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 kodos wrote:
a perfect information game like chess?

of course, because in chess, when I build my list for black, there is the chance that the models I chose get different rules in 2 weeks and other models are moved to legends
without me even have a chance to know what the rules will be or what models will be valid by the time I purchase them

yeah, 40k is totally like chess and not even close to MtG

You don't know what a perfect information game is. The point is, in Chess, everything is on the board. There is no hidden hand of cards. In 40k, outside of a few very specific mechanics (GSC is it afaik), you always know the state of the game - there is no hidden hand of cards, no shuffled deck. Magic is very different.

 kodos wrote:
Have you even played 40k once?
are you just looking up information on wikipedia what the game is about and try to tell people who have played it for 20 years that they don#t know what the game is?

Are you aware of what "perfect information" means in the context of gameplay? If not, don't comment.


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 auticus wrote:
I think at this point its fair to say that Hecaton is one of those individuals that will double or triple down on pretty much anything in as aggressive a manner as possible.

Nah, I admit when I'm wrong. You've just utterly failed at giving good arguments.

 auticus wrote:
Most of us hear know what is meant when we say 40k seems similar to a CCG, and the people that sign my checks also know what is meant when they say it and put it in their design documentation, so ..

.

Have you ever got design documentation that was written by idiots?

 auticus wrote:
at this point I think we just move on and get out of this lawyering hell that we seem to have descended into. Individuals saying that 40k is nothing like a CCG don't change my opinion on the matter, nor the language I use in game design documentation with other game designers. Same as flat earthers don't change my life in regards to how I view the planet and the universe it sits in.

Doesn't change the fact that your opinion is wrong. You've notably failed to provide any concrete evidence - surely there's some design documentation you could share from some project you've worked on to provide proof positive of what you're saying? Instead you've just been going "trust me brah I'm a game designer" and it just makes you look like you have a very inflated opinion of yourself. Not uncommon for tabletop game designers, though.


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Toofast wrote:
There could be a stratagem with the exact same wording as an MtG card and certain people here would argue no similarity at all because they seem to have developed an emotional attachment to their existing stance.

I legit don't think you understand what makes a CCG a CCG.


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Dai wrote:
Seems to be a lot of pedantry against people saying that the game since 8th has taken a lot of modern bored and card game ideas, especially given how previous 40k or even more so WHFB looked.

I would say that it's more board game ideas than CCG ideas. It's not pedantry - people are just wrong about 40k becoming more CCG-like.


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 auticus wrote:
When its license was pulled for being too close to 40k, we all had a long hard laugh because most of the people on that team were either current or past 40k players and we all joked about the current 40k being a lot like card games, and that experience pretty much solidified it for me.

This sounds like apophenia i.e. seeing a connection or pattern when there isn't one.


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 auticus wrote:
Despite several bullet points that show how they are alike.

The ways in which they are alike are ways in which they are alike to many non-CCG games as well, so it's meaningless to say that 40k is more "CCG-like."

 auticus wrote:
Its been entirely that it feels in many places to be like a card game and given bullet points showing where those points lay.

"Feels" aren't something I expect to be swayed by.

 auticus wrote:
And 40k borrowed some elements of MtG in their game design, to which many people can feel that influence in the games that they play.

Nope, you have consistently failed to show this, and when called on it evade the question and then repeat it later hoping nobody will notice you have no basis for what you're saying. How long did that NDA for that 40k card game last, btw?

 auticus wrote:
To whit game designers themselves use the term in their design documents to illustrate those elements when discussing projects.

Show me an example.

 auticus wrote:
Discussing the differences of the two does not disprove that they don't contain similarities. It is argument for the sake of argument to prove that the two are not the same, which I don't believe anyone here is trying to argue. I don't think anyone in here has said that the two games are the same.

It was said that 40k is like a CCG in many ways - to which was expounded that 40k feels like a CCG in many ways and then bulleted out what those similarities were.

You're repeating this, when those supposed similarities were picked apart and you failed to provide any counter argument to those criticisms.

 auticus wrote:
To whit the counter argument was "no you're dumb, those are digital game elements not CCG elements that you are discussing" -> where we then went further down the rabbit hole to discuss where today's digital gaming was inspired by to be what it is today (the MtG of yore).

You made a lot of claims and then avoided backing them up when called on specifics. That makes you *less* trustworthy, not more.

 auticus wrote:
To say that MtG and 40k are in NO WAY alike... is very disingenuous. Especially after so many examples of how they are similar have been given.

What *I* said was that they're different enough that you can in no way say 40k is "CCG-like" with a straight face.

 Jidmah wrote:

Toofast wrote:
There could be a stratagem with the exact same wording as an MtG card and certain people here would argue no similarity at all because they seem to have developed an emotional attachment to their existing stance.

So you are saying that a game of MtG using the Warhammer 40k set plays EXACTLY like a game of 40k would?

No, that's not what anyone is saying and I have no idea how you got that from what I said. Either your English reading comprehension needs work (understandable, I sure as hell can't read German), or you're intentionally misrepresenting my argument to make it sound ridiculous.

 Jidmah wrote:

And that's precisely why people are saying that MtG and 40k are in no way alike - they are completely different games, just like Chess and Poker are despite both having kings and queens

yet Chess and Poker both share the point of trying to "out-thinking" your opponent, not only playing your game with what you got but thinking several steps ahead and try to guess what your opponent wants to do

and just because not knowing what cards your opponent has in your hands, you have a basic idea what the faction can do and what to expect from the deck he is playing
the argument that you cannot know all cards that are allowed and therefore cannot guess what he might have in his deck, the same way you hardly know all stratagems in 40k and cannot know if your opponent is going to use the obvious ones are comes up with something you did not had on your mind

we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

so how is it possible that the opponent knows everything all the time, but at the same time gets caught by something he was not aware of

Because people aren’t perfect.

The GAME doesn’t hide info. But because of how many niggling little details there are, people can forget or not know.

In Magic, you don’t even know an opponent’s color identity (outside Commander) from over thirty possible combinations, until they start playing things.

IMO the mechanics take too long, and if you do not play against or with an army over and over again, keep track of all ad mecha rules, specially some wierd situational ones is going to end up with those Gotcha! moments.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Because people aren’t perfect.

The GAME doesn’t hide info. But because of how many niggling little details there are, people can forget or not know.
In Magic, you don’t even know an opponent’s color identity (outside Commander) from over thirty possible combinations, until they start playing things.

that is way you play more than 1 game against the same opponent to win the match, you only don't know anything the first game of a match
and the good player in Magic well know what you are playing, the same way a good player in 40k needs to know all the detail

but if we talk about people not being perfect, 40k being about perfect knowledge is a theoretic assumption that will never happen outside high level tournament games
so for the casual player in the store that had not the money and time to learn all the rules that are there for alle the factions, this is a very different game

40k changed over time, talking about how it was played during 3rd, were really everyone knew what the other one could do makes no sense when people say that this changed with 8th/9th

PS: of course except those tournaments prior 8th were you played with hidden army lists and there was a reason some people liked this as they could exploit it, the same way not very popular armies were chosen because the chance was lower that the opponent knew what they could they

from a technical point, one can know everything, be no one does and people like this (and those that don't mostly left or complain about bloat, while other praise this as "tactical")

 kodos wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Because people aren’t perfect.

The GAME doesn’t hide info. But because of how many niggling little details there are, people can forget or not know.
In Magic, you don’t even know an opponent’s color identity (outside Commander) from over thirty possible combinations, until they start playing things.

that is way you play more than 1 game against the same opponent to win the match, you only don't know anything the first game of a match
and the good player in Magic well know what you are playing, the same way a good player in 40k needs to know all the detail

but if we talk about people not being perfect, 40k being about perfect knowledge is a theoretic assumption that will never happen outside high level tournament games
so for the casual player in the store that had not the money and time to learn all the rules that are there for alle the factions, this is a very different game

40k changed over time, talking about how it was played during 3rd, were really everyone knew what the other one could do makes no sense when people say that this changed with 8th/9th

PS: of course except those tournaments prior 8th were you played with hidden army lists and there was a reason some people liked this as they could exploit it, the same way not very popular armies were chosen because the chance was lower that the opponent knew what they could they

from a technical point, one can know everything, be no one does and people like this (and those that don't mostly left or complain about bloat, while other praise this as "tactical")

You can say all this, but perfect and hidden information have specific definitions and you're way off.

Hecaton wrote:
You can say all this, but perfect and hidden information have specific definitions and you're way off.

one is with random boosters packs and the other with miniature boxes were you see on the box whats inside?

There's a lot of people conflating "40k borrows mechanics from MtG" with "40k uses the sales model of MtG". It's disingenuous at best...

 auticus wrote:

And that's precisely why people are saying that MtG and 40k are in no way alike

Despite several bullet points that show how they are alike.

No one is saying they are identical to each other. Nor are they saying that 40k is a card game.

Its been entirely that it feels in many places to be like a card game and given bullet points showing where those points lay.

To whit no one has disagreed with, but plenty of arguing continues anyway among other ways to split hairs.

MtG and 40k ARE completely different games. And 40k borrowed some elements of MtG in their game design, to which many people can feel that influence in the games that they play.

To whit game designers themselves use the term in their design documents to illustrate those elements when discussing projects.

Despite tabletop games being different than card games, the philosophy and elements that bind them together are today in many places similar or the same.

Discussing the differences of the two does not disprove that they don't contain similarities. It is argument for the sake of argument to prove that the two are not the same, which I don't believe anyone here is trying to argue. I don't think anyone in here has said that the two games are the same.

It was said that 40k is like a CCG in many ways - to which was expounded that 40k feels like a CCG in many ways and then bulleted out what those similarities were.

To whit the counter argument was "no you're dumb, those are digital game elements not CCG elements that you are discussing" -> where we then went further down the rabbit hole to discuss where today's digital gaming was inspired by to be what it is today (the MtG of yore).

To say that MtG and 40k are in NO WAY alike... is very disingenuous. Especially after so many examples of how they are similar have been given.

I more take issue with the fact whenever someone brings this up, it's to disparage 40k as not being a 'true wargame'. To which I usually say 'probably for the best, every example of a 'true wargame' I've ever heard people use in these examples sound dreadfully boring.'

 Jidmah wrote:

In any game of 40k, at any point during the game, you know everything your opponent knows. There is nothing you can hide,

That's incorrect. We Necron players do not have to tell you what order we've put our Command Protocols in.

FWIW, I don't think 40k is like MTG.

I think the closest a wargame came in my mind to MTG was WMH (circa Mk2 when I played etc). Competitive Lists tended to be identifiable as "armour skew", "defense skew", "assassination", "flood the board with little guys so you win by holding the objective" etc (tied to faction, warlock etc). The "fluff" of these lists was a very minor thought, if indeed it was a thought at all. Your list generally had a clear game plan - and it tended to have odds based on matchup. A bit like how MTG decks are aggro, control, midrange etc - and sort of interact on that basis.

Most 40k builds don't really work like that. There's sometimes an attempt to make the translation (i.e. we can talk about a "goff pressure/tempo list") but its not really the same. Probably because 40k balance doesn't tend to really have this side of the meta. Its almost always too imbalanced - so just grab your factions "good stuff" - which is usually broadly agreed upon - and see how it fairs across multiple games into other factions "good stuff". The "best stuff" tends to dominate tournament wins and placings.

There clearly are deviations (i.e. this list is designed to try and sit on objectives all game - this other list is designed not to care about obsec etc, it just hopes to kill you quick and win that way) - but its not as clear cut. You skew into [current top faction] not [current top playstyle].

Now its possible if 40k was much more finely balanced - so every faction had several different competitive builds (rather than its 1800 points the same but I take X rather than Y), with differing chances to win etc - it would feel like MTG. But I don't think it ever has been or is today.

In practice, a lot of people would say this isn't desirable either - because you don't want the odds of a game that will take 2-3 hours to play to be sort of set down. In MTG you can get smashed in 15 minutes or something... just go again, maybe with some other decks? Again, to go with WHM, you could potentially lose in 20-30 minutes (especially if new) and just play again. 40k is going to take a long time to play out unless both players just say "I end my turn" without doing anything.

 kodos wrote:
we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

...Yeah. That's why it's contentious and people get annoyed.

Losing a round of poker because your opponent had a card in his hand you weren't aware of isn't a 'gotcha'.

Losing a game of 40K because you didn't know about a particular stratagem in your opponent's codex (when it was available to you all along, but you didn't want to hold up the game for an hour to memorize all your opponent's abilities) is a 'gotcha'.

One is losing because you had to act on imperfect information as an explicit part of the gameplay, and the other is losing because you couldn't remember one of a multitude of special rules.

40K is a game of perfect information and gotchas should not exist. The fact that they do means something is wrong. The game assumes you know all of your rules and all of your opponent's rules and everything that is going on in the game state. The reality of the situation is that most players can't keep up, and so there's a disconnect.

 kodos wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

And that's precisely why people are saying that MtG and 40k are in no way alike - they are completely different games, just like Chess and Poker are despite both having kings and queens

we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

If you don't know what Transhuman Physiology does at this point after one game seeing it, that's the fault of the people comparing 40k to a CCG.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

And that's precisely why people are saying that MtG and 40k are in no way alike - they are completely different games, just like Chess and Poker are despite both having kings and queens

we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

If you don't know what Transhuman Physiology does at this point after one game seeing it, that's the fault of the people comparing 40k to a CCG.

Out of the 700 stratagems, I don't see anyone singling that out as a gotcha. Plenty of others are if your opponent doesn't know about them (which is basically a guarantee unless your opponent is a very frequent and competitive player).


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ERJAK wrote:

I more take issue with the fact whenever someone brings this up, it's to disparage 40k as not being a 'true wargame'. To which I usually say 'probably for the best, every example of a 'true wargame' I've ever heard people use in these examples sound dreadfully boring.'

I can't think of a more boring game than 40k where you can stand around for 20-30 mins rolling a few saves and removing models without being able to really do anything. I've been playing Infinity because games aren't decided before any dice are rolled just based on faction choices and you aren't standing around doing nothing for long periods of time. In 40k, depending on opponent and army, I can go outside and take a smoke break while they play their turn and not miss anything. I can't think of another game where I can do that and it's not a good thing...

ERJAK wrote:
I more take issue with the fact whenever someone brings this up, it's to disparage 40k as not being a 'true wargame'. To which I usually say 'probably for the best, every example of a 'true wargame' I've ever heard people use in these examples sound dreadfully boring.'

by now I cannot think of any wargame that was as boring as the current version of 40k

so it more or less depends on what you like and the "true" wargame is the the game Wargame (Kriegsspiel), were all others get the name from, and this has definitely nothing to do with whatever 40k tries to be

 kodos wrote:


we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

so how is it possible that the opponent knows everything all the time, but at the same time gets caught by something he was not aware of

Because 40k rules are distributed across a large number of sources that it is prohibitively expensive for a player to acquire all of them and gain a firm understanding of all of them. 40k's gotcha moments come from not knowing all the rules, not from not knowing what units your opponent has. It was bad enough when 40k had around 16 codices and a few FW books. Now I don't know if anyone has a handle on all the rules sources for 40k.

 Arschbombe wrote:
Because 40k rules are distributed across a large number of sources that it is prohibitively expensive for a player to acquire all of them and gain a firm understanding of all of them. 40k's gotcha moments come from not knowing all the rules, not from not knowing what units your opponent has. It was bad enough when 40k had around 16 codices and a few FW books. Now I don't know if anyone has a handle on all the rules sources for 40k.

and by the arguments brought up, this is your fault and your fault only
gotcha moments exist because you are too poor/lacy/stupid to know all the rules, not because the game is designed in a way to make it harder (or impossible) to know everything

all those options are there to add flavour and for fluff reason only, not a game design choice /s

Glad we are all in agreement:

1. 40k is exactly like CS:G

2. 10th will exclusively use PL

3. 10th will have a draw phase, where if you don't play at least 2x upkeep, the black dragon flight will consume the MP of your Wakka.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Glad we are all in agreement:

1. 40k is exactly like CS:G

2. 10th will exclusively use PL

3. 10th will have a draw phase, where if you don't play at least 2x upkeep, the black dragon flight will consume the MP of your Wakka.

I agree 10th edition is more like Blitzball

 kodos wrote:

and by the arguments brought up, this is your fault and your fault only
gotcha moments exist because you are too poor/lacy/stupid to know all the rules, not because the game is designed in a way to make it harder (or impossible) to know everything

all those options are there to add flavour and for fluff reason only, not a game design choice

Yeah... its fluffy that the showing off rule is only useable by one unit of flashgitz because the other units definetly wouldnt want to show off while their homies are showing off.

Or how fluffy it is that one unit of marines has trans-human abilities but no one else does.

Toofast wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

And that's precisely why people are saying that MtG and 40k are in no way alike - they are completely different games, just like Chess and Poker are despite both having kings and queens

we got many pages if people complaining about "gotcha" moments in 40k, yet if 40k is a game of perfect knowledge, those should not exist

If you don't know what Transhuman Physiology does at this point after one game seeing it, that's the fault of the people comparing 40k to a CCG.

Out of the 700 stratagems, I don't see anyone singling that out as a gotcha. Plenty of others are if your opponent doesn't know about them (which is basically a guarantee unless your opponent is a very frequent and competitive player).

Well if you're completely off guard by someone using a Strat to lower your LD or some garbage like that, I dunno what to tell you.

Tittliewinks22 wrote:

Yeah... its fluffy that the showing off rule is only useable by one unit of flashgitz because the other units definetly wouldnt want to show off while their homies are showing off.
Or how fluffy it is that one unit of marines has trans-human abilities but no one else does.

this is the claim, if you don't agree than I guess you think 40k is a card game, simple as that

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Well if you're completely off guard by someone using a Strat to lower your LD or some garbage like that, I dunno what to tell you.

Again you're cherry picking strats to pretend gotcha moments don't exist. If they don't exist for you, congrats on having the time to sit down and learn 700 stratagems and special rules. For the other 99.9% of the playerbase, they both exist and feel bad when they happen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kodos wrote:

all those options are there to add flavour and for fluff reason only, not a game design choice

All those options are there to increase GWs profit because even if you have 3x of every unit for your faction, you still have to buy the rulebooks to be able to play with them. They can have a couple interns spend 2 weeks making rules, never bother playtesting those, and throw 4 pages of them in a book with 150 pages of stock photos of models with smoke photoshopped behind them, spend $10 per copy printing and shipping them and make $50 per sale.

Toofast wrote:
All those options are there to increase GWs profit because even if you have 3x of every unit for your faction, you still have to buy the rulebooks to be able to play with them. They can have a couple interns spend 2 weeks making rules, never bother playtesting those, and throw 4 pages them in a book with 150 pages of stock photos of models with smoke photoshopped behind them, spend $10 per copy printing and shipping them and make $50 per sale.

this is not possible, because 40k does not use cards sold in random booster packs, this is for fluff only and nothing else

/s

 kodos wrote:

this is not possible, because 40k does not use cards sold in random booster packs, this is for fluff only and nothing else

/s

The way GW changes some of their army or unit rules, you may as well be buying random stuff sometimes. What happened to the armies of people that bought centurions, eliminators, multiple squads of intercessors, buckets of shield drones etc? Sometimes it takes less then half a year for models to be invalidated. Not even WotC has a 6 months rotation of cards.

Karol, /s means he's being sarcastic.

Karol wrote:

Not even WotC has a 6 months rotation of cards.

Not rotation, but they have banned cards MUCH faster than 6 months. In August 2011, I spent $1,200 building a Modern deck with Emrakul when the format was announced. A month later in September, they banned Cloudpost and my deck wouldn't work any more so I sold it for $700 because the ban made those cards much less valuable. I then spent $1,200 on a modern zoo deck. I played a few events with it and in December, Wild Nacatl was banned which really hurt my tempo early in the game. In less than 4 months, 2 of my decks that I spent a total of $2,400 on were invalidated. I sold my modern zoo deck on ebay and haven't bought one MtG card since.

 kodos wrote:

one is with random boosters packs and the other with miniature boxes were you see on the box whats inside?

No. I'm talking about during the game. In Magic, unless an effect says otherwise, you don't know what's in your opponent's hand. In 40k, you *do* know exactly what stratagems are available to your opponent at any given time.

Karol wrote:
The way GW changes some of their army or unit rules, you may as well be buying random stuff sometimes. What happened to the armies of people that bought centurions, eliminators, multiple squads of intercessors, buckets of shield drones etc? Sometimes it takes less then half a year for models to be invalidated. Not even WotC has a 6 months rotation of cards.

I still field my Intercessors all the time. My Eliminators see the table, but clearly they have been shirking their time at the range (they just can't seem to roll 3+ to hit with me), so I use them less these days. If I remember correctly, the points difference between 15 Tacticals and 15 Intercessors is 30pts. I can live with that difference for 'cheap' Troop slot fillers, given what those 30pts get me. And sometimes, I don't want to break out my Infiltrators or Incursors.

The bigger point I'm making is that when you aren't playing at the bleeding edge of optimization, units going up and down in effectiveness just isn't that big of a concern. It also happens to be a hell of a lot cheaper, too. I don't see there being a different in potential competitiveness of a game played at 100% of optimization and one played at 75% of optimization. Relative to each other, the game is, in theory, going to require the same amount of effort for the players to win. The 75% of optimization just so happens to be both cheaper and have a wider net of non-invalidation units. If a group can manage it (some obviously can't) then everyone wins except maybe GW who loses some sales, and don't we all kinda want that?

However, I understand your plight. You play in an area that is a 100% (possibly more given the out of game aggression) optimization. And you have a single faction and limited options of that single faction. Plus, you want to win games, as I believe much of the fun (if not all of it) of 40k for you is in winning. You have my condolences.

My area allows for various levels of optimization, with even the best of the tournament players tuning down for more evenly matched games. Because they want challenges, not wins. I do have several factions and wide number of options for all of them. If a unit or two isn't working for me, I can easily change them out for something different. And finally, I gain no additional fun from winning. I just want to provide a challenge or be challenged during a game with a pleasant opponent. If I feel like my win wasn't deserved, such as having the obviously more powerful list, that isn't any fun at all for me.

Toofast wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Well if you're completely off guard by someone using a Strat to lower your LD or some garbage like that, I dunno what to tell you.

Again you're cherry picking strats to pretend gotcha moments don't exist. If they don't exist for you, congrats on having the time to sit down and learn 700 stratagems and special rules. For the other 99.9% of the playerbase, they both exist and feel bad when they happen.

Citation needed for the 99% of the playerbase that hadn't memorized Transhuman Physiology and Agents of Vect after they became rules.

Or the real Gotcha special rules like Salamanders rerolling a hit roll! Man that catches me off guard every time!