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 vict0988 wrote:

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
...99% of winning a game is about bringing the obvious cookie cutter netlist...

Why don't you say something like "I feel like building a competitive list is too easy and has too big an impact on the outcome of the game" instead?

"competitive" missions that create a nice predictable environment where the analysis that generated the netlist is guaranteed to be true.

As opposed to being roulette to see if you get a mission that is winnable against your opponent's list or a 50/50 to see if you're the defender in a mission where being the defender is an auto-loss?

Despite the impressive word count of its rules 40k has the strategic depth of a puddle

40k doesn't have an impressive word count compared to previously. The codexes are very wide, but Stratagems do add a lot of depth to the game. If you don't know what Stratagems there are or how to ask for them, then you will be in major trouble, just if in Chess you haven't studied thousands of opening moves you are quickly going to get into a terrible board-state against a high-ranked player. Chess achieves it's depth without as many words (width) and that's good game design, but just because the ratio between 40k's width and depth is worse than that of Chess does not make 40k shallow. Good players consistently performing above average shows this to be true, while they sometimes have first-mover advantage there is also a tonne of skill. Even some of the best 40k players will admit to making mistakes, when people on the internet say that 40k is easy and they never make mistakes, how do you think that makes me think of those people?

Us players who make few mistakes are off playing Infinity ;-)

 vict0988 wrote:

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
...99% of winning a game is about bringing the obvious cookie cutter netlist...

Why don't you say something like "I feel like building a competitive list is too easy and has too big an impact on the outcome of the game" instead?

Because that is not what I mean. Making list building harder would not change the fact that the on-table game is incredibly shallow, it would only slightly delay the time it takes for the obvious netlist to be found and adopted.

As opposed to being roulette to see if you get a mission that is winnable against your opponent's list or a 50/50 to see if you're the defender in a mission where being the defender is an auto-loss?

That's a very nice false dilemma fallacy you've got there.

If you don't know what Stratagems there are or how to ask for them, then you will be in major trouble, just if in Chess you haven't studied thousands of opening moves you are quickly going to get into a terrible board-state against a high-ranked player.

That is word count, not depth. Having to memorize a lot of material is not the same thing as having complex and interesting decision trees.

Good players consistently performing above average shows this to be true

Not really. 40k has major issues with small sample size as there are only a handful of people who play "professionally". It's not surprising to see the same 5-10 people winning events when only 10-15 people are attending multiple major events per year and most of the people in a given event are casual players with sub-optimal lists who just want to get in 5+ games in a weekend.

Even some of the best 40k players will admit to making mistakes, when people on the internet say that 40k is easy and they never make mistakes, how do you think that makes me think of those people?

Having such a high word count that even the best players can't avoid making mistakes is not the same thing as depth.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:

Hecaton wrote:
Power armor's primarily ceramic iirc, actually. Dunno about Crisis suits. But the idea being that it's plenty good at killing them, a vehicle is just a bigger block of metal so it gets a bonus because it's causing waves of electron movement in the object.

Then why does it work against an Eldar wraithbone tank?

Eldar tanks aren't entirely wraithbone, just the chassis frame.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
^Is that for just Unit but not Weapon? Like, weapon X has a to-hit for aircraft?

A unit has various weapons, targets and ranges for each:
so say a Konigsluther tank hunter mech can use its dual 128mm guns on Tanks and Infantry but not aircraft - and the effectiveness is also related to armour rating of the unit (if any) - some armour ratings are impervious to some weapons
but a Lothar Panzer II-D Mech, although its twin nebelwerfers can only attack Tanks and Infantry - its MG44 can fire at anything but only effect aircraft, infantry and light vehciles but not most tanks.

more info:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/54/b5/54b5999f-602f-42a0-80a0-e41aec30b6fb/dust-tactics-rulebook.pdf

Cool, thanks! Although my first thought there is that the old AV system accoplishes much of that besides the "cannot fire at aircraft" bit.

Lol no, the old AV system led to clearly anti light infantry guns like scatter lasers and brain leech devourers being absurdly good at wrecking light and even medium armor.

And of course the eternal issue of vehicles vs monsters.

 Tyran wrote:
Lol no, the old AV system led to clearly anti light infantry guns like scatter lasers and brain leech devourers being absurdly good at wrecking light and even medium armor.

And of course the eternal issue of vehicles vs monsters.

Sure, but the same system could be used with different values applied and you'results might be more desireable. Personally I was ok with S6 being decent against lighter vehicles though. If HBs are S5 and those are armor piercing grenades, seemed ok.

 Tyran wrote:
Lol no, the old AV system led to clearly anti light infantry guns like scatter lasers and brain leech devourers being absurdly good at wrecking light and even medium armor.

And of course the eternal issue of vehicles vs monsters.

Then make scatter lasers S4 if they're supposed to be purely infantry killers. Or accept them as mid-range autocannon equivalents and address the problem of spamming undercosted bikes armed with them. There's nothing inherently impossible to balance about the scatter laser profile, they were just too cheap and on platforms that were too good.

Or IMHO just reverting to the old wound table pretty much does the same thing without having to deal with all the design issues of having an entirely different wounding and damage mechanics in the same game.

^Also an option.

Thirded for reverting back to the old wounding system.

I may have scrolled too fast, but did someone suggest a weight based armor system? Light, Medium, and Heavy?

Basically, Infantry, Elites, and Vehicles? I could see that working well with modifiers...

I don't recall upthread, but whenever I poke at design myself I tend to differentiate between light and heavy infantry.

I can't believe we had someone argue that Strats add depth to the game. 40k has no depth. It has width, but it's as deep as a paddling pool.

But yeah, the old wounding chart (or moreso the old ratios of what caused 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+/cannot wound, given we can go above 10 now), would go a long way toward fixing this game.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
...have a nice day

You too, sorry about the unnecessary insult, I'll try not to do that in the future.

For anyone curious this is what competitive lists look like, they're not one-dimensional like what we saw a lot at the start of 8th.




The definition of game design depth is the amount of possible choices you can make in a game. If you can choose to go left or right you have 2 possible choices, if you can also go up, forward or backwards as well you have 5 possible choices. If I can either shoot my lascannon or shoot my lascannon and use 1 Strat or shoot my lascannon and use 2 Strats the game is deeper. That depth is achieved by adding a lot of unnecessary complexity (width) to the game, so it's bad game design because it makes the game unnecessarily hard to get into or keep up with.

 catbarf wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
If there are 9 missions, and I am choosing whether to take list A or list B. List A has an average chance of winning of 45% in every mission and a chance of going 5/0 1%. List B has a 50% chance of winning 6 missions, 70% chance of winning 1 mission and 40% chance of winning 2 missions and a 2% chance of going 5/0 then I will choose list B.

If list C has an average 50% chance of winning every mission, while list D has 60% in one mission, 50% in three missions, 40% in two missions, and 10% in the last, you're better off taking the well-rounded one and considerably more likely to go 5/0.

I changed the names of your lists because you're giving a different scenario. You might use list C instead of list D, but list A is still better than list B. But you cannot guarantee that most factions would end up in the situation of choosing between C and D instead of A and B.

That doesn't mean the only alternative is the current cookie-cutter symmetrical experience where every mission is functionally the same.

I agree, but would you agree that the chance of the situation we agree is bad is higher in a system with more different missions? Would it make sense to you if I said that I think games being decided before the first turn is the most important factor to me and I therefore want to ensure that is never the case. I think missions being different is fine in a casual format, but I think the missions should add additional late-game randomness to keep the winner in the air until the last moment.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
To the idea that Custodes Captains don't need better than a 2+, then why the hell do we pay 2-3 times more for one that any other 2+BS unit? Is a Lord Commissar really as good a shot as a Custodian? Doubtful. Is a Cannoness as good at shooting? She's about third the cost.

Yes, they all hit almost all the time. Whether you hit almost all the time or a little better than almost all the time is irrelevant. Who would win in a fight between a US Marine and Jeet Kun Do expert Bruce Lee in his prime? US Marine with a shotgun wins. If Custodians in the fluff don't take much damage from plasma they need better invulns.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I can't believe we had someone argue that Strats add depth to the game. 40k has no depth. It has width, but it's as deep as a paddling pool.

How often did you decide to use a CP re-roll in 5th edition?

 vict0988 wrote:
The definition of game design depth is the amount of possible choices you can make in a game.

No. Depth is defined by the number of meaningful choices you can make. If going left vs. going right has no meaningful impact because the board is completely symmetrical then that decision does not add depth. If there's a "choice" of whether or not you use the obvious overpowered buff stratagem that is not depth, it's word count creating the illusion of depth. If the on-table decisions are largely meaningless because the outcome of the game is decided by who took the most overpowered list then all of those on-table decisions no longer count towards depth.

The reality is that 40k has all of these things. Once you strip away the illusion of depth created by fake choices you're left with a game that has an impressive word count but the depth of a puddle.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
If there's a "choice" of whether or not you use the obvious overpowered buff stratagem that is not depth...

How are you going to determine when a choice is too obvious to be counted as depth? Because I have seen Stratagems used badly dozens of times, I have personally misallocated CP dozens of times. If I can choose to shoot your the guns or the feet of your Knight with my weapon that hits and wounds on 4+ to either get +1 to hit or +1 to wound then that choice will have no impact on the statistical average damage I do and is therefore irrelevant. There have to be superior and inferior choices of when and which Stratagems to use before it actually adds depth.

I am not defending 8th edition's Endless Cacophony + Veterans of the Long War combo, but I am not going to say that their existince is proof Stratagems are a bad concept, just like pts are not a bad concept just because tesla carbines cost 2 pts for Necron Immortals instead of 0 pts at the start of 9th. Or 7th edition's nested special rules hidden away in the core rules as evidence of USRs being bad. Veterans of the Long War could be fixed by having it apply against Infantry and Bikes for one attack instead of a phase and against any target. Endless Cacophony would have been balanced at 3CP or if it had a 1-time use or another downside like the unit using it not benefitting from cover.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
To the idea that Custodes Captains don't need better than a 2+, then why the hell do we pay 2-3 times more for one that any other 2+BS unit? Is a Lord Commissar really as good a shot as a Custodian? Doubtful. Is a Cannoness as good at shooting? She's about third the cost. Here's the thing:

BS is only thing that matters? Points are determined just by BS?

You sir, have zero idea how games are designed.

 vict0988 wrote:
How often did you decide to use a CP re-roll in 5th edition?

What you've described is a tactical choice, and not something that adds any real depth to the game beyond any other type of tactical choice.

What depth did GW add to the game when they made smoke launchers on vehicles a one vehicle per turn use item that requires the expenditure of a limited-but-regenerating abstracted strategic resource?

Most strats fall into four categories:

1. Things that should just be part of the core rules.
2. Things that should just be unit special rules.
3. Things that should just be wargear.
4. "Gotcha" things for combos that shouldn't be part of the game.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
But yeah, the old wounding chart (or moreso the old ratios of what caused 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+/cannot wound, given we can go above 10 now), would go a long way toward fixing this game.

Nah, people would still find something to complain about.

People want to reclaim the game of their youth not realizing that they can never reclaim their youth. A tale as old as fandom itself.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
How often did you decide to use a CP re-roll in 5th edition?

What you've described is a tactical choice, and not something that adds any real depth to the game beyond any other type of tactical choice.

All tactical choices add depth, a game with a lot of tactical choices is deep. Chess has a lot of tactical choices, therefore it is deep. Tic-tac-toe has very few tactical choices, therefore it is shallow. If you have 10 different colours of X and O but ultimately it only matters whether you place an X or an O you have Tic-tac-toe with the illusion of depth.

What depth did GW add to the game when they made smoke launchers on vehicles a one vehicle per turn use item that requires the expenditure of a limited-but-regenerating abstracted strategic resource?

They removed some depth by removing the once-per game ability and added some when they added the Stratagem. By what logic would you assume I approve of the change?

Most strats fall into four categories:

1. Things that should just be part of the core rules.
2. Things that should just be unit special rules.
3. Things that should just be wargear.
4. "Gotcha" things for combos that shouldn't be part of the game.

I don't think factions should have their own Stratagems. I think there are some benefits to units having individual Stratagems to incentivize highlander-like lists, but I think the downsides outweigh the upside in most circumstances. Every faction needing 20+ Stratagems was a bad design requirement, but that's not a knock against Stratagems as a concept. I might come to think that Stratagems are wholly unsalvageable in the future but I'd need to test some things of my own to see if it could work.

 vict0988 wrote:
How are you going to determine when a choice is too obvious to be counted as depth?

You use common sense. It's not like there's some kind of mathematical formula assigning an objectively correct number for depth, it's all just opinions. But if you apply common sense to the "obvious" criteria most stratagems fit into that. Yes, you are going to use the too-cheap 1 CP stratagem to let your crisis squad move after shooting, and it's such an obvious auto-take thing that you're going to use 5-model units specifically to hit the 1 CP breakpoint on it. Yes, if you play Farsight Tau you are going to use the stratagem that gives you full hit and wound re-rolls on a deep striking unit, and you are going to put at least one unit in your list to use it. No, you are never going to use the orbital ion beam stratagem that costs 2 CP and is trivial to dodge because it doesn't hit until your next turn. These are not meaningful choices unless you're a newbie who hasn't learned the game yet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vict0988 wrote:
All tactical choices add depth, a game with a lot of tactical choices is deep.

This is not true at all. Let's say I give tactical marines the following special rules:

Bolters are cool: when attacking you may choose to make all of your bolters inflict mortal wounds instead of normal damage.
Power armor is awesome: you may choose to automatically pass any saves you have to make.
Marines are the best: when building your list you may choose to pay the normal point cost or make this unit cost zero points.

Do you honestly think that these "choices" add depth to the game when there is no reason you would ever choose not to activate those abilities? Obviously this is an extreme example but most of 40k's "choices" are little better. Most of the time the correct answer is extremely obvious to anyone who understands the rules and it's just a matter of memorizing the endless pages of rule text.

 vict0988 wrote:

The definition of game design depth is the amount of possible choices you can make in a game.

For someone making insulting comments about the competitiveness of other players, this quote is just dripping with unintended irony. This is what GW would love you to believe, but it's simply incorrect.

Depth is about meaningful choices. According to you, just adding 100 more useless strats to an army immediately increases the depth of the game. That's not the case, because those strats will never see use. Similarly, adding a bunch of really powerful, cheap strats to the game doesn't improve depth because there are no meaningful choices to be made in employing them.

As an example from the previous CSM Codex, you used to be able to take IW Slaanesh Obliterators. Using a variety of strats you could have them re-roll the random dice for their weapons, get +1 to wound and shoot twice. Technically there were dozens of other things you could do with them, and countless other ways of spending your CP, but this was very obviously the optimal play, pretty much literally every single turn. There's no decision to be made here.

Depth comes from decision making processes where choices are not so obviously good and bad. This is not an exact science and the amount of depth varies from game to game. Often things like incomplete knowledge are part of what creates depth, either through hidden information or the possibility of enemy reaction to your moves. For example, in a game like X-Wing, you have to decide on your ships' movement before knowing what your opponent is going to do, so you're relying on incomplete information, intuition and probability to decide what to do, all while your opponent is doing the same. In a game like Epic, with alternating activation, every move you make potentially changes the order of moves your opponent takes, and vice versa. The inability to just blindly do everything you want, uninterrupted, creates depth that a game like 40k can't match regardless of how many strats or other rules it contains.

 Eldarsif wrote:
Nah, people would still find something to complain about.

People want to reclaim the game of their youth not realizing that they can never reclaim their youth. A tale as old as fandom itself.

"Waah! People just complain anyway!"

That's not helpful.

Trying to find solutions that could help fix a game isn't just "reclaiming youth", and it is absurd to suggest otherwise.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
But yeah, the old wounding chart (or moreso the old ratios of what caused 2+/3+/4+/5+/6+/cannot wound, given we can go above 10 now), would go a long way toward fixing this game.

Nah, people would still find something to complain about.

People want to reclaim the game of their youth not realizing that they can never reclaim their youth. A tale as old as fandom itself.

I believe the phrase here is "Do not let perfect become the enemy of good" - an incremental improvement is worth doing, even if we won't have reached the Nirvana of a "Perfect Game".

I would like unit rules that I can learn by heart like magic cards.

I don't think 40k is that simple a game, and whenever people say it is I am left thinking they just don't think that deeply about it. When people start saying "its just about the netlists" you know its just a whinge. If you go to a tournament where 50%~ of people are running "cookie cutter netlists", you need a little more to reliably place. What is currently the best list winning every tournament anyway?

I think however the main divide is that people enjoy different things. So for some using a stratagem is a shallow choice with no tactical significance. Partly perhaps because they can't imagine what else they'd use the CP for and, as per the above, don't want to spend time thinking about it. But somehow deepstriking melta into the rear of a tank (or side, assuming that tank is backed into a terrain piece to avoid precisely this play) is the height of tactical genius. Even though to my mind it was always the inevitable play you were going to try.

To a degree the depth of 40k is limited because you've only got 5 (or up to 7 etc) turns. (In practice, some limiter like this is true for almost any miniatures game I can think of.) There are order of operation optimisation concerns in those turns - but more importantly what you do on turn 1 determines what your opponent can do which then determines your available options in turn 2 etc. Getting that right - so the game flows where you want it to - while adapting to your opponent's decisions, the vagaries of dice results etc, isn't obviously "shallow" - or at least its not half as straightforward as forumers often claim. Certainly right now if you are running a toolbox style list and not something like "haha, 90 point Voidweavers, lets go".

But that turn limit (combined with IGOUGO) gives limited scope for some lengthy game of feints and counters. So I kind of think people who want some complicated interplay of fire and maneuver - where the probabilities of damage are all a function of who is shooting what, where and how, are always going to be disappointed. It needs a more fundamental re-write of the rules, than "I put my guys in cover, and shot your guys in the open, I am a tactical mastermind."

 Manchild 1984 wrote:
I would like unit rules that I can learn by heart like magic cards.

Onepagerules does it, why can't 40k?

 vict0988 wrote:
I changed the names of your lists because you're giving a different scenario. You might use list C instead of list D, but list A is still better than list B. But you cannot guarantee that most factions would end up in the situation of choosing between C and D instead of A and B.

Ideally, I'm not giving a different scenario. If the game is designed well, list A (the one that always underperforms) should not exist outside of a new player making big mistakes with their army composition, and list B (the one that typically overperforms) should not exist either.

The dichotomy you describe- all-rounder that sucks versus a specialist that usually performs better- is a game design issue, but not something inherent to varied mission design.

 vict0988 wrote:
I agree, but would you agree that the chance of the situation we agree is bad is higher in a system with more different missions? Would it make sense to you if I said that I think games being decided before the first turn is the most important factor to me and I therefore want to ensure that is never the case. I think missions being different is fine in a casual format, but I think the missions should add additional late-game randomness to keep the winner in the air until the last moment.

In a game where units have points costs assigned in abstract and wildly varying actual value depending on the matchup, there's always going to be an element of good matchups and bad matchups even if there is exactly one scenario with no variety. We can't get away from that. No good competitive list will cripplingly overspecialize to the point where going up against any particular faction is an auto-lose, and then just hope that doesn't happen; they're going to ensure they have tools to deal with all the hot meta threats and gatekeeper lists.

The objective of having varied missions for competitive play (as well as casual) is to apply the same complexity to missions. Having to factor in the mission drastically increases the number of permutations of matchup, reducing the degree to which players can optimize. It increases the complexity of board state, requiring players to adopt different strategies depending on the mission rather than pre-planning.

I also agree that listbuilding shouldn't drive the game. But I strongly believe that in order to avoid the game being driven by listbuilding optimization, you need to avoid having a single target that players can optimize towards. From what I've encountered, the players who complain the loudest about auto-losing because they rolled a 'bad' mission are the ones that chose to take a one-trick-pony netlist without consideration for what it couldn't do, and for them I play the saddest song on the world's tiniest violin. There will still be good lists and bad lists in a competitive environment with varied missions- in large part because internal balance is never great in 40K- but the harder it is to look at a list and immediately know if it's good or bad, and the less you can script out before hitting the table, the better.

Not sure how familiar you are with Infinity, but tournament play there has a considerable variety of missions, ranging from kill-em-all to progressive scoring to board control at the end, and I have never had a game where I thought the game was a foregone conclusion just based on lists and mission. In my experience the scenario you describe of players choosing to optimize for certain missions and accept auto-loss in others is not how it plays out.

 catbarf wrote:

Not sure how familiar you are with Infinity, but tournament play there has a considerable variety of missions, ranging from kill-em-all to progressive scoring to board control at the end, and I have never had a game where I thought the game was a foregone conclusion just based on lists and mission. In my experience the scenario you describe of players choosing to optimize for certain missions and accept auto-loss in others is not how it plays out.

Every infinity mission is Anihilation with extra steps :p (jk but not 100% jk) and we're up to season 14 now

to "port" that kind of mission to 40k we could have :

Mission A : secure the payload, vehicles/monsters can do an action to move an objective X" (starts on the centerline), player with the objective in their DZ at the end of turn gets points

Mission B : Retrieve STC data, elites can do an action on an objective in No man's land to identify which objective in their opponent's DZ contains STC data, control that objective at the end of a turn to get points

Mission C : Scout ahead, Fast Attack can do an action in a table quarter they havnt done already, they get points based on how many enemy points are in that table quarter

Mission D : Pound them to dust, Heavy support give x points for every model they kill

Now, all of those are off the top of my head and zero% playtested but if i had to show up to a tournament that rolled randomly within that spread of missions, i know my army would need elites,fast,vehicles/monster and heavy supports. By forcing you to take actions, i reduce the overall lethality too (in a perfect world, no unit could to action+shoot like some can right now). Sure i *could* bring a list with only vehicles that are fast/heavy supports and have 3 missions "covered" but as i said, these were off the top of my head, an ideal pack would have like 12 missions.

 vict0988 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
How often did you decide to use a CP re-roll in 5th edition?

What you've described is a tactical choice, and not something that adds any real depth to the game beyond any other type of tactical choice.

All tactical choices add depth, a game with a lot of tactical choices is deep. Chess has a lot of tactical choices, therefore it is deep. Tic-tac-toe has very few tactical choices, therefore it is shallow. If you have 10 different colours of X and O but ultimately it only matters whether you place an X or an O you have Tic-tac-toe with the illusion of depth.

What depth did GW add to the game when they made smoke launchers on vehicles a one vehicle per turn use item that requires the expenditure of a limited-but-regenerating abstracted strategic resource?

They removed some depth by removing the once-per game ability and added some when they added the Stratagem. By what logic would you assume I approve of the change?

Most strats fall into four categories:

1. Things that should just be part of the core rules.
2. Things that should just be unit special rules.
3. Things that should just be wargear.
4. "Gotcha" things for combos that shouldn't be part of the game.

I don't think factions should have their own Stratagems. I think there are some benefits to units having individual Stratagems to incentivize highlander-like lists, but I think the downsides outweigh the upside in most circumstances. Every faction needing 20+ Stratagems was a bad design requirement, but that's not a knock against Stratagems as a concept. I might come to think that Stratagems are wholly unsalvageable in the future but I'd need to test some things of my own to see if it could work.

Strats aren't the problem so much as certain strats that just straight up buff offense and defense are.

I don't want a new edition, at least not for now. Every 3 years a new edition is madness. But between the choices I want more of the same. I don't think 40k needs a hard reset, the core rules are solid, just need some ironing. What I would like:

- less rule bloat. What do I mean: I don't mind big, chunky codexes full of rules and stuff. What I DO mind is the supplements, updates, faqs, extra rules scattered in campaign books and whatnot. I don't like that for ex. next month when I'm playing there's a new rule for my army - now I have -1 AP (armor of contempt) what? since when?. Or that now CPs are received on every turn. I hate that whenever I play I have to track down the rules for my army in so many places. If it wasn't for Wahapedia and battlescribe, I don't think I would keep up with this game. What's the point in paying for an expensive codex that is already outdated in 2 months?

- less frequent updates: I appreciate that GW is interested in keeping the game balanced, this is great, but rebalancing every 3 months is too much. I get that highly competitive players likes it, but it's not good for the game. I think a thorough rebalance patch at 6 months should be enough. And limit the changing/adding new rules.

- leave stratagems alone. I know, it won't happen, people hate them, and will go, which is a shame. They add a lot of depth to the game, because they add meaningful decisions. Do I use my cps to buy relics/traits or leave them for strats? Do I use them offensively or keep them for defense? Lots of cool stuff, even for those who are not that good, at least have flavor. Another aspect that makes stratagems great is the fact that they engage both players during both turns. Strats reduce the "now it's your turn so you do your stuff while I watch my dues being blown up", which is great.
Now, I get it. strats brings a lot of bloat. There are too many, and trying to keep up with both yours and your opponent is hard. But instead of scrapping them altogether, my suggestion is: Before the game, players have to choose a certain number of strats that they can bring to the battle - like 5, or ~10.