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I’ve got to chime in with terrain complaints, and specify that the loss of “area” terrain has been madness. For numerous editions, we’ve been stuck with “True line of sight,” and this has been a major step backward from ideas we understood well for decades.

One cannot represent a forest, because the real thing would be too dense and wild to move miniatures through comfortably. So, you define a perimeter, and say “everything in here is in a forest.”

You toss model trees in to your heart’s content, and move them when you need to for the game, but you don’t move the perimeter of the forest, that’s defined and static.

Now, you define what a forest means, like “models can fire into and out of but not through a forest. Models inside the forest are -1 to hit.

And, that’s it. Now you don’t need a laser pointer to see if every gun in your knight has line of sight to a unit by swiveling it through every random tree branch and stump. It’s fast, it’s evocative, and it makes trees and ruins actually something that matters!

 Kanluwen wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
The detachment and army construction system, with a smattering of allies.

I think the detachment system is also an example of why GW's rules end up being so bloated - they end up making a pile of bad rules to try and balance out another pile of bad rules.

Initially, we've got a few pages of rules outlining the 10 or so different detachments, with the intention seemingly being to give players as much freedom as possible when it comes to building their army.
But then they decided that players had too much freedom and were (to the surprise of no one except the GW design team) just including as many of the strongest units as possible.

So then we got additional rules - such as restrictions on taking allies in the same detachment, penalties if allies and/or different subfactions are taken in the same detachment, and a hard limit on the number of non-troop units that can be taken in an army as a whole.

The timeline doesn't really work here though.
Rule of 3, for example, was present in the rulebook--it's just specifically called out as what it is: an optional rule for tournament play.

Introduced later via faq, not in the original rules. I got my group to use rule of 2 before they suggested rule of 3. I hope you don't have to face 6+ DPs and maybe that you never had to.

Terrain/Cover.

The implementation right now makes it worthless to all units who don't have good armor saves, large units and units that need to move in order to get range on things/in charge range. When playing orks, cover might as well not exist.

For what I care TLOS should die, I'm so sick of these "can I see this?" arguments.

Not sure which is the worst, as there are so many to choose from.

The inclusion of supersonic jets/aircraft really bothers me. They shouldn't be in the game. Remember how they worked in Epic 40,000... that is how they should work in 40k. They came on from a board edge, move straight forward, anti-aircraft weapons got a chance to shoot, then the flyer bombs/shoots a target it flies over, then flies off the battlefield if it survives. Then it come back on in another turn.

Now we have super sonic jets doing 90 degree turns in a battlefield no bigger than a shopping centre carpark, while being automatically hit by a flame thrower... I think not!

Fw indexes.

Terrain is probably gamemechanic wise the worst.

Stackable -1 are probably the worst interaction of rules.

 stonehorse wrote:
Not sure which is the worst, as there are so many to choose from.

The inclusion of supersonic jets/aircraft really bothers me. They shouldn't be in the game. Remember how they worked in Epic 40,000... that is how they should work in 40k. They came on from a board edge, move straight forward, anti-aircraft weapons got a chance to shoot, then the flyer bombs/shoots a target it flies over, then flies off the battlefield if it survives. Then it come back on in another turn.

Now we have super sonic jets doing 90 degree turns in a battlefield no bigger than a shopping centre carpark, while being automatically hit by a flame thrower... I think not!

I feel this was not reallyt he fault so much of the rules, but that the models where not planned out well for what it seems the Model design seem to have been doing. Some races only have fighters, others have dropcraft of some kind. and then there are hybrids.
Its the sorta thing that comes out of a cool idea, with little direction. Which is kinda sad, since i think Cool Drop craft where a great place for 40k to go. But with races that flat out miss out on it, without good reasons why or with little thought out way to deal with them. It was always sorta going to end up dispointing :( This and terrain my be what i feeling are the worst at moment.
But i think this kinda shifts around a bit as i think more about things in the game.

Maybe the leave no model behind, but also Rule of Cool design that the people designing the models seem to go by is the worst. Some army's just not cool enough to get models up to the game they are playing it seems.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
The detachment and army construction system, with a smattering of allies.

I think the detachment system is also an example of why GW's rules end up being so bloated - they end up making a pile of bad rules to try and balance out another pile of bad rules.

Initially, we've got a few pages of rules outlining the 10 or so different detachments, with the intention seemingly being to give players as much freedom as possible when it comes to building their army.
But then they decided that players had too much freedom and were (to the surprise of no one except the GW design team) just including as many of the strongest units as possible.

So then we got additional rules - such as restrictions on taking allies in the same detachment, penalties if allies and/or different subfactions are taken in the same detachment, and a hard limit on the number of non-troop units that can be taken in an army as a whole.

The timeline doesn't really work here though.
Rule of 3, for example, was present in the rulebook--it's just specifically called out as what it is: an optional rule for tournament play.

The more logical solution is to remove the ability for armies to take non-specialist detachments as an "allied" contingent.

Fixing it would be as simple as:

Your army cannot contain a Battalion, Brigade, Supreme Command, or Flyer Wing detachment that is not what you have declared as your 'primary' detachment. Allied Detachments can include:
Auxiliary Support Detachments[Yes, the -1 CP options]
Vanguard Detachments
Spearhead Detachments
Outrider Detachments
Patrol Detachments

I think aircraft rules should essentially be ditched, to the point where they are just regular flying vehicles and act accordingly. A bit like say helicopters would be (which are a more realistic choice for what the unit "does"). Make them all hover - even if they are clearly supersonic jets that should be covering the battlefield in seconds.

Realistically yes, the model should come in, fly over, throw some dakka, maybe get shot and fly off the board. Then attack again in two turns time. But you essentially wouldn't need a model - and thats not going to work in a mini game.

So yes, aircraft doing doughnuts above a parking lot is stupid. But then 40k generally collapses if you get too literal about what is happening on the table.

Tyel wrote:
I think aircraft rules should essentially be ditched, to the point where they are just regular flying vehicles and act accordingly. A bit like say helicopters would be (which are a more realistic choice for what the unit "does"). Make them all hover - even if they are clearly supersonic jets that should be covering the battlefield in seconds.

Realistically yes, the model should come in, fly over, throw some dakka, maybe get shot and fly off the board. Then attack again in two turns time. But you essentially wouldn't need a model - and thats not going to work in a mini game.

So yes, aircraft doing doughnuts above a parking lot is stupid. But then 40k generally collapses if you get too literal about what is happening on the table.

I would like to see both, even if a mini is only on for short moments at time. If its making a impact on the game that is fine. Realistically its similar to drop pods, the rules for such could be a creator or a template. But having them add onto the battlefield is a desirable outcome.
And i think if they had rules for the the supersonic fighters, and how they engage. It could be really cool and ad lots to the way the game plays, Even if they are all reserved to a higher points bracket. Cannot get a fighter untill you have 1500 points in a faction on the table.
Then you could have the other types, distinct in the rules they utilize. Could see dropships and other air vehicles having things like deep strike Would be awesome and worth the rules investment i feel.

With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

morgoth wrote:
With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

Why is the rule of 3 bad?

 kastelen wrote:

morgoth wrote:
With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

Why is the rule of 3 bad?

Because it's a blanket ban that exists to restrict two things that were actually problematic (Flyrant-spam, Tau Commander-spam), was so ineffectual at restricting them that Tau Commanders required an extra restriction (there are about eight Tau Commander datasheets, counting Forge World), and because it applies wildly unevenly across armies (why can a Guard army take nine Leman Russes, but a Space Marine army can only take three Predators?).

 kastelen wrote:

morgoth wrote:
With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

Why is the rule of 3 bad?

Its not, B.c then you get crap lists like 14 DE Ravagers, or 9 Flyrants, anyone else that says otherwise doesn't understand.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Fw indexes.

Terrain is probably gamemechanic wise the worst.

Stackable -1 are probably the worst interaction of rules.

The stacking of -1 to hit is only an issue because of the refusal to be on from D6.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 kastelen wrote:

morgoth wrote:
With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

Why is the rule of 3 bad?

Its not, B.c then you get crap lists like 14 DE Ravagers, or 9 Flyrants, anyone else that says otherwise doesn't understand.

You mean the units that just need to be directly nerfed? Big think.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Fw indexes.

Terrain is probably gamemechanic wise the worst.

Stackable -1 are probably the worst interaction of rules.

The stacking of -1 to hit is only an issue because of the refusal to be on from D6.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 kastelen wrote:

morgoth wrote:
With the inherent unfairness of the associated CP bonuses, I think the battle-forged detachment based army is one of the worst offenders.

Everything should be Unbound and everyone gets as many CP whether they have access to cheap units or not.

Goodbye loyal32, goodbye battalions, let's see what crazy ideas people really want to play instead of auto-take conclusions from a biased rule system.

(And of course the rule of 3 is one of the worst ideas ever. It just tastes so salty even salt has less salt in it.)

As for extreme competitive lists, they've always been FOTM crazy stuff anyway so it won't make a difference.

Why is the rule of 3 bad?

Its not, B.c then you get crap lists like 14 DE Ravagers, or 9 Flyrants, anyone else that says otherwise doesn't understand.

You mean the units that just need to be directly nerfed? Big think.

They dont tho, as someone that plays both, there are times all 3 ravagers dies turn 1, and Flyrants are not as good as you think they are. I stopped taking flyrants.

Worst Rules:

-IGOUGO: We need alternating activations or alternating sub-phases

-Psychic system (oversimplified, basically a special rule that has a 50/50 shot of going off. No interactive dice management system, bluffing etc. Also, mortal wounds only? common)

-Morale System: Why does this even exist? The morale system was fine before, the problem is that every army had a special rule that ignored it so nobody ever used it.

-Character targetting rules: Yep, this is stupid. Why did we lose the independant character rules? They were completely fine, much better than "sorry you can't shoot my Lord because this one infantry dude is closer"

-Character Auras: You know whats better than making Death Stars? Death Armies! Yep, now basically your whole army can re-roll to hit/to wound. It's perfect, shouldn't cause balance issues or slow down the game at all...Characters should only be able to affect 1 unit per turn.

-Re-roll/modifier interactions: I called this on the first day. Did these guys not even put any thought into how these rules with interact? What complete garbage.

-Terrain: Good...Lord...1 page of rules in the rulebook ain't going to cover this guys. Sorry to break it to you, you can't write a game like 40K with only 12 pages, it just ain't happening.

-No USR's: Nobody in their right mind would organize a game without USR's

-Command Point generation linked to detachments: You should start off with a base amount of command points and gain them for destroying enemy units, or taking objectives etc.

-Strategems should be one use only. You should have to make a hard in game decision about when to use strategems, not just spam them as much as you can. They should be important game changing moves that you can only use once.

-Stacking modifiers/special rules: Units should only be able to benefit from aura's/modifiers twice in one phase.

-Remove Re-rolls: At this point, there's so many re-rolls for everything it's just turned the game in to a slog. Just get rid of it.

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
Worst Rules:

-IGOUGO: We need alternating activations or alternating sub-phases

-Psychic system (oversimplified, basically a special rule that has a 50/50 shot of going off. No interactive dice management system, bluffing etc. Also, mortal wounds only? common)

-Morale System: Why does this even exist? The morale system was fine before, the problem is that every army had a special rule that ignored it so nobody ever used it.

-Character targetting rules: Yep, this is stupid. Why did we lose the independant character rules? They were completely fine, much better than "sorry you can't shoot my Lord because this one infantry dude is closer"

-Character Auras: You know whats better than making Death Stars? Death Armies! Yep, now basically your whole army can re-roll to hit/to wound. It's perfect, shouldn't cause balance issues or slow down the game at all...Characters should only be able to affect 1 unit per turn.

-Re-roll/modifier interactions: I called this on the first day. Did these guys not even put any thought into how these rules with interact? What complete garbage.

-Terrain: Good...Lord...1 page of rules in the rulebook ain't going to cover this guys. Sorry to break it to you, you can't write a game like 40K with only 12 pages, it just ain't happening.

-No USR's: Nobody in their right mind would organize a game without USR's

-Command Point generation linked to detachments: You should start off with a base amount of command points and gain them for destroying enemy units, or taking objectives etc.

-Strategems should be one use only. You should have to make a hard in game decision about when to use strategems, not just spam them as much as you can. They should be important game changing moves that you can only use once.

-Stacking modifiers/special rules: Units should only be able to benefit from aura's/modifiers twice in one phase.

-Remove Re-rolls: At this point, there's so many re-rolls for everything it's just turned the game in to a slog. Just get rid of it.

Simplifying the core rules was a huge mistake in hindsight. They realized they had to introduce complexity from somewhere to keep the game from becoming a goo goo gaga themepark. So it became about all these synergies and modifiers.

There's also not enough impediments to shooting/charging across the table so transports are no longer mandatory. With that and the constant point cuts, there's more models than ever on the table (I'm sure they love the sales though)

Wounding vehicles. If we're going to give a land raider wounds and a toughness value now, the wounding table needs adjusting so you can't wound it with a zogging boltgun!

Overwatch

Being able to leave combat with no negatives (particularly flyers)

In many cases these make assault a largely worthless endeavor.

Terrain, IMHO, is the major factor ruining 40K.

We need solid, well-defined terrain rules, along with a system to define how the table should be set up in a more consistent way.

I'd happily pay for a whole book to do this. Make bunkers, fortifications etc. actually good for once. Have faction specific terrain (I'm looking at you tyranids!).

This greatly reduces the IGOUGO, gunline and op shooting issues the game currently has.

Almost everyone has mentioned terrain, but I have a specific beef with close combat inside and around terrain.

The CC rules are written as if the game was intended to be played by flat circular and oval tokens with no height on a flat horizontal plane with no elevation and no obstacles.

Anything more complex than that and it becomes a slog with many broken and hilarious scenarios. Hilarious for the defender, of course.

 Brotherjulian wrote:
Wounding vehicles. If we're going to give a land raider wounds and a toughness value now, the wounding table needs adjusting so you can't wound it with a zogging boltgun!

A boltgun has a 1.8% chance to wound a land raider, you need 87 marines in rapid fire range for five turns to kill a landraider. Please let this urban myth die.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Brotherjulian wrote:
Wounding vehicles. If we're going to give a land raider wounds and a toughness value now, the wounding table needs adjusting so you can't wound it with a zogging boltgun!

A boltgun has a 1.8% chance to wound a land raider, you need 87 marines in rapid fire range for five turns to kill a landraider. Please let this urban myth die.

How is it a myth if it's true...

Because even if you somehow are in a situation where you would shoot a landraider with boltguns over anything else (i.e. throw those shots away), you won't wound it in the vast majority of your games.

Worst single rule?

Rerolls before modifiers

That said, in general the single biggest issue is the lack of a defined scale, trying to make the difference between an infantryman's mace and an axe matter in a game where a tank battalion is facing off against a lance of Battlemechs. This stretched scale, trying to encompasse everything, is how most of the rules oddities arise. Define the scale better and a lot of the need to smear stuff behind abstraction goes away.

Dandelion wrote:
Ignoring the turn structure, I feel that invulnerable saves don't fit the current AP system and are detrimental to balance.
Previously, AP would outright ignore armor, so a termie would have no save vs plasma; this was mitigated by invulns which created a step down where you go from a 2+ to a 5+ to prevent termies being too fragile to such weapons. In 8th, the plasma brings a termie to a 5+ save without the invuln. So the step down currently is already built into the system.

Of course, GW decided to hold on to invulns which creates a bit of a problem: high AP weapons are seriously affected while low AP weapons don't care. If I shoot a Knight with a melta, the 4++ completely neuters meltas primary advantage. But an autocannon is completely unaffected.

So, I'd delete invulns and replace them with increased sv, T, W and the occasional -1 to hit: Knight too fragile? Give it more wounds. Stormshield? Gives +1sv etc...

This is a real winner idea IMO. Invo saves are the worst thing from a balancing prospective. It makes it impossible to balance 2+ saves and 3+ saves and weapons with very good AP.

In general I think Some things should have an invo save but it should be maxed at 5++ and it should be very rare (elite hero type models). Being hard to kill should be a factor of toughness and wounds and save.

 Jidmah wrote:
Because even if you somehow are in a situation where you would shoot a landraider with boltguns over anything else (i.e. throw those shots away), you won't wound it in the vast majority of your games.

But you can which is the problem.

Demons getting to auto win vs grey knights because they get to resummon dead units if grey knights killed them.

pm713 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Because even if you somehow are in a situation where you would shoot a landraider with boltguns over anything else (i.e. throw those shots away), you won't wound it in the vast majority of your games.

But you can which is the problem.

Why is it a problem outside "you can do it now"?

If you launch that many mini propelled rockets into a vehicle you would likely cause a bit of damage in the real world.

Chapter Tactics.