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.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
A special rule or two is A-OK.

GW takes it to extremes though.
My favourite example is the Ork buggy - the model has a grot hanging off the side with a pistol.
So the vehicle has an extra special rule allowing it to shoot a pistol on top of everything else as an exception to the normal rules.
For a S3 AP- pistol. Genuinely, who cares? Why bother? The time spent rolling that dice isn't worth the damage it does, let alone the ink used to print the rule.
Any sane game would have just left that grot as a cute little piece of decoration and character.

That's a great example of how GW ignores the quality of actual User Experience in their games and designs them to be a tedious slog.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Genuinely, who cares?

The grot.

moreorless wrote:
I spose a big factor here as well really is the kind of culture around playing the game isnt it? you could argue its a bit like choosing a list you know isnt optimized for maximum effectiveness but you think fits into the lore or is just fun to play. I think there is fun to be had playing with a handicap personally even in competitive games.

I mean I wouldnt often just pick a totally handicapped list but I would often think "I want to use X unit/s, how do I do this most effectively?"

For that to work well, balance needs to be in a somewhat decent state, both internally and externally. Until Drukhari were released this kind of was the case for 9th, but afterwards even slightly handicapping yourself meant that you would have a non-game against certain codices because even an army of "units I think are cool" would completely overpower you and end the game by the bottom of turn 2.

As the game is right now, either the weak codices are forced to play optimized lists in narrative to even have a chance of not getting tabled (no units, no story told), or the powerful codices have to actively hamstring themselves to get anything out of the game (no story told with the opponent being dead for three turns either).

Either way, people are not able to play what they think fits the lore or is fun to play because of how unhinged the game is right now. The crusade rules coming apart at the poorly sewn seams due to all that lethality doesn't help either.

I'm currently trying to mitigate that by only matching armies of similar tiers (similar to what ClockworkZion is suggesting) in our campaign, but this is nothing but a band-aid. People will start complaining about having the same match-ups all the time, and unlike with bloodbowl, you can't just switch armies by buying a box or two and painting it in a weeks worth of work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
A special rule or two is A-OK.

GW takes it to extremes though.
My favourite example is the Ork buggy - the model has a grot hanging off the side with a pistol.
So the vehicle has an extra special rule allowing it to shoot a pistol on top of everything else as an exception to the normal rules.
For a S3 AP- pistol. Genuinely, who cares? Why bother? The time spent rolling that dice isn't worth the damage it does, let alone the ink used to print the rule.
Any sane game would have just left that grot as a cute little piece of decoration and character.

It's just one extra color of dice you are rolling in addition to the pile of dice the buggy is rolling anyways. It's not really that different from the random bolters and grenade launchers stapled to every imperial vehicle.
Of course, they could have made the grenades and grot blasters assault and skip the special rule.

If you actually want to complain about needlessly complex rules, look at the squighogs. Outside of edge cases writing them as just having 5 Attacks with as single S6 AP-2 D2 weapon would have been absolutely equivalent.

Cyel 803436 11323065 wrote:

That's a great example of how GW ignores the quality of actual User Experience in their games and designs them to be a tedious slog.

But what if some other company starts making models for grots hanging off buggies, and GW can't prove that they are the sole and only owners of every depiction of a goblinoid with a pistol handing ?

Or that they somehow think that having a grot with a pistol on the buggy will confused the players, there is a pistol why doesn't it get to attack? While at the same time full expecting a new player to have 100% control and knowladge of 5 tier deep stratagem and aura interactions, which as we all know are so easy and clear to understand and remember that they can never confuse anyone.

I think the issue is just that someone in GW thinks its cool/fun that a Grot can lean out of the Mad Max style buggy and blam someone. It forges a narrative, even if its pointless 90%+ of the time.

Same story with Squighogs. Its "fun" to know the Hogs (or Saddlegit) got the kills rather than the Boyz.

Me and most of my opponents also think it's cool and fun

For the hogs that effect doesn't really work though. It just makes you lose time because you can't just roll 25 dice and be done with it.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
@Hecaton: you say that it'd make people mad, but is there anything that GW does that doesn't actually make them mad?

And I stand by that it'd at least lean into the lore better considering.

Also, war games don't have to be "fair". Asymmetrical design can work if it's intentionally designed for.

Well then what's the point of the points system? It's supposed to provide an (approximately) even fight.

GW can make cool minis and publish balanced, flavorful rules, and people won't get mad. There are some people who complain to complain, but not me.

War games don't have to be fair - but asymmetrical design typically implies fairness, so it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about. Moreover, if a wargame isn't fair, people aren't going to want to play it. "I won because I chose to spend money on the army the designers said was more powerful, and you lost because you chose to spend money on the army the designers said was less powerful" does not a fun game make.

The reason Blood Bowl works differently is that instead of points, there's a limitation to the amount of players that can be on the field (I know your roster has a "points" cap but you're limited to what can be on the field at a given time). 40k doesn't have that limitation; Custodes vs. Infantry-focused IG will have vastly different numbers of troops on the opposite sides, but the possibility exists for it to be a fair fight regardless.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:
The Blood Bowl comparison doesn't work because it also pokes fun at the fact some sportsball teams are just garbage.

And every military force is well trained and equipped to handle any foe? Not even true in 40k.

If that's your argument, 40k hasn't been satirical or poking fun at that (if it ever did) in decades.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:
The Blood Bowl comparison doesn't work because it also pokes fun at the fact some sportsball teams are just garbage.

And every military force is well trained and equipped to handle any foe? Not even true in 40k.

If that's your argument, 40k hasn't been satirical or poking fun at that (if it ever did) in decades.

Who mentioned satire?

I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

Some armies, e.g. Marines, are pretty straightforward to play, have lots of redundancy built-in, and are easier to recover from gameplay mistakes and mishaps (poor positioning, etc.) since the units are pretty tough overall.

Other armies can require more finesses and careful planning to get the most out of them, and more importantly if fail to plan ahead accordingly there isn't as much leeway for mistakes.

I think the above is the point to be reiterated about army selection.

I also feel like these differences haven't translated as well to modern era, and were probably more distinctive in older editions.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

Some armies, e.g. Marines, are pretty straightforward to play, have lots of redundancy built-in, and are easier to recover from gameplay mistakes and mishaps (poor positioning, etc.) since the units are pretty tough overall.

Other armies can require more finesses and careful planning to get the most out of them, and more importantly if fail to plan ahead accordingly there isn't as much leeway for mistakes.

I think the above is the point to be reiterated about army selection.

I also feel like these differences haven't translated as well to modern era, and were probably more distinctive in older editions.

Said it better than I did.

Points don't reflect complexity, just relative strength on paper (and that is rarely a fixed thing). Some armies have better statlines and are easier to pilot to a win than others, even when both armies have been updated at the same time. Compare Grey Knights to Thousand Sons for example. Thousand Sons are more complex compared to the more straightforward Grey Knights and struggled to make a splash in the meta as a result.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

And it's due to that logic we'd have people defending the game if GW priced Termagaunts at 10 points per model. L2P has always been a garbage argument.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

And it's due to that logic we'd have people defending the game if GW priced Termagaunts at 10 points per model. L2P has always been a garbage argument.

That wasn't what the point about tiers was about.

The idea was that GW could level the playing field further while also setting expectations for players by saying "this army is easier to win with than that army, so here's some bonuses to the army that is harder to win with".

 ClockworkZion wrote:
The idea was that GW could level the playing field further while also setting expectations for players by saying "this army is easier to win with than that army, so here's some bonuses to the army that is harder to win with".

Yeah, this could all be done with points.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

Well, they were the ones using terms like strong and weak.

If they wanted their point to be understood, then they should have used the correct terms.

Karol wrote:

Cyel 803436 11323065 wrote:

That's a great example of how GW ignores the quality of actual User Experience in their games and designs them to be a tedious slog.

But what if some other company starts making models for grots hanging off buggies, and GW can't prove that they are the sole and only owners of every depiction of a goblinoid with a pistol handing ?

Or that they somehow think that having a grot with a pistol on the buggy will confused the players, there is a pistol why doesn't it get to attack? While at the same time full expecting a new player to have 100% control and knowladge of 5 tier deep stratagem and aura interactions, which as we all know are so easy and clear to understand and remember that they can never confuse anyone.

Yeah, burdening players with irrelevant minutiae like these is what makes this game feel like a slow-paced, tedious chore.

I think game design is like programming. Any idiot can keep adding lines upon lines of code, but it takes a smart person to actually make code shorter but still working as intended.

I'll echo a point about apparent player skill. A faction like Custodes caters to people who don't really like rules, or phases, or regular styles of play. There is only one style of play really for Custodes. Get in close and deck 'em in the schnoz. Rinse, and Repeat. Psykers? Can your Grade A psyker stop my size 15 boot from being inserted into your rear? Shooting? Sure we can shoot, but that's not what we are best at. Our Shooting just softens up the mobs for getting punched.

I would honestly wonder, if all the players getting top places right now with Custodes could do the same with Dark Eldar, or Space Marines, or Nids. Likely not. Custodes is basically babies first 40k faction. We're catered to less talented players, who don't like confusing codexes with lots of rules and text. We worry about two things. How fast can I get there, and how hard can I hit it with my weapon?

We've never had a time where the simplest most newb friendly faction is this powerful. Of course we are seeing droves or good placings. Because a lot of dumb dumbs out there are running with the simple easy mode lists. Im actually on the Nerf Custodes bandwagon, and they're my faction.

I just want to be able to have fun playing them. If you nerf them, just leave us something fun.

Ah yes, because DE require genius level of skills to play. Same with the stamped nids. Saves on saves, -1D multi wound models. Same with GK , 5 NDK -1D, inv and psychic powers.

Now ad mecha, that is an army which requires someone of the , likes to fill out his own tax forms, mind set.

The more I listen to custodes rants, the more it looks like the IH end of 8th ed rants. People hate them, because it is not their army which is at the top and it costs less then what they spend on their army. And the better the army, the higher win rate it had pre custodes arriving the higher the lack of acceptance for custodes being good. And no wait and see for 6-9 months, like with DEs or Inari in 8. No they are suppose to be nerfed in to the ground now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

EviscerationPlague 803436 11323417 wrote:
And it's due to that logic we'd have people defending the game if GW priced Termagaunts at 10 points per model. L2P has always been a garbage argument.

Okey, but when the illusion of play what you want is being drawn, how would you name all the pitfalls, bad armies, bad units etc factions in w40k have?
Learn to play is a nice of way of saying, if you don't buy and play with x, y and z and stay away from faction a, b and c, you are going to have a hell lot of bad time and a ton of , I wasted my money, feelings.

Custodes literally don't have a Psyker phase, and more than 10 actual units, with a host of different abilities. By the nature of them even having a psychic phase, they are inherently more complicated than Custodes. Stop grasping at straws. This isn't even an argument that Custodes are the simpleton faction.

 Tyran wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

Well, they were the ones using terms like strong and weak.

If they wanted their point to be understood, then they should have used the correct terms.

I was using it in reference to stats but people spun that out to mean the entire army or that I meant that people should be told their army can't win.

The point was that there some armies will always be easier to win with over others due to the innate advantages a good statline gives an army. Add in rules complexity (like Guard orders) and the deck starts stacking in favor of armies like Marines and Custodes.

I'm not saying that tiers should say "your army sucks" but rather say "your army is easier/harder to win with and as such we offer additional bonuses to balance those uneven match ups".

I know some people think that points are a magic bandaid to sort this but there is no mathematical way to point everything out perfectly for every match up and combination. Some match ups are going to be more unfair to one army than the other by the simple way the mechanics pile up (not even touching on how players gravitate towards optimizing the heck out of their armies to boot) and recognizing it and building it a system to try and flatten the curve on those match ups to create a more interesting game.

Plus it'd make it easier for new players to a faction to know what kind of experiance they're looking at. Are they getting an army like Custodes or Marines that are fairly straightforward and strong because of how their buffs work in a straightforward manner to mitigate bad rolls, or are they getting GSC or Thousand Sons who have to work to get their bonuses and require more finesse and a bad turn can pull the whole army apart? I feel like recognizing that there are differences in what kind of experiance you're looking at would make people feel less bad about jumping into an army only to find out it's got a harsher learning curve than they expected.

And maybe GW could sort this by stripping the game down to statblocks and limiting the game to one faction bonus and no more than one rule per datasheet, double all the points base and refine it from there, but with the design team trying to dial into the lore of the setting in how the armies play I feel they should look at setting expectations from the outset in terms of the complexity of the armies, the differences in strength provided by their statline and the bonuses given to the armies.

Failing all that, then at the very least a designer's introduction on what they designed the army to play like would go a long way for setting intent and allowing players to get a better feel for an army before they buy it.

To be frank, they could also market armies in terms of their "complexity" as a way to get at the difficulty of piloting question. More complex armies with a lot of moving parts at work, tend to require more mental overhead to pilot well, since there are more plates you need to keep spinning in the air. It would be an easy shorthand way to talk about it too.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

And it's due to that logic we'd have people defending the game if GW priced Termagaunts at 10 points per model. L2P has always been a garbage argument.

That wasn't what the point about tiers was about.

The idea was that GW could level the playing field further while also setting expectations for players by saying "this army is easier to win with than that army, so here's some bonuses to the army that is harder to win with".

Which would require leveling the playing field. Which they're not interested in doing and would require them to dramatically alter their business model to achieve.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I think people are missing ClockworkZion's point.....

This isn't about good/bad or strong/weak, it's about how difficult it is to pilot the army well.

And it's due to that logic we'd have people defending the game if GW priced Termagaunts at 10 points per model. L2P has always been a garbage argument.

That wasn't what the point about tiers was about.

The idea was that GW could level the playing field further while also setting expectations for players by saying "this army is easier to win with than that army, so here's some bonuses to the army that is harder to win with".

Which would require leveling the playing field. Which they're not interested in doing and would require them to dramatically alter their business model to achieve.

Not really an arguement against it in a topic called "What 40k SHOULD be".

 Mezmorki wrote:
To be frank, they could also market armies in terms of their "complexity" as a way to get at the difficulty of piloting question. More complex armies with a lot of moving parts at work, tend to require more mental overhead to pilot well, since there are more plates you need to keep spinning in the air. It would be an easy shorthand way to talk about it too.

One of my favorite board games, BattleCON, does this - it ranks the characters by their complexity, not their power level. Some of the very "simple" characters (CADENZA) can win games, but their mechanics are relatively straightforward, whereas others (Tanis Trilives) are like a puzzle to play, or to play against.

If GW wanted to make all-Primaris Astartes a very simple army to play, but kept its power level in line with other factions, that'd be a great way to get people into the game. As it stands the power level is too volatile (though they'll almost certainly get pushed to the moon when the new codex comes out).

Hecaton wrote:
Yeah, this could all be done with points.

As I've been saying to years: Points are not the great leveller. They certainly help, but they are not the one-stop solution to all problems.

GW's issues like with the constant addition of layered rules, and escalating rules. It comes down to there being no standardisation and no scalability built into 40k: Everything is bespoke, meaning that they just make it up as they go along, introducing new mechanics, or the same mechanics done slightly differently, with each new book (and sometimes within a book).

I think the special rule on the Buggy that lets the Grot fire a single shot is a great example of the problems with GW rules. This single special rule could be a universal rule, easily applied to all manner of things. But instead of that, this one buggy has this one rule that is unique to it, and no amount of points fiddling is ever going to reflect that (or anything like it).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Hecaton wrote:
Yeah, this could all be done with points.

As I've been saying to years: Points are not the great leveller. They certainly help, but they are not the one-stop solution to all problems.

GW's issues like with the constant addition of layered rules, and escalating rules. It comes down to there being no standardisation and no scalability built into 40k: Everything is bespoke, meaning that they just make it up as they go along, introducing new mechanics, or the same mechanics done slightly differently, with each new book (and sometimes within a book).

I think the special rule on the Buggy that lets the Grot fire a single shot is a great example of the problems with GW rules. This single special rule could be a universal rule, easily applied to all manner of things. But instead of that, this one buggy has this one rule that is unique to it, and no amount of points fiddling is ever going to reflect that (or anything like it).

With what I was replying to specifically, yes it could. Just give "low tier" armies 20% more points or whatever.

Hecaton wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Hecaton wrote:
Yeah, this could all be done with points.

As I've been saying to years: Points are not the great leveller. They certainly help, but they are not the one-stop solution to all problems.

GW's issues like with the constant addition of layered rules, and escalating rules. It comes down to there being no standardisation and no scalability built into 40k: Everything is bespoke, meaning that they just make it up as they go along, introducing new mechanics, or the same mechanics done slightly differently, with each new book (and sometimes within a book).

I think the special rule on the Buggy that lets the Grot fire a single shot is a great example of the problems with GW rules. This single special rule could be a universal rule, easily applied to all manner of things. But instead of that, this one buggy has this one rule that is unique to it, and no amount of points fiddling is ever going to reflect that (or anything like it).

With what I was replying to specifically, yes it could. Just give "low tier" armies 20% more points or whatever.

That's effectively the same as a points drop and no, we do not need to keep dropping points. And not every problem can be solved with points.

And, again, points are not the great leveller. You can't just fix the games rampant problems with a price cut.

I agree points alone won't fix the game, but they are a great tool for fixing imbalances.

If a unit is overperforming increasing it's points is an easy way to bring it back in line unless there's something really weird/crazy going on.
In those situations it's best to nerf those things in particular (it might be a strategem or a particular buff interaction).
But buy and large points work well enough as a quick fix.

and your example very well shows how point adjustments can work
on a small scale to solve minor imbalance

if an army is outperformed on all levels, it means that it misses the tools to work with
not that those tools are too expensive

and no, giving them 20% more points is not the same as point drops on individual units unless all units/models/wargear is reduced by 20%

but we are running into the same problem with KillTeam at the moment, if a faction does not have the right tools to play well, giving them more tools that do not work does not help
the problem of a Intercessor KillTeam being that those are all the same models, and the solution is to give them one more instead of allow a mixed team