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 Peregrine wrote:

While it's not the game breaking issue some claim, I do think your being too dismissive about people complaints that it bars them form fielding a "competitive list" ie having enough acess to CP and hence strategums to have a balanced game.

IOW, "I want my army to be better at winning games, can we change the rules so it wins more". If that's the issue then at least admit it and stop hiding behind this idea that the RO3 makes it impossible to play thematic lists.

The ability to field two battalions is not just about CPs. It's also about having enough Troop slots available; you know, those very slots that GW is encouraging us to fill by introducing the Rule of Three. Kabalites are cheap, so in a Drukhari army, 6 Troop slots don't take you very far in terms of points.

"Just run a Brigade!" you might say. Okay. Filling the Elites, Fast Attack and Heavy Support slots of a kabal-based Brigade sets you back at least 795 points (assuming your Scourges don't even have special weapons). It also requires you to be made of money.

Like I said before, the issue is not so much a matter of rule design as a matter of Drukhari having too few options to abide by that rule effectively, compared to literally EVERY OTHER ARMY. That's why, if invited to a 2000 game, I would explain my situation and request that we either make a single exception to the RO3, or make it a 2001 game instead. In a tournament I would run Drazhar; but my point is, I should not have to. It's a stopgap solution at best.

.

I remember reading a thing were one of the GW rules team guys was asked about the lash prince being used to back models in a nice little circle so you could bomb them with a pie plate and his response was no one here had ever thought of using it that way.

GW's rules guys have constantly shown that they are not playing in a competitive manor and that shows in how often they miss unintended rules interactions and interpretations.

Hopefully 2020 will be the year of the Xeno. The best solution is for GW to release 4-5 DE characters to solve the problem.
Who doesn't want to see them rebuild Vect and the Dias of Destruction; his trenchcoated incubi guards were awesome.
I have always wanted Keradruak the decapitator. A four armed mandrake? Yes please!

Baron Sathonyx and Duke Sliscus are two old faves too. For Kabals, Lady Malys is a counterpoint to Vect- he would be the DE equivalent of primarch power, so Malys is actually the more feasible option.

The dracon would be the more practical solution. I say release one for Kill Team with 40k rules in the box. Here's hoping.

Multiple generic HQ options- every faction should have them. I play campaign style, so I've just finished building a continent with 245 territories, organized into one large city and eight smaller settlements. The City garrison is a Brigade while the settlements host a battalion at each of their garrisons. It doesn't make sense for the detachments at the settlements to be commanded by company level officials, who would issue their orders from HQ in the cities, and only show up in settlements in response to overwhelming opposition. Platoon Commanders would be perfect for this role of commanding settlement garrisons, but they aren't HQ choices in 8th. Nothing to do with wanting to win; I just want to tell a story.

Of course, in a campaign full of friends, you just make them HQ choices an get back to the game.

-Guardsman- wrote:
"Just run a Brigade!" you might say. Okay. Filling the Elites, Fast Attack and Heavy Support slots of a kabal-based Brigade sets you back at least 795 points (assuming your Scourges don't even have special weapons). It also requires you to be made of money.

Shock! Horror! RO3 encourages you to spend ~40% of your points on filling up a range of FOC slots instead of just spamming the best option. This sounds like a very good argument in favor of RO3. Of course it isn't mandatory, you're always free to use the less powerful option. But "I want my army to win more" is not the same as "RO3 prevents my army from working" or "RO3 makes it impossible to take themed lists".

That's why, if invited to a 2000 game, I would explain my situation and request that we either make a single exception to the RO3, or make it a 2001 game instead.

IOW, "I want to win more, so let's play a 2000 point game without RO3 or play a 2000 point game without RO3". How about instead of asking to bend the rules for an advantage you just play with the standard rules like everyone else?

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Remind me, what did they do when they actually design the game when they had instances for multiple editions of one CSM army domination excactly like that :

2 Lash princes,9 obliterators and 2 5 man squads with plasma in rhinos.

Game developers and designers are not the same thing. Designers come up with ideas, developers make them work.
As far as I'm concerned, 8th edition is the first edition ever to show signs of game development.

They simply had no clue those kind of armies ever existed.

Or lack the basic capability to be developers and designers in the first place.

I wasn't joking though, most of this comes from people talking to developers or from interviews with them. The designers had a culture of "games don't need to be balanced, just talk to your opponent" and "competitive players are doing it wrong", stuff that is still echoed by some long-time players. When the internet happened, GW took down all their public endpoints for criticism, and the designers just went with what they learned in their micro-cosmos of players - who were mostly just tossing dice with fluffy arrangement of models to wait for awesome things to happen. Unclear rules were never an issue because they knew how they were meant to be played. Any WD game from that era is testament to that, for example Phil Kelly was playing his own codex' KFF not according to the rule he wrote, but to how he intended it to be used. He was massively irritated when he was told that he was using his rule wrong.
Something like using double lash princes simply would never happened because that would mean building two identical princes, none of them would have done that.

GW has always had good designers, as in people who think up creative and awesome rules to go with their miniatures, finding design space in army ranges (putting a space marine in armor in armor in armor ) - that's a designers job. You might disagree on certain design choices, but there will be at least some people here on dakka that love whatever you hate.

A game developer has to make sure that the game is fun to play for everyone, or - in business terms - make sure that people will pick up the game and then stay with it.
This includes, but is not limited to
- internal and external balance (all units are viable vs all armies are viable) - if you buy and army full of cool things and it sucks, you stop playing
- accessible(easy to learn and understand) - If people become irritated and can't just start pushing models around without reading 100+ pages first, you'll struggle to introduce new people to the game. 8th has a done a lot of good in this regard.
- clear and precise rules - When half the game is arguing how rules are to be read, how many models were hit by a template, where the scatter dice is pointing, whether the polish or the english wording is the correct one to use, you are not going to have a good time. 8th is light-years from 5th, but 8th is just as far from air-tight ruleset like MtG has.
- intuitive rules - people hate things that just don't make sense. Proof of that is how often "flamers are great anti-air" comes up on this forum, despite them not actually being good at killing planes.
- game health - certain units or rules have the ability to warp the game, forcing everyone to play in a certain way that they don't actually want to. The castellan was a prime example of this. Everyone needed to bring weapons to kill a 28W T8 4++ monster, which in turn made all vehicles with less durability obsolete.

In general, game development requires completely different set of skills than game design, but you can't have a great game without either. Very few people are good at doing both.
MtG realized that they need game developers to reign in their designers in 1998 when the designers almost killed their game during combo winter. GW took two more decades to get there.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
I remember reading a thing were one of the GW rules team guys was asked about the lash prince being used to back models in a nice little circle so you could bomb them with a pie plate and his response was no one here had ever thought of using it that way.

That's not even the worst way to use them. I was playing orks against a chaos player regularly, and he would use the princes to move my units backwards, allowing his units to fight just 3-4 boyz at a time until they lost combat and were run down.

So basically as stated before by me, lacking any and all capability to be in their position.

No, GW has a herd of sheep making wool. And they are producing a lot of wool.
However, four of those sheep have wandered off, one is drunk because it found some booze, three are on fire and one is slaughtering goats to purify itself.

They are missing a shepherd and a sheepdog, the sheep are doing their job just fine.

 Jidmah wrote:
No, GW has a herd of sheep making wool. And they are producing a lot of wool.
However, four of those sheep have wandered off, one is drunk because it found some booze, three are on fire and one is slaughtering goats to purify itself.

They are missing a shepherd and a sheepdog, the sheep are doing their job just fine.

This analogy is... Questionable.

But you are trying to say that the need leadership and someone to reign their stupid backsides in?

That ain't how it works.
It would be the Job of the designers to have a fething idea what is going on.

That's what I'm trying to explain.

A DESIGNER's job ist not to balance the game. Their job is to make the game interesting. They are doing creative work.
Most of GWs games have been games solely ritten by designers so far. Creative tend to be terrible at doing structured work.

A DEVELOPER's job is not to make an interesting game. Their job is to make the game work on technical level. Their job is analysis, abstraction, iteration and math.
Games written exclusively by developers tend to be bland and unfun to play. While they have tight and well-thought rules, they are often lacking fun components.

If you take the ork buggies an example:
DESGINERs did a great job - they hit the nerve of what orks were lacking (light battle tanks), managed to create six buggies with different look&feel that don't tread too much on other unit's reason to exist.
DEVELOPERs dropped the ball by making them cost way too many points, not catching that the squig launcher has a profile which is never worth shooting, not giving the mek special the proper stat line and confusing/forgotten grot gunner rules.

Both the designer and developper would need to have a basic clue about the game. One in order to determine designspace the other for balance.
As it stands both suck at it.

considering that the same people design all their books, I don't not see how the design team that exists right now done a good job. Maybe for some armies. Eldar were fun to play for a long time in 8th, knights and IG soups of different kind seem fun, the new chaos soup seems to be doing fine too. But the same people also did very unfun to play armies, and then the developers let it through.

Plus from what I understand the studio is full of people working on their 4th or 5th edition of w40k. Those aren't new designers that can drop, something in form of we didn't knew people would be playing it that way. after 20 years you should very well know how people are playing your game. Or at least check the tournament lists or what the forums lists look like.

Karol wrote:
considering that the same people design all their books, I don't not see how the design team that exists right now done a good job. Maybe for some armies. Eldar were fun to play for a long time in 8th, knights and IG soups of different kind seem fun, the new chaos soup seems to be doing fine too. But the same people also did very unfun to play armies, and then the developers let it through.

Plus from what I understand the studio is full of people working on their 4th or 5th edition of w40k. Those aren't new designers that can drop, something in form of we didn't knew people would be playing it that way. after 20 years you should very well know how people are playing your game. Or at least check the tournament lists or what the forums lists look like.

What you have to remember though is the sorts of people regularly post here or on Reddit or whatever are just one demographic of player. We are a minority. Sure, they still should be aware of what people like us think. But they're not just making the game for us.

 Stux wrote:

Karol wrote:
considering that the same people design all their books, I don't not see how the design team that exists right now done a good job. Maybe for some armies. Eldar were fun to play for a long time in 8th, knights and IG soups of different kind seem fun, the new chaos soup seems to be doing fine too. But the same people also did very unfun to play armies, and then the developers let it through.

Plus from what I understand the studio is full of people working on their 4th or 5th edition of w40k. Those aren't new designers that can drop, something in form of we didn't knew people would be playing it that way. after 20 years you should very well know how people are playing your game. Or at least check the tournament lists or what the forums lists look like.

What you have to remember though is the sorts of people regularly post here or on Reddit or whatever are just one demographic of player. We are a minority. Sure, they still should be aware of what people like us think. But they're not just making the game for us.

Even on dakka we are a diverse group, I myself are mostly narrative focused. Casual second and so far away from tournaments. And yet I still find there game frustrating and rather poor.
There are some things that happen that just sit back and think how did they think that was right.

A competently balanced game is good for all people and all groups.

Karol wrote:
considering that the same people design all their books, I don't not see how the design team that exists right now done a good job. Maybe for some armies. Eldar were fun to play for a long time in 8th, knights and IG soups of different kind seem fun, the new chaos soup seems to be doing fine too. But the same people also did very unfun to play armies, and then the developers let it through.

All of what you are describing is DEVELOPMENT failing.

I don't think any of the soups were created by designers, outside of traditional allies like CSM+daemons, Assassins, Harlequins or Ynnari.

Plus from what I understand the studio is full of people working on their 4th or 5th edition of w40k. Those aren't new designers that can drop, something in form of we didn't knew people would be playing it that way. after 20 years you should very well know how people are playing your game. Or at least check the tournament lists or what the forums lists look like.

I just wrote a couple of extensive posts outlining what exactly they did and did't do, you might want to give them a read

From that it should be pretty clear that game DEVELOPMENT started with 8th, maybe even later. Thus, they have no experience to draw from.


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Not Online!!! wrote:
Both the designer and developper would need to have a basic clue about the game. One in order to determine designspace the other for balance.
As it stands both suck at it.

So, which of the releases that happend during 8th do you think were badly designed?

Master of executions, new havocs, Lord discordant (because he fails at what he is supposed to do, making daemon engines viable), newblits, MoP, newpostle,

And that is just csm.

 Peregrine wrote:
How about instead of asking to bend the rules for an advantage you just play with the standard rules like everyone else?

He is asking to play by the standard rules. You're the one who wants to use optional stuff for your own benefit.

 Crimson wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
How about instead of asking to bend the rules for an advantage you just play with the standard rules like everyone else?

He is asking to play by the standard rules. You're the one who wants to use optional stuff for your own benefit.

Didn't you know, Peregrine IS the standard.

Just not for 40k

Not Online!!! wrote:
A competently balanced game is good for all people and all groups.

Only in abstract sense. How you arrive to that balance matters. If you start to ban and limit stuff to improve balance, then it is not good for everyone. Ro3, detachment limits, banning allies, banning Forgeworld. All popular in Dakka in the name of improving balance, all limit what sort of army you can make. Some of us prefer the freedom of army construction over what questionable improvements of balance tossing all this bathwater with alarmingly high concentration of babies would achieve.

 Crimson wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
A competently balanced game is good for all people and all groups.

Only in abstract sense. How you arrive to that balance matters. If you start to ban and limit stuff to improve balance, then it is not good for everyone. Ro3, detachment limits, banning allies, banning Forgeworld. All popular in Dakka in the name of improving balance, all limit what sort of army you can make. Some of us prefer the freedom of army construction over what questionable improvements of balance tossing all this bathwater with alarmingly high concentration of babies would achieve.

That would insinuate that i regard the Dakka balance suggestions as usefull in the first place.
Which i don't.

 Jidmah wrote:

All of what you are describing is DEVELOPMENT failing.

I don't think any of the soups were created by designers, outside of traditional allies like CSM+daemons, Assassins, Harlequins or Ynnari
I just wrote a couple of extensive posts outlining what exactly they did and did't do, you might want to give them a read

From that it should be pretty clear that game DEVELOPMENT started with 8th, maybe even later. Thus, they have no experience to draw from.

So, which of the releases that happend during 8th do you think were badly designed?

I play grey knights. My codex was bad designed, bad developed. Non of the FAQ or CA errata GW implemented to made the codex better, in fact a lot of the changes made the codex worse. I haven't played whole 8th ed, but from what I think is true, the codex was 4th or 5th GW made. Codex that were before it and were weak, like for example primaris in space marine codex, Got fixed. Now an interecessor costs 17pts, when a 1w GK strike cost 21. And the grey knight strike has one stratagem that buffs its ammo, something primaris just do by having different weapons or have it stock if they are DW. All the GW "fixs" were stuff they had to do, because they were doing it to other marines. Other marines got cheaper HQs and cheaper primaris. GK got cheaper HQs ,even if HQ price wasn't their problem. SM dreads got cheaper, GK dreads got cheaper. But GW doesn't understand that stuff like psychic powers has huge diminishing returns when you have, maybe, 3 to cast per turn for an entire army that has points cost added to it as if they were casting every turn. Same with deep strike. GW articles about how GK should work are full of powerful turn 1 deep strike and using stormbolters, only you can't do that in 8th ed.

Some of us prefer the freedom of army construction over what questionable improvements of balance tossing all this bathwater with alarmingly high concentration of babies would achieve.

yeah, those some people who have good working armies, and who want even more out of the game. On the other hand some people have armies that just don't work, and taking ally would only mean you would have to take less and less of the army you want to play, to a point where ally are no longer ally, but they are your army.

Posted in error

 Crimson wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
How about instead of asking to bend the rules for an advantage you just play with the standard rules like everyone else?

He is asking to play by the standard rules. You're the one who wants to use optional stuff for your own benefit.

The 80% of people who voted that they consider RO3 at least the expected standard, if not strictly mandatory, would disagree with you.

And no, it isn't for my own benefit. My army gets better if I can spam mortar HWS, deep striking plasma command squads, etc. But RO3 is good for the health of the game as a whole even if it hurts my win percentage.

 Peregrine wrote:

The 80% of people who voted that they consider RO3 at least the expected standard, if not strictly mandatory, would disagree with you.

Dakka is not representative of the payerbase as a whole and certainly has no authority to decide what the rules are. Only GW can do that.

And no, it isn't for my own benefit. My army gets better if I can spam mortar HWS, deep striking plasma command squads, etc. But RO3 is good for the health of the game as a whole even if it hurts my win percentage.

Oh please! I was talking about relative power, of course every army gets better without Ro3, some are just affected much more. And we all know that you're a complete hypocrite on this 'limitations for balance' thing. At them moment banning FW for balance is suggested, you start shrieking. Yet in many tournaments banning FW is indeed a convention, and doing so is hardly uncommon among the playerbase. You have advocated banning allies, because you your self do no not use them. You're fine with all sort of restrictions as long as they do not actually affect you.

And no, do not bother with 'my preferred restrictions are good for the game, those that I do not like are bad for it.' You are not the arbiter of the good game design, and I have to say you have highly inflated opinion of your grasp of the subject matter.

It always bugged me that people who want to play a certain way, choose armies that are antithetical to that style of play.

The kid who gets upset when my custodes slaughter his ork boyz, is upset that his horde is not as strong as my 3 guys that cost more than 20 of his guys.

The girl who got upset when her 3 knight list got taken down by nids.

If you want to play horde, play horde. But don't play Custodes and demand they cost 17ppm, and you should be able to field squadrons of Telemons. I'm sorry your army was designed by Stevie Wonder on crack, but if you don't like that play style, don't play that army.

I'm sorry the hobby is really expensive, and it sucks to start a new army. Try ebay? But that's how it is.

If you want to play your own game, suggest that. Come up with rules, stats, and whatever, disseminate it. I would love to use my army to play different games. I would enjoy seeing a different self made warhammer.

But I think it's wrong to just look at the majority playing a certain way, and demanding they play your way.

Not every faction gains a lot by having 4+ of the same datasheet in a list. As a BA player I could take 2 instead of 1 smash captain but everything else I would rather just take one off. Even our smash captains have extremely diminishing returns due to extreme CP usage. I like the RO3 since it limits the broken stuff my opponents can do since I have 0 units that are under costed in both points and CP. The smash captain is perhaps a bit under costed in points but not in CP so even having 10 of them wouldnt really do much.

9 mortar squads on the other hand sounds very good. Their only drawback is that you can't take more than 3 of them right now. 0 reason not to fill up max heavy slots with mortars if you had any open. Best spent points there is.

Klickor wrote:
Not every faction gains a lot by having 4+ of the same datasheet in a list. As a BA player I could take 2 instead of 1 smash captain but everything else I would rather just take one off. Even our smash captains have extremely diminishing returns due to extreme CP usage. I like the RO3 since it limits the broken stuff my opponents can do since I have 0 units that are under costed in both points and CP. The smash captain is perhaps a bit under costed in points but not in CP so even having 10 of them wouldnt really do much.

So in other words you are arguing in a favour of a game format which gives you a competitive advantage?

And I am not saying this is wrong. Every format has its winners and losers. But lets try to be objective here and understand that this indeed is the case.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
It always bugged me that people who want to play a certain way, choose armies that are antithetical to that style of play.

The kid who gets upset when my custodes slaughter his ork boyz, is upset that his horde is not as strong as my 3 guys that cost more than 20 of his guys.

The girl who got upset when her 3 knight list got taken down by nids.

If you want to play horde, play horde. But don't play Custodes and demand they cost 17ppm, and you should be able to field squadrons of Telemons. I'm sorry your army was designed by Stevie Wonder on crack, but if you don't like that play style, don't play that army.

I'm sorry the hobby is really expensive, and it sucks to start a new army. Try ebay? But that's how it is.

If you want to play your own game, suggest that. Come up with rules, stats, and whatever, disseminate it. I would love to use my army to play different games. I would enjoy seeing a different self made warhammer.

But I think it's wrong to just look at the majority playing a certain way, and demanding they play your way.

About whom are you talking here?

Not Online!!! wrote:

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
It always bugged me that people who want to play a certain way, choose armies that are antithetical to that style of play.

The kid who gets upset when my custodes slaughter his ork boyz, is upset that his horde is not as strong as my 3 guys that cost more than 20 of his guys.

The girl who got upset when her 3 knight list got taken down by nids.

If you want to play horde, play horde. But don't play Custodes and demand they cost 17ppm, and you should be able to field squadrons of Telemons. I'm sorry your army was designed by Stevie Wonder on crack, but if you don't like that play style, don't play that army.

I'm sorry the hobby is really expensive, and it sucks to start a new army. Try ebay? But that's how it is.

If you want to play your own game, suggest that. Come up with rules, stats, and whatever, disseminate it. I would love to use my army to play different games. I would enjoy seeing a different self made warhammer.

But I think it's wrong to just look at the majority playing a certain way, and demanding they play your way.

About whom are you talking here?

No one person, I find singling out someone leads to trouble. Just more of a general observation. I've heard a lot of people on Dakka advocate for volumes of rule changes, or new "suggestions". I have seen countless posts in this thread stating GW is crap at their job, and their output as far as rules is crap. I have seen people claim they could do it better.

All I am saying is that sounds AWESOME. Lets see it. I'd love it if someone that can, would. Because I think a F2Play living rules set for Warhammer 40k (modded version) would be an amazing thing. I'm totally serious. I'd love to help start a Battlescribe list for races, so people could play with a unified (user-created) list of stats/rules. It's like how Skyrim sucked until the players completely redesigned the game with mods.

But if no one can do that, maybe we should tone down the "GW sucks, GW sucks, GW sucks" incessant chanting around here.

For starters, it would eliminate the BS cost of buying new rules every couple months, and it would make toting the books around a lot easier.

Also, it would help GW see what the players actually want.

For starters, I want my Custodian Guard to be allowed to use Saggy Guard as troops.

 Crimson wrote:

So in other words you are arguing in a favour of a game format which gives you a competitive advantage?

And I am not saying this is wrong. Every format has its winners and losers. But lets try to be objective here and understand that this indeed is the case.

That is true, and it is good. But to me it looks a bit as if we played in an event where there are 10 people 4 from first class in highschool, 3 from last school in highschool and 3 come from sports school and were held up there for 2 years, and take part in school wrestling derby at the age of 19 vs guys who are 15.

It always bugged me that people who want to play a certain way, choose armies that are antithetical to that style of play.

unless your a GW designer or a GW owner, I doubt most people can decide on the rule set your playing with.