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.

 Sim-Life wrote:


What if the units you like the most are the ones that become broken? I've used genestealers in my nids armies for years, even when they were crap I stuck with them, then they became good in 8th. So I should just stop using them? How is that fair? If screamer killer become insanely OP should I just put the 8 I own on the shelf because GW's blindfolded throw of the Dart Of Unintentional Brokeness happened to land on them?

A single unsupported units has never been broken even with OP stats. Just don't spam it. Take melta marine units: 3-6 eradicators or 1-2 attack bikes are powerful but won't break the game, 9+ eradicators or 6-9 assault bikes probably would. All units that were OP in the past were never a problem if taken in small-medium numbers.

And I think that skew lists that spam a few units are a cancer anyway. Love your genestealers? Feel free to bring 20-40 of them anytime, regardless of how good or bad they are. Just avoid fielding 60+ models if they become too OP.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 IanMalcolmAbs wrote:

You are correct - 95% of all 40k is actually played in the tournament setting. Yet - most of those games are considered casual...

Playing in the tournament setting is not the same than playing tournament lists though. That's why they're considered casual.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I still don't understand the purpose of "Open Play".

Nor do I. It's some sort of weird official ruling that you don't have to follow any of their official rules. I think it's probably because "2 ways to play" doesn't sound very impressive so they added on the third to make it sound better.

Slipspace wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I still don't understand the purpose of "Open Play".

Nor do I. It's some sort of weird official ruling that you don't have to follow any of their official rules. I think it's probably because "2 ways to play" doesn't sound very impressive so they added on the third to make it sound better.

The open war cards are a fun way to play (I think I played more games with these than matched play missions in 8th), but I agree, you don't need a "game Mode" that says, use these Cards or do what you want.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:


Had an interesting chat with Jervis many years ago where he talked about chrome. In essence it boiled down to having to add that to engage players, while some of the game design he would like to do would have stripped a lot more of it out.

An example of that line of thinking was 1997 Epic and see how that turned out.

Epic 3rd ed may have featured in the conversation... (he really liked it), including slight bafflement as to why the same system was so liked in BFG. Interestingly there Andy Chambers later decided he didn't like it and had started on a different version of BFG using dice pools (he liked large amounts for engagement and averages) that would have modifiers applied, rather than the firepower mod chart. Wrote about it a bit then went off to pastures new.

I enjoy the Open War cards, but I always play them in Matched Play. In fact, I've played in two separate groups that used the Open War cards in tournaments.
The divide between Narrative, Open, and Matched seems so pointless. Every group I've been in has ignored it, applying Matched play balancing concepts (such as strat limits) regardless of anything else.

This gets to the complexity issue as well, because not only do I have the normal stuff to track but now I also need to plan for 3 different games:

1) matched play 2k (can't use any of my crusade stuff, gotta figure out what to include beyond my roster, gotta consider the wide variety of enemy threats they could offer to build a good list)

2) Crusade (gotta keep track of tons of special rules, in gameplay gotta track agendas instead of secondaries, XP mini game, building a list for narrative rather than in consideration of threats, constrained by the roster)

3) open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)

It sounds like you're confusing Open War (a set of cards used to generate missions, marketed to Open Play but perfectly usable outside of it) and Open Play (the 'mode' which ignores a few balancing rules for convenience but otherwise adds nothing).
I think it's a useful distinction because the Open War cards can be used perfectly well for Matched play as well. In my opinion (which is shared by many in my local groups) they're better than the dedicated 9th edition missions as they mean people can play without the faff of secondaries.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Open war (I haven't actually played this but if I did I would probably run my chaos guard with my Slaanesh as actual guard codex, and that is a whole other can of worms)

It sounds like you're confusing Open War (a set of cards used to generate missions, marketed to Open Play but perfectly usable outside of it) and Open Play (the 'mode' which ignores a few balancing rules for convenience but otherwise adds nothing).
I think it's a useful distinction because the Open War cards can be used perfectly well for Matched play as well. In my opinion (which is shared by many in my local groups) they're better than the dedicated 9th edition missions as they mean people can play without the faff of secondaries.

Ah yes I meant open play, how silly of me to confuse Open War with Open Play. You are quite correct.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?

Quite well, given that I didn't HAVE to do that (but rather chose to). In fact, better than 9th, because I could just throw a special rule down ("you get Preferred Enemy (X) but your opponent gets Feel No Pain and Stubborn")

I honestly don't see what's so different between this and "You get to re-roll 1s to hit but your opponent shrugs damage on 5+ and doesn't add their losses to Morale tests". Is having an official short hand name for a bonus that strong of a point in another edition's favor?

Rihgu wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
I know I've read posts about the quick and simple house rules you made for campaign play, so how well did the base game serve your purpose if you had to do that?

Quite well, given that I didn't HAVE to do that (but rather chose to). In fact, better than 9th, because I could just throw a special rule down ("you get Preferred Enemy (X) but your opponent gets Feel No Pain and Stubborn")

I honestly don't see what's so different between this and "You get to re-roll 1s to hit but your opponent shrugs damage on 5+ and doesn't add their losses to Morale tests". Is having an official short hand name for a bonus that strong of a point in another edition's favor?

Preferred Enemy in 4th meant you hit on a 3+ regardless of your opponent's weapon skill in close combat, and would gently encourage said army to enter combat (or else lose the buff). I used this at the time to encourage attackers to actually move, rather than simply sit back and blast away (typically the attackers had higher combat power than the enemy and some incentives were required to move the game along, this was just one of them). Given that weapon skill comparisons don't exist in 9th, it would be difficult to replicate this rule (given that most units hit on a 3+ already, and the ones that hit on a 2+ would actively hate it unless I added an exception for them). I could just give the army +1 weapon skill but compared to Preferred Enemy (the narrative is in the title!) that doesn't seem to be meaningful and just sounds arbitrary.

The "shrugs on 5+" is fine, but in 4th, Feel No Pain interacted with other rules ("ignores armor saves" and "instant death") in ways that are lost in 9th - giving one side Feel No Pain is another way to encourage the other side to enter combat, as most power weapons "ignored armor saves" and therefore would ignore Feel No Pain. In 9th, you could write "5+ shrug except in close combat against weapons with AP-2 or higher" but then you get Marines with chainswords in assault doctrines, etc and if you said -3 or higher you'd ignore Power Axes (and even -2 ignores Power Mauls....).

Not adding losses to morale tests isn't REMOTELY the same thing as stubborn. Stubborn most readily made your units more resistant to getting swept in combat - I used this rule to try to mitigate the "enemy sweeps up all the defenders in 1 round" that plagued 4th edition as people consolidated from combat to combat. In 9th, it would be something like "you can't fall back" but in this edition it's actually a DRAWBACK....

Huh, I didn't realize that the rules had changed so much between 4th and 5th edition. Interesting!

<I'm sure in 25 pages someone has made this point already... but whatever, adding my $.02>

If using too complex to mean "too many things to keep track of" then yes. If not treating 40k as a dedicated primary hobby, it's way too complex.

When I have the moments in my life when I can buckle down and really read through every codex, daily stay up on the meta, and catch and analyze the updates as they come in... it's manageable. But even then (and I've won an Adepticon Medal in a 40k event in the 26 years I've been playing, so I've been in decent tournament form before) it's too much for anyone who's not playing in that top 5% of all players.

It's silly when games are won, not because of superior list play or tactics, but because someone had knowledge of a buried-army specific rule and its combination with other rules and the opponent simply was unaware of the possibility of that interaction... not because they weren't clever enough, but because they hadn't been able to digest all of the different rules, updates, chapter approveds, etc.

Special rules, strategms (which I hate), army construction bonuses, etc need to have significantly less game effect. This will make balance easier to percieve and reward good gameplay instead of rewarding game knowledge. Beat me because you played the game better on the table... not because you tailored a list to some giant if-then-else combo that I would have/could have easily stopped, but didn't buy that book 1 book of the 35+ that could show up in competitive play.

That's bloat beyond compare

It's also why almost everyone locally prefers Grimdark from 1pagerules over GW official rules. You have to play the statlines in that game and all the rules are free and trimmed of bloat (and I might add, balanced as point costs are based on a construction system not a dart board and a "feeling").

TLDR: use your 40k models to play a system with balanced rules and streamlined gameplay, like Grimdark Future

Thanks, I will check the Grimdark Future rules.

 Lobukia wrote:

Beat me because you played the game better on the table... not because you tailored a list to some giant if-then-else combo that I would have/could have easily stopped, but didn't buy that book 1 book of the 35+ that could show up in competitive play.

That's bloat beyond compare

You're talking about 8th edition, which ended more than a year ago. Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.

 Blackie wrote:
Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.

You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?

It's the most wombo of combos.

I don't think we have anything comperable to what Inari at the start of 8th could do with flocks and dark reapers procing of them, getting multiple soul bursts per turn. Not saying there are no combos, because they of course are, but show me something comperable to IH chaplain dread in an army of 2.0 IH with stone tanking shots it can ignore or heal, redirecting shots it doesn't want to get hit with to intercessors, and then getting healed back up in a single turn.

I'm with Karol. Saying the wombo comboness increased is subjectively not right.

What do you guys classify as wombo combo and what are examples for 9th edition armies?

How many are there compared to 8th edition?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.

You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?

Yeah I do. A few examples of those combos that break the game? I play SW and orks and can't think about anything. I regularly face evertyhing but custodes, knights, gen cult, blood angels, slaanesh and thousand sons armies and I don't remember a real gotchas in this edition so far. Basically only armies with lots of "fight first" units gave me some sort of gotchas. And I never read anything in advance to prepare games vs my opponents, no articles no enemy codexes.

Well, I guess the DG combo The Droning + Flash Outbreak tossed on a foetid bloat-drone does count.

On the other hand, I'm also very sure that none of the people in this thread complaining about wombo-combos even know what this one does.

 Blackie wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.

You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?

Yeah I do. A few examples of those combos that break the game? I play SW and orks and can't think about anything. I regularly face evertyhing but custodes, knights, gen cult, blood angels, slaanesh and thousand sons armies and I don't remember a real gotchas in this edition so far. Basically only armies with lots of "fight first" units gave me some sort of gotchas. And I never read anything in advance to prepare games vs my opponents, no articles no enemy codexes.

Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.

Slipspace wrote:
Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.

I guess that depends how you define Combo Wombo.

Deepstriking Slaanesh Obliterators that get Prescience, Cac and VotLW is that, surely.

Vanguard that deepstrike and then improve their shooting profile isn't, really. Now separately they might have an armor bonus or ignore blast, but these are not combos - especially not in the "gotcha" sense are they?




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Combo wombo have been removed in the meantime.

You... you don't seriously think that 9th doesn't have "wombo combos"?

I don't. Certainly not in the context described on the forum often.

9th does have hero-hammer aspects, but those aren't used terribly often ( does anyone remember the crazy DA HQ that was going to crush everyone? ) and are typically just extending their ability rather than producing a gotcha.

My exalted uses scrolls to calls a spell on a 9 thereby granting an extra undeniable cast through his trait. So there's two or three things that go into doing that, but the end result is that he casts another spell and in a way that I have to inform my opponent as to exactly why it is happening.

There are potential scenarios like that DA character that are a silly combo of traits, relics, psychic, prayers, and so on that are almost universally unviable, because putting that much effort into a single model doesn't have the same desired impact on the other end.

I think at the end of the day a lot of stuff comes down to attitude, rather than the contents of the actual rules, and a lot of the contents of the actual rules are being pointed at and blamed when really you're seeing an attitude shift.

Like it or don't, 9th edition is the most clearly defined, nailed down, un-interpretable edition of warhammer 40,000 ever. However, in my experience at least, the people playing it are constantly testing that clarity and actively seeking to exploit ambiguities to gain advantage far more regularly than previously used to be done.

I think a lot of it comes from how seeking out glitches and holes in the programming of video games has kind of seeped into wider gaming culture. I know it's not an entirely new thing - 'munchkins' in DND being an old a joke as it is - but it definitely seems like you somehow have two groups. Over here you've got some old-school historical wargamers playing some lesser known system that, were someone to try and come in and use the same attitude they use with 40k to exploit it, they'd be able to ABSOLUTELY EXPLODE, and somehow it doesn't happen, while over in 40k, people are constantly complaining that it's the worst system ever built it's so janky and busted and everythings incredibly imbalanced oh god its all on fire.

I think at the end of the day it's just: People playing historical games are trying to win as hard as they can, but also trying to create situations that feel like the picture they have in their head of a historical battle play out, and people playing 40k are trying to win as hard as they can, period. Whatever their models and dice and list has to do to make that happen, they want to win.

A few months ago I got involved with a historical ww2 game with a fairly similar structure to 40k, but to give you a few examples of rules 'whoopsies' present in the system:

-units of infantry move in groups but all vehicles move individually. A single unit can never be out of squad coherency RAW which is all models 1/2" away. A german infantry squad is 6 men and they are transported on 2 bikes. What happens if the two bikes (which RAW move individually) move apart, which RAW theyre allowed to do?

-Various units have typos in their statlines as bad as a model having a strength of "2" when it's supposed to have "12" and guns having strength values like "Short/Medium/Long 13/12/1" and " Front/Side/Rear 14/1/12"

-The same unit in various different supplements will have different rules, e.g. a medic tent may just not have the rule that lets it revive a wounded soldier in one supplement but it does in the other

Despite all that, though, nobody in the group has anything significantly above or below a 50% winrate. Nobody is 'the unstoppable guy that always wins' or 'the guy that always loses becuase his army sucks.' Nobody has discovered that hey actually it turns out finnish machine gun teams have like 60 shots when all other machine guns in the game have 6, and they show up to the next game night with a list that's just 45 finnish machine gun squads.

So GW has created a perfectly balanced a straight forward game but most 40k players are dicks????

Thats cult level of fanboyism!!!

No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.

Ah so it is like my school. Perfect Italian design. Spacious, advanced for the time it was build. It only has one small problem. It was build with southern Italy climate in mind and was build in northern Poland.

Who knows maybe w40k is perfect the way it is not, you just have to play it with specific people, in specific places with a specific mind set and specific , mainly 9th ed updated armies. And then it is okey.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
Codex AdMech might as well be renamed Codex Wombo Combo, for one.

I guess that depends how you define Combo Wombo.

Just go and watch any batrep with AdMech in it and see how much of their damage output and defensive capabilities come from rules not on a unit's datasheet. Also, check out how long the Command phase takes compared to other armies.

I guess if you define combos as "whatever I feel like" then they don't exist in 9th but I'm not sure yours is a sentiment many people share, particularly when it comes to AdMech. There are other offenders but I think they're probably the worst.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

a_typical_hero wrote:
No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.

Cleanly written? From a technical writing and editing POV 9th is a joke. Just go look how clumsily written many of the rules are. How many times do GW repeat the word "unit" and "attack" in a single rule?

I agree the rules are generally a little clearer than in 8th but I wouldn't call them clean. I'd define the text as pretty clumsy. It's like they're written by someone who's heard about tight, unambiguous rules language but only third hand and in a foreign language so they haven't really grasped the concept.

I appreciate Scotsman's post but there is one unstated assumption in it:

That it is impossible for well-written rules themselves to "create situations that feel like the picture they have in their head of a historical battle play out".

With games like Chain of Command, if you play your hardest, meanest, assholishist tactics and lists... you generally get how armies actually behaved on the battlefield. There is no border between "narrative (or in this case historical)" and "competitive (or in this case playing to win)" because the game rules themselves reward tactical play the same way reality rewarded tactical maneuver historically.

It isn't like historical armies weren't trying their hardest to win - just the reality of the times (the 'game rules' as it were) constrained what they could do.

Similarly, 40k *could* be written in a way that, by playing to win, you are also playing to your army's strength in the setting and you and your troops are also behaving the same way they would in the setting. But this doesn't seem to be the case - so while the Imperial Guard fields entire regiments of mechanized infantry mounted in Chimeras that are renowned for executing speedy and effective armored assaults... Well... let's just say fielding pure mech guard with the Steel Legion default loadout probably isn't a recipe for success.

Edit:
The fact that *some* wargames (yes. Even historicals!) also fail at this does not excuse 40k.

Slipspace wrote:
Just go and watch any batrep with AdMech in it and see how much of their damage output and defensive capabilities come from rules not on a unit's datasheet. Also, check out how long the Command phase takes compared to other armies.

I guess if you define combos as "whatever I feel like" then they don't exist in 9th but I'm not sure yours is a sentiment many people share, particularly when it comes to AdMech. There are other offenders but I think they're probably the worst.

Well, in this video the Command Phase took a minute. VG got +6" and an AP as well as ignore AP1/2. So when I cast -1 to hit and a 4++ on one of my units and then warp time them and give one model +2S and +1A - is that particularly burdensome? Are any of those things on the unit's datasheet?

Does Admech have a psychic phase? What is problematic about considering the Command Phase to be their Psychic Phase? If you think of the Magus casting a spell on a unit it's really not very different outside chance for failure.

https://youtu.be/OqpNfybMCck?t=2110

a_typical_hero wrote:
No... The TL;Dr version of Scotsman's post is:
The game is in the best rules iteration it has ever been, looked at from a "how clean it is written" pov and people play with a certain kind of attitude that's detrimental to both players having fun.

Yeah, that Death Guard equipment option entry is a prime example of clean writing.