesn't make for fun games. It's a good strategy in a war to pick a one-sided fight that you can win without needing good tactics, but I don't want to spend hours playing out a game that had the conclusion determined at list selection.

With the modifier system though, I feel like saves are just a second roll to wound tacked-on for legacy reasons and granularity limits. It definitely lost the distinctiveness of the all-or-nothing AP system.

 Tyran wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

List building isn't tactics.

I never said listbuilding is tactics. Listbuilding is making sure you have the options available to employ different tactics on the tabletop. Listbuilding is giving your character Meltabombs. Tactics is getting to use them effectively.

Actually that gets me thinking, you could do something interesting with listbuilding-as-strategy in an extended campaign. Like maybe you and your opponent both requisition new units in secret, and you're each trying to counter whatever your opponent is doing. In that context individual games don't need to be evenly matched because they're part of a larger game, and tailoring your list is both expected and subject to the campaign rules for adding new units (which would presumably be limited). In a campaign with many players/factions you would need to (for example) decide whether to take a Hellhound to get an advantage over the Orks in your next game or save up Supply Points to buy a Leman Russ for future games against Chaos Marines.

That said, I don't think 40k was ever really designed around that playstyle. There were usually rules for it published somewhere but it wasn't an assumption of game (as with say Necromunda).

 catbarf wrote:


I've toyed over the years with the idea of a system that is neither all-or-nothing nor linear modifiers, but rather logarithmic/exponential. Eg instead of an autocannon completely denying a 4+ save but doing nothing to a 3+ save, maybe it drops the 4+ to a 6+, but the 3+ to a 4+. The problem is just finding a way to implement that without requiring an AP-vs-save chart, bespoke armor penetration profiles per weapon, or some other solution that might approach mathematical perfection while being obnoxiously inelegant to actually play.

Points values should work like that. You compare expected results, hit probabilities so that you get multipliers. I have no idea how GW does points, but they rarely work out that well. A unit with twice the hit probability should cost twice the points. Twice the save potential, twice the points.

The problem is that AP doesn't point well because it's all or nothing, so then you try to rate it in that way, but as discussed, if the opponent maxes AP 2/3, the actual value of it is zero, not what was paid.

And how do you price those weapons? They hit everything exactly the same in terms of hit or wound probability, making AP one of the largest swings. What percent of the cost should be tied to that?

Plus, GW also can put hard limits on things based on squad structure and weapon type prevalence. The points values in 6th ed. Fantasy (perhaps the best one they did) only went so far; it was the selection rules about unit types and character limits that made it a game of tactics rather than a card-driven herofest as in the previous version.

I get GW's desire to see save modifiers get toned down, and they should have been. When every weapon gets a -1 save modifier, you're just cluttering up the design space. A sensible decision would simply have been to reduce all save modifiers by one, and see what happens. Marines would be even more resilient, but orks and IG would actually get armor saves, and intermediate saves of 4 and 5 would become more interesting.

Maybe next edition, right?

I'll echo Hellebore and say there's also a lore problem at work: space marine bolters are always explicitly described as using "armor-piercing rounds" so of course designers want them to have some kind of AP value. But bolters are the standard weapon of the game, not the rare specialist weapons the fluff portrays them as. And most other guns (shuriken, gauss, pulse) are described as "armor piercing" in some way as well; what isn't? Lasguns (unless they're "hotshot")? Shootas? Heavy stubbers?

The real answer in my view is to finally just merge armor into Toughness and be done with it, but I think GW is unlikely to do that (too much of an overhaul).

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
I'll echo Hellebore and say there's also a lore problem at work: space marine bolters are always explicitly described as using "armor-piercing rounds" so of course designers want them to have some kind of AP value. But bolters are the standard weapon of the game, not the rare specialist weapons the fluff portrays them as. And most other guns (shuriken, gauss, pulse) are described as "armor piercing" in some way as well; what isn't? Lasguns (unless they're "hotshot")? Shootas? Heavy stubbers?

The real answer in my view is to finally just merge armor into Toughness and be done with it, but I think GW is unlikely to do that (too much of an overhaul).

IIRC, their Lord of the Rings rules set did not have toughness. It's downstairs, and I could look, but the cat is very cozy on my feet.

I never actually played the game, mind you. I bought the boxed sets for the figures, which were far and away better than anything else GW had done up to that point, particularly in plastic. But I digress.

Yes, the lore is kind of all over the place. I recall a thread where we noted that bolters were supposed to be caseless, yet there are tons of illustrations featuring casings flying around.

What's funny is that if you look closely at the casings, they are rimmed, not something that would easily fit into a magazine. My surmise is that the artists saw some Webley .455 or the S&W .38/200 casings and used those as their model.

Yeah toughness and armor were a single value ("resilience"?) merged together. Usually just armor since most units were human-like but for monsters and such it was also physical bulk.

It also had an odd chart to calculate the wound roll, where every two points of difference would modify the dice.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
I'll echo Hellebore and say there's also a lore problem at work: space marine bolters are always explicitly described as using "armor-piercing rounds" so of course designers want them to have some kind of AP value. But bolters are the standard weapon of the game, not the rare specialist weapons the fluff portrays them as. And most other guns (shuriken, gauss, pulse) are described as "armor piercing" in some way as well; what isn't? Lasguns (unless they're "hotshot")? Shootas? Heavy stubbers?

The real answer in my view is to finally just merge armor into Toughness and be done with it, but I think GW is unlikely to do that (too much of an overhaul).

Imo that description fits right unto the 3-7th AP diagram. Bolters and other high tech guns were excellent at piercing common light armor types. Guaedsmen, Orks and Guardians did not get a save. Sufficiently tough or advanced armor still offered good protection though.

Lorewise, Guardsman still got their save against Orks and little Nids though (and traitor Guard/PDF/Cultists.) A nice 33% chance, which definitely ain't nothing. Guardsmen Armor gave them some protection against the most common small arms in the galaxy.

Game experience? Lots of AP 5 around because that's just what a lot of people played, and maybe that's a dissapointment to some But lorewise it still checks out.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:Points values should work like that. You compare expected results, hit probabilities so that you get multipliers. I have no idea how GW does points, but they rarely work out that well. A unit with twice the hit probability should cost twice the points. Twice the save potential, twice the points.

The problem is that AP doesn't point well because it's all or nothing, so then you try to rate it in that way, but as discussed, if the opponent maxes AP 2/3, the actual value of it is zero, not what was paid.

And how do you price those weapons? They hit everything exactly the same in terms of hit or wound probability, making AP one of the largest swings. What percent of the cost should be tied to that?

You price them the same way you price anything else- heuristically, and refined by playtesting. Any decently complex wargame will have mechanics that are contingent on the table, on the matchup, on the rest of the list, on the moment-to-moment game state, and thus impossible to objectively assess the value of.

The example of 40K's hit probability, a fixed value that never changes, is the (dull, shallow, simplistic) exception to the norm. But even that isn't so clear-cut, since a unit with double the hit probability doesn't have double the resilience or double the board presence, so it probably isn't actually worth as much as two separate units. Then again, maybe it's worth more if your game uses an activation system or buff system (hello, stratagems) that incentivizes fewer, better units. Or maybe it's barely worth more than the 'baseline' unit, because double the hit probability doesn't mean much if the unit's firepower is negligible and its value is as a meatshield. Trying to assign points values by algorithm with the expectation that they reflect reality on the table is a fool's errand.

Points are an opportunity cost to the player to shape listbuilding, not an objective measurement of value. You're just picking a number such that an option is worth considering in some context, neither an auto-include nor a never-take, and that can be done even when its actual utility on the table will depend on a plethora of other factors. The problem here is that if a local meta doesn't align to what the designers consider a representative environment for the game, then those differing conditions may make some choices auto-includes or never-takes, or spoil external balance between armies. That applies to a lot more than just AP systems, and you can observe similar issues with meta and counter-meta builds throughout the game's history.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

Yeah that's why the whole idea fell flat. If every army had a mix of low-save chaff, mid-save regulars, and high-save elites then there would be tactical depth in bringing the right weapons to bear against the right targets. But the factions were designed the opposite way: an Ork army was barely anything other than 6+, SM barely anything but 3+. So in practice you would use your flamers and plasma guns exactly the same: either shooting flamers into marines or plasma guns into boyz, because their optimal target just wasn't in the game.

Imo this doesn't really track. Flamers had a solid role against Marines because you could hit a bunch of them and still Assault afterwards. They weren't sub-optimal in my view. They just played a different role. Likewise, Plasma was fine against Orks because it could serve as an anti light vehicle/Mega Armor/Killa Kan weapon at a range the flamer couldn't compete at. Both weapons had a solid place against either army.

Quick math! A single plasma shot has a 55% chance to kill a Marine. (.666×.83) If a Flamer hits 4 Marines it's a 66.6% chance (4×.5×.333) to kill one. 49.9% chance (3x.5x.333) with the template hitting 3 of them. That's not really so sub-optimal to me. Flamer is better into groups, into cover, and pre-assault. Plasma is better at range and if you can rapid fire.

"Needing" AP3 is kinda a myth, imo. They didn't benefit from cover against lighter weapons and were typically not taken in huge numbers. They were also at an intersection where they weren't bad to shoot at with high volume of fire anti-horde weapons, nor bad to shoot at with anti-vehicle weapons.

Another math experiment gives a Lascannon hit has a .83 probability to kill a Marine. That's the same as 7.5 lasgun hits (.333×.333×7.5=.83). Just four Guardsmen rapid firing does slightly better than the squad heavy weapon. That's something to lean on.

That's not really how chance works, you cannot just multiply the probability by the number off attacks.

e.g. a plasma gun in RF doesn't have 110% to kill a Marine, it is more like 79.75 % (1 - chance to not kill a marine = 1- (0.45*0.45) = 1 - 0.2025).
To be even more specific it has a 49.5% to kill one marine and a 30.25% to kill two marines.

That's also why trying to balance weight of dice weapons never really works, the math gets exponentially more complex with each additional attack.

For the rest,
4 flamer hits have a 51.74% to kill at least one marine.
3 flamer hits is 42.09%
7.5 lasgun hits is 58.58%

And as you can see, none of them is as reliable as an individual plasma or lascannon hit.

Insectum's conflating averages with probability of success, but it also isn't rocket science to calculate both. The latter is more useful for high-impact single-trial events, while the former is more useful for approximating the outcome of multiple trials.

The fact that a flamer or volley of lasguns is actually slightly less likely to kill any Marines (but has a small chance to kill several) doesn't substantially affect the point he's making.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
If anything list building is logistics

Spoiler:

The planning and coordination of the movement of materials, and other details of any large activity, such as a business or a political campaign

but listbuilding is always a big part of wargaming. getting your tools into the right place and the right time means nothing if you havn't brought the tools in the first place.

I'd argue that logistics is a part of strategy.
If you aren't incorporating logistics in your strategical planning, then you are going to have the same experience Imperial Japan did during WW2.
In other words,

Orkeosaurus wrote:Actually that gets me thinking, you could do something interesting with listbuilding-as-strategy in an extended campaign. Like maybe you and your opponent both requisition new units in secret, and you're each trying to counter whatever your opponent is doing. In that context individual games don't need to be evenly matched because they're part of a larger game, and tailoring your list is both expected and subject to the campaign rules for adding new units (which would presumably be limited). In a campaign with many players/factions you would need to (for example) decide whether to take a Hellhound to get an advantage over the Orks in your next game or save up Supply Points to buy a Leman Russ for future games against Chaos Marines.

That said, I don't think 40k was ever really designed around that playstyle. There were usually rules for it published somewhere but it wasn't an assumption of game (as with say Necromunda).

Necromunda, Mordhiem, SW:A, etc are resaonably good examples of this, especially played with a fixed group. You do your best to put together a good list at the beginning, but over time you can do a bit of tailoring of your force against how your opponents play, and how they choose to upgrade their lists.

However, in the campaigns we played, folks seemed to upgrade their forces more based on a general-goodnes of an upgrade and what their faction allows rather than specifically tailoring against another force.

Something I've long advocated for but almost no one does is for folks to play a game and then switch armies and play a second game. This is probably tough in a game like 40k where "Knowing your army" is so important but it might go a long way to figuring out whether a loss is over tactics or listbuilding. If the same army dominates in both games then you know listbuilding is probably playing a significant role.

JNAProductions wrote:

I will say, though, I don't want list-building to be of excessive importance. Like, I don't mind if it's possible to build a bad list, but it should be easy to build a good list. And the difference between a good list and an optimized to the gills list shouldn't be very large.

This is an advantage of simpler systems like Grimdark Future. With less variables, it's easier to build a good list, and far less likely to benefit a "Trick" army that combines special and factions rules into combos that surprise your opponent.

Maybe some folks miss getting surprised by a deadly combo, but I suspect many folks would rather have tactics win the day than listbuliding.

 catbarf wrote:
Insectum's conflating averages with probability of success, but it also isn't rocket science to calculate both. The latter is more useful for high-impact single-trial events, while the former is more useful for approximating the outcome of multiple trials.

The fact that a flamer or volley of lasguns is actually slightly less likely to kill any Marines (but has a small chance to kill several) doesn't substantially affect the point he's making.

He is using the wrong weapons.

What I remember being the marine killers by excellence were blast weapons with AP3 or better. The ability of a vehicle to outright delete a Marine squad (and thus likely make all their points back) while still keep excellent anti-horde capability was inherently broken IMHO.

I remember competitive 5th Guard lists, they rarely brought plasma guns to kill marines, they had tank mounted plasma cannons and battlecannons for that.
By the end of 7th, you needed AP2 because you weren't dealing with Marines anymore, you were dealing with Centurions and Riptides and Wraithknights that could delete entire squads (be it Marines or horde) per turn.

That idyllic 3rd-4th era of a still small scale infantry game, I didn't experience it. And I'm not sure I want to when most of my collection is made of large monsters that were unsuited for 3rd-4th.

Nids were still pretty scary in 3rd or 4th ed, and monsters in general were pretty dangerous as they tended to have enough toughness to make them immune to infantry.

I remember my necrons having a hard time against the likes of wraithlords and carnis. Vehicles? No problem, gauss counters them. Monsters though? Now they were scary.

I meant that most of my models do not have 3rd-4th rules.

Oh. In that case, yeah, can't go retro :(