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So with the new Tau Codex I see a lot of people on youtube, here and other forums saying Tau players are upset because they think anything but a total slaughter of their enemy means they are weak. I see this phrase said many more times, in addition, when others talk about the power level of their army. Now I understand that when you play a game with factions people always want their guys to be unbeatable (sometimes it's because you hate losing or other times it's because you love your faction) but isn't the point of games to feel like epic unbeatable heros? Don't get me wrong, the game should be balanced but if you have ever played games like Guild Wars 2 (haven't played in years so could be different now) you can feel like an epic unbeatable hero from level 1 and still have a balanced fun environment. So how would this be possible in 40k? How do you get the feeling every faction are godlike but still also have the ability to lose?

Post your suggestions and ideas below.

My opinion:
I have no idea how to achieve this outside of have a DM mode where the DM's role is to make you win and feel good but also kake it challenging. But then that's not 40k... that's just DnD but with 40k armies.

Give everyone large numbers for stats and use d100s. The fact is nothing has really changed but psychologically everything feels "bigger".

The answer to your question seems to be having two players taking the most egregious lists possible and 'out-WAAC' each other.

No thanks.

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
The answer to your question seems to be having two players taking the most egregious lists possible and 'out-WAAC' each other.

No thanks.

That's not always the case. Sure it is now in modern 40k but in many other games I can feel like an epic powerful army or robot or whatever and still not play competitively.

 lolman1c wrote:

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
The answer to your question seems to be having two players taking the most egregious lists possible and 'out-WAAC' each other.

No thanks.

That's not always the case. Sure it is now in modern 40k but in many other games I can feel like an epic powerful army or robot or whatever and still not play competitively.

Fair comment. I was just answering in the context of 40K, which is an arms race e.g. I have big stompy megalozordrobot (read Warlord titan).

Do they think they can't slaughter people based off the leaks?

The sole thing which is lacking heavily in 40K and has for some time: penalties and downsides.

For every potent advantage, an army should feature a serious penalty or downside. This is story writing 101, something you'll note in the greatest villains and heroes in movies and televisions, books, and novels, etc...even our own human history.

This leads to internet griping, and a constant "why can't we also have...", etc. And sadly the days of armies not having access to stuff (in a great way of differentiating them) is gone, because GW is aimed at selling more models, etc. I don't blame them, of course, but the quality of the game will suffer as sales become more of the prominent goal. Such is life.

Mechanically speaking in game? I havent the foggiest.

What ive allways done, is make a story out of every game. Physically write down everything and even in the most humiliating defeats can be found small moments of epicness.

I love my SoB. I like them to win, it deels good to win. But sometimes they get beat. Hard.
I remember back in 6th ed i had a gane against a friends GKs. It was an abysmal game- the kind where you feel like you wasted time even organising the game. Right off the batt i lost my cannoness and the game was a gormality the rest of the time.
Theree was however an epic 3 turn combat between a lone surviving repentia and his GK champion. Her 6++ was just on fire. By that yome of course my entire army was wiped and id literally done nothing against him except a few wounds off his GK champ.

Instead of walking away poo-pooing how weak sisters were, i wound up with a great story of a sisters detachment that was ambushed; its leader killed in the initial shots and the rest of the squads trying to do the best they could and an epic fight of the repentia all told from the surviving repentias testimony.

Even in the face of defeat, an epic story can still be forged and you can still feel your army can be epic.

TL;DR Forge (force) the narrative?

So basicly Tau players are upset that have to try and don't have a "point, click,. table" army in 8th? ohh boo hoo hoo

BrianDavion wrote:
So basicly Tau players are upset that have to try and don't have a "point, click,. table" army in 8th? ohh boo hoo hoo

I don't believe the OP is talking about specifically Tau players. I'm pretty sure he's saying that that sentiment can be found across ALL factions, by some people.

You do it by using point costs appropriately. You can have a faction made up of super-powerful models as long as you give them the appropriate point cost, meaning few of those models on the table at once. I think the complaint of Tau players, at least in my case, is not that we don't have an auto-win tournament army, it's that we have an army that often feels like we're playing orks and winning by the sheer volume of dice that the horde can put out. And, rather than make Tau units feel like elites instead of orks, the new codex seems to have been focused on buffing them through point reductions and letting you bring buy more models. Crisis suits should be BS 3+ and get JSJ back at a higher point cost, tanks should ignore the movement penalty on heavy weapons, etc. All of this is fine as long as appropriate point costs are assigned.

 Peregrine wrote:
You do it by using point costs appropriately. You can have a faction made up of super-powerful models as long as you give them the appropriate point cost, meaning few of those models on the table at once. I think the complaint of Tau players, at least in my case, is not that we don't have an auto-win tournament army, it's that we have an army that often feels like we're playing orks and winning by the sheer volume of dice that the horde can put out. And, rather than make Tau units feel like elites instead of orks, the new codex seems to have been focused on buffing them through point reductions and letting you bring buy more models. Crisis suits should be BS 3+ and get JSJ back at a higher point cost, tanks should ignore the movement penalty on heavy weapons, etc. All of this is fine as long as appropriate point costs are assigned.

Have the Tau ever been that elite though? They've always seemed more like "high tech Imperial guard" equivilants then "alien space marines"

For my own part, I pick an army i like and try to make an army for it that fits it's background.

I'l keep saying this forever.

You don't go onto a car forum and make posts
about how your car is working fine

The people complaining are a vocal minority and they're vocal cause everyone else is happy enough with the book. There was a post somewhere on here with someone complaining that the points drops put the riptide into the area "good but not great" and implied that that was a bad thing.In other words he was complaining that the riptide was fairly balanced.

Certain people will always complain about not being able to table their opponents on turn 1. These are the same people who lose a game a game and declare their opponents army as OP and their own underpowered. You just can't win with them.

*Insert mandatory comment about pulse xeno scum*

I think two of the easiest ways to enjoy the game have already been mentioned. Talking to the other side to craft a bit of a backdrop to the battle and maybe more balanced forces or favorite units that wouldn't usually see the light of day. Should that fail and you're starting to take a thrashing, set secondary objectives that are either fun narrative bits or small moral victories. Being able to wrestle a few small victories from a defeat or at least get a good laugh out of a spectacularly failed charge might be enough...

BrianDavion wrote:
Have the Tau ever been that elite though? They've always seemed more like "high tech Imperial guard" equivilants then "alien space marines"

The 5th edition codex was pretty elite. Crisis suits were BS 3 stock but could upgrade to BS 4, the tanks had an upgrade that let them shoot all of their weapons while moving, markerlights gave cheap BS upgrades when needed, etc. You could have an entire army where everything but the basic troops was hitting on 3s or better with excellent mobility and better guns than most armies (remember, this is before the power creep in weapons started getting so bad). But we've progressively lost that. Crisis suits are stuck at BS 3, our tanks can't move and shoot anymore (and only some of them are BS 4), and now markerlights are nerfed to a much weaker accuracy buff. GW's compensation for the loss seems to be giving point discounts, where we just deploy a gunline and roll buckets of dice until we either win or get charged and die. We're the shooting equivalent of orks.

1. Fun:

Army needs a somewhat good lore and rules that represent said lore. The army needs a 'theme' - something it is known for and the rules respect that. Of course that theme can get some upgrades and changes as time and editions passes, but if you read 'this faction is known for being good at psykery' and its psyker units aren't even close to being good at it, it will break the suspension of disbelief. Also, as part of fun, an army should have at least 2 ways to be played without being outclassed by other armies. Using the same list on and on forever until a new codex/FAQ hits is quite boring.

2. Powerful:

That's easy - just give them good rules and 'passive' synergy (i.e. units can do their job by themselves, but other things in the army make them even better at doing that). Again, it helps with fun if those rules make sense with the theme of the army.
However, this will only be fun to others (and to those that like a challenge) if everyone else is powerful as well.

3. Balanced

That's pretty hard - because you must consider both internal and external balance.
Internal balance is when most units inside a codex that do a similar job between themselves are good options and you scratch your head to choose between them when making a list.
External balance is when lists from your faction can battle lists from other codexes and what matters most is the skill of the players, not the units picked (although this will always have weight on victores/defeats).

Also, as Elbows said, most armies have few downsides to their upsides. Reworking that could bring a bit more flavour to all armies.

I honestly think of all the codexs out so far tyranids is the one done "most" right..

It has powerful units, good synergy, a minor disadvantage for enemies to exploit, many great lists. And wile I hear a bit of complaining about them being powerful I am not getting the feelings of butt hurt you hear about things that are completely broken.

This said even miss have some problems but this is the first ed where we don't have to wait till next ed for them to be fixed so it give me hope for a better all round game.

 lolman1c wrote:
...How do you get the feeling every faction are godlike but still also have the ability to lose?...

The problem, fundamentally, is the durability/damage balance. If you want everyone to feel strong you need to back off on the gunlines-crippling-large-chunks-of-an-army-top-of-1 approach to stuffing the game with bigger and bigger guns.

You could try playing with tight army-composition constraints under the current rules such that the utter devastation of the alpha-strike is less punishing and the skew/rock-paper-scissors problem is mitigated, but that's really only a half-measure since you need to come at it from the other side and tweak the relationship between volume of fire and damage (a plasma gun is a better anti-tank gun right now than a meltagun, because two D2 shots are more reliable and do similar or better damage to one Dd6 shot) such that there aren't guns that are cost-effective answers to everything, and possibly even buff vehicles to the point that they can't be casually one-rounded.

The other option is to just go for smaller games. I find fights between infantry to feel more interesting when there aren't Basilisks (for instance) casually removing a squad a turn, but if you're running some form of combat patrol or kill-team mission the qualities of said infantry get to shine through in a way that they don't in full-size games.

 lolman1c wrote:
So how would this be possible in 40k? How do you get the feeling every faction are godlike but still also have the ability to lose?

Post your suggestions and ideas below.

My opinion:
I have no idea how to achieve this outside of have a DM mode where the DM's role is to make you win and feel good but also kake it challenging. But then that's not 40k... that's just DnD but with 40k armies.

Guild Wars and D&D are both "PVE" environments (unless you're in a PVP zone or something). You can smack down waves of NPCs no problem because they're NPCs. There's no player behind them that also needs to feel rewarded by the gameplay. Similarly, D&D is a cooperative PVE game where everyone (including the DM even though he controls the enemies) is cooperatively working to create a cool story or execute an enjoyable dungeon crawl.

40k is PVP. You have to acknowledge that those hordes of minions you're smacking down are the avatars of another player.

So with that in mind, I think the "fun", "powerful", and "balanced parts are all tied together. The "powerful" part and part of the "fun" part comes from giving the faction attributes and play styles that make it powerful. Guardsmen have waves of disposable models backed up by big guns. Space marines are durable and can take on any threat with the right load out. Eldar are (or used to be) glass cannon specialists with hyper-effective offense that had to be delivered before they got blasted apart. Genestealer cults are masters of ambush. That sort of thing.

I see armies feeling "powerful" as a result of a compelling gimmick/playstyle rather than as a result of raw firepower. If I can set up a satisfying "ambush" with my 'stealer cultists wherein I take out key parts of your army, I feel satisfied. I got to show off what makes my army potent both in the fluff and on the tabletop. Even if I lose after that, I've still played out the thing that I loved about the army in the first place. Similarly, I don't care if I lose games with my marines so long as they felt effective and durable. Having a squad drop to lucky lasgun fire is much more discouraging than losing the game.

So make the army feel powerful by giving them a gimmick they can execute through decision making on the tabletop. Those decisions and execution should be "fun." 7th edition scatbikes and riptide wings do this poorly because there's little decision making involved in blasting your opponent off the table turn 1. Some of the previewed Tau rules are a much better example of this because they give you various advantages that you can take advantage of with decision making. Do you hold still to improve your armor saves? Is it worth it to advance to that objective and get one shot at your target instead of falling short of the objective and getting two shots? Is it worth it to move closer to that unit over there so you can shoot them more effectively?

As for making a force balanced, that's a matter of making the various gimmicks and playstyles similar enough in efficacy to leave the outcome unclear. If we can look at our lists and pretty much call the game before deploying, that's poor balance (or at least poor list design). Part of this is just getting the math right. A tau gunline and an IG gunline that plan to do nothing except shoot across the table at one another all game should probably have mathematically similar damage output. Another part of this, however, is having interesting interaction between playstyles. If IG and Tau spend all game castled up and shooting across the table with comparable average damage output, then whomever goes first will win. If those players both invested in deepstriking units with higher damage output but shorter range and screens to try and keep these heavy hitters back when they arrive, then you've introduced an interesting variable to the equation. Do you keep blasting their damage dealing tanks, or do you try to clear out some of the screening and objective scoring infantry?

Ideally, you'd like the decision making process to be flexible and fluid. Sure, you invested in fusion blaster crisis suits or scions with the intent of deepstriking them near your opponent's big guns, but what if your opponent brought a significant melee force that intends to charge straight at your gunline? Suddenly, it might be worth it to start those plasma scions off in your own deployment zone to whittle down the oncoming waves or to blast apart deepstrikers.

I'm starting to ramble. Basically, give armies fluffy gimmicks that can be demonstrated on the tabletop, and create meaningful decisions regarding how those gimmicks interact. Let tyranids field endless hordes, and let marines be durable and killy enough to eliminate chunks of those hordes. Let khorne armies murder whatever they reach, and make my dark eldar nimble enough to kite them. Let my genestealer cultsits take out something expensive with a beautifully-executed ambush, and then show me just how squishy my cultists are once they've revealed themselves.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrianDavion wrote:
So basicly Tau players are upset that have to try and don't have a "point, click,. table" army in 8th? ohh boo hoo hoo

The OP said that
some people on the internet said that
some tau players they know said that
they wanted their army to blow other armies away.

Your response to these 3rd hand allegations was to instantly paint all tau players with a broad and unflattering brush without really addressing the main topic presented by the OP. Let's all try to get along and be civil while discussing this hobby we love, friend.

I do think stratigiums are a good addition to 40k in terms of giving new ways to itneract etc. universally the armies that are most loved seem to be the ones with strong stratigiums that enable them to really mix things up.

You want balanced factions.

You start by going the Infinity route in terms of list builds.

Infinity has AVA (Availability) counts of individual units. You can take as many as you want for {TOTAL} or up to an specified amount {1, 2, ,3 ,4 etc }. In Infinity, this prevents the spamming of high-tier units. In 40k, this can serve to limit , or to deter players from spamming ridiculous units like Dark Reapers ad naseum.

The second is SWC (Support Weapon Costs), or basically a second set of points reserved for special equipment and such. SWC is used in Infinity to prevent players from spamming Mines, Camouflage , Rocket Launchers, Flame templates. It forces the player to ration out heavy ordnance and special abilities among their list.

If implemented in 40k, this would essentially eliminate the extremes of lists. It would force players to sometimes choose between S tier loadouts or A tier loadouts (with less SWC costs).

The final step is to level the discrepency between melee and shooting factions. Right now, falling back, overwatch rules (i'm looking at you, greater good Tau with an entire backfield of dakka) and charge RNG is really making melee centric armies hit and miss.

JMAvariant wrote:
You want balanced factions.

You start by going the Infinity route in terms of list builds.

Infinity has AVA (Availability) counts of individual units. You can take as many as you want for {TOTAL} or up to an specified amount {1, 2, ,3 ,4 etc }. In Infinity, this prevents the spamming of high-tier units. In 40k, this can serve to limit , or to deter players from spamming ridiculous units like Dark Reapers ad naseum.

The second is SWC (Support Weapon Costs), or basically a second set of points reserved for special equipment and such. SWC is used in Infinity to prevent players from spamming Mines, Camouflage , Rocket Launchers, Flame templates. It forces the player to ration out heavy ordnance and special abilities among their list.

If implemented in 40k, this would essentially eliminate the extremes of lists. It would force players to sometimes choose between S tier loadouts or A tier loadouts (with less SWC costs).

The final step is to level the discrepency between melee and shooting factions. Right now, falling back, overwatch rules (i'm looking at you, greater good Tau with an entire backfield of dakka) and charge RNG is really making melee centric armies hit and miss.

Interesting concept. How would you handle thematic armies like Iyanden wraithguard armies or death wing terminator armies? Also, does this really address issues of balance these days? Last edition, throwing piles space marines onto objectives and taking (troop choice) scatbikes were some of the winning strategies. Would such a system address problems like those? Sure, the issue of the moment is dark reapers, but being a "common" unit (a troop choice) doesn't automatically make something non-problematic, right?

I think before you get too deep into this discussion, the elephant in the room should be addressed.

Elephant: GW wants to sell more plastic miniatures, so their interest is not in an amazing, perfect, balanced and thematic game, the interest is in making a game which is at least acceptable...and then designed with a heavy emphasis on purchasing more models.

So, sadly, any form of future balance will be solely handled by the players themselves, or, at a stretch, tournament organizers. I agree that there are tons of very simple options to "fix" 40K balance, but that is counter-intuitive to the way GW is operating now as a business. It's unfortunate but they're making money and I can't really blame them. I should say "you know...you should sacrifice sales to make this game cooler".

As long as people understand, going forward, nothing that limits model sales will be genuinely considered...then we can continue our conversation. The above is not a conspiracy theory, it's just a reality. It's a reality which does impact the game's design pretty heavily. I've considered doing some fan-based Codex stuff related to Craftworld Eldar, and I'd like to see some more community builds go in that direction.

Wyldhunt wrote:

JMAvariant wrote:
You want balanced factions.

You start by going the Infinity route in terms of list builds.

Infinity has AVA (Availability) counts of individual units. You can take as many as you want for {TOTAL} or up to an specified amount {1, 2, ,3 ,4 etc }. In Infinity, this prevents the spamming of high-tier units. In 40k, this can serve to limit , or to deter players from spamming ridiculous units like Dark Reapers ad naseum.

The second is SWC (Support Weapon Costs), or basically a second set of points reserved for special equipment and such. SWC is used in Infinity to prevent players from spamming Mines, Camouflage , Rocket Launchers, Flame templates. It forces the player to ration out heavy ordnance and special abilities among their list.

If implemented in 40k, this would essentially eliminate the extremes of lists. It would force players to sometimes choose between S tier loadouts or A tier loadouts (with less SWC costs).

The final step is to level the discrepency between melee and shooting factions. Right now, falling back, overwatch rules (i'm looking at you, greater good Tau with an entire backfield of dakka) and charge RNG is really making melee centric armies hit and miss.

Interesting concept. How would you handle thematic armies like Iyanden wraithguard armies or death wing terminator armies? Also, does this really address issues of balance these days? Last edition, throwing piles space marines onto objectives and taking (troop choice) scatbikes were some of the winning strategies. Would such a system address problems like those? Sure, the issue of the moment is dark reapers, but being a "common" unit (a troop choice) doesn't automatically make something non-problematic, right?

Death Wing Terminator Armies.

I'm guessing in this case, you would want a example:

Lets follow an test build of Death Wing Terminators list, 2000 points, with "SWC" being denoted to 1/5 of the total list (just like how in Infinity, 300 point level matches have 6 SWC. That leaves around 400~500 SWC worth of specialized equipment to allocate among 2000 points.
You would need 2 HQ, 3 Troops. to fill out a basic battalion detachment.

In infinity, there are SWC attached to some key equipment / key abilities.

Lieutenant (Warlord/HQ) usually has a SWC cost
Heavy Weapons have SWC Cost
Movement abilities have SWC costs

Following this template, SWC would be the cost of (Jump Packs, Sergeant Equipment , Terminator Heavy Weapons, Heavy Weapons)

A Captain (Non - Primaris) would add any Sergeant Equipment / Jump Pack / Terminator Heavy Weapons, Heavy Weapons to the SWC pool. AVA {2}
Add in another HQ with "Special Equipment Costs" AVA {2}

AVA 2 means you can take two of specified unit, and only up to two, in the entire ARMY.

Frontline Troops. much like Infinity, would be AVA {Total}. Unless of course you want troop AVA listed to 6 (Two battallions worth)

Up to now, SWC should be anywhere between 0 {With bare mininum upgrades to HQ} to 75+ {if you decide to kit out each TROOP squad with a Heavy weapon (25 x 3, for 3 missile launchers). At this point you have either 400 swc left, or 300+ left depending on heavy weapon loadouts.

With 300 pts left, comes the Deathwing Terminator Squad. There are two extremes. You can kit out one full squad of Deathwing Terminators with Cyclone (50 points each, the most expensive heavy weapon) and use up a bunch of SWC at once, or kit out one full squad of DW Termies with Assault cannons (+ 110 SWC), or you can a number of DeathWing Terminator units equal to it's AVA { X } , and spread the SWC cost of Cyclones / Terminator heavy weapons across AVA.

A squad of DA Terminators with each using a Assault Cannon uses 110 SWC, and costs 272 Points .

A squad of DA Terminators with each (except the Sergeant, Sergeant cannot have Cyclones) using Cyclones uses 200 SWC, would be 392 points (a whopping 1/5 of your army)

You could fill out the rest of the battalion detachment with DA Terminators up to their specific AVA. Nothing is going to stop you from using multiple squads of DA, as long as you hit the upper limit of AVA.

3 squads of DA terminators with 2 Assault Cannons in each squad would total 696 points , and 132 SWC.


Basically, SWC helps dampen the amount of super awesome weapons, and kinda makes army lists into TAC (Take all Comers). You could run an entire list of vehicles with twin lascannons, but you can only take up to SWC of 400, (meaning 8 lascannons at most, if even the AVA of the unit allows you to take up to 8 vehicles with Twin Lascannon loadouts.

The real question is AVA. AVA determines how spammy / how many units you can have. At what point is X amount of Y unit too much. Is 3 full units of Dark Reapers too much? 6? 9? AVA settles that question.



Edit: Take out the Sergeant Equipment list for SWC. I looked at it and it was filled with Melee Weapon choices. I feel that the above SWC cost to a list of melee weapons is unneeded, as it hinders melee centric armies , who have to risk alot (fall back, charge 2d6, and overwatch) to enter melee.

I don't know how you make a balanced faction, but if anyone finds out they should alert Games Workshop immediately.

Wait Powerful AND balanced?..?

The Fun part is subjective.

So, ignoring the not-so-subtle "Let's just gak on Tau players" of the OP's post, here's an answer to the question:

What's fun for me won't necessarily be fun for you. Some people like winning, some people like fluff, some people like variety, etc. As such, you have to have some built-in flexibility: having an army that feels pigeon-holed into playing a certain way to put up a decent casual showing feels bad.

I think the 7th edition Eldar codex was a good example of a codex done well: it had a minimal number of units that you felt bad about taking if you wanted casual fun, with ~3 of spammable tournament-competitive units scatter(bik)ed throughout.

To make something "powerful" and yet balanced requires the game to have some back and forth in its interactions. The problem right now with 8th and certain parts of 6th and 7th is that things die too quickly or have too much firepower for a smooth burn from turns 1 to 7 but instead it basically is a powder keg turns 1 and 2 with everything after that being the remaining cinders that haven't quite been snuffed out yet. Doesn't give a lot of time for meaningful maneuvers, delayed deployments, hunkering down, trekking across the board, etc when generally its best to maximize firepower early to alpha strike the gak out of the opponent. The best defense is heavy offense because there isn't much value to holding cover or favoring maneuvers over dealing damage.

In general I would say fun gameplay is getting your guys to do a mechanic or tactic that you want them to do to some reasonable degree of success. When game mechanics and tactics are limited to mostly "kill all the things" then it sets up an arms race to have the most dakka and leafblower the hardest. If having greater longevity, locking down the opponent, or out maneuvering them can be effective then it allows for more skills to become viable instead of everything resorting back to how much damage it can do or how cost effective can this be for fodder.