Hecaton wrote:
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chaos0xomega wrote:Anyway, there is a reality in which the Devourer + scytal warrior is better than the Deathspitter Dual Bonesword warrior - a reality in which more than 50% of likely opponents have toughness 2, 1 wound, and no armor save (so basically somewhere between a grot and a nurgling). Its just that thats a generally unrealistic expectation of the game and the limited corner case scenarios in which the devourer + scytal warrior works out to being matehmatically superior are extremely extremely rare - rare enough that given the option between the two loadouts you would hedge your bets and go for the deathspitter dual bonesword loadout 100% of the time.
That just makes you look like an idiot for suggesting they be the same points then.
No, that makes
GW idiots for not making Devourers and Scytals a reasonable equal alternative to Deathspitters and Dual Boneswords. I only delineated
GWs approach and philosophy - which is a 100% valid approach - I didn't suggest that they were implementing it well.
Wounds, whilst its not stated anywhere that I know of I've always considered wounds to represent the general size of the model (height, width, volumes etc..) the bigger you are the more you have. This seems to hold up in general but GW seems to have forgotten vehicles when they upped the W of many units in 9th edition. A rhino used to have the same wounds as 10 space marines, now it has the same wounds as 5 for instance.
The same argument kinda works in reverse with weapons though. In older editions of a game a lascannon or a meltagun/multimelta, etc. could potentially destroy any vehicle in the game in a single hit (except once structure points came into play, though
IIRC it was still possible with good rolls using certain weapons), and versus certain multiwound infantry models (like terminators, marines, etc.) would automatically kill them in a single hit/wound as well via the instant death rule. Back then, upgrading a weapon to a lascannon generally cost ~20 points and made a lot of sense because even though you only got *one* shot with them per shooting phase (rare shenanigans and special rules notwithstanding) they still could do a lot if that shot was successful.
Today, that same weapon will need 3-5 hits minimum (assuming they wound, etc.) to destroy those same vehicles, and has the potential of leaving the same multiwound infantry models alive even if the hit successfully wounds them... but lascannons still generally work out to a roughly 20 point upgrade on a lot of models that have the option to take them despite the fact that they are now only one-fifth to one-third as lethal as they used to be. Granted, multimeltas faired a bit better (alongside anything that used to be twin-linked) as it received a second shot, but they are still substantially less lethal than they were in their previous incarnations.
So its not the traditional anti-tank weapons which are causing the problem here - while some weapons (Hammerhead Railguns) did become more lethal, in general they overwhelmingly became less lethal and less effective at killing vehicles than they were in previous editions. Instead the problem is the fact that just about every weapon in every army now has the potential to do damage to any vehicle in the game, whereas in the past if you were armed with anything weaker than an autocannon or a plasma gun it generally wasn't worth even bothering to shoot at a vehicle because it was either impossible to harm them or the probability of doing so was so low that it would be a waste of those shots unless you were absolutely desperate and were hoping for a lucky hit.
Increasing toughness and wound counts won't (in my mind) substantially help matters, it will just further devalue the already weak and inefficient
AT weapons, whereas people who use massed bolter fire and the like to chip wounds off of tanks (and many do) will be wholly unaffected as they are already rolling 6+ to wound vs a 3+ save in many cases anyway (though some who get the benefit of 5+ to wound against certain vehicles might see that degrade to 6+ in some cases, but still my point stands). Theres a danger here too, because if you up wound counts dramatically enough to fix the vehicle survivability issue and suitably devalue massed small arms as a viable anti-vehicle weapon system, you will need to increase accessibility to weapons like lascannons/meltaguns or increase their
ROF/damage output to make up for it.
If you currently need 3-5 hits (again thats a minimum assuming that you wound and bypass saves, etc.) to destroy a vehicle, by upping the wound count you push that number higher. Using your rhino wounds count as an example if currently you need 3 average damage lascannon hits to destroy a rhino, then upping the rhinos wound count to 20 in order to keep consistent with the marines would mean you would need 6 average damage hits to destroy it instead. At that point, you're essentially talking about a single lascannon, etc. per rhino firing away at it as a full time job for 6 turns straight and successfully hitting, wounding, and bypassing armor in order to destroy it by the end of the game. In reality though you need multiple lascannons (or meltaguns, etc.) per rhino or other vehicle firing away at it as a full time job, because not every shot you take is gonna hit, not every hit is gonna wound, not every wound is going to penetrate armor, etc. Likewise you have to account for attrition, a percentage of those lascannons won't survive past the first turn, a percentage won't survive past turn 2, etc. etc. Then you also have to factor in the current paradigm where most games are over by turn 3 or 4, so you need to up the number again to account for that.
Doing some quick back of the envelope math, if you made Rhinos T9 20W with a 2+ save (for example), at BS4+ you would need an average of 36 lascannon shots to destroy a single rhino. Assuming an average game length of 4 turns and 4 rhinos in the typical opposing list, you would need an average of 18 lascannons firing per turn to destroy *half* of those rhinos. Assuming an average of 12.5% of your starting lascannons are lost per turn (if we are targeting 50% destruction of enemy rhinos over the course of 4 turns then its fair to assume 50% destruction of your lascannons over the course of 4 turns), you would effectively need to start the game with about 27 lascannons to destroy just two rhinos assuming everything is average - which is a larger number of lascannons than I've ever seen fielded in any game across my 5 editions playing... just for rhinos. If your opponent focuses fire on lascannon armed models as "high value targets" then you will need even more as they will have a higher attrition rate. This doesn't even begin to account for any other vehicles your opponent might have in their list. In this scenario, its unlikely (if not impossible) that you will ever destroy all 4 rhinos (which may or may not be a problem depending on what your opinion is with regards to the possibility of tabling an opponent). So, an increase in survivability of vehicles without a commensurate increase in lethality of supposed "anti tank" weapons is a recipe for disaster and potentially breaks the game.
In reality, this is emblematic of the sort of problem that exists with the game since the switchover from 7th to 8th ed. 8th and 9th edition were built on the bones of previous editions, and while they made substantial changes in some areas of the game (for example - vehicle statlines/profiles and space marine wound counts) they left other areas of the game largely untouched or didn't adequately adjust it to reflect the "new normal" of the game in the face of other changes (for example - lascannon and melta profiles and weapon costs didn't change much, aside from the addition of
d6 damage, but the
d6 damage change still results in them being less lethal than they were before). This has obviously thrown a lot of internal and external balance out of whack which they are now struggling to come to grips with.
I would guess that a big part of this is the fact that the OG game designers who did all the math and number crunching in designing the basis for the older editions of the game are all gone now, and the people who are left aren't familiar enough with the underlying system logic, assumptions made, design paradigms, etc. that shaped those numbers in the first place. They have spreadsheets and calculators they can use to figure out stats, points values, and the like and have enough knowhow to calculate probabilities and points efficiencies, etc. but they don't necessarily have the designers notes that explain what the target numbers, ratios, parameters, etc. were for establishing unit survivability/resiliency or weapon lethality, etc. or why those target numbers and ratios are relevent or the mathematical paremeters within which the points system and calculators were intended to work and the necessary design limitations in order to avoid compromising the integrity of the game engine.
I think back to an excerpt from an article penned by Rick Priestly (
iirc) that I once read, where he discusses the use of ratios to define movement distances in the game - he argued a normal unit should have a movement speed that corresponds to 1/8th of the table length because it should take it approximately 8 turns to go end-to-end across the table unassisted, a slow unit 1/12th, and a fast unit 1/4th. In other words, in older
40k and
WHFB where the table was defined as 48" wide, normal speed units moved 6", fast units moved 12" and slow units moved 4". Weapon ranges were likewise built around this system of ratios (hence oldschool
40k weapons always being in 6" range multiples with a bias towards full 12" increments with only a rare few being at 6" intermediate steps). Unfortuately, he never really bothered to explain the basis for these ratios or why they were important or when/why they should be used or ignored - he could have sound logic and data underlying it, or it could have been something he and the design studio arrived at through trial and error and sussed out as a sort of intrinsic and instinctual truth (i.e. "this feels right" - its quite possible that the entire game was designed that way with the studio arriving at reasonable/approximate conclusions through experimentation without the studio having any understanding of the underlying dynamics that made it work), or he could have pulled it wholly out of a hat. Without the explanation of the "why" there, I can't fault the current design team for ignoring it (not only is the table size smaller but units no longer adhhere to those ratios), assuming they were even aware of it to begin with. If my systems lead handed me documentation that tells me what the design limitations or parameters of something are without any explanation as to why, I would question the validity and utility of it and would treat it with suspicion until I could get clarification on it, I expect any semi-competent game designer at
GW would probably feel the same if they were handed Priestly et als design notes and saw something like that too. Anyway, fact of the matter is that this is an example of design logic that the game was quite literally built around back in the day and which was part of the underlying fundamentals around which the entire game system was built around... but its clear that they are no longer following that today, which begs the question: did they move away from it intentionally and knowingly because they disagreed with it with consideration to all the other aspects of gameplay that would be impacted by this deviation? Or did they move away from it because they looked at movement distances and ranges in the game and said "its kinda boring that everyting moves either 6" or 12" - what if these guys went 8" and those fast vehicles could move 14" instead!" without any consideration for why they were structured that way, or what else might be impacted by doing so?
Personally, I think the latter is more likely than the former, purely on the basis that when looking at things like changes to marine wound counts, the shift from vehicle armor profiles to using the standard model profile, etc. there is insufficient evidence that these changes were made with any amount of consideration to the impact they have on broader gameplay or balance, etc. as evidenced by the fact that points values didn't change much (if at all) even as the established ratios and parameters of survivability vs lethality were effectively turned on their head and thrown out the window.
Doubling vehicles wounds (for example) and doubling AT weapon damage so their relative power stays similar also has the advantage of reducing just how good the 'anti elite' weapons are that often now run double duty since their 2-3D combined with a decent RoF is also great against vehicles.
AoC sounds like a solution to run away AP values but only if you pretend all the other armies that didn't get AoC were somehow ok. (hint, they were not).
What 40k needs more then anything else right now is a complete rebalance of all weapons to reduce lethality.
Doubling both is better than only doubling one but not the other, but I think you still run into trouble with "intermediate" weapons that are intended to hunt both light vehicles and heavy infantry. They exist at a sort of crossover point where improving their lethality vs vehicles makes them too lethal vs heavy infantry, but leaving them as is kinda makes them useless as they are already sort of ineffective in their intended role - having insufficient damage output to address vehicles and insufficient rate of fire to address heavy infantry.
EviscerationPlague wrote:EviscerationPlague wrote:chaos0xomega wrote:
H.B.M.C. wrote:
Gadzilla666 wrote:It's quite odd that so many of its options are the same price, and overall, it's a bit
It's not odd. It's the current paradigm among the design team. I expect we'll see it more and more over the next few Codices.
Why even have points if you're going to cost everything's options the same. They're
not the same.
Not the same doesn't automatically mean they have different value. There are times you want a heavy bolter
Okay, so name the times you want the Heavy Bolter over the Volkite.
I'm still waiting for an answer to this, chaos0xomega
Its embarrassing for you to try to be a tough guy and call me out when I answered that exact question in pretty simple terms on the previous page. Go look for it - hint:
ctrl + f "volkite" (no quotes) - its the last hit you'll get on page 4.
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