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As I have grown older I find that obligations make it harder and harder to get to the table for any substantial block of time.

I would gladly trade all game those extra layers of "realism" (if toy soldiers can claim that) just to be able to get a game to completion before life drags me away again. I want to see two armies of painted figs fight on cool terrain to some form of conclusion in a couple of hours.

Size creep doesn't bug me, I won't be replacing any of my Raven Guard for the numarines, and my game room comfortably fits a 6' x 8' table.

My thoughts are weapon ranges. When you pay for a weapon that has more than 48" range then when you play on a smaller table {6x4} then you are overpaying.

We play on 6x8 table with the option of 6x12 for larger games.
Last week we tried to play the long board way. We were all so used to close up fighting we ALL set up near the middle and NONE of us used our full deployment zones. As soon as the first turn started we all wondered why we set up so ineptly!

Smaller boards breeds a tactical mindset that larger boards would likely offset. The game is a different animal.

I prefer larger armies and larger fields of play to do more flanking and bait play.

Of course we normally have 30+ pieces of terrain on our battlefields. ... Not 6 like I see in tournament games

wes

2000pts on a 4x4 is where it's at. The sheer chaotic destruction that comes from forces that large being that close is intense.

You basically have to kill team levels of terrain for it to work though.

ERJAK wrote:
2000pts on a 4x4 is where it's at. The sheer chaotic destruction that comes from forces that large being that close is intense.

You basically have to kill team levels of terrain for it to work though.

That is insane.

I would enjoy less than a thousand points on a 4x4, 1500 on 6x4, and so on.



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 dracpanzer wrote:
As I have grown older I find that obligations make it harder and harder to get to the table for any substantial block of time.

I would gladly trade all game those extra layers of "realism" (if toy soldiers can claim that) just to be able to get a game to completion before life drags me away again. I want to see two armies of painted figs fight on cool terrain to some form of conclusion in a couple of hours.

Size creep doesn't bug me, I won't be replacing any of my Raven Guard for the numarines, and my game room comfortably fits a 6' x 8' table.

I can appreciate this.
Still, for myself I would enjoy the realism at smaller scales rather than less realism with a board too full of big models.
This is very much how the game began, if I can remember correctly...
Then again, I am really looking for a scaled up D&D type experience - Necromunda was on its way there IMO -
and I am not looking for a dicey chaotic blast zone so much.
This hobby grew from my love of chess, through D&D and other RPGs, and though I did play a couple of collectible card games they were short lived interests at best.
Man o'War is the closest I want to come to a boardgame.
BfG was great, too...

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bortass wrote:

 jeff white wrote:
Table tennis is where its at. My trouble is that we just don't have space for anything like that in the city here. Not easy anyways. So this leads me to suspect that we are looking at GW recognizing this limit in a lot of possible markets and are maybe looking to 4x4 and smaller tables to appeal to these people. Three ways to play should be Necromunda Mordheim and maybe Epic and Titanicus on 4x4 and 40k on 6x4 and Apocalypse style with big models on 8x4.

{snip}

We played Epic and Adeptus Titanicus on 8 x 4 tables. 8x4 and 9x5 were the traditional table sizes for miniature wargames back in the day. Larger tables and more terrain will make for more interesting games.

Yeah, we did use big table for Epic too, even as recently as fifteen years ago.
My point was more from the angle of space.
Where we live, now, I can pretty well fit a 4x4 table as a near permanent fixture in my office room, but a larger table will have to either serve as a guest bed platform and worktable doing triple duty, or we leave the room empty with space for folding tables.
Epic on a 4x4 table with smaller forces makes a lot of sense in this sort of case, where space in home is at a premium.
In the States, and maybe in the West generally, people tend to live in bigger houses with basements that are often unused or underutilized.
Here, there is really no such thing.
This is Asia - "coffin" hotel rooms, miniature apartments, people living in PC rooms, these are increasingly common fixtures of the social landscape.
There is at the same time a lot of interest in models, especially Gundam, and of course people love VR and computer games especially like Starcraft and so on.
So, it seems that there is a natural market for GW here, but as I had noted previously only 1 store selling GW products exists in this country so far as I am aware and it is in Seoul.
Support for a 4x4 or even 3x3 variant, and most ideally the creation of a truly scalable rules system, would go a long way to opening this region to 40k and neo-Fantasy wargaming.

 insaniak wrote:

'Introduced'...? 40K and (as far as I remember) WHFB have always used true line of sight.

TLOS was introduced in 5th edition.

Before that it was measuring how deep into a terrain feature the model was etc.

In the best of my 'old men's voices'...



There once was a time where a Space Marine was costed at 30 points or so, and games were like 1000 points standard. Playing at 1500 points was a rather large game. Those were the days when we saw, like, two Space Marine tactical squads with a lieutenant type character (as there were intermediate ranks and statistics between veteran sergeants and captains/chapter masters) with one or two vehicles and a small devastator squad or a small assault squad. Point cost was up, model count was low.
It wasn't so much different for many of the other armies as well, except true horde armies such as the earliest termagant hordes or Ork Boyz mobs.

Fast forward to the 'end days' of 7th. Demi-Battle Companies, Battle Companies, Space Wolf Great Companies. Free transports. Points costs went down, model count went up. Except for a couple of armies that reverted to low model count, because they consist of just a couple of huge models which are often seen as overpowered. At the same time, with the prevalence of low AP weaponry, many models get hit, get wounded easily, and due to the lack of a saving throw get scooped up by the dozen and removed from the table.

In the mean time, I found that the table hardly grew with the model count. In my current house I have something of a problem, as my average play field is something like 4 by slightly less than 3 feet. I haven't the spare room to use a wider board or a dedicated gaming table. In our new house (to be inhabited by the end of june) I claimed to attic for my own. I will be able to properly set up a gaming table there. I will build a 4×4 and a 4×6 setup as soon as we are settled there.
With such limited space available now, I have had many problems with unit footprints (I have a nice Tyranid swarm with 30 Hormagaunts, 30 Termagants, two times 20 Genestealers, etc, as well as an Imperial Guard infantry army with two 45-man platoons with command and basic squads, not added special and heavy squads yet) and the deployment zone. When playing over the length of that table we have a narrow deployment zone and battlefield, when playing across the width of the table we either have narrow deployment zones, or simply less room between the armies. of course, this also makes Deep Strike units more of a gamble. As such, our games have been at the 750 or 1000 points mark more often than not.

And then some units came with bigger bases all of a sudden. And some even bigger miniatures were released, their own huge bases a problem in, for example, dense city terrain.

And then the board became more crowded again.

I never thought of a ping pong table. Anhone know of a good decent priced collapsable ping pong table?

 Luciferian wrote:

TLOS was introduced in 5th edition.

It really, really wasn't.

5th edition simply introduced a less abstract system for LOS through area terrain. True LOS has formed the core of the LOS rules in every edition of the game.

 Lord Xcapobl wrote:
In the best of my 'old men's voices'...



There once was a time where a Space Marine was costed at 30 points or so, and games were like 1000 points standard. Playing at 1500 points was a rather large game. Those were the days when we saw, like, two Space Marine tactical squads with a lieutenant type character (as there were intermediate ranks and statistics between veteran sergeants and captains/chapter masters) with one or two vehicles and a small devastator squad or a small assault squad. Point cost was up, model count was low.
It wasn't so much different for many of the other armies as well, except true horde armies such as the earliest termagant hordes or Ork Boyz mobs.

Fast forward to the 'end days' of 7th. Demi-Battle Companies, Battle Companies, Space Wolf Great Companies. Free transports. Points costs went down, model count went up. Except for a couple of armies that reverted to low model count, because they consist of just a couple of huge models which are often seen as overpowered. At the same time, with the prevalence of low AP weaponry, many models get hit, get wounded easily, and due to the lack of a saving throw get scooped up by the dozen and removed from the table.

In the mean time, I found that the table hardly grew with the model count. In my current house I have something of a problem, as my average play field is something like 4 by slightly less than 3 feet. I haven't the spare room to use a wider board or a dedicated gaming table. In our new house (to be inhabited by the end of june) I claimed to attic for my own. I will be able to properly set up a gaming table there. I will build a 4×4 and a 4×6 setup as soon as we are settled there.
With such limited space available now, I have had many problems with unit footprints (I have a nice Tyranid swarm with 30 Hormagaunts, 30 Termagants, two times 20 Genestealers, etc, as well as an Imperial Guard infantry army with two 45-man platoons with command and basic squads, not added special and heavy squads yet) and the deployment zone. When playing over the length of that table we have a narrow deployment zone and battlefield, when playing across the width of the table we either have narrow deployment zones, or simply less room between the armies. of course, this also makes Deep Strike units more of a gamble. As such, our games have been at the 750 or 1000 points mark more often than not.

And then some units came with bigger bases all of a sudden. And some even bigger miniatures were released, their own huge bases a problem in, for example, dense city terrain.

And then the board became more crowded again.

Yup.
When I was a kid, we didn't have no fancy plastic poseable models.
We had lead. And metal. And brass rods. And we liked it.
And we didn't have no fancy paints. We had paint. And black ink. And we licked the brush tips. And we liked it.



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 insaniak wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:

TLOS was introduced in 5th edition.

It really, really wasn't.

5th edition simply introduced a less abstract system for LOS through area terrain. True LOS has formed the core of the LOS rules in every edition of the game.

Yup.
And we got down and we looked from model eye level and some got poked in the eyes but no body complained because that's the way it was and we liked it!

 Lord Xcapobl wrote:
In the best of my 'old men's voices'...



There once was a time where a Space Marine was costed at 30 points or so, and games were like 1000 points standard. Playing at 1500 points was a rather large game.

And then the board became more crowded again.

Actually the rules stated that 2000 points was what the game was designed for at that time. It was just some people played with less. We are still doing that today. I, personally, liked to play 3000 points from that era as you could field a fully balanced force.{sacrificial units, Heavies, characters, psykers, lots of infantry for flanking and guarding, and a few deep striking/fast units}

That is why the newer and larger game size is appealing to me.

As for table size it isn't too hard to set up a garage once a week with cinderblock and some plywood to have a great table. Alternately you can lay a couple pieces across your bed. Most beds are large enough for a nice size game. Just put the plywood under the bed til the next game! Lots of creative ways to get larger gaming areas. We used to use our laundry table and of course the fold out ping pong table as mentioned above is a favorite of a pal of mine.

bigger is better!

 insaniak wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:

TLOS was introduced in 5th edition.

It really, really wasn't.

5th edition simply introduced a less abstract system for LOS through area terrain. True LOS has formed the core of the LOS rules in every edition of the game.

Truth!

Again, IIRC, I believe it was 4th edition that made things so abstract.



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 3orangewhips wrote:

 oni wrote:
IIRC Warhammer 40,000 started with 6x4 as the table standard and only moved to 8x4 in 4th edition. This change to a much larger table size was not met with open arms - not one bit. Going back to a 6x4 when 5th edition came was heralded in with trumpets and cheers like a fething Thanksgiving day parade.

I am pretty sure 2nd was 8x4, but it was a long time ago.

Hmmm... I don't have my 2nd edition books any more, but I still have my 3rd edition book. I'll have to pull it out and check when I get home tonight.

I recall going to a few Baltimore, MD Games Days back in the mid 90's and I thought most of the tables were 6'x'4'. I wonder if we (Dakka) can dig up some old pictures and post them?

 insaniak wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:

TLOS was introduced in 5th edition.

It really, really wasn't.

5th edition simply introduced a less abstract system for LOS through area terrain. True LOS has formed the core of the LOS rules in every edition of the game.

I don't understand. If you could see through walls and through 5" of forest, but not to the other side of a forest even if it was only 1" thick, how is that true line of sight? TLOS for 40k meant model's eye view.

 jeff white wrote:

Yup.
When I was a kid, we didn't have no fancy plastic poseable models.
We had lead. And metal. And brass rods. And we liked it.
And we didn't have no fancy paints. We had paint. And black ink. And we licked the brush tips. And we liked it.

Well, we're modelers. If we didn't care about having pretty models, we'd be playing games with die-cut cardboard tokens with NATO symbols on them.

This game is improved far more through nicer models than through any realism it may have contained, because I don't remember it having but the slightest nod to realism.

 Luciferian wrote:


I don't understand. If you could see through walls and through 5" of forest, but not to the other side of a forest even if it was only 1" thick, how is that true line of sight? TLOS for 40k meant model's eye view.

You appear to be conflating 'how LOS worked' and 'how LOS worked with area terrain'.

Each edition has used different degrees of abstractitude to deal with area terrain, while using the model's eye view for the core of the LOS rules.


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 oni wrote:


Hmmm... I don't have my 2nd edition books any more, but I still have my 3rd edition book. I'll have to pull it out and check when I get home tonight.

I recall going to a few Baltimore, MD Games Days back in the mid 90's and I thought most of the tables were 6'x'4'. I wonder if we (Dakka) can dig up some old pictures and post them?

The end of 2nd edition/start of 3rd edition was where tournaments started to get bigger (as in, more players entering them), and so they compensated by starting to reduce table sizes. For most of 2nd edition, though, 8x4 was the standard that most people were playing on.

The studio had mentioned somewhere (I think in White Dwarf) that as a rule of thumb they recommended a 2' of table per 500 points.

one thing worth noting is that Primaris Marines could be reflecting a round about return to this. given the points costs, a 1500 point Primaris Army could consist of the contents of the starter kit plus a tank or two