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SemperMortis wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Galas wrote:
As an ogre/minotaur player in fantasy/aos and custodes in 40k I'll admit that I love my infantry with a good bunch of wounds. And yeah, those armies work because they are the exceptions not the baseline. But whats the problem with the baseline of the game being heavy infantry with 2 wounds and squishy one with 1 (Ignoring all the variances , inmortals are 1w but in no way squishy), barring GW bad rules and codex release cicle?

No the Baseline for each faction is the standard line infantry.

Imperium: Guard
Orks: Boyz
Tyranids: Gaunts
Dark Eldar: Kabalites
Tau: Fire Warriors
Necrons: Warriors
etc
Marines are elite special forces.

So Space Marines aren't their own faction and fall under Codex "Imperium"? Interesting, i was unaware of this.
The reality is, you can play semantic games to your hearts content, but SM's are the most common faction in the game, and their "line" infantry is Tacs and intercessors.

Yes you can play semantics as you are doing
Notice I Said IMPERIUM Not Marines as Marines are elite forces in the IMPERIUM.
Marine are just one small element of the Imperial war machine.

There are three ways to view this argument.

1: from the perspective of what is most common in the actual game. SM are the baseline.
2: From the perspective of what is most common in each army within the game. SM are most common and basic tacs/intercessors are baseline.
and finally 3: Lumping something like 50% of all the codex's in the game into 1 super faction and than comparing them to everyone else in a fluff perspective as opposed to a useful game perspective and saying "see, IG are the most populous in the fluff therefore they are the baseline".
You chose 3. Nobody else cares what the fluff says, we were talking about the actual game.

Ok mate - look at the Marine data sheet - whats its fething primary key word - yeah thats right IMPERIUM.

Whats an orks boyz primary key word - oh yeah fething Orks.

Q E fething D.

Marines have Imperium keyword fails to refute that they are baseline for the game. Which they pretty clearly are given their number of kits and their frequency of play. You are saying they SHOULDN'T be, but simultaneously they should also only show up rarely due to their immersion-breakingly low numbers.

Here I am scrounging for a Triarch Stalker and there's like eight times more marine kits at the store than the next closest faction. Don't tell me they aren't the standard.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
And get punched to death by Marines one on one with little effort.

lolwat?

So what's Chaos' basic trooper?

And why are you looking solely at fluff? Because Marines are, despite being vastly less numerous in the fluff, much more common and the tabletop.

Chaos, dependant upon what Chaos.

the most common according to fluff would be some sort of paramilitary fodder.... (and that allready would be pushing it training wise )

Basically a Renegade, Heretic, or someone who is Lost or Damned.

 Mr Morden wrote:

Ok mate - look at the Marine data sheet - whats its fething primary key word - yeah thats right IMPERIUM.

Whats an orks boyz primary key word - oh yeah fething Orks.

Q E fething D.

I think you might be misunderstanding the point.

From a Lore perspective, guardsmen (perhaps also Admech, albeit to a lesser extent) are the baseline Imperium troops. Guard in particular are by far the most numerous, and the force that will be called on to deal with almost every threat to the Imperium. Even if more elite troops are sent afterwards or in addition, the guard will still represent the first line of defence.

Marines, meanwhile, are very much an elite unit, who are well above the baseline of the Imperium. Given that their numbers are minuscule, relative to the guard and other Imperium units, they are relatively rare and are generally too scarce to participate in the vast majority of conflicts.

I assume you wouldn't disagree with the above?

Here's where it gets difficult. See, in the lore, Marines are scarce while guardsmen are the baseline. However, this simply isn't reflected in the actual game. Instead, you'll find that guardsmen are the scarce ones, whilst Marines are by far the dominant army in almost every gaming club and group. Even the novels and other such tend to present Marines in a similar manner. Yes, they'll probably say somewhere that Marines are rare, but just look at the number of Marine-centric novels, compared to guard-centric ones.

Put simply, the supposed scarcity of Marines is completely undermined by their ubiquity, both on and off the table. The upshot is that, whatever the lore, Marines must be seen as the baseline unit in the actual game. Because they are. Hell, they're so numerous that they've literally got their own separate tab on the GW webstore, whilst IG, SoB, Admech etc. are all lumped into Imperium. That should tell you something.

If you want to look at it in terms of numbers, there are 2 IG armies (I'm being quite generous here and counting MT as separate from IG, in spite of the fact that they don't even get their own entry on the GW webstore). I honestly don't know how common Admech are supposed to be, but let's throw them in anyway. Hell, we'll even throw in the Inquisition, why not? That gives us 4 factions (two with barely any units to their name) to represent the "baseline" Imperium units. Now lets look at the 'incredibly rare and scarce elites':
- Space marines
- Blood Angels
- Grey Knights
- Space Wolves
- Deathwatch
- Dark Angels
- Black Templars
- Imperial Fists
- Iron Hands
- Raven Guard
- Salamanders
- Ultramarines
- White Scars

That's Space Marine factions. They literally outnumber the ""baseline"" factions by more than 3:1. And if I was being less generous and just used IG and Admech as the base factions, it would be more than 6:1.

And this isn't even getting into the discrepancies with regard to the number of Space Marine players, compared to IG or Admech players.

Can you see why this makes it untenable to use IG as the baseline? Because when Space Marines outnumber them to this degree, it simply makes no sense. Their ubiquity means that their profile is by far the most common in the game, and thus it must be the baseline. And just to reiterate, I am in no way saying that this is reflective of the lore. The point is that, whatever the Lore might say, in actual game terms Space Marines are irrefutably the baseline unit.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Basically a Renegade, Heretic, or someone who is Lost or Damned.

If it can use a rifle it can partake in the meritocracy that is the chaos career ladder of beeing a slave with a forfeit soul



Automatically Appended Next Post:
and yes vipoid is right with his asessment. allbeit i'd not even count MT separately...

 Galas wrote:
I always understand T as how hard is something to wound and the wounds the ammount of punishement it can take before going down.

For example, both Boyz and Nobz are equally hard to wound. Nobz don't have harder muscles or skin than boyz, but they are larger and take more punishement. Wounding a Plague Marine is harder than a normal marine basically because he's rotten flesh, and then he can take even more punishement (Represented in this case by their FNP not by having more wounds, so even another layer). In this case the same can be said about Wracks, they chosed to represent their durability with an invulnerable save, a little extrange but eeeh I can accept it.

Now, stats are just too small to represent the broad narrative difference in all the models in the game, just like a S4 Catachan isn't as strong as a S4 ork or a S4 marine by fluff. Probably a normal human would be T3, a Gaunt T3,4 an ork boyz 3,8T a space marine T4, but this isn't an RPG. Is a Wargame with stats that should translate some sense of fluff adderence but be ultimately made to be balanced. Having everyone with 1 wound and characters with 2-3 can work, it worked in Fantasy. In 40k ... it kinda worked because stufff like instant death was trash, and instead of removing it they added things like eternal warriors in typical GW way of fixing errors with bandages.

That model makes sense on the face of it but doesn't fit how the game works in practice. Ork flesh isn't noted as being particularly able to bounce bullets (lasguns frequently blow big chunks out of them), they're just very hard to actually stop- so, by that T/W explanation, they ought to be T3 but W2. Same for Wracks, which are made of the same stuff as any other Eldar.

Death Guard are made of rotting flesh. Rotting flesh isn't harder to damage than living flesh, so they shouldn't have a higher T than a Marine, but should have more Wounds to reflect that they can keep ignore their injuries and keep fighting.

Tyranids have a duplicative skeletal structure with both exoskeleton and endoskeleton, plus chitin reinforcement, that makes them difficult to damage with small arms- their 'skin' is made of bone. If T represents how hard something is to damage, a Termagant should have higher T than an Ork. Obviously this is not the case.

I don't have any clear idea of what T, W, FNPs and invulns independently represent, and I think neither do the designers. They're just levers to pull to interact with an increasingly abstract game engine.

 Void__Dragon wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

Lore-wise, an Ork is a fungal mass with no discernible vital organs, so they're extremely difficult to kill. Don't need two hearts if you don't have a heart in the first place.

And get punched to death by Marines one on one with little effort.

I think we need a source for that, and it needs to be something other than the Space Marine video game. To my recollection, any time a bunch of Orks are getting one-sidedly punched to death it's because things like major characters or Terminators are involved.

 catbarf wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Except we have people here, including me, saying Orks would be great at W2

That's not solving an imbalance so much as just adding to the inconsistency.

Would Orks be bumped down to T3? Or would they be T4 and W2? If W2 represents how much harder to kill they are than a human, what does the T4 represent?

Should everything else that's harder to kill than a human be W2 as well? Aren't those all T4+ already? Should there not be anything T4/W1? How do we decide what should switch and what shouldn't?

Why is a Plague Marine soon to be T5/W2? Why not T4/W3? When should something be high-T-low-W and vice versa?

What the feth do these stats mean?

Why shouldn't Orks still be T4? Quite frankly I don't know what you're babbling about, but the general consensus is that toughness is how hard a model is to wound and wounds is how much of that punishment a model can take before dying. Seeing as Orks have always been basically as tough as Marines but without the armor, I'd propose they get T4 W2. It isn't inconsistency. It's getting close to lore toughness.

Also you're bringing up the problem of the gak wounding chart and the fact we should be on a D8 or D10 system.

 vipoid wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

Ok mate - look at the Marine data sheet - whats its fething primary key word - yeah thats right IMPERIUM.

Whats an orks boyz primary key word - oh yeah fething Orks.

Q E fething D.

I think you might be misunderstanding the point.

From a Lore perspective, guardsmen (perhaps also Admech, albeit to a lesser extent) are the baseline Imperium troops. Guard in particular are by far the most numerous, and the force that will be called on to deal with almost every threat to the Imperium. Even if more elite troops are sent afterwards or in addition, the guard will still represent the first line of defence.

Marines, meanwhile, are very much an elite unit, who are well above the baseline of the Imperium. Given that their numbers are minuscule, relative to the guard and other Imperium units, they are relatively rare and are generally too scarce to participate in the vast majority of conflicts.

I assume you wouldn't disagree with the above?

Here's where it gets difficult. See, in the lore, Marines are scarce while guardsmen are the baseline. However, this simply isn't reflected in the actual game. Instead, you'll find that guardsmen are the scarce ones, whilst Marines are by far the dominant army in almost every gaming club and group. Even the novels and other such tend to present Marines in a similar manner. Yes, they'll probably say somewhere that Marines are rare, but just look at the number of Marine-centric novels, compared to guard-centric ones.

Put simply, the supposed scarcity of Marines is completely undermined by their ubiquity, both on and off the table. The upshot is that, whatever the lore, Marines must be seen as the baseline unit in the actual game. Because they are. Hell, they're so numerous that they've literally got their own separate tab on the GW webstore, whilst IG, SoB, Admech etc. are all lumped into Imperium. That should tell you something.

If you want to look at it in terms of numbers, there are 2 IG armies (I'm being quite generous here and counting MT as separate from IG, in spite of the fact that they don't even get their own entry on the GW webstore). I honestly don't know how common Admech are supposed to be, but let's throw them in anyway. Hell, we'll even throw in the Inquisition, why not? That gives us 4 factions (two with barely any units to their name) to represent the "baseline" Imperium units. Now lets look at the 'incredibly rare and scarce elites':
- Space marines
- Blood Angels
- Grey Knights
- Space Wolves
- Deathwatch
- Dark Angels
- Black Templars
- Imperial Fists
- Iron Hands
- Raven Guard
- Salamanders
- Ultramarines
- White Scars

That's Space Marine factions. They literally outnumber the ""baseline"" factions by more than 3:1. And if I was being less generous and just used IG and Admech as the base factions, it would be more than 6:1.

And this isn't even getting into the discrepancies with regard to the number of Space Marine players, compared to IG or Admech players.

Can you see why this makes it untenable to use IG as the baseline? Because when Space Marines outnumber them to this degree, it simply makes no sense. Their ubiquity means that their profile is by far the most common in the game, and thus it must be the baseline. And just to reiterate, I am in no way saying that this is reflective of the lore. The point is that, whatever the Lore might say, in actual game terms Space Marines are irrefutably the baseline unit.

What are you using for a basis as this, loyalist armies with power armour? If so that's 2 codex now, if you mean choice of specific subfactions (chapter in this case), if you count the number of equivalent forgeworlds, sister orders, guard regiments, scion regiments & knight houses, then yes the marines are the minority. If youre simply counting publications, you then need to decide whether supplements are comparable to a codex despite requiring one.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
but the general consensus is that toughness is how hard a model is to wound and wounds is how much of that punishment a model can take before dying.

So, show me a lore source saying Ork flesh is particularly difficult to damage. Not that Orks can keep fighting despite sustaining heavy damage, after all, that's what Wounds represent, right?

Why don’t you count number of unique units, Dudeface?

You can compare Space Marine’s total unit count to the rest of the Imperium.

 catbarf wrote:

Spoiler:

 Galas wrote:
I always understand T as how hard is something to wound and the wounds the ammount of punishement it can take before going down.

For example, both Boyz and Nobz are equally hard to wound. Nobz don't have harder muscles or skin than boyz, but they are larger and take more punishement. Wounding a Plague Marine is harder than a normal marine basically because he's rotten flesh, and then he can take even more punishement (Represented in this case by their FNP not by having more wounds, so even another layer). In this case the same can be said about Wracks, they chosed to represent their durability with an invulnerable save, a little extrange but eeeh I can accept it.

Now, stats are just too small to represent the broad narrative difference in all the models in the game, just like a S4 Catachan isn't as strong as a S4 ork or a S4 marine by fluff. Probably a normal human would be T3, a Gaunt T3,4 an ork boyz 3,8T a space marine T4, but this isn't an RPG. Is a Wargame with stats that should translate some sense of fluff adderence but be ultimately made to be balanced. Having everyone with 1 wound and characters with 2-3 can work, it worked in Fantasy. In 40k ... it kinda worked because stufff like instant death was trash, and instead of removing it they added things like eternal warriors in typical GW way of fixing errors with bandages.

That model makes sense on the face of it but doesn't fit how the game works in practice. Ork flesh isn't noted as being particularly able to bounce bullets (lasguns frequently blow big chunks out of them), they're just very hard to actually stop- so, by that T/W explanation, they ought to be T3 but W2. Same for Wracks, which are made of the same stuff as any other Eldar.

Death Guard are made of rotting flesh. Rotting flesh isn't harder to damage than living flesh, so they shouldn't have a higher T than a Marine, but should have more Wounds to reflect that they can keep ignore their injuries and keep fighting.

Tyranids have a duplicative skeletal structure with both exoskeleton and endoskeleton, plus chitin reinforcement, that makes them difficult to damage with small arms- their 'skin' is made of bone. If T represents how hard something is to damage, a Termagant should have higher T than an Ork. Obviously this is not the case.

I don't have any clear idea of what T, W, FNPs and invulns independently represent, and I think neither do the designers. They're just levers to pull to interact with an increasingly abstract game engine.

I think you smacked the nail right on the head right there Kemosabe. It just comes down to what the designers want a unit to be durable against, and by how much. Fluff has little to do with it.

One other thing:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Seeing as Orks have always been basically as tough as Marines but without the armor, I'd propose they get T4 W2. It isn't inconsistency. It's getting close to lore toughness.

Plenty of other things that are significantly tougher than humans don't get a second wound. Only Marines do currently. That's inconsistent design.

Expanding the inconsistency of who gets a bonus wound and who doesn't to include Orks- by your own words, pretty much just because Marines do- is only continuing the problem; now it's not 'Marines are special', it's 'Marines and Orks are special'. Unless we go all the way and every race with fluff that says they can keep fighting despite grievous injury (which is most of them, because this is 40K) gets a second Wound. Are you fine with W2 Termagants? I mean, the lore says they have distributed multiple redundant organs to ensure that they can take a lot of punishment and keep fighting until completely destroyed; surely that qualifies for 'how much of that punishment a model can take before dying'.

This is what I was saying about the designers just using these stats as levers. They're clearly not trying to objectively model how tough something is to injure vs how much damage it can take before being combat-ineffective; they use about four different methods of representing durability (T, W, invulns, and FNPs) and just change numbers until it produces the generally desired end result in the gameplay, with some weird edge cases and balance issues as a side effect.

100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

Probably not. But its hard to get granularity at the low end with GW's system.

 catbarf wrote:
One other thing:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Seeing as Orks have always been basically as tough as Marines but without the armor, I'd propose they get T4 W2. It isn't inconsistency. It's getting close to lore toughness.

Plenty of other things that are significantly tougher than humans don't get a second wound. Only Marines do currently. That's inconsistent design.

Expanding the inconsistency of who gets a bonus wound and who doesn't to include Orks- by your own words, pretty much just because Marines do- is only continuing the problem; now it's not 'Marines are special', it's 'Marines and Orks are special'. Unless we go all the way and every race with fluff that says they can keep fighting despite grievous injury (which is most of them, because this is 40K) gets a second Wound. Are you fine with W2 Termagants? I mean, the lore says they have distributed multiple redundant organs to ensure that they can take a lot of punishment and keep fighting until completely destroyed; surely that qualifies for 'how much of that punishment a model can take before dying'.

This is what I was saying about the designers just using these stats as levers. They're clearly not trying to objectively model how tough something is to injure vs how much damage it can take before being combat-ineffective; they use about four different methods of representing durability (T, W, invulns, and FNPs) and just change numbers until it produces the generally desired end result in the gameplay, with some weird edge cases and balance issues as a side effect.

You're going by a slippery slope fallacy so thats about that. Is it really unfair to say that Orks and Marines are special?

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

I'm unsure what you're calculating there, but I think that 2W marines are more resilient than they should be over 1w Orks.

I return to the old balance again, of marines being as tough as an ork, with the armor of a heavy Aspect Warrior, and stronger than both. 2w is too big a jump.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

I'm unsure what you're calculating there, but I think that 2W marines are more resilient than they should be over 1w Orks.

I return to the old balance again, of marines being as tough as an ork, with the armor of a heavy Aspect Warrior, and stronger than both. 2w is too big a jump.

The problem being weapons that mow down orks and aspect warriors were also mowing down marines, and they can't have that anymore. Apparently.

At this point, I'd just say feth it and give aspect warriors a 2W plasma shield directly lifted from starcraft. But I guess they aren't the Mary Sues the marines are. Eldar should be more powerful than marines. Significantly so. They should just pay for it.

At AP-1, MEQ get a 4+ to an Ork’s 7+. That’s twice as durable.

Then, two wounds as compared to one-that’s another 2X multiplier.

Total of 4X.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

I'm unsure what you're calculating there, but I think that 2W marines are more resilient than they should be over 1w Orks.

I return to the old balance again, of marines being as tough as an ork, with the armor of a heavy Aspect Warrior, and stronger than both. 2w is too big a jump.

Not in a system with damage stats on weapons now.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
100% agree with catbarf. The stats don't represent categorically discrete things, they're just numbers to fiddle with until the resulting tabletop interaction feels right/reasonable.

That’s a perfectly reasonable view.

But should a single Marine be around four times as durable as an ork boy to a common AP-1 weapon?

I'm unsure what you're calculating there, but I think that 2W marines are more resilient than they should be over 1w Orks.

I return to the old balance again, of marines being as tough as an ork, with the armor of a heavy Aspect Warrior, and stronger than both. 2w is too big a jump.

Not in a system with damage stats on weapons now.

I run Nurgle Daemons.

What are my D2 options?

Here’s a hint-most if it is AP0, and therefore still bad against MEQ.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
You're going by a slippery slope fallacy so thats about that.

Nonsense. Slippery slope would be if I said 'if you give Orks a second wound, then pretty soon everybody's going to get a second wound!' I said no such thing.

What I said was that if we applied your explanation for what T and W represent equally to all factions, then that would have some unintuitive consequences- namely T3 Orks and W2 Termagants. Still waiting for a fluff reference for Ork flesh being significantly harder to damage than human flesh, which per your definitions for T and W would be necessary to justify T4.

So given that Orks are T4 and Termagants are W1, and people seem fine with these, obviously T does not really measure how hard to injure something is in the lore, and obviously W does not really measure how much damage something can take in the lore. They're just arbitrary stats balanced for overall game effect.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Is it really unfair to say that Orks and Marines are special?

Yes.

There is nothing so wildly unique about Orks or Marines that they need to break the existing paradigm wherein humanoid infantry are W1, with Toughness representing their overall durability.

I think with weapon damage, infantry wounds should range from 1-5. 2W marines are fine as long as they charge for it.

Have we made any mention of 2W Orks being a good space to open up for Ard Boyz as a thing?

Because I think that would be a Good Thing as another Troops choice. 2W with a better save than the standard Boyz and same rough Toughness as the standard Boyz just a bit harder to kill.

 catbarf wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Except we have people here, including me, saying Orks would be great at W2

That's not solving an imbalance so much as just adding to the inconsistency.

Would Orks be bumped down to T3? Or would they be T4 and W2? If W2 represents how much harder to kill they are than a human, what does the T4 represent?

Should everything else that's harder to kill than a human be W2 as well? Aren't those all T4+ already? Should there not be anything T4/W1? How do we decide what should switch and what shouldn't?

Why is a Plague Marine soon to be T5/W2? Why not T4/W3? When should something be high-T-low-W and vice versa?

What the feth do these stats mean?

It's pretty simple. The stats function how they function. Toughness is how hard you are to wound and what strength weapons you are more likely to withstand. Wounds is how many wounds you can take before going down. Saves are the strength of your armor. I think you are being pedantic trying to dissect stats in weird ways.

There are already baselines for toughness in the game. Basic Humans and Eldar are T3 and Space Marines are T4. Why is a Plague Marine T5? They are harder to wound than a Space Marine. T4/3 wounds isn't harder to wound, it just means they can take more before going down. The stats function logically and consistently.

A t4 2w 6+ save Ork seems reasonable. T4 because they are harder to wound than a human, 2 wounds because they are known to survive wounds that would be fatal to something like a human or an eldar, and a 6+ save because their armor sucks.

Its not quite that simple. The post explains why it isnt.