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I played my first game against conscripts this edition.
Emperor's mercy, was that a crapshow.

My opponent was a cool dude, fun to hang out with afterwards, and I can't blame him for writing a list designed for the (admittedly very janky) Konor mission or for using what tools his Index gave him. Heck, I don't even care that he used a powerful unit - I like playing against powerful units.
But Conscripts were just. So. Damned. Boring.
At one point, I tried to charge a couple units of conscripts, meaning he had to fire well over a hundred dice in Overwatch, and since Yarrick was nearby that meant he also had to re-roll all ones. It took about fifteen minutes to check range, count up shots, roll all the attacks, re-roll 1s, roll wounds, and then roll saves, and it literally didn't do any damage. I then failed my charge range, meaning that when I charged with my next unit... Well, the exact same thing happened.
And since they're impossible to remove without either tailoring your list to kill hordes or finding a way to snipe out the Commissars (which I could have potentially done, except my first Psychic phase I got two 4s and three 3s,) there wasn't really much it felt like I could do about it except slog through and wait for it to be over - Which took forever, of course, because each turn took over an hour thanks to the incredibly tedious task of moving 100+ models, checking range on all of them, and rolling handfuls of dice over and over.
Having to sit through the turns with those conscripts was just not fun, and it was made worse by how ineffectual everything was - At least when Orks hit you with a bucket of dice, it usually at least *does* something. When he hit me with buckets of dice, I wasn't likely to lose more than one or two Tactical marines.
It feels like I have to bring a specific counter to Conscripts in every list I bring, or else any time I get matched against a Guard player it's going to end the same way - With literal hours of sitting around while nothing happens.
I don't want to be 'that guy' and say I won't play against a specific unit, or that one unit should be banned from play for whatever reason, but at the same time I really don't want to play against Conscripts again simply because of how time-consuming and tedious it was to fight.


Which left me wondering afterwards - Was that a 'bad' game? My opponent brought a strong list, sure, but it was by no means pure cheese - In an 1100 point game (We're doing an escalation league, hence the weird number) he had about 400 points of conscripts, so it's not like some massive ridiculous amount - Everything else was in assassins, a few vehicles for anti air and some anti-tank, a couple Commissars, and the guy who gives out orders. He was friendly and cool throughout the whole thing, too. There was strategy going on, and excitement over dice rolls and trying to outmanuever one another.
But even with all that, I still don't know if I'd actually say it was a 'good' game. I'm absolutely fine losing because I didn't prepare for something well enough and died to it, but when dying to it also takes literal hours of rolling dice that don't do anything... I kind of just want to stay home and skip it.

Excessively slow play, whether because of you or your army composition, is annoying in casual play and basically cheating in tournament play.

A bad game is any that you walk away from feeling like your time would have been better spent doing something else in however many hours it took to complete.

You might go against some particular units that you might feel are quite boring to play against. Hell, I'd argue that most Tau armies I've faced are full of boring units. A lot of the time those units are very competitive, and a lot of people enjoy playing games of 40k competitively.

In a casual environment though, I would just kindly ask your buddy next time if he could tweak his list to make it more enjoyable to play against; if you tell him the reasons why you don't like Conscripts I'm sure they'll understand. As long as you're both playing with the same intentions for the what the goal of the game is (casual or competitive), it should result in a better game the next time round.

Getting tabled turn 1? Although some of the most fun games I have had ended up with me getting thoroughly trounced. That's Chaos for you!

Yeah I've faced an army of 90 orcs and its fekking dull waiting for your opponent to move em all.

With that many dice to roll, I think there is a strong case for doing the to hit rolls statistically, then just rolling the wound dice.

That way 100 shots becomes 33 hits. re-rolling 17 1s becomes 6 more hits. Then you just have to roll 39 wound rolls instead. Hell, I'd be happy to round up to 40 or even 42 to speed things up if my opponent had the conscripts, or down to 38 or even 36 if I were fielding them.

Cheaters : whether intentional or not, ie : a guy that always moves his models a few more inches because he moves the tape and the model at the same time.

Also : no movement, no interraction, just dice rolling (*cough* gunlines *cough*). This is a strategy game. If I only wanted to roll dice I would go to the casino.

Boring tables, boring missions, boring terrain. Boring army composition. Overly competitive players or those who gripe and moan over simple dice-based luck.

More importantly, is the game fun? This is first and foremost a game and should be fun - with tournament considerations a distant second. It's a hobby, a way to spend time when you're not working.

Yeah uninteractive gunlines like that are painful, my main opponent is gunline IG and I've given up playing him, it was boring in 7th, nothing has changed. Sure its fluffy as hell but its literally the same army comp all the time. To his credit he plays it not because its powerful, he played it all through 7th and it wasnt a good time for him, he just loves that playstyle.

Other 'bad' games could be things like the game I had last night. I had a competitive game against a nasty GK list, and I thought I had a chance, but literally every possible option (map type, table sides, who got first etc) went against me, into a list that was an uphill battle even if I had everything I wanted. Basically a foregone conclusion before the first game dice were rolled.

Its okay in a sense as you can learn a lot from it, but its not enjoyable to realise what is about to happen and see it play out for 2hours.

See, this is a weird paradox.

I see people say gunlines are boring, so I play a superheavy tank company, which has a load of firepower but it's not in very many shots (comparatively) so not too much dice. The tanks are at home in melee so I shove them forwards, jockeying for the best position to tie up as many units as possible while still simultaneously staying in support range of my lesser units and other tanks...

... it's really quite fun, and for my opponents as well (or so I am told).

But then people say that army is boring, and I sometimes wonder if IG can ever be played without being labeled as boring.

 Fifty wrote:
With that many dice to roll, I think there is a strong case for doing the to hit rolls statistically, then just rolling the wound dice.

That way 100 shots becomes 33 hits. re-rolling 17 1s becomes 6 more hits. Then you just have to roll 39 wound rolls instead. Hell, I'd be happy to round up to 40 or even 42 to speed things up if my opponent had the conscripts, or down to 38 or even 36 if I were fielding them.

Absolutely not. The whole point of having dice rolls is because the randomness swings both ways. Might as well just make it "This unit kills 3 enemies whenever it fires" instead of rolling.

I do sometimes wonder if, as infantry guard, I should start using an RNG program on my phone to "roll" instead of physical dice.

A well-featured program can roll a whole bunch of virtual dice at once, do the re-rolls automatically, and tally the successes for you so you don't even need to count. On top of that it weighs less, doesn't clutter the table, doesn't bump models, doesn't end up tilted on terrain...

On the other hand, it's not nearly as intimidating as a literal bucket with 200+ dice in it.

I wouldn't say it's a paradox. Any army consisting of spammed units (for better or for worse) becomes really boring, particularly on the 2nd-3rd time unless you're willing to really work on custom scenarios or have tables which make it more interesting.

It's why I don't approve of people who just build an army toward one list...and that's it. I vastly prefer people who have armies big enough to run them a dozen different ways and still play the same army (makes it 10x more interesting for a campaign or series of games).

You could run something like 10 Leman Russes and while fluffy...it's boring simply because it's 10 nearly identical units. That gets boring in a game, let alone more than one. Admittedly the goal of winning/crushing an opponent is often more important to people than providing something of interest for the game.

I'd love to play against a super heavy list...but the same one several weeks in a row? No thanks. Same thing with your conscript style force. You want to run a crazy 200+ man conscript army? Cool. Once. It just gets boring as crap after that. Particularly if you stick to the rather blase scenario/mission approach of GW's Maelstrom/etc. games.

The opponent is usually top of my list of factors making a game bad. But this can be for many reasons, poor loser, poor winner, cheating, playing tourney level, rules lawyer, or just someone I don't like. Life's too short. I play to enjoy the game and the company.

All about the batch rolling.

As a Warhammer Veteran that played Ogres in 8th Ed, I know what it is to chuck out buckets of dice.

If you need to roll 100? Roll them in batches of 20. Keep tally, and move to the next roll, be it re-rolls or straight to wounding. Needs less space to make the roll in, and makes it harder for unscrupulous players to roll too many dice, on account 100 looks awfully similar to 110....

For me, it's all about my opponent's attitude to the game. I've ROFLstomped and been ROFLstomped. I've had incredibly close 'won or lost on the very last roll' games. Any time I've not enjoyed it, it's been because of my opponent's attitude.

It sounds like you experienced a case of "Dice Fatigue," a scenario where the game simply can break down under weight of dice for relatively minimal effect (a notable example of this early on was the Ynnari Flockspam, prior to the FAQ point adjustment). A good sign that a game is badly designed is when you can drown it under excessive dice rolls, chart lookups, etc, without actually increasing player agency.

A notable example of bad game design would be the WHFB Giant, which rather than having normal attacks, had 3 charts that let it determine what it does. You rolled on one chart versus big models, one chart versus small models, and the third chart was a sub-chart of the second ("Pick up and..."). By contrast, Warmachine makes Throws, Arm Locks, Slams, etc. all varied Power Attacks with their assorted tactical usages.

A bad game is knowing how the game will end after a turn. This is not only for warhammer but any game really.
A good game is a thriller to the end where it changes the whole time who is up for the win.

Not talking about the opponent. I only play games with people I enjoy playing.

 Elbows wrote:
I wouldn't say it's a paradox. Any army consisting of spammed units (for better or for worse) becomes really boring, particularly on the 2nd-3rd time unless you're willing to really work on custom scenarios or have tables which make it more interesting.

It's why I don't approve of people who just build an army toward one list...and that's it. I vastly prefer people who have armies big enough to run them a dozen different ways and still play the same army (makes it 10x more interesting for a campaign or series of games).

You could run something like 10 Leman Russes and while fluffy...it's boring simply because it's 10 nearly identical units. That gets boring in a game, let alone more than one. Admittedly the goal of winning/crushing an opponent is often more important to people than providing something of interest for the game.

I'd love to play against a super heavy list...but the same one several weeks in a row? No thanks. Same thing with your conscript style force. You want to run a crazy 200+ man conscript army? Cool. Once. It just gets boring as crap after that. Particularly if you stick to the rather blase scenario/mission approach of GW's Maelstrom/etc. games.

This makes sense, but also kind of makes me sad.

I'm a fluff player through and through; I'd sacrifice balance on the altar of fluff (if the fluff made any damn sense. 40k's fluff is too slippery to actually write the rules around). Spammed armies are not only fluffy, but they're sensible IRL too - right now I'm doing a study with MCSS on how to possibly manage all the logistical demands of the future because they're just so bonkers (thinks like mixed-type artillery battalions, which means not only do you have to make sure they get enough 155mm shells from a given plant, but also enough rockets from a different plant, mortar rounds from another plant, fuel for their self-propelled systems, vehicles for their towed systems, engineers for the towed systems and mechanics for the self-propelled systems, etc. It's a logistical nightmare.).

In fact, one of my favorite things about this game is that I'm a firm believer in "you play the list, you learn the list." A player who plays the same (or similar enough) list week-after-week becomes better at running that list, because they really learn the ins-and-outs, little quirks of the rules, how many of a given weapon is needed to accomplish a task, how much force to throw forwards vs hold back, etc.

I hate constantly switching lists because I feel like I never learn anything.

Unit,

I fully agree...logistically it makes sense. But logistically it always begs the question why any of these wars exist when you have ships which can blast a planet into nothingness. Logistics, common sense, etc. are great for real life...but can make a game pretty boring.

I agree with your perception of fluff/lore being more important than winning/balance as well. But that sadly doesn't overcome the lack of enthusiasm when it becomes "oh, it's that guy with the same ten units...for the sixth time...". I don't think that Warhammer 40K is a good enough game to make that interesting. Now, with some custom scenarios and crazy tables...maaaaybe?

Of course, none of that really matters if you have 10-15 people in your gaming circle. If I just faced your superheavy detachment once every 4-5 weeks or something that'd be fine as I'd have plenty of other games in between. But if you were a consistant opponent it'd get old real fast.

It is a pretty simple answer.

Did you have fun?

If no, then it was a bad game; sometimes this can mitigated if you learned something. But you didn't.

That is a textbook bad game.

 Elbows wrote:
Unit,

I fully agree...logistically it makes sense. But logistically it always begs the question why any of these wars exist when you have ships which can blast a planet into nothingness. Logistics, common sense, etc. are great for real life...but can make a game pretty boring.

I agree with your perception of fluff/lore being more important than winning/balance as well. But that sadly doesn't overcome the lack of enthusiasm when it becomes "oh, it's that guy with the same ten units...for the sixth time...". I don't think that Warhammer 40K is a good enough game to make that interesting. Now, with some custom scenarios and crazy tables...maaaaybe?

Of course, none of that really matters if you have 10-15 people in your gaming circle. If I just faced your superheavy detachment once every 4-5 weeks or something that'd be fine as I'd have plenty of other games in between. But if you were a consistant opponent it'd get old real fast.

I could see that, though you wouldn't see the same list each time (though I can forgive you for thinking it was since the differences between the what, 9 types of IG superheavies sort of blur into the background for most people).

However, I would say that no matter what army I play you'll see the same lists over and over again. Because I like to learn them, as mentioned before, and because I only play with painted models, which means it takes supreme effort of will to get me to put a new model on the table, since I am a slow painter.

I think this may be an incompatibility with our playstyles, I fear. I like to iterate the same list over and over again like a science experiment, refining it to the utmost sharpest of an edge that that list concept can possibly be. I feel like that's something you probably would hate facing.

When it feels like you took no part in the game. Either because your opponent has excessively long turns, your dice don't roll well or your opponent shoots you off the table in record time.

"What makes a bad game?" 8th edition as a whole is a bad game so it's kind of a given that is what you'll get

TeAXIIIT13 wrote:
"What makes a bad game?" 8th edition as a whole is a bad game so it's kind of a given that is what you'll get

I love it when people come into topics to take swipes at 8th even though it's unrelated to the conversation. Your salt energizes me.

 General Annoyance wrote:
A bad game is any that you walk away from feeling like your time would have been better spent doing something else.

Bam. THAT'S what a bad game is! It doesn't matter how or why exactly, what matters is you felt it was a bad game.

In your situation, you can absolutely tell your opponents that you're looking to complete a game in 2.5hrs, and if they don't think they can do that with their army, then it's totally fine to politely decline the match. If this specific person is someone you want to have matches against again, you can also work with them to help complete actions faster. You can ask if you can help them move models, tell them you'll let them cheat measurements for sake of expediency, like letting them measure one model and just move all others up to it (since the overall numbers really don't matter too much like you said), and ask if you can start making moves while they complete other moves. Those things all really help. If it's still too slow, tell them your problem, "These games just feel like they take too long to do the minutia. Can you take a different list next time?"

Waaaghpower wrote:

At one point, I tried to charge a couple units of conscripts, meaning he had to fire well over a hundred dice in Overwatch, and since Yarrick was nearby that meant he also had to re-roll all ones. It took about fifteen minutes to check range, count up shots, roll all the attacks, re-roll 1s, roll wounds, and then roll saves, and it literally didn't do any damage.

If you're being hyperbolic, stop, it makes you lose credibility. If you're not, what's wrong with you guys? That's a one minute activity.

 Quickjager wrote:
It is a pretty simple answer.

Did you have fun?

If no, then it was a bad game; sometimes this can mitigated if you learned something. But you didn't.

That is a textbook bad game.

Exalted.

Too true, no fun when you get tabled by a Tau Alpha Strike on the first turn (or any other army that does the same thing).

CB

 Scott-S6 wrote:
Excessively slow play, whether because of you or your army composition, is annoying in casual play and basically cheating in tournament play.

That's something that I have to disagree with a bit, at least the second half. If you're just really bad at keeping things going, sure, but saying that you can't bring large, bulky armies to tournaments because it's 'Cheating' is tantamount to saying that you can't bring Ork boyz, Conscripts, many forms of Nids, and some other options I'm sure I'm forgetting. In a tournament, denying several armies their most powerful unit is basically the same as barring them from playing - Or at least winning.

I also wonder where people get the idea that being locked into an assault on turn 1 is somehow more "interactive" than being shot off the table. In my view 40k's melee system is a good deal less "interactive" than a good firefight, though the addition of rules to get you *out* of melee is an improvement at least.

 ross-128 wrote:
I also wonder where people get the idea that being locked into an assault on turn 1 is somehow more "interactive" than being shot off the table. In my view 40k's melee system is a good deal less "interactive" than a good firefight, though the addition of rules to get you *out* of melee is an improvement at least.

If I'm in an assault I do something other than die.