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Horde armies don't slow the game down, armies that are being played slowly slow the game down

removing the blast templates made the game play faster as you no longer needed maximised spacing etc.

I've run hordes for a while in several games, my turns are usually a lot shorter than my "elite" opponents, heck I've deployed faster against some (true less often in 40k though).

remove a lot of the re-rolls and more elite armies will take less time, but it will still be the speed of the player.

Hordes are good specifically because it forces some variability, if all armies were small elite armies they would all focus on killing small elite armies - as it is running a horde can shake things up, and that also benefits the elite armies

 Gregor Samsa wrote:


As in:

For the love of the Warp:

Stop
Buying
Space
Marines

I have a small Dark Angels faction, which I never, ever use, largely because...It is just enough with the space marines.

Cheers!

Do you even 40k bro?

 Gregor Samsa wrote:
The problem with hordes is, imo, largely a result of scale and abstraction. Even with hordey armies: orks/nids etc... there aren't enough models they can bring to really function as a "horde" relative to the amount of shots/firepower Space Marines can bring.

As usual with GW, the problem lies in having every xeno faction being largely a foil for Space Marines to annihilate in epic lore stories.

With the points increase in 9th, I think this will only get worse. What will happen with less models over all is that hordes would feel even less of a horde, largely because of the very relevant housekeeping issues (takes a lot of time to move and arrange hundreds of models on a board).

So it seems that unless the horde keyword confers some very gamey effects, 40k is spinning its wheels in exactly the same place it has always been: way too many space marines making for boring and tactically uninspired play styles.

Ultimately, because GW is a business, I don't fault them. They supply people's demand for fantasy juice. At some point the cycle has to be broken.

As in:

For the love of the Warp:

Stop
Buying
Space
Marines

I have a small Dark Angels faction, which I never, ever use, largely because...It is just enough with the space marines.

Cheers!

Yeah, who knew that if you make 1/2 of the factions in the game space marines, then proceed to make space marines immune to mechanics that you build into your game (e.g. morale) then those mechanics will become largely meaningless and you may as well not have them. WILD stuff.

Look, I am of the opinion that if the mechanics actually support it I would LOVE for pretty much every horde unit to be bumped up in points. I think Grots and Brims are pretty comfy at 3ppm, but I think they shoudl be just about the only things in that bracket, and I would love to see a game where we can have 4-5ppm nid gribbles, 6ppm GEQ, 8-10ppm guardians/kabalites/ork boyz/lesser daemons, you know the nice sliding progression between "super cheap horde infantry that does basically nothing" to "medium infantry defined by the space marine" that we had in previous editions.

The problem is, every mechanic previewed so far benefits smaller, elite units much, MUCH more than horde units. To make horde units actually useful, you'd want soemthing like:

1) terrain rules that proportionally benefit infantry that start out with lighter protection. This is why cover saves were 4+ for SOOOOOOOOO many editions - it's the perfect spot to put them in. It provides marines protection, but ONLY against weapons that would ordinarily be wiping them out, while orks, guardsmen, guardians, etc etc actually get a boost to their defenses for being in the terrain.

2) morale rules that you can mitigate by having more models in your squad. bonus points if you also redesign morale to be something that reduces rather than increases lethality, like it does in nearly every other game in existence that has a morale mechanic. Don't have morale just throw down mortal wounds like soldiers die of a heart attack in the field, make it a sliding scale that causes units to move slower, shoot worse, and potentially even not act at all. And for feth's sake don't just give every faction a way to totally mitigate it holy crap why does GW keep doing this how many ING editions have we had where GW designed a morale system and then spent the whole edition giving basically every. single. goddamn. faction. a way to not play with it at all?

The problem is, in the past rather than create these roles for troops and give them a situation where they can meaningfully compete (i.e. where both sides are dug in to terrain, light infantry gets an advantage!) GW has opted to either require them, or grant them bizarre conditional advanages that allowed them to punch WAY above their weight class, like the 8th ed lockdown rules or the 7th ed "vehicles always use rear armor in melee" rules.

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

leopard wrote:
Horde armies don't slow the game down, armies that are being played slowly slow the game down

Of course it depends on the player, there are fast and slow players. But 50 models usually take less time to manage than 200 models, if both players are equally fast.

 p5freak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.

lol, you are aware that the orkz literally don't do half the stuff you complained about taking time yet you rolled more reactionary dice then the bloody unit would roll for attacks yes that is hyperbolic but still-

 p5freak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

leopard wrote:
Horde armies don't slow the game down, armies that are being played slowly slow the game down

Of course it depends on the player, there are fast and slow players. But 50 models usually take less time to manage than 200 models, if both players are equally fast.

You mean you are force to play the game with the rules you have? If his turns are taking twice as long then he is a slow player and he would have been slow no matter the army. PS No major tournament limit models. Limiting model count is as bad as limiting Knights.

And no 50 mdoels dont take the same time if they are rolling 4x the dice.

 p5freak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.

If you want the model count to be less, that's perfectly fine and makes sense.

But if you give light infantry units bigger point hikes than elite units, and make the rules of the edition favor elite units even MORE than the previous edition, then you just will never see light infantry units used.

That's the dichotomy here. No person who plays a cheaper army ENJOYS having to field 200 orks instead of 150 orks to play a 2k game, we just want them to be actually functional at whatever point value you choose to apply to them, rather than just costing more and being unusable.

If you just hike the cost on them, their cost will just slowly drop down throughout the edition with Chapter Approveds, and you'll end up in the same spot you're in now.

....I would argue though that things takin way too long is a problem with 40k in general, rather than just hordes. how many shots roll, Hit roll, wound roll, save roll, remove models, with rerolls exploding dice stratagems and gak all in there makes everything take a crazy long time. especially when you have gak like aggressors putting down 18 shots per model.But that's not a problem that's going to be resolved with 9th, unless they do stuff like take out Overwatch or reconfigure it so it isn't a fullly resolved shooting attack. THat problem is baked into every datasheet, and in particular datasheets like Ork Boyz, Punisher tanks, Aggressors, Dakkabots, and every other unit that requires a bucket of freaking dice to use.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 p5freak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

leopard wrote:
Horde armies don't slow the game down, armies that are being played slowly slow the game down

Of course it depends on the player, there are fast and slow players. But 50 models usually take less time to manage than 200 models, if both players are equally fast.

You mean you are force to play the game with the rules you have? If his turns are taking twice as long then he is a slow player and he would have been slow no matter the army. PS No major tournament limit models. Limiting model count is as bad as limiting Knights.

And no 50 mdoels dont take the same time if they are rolling 4x the dice.

I use the GW dice app when I play my orks and it is a god damn dream to resolve die rolls instantly. Since it's an "official warhammer app" few people have problems with it I've found.

To bad its Iphone only.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
PS, its not on Android anymore (and hasn't for a couple years) b.c its outdated and no longer supported.

Not Online!!! wrote:


lol, you are aware that the orkz literally don't do half the stuff you complained about taking time yet you rolled more reactionary dice then the bloody unit would roll for attacks yes that is hyperbolic but still-

Thats weird, because one ork player does it exactly like i described. 2x30 boys advance towards me, 1 unit of 30 boys gets da jumped, sometimes they make the charge, sometimes they dont. 10 intercessors with auspex scan cant kill 30 boys.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

And no 50 mdoels dont take the same time if they are rolling 4x the dice.

50 intercessors roll less dice than 200 orks, even with reroll everything, and reroll 1s to wound. Ars Bellica limits the number of models. Its not a major tournament, its a competitive tournament format for the tabletop game Warhammer 40.000.

Thats b.c you are comparing 1400pts vs 850pts.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
To bad its Iphone only.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
PS, its not on Android anymore (and hasn't for a couple years) b.c its outdated and no longer supported.

Ah, mine must be out of date then. But i mean, it's a dice rolling app. I'm sure there's a half dozen you could use to simulate rolls, rerolls, whatever.

Admittedly I just skimmed the thread, so apologies if this was covered, but I keep seeing it come up -

"I'm so tired of the horde armies and all the dice they roll ...etc etc" ....

Do people not use dice roller apps? As someone else said - "Horde armies don't play slow - armies that are played slow, play slow". I've seen 1000 point games between two marine players take forever, and I've seen 200+ combined models on the table where the game took hardly any time at all.

Generally speaking, and whether players want to admit/understand it or not - three things slow the game down. Re-rolls, strats, and not knowing the rules of the game/the rules of your army well enough. Army size has significantly less to do with it.

Tycho wrote:
Admittedly I just skimmed the thread, so apologies if this was covered, but I keep seeing it come up -

"I'm so tired of the horde armies and all the dice they roll ...etc etc" ....

Do people not use dice roller apps? As someone else said - "Horde armies don't play slow - armies that are played slow, play slow". I've seen 1000 point games between two marine players take forever, and I've seen 200+ combined models on the table where the game took hardly any time at all.

Generally speaking, and whether players want to admit/understand it or not - three things slow the game down. Re-rolls, strats, and not knowing the rules of the game/the rules of your army well enough. Army size has significantly less to do with it.

In general they don't. I think I've seen one used maybe twice in the whole time they've been available. Not sure if that's just because people haven't really figured out how useful they are or whether people are suspicious of their quality. There's also the fact that it's pretty much a GW-only problem since the vast majority of other wargames don't roll so many dice in the first place. That's where GW should be concentrating their efforts, IMO, but it seems 9th isn't changing those basic mechanics.

Slipspace wrote:

Tycho wrote:
Admittedly I just skimmed the thread, so apologies if this was covered, but I keep seeing it come up -

"I'm so tired of the horde armies and all the dice they roll ...etc etc" ....

Do people not use dice roller apps? As someone else said - "Horde armies don't play slow - armies that are played slow, play slow". I've seen 1000 point games between two marine players take forever, and I've seen 200+ combined models on the table where the game took hardly any time at all.

Generally speaking, and whether players want to admit/understand it or not - three things slow the game down. Re-rolls, strats, and not knowing the rules of the game/the rules of your army well enough. Army size has significantly less to do with it.

In general they don't. I think I've seen one used maybe twice in the whole time they've been available. Not sure if that's just because people haven't really figured out how useful they are or whether people are suspicious of their quality. There's also the fact that it's pretty much a GW-only problem since the vast majority of other wargames don't roll so many dice in the first place. That's where GW should be concentrating their efforts, IMO, but it seems 9th isn't changing those basic mechanics.

I recall flames of war having a pretty similar structure, but at this point I'm sure the volume of dice rolling in 40k has massively outstripped it. I haven't played it since like 6th ed 40k era so couldn't tell you for sure.

As someone who has seen it used against them. Slow play is slow play, but it is a lot easier with hordes. Timed play is a major factor too, but I can tell stories about timed tournament games where an ork player ended the game turn two and won on objectives by playing 6 30 boy troops where the player exhaustively measured each model's movement precisely, and used all the time allotted to both players - refusing the other player time to play the game.

In 8th at least, there is no reason not to play hordes, as movement trays are a perfectly valid way to move models if you want to. With the absence of blast templates and facing not mattering there is little to no reason not to use them to speed the game up.

In 9th, there is likely going to be an issue with units that have 19+ models. But the only thing that I have seen is the thing that says that units with more than 18 wounds don't benefit from cover.

 carldooley wrote:
As someone who has seen it used against them. Slow play is slow play, but it is a lot easier with hordes. Timed play is a major factor too, but I can tell stories about timed tournament games where an ork player ended the game turn two and won on objectives by playing 6 30 boy troops where the player exhaustively measured each model's movement precisely, and used all the time allotted to both players - refusing the other player time to play the game.

In 8th at least, there is no reason not to play hordes, as movement trays are a perfectly valid way to move models if you want to. With the absence of blast templates and facing not mattering there is little to no reason not to use them to speed the game up.

In 9th, there is likely going to be an issue with units that have 19+ models. But the only thing that I have seen is the thing that says that units with more than 18 wounds don't benefit from cover.

MODELS with 18 wounds. That would have nothing to do with hordes.

 p5freak wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:


lol, you are aware that the orkz literally don't do half the stuff you complained about taking time yet you rolled more reactionary dice then the bloody unit would roll for attacks yes that is hyperbolic but still-

Thats weird, because one ork player does it exactly like i described. 2x30 boys advance towards me, 1 unit of 30 boys gets da jumped, sometimes they make the charge, sometimes they dont. 10 intercessors with auspex scan cant kill 30 boys.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

And no 50 mdoels dont take the same time if they are rolling 4x the dice.

50 intercessors roll less dice than 200 orks, even with reroll everything, and reroll 1s to wound. Ars Bellica limits the number of models. Its not a major tournament, its a competitive tournament format for the tabletop game Warhammer 40.000.

Really now? Because T1, your 50 Intercessors shoot 100-120 shots (depending if you use the Rapid Fire Strat) for...

120 shots
40 rerolls [160]
107 wound rolls [267]
18 rerolls [285]

That's 285 rolls T1.

The Boyz roll... 6 Advance rolls, and they cannot make it to shooting range assuming you were smart and deployed back. But wait! One squad gets Da Jumped! So that's 7 rolls so far.

They then get shot by you with Auspex Scan, for...

40 shots
20 rerolls [60]
30 wound rolls [90]
5 rerolls [95]

The remaining 13 Boys shoot you.

13 shots
2 extra rolls [15]
5 wound rolls [20]

Orks are up to 20 rolls total. Charging makes that 21, rerolling the charge, 22.

If they make it, they roll 39 attacks.

39 attacks
26 wound rolls [65]
13 save rolls [78]

So, counting the save rolls they force as rolls they make, they make a total of 100 rolls T1.
Marines make 95 on Auspex Scan alone, with Rapid Fire strat and Rerolls.

Timed play is a major factor too, but I can tell stories about timed tournament games where an ork player ended the game turn two and won on objectives by playing 6 30 boy troops where the player exhaustively measured each model's movement precisely, and used all the time allotted to both players - refusing the other player time to play the game.

But this was an issue inherent to the tournament rules. Not the horde. A player could easily have done the same w/a few squads of marines. Was a judge not called? Did the tournament not have a scoring system that would have penalized the other player for doing this? If player A was ALLOWED to use all of the time given to BOTH player A and player B - That's strictly an issue with the tourney format you were playing, or possibly an unwillingness to call a judge to intervene. It has nothing what-so-ever to do with anything specifically wrong with Orks.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 p5freak wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:


lol, you are aware that the orkz literally don't do half the stuff you complained about taking time yet you rolled more reactionary dice then the bloody unit would roll for attacks yes that is hyperbolic but still-

Thats weird, because one ork player does it exactly like i described. 2x30 boys advance towards me, 1 unit of 30 boys gets da jumped, sometimes they make the charge, sometimes they dont. 10 intercessors with auspex scan cant kill 30 boys.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

And no 50 mdoels dont take the same time if they are rolling 4x the dice.

50 intercessors roll less dice than 200 orks, even with reroll everything, and reroll 1s to wound. Ars Bellica limits the number of models. Its not a major tournament, its a competitive tournament format for the tabletop game Warhammer 40.000.

Really now? Because T1, your 50 Intercessors shoot 100-120 shots (depending if you use the Rapid Fire Strat) for...

120 shots
40 rerolls [160]
107 wound rolls [267]
18 rerolls [285]

That's 285 rolls T1.

The Boyz roll... 6 Advance rolls, and they cannot make it to shooting range assuming you were smart and deployed back. But wait! One squad gets Da Jumped! So that's 7 rolls so far.

They then get shot by you with Auspex Scan, for...

40 shots
20 rerolls [60]
30 wound rolls [90]
5 rerolls [95]

The remaining 13 Boys shoot you.

13 shots
2 extra rolls [15]
5 wound rolls [20]

Orks are up to 20 rolls total. Charging makes that 21, rerolling the charge, 22.

If they make it, they roll 39 attacks.

39 attacks
26 wound rolls [65]
13 save rolls [78]

So, counting the save rolls they force as rolls they make, they make a total of 100 rolls T1.
Marines make 95 on Auspex Scan alone, with Rapid Fire strat and Rerolls.

Also its 850pts marines vs 1400pts orks.

 Amishprn86 wrote:
Also its 850pts marines vs 1400pts orks.

Well yeah. So half the points for triple the rolling!

Personally I've found the blast weapon adjustments to be baffling, for a couple reasons.

For one, in my entire time playing 8th I very rarely saw anyone play a horde army, especially compared to my experience with previous editions. That I can recall, in 8th I only ever lost to someone playing a horde once and it was an Ork army that worked around the super mobility of old Ghazghkull, Da Jump and Storm Boys. I vaguely recall it being before the Astra Militarum Codex dropped but I'm not sure.

Secondly, especially from the perspective of someone that plays Guard, I've found hordes to be pretty terrible this edition since the moment the Commissar nerf dropped. I ranted at length about this in another thread a while back, but the gulf in effectiveness and efficiency between Guardsmen and something like Custodes is so ridiculously big that unless you're going to try squeeze like 200 Guardsmen on the board and bore your opponent into submission the only reason to take 50-80 Guardsmen or is because you want more chaff to throw onto objectives and more bubblewrap to guard fire support with. I certainly stopped taking any upgrades, priests and extra officers after my experience with custodes. Some people raised the point that the same issue exists with Primaris, which I'm not going to argue against anymore tbh.

They made it impossible to take combined squads, nerfed Conscripts into uselessness, and then gave Commissars a big fat nerf as well. It was understandable that there needed to be some changes what with the nonsense of 150 pt, 50 man fearless conscript blobs at the start of the edition, but instead of carefully adjusting it and fixing it, GW just took a sledgehammer to the whole issue and piled on so many nerfs that noone in their right mind would even bother with the playstyle anymore.

Oh and finally, between the abundance of multi-shot weapon units (hello, aggressors) that wipe the floor with hordes anyway, and the fact that I spent the better part of this edition dumping well over half of my points into tanks and artillery to pretty good success, it comes across as completely pointless to me. I started playing Russ spam at the very end purely to counter annoying elite model armies with supertough fire support (Knights, Callidus tanks, etc) and now as a free bonus that list is now well suited to curbstomping hordes seeing as how every one of my Russes now gets an automatic 12 shots against any mob of greater than 10 dudes. Oh and as another bonus my tanks can shoot into melee with merely a -1 to hit too now so any poor person playing hordes against me can't even rely on the oldest trick in the book in tying up my stuff in melee, which in a number of tournament games against non-hordes this edition otherwise basically signalled the end of the match for me.

Since about last April I've mainly been playing X-wing purely because I'm tired of the monotony of the game. Every single tournament the main challenge had been working out how to spam high strength/ap/damage guns harder than my opponent can and then gambling that I blew up their heaviest thing before they blew up my heaviest Russes.

I played one game in January I believe where in the first round I lost initiative against a guy with a Knight Crusader, 2-3 Callidus tanks and minimum investment skitarii. It was a clustered urban board with heavy obscurement on one side and I ended up losing my 200+ pt Knight Commander Pask in an executioner on turn one because the Crusader was within range of him by a margin of one inch with the melta and because he fired before Pask did. I then lost at least another Russ to the Callidus tanks. And that signalled game over basically with the rest being going through the motions. Probably the most competitive list I faced this edition that I can remember.

And the reason I had a lot of success this edition is because about 80% of the time I was the one making other people feel like they were going through the motions because I deleted 400~ pts of hard hitters on turn one instead.

But no according to GW the pressing issue is hordes and that multi-shot high strength/ap/damage weapons aren't powerful enough.

Sigh.

I am having a hard time understanding the argument that hordes confer some kind of competitive advantage over elite armies. Surely those edge-cases where a player is able to use army size to "stall" and frustrate the other player is not unique to horde armies. People can do that by slowly flipping through rules, "suddenly" needing to text their partner, bathroom breaks and so on. All of these qualitative factors slow down the game and are not intrinsic to horde players.

From a quantitative perspective focusing on the data provided by unit data sheets, mathhammer, and the results of powergaming tournaments clearly demonstrate the competitive advantage of elite armies.

Providing arguments that the game system should further penalize the already significant challenge of fielding a horde army (time investment and cash investment) will contribute to an even worsening of homogenizing elite style army lists.

I understand the cumbersome nature of dice, but on the other hand one of the essential charms of wargaming is its admittedly gruelling analog nature. Personally I like to roll the dice and engage mentally in the small arithmetic it entails. Certainly there are good ways to reduce the number of dice that are used (end the rerollapalooza). But my crew and I definitely prefer dice in a dice tray to some kind of digital system. 40k's niche is a very "offline" game (before the internet even!). Be careful at how you chip away the foundation as it is perhaps sort of unclear what the cornerstone of this hobby/obsession is.

 Mr.Omega wrote:
Personally I've found the blast weapon adjustments to be baffling, for a couple reasons.

Spoiler:

For one, in my entire time playing 8th I very rarely saw anyone play a horde army, especially compared to my experience with previous editions. That I can recall, in 8th I only ever lost to someone playing a horde once and it was an Ork army that worked around the super mobility of old Ghazghkull, Da Jump and Storm Boys. I vaguely recall it being before the Astra Militarum Codex dropped but I'm not sure.

Secondly, especially from the perspective of someone that plays Guard, I've found hordes to be pretty terrible this edition since the moment the Commissar nerf dropped. I ranted at length about this in another thread a while back, but the gulf in effectiveness and efficiency between Guardsmen and something like Custodes is so ridiculously big that unless you're going to try squeeze like 200 Guardsmen on the board and bore your opponent into submission the only reason to take 50-80 Guardsmen or is because you want more chaff to throw onto objectives and more bubblewrap to guard fire support with. I certainly stopped taking any upgrades, priests and extra officers after my experience with custodes. Some people raised the point that the same issue exists with Primaris, which I'm not going to argue against anymore tbh.

They made it impossible to take combined squads, nerfed Conscripts into uselessness, and then gave Commissars a big fat nerf as well. It was understandable that there needed to be some changes what with the nonsense of 150 pt, 50 man fearless conscript blobs at the start of the edition, but instead of carefully adjusting it and fixing it, GW just took a sledgehammer to the whole issue and piled on so many nerfs that noone in their right mind would even bother with the playstyle anymore.

Oh and finally, between the abundance of multi-shot weapon units (hello, aggressors) that wipe the floor with hordes anyway, and the fact that I spent the better part of this edition dumping well over half of my points into tanks and artillery to pretty good success, it comes across as completely pointless to me. I started playing Russ spam at the very end purely to counter annoying elite model armies with supertough fire support (Knights, Callidus tanks, etc) and now as a free bonus that list is now well suited to curbstomping hordes seeing as how every one of my Russes now gets an automatic 12 shots against any mob of greater than 10 dudes. Oh and as another bonus my tanks can shoot into melee with merely a -1 to hit too now so any poor person playing hordes against me can't even rely on the oldest trick in the book in tying up my stuff in melee, which in a number of tournament games against non-hordes this edition otherwise basically signalled the end of the match for me.

Since about last April I've mainly been playing X-wing purely because I'm tired of the monotony of the game. Every single tournament the main challenge had been working out how to spam high strength/ap/damage guns harder than my opponent can and then gambling that I blew up their heaviest thing before they blew up my heaviest Russes.

I played one game in January I believe where in the first round I lost initiative against a guy with a Knight Crusader, 2-3 Callidus tanks and minimum investment skitarii. It was a clustered urban board with heavy obscurement on one side and I ended up losing my 200+ pt Knight Commander Pask in an executioner on turn one because the Crusader was within range of him by a margin of one inch with the melta and because he fired before Pask did. I then lost at least another Russ to the Callidus tanks. And that signalled game over basically with the rest being going through the motions. Probably the most competitive list I faced this edition that I can remember.

And the reason I had a lot of success this edition is because about 80% of the time I was the one making other people feel like they were going through the motions because I deleted 400~ pts of hard hitters on turn one instead.

But no according to GW the pressing issue is hordes and that multi-shot high strength/ap/damage weapons aren't powerful enough.

Sigh.

Your also playing on of the armies best suited to spamming Mass Random shot,high strength, medium damage shooting.

If you take grinding advance away from Russ's as most other armies have to contend with and it becomes flat D6 shots without catachan rerolls etc D6 shot weapons are avoided like the plage as they aren't currently reliable.

Saying you don't have that issue when you play the army thats been handed the most ways to mitigate bad rolls isnt a shock.

I understand the cumbersome nature of dice, but on the other hand one of the essential charms of wargaming is its admittedly gruelling analog nature.

But like I said earlier - even that limitation is easily over-come. Admittedly, I have not been on the "ITC"/major tourney scene in about a year, but I'm flabbergasted to see people not using dice rollers. They save so much time, and a lot of them also take things like exploding 5s/6s into account as well. Kind of crazy to me that people are actually rolling that amount of dice ...

In my local meta, most players use dice apps for large rolls like that. Saves so much time and space.

Ice_can wrote:

 Mr.Omega wrote:
Personally I've found the blast weapon adjustments to be baffling, for a couple reasons.

Spoiler:

For one, in my entire time playing 8th I very rarely saw anyone play a horde army, especially compared to my experience with previous editions. That I can recall, in 8th I only ever lost to someone playing a horde once and it was an Ork army that worked around the super mobility of old Ghazghkull, Da Jump and Storm Boys. I vaguely recall it being before the Astra Militarum Codex dropped but I'm not sure.

Secondly, especially from the perspective of someone that plays Guard, I've found hordes to be pretty terrible this edition since the moment the Commissar nerf dropped. I ranted at length about this in another thread a while back, but the gulf in effectiveness and efficiency between Guardsmen and something like Custodes is so ridiculously big that unless you're going to try squeeze like 200 Guardsmen on the board and bore your opponent into submission the only reason to take 50-80 Guardsmen or is because you want more chaff to throw onto objectives and more bubblewrap to guard fire support with. I certainly stopped taking any upgrades, priests and extra officers after my experience with custodes. Some people raised the point that the same issue exists with Primaris, which I'm not going to argue against anymore tbh.

They made it impossible to take combined squads, nerfed Conscripts into uselessness, and then gave Commissars a big fat nerf as well. It was understandable that there needed to be some changes what with the nonsense of 150 pt, 50 man fearless conscript blobs at the start of the edition, but instead of carefully adjusting it and fixing it, GW just took a sledgehammer to the whole issue and piled on so many nerfs that noone in their right mind would even bother with the playstyle anymore.

Oh and finally, between the abundance of multi-shot weapon units (hello, aggressors) that wipe the floor with hordes anyway, and the fact that I spent the better part of this edition dumping well over half of my points into tanks and artillery to pretty good success, it comes across as completely pointless to me. I started playing Russ spam at the very end purely to counter annoying elite model armies with supertough fire support (Knights, Callidus tanks, etc) and now as a free bonus that list is now well suited to curbstomping hordes seeing as how every one of my Russes now gets an automatic 12 shots against any mob of greater than 10 dudes. Oh and as another bonus my tanks can shoot into melee with merely a -1 to hit too now so any poor person playing hordes against me can't even rely on the oldest trick in the book in tying up my stuff in melee, which in a number of tournament games against non-hordes this edition otherwise basically signalled the end of the match for me.

Since about last April I've mainly been playing X-wing purely because I'm tired of the monotony of the game. Every single tournament the main challenge had been working out how to spam high strength/ap/damage guns harder than my opponent can and then gambling that I blew up their heaviest thing before they blew up my heaviest Russes.

I played one game in January I believe where in the first round I lost initiative against a guy with a Knight Crusader, 2-3 Callidus tanks and minimum investment skitarii. It was a clustered urban board with heavy obscurement on one side and I ended up losing my 200+ pt Knight Commander Pask in an executioner on turn one because the Crusader was within range of him by a margin of one inch with the melta and because he fired before Pask did. I then lost at least another Russ to the Callidus tanks. And that signalled game over basically with the rest being going through the motions. Probably the most competitive list I faced this edition that I can remember.

And the reason I had a lot of success this edition is because about 80% of the time I was the one making other people feel like they were going through the motions because I deleted 400~ pts of hard hitters on turn one instead.

But no according to GW the pressing issue is hordes and that multi-shot high strength/ap/damage weapons aren't powerful enough.

Sigh.

Your also playing on of the armies best suited to spamming Mass Random shot,high strength, medium damage shooting.

If you take grinding advance away from Russ's as most other armies have to contend with and it becomes flat D6 shots without catachan rerolls etc D6 shot weapons are avoided like the plage as they aren't currently reliable.

Saying you don't have that issue when you play the army thats been handed the most ways to mitigate bad rolls isnt a shock.

Um, what? The point I'm making is that I was taking random shot weapons for use against high toughness and elite targets and now for no good reason the blanket change means they're extremely effective against hordes too.

The fact that its a blanket change is what makes it so silly. Its disproportionate. Yes I'm well aware there are weapons in other armies that are probably hot garbage without the buff. Pointing out that I don't believe that every Leman Russ I take should suddenly double as high grade anti-horde doesn't mean I don't think those other random shot weapons shouldn't be balanced, adjusted and fixed.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Really now? Because T1, your 50 Intercessors shoot 100-120 shots (depending if you use the Rapid Fire Strat) for...

120 shots
40 rerolls [160]
107 wound rolls [267]
18 rerolls [285]

Thats not whats going to happen. If the marine player gets T1 the ork player will set up his boys more than 36" away. 50 intercessors will roll 0 dice.

 JNAProductions wrote:

They then get shot by you with Auspex Scan, for...

40 shots
20 rerolls [60]
30 wound rolls [90]
5 rerolls [95]

How do 10 intercessors get 40 shots with auspex scan ? They get 20 with bolt rifles, and 30 with auto bolt rifles.

Tycho 789228 10831683 wrote:

But like I said earlier - even that limitation is easily over-come. Admittedly, I have not been on the "ITC"/major tourney scene in about a year, but I'm flabbergasted to see people not using dice rollers. They save so much time, and a lot of them also take things like exploding 5s/6s into account as well. Kind of crazy to me that people are actually rolling that amount of dice ...

In my local meta, most players use dice apps for large rolls like that. Saves so much time and space.

Not everyone wants to risk taking a tablet to a store, and not everyone has a phone that can run apps on it. Sometimes both things happen. Plus you would have to be very sure of the quality of the roller used by the other person.

 p5freak wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Really now? Because T1, your 50 Intercessors shoot 100-120 shots (depending if you use the Rapid Fire Strat) for...

120 shots
40 rerolls [160]
107 wound rolls [267]
18 rerolls [285]

Thats not whats going to happen. If the marine player gets T1 the ork player will set up his boys more than 36" away. 50 intercessors will roll 0 dice.

 JNAProductions wrote:

They then get shot by you with Auspex Scan, for...

40 shots
20 rerolls [60]
30 wound rolls [90]
5 rerolls [95]

How do 10 intercessors get 40 shots with auspex scan ? They get 20 with bolt rifles, and 30 with auto bolt rifles.

Rapid Fire Strat. And if the Orks deploy 36" away, they delay the inevitable. You're not Da Jumping all 7 squads each turn-if you do just one a turn, you'll get eaten piecemeal.

Melee units have to close in. Ranged units don't.

 p5freak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

So, what is it p5freak? Are those orks wasting your time through their re-rolls? Because of their exploding sixes in combat? Or do they have +1 to charges?
Did you forget to use your stratagem to shoot at models arriving from reserves? Was the TF cannon gunner on a break?
How are you hiding 30 32mm bases out of LoS while also advancing across the board in two turns? Did you move forward towards your enemy so he has a 100% charge after moving 10"+2d6?
What were those other troop slots doing while 630 points of boyz spread across 3 slots were walking up the board to maul your 170 point unit? What was the rest of the army doing?

They are wasting my time because i have to counter them. Im forced to play auspex scan on them, im forced to fire my TFCs at them. Im forced to fire WWs artillery at them. Im forced to counter them with lots of dice, which adds to the insanely huge numbers they roll. When i play against an ork player with SM his turn takes about twice as long as my turn. Some tournaments limit the number of models, and thats a good thing. I wish that had been a matched play rule. Now the number will be limited by points increases.

Poor you, please show me on this bandai toy where the orks hurt you.

You do realize that you have to shoot the same amount of shots to kill similar amounts of points regardless of model count, right?
To bad that stupid ork play just isn't lying down to die and instead puts pressure on you.

Tournament limiting models is on the same level as tournaments banning primaris marines - a stupid house rule made by people who have no clue how the game works.
Get a chess clock from your TO if you think your opponent is being to slow, the amount of models you are whining about can easily be played without hitting the clock.

 p5freak wrote:
Horde armies are bad because they slow down the game. They take a lot of time to set up, and to move. Its not fun to see your opponent roll 1000+ dice during a game. Blast weapons, point increases, vehicles being able to shoot in melee, will greatly decrease the number of models, which means less set up time, less movement time, less dice to roll.

I think you exactly right. If you watch the Table Top Tactics guys vox cast talking about play testing 9th (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLM6O6Aglc) you can see a consistent theme from GW. Play the game faster. The Blast rule is just an extension of that. It 1. helps reduce large squads faster (reducing the number of models being moved, dice rolled etc.) and 2. discourages you from relying on large squads as the base of your army as you know they will get killed quicker, harder to hide etc. Now you can debate whether this is fair or not to the player who wants to bring 3 x 30 mobs of whatever, but clearly GW is trying to discourage this for, what I think, is the purpose of faster games.

This is also why vehicles are getting better. it is much quicker to play with 2 tanks and one infantry squad than even 3- 10 man infantry squads. Also the blocking of line of sight plays into faster games, which might not sound right, but with more units unable to see or be seen, that is less shots per turn, so like turn one and two your whole army is not shooting, maybe only half, meaning less dice rolled. Smaller tables make so units get engaged faster, aka killed or kill faster, and thus the game plays faster. Aircraft can move off the table so you don't need to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to move them is faster. More points per unit, less units is faster.

To me the main focus of 9th is that a 2000 point game should play in 3 hours and the overall changes are all geared toward that goal. Again, if this is the best course is debatable, but I think it is clear that is GWs focus. I for one love this as I don't usually have a ton of time to play, and ensuring games are in a 3 hours span or less will be great for me. I do feel bad for people who like large 100 man armies that represent a hoard charging across the battlefield, as I do think this edition is not going to be kind to them, and I believe that is solely due to GW wanting to speed up the game.