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I have hand-picked all the factors from Open War that lengthen the game (meeting battle, acid rain, restoratives, night battle) and I choose one with every game (opponents permission of course).

I have yet to see a game end by tabling since I started doing that.

The Open War "twists" or whatever are a good way to address that. The easiest way? Tons of terrain.

So five editions of the game after 3rd ed 40 k .And GW still have not addressed the core issues with the 40k battle game.

Just more simplistic knee jerk reactions that lead to rules bloat..

Yes, as many have pointed out, shooting is too effective.
But rather than players having to compensate with tons of L.O.S blocking terrain, why not fix the rules ?

Use a more interactive game turn, and add simple suppression mechanic.

Is it that shooting is too effective or is it that shooting is too effective when comboed with other units?

Because the game itself is really secondary to selling models - something they're doing more of right now than in the past 10-15 years. That's not a critique of them. I don't expect glorious, amazing rules - those days are behind them.

You will never, ever see a suppression mechanic in a game the scale of 40K with the aim at putting increasingly more models on the table, and wiping them off progressively faster each rendition.

Shooting is too effective, I agree, but it's not a matter of rules. To fix that GW should change about 60 profiles, probably even more. Then some combos/stratagems should be fixed like guilliman re-rolls, which are extremely silly.

Fixing the rules in order to have shooting less efficient is not that easy, it means changing a lot of units/wargear. In points and/or stats.

Tabling and tabling on T1 are different.

FoW v3 had a nice concept, a "mobile battle" rule that some scenarios used that constrained whichever player went forest slightly

- everything counts as having moved even if it doesn't
- no artillery bombardments
- no air strikes

the idea being to limit the alpha strike capability until the other player has at least had a movement phase

A "lul" at the beginning where weapons are being adjusted for range, etc.

M.

 Infantryman wrote:
A "lul" at the beginning where weapons are being adjusted for range, etc.

M.

Its easy to justify from a fluff perspective, this is the time as models move from being actually out of range to being just inside range - even if you had a pre-"game" deployment turn where things get to move, but not advance or charge, no shooting, psi etc - just a change to make a single move from where they get put down

I'd be down with it. As before, I'd dislike being quartered in turn one, as would I dislike quartering someone turn one.

M.

Hi folks.

Because the game itself is really secondary to selling models - something they're doing more of right now than in the past 10-15 years. That's not a critique of them. I don't expect glorious, amazing rules - those days are behind them.

You will never, ever see a suppression mechanic in a game the scale of 40K with the aim at putting increasingly more models on the table, and wiping them off progressively faster each rendition.

I agree with this summery of what focus GW have, and probably everyone can see this.

However, this does not mean to say that it a good focus, or healthy long term for the games.

GW are simply selling more models to the customers that are easy to please.The ones that do not really care about the rules/game play.

If we assume the current GW collectors would not change buying habits, after rule s changes.(They just buy what they think looks cool any way.)
If the game play and rules were a better fit to players expectations more people would play 40k and buy into it.(Rather than the churn and burn model GW still follows.)


I would like to challenge the current core game mechanics as the source of the problem.

So to be more specific.
In the 40k battle game , shooting is too effective compared to the density of deployment and the game turn used.

Eg The alternating game turn requires both sides units /models to have to move into effective weapons range.

If we swap out the game turn mechanic for alternating activation/turn.Then this reduces the effect of '' alpha strike'' a bit.It also increases the depth of tactics players can use.

However, shooting is still more effective at killing , compared to close combat.(As close combat requires the unit to move into contact.)

So the question is how do you want to address this imbalance?



Automatically Appended Next Post:
To continue from my previous post..

There are several options to reduce the effectiveness of shooting.

A)Use more L.O.S blocking terrain to artificially limit shooting .

B)Reduce the effective range of shooting.But as the ranged as massively out of scale with the minatures as is, I am not sure if this would look right.(This is where 6mm to 15mm scale minatures have an advantage over 28mm heroic minatures in a battle game.)

C)Change the function of shooting to primarily be about controlling enemy movement.(Suppression/disabling transport etc.)
With assault being the primary method to finish off units.

D)Replace the fixed roll to hit with something more proportional.(Add limited ''to hit'' modifiers or use a scalable opposed value system.)

I believe the best results would be from a combination of C and D.