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What’s particularly ridiculous is the “stratagems” that are limited solely to a specific unit. Just put it as a special rule for that unit! You can still have it cost command points if you want…

Tallonian4th wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
You shouldn't have to keep track of 5 books plus FAQs and still have to use 3rd party software to play a game.

We were typing at the same time but your post exactly sums up what I was trying to get at. The stats block has little to no bearing to what happens by the time you end up actually rolling dice and there are too many rules sources to be able to make one roll.

Why, thank you. I feel like your post got the message across a bit more clearly and coherently, though, still.

 Geifer wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:
Yeah, simplifying the core ruleset and becoming more reliant on stratagems and themed armies feels like the exact opposite of what people generally want, and given GW are asking about stratagems in the questionnaires I don't expect them to double down on them.

And splitting up firstborn and Primaris feels very unlikely at this point. Maybe once significantly more characters have moved over and Primaris have jump packs, a quasi Land Raider and a Devastator equivalent, but not yet.

Not that I'd put any stock in something coming from Faeit, but the convenient thing about this being a 10th ed rumor is that there's guaranteed to be a Marine update as part of the edition launch, so a lot of those things could get sorted out for Primaris with the launch box, starter set and/or miniature release accompanying the codex.

If there is a hard reset, it might even lead to another round of chapter supplements with accompanying characters.

I am assuming they will be, but it still feels an edition premature to me.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:
Although I am drowning in salt at the Faeit thing I am wondering how they can simplify this any further. Only thing I can imagine is that they will use AoS as an inspiration and make wounding fixed like in AoS. Same goes for unit loadouts and size.

The only thing I am not a fan of in that rumor is heavier leaning on stratagems.

I can think of lots of simplifications I want.

Compress weapon profiles - no one cares if you have an axe or a sword or a maul, no one. Just take one look at the Plague Marine unit sheet and tell me we want or need half of the weapon 'options'.

Definitely agree with this, and I play Death Guard. Although certain iconic weapons should keep their unique weapon profile(Power Fist) I feel the difference between Power Axe and Power Sword to be so superfluous that it could easily be rolled into one.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Cut special unit rules - the IG Crusaders are a great example, dudes with shields and swords good! But also have a paragraph a special morale and anti psy powers that no one is going to remember.

Although some special rulings can be cut out I think unit special gimmick gear should be baked into the stat. For example the Chimes of Contagion, Cult Icons, or the thing Sisters of Battle have in their core squads. So the extra range of contagion that chimes gives is something Deathshroud should just have built in as well as the infantry returnal of the neophytes. It would also give these unit an even better identity imo.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Make infantry one wound - if you need to buff marines, make them T5, not two wounds. Now you don't have to roll for number of wounds when shooting the most common army in the game.

Nah, better to just remove the random effect of d3 and d6 and keep the numbers fixed. I personally don't mind multi-wound infantry as it is nice to differentiate between elite and standard infantry. Also not a fan of painting 50% more Death Guard just for the point reduction scaling the wounds back gets me. Also, having wound differences opens up the design space even if GW has been lazy at using it effectively.

Massive streamlining of minutia. The scale and model count has gone far past the skirmish level of detail they are using.

Something far closer to Epic/Apoc

I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
A complete reset? Ditching all the Codices and everything so far?

Seems unrealistic, especially with this rules-base being so young.

Yeah it was a huge thing doing the indexes this time, we haven’t seen it that many times in fantasy and 40k’s histories.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

I'd love them to head back toward the game ending in the last turns rather than getting more and more lethal and faster and faster so that its over in the first turn or two and the rest is mopping up. GW seems to be hooked on creating big cinematic moments where your army sweeps the other away in a single turn without realising that its really unfun to be on the receiving end and boils the game down too much. I've had way more fun when its two forces going toe to toe and the win is a hard won thing that could go either way for most of the game. When the challenge is more even; when units can actually last enough to actually try and do something

 Overread wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

I'd love them to head back toward the game ending in the last turns rather than getting more and more lethal and faster and faster so that its over in the first turn or two and the rest is mopping up. GW seems to be hooked on creating big cinematic moments where your army sweeps the other away in a single turn without realising that its really unfun to be on the receiving end and boils the game down too much. I've had way more fun when its two forces going toe to toe and the win is a hard won thing that could go either way for most of the game. When the challenge is more even; when units can actually last enough to actually try and do something

Part of it, I think, is that the game structure of 40K is extremely traditional/conventional despite some of the more modern changes they've made. Case in point, in a game where winning is driven by progressive scoring rather than holding objectives at the end, you could very easily allow units to be recycled or brought on as reinforcements without making the early turns irrelevant. An alpha strike that wipes out half of your opponent's army turn 1 would give you a leg up on grabbing objectives, not a nearly guaranteed win.

I think there's potential for GW to do some real shakeups to the core rules while still allowing backwards compatibility with codices. GW totally rebooting the game at this point seems unlikely to me, but reworking the core rules to bring in fresh ideas and address some of the biggest complaints could be doable.

Take stratagems for example. The core rules could specify that you only get X number of stratagems available for the battle and must write them down in your army list. It'd still be backwards-compatible with existing codices, but would address the frequent complaint of keeping track of stratagems.

Put Apocalypse rules in the core book instead of making it a separate game that gets ignored after two months.

 catbarf wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

I'd love them to head back toward the game ending in the last turns rather than getting more and more lethal and faster and faster so that its over in the first turn or two and the rest is mopping up. GW seems to be hooked on creating big cinematic moments where your army sweeps the other away in a single turn without realising that its really unfun to be on the receiving end and boils the game down too much. I've had way more fun when its two forces going toe to toe and the win is a hard won thing that could go either way for most of the game. When the challenge is more even; when units can actually last enough to actually try and do something

Part of it, I think, is that the game structure of 40K is extremely traditional/conventional despite some of the more modern changes they've made. Case in point, in a game where winning is driven by progressive scoring rather than holding objectives at the end, you could very easily allow units to be recycled or brought on as reinforcements without making the early turns irrelevant. An alpha strike that wipes out half of your opponent's army turn 1 would give you a leg up on grabbing objectives, not a nearly guaranteed win.

So Warcaster already messes around with this and its an interesting idea. It certainly shifts the game toward objectives not just kills and it changes a few other things. Having an active in-game sideboard of models means you can bring along more niche and situational models that might otherwise never see general play. Because now if you don't need them you just choose not to call those units to the field during the fight itself and if you do need them you call them up.

The issue is balancing out the resource that controls how much you can call in and when. The risk there with GW is that they'd mess around with it trying to give each army a flavour and in doing so could end up creating situations where one army can summon new things to the field like crazy whilst others can't. Heck just look back to the 2nd edition Slaanesh where if you took an army of Keepers of Secrets you could generate insane depravity to generate more keepers that generated more depravity to create more keepers.


It would be interesting though, and it also works well with armies as they get bigger in terms of model diversity. It lets you create a lot more niche slots and thus models far each army.

For GW it would also allow them the high lethality that they clearly like, without it being game ending as it is now. That powerful alpha strike might be awesome and let you secure objectives, but might also mean that during your opponents turn they will be bringing to the table a lot of fresh units to fight back.

Perhaps we don't need this:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

Edit: my bad lol

I created that pic in May. I don't think there have been any Marine Codices since then.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
If it's not going to fix the awful IGOUGO system there's really no reason to release a new edition at this point.

Getting rid of stratagems or heavily reducing them seems to be an almost universal request. It should not be easier for me to learn conversational Spanish than it is to learn the rules to a game I play for a couple hours on weekends when I don't have anything better to do. Even the players who know them all by heart and gain an advantage from that don't like them, which says a lot.

Wargear strategies should go away, back to unit upgrades. Universal buff to toughness would also help deal with damage inflation without needing an arms race of special rules.

if "theme" armies come back (we had them in 7th), and we also get reactions from HH I can see something like this:

theme armies are a specific composition of units, army list Stratagems/Artifacts/whatever will be free while others pay points/CP
specific and/or additional Reactions will be available for themed armies

going by past changes, what GW means with "simplified" and what the community means are the opposite of each other

question is just of they go by the AoS way of simplified, or the HH way of "simplified"

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

Damn, that hurts to see all spelled out. But it's spot-on. They really need to cut the bloat within each army. Sadly, I imagine they would rather cut things the way they did with the Chaos Marine Codex, chopping out whole options and tying everything to a sprue, rather than consolidating duplicative weapon stats and eliminating the endless list of strategems.

Never thought I'd pine for 2nd Edition 40K and it's streamlined rules.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

I need to read the other responses but just in line with this, if they just reverted back to the older to wound table (double toughness of a weapon made you immune) it would make tanks so much better.

If they want to keep it so weapons can cause a wound to anything, if the target is double of more of the T, make it so it requires an unmodifiable 6 to hit, and then a 6 to wound. I don't really care for the justification, a bolt, las bolt, shurikan etc should never be able to penetrate a battle tanks armour, let alone actually cause significant damage without the luckiest of lucky shots.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

Damn, that hurts to see all spelled out. But it's spot-on. They really need to cut the bloat within each army. Sadly, I imagine they would rather cut things the way they did with the Chaos Marine Codex, chopping out whole options and tying everything to a sprue, rather than consolidating duplicative weapon stats and eliminating the endless list of strategems.

Never thought I'd pine for 2nd Edition 40K and it's streamlined rules.

Universal special rules should come back. The 3 types of bolt rifles are all the exact same profile, but allow the unit to have a different special rule instead.

Stalker - Sniper special rule with rending.
Autobolt Rifle - relentless
Standard - Bolter discipline (double shot at max range if stood still)

1 weapon profile with different effects, flavour and simplicity.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I hope they also tone down on the ever-increasing lethality, when basic troops have access to both full or auto wounding stratagems and passive AP3 boosting, a T8 tank is basically made of paper.

I need to read the other responses but just in line with this, if they just reverted back to the older to wound table (double toughness of a weapon made you immune) it would make tanks so much better.

If they want to keep it so weapons can cause a wound to anything, if the target is double of more of the T, make it so it requires an unmodifiable 6 to hit, and then a 6 to wound. I don't really care for the justification, a bolt, las bolt, shurikan etc should never be able to penetrate a battle tanks armour, let alone actually cause significant damage without the luckiest of lucky shots.

Apocalypse had tough units and tanks roll D12 for saves.

Oh wait GW promptly ignored every good idea they put into that system (D12s, stratagem is a deck-building game, casualty removal at the end of turn, etc) when they made 9th.

 endlesswaltz123 wrote:


Universal special rules should come back. The 3 types of bolt rifles are all the exact same profile, but allow the unit to have a different special rule instead.

Stalker - Sniper special rule with rending.
Autobolt Rifle - relentless
Standard - Bolter discipline (double shot at max range if stood still)

1 weapon profile with different effects, flavour and simplicity.

That's not reducing bolter bloat. That's just shifting the bloat to the USR.

All of these rifles should just be moved to one singular profile without any differentiation except aesthetic. By combining weapon profiles you allow people to model for the rule of cool without worrying about whether they selected the best meta loadout or not. They did that with a few units in AoS and it was awesome.

USRs are there to remove the bloat and give a set of standardised (yet scalable) rules that can be applied to everything.

You can have expansive USRs. It's what prevents expansive "bespoke" nonsense.

Thr problem isn't multiple Bolter profiles. It's the fact there's more than three.
The Intercessor Rapid Fire, Assault, and Heavy were all just fine to work with. There's no reason for the Heavy Intercessors to have different ones with S5 for example.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
USRs are there to remove the bloat and give a set of standardised (yet scalable) rules that can be applied to everything.

You can have expansive USRs. It's what prevents expansive "bespoke" nonsense.

This, it also leads to less gotchas as you and your opponent will be playing the same set of rules. Sometimes currently it feels like playing two different games if the codex are mismatched.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Thr problem isn't multiple Bolter profiles. It's the fact there's more than three.
The Intercessor Rapid Fire, Assault, and Heavy were all just fine to work with. There's no reason for the Heavy Intercessors to have different ones with S5 for example.

And the incursors/infiltrators/reivers each have their own bolter profile.

Ork-en Man wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Thr problem isn't multiple Bolter profiles. It's the fact there's more than three.
The Intercessor Rapid Fire, Assault, and Heavy were all just fine to work with. There's no reason for the Heavy Intercessors to have different ones with S5 for example.

And the incursors/infiltrators/reivers each have their own bolter profile.

Which isn't necessary. Just give them the Assault profile.

 kodos wrote:
if "theme" armies come back (we had them in 7th), and we also get reactions from HH I can see something like this:

theme armies are a specific composition of units, army list Stratagems/Artifacts/whatever will be free while others pay points/CP
specific and/or additional Reactions will be available for themed armies

going by past changes, what GW means with "simplified" and what the community means are the opposite of each other

question is just of they go by the AoS way of simplified, or the HH way of "simplified"

Considering that most of HH's good mechanics are lifted straight from sigmar (and then slightly botched) I'm hoping the Sigmar route.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

Damn, that hurts to see all spelled out. But it's spot-on. They really need to cut the bloat within each army. Sadly, I imagine they would rather cut things the way they did with the Chaos Marine Codex, chopping out whole options and tying everything to a sprue, rather than consolidating duplicative weapon stats and eliminating the endless list of strategems.

Never thought I'd pine for 2nd Edition 40K and it's streamlined rules.

What's this 'each army' stuff? Nah, they need to cut the bloat of SPACE MARINES.

If they really want to get 10th right they need to:

Roll all SM subfactions into one codex. Wanna be a dark angel? Paint your guys green.

Then, everything that isn't primaris goes to Legends. All of it. From Tac Marines, to Land Raiders, to Sanguinary Guard.

If you ACTUALLY care about reducing bloat in 40k, this is where you start.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

This is just like the Space Wolves all over again.
"My bolter marine shoots at your orks with his mastercrafted auto bolt rifle of bolting with hellfire bolts. He gets to reroll attacks due to bolter discipline"


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ERJAK wrote:

 kodos wrote:
if "theme" armies come back (we had them in 7th), and we also get reactions from HH I can see something like this:

theme armies are a specific composition of units, army list Stratagems/Artifacts/whatever will be free while others pay points/CP
specific and/or additional Reactions will be available for themed armies

going by past changes, what GW means with "simplified" and what the community means are the opposite of each other

question is just of they go by the AoS way of simplified, or the HH way of "simplified"

Considering that most of HH's good mechanics are lifted straight from sigmar (and then slightly botched) I'm hoping the Sigmar route.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Perhaps we don't need this:

Spoiler:

Damn, that hurts to see all spelled out. But it's spot-on. They really need to cut the bloat within each army. Sadly, I imagine they would rather cut things the way they did with the Chaos Marine Codex, chopping out whole options and tying everything to a sprue, rather than consolidating duplicative weapon stats and eliminating the endless list of strategems.

Never thought I'd pine for 2nd Edition 40K and it's streamlined rules.

What's this 'each army' stuff? Nah, they need to cut the bloat of SPACE MARINES.

If they really want to get 10th right they need to:

Roll all SM subfactions into one codex. Wanna be a dark angel? Paint your guys green.

Then, everything that isn't primaris goes to Legends. All of it. From Tac Marines, to Land Raiders, to Sanguinary Guard.

If you ACTUALLY care about reducing bloat in 40k, this is where you start.

Yeah there's something like, 6 flavors of marine books now? That's a bit excessive, especially when they share a lot of units. You'd think that with the keyword and subfaction / chapter rules you could just merge them all into one book. Sort of like what pretty much every other army does. You don't see orks having a codex for each clan or necrons having a codex for each dynasty now, do you?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah there's something like, 6 flavors of marine books now? That's a bit excessive, especially when they share a lot of units. You'd think that with the keyword and subfaction / chapter rules you could just merge them all into one book. Sort of like what pretty much every other army does. You don't see orks having a codex for each clan or necrons having a codex for each dynasty now, do you?

No, but neither of those armies are as detailed in their lore or as popular as the Space Marines are. I don't say that as a dig on the ones you mentioned, just a fact.

I also wouldn't mind consolidation of Space Marine codices, but I don't imagine it happening any time soon.

Reducing Marines to a paintjob is, well, reductive.

A Dark Angel should be different to a Space Wolf. An Iron Warrior should be different to a Night Lord.