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 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Proper skirmish wargames are something like Necromunda, which are played with 5-10 models per faction, at most.

Elite armies in 40k have 30-40 typically, which are way more models (4x to 8x).

Hence the problem in this thread...

The problem however is not caused by horde armies as they don't really slow down the game. Elite armies do. It takes forever to kill models with T5 3W and invulns but at the same time they are able to fire lots of shots or deals tons of attacks, resulting in massive dice rolling. The OP doesn't like opponents to use a significant part of their time moving miniatures but if the problem is to remove things that really slow down the game, it's the unkillable stuff that needs to be addressed. Horde armies are really horde for a couple of turns at most, after that half their army is already gone. And most of the units don't even contribute to the shooting phase, they're melee only.

For a 2000 points non skirmish game, armies with 90-150 models suit much better this kind of games than armies with 30-40 or even less.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrianDavion wrote:
IMHO movement trays need to become a thing for hoard armies.

Dice apps need to become a thing .

tneva82 800800 11214912 wrote:

We can't do anything...except vote with wallet with GW that this isn't acceptable.

THEY are doing the issue. Hordes worked fine until GW decided to hide the crappyness of the rules with silly amount of dice rolling.

I think that only horde players think that way. Seeing a chaos player space his 60 pox walkers, in a perfect diamond formation, and then spacing his horrors and then the rest of his stuff often took up to 25min.

Also the dice rolling was clearly related to the fact that playing elite made no sense through huge parts of 8th ed.Even at the start of 9th some armies, could just swarm objectives if they went first, and just win by virtue of being more point efficient. Chaos marines turned in to an army without any csm in it, because cultists were point for point more resilient then marines.

Karol's not wrong back in 6th/7th edition you heard plenty of horror stories of games vs hoards taking forever because that guy playing the green tide was precision measuring each and every one of his boyz etc

The inherent downside of having blast markers mixed with anal-retentive proclivities.

Movement trays are fine and all, until you want your horde unit in close combat, at which point it takes considerable time removing the models from the tray so that you can do things like make base to base and pivot around enemy models. Source - I ran a Daemonette horde.

 Afrodactyl wrote:
What I used to do with my hordes back when I ran green tide in fifth edition was to put a "footprint" unit on the table and leave the rest in the case.

So I'd have a ring of about 12 ork boys on the table, with enough room in the middle that I could put the other 18 if I needed to. The ring indicates the entire area the unit would take up without all of the tedium of moving so many models. So instead of shuffling 120 Ork boys around I was only moving about 40 or so.

This was of course purely casual games though and I'd pre agreed with my group that I was allowed to do it.

That just sounds awful, with colors of the Warmachine communities approach to playing with 2D terrain. At that point why even bother playing with miniatures at all. If you can eliminate 3/5ths of the minis in a unit you can eliminate the remainder too. Just put a single marker on the table at the center of mass of the unit and have your opponents add a number of inches to their weapon ranges, etc. when targeting it to account for the radius of the ring. I.E. if your ring of 12 boys had a 6" radius, then all your opponents weapon ranges and charge distances increase by 6" when interacting with the unit in question to account for the missing minis. Track wounds/models with dice to indicate how much more damage the marker can take before its removed.

Voila, you're playing the same game without miniatures at all, so instead of shuffling 120 boys, or 40 boys, you're shuffling a literal handful of boys.

At least the blast-templates thing had an on-table effect.

Spreading out to 2" between models meant a few things:
1) More dragged into terrain, slowing the unit's movement
2) A wider frontage for CC units to get stuck in with and lock up
3) just more space on the table, constraining the maneuver ("getting in the way of") other units.

Right now, a unit of 30 gaunts with 1 gun each, or 15 gaunts with 2 wounds and 2 guns each, are basically the same since you can maneuver them however the hell you want, the positioning of individual models matters for like 3 things in the game (TLOS which should be abstracted anyways, gun ranges, and combat distance in melee).

I mean, I'm oversimplifying; there's also Damage to consider (Damage 2 weapons vs. 2 wound targets is a thing), so I guess that's a thing. But position wise? Meh, do whatever with your unit, no one cares, there's no advantages or disadvantages to positioning of individual models except TLOS.

JakeSiren wrote:
Movement trays are fine and all, until you want your horde unit in close combat, at which point it takes considerable time removing the models from the tray so that you can do things like make base to base and pivot around enemy models. Source - I ran a Daemonette horde.

That just points to an issue with the CC rules, like True Line of Sight. Base to Base with the movement tray should be sufficient to say “these two forces are in melee” without having to fiddle with swallowing individual enemy models.

tneva82 wrote:

ccs wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
Am I the only one that doesn't see any issue in moving hordes of models?
It usually takes a really short time compared to the other phases.
What really really eats time when playing hordes are the dices. If you want to change something to make things faster, act there, implement combined attacks or things like that.

Movement is the lesser of the issues.

Here's another who finds that.

Rolling like 200 hundred dice to resolve attack and get odd wound here and there...That takes time.

True. But other than simply forgoing some of the attacks you can't really do anything about that aspect of the horde armies game.
Movement of the horde though.... There, by spending a few minutes outside the game ONCE, you can save some time each turn.

We can't do anything...except vote with wallet with GW that this isn't acceptable.

THEY are doing the issue. Hordes worked fine until GW decided to hide the crappyness of the rules with silly amount of dice rolling.

1) Sorry, rolling a crap load of dice is not a deal breaker for me. Neither is waiting a few seconds for my opponent to make their rolls.
If it were? Then on my end I might consider just skipping taking any re-rolls/extra rolls I might be entitled to. I doubt any opponent would object.
If it really bothered me I might broach the idea of my opponent doing so as well (not that I'd really expect them to agree, but if you don't even ask....)

2) So you say "Vote with your wallet".... I'm not sure how to square that.
See, even if I never bought another book from GW & simply pirated it all? I'd still buy models that I like. And that's where GW get's most of the money I spend on their stuff from.
And no matter what my intent all GW sees is "sales = support for {game}".

3) So let's say I don't buy anything more - rules/models/etc from GW.
Well, I still like 9th well enough to play it. I have the books I need. I own more than enough models.... As do all the people I play with 9th with. How does not buying anything new from GW change the printed rules we already have?

I dont really mind the movement phase too much but the addition of the charge phase and the fight phase make movement take a lot of time.

Moving a unit 6" goes really fast most of the time since you probably have a 6" tool to use instead of the measuring tape and already had an exact plan for the movement phase. You also have done the exact same forward movement a million times before so its mostly muscle memory. But in the charge phase you might move like 10" suddenly and have to move around individual enemy models and terrain more exactly and you don't know exactly how to move until you roll the dice so there is some extra decision time needed. Also need to plan for heroic interventions and any pile ins and consolidate move from your own and opponent units. Then you need to do all those tiny 3" movements around other models and measure individual models to see what enemy model is closest so you know where to move them since its not unrestrictedmovement. If you add in double movement abilities and/or fight twice abilities you can move a model like 6! times outside of the movement phase in a single turn. Most time spent moving models when you have a lot of melee units in a battle is not in the phase called "The Movement Phase"

This is why I prefer WFB/KoW/MESBG over 40k. You only move once in the movement phase and if you wipe the enemy you get to reposition but that is basically it.

tneva82 wrote:
We can't do anything...except vote with wallet with GW that this isn't acceptable.

THEY are doing the issue. Hordes worked fine until GW decided to hide the crappyness of the rules with silly amount of dice rolling.

Considering that Orks don't reroll anything unless you put a bunch of points into Ghaz and other armies have had rerolls reduced and restricted it would seem to me that they are correcting the issue already.

Did anyone play apoc? Hordes worked great there. I think the most dice rolled was 12 for 30 termagants with devourers.

The model to unit interaction in 40k is frankly insane for the scale of the battle. It should be unit to unit.

 Stormonu wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
Movement trays are fine and all, until you want your horde unit in close combat, at which point it takes considerable time removing the models from the tray so that you can do things like make base to base and pivot around enemy models. Source - I ran a Daemonette horde.

That just points to an issue with the CC rules, like True Line of Sight. Base to Base with the movement tray should be sufficient to say “these two forces are in melee” without having to fiddle with swallowing individual enemy models.

Possibly, but there is a combination of things that CC encourages that don't work well with movement trays.

1) Engagement range, and the 0.5" chaining (imagine an enemy in any formation that's not a straight line)
2) Pivoting around enemy models to get closer to objectives or tagging other units.
3) Wrapping enemy models to prevent them from walking out of combat.

You would have to address these to make movement trays worthwhile IMO. That said, I was comfortably able to move 150 Daemonettes and the rest of my army in 7 minutes without movement trays. It's not uncommon for my opponents to take twice as long in their movement phase (but I do make up for it with my charge phase)

JakeSiren wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
Movement trays are fine and all, until you want your horde unit in close combat, at which point it takes considerable time removing the models from the tray so that you can do things like make base to base and pivot around enemy models. Source - I ran a Daemonette horde.

That just points to an issue with the CC rules, like True Line of Sight. Base to Base with the movement tray should be sufficient to say “these two forces are in melee” without having to fiddle with swallowing individual enemy models.

Possibly, but there is a combination of things that CC encourages that don't work well with movement trays.

1) Engagement range, and the 0.5" chaining (imagine an enemy in any formation that's not a straight line)
2) Pivoting around enemy models to get closer to objectives or tagging other units.
3) Wrapping enemy models to prevent them from walking out of combat.

You would have to address these to make movement trays worthwhile IMO. That said, I was comfortably able to move 150 Daemonettes and the rest of my army in 7 minutes without movement trays. It's not uncommon for my opponents to take twice as long in their movement phase (but I do make up for it with my charge phase)

I think you're missing the point. Stormanu is saying that you shouldn't have to worry about finicky melee rules like that.

I'm on the fence about it. I don't mind unit-to-unit combat in theory, but I wish the game was consistent about it. Being able to make an attack is model-to-model, removing casualties is unit-to-unit. Initial morale is at ths unit level, but then attrition is at the model level. It's counterintuitive is my point.

(Of course if I had my druthers 40K would use a pinning system like Bolt Action instead, but that's a whole different discussion.)

Generally, I'd say that the 40k rules have one major issue: They have incredible detail, but at the same time, the game is quite big in scale. And that's not just about numbers, but also about the models that are in use.

In the rules, we go into the level of detail of what basically are different marks of small arms, which works in a game about a dozen models or so, but becomes pretty pointless when the exact same scale is used to represent heavy artillery and the like. That automatically makes everything seem silly.

And then there are the models. This ruleset tries to encompass everything from termagants, guardsmen, and grots to superheavies like knights and supersonic aircraft. I run into this a lot with my guardsmen who feel like they're just there to take up space against many enemies.

That means that a clash is almost automatic. In a way, 40k is like a WW2 game that tries to put individual infantrymen in the same game as bombers and naval vessels.

What 40k needs is someone actually deciding what the game wants to be and what the scale is supposed to be. Because right now, it's a complete mess.

They did exactly that with apocalypse.
I don't know why it didn't have more success as a ruleset.

The same thing that prevented the success of Epic 40k, and that people complained about with 3rd edition 40k: Lack of complication.

Spoletta wrote:
They did exactly that with apocalypse.
I don't know why it didn't have more success as a ruleset.

I'd say it's because the first version of apocalypse got a bad rep as a painful mess. My group played it once and like a bunch of hungover partiers swore never to touch it again.

Apoc at 100-150 pl is just flat out better 40k at 2k points. There is no reason to play the slog that is 40k when you could be having a better experience with apoc.

Yep 40k survives and grows due to inertia and its huge mass and in spite it ruleset

GW already did something to discourage horde armies - they added / amended 2 key rules specifically to penalise them:

* Blast weapons are much more effective against hoard units
* Unit coherency is much stricter and more punishing to hoard units which would otherwise represent a tide, flowing across the battlefield as oppose to the regimented chain reaction of death it currently is if you do it wrong.

It's not just 40k, they are also taking similar lines in AOS by making them spend command points to take larger sized units.

GW doesn't really want you to buy lots of little models any longer. They want you to buy bigger, more elite models that they can sell for a lot more and manufacture for a lot less. It also helps that these types of armies are very unappealing to newer players due to the volume of paint and time required.

Also remember that Tyranids are especially punished. Whichever sick feth designed Genestealers knew those buggers could hook onto ever model and piece of terrain it could while Termagants need to be placed all facing the same way to realistically fit them all in thanks to those long tails sticking out from the back of the base.

So let the guy take his time placing his models - especially if he painted them all. That's a lot of time he spent to give you an experience that isn't just another bloody marine army opponent. Don't then look down your nose at him just because you brought 10 custodes models that you spray painted a thick layer of gold and for which you brought to the game in your purse. Praise him for sticking to the hobby and doing it right.

Part of voting with your wallet is buying products that move the game in a good direction. Want more xenos, well you need to buy the xenos products GW offers to show them it's a revenue stream worth exploring. Want better rules? Check out their non-40k games and buy those.

Obviously the hard part is that you may not want to buy 20-year-old sculpts and games you're not invested in like 40k, but that is how it's done; 30 years of Space Marines have been driven by people buying Space Marines.

Movement trays help but as has been the case for some time, skirmish level minutia in a mass battle game is the larger issue.