State of the game?

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**th3eviltwin**

dose gw still hate it players, cost to get started? top armys? ect..

**Lance845**

What the hell kind of thread is this? You barely ask some vague questions with no real direction and with no actual point to make.

You might as well have titled the thread "40k General Discussion" and then wrote in the OP "Read this sub forum".

What exactly are you trying to talk about?

**Latro_**

With new codex books coming out every month and faq's dropping all the time top army's change on a 3 monthly basis IMO.

In general there is a focus for armies to need some of the following to compete:
- chaffe that is to say large units of disposable troops to maintain board control for objs and stop deep strikers
- increased amount of shots in general + AP makin pure MEQ and elite armies a bit lacking
- Shooting is probably still king
- Soup lists are popular, that is detachments made up of various different factions to provide buffs and strat unlocks. Chaos and eldar sit within the bigsoupers. Separate to soup general synergy is massive in 8th e.g. you rock a character that does a buff, combine another buff from a psy power then apply a strat and you have a unit that might be drastically better for the turn.
- CMD pt mining for the above (goes hand in hand with chaffe) to get as many CPs for starts as poss via use of min detachments

Cost is about the same as 7th although GW do some nice deals from time to time. It depends on your army.

**A.T.**

1) Half and half. One the one hand they are releasing more frequent errata and interacting with the player base, on the other hand their first big errata was remarkably underwhelming and they were charging money for points adjustments.
So far though nothing as insanely pay to win as the heydays of formations. They are stubbornly sticking to their guns on no model = no rules though, and marines are still clearly the focus of the organisation.

2) A few hundred £ less 3rd party retail discounts for a small starter army. See the tau battalion box/get started sets.

3) Eldar, and various somewhat abusive mixed faction armies. There is a distinct gap between the codex and the index armies (aside from GK who are just poor), if you exclude the have-nots like the inquisition then the gap between all the armies isn't anything like in 6th/7th. Index players like orks and sisters can make a decent enough showing against marines and guard. Things like flyers are no longer 'have AA or get wrecked' units but the daemon primarchs are a bit like bringing a warhound titan to a game - you either have the tools (lascannons and mortal wounds generally) to relieve your opponent of a big chunk of their army early or not.

**NurglesR0T**

GW is an evil corporation secretly ruled by the Illuminati, of course they still hate the players

**Torga_DW**

Games Workshop is still Games Workshop, nothing has changed on that front. The only real difference is they did a (tiny) bit of marketing with 8th edition. Otherwise, still pretty much the same.

**NurglesR0T**

To be fair to them, they have had a few huge cultural shifts over the last few years when the new CEO took over. Embracing the community and social media is something that would have been unheard of a few years ago.

**Primark G**

It’s a lot better now for most everyone. Of course some are hard to please.

**meleti**

The top army is changing every few months so that's pretty great.

**Daedalus81**

**BrianDavion**

disagree, GW's made some very positive strides of late.

**dkoz**

I don't think GW has every really hated it's players. I don't think they really understood players in the past but now they're working w/a lot of good outside help like the guys from FLG. The cost is high but they really produce high quality products so your getting what you pay for. As for top armies I guess they're still pretty consistent but there is some fluctuation in the top armies.

**AnomanderRake**

GW is still confused and plays favourites between the armies they like and support well and the armies they don't like and don't support, but they're paying more attention and being deliberate/intentional about design and reacting to feedback rather than throwing out a wild flurry of untested mess, so I would say they "hate their players" less than they used to.

Cost to get started depends wildly on the army, but a foundation still runs you $2-300 for smaller armies and more for bigger ones. As with every edition working with the starter boxes/secondhand models helps a lot; find someone to split Dark Imperium with, for instance, and you get two reasonable ~750pt forces plus the rulebook for $160. Also worth noting: Get into a kill-team format (Heralds of Ruin is one of the better-supported ones) and you can get a toe in the door for under $100.

Top armies are Craftworlds (Aspects, planes, psykers, and Wave Serpents are all strong), Chaos soup (the Daemon keyword is mixed into the Marine book so there's a lot of cross-synergy there), Tyranids (they just got a great book with a wide variety of strong builds), and Imperial soup (generally Guardsmen for cheap command points/space-filling coupled with whatever hard-hitting element you feel like running). Most everyone else is in the mid-tier (where they work, just not as well), the s***-tier (where you feel like there's no point playing your army at all) is pretty small (Necrons, Grey Knights, Deathwatch, Corsairs, and non-souped Harlequins, off the top of my head) and the Necrons at least are next in line for a Codex to elevate them out of it, though some mid-tier armies would be s***-tier without a small set of builds.

As for a general state of the game 8th plays quickly and rewards early-game damage; gunlines are still a thing but risk-free Deep Strike and a broad array of defensive shenanigans (-1 to hit) has brought melee back as a usable strategy. Everything can damage everything but that doesn't mean it will; pre-Conscript-nerf I had a Guard player dump two hundred lasgun shots (FRF/SRF on a fifty-man blob) into a Blackstar and it got off with two wounds. Small stat advantage on guns is more important than large, the game still rewards volume of mid-power shooting (autocannons, plasma, etc.) more than it does high-power shooting (lascannons, railguns, etc.) but the damage stat means that high-power weapons still have things they can do. Space-filling is more important than it used to be because you can't rely on deepstrikers not wanting to scatter off the back of the table to keep them off your backlines. Transports are less helpful because of the death of fire points and because of the early-game focus (using a transport to move a unit someplace means you're committing to not having it do damage in the crucial stage of the game).

I think that covers most of it.

**NurglesR0T**

This post should be stickied onto the home page. Nice summary, pretty much covers it.

**Rune Stonegrinder**

well I guess since Chaos is trying to take over the universe, so having the game in total chaos is appropriate. In all seriousness, even other games that have living rules including Age of Sigmar don't have this much rules/point tweaking.

Costs are always rising it will never change, this game has always been marketed towards young adults. As for teens or even pre-teens go they will just have to built armies based on birthdays and holidays. no way around it. The new market is the power gamer heavy, and causal can go Feth themselves apparently.

Having the flavor of the month power creep is not promoting a stable well rounded game. But hey that's where they are at GW, they only care to listen to the less than 1% of gamers, that's why they take the majority of advice from the tourney organizers and winners.

In short GW still doesn't have a clue and is still promoting the power game. When in fact a more balanced game is better in for long term for them and us. Do I think a 100% balanced game is possible, NOPE. but they can make it better and I don't feel they are trying.

This is all my opinion of course, but you did ask.

**Backspacehacker**

My opinion made very short is, eh.

Each game I play I end up missing 7th ed more and more. 8th is like a massive pool that's only 3 feet deep, there is a lot to do, and a lot of possibilities, but it's all really shallow and like sigmar in that games are over by turn 2 or 3 rarly get to turn 4 and have it be undecided.

**Vankraken**

I share a similar feeling about 8th (although I don't think there are a lot of true possibilities in 8th due to everything being too similar to each other). 8th feels like splashing around in a kiddie pool but you really want to go for a proper swim with some depth so you have room to move without hitting the limits (bottom) of the pool.