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.

Spoletta wrote:
^ This.

The issue isn't the fact that after losing a bet the DE list was wiped out in quick order.
The issue is that the DE list was FORCED to take that bet.

That's what's bad about all this.
And it would have been bad even if the orks got totally slaughtered, because if the game boils down to "We roll these dices and see who wins", then there is something fundamentally wrong.

Its not "in quick order" though - it was a turn.

The game shouldn't be so lethal that if you can put what you want into the right stuff, you have a reasonable chance to delete essentially a whole army in a turn.
As I think Sean said - its not like the Ork player wouldn't almost certainly have won if he'd killed 1000 points of stuff. But at least you'd play it out to see.

It would be interesting to crunch the odds on that outcome to see how likely it is - but I doubt its that absurdly unlikely. If its happened once, it will happen again.

Luck is a fundamental part of 40k. I'll always remember another game with Nayden where he played Siegler in the 2020 LVO semi final. Shining Spears go in, kind of bounce. Intercessor Sergeant with Thunder Hammer turns around and kills 3 (IIRC), which I think wiped the Spears rather unexpectedly. Big unexpected swing in the points, probably cost Nayden the game. (Not exactly, because lots of other things could have happened - but a big swing versus where the probability would get you).

But that's the sort of... hotness you expect out of dice. Not "oh sorry, the dice were kind to me, so it looks like you don't have an army any more".

chaos0xomega wrote:
What were the conditions of the other turn 1 tabling? Was it another case of "a glass army just standing in optimal range of a gunline army loaded with rapid fire/Dakka weapons and saying come shoot me bro?". Because, if so, its still an outlier.

It was a SM army, mainly consisting of Dreads. Not to worry though, I'm sure you can come up with another justification to explain how everything is just fine and working as expected.

chaos0xomega wrote:
If the basis of design calls for a certain percentage of your force to be protected by terrain, cover, and other mechanics in order to mitigate lethality, and you do none of that, the problem is not the game design.

If the game allows you to have near 100% offensive efficiency in scenarios that are likely to happen then the problem really is with the game design. Hell, 90% efficiency under absurdly optimised conditions is bad game design.

As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

Hammering nails with a wrench actually works though, contrary to this edition XD

I still haven't had a chance to play my Orks with the new codex but wow! 1800pts destroyed in the shooting phase of all things.

I'm fortunate in that the armies I've been playing in 9th the most have been very durable so I'm a little blown away by nearly an entire board getting wiped like that in turn 1. The lethality sure is cranked up to 11. To answer the original question, I would enjoy 40k more if you could lose no more than a quarter of your army per round in a 5 round game. I find it's a lot more fun when you don't experience mass cas in Round 1 as well.

Spoletta wrote:
I would be really curios about the results of a 1500 point tournament. I think that 2000 isn't really a good army size for 40K. Too slow and too much fat allowed.

We play 1500 at the meta at my college club. It speeds up games for sure, and makes some units more critical, especially if you build around them. You can afford to make less mistakes in the movement phase and during positioning for objectives and vp, while the enemy can punish your mistakes or build somewhat less than in 2k games. Bonus for less logistics in transporting your army and quicker setup as well.

It has to be coupled with rules for a single detachment though, imo. Without it, you can still meet lists that spams units you just didnt bring the tools to meet. Making for the disappointing experience of setting up terrain, objective markers, setting the mission and secondary objectives, and deploying on the table, just to discover you cant hurt his all flier list with a few invisible invul rerolling assassins that can only be hit on 6+ hiding somewhere on the table or some similar BS.

Lords of War, Superheavies, Fliers, Tank only lists etc, have no place in regular 40k the way I see it. If you know your oppponent has to build around a battallion detatchment, you can roughly prepare for how the game will unfold.

Take units that dont need LOS to shoot. How fun is it to meet 6 of those at a game? I know I dont have a good time. Even at tournaments its BS, pseud strategy pretending someone did something interesting with the game by bringing units that simply camps and shoots whatever unit it wants on the game, like basilisk spam at the start of 9th (?).

Boo Hiss.

Join the 1500 games. They are fun.

Tune in later for my sales pitch pimping the 750 point games, and how fun they are

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

Exactly this, but apparently a large portion of the player base ignores this or refuses to accept it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 triplegrim wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
I would be really curios about the results of a 1500 point tournament. I think that 2000 isn't really a good army size for 40K. Too slow and too much fat allowed.

We play 1500 at the meta at my college club. It speeds up games for sure, and makes some units more critical, especially if you build around them. You can afford to make less mistakes in the movement phase and during positioning for objectives and vp, while the enemy can punish your mistakes or build somewhat less than in 2k games. Bonus for less logistics in transporting your army and quicker setup as well.

It has to be coupled with rules for a single detachment though, imo. Without it, you can still meet lists that spams units you just didnt bring the tools to meet. Making for the disappointing experience of setting up terrain, objective markers, setting the mission and secondary objectives, and deploying on the table, just to discover you cant hurt his all flier list with a few invisible invul rerolling assassins that can only be hit on 6+ hiding somewhere on the table or some similar BS.

Lords of War, Superheavies, Fliers, Tank only lists etc, have no place in regular 40k the way I see it. If you know your oppponent has to build around a battallion detatchment, you can roughly prepare for how the game will unfold.

Take units that dont need LOS to shoot. How fun is it to meet 6 of those at a game? I know I dont have a good time. Even at tournaments its BS, pseud strategy pretending someone did something interesting with the game by bringing units that simply camps and shoots whatever unit it wants on the game, like basilisk spam at the start of 9th (?).

Boo Hiss.

Join the 1500 games. They are fun.

Same feeling. 1500 points is by far my favorite format. 44'' x 60'' tables and 12 + 1/turn CPs are more suited for 1500 than 2000, and there's no real room for overly expensive units at 1500. Also listbuilding now involves making some actual hard choices. That's real peak 40k .

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

 Ordana wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

It does, but it also depends on the nature of the imbalance. For example, in 8th the Eldar flyer spam list was extremely powerful but your chances of running into it in casual games was pretty low. Most Eldar players didn't own the 6-7 planes needed and it's the sort of list you know is broken if you're going to run it. SM 2.0, OTOH, was broken pretty much across the board so any game against SM with any of the slightly weaker armies in 8th was a miserable experience. I stopped playing my SM at the end of 8th for that very reason.

At the moment I think AdMech and DE are in the same category as SM 2.0. They're just undercosted across the board and taking fairly normal lists from those Codices will result in very powerful armies that many people will have no answer for. Orks are borderline, I think. The Freebooterz terror is basically a Speed Freaks list, just with a bit more spamming of certain fast options.

I'm not saying GW shouldn't do a much better job at balance - they absolutely should. But I think some people don't see a problem with some armies because the nature of what makes them broken is often only going to be encountered at tournaments. Eventually GW's terrible balance catches up with them though, and we get that imbalance ruining regular games.

 bullyboy wrote:
I'm not seeing a problem of lethality overload here.

So what is your definition of too lethal? Probably useful to say, otherwise if you have a radically different definition you are just at cross purposes and getting nowhere.

I would say for me in 'modern' wargames optimal attack positions vs optimal targets should result in at most a third of the enemy being removed (others can be fleeing, broken, disrupted etc.) early game. Later on after some manoeuvre it can be higher (and especially with some historical stuff which is often vying for the winning position then executing the attack) and indeed the majority of the enemy, but that is then the result of in game decisions, not bad deployment or lists.

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns. You can play as casually as you want. I've introduced a hell of a lot of new players to 40k and there's almost always at least one moment of "Wait. What? It's just dead? Just like that?"

40k is a TERRIBLE casual game. I can slap together a game of Apocalypse and teach a new player how to play in minutes, and we can have great fun throwing down our armies and duking it out over 6, 7 turns, end the game with 20-30% of our armies still on the table. 40k is 3 turns of competitive manual tax filing where one player sits there for an hour and scoops models off the table while their opponent recites rules to them.

A typical Freebooters + Speedfreaks list, aka made without spamming stuff, is not OP at all. Bringing 4+ planes and 9+ buggies is.

I mostly play Freebooters Speedwaaagh and several of my opponents who play 9th edition factions run more powerful lists.

Ad mech and Drukhari (especially) are more of an issue because one average collection of models is already a very solid base. So were 8th SM 2.0. Orks without skewing are ok at best, even Freebooters Speadfreaks.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 the_scotsman wrote:


IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns.

I thought it was 5. Need to double check my rulebook then.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
I'm not seeing a problem of lethality overload here.

So what is your definition of too lethal? Probably useful to say, otherwise if you have a radically different definition you are just at cross purposes and getting nowhere.

I was talking specifically about the interaction of the 12 chimeras vs wraithknight example, not the game in general.
Yes, for the most part, this game is too lethal.

A lot of people only play 40k and it shows. In a game like Flames of War (which is mechanically very similar to pre-8th edition 40k), if I know my opponent's list I can tailor mine to explicitly counter theirs as viciously as possible. If the opponent runs a gamble hail mary to try and take me out and fails, their failure WILL be punished by my counter-play. They likely will lose the game because of it.

But it still would be nearly impossible to destroy 90% of their units in a single turn. Range, cover, unit type, number of shots available (do we REALLY need to be rolling 40+ dice at a time?), all make units in that game much more survivable. The result would be my opponent on a serious back foot, struggling to score points and eke out a draw even. But we still would have a game to play.

 Ordana wrote:
I have trouble imaging casual players don't run into the same issue when you take your fluffy GSC into a fluffy Drukhari or speedfreak list.

Lack of balance hits everyone.

Imbalance hurts casual play for a certain; GSC have been essentially unplayable for all of 9th and most of 8th. But at least in casual play, you have breathing space for things like nonstandard missions and boards, handicap points, houserules, and gentlefolks'-agreements like "look, I'm not gonna bring any flyers, and only a couple buggies, tops."

40k is a janky ruleset* when it comes to casual play and pick-up matches. It falls apart utterly when you try to make it into a competitive game of skill.


* To be fair, the real problems have never been in the core rules--40k is always destroyed in the codexes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Las wrote:
A lot of people only play 40k and it shows. In a game like Flames of War (which is mechanically very similar to pre-8th edition 40k), if I know my opponent's list I can tailor mine to explicitly counter theirs as viciously as possible. If the opponent runs a gamble hail mary to try and take me out and fails, their failure WILL be punished by my counter-play. They likely will lose the game because of it.

But it still would be nearly impossible to destroy 90% of their units in a single turn. Range, cover, unit type, number of shots available (do we REALY need to be rolling 40+ dice at a time?), all make units in that game much more survivable. The result would be my opponent on a serious back foot, struggling to score points and eke out a draw even. But we still would have a game to play.

To illustrate, in Flames of War you have to spend your entire first turn maneuvering, and don't come into effective shooting range until turn 2 at the earliest. As far as I'm concerned, that's a bare-minimum standard of "pretty okay game design."

Even "basic infantry" in most 40k factions have weapon ranges that cover most of the table, and can engage from one deployment zone to the other without moving. That is axiomatically bad game design, and things only get worse from there.

You don't have to reduce ranges to have an effective game design either.

Chain of Command uses a 1/120 ground scale (the minis can be anywhere from 6mm to 28mm, with the devs recommending 20mm; my group uses 28)... anyways

That means that a 6 foot table is only 240 yards from end-to-end. A good marksman with a World War II rifle could easily shoot that far - and indeed, most weapons have infinite range in COC (though there are some exceptions obviously).

However, the Patrol Phase + Jump Off Point mechanics means that armies rarely shoot on their first opportunity to do so, and if they do it's because their opponent made a mistake (or is deliberately provoking them into shooting to serve their ends). This plus actually good terrain rules means you can combine realistic weapon ranges but still have a normal, fun game.

The whole balancing/nerf ork codex freak out is annoying. Even goon hammer is screaming nerf orks… https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-many-magnificent-majors/

the nonsense about the obvious bias is he lists all the top 10 finishes over the last week tournaments. In just the majors tournaments they are primarily won by drukari or ad mech. With ad mech and drukari also filling up most of the top 10 rankings (7x grey knights and 6x adeptus soritas placing too). There is 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and like 2 other freebooter lists on the bottom 10 of those 5 major tournaments and the dude is posting nonsense like
"Beyond that, it floods the board with vehicles and takes the opponent off the table in double time. You know this stuff. I am starting the feel the angry spirit of JONK overtaking me, so let’s congratulate on the podium finish and move on."

47 players listed in 5 majors tournaments 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and 2 other in bottom 10 and the dude is crying about Orks. There are 22 admech/drukari lists out of 47 players who placed... and he's crying about orks!!! It's a freak out about 1 ork list winning 1 tournament and that ork list even went 8-1 losing a game during that same tournament on a codex that’s been out for 3+ months… but ya know nerf orks!!

gungo wrote:
The whole balancing/nerf ork codex freak out is annoying. Even goon hammer is screaming nerf orks… https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-many-magnificent-majors/

the nonsense about the obvious bias is he lists all the top 10 finishes over the last week tournaments. In just the majors tournaments they are primarily won by drukari or ad mech. With ad mech and drukari also filling up most of the top 10 rankings (7x grey knights and 6x adeptus soritas placing too). There is 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and like 2 other freebooter lists on the bottom 10 of those 5 major tournaments and the dude is posting nonsense like
"Beyond that, it floods the board with vehicles and takes the opponent off the table in double time. You know this stuff. I am starting the feel the angry spirit of JONK overtaking me, so let’s congratulate on the podium finish and move on."

47 players listed in 5 majors tournaments 1 ork win, 1x 3rd place finish and 2 other in bottom 10 and the dude is crying about Orks. There are 22 admech/drukari lists out of 47 players who placed... and he's crying about orks!!! It's a freak out about 1 ork list winning 1 tournament and that ork list even went 8-1 losing a game during that same tournament on a codex that’s been out for 3+ months… but ya know nerf orks!!

The Goonhammer team have called for Drukhari and Admech nerfs as well, in the past, and as far as I know are still calling for them.

No, it's bad game design/balance. Warhammer always has bad balance. It's terribly balanced. It isn't even vaguely designed to be balanced. Stuff comes out all the time that, when 'optimised' by competitive players, totally ruins games.

It would be utter stupidity to try and play this game 'competitively' and expect balance. The only thing you'll achieve is breaking the game.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
As I know I’ve said before, GW is *supporting* competitive play but not actually designing for it. A competitive game genuinely built for tournament play would look radically different than the current edition of 40K. And we know that GW is capable of producing more competitive games because they’ve done it. They just don’t want to with 40K.

40K is still being designed as a casual game of indeterminate length built to sell models and create in-game narratives and such, and attempts to make it into a near-sport will always disappoint with incidents like this one. People still do it anyway, so GW gave up and gave in with 9th. Still, all that competitive support is just some form of “while we don’t recommend hammering in nails with a wrench, here’s how you can if that’s what you want to do.”

Don’t get me wrong…people should have fun however they want. It just baffles me when people act like they don’t know they’re hammering nails with wrenches.

IMO, the "Hammering Nails with Wrenches" is when people try to play 9th edition 40k as a "Casual game of indeterminate length."

Because the length is determinate. it's 3 turns. You can play as casually as you want. I've introduced a hell of a lot of new players to 40k and there's almost always at least one moment of "Wait. What? It's just dead? Just like that?"

40k is a TERRIBLE casual game. I can slap together a game of Apocalypse and teach a new player how to play in minutes, and we can have great fun throwing down our armies and duking it out over 6, 7 turns, end the game with 20-30% of our armies still on the table. 40k is 3 turns of competitive manual tax filing where one player sits there for an hour and scoops models off the table while their opponent recites rules to them.

I don't think we really disagree. To me, 40K doesn't seem to be doing anything particularly well. The rules writing has gone the way it has, but the core design philosophy doesn't prioritize competitive play. Truly designing for competitive play means seeking real balance, and they can't achieve that with endless and layered special rules, army lists that sprawl on for 30 pages, etc. Competitive 40K would have very lawyer-y rules, but also be a far leaner game designed for faster play.

And the thing is, GW has in recent years designed both good competitive games and good casual games. AT is definitely a casual game and the rulebook is written in a classic GW narrative style. But because the game isn't overly complex, has good flow, feels intuitive, places emphasis on in-game decision-making rather than list-building, the factions are subdued in terms of special rules, etc...yeah, you can get a new player up and running pretty well in a couple turns of play. Likewise I think a new player can get their head around the basics of Underworlds pretty quickly, and that game is designed for competition. So the state of 40K is...intentional, driven a lot by the need to be a cash cow and weighed down with decades of baggage.

But again...it's obviously still very popular, so even if it baffles me I can't really call GW or the players 'wrong'. It's just not my cup of tea anymore.

 the_scotsman wrote:


1. so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn?

2. Is this healthy for a competitive game?

3. What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

Broke it down for clarity.

1. With the caveat that the Dark Eldar player put his proverbial junk on the table in his gambit to grab objectives and perhaps lock up units and failed, yes. Risk/Reward.

2. In normal circumstances, no. In this exact example, yes.

3. 1/4 to 1/3 on planet bowling ball. Don't play on planet bowling ball.

 kronk wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:


1. so, in your opinion, understanding that the opposing player went for an all-out offensive strategy in an attempt to reach his opponent, do you think it is good game design for it to be possible to remove effectively an entire 2,000 point army in a single turn?

2. Is this healthy for a competitive game?

3. What should be the maximum amount of units it should be possible to remove in one turn if, say, you were to line up a 2000pt army against another 2000pt army in the open and allow them all to open fire?

Broke it down for clarity.

1. With the caveat that the Dark Eldar player put his proverbial junk on the table in his gambit to grab objectives and perhaps lock up units and failed, yes. Risk/Reward.

2. In normal circumstances, no. In this exact example, yes.

3. 1/4 to 1/3 on planet bowling ball. Don't play on planet bowling ball.

Do you seriously believe that in the current game, with a reasonably competitive list, you couldnt remove more than 1/4 to 1/3 of an opposing army in one turn on planet bowling ball?

I'm fairly confident I could take out at the very least 1000pts with, say, my Thousand Sons which are generally considered fairly middle of the road after their recent 'dex. And I could definitely do basically the same on planet "entirely covered in low cover that isn't Obscuring". Put enough Light Cover on the table to give 100% of my opponent's infantry and beast units +1 to their save, it won't matter one bit, I'll shred through them like a hot knife through butter.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hankovitch wrote:

* To be fair, the real problems have never been in the core rules--40k is always destroyed in the codexes.

I don't believe you. In the current game's core rules there is almost no difference between "Most Optimal firepower" and "Least Optimal Firepower."

If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

That's a core rules problem, and it's exactly why GW has to layer all the crap like rotating army rules (doctrines/canticles/etc), special rules that make Ork weapons extra effective at half range, stratagems that spike a unit's effectiveness, auras, relics, etc etc. The core rules give basically no space for an engagement between Unit X and Unit Y to go any differently based on circumstances, so we have to make sure Unit X and Unit Y have a million army-wide rules, auras, stratagems, potential relics/special traits and such to add depth.

Thats a core rule problem. The codexes as they are now are a natural offshoot to the need to keep things interesting because there's just not that much there in the core rules.

I don't think the issue is that units do 100% of their output if they can see 1% of the enemy unit. I think its just the codex synergy maths is too good. If you have a unit where you'd expect a 65%+ return on your points on average dice - which can happen with Ad Mech and Ork Speedwaaagh Shooting and way above that with DE combat (and various other factions) well if you roll high, and they roll low, there are going to be outcomes where that's 100%+.

The difference is that if the average expected return was say 25%, a "hot" return would be say 40%. Its much more moderate.

There's this solution of "omg we need to ban flyers" - but that just seems lazy. Because if say a Tau player turned up with 3 Sun Sharks are you going to scream OP?

 the_scotsman wrote:
If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

Exalted. This is the one thing that really bugs me about 40k, it instantly rips you out of the experience where if you can see a single piece of a model is visible then you can throw buckets of dice at the entire unit. Really kills the versimilitude for me. When I introduce the game to new players it's something they get hung up on a lot since they may have thought they maneuvered smartly but unfortunately you can still leverage 100% of your firepower with 100% accuracy because Trooper Bigguy has a bulging bicep exposed and now the whole unit is being peppered with fire.

 The Red Hobbit wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
If I can see 1% of 1 model in an enemy unit at the absolute maximum edge of my effective range, then I can hit them with the exact same firepower that I can hit an enemy unit 2" away from me completely out in the open.

Exalted. This is the one thing that really bugs me about 40k, it instantly rips you out of the experience where if you can see a single piece of a model is visible then you can throw buckets of dice at the entire unit. Really kills the versimilitude for me. When I introduce the game to new players it's something they get hung up on a lot since they may have thought they maneuvered smartly but unfortunately you can still leverage 100% of your firepower with 100% accuracy because Trooper Bigguy has a bulging bicep exposed and now the whole unit is being peppered with fire.

The rules are a mixture of:

-exceedingly casual, loosey-goosey mechanics and fanciful sci-fi names

-and then all of a sudden HYPER-specific, HYPER-complex mechanics that punish you SUPER SUPER HARD if you don't keep them in mind AT ALL TIMES (see: Cover, Obscuring, the flow of the fight phase selection order where the active player goes first in the 'charged' round and the inactive player goes first in the 'normal' round

-and then a billion-and-one different options and interactions that you have to remember or they create gakky 'gotcha' scenarios - whoops, you deep struck against one of the armies that has a stratagem for that, your dudes are deleted. Whoops, you forgot that this subfaction of space marines has a stratagem to make all their units pile in, your dudes are deleted. Whoops, this unit can deal 6 mortal wounds to you if you get moved over, your dudes are deleted.

It is basically the least friendly game system to try and introduce a new player to or to play casually ever conceived of. Warmahordes might be worse what with its 'insta-lose' mechanic of taking out the caster but its less obtuse.

Remember when deep strike mishaps were still a thing? When those existed, it was possible for a player to play very aggressively and with sufficiently bad luck wipe themselves out. It was also possible for the other player (expecting deep strikes) to arrange their forces so that the deep striking force essentially had to deep strike aggressively.

Suppose you've got a Slaanesh daemon player vs. a marine player and the Slaanesh player runs their entire army into bolter rapid fire range. Suicide by bolter isn't something GW can do anything to prevent.

 solkan wrote:
Remember when deep strike mishaps were still a thing? When those existed, it was possible for a player to play very aggressively and with sufficiently bad luck wipe themselves out. It was also possible for the other player (expecting deep strikes) to arrange their forces so that the deep striking force essentially had to deep strike aggressively.

Suppose you've got a Slaanesh daemon player vs. a marine player and the Slaanesh player runs their entire army into bolter rapid fire range. Suicide by bolter isn't something GW can do anything to prevent.

...Of course, "Rapid Fire Range" now being 30" on a 44" table, that's foolishly exposing your forces to...the 2/3 of the board that contains any of the opposing army.

Yeah really just a massively avoidable error.

And also, why would they do anything but that? Cover literally doesn't do anything, diddly freakin' squat, for slaanesh daemons. They can't benefit from it, they might as well just run headlong at the enemy if theyre not cowering behind obscuring raising banners.

The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

I really hope they don’t do that. That is literally the absolute worst solution anyone could think of

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The worst part about this - other than all the folks acting like this isn't a problem or is some grand outlier and not actually a pitch-perfect representation of the absurd lethality of 9th - is that I know exactly how GW is going to 'fix' this:

They'll add the phrase "in any turn after the first" to the rules for calling a Waaagh!/Speedwaaagh/Great Waaagh!, and they'll call that a job done.

Then do it also to SM doctrines .