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army list is same as the rules

so 40k makes now the better small scale skirmish and KT with little changes (just use units instead of models) will be the better 40k

I'd suggest looking at how Chain of Command does it: Each platoon has a historical composition, as you say, but then an additional bonus point value. Those points are then used before the game to purchase additional support assets, on top of whatever number may be provided by the scenario. So in this way, the platoons are balanced against one another by varying the amount of support they can bring along, and the designers can adjust balance by adjusting those totals.

yup, I've played games like that - choose a main battle group, and then support groups to fill in gaps etc. A couple of Napoleonic games come straight to mind.

I'm not overly bothered about whether people will take weapon A over weapon B all the time in this setup, that is a choice per player; it is balance between factions and groups that is more important IMHO. But the basic setup does prevent total skew lists by the looks, and should keep each group balanced to each other a lot more. It's also generally a lot easier to tweak over time, add an operative, remove the number you can take etc, as you can tweak the specific problem group and not a points value which has impacts across the board.

List composition feels much more similar to how historicals do things!!! That's great!

It occurs to me that while this does look horrendously clunky to describe on paper, it probably streamlines effectively into nice little dropdown menus in their new app.

This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

 Sledgehammer wrote:
List composition feels much more similar to how historicals do things!!! That's great!

not really

I don't know any historical skirmish game that has such limited list building
this is more of mass skirmish or R&F type of list building

Oh dear, this sounds incredibly limiting, boring and tosses out all the amazing creativity people have done with Kill Team.

Everything about this ruleset is beginning to sound like a pig's ear.

jullevi wrote:
This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

Until we see the lists, it's a bit hard to judge.

I will say that the Guard one is...interesting.

jullevi wrote:
This feels like it is designed to match the contents of Death Korps and Kommandos boxed sets. Build models, choose a number of them for a scenario and split into Fire Teams if required. No need to fiddle with points or anything.

It would of course work better if similar kits were available for other armies too.

I suspect that we'll both see similar kits as future releases, but also that the initial factions' fire teams are arranged so that they (more or less) consist of the options available in existing 40k boxes. Note that the non-Krieg-box-corresponding Guard can take a Scion fire team and a Guardsman fire team that sure looks like every option is included in a single Cadian Shock Troops box.

 The Phazer wrote:
Oh dear, this sounds incredibly limiting, boring and tosses out all the amazing creativity people have done with Kill Team.

Everything about this ruleset is beginning to sound like a pig's ear.

Its very much designed to be 'you can only take what the kit can build.' Just like the DG plague marines in their codex (if a bit more readable).
Except for basic guy (boy or trooper) each gear combination is only selectable once. (With a max of three non-troopers for guard, but not for kommandos)

Not sure about balance. Balance seems to exist because they say it does, not something inherent to the rules or an emergent property of these choice limitations.
In theory a team of all kommando boys is supposed to be just as balanced as a maxed out group of special weapons boys (1 of each), and it seems self-evident that would be nonsense.

I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

As far as the Guard roster goes, I'm pretty happy to see what they did with it, and I'm hoping other factions are similar. Seeing a Guard team that was half-armed with plasma guns was just silly and made no sense from a lore or military structure stand point. It will be nice to have teams that actually look like a military unit.

Hopefully they can get the numbers balanced out amongst the weaker individual models factions, so you don't end up with 14 Guardsmen vs 14 Tau Fire Warriors kind of deal.

Voss wrote:

(With a max of three non-troopers for guard, but not for kommandos)

For normal guard. But then, a Kill Team of them is two Fire Teams, so you can choose each of the six operatives once.

 Sabotage! wrote:
I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

I'm guessing the ones you can take multiple of are the ones with a GA >1, and that's why you *might* take extra over their special weapon counterparts.

Even if the balance of that doesn't fly, and you tell a new player "take up to your limit of limited options, and choose among them what sounds good to you" how is that a *worse* position than current list-building practices, where you aren't *required* to take specialists, but you darn well should? Or taking as many gunners as you're allowed?

It's a bit more constrained in that you can't spam a single option to hit the limit, but I feel like that's got to be a net positive for creativity, not a negative.

Kaffis wrote:

 Sabotage! wrote:
I'll have to get a look at all the lists to see how this stuff all pans out. While there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to take generic Veteran Guardsmen or Ork Kommandos over their specialist equivalents, maybe there is some action they get a bonus on/only something they can do (kind of like Ob sec or something).

I'm guessing the ones you can take multiple of are the ones with a GA >1, and that's why you *might* take extra over their special weapon counterparts.

Even if the balance of that doesn't fly, and you tell a new player "take up to your limit of limited options, and choose among them what sounds good to you" how is that a *worse* position than current list-building practices, where you aren't *required* to take specialists, but you darn well should? Or taking as many gunners as you're allowed?

It's a bit more constrained in that you can't spam a single option to hit the limit, but I feel like that's got to be a net positive for creativity, not a negative.

Very true. I would rather see a "Veteran Guardsman" style roster composed of a single lasgunner, a medic, a comms op, a harden vet, a plasma gunner, a sniper, a demolitionist, a sarge, etc. than a list with one Sergeant who hides in the back leading 5 plasma gunners and 5 conscripts with nothing. At least the Veteran team feels like a real special ops team on a crucial mission, as opposed to something that would never actually be fielded.

This will harshly homogenize lists.

Basically every faction now has

exactly X number of models
of which Y can be specialists
and you'd be completely insane not to max out on the specialists
and that's literally it

Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

An interesting notion I haven't seen mentioned is that I think (offf the top of my head) a Krieg box can be built as a (non-Veteran) Guardsman fire team, if what we heard about the contents having standard equipment build options instead of their specialty/wargear builds. If so, that means that one could build a two-box Krieg Astra Militarum KT, or a Krieg and Scion KT with no trouble if the Veteran Guardsman option feels too elite at 10 models...

Hmm. A lot less interested now. At least until the fandex point costs get sorted out

One of the nice things about the 1st edition was fiddling with lists.

Every little tidbit that comes out makes it worse. I'm not opposed to a balancing system that doesn't use points. I started with historicals where the forces were dictated by the scenario. However, points or something similar are indicated in a system where players get to choose their own forces from their personal collections like 40k proper. This seems like a weird hybrid where you can choose models, but from a much more limited pool dictated by however GW packages the kits. There's no way this is going to work well. Players will figure out what the best kit is and that'll be that.

You know, on one hand, this is kinda limited system and looks like only kill teams with good sprue (or KT extra sprue, like new kommandos/krieg) will have a lot of flexibility. On the other, the kill teams finally look like they are supposed to in the fluff and the new format finally forces some thinking and picking choices instead of braindead netlisting with 15 plasma guns.

I like the system more than past one, where you often had stupid choices like downgrading equipment on your guys fielding blandest, most boring models to avoid massive penalty (like SM team, where 1 point was often difference between being 19 pts and 1 body down or 1 point above 100 points limit when you tried to take fluffy options) needlessly penalizing teams with expensive troopers.

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
Isn't "Giving equal amounts of currency to both sides and letting them spend it on what they want, with better stuff costing more" literally how every single competitive strategy game works on PC.

Erm, no. Let's give two examples similar to KT - namely, Team Fortress 2 and Wargame. In TF2, competitive scene hard locks your kill team to two builds - either 6 (medic, 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, demoman) or 9 (one of each class) because team of say 6 soldiers would be absurdly broken and hard to kill. They don't bother mucking about with different compositions (even though on different maps something else might be better), they try to make kill teams balanced as a whole against each other, like new KT.

Wargame also features hard locks - you have points, true, but each unit you pick has hard limit, the more the better it is. So, you can pick 1-4 T-72 tanks but 1-8 T-55 tanks (or 1-2 T-90) - to ensure you can't spam your plasma gun trooper, so to say. New KT does pretty much the same thing but dispenses with points because you don't have PC to dynamically calculate them and keeps just the hard lock idea.

Blastaar wrote:
I disagree. Do a guardsman with a grenade launcher and a guardsman with a plasma gun have the same value? The Kill Team team thinks so.

Completely wrong. New KT balances teams, not dudes. Designers know that even if one gun is broken, it will be on one model only (instead of old munchkin 12 plasma party), and opponent will have counterplay (shooting said model) instead of losing by default thanks to inferior options. You also have now real choices - do I pick dude with long las for long range in my gunner slot, or flamer for close range kick (when in old KT neither existed because it was WAAAC 12 plasma time, baby). Do I take melta for short range AT, or grenade launcher for versatility? Answer might change depending on opponent, or map, or scenario - and it's great, now you finally have no idea (well, you know what I mean) what opponent might field and you might see a lot more mixed kill teams that still look fluffy instead of rolling your eyes seeing 12 plasma gunners (and meat shield conscript to make the whole thing look even dumber) every single time.

I find it really funny and ironic that people blame format forcing diversity of options and troopers to somehow not 'being your dudes' when people who like fluff will jump on it and the only ones who won't like it will be dudes who bent fluff into pretzel to justify their 12 plasma copy paste clone gang

 kirotheavenger wrote:
You actually lose a lot of flexibility in how you can build Killteams and that's super lame. You're never going to take a laspistol on your sergeant for any reason beyond masochism.

I have concerns here too but 1) they mentioned requisitions so maybe plasma is end game gear, 2) sarge with actually good gear looks cool and I will take them over bland min-maxed 40K cheapest sarges possible. If anything, it's invitation to have blinged up 'your dude' veteran as leader, which is nice.

It seems like it will be a real pain to rebalance kill teams without points.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
T
Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

Well, the teams in the box are veterans and kommandos. Yes, they're really restricted, but you still have guard and orks as options.

Looking at the normal list for guard you could choose two fire teams of guard or scions or one of each. I suppose other factions have similar options.

Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

Oof. Todays' reveal was a bit of a deal breaker for me. The new fire team system blows hard. Not everyone was playing randos with max plasma spam FFS. Now we will see Kill Teams with 9 troopers and 1 leader, because GA will make troopers viable in melee, and because ranged weapons are less effective than melee when fighting MEQ...

I still want to see all the new rules, and especially the new campaign system (which might still save matters somewhat), but the past few reveals have gotten me thinking about sticking to KT1/Open Play..

What a disappointment. The redesigned rules paradigm was a fresh idea, but now its looking to me like the potential will be wasted by GW half-a$$ery once again.

To me, building a Kill Team involves buying several kits and researching special bits for custom kitbashes. So GW wants me to spend less money now??! Just buy one box and call it a day? Where's this "customizability" you praised in your "5 things we love" article?

RazorEdge wrote:
Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

It's easier to see if you replace "Fire Team" with "GW retail box".

 lord_blackfang wrote:
This will harshly homogenize lists.

Basically every faction now has

exactly X number of models
of which Y can be specialists
and you'd be completely insane not to max out on the specialists
and that's literally it

Every [FACTION] list will look identical except for choice of specialists.
And the Ork list as we've seen is literally "1 of each specialist" to boot, so all identical.

Wrong. Loading up on specialists might look good on paper, but it's just shooting your own foot depending on map or opponent. Fine, you took melta, now look how all termagant team laughs at it because rapid fire lasgun was better pick. You took flamer on SM instead of bolter? Enjoy short range meaning you won't get to shoot it till turn 3 against competent opponent. Now the system finally encourages thinking and picking good choices, and if you think it will homogenize lists more than 12 plasma clone WAAAC party, I have bridge on Terra for sale.

Even if we assume you're 'technically' right because maxed up kill teams will have same options (except we already know you're completely wrong because you have multiple fire team options so not even two IG teams will necessarily look identical) I will still take two kill teams fielding all weapon options in the game (forcing you to think how to best apply them) over 12 plasma clone WAAAC party and its brainless autoplay. And that's assuming people will max options instead of taking troopers - that ork team you mentioned? For all we know, 5 of the specialists are very situational picks and you will need to think long and hard if you take them over regular kommando. Anything that will change the game from solved equation (like 12 plasma clones to minmax point efficiency) to actual game of skill in picking best choices is good, not bad.

RazorEdge wrote:
Don't see the sense of this "Fire Teams".

I suppose they're part of a modular design of the forces. If we're going with the guardsmen example, they have 7 members. I guess scions won't, let's say they have 5. So you could build a KT of 14 guardsmen, 10 scions or a mixed force of 5 scions and 7 guardsmen. We'll have to see what the other lists look like. Maybe the Marine list isn't as varied as it seems.

 Dryaktylus wrote:
I suppose they're part of a modular design of the forces. If we're going with the guardsmen example, they have 7 members. I guess scions won't, let's say they have 5. So you could build a KT of 14 guardsmen, 10 scions or a mixed force of 5 scions and 7 guardsmen. We'll have to see what the other lists look like. Maybe the Marine list isn't as varied as it seems.

If anything, SM will be more varied, because you have scouts, tacticals, primaris, and deathwatch in one list, each of which sounds like their own fire team - say, 4 scouts, 3 tacticals/primaris, or 2 DW veterans.

 tauist wrote:
To me, building a Kill Team involves buying several kits and researching special bits for custom kitbashes. So GW wants me to spend less money now??! Just buy one box and call it a day? Where's this "customizability" you praised in your "5 things we love" article?

Read the article again. GW wants you to make pool of 20-25 models with which to make fire teams and kill teams on the spot. A pool to which you can add (or convert) if later you have better idea/get rare loot in game. I have no idea how you intend to assemble 25+ custom kitbashed models from one box. Especially seeing old edition and its 12 plasma clones really was buildable from a single box + a few bits because best compositions were solved thanks to rigid point system. So, if anything, your criticism is backwards.

 Flinty wrote:
Hmm. A lot less interested now. At least until the fandex point costs get sorted out

One of the nice things about the 1st edition was fiddling with lists.

Based on what we've seen so far:

Fire Teams are either 840 points (Guardsmen, Scions, probably most FTs) or 1680 points (Astartes, Kommandos, Veteran Guardsmen). Games are 1680 points.
Poxwalkers are 105 pts
Death Guard are 280 pts
Veteran Guardsmen and Kommandos are 168 points
Guardsmen are 120 pts.

Wargear is 0 points, but subject to Fire Team composition restrictions.

Done.

Taking guard specifically, I worry that unless there are more Fire Team options then all Guard lists are going to look very similar. Using the Guardsman Fire team only, and taking two teams, you are always going to choose

7 Regular Troops, 1 of each Operative, and 1 leader, for a total of 14 troops. The only choice is what your leader is equipped with.

Without points there is never a reason to take another Trooper over one of the specialists. If you splash in Scions it might be a bit more varied, but this feels like it's going to be easier to solve for the "best" combo.

I'm hoping there are going to be other types of Fire Teams, like maybe a special weapons Fire team, an Ogryn / Bullgryn Fire Team, and others.

Even looking at the Kommando list, I feel like there are going to be few choices. There are 9 special operatives, and you can select 9 special operatives, so I'm curious how a regular "Boy" is going to be made a valid choice against any of the others. Why would you not just take a leader and the 9 specialists?

Finger crossed the Rustalker Princerp get the dataspike as wargear.