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 Peregrine wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:
We? Seems like a few people agree with me in here. Differences of opinion never did seem like your strong point though. Far better to flog a dead horse.

We, as in the people who don't like WD or its battle reports. The objection is that it's low-quality work, not that it isn't an endless repetition of the same top-tier tournament list vs. top-tier tournament list played for high stakes by WAAC professionals.

And I'd hate to think that anyone agrees with you and your ridiculous straw man, since that would be a disappointing lack of taste or critical thinking.

It's low quality work judged by your standards, playing a game can be a difference of opinion whether one wants to see WAAC games or friendly games played instead.

Saying you speak for a group like a hive-mind doesn't make your point work either.

 Peregrine wrote:
real 40k armies.

Could you expand on this point please?

 Peregrine wrote:

Nice straw man there. Nobody is asking for the same report every single month, what we DO expect from a magazine you have to pay money for is a battle report where the mission and forces aren't rigged, the armies resemble real 40k armies, everyone follows the standard rules (unless there's a specific house rule/scenario rule made for a very good reason), and both players do their best to play and win the game. And the description should be more than just pretty pictures of the new models you can buy, there should be explanations of each player's strategy at key moments, thorough descriptions of what's going on, post-game analysis of how things worked (besides "this was really cool I love the GW (tm) Hobby!!!!!! I can't wait to buy more GW (tm) Products!!!!!"). You know, the kind of things you can find (for free!) on dozens of blogs covering every kind of game, from hardcore tournament matches to fluffy story-based scenario games.

I have seen some old white dwarfs like 10+years old and those reports . so much different . people using armies they actualy own , painted and converted by them , giving actual gaming tips and insight in to strategy they will use . Non of the "and here my +3 sv power sword cpt is doing a lone charge against a hive tyrant with bodyguard" we seem to get nowadays . models or units dieing for nothing or because someone does stupid mistakes isnt fun to watch . It probably isnt fun to roll too .

 Kaldor wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
real 40k armies.

Could you expand on this point please?

Surely this is easy:
Real 40k includes the use of the Force Org Chart
Hence real 40k armies must fit the force org chart.



On another level the post is probably referring to the fact that 40k armies used in real games (rather than rigged or pre-planned games) are designed, planned and intended to be effective in some manner. E.g. several hours are likely spent building a list. Whereas this BR clearly threw together lists in mere moments.

I think the problem here stems from the fact that many people play 40k for very different reasons.

Naturally, there's the hard core tourney crowd, and this WD BR probably doesn't have much for them. It's not balanced, and the unit selection din't approach intelligent, much less min-maxed. For a competitive format, battles should always be as close to evenly balanced as possible, something this report clearly lacked.

Then there are more fluff/storyline-centric players, and this WD was probably much more satisfying for them. Battles in stories (and real life) are very rarely exactly-matched forces going up against each other, and so those of us who appreciate the the "cinematic" concepts of the battle didn't find the mismatched forces such a problem. Plus, while some commenters have mentioned that only taking one dragon, and that one without the flamer, was stupid, it would also be stupid if every Chaos Space Marine army had 3x dragons with flamers. It would be good in a tournament, but it wouldn't fit the fluff.

And, also, keep in mind that WD is an advertising tool, and they want to show off the new products for sale. The flip side of that is, as a Dark Angel player, I'm very eager to see everything new that I could possibly put on the field, so I appreciate seeing a widely varied force instead of just cookie cutter internet army templates.

If you want to talk about how WD has declined, we can do that -- I've moved my old WD's halfway around the world, but the new stuff is hardly worth using as cat litter these days. Old WDs had rules, short stories, amazing paint jobs on all sorts of minis, not just the latest and greatest releases, and some really interesting articles (my favorite is still the recurring one about how to build an army on a limited budget each month -- they could easily redo that one, except with the current prices, there's no way to build an army on a limited budget.)

Tycho wrote:

They have said that they usually play out the battle several times until they get the result that they are looking for (I.E. the result where the new models they just released do something super cool and make the readers want to go buy them).

RANT INCOMING:
No. They've never said this. Not one time and not even "indirectly" as Pouncey put it. Were that actually true, the 6th ed Chaos Marine debut would not have have sucked nearly so hard. You don't "make readers buy the shiny new miniatures" by having them do feth all nothing for an entire game and then lose. Which is exactly how that bat rep went. They DO play practice games, but I don't see an issue with that.. Playing the game through once probably DOES help them make a more interesting game the second time through. Seriously people, think about it - it's not like the miniatures are running around their own completely out of our control. Think about how silly that statement is. Honestly, if they wanted certain specific results, they wouldn't play a game at all. lol Like someone above me said, they would just set the miniatures up for different photos and fill in the blanks with, you know, writing. Do some of you actually envision the GW staff standing around a game table saying things like "MAN! I REALLY hope my bikers go right up the middle this game. I was hoping they would do it the last two games, but they just keep running up that far table edge. Well fingers crossed they cooperate this time!" lol Ugh. END RANT

I dont know if anyone else has answered this, sorry...

They have actually. I havent even bought/read a WD in years and i still own at least 2 where their 'practice games' are explicitely mentioned (one being a 'Last Stand' of Empire vs Skaven when the new Steam Tank came out and the Tank got destroyed first turn with a Skitterleap+Brass Orb combo in the 'practice' so they re-played the game. The other i cant remember the specifics of off the top of my head, apologies). This at the very least is inference that they re-play the games until the result they want comes up.

The way I see it, the Chaos Battle Report was a way of showing off how NOT to use the new chaos army... Even the peanut gallery folks at the end were saying 'yeah, he did it wrong.'

In saying that, I would prefer a bit more of a middle ground in battle reports, like people said, 'real' armies, something with some real plan in mind, even if it's not a particularly good plan...

The old Rourke's Drift re-enactment with Orcs and Praetorians also mentions that they played it 3 times to tweak the results and the rules.

Loved that report in any case.

 Savageconvoy wrote:
I've always heard that the GW and more generally UK players prefer cinematics and narrative to actual gameplay and fairness.

I've always just imagined the gameshops to consist of a single table. The rest of the room is filled with chairs as the other patrons take their seats the two players come in, dressed in their finest garb. They both start reciting Shakespearean dialog as they forge the story, occasionally shaking a model and going "pew pew" for added effect. The dice have no numbers and are just thrown for effect.

These battle reports make me think these things.

Comment removed.
reds8n

milo wrote:
I think the problem here stems from the fact that many people play 40k for very different reasons.

Naturally, there's the hard core tourney crowd, and this WD BR probably doesn't have much for them. It's not balanced, and the unit selection din't approach intelligent, much less min-maxed. For a competitive format, battles should always be as close to evenly balanced as possible, something this report clearly lacked.

Then there are more fluff/storyline-centric players, and this WD was probably much more satisfying for them. Battles in stories (and real life) are very rarely exactly-matched forces going up against each other, and so those of us who appreciate the the "cinematic" concepts of the battle didn't find the mismatched forces such a problem. Plus, while some commenters have mentioned that only taking one dragon, and that one without the flamer, was stupid, it would also be stupid if every Chaos Space Marine army had 3x dragons with flamers. It would be good in a tournament, but it wouldn't fit the fluff.

And then there's the people who don't require a min/maxed battle report, but expect one that follows the actual rules GW puts out.
That's not a big expectation. Scenarios are fine - I've played in them and enjoyed them. Even scenarios follow army building rules (usually - there's not too many exceptions ime and I've never seen "lets just take what's painted and forget about everything" as one of the scenario points).

 Kaldor wrote:

 BluntmanDC wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:
Personally, I think most players could learn a lot from reading WD battle reports. They could learn how to lighten the feth up about their game of toy soldiers, they could learn how to consider the enjoyment of their opponent when building a list, and they could learn not to rigidly adhere to a single TAC list all the time.

List building has nothing to do with an opponents enjoyment of the game (if you can't think of ways to beat a 'power list' then you aren't a good player)

That's one of the silliest things I've read all day. Congratulations.

Your answer is one of the silliest things I've read all weak. Congratulations.

See what I did here?

For what it's worth, I and pretty much everyone I play with in my area never buy the White Dwarf for the reasons the OP stated.

I have no problem with people enjoying different ways of playing 40k. More fluffy/narrative? More power to you. Competitive gamer? Cool story bro. I'm simply stating that no one I play with actually pays money for a White Dwarf because there is nothing in that magazine that appeals to us.

Be nice if there was though.

This at the very least is inference that they re-play the games until the result they want comes up.

No. That is you reading way too much into someone saying "In the practice game x/y/z" happened. THEY did not infer. YOU did. There is no evil conspiracy here. Again, I would refer you to the Chaos report (because it's a good example and it's recent so many here are likely to have at least looked at it) from when they debuted the 6th ed codex. Half the new minis did nothing. The Drake was decent, but the Maulerfiend did ... what? Nothing. Just like most of the rest of the army. If these were all "fixed" don't you think they would have tried a little harder to showcase the new stuff? Again, games take a long time to play (especially when you have to stop on a regular basis to take notes and photos) and it's not like the WD/GW staff is hurting for things to do. If they wanted certain specific results, do you guys really think they would waste time playing even ONE game? Let alone the multiple games they run through now. No, they would just set the stuff up, photograph it and slap some text on it. Done.

The old Rourke's Drift re-enactment with Orcs and Praetorians also mentions that they played it 3 times to tweak the results and the rules.

Really testing my memory on that one so I could be wrong, but if I remember correctly, they were setting up a special scenario (due to the "Historical Reenactment" part of it) and wanted to create a unique scenario that players could run through at home without needing to make their own house rules. That was back in the day when WD regularly made scenarios you could play at home with special/unique rules that existed outside the normal missions. So of course they had to tweak the special rules. It takes a few times to get stuff like that right. That's why rule sets always have play-testers. Unless someone can provide a specific quote where they explicitly state that they tweaked RESULTS in addition to rules, this is just another conclusion that has been lept to from a ledge that is tenuous at best.

So anyway, I know I'm probably fighting a losing battle with that. There will always be GW conspiracy fans. I just wanted to add again that while I wish the report had been a little more informative as far as the new DA codex, I did really enjoy it. People really do need to lighten up sometimes. If it wasn't your cup of tea I can get that. Calling it the "Worst Battle Report of all time"? No. Just no.

I dug up WD 222 which contained the Rourke's Drift report.


Paul Sawyer doesn't come out and bluntly say they replayed it to tweak the results, but does say they played it 3 times to balance the rules:
battle 1) too big table, orks shoot them all to death.
battle 2) buff IG too much, they shoot orks to death
battle 3) the published report, with IG narrowly winning in a very 'cinematic' way.

Tweaking the rules for their custom battle tweaked the results naturally. But I concede it probably wasn't their intent, although I'm sure they'd fought a fourth time or until the IG won

I dug up WD 222 which contained the Rourke's Drift report.


Paul Sawyer doesn't come out and bluntly say they replayed it to tweak the results, but does say they played it 3 times to balance the rules:
battle 1) too big table, orks shoot them all to death.
battle 2) buff IG too much, they shoot orks to death
battle 3) the published report, with IG narrowly winning in a very 'cinematic' way.

Tweaking the rules for their custom battle tweaked the results naturally. But I concede it probably wasn't their intent, although I'm sure they'd fought a fourth time or until the IG won

Thank you. So it was as I remembered. They were just trying to make a balanced set of rules for a unique scenario and that was exactly my point. Also, in that case I would suggest that they were talking about the practice games NOT to suggest that the games are suppose to be "fixed" but rather because they wanted to demonstrate the thought process behind setting up that type of unique scenario. It was intended to give us a look "behind the scenes" if you will. That sort of thing was common in the Paul Sawyer days.

Eldercaveman wrote:

Darrett wrote:
I find it interesting; don't most of you play where bringing undercost lists buy you advantages? In our games, you automatically get first turn, and depending on point disparity, you might get other fun things like rerolls on mysterious objectives or a deployment zone modification (reducing your opponent or increasing your zone by 3", etc). Since its blind lists until the start of the game, we've had 1850 point games where both players arrived with 1500 points trying to outdo the other.

I've never heard anyone do this, but it is a cool idea, did it stem from Apocalypse games by any idea?

Didn't stem from Apocalypse as far as I know. Honestly, I thought it was common; I've played in groups separated by 3500 miles and have always done at least the "lowest point value goes first".

Plumbumbarum wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:

 BluntmanDC wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:
Personally, I think most players could learn a lot from reading WD battle reports. They could learn how to lighten the feth up about their game of toy soldiers, they could learn how to consider the enjoyment of their opponent when building a list, and they could learn not to rigidly adhere to a single TAC list all the time.

List building has nothing to do with an opponents enjoyment of the game (if you can't think of ways to beat a 'power list' then you aren't a good player)

That's one of the silliest things I've read all day. Congratulations.

Your answer is one of the silliest things I've read all weak. Congratulations.

See what I did here?

Yeah, you earned yourself a place on my 'Ignore' list. Good for you, I guess.

By far the worst White Dwarf battle report is always the one in the current issue; whatever month it happens to be.

This months issue being no exception. I had skipped over to the army list because the play by plays are usually dumb, then had to do a double take and go back to the beginning.

Ignoring the rule book (FOC) completely has got to be a brand new low. I suggest for the February issue they go ahead and make up new rules for existing units simply because it would be much more awesome.

I mean how cool would it be if they did a "battle report" where flyers came in turn 1 and could assault into close combat!

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
That or one comes in dressed as a Space Marine and places down his SM Army, and his oponent has painted their skin green w/ their ork army already deployed

Cinematic +10!


I used to read the battle reports... now I just read the pictures and captions rather than read through all the gak.

EDIT: or to take an overly used joke from a certain game...
"I used to read the battle reports like you, then I realised GW can't play"

Ok, that sucked... sue me. On second thought, don't. Sue GW.

"I used to read the battle reports until Fat Bloke took an arrow to the knee."

 Kaldor wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
real 40k armies.

Could you expand on this point please?

A real army is an army that:

1) Follows the standard rules about even point values (preferably ones that people tend to play at) for both players, FOC, and any other army composition rules. It's ok to make the occasional exception to the rule for theme reasons (for example, removing the HQ from a "our leader is dead, WTF now?" mission) as long as you make it clear that's what you're doing, but in general the armies should follow all of the normal rules that people play by.

2) Contains a realistic choice of units. It doesn't have to be the most optimized tournament list, but there should be a clear plan for how the army was built and what part each unit has in the overall plan. It should be a reasonable example of what real 40k players use, not just a pile of whatever the studio happened to have painted at the time or all of this month's new models thrown together without any thought given to how to make it work.

In short, the armies should look like what you'd see if you walked into the average game store (though better painted) in the middle of a game, not just a random pile of catalog models being pushed around a table to make pretty pictures.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
It's low quality work judged by your standards, playing a game can be a difference of opinion whether one wants to see WAAC games or friendly games played instead.

Why do you even bother replying to me when you didn't take the time to read what I said? I made it very clear that the problem is NOT the fact that GW doesn't use WAAC lists and behavior, it's that the battle reports are just badly done because of writing quality and similar issues. Even if your goal is to see a friendly story-based game they're still badly done.

clively wrote:
By far the worst White Dwarf battle report is always the one in the current issue; whatever month it happens to be.

It's two guys having fun and showing off what the new models do. Big frigging deal.

 Brother SRM wrote:

clively wrote:
By far the worst White Dwarf battle report is always the one in the current issue; whatever month it happens to be.

It's two guys having fun and showing off what the new models do. Big frigging deal.

Nod.

At the risk of sounding repetitive - I thoroughly enjoyed it this month.

 cvtuttle wrote:

 Brother SRM wrote:

clively wrote:
By far the worst White Dwarf battle report is always the one in the current issue; whatever month it happens to be.

It's two guys having fun and showing off what the new models do. Big frigging deal.

Nod.

At the risk of sounding repetitive - I thoroughly enjoyed it this month.

Yeah, seriously. I haven't touched WD in over a decade. I still pick up issues from the 200's and enjoy the hell out of them. And I quite enjoyed the battle report. Two blokes sitting down with their own collections (the only extras were the new Dark Angel units; the Black Legion was definitely not the studio one I remember) and getting their game on. Some people get too hung up on constructs that were introduced to make the game pick-up friendly. When planning out narrative scenarios it is best to take a page from historicals and not bother with points and just come up with forces you would see (or just bring everything you have, as in this case), and leave balancing to things like force objectives and relative terrain set up.

This set-up actually had a lot working against the DA. The Black Legion had a great defensive position, a buff in their deployment zone, a bottleneck to funnel the enemy (and unfortunately themselves) and the objective itself was completely in their control and hidden. So even if the DA end up with a larger force by a bit the balance for the scenario seems to be quite good. If they had any practice games it was likely to tweak things like giving Chaos the shrine as a boost and determining the best way to handle the Fallen in their ranks. If you are ever running a narrative scenario then it will take several games before you work out the kinks in it. My Infinity group has a mission we must have tweaked half a dozen times to fill in holes that people kept finding. If GW runs practice games for batreps then that only sounds like a good idea to me. Better than running a new scenario sight unseen and having it end anti-climatically when one side finds a loop-hole in the scenario and wins too easily. Scenarios are most fun when things a drawn to a nailbiting conclusion.

My group has a game like this near-annually where we get everyone together, split up in to teams based on the most sensible alliances and plonk down everything we own. This battle report brought back good memories of those games.

My group has a game like this near-annually where we get everyone together, split up in to teams based on the most sensible alliances and plonk down everything we own. This battle report brought back good memories of those games.

what would you do , if one of those games a prime objective holder of one force would clearly play in favor of the other class. Charging the fallen guy in to a unit that can easily kill him , made as much sens too.

I do not want to see WD reports with competitive lists. I see enough of those already and it might even make the meta worse with all those kids thinking they suddenly became professional players because they copy a tournament list and utterly fail with it, blaming the units -___-

And seriously, do you think a competitive IG list will be fun to watch? An entirely static army? Imagine the report! "Yeah, I rolled...and then rolled...I rolled pretty hard that day! Took so many risks...like hurting my wrists. Ye brah! I'm such a pro gunline player, yo. swag swag yolo."

Besides who ever said war was fought by two equal sides?

 Kaldor wrote:

Plumbumbarum wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:

 BluntmanDC wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:
Personally, I think most players could learn a lot from reading WD battle reports. They could learn how to lighten the feth up about their game of toy soldiers, they could learn how to consider the enjoyment of their opponent when building a list, and they could learn not to rigidly adhere to a single TAC list all the time.

List building has nothing to do with an opponents enjoyment of the game (if you can't think of ways to beat a 'power list' then you aren't a good player)

That's one of the silliest things I've read all day. Congratulations.

Your answer is one of the silliest things I've read all weak. Congratulations.

See what I did here?

Yeah, you earned yourself a place on my 'Ignore' list.

I copy your answer to someone plus little exaggeration and you are going to ignore me for that?

 Kaldor wrote:
Good for you, I guess.

Not really. I enjoy debating you just as anyone else despite your rarely backed up one liners.

We'll leave this particular tangent here please.


Thanks.

I personally have been enjoying the battle reports in the newer issues of White Dwarf. They seem to focus on looking at what the new stuff does, ways to use it, and how it actually worked out in-game. For those kicking off about not following FOC and points values? I'm pretty sure in the rulebook it talks about ignoring those very things if it's what you and your opponent want.

Eldercaveman wrote:
Besides who ever said war was fought by two equal sides?

40k isn't a war, it's playing a game

On another point, though, uneven games can be a lot of fun too! And I don't mean SoB vs. GK, I mean stuff like 1500 vs 1000 points.