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My favorite thing about the 40k setting is that there's daemons in it. Pure daemons.

It's Event Horizon man, it's tight.

I don't think there's anything broken about the game. It's fun to play, both at casual and competitive levels. It's only unfun when you're not on the same page as your opponent regarding the degree of mathhammer vs shelfhammer you're bringing to the table.

I'll just say that I agree that a lot of the Codexes out there could and should have just been combined into a single book. Like imagine if, instead of Codex: Orkz, we had Codex: Goffs, Codex: Freebooters, Codex: Snakebites, etc. No real reason to have so many SM Codexes when 90% of their contents are similar to each other.

Lol a lot of you guys got angry really quickly. Various codex books not having balance doesn't mean the game is broken. It means various codex books don't have balance.

Most armies have a win rate between 40-60%
It's certainly not great and needs improvement, we can all agree on that.

But importantly that's not a broken disparity. If one faction won 90% of games and another only 10, that might be considered a broken disparity. Calm down. The game isn't broken, it's updated regularly. It's a lot better than it was in the 8 years prior to 8th edition.

It might not play how some of you personally want it to, but again that isn't an indication of it being broken. That's an indication of the game not playing how some of you personally want it to. You can always have a hobby hiatus and come back in the future.

Again, you are being ridiculously over-literal with the term "broken". There's a long list of complaints, including complaints entirely unrelated to balance or win rates, from a bunch of different people here and all you have in defense of your argument is nitpicking if it's "broken" or just "not great and needs improvement".

 Peregrine wrote:
Again, you are being ridiculously over-literal with the term "broken". There's a long list of complaints, including complaints entirely unrelated to balance or win rates, from a bunch of different people here and all you have in defense of your argument is nitpicking if it's "broken" or just "not great and needs improvement".

Yeah, there's lots of entitled, unreasonable complainers who can't even use the correct words to describe something. I guess you're right about that.

I would also support, that a reduction of necessary dice rolls would be great. I have no real idea how to achieve this, but if there was a more or less fair optional mechanic to handle 100+ attacks of some units followed by wound rolls and saves in lets say 10 dice rolls, that would be great.

In another system er experimented a bit with using the statistical average and only modify it by a limited number of dice. So like 100 WS4+ attacks equals 50 +/- d12 successes. One die was for +/- the other for the effect size. The result was at least much faster

 Peregrine wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

warpedpig wrote:
Lmao well said. Although themed close combat armies can exist. They still have guns

Nurgle Daemons.

Are you saying I’m wrong to play the army I enjoy?

Your army is bad for the game and should be consolidated back into the CSM codex. Demons should be summoned allies for a CSM and/or chaos cultist army, not an opportunity to use your WHFB army on round bases.

OMG I would be so happy to see a cultist demon army that worked and was fun to play.
I think 40k does close combat rather badly, and mostly just leads the game bogging down at this point in the rules, and i even play demons.
To many games ended up, running in a line at the enemy and hoping over the years.

Seems the biggist thing broken about 40k is GW. A lot of there issues could be fixed with better design, Even if they just take a bit of inspiration from other games.
Its cool, seems to be all GW has for a lot of there stupidity.

You would think for such a large gaming company they could have the personnel resources to actually come up with awesome simple rules

warpedpig wrote:
You would think for such a large gaming company they could have the personnel resources to actually come up with awesome simple rules

They do. They have many different rule sets and games, from tight competitive rulesets like Shadespire over more board-game-inspired stuff like Betrayal at Calth to sprawling, more relaxed "show-off-all-your-toys" things like 40K.

The problem is people don't pick the game to suit their preferences (whether within the GW catalog or even beyond it). They instead insist to 40K should fundamentally change to be a different kind of game entirely, despite plenty of games scratching those other itches being out there, which is kinda dumb.

It's Base 6 instead of Base 10. We use a 6 sided dice to randomize results. I don't even know how many factions there are anymore. There's 80 codex on the website, I think 4 per faction, between hardcopy soft cover, epub, Apple book, and Apple Book Enhanced or some such. That's still something like 20 factions. Sure some of the factions have some strong and justified overlap, Craftworld, Drukhari, Ynnari - they're all elves with roughly similar armors, strength toughness etc.

But the MEQ and MEQ+ stuff- The Necrons were a great idea. But there wasn't room for them on a D6, so they got 3+ and reanimation protocols- which has been boom or bust -either too good or not good enough.

Terminators on a 2D6 3+ with Save modifiers was actually pretty nice - Probably too good, but still about where it should have been. 2+ with no invuln was awful. 2+ with a 5++ isn't good enough, 2+ with 4++ is too good- especially in comparison to captains+ And don't buy into the D12 exclusively hype. Putting Terminators on a 3+ on a D12 (two fails out of 12) isn't the solution either. It's the same as a 2+ on 1D6. A 3+ on 2D6 (1 fail out of 11) meant to fail a roll vs AP -0 , first you had to roll a 1 on the first dice. 16% of the time. Then you have to roll a 1 on the second dice. 16% of 16% of the time. That should be something like a 97.5% success rate. Probably too good for a balanced game where most Imperial Guardsmen should be using lasguns.

If you make it a 3+ on 1D6 with reroll... you'll succeed on 67% of your original 33% failures. giving you an overall success raite of about 89%. Slightly better than a 2+ no-rerolls at 83/84% - vs Plasma you'll pass 16% of your armor saves + 16% of 83% of your armor saves. Or about 29%.

As a 1 is "always a failure", that means there are 5 potential good results on a D6, and Plasma removes 3 of them- which means 60% - on a D12, Plasma would have a (11 potential good results * 60%) -6.6 save mod. 3+ -6 = 33% success rate. 3+ -7 = 25% save rate

As you can see rerolls- despite the complaints - are a good way to change the results window by a different increment.

If I were doing this, I'd probably mix D6's and D10's even though D12's would be better in many respects, having more result options, and being more "normal" looking to observers. But may of the increments of D6 and D12 will overlap.

Sunny Side Up wrote:

warpedpig wrote:
You would think for such a large gaming company they could have the personnel resources to actually come up with awesome simple rules

They do. They have many different rule sets and games, from tight competitive rulesets like Shadespire over more board-game-inspired stuff like Betrayal at Calth to sprawling, more relaxed "show-off-all-your-toys" things like 40K.

The problem is people don't pick the game to suit their preferences (whether within the GW catalog or even beyond it). They instead insist to 40K should fundamentally change to be a different kind of game entirely, despite plenty of games scratching those other itches being out there, which is kinda dumb.

For a lot of us, it was GW changing 40k to fit other peoples preferences and we just got left behind wondering what happened. Even looking at apoc, our primary reason of interest here for my group is if we can get it to play 40k better at lower points. None of my friends have even put a thought to it as a use for massive games. House rules of necessity.

For me it's definitely the combo-oriented nature of the game that breaks it the most. The idea you can guarantee a certain combo of units and stratagems and re-rolls all working together, often with a psychic power or two (that you can't reliably Deny with most armies) makes games play out far too similarly. It's very much like a CCG, but with the crucial difference you don't have to draw any cards to activate your combo because you always have access to them. There's nothing more disheartening than seeing your opponent get a bad roll, only for them to just pick up all their failures and re-roll into 90% successes because they have the amazing tactical acumen required to stand within 6" of a specific model.

The number of dice is also becoming comical. GW even boasted about the number of dice the new Havocs could put out with the Mark of Slaanesh and the new chainguns. I think this, combined with the prevalence of auras, highlights GW's laziness when it comes to the game. Orks, for example, could have had increasing strength, or improved hit rolls for shooting as their numbers increased rather than getting more attacks. Custodes - an army of complete individuals who are noted in the background as lacking the squad-level training and command structure that makes Marines powerful - still get re-roll auras from their characters instead of some other buff. Or - shock! horror! - no character buffs at all. Why? Because GW is fundamentally lazy when it comes to game design and just recycles the same mechanics regardless of whether they're characterful or useful.

One thing I think game designers should think about is how the various elements of their game are countered. If too many aspects of your mechanics have no viable counter you end up with an unsatisfying game which is all about a damage race rather than any actual tactics. Most of the degenerate things in 40k fall into this category. Arbitrarily improved weapons like Cawl's Wrath, combos of stratagems and buffs that vastly magnify the power of a unit, soup allowing CP farms with little drawback all remove a lot of player agency and furthermore tend to even remove the point of rolling dice since units that reroll all hits and wounds, sometimes with +1 to one those rolls too, often become an exercise in rolling dozens of dice only to arrive at the inevitable result of 90%+ efficiency.

40k is hardly optimal or that fun. A clumsy system that needs correxting

1. Imperial Guard/AM
2. Imperium of Man
3. 8th edition

I do agree with the above comment that there are too many armies. In the past all these armies were effectively in one book and the HQ choice would give you some basic options to make some of the unique options stand out. The most basic example of this was Dark Angels where their HQ allowed Terminators or Bikers as troops and they had plasma options in their troop squads. Expanding that type of play style would have been quite easy to expand to the others at the time but we've long since moved so far beyond those basic elements I don't know if we'll ever go back.

But you're right, armies like BA and SW are underperforming and it makes more sense to consolidate them than expand them further and keep going down the path we're headed down.

Chaos were effectively the same. Demons just had generic profiles and you could use lesser demons and greater demons in armies and you could pick the ones you like most to look at for theme purposes. Those days are also long past.

There are arguments on both sides as to if those were the golden years or if things were improved since then but I do agree that we have too many niche armies these days and that needlessly bloats the games complexity.

Nvs wrote:
I do agree with the above comment that there are too many armies. In the past all these armies were effectively in one book and the HQ choice would give you some basic options to make some of the unique options stand out. The most basic example of this was Dark Angels where their HQ allowed Terminators or Bikers as troops and they had plasma options in their troop squads. Expanding that type of play style would have been quite easy to expand to the others at the time but we've long since moved so far beyond those basic elements I don't know if we'll ever go back.

But you're right, armies like BA and SW are underperforming and it makes more sense to consolidate them than expand them further and keep going down the path we're headed down.

Chaos were effectively the same. Demons just had generic profiles and you could use lesser demons and greater demons in armies and you could pick the ones you like most to look at for theme purposes. Those days are also long past.

There are arguments on both sides as to if those were the golden years or if things were improved since then but I do agree that we have too many niche armies these days and that needlessly bloats the games complexity.

I honestly do not understand how more different army options makes the game bloated and too complex. 8th ed is as far from complexity as the game can possibly get. Now if you were to say that the volume of different armies can be very confusing for new players, I would absolutely agree with you, but the number of armies has nothing to do with the underlying complexity of the game system itself as far as I understand it.

Now don't get me wrong, I agree with you that some armies should be put back together in one codex. Grey Knights, Inquisition and Assassins for example like in 3rd ed, Sisters of Silence and Custodes also belong into one book. GW will never consolidate Blood Angles and Space Wolves into one book, they sell way more books and models this way, and that is the only thing that counts, always.

I think it's kind of ridiculous when you have some lists pumping out 100+ dice of shooting/attacks and your opponent cant even produce that many dice in the first place.

It makes me roll my eyes, no pun intended.

Tiberias wrote:

Nvs wrote:
I do agree with the above comment that there are too many armies. In the past all these armies were effectively in one book and the HQ choice would give you some basic options to make some of the unique options stand out. The most basic example of this was Dark Angels where their HQ allowed Terminators or Bikers as troops and they had plasma options in their troop squads. Expanding that type of play style would have been quite easy to expand to the others at the time but we've long since moved so far beyond those basic elements I don't know if we'll ever go back.

But you're right, armies like BA and SW are underperforming and it makes more sense to consolidate them than expand them further and keep going down the path we're headed down.

Chaos were effectively the same. Demons just had generic profiles and you could use lesser demons and greater demons in armies and you could pick the ones you like most to look at for theme purposes. Those days are also long past.

There are arguments on both sides as to if those were the golden years or if things were improved since then but I do agree that we have too many niche armies these days and that needlessly bloats the games complexity.

I honestly do not understand how more different army options makes the game bloated and too complex. 8th ed is as far from complexity as the game can possibly get. Now if you were to say that the volume of different armies can be very confusing for new players, I would absolutely agree with you, but the number of armies has nothing to do with the underlying complexity of the game system itself as far as I understand it.

Now don't get me wrong, I agree with you that some armies should be put back together in one codex. Grey Knights, Inquisition and Assassins for example like in 3rd ed, Sisters of Silence and Custodes also belong into one book. GW will never consolidate Blood Angles and Space Wolves into one book, they sell way more books and models this way, and that is the only thing that counts, always.

It's not an issue for the person playing the army, it's really an issue for who you're playing against. Take space marines for example. All a player needs to do is paint an army in their favorite color and choose a book with the strongest rules at the time and they're good to go. But their opponent on the other hand needs to learn what, 7 different space marine books at the moment so they are prepared to fight against your 'counts as' Space Marine army. This wouldn't be so bad if they all used the same book but only needed to remember some force org swaps based off the HQ they had chosen. But now they have to remember different formations, detachments, CPs, spells, etc. It's a bit absurd at times. Their opponent isn't going to buy every book under the sun just to stay up to date on the rules. Thus the issue where people spend the first 30mins setting up models and reading each other's books at the beginning of every match and spend 10mins of every turn phase verifying someone isn't cheating. Not to mention GW has gotten rid of alot of the flavor text available in the different books at this point. We don't even get much in the way of unique stories and such anymore in these books. It's almost like we should be hosting all the rules online for free and players could buy a codex for nothing more than the fluff at this point.

The argument that they sell more books doesn't hold up. What's the difference is a player needs to buy a Space Marine codex or a Space Wolves codex? They still only need to buy one codex. GW could arguably make more money by going back to upgrade sprues to be honest. Instead of everyone buying a Blood Angels Marine box or a SM box at the same price. They'd buy a SM box and a BA upgrade sprue.

I realize this isn't a popular opinion and I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for these armies to coexist like they do currently. I just feel that while the hobby is better off, the game itself is suffering.

Tiberias wrote:


I honestly do not understand how more different army options makes the game bloated and too complex. 8th ed is as far from complexity as the game can possibly get. Now if you were to say that the volume of different armies can be very confusing for new players, I would absolutely agree with you, but the number of armies has nothing to do with the underlying complexity of the game system itself as far as I understand it.

Now don't get me wrong, I agree with you that some armies should be put back together in one codex. Grey Knights, Inquisition and Assassins for example like in 3rd ed, Sisters of Silence and Custodes also belong into one book. GW will never consolidate Blood Angles and Space Wolves into one book, they sell way more books and models this way, and that is the only thing that counts, always.

Its not too complex, but its hard to make them unique on a D6. Power Armor is supposed to be rare and better protection most battlefields see. How many 3+ armies are there? How many 4+? 5+? 3+ is getting pretty crowded. Dark Angels and Blood Angels were at one time in one codex. It was Codex: Angels of Death. They will not likely share a codex with anyone, even each other, again.

Well, in terms of the things that turn me off the game:

- Lack of support for certain armies. If GW weren't making any new models, I could put this down to production issues. However, they're actually making tons of new models . . . just none for the army they spent the last 2 editions gutting.

- On top of the above, they've also resolved that said army needs to have the most boring and worthless HQs possible. Because no one likes having fun or interesting characters leading their armies, right?

- I hate the removal of options and wargear (whether it's removed entirely, changed into a stratagem or confined to the Index).

- In terms of gameplay, I despise the pointless randomness. Why do weapons need a random number of shots? It's not tactical or interesting, it's just an exercise in time-wasting.

- Speaking of which, could Overwatch please die already? It's been nothing but a pointless waste of time ever since it was first introduced.

- Really not a fan of Stratagems. It's rare that I'll give any praise to Age of Sigmar, but I think its system is vastly superior. Having the 'stratagems' as Command Abilities on heroes means there's only ever a handful for players to keep track of, whilst also allowing for hero buffs (or debuffs) that aren't just auras. Also, the 1CP-per-turn keeps things in check and prevents Alpha Strikes and such.

- I dislike the scale-creep. I don't like seeing models getting bigger and bigger for no reason and I especially don't like the push towards the use of bigger and bigger models (in terms of aircraft, super-heavies, Lords of War etc.). Especially in the latter case, it's not just the units themselves but also the way the game has to be reshaped to accommodate them.

 Peregrine wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Why not? Why are magical space Daemons any less acceptable than magical space elves, or space soccer hooligan mushrooms?

Because "soccer hooligans" and "elves" are just minor elements on top of conventional forces. The "space elves" are using tanks and guns and calling in air strikes, not running around on unicorns with swords. The "soccer hooligan mushrooms" are going to chop you up with swords, but they're also going to shoot you with normal guns. Put them in WHFB and they'd be completely out of theme. But pure demons, on the other hand, are literally a WHFB army on round bases.

This raises an interesting point. Do you think Chaos Daemons would be more suitable for 40k if they were like the demons from Doom, with weapons built into them?

 Ishagu wrote:

Broken means the rules cease to function

Take a look at BCB's signature sometime.

How entitled and shrieking the community is.

Y'all are just awful.

 Ishagu wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Again, you are being ridiculously over-literal with the term "broken". There's a long list of complaints, including complaints entirely unrelated to balance or win rates, from a bunch of different people here and all you have in defense of your argument is nitpicking if it's "broken" or just "not great and needs improvement".

Yeah, there's lots of entitled, unreasonable complainers who can't even use the correct words to describe something. I guess you're right about that.

Broken, my immersion in the game is broken, therefore the game is broken to me.


Balls in your court smartarse

Oh, the vocabulary police are on the job now.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
How entitled and shrieking the community is.

Y'all are just awful.

having spend easily upwards of £30,000 on GW stuff since I started.... yep I am entitled for wanting a superior product.... reaaaaal entitled, or, and this is the real problem, we are just expressing our frustrations for a setting we all enjoy and purging once and a while is healthy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
Oh, the vocabulary police are on the job now.

just pointing out that he is being far too picky, do you not agree.

I meant HE was the vocab police.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
How entitled and shrieking the community is.

Y'all are just awful.

Was the likely content of the thread not completely obvious from the title? Seems to me there's been a mix of feedback here, from overblown to pretty considered. Or are we just supposed to accept anything GW pushes out as being brilliant and not comment at all. Also, as Formosa rightly points out, many people have put a lot of money and a lot of time into this game and don't like seeing those dual investments eroded in value.

I'd argue most of the comments so far in this thread have been more helpful and enlightening than yours.

 Formosa wrote:

 Excommunicatus wrote:
How entitled and shrieking the community is.

Y'all are just awful.

having spend easily upwards of £30,000 on GW stuff since I started.... yep I am entitled for wanting a superior product.... reaaaaal entitled, or, and this is the real problem, we are just expressing our frustrations for a setting we all enjoy and purging once and a while is healthy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Martel732 wrote:
Oh, the vocabulary police are on the job now.

just pointing out that he is being far too picky, do you not agree.

I spent more than that on a car. I guess I'm entitled to ask for it to be faster, more economical and more spacious?

Everything

Seriously, I'd say:

1) Too many armies, leading to massive bloat. Not much more to say about this other than the more armies you add, the more permutations you need to consider in your rules to make sure things are balanced. I'd also throw in too many options in this category, but that's been an issue with 40k for years.

2) Stratagems went from being pitched in the previews as minor neat things you can do, do being army-defining with many rules that were previously passive baseline rules being moved to stratagems.

3) Continuing from above, the pushing of stratagems as army-defining features leads to CP abuse. Instead of Command Points being a nice extra that you have to do some neat things, it becomes the focal point of list building due to stratagems being so influential. This, in turn, leads to soup dominating and CP farms/batteries being such a common sight.

4) True Line of Sight. It's already been mentioned but it is absolutely stupid that if your model can see a tiny portion of an enemy model through a gap in a building/under the tread of a tank, etc. you can shoot at them with no penalty as though they were standing out in the open. It's an extremely lazy way to handle line of sight.

5) Keeping every unit with its own set of rules on paper seems good, but has the side effect of contributing to the bloat. Do you really need five different variations of Re-roll 1s to hit while within 6" of this model? Especially when there seems to be a random chance if each ability will be worded slightly differently. I get the hate for USRs from 7th, but the issue with USRs was that there were too many of them. A lot of rules need to just be there as global rules that can apply to models, especially since GW seems to be ignoring the main benefit of having individual rules for each model: That being you can change one model without impacting the others, which you could not do with USRs.

6) The high visibility of tournaments means that you have rules being changed for all matched play when they should just affect tournaments. The "rule of three" for example is only a suggestion for events, yet everyone treats it like a matched play rule. While it can be argued that the rules which balance tournaments are also good for matched play, and this is technically true, the fact remains that we have seen units get affected by issues that only come up in tournaments or due to issues often seen in competitive games. Blood Angels, for example, suffered unduly because you saw "Smash Captains" with the Loyal 32 in tournaments.

I would say that #2 and #3 (Stratagems/CP) is probably the most egregious and the biggest fundamental issues in the game today. Nearly all the issues can be traced to the proliferation of stratagems as the major army traits (playing into the "CCG Combo" mentality) and as a result CP stacking being such a problem.

Slipspace wrote:

I'd argue most of the comments so far in this thread have been more helpful and enlightening than yours.

Coolbeans. It wasn't meant to be either helpful, or enlightening. It was meant to express dis-satisfaction with the same tired old voices making the same tired old argument and injecting their own, tired subjective criteria into a debate as if anyone gives a flying [Expletive Deleted] at a rolling doughnut about their ridiculously entitled opinions. But, for sure, you can defeat an accusation of entitlement by doubling down on it and pointing out that in fact, yes, you spent some money so you are owed. That is not the textbook definition of entitlement, or anything.

Spending £30k on something you consider a sub-par product does in fact speak volumes, but not about GW.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

I'd argue most of the comments so far in this thread have been more helpful and enlightening than yours.

Coolbeans. It wasn't meant to be either helpful, or enlightening. It was meant to express dis-satisfaction with the same tired old voices making the same tired old argument and injecting their own, tired subjective criteria into a debate as if anyone gives a flying [Expletive Deleted] at a rolling doughnut about their ridiculously entitled opinions. But, for sure, you can defeat an accusation of entitlement by doubling down on it and pointing out that in fact, yes, you spent some money so you are owed. That is not the textbook definition of entitlement, or anything.

Spending £30k on something you consider a sub-par product does in fact speak volumes, but not about GW.

The money arguments are dumb. The quality arguments are not. The game is broken. It does have massive problems. And the rules writing and design of 40k has been "lack luster" at best for editions. 8th might be miles better than 7th but that is a exceedingly low bar. Better than complete garbage is still not good.