Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Jidmah wrote:
No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.

I like transformers, I don't like Rosie Huntington. You tell me the time stamps for all the times Rosie Huntington appears in Transformers 3 so I can close my eyes, that's just not a great solution. Megan Fox spitting on Michael Bay is IMO another reason she should have been brought back for the third movie. No, with my budget and skills I cannot retroactively add Megan Fox to Transformers 3, but I can still imagine how much better the movie would have been with Megan Fox in the movie and discuss it in the Transformers forum. Nobody asked for your solutions, we are discussing whether Rosie Huntington was good in Transformers 3 and you've admitted that Megan Fox was a better love interest for Sam.

So what is your solution?

Play casually until GW fixes the game or I bother doing my hobby homework.

 AnomanderRake wrote:


The "gotcha" in 40k is "this army is just better than mine and there's nothing I can do about it" more often than it's "this army has this one weird trick and I have tools I can counter it with next time," at least for me.

I'd like to take a moment to highlight this past week's results.

 Jidmah wrote:

No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.

I didn't spend 20+ years of my life and thousands of currency on the Transformers movie though.

 Jidmah wrote:
None of that... makes any sense. What exactly is your metaphor supposed to represent?

this is a discussion and not a fanpage, there is no argument to shut the discussion down just because it does not fit your narrative and you have no arguments left

 Jidmah wrote:


So what is your solution?

If it isn't unending war while being laughed at by cruel gods you are playing the wrong game...

 Jidmah wrote:

No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.

This comparison is pure genius . And ironically Transformers is the only movie I've ever watched that I couldn't manage to finish, worst movie ever IMHO . Haven't watched the sequels though .


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vict0988 wrote:

So what is your solution?

Play casually until GW fixes the game or I bother doing my hobby homework.

Which is an excellent solution .

Playing 40k nowadays feels like im getting tested at school with all the memorisation there is going on. Yes, most factions only have 2-3 strats you should know but i'm the kind of player that wants to know every possibilities before taking any decisions. Problem is : i'm bad at memorizing stuff. Give me "logic-based exams" over "memorisation-based exams" anyday.

When i first started playing 40k and started showing interest in other wargames like infinity, people always clamored that it was overly complex for no reason. In reality, it's much more simple to grasp all the rules (learn one faction and you basically know what most others can possibly do). Yet all these factions play very differently because of what skill combination their units have. In 40k, i don't get the same feel that my factions play like they should. Are my dudes a bit more different because they get to reroll 1's to hit vs 1's to wound?

40k is in dire needs of a return to USRs to simplify it IMO (but yeah, thats for another discussion).

Do i have fun while playing the game? Yeah, i just feel like i would have more fun if all these superfluous strats that do "almost the same thing but not quite" either weren't in the game or were all fused into a single one that did the same thing. (Lightning fast reactions vs Smokescreen for example)

With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.

However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?

Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.

Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?

How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?

How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?

I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.

And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.

I apologize to anyone I have offended and will bow out of this discussion. I see no point these fruitless discussions, but I respect that this is what you want to do.

I suggest tagging threads accordingly in the future.

 Blackie wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

No, my actual argument is that if you don't like the Transformers movie, stop watching it. And for feths sake, stop posting 100+ posts a day on the transformers movie facebook fan page.

This comparison is pure genius . And ironically Transformers is the only movie I've ever watched that I couldn't manage to finish, worst movie ever IMHO . Haven't watched the sequels though .

It's probably some form of art. Every movie manages to be even worse than the previous one.

 vipoid wrote:
W.

Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?

Creeping Blight - Pffff...poxwalkers get to advance and charge?
Haze Of Corruption - unit is -1 to hit or Cover?

How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?

These don't sound like they do remotely the same things.
Fire Fever is an extra shot and Vermid is something to do with morale?

How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?

Effluent - -1 to enemy Ld in melee?
Befouled - Poison attacks?

How'd I do?

 kodos wrote:
so we are back to:

"Transformers is the best mover ever made because it made a lot of money and got a lot of sequels. If you cannot see it you are too stupid to understand the movie"

With the occasional, "There was no sequels to the Transformers movie because they killed off Optimus Prime and gave his role to a whiny brat."

Yes, I'm a bigger fan of the animated movie from the 80's, and moved off of modern 40K a while back to another game that has a more complex rule structure, and loving my Battletech nights.

Sounds like agitating for 40k to be better and admitting its flaws in the present means I should quit playing...

that's sad.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Sounds like agitating for 40k to be better and admitting its flaws in the present means I should quit playing...

that's sad.

It honestly blows my mind that people will attack others who want the game to be better. It's such a weird mentality.

 Jidmah wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."

I mean do you not hear yourself?

Thanks for completely misrepresenting my argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.

But clearly I used too many words, so here the the TL;DR for people who also feel like counting is too complex:
Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.

If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.

Can't help people who reject solutions and demand that the world changes for them instead.

Men, 40K is not complicated in a broad sense... Its not rocket science or an esoteric literary piece... But is clumpsy as hell and needs a huge effort for a game that can be reduce to "throw a bucket of dice and your opponent withdraws minis from the table... Rense and repeat during 2 or 3 hours".

Its the contradiction between the awfull amount of moving parts and things to learn and the naive (almost silly) nature of the activity itself what creates the cognitive disosiation.

 vipoid wrote:
Creeping Blight, Haze of Corruption, Fire Fever, Vermid Whispers, Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators.

Creeping Blight: Plague Weapons become Rending in melee.
Haze of Corruption: damage spills over instead of being lost.
Fire Fever: Helbrute +1 to hit/wound if all shooting is pointed at one unit.
Vermid Whispers: +1 to hit for Terminators in melee.
Diseased Effluent: Character suffers 1 mortal wound to deal D3 mortal wounds to a unit in engagement range, double damage against non-characters.
Befouled Incubators: a Character's attacks causes enemy models destroyed to damage their own unit.

I don't fault you Sim-Life, but I also don't think the system would be better if the names made more sense. Whether you call it Lightning-Fast Reactions or Aeldari Dodge, if I know it exists, I know, if I don't know, then I don't. It seems clear that these Stratagems are just bloat for the bloat throne, +1 to hit for Terminators in melee isn't a thematic effect for DG at all. Past a point you stop enhancing flavour and you just print Stratagems to fill page space and off-load power from datasheets to Stratagems and by doing this you actually move focus away from the focus of the faction to what should be the focus of other factions, this is most notable with Space Marines because of the number of Stratagems they have combined means that GW has had to explore every bit of design space available, leaving nothing unique to other factions, so the point of faction Stratagems isn't even there anymore, it's just a snake eating its own tail.

 vipoid wrote:
With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.

However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?

Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.

Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?

How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?

How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?

I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.

And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.

Literally no one references rules by their proper name unless they're also explaining what it does.

Vatsetis wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
"40k's not complex at all. I mean, take Death Guard. They only have access to 39 different strats that are broken into 7 broad categories..."

I mean do you not hear yourself?

Thanks for completely misrepresenting my argument and returning this thread to pure vitriol instead of constructive solutions.

But clearly I used too many words, so here the the TL;DR for people who also feel like counting is too complex:
Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.

If that's too complex for you, I might suggest switching pre-school board games for your enjoyment, but careful, some of them require you to know both numbers and colors. I would also refrain from building or painting models, because that's not easy either.

Can't help people who reject solutions and demand that the world changes for them instead.

Men, 40K is not complicated in a broad sense... Its not rocket science or an esoteric literary piece... But is clumpsy as hell and needs a huge effort for a game that can be reduce to "throw a bucket of dice and your opponent withdraws minis from the table... Rense and repeat during 2 or 3 hours".

Its the contradiction between the awfull amount of moving parts and things to learn and the naive (almost silly) nature of the activity itself what creates the cognitive disosiation.

Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
With regard to Stratagems, I don't like them in the first place as I believe they are unnecessary and place more emphasis on a card-game than what's actually happening on the board.

However, if we are going to be stuck with the bloody things for the foreseeable future, would it be too much to ask that they be sensibly named?

Since Death Guard was brought up earlier, let's look at some of their stratagems.

Any non-Death Guard players want to guess what Creeping Blight does? How about Haze of Corruption?

How do you think Fire Fever differs from Vermid Whispers?

How about Diseased Effluent or Befouled Incubators?

I'm sure I'll be told that this sort of naming is for flavour but to me it just makes them pretentious (especially when the effect is just reroll 1s to hit or some other time-wasting faffle like that) and awkward to remember.

And it's even worse when this is just one layer of awkward and unintuitively labelled rules that I'm expected to remember. I had a glance at the AdMech codex a few months back and many of the rules might as well have been written in another language for all the sense they made.

Literally no one references rules by their proper name unless they're also explaining what it does.

Well, the famous ones like Veterans of the long war, death to the false Emperor and common faction specific rules or often used stratagems are usually called with their official names, no?

 Grimtuff wrote:


Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!

i would 100% take MTG-level rules for 40k instead of the incoherent mess that we have right now.

 Jidmah wrote:
Out of that unthinkable number of 39 different strats which no human alive could possibly all remember, you only need to know what two do exactly and what another 8 roughly do to avoid falling victim to any gotchas, assuming the relevant units/subfactions are even part of the game. In your average game against your average DG army you need to know 4 or 5. And that's for one of the armies which specializes in gotchas.

By my count there are some 21 full factions in the game. If you have to know just three or four stratagems per faction (other than your own), that's 60-80 stratagems. That's not even getting into subfaction traits, specific unit abilities and combos, and other elements of complex interactions that go well beyond stratagems.

Earlier you suggested that the game only requires an hour or two of 'homework'. Two hours split across all the factions amounts to six minutes per faction. What are you going to learn, understand, and retain in six minutes? Is that even enough time to skim the Goonhammer review, let alone take notes?

I genuinely have to wonder how many of the people saying it's not that hard to learn are playing against a limited player pool with only a handful of factions represented, with consistent army builds and subfactions. Because if there were only 4-8 factions in the game, without the dizzying variety of supplements and subfactions that can radically change how an army plays, then I could see it being pretty reasonable to learn. But as it stands if you are playing pick-up games against random opponents there is a ton of stuff to learn if you want to be able to play the game without your opponent needing to walk you through what everything does.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:


Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!

i would 100% take MTG-level rules for 40k instead of the incoherent mess that we have right now.

As would I. I was more taking a swipe at the assertion that as MTG has an encyclopedic wealth of data amongst it, then that is also fine for 40k, despite the games being structured differently and (IME, certainly pre 8th) attracting different kinds of people. There's a reason I, and several others round here (jokingly) call it Tragic the Saddening. Very rarely do the groups mix.

If GW wants to attract the MTG crowd then they'd best make the rules that reflect that.

Grimtuff wrote:
Nah, you're wrong- clearly all of us who cannot penetrate the walls of documents in 40k have gak for brains. If it is fine for Tragic the Saddening then it must work perfectly in 40k too!

Best description ever!

I feel like now that Jidmah insulted everyone and conceded his point and we're all just slagging MtG now this thread will get locked soon. I'm surprised it hasn't already honestly after the page 16-19 shitshow.

Well if GW has created a huge mess out of its flagship game just because they reject to organize their rules up to the industry standard and instead opted to double down on the bloat so that the whole gamming experience has turn into the hobby equivalent of a ponzy scheme (IE: its a fraud that can only be sustained by denial and running forward) its all but inevitable that some level of negativity starts to spread.

Ah yes, comparing a literal crime that has ruined lives to check notes a game having more rules than you personally can understand. Clearly it's the other side that is being virulent here

Tyel wrote:
Would someone like to do a list of these wombo-combo gotchas, because I really don't think there are that many.

I'm not going to make a list, but I'll point out one of my favorites from recent memory. Iirc there was a series of buffs that amounted to a TH Terminator Squad being able to take out FOUR Knight Errants in CC in one round of combat. This was the good 'ol Marines 8.5 dex. I believe this was without much/any character support as well. Like there was still room to continue buffing.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Ah yes, comparing a literal crime that has ruined lives to check notes a game having more rules than you personally can understand. Clearly it's the other side that is being virulent here

Would it be possible for your side to make an argument without deflecting, deliberately misrepresenting the argument or implying that the other side is stupid?

I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.

I look at the shooting rules, vehicle rules, blast templates etc and I see a more streamlined game than the editions before 8th Edition.

I quite like Stratagems. I know the ones I am intending to use, and I have familiarity with other Codexes but not memorization. In the interests of disclosure I do play fairly regularly, although the winter and spring saw lockdown interruptions. My first real games post-3rd lockdown were in a local tourney. No rules issues. My opponent on Saturday asked me ahead of time if I could bring my Astra Militarum since he not faced them in some time. It was my first game with my AM in months (and 2nd AM game in 9th), so I did a little reading and planning ahead of time and knew which Stratagems I intended to use. No brain meltdown and no issues during the game. I also managed my own expectations.

Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible? You might lose the game? OK - so you won't get caught out by that again. I don't like gotchas myself, to be clear, and most players will offer a quick rundown of their Strats at the start of the game if their opponent has not faced their list. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that regular posters here enjoy investing their time in thinking about the game since they are clearly invested enough to write about it? So read about some other faction's money-making Stratagems from time to time?

If Stratagems really make you angry then maybe play Open War without them? When I am playing a teaching game I will suggest that we just use core rules and datasheets.

I have seen some other game systems keep core rules complex between editions while streamlining lists (Flames of War, Space Marine to Epic). The result was disastrous. What some call bloat others call flavour.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:
I argue that 40K is a clean gaming experience with respect to the rules. We can dance around the difference between complexity and complicated, but I judge a game's complexity by how many times I have to dig through the rule book during the game because my opponent and I are hung up on something. Happened in editions before 8th. Doesn't really happen for me now. It does happen in Flames of War.

I look at the shooting rules, vehicle rules, blast templates etc and I see a more streamlined game than the editions before 8th Edition.

I quite like Stratagems. I know the ones I am intending to use, and I have familiarity with other Codexes but not memorization. In the interests of disclosure I do play fairly regularly, although the winter and spring saw lockdown interruptions. My first real games post-3rd lockdown were in a local tourney. No rules issues. My opponent on Saturday asked me ahead of time if I could bring my Astra Militarum since he not faced them in some time. It was my first game with my AM in months (and 2nd AM game in 9th), so I did a little reading and planning ahead of time and knew which Stratagems I intended to use. No brain meltdown and no issues during the game. I also managed my own expectations.

Is the issue that some people feel the need to memorize all the Stratagems? Are they worried about gotchas but are not regular players? What is the worst thing that happens if someone springs a Stratagem on you that you had no idea was possible? You might lose the game? OK - so you won't get caught out by that again. I don't like gotchas myself, to be clear, and most players will offer a quick rundown of their Strats at the start of the game if their opponent has not faced their list. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that regular posters here enjoy investing their time in thinking about the game since they are clearly invested enough to write about it? So read about some other faction's money-making Stratagems from time to time?

If Stratagems really make you angry then maybe play Open War without them? When I am playing a teaching game I will suggest that we just use core rules and datasheets.

I have seen some other game systems keep core rules complex between editions while streamlining lists (Flames of War, Space Marine to Epic). The result was disastrous. What some call bloat others call flavour.

The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.

There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
...The divide is between people who do play and have experience and those who don't play and have opinions.

There is nothing we can convey that they're actually going to listen to. It's pointless and it's why I stopped bothering with this thread.

All united, however, by the absolute conviction that their opinions or their experiences represent universally applicable truths and the only reason anyone could possibly disagree is because they don't actually play or are otherwise an idiot.