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To be fair, it didn’t really waste much time on shoota boyz cause who took shoota boyz?
I think just having it be 2 auto hits on bullet weapons would’ve been a good change, makes shootas maybe effective, keeps the big powerful shots swingy.
"Us Blood Axes hav lernt' a lot from da humies. How best ta kill 'em, fer example."
— Korporal Snagbrat of the Dreadblade Kommandos
You have a squad @ 220, a rhino @ 90+ points, an Infernal Master @ 90 points, and at least an exalted @ 100 points. So, 490 points and 2 CP to deliver and kill 140. And that's a problem?
It's not exactly accurate to include all those character points in the cost of the unit. Yes, they provided buffs, but they are also making other contributions outside of boosting those Rubrics. They could, for example, easily run off after shooting and charge another unit or the Rhino could move block or tie up something in close combat. Unsurprisingly you've missed the point, or are wilfully ignoring it. The problem is twofold. If you remove those buffs the Rubrics kill about 3 SW and get the chance to charge to do a bit more damage. That seems OK and more or less inline with most other wargames in terms of lethality. It shouldn't be possible to buff a unit so much that it goes from doing decent but not catastrophic damage to their target to wiping them out. There's also no counterplay to this beyond "don't get shot". The SW player just has to sit there and take it.
As the_scotsman said, it's about the gameplay reflecting the lore and at the moment it fails pretty hard as units simply evaporate the moment they're targeted. There's very little ability to gradually grind the opponent down, incrementally improve your position and eliminate units through better positioning and superior in-game decisions. It's just endless trades between units.
Even if you were to count just the rubrics and the IF you're still solidly using 300+ points, which is well more than was killed.
On the buffs - one of them was a spell and the other was effectively a spell. Are we getting rid of spells now? One of them was a small reroll. Should characters do nothing for units?
Should everything psykers do just be mind bullets so people don't get upset that a certain unit got stronger? VotLW ( +1 to wound ) results in ONE additional model dying in that scenario. That's for two CP. That's our boogeyman.
SW doesn't just "sit there and take it". They moved there. They knew what was in the rhino. They decided to move close enough to be in the hop out and RF range. Either it was worth the move ( like denying an objective, because all the obsec was in a rhino ) or it was a bad choice.
It just feels like no one wants to deal with adversity and would just prefer that nothing bad happens instead of accepting that they might have made a bad calculation. But "40K has no depth and everything is super simple".
Your scenario sounds supercool and thanks for essentially writing out a full batrep. Really enjoyed reading it.
I totally relate to the Fenris lack of terrain is fluffy issue. I get most White Dwarfs, and I bought hard into PA... I know not everyone did, and I also agree that it's not fair to players to have to do that... BUT-
This is exactly where I would have used a Snowstorm Theatre of War rule that limits LOS. It would be balanced by the lack of obscuring terrain so as not to be over the top oppressive, as some theatre of war options are.
Since you are writing the scenario anyway, you're also free to write the Theatre of War snowstorm rules yourself, eliminating the need to find one in a WD or PA... I only mention the official sources for such things because I know sometimes players need to use as much "official" content as possible in order to secure buy-in from their opponents- though your crew sounds pretty cool about this sort of thing.
I think (but could be mistaken) there were some snowstorm ToW rules in one of the recent Octarius Flashpoints.
Daedalus81 wrote: Heavy dice rolling with little outcome is boring. It has little to do with competitiveness.
This is the pinnacle for Thousand Sons, in my opinion. CSM 3.5 was the only other "interesting" book, because you could take a LoC and spend a gakload of points of sorcerers.
See, I'm of two minds here.
On one hand, it is cool that I can finally customize my Exalted Sorcerors enough to make the amazingly diverse kit worth it. Is it annoying that I have to do it by loading weird, vague adjectives onto the unit to alter their stats instead of a straightforward method? Yes. Am I going to begrude the poor sap laboring under GW's asinine legal department rules that? No, its ok, hes working with what hes got.
what gets frustrating is when I organize a game with a friend who I know isn't going super hard in terms of competitive craziness, and we want to have an old-school grudge match Thousand Sons vs Space Wolves battle, we put down our gorgeous 100% painted armies, we set up a snow world table, we decide on a custom mission where the Thousand Sons are trying to open up portals to the warp and the Space Wolves are trying to stop them, and then when we sit down to actually play the game, it plays out like this:
Spoiler:
-the space wolves roll to go first. A long fang squad drop pods in with a super-super casual Heavy Bolter/Multi-melta/Lascannon/Missile Launcher configuration, the squad sergeant hands +1 to hit to the single multi-melta, they pop a stratagem to ignore to-hit mods so they can move and shoot heavy weapons (rendering any usage of the Smokescreen stratagem also pointless) and they instantly one-round the most expensive vehicle on the board, my lone Predator, first shooting attack of the game. The rest of the space wolves move up, nothing else much happens because both of us are using mostly oldschool rhino-rush list setups.
- One squad of rubrics hops out of a rhino, gets prescience'd and easily blows away both the devastator squad and 3/5 of the members of a blood claw squad that came in on the same pod but had nothing to charge at. My heldrake drops into hover, shoots across no mans land and kills 1 minor character (a lieutenant, or equivalent I think) and then charges a librarian, instantly wipes him out too to secure an objective.
-Thunderwolves roll into the exposed rubric squad, killing them all. The two remaining blood claws swing around a building and get to some cultists hanging on an objective, killing like 7/10 of them after morale. A dreadnought charges the heldrake, kills it. A squad of blood claws hops out, kills a rhino, can't swing around enough to insta-kill the squad though so they get out.
-The squad whose rhino got destroyed gets buffed, kills the blood claws, two of my sorcerors drop all the mortal wound powers into the dreadnought, kill it, my terminators drop in, leave one thunderwolf alive
top of turn 3, my opponent is working with 1 thunderwolf, 2 blood claws, a jump pack chaplain, a drop pod, and two rhinos. Game's done! we basically just had him use the dregs to kill whatever he could which IIRC was basically the two sorcerors. What about the mission we wrote up? Eh, didnt matter, everything just fething died, like it always does, by turn 3.
Now, I understand that there are actions I could have taken to, for example, set my cultist squad up carefully screening out the tank so the one multi-melta would have not basically insta-killed it and it might have escaped that single shooting attack with 2-3 wounds. My opponent could have not blown his blood claw squad killing a rhino, or he could have made sure to keep the dreadnought near the two HQs in his territory so that the dread could have intervened on the helldrake and avenged the two HQs right then, instead of on his following turn.
But here's the thing: In a casual, narrative game, the stakes being set to 'if you make one single bad move, if you misposition by a fething MILLIMETER so your opponent can draw LOS, or get a deep striker in unscreened, or sneak a multi-melta into melta range, or you miscalculate the movement required to fully wrap a transport with your pile-in and consolidate, you will IMMEDIATELY lose whatever 150-250 points of models you made the mistake with' sucks. It sucks so, so much ass, because even if youre very very purposefully trying to bring soft, friendly units, and construct a fun scenario, once you get into the game you just cant. You can't decide "oh, what if this character fought that character, won't this make an exciting matchup?" because you know, going in, if your character is charging? The target is probably just gonna die.
Between buffed offensive stats, stratagems, auras, and various and sundry bonuses, it is so trivial to stack up buffs onto a unit to turn it into just an absolute damage hose - a simple 10-squad of rubrics hops out of a rhino and goes 'OK, here's 19 shots, hitting on 2s rerollable, wounding on 2s because we got the buffed strength from the infernal master and we used the strat for +1 to wound, AP-2 so youre saving on 5s oh and also the now 5 shots at S6 Ap-3 from our soulreaper cannon that's another 2 dead, your unit is basically smoking boots now.
Too much awesome in this post for words alone. My exalt button muscle is still twitching, eyes rolling, … brilliant.
Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote: To be fair, it didn’t really waste much time on shoota boyz cause who took shoota boyz?
I think just having it be 2 auto hits on bullet weapons would’ve been a good change, makes shootas maybe effective, keeps the big powerful shots swingy.
Shoota boyz were actually pretty common in 8th greentides. Since only 10ish bodies could fight, many players used to mix their 30 man mobs with sluggas and shootas. Those shootas had better shooting than sluggas, didn't matter if they had one less attack in combat since they were in the last rows and couldn't fight but they did matter for the +1A for the whole squad which was triggered by the number of the mob, not by the equipment.
10-15 shootas in a 30 man mob was pretty much the way to go.
6s to hit generating double hits could have been a legit way to update DDD, especially if GW didn't increase the base number of shots of many weapons.
Even if you were to count just the rubrics and the IF you're still solidly using 300+ points, which is well more than was killed.
On the buffs - one of them was a spell and the other was effectively a spell. Are we getting rid of spells now? One of them was a small reroll. Should characters do nothing for units?
Should everything psykers do just be mind bullets so people don't get upset that a certain unit got stronger? VotLW ( +1 to wound ) results in ONE additional model dying in that scenario. That's for two CP. That's our boogeyman.
SW doesn't just "sit there and take it". They moved there. They knew what was in the rhino. They decided to move close enough to be in the hop out and RF range. Either it was worth the move ( like denying an objective, because all the obsec was in a rhino ) or it was a bad choice.
It just feels like no one wants to deal with adversity and would just prefer that nothing bad happens instead of accepting that they might have made a bad calculation. But "40K has no depth and everything is super simple".
You're really good at missing the point. Effectively doubling the damage output of a unit, using any source, just shouldn't be a thing. There are way more things you can do with psychic powers or characters than just increase the damage output of a unit, especially if the system had more depth through things like morale or suppression or an expanded utility for actions (a mechanic that is really interesting but massively underused by GW). The problem is most buffs are relatively innocuous on their own. Then you stack them and you go from killing 2-3 guys to nearly wiping a unit. If GW would tone down the offensive buffs available in general it would be a good start to making the game a little more engaging.
The specific complaint here is about how fast units die and I can completely understand that. Previous versions of 40k had units taking 1-2 casualties from another unit's fire. Other wargames tend to operate around needing roughly 3 times the points of units to destroy a given unit and even then it's often more a case of severely damaging rather than destroying. Nothing you've said really addresses the reality the_scotsman put forward - units effectively do a thing then get removed from the board. How is that desirable? Why is it a good thing that unless I hide a unit at deployment there's pretty much a 90% chance it gets removed before it does anything?
Web 2.0 made the setting more popular in the U.S. and they brought their over-competitiveness with them. The U.S has the biggest tournaments with the biggest prizes with the biggest attendance and is the biggest market for the game. America is so hugely the prevalent culture online that it inevitably consumes everything it takes part in and whether they like it or not America as a culture is VERY competitive.
While this is sadly very true, or at least seems to be what is going on. It isn't limited to the Web 2.0. Magic the Gathering, WARMACHINE/HORDES were all very popular prior to Web 2.0 and they not only encouraged WAAC mentality, but championed it as the only way to play.
What is sad is that it is infecting most types of tabletop gaming, which is why things like Oathmark, and Dragon Rampant are such gems. The days of 'gentleman's agreement' seem to be long gone. In the ranks of GW I think Rick Priestley was the last bastion of that mindset. Hence why his games still seem more about the spirit of the game.
One point that always struck me as odd was the removing of designer's notes in the back of rule books. Looking through my older editions of WFB and 40K the rule books and Codexes/Army books all have the designer writing about what they aimed to achieve with the game and the spirit the game should be approached in.
The objective of the game is to win. The point of the game is to have fun. The two should never be confused.
stonehorse wrote: One point that always struck me as odd was the removing of designer's notes in the back of rule books. Looking through my older editions of WFB and 40K the rule books and Codexes/Army books all have the designer writing about what they aimed to achieve with the game and the spirit the game should be approached in.
stonehorse wrote: One point that always struck me as odd was the removing of designer's notes in the back of rule books. Looking through my older editions of WFB and 40K the rule books and Codexes/Army books all have the designer writing about what they aimed to achieve with the game and the spirit the game should be approached in.
It's online now.
Which isn't good.
Having it in a separate place in a totally different format just makes it feel that it isn't part of the game, plus unless someone knows about them, they are not going to go looking for them.
The objective of the game is to win. The point of the game is to have fun. The two should never be confused.
I know for sure that AoS has "rules" for etiquette and stuff and I'm fairly certain there's something similar in a 40k book somewhere, even if it's just "the most important rule is having fun".
Gert wrote: I know for sure that AoS has "rules" for etiquette and stuff and I'm fairly certain there's something similar in a 40k book somewhere, even if it's just "the most important rule is having fun".
There aren’t. Remember when AoS 3rd dropped and this subforum got its jimmies rustled by it?
I member.
Games Workshop Delenda Est.
Users on ignore- 53.
If you break apart my or anyone else's posts line by line I will not read them.
Gert wrote: I know for sure that AoS has "rules" for etiquette and stuff and I'm fairly certain there's something similar in a 40k book somewhere, even if it's just "the most important rule is having fun".
There aren’t. Remember when AoS 3rd dropped and this subforum got its jimmies rustled by it?
THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE
...apply the solution that makes the most sense to both of you (or seems the most fun!)...
It's still alive and well in 40k
Grimtuff wrote: Remember when AoS 3rd dropped and this subforum got its jimmies rustled by it?
As far as I remember, there were some questionable inclusions in that document, like never complain about dice rolls, which is an extreme version of don't complain about dice rolls in a way that ruins the game for your opponent. Discussing things on a forum doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
Web 2.0 made the setting more popular in the U.S. and they brought their over-competitiveness with them. The U.S has the biggest tournaments with the biggest prizes with the biggest attendance and is the biggest market for the game. America is so hugely the prevalent culture online that it inevitably consumes everything it takes part in and whether they like it or not America as a culture is VERY competitive.
While this is sadly very true, or at least seems to be what is going on. It isn't limited to the Web 2.0. Magic the Gathering, WARMACHINE/HORDES were all very popular prior to Web 2.0 and they not only encouraged WAAC mentality, but championed it as the only way to play.
What is sad is that it is infecting most types of tabletop gaming, which is why things like Oathmark, and Dragon Rampant are such gems. The days of 'gentleman's agreement' seem to be long gone. In the ranks of GW I think Rick Priestley was the last bastion of that mindset. Hence why his games still seem more about the spirit of the game.
One point that always struck me as odd was the removing of designer's notes in the back of rule books. Looking through my older editions of WFB and 40K the rule books and Codexes/Army books all have the designer writing about what they aimed to achieve with the game and the spirit the game should be approached in.
When I read this I do find it interesting, when I first was getting into warmachine I didn’t really encounter WAAC additudes at all. Not online, not at events and not local.
What I did find was a competitive community driven game that was home to a lot of narrative driven players as well.
Boards, rules and support where great.
This all as 40k was stripping that all away, I come here to read about units and find that lots of units I would have liked to use where essential useless as they wouldn’t really function against players putting in some effort.
Where I could often find useful info on any unit I wanted in warmachine, often the worst was people pointing at lists and units that lacked support or didn’t support each other as well and would be found lacking against a more cohesive list.
I would say the worst, warmachine had such a bad community is here, on the 40k board. Even other 40k places seem to never bring it up when warmachine does come up.
Off corse, this is my own opinion here.
But I often find the same with magic, which has a massive casual player base and possibly one of its most popular formats is a casual one.
WAAC players exist everywhere, but it’s 40k that though design more than any other table top that leans into it so much. It’s been a huge issue swinging back and forth for a long while now, and it’s not any better now.
How much is design driven, and how much is the player base itself driving that is probably too much for me to know
Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote: To be fair, it didn’t really waste much time on shoota boyz cause who took shoota boyz?
I think just having it be 2 auto hits on bullet weapons would’ve been a good change, makes shootas maybe effective, keeps the big powerful shots swingy.
Shoota boyz were actually pretty common in 8th greentides. Since only 10ish bodies could fight, many players used to mix their 30 man mobs with sluggas and shootas. Those shootas had better shooting than sluggas, didn't matter if they had one less attack in combat since they were in the last rows and couldn't fight but they did matter for the +1A for the whole squad which was triggered by the number of the mob, not by the equipment.
10-15 shootas in a 30 man mob was pretty much the way to go.
6s to hit generating double hits could have been a legit way to update DDD, especially if GW didn't increase the base number of shots of many weapons.
Dakka weapons as they are now would I think maybe start to become effective if they got 2 hits on a six, the new extra shots, and were kept as assault. Flat ap s4 is just kinda bad.
"Us Blood Axes hav lernt' a lot from da humies. How best ta kill 'em, fer example."
— Korporal Snagbrat of the Dreadblade Kommandos
You're really good at missing the point. Effectively doubling the damage output of a unit, using any source, just shouldn't be a thing. There are way more things you can do with psychic powers or characters than just increase the damage output of a unit, especially if the system had more depth through things like morale or suppression or an expanded utility for actions (a mechanic that is really interesting but massively underused by GW). The problem is most buffs are relatively innocuous on their own. Then you stack them and you go from killing 2-3 guys to nearly wiping a unit. If GW would tone down the offensive buffs available in general it would be a good start to making the game a little more engaging.
The specific complaint here is about how fast units die and I can completely understand that. Previous versions of 40k had units taking 1-2 casualties from another unit's fire. Other wargames tend to operate around needing roughly 3 times the points of units to destroy a given unit and even then it's often more a case of severely damaging rather than destroying. Nothing you've said really addresses the reality the_scotsman put forward - units effectively do a thing then get removed from the board. How is that desirable? Why is it a good thing that unless I hide a unit at deployment there's pretty much a 90% chance it gets removed before it does anything?
I don't think I'm missing the point.
People are putting on rose tinted glasses and pretending that because marines didn't shoot as much that things didn't die fast. gak...this forum wasn't even alive until 2009. No one here has any real idea how effective armies could be back in earlier editions, because no one was around to discuss it. People playing oldhammer are like-minded individuals that don't care to bring the best lists. If we really wanted to go back to that time now people would find the best army and break the game.
Let's take a stroll down memory lane to 5th edition:
It was also more of a joke, that a GK player (and the vast majority are bandwagoners) would call something else "overpowered" with all the heat they're taking right now.
Maybe some some Jokaeros?
Inquisitor Coteaz
50 Jokaero
1850 points exactly. Monkey shooting army of death that can be anywhere from 5 to 16 claiming units of 60" lascannons, 36" multi-meltas (so is that 2d6 pen at 18"), and rending heavy flamers. Possibly a way to dust off my AT-43 Karmans and make a Charlton Heston inquisitor.
People don't seem happy!
This is the cancer thats killing 40k
Who could forget old MW?
It's lists like this that really make me despise Matt Ward
There are way more things you can do with psychic powers or characters than just increase the damage output of a unit, especially if the system had more depth through things like morale or suppression or an expanded utility for actions
Thousand Sons have that. Mortal wounds every time a unit moves / resurrect a model / reduce strength / prevent a unit shooting past 24" / strip invuln / reduce attacks / miracle dice / half movement.
You didn't address the question. Should psychic buffs not exist? Everyone talks about strats and rerolls, but those played a minor roll here. Why are we looking to make these invalid, too? Am I no longer allowed agency, because someone decided tossing 5 to 10 marines near me was a good idea?
What exactly should have happened to those marines? Should only 3 of them died using the same effort? Should the psykers have reduced their movement instead even though they were probably in charge range already? Should he have done the reroll ability instead of +1S? Should he have avoided smiting them at all just so we don't accidentally kill too many models? It's absurd.
Some examples for this edition on what it takes to kill models --
In this game Nanavanti killed 380 points of Wazboms with his entire army and a lot of 5++ saves were failed. Both planes exploded, which crippled his army, but that's just bad luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3R2P6lBIc
In my tournament 18 warbikes did a WAAAGH and charged me turn 1. They killed a Mutalith ( Goff Explodes strat ) and a couple Scarabs. That's 470 points, 2 CP, and a once per game ability killing 225. Then it took the entirety of my remaining army to kill 11 bikes ( no thanks to bad decisions and bad dice ).
The worst was 10+5 RGVV w/ LC&SS ( 270 ) spending 3 CP to move and go assault doctrine and wiping out terminators, but that's a melee dedicated unit. It SHOULD kill things when it gets there, because it doesn't always get the chance. And then I spent 900 or so points trying to kill them and got 10 out of 15. That's with 16 MW in the psychic phase.
If everything is average an entire unit of Scarabs w/ RR1s ( 230 ) kills 3 SS marines ( 81 ). If I decide to give them +1 to hit instead of smiting I kill an extra model - so basically a wash.
To me it feels like people would prefer that everything is just so milquetoast that decisions don't actually matter. Moved to a bad spot? No problem - nothing dies anyway!
There's issues with the game. Admech are ballbusters that need a 10% hit. DE need boats and lances hit. But outside of that you don't see this hyper efficiency unless someone rolls a tank in front of eradicators ( that almost no one takes ). Everything you do has some innate cost whether it be CP, a spell slot, or an ability and choices can have consequences.
People are putting on rose tinted glasses and pretending that because marines didn't shoot as much that things didn't die fast. gak...this forum wasn't even alive until 2009. No one here has any real idea how effective armies could be back in earlier editions, because no one was around to discuss it. People playing oldhammer are like-minded individuals that don't care to bring the best lists. If we really wanted to go back to that time now people would find the best army and break the game.
Emphasis mine.
This is a really important point that isn't focused on enough. There's a great recent example that's applicable here in the form of World of Warcraft Classic's release. For those who don't know, a few years ago Blizzard released a version of World of Warcraft as it had existed (more or less) on launch day back in 2004. The general sentiment going into the game's launch was that the difficulty and purity of the old systems would mean that those used to the more modern mechanics would struggle with the game. There was a real sense that "skill" in this classic game would be more important than "the right internet-sourced rotation or character build."
People absolutely cake-walked through it.
The truth was that the way people play games had changed drastically over the last 20 years because of the internet, and there was no going back. People looking to get better at games can draw on the huge, diffused, gestalt supercomputer of human problem solving and processing that is the internet to play competitive games hyper-efficiently.
The elephant in the room is that any game popular enough to draw the attention of the internet is going to produce the kind of efficiency armament that anyone can pick up and apply to a game. These kinds of "how do you want to play?" discussions and/or sub-rulesets of restrictions to counter the intellectual problem-solving arms race are a factor in all modern gaming from the tabletop to the computer screen. Map sets and weapon restrictions in games like Halo or CoD are an example of just this type of thing. When these restrictions aren't in-place by the rulesets in the form of "types of play" for users to opt into, they will attempt to enforce them themselves through things as simple as lobby names. There really is no avoiding it, but there are ways that rulesets can help users find their way to the type of play that they're looking for.
40k doesn't do a great job of the latter today.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2021/10/15 16:52:23
The difference though is in what type of optimization is being done.
Is the optimization at the pre-engagement step or during the battle?
To use your Warcraft 2004 example (or any MMO really), how much your "build" (in terms of gear, chosen skills, and damage rotation) affects the outcome is DRASTICALLY GREATER than being skilled at the game.
To push the MMO example further: a game where a naked character could beat a fully decked out character probably leans too much into "skill based play" (which damages roleplay for the people who are unskilled) OTOH a game where a fully decked out character can defeat the most skilled player in the game with a single button press (to start a macro) probably leans too much into the "skill doesn't matter enough" category.
Right now, (and always with 40k to some extent), 40k seems to be a game where the decisions made BEFORE the game actually have a disproportionate impact on how the game actually goes.
I will admit it is also possible to go too far the other direction (though 40k has never been there), where decisions made DURING THE GAME are too important and relegate any pregame decisions made to irrelevancy.
This message was edited 5 times. Last update was at 2021/10/15 16:58:14
I should say - this particular forum on Dakka. I think the other parts existed first. I see tactics out to 2006.
Here's an ancient tactics discussion:
Mahu, you might also PM Agustus. He has taken a 6 dread list to two larger RTT's (GhengisCon in denver and Adepticon). He also had a swarm of speeders.
I know that it did well in winning battles but got lots of cries of cheese, lots and lots of cries.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/10/15 17:07:28
Unit1126PLL wrote: The difference though is in what type of optimization is being done.
Is the optimization at the pre-engagement step or during the battle?
To use your Warcraft 2004 example (or any MMO really), how much your "build" (in terms of gear, chosen skills, and damage rotation) affects the outcome is DRASTICALLY GREATER than being skilled at the game.
To push the MMO example further:
a game where a naked character could beat a fully decked out character probably leans too much into "skill based play" (which damages roleplay for the people who are unskilled) OTOH a game where a fully decked out character can defeat the most skilled player in the game with a single button press (to start a macro) probably leans too much into the "skill doesn't matter enough" category.
Right now, (and always with 40k to some extent), 40k seems to be a game where the decisions made BEFORE the game actually have a disproportionate impact on how the game actually goes.
I will admit it is also possible to go too far the other direction, where decisions made DURING THE GAME are too important and relegate any pregame decisions made to second string.
I think there's a lot of truth to this, but I'd say that that is largely a result of how hyper-educated people are about what the precise, hyper-efficient combinations in armies are, and what strategems to use with them to maximize lethality. I, for example, am not a skilled min-maxer. When looking at a ruleset, I struggle to decipher force multiplying combinations, but I can do about 45 minutes of research online and easily come out with a killy list. To return to my WoW example, in 2004 when this wasn't an option the game FELT harder to any given person, despite the fact that that same person playing in 2021 would likely have found it to be much less difficult. I have a very strong feeling that if the internet didn't exist, 40k would FEEL more balanced to the average gamer, as it may have in 1999.
That is a problem that exists in every reasonably popular wargame I've ever played. The intricacies of complex competitive rules systems means that there will always be some measure of this problem. 40k does have balance issues that stem from its core mechanics, but I think a far better and more effective application of resourcing would be to further define the "ways of play" to ensure less of the onus of a "pre game conversation" rests on the end user. Seems infinitely more possible to do at this point than retooling the balance across the board, imo.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2021/10/15 17:14:44
The concept of pre-game planning is pretty appealing, although it's kind of in tension with the notion of equal points-worth of armies being a fair match-up.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/10/15 17:35:22
In US culture people will say "I am very competitive" as if it is a positive character trait, or at least not a negative one. There is a lot that goes into the mentality and why it exists that is outside the bounds of this discussion, but at the end of the day it does. And it will infiltrate any game that US gets it's hands on, if allowed to do so.
It's not an American thing, I've met plenty of WAAC players in the UK. Although I have noticed that most people tend to grow out of it and instead go for painting, converting, or gaming as a chill time.
No, no, he's right - it's all part of a grand conspiracy on our part to make you all sick to death of the things you enjoy so that we can have them for ourselves forever. After all, who would expect such a subtle plan from such a boisterous, impatient people?
Gert wrote: It's not an American thing, I've met plenty of WAAC players in the UK. Although I have noticed that most people tend to grow out of it and instead go for painting, converting, or gaming as a chill time.
Thought for the day 
