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 Gert wrote:

@NotOnline!

Spoiler:

Not Online!!! wrote:
9th ? Not a problem?
Considering that 8th dexes baseline just suck in most cases in 9th? Even amongst a closeknitt group which has a common view upon the balance, right now some people more or less don't want to play right now against 9th dexes or even with their 9th dexes, understandably so.

Nevermind that GW WILLINGLY has adopted a DLC style monetisation policy and monetises balance patches too boot.

I am sorry, players might be part of the problem, but lets not pretend that the lionsshare of responsibiltiy doesn't lie with GW.

I'm playing 9th Ed with both 9th and 8th Ed Codexes against other 9th and 8th Ed Codexes. I've lost with an 8th VS 8th, 9th VS 9th, and 9th VS 8th. And again, personal experience that 9th and 8th were both hugely better for me personally than 5th through to 7th.

Your mileage may vary, but indeed since 7th GW has adopted the gaming industries bs tactics in regards to monetisation. And that annoys me the most

Also unlike 8th and 9th , my favourite army was actually not taken behind the shed between 5-7th so that may colour my biases.

Nvm that we lost in that transition multiple armies. Nvm that we got now preorder DLC, NVM that GW once again has stopped propperly FAQ'ing for what one can only assume is frustration marketing tactics, in regards to 2 wound chaos marines f.e.

No, ontop of that GW has once again given us 8.5 marines, monetised balance patches, ynnari, and of course the new Ad mechs and Drukhari dex, sure FAQ fixes some issues and others are fixed by pts changes by the field manuals, that doesn't change the fact though that not even EA gets away with monetising "pts changes" aka balance updates.

I still think its perfectly fine to be unhappy about GW and 8th -9th. especially when one realisis that the piecemeal monetisation has been there since 7th and the only thing that has really improved is a social media PR team.

Not Online!!! wrote:
No, ontop of that GW has once again given us 8.5 marines, monetised balance patches, ynnari, and of course the new Ad mechs and Drukhari dex, sure FAQ fixes some issues and others are fixed by pts changes by the field manuals, that doesn't change the fact though that not even EA gets away with monetising "pts changes" aka balance updates.

They do get away with a database update and repackaging every year, though

a_typical_hero wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
No, ontop of that GW has once again given us 8.5 marines, monetised balance patches, ynnari, and of course the new Ad mechs and Drukhari dex, sure FAQ fixes some issues and others are fixed by pts changes by the field manuals, that doesn't change the fact though that not even EA gets away with monetising "pts changes" aka balance updates.

They do get away with a database update and repackaging every year, though

Yeah.. and making money with illegal gambling ontop of children...

One could consider the often large Copy paste parts of dexes and art similar.

TBF though GW did enter the "lootbox" market aswell with these character packs.

Slipspace 799934 11182665 wrote:

It also seems to be a uniquely GW thing to put the emphasis on the players to fix the problems of the system's terrible balance (other than systems that are explicitly designed with that sort of co-operation in mind, of course, like many historicals). The balance problems are exacerbated by the lack of skill expression in 40k. All games involving list building will have disparity between good and bad lists, which is fine, but 40k's disparity is too big and the financial investment required to build an army makes that disparity even worse. It's really disheartening to have to tell someone the really cool unit they bought for their army is terrible and will actively handicap them even in fairly casual games because GW's balance sucks so hard. As a practical example, a few years ago I helped a new player get into X-Wing in much the same way I would help a new player get into 40k. I played some games against them, trying to balance my list against theirs and not taking the absolute best tournament-winning list. I gave them advice about how to improve. The vast majority of this advice was not about their list, but about improving their skills in-game. There were some tweaks to ships and upgrades but fairly minor ones and all of them were quick and cheap to implement. Compare that to a new 40k player that chooses the "wrong" army and has to endure an underpowered, uninteresting mess for months or years. It's really disheartening having to say to someone they've basically wasted their money on some stuff (at least until the random GW balance swings back in that unit's favour) and they now need to spend even more time and money getting a totally different unit if they want to have even a halfway decent army.

The problem is often what makes the army broken. If to make a broken list you have to recast 7-9 FW dreadnoughts, or play poxwalkers and horrors at the same time in the same soup list. Then the chance of it being a problem at the bottom level of playing, specially in games of new player 01 vs new player 02 is much lower. The problems start when stuff like, take 90 intercessors to get an unbeatable army at store level, happens. Because such a list, even if in a GT enviroment a weak one, will create huge problems in a store enviroment. Have enough of such armies in hands of players, and sooner or later the whole thing ends in an arms race. Because those with weaker or weak armies are going to have to upgrade to their factions versions of tournament lists. Plus at some point the limitations become laughable to enforce. If a DE players had to not take a succubus, witchs, raiders with lances, wrecks with liquifires, Draz etc, then suddenly it turns in to the DE player has to play with only bad units and have a bad army, because otherwise I won't have fun. And good luck convincing the DE player to buy an army to fit this way. That is why stuff like marines 2.0, DE or ad mecha was so much worse at the casual level of playing, then at the tournament level or high end player level.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Not Online!!! 799934 11182734 wrote:

Yeah.. and making money with illegal gambling ontop of children...

One could consider the often large Copy paste parts of dexes and art similar.

TBF though GW did enter the "lootbox" market aswell with these character packs.

Don't give them ideas. Just think about it. Random boosters to support an event book in it you have. New sculpts for basic troopers for factions involved, lets say 2-3 models, then 2-3 officers models, and then some rare 1-2 super powerful rules wise HQs, support options or new squad weapon guys. Rules printed only in the boosters, added 2 sesons after the event ends to the w40k app.

Want that twice shoting demonic plasma gun csm player? Try to get the character and the rules for him, and the models in one of our 3 different booster boxs.

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Rules seem simple compared to previous editions. One armor value instead of multiple for different sides, no blast templates needed to use certain weapons…

instead you have 2 dozen stratagems per army.

I'll take the 'complexity' of 3 armor values over the gotcha's from statagems.

Lot of good points on here. Frankly I don’t know if orkz will be OP, just guessing they might based mainly on how powerful t-Rex and buggies are.

I agree with others that certain armies default builds are just superior to others. You want to to run a fluffy drukhari bulld with tons of raiders, wyches, incubi, drazar, wracks, ect? Great! You’ll be making a fluffy and powerful list.

You want to do build a fluffy necron list using tons of warriors mixed with catocomb units to make a nice combine forced army? Well the warriors will help you at least and the scarabs are ok, but most of the rest of the catacomb stuff is trash that will actively hurt your list. Marines in transports? Just make sure to ditch the transports and you’ll be fine. Chaos marines running demon engines? If by demon engines you mean noise marines and emperor children terminators then by all means, all in on demon engines.

And really, it’s the rules bloat that gets me the most. GW adding interesting complexity is one thing, but a lot of rules exist solely to curb other rules problems (AP creep is a big problem, better add a bunch of -1 damage units and only wound on 4+ effects) or are so finicky that they are basically pointless outside of that one niche scenario your opponent might notice. (Random modifiers to leadership/ combat attrition, random abilities that give neutered versions of good rules like heroic intervention only against units that charged, random mortal wound effects that can be good if they aren’t capped, but usually is limited to 1 (or 3 at most) if you make die role, effects that matter after a fight has already happened, set to defend, leadership in general, keyword bingo effects, ect etc). The base rules of 8th where a little too simplistic, but at least they tried to make things easy to understand. I just wish GW would get a better at making a few rules that they are certain will make a big impact, vs just generating a bunch of random nonsense in the hopes one of the rules will mean something. As a deathguard player, I’d take a single “contagion of Nurgle” effect over a 100 “remorseless” level rules easily.

Anyway this is kind of rant, but the point is the game reminds of what 7th was. The only difference is OP armies match the fluff better, but as mentioned earlier, this isn’t even a good thing .

mrFickle wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
The game is totally over complicated and what I would like to know from the 40K veterans is: is there any evidence that the changing of the rules and game mechanics has brought more players to the game.

Because I expect that gamer numbers go up through marketing etc

The game is soooooo different to when I played it in 2nd Ed, which felt more like it it was designed for fun. Now it feels like it’s designed for a tournament community.

The use of CP and strategems in game to get re rolls and buff feels like it’s moved half way towards being a card game instead of a strategic table top war game.

The demographic has changed. The rise of the US ITC basically led to the game being where we are.

The American scene has a large vocal community of play to win type tournament players. If it's not capable of being a sport it's not worth sort of mindset.

Given how much the online presence on YouTube and podcasts grew and became ITC centric through this time span, it resulted in it becoming the most commonly talked about and portrayed way to play the game and conversely what the vocal player base wanted.

Roll on 9th ed and GW partner and hire with people from the US tourney scene to steer the game that way.

What does ITC stand for please?

International Tournament Circuit, which was created, designed and maintained by FLG (Fronline Gaming).

I appreciate you might be wondering where the International comes into it, however because their use spread to be International that doesn't preclude that they originated in the US and spread as per my post.

There was another thread comparing 7th and 9th so I'm just going to copy what I wrote previously:

7th:

Let's not beat about the bush, 7th was an absolute mess. The core rules started badly and then the codices, supplements, mid-edition codices (where the design philosophy changed completely), lack of FAQs etc. made things spiral completely out of control.

In terms of the core rules, there was a lot of bloat - not least because it refused to reverse the disastrous changes wrought by 6th edition (with the inclusion of super-heavies and fliers being the most egregious). Hence, we had to have whole sections for new types of units, basically detailing how they follow no rules whatsoever and can do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. Awesome. This totally didn't read like someone trying to insert their badly-written, Mary-the-Mechwarrior Sue fanfiction into a game that was already ill-suited for it.

But for as bad as those rules were, they were by no means the only issue with 7th. In fact, quite a few of 7th issues seemed to stem from someone on the design team (you know who you are) having the bright idea to just lift swathes of 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and ram them into 40k. This was most evident with 7th's magic (sorry "Psyker") system, which had all the same nonsense as 8th edition - right down to the 'random to determine the random thus seeing whether you'll random or randomly get randomed in the face' and the utterly broken spells. However, even leaving aside the fact that 8th edition WHFB's magic system was a colossal pile of pigswill, at least that game system was built with magic as a core element. Hence, every race either had wizards of its own (generally costing roughly the same) or else had significant countering/dispelling ability (like with Dwarves). In contrast, 40k races have vastly different accessibilities when it comes to psykers and counters to psykers - ranging from entire armies of psykers to armies with no psykers whatsoever (and also with very few tools to counter such). So while WHFB's terrible magic system was at least somewhat balanced by roughly equal access, 40k's attempt at the same didn't even have that modicum of balance. Instead, if a Tau or Necron or DE player (or even a player who'd foolishly brought only one or two psykers) was up against GKs or Daemons, he might as well go and make himself a sandwich while they conduct their psychic phase.

And because I'm not done ragging on the psychic phase, now would probably be a good time to bring up 7th's commitment to 'balance by random'. As in, it doesn't matter if one psychic power is useless and another is game-winning because you have to roll for them! Presuming your brain is located in your skull and not your rectum, you can probably see the flaw in that particular line of reasoning. Alas, GW did not. And so not only was this policy applied to psychic powers, it was also applied to other areas of army construction such as Warlord Traits (because who'd want to give a character a thematic trait, right?). Naturally, it meant that there was a ton of pre-game nonsense that had to be rolled for at the start of every game.

Then you've got the endless litany of time-wasting mechanics - the terrible wound-allocation rules, the entire Challenge system, the pointless special rules (Soulfire anyone?).

And you've got the final problem which was that the layout of the core rulebook was absolutely atrocious. Nothing seemed to flow logically, so that you'd have the rules for vehicles in one section, except for a certain type of vehicle which is found in an entirely different section because reasons. Or the USRs that you look up only to find that all they do is give a unit two different USRs. It meant that any sort of rules debate immediately brought the game to a grinding halt as players struggled to even find the right section in the convoluted mess of a rulebook.


So what about 9th?

Well, it certainly made some improvements. The rulebook is better laid out . . . though this seems to have been achieved primarily by just throwing most of the content in the bin. Indeed, I think the biggest flaw with 8th/9th is that it threw far too much good stuff out, along with the bad.

USRs are gone and instead each model has a different name (and sometimes even description) for what amounts to the same ability. This makes the game very awkward in a number of ways.
- It makes it much harder to remember what a given rule does (there's a reason people still talk in the language of USRs).
- It makes it much harder to spot when a similar-looking rule differs from a common one. In the past, a model with a different Deep Strike ability would have either an ability with a different name (so you'd know immediately that it was different) or else Deep Strike but with a second rule to amend it. Now, though, every model has a different name for deep strike, so it's easily to skim read such rules with the assumption that it's just another deep strike rule, and inadvertently miss a small but important difference.
- It makes it much more awkward to write rules that refer to what were once common rules. e.g. in the past you could have referred specifically to FNP or Deep Strike, now you have to refer to 'rules that let a model ignore wounds' or 'rules that let a model deploy on the table after the first battle turn' or some other very awkward language.
- It means that there's often no common language. In the past, you'd know that FNP meant FNP. Now, though, you often end up looking at two rules with very similar wording and trying to work out whether the difference is intentional or just the result of them being written by different writers without any sort of agreed language/format for rule text.

In short, it creates far more problems than it could ever hope to solve, whereas most of the original problems with USRs could have been solved by just writing out the text on each model's datasheet.

The psychic phase has been simplified but perhaps a little too much (probably because it just pinched yet another magic system from Fantasy - this time the heavily trimmed-down AoS one). All the different weapon profiles are gone, now it's mortal wounds and more mortal wounds. It's better than the ridiculousness of spells like Invisibility but it doesn't leave much room for creativity. Also, the system is quite weird in that you just throw two dice and hope to achieve the target number. No resources are expended beyond an arbitrary cast limit per turn and there are almost no choices to be made. At least with the 7th edition system you could add more dice, increasing the chance of succeeding but also increasing the chance of Perils. Now spells have different cast values but you can't do anything about it because your dice are always fixed anyway. All things considered, I find myself wondering why we need to have a psychic phase at all - it seems you could have just as easily gone back to the pre-7th model, where units just make a Ld test to cast a psychic power.

Initiative is gone completely and instead we have a mess of 'always strikes first' and 'always strikes last'. Resolving combats without those rules is even worse, as you have ludicrous situations where selecting a unit to fight causes an entirely different unit, in an entirely different combat, to fight more slowly. But apparently this is an improvement for some reason.

Morale is basically gone, with Pinning and Falling Back being removed entirely. Now when a unit fails a morale test some of its members just vanish into the aether.

Transports can't deploy passengers when they move, thus negating the point of most transports even existing (plus fire-points are inexplicably gone - so either your transport is open-topped or else its just a mobile brick).

Stratagems, Dear, God, stratagems. If there is anything current 40k did not need, it was Stratagems. I note that this idea came, as so many seem to, from importing yet more stuff from Age of Sigmar. Except that Age of Sigmar took the wise decision to make Command Points usable by HQs for specific command abilities. 40k on the other hand decided that HQs would be entirely divorced from CPs (why would HQs have any strategic or command role, after all?) and so instead tied CPs to a card game that feels entirely disconnected from anything in the rulebook or on the table. It also gives us even more ludicrous scenarios - like one unit being unable to throw their grenades because a different unit threw theirs.

What's worse is that Stratagems also seem to have eaten a not insignificant chunk of what used to be actual options and wargear. So now many units have few options and instead rely on specific stratagems for that purpose, thus restricting the ability to personalise individual units.

Speaking of which, 8th removed character's being able to join squads and instead made characters very hard to target. The main issue was that the arbitrary cut-off limit meant monster-characters could hide behind basic infantry, since it was based on wounds and the wounds characteristic had almost no relation to the actual size of a given model. 9th ""fixed"" this not by using a different statistic (such as strength or toughness or one of the billion keywords that has been added to the game) but instead by requiring characters to be stupidly close to a unit in order to gain any protection. This means stuff like Death Jesters and other characters that are meant to be lone-snipers or lone-hunters now can't act as they're supposed to. But hey, at least Guilliman can still hide behind guardsmen, and that's all that matters.

Cover is still negligible, especially as there's no longer any penalty for firing at an obscured target. Combined with fewer penalties for movement and smaller boards, this typically means units can just shoot at whatever the hell they want with zero regard for intervening models and even intervening terrain.


I should say that it's by no means all bad. 9th at least doesn't have random psychic power selection or warlord trait selection. The wound allocation system is vastly better (though I do think it would be wise to future-proof it, so that the game doesn't break if a unit has more than one wounded model at a given time). And all in all it's at least a more functional game than 7th was (as it doesn't require significant house-ruling before you can even play).

However, I fear that in an effort to get away from 7th, 8th/9th ended up throwing out a lot of stuff that was actually functional (or which required only some minor tweaks to make it functional). Not that it's necessarily a worse game in and of itself, just I think it represents a bad direction for 40k to be heading in - not least because the game seems to be increasingly getting away from what's happening on the table being the key factor in who wins. Especially with the advent of stratagems, it seems we're really not far off from just turning 40k into a full-on card game and abandoning the board and minis entirely.


...

Just to add to my prior thoughts, I think 9th is still better balanced than 9th was, even after DE/Admech. However, I'm finding it a lot harder to stay invested in it. There's just something about the current rules and mechanics that dampen my spark of enthusiasm far more than even 7th's godawful rules ever managed.

Dudeface wrote:

mrFickle wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
The game is totally over complicated and what I would like to know from the 40K veterans is: is there any evidence that the changing of the rules and game mechanics has brought more players to the game.

Because I expect that gamer numbers go up through marketing etc

The game is soooooo different to when I played it in 2nd Ed, which felt more like it it was designed for fun. Now it feels like it’s designed for a tournament community.

The use of CP and strategems in game to get re rolls and buff feels like it’s moved half way towards being a card game instead of a strategic table top war game.

The demographic has changed. The rise of the US ITC basically led to the game being where we are.

The American scene has a large vocal community of play to win type tournament players. If it's not capable of being a sport it's not worth sort of mindset.

Given how much the online presence on YouTube and podcasts grew and became ITC centric through this time span, it resulted in it becoming the most commonly talked about and portrayed way to play the game and conversely what the vocal player base wanted.

Roll on 9th ed and GW partner and hire with people from the US tourney scene to steer the game that way.

What does ITC stand for please?

International Tournament Circuit, which was created, designed and maintained by FLG (Fronline Gaming).

I appreciate you might be wondering where the International comes into it, however because their use spread to be International that doesn't preclude that they originated in the US and spread as per my post.

Yeah the ITC is a ruleset made by Americans who then put 'International' in it, as they are want to do.
It was not 'internationally' developed.

In Europe ITC was generally considered bad because of its overly focus on killing and if there was a communal set of house rules that was followed at all it was the ETC rules (European team championship), which was actually an internationally collaborated set of rules (tho mostly European)

Pretty sure the "I" in ITC stands for Independent.

how Orks are thrown in with this mess is beyond me. Lets complain about models that are unreleased and how powerful units that came out this weekend are. At least wait till model release and some time for people to actually play the new ork codex before complaining about its power level. there were some buffs but also a lot of checks to counter (and often make those "buffed" units overall worse) that in my opinion brought the power level of the army down outside of a few theoretical builds with untested units.

But... this is supposed to be the best edition evAr because GW consulted design with high profile tournament players and is also having high profile tournament players play test it.

None of this makes any sense... GW's having tournament players heavily influence design and play test the game for them. What are you all even talking about?

GW even hired Mike Brandt (the NOVA Open guy) to design the absolutely amazing 9th edition missions. And all this talk about complexity...
People must be confused. The missions are so one-dimensional, how could anyone call them complex?

I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

 oni wrote:
But... this is supposed to be the best edition evAr because GW consulted design with high profile tournament players and is also having high profile tournament players play test it.

None of this makes any sense... GW's having tournament players heavily influence design and play test the game for them. What are you all even talking about?

GW even hired Mike Brandt (the NOVA Open guy) to design the absolutely amazing 9th edition missions. And all this talk about complexity...
People must be confused. The missions are so one-dimensional, how could anyone call them complex?

I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

Almost like the squeaky wheel gets the grease or something.

 oni wrote:
I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

Get a core rulebook and look up Narrative and Open Play. If you confine yourself to Matched Play / the tournament pack, don't blame others for your perceived lack of variety.

Extra hint of the day: You can even mix those rules or adjust them how you see fit. Nobody is forcing you to play the same "hold, hold more, hold many" for the entire edition.

a_typical_hero wrote:

 oni wrote:
I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

Get a core rulebook and look up Narrative and Open Play. If you confine yourself to Matched Play / the tournament pack, don't blame others for your perceived lack of variety.

I don't think that will make them happy - after all, there is no confirmation bias game mode.

I"m having more fun playing Crusade in 9th than I've had in a really long time with 40k.

My only real beef with current 40k is that the complexity of all the layered rules leads to a lot of forgotten rules.

 Polonius wrote:
I"m having more fun playing Crusade in 9th than I've had in a really long time with 40k.

My only real beef with current 40k is that the complexity of all the layered rules leads to a lot of forgotten rules.

I can relate to that - almost makes me glad that Inexorable Advance usually does nothing and that the Waaagh! is over after two turns

I totally wouldn't be able to keep track of all the admech stuff after a few hours of gaming.

 Polonius wrote:
I"m having more fun playing Crusade in 9th than I've had in a really long time with 40k.

My only real beef with current 40k is that the complexity of all the layered rules leads to a lot of forgotten rules.

Pffft, I was forgetting Astra Militarum Orders back in 5th and I sure as heck ain't going to start remembering now.

Slipspace wrote:
Pretty sure the "I" in ITC stands for Independent.

From the FLG site:

"The ITC (International Tournament Circuit) is a coalition of tabletop gaming tournaments that have joined together to increase their mutual resources, exposure to the community and the prestige of their events."

 Ordana wrote:

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Rules seem simple compared to previous editions. One armor value instead of multiple for different sides, no blast templates needed to use certain weapons…

instead you have 2 dozen stratagems per army.

I'll take the 'complexity' of 3 armor values over the gotcha's from statagems.

+1

Yes please!

a_typical_hero wrote:

 oni wrote:
I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

Get a core rulebook and look up Narrative and Open Play. If you confine yourself to Matched Play / the tournament pack, don't blame others for your perceived lack of variety.

It's easy to say such things.

Matched Play is the default mode of play. That's a universal truth.

And in my area, sadly, you play Matched Play (GT pack - or previously NOVA) or you don't play at all. It's all tourny-hammer all the time here.

I'm spoiled for choice of stores too. I've ventured to many surrounding stores within a 50 mile radius, I've even travelled as far as 150 miles, trying to find like minded players and keep coming up empty handed. No one actually plays anything other than Matched Play here.

Dudeface wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
Pretty sure the "I" in ITC stands for Independent.

From the FLG site:

"The ITC (International Tournament Circuit) is a coalition of tabletop gaming tournaments that have joined together to increase their mutual resources, exposure to the community and the prestige of their events."

I stand corrected. Pretty sure it used to stand for Independent. CAlling it International isn't technically wrong since it is an international format, I guess.

Dudeface wrote:

The demographic has changed. The rise of the US ITC basically led to the game being where we are.

The American scene has a large vocal community of play to win type tournament players. If it's not capable of being a sport it's not worth sort of mindset.

Given how much the online presence on YouTube and podcasts grew and became ITC centric through this time span, it resulted in it becoming the most commonly talked about and portrayed way to play the game and conversely what the vocal player base wanted.

Roll on 9th ed and GW partner and hire with people from the US tourney scene to steer the game that way.

Crusade and rules that fit the fluff of a faction are stand-outs for 9th. Those have nothing to do with ITC.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Rules seem simple compared to previous editions. One armor value instead of multiple for different sides, no blast templates needed to use certain weapons…

instead you have 2 dozen stratagems per army.

I'll take the 'complexity' of 3 armor values over the gotcha's from statagems.

+1

Yes please!

Just want to add my support for this, too.


Actually, on that note, I find it absolutely hilarious that one of the arguments against USRs was that people didn't like having to look up rules and that the current system meant that every rule you needed for a unit was on that unit's dataslate (except for faction special rules, subfaction special rules, weapons, warlord traits, artefacts etc., which don't count, apparently). However, its apparently fine for units to have two dozen Stratagems that potentially affect them and which still have to be looked up, yet (unlike USRs) you don't even see the names of those Stratagems on the unit's dataslate.

 oni wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:

 oni wrote:
I just don't understand what the problem is. This edition is clearly Tournament-Hammer and you cannot go wrong with that because what's best for tournament players is obviously what's best for the game and everyone who plays it.

Get a core rulebook and look up Narrative and Open Play. If you confine yourself to Matched Play / the tournament pack, don't blame others for your perceived lack of variety.

It's easy to say such things.

Matched Play is the default mode of play. That's a universal truth.

And in my area, sadly, you play Matched Play (GT pack - or previously NOVA) or you don't play at all. It's all tourny-hammer all the time here.

I'm spoiled for choice of stores too. I've ventured to many surrounding stores within a 50 mile radius, I've even travelled as far as 150 miles, trying to find like minded players and keep coming up empty handed. No one actually plays anything other than Matched Play here.

You'll find that a lot of people leaping to 40k's defence suggest just playing somewhere else or other people or just making your own group, like it's a simple thing to do. I don't know where these people live that they have multiple groups that play multiple different games regularly or old editions of 40k or WHFB and everyone has flexible attitudes and ways to play but I'd like to visit these places some day.

 vipoid wrote:

Actually, on that note, I find it absolutely hilarious that one of the arguments against USRs was that people didn't like having to look up rules and that the current system meant that every rule you needed for a unit was on that unit's dataslate (except for faction special rules, subfaction special rules, weapons, warlord traits, artefacts etc., which don't count, apparently). However, its apparently fine for units to have two dozen Stratagems that potentially affect them and which still have to be looked up, yet (unlike USRs) you don't even see the names of those Stratagems on the unit's dataslate.

Likewise. I never understood the argument against USRs and needing to look things up. The thing about Universals was that over time you would memorize them (if they came up enough, of course you still have to look up the rarely used one). Then we get dozens of stratagems instead, pretty funny to be honest.

Tyel wrote:
and DG making appearances in those top ranks.

DG had an exceptionally good showing this past weekend.


Army P #W #G % Adeptus Mechanicus 40 141 213 66 Aeldari 3 13 18 72 Chaos Space Marines 12 37 64 58 Death Guard 33 106 186 57 Drukhari 37 120 193 62 Harlequins 6 17 30 57 Imperial Knights 8 25 45 56 Orks 9 24 44 55 Sisters of Battle 26 77 149 52

Wait hold up, Drukhari and Admech are hitting under 70%? That's not as bad as people have made it out to be. I'm here thinking that those two factions are taking home 80-90% win rates.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 oni wrote:
It's easy to say such things.

Matched Play is the default mode of play. That's a universal truth.

And in my area, sadly, you play Matched Play (GT pack - or previously NOVA) or you don't play at all. It's all tourny-hammer all the time here.

I'm spoiled for choice of stores too. I've ventured to many surrounding stores within a 50 mile radius, I've even travelled as far as 150 miles, trying to find like minded players and keep coming up empty handed. No one actually plays anything other than Matched Play here.

You'll find that a lot of people leaping to 40k's defence suggest just playing somewhere else or other people or just making your own group, like it's a simple thing to do. I don't know where these people live that they have multiple groups that play multiple different games regularly or old editions of 40k or WHFB and everyone has flexible attitudes and ways to play but I'd like to visit these places some day.

Nobody said it was easy. Just that if you want something that you do not have, you should try to get it instead of waiting for it to magically appear one day in your lap.
I'm honestly sorry for oni if there really is nobody who likes to try something other than standard tournament play. I really mean it.

That being said, it is more a local problem rather than one with the system. GW could promote Crusade more so people would perceive it as the default way of playing the game or at least it being as valid as tournament play, though.

Matched play is more like balanced play.
My group sometimes plays Narrative, but when we do we still use points and other Matched restrictions. We used Matched rules in our brief Crusade campaign for example.

Another group regularly plays with the Open War deck in Matched play games, when that's nominally only for Casual games.

I really don't get the attitude that Matched == tournament play.

On the flip side, my experience is that the "default" play experience is absolutely competitive Matched play. In large, disjointed, groups this will be all that gets played as there just isn't the opportunity to get beyond that.

However in smaller groups you can get beyond that. Often, however, with a new member you'll default back to the competitive Matched playstyle, or risk bombarding them with a slew of house rules/agreements from the "old boys club".