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 Peregrine wrote:
The whole point of having rules at all is to sacrifice freedom. It's to turn MY SPACE DOLLS ARE SO AWESOME LOOK MY PRIMARIS ULTRASERGEANT WITH CITADEL™ PRIMARISBOLTER™ JUST KILLED ALL OF YOUR PATHETIC SPACE ELVES into "nope, you have to roll a 3+ to hit and you only fire two shots per turn". The matched play restrictions have been great from a casual point of view, they encourage fluffier armies and reduce unfluffy spam lists. And by having the restricted version of list building be the default it ensures that the only restriction-breaking lists you see are the ones that are so awesome and fluffy that of course everyone is going to give them a special exception, the ones that are built with a goal of exploiting the overpowered thing as much as possible get thrown out with a "no thanks, let's just play by the standard rules".

And take limiting options to increase balance to the logical extreme and you're playing checkers. It is an continuum, where you sacrifice freedom for balance, and other people might have preferred sweet spot that is different from yours. I mean banning Forgeworld units arguably improves balance too (just by lessening the amount of options, same way as banning, say Eldar would) yet you're opposed to that.

Sounds like Peregrine and I are closer to agreement than I thought.

But I think we disagree on the particular balancing of flavor vs balance. I think it's safe to assume we all want better balance. It's also safe to assume we all want better flavor. It would be ideal if we could have perfect balance and flavor, but that's a pipe dream - both are really, really hard.

The question becomes what's the balancing point? My point is that I find the balancing point more in favor of flavor in D&D and more in favor of balance in StarCraft - with 40k somewhere in the middle.

 Crimson wrote:
And take limiting options to increase balance to the logical extreme and you're playing checkers. It is an continuum, where you sacrifice freedom for balance, and other people might have preferred sweet spot that is different from yours. I mean banning Forgeworld units arguably improves balance too (just by lessening the amount of options, same way as banning, say Eldar would) yet you're opposed to that.

I oppose banning FW because it's stupid game design, just like banning Eldar. Printing rules but then saying "don't use these rules" is a fundamentally broken approach to balancing, and leads to frustrated customers who can't use the products they just bought. That's completely different from the RO3 or restricting soup or whatever, you can still use all of the options in the game just not necessarily at the same time. And, again, there are very few valid objections to RO3/5th edition style FOC/etc from a purely fluff point of view. The vast majority of objections involve blatantly un-fluffy armies that are clearly designed around identifying a single effective unit and spamming as many copies as possible. The very rare exceptions are easily handled by having them banned by default and trusting the fact that if it's genuinely as cool as is claimed people will make an exception to the rules for it.

What FW does is print rules and barely, if it all, attempt to balance those rules.There's a whole lot of wildly imbalanced FW units, and indeed some of the largest balance changes in FAQs and CA have been aimed to bringing stupid FW units like Fire Raptors and Malefic Lords to heel.

Bharring wrote:
My point is that I find the balancing point more in favor of flavor in D&D and more in favor of balance in StarCraft - with 40k somewhere in the middle.

Again, that's not really true. D&D isn't poorly balanced because it favors flavor over balance and makes a deliberate choice to include flavorful elements even if they might have negative effects on balance, it's poorly balanced because WOTC takes a badly designed set of core rules* and then piles on a bloated mess of special rules and feats and spell and campaign books and class supplements and whatever else they think they can make another $50 from selling. You could vastly improve balance in D&D with little or no loss of flavor, and arguably a lot of balance changes would improve flavor by preventing the less-powerful character classes from being overshadowed by spellcasters.

*Much like 40k and IGOUGO D&D has a problem of being chained to the obsolete mechanics of a decades-old miniatures game. The entire D20 system is badly flawed, but WOTC is stuck with it because of brand baggage.


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meleti wrote:
What FW does is print rules and barely, if it all, attempt to balance those rules.There's a whole lot of wildly imbalanced FW units, and indeed some of the largest balance changes in FAQs and CA have been aimed to bringing stupid FW units like Fire Raptors and Malefic Lords to heel.

The same is true of everything else GW publishes.

 Peregrine wrote:

w1zard wrote:
Sure, technically this is correct, but it will be an extremely narrow and limited "Scion army" with at most 3 officers, and at most 3 command squads, and the rest of the points has to be spammed infantry squads and or spammed taurox primes. If I want more HQs I have to break my own doctrines by taking non-scion units which really breaks the theme of the army and makes it significantly weaker on the tabletop, and why would taking 4 command squads and officers instead of three suddenly make my hypothetical scion army brokenly OP?

I really don't see what your problem here is. Yes, if you limit yourself to picking from exactly four different units to build your army you're going to have a one-dimensional spam list. Three officers and command squads is plenty fluff-wise, and arguably more than is fluffy. The thing you're losing isn't fluff, it's the ability to spam plasma command squads and make your army more powerful.

(And TBH, your hypothetical army of mass scions isn't fluffy anyway. At a game size where RO3 matters at all you should have a small scions force fighting alongside other units, not a horde of them with nothing else.)

Yes, I mean an infantry heavy weapons battalion/support battallion led by officers, with only a couple of IS for screens. Super fragile, not remotely OP, and yet a pretty fluffy army made impossible by the rule of 3.

That isn't how IG armies work fluff-wise. Heavy weapons are allocated within infantry companies, you don't have an entire force of nothing but heavy weapon squads. And infantry companies fight alongside tanks/aircraft/etc, you should rarely, if ever, have a force of nothing but infantry. And TBH I'm glad this nonsense is excluded from the game, it would be an incredibly boring army to play with or against. You set up your gunline of spammed heavy weapons and roll dice each turn until someone loses. At no point would anything interesting happen in this "game", it would be a pure exercise in dice rolling.

To be fair, going off the last major fluff thing Militarum Tempestus had, their old codex, taking an army like that, but with Commissars and Valkyries, would be a fluffy force. It is essentially bringing the entirety of a small regiment to bear for some very important operation. With how dubious the Militarum Tempestus and Advisors and Auxillia rules interaction is as well, an army of this fluffy type is hindered as well.

 Peregrine wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

meleti wrote:
What FW does is print rules and barely, if it all, attempt to balance those rules.There's a whole lot of wildly imbalanced FW units, and indeed some of the largest balance changes in FAQs and CA have been aimed to bringing stupid FW units like Fire Raptors and Malefic Lords to heel.

The same is true of everything else GW publishes.

It's been more extreme with FW.

 Peregrine wrote:

meleti wrote:
What FW does is print rules and barely, if it all, attempt to balance those rules.There's a whole lot of wildly imbalanced FW units, and indeed some of the largest balance changes in FAQs and CA have been aimed to bringing stupid FW units like Fire Raptors and Malefic Lords to heel.

The same is true of everything else GW publishes.

There's a pretty big disparity between GW imbalance issues and FW imbalance issues throughout 8th edition. Did you ever PLAY against the alphabet bird?

 Peregrine wrote:

I oppose banning FW because it's stupid game design, just like banning Eldar. Printing rules but then saying "don't use these rules" is a fundamentally broken approach to balancing, and leads to frustrated customers who can't use the products they just bought. That's completely different from the RO3 or restricting soup or whatever, you can still use all of the options in the game just not necessarily at the same time. And, again, there are very few valid objections to RO3/5th edition style FOC/etc from a purely fluff point of view. The vast majority of objections involve blatantly un-fluffy armies that are clearly designed around identifying a single effective unit and spamming as many copies as possible. The very rare exceptions are easily handled by having them banned by default and trusting the fact that if it's genuinely as cool as is claimed people will make an exception to the rules for it.

So basically you're fine with limiting options, as long as they're not options you want to use. Got it.

And the of course proper solution to people spamming OP units is not limit how many they can spam, but fix the OP units. The rule of three is frankly stupid and arbitrary band-aid. Some armies have datasheet with many options, whilst in some armies similar unit is spread across several different datasheets with less options. Some armies can squadron their best unit, some other armies cannot. Some armies have great troops, some do not. Some armies have many good units to choose from, some do not.

Funny how your army, the Imperial Guard, is one of the least affected by the rule of three...

 Peregrine wrote:
It's relevant to the discussion because you're trying to claim that the strong sales of 8th edition are proof of rules quality

I won't answer your whole post I will just reply to this as it's the main point of contention.
I'm not saying popularity = good rules. I said popularity is proof they are doing something right and thus can't be called incompetent. The point wasn't about balance itself. The rules are part of the product and if they are done this way, it's probably on purpose. Do they mess up ? Yes. Could the rules be better ? Yes. I won't ever advocate that it's on purpose that some units are barely playable in any format you play.
But do they want a strictly competitive game ? I'm not too sure about that. And I'll disagree, having a good competitive set of rules doesn't always benefit every players. Just look at how we react when we lose codex entries because they don't produce a mini. What would happen if we lost half the range because that's what was required to keep every faction in check with each other ? And what would happen to their business if they did cut half the range ?
And yes, it wasn't meant to be a competitive game, I don't know why you are upset with this. While it's a WFB example, I don't think old stuff like skavens or orks where a lot of your performance was tied to your dice rolls would fly in a good competitive rule set. Doesn't mean you can't/couldn't play it competitively though (since people are/were doing it for ages already). And it doesn't mean either that they can't try to please players from both "sides".
It's pretty clear they want an easy to grasp set of rules with easily remembered and fun (fun being subjective though) mechanics for as many people as possible to enjoy. Basically I attribute to intent what seems to be often attributed to incompetence as they are trying to cast the widest net they can (and it seems to work from what I can tell).
Edit : I might have actually answered your whole post after all

Regarding Epic, I don't think why they aren't relaunching it has much to do with its past sales rather than what space it would fill (hint : you can't play 40K armies in Adeptus Titanicus and you probably never will be able to). But feel free to disagree.

 Marmatag wrote:

There's a pretty big disparity between GW imbalance issues and FW imbalance issues throughout 8th edition.

It is true, FW rules have been even more of a mess in this edition than usual.

 Crimson wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

There's a pretty big disparity between GW imbalance issues and FW imbalance issues throughout 8th edition.

It is true, FW rules have been even more of a mess in this edition than usual.

Not really, considering they had only how long to create 8th edition profiles for everything. Not a lot ended up being over the top, so that's actually better than what GW did in allowing Commisars and conscripts to do what they did so early on.

 Peregrine wrote:
Again, that's not really true. D&D isn't poorly balanced because it favors flavor over balance and makes a deliberate choice to include flavorful elements even if they might have negative effects on balance, it's poorly balanced because WOTC takes a badly designed set of core rules* and then piles on a bloated mess of special rules and feats and spell and campaign books and class supplements and whatever else they think they can make another $50 from selling.

As someone who just got finished rewriting his pathfinder character from a summoner to an unchained summoner at the behest of an exasperated GM this rings so true to me.

Another crazy thought. If a big part of the problem is taking minimal detachments to maximize CP, why don't they make a Matched Play rule that you can't take a second detachment until you max out the first? So if you were taking a Battalion, you'd have to max out on all the slots before you could take a second Battalion (which could, in theory, be minimal then as long as you don't try to take a third). The tradeoff then is you could take a Patrol detachment for an easy way to max something out to take a meatier detachment, but you don't get CP for a patrol. Or suck it up and pay CP with an Auxiliary detachment to circumvent the rule.

Wayniac wrote:
Another crazy thought. If a big part of the problem is taking minimal detachments to maximize CP, why don't they make a Matched Play rule that you can't take a second detachment until you max out the first? So if you were taking a Battalion, you'd have to max out on all the slots before you could take a second Battalion (which could, in theory, be minimal then as long as you don't try to take a third). The tradeoff then is you could take a Patrol detachment for an easy way to max something out to take a meatier detachment, but you don't get CP for a patrol. Or suck it up and pay CP with an Auxiliary detachment to circumvent the rule.

At that point you just take a Brigade.

Wayniac wrote:
Another crazy thought. If a big part of the problem is taking minimal detachments to maximize CP, why don't they make a Matched Play rule that you can't take a second detachment until you max out the first? So if you were taking a Battalion, you'd have to max out on all the slots before you could take a second Battalion (which could, in theory, be minimal then as long as you don't try to take a third). The tradeoff then is you could take a Patrol detachment for an easy way to max something out to take a meatier detachment, but you don't get CP for a patrol. Or suck it up and pay CP with an Auxiliary detachment to circumvent the rule.

That'd wind up being very lopsided for different armies, as some armies can fill slots for a lot cheaper. The problem basically stays the same, but is just on a slightly different scale.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

There's a pretty big disparity between GW imbalance issues and FW imbalance issues throughout 8th edition.

It is true, FW rules have been even more of a mess in this edition than usual.

Not really, considering they had only how long to create 8th edition profiles for everything. Not a lot ended up being over the top, so that's actually better than what GW did in allowing Commisars and conscripts to do what they did so early on.

Look up the profile for the alphabet bird, and be thankful you didn't see it when it was like 700 points.

 Marmatag wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:

There's a pretty big disparity between GW imbalance issues and FW imbalance issues throughout 8th edition.

It is true, FW rules have been even more of a mess in this edition than usual.

Not really, considering they had only how long to create 8th edition profiles for everything. Not a lot ended up being over the top, so that's actually better than what GW did in allowing Commisars and conscripts to do what they did so early on.

Look up the profile for the alphabet bird, and be thankful you didn't see it when it was like 700 points.

You gotta bring me up to speed as I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Oh yeah. That's probably the best nickname for it.

Yeah the Greater Daemons weren't done terribly well I'll admit that.

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Wayniac wrote:
Another crazy thought. If a big part of the problem is taking minimal detachments to maximize CP, why don't they make a Matched Play rule that you can't take a second detachment until you max out the first? So if you were taking a Battalion, you'd have to max out on all the slots before you could take a second Battalion (which could, in theory, be minimal then as long as you don't try to take a third). The tradeoff then is you could take a Patrol detachment for an easy way to max something out to take a meatier detachment, but you don't get CP for a patrol. Or suck it up and pay CP with an Auxiliary detachment to circumvent the rule.

I like it in theory but some factions will effectively always be restricted to a Battalion whilst other factions will fill out several quite easily due to how cheap they are.

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

meleti wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

So which is bigger now? The resin FW guy or the current plastic Lord of Change?

Imo the FW one is kind of an ugly model anyways.

 Insectum7 wrote:

meleti wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

So which is bigger now? The resin FW guy or the current plastic Lord of Change?

Imo the FW one is kind of an ugly model anyways.

FW one is still a bit bigger.

secretForge wrote:

ccs wrote:

Kdash wrote:

ccs wrote:

Kdash wrote:
I personally disagree that the rule of 3 hurts “fluff” armies, especially in 1000-2000 point games. (After 2000, it becomes rule of 4 don’t forget!)

What units, in “fluff” armies, that you can’t currently take more than 3 of, do you guys want to see/use?

Guard Tank forces can still exist. Eldar Jetbike/Saim-Hann fast moving armies still exist. Dreadnought armies can still exist. Wraith armies, Necron armies focused around 3 huge blobs of Flayed Ones etc etc.

All the rule of 3 makes you do, if you want to spam a lot of the same type of model, is to increase the squad size instead of just taking more min squads.

If I were to play where Ro3 was enforced I'd have a tough time fielding my Ultra-Marine 9th Co.

Interesting.

What is in the 9th Company? Isn’t it the Dreadnought and Fire Support one?

In which case, I could argue that 3 units of Hellblasters, 3 units of Devestators and 3 units of Aggressors alongside several Dreadnoughts, a Captain and 2 Lieutenants. However, I will admit that if you’re not running Primaris, then it becomes a lot harder (Unless you want to run 1000 points of Dreadnoughts and transports) as the only option you have is 3 10-man Devestator squads.

I’m curious to know what else might be slightly missed cos of it.

The 9th is a marine chapters heavy weapons reserve company. In the current codex for the UM it's listed as a 1 Captain, 2 Lts, 10 fire support squads (devs), & 7 Dreadnoughts. It doesn't specify or indicate any Primaris hellblasters (or other primaris). I suppose I could see it including centurian armor (wich is doled out from the armory along with vehicles) as it talks about those who don it coming from either the close or fire support companies....

But! this particular collection, MY UM 9th, will never include Primaris or centurians models. Not even Guillemen. Because I specifically built & limited it to using only RT era metals & plastics. And I'm not breaking my theme.

One could field 3 dev squads, 3 squads of long fangs and 3 5 man tactical squads (representing combat squadded devs), 4 squads of deathwatch veterans with missile launchers hand heavy bolters, along with another 4x5 tactical squads. This would give you the same models as 10 devastator units, with roughly the same rules, all you would need is a couple of HQs to make the formations legal.

I could, but I won't. That'd be really confusing to an opponent. "OK Brian, these UM are UM. These UM are DW, these UM are actually SW, & these UM....."

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Oh yeah. That's probably the best nickname for it.

Yeah the Greater Daemons weren't done terribly well I'll admit that.

The FW indexes were done so abysmally that it started an entire new wave of 'ban all forgeworld forever' because several of their units were the most woefully busted things in 8th, several more just straight up didn't function ROW, and the rest were terrible crap. Turns out when they have to write rules for a game that has more than one army in it, they're actually worse than GW prime.


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meleti wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

I thought it was 'super chicken'

Arson Fire wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

meleti wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

So which is bigger now? The resin FW guy or the current plastic Lord of Change?

Imo the FW one is kind of an ugly model anyways.

FW one is still a bit bigger.

Spoiler:

Egads that thing is HUGE! Thanks for posting.

ERJAK wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Oh yeah. That's probably the best nickname for it.

Yeah the Greater Daemons weren't done terribly well I'll admit that.

The FW indexes were done so abysmally that it started an entire new wave of 'ban all forgeworld forever' because several of their units were the most woefully busted things in 8th, several more just straight up didn't function ROW, and the rest were terrible crap. Turns out when they have to write rules for a game that has more than one army in it, they're actually worse than GW prime.


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meleti wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^I think he means the Daemon Lord of Change, named KJFHAJKFHSDK?JSDH

Also lovingly known as Big Bird.

I thought it was 'super chicken'

Outside Malefic Lords (where the problem is actually how Smite was implemented and what it did), what else was busted?

 alextroy wrote:
You do realize that the 'Rule of Three' is an Organized Event guideline for Matched Play and not a standard Matched Play rule? GW has given everyone not 3, but 4 ways to play (Open, Narrative, Matched, and Matched Play Organized Event). It's not their fault of you decide to play a way that doesn't allow you to play the army you want to play.

That isn't always your choice to make.
For ex; At my current local shop there's only 1 person that I can get an Open or Narrative game with. Anyone else? They insist on matched play.
(Fortunately the majority of them also hold the opinion of "Well this isn't a tourney, so the Organized play stuff doesn't apply." This I 100% agree with. If I wanted to play tourneyHammer, I'd go to a tourney....)
So by default if I'm looking to play a 40k game at my local shop, wich is the only place I play 40k currently, virtually any game will be Matched. Narrative/Open is not a practical option.