Generally reasonable objectives, but with overly broad restrictions that hit some armies much harder than others. Detailed critique to follow, but there are a few points I tend to use that you haven't addressed.
1: If a Psyker uses more than 6 Warp Charge on a power they automatically suffer a Perils of the Warp attack from the cast.
2: All models with the Psyker rule are considered to be equipped with a Psychic Hood. Models that already had Psychic Hoods may use them to deny powers cast or targeting models within 18", rather than 12".
3: Summoning powers are considered to have 'targeted' the point on the field where the initial model is placed when Deep Striking for purposes of Denial.
4: Invisibility sets all models' Weapon Skill and Ballistic Skill to 1 when targeting the unit rather than making them Snap Shot/hit on 6s in melee.
(These changes are broadly designed to make denying psychic powers easier, make it harder for armies with lots of dice to bull-rush powers through with a massive cast pool, and make Blessings/Summoning powers easier to stop.)
5: If a model has a rerollable 2+ for any reason the reroll is only passed on a 4+, rather than a 2+.
(Rerollable 2+ saves, to-hit rolls, et cetera exist, but they're frequently very annoying. This change makes them still the best possible roll (92% to succeed, versus 89% for a rerollable 3+ and 83% for an ordinary 2+), but it makes rerollable-2+-save deathstar shenanigans take three times as many wounds as they would without it (a wound has an 8.3% chance to go through rather than a 2.8% chance as it would if the reroll still passed on a 2+.).)
Specific critiques:
eskimo wrote:
Reasonings for Changes
The objective of this is to try and keep my own interest in
40k flowing, and perhaps until 8th edition, a more stable community. Bored of one sided games, whatever side that may be. Unable to play successful pick up games due to massive power indifferences between Factions, merely stating what type of game is preferred on that day is no longer enough to warrant a gamble of a potentially boring 3 hour game.
Following on from that, the game can take a long time to play. With hundreds of dice being rolled with no effect being applied to the table, lots of time is wasted with little impact to the game or the enjoyment of it.
Future changes depending on success may result in removal or replacement of things like Overwatch, psychic table rolling, etc.
The changes are far from perfect, but they are the shortest possible route to achieve quicker and more enjoyable games from my perspective. Therefore feedback in any way is appreciated if it consists of more than one line of text.
Rule Changes
1: Models no longer required to be 1” away. 1mm is fine.
--A tactic used to destroy units outright, or area denial to prevent capturing an objective and preventing an assault of a vulnerable unit. Quite simply, not how I envision
40k. Whilst a tactical way of playing, it’s not very fluff like.
This isn't a 'tactic', it's a matter of convenience. With a clear and obvious distance between units it's much, much easier to tell them apart.
As for people using it to block space? You're almost never in a situation where the difference between '1"' and "not in base contact" is going to have any effect on the outcome of the game. I've never seen this as a problem, if you want to make sure your units are clearly marked so you can tell them apart when they're in close proximity go right ahead.
2: Land based vehicles/ skimmers/ dreadnoughts have a 5++ Invulnerable Save.
--The simplest fix for vehicles. Any more than one line of text isn’t simple. We shall see how it plays out with the assault changes however.
The issue with this as your one-line fix is that you've nerfed a chunk of units that have an Invulnerable save already (Daemon Engines, War Walkers, Holofields/Flickerfields, Contemptors...), since they're paying points for a thing you've just handed everyone for free. A better one-line fix that makes vehicles tougher, doesn't step on anyone's toes, and remains simple and easy to implement would be "All vehicles gain +1 hull point. All rolls on the vehicle damage table are made with an additional -1 penalty."; you apply the benefit equally to everyone, make vehicles harder to explode, and give vehicles the same amount of 'hit points' as roughly equivalent Monstrous Creatures.
3: Jump units gain Jink.
--Bikes sicken me. How a bike qualifies for Jink and +1T whereas a Jump unit gets much less for not much in point change. Should make some Units more feasible, if they don’t go crashing into dangerous terrain still.
The thing about Jink is that almost all Bikes in the game are shooting units, which makes Jink an actual trade-off, whereas Jump units are usually melee units, which makes Jink just free stuff. I don't think the points discrepancy is that bad given that Bikes only have their cover save if they choose to reduce their attacks to 1/3 or 1/4 effectiveness. If you want to improve Jump Infantry in comparison to Bikes I'd suggest mitigating Dangerous Terrain so they can actually make use of cover instead, it lets them get places Bikes can't and with easier access to normal on-the-table cover they become tougher.
4: No more than 1 Independent Character may join a single unit at any time.
--Deathstar, no thanks. Even mild Deathstars are bland. Throwing many dice at a Unit with it not dying is frustrating, time consuming and often fluff killing. With Look Out Sir being easily abused, your beatstick leader can make it to his destination untouched.
I
mostly agree with this one, but at the same time you can easily end up with stupid, frustrating Look Out, Sir! abuse that only requires one
IC (Coteaz joined to an Artillery unit is the most annoying example I've come across; he's T7/2+ against shooting and can Look Out, Sir! any AP2 Wounds to keep the save up), and there are places where multiple
ICs are just sort of ordinary or to be expected (Oberyn/Zandrekh, Inquisitorial Henchmen Warbands...). I'd suggest upping the limit to two
ICs to avoid needing to go through and make loads of individual-exception rulings.
5: Smash reverts to the 6th edition ruling. Half attacks rounding up are made at double strength.
--MC versus the now buffed Dreadnought is saddening, especially with it having a 5++ now. This should even the odds a bit and insta-gib those +1T bikes and T5 assault units with FNP. Even a 2atk Power Fist Dreadnought versus a Tyranid MC was pathetic at best.
Are you suggesting reverting the entire rule? I'd be quite happy with a rule that required Monstrous Creatures to have a melee weapon with AP2 to have AP2 in melee, it makes dedicated gun-
MCs much less of an automatic answer to everything.
6: All Units may Run and Assault
--Making assault more viable. No waiting till turn 3 or 4 (an hour!) to assault. Get in there and slaughter each other
Charging (effectively)
3d6" instead of
2d6" isn't really going to change the fundamental issue with most assault units, not to mention you're stepping on the toes of people who are paying formation taxes to get this already. If you really want to make assaults happen faster I'd suggest letting people make Disordered Charges the turn they get out of transports without Assault Vehicle or Open-Topped; you'd increase the threat range of most units significantly (a footslogging infantry unit today can get to 22.5" from its deployment position for a turn two charge on average rolls, under your suggestion that goes up to 26" (2" inside the enemy deployment zone), under my suggestion they go on average 37"), dodge the disembark-and-sit-around-being-shot issue, and make transports generally more useful.
7: When failing an Assault Move, the Unit moves the distance rolled.
--As above. May need tweaking. Future idea to remove Overwatch but reduce charges to 1x D6.
Sure? Again, this isn't really going to affect much. As for Overwatch you could take a leaf out of
WHFB's book (stand-and-shoot charge reactions in 7th/8th) and make charges made from within 6" of the target unit ignore Overwatch?
8: You may shoot into combat. Always at an unmodifiable BS3. Misses are resolved against the owning player’s unit.
--An alternative to giving everything a Hit & Run type of rule for the time being. Allows some funny events to happen, while tarpitted TMCs are largely unaffected in this instance. Yes, Orks, I know, and I don’t care.
You may not care about Orks but if you want to make assault viable letting gunline armies throw a wave of conscripts at the enemy to pin them in place and let the Russes/Riptides/Vindicators keep firing is really, really not the way to go. Tarpits are vastly less of a thing than people on Proposed Rules keep making them out to be, and this is a pretty bad overreaction.
Restrictions
1: No D weapons in casual games.
--Deleting valuable Units off the board turn 1 is a waste of time. Keep it to Apocalypse games.
Sure, so long as you change normal-scale Distortion weapons in the Eldar book to something else. I'd suggest going along the lines Heralds of Ruin took and make the Wraithcannon S10/Armourbane/Fleshbane and the scythes S4/Armourbane/Fleshbane, let them
threaten everything but don't let them auto-delete things. Preserve the scariness inherent in the cost and terrible range without making them invalidate the existence of other things.
2: Battle Brothers downgraded to Allies of Convenience. No Come the Apocalypse Allies.
--An obvious one to prevent help prevent sneaky undesirable tricks.
Give me my Inquisition Codex back and update the Badab War list to the current Marine book, and then we'll talk. There are a
lot of perfectly reasonable lore-friendly concepts that rely on Battle-Brothers existing. And you may need to clarify that detachments that allow models from multiple Factions are still allowed to be Battle-Brothers, it would be thoroughly silly to take the Skitarii Start Collecting box and declare that since Battle-Brothers are downgraded the Tech-Priest isn't allowed to join the Skitarii units.
Generally Allies abuse isn't particularly abusive in this day and age, simply because actually getting the stuff together to abuse it is so impractical. Yes, I can construct an Eldar leadership-shenanigans deathstar from three Codexes that can auto-delete a GMC or a Primarch with no chance of failure. It requires a thousand points, I need to roll about four of the exact right psychic powers from different tables and cast them successfully, it's at the mercy of Reserves rolls to see when it'll deploy, and as soon as it kills your giant model that's half its price it is going to explode into a puddle of T3 goo, so nobody is ever going to play it even as a joke because it doesn't actually
work. 90-95% of the abusiveness possible with the Allies rules has been cut out by your restriction on the number of characters in a unit, this restriction is just spite.
3: If no unit is duplicated the player is awarded 6VPs. Orks and Dark Eldar may duplicate their Troop units 3 times before forgoing the 6VPs.
--Quite controversial. As far as I can see, shouldn’t be an issue in list building. This is more to see how much variety hits the table, rather than balance it.
The issue with this is that quite a lot of armies
can't play with this restriction. Space Marines have two Troops choices. Harlequins have one. Eldar have
five[i]. 6VP is enough to turn the tide of almost every game, to the point that you're functionally handing automatic victory to the army that has more Troops choices in their Codex.
Another issue is that Imperial armies tend to get variety out of [i]how their units are equipped rather than what their units
are; the Eldar will have two different unit entries to fill two different roles, the Imperium will have one with weapon swap options.
I get what you're trying to do, but so long as you want to restrict Allies and so long as Codexes with a seriously limited number of unit options exist this isn't a feasible way to do it.
4: Super Heavies and Gargantuan Creatures disallowed at 2000pts and below.
-- Obvious one. Just like the unkillable Deathstar, some Factions just can’t handle these comfortably enough to be fun.
I have no objection. I usually write "no more than one per full 1,500pts in your army", but just "banned below 2,000pts" works.
5: Free Units are limited to once per game.
----Summoning anything once, spawning anything once, one unit with weapon upgrades once, etc.
--A balance choice. Whilst not perfect, does keep game times down at least. To be future adjusted with the psychic phase.
After trying to play a summon army I'd suggest limiting it to one summon in play per summon-capable model at a time (can't summon more until the last summon is destroyed), and/or prohibiting summoned models from summoning more models. It's much more difficult than it sounds/seems to get a summon army that actually ends up increasing the number of models on the table, making summoning a 1/game effect seems unnecessarily limiting. As for Tervigons and Spyders they don't really need the nerf.
6: Warlord Traits cannot be rolled for. You only receive a Warlord Trait if the HQ has one pre assigned to them. As an example Commander Dante only receives Descent of Angels, and not a Tactical Trait in addition.
--Some are good, some are crap. Often a waste of time.
And by removing them from generic characters only you're forcing players to take Special Characters. I'd suggest either removing the system entirely (if you do this please,
please give Vulkan He'stan and Lysander Eternal Warrior back?) or letting people pick their Warlord Trait so they can actually plan around them and make them less of a waste of time, rather than making Special Characters just better than generic characters.
7: Forgeworld models and rules are on a ask permission before playing basis.
--Pay to win? Sometimes the generous rules FW hands out it feels like this. Also not everyone likes FW models/ resin/ cost. So a simple restriction is to ask before playing as both players may both want to play FW units.
The issue with this as a blanket declaration is that Forge World units are almost never actually pay-to-win. If you start listing off the problem units in the game you have to go a long ways down (past Wraithknights, Warp Spiders, Scatterbikes, Grav-Centurions, free Razorbacks, Riptides, Stormsurges...) to find any Forge World units, and almost all of the ones you find (Typhon, Skathach, Malcador Infernus...) are already covered by the superheavy restriction. I'd suggest restricting the Lynx, Achilles, and Fire Raptor to games over 2,000pts like superheavies, hard-banning Kasyr Lutien and Battle of Keylek, and making the Sicaran use the updated pricing in the 30k rules, at that point (and with the superheavy restrictions) there's basically nothing left to worry about.
Faction Changes
1: Non Monstrous Creature Craftworld Eldar downgrade all armour saves better than 4+ to 4+.
--Eldar have enough tricks to keep them survivable without them having a crutch such as power armour.
The issue with big, sweeping changes like this is that the Eldar Codex has terrible internal balance. You may be giving reasonable nerfs to jetbikes this way, but you're also making Wraithblades, all the melee characters, and Striking Scorpions actually unplayable. Eldar characters already lose duels to pretty much everything in the game, making them all 4+ armour is an unnecessary and silly nerf.
And power armour isn't a 'crutch' for models that are already paying 15+pts for T3 and one Wound, it's all that is standing between them and Genestealer-style irrelevance as they get casually RFPed by heavy flamers.
Take away 3+ armour from the Windriders, sure, but leave the Aspect Warriors and the Wraithguard alone. The army has already been reduced to an annoyingly alpha-strikey one-trick pony, all nerfing the units that don't need it is going to do is punish people for not playing the scatterbikes and make the whole problem worse.
2: Imperial Drop Pods loose the rule “Drop Pod Assault”.
--Evens the odds considerably. I believe it will allow the opposing army to move out, score, kill, and find cover before suicide squads remove some vital units. It allows the opponent to prevent the drop pod assault from capturing an objective and killing off a unit early game by extending the distances by moving out, and it prevents it happening for potentially 5 turns.
Deep Strike in general is definitely in need of a rethink; most Deep Strike units are straddling a very fine line between 'overpowered' and 'completely useless'. Taking away Drop Pod Assault is going to make pods functionally useless; they may be a safe mode of Deep Strike, but the major advantage of having them is not having to play with a tiny fraction of your army in the early turns when you have no idea when the rest will arrive.
A quick fix that prevents the issue wherein the enemy has no chance to respond to pods could be taking the half of your pods that arrive on your turn one and making them arrive in no-man's-land before the game starts (after Scouts/Infiltration, before the Seize roll) so they're on the table and can be targeted, but they don't get to randomly land behind vehicles, they don't get to land safely and shoot immediately, and the other guy has more chance to respond to where they hit.
