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I'll only expand on two questions:

New edition? - Once you step outside of GW written rules and experience the world out there it is hard to look at 40k as an interesting game. Regardless of balance, it is just a poor and very restricted mechanic. Especially if you are into proper wargames instead of war themed games. So it is "complete rewrite" for me to.

Advancing narrative: the single worst decision GW ever made. It is a great setting, but 40k fiction is mostly horrid, so the game has now both bad rules writing, and bad writing that changes the setting incrementally for the worse. Somehow, GW has always been good at conveying the background in an interesting and compelling way, but stories in front of that background are mostly childish even when "grim and dark". I really wish they stayed with just writing the background.

Cool poll jeff. I like how you've set it up.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Cool poll jeff. I like how you've set it up.

Thanks! Stolen, or borrowed at least, ideas from a couple more talented than I, but glad for the engagement so far!

Tyel wrote:


I mean if you increase the points cost of Harlequins, Custodes etc units - you are nerfing their cannon and upping their glass. The issue is that they likely just become the faction that disappears off the table in a few turns rather than the other way round.

No, it depends on the hikes. I think it's definitely possible to make them good or ok. Armies can't be just either trash or OP. And a lot of their stuff is really cheap compared to what other factions have, considering they're supposed to be elite oriented armies.

 Blackie wrote:
No, it depends on the hikes. I think it's definitely possible to make them good or ok. Armies can't be just either trash or OP. And a lot of their stuff is really cheap compared to what other factions have, considering they're supposed to be elite oriented armies.

The problem I think is you are looking at this in terms of tournament win percentages. I'm talking in terms of raw lethality.

As an example - consider a casual game between Tau and Space Marines.

Some Tau Fire Warriors with pulse rifles (and friends) are facing off against some Intercessors armed with auto bolt rifles (and friends).

Left to their own devices, 10 fire warriors have 20 shots. 10 hit. 20/3 wound. 20/6 go through. 3.33 damage, so at 10 points a wound 33.3 points of damage. Divided by 80, a 41% return.
Now lets see what happens when marines shoot. Say 5 marines for 15 shots. 10 hit. 20/3 wound. 20/6 go through. Also 3.33 damage. At 8 points a wound for 26.66~ points of damage. Divide by 100, a 26% points return.

So far, so average. The fire warriors outshoot the marines - as they should, because the Marines will significantly outpunch them if they can get a charge off. The game isn't expecting to be that lethal.

But now lets buff these guys up.
Fire warriors to get a markerlight, mont'ka, and be standing near a commander. So now that 20 shots results in 15.55 hits. 12.09 wounds. 8 wounds, for 80 points of damage. Divided by 80, a 100% return.
Lets give the Marines a captain and lieutenant and tactical doctrine for the point of AP. So that 15 shots is 11.6 hits. 9.07 wounds. 6 damage. 48.4 points of damage - a 48.4% return.

Now maybe you think a 100% return on your points (okay some marginal cost in the markerlight - but not much of one) is a bit too extreme. So lets nerf fire warriors. Lets say they should be 10 points (bit of an extreme hike, but go with it) - so now 100 points doing 80 points of damage is only get a 80% return on their points. Well now those Marines are killing 6 10 point models - so getting 60 points of damage, for a 60% return on their 100 points rather than 48.4%.

Given the Marine's superior assault abilities maybe we can say this is "balanced". And maybe it is - but its balanced with both units expecting to do 60-80% of their points in damage if they get to shoot (before applying yet further buffs/debuffs etc). Which is - imo anyway - far too high. And why games result in blowouts unless convenient L-shaped ruins can keep players apart for several turns.

So no - you can't obviously fix this lethality with points. Because while you can make one unit more expensive so it damage output becomes less efficient, you are simultaneously boosting the efficiency of everything else against it. Which is already too high - although perhaps not quite as bonkers as other stuff.

And where we see the growing imbalance is with factions who get to have their obscene damage output as per the above - but also get to stack an ever growing list of defensive special rules on top. And sure, GW could in 10th go through giving every model a relatively high T, a high save, a 4++, minuses to hit, minuses to damage taken, FNPs and/or the latest "no rerolls allowed" - but this seems a rather stupid solution to their inability to stop buffing damage output.

Don't you think undercosted units exist?

Oh, and 10ppm firewarriors to me don't look like an extreme hike when ork boyz are 9ppm and a tac is 18ppm. A battle sister is 11ppm. I think 10ppm firewarriors is even too cheap, they could easily be 11-12ppm and still be ok, if not even really good.

We agree that points don't fix everything, but when there's stuff that is clearly undercosted a price hike solves at least part of the problem.

I'd say it'd be fair to call a 25% price increase "extreme", especially on a basic Troops choice.

 Blackie wrote:
Don't you think undercosted units exist?

Oh, and 10ppm firewarriors to me don't look like an extreme hike when ork boyz are 9ppm and a tac is 18ppm. A battle sister is 11ppm. I think 10ppm firewarriors is even too cheap, they could easily be 11-12ppm and still be ok, if not even really good.

We agree that points don't fix everything, but when there's stuff that is clearly undercosted a price hike solves at least part of the problem.

I think there's clearly undercosted stuff. Voidweavers have far too many perks for 90 points by the standard of everything comparable in 40k. I think if these errors were not the case faction balance will be better. Its reasonable to imagine GW will eventually intervene if something is clearly winning all tournaments etc.

My issue is that its perfectly possible to have a "balanced" game where every unit does 60-80% of its points worth of damage if it gets to attack. In such a circumstance every faction could notionally win a tournament, it would largely be down to skill etc.

I want a game where at the datasheet level, units expect to do about 25% of their points worth of damage into generic stuff. Rising to about 35-40% when appropriate synergies and buffs are applied. Outside of the top tier stuff, that's roughly where we were in 8th. By contrast in 9th the average lethality is 50-100% higher. And this isn't about imbalance or things being undercosted. Its because in almost every case, GW buffed damage more (relatively) than defenses.

There are downsides (or impacts) to reducing lethality. It probably makes the game more swingey on luck - rather than this form of checkers but you have to roll a 2+ to take a piece. I can imagine the professionals may dislike it because they are more likely to get chucked out of a tournament on bad dice (which, to be fair, feels bad). But I think its what most of the playerbase would like - rather than this situation where you can be picking up your army at the bottom of turn 2, unless its carefully compartmentalised behind rows of LOS blocking ruins.

A poll with 14 options covering about 9 million different conversations. Odd.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
A poll with 14 options covering about 9 million different conversations. Odd.

It's a poll asking seven questions at the same time, presenting two options per question. Not that odd after all.

The podcast discussion from which these were drawn is worth a listen, imho… other ideas there that I failed to reproduce here.

Anticipated 10e - I would need to see what it's about. 9th isn't great, i've only played two games in 9th whereas in 8th we were playing weekly. We just don't like how much of a hassle it's all become through bloat. It elongates games and makes it too difficult to keep up with changes.

Tourney Catering - Yes, I think GW should take note of tournament play. It's a good way to root out imbalances and broken units that can be abused by opportunists without the need for social darwinism. I don't do casual play. We play to have fun AND win (the "it's okay to lose but we want to win" mentality) within the confines of the rules and prefer a system that is as tuned/balanced as reasonably possible without significant loss of flavour.

Power Creep - No. They should write all codexes at the same time and play test together. There's no need to write them separately and have different design ethos'/power levels.

New Ed New Rules - Yeah, well, less so a ton of new rules (some areas could do with looking at) but more just GW's design approach and bookeeping.

9 Ed Best Ed - No. I fell in love at 3, left at 5 and came back at the end of 6th. 8th with the indexes was the best it's been since the end of 3rd ed imho.

Advancing Narrative - Happy it advanced, not too crazy how it advanced but glad it did. Don't feel the need for any further advance.

Codex Power Creep - Annoying because it's easily avoided.

Not Online!!! wrote:
i think more that the escalatig scope of the system is an issue as in what is commonly fielded, not too long ago flyers were things of rariety, nowadays they hardly are, same with superheavies.

I keep seeing people say stuff like this but it seems just as outdated as "named characters OP". Can you tell me the last tournament where flyer abuse or superheavies were the problem? Harlequins with a good list and no mirrors had a 96% win rate at Adepticon and they don't have flyers or superheavies. Custodes have placed at like 2 tournaments in the last year using their FW flyer. Tau win by spamming crisis suits and abusing shooting without having LoS. Drukhari were around 65% win rate for a year with 3 different builds without using flyers or superheavies.

The problem is GW is horribly incompetent at balancing things. Voidweavers are just too killy and too survivable for their points cost. Scope of the game, flyers, superheavies, and named characters have nothing to do with this. If GW could write a codex better than a room full of monkeys at typewriters, that would improve the game. As it is, we could remove flyers and superheavies and still watch Harlie clown cars dominate the tournament scene with 90%+ win rate.

Toofast wrote:
I keep seeing people say stuff like this but it seems just as outdated as "named characters OP". Can you tell me the last tournament where flyer abuse or superheavies were the problem?

Flyers - I imagine this was in the period leading up to the Balance Dataslate which implemented a stricter limit on how many Flyers could be fielded, which was following Ork/AdMech lists which had been a problem.

Superheavies - Well, we've got the Castellan meta from 8th, at a minimum. Not sure since then, off the top of my head.

 Blackie wrote:
Don't you think undercosted units exist?

Oh, and 10ppm firewarriors to me don't look like an extreme hike when ork boyz are 9ppm and a tac is 18ppm. A battle sister is 11ppm. I think 10ppm firewarriors is even too cheap, they could easily be 11-12ppm and still be ok, if not even really good.

We agree that points don't fix everything, but when there's stuff that is clearly undercosted a price hike solves at least part of the problem.

The problem with points fixs GW makes is that they don't really change much, aside for the occassional killing of an army or faction. For armies with a big pool of good units, this means a DE army switch from waves of mounted infantry. To a bit less infantry and a lot more monsters. If GW would to nerf voids, the way they nerf stuff when they nerf it for real, then all it would achive is that we would not see harlequins being played or souped in to other eldar armies. Same with other factions who have limited number of models to pick from. Even marines who on paper have the biggest number of options had a very small actualy viable number of units to build around, when the meta moved to be able to kill 2W meq and deal with inv saves marines took a huge drop in how fun they were to play. It took BT, with their additional two layers of special rules and GK, who more or less played a more efficient dread spam list, that made marine style armies okey for a time. But then meta pulled further and with armies like eldar, tau or upcoming nids we aren't seeing many GK or BT doing much. In the end fun in the game boils down to how many units, which are good, the DT gave your army. If it is 5-6, then you are one step from being a bad army. If it is 10+, then you probably can survive a nerf wave, specially if the core army rules you have are good too. And GW doesn't change those in regular post codex errata.

 Dysartes wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I keep seeing people say stuff like this but it seems just as outdated as "named characters OP". Can you tell me the last tournament where flyer abuse or superheavies were the problem?

Flyers - I imagine this was in the period leading up to the Balance Dataslate which implemented a stricter limit on how many Flyers could be fielded, which was following Ork/AdMech lists which had been a problem.

Superheavies - Well, we've got the Castellan meta from 8th, at a minimum. Not sure since then, off the top of my head.

Yes, so we have a few months in the entire existence of flyers/superheavies where they were an issue and it was quickly fixed. The core issue is units getting too many special snowflake rules and being to killy/survivable for their points. You could raise points on crisis suits, vertus praetors and voidweavers and it would do far more to balance the game than totally banning flyers and superheavies

Should GW move away from creating combo based magic the gathering feeling war-themed games, and give us some wargame back in the wargame... I'll consider buying in again.

 auticus wrote:
Should GW move away from creating combo based magic the gathering feeling war-themed games, and give us some wargame back in the wargame... I'll consider buying in again.

This.

The MTG wombo combo 40k is a cancer.

I have little hope that GW will fix what they did with 8th/9th but the current iteration of 40k is something that has killed the hobby for me. I think there is fundamental issues with the core ruleset and it's resulting in out of control power creep. The bare bones ruleset leaves little design space which results in more codes rules bloat being layered on top of each other (but still isn't changing the fundamental gameplay).

I wish they would scrap it all and rebuilt it from scratch for both the sake of resetting the bloat and building a better foundation for a more meaningful and potentially complex game. My expectations are the opposite as GW continues to take the dumbest path and yet gets rewarded for it.

9th is better than 8th, and I'd like to see it hang around longer before 10th arrives. Beyond that I don't have any strong feelings about catering for the tournament scene, advancing the narrative (unless we're talking specifically about the introduction of Primaris in 8th edition) or codex power creep.

Toofast wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I keep seeing people say stuff like this but it seems just as outdated as "named characters OP". Can you tell me the last tournament where flyer abuse or superheavies were the problem?

Flyers - I imagine this was in the period leading up to the Balance Dataslate which implemented a stricter limit on how many Flyers could be fielded, which was following Ork/AdMech lists which had been a problem.

Superheavies - Well, we've got the Castellan meta from 8th, at a minimum. Not sure since then, off the top of my head.

Yes, so we have a few months in the entire existence of flyers/superheavies where they were an issue and it was quickly fixed. The core issue is units getting too many special snowflake rules and being to killy/survivable for their points. You could raise points on crisis suits, vertus praetors and voidweavers and it would do far more to balance the game than totally banning flyers and superheavies

To be fair, if we're going through the "entire existence" of superheavies/flyers, we'd also have to include things like the flying bakeries of 6e 'crons or Valkyrie/Vendetta spam from 5e IG (which could have extended quite a bit if you played one of the armies unburdened by effective AAA choices), or the initial Knight release in...what was it, 7e? You're right that they're not really an issue at the moment, but dislike of flyers/superheavies is not new, and they weren't always "quickly fixed".

Note: Personally, I'm not against flyers/superheavies/named characters in 40k, though I'd prefer it if they were generally rarer as a rule - not unusable, but also not on every battlefield.

Toofast wrote:

To be fair, if we're going through the "entire existence" of superheavies/flyers, we'd also have to include things like the flying bakeries of 6e 'crons or Valkyrie/Vendetta spam from 5e IG (which could have extended quite a bit if you played one of the armies unburdened by effective AAA choices), or the initial Knight release in...what was it, 7e? You're right that they're not really an issue at the moment, but dislike of flyers/superheavies is not new, and they weren't always "quickly fixed".

Note: Personally, I'm not against flyers/superheavies/named characters in 40k, though I'd prefer it if they were generally rarer as a rule - not unusable, but also not on every battlefield.

This is preciscly what i mean, during 5-6/7 the most armies aa options were aa missiles from missile launchers. If you didn't have decent aa they were horrific to play against.

Same with knights, both are things that would have required more thought in their design as factions and implemented units to be implemented with less issues.

Just because right now they are not an issue doesn't remove the fact that gws design philosophy is and was attrocious.

 auticus wrote:
Should GW move away from creating combo based magic the gathering feeling war-themed games, and give us some wargame back in the wargame... I'll consider buying in again.

Have to agree here though realise I am in the minority here. Im slowly realising though that i am really thirsting for a return to fantasy battle

Dai wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Should GW move away from creating combo based magic the gathering feeling war-themed games, and give us some wargame back in the wargame... I'll consider buying in again.

Have to agree here though realise I am in the minority here. Im slowly realising though that i am really thirsting for a return to fantasy battle

I find myself gravitating to Heresy nowadays. I hope the "reactions" aren't a stand in for strategems, otherwise I'll have to stick with the old ruleset.

This is preciscly what i mean, during 5-6/7 the most armies aa options were aa missiles from missile launchers. If you didn't have decent aa they were horrific to play against.

you would be incorrect

eldar-
firestorm AA tank with a heavy 7 long range scatter laser

Tau-
skyray the way it was originally designed by FW

ORK-
FLAKK truck

IG-
.hydra
.praetor

space marines
.helios missile
.flak missile (infantry weapon)
.contemptor dreadnought*
.doredeo dreadnought*
.stalkers
.hunters

*required to remain stationary

Imperial knights-
.(backpack twin autocannon)

And that is not counting the various planes used by eldar, dark eldar, tau, orks etc that were interceptors

Additionally if you use the old FW flyer rules with the 6th/7th flyer rules jump infantry can also assault flyers. additionally flyers used to die to immobilized results. there was no such thing as vector lock in the original rules.


Dealing with flyers was harder without AA but you could still get a lucky 6 and down them. however saying AA options did not exist is just not true especially by the time of 7th ed.

Not in 5th , 6 added snapshot , however that often was too very little .
Half what you list was FW which is and was an availability nightmare.

Matter of fact, gw fethed up and did so again with knights.

 aphyon wrote:


ORK-
FLAKK truck

In 7th orks also had Traktor Kannons which were extremely powerful against flyers.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Not in 5th , 6 added snapshot , however that often was too very little .
Half what you list was FW which is and was an availability nightmare.

Matter of fact, gw fethed up and did so again with knights.

That would be incorrect sir. i have the flyer rules from 3rd-when FW made them to be used in normal 40K games

.-12" range penalties
.can only be hit on 6+ for non AA mounts (oddly pintle mounted weapons all have the AA special rule, but then almost all flyers used to be AV 10)
.can be assaulted by jump infantry.
.immobilized results=crash
.armored cockpits & chaff/flare launchers upgrades for aircraft

Also keep in mind that flyers were originally all FW which is why they have the lions share of the AA vehicles.

The only good things 6th ed added to the flyer rules was changing the arrival of the flyer to the normal player reserve/movement step instead of having it fly on during your opponents movement phase.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Blackie wrote:

 aphyon wrote:


ORK-
FLAKK truck

In 7th orks also had Traktor Kannons which were extremely powerful against flyers.

The flakk truk also had some fun movement rules for when it was chaisng down aircraft.

The game needs a 3E/8E reset in power. Unlikely to happen (again) though because you have to address ALL the factions at the same time to give them the same baseline, similar to the indexes we got at the start of 8th.

As soon as GW would publish the next codex though, all of it would go back out the window into power creep to incentivize buying the books (who would buy a sidegrade instead of an upgrade for this game?).

 aphyon wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Not in 5th , 6 added snapshot , however that often was too very little .
Half what you list was FW which is and was an availability nightmare.

Matter of fact, gw fethed up and did so again with knights.

That would be incorrect sir. i have the flyer rules from 3rd-when FW made them to be used in normal 40K games

.-12" range penalties
.can only be hit on 6+ for non AA mounts (oddly pintle mounted weapons all have the AA special rule, but then almost all flyers used to be AV 10)
.can be assaulted by jump infantry.
.immobilized results=crash
.armored cockpits & chaff/flare launchers upgrades for aircraft

Also keep in mind that flyers were originally all FW which is why they have the lions share of the AA vehicles.

The only good things 6th ed added to the flyer rules was changing the arrival of the flyer to the normal player reserve/movement step instead of having it fly on during your opponents movement phase.

Again, that was before GW decided to gak the bed with 5th/6th valkyries and vendettas.
And again it didn't resolve the availability of non fw AA.