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Hollismason wrote:
Who did you guys play with in 2nd edition that did not turn into a game of who can be a bigger dick to their opponent with wargear and strategy cards.

4 Words. Virus Grenade Imperial Guard.

People are right though 2nd edition will not be topped for sheer absolutely maddening insanity when it comes to rules though.

It was horribly unbalanced game.

It was also amazingly fun to play with a group of friends who weren't trying to kill the Imperial Guards entire army on turn one with a Virus Grenade.

That's the most important thing

Fun times.... at least until the vaccine squig was invented. But in fairness it didn't take much to read the rules and see how useful a virus grenade/outbreak would be, even if it did stupidify the game. But if its in the basic rules and causes such a big problem, kind of points to the problems with the basic rules imo. I guess that's the thing though, 5 editions later the only thing thats changed is you need bigger and more expensive models to play the same as you did back then.

You will also note that in earlier editions, you did not really see much in the way of tournaments either. it was more of a game designed to be played amongst buddies than out in a WAAC touney type setting. Generally back then, if you had a question, you just rolled off for it so you can finish the game and look it up later at leasure. The atmosphere of the players (in terms of how they looked at the hobby and who they played with) changed such that now thedetails mean more than they did back then.

You'll notice that this is why when I refer to "the good old days" of 40k, I'm not talking about the rules and mechanics (to me those are secondary and players focus on them WAY too much and make grandstand statements and all on them WAY too much as I think that sort of viewpoint and behavior ruins it as a hobby), I'm talking about the atmosphere we played in and the images the game evoked where we could actually ENJOY a game instead of having to fight through a game.

Hollismason wrote:
4 Words. Virus Grenade Imperial Guard.

Yeah I remember a game, not with a grenade but the 'virus outbreak' strategy card from Dark Millennium. It pretty much wiped out a third of my friends army in one turn. He wasn't impressed at all.

 EVIL INC wrote:
You will also note that in earlier editions, you did not really see much in the way of tournaments either.

Maybe not in Rogue Trader. But there was a healthy tournament following for 2nd edition that just kept building in every edition since.

Generally back then, if you had a question, you just rolled off for it so you can finish the game and look it up later at leasure. The atmosphere of the players (in terms of how they looked at the hobby and who they played with) changed such that now thedetails mean more than they did back then.

That hasn't really changed. There have always been players happy to roll off, and players who prefer to stop and look up the relevant rules. Which is prevalent has always come down to individual playgroups.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Smacks wrote:
Yeah I remember a game, not with a grenade but the 'virus outbreak' strategy card from Dark Millennium. It pretty much wiped out a third of my friends army in one turn. He wasn't impressed at all

I once took out all bar 4 models from an opponent's Ork army before the game started with the Virus Outbreak card. After that, we took that card out of the deck... and shortly after that, GW said to do just that in a White Dwarf FAQ article

 insaniak wrote:

 EVIL INC wrote:
You will also note that in earlier editions, you did not really see much in the way of tournaments either.

Maybe not in Rogue Trader. But there was a healthy tournament following for 2nd edition that just kept building in every edition since.

Generally back then, if you had a question, you just rolled off for it so you can finish the game and look it up later at leasure. The atmosphere of the players (in terms of how they looked at the hobby and who they played with) changed such that now thedetails mean more than they did back then.

That hasn't really changed. There have always been players happy to roll off, and players who prefer to stop and look up the relevant rules. Which is prevalent has always come down to individual playgroups.

The tourney scene started in 2nd edition but was not really big. As you said, over time it grew. I think into the monster that it is today. My point was that while you MAY have seen a tourney or two early on, it was not the scene it later grew into whicj means that the overall attidude was different then.
There are still people willing to "roll off" on issues to make the game go by faster. this is true However, the numbers have shrunk (I think a case could be made that it is in proportion to how the tourney scene has grown but have no numbers to verify so its just apossibility that i think has merit).

One must also remember the current tourney scene is entirely player-created. GW doesn't run tournaments besides the occasional event at Warhammer World in Nottingham, England. If you live anywhere else, it's a player run event. This makes for a different atmosphere than if GW itself were running it.

That said, GW were the ones that started doing major, hyper-competitive oriented events with no regards for painting/hobby portions when they started doing 'Ard Boyz.

Isn't it a bit of a fallacy to say that back in 2ed the game was more "pure", because there were fewer tournaments. Where there were probably fewer tournaments, because the community was much smaller, more then because people felt tournament games as something not w40k.

I watched some some designer guys talk about tournaments and streamlining of rules for chaos , removing stuff like chaos eldar to make the army easier to use in a tournament.

 EVIL INC wrote:

The tourney scene started in 2nd edition but was not really big. As you said, over time it grew. I think into the monster that it is today. My point was that while you MAY have seen a tourney or two early on, it was not the scene it later grew into whicj means that the overall attidude was different then.

Of course it wasn't as big. 40K wasn't as big.

It sounds like your experience of 2nd ed was very different to mine, though. Because I saw no shortage of 2nd ed tournaments.

There are still people willing to "roll off" on issues to make the game go by faster. this is true However, the numbers have shrunk (I think a case could be made that it is in proportion to how the tourney scene has grown but have no numbers to verify so its just apossibility that i think has merit).

Again, I suspect this is more down to different groups in different areas than anything particularly community-wide.

Whether it be a casual game or a tournament, my experience has been that the vast majority of rules issues never even went as far as a roll off. It usually comes down to one player saying 'x', the other player saying 'No, it's 'Y'', and the first player then saying 'Oh, ok then' and getting on with the game.

Even in a tournament, it generally only goes any further than that if it's something that might have a fairly pivotal impact on the game.

Psienesis wrote:If it's not intended to be played that way, why not write your ruleset to indicate this?

It'd be real easy to add caps to how many of Unit X can appear on the table.

True. But that would direct people away from planning senarios involving, say, an entire ghost warrior army.

Blacksails wrote:

Tyranno wrote:

However, taking "determine to win" to the level of "it's okay to act like a dick and generally have no social skills", if not originating from the video game community, is largely found there, or at least, in internet gaming communities, which by default are largely video game communities. For some reason, many people apparently think because you're communicating through a computer, social skills and being civil can just be dropped whenever you feel like it).

There is no correlation between being determined to win and acting like a dick. They are two entirely seperate problems. People who act like dicks and generally lack social skills will act that way regardless of the list they use or skill at the game.

However, much like the Pulsa Rokkit list, today's Wraithknight/Riptide spam lists (or lists with 20 Daemon Princes) weren't supposed to exist. They exist because people want competitive lists for a game that hasn't been truly competitive at any point in its existence. The only differences is, GW being less vocal on the subject of "that's not how the game is intended to be played", and arguably, because it's been around for longer, that people shouldn't be more widely aware it isn't designed with truly competitive armies in mind.

How do you know they weren't supposed to exist? What a bold claim with nothing to back it up. If its in the codex, and fits within the Force Org chart (or indeed, Unbound now), then who are you to say it wasn't intented?

Further, how is the game intended to played? If they wanted it to be played a certain way, the rules would reflect that. Currently, they don't. It sounds a lot like you're telling us how we should play based on how you enjoy playing.

insaniak wrote:

However, much like the Pulsa Rokkit list, today's Wraithknight/Riptide spam lists (or lists with 20 Daemon Princes) weren't supposed to exist.

And yet GW gave us an army selection process that allows players to take whatever the heck they want. So on what basis are you deciding that they're not 'supposed' to exist?

Because of several articles in older White Dwarfs where the WD staff themselves (and games designers) semi-frequently took the attitude that beadry lists and whatnot are bad.

In the context of the backstory, armies with three Wraithknights, Revenants, no Wraithlords and no Wraithguard/those other ones probably appear, well, probably only if the entire enemy force consists of almost entirely superheavy level units. Wave Serpents are the only exception to the spammy lists being out of sync with the mythos in general.

Remember, rolling off disputes become a key issue within GW itself since they write about it in their publications and in their own rules.

It shows a disregard for the paying public that they do not hand over their publications to proper proofreaders or editors who can spot glaring grammatical errors and defects.

Let alone inconsistencies within the rules themselves.

 insaniak wrote:
Whether it be a casual game or a tournament, my experience has been that the vast majority of rules issues never even went as far as a roll off. It usually comes down to one player saying 'x', the other player saying 'No, it's 'Y'', and the first player then saying 'Oh, ok then' and getting on with the game.

Even in a tournament, it generally only goes any further than that if it's something that might have a fairly pivotal impact on the game.

I'll second this. I can't recall the last roll-off.

The only time there is an issue at all is when both players are absolutely sure the rules say X or Y. Usually, it's resolved by asking the next table over (occasionally, the minority is right, and then they get to say, "I told you so" a few hours or the next week), and more often than not, it's not as you say, something that would cause a pivotal impact in the game anyways.

Tyranno wrote:
Because of several articles in older White Dwarfs where the WD staff themselves (and games designers) semi-frequently took the attitude that beadry lists and whatnot are bad.

At one point, the Studio said in White Dwarf that people who took the rules for an existing Special Character and use those rules for their own Chapter's character were horrible people who were destroying the hobby as we know it.

Then the Studio told us that it was perfectly acceptable to paint Marneus Calgar orange and use him in your own home-brew Chapter.

Should we still go by the older material? Or should we go by the more recent statement and assume that what the studio originally intended has little bearing on the current game?


The same thing here.

If you put three cookies on the table and tell people they can eat as many as they like, you can hardly complain if they eat all three. If you only wanted them to eat two, you should have said so.

In the context of the backstory, armies with three Wraithknights, Revenants, no Wraithlords and no Wraithguard/those other ones probably appear, well, probably only if the entire enemy force consists of almost entirely superheavy level units. Wave Serpents are the only exception to the spammy lists being out of sync with the mythos in general.

Speaking of things that were said in old White Dwarf articles... When Epic 40K was released, the studio guys explained the new 'firefight' mechanic as being repesentative of what was essentially a 40K battle happening in the middle of the overall conflict. The idea was that your games of 40K aren't intended to necessarily reflect the whole engagement. They're just a snapshot of a small part of it. The Epic battle was the full shebang.

Within that context, it's perfectly reasonable for a 1500 point army to include nothing but Wraithknights. They're not the only units in the whole battle... just the only units currently taking part in the part of the battle being represented by your current game of 40K.

Tyranno wrote:

Because of several articles in older White Dwarfs where the WD staff themselves (and games designers) semi-frequently took the attitude that beadry lists and whatnot are bad.

In the context of the backstory, armies with three Wraithknights, Revenants, no Wraithlords and no Wraithguard/those other ones probably appear, well, probably only if the entire enemy force consists of almost entirely superheavy level units. Wave Serpents are the only exception to the spammy lists being out of sync with the mythos in general.

I hate to be a killjoy, but that era has long since departed since the SS Kirby steamed in.

And still, if they found it beardy, why the hell didn't they check the g'damned rules BEFORE publication?

If the staffers turn around in publication and say 'well, the serpent shield rule is wrong and shouldn't be used in that way' why din't they edit that part before they signed off on that section?

 Mr. Burning wrote:
Remember, rolling off disputes become a key issue within GW itself since they write about it in their publications and in their own rules.

It shows a disregard for the paying public that they do not hand over their publications to proper proofreaders or editors who can spot glaring grammatical errors and defects.

Let alone inconsistencies within the rules themselves.

This is not entirely correct. The roll-off is there in case two players disagree on a rule, and it can't be resolved quickly. Many times, this occurs because neither player knows where the exact rule is, and the choice is to take 5 minutes to look something up, or to simply get on with it.

It is very seldom that a rule in 7th ed is so ambiguous as to allow two contrarian interpretations, because in 7th ed, most of the complex rules include specific examples. Quite commonly, players disagree over special rules precedence -- for example, whether they get a save or not, when their character's ability says they always get a save, but some special circumstance says they don't get one. Almost universally the rules are very explicit, but to dig up a codex or rulebook and find the language is time-consuming.

Also, many of these type of questions are specific to one army, and one player is simply not familiar with that codex.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 insaniak wrote:

Then the Studio told us that it was perfectly acceptable to paint Marneus Calgar orange and use him in your own home-brew Chapter.

Should we still go by the older material? Or should we go by the more recent statement and assume that what the studio originally intended has little bearing on the current game?

Well, the rules in the current Space Marine Codex is pretty clear -- you can invent your own Chapter (and paint it whatever color you want), but it is descended from one of the original chapters, and gets the benefits of that Chapter. You just have to tell your opponent before the game starts.

 insaniak wrote:

Speaking of things that were said in old White Dwarf articles... When Epic 40K was released, the studio guys explained the new 'firefight' mechanic as being repesentative of what was essentially a 40K battle happening in the middle of the overall conflict. The idea was that your games of 40K aren't intended to necessarily reflect the whole engagement. They're just a snapshot of a small part of it. The Epic battle was the full shebang.

Within that context, it's perfectly reasonable for a 1500 point army to include nothing but Wraithknights. They're not the only units in the whole battle... just the only units currently taking part in the part of the battle being represented by your current game of 40K.

Yeah, and I *LIKE* that the rules allow for a game to occur with 1500 point armies with only super-heavies on one end. However, I think someone's a major ass if they play such an army against an opponent that clearly is not set up to fight it.

One can argue bout what's changed but i know for sure that the grass used to be greener.

Talys wrote:

Yeah, and I *LIKE* that the rules allow for a game to occur with 1500 point armies with only super-heavies on one end. However, I think someone's a major ass if they play such an army against an opponent that clearly is not set up to fight it.

Why? They are using an army that is perfectly legal so why should they be looked down on for their army choices? Or are you proposing that someone should spend the money and time to buy multiple iterations of their army so that they can tailor it to what their opponent expects to face? What exactly makes your way of playing the game superior to everyone else's?

If someone builds a legal army for a determined point level, then that army should have a reasonable chance to defeat and be defeated by every other army of the same points level. If this doesn't happen, then it is not the player's fault, its the rules!

Why do you people insist on blaming the players for the mistakes of the rules creators?

Talys wrote:
Yeah, and I *LIKE* that the rules allow for a game to occur with 1500 point armies with only super-heavies on one end. However, I think someone's a major ass if they play such an army against an opponent that clearly is not set up to fight it.

And they well might be. But that isn't the point.

If the game was actually written with some consideration for unit balance, it would be far more acceptable for someone to rock up to that game with their super-heavies.

The fact that so many people are so willing to put all the blame on players for building legal armies rather than expecting the guys who write the game to put some actual effort into it is just mind-boggling.

 insaniak wrote:

Talys wrote:
Yeah, and I *LIKE* that the rules allow for a game to occur with 1500 point armies with only super-heavies on one end. However, I think someone's a major ass if they play such an army against an opponent that clearly is not set up to fight it.

And they well might be. But that isn't the point.

If the game was actually written with some consideration for unit balance, it would be far more acceptable for someone to rock up to that game with their super-heavies.

The fact that so many people are so willing to put all the blame on players for building legal armies rather than expecting the guys who write the game to put some actual effort into it is just mind-boggling.

This this this this. A balanced game would have a superheavy as a tactical choice, that made you sacrifice other tactical choices, not basically an "I Win" button. Compare the closest thing, the Colossal/Gargantuan in Warmachine/Hordes: They fill roughly the same role, except they are balanced in the overall game. If I show up with a Conquest (Khador Colossal), it's nothing more than a tactical choice I'm making. It's not going to single-handedly win me the game, or even be something that my opponent needs to specifically deal with (it's basically two Warjacks rolled into one). If they can deal with a Warjack, then can deal with a Colossal just they have to be aware of some of the things it can do (even the stronger Colossals, such as Cygnar's Stormwall, is basically the same thing. It's a very nasty Warjack, but it's still a Warjack).

40k doesn't have that. Most superheavies require you to actually build an army to deal with them, or they will walk all over you because, to quote a popular video game meme, you are not prepared.

The blame for that lies 100% on GW for not balancing them correctly because they have this cool idea that a superheavy should demolish anything it's set against, and make it like that. While that is likely true in the fluff, GW refuses to realize (or just don't care) that the fluff can't always be translated to the game and the game needs to take precedence. In fact, they already do this in other cases - in the fluff a single squad of Space Marines can pacify an entire planet, but that can't happen in the game. So worse still, they selectively choose where to enforce the fluff versus game balance, to everyone's detriment.

WayneTheGame wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

Talys wrote:
Yeah, and I *LIKE* that the rules allow for a game to occur with 1500 point armies with only super-heavies on one end. However, I think someone's a major ass if they play such an army against an opponent that clearly is not set up to fight it.

And they well might be. But that isn't the point.

If the game was actually written with some consideration for unit balance, it would be far more acceptable for someone to rock up to that game with their super-heavies.

The fact that so many people are so willing to put all the blame on players for building legal armies rather than expecting the guys who write the game to put some actual effort into it is just mind-boggling.

This this this this. A balanced game would have a superheavy as a tactical choice, that made you sacrifice other tactical choices, not basically an "I Win" button. Compare the closest thing, the Colossal/Gargantuan in Warmachine/Hordes: They fill roughly the same role, except they are balanced in the overall game. If I show up with a Conquest (Khador Colossal), it's nothing more than a tactical choice I'm making. It's not going to single-handedly win me the game, or even be something that my opponent needs to specifically deal with (it's basically two Warjacks rolled into one). If they can deal with a Warjack, then can deal with a Colossal just they have to be aware of some of the things it can do (even the stronger Colossals, such as Cygnar's Stormwall, is basically the same thing. It's a very nasty Warjack, but it's still a Warjack).

40k doesn't have that. Most superheavies require you to actually build an army to deal with them, or they will walk all over you because, to quote a popular video game meme, you are not prepared.

The blame for that lies 100% on GW for not balancing them correctly because they have this cool idea that a superheavy should demolish anything it's set against, and make it like that. While that is likely true in the fluff, GW refuses to realize (or just don't care) that the fluff can't always be translated to the game and the game needs to take precedence. In fact, they already do this in other cases - in the fluff a single squad of Space Marines can pacify an entire planet, but that can't happen in the game. So worse still, they selectively choose where to enforce the fluff versus game balance, to everyone's detriment.

Bah! You should just houserule everything - but keep buying dem official "rulez!"

Sometimes I thin the toss up is between buying the rulebooks or just spending a quid or two on some paper and a pens and writing up my own stuff - It comes to the latter whichever way.

Tyranno wrote:


Because of several articles in older White Dwarfs where the WD staff themselves (and games designers) semi-frequently took the attitude that beadry lists and whatnot are bad.

As has been pointed out, those articles are now really, really old. Their relevance to the game as it stands now is pretty thin, and if they still intended it to be played a certain way, they certainly didn't make any real effort to show that in the rules.

Besides, the definition of beardy is not universal. What you may find beardy, I may find to be just another Tuesday at the store.

Point is, if they intended the game to be played a certain way that the rules don't reflect, they have failed. Any blame lies squarely on the writers, and not an ounce on the player who takes a legal force they enjoy.

In the context of the backstory, armies with three Wraithknights, Revenants, no Wraithlords and no Wraithguard/those other ones probably appear, well, probably only if the entire enemy force consists of almost entirely superheavy level units. Wave Serpents are the only exception to the spammy lists being out of sync with the mythos in general.

And any of those armies you feel are out of sync are easily explained to be very fluffy, considering a battle of 40k is often representing a smaller section of a much larger battle. A 40k army with wraithknights and revenants just represents the superheavy spearhead of the battle, and is 100% fluffy. Further, spam is in fact very fluffy for nearly every army in 40k, and indeed reality. You may personally dislike spam, but it is not in any way unfluffy.

Actually if you had a question in 2nd edition you could literally call the "Rulez Boys" ? I think it was called and they'd answer it. There was I think a 1 800 number and an actual number to the Games Workshop in England that you could call.

The only thing I really miss about 2nd edition is the removal of specific movement. Its never sat right with me that everyone has the same movement rate for infantry.


Oh and just bring back the original Overwatch rules.

Hollismason wrote:
Actually if you had a question in 2nd edition you could literally call the "Rulez Boys" ? I think it was called and they'd answer it. There was I think a 1 800 number and an actual number to the Games Workshop in England that you could call.

The only thing I really miss about 2nd edition is the removal of specific movement. Its never sat right with me that everyone has the same movement rate for infantry.


Oh and just bring back the original Overwatch rules.

Eh the Roolz Boyz were just gamers though, so the joke at the time used to be you could call three times, ask the same question and get three different answers. They weren't official in any way, shape or form they were basically just a third-party arbiter and would tell you how they would interpret/play the rule. It's a far cry from say PP where on the forums they have a special poster rank (Infernal) that is essentially speaking the word of the designers and can definitively state how a rule works without it being questioned.

Hollismason wrote:
The only thing I really miss about 2nd edition is the removal of specific movement. Its never sat right with me that everyone has the same movement rate for infantry.


Oh and just bring back the original Overwatch rules.

The main things I want to see come back from 2nd edition...

1. Movement characteristics, as you say, just makes more sense to me than having a bunch of special rules that have to dictate movement rates for different unit types. Just put a movement characteristic right in the unit profile next to Ws and you can simplify many rules.

2. The overall movement system where you only move once in a turn. Decide if you're going to move and shoot, stand and shoot or run and not shoot and then move accordingly. Get rid of this silliness where you move in the movement, possibly move again in the shooting and possibly move again in the assault phase. This again could greatly serve to simplify the game, especially for newcomers.

3. Drop the AP system and bring back save modifiers. The 2nd edition modifiers needed to be tweaked (lasguns and bolters used to be -1, they should probably be 0), but overall it was a better system for the sake of balance.

4. Bring back "to hit" modifiers.

What has changed? GW realized that putting limits on people causes them to buy less. Codices used to have units that were 0-1 choices, those went away. We used to be limited to one codex for building an army, that went away. We used to be restricted to an FOC, now that too has more or less gone away.

If you don't think GW intends for people to run things like 5 Wraithknights or riptides, you simply are not looking. Let me just point to codex:Imperial knights, the spamiest codex ever to exists consisting of 1 unit, must take at least 3 to play it by itself.

GW realized that hey selling 5 Iknights is way better than selling 1, same with Riptides, Wraithknights etc.

If selling a person 1 codex is good, selling them multiples + formations + data slates is better.

Same is true with Fortifications, same is true with escalation etc.

The thing I miss most about earlier editions is the internal balance within Codexes, really. In 3e and 4e (I didn't play 2e, can't remark there) your basic Troops units were reasonably efficient (if not the most efficient) ways to accomplish certain goals, with a lot of the new kits that showed up in 5e/6e it feels like somewhere along the line taking two minimum Troops units so you can take more Monstrous Creatures/Flyers stopped being the WAAC/munchkin thing to do and started being an accepted normal way to play the game.

As to the current state of the game my impression is that power creep got vastly out of control in the 5e/6e era and GW's in the process of running damage control with the stripped-down 7e Codexes that don't offer much in the way of new toys, but their release schedule is such that damage control could take years.

Tyranno wrote:


Because of several articles in older White Dwarfs where the WD staff themselves (and games designers) semi-frequently took the attitude that beadry lists and whatnot are bad.

In the context of the backstory, armies with three Wraithknights, Revenants, no Wraithlords and no Wraithguard/those other ones probably appear, well, probably only if the entire enemy force consists of almost entirely superheavy level units. Wave Serpents are the only exception to the spammy lists being out of sync with the mythos in general.

You mean the same white dwarf that stated its great news that one of the designers could take his 6 riptide army when unbound was revealed?

PhantomViper wrote:If someone builds a legal army for a determined point level, then that army should have a reasonable chance to defeat and be defeated by every other army of the same points level. If this doesn't happen, then it is not the player's fault, its the rules!

Why do you people insist on blaming the players for the mistakes of the rules creators?

Because it's really hard to have that in a very complex game that caters to the veterans, who are more likely to have with vast (unit) resources. There is nothing wrong with a Baneblade being 525-640 points, *as long as the other side has ways to deal with them*. In fact, 640 is perfectly balanced, in my opinion, relative in costs to units like Stormclaw, Wraithknight, Hammernators, et cetera.

You can't have a game with THOUSANDS of possible playing pieces ranging in size from Gretchin to Imperial Knights, from powerful Psykers to lumbering units with the intelligence of "Hulk, Smash" and perfectly balance them in every scenario.

insaniak wrote:
If the game was actually written with some consideration for unit balance, it would be far more acceptable for someone to rock up to that game with their super-heavies.

The fact that so many people are so willing to put all the blame on players for building legal armies rather than expecting the guys who write the game to put some actual effort into it is just mind-boggling.

If you made a real-life type wargame, an army of guys with pistols could not take on a mechanized armor or a fleet of bombers, even though all those units would certainly have points attached to them.

This is what 40k is like: the universe has all of these units, and in order to create a maximally effective battleforce, you need to have access to little units and big units that do all sorts of things. But, not every player has the money to do this, and when they start, and for a long time, it's easy to have invested in a non-optimal battleforce.

I don't think this makes 40k a bad game at all, and I don't blame developers for allowing ineffective combinations. I do think there are simpler games that avoid these issues, but to achieve this, they sacrifice the rich complexity that exists in real life.

I do believe in this thing called sportsmanship and I, personally, don't really get any great pleasure out of winning a game simply because I have a overwhelmingly superior force.

But, anyhow, I digress: play how you like; I don't fault players that just want to play their specialty armies, though I won't actively seek out games with them, either. In my play groups, I know who they are, and I will field armies accordingly, if we happen to be the last matchups possible (or if I have to swap with someone), but frankly, there aren't many of them.

Talys wrote:

Because it's really hard to have that in a very complex game that caters to the veterans, who are more likely to have with vast (unit) resources. There is nothing wrong with a Baneblade being 525-640 points, *as long as the other side has ways to deal with them*. In fact, 640 is perfectly balanced, in my opinion, relative in costs to units like Stormclaw, Wraithknight, Hammernators, et cetera.

You can't have a game with THOUSANDS of possible playing pieces ranging in size from Gretchin to Imperial Knights, from powerful Psykers to lumbering units with the intelligence of "Hulk, Smash" and perfectly balance them in every scenario.

Can't is a strong word. Can't means its impossible. Balancing the units and options in 40k is a doable task. It'd be hard and take a while, but its more than workable. Given the right team of professionals, with a core of testers, supplemented by open testing and feedback, there's no reason the margin of balance and power can't be brought in well enough that player decisions are the primary reason for victory, rather than picking the strongest units or codex.

It'd help if the core rules were straightened out, so that figuring out power levels between assault and shooting is a more simplified process.

There's no reason why some units are hilariously underpowered and others are ridiculously overpowered. It boils down simply to laziness and/or incompetence.

 Blacksails wrote:
here's no reason why some units are hilariously underpowered and others are ridiculously overpowered. It boils down simply to laziness and/or incompetence.

And what's worse about it, GW are actively hurting themselves. These sorts of imbalance issues dramatically affect what sorts of models people buy. Things like Dark Eldar scourges were generally only purchased before the release of the new codex for modelling reasons; the rules for the models themselves were generally seen as inferior. Now the new codex comes out and they're a much better unit, people start buying more, but then other units that used to be fairly good come out worse (wyches, beastpacks, etc.). It just creates this impression that either GW has little idea what they're actually doing with the rules, or are purposely manipulating units as to boost sales. Either way, it's not a great plan IMO, and is probably hampering the company's long-term growth.

GW seems to recognize this, a lot of their new boxsets have a number of "poor" units, which seems to be for the purpose of moving those units. But if GW would just put some (hard) effort into balancing the game, then they wouldn't have the problems of models not selling due to rules reasons. It would be just because the models themselves are poor.

I would buy the theory about them changing rules to promote sales if they were consistent about it. With things like the Heldrake and Maulerfiend both being new kits, but one being dramatically better on the table shows that GW really just plays darts with rules and points cost.

Then again, this is the same company that nerfed Chaplains and buffed Librarians because the guys in the studio felt the Chaplain was overpowered.

But yes, it really is just a combination of incompetence and laziness, and it is hurting them. I'm curious if things like the End Times and the Tyranid release can pull them back from last years' numbers. I'm leaning towards no, seeing as last year saw the release of a lot of really big and usually good selling stuff, whereas Fantasy has fallen off the popularity wagon, and Nids don't sell as well Codex Marines or even Guard.