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Grey Knights- Annoy me as they dont belong in standard games. In lore they only appear when daemons are present. If no daemons are there, the Grey Knights are not showing up. Chaos Marines might make them perk their ears a bit but if they arent summoning daemons and are just doing mundane stuff, "Oh its just Night Lords flaying people, why are you calling us? Send the Astartes, we are busy." I liked them better many editions ago when they were an allied unit you could bring a squad of IF you were playing against daemons and it actually gave bonuses like reinforcements to the daemon player. Tanks? Thats the guards job, we dont carry anti-tank weapons.

Any faction where you pick their ability prior to a battle but after you see their list. I hate list tailoring and being able to see your opponent and go, "My army is anti-tank and gets lethals against tanks this game/round with everything, or anti-infantry etc...." is pretty broken. It should be if you pick X detachment then you get lethals vs X for the game before you see what your opponent is fielding.

 Hellebore wrote:

The system they built with their necron slaves was basically a giant crack factory, farming lifeforms to feed the need for that taste of strange. But now they were tainted by the mortal world they were also interfering with it in a way that wouldn't have occurred to them in their floaty glowy state. The need for pleasure now extended into machinating by the Deceiver, slaughter by the nightbringer, tech madness by the dragon etc.

Now you can find all sorts of things to change or improve in that area, but the concepts were there already. People not being able to tell the difference between a soul as a warp reflection of consciousness tethered to realspace by your mind and the literal EM field of a brain was the reason the confusion of c'tan eating souls happened.

But not just a conflation by the readers, there were numerous pieces published by GW saying that they ate "souls" and that the Necrons were "soulless" because their souls were eaten by the C'Tan. And in the Newcron lore that seems to be the entire grievance the Silent King has against the C'Tan, if the Necrons weren't "soulless" then everything would have turned out great. Necrons are immortal and powerful and retain their old minds and personality.

It doesn't help that there's no intuitive connection between wanting to experience the unique electric signature of a creature's brain and shooting them in the chest with a disintegration ray or cutting them into pieces with giant claws. Whatever it is that the C'Tan "feed" on is something they can apparently only consume by killing you, which definitely implies a warp-soul and not the electric patterns in their brain. It really feels like the original Necron lore was written by multiple people who weren't communicating with each other.

If the Oldcron lore were to be redone it would be better if the Necrons weren't trying to kill you, they were instead trying to entomb you in some sort of electro-coffin like The Matrix and put you in a ziggurat connected to a C'Tan. That would not only help to differentiate the C'Tan from the Chaos Gods but also distinguish the Necrons from the Tyranids which was sorely needed. Then if they wanted to keep the Silent King maybe he does just want to kill everyone out of spite for the C'Tan, so players can keep that angle if they prefer it.

 vipoid wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

Tyel wrote:
My take on Votann is that they are just weirdly normal.

There's lots of stuff in their new fluff that could be played on to make them... idk, Grimdark. Or at least unique.

But the mini range - and army rules - is painfully "Dwarfs in Spaaace".

As examples:
"We are all clones" - it doesn't matter.
"We have self-aware robots" - it doesn't matter.
We obey/worship hyper advanced machine intelligences that are breaking down - eh... it doesn't matter.

My problem with them is they're not even dwarfs in space. Nothing about them tells me dwarfs in space. They're as much dwarfs as the elves were elves in that aweful witcher spinoff series. They're old scale Space Marines with runes and Tau guns.

I think Age of Wonders Planetfall did Space Dwarves aesthetics much better:

Spoiler:

The new Squats look like someone found a bunch of generic 80s sci-fi toys and tried to make them into a faction.

Even Mantic's Forgefathers have a very clear Design language that makes you go: ah, it's space dwarfs. Votann are... something. Maybe GW simply shouldn't have presented them as successors to Squats but as something else entirely so you wouldn't wonder where the dwarfs are in that supposedly dwarf army. If they weren't interested in doing dwarfy stuff they should have just taken them as Demiurg and clear Tau allies with no connection to squats whatsoever.

I disagree with the idea that Votann isn't "dwarfy" enough and that their models should be these extreme Gimli caricatures that all have giant beards and are standing on anvils and drinking ale out of steins. Votann looks a lot more "dwarfy" than the Eldar look "elfy". If you were to show a Votann and an Eldar army to someone unfamiliar with 40k there is a decent chance they would figure out the Votann are supposed to be space dwarves but almost zero chance they would figure out the Eldar are supposed to be space elves. They would need to find one of the few Eldar models that isn't wearing a helmet and then closely look at its ears to get it.

So the Eldar shouldn't have guns they should have laser-bows. And none of them should wear helmets and their pointy ears should be at least 6" long. They should have leaf patterns all over their armor and their Warlocks should play psionic techno-harps in battle. Because they're supposed to be space elves and that means they need to be a pastiche of elf memes from D&D and Warcraft.

Yet that criticism is never levied against the Eldar because they're a long-standing faction that has developed its own identity which isn't just a pastiche of pop-culture elf memes. And that's what Votann should become, and could become with enough time and background lore fleshing them out.

Actually I'd love to see Eldar with superlong ears (done well). One thing I can argue against them is that, esp with their cone helmets, they really don't stand out enough as alien/nonhuman in 40K

But the Leagues of Votann are successors to the Squats. Real world and background, that’s exactly what they are.

A technologically proficient species doesn’t stand still for 10,000 years.

Certain technologies may well plateau, once you get to high efficiency. Like the scientific method and its resultant laws and theories, to replace say, FRL Travel, any alternative to that must perform the same task at least as well as the current method. That means speed, safety, reliability and energy consumption and what have you.

Yet when we compare the Ironhead Squats (newly covered in decent depth in Halls of the Ancients for Necromunda), a League which has existed largely in isolation from its contemporaries for 10,000 years, we see the difference.

They’ve been planetside for that period. And despite the challenges of living on Necromunda, those challenges don’t really change. This is different to the star faring Leagues, which will see comparatively rapid change in the pressures and challenges faced in mining the next world in their way. And as Necromunda has been, as such things are measured, relatively peaceful? Any potential enemies have also remained more or less set for the Ironhead, with the main change in 10,000 years being the Malstrain.

But they’re not everywhere on Necromunda. Wider spread than might be admitted, sure. But still largely confined to the ruins of Hive Secundus, with only the Jarland hold having regular run ins with them (and eventually falling).

And so, those twin barreled Autoguns and Bolters have remained plenty good enough for shredding anyone stupid enough to try and grab your riches. Especially when your Holds were originally built from your Bastion Starship. And yes, they’ve retained their Macro Weaponry. Is that speculation?

Halls of the Ancients wrote:

712 M32

Uranthi Silverhand, Lord of the Calypso Hive Cluster, attempts to conquer the Anglish after hearing of the wealth horaded within their holdfast. Riding atop a great tracked War Runner, Uranthi approaches the gate of the Anglish fortress, his thousands strong army at his back. He is met by the Charter Lord Horngir, who thanks him for his tribute of scrap and steel, before turning the Macro Guns of the Anglish bastion ship upon the startled gang

Given the Ironhead hold rights on Necromunda agreed with the Adeptus Terra (so not even the Imperial House can change that), and that their efforts help ensure the Tithe is met? There just aren’t many credible threats to the Ironhead as a whole. No gang has access to dedicated, purpose built and designed war machines. Certainly nothing that can dent a void ship in any meaningful manner.

Anyways, sorry. Got away with myself.

The Ironhead are Kin. Just Kin that haven’t had to rapidly adapt in the past 10,000 years in the way other, migratory Leagues have.

 Overread wrote:
Actually I'd love to see Eldar with superlong ears (done well). One thing I can argue against them is that, esp with their cone helmets, they really don't stand out enough as alien/nonhuman in 40K

I'm really not an Eldar fan. There are a lot of elements about them I do like, but the helmets really don't work for me at all.

Maybe I should add a caveat here: I have a small Votann army and I've only used the heads with beards (except for women obviously). I also have shovels and pickaxes on their backpacks and my Kahl has a power axe and I like the runic designs and the crests. So I do like the dwarfy elements in the range and I wouldn't want them to look like Primaris marines or something.

That said a lot of the Mantic range is going too far with it in my opinion. I don't want every helmet to have a stylized beard-plate, I don't need stylized beards on robots, and I don't want every single melee weapon to be a big mallet. I don't want a bunch of special characters with names like "Aleforge Minehammer" and I don't want a new unit of squats riding big floating anvils into battle. Basically I want them to stay what the Space Wolves were early on and not what the Space Wolves eventually turned into. A sci-fi army foremost with fantasy elements where they can comfortably fit.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

Tyel wrote:
My take on Votann is that they are just weirdly normal.

There's lots of stuff in their new fluff that could be played on to make them... idk, Grimdark. Or at least unique.

But the mini range - and army rules - is painfully "Dwarfs in Spaaace".

As examples:
"We are all clones" - it doesn't matter.
"We have self-aware robots" - it doesn't matter.
We obey/worship hyper advanced machine intelligences that are breaking down - eh... it doesn't matter.

My problem with them is they're not even dwarfs in space. Nothing about them tells me dwarfs in space. They're as much dwarfs as the elves were elves in that aweful witcher spinoff series. They're old scale Space Marines with runes and Tau guns.

I very much like the Votann, their lore is definitely Space Dwarf and their DAOT explorer theme is great, but the one thing I really don't like is the lack of Dwarf apparant on their miniatures. They barely have it, beyond their proportions. The weird thing with them is that the designers said they didn't want them to be "Dwarfs in Space", but that just comes across to me as them not really understanding what that even meant in the first place, because the Leagues...are Space Dwarfs. That's the whole point of them.

Beingt "Space Dwarfs" did not mean they to literally take the WHF designs and put them in 40k, gromril and chainmail and horned helmets and all, doing "X in Space" means to take the archetype and its key elements and put in a sci-fi suitable version and that's what the Eldar, Orks, Necrons, Ratlings etc do. The Leagues do that with their lore, but not so much the models. It's as if for some reason they thought Dwarfy beards were fantasy dwarf specific elements rather than just a part of the Dwarf archetype in general that should be present regardless of setting so removed them, making them feel less like the thing they're meant to be.

The background for LoV is pretty cool. I prefer the old Squat background but I'm aware it's probably purely nostalgia - I loved fantasy Dwarves and the idea of Dwarves in Space was really cool to me as a kid. I read the background section for the Squats in Codex Imperialis over and over.

But they did a good job of integrating, expanding and updating the background with the new book. I can't complain. They even folded the Demiurg idea into it in a clever way.

I don't really like the models that much, but they're not bad. I didn't like the old Squats that much either, model wise. I much prefer Mantic's take on Space Dwarves, I think the armoured Forgefathers look great and I don't mind the beards on the walkers and tanks. I'm likely in a minority there but it's great after so long with no Space Dwarves that we have such a variety to choose from now in hard plastic. We're in a proper golden age.

Deathguard. If they had a theme song it would be Filthy Gorgeous...their sculpts are possibly the best in the whole range but yee gods are they DISGUSTING!!!

 LunarSol wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Actually I'd love to see Eldar with superlong ears (done well). One thing I can argue against them is that, esp with their cone helmets, they really don't stand out enough as alien/nonhuman in 40K

I'm really not an Eldar fan. There are a lot of elements about them I do like, but the helmets really don't work for me at all.

Same.

It's a shame because DE do have some nice helmets - the Scourge ones, the Incubi ones, the Wych ones - basically all the ones that get away from the cone-head look.

Maybe that's the real reason DE are so eager to rise up the ranks. Would you want to spend the next thousand years going into battle dressed like a complete pillock?

funny thing is the cone helms work on Banshee. If they were all like that I think GW would be onto something but its just how the core guardians are so - basic with them

Maybe its just that its hard to escape from... 1990s nostalgia, but I've always loved the Eldar and yes, loved their pointy helmets. Give me that weird bug-eyed Farseer.

I think you'd pick out they are meant to be Space Elves pretty quicky - but the lore in the 2nd edition Codex was dense enough to make them their own thing rather than a carbon copy of WHFB.

I can sort of see the issue with LoV "model range" being between "Classical Dwarf" and "Slight Squat Mini-Marine". Some models suffer from this more than others. Maybe its moving towards "guys drinking while riding Anvils" - but I'd prefer if the Ironkin were more explicitly "Fantasy Golem" style minis.

But as I said my real issue the lore. "They are genetically programmed to do cliched dwarf things" - truly the greatest tragedy you could imagine for a race of not- exactly-dwarfs. "No, you see they have to upload their lives to the cloud, and they are running out of memory so they eventually won't be able to". Okay - so what happens if/when they can't do that? "Idk, they get a bit sad?"

I mean its not like if you die without a spirit stone - or you fail to keep yourself alive via grotesque acts of pain vampirism - then a Chaos god you brought into existence will drink your soul.

Tyel wrote:
Maybe its just that its hard to escape from... 1990s nostalgia, but I've always loved the Eldar and yes, loved their pointy helmets. Give me that weird bug-eyed Farseer.

I think you'd pick out they are meant to be Space Elves pretty quicky

Let's assume I know nothing about the faction & haven't read any of their lore yet.
So unless I see a picture or a mini of some without their helms, how exactly am I supposed to do that? Am I supposed to maybe divine that from their name? Eldar/Eldari sharing the EL with the word Elf??

And yes, I agree, the Farseer in his baroque bug-eyed helm IS a great model.

ccs wrote:
Let's assume I know nothing about the faction & haven't read any of their lore yet.
So unless I see a picture or a mini of some without their helms, how exactly am I supposed to do that? Am I supposed to maybe divine that from their name? Eldar/Eldari sharing the EL with the word Elf??

Kind of?

I want to link photos - but I can't see a way to do it without them turning out huge. And not sure what the forum policy is even if you hide them with Spoilers.

So you'll just have to imagine.

If you walked into a GW in around 1995 and were faced with
[2nd edition plastic Guardian box where the Guardians have tall pointy weirdly skull/angler fish style helmets and Lasguns] then okay - I can see why you'd potentially not instantly get it. (Although I think if you put those models next to say 2nd edition Marines, Orks, Guard, Tyranids... they'd seem further along the "elf spectrum".)

But if you looked up and saw
[2nd Edition Eldar Codex] then I think you would start to think "these are the elves of the setting" from the cover alone - never mind anything else inside it.
I feel this is especially true if you then turned to the other side of the GW store and saw
[4th Edition High Elf Army Book]. Which would I think make certain.. commonalities of how GW make Elves/Eldar obvious. (Its also perhaps bias, because that book probably influenced me more on "how fantasy elves are" than say frolicking in Lothlorien or Legolas in particular. (There's probably a wider point to be made separating elves into high/wood varieties here.)

Old Rangers are I guess cheating as half of them don't have helmets - but the ones that do felt very "elf like" to me. Warlocks always seemed very elf-like in terms of their proportions/robes. I guess Dark Reapers not so much - but most of the Aspect Warriors fall somewhere on the elf spectrum. I feel especially so once you put them next to Marines/Orks/Guard etc.

I remember my Mom's least favorite 40k faction came from Necromunda. House Cawdor models with their pointy hoods looked like "Klansmen," thus that game was off the table for the foreseeable future.

So I went back to 40k. Where to this day, she refers to the game as: "That game with the tanks."

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember my Mom's least favorite 40k faction came from Necromunda. House Cawdor models with their pointy hoods looked like "Klansmen," thus that game was off the table for the foreseeable future.

Presumably you mean Redemptionists.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember my Mom's least favorite 40k faction came from Necromunda. House Cawdor models with their pointy hoods looked like "Klansmen," thus that game was off the table for the foreseeable future.

So I went back to 40k. Where to this day, she refers to the game as: "That game with the tanks."

Ha my mum was pretty cool about not banning things she disapproved of unless it was full on just not at all suitable for children but i remember getting some sideways looks when i was reading a magazine with a pic of the old boob harpies and after I'd painted up my witch elves.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

If the Oldcron lore were to be redone it would be better if the Necrons weren't trying to kill you, they were instead trying to entomb you in some sort of electro-coffin like The Matrix and put you in a ziggurat connected to a C'Tan. That would not only help to differentiate the C'Tan from the Chaos Gods but also distinguish the Necrons from the Tyranids which was sorely needed. Then if they wanted to keep the Silent King maybe he does just want to kill everyone out of spite for the C'Tan, so players can keep that angle if they prefer it.

Except the OldCron fluff had that covered. The very last page of the 3rd ed codex is a short story detailing an Eldar vision of what would happen if the Necrons win; all life in the galaxy enslaved and bred to feed the C'tan.
The idea that they are just metal nids is a gross oversimplification.
The nids just want to eat you.
The Chaos gods want your worship to fuel their power.
Necrons want to farm you for eternity, and no warp entity, be it the Emperor or the Dark Gods, will save you because the C'tan will seal off the warp for good. Absolute omnicide was never the Necron goal. The idea what they wanted to kill everything is a meme.

As for Necrons not having personality, the third ed codex also mentions that Lords still have some and Dawn of War had Pariahs and Necron lords that could speak. Just because they aren't mustache twirling skeletor wannabes who steal anything that's not nailed down or Don Quixote knock-offs doesn't mean they were completely mindless.

Pariahs weren't just bodyguards either, they were meant to be next generation of necron based on human stock, that they were evolving and becoming something more terrifying. That's another aspect I see a lot of people miss. They weren't just a bunch of spooky robot skeletons, they were a threat that was slowly waking, growing in power, and more terrifyingly, evolving and adapting to kill and subjugate humans more effectively.
Hell, the Necrons would raid vessels and use their phase tech to steal organs for study, leaving victims with no visible signs of injury until an autopsy.

The Wardcron fluff is dumb because the C'tan are still lords of reality; having advanced tech (that the C'tan provided) doesn't help if they could just, I dunno, open a space rift or manipulate time so that the attack has a 0% probability of doing anything or never happened to begin with. The Enslaver plague made much more sense because it literally starved them into hiding and involved their greatest weakest; the Warp.

Not to mention that the C'tan gave the Silent King control of the entire Necron race for...reasons. With no caveats to ensure loyalty. You meant to tell me that a race of incredibly cruel, vampiric eldritch horrors are just going to give away control to one of their slaves? And not expect the possibile betrayal? Really? That's not hubris, that's just being incredibly stupid.
Hubris would be not expecting the Silent King or even the Eldar (to rob them of their armies) to hack into the command protocols and seize them that way. Just giving away protocols or whatever they are called is just an act of cosmic idiocy.

There's a reason why Ward was so thoroughly mocked back then. He's not a good writer and everything he comes up with reeks of poor quality fan fiction with not much thought of what the implications could be.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember my Mom's least favorite 40k faction came from Necromunda. House Cawdor models with their pointy hoods looked like "Klansmen," thus that game was off the table for the foreseeable future.

Presumably you mean Redemptionists.

Yeah, my mistake.

Yea maybe Slaanesh should be on the list for me here, as an army which is very cool... but impossible to collect without being branded as a deviant for painting all the naked demon women XD

Just collect Khorne as well then you're balanced as you've painted all the naked demon hermaphrodites of Slaanesh and all the naked men of Khorne

Eldar will always be special to me, as in the early days they were a very striking army, one arguably best suited to the more artistic gamer.

Where Marines, Guard and Orks tend to have a set, primary colour set? Thanks to Aspect Warriors, an Eldar army was always pretty colourful by comparison. Not a mind melting Slaaneshi clash of colours. But a shared scheme for Guardians, flowing robes for Psykers, a big burny daemon, and uniquely schemed Aspects has always looked great, and distinctive, from across the table.

I’ll always remain miffed we’re yet to get anything quite like Realms of Chaos and Waaaargh! The Orks covering the Eldar. I’d even settle for a single volume covering Craftworld, Commorite, Exodite and Harlequin societies, if one each is too much to ask.

I've always never really liked elves in fantasy settings, and it's no different for Eldar IMO. So they get a runner up honorable mention because even though I'm not a personal fan of them I wouldn't remove from the setting since they're a faction I like to dislike.

Space Wolves on the other hand are a different story. Out of all the marine factions, I feel like they're one of the marine sub-factions that got flanderized the most with all the wolf stuff, they're incredible hypocrites for a lot of the things they did in the Heresy and in 40k they're not much better since GW moved away from badass vikings to Wolfy McWolf Face. Also doesn't help that outside the Wolf Guard/Long Fangs that their aesthetic is not great IMO and with the tacticool shift to primaris I'm not sure how well GW will do to update them in primaris armour given how iffy the new Sanguinary Guard look.

Space Wolves was my army back in 2nd edition before they got silly. I just couldn't bring myself to use them now no matter how cool I thought they were before.


My least favorite in the 40K scale is the Knights (and other super heavies). They are great in an Epic scale game but seem completely counter to the 40K scale and are game breaking. But then I've always favoured the smaller infantry skirmish side of things than carparkhammer so maybe I'm an outlier.


Dishonourable mention goes to Orks - I love the wackiness of orcs and goblins in general, and love painting me some grots. But somehow that fun didn't carry over into 40K so you've just got a stupid, clunky horde army that just feels lacking somehow.



I won't say I dislike Space Marines either, I just feel somewhat underwhelmed and oversaturated with them. There's no drama about super soldiers who can withstand anything and have super super variants and 4 million captains. That's more of a 40K scale creep thing in general though.

I notice that no one has mentioned:

Sisters of Battle, Alien Dinosaurs Tyranids, or Black Legion.

They either blend into the background or everyone is fine with them.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I notice that no one has mentioned:

Sisters of Battle, Alien Dinosaurs Tyranids, or Black Legion.

They either blend into the background or everyone is fine with them.

Sisters pretty much took the mantle of what space marine should be : gothic space fanatics. They fit seemlessly into the historical background of 40k.

Tyranids are the only monstrous looking race, and while some of their design are not that good, they are very evocative of eldritch horrors from outer space, and pretty much the only faction occupying that design space in 40K.

Black Legion are the poster boys chaos marines, and they embody the setting perfectly. Their miniature refresh is fantastic, which helps.

I 'd argue that Eldar, visually fit seemelessly into the 40k background as the clean faction, but it is a shame that they have been relegated to not-really-protagonists and their lore evolve very slowly, if at all, as a result.

Eldar spent a long time with old models and GW doesn't push old armies (outside of Old World) until they get modern models. So yeah I figure with Eldar now updated to an almost entirely new model range we might well start to see them do something.

It also hinges a lot on what the next editions protagonist non-marine faction will be (since its on a 3 year cycle)

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I notice that no one has mentioned:

Sisters of Battle, Alien Dinosaurs Tyranids, or Black Legion.

They either blend into the background or everyone is fine with them.

Well, I thought about mentioning tyranids because I find they're probably the ugliest range in the game, a poor man's Giger Aliens with guns in their hands... but then again I bought GF9 Giger Aliens and use them as tyranids, so there's nothing about their background or rules I dislike, it's just the official models, and even they can shine with proper paintjobs (so... not GW's ugly Leviathan scheme).