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One thing that I notice in Warhammer compared to other wargames of a similar scale is that there is that there are so many rules for slight varieties of weaponry and troops. Take for instance the humble bolter. There are countless versions of what essentially are slightly different patterns of the same weapon and they could very easily all be under one and the same profile. The same goes with melee weapons, particularly power weapons. I recall a time when there was just a general power weapon profile, and now you have a ton of different ones that all are slightly different. That not only makes WYSIWYG much more difficult (oh no! This guy has a mace, instead of a sword!), but it also adds a lot of quite needless complication where there are so many more rules to remember even though the final impact would be quite small. This impact can be overblown by the D6-based system, where, to represent these differences, you need a huge

And then there are (sub)faction traits. There are very many of them, and honestly, they don't add that much to the game. They give another difference between varieties of the same troops, but funnily enough, these can be pretty large for what they're meant to represent. For instance, I would guess that most Space Marines would have a fairly similar level of training to each other. Another example is for my guardsmen. Catachans for instance have +1 to their strength. They indeed are more muscular than the alternatives, but a single point of strength is quite a thing in 40k. It puts them at the same level as on ork, which doesn't make any sense because a basic Boy still has arms thicker than the whole guardsman.

So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

We don’t. But that’s apparently what people want...

I think you're right. One thing that has been lost with GW's push for every subfaction to have its own special rules is player creativity. It used to be that GW encouraged you to make your guys your own through modelling, painting and thematic army building. Now it feels like if it doesn't have its own set of super-special rules it doesn't exist. GW themselves contribute to this with their "no model no rules" policy.

Most non-GW games manage perfectly fine with around half of the stats GW uses for their units and probably about 10% of the variation they have in their weapons and I think this directly contributes to the game's imbalances. Take SM as an example. They have so many units, weapons and subfaction rules that it's impossible to balance properly. Sure, you can nerf IH, or RG with specific FAQs and errata but then you just end up with Salamanders, or White Scars as the next broken thing, because the proliferation of special subfaction rules means you can't possibly keep track of every point of balance. Not to keep focussing on SM, but the Incursor/Infiltrator divide is a really weird one. They both have Bolters, with slightly different special rules that could easily have been unit special rules (or just not bothered with special rules because you don't have to have any) and they both infiltrate the same way. The only real, meaningful difference is the 12" DS deny for one unit vs the knife fighting of the other. But is that really necessary? Would anyone have been annoyed if one or other of those rules didn't exist and we just had a single infiltrating Primaris Troops unit?

I think the main problem with reducing all these special rules and different weapons is it would even more obviously expose how shallow the core of 40k is. That added complexity gives the illusion of depth. i think 9th's mission rules have helped add more depth to the game but it isn't helped by the needless extra complexity GW piles onto everything.

In theory - but not necessarily in practice - chapter tactics give a range of models more depth, because units X, Y and Z may be technically better with rules A and B, but units K, J and L may be better with rules C and D, which means two people can build a fundamentally different army from the same book without going "yeah, your list is just a bad version of mine".

How successful GW has actually been at achieving this can be debated - I think there have been more failures than successes. (Possibly due to the silliness of going "we need at least 6 options for a faction that can't possibly be built 6 different ways"). But hey, some books have had 2-3 viable options.

As for the endless versions of bolters... I think that's GW artificially pushing "your dudes" down people's throat. There is a view (possibly correctly) - that the old way of doing things (i.e. "these are normal guys. These are guys with pistols and swords. These are guys with jetpacks. These are veteran guys, so can take some more special weapons") was boring.

Arguably by giving unique items you can add a greater variation between the units, so everything doesn't feel much the same.

On the other hand having almost every model in the game with its own specific wargear feels kind of bad for the fluff.

 Dolnikan wrote:
So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

You don't see value, but the majority of players do. Narrative players love minutia and detail which reflects the lore, helps tie the gameplay closer to the narrative, and allows you to explore further into the setting. Casual players like having options to choose from and ways to personalize their units. GW continues to add more options and rules because players like them, ergo it helps drive excitement and sell more product.

(And no, even if the current rules do a poor job of meeting these desires that is not a valid justification for removing options and customization. That just means the rules should be reevaluated.)

Also having insane amounts of minutia has been part of the game's spirit since the beginning. People like to point out one or two points in the games history where something like power weapons shared a profile (which have also been split since iirc 3rd edition? so over half the game's history), but ignore the morass of other rules that has existed in basically every edition. Even the current Space Marine "Build a Chapter" rules are just a modern version of the 4th edition codex's chapter specialization rules.

Also despite Index 8e's "most balanced edition ever" I remember hearing and seeing a lot of comments after a few months about how the game felt bland and people were waiting for codexes to arrive and bring customization back.

So yeah, what does it add? Flavor.
Because most people like spice in their life...

Think of 40k as Lego with rules. The pleasure is in building and painting.

Whenever you dive into actual gameplay, you'll be disappointed.

In many ways 8th and 9th edition harks back to the original game with many call back units and minis appearing.

Detailed weapons were present from the very start with a huge variety of different weapons available - with the main difference that for the most part they were open to all. So anyone could use a Bolter - Orks, Marines, Sisters, Guardsmen, Tyranids.

For the most part I like it - but it is noticable that new units, especially Marine always seem to have to have a "new" gun and this does cause a fair bit of bloat and balance issues.

To be fair I prefer having a longger range bolter called a Bolt Rifle more than endless variations of Blood Missiles and Wolf-Wolf Swords

Now do all these new guns need different rules - debatable.

The Imperial Guard use a huge variety of lasguns with different amounts of firepower, clip capacity, shots per minute etc but they are all Lasguns.....

I think a lot of it's to do with the fact that every new kit must come with new rules, to encourage people to actually buy them. Like if Intercessors had instead been released as tactical marines with bolters under the exact same data sheet, would Games Workshop have sold as many of those kits?

 Jack Flask wrote:

 Dolnikan wrote:
So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

You don't see value, but the majority of players do. Narrative players love minutia and detail which reflects the lore, helps tie the gameplay closer to the narrative, and allows you to explore further into the setting. Casual players like having options to choose from and ways to personalize their units. GW continues to add more options and rules because players like them, ergo it helps drive excitement and sell more product.

Every single thing you mentioned there has always been possible even before the game started to get bloated with new guns for every single new unit and when the SM arsenal of weapons fit comfortably on one page. I'm really not trying to sound like an old grognard here talking about how things were better in my day, but everything you mention there seems less like exploration and personalization and more like official GW-mandated fun. It's quite possible to take a much more limited set of options and still be creative and explore the background through that creativity without needing some official seal of approval from GW. Look back at some old White Dwarfs and you'll see things like Paul Sawyer's White Scars, which were a bike and Rhino-heavy SM army built using the regular SM Codex but built around a template of mobility using a self-imposed restriction on army building based on the background lore. That's the kind of thing that's been lost now as every subfaction gets its own special rules which just encourages many people to min-max within that ruleset. When SM were just SM the chapter someone collected would often say something about them and was almost always done because of rule of cool. Now it's probably more likely your opponent has the SM army he does because they happen to be the most powerful.

I'm not even sure it creates excitement. I'm more bothered about a unit's tactical role and how it expands on the background than whether its own special brand of bolter ignores cover or wounds automatically on a 6 to hit. I'd argue that all this weird unit-specific equipment is actually immersion breaking rather than enhancing as it makes no logistical sense to build all these different types of weapon that serve the same function. Many new units also don't seem to fit into the background too well and are obviously just attempts to sell more model kits, which doesn't help with the expansion of the background.

Many people mistake the breadth of the system with it's depth, probably including designers themselves.

When core rules are too shallow to provide engaging gameplay the easiest way is to add things so that it gives an illusion of choices.

But as you say those aren't meaningful choices because they don't really affect outcomes, they just add to the memorisation load (or add more time looking up in a codex whether this special knife sergeant Joe is fighting with has +1S or -1AP compared to the rest of his squad).

I think its at least partially to support GW's miniature model sales practices and increase profits. If you must use a specific weapon / thingamajig for everything, and you cannot buy individual components separately, this ends up GW selling more plastic kits. This is also why the kits don't come with all weapon options.

If all the guns were the same, you could just use your existing weapons for every new model and the rules abstractions of "laser weapons" or "power weapons" would allow it. I have a bitz box with maybe hundred weapons of various kinds in it, but there are a lot of models I couldn't weaponize with my bitz, because according the GW that specific model cannot be equipped with it.

Then there's the subfaction specialties and all sorts of special rules, which require some sort of extra books to be bought for. If these wouldn't exist, you'd hardly need several books worth of stuff to play a single army. Result, more sales for GW.

I don't think its the only reason but its definitely a big part of it.

 Dolnikan wrote:


So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

GW hasn't got competent designers(ability to shout waaaaagh loud in interview counts more than talent after all) so they are mixing tons of rules equals depth.

I for one like the fact that RG and IH lists aren't exactly a carbon copy of each other, with one being better. The fact that through stratagems and faction rules, specific units can actualy find use is great. Till RG got their rules that synergiesed with assault centurion no one used them. Till IF and CF got theirs no one thought that centurions with bolters are worth taking.

The soft enforcment of specific units in specific factions is great too. An ultrmarine army may not play 4xmsu assault intercessors and 2xmsu regular ones, because they want to shot more, and focus on their bolter synergy with tactical doctrins. BA or WS on the other hand would gladly run such a set up, because it works great for them. And even between those two differences easily exist. The BA player may decides that with 2W on DC and +1W on sang guard he wants fewer intercessors and more elite units. The WS player may want more bikers, specialy if their sgts get melee weapon options.

It is great that thechicaly the same pool of units can give birth to many different ways of play, and that each game doesn't end the way they did in 8th.

 Dolnikan wrote:
So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

GW has made occasional moves in this direction, most notably around mid 4th edition and over a decade on there are still numerous posts each year about how this was the worst thing ever to happen.

Custom faction rules sell really well. Especially when they are better than the other guys rules.

OP - it sounds like you'd have really enjoyed the 3rd ed to 5th ed era.

3rd stripped back the fuss of 2nd edition in a bid to make larger battles easier, and it largely succeeded.
It was the first edition where fast dice rolling was really possible, previously units could have a wild mix of all kinds of weapons - but also, things like 'power weapons' being a single term that covered all weapons, regardless of them being an axe, sword or otherwise.

I mention 5th specifically because it introduced USRs - "Universal Special Rules" - to cover things like Feel No Pain, Fleet of Foot and so on where multiple factions could benefit from effectively the same thing. Overall, there were other changes that made the edition more complex than 3rd, however (mostly found in the Codexes).

Well, I've been dipping in and out of 40K since the interminable 7th edition, in which about 90% of the rulebook seemed to be the special rules section. I mean look at Primarch rules, they have stuff like Move Through Cover, Smash, It Will Not Die, Eternal Warrior, Fearless etc... this number of abilities is well and good if you're playing a computer game like Hearts of Iron, or Football Manager 20, but not so good when you're trying to learn it all and recall it on the fly.

I once wrote down the special rules of all daemons of Nurgle in 7th and simply couldn't believe how insane it was: they could chuck grenades without being equipped with grenades, they had two different saves, they had special rules up the arse. I have severe ADHD and cannot cope with that lot.

8th and now 9th have taken it in a new direction: instead of referring everyone to a rulebook, let's have fifteen special rules crammed onto each datasheet. Let's go back to 1992 when Epic Space Marine took 2 hours per turn because every single unit had unique rules and a unique profile. Epic was AMAZING, but good God-Emperor, did it get bogged down.

Personally I think that's the main appeal of GW games. You have specific rules for every model and bit and also for every subfaction so your dudes get something special.
I'm also playing Oathmark which is the complete opposite. It has a more tactical base system but no army specific rules at all aside from 5 Main species. So it doesn't matter whether your humans are Saga Vikings, Lotr Easterlings or Warhammer Kislevites, they're humans in armor and that's it. A game like that also has its appeal, but 40K is not that game. You might want to have a look at Apokalypse, it seems to be what you're after.

Slipspace wrote:

Spoiler:

 Jack Flask wrote:

 Dolnikan wrote:
So, what I'm trying to say is that I personally don't really see a need for all these minute differences in profiles of weapons and troops. Everything could be represented perfectly fine with simple basic profiles and I don't think that very much would be lost from the game. Of course, GW is in love with special rules and little details and it helps sell books because those are things that make an army more powerful, but honestly, what does it add to the game?

You don't see value, but the majority of players do. Narrative players love minutia and detail which reflects the lore, helps tie the gameplay closer to the narrative, and allows you to explore further into the setting. Casual players like having options to choose from and ways to personalize their units. GW continues to add more options and rules because players like them, ergo it helps drive excitement and sell more product.

Every single thing you mentioned there has always been possible even before the game started to get bloated with new guns for every single new unit and when the SM arsenal of weapons fit comfortably on one page. I'm really not trying to sound like an old grognard here talking about how things were better in my day, but everything you mention there seems less like exploration and personalization and more like official GW-mandated fun.

No? Objectively no?
For example, my space marines are an Imperial Fists successor chapter. They have been since 4th edition when I started, are currently still Imperial Fists successors, and will forever be (regardless of the associated edition's rules) be an Imperial Fists successor chapter. However my lore for them says that they specialize in infantry heavy urban and Zone Mortalis combat, where they up-armor themselves and focus on flushing foes out of cover into overlapping ranged kill zones, also they allow Librarians to act as force commanders due their homeworld's culture (which will relate to my point shortly)

Previously I always ran them rules-wise as Imperial Fists (because of their lore) even though rerolling 1s on bolters didn't really relate to their lore. That discrepancy never stopped me from equipping my marines with extra armor plates and zone mortalis boarding shields, making additional veterans with salvaged Mk2 and Cataphractii armor, or adding scopes to many of my bolters.

The difference is now my chapter is still a successor of the Imperial Fists (gaining access to their relics and psychic powers in the process) but now my Chapter tactics are:

Add 3" to the range characteristic of ranged weapons models with this tactic are equipped with. (Their focus on ranged accuracy used to set up kill zones)
When resolving an attack made against a unit with this tactic, an unmodified wound roll of 1 or 2 always fails. (Their reinforced armor, shields, etc)

Why does this matter? Because for the first edition in a long time my marines don't just look like my chapter, they feel like my chapter.

Slipspace wrote:
It's quite possible to take a much more limited set of options and still be creative and explore the background through that creativity without needing some official seal of approval from GW. Look back at some old White Dwarfs and you'll see things like Paul Sawyer's White Scars, which were a bike and Rhino-heavy SM army built using the regular SM Codex but built around a template of mobility using a self-imposed restriction on army building based on the background lore.

Which you can still do? Remember how I mentioned my chapter allows Librarians to act as force commanders? I've been doing that since 4th edition. I can still do that in 9th edition.
Do I lose out on the aura bonuses of a captain if I decided to put my Librarian in charge of my force? Yeah, but that's a narrative choice that I make because it's what my chapter would do.

I also don't field many fast attack units or tanks unless we play a narrative scenario in which it makes sense to break those quirks or in higher point games where my chapter would utilize additional tactics an armaments. Again, it's what I envision my chapter to do so it is what I do unless I am told ahead of time to bring a crunch list. (an even then I still use the same CT and IF successor rules, but I ignore my narrative army building restrictions)

Slipspace wrote:
That's the kind of thing that's been lost now as every subfaction gets its own special rules which just encourages many people to min-max within that ruleset. When SM were just SM the chapter someone collected would often say something about them and was almost always done because of rule of cool. Now it's probably more likely your opponent has the SM army he does because they happen to be the most powerful.

Again, objectively false. There is nothing in this game's rules that encourages anyone to min-max. Period. Exclaimation point. NO. That is 100% a personal choice.

Now I am going to take a quick tangent to address a comment that I know will come up. Yes, their are a lot sub-faction tactics that suck or are basically lacking any meaningful sub-faction rules on an army that is already under-powered. In those cases, when someone picks rules by numbers rather than lore, I understand. It's not what I would do, but I understand.

BUT! That is not a problem with special rules existing, it is a problem with GW doing an inconsistent, poor job.

If you have an Ultramarines army and you choose to run them as Iron Hands because IH has more abusable rules, in an already good faction. That's your own choice and I refuse to allow anyone to shift blame onto the system for their own lack of honor.

Slipspace wrote:
I'm not even sure it creates excitement. I'm more bothered about a unit's tactical role and how it expands on the background than whether its own special brand of bolter ignores cover or wounds automatically on a 6 to hit. I'd argue that all this weird unit-specific equipment is actually immersion breaking rather than enhancing as it makes no logistical sense to build all these different types of weapon that serve the same function. Many new units also don't seem to fit into the background too well and are obviously just attempts to sell more model kits, which doesn't help with the expansion of the background.

Have you ever actually looked at real world firearms history? New guns are developed constantly by competing nations and companies in an attempt to win military contracts, update aging equipment to meet emerging challenges and technology, or even just to be sold on the consumer market.

Now imagine it wasn't just ~200 nations on a single planet, but instead countless planets across an entire solar empire, with entire planets dedicated to making things based on half remembered or half understood knowledge. Where your foe is no longer just the humans next door building a better AR, but entire alien species and literal demons made manifest. Where material supply lines can collapse when just a single planet turns traitor or gets captured.

That description is barely scratching the surface of the insanity that is 40k. You can't say it "breaks your immersion" to have weapons of overlapping purpose when we have all of that on a singular planet or just humans fighting other humans...

And yet many games set in the real world manage to abstract all of those firearms into a handful of types. Bolt Action has a page of weapons; Spectre Operations, which is for the real gearheads has five and a half generously spaced pages of weapon types. Including vehicle armament, explosives and stand-off weapons like drone strikes, plus differentammo types and sights..

40k doesn't know whether it represents a heroic skirmish, a platoon-sized action or Kursk. You can choose several types of pistol or knife, but it doesn't matter if you're deep in ruins or standing next to a window and on-board aircraft are a thing. Abstraction varies from rule to rule.

I'm not alone in thinking the modern game suffers as a result.

Jack Flask wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
That's the kind of thing that's been lost now as every subfaction gets its own special rules which just encourages many people to min-max within that ruleset. When SM were just SM the chapter someone collected would often say something about them and was almost always done because of rule of cool. Now it's probably more likely your opponent has the SM army he does because they happen to be the most powerful.

Again, objectively false. There is nothing in this game's rules that encourages anyone to min-max. Period. Exclaimation point. NO. That is 100% a personal choice.

I'm not sure we're playing the same game if you think that's the case. The very existence of so many subfactions with different special rules encourages min-maxing. The imbalance caused by GW's lax approach to design encourages min-maxing by making it possible in the first place.

Jack Flask wrote:
Have you ever actually looked at real world firearms history? New guns are developed constantly by competing nations and companies in an attempt to win military contracts, update aging equipment to meet emerging challenges and technology, or even just to be sold on the consumer market.

Yes, I have. Have you noticed that an individual nation's military will always tend to have a very small number of weapons for each task? The US or UK military doesn't hand out a different rifle to each regiment. Different branches of the same military will often use the same weapons because it's a logistical nightmare if your army uses one type of pistol while the navy uses another and the air force yet another. Yes, some units require different types of weapon and some special forces units get more choice of what to use, but in general real-world militaries don't have a dozen different basic rifles.

Momotaro wrote:And yet many games set in the real world manage to abstract all of those firearms into a handful of types. Bolt Action has a page of weapons; Spectre Operations, which is for the real gearheads has five and a half generously spaced pages of weapon types. Including vehicle armament, explosives and stand-off weapons like drone strikes, plus differentammo types and sights..

40k doesn't know whether it represents a heroic skirmish, a platoon-sized action or Kursk. You can choose several types of pistol or knife, but it doesn't matter if you're deep in ruins or standing next to a window and on-board aircraft are a thing. Abstraction varies from rule to rule.

I'm not alone in thinking the modern game suffers as a result.

Exactly this.If the abstraction isn't meaningful it doesn't need to exist. Since introducing Flyers 40k has had a scale problem where it wants to have everything from a Grot to a Titan on the board but also still cares exactly what type of pistol your squad sergeant is carrying.

 Jack Flask wrote:
Also having insane amounts of minutia has been part of the game's spirit since the beginning. People like to point out one or two points in the games history where something like power weapons shared a profile (which have also been split since iirc 3rd edition? so over half the game's history), but ignore the morass of other rules that has existed in basically every edition.

3rd-5th had the generic power weapon rules. General CC weapons went, off the top of my head:
-Basic CCW (extra attack when paired)
-Power weapon (ignore armor)
-Power fist (double strength, ignore armor, I1)

So there was a pretty well-rounded set of options there with distinct roles. Fom a narrative/casual perspective, it's fun to be able to depict a model however you want and not have to worry about choosing the 'wrong' flavor of power weapon, or one that will be invalidated in future editions.

 Jack Flask wrote:
Even the current Space Marine "Build a Chapter" rules are just a modern version of the 4th edition codex's chapter specialization rules.

4th Ed had a very interesting system for this and one which, IMO, is a much better implementation than the current rules.

You start by deciding how far your Chapter adheres to the Codex Astartes. If you're a codex-adherent chapter, congratulations, you use the base rules in the book. If your chapter deviates, then you get to pick the degree of deviation. The more deviation, the more beneficial traits you get to pick, but the more negative traits you have to take as well.

And these traits weren't the 'bonus hits on 6s' or 'always counts as cover' or other highly impactful straight combat upgrades that they are in 9th. They were things like 'have the option to take Devastators as Elites, but you must purchase Tank-Hunter or Infiltrate on them for more points' or 'any squad can purchase Furious Assault for 3pts per model' or 'receive a 6+ invuln, but can't take cover'.

Notice anything about these 'beneficial' traits? They all give you options, and they all come at a cost. This means that if you want to keep the game simple and ignore subfaction traits entirely, it's not penalizing you or reducing your army's power. Similarly, while these traits do allow you to min-max (take six squads of Devastators- sure), it's only through force organization or upgrades that generally are fairly costly, not through further buffing your units for free.

From a casual/narrative perspective, it is fun to be able to take traits that fit your theme but don't pressure you to lean into a particular skew. Playing as Cadian (re-roll 1s when stationary) mechanized infantry doesn't work; if you play Cadians the game is encouraging you to turtle up. Back in 4th Ed when being Cadian just meant you have access to heavy weapon teams and Stormtroopers as Troops and can purchase re-roll 1s (all the time) at the cost of 10pts per squad, you could still vary your force composition.

I feel that a big issue GW has with this from there design, is they keep wanting everything to be simple. Then overloading there simple systems.

This also feeds into a game that needs to make rather poor design work with each other.
They also have this need to have a do what ever you want, but favouring design that goes against it.

It’s a chimera game that has had no solid direction at times, and a design team(possibly from a it’s cool therefor it’s fine creative team) that’s out of touch with the game they have create at times.

They want to add depth, but have spent years stripping that out of the game. They spent a lot of time talking about 8th being new and how they would change a lot, but ultimately they just flatten a lot of the game to make some of there poor design work without having to put real effort in on a company level.

It’s very much the flashy coat of paint without fixing the engine aproach to narrative design.
It’s not much wonder they have issues with ballance across the game,
A lot of the details are fluff, showing more at ideas rather than really pushing a good narrative base. The system struggles to support a lot of it.

 Jack Flask wrote:
Have you ever actually looked at real world firearms history? New guns are developed constantly by competing nations and companies in an attempt to win military contracts, update aging equipment to meet emerging challenges and technology, or even just to be sold on the consumer market.

I used to handle warfighting materiel procurement as part of my former logistics job. New weapons are generally purchased for reasons of logistical compatibility (we're NATO now! get rid of your .45s), maintenance contracts (can I get spare parts? Do I have a POR in place for it?), platform modernity (can I stick an AN/PEQ-15 on it?), or manufacturing support (can we get new ones in ten years?). Downrange there is little practical difference in effectiveness between a 5.45 AK-105 and a 5.56 Mk18MOD1, and it's usually not performance that drives development.

What differences there are do not show up at a scale where going from 'normal dude' to 'transhuman superman' is a single point of T, command and control does not exist so transhuman supermen are just as easy to command as unruly Orks, every basic soldier is binary full-capability or dead, and armor penetration is just a D6 dice roll. Not even Kill Team has the requisite level of granularity for nitpicky differences in small arms.

Someone made a comparison earlier to Spectre and it's spot-on. I like Spectre. I can build a squad of African militiamen armed with assault rifles with a PKM gunner and an RPG, or I can take a squad of totally-not-SG-1 armed with submachine guns and equipped with body armor, and they play very differently. What the game does not have, or need, is chart after chart of nerds speculating as to how exactly a P90 stacks up against an MP5 or Uzi- they're all pistol-caliber select-fire subguns, they all get the same profile, and inexperienced + assault rifle feels very different on the table from elite + submachine gun + body armor.

Even that might not be enough abstraction for something like 40K; after all, Spectre doesn't also put ICBMs and attack aircraft on the board, or hundreds of infantry per side. At that point the factors that matter a lot more than exactly what flavor of small arm they have are things like training, doctrine, C3ISR, and experience; none of which 40K gets particularly deep into. The idea that 40K can abstract out combat skill to three common levels of proficiency (2+/3+/4+), ignore doctrine completely (just move however you like!), ignore C&C completely (everyone reacts instantly and does exactly what you want!), ignore reconnaissance and intelligence completely, and still somehow needs different stats for every flavor of bolter is ridiculous.

Well, I don't see why every game has to be that abstract. It clearly works for GW. Variety is the strongest seller for 40k to me. I could (and do) play other games when I feel like a more abstract or more detailed type of game.

There are a lot of things that could be improved in 40k, but drastically changing the level of abstraction shouldn't be one.
If you really want that, try the new Apocalypse.

 Super Ready wrote:
OP - it sounds like you'd have really enjoyed the 3rd ed to 5th ed era.

3e probably isn't the best example, it started simple but by the end of it you were starting to see vast wargear tables and all kinds of trade-off upgrades and variants down to individual point differences for taking particular upgrades on a model painted a particular colour.

The part that is painful for me is that we have all this choice and precision, but it lacks accuracy and isn't actually good.

This is a game now where (at least for now) the difference between a power stave and a power axe is larger than the difference between a lasgun and a boltgun. That seems a bit off to me.

I love narrative, but the weapon options actually get in the way of narrative - my guy has a power glaive! Oh, not WYSIWYG, oh dear.

At least in 4th it was a "power weapon" and you could model it however the hell your narrative heart desired.

A.T. wrote:

 Super Ready wrote:
OP - it sounds like you'd have really enjoyed the 3rd ed to 5th ed era.

3e probably isn't the best example, it started simple but by the end of it you were starting to see vast wargear tables and all kinds of trade-off upgrades and variants down to individual point differences for taking particular upgrades on a model painted a particular colour.

Funnily enough, 3rd is the time that I started playing originally, and I've only returned recently after a long break. I personally don't feel a need for a lot of detail in the wargear and stats, I leave that for true skirmish games where those differences can actually be justified. And, of course, a game where the scale works for it. 40k is just too broad in its scope to even care for different infantry weapons unless they are radically different (like a lasgun and a pulse rifle).

The same is for subfaction traits. They give massive bonuses for specific things that just feel weird. There is no way that slight differences in training between Codex chapters for instance would ever give rise to such large differences in how well they perform.

Regarding weapons and wargear, I think it depends entirely on the faction.

To me, it seems like the majority of factions have already had their unique weapons and wargear drastically reduced. It seems to only really be Marines that are getting new, slight variations on existing weapons by the bucket-load.

In terms of general design principles, I don't think it's an issue when models have different weapons to choose from. My issue is when most of those weapons are so close in function as to not be worth differentiating. As an example, the DE Haemonculus has about 8 different weapons, all of which boil down to 'weak anti-infantry weapon with Poison' or 'garbage anti-infantry weapon without poison'. And one of them is just objectively better than all the others. That's the sort of situation I think needs to be avoided because it's just pointless bloat. If a model is going to have multiple, different weapons then those weapons should serve different functions. At the very least, don't make every single fething one of them only effective against light infantry.

I would also say that I preferred it when Power Weapons worked the same regardless of whether they were a sword, an axe, or a staff. Especially since a vast number of models do not have access to all three. It seems a bit silly that those models are stuck with worse weapon options just for the sake of arbitrary pedantry. Not to mention the fact that it makes conversions more difficult as you can no longer use power sword, axes and staves interchangeably without affecting rules or point costs.


Regarding faction traits, IMO the issue is that (not unlike auras) most of them are just too generic. I think it would be much better to have them focus on specific units, rather than just vaguely hinting at them, and sometimes even encouraging playstyles that are contrary to how a given faction is supposed to work. For example, perhaps a SM subfaction that uses a lot of Terminators should give buffs specifically to Terminators.

I imagine that that some subfactions will still end up better either because their buffs are better or because the base models are better, but it seems like this would at least make the different subfactions more distinct and help encourage more themed armies.

Or you could do what the 3.5 edition Imperial Guard codex did (and what 30k does for its Imperial militia) and make faction rules cost points. That way, some factions can be better than others (like Cadians > generic, to steal an example from the old Imperial Guard book) but not actually be better on the tabletop so things can be balanced.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Or you could do what the 3.5 edition Imperial Guard codex did (and what 30k does for its Imperial militia) and make faction rules cost points. That way, some factions can be better than others (like Cadians > generic, to steal an example from the old Imperial Guard book) but not actually be better on the tabletop so things can be balanced.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but how would you work it?

Does each individual model and upgrade cost more/less points depending on your chosen subfaction?