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KurreLurre wrote:
Rules-wise I'd say that 8th is probably the worst mess I've seen in a long time as a tabletop & RPG player, seems like GWs game designers are flinging refuse at a teflon wall with this one. People are praising it as much better than 7th/6th, but I don't know as I never played those.

I'm of the opinion that the best thing about 8th ed is that it's not 7th ed, but aside from that it's just a different kind of bad.

As far as I'm concerned GW still fails to address the core issue of their game with 8th edition. The "game" is list building and rolling off who goes first. The rules are written in such a way that oftentimes comparing army lists or seeing who goes first is enough to determine the outcome of the game, and as such the actual game never really takes place. If your idea of fun is to put models on the table, roll dice and not do much else, 8th ed may be the perfect game for you. If you want to make meaningful decisions that influence the course of the game, you are severely limited at best and probably better off looking for another game.

 Galas wrote:
The real question here is...
Is dakkadakka good now?

The best.

8th has good ideas but is currently a non playable game to me until they remove a few elements out of the core rules like alpha striking being a common "tactic" and the expectation by the community in general that tables will have little terrain on them and you can see everything everywhere all the time or you are "screwing them over".

 auticus wrote:
the expectation by the community in general that tables will have little terrain on them and you can see everything everywhere all the time or you are "screwing them over".

A strange amount of people seem to see terrain solely as an armour buff, whether it's the +1 save or the cover saves from previous editions, rather than something to be used tactically and played around. It's pretty common to see games being played here with little or no LoS blocking terrain in the middle of the board. Given how little the battlefield seems to impact some games being played almost can't help but wonder why those players don't save themselves the hassle and just play 40k as a pen and paper dice rolling game instead.

Thats just it. The game basically IS a dice rolling game or CCG style board game with expensive models in its current state.

Stux wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Depends on it you like gun lines or not, if you play a melee army it's pretty dire.

Well, yeah. The game isn't balanced around being a one trick army. You're supposed to mix tactics.

Which is all well and good, and generally makes for more fun games in my opinion, except some armies have virtually no shooting.

Daemons being probably the biggest issue here, especially Khorne. But Daemons are a weird one, because they share a model range with fantasy, so they're limited to what can be done to balance it.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think it's just make melee better...

The problem is that there's little tactical place for melee in any system of advanced firepower, unless shooting has a disadvantage in enclosed and tight spaces (as it sometimes does IRL). 40k as best I know doesn't really care about enclosed spaces when shooting, so unless you have some odd trick melee makes no sense.

To be fair the game was never that good - there were always better options out there. That is just more marked now other games have developed and 40k is similar to what is was 20 years ago. Indeed every time I play 40k I was I was playing Epic A as that gives far more of a 40k experience! But with its models, background and popularity it remains easy to get opponents for.

7th was better.


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 nurgle5 wrote:
. Given how little the battlefield seems to impact some games being played

That's surprising indeed. I was always told that 40k was a game that requires a lot of terrain, and fully expect to see lots of it on battlefields.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
To be fair the game was never that good - there were always better options out there. That is just more marked now other games have developed and 40k is similar to what is was 20 years ago. Indeed every time I play 40k I was I was playing Epic A as that gives far more of a 40k experience! But with its models, background and popularity it remains easy to get opponents for.

If you pull together 2x 2,000 point armies using some of the 6mm (and sometimes 15mm) lines at Vanguard Miniatures, you could probably proselytise and get some new recruits



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 corpuschain wrote:
7th was better.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 nurgle5 wrote:
. Given how little the battlefield seems to impact some games being played

That's surprising indeed. I was always told that 40k was a game that requires a lot of terrain, and fully expect to see lots of it on battlefields.

Almost every time I put terrain down on the field when I played 40k, whoever had brought more guns than knives would start giving dirty looks and getting salty about how it was an attempt to nerf him unfairly :/

It sounds to me that your real problem is the players more than the rules.

The option I feel.is really the most applicable is not there.

The game is alright, the lore is meh.

 Crimson Devil wrote:
It sounds to me that your real problem is the players more than the rules.

I have met quite a few players. Most were like that :/

 Crimson Devil wrote:
It sounds to me that your real problem is the players more than the rules.

The real problem is competitive players that rant about their army not being top tier

Competitive gaming isn't necessarily a list with the spam of the most overpowered units of the moment. Some people, including dudes that don't even play at biggest events, fail to understand that.

Looking at the comments, it is hard to believe that so many people voted for lore being good...

 Sim-Life wrote:
The thing about the lore being good.

I kind of disagree. I said before it's become too Space Marine focussed which is true since the fluff is mainly based around Primaris and Guilliman. But it's INTERESTING if nothing else. After 20-odd years of stagnation anything would be interesting at this point. I won't say it's good but it doesn't cause physical pain to read so its better than a kick in the teeth.

I just went though my new Dark Eldar codex checking for new fluff:

-Space Marines, whether Primaris marines, Custodes, or various flavors of chaos, have 8 new lore mentions.

-Yvraine and the Ynnari, supposedly the craziest thing to happen to the eldar in 10 millenia, have 4 new lore mentions.

-The Great Rift, giant gaping maw of chaos opening up in the middle of the galaxy, has 3 mentions, none of them anything more specific than "and the great rift made it so the dark eldar could do the same thing they were already doing, but more"

-In terms of "non space marine related things the dark eldar have been doing since their last codex came out", we have 2 major things: Vect pulls a Sean Connery Bond and fakes his own death so he can keep doing the very same thing he was doing before, in exactly the same way (At least for Sean it resulted in a cool intro sequence to You Only Live Twice, Vect certainly didn't get rules or a model out of it). Also, the whole thing that almost destroyed the city is continuing to destroy it, and they have pretty much no ideas as to how to stop it. They're just feeding little pocket dimensions of Commoragh to the warp, one by one.

but BOY OH BOY did the addition of slightly taller space marines (you know, those guys who have numbers approximately equal to one for every imperial controlled planet) rock the dark eldar world. The haemonculus are after them! Urien is talking about Guilliman! The wyches are trying to capture them for the arenas, apparently fascinated by their slightly taller height and subtly different designs of boltgun! Ahriman is after Drazar! Lelith is after Lucius, and is only doing the Ynnari thing because for some reason that will allow her to capture him! The Hex wants to get their freeky-deeky on with the custodes! Oh my gosh stop the presses they made NEW, more DIFFERENT space marines!?!????!??????

 jeff white wrote:
Looking at the comments, it is hard to believe that so many people voted for lore being good...

There is good and there is amazing. 40K lore is good. It is evocative and entertaining. Just because something is not amazing does not automatically make it bad.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 jeff white wrote:
Looking at the comments, it is hard to believe that so many people voted for lore being good...

There is good and there is amazing. 40K lore is good. It is evocative and entertaining. Just because something is not amazing does not automatically make it bad.

I found it surprising because so much of the new stuff isn't good. Although the remainder is still as good as it was before.

Rules are 90% with just a couple elements that need a fix, and the lore has gotten better and better.

Stux wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Depends on it you like gun lines or not, if you play a melee army it's pretty dire.

Well, yeah. The game isn't balanced around being a one trick army. You're supposed to mix tactics.

Which is all well and good, and generally makes for more fun games in my opinion, except some armies have virtually no shooting.

Daemons being probably the biggest issue here, especially Khorne. But Daemons are a weird one, because they share a model range with fantasy, so they're limited to what can be done to balance it.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think it's just make melee better...

No one wants melee to be better than shooting but it should be equally as viable.

We've now had three editions where taking melee is a detriment, for some of us that's unacceptable.

Yeah. I'm fine if a combined arms approach is best (but, in that case, GIVE DAEMONS RANGED WEAPONS!) but the issue is, you can do shooting basically the whole day and have only token melee (or even just screens) and do fine.

Daemons have ranged weapons. Or did I imagine the Khorne model that's a cannon.

pm713 wrote:
Daemons have ranged weapons. Or did I imagine the Khorne model that's a cannon.

I play Nurgle Daemons. I have a couple of 6" guns on the GUO and Spoilpox Scrivener, and some 12" guns on Plague Drones.

And even for Khorne, they need a lot more than ONE model who shoots well.

So there you have the Khorne cannon, GUO, Drones, Spoilpox and things like Tzeentchs psy shooting.

If you're playing a subfaction of your army then of course you're going to be limited.

pm713 wrote:
So there you have the Khorne cannon, GUO, Drones, Spoilpox and things like Tzeentchs psy shooting.

If you're playing a subfaction of your army then of course you're going to be limited.

So, no one should play anything but Ravenguard or Ultras, then? They're the best, and feth you if you LIKE BLack Templars or Iron Hands.

And the GUO both sucks and has 6" guns, the Scrivener is great, but has a 6" gun, and the Drones have 12" guns.

That's not good shooting. It doesn't have range, nor strength, nor AP....

pm713 wrote:
Daemons have ranged weapons. Or did I imagine the Khorne model that's a cannon.

Oooh yeah one gun that'll square up well to guard.

They were solely reliant on deep strike the recent change has fekked them now half their army will get shot to skitja turn one with little return fire then the rest will ds take overwatch and maybe get a charge off before the units pull back and they get annihilated by close range fire.

Cover is crap in this edition unless you can block los from every enemy unit your in for a bad time, if you can do that your not advancing across the board to get into cc.

Melee is meant to be high risk high reward but now as in 6th and 7th it's just giving a points advantage to the guy who brought snooty units.

 JNAProductions wrote:

pm713 wrote:
So there you have the Khorne cannon, GUO, Drones, Spoilpox and things like Tzeentchs psy shooting.

If you're playing a subfaction of your army then of course you're going to be limited.

So, no one should play anything but Ravenguard or Ultras, then? They're the best, and feth you if you LIKE BLack Templars or Iron Hands.

And the GUO both sucks and has 6" guns, the Scrivener is great, but has a 6" gun, and the Drones have 12" guns.

That's not good shooting. It doesn't have range, nor strength, nor AP....

You can play Templars and Hands and still use all the units in the Marine army. Or did 8th add a rule that said Templars can only take 2 units?

Choosing to play just Khorne or just Nurgle is obviously going to limit your choices. It's like me saying I want to play just Assault Marines and Scouts then complaining I don't have artillery.

If you want to play Nurgle daemon armies then you need to deal with the fact that that's limiting your army a lot.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
The thing about the lore being good.

I kind of disagree. I said before it's become too Space Marine focussed which is true since the fluff is mainly based around Primaris and Guilliman. But it's INTERESTING if nothing else. After 20-odd years of stagnation anything would be interesting at this point. I won't say it's good but it doesn't cause physical pain to read so its better than a kick in the teeth.

I just went though my new Dark Eldar codex checking for new fluff:

-Space Marines, whether Primaris marines, Custodes, or various flavors of chaos, have 8 new lore mentions.

-Yvraine and the Ynnari, supposedly the craziest thing to happen to the eldar in 10 millenia, have 4 new lore mentions.

-The Great Rift, giant gaping maw of chaos opening up in the middle of the galaxy, has 3 mentions, none of them anything more specific than "and the great rift made it so the dark eldar could do the same thing they were already doing, but more"

-In terms of "non space marine related things the dark eldar have been doing since their last codex came out", we have 2 major things: Vect pulls a Sean Connery Bond and fakes his own death so he can keep doing the very same thing he was doing before, in exactly the same way (At least for Sean it resulted in a cool intro sequence to You Only Live Twice, Vect certainly didn't get rules or a model out of it). Also, the whole thing that almost destroyed the city is continuing to destroy it, and they have pretty much no ideas as to how to stop it. They're just feeding little pocket dimensions of Commoragh to the warp, one by one.

but BOY OH BOY did the addition of slightly taller space marines (you know, those guys who have numbers approximately equal to one for every imperial controlled planet) rock the dark eldar world. The haemonculus are after them! Urien is talking about Guilliman! The wyches are trying to capture them for the arenas, apparently fascinated by their slightly taller height and subtly different designs of boltgun! Ahriman is after Drazar! Lelith is after Lucius, and is only doing the Ynnari thing because for some reason that will allow her to capture him! The Hex wants to get their freeky-deeky on with the custodes! Oh my gosh stop the presses they made NEW, more DIFFERENT space marines!?!????!??????

Is it pretty much like that for other non-Imperium codexes? I'll probably keep away from 40k lore if it's just going to be all about how "these UBER EXBAWKS HUEG ULTRA SPECIAL Mary Sues" hijack the faction in question and become the centre of attention. Especially if it's written in a noblebright or straw-grimdank way.

Stux wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
Depends on it you like gun lines or not, if you play a melee army it's pretty dire.

Well, yeah. The game isn't balanced around being a one trick army. You're supposed to mix tactics.

Which is all well and good, and generally makes for more fun games in my opinion, except some armies have virtually no shooting.

Daemons being probably the biggest issue here, especially Khorne. But Daemons are a weird one, because they share a model range with fantasy, so they're limited to what can be done to balance it.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think it's just make melee better...

Yeah, I was going to say, daemons man, they don't shoot gud lol.
Daemons have always been a weird cog in 40k (unsure about fantasy) when they came out in 5th edition, they pretty much broke/ignored every special rule. Invul saves, eternal warrior, and fearless was just the tip of the "oh yeah, I ignore that" iceberg that frustrated other players. They have always been the far spectrum of crazy that made them an army rarely seen... until this edition. Now with: random forced reserves, warp storm table, daemonic instability and random upgrades all being a thing of the past, daemons are simply another army that plays just a little different.

Heck, if you don't use beta rules, you could run 90 bloodletters and nearly table an opponent on turn 1 without needing much in the way of tactics. As a long time daemon player, I feel like 8th edition has been one of the best for melee armies. Shooty armies used to spread out all over the deployment zone. Leman russes in each corner and a bunch of heavy weapons teams all over the place, so you had to take 3-5 turns to even consider assaulting each one. Now all the shooty armies huddle together around some jerk who gives re-rolls out the butt. So once you make it into combat with that little huddle, you basically have their whole army tied down. It's all about if you can get one good unit into that fight.

Deathstars might be gone, but castles are a big thing, and if you can breach the castle, you pretty much win. It's not a 100% game wide strategy, but it is the theme of shooty armies this edition. Daemons (no beta rules) are the best army at upsetting that style.

Stux wrote:

 Selym wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Game is great if you aren't playing top tier competitive level (which is the only level Dakka will talk about). Lore is meh. It's very space marine/primarch focussed right which my least favourite part of the lore so takd take that with a grain of salt.

Are they still doing continuous SM releases?
I got tired of that a good couple of years before I checked out...

Space Marines are the bread and butter of 40k, and frankly what the empire GW have created is built on. They will dominate releases for this reason. They always have done and always will.

I don't really understand why people who have a serious problem with this get in to or stay with the game.

People have a problem with this, because they enjoy the game, and other factions that AREN'T Space Marines.

GW has pigeonholed themselves into a corner - SM are far and above the most popular, because they've spent literally every cycle pushing them onto the game, the lore, the promotional material, and every aspect of the game's corner.

There's a very real factor that every other release WAS a Space Marine codex. It'd go X-SpaceMarine(Red)-Y-SpaceMarine(Green)-Z-SpaceMarine(Blue); it got really fething old, really fething fast.

There's 10! colors of Space Marines
-Space Marines
-Blood Angels
-Dark Angels
-Space Wolves
-Gray Knights
-Adeptus Custodes
-Deathwatch
-Chaos SM
-Thousand Suns
-Death Guard

There's 14 non-Space Marine books
-AdMech
-Imperial Titans
-Sisters of Battle
-Imperial Guard
-Chaos Demons
-Renegades/Heretics (Chaos IG)
-Eldar
-Dark Eldar
-Harlequins
-Necrons
-Orks
-Tau
-Tyranids
-Genestealer Cults

Hell, 9 out of 10 colors of Space Marines (minus SpaceWolves) came out BEFORE the remaining factions, during the first few months.

I'm going to boil everything down to one thought - imagine if non-SpaceMarine factions got the same amount of love and books that SM do - we'd have a BOOK for each Craftworld/Hive Fleet/Klan/Sept/Chaos Legion/Chaos God. ; Instead, those factions get entirely lumped into ONE book, which they can, if they're lucky, soup with other books in their faction.

Meh, its not quite the catch 22 you make it out to be. Its easy to say Space Marines are popular because Space Marines are advertised, but its not really true. Space Marines are popular because people like Space Marines. People are drawn to super heroes, people are drawn to "the good guys". Space Marines give you a bit of both, the fact that their models have a classic sci fi trooper look to them and are somewhat easy to paint is just icing on the cake for the SM gravy train.

Look at the popularity of characters like Master Chief or other characters who follow the generic armored space soldier troop, they are very popular.

There will always be people more drawn to the sneaky Xenos, or the silly Orks, or even the Traitor rivals to the Space Marines. But they tend to have a lower draw.

i don't like the massive SM favoring either, but we all know SM would be the most popular faction even if GW didn't push them with its advertising.

Its also worth noting that if you've been in the game for a long time you'd realize that the concentration of space marines to other factions is actually diluting. Thousand Sons and Death Guard are the only new flavors of Space Marines that have been added since Codex Grey Knights broke away from Inquisition in 5th edition.

40k was always good.

40k 7th was good if you played without monstrous creatures & summoning.

40k 8th is good - better than 7th - and it requires less overall restrictions to make it fun.

But 8th is indeed a bland gaming experience for many factions. If you're lucky - like me - you have really diverse choices, and even if they don't amount to a great army, at least there's more than 1 way to play.