Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 TheKbob wrote:
I know the one thing everyone would love to have come back...

FEARLESS WOUNDS!

Oh that would be brilliant! Lets also bring back IC 's not giving fearless to units. Used to love how my draigo paladin unit was "escorted" outside the table.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
So, of the units you're talking about are so resistant to shooting, how much of a difference is a shooting phase extra going to make?

A turn of one or more units firing at full BS is going to do a lot more to these units than a single unit firing at BS1. This should be obvious.

Death Stars are an issue that need addressing separately, not something that the whole fabric of the game needs to be contorted around because they exist.

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they're here. Death Stars are apart of the game, and if current rumors about Unbound and everything being able to score are true, they're only going to become more powerful.

So like it or not, they're impact on the game needs to be considered.

Bear in mind that if you use overwatch fire then you could kill enough models to stop them consolidating into another unit. If the 2nd unit is 4"+ away then you probably don't need to kill many models to stop them reaching you.

overtyrant wrote:
Running across an open battlefield to hit someone with your sword is stupid and the fething loonies (Berserkers, Orks etc..) should be punished with unrelenting fire, Close quarter combat should be reserved for building to building and trench warfare only.

You are correct, in the case of realistic, real-world fighting.

...But this is 40k. A specific element of the background is the claim that assaulting is an effective tactic. Assault Marines and Terminators are often described in the fluff as getting into the middle of an enemy force and wreaking havoc while the ranged units and support advance. In other cases, Orks are described as weathering an incredible amount of fire but still being deadly enough when they arrive to overrun an Imperial Guard position.

It follows, then, that the rules should reflect the apparently equal power/efficacy between ranged and melee combat - after all, if the game does not allow players to forge a narrative within the universe GW has created, then what's the point of having background at all? That this does not happen is why people are frustrated with the domination of shooting-based armies.

Think of it this way: How frustrating would it be if your IG's Basilisk artillery was only S3 AP-, Small Blast 1? Of course it would be terrible, because you would never be able to use the unit the way it is presented in the lore. So how do you think players who field assault armies feel when their entire force cannot function in the way the background says they should?

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
So, of the units you're talking about are so resistant to shooting, how much of a difference is a shooting phase extra going to make?

A turn of one or more units firing at full BS is going to do a lot more to these units than a single unit firing at BS1. This should be obvious.

Death Stars are an issue that need addressing separately, not something that the whole fabric of the game needs to be contorted around because they exist.

Mathematically, of course it will. Meaningfully? Not so much. Scoring two wounds is 200% more effective than no wounds! but makes no functional difference to the efficacy of the deathstar.

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they're here. Death Stars are apart of the game, and if current rumors about Unbound and everything being able to score are true, they're only going to become more powerful.

So like it or not, they're impact on the game needs to be considered.

GW clearly either is not aware or does not care that they exist, but they are at least something that can be voluntarily withheld from the game by the player. While TFG syndrome must be borne in mind to a degree, I'd much rather a ruleset that favoured a wider range of players and units than one that existed purely to put the kibosh on a sub set of a sub set.

In short, I believe consolidation, implemented correctly, has a much larger positive impact on overall game balance and will only make a few certain broken things mildly more broken than they already are.

You're hitting on 6's.

Honestly, I wonder what sort of horrifically bad dice-rolling luck people have had against overwatch to think that it's anymore than a minor nuisance.

Double-tapping firewarriors are going to kill 3 charging guardsmen on average in overwatch. GUARDSMEN. They don't even get a save. We're not talking about space marines or something, just regular old guardsmen.

I wouldn't bank on overwatch to do gak against anything unless I had a Tau gunline set-up with markerlights to maximize support-fire shenanigans. Otherwise it's borderline useless.

I've lost Greater Daemons and Princes to Overwatch.

Orks run at 50% efficiency when using OW, Tau have tricks to support OW, Eldar have copious ways of t/l stuff, other armies have their mainstay troops rocking rapid fire weapons, so at least are throwing down handfuls of dice.

Charge a unit of 9 Flamers of Tzeentch with anything short of an MEQ statline and tell me overwatch is a nuisance.

 azreal13 wrote:
Mathematically, of course it will. Meaningfully? Not so much. Scoring two wounds is 200% more effective than no wounds! but makes no functional difference to the efficacy of the deathstar.

Multiple units pouring fire into a Death Star is going to do more than "2 wounds" compared to a single unit firing at BS1. With many of these types of units, wittling them down with sustained fire is the only way to bring them down. Allowing them to "hide" in combat for most of the game is going to nullify the one thing that can really counter them.

Besides, even if it was "just 2 wounds", 2 wounds could be the difference between a dead GUO and a GUO massacring another squad.

GW clearly either is not aware or does not care that they exist, but they are at least something that can be voluntarily withheld from the game by the player.

If we're going to use casual play as a metric here, then there's no point in having this conversation. There is no such thing as imbalance in casual 40K. Assault units are perfectly useful and balanced in casual 40K. You can voluntarily withhold a Death Star in casual play, you can also voluntarily not consolidate into combat, or turbo-boost onto objectives turn 5, or use data-slates, or spam doom-scythes, or play gunlines, or use any other number of broken mechanics, in casual 40K.

I don't care about casual 40K. I'm talking about competitive 40K, where balance actually matters and you can't just house-rule away things that you don't like about the game like death-stars or melee units pin-balling around the table with consolidation rules.

When discussing "balance", you need to consider the broken mechanics. You can't just hand-wave them away.

So I re-iterate, there are many units that are either very fast or are very durable and the only way to kill them is to whittle them down over multiple turns of shooting. When dealing with those units, yes, there is a world of difference in effectiveness between focusing them down with shooting, and a single unit getting to snap-fire at them before getting crushed under their assaulting boot.

 azreal13 wrote:
I've lost Greater Daemons and Princes to Overwatch.

I've assaulted a squad of flamers with seekers and taken zero casualties.

No one cares about anecdotes.

It was a combination of mechanics in the old editions that made consolidation a pain.

Assaulting out of reserves, outflanks etc meant you basically had to castle in the middle of your table to have any chance. In addition being able to assault out of vehicles made it much more likely to happen.

So just by itself consolidating into new combats with the current rules would not be that big a deal.

I would like transports to go back to the sit still and still be able to assault but we will see.

Outflank didn't exist last time you could consolidate into new combats, and it was still horrific. Units have only gotten faster and tougher since then.

 azreal13 wrote:
I've lost Greater Daemons and Princes to Overwatch.

Yeah, and I once charged 3 broadsides with a unit of 6 gargoyles and won. Whats your point? This is a game played with dice, you're going to get some crappy (or excellent in my case) roles every once in a while. Unless you've been losing DPs CONSISTENTLY to overwatch, that sill doesn't change the fact that unless they have divination and/or Corteaz, overwatch is at worst an inconvenience, and nowhere near as detrimental to assault as the random charge distance is.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
If we're going to use casual play as a metric here, then there's no point in having this conversation. There is no such thing as imbalance in casual 40K. Assault units are perfectly useful and balanced in casual 40K. You can voluntarily withhold a Death Star in casual play, you can also voluntarily not consolidate into combat, or turbo-boost onto objectives turn 5, or use data-slates, or spam doom-scythes, or play gunlines, or use any other number of broken mechanics, in casual 40K.

I don't care about casual 40K. I'm talking about competitive 40K, where balance actually matters and you can't just house-rule away things that you don't like about the game like death-stars or melee units pin-balling around the table with consolidation rules.

When discussing "balance", you need to consider the broken mechanics. You can't just hand-wave them away.

Emphasis mine.

You are right, there's no point in having any sort of conversation, because the two points I've bolded show you don't really have a grasp of the fundamentals of the issues lack of balance brings to the game in general.

I don't care about competitive 40K, because anyone seriously trying to pursue that particular fools errand in this environment needs their head read, we can hope for a better, tighter ruleset in 7th, but of you're still trying to play 40K as a competitive exercise, you have my sympathies.

My point in yellow I picked up on because if we're taking "balance" and a serious effort to achieve it, why would there be any broken mechanics?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ferrum_Sanguinis wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
I've lost Greater Daemons and Princes to Overwatch.

Yeah, and I once charged 3 broadsides with a unit of 6 gargoyles and won. Whats your point? This is a game played with dice, you're going to get some crappy (or excellent in my case) roles every once in a while. Unless you've been losing DPs CONSISTENTLY to overwatch, that sill doesn't change the fact that unless they have divination and/or Corteaz, overwatch is at worst an inconvenience, and nowhere near as detrimental to assault as the random charge distance is.

My point is, and remains, that if you're rolling dice, there's always a chance that hints can happen, and no matter how statistically small one incidence occurring might be, the sheer volume of unlikely incidences that are given the opportunity to occur over the course of a game means that some will have a meaningful impacts.

I agree random charge is also an issue, and I'd also like to see D6 + I as a charge range (with perhaps a cap to prevent stupid ranges) but we're not talking about that here.

 Zarrath wrote:
Rumors stay rumors. According to my local GW store: Hampton Village, Michigan, USA: GW will continue to beselling 6th edition and there are NO new plans for updating the rules, nor is there a need too. With that said, no 7th edition will be made. However, GW will be making a rules amendment and slight change to several rules. Just like with what they did with death from the skies. It`ll just be another book for sell comprising of several small changes, to the rules. Besidea that 7th edition would instantly all of GWs product line, making astra militarum a flop. My 2 cents.

Never listen to the clowns at your GW store again. Its embarrassing...

 azreal13 wrote:


My point in yellow I picked up on because if we're taking "balance" and a serious effort to achieve it, why would there be any broken mechanics?

There wouldn't be but the fact is there are some at the moment. And the point they were making is that you can't address and fix those broken mechanics if you pretend they don't exist.

Geeze. I was just thinking...

Awesome! once I break into the Taudar lines I will just rampage their backfield... until I thought about the screamer star list... YIKES.

 Byte wrote:

 Zarrath wrote:
Rumors stay rumors. According to my local GW store: Hampton Village, Michigan, USA: GW will continue to beselling 6th edition and there are NO new plans for updating the rules, nor is there a need too. With that said, no 7th edition will be made. However, GW will be making a rules amendment and slight change to several rules. Just like with what they did with death from the skies. It`ll just be another book for sell comprising of several small changes, to the rules. Besidea that 7th edition would instantly all of GWs product line, making astra militarum a flop. My 2 cents.

Never listen to the clowns at your GW store again. Its embarrassing...

I learned a long time ago that the only people more clueless about 40k than GW's executives are GW's store employees.

Also people that are opposed to consolidation are forgetting that there are now allies. It's easy to draft in counter-charge units to protect your squishy shooties. Seems like everyone can ally with the Inquisition. Trust me, a Hammerhand, rad grenade Inquisitor with Priest giving re-rolls to hit and wound in a unit of Death Cult Assassins is going to eat anything that isn't in terminator armour, and will do a fair bit of damage to them too.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:


My point in yellow I picked up on because if we're taking "balance" and a serious effort to achieve it, why would there be any broken mechanics?

There wouldn't be but the fact is there are some at the moment. And the point they were making is that you can't address and fix those broken mechanics if you pretend they don't exist.

I'm not.

The discussion, or at least the one I thought I was having, was if overwatch, perhaps with a mechanic to allow falling back, was sufficient to balance out the advantages of consolidating into combat sufficiently to avoid a return to the mistakes of old, while leaving enough of a buff to make assault armies/units more viable.

Deathstar units are an entirely separate issue, but as this whole discussion is hypothetical, I'm hypothetically assuming they've been fixed too.

If people want to discuss what actions they'd like to see to help balance out deathstars, as long as that's not too off topic, I'm sure that's a worthy topic of discussion too.

why are there so many units made for assault that get chewed up so easily then. Bezerkers, warp talons, mutilators, vanilla possessed. Okay so maybe thats just csm. But still. I dont like how there are so many units (in other codices as well) that are designed for cc but thanks to the 6th mechanics never make it.

I was thinking about the unbound list nonsense where people are planning on bringing X amount of riptides and all unit being scoring and had an idea.
What if an unbound list was like the WHF percentages say x% in HQ X% in troops and then X% used on elites fast attack and heavy support! that way people are still taking troops for scoring but could use the last of their points in specialising there force to have more heavy support, fast attack or elites than a usual force.
People could build those iron warrior forces that they have always wanted to play without some WAAC guy pulling out 20 riptides.

pax_imperialis wrote:


why are there so many units made for assault that get chewed up so easily then. Bezerkers, warp talons, mutilators, vanilla possessed. Okay so maybe thats just csm. But still. I dont like how there are so many units (in other codices as well) that are designed for cc but thanks to the 6th mechanics never make it.

No, man, you see. It's 100% ok for shooting units to gun down CC units turn 1 but once a CC unit gets into CC with a shooty unit on turn 3 and after taking 50% casualties, it really shows how OP the CC unit is and why it should be nerfed even more. Those 4 rounds of shooting, turns 1, 2, 3, and Over Watch, that the CC unit had to go through, yea, forget about that being the balancing factor. Yea, forget that the shooty unit negates the CC unit's armor save. Also, forget that the shooty unit is in terrain so the CC unit strikes after the shooty unit for a total of 5 separate damage phases in a row before the CC unit can even attempt to hit the shooty unit. Did I mention how OP CC units are?

Shooting is almost stupidly OP in 6e and then you factor in all the CC nerfs that wen't along with it, it makes playing CC units un-enjoyable. It absolutely amazes me that players have the gall to say that the ability to consolidate into a new CC is game braking or OP. What game are you playing that CC consolidation would be OP because it's not 40k. It's a d6 consolidation. Spread out your units. You don't need a second overwatch phase, you shouldn't have gotten overwatch at all after consolidation into CC was removed. With any luck, the hay day of shooting is over and the game will take a step towards balance because this standing 1 inch away from the enemy so they can shot up again for a 4th turn in a row got old in 5e 6 years ago. Now put your big-boy pants on and say how happy you are that units with no shooting ability might get a slight bump to their overall effectiveness. While, at the same time, making 40k more enjoyable for the armies that struggle at shooting. All without nerfing shooting in 40k at all. This is literally what they call a 'win-win situation.'

 BlaxicanX wrote:
You're hitting on 6's.

Honestly, I wonder what sort of horrifically bad dice-rolling luck people have had against overwatch to think that it's anymore than a minor nuisance.

Double-tapping firewarriors are going to kill 3 charging guardsmen on average in overwatch. GUARDSMEN. They don't even get a save. We're not talking about space marines or something, just regular old guardsmen.

I wouldn't bank on overwatch to do gak against anything unless I had a Tau gunline set-up with markerlights to maximize support-fire shenanigans. Otherwise it's borderline useless.

As someone who played a very assault heavy Ork list in 5th, and stopped playing orks in 6th i will tell you the reason my army dosen't work any more.

Removeing casualties from the front.

If your spreading your orks out to their full 2" spaceing to defend from blast weapons, by shooting off the 1st rank of of orks, you effectivly lost 3" of movement from your last movement phase.
(The 1" ork base plus the 2" spaceing.)

Now if your running green tide the problem is even worse, since due to space when deploying you have to make your ranks shorter for space. If you end up rolling "Hammer and Anvil" deployment you bassicly are forced to have only 5 orks per "rank" in the hoard.

So by killing 10 orks, i lose 6" of movement from my hoard. All assault based armies suffer from this lose of movement to some degree or the other, but I think orks are the example of it at it's worse.

Bassicly 6th ed wound allocation punishes you for playing a assault army, and rewards people for playing shooting armies. Stuff like Overwatch on it's own isn't the problem, it's that over watch is takeing the problems with 6th ed wound allocation and makeing them WORSE.

6th then also felt content to take away the few tricks assault armies had to keep competive with shooting armies in 5th, like assaulting out of outflanks and a few other minor details. 6th ed killed the assault army.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Outflank didn't exist last time you could consolidate into new combats, and it was still horrific. Units have only gotten faster and tougher since then.

There were things like wolf scouts that could come in and assault since third. But my point is that many of the mechanics that made consolidate so deadly was the consistancy that people would reach assaults. However with current mechanics the amount of times someone makes it into assault is pretty limited so it is not as big of a deal if it came back. In addition there are many leadership mechanics that prevent a lot of people from falling back. Guard and many other armies have ways to prevent the fall back.

However we dont know enough to say for sure since we dont know anything about the context of the changes.

 Thokt wrote:
Why would armies obey an arbitrary organizational structure in the first place? In the framework of 40k we're already bound to all sorts of abstractions like this, what's weird about it? It's part and parcel to the norm. Why can some units score and others not in the first place? Why must both armies deploy in the same manner?

The organisational structure is there to create a (theoretically) fair game for both players, and to encourage people to build armies that utilise a reasonable mix of different unit types rather than just cherry-picking the best units.

The fact that only certain unit types can score is one of the things I disliked about 6th edition. The ability to hold an objective should be based on the unit's ability to defend that objective, not on where on the FOC it happens to be placed. Thankfully, it sounds like 7th ed is removing this issue...

However, the idea that a unit would be unable to contest an objective because the player chose to not follow the FOC, while an identical unit from a Battle Forged army can contest is just taking the abstraction to far. It's a limitation that's put in there to balance out the effectiveness of Unbound armies, yes... but it's a nonsensical one.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vector Strike wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Vector Strike wrote:
... but as the time passes by people will flock back to battle-forged - where having Troops is tantamount to victory. .

How?

Because troops are the only scoring units (some SC notwithstanding) normally available. .

The rumours we have currently are suggesting that everyone scores in 7th ed. As I mentioned in the post that you were responding to.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Why do people think that overwatch balances out consolidating into combat? Unless you're Tau, overwatch is a single unit hitting on 6's..

Wasn't there a rumour that Overwatch was getting a boost? Or at least that Snap-firing was getting boosted, which would have a carry-on effect to Overwatch.

And again since BlaxicanX seemed to ignore it; you don't need to kill the entire unit on overwatch to stop the consolidation, you just need to kill enough to stop them from reaching combat.

Assuming that the consolidate move hasn't changed at all, it's only D6". That's an average of 3.5 inches, which is unlikely to be more than 2-3 models worth of casualties at most. It's the same issue as random charges and removing casualties from the front. It's not just the random charge that's an issue, it's that when overwatch removes the front couple of models then the unit is often out of range, unless you're right down the enemies throat.

If the combination of overwatch, removing casualties from the front and only a D6" consolidate is not stopping consolidating then maybe, just maybe you're packing your units too close together.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 azreal13 wrote:
I've lost Greater Daemons and Princes to Overwatch.

I've assaulted a squad of flamers with seekers and taken zero casualties.

No one cares about anecdotes.

A point to make is that extremes can happen, and will happen occasionally and inevitably, changing fate,hence making anecdotes on Overwatch potential a more logical piece of evidence, not merely a desirable piece of evidence. This is because the game works by allowing massive extremes to happen, like 2 Guardsmen roll 8 sixes in a row in overwatch with Lasguns, and a Hive Tyrant fails all of his saves. Not an overwhelmingly strong point, but it is one nonetheless.

Not seriously, its Sod's Law. Seriously, before Christmas I went to a pair of tournaments one after another, and I had draws/losses in 3 games out of 6 because of unforeseen last ditch rolls. Its a flaw of 40k in itself that games are won on opportunity dice so often now.



As a considerably stronger point on the topic of overwatch, even less than a handful of kills can considerably reduce the chance of a charge going off, as the distance is determined after overwatch. I don't think killing 2 Marines or so in overwatch is that remarkable of an event with your average infantry unit, and yet those 2 Marines could easily be 1.5~'' worth of distance gained.

I may be the only one but as an ork player I have a real problem with challenges. I take ork boyz in huge numbers just to take a nob who gets destroyed in combat before he ever gets a chance to strike. The boyz are almost useless in CC these days and nobs for the squad are even worse because the accomplish nothing when they do get there. I understand that when, Well really if, my unit of boyz make it into cc they will be weakened but to have my units of boyz so consistently crushed by fire warriors of the same numbers or marines with less than half their numbers or anything really that can challenge my main damage dealer and completely gimp my unit really sucks.

WH40K has always been a case of "Jumping the Shark"

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
Also people that are opposed to consolidation are forgetting that there are now allies. It's easy to draft in counter-charge units to protect your squishy shooties. Seems like everyone can ally with the Inquisition. Trust me, a Hammerhand, rad grenade Inquisitor with Priest giving re-rolls to hit and wound in a unit of Death Cult Assassins is going to eat anything that isn't in terminator armour, and will do a fair bit of damage to them too.

Sounds like a sell job by GW for the Bullgryns and the like.

 Kwosge wrote:
No, man, you see. It's 100% ok for shooting units to gun down CC units turn 1 but once a CC unit gets into CC with a shooty unit on turn 3 and after taking 50% casualties, it really shows how OP the CC unit is and why it should be nerfed even more. Those 4 rounds of shooting, turns 1, 2, 3, and Over Watch, that the CC unit had to go through, yea, forget about that being the balancing factor. Yea, forget that the shooty unit negates the CC unit's armor save. Also, forget that the shooty unit is in terrain so the CC unit strikes after the shooty unit for a total of 5 separate damage phases in a row before the CC unit can even attempt to hit the shooty unit. Did I mention how OP CC units are?

Good assault units don't take four turns to reach their target. You're grossly overstating the plight of assault units.

 SkaerKrow wrote:

 Kwosge wrote:
No, man, you see. It's 100% ok for shooting units to gun down CC units turn 1 but once a CC unit gets into CC with a shooty unit on turn 3 and after taking 50% casualties, it really shows how OP the CC unit is and why it should be nerfed even more. Those 4 rounds of shooting, turns 1, 2, 3, and Over Watch, that the CC unit had to go through, yea, forget about that being the balancing factor. Yea, forget that the shooty unit negates the CC unit's armor save. Also, forget that the shooty unit is in terrain so the CC unit strikes after the shooty unit for a total of 5 separate damage phases in a row before the CC unit can even attempt to hit the shooty unit. Did I mention how OP CC units are?

Good assault units don't take four turns to reach their target. You're grossly overstating the plight of assault units.

And the good units are:
-LoC
-Fleshounds
-Wraiths
-Winged super kitted out Princes
-Beasts
-Ork bikers?
-Daemonettes of Slaanesh
-Seekers of Slaanesh
-Maybe the bloodcrusher

Some that can do it well:
-Deathstars by absurd toughness.

In other words, super mobile units that can reach the enemy early. For the most part, CC armies have a couple fast picks but they do largely suck. Heck vanguard still really aren't that good despite still being somewhat fast. It seems far more CC specialized units aren't built to be all that fast which means charges will usually occur from turn 3-5 averaging at turn 4. There's a reason you don't see most CC units besides the really fast monasters or at least ones with godly transports (and even then you won't see banshees)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Thokt wrote:
Why would armies obey an arbitrary organizational structure in the first place? In the framework of 40k we're already bound to all sorts of abstractions like this, what's weird about it? It's part and parcel to the norm. Why can some units score and others not in the first place? Why must both armies deploy in the same manner?

Same reason we get equal points


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Why do people think that overwatch balances out consolidating into combat? Unless you're Tau, overwatch is a single unit hitting on 6's.

That's not going to do gak to anything.

Late but just wanted to say is a d6 consolidation even that great for a charge? I mean, that's a pretty close range to get off and really only bad if you clump up everybody.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

overtyrant wrote:
Running across an open battlefield to hit someone with your sword is stupid and the fething loonies (Berserkers, Orks etc..) should be punished with unrelenting fire, Close quarter combat should be reserved for building to building and trench warfare only.

I remember 4th quite well, I had a guard army and a World eaters army and playing either against there opposite (guard vs CC, WE vs Shooting) was not fun at all. I've not played 40k properly since then apart from dipping my toe in now and again as there are far superior rules out there to play. But I look for excuses to get back in and have been disappointed so far (yes im looking at you Sisters and Inquisition) so my expectations are not great but I still have hope.

Wise tip. 40k was and always was fantasy in space. A place where daemons stood, where heroes duked it out with fist to claw to blade to scythe. A place where silly over the top things go and mages to magical stuff. In short, don't use realism when observing the world.