Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 RustyNumber wrote:
Can someone explain to me the balancing of vehicles? Even the scout sentinel and sentinel have 3+ 2+ armour saves, so I guess most vehicles have high armour and the differing value for vehicles will mainly be toughness/wounds?

You see the armor value represents one part of the armoredness of a tank. The really important stat is the increased T ceiling with the wound count.

in the past we could do that with the wounds and AV what we now need 3 stats for. Theoretically the later solution increases posibility for finetuning, but only if the people involved actually USE the spread of stats. Hence the wierdness you brought up with the SV being so close and so good on sentinels, traditionally not very tanky units.

IoW, on paper a 3 step modifyable "tank" toughness system is a good idea but only if you actually have the designers that have the overall restraint and awareness over multiple factions for it to be made to work.

Huh thanks, so it seems like armour value is now based around an infantry scale, and thus almost any vehicle is 'ard as in comparison.

Price list

Not Online!!! wrote:

 RustyNumber wrote:
Can someone explain to me the balancing of vehicles? Even the scout sentinel and sentinel have 3+ 2+ armour saves, so I guess most vehicles have high armour and the differing value for vehicles will mainly be toughness/wounds?

You see the armor value represents one part of the armoredness of a tank. The really important stat is the increased T ceiling with the wound count.

in the past we could do that with the wounds and AV what we now need 3 stats for. Theoretically the later solution increases posibility for finetuning, but only if the people involved actually USE the spread of stats. Hence the wierdness you brought up with the SV being so close and so good on sentinels, traditionally not very tanky units.

IoW, on paper a 3 step modifyable "tank" toughness system is a good idea but only if you actually have the designers that have the overall restraint and awareness over multiple factions for it to be made to work.

Amrou saves make sense but yeah the light scout vehicles should be 4+ or more often 5+ Armour save - we did have the awful system in earlier editions where monsters and pretend monsters like Tau and Eldar vehiclces benefited from Armour saves but vehicles did not.

Why the feth are those bundles? So we can force the Eldar player who doesn't happen to know a Tau player to waste money?

 Snord wrote:
I wonder how GW got the idea that players don't like doing points calculations?

GW does not like it as it uses up a lot of resources for no gain (people play the game anyway).
if they could they would cut points all together but that failed so they took the middle ground with Powerlevel and you got an Edition with both to get used to the concept
but marketing speech won't advertise it as "we don't want to do it" but always as something the people demanded and/or benefit from it

This is surprisingly reasonable if you play multiple armies. I was expecting around that per army.

Justyn wrote:
Why the feth are those bundles? So we can force the Eldar player who doesn't happen to know a Tau player to waste money?

I guess they just made bundles of equal size so all can have the same price and they don't need to keep track of different stocks
similar as the Index books in 8th were bundles of similar size

which also means all Xenos combined have a similar number of units as all Space Marines combined

Justyn wrote:
Why the feth are those bundles? So we can force the Eldar player who doesn't happen to know a Tau player to waste money?

Well alternatively we would be looking at like 2/3 of price for one army. Gets up expensive real fast if you play multiple armies.

Splitting with friends is always an option.

As is I was expecting price point to be about this but for ONE army...

edit: AOS card packs are over double this per army. Albeit has counters as well but still...

This is for GW products positively reasonable pricing O_o

 Mr Morden wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 RustyNumber wrote:
Can someone explain to me the balancing of vehicles? Even the scout sentinel and sentinel have 3+ 2+ armour saves, so I guess most vehicles have high armour and the differing value for vehicles will mainly be toughness/wounds?

You see the armor value represents one part of the armoredness of a tank. The really important stat is the increased T ceiling with the wound count.

in the past we could do that with the wounds and AV what we now need 3 stats for. Theoretically the later solution increases posibility for finetuning, but only if the people involved actually USE the spread of stats. Hence the wierdness you brought up with the SV being so close and so good on sentinels, traditionally not very tanky units.

IoW, on paper a 3 step modifyable "tank" toughness system is a good idea but only if you actually have the designers that have the overall restraint and awareness over multiple factions for it to be made to work.

Amrou saves make sense but yeah the light scout vehicles should be 4+ or more often 5+ Armour save - we did have the awful system in earlier editions where monsters and pretend monsters like Tau and Eldar vehiclces benefited from Armour saves but vehicles did not.

Incidentally the issues of the old system is the same as the issue with the new system.
Designers that have neither restraint nor awareness. MC's were BS i agree in their untold advantages over vehicles and clear vehicles being marked as MC because ..but i'd rather go back to the old system instead of the new system which since it's birth has the core issue with the wounding table AND no restraint at all once again on the designerfront.

 kodos wrote:

 stonehorse wrote:

What are you even on about at this point?

simply just using your own arguments for why it is good for casual players that the rules are bad, to show that those make no sense

so fine that you realised that people play 40k despite the rules and not because of it, so defending bad rules makes no sense as no one benefits from it except GW

That would be correct if what you used was anything like my argument.

I'm not the one saying the rules are bad, so your point would only work if I said the rules are bad, as I haven't said that, your point doesn't work.

I don't know how many other ways I can explain this.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Waaagh_Gonads wrote:

 Shakalooloo wrote:
The casual player is one that would happily take part in a 'last stand' type mission, where they are hopelessly outnumbered with no chance of victory, and the fun comes from seeing how well they do before being wiped out. The old Ork's Drift routine.

Some of my fondest memories were using my praetorian IG holding out in the Gorkamorka fortress vs endless waves of orks.
Crusade for me is not essential to buy as book, most gamers can make their own rules up.

Crusade is not something I am familiar with, but if it leans into narrative missions like the one you mention playing, I am all for that.

Ork's Drift is such a classic piece of 40k.

 Prometheum5 wrote:
You're only 'playing down' if the only reason you showed up is to run a mathematically optimized list to stomp your opponent into the dirt. There are more ways to play wargames than pure 1:1 competitive formats.

And every single one is helped by having good balance as the starting point. It's much easier to get something approaching a good asymmetric scenario first time if the game is more balanced.

More importantly, the vast, vast majority of games are some kind of roughly equal points battle, whether that's cutthroat tournament games, club pickup games, garagehammer or Crusade. They all benefit massively from good balance. Being from a large university city a lot of my opponents are students. They tend to have older armies that need refreshing for a new edition or they pick up start collections and build from there. I've seen with my own eyes what happens when people start to play the game and one picks the overpowered faction while the other picks the underpowered one, with absolutely no knowledge of which one is which at the time. You can see the frustration from the person playing the underpowered faction as they struggle to get anywhere near a win. That's especially true when they build what should be a fairly normal force of, say, Fire Warriors, a Crisis Team, some Kroot and a couple of Devilfish. I've seen this happen on numerous occasions.

These are players who have no intention of playing competitive 40k at tournaments. They don't follow the meta and study statistics about which armies or units are good or bad. They just want an entertaining game of toy soldiers with forces representative of the fluff for their faction. Bad balance is more of a problem for casual players, not less.

Why GW can't just do an all in one app with all rules, cards, army building, game tracking etc and provide it at normal price or free, like pretty much every other games company is beyond me.

 DaveC wrote:
Price list

I think this is being misinterpreted. These are bundles of 10 card packs sold to retailers at around £67-£75, with the RRP per pack being £12-£13.

It's not clear right now what exactly these bundles contain. The only clue is that the SM bundle weighs twice as much as the Imperium one, implying it contains far more cards.

One possibility is that is 5 x generic SM packs, plus 1 each BA,DA,BT,SW,DW. For the others... who knows? We might have to wait until Friday for confirmation.

Sunno wrote:
Why GW can't just do an all in one app with all rules, cards, army building, game tracking etc and provide it at normal price or free, like pretty much every other games company is beyond me.

Greed. It's just greed.

Sunno wrote:
Why GW can't just do an all in one app with all rules, cards, army building, game tracking etc and provide it at normal price or free, like pretty much every other games company is beyond me.

https://www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-reviews-the-new-warhammer-40k-app/

This shows what's in the new app, but there's no clear confirmation on what is free and what's part of the WH+ subscription.

If any of it requires the subscription its a hard pass from me. I detest subscriptions in general. A subscription to do basic math, that I will probably have to own every codex I want to use it for, double hard pass. Fortunately there are alternatives. And with the ultra stupid lack of choices the math is going to be very easy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Incidentally the issues of the old system is the same as the issue with the new system.
Designers that have neither restraint nor awareness. MC's were BS i agree in their untold advantages over vehicles and clear vehicles being marked as MC because ..but i'd rather go back to the old system instead of the new system which since it's birth has the core issue with the wounding table AND no restraint at all once again on the designerfront.

I might be missing something, but it certainly seems like this problem is back. With Tyrannid MC being much cheaper than equivalent SM Dreads. Again I could be wrong. But looking at the statblocks that seems to be the way it is.

So as a recap, the Leviathan box contains £84 "worth" of books.

It is my understanding it only contains index sheets for the models in the box, not for all of SM and all of 'Nids.

 stonehorse wrote:
Yes points where always badly handled, making weapon options different in how they operate with the points baked into the unit is a much better way to do it.

It also means the game is more about fun and not micro adjustments to squeeze out the most optimal peak performance from every single point... you know, the tournament mindset that has been making the game a bit dull.

This is a return to fun, and for people to be able to build their models how they like without having to worry about whether that configuration would mean the unit/model puts their force over the points limit.

 stonehorse wrote:

But 40k is a serious game, played by serious people, who are too serious for petty concepts such as 'fun', why have fun when we can math hammer the system into oblivion!

You must have missed the memo.

 stonehorse wrote:

I'm not the one saying the rules are bad, so your point would only work if I said the rules are bad, as I haven't said that, your point doesn't work.

No, you said that casual players need bad rules to have fun because good rules are only for competitive mathhammer players and make having fun impossible while 10th puts back the fun into the game because of its imbalance and inconstancy

I call 10th in its current form bad, simply for the inconsistency in design that we have as a reset should be done to get everything on the same level again and not to just make previous rules invalid (for everything the Indices do a simple Errata for the previous Codex would have done the same)
an casual players don't benefit at all from it while competitive players just don't care (because they just play the strongest build anyway)

and having upgrades not costing points but being including is making mathhammer much more important so you are not playing against a force that is worth double the points
not like we had this thing with free upgrades already in 7th and I remember how the casual players all say that free-upgrade 7th was the most fun version of the game

Justyn wrote:
It is my understanding it only contains index sheets for the models in the box, not for all of SM and all of 'Nids.

£40 rulebook
£25 leviathan crusade content
£19 mission cards

All are in the Leviathan box, I wasn't even thinking about any cards.

Maths sucked though, £84*

Weird that the Leviathan limited book has content the main core rulebook doesn't. I don't think there's precedent for that, is there?

Ah it was the Crusade rules I didn't realize were in the box.

Slipspace wrote:

 Prometheum5 wrote:
You're only 'playing down' if the only reason you showed up is to run a mathematically optimized list to stomp your opponent into the dirt. There are more ways to play wargames than pure 1:1 competitive formats.

And every single one is helped by having good balance as the starting point. It's much easier to get something approaching a good asymmetric scenario first time if the game is more balanced.

More importantly, the vast, vast majority of games are some kind of roughly equal points battle, whether that's cutthroat tournament games, club pickup games, garagehammer or Crusade. They all benefit massively from good balance. Being from a large university city a lot of my opponents are students. They tend to have older armies that need refreshing for a new edition or they pick up start collections and build from there. I've seen with my own eyes what happens when people start to play the game and one picks the overpowered faction while the other picks the underpowered one, with absolutely no knowledge of which one is which at the time. You can see the frustration from the person playing the underpowered faction as they struggle to get anywhere near a win. That's especially true when they build what should be a fairly normal force of, say, Fire Warriors, a Crisis Team, some Kroot and a couple of Devilfish. I've seen this happen on numerous occasions.

These are players who have no intention of playing competitive 40k at tournaments. They don't follow the meta and study statistics about which armies or units are good or bad. They just want an entertaining game of toy soldiers with forces representative of the fluff for their faction. Bad balance is more of a problem for casual players, not less.

That is putting the cart in front of the horse. The game (like any game) is played to have fun. If one can only obtain fun from winning, then they need to reevaluate a few things. Sure winning is nice and makes for a good feeling, but essentially this is a game of make belief, the points are completely made up, and more a rough approximation of a units ability. The game designers have no idea what players are going to do with the game once it is out in the wild, terrain and force building are not always going to match what GW designers use, and it never can as there is simply to much to factor in. Even the playing a game with the same players, same forces, same terrain, and same missions will be completely different.

If a player finds that they are getting creamed so hard on a regular basis, to the point of not enjoying the game, it might be an idea to have a word with their gaming group, ask to try out a custom scenario or Crusade (as that seems to be more about those sort of games).

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Shakalooloo wrote:
The casual player is one that would happily take part in a 'last stand' type mission, where they are hopelessly outnumbered with no chance of victory, and the fun comes from seeing how well they do before being wiped out. The old Ork's Drift routine.

Thing is, you can do these types of game just as well if the 'base' version of the game is balanced (as far as it can be) or at least aims at being balanced. It's possible to play un-balanced scenarios with roughly balanced games, but the reverse is not true. And of course there are all sorts of cases, like specific missions, where one side has a comparative advantage that is not reflected in their e.g. points costs, but then again that's a specific example while we're mostly speaking averages here.

It's actually easier to make interesting scenarios if the base game you are building them from is balanced.

Lets take the aforementioned Last Stand scenario. You think that you have it set up that the defenders will slowly be overwhelmed. The orks have a point advantage and replenish destroyed units, after all. But that means nothing if the Guard actually have parity as their units are more efficiently costed and can just paste the Orks before they get close. Or the inverse, the Orks immediately overwhelm the Guard and it isn't so much a dogged last, desperate defence a la Rorke's Drift, but more akin to a recreation of the Amritsar massacre.

Sunno wrote:
Why GW can't just do an all in one app with all rules, cards, army building, game tracking etc and provide it at normal price or free, like pretty much every other games company is beyond me.

They have released all the rules for free, what more do you want them to do?

This is honestly a massive departure for GW, free rules for their flagship game.

GW are, for the most part allergic to the idea of free things.

Justyn wrote:

Incidentally the issues of the old system is the same as the issue with the new system.
Designers that have neither restraint nor awareness. MC's were BS i agree in their untold advantages over vehicles and clear vehicles being marked as MC because ..but i'd rather go back to the old system instead of the new system which since it's birth has the core issue with the wounding table AND no restraint at all once again on the designerfront.

I might be missing something, but it certainly seems like this problem is back. With Tyrannid MC being much cheaper than equivalent SM Dreads. Again I could be wrong. But looking at the statblocks that seems to be the way it is.

The issue is the wound table is pretty much since 8th edition broken. Autowound 6 and only wounding on 2 + on double S vs T and the inversion of that, make a whole slew of mid range S weaponry pretty much useless, which in the past could land penetrating hits whilest HB and Bolters were not really usefull for AT duty.

That said the case above is just once again designers not being aware of what the other people do or the baselines should be...

tneva82 wrote:
This is surprisingly reasonable if you play multiple armies. I was expecting around that per army.

Yeah, not much point going through the trouble of editing and printing PDFs and laminating when the printed cards net out cheaper. There's not a ton of overlap in my Crusade group (other than Marines), so one set of each should pretty much cover the entire group.

 stonehorse wrote:
They have released all the rules for free, what more do you want them to do?

Write good rules.

If they released a free PDF which just said "The players take turns swinging a dreadsock at the opponents groin until one quits. The player who didn't quit is the winner and gets to stamp on their opponents model collection whereas the loser has to walk barefoot over their own scattered leftover bits." would you praise that because it was free?

Quality still matters, even if it is free.

 stonehorse wrote:

Sunno wrote:
Why GW can't just do an all in one app with all rules, cards, army building, game tracking etc and provide it at normal price or free, like pretty much every other games company is beyond me.

They have released all the rules for free, what more do you want them to do?

This is honestly a massive departure for GW, free rules for their flagship game.

GW are, for the most part allergic to the idea of free things.

And the cards themselves are uncharacteristically cheap O_o. Multiple armies in a bundle that costs about half the cardpack of ONE army in AOS.

For once starting cost from rules can't be complained. You can get by paying 0 without even resorting to wahapedia etc. Basically only thing that GW doesn't provide free that you probably want is the mission deck.

Cost of models and quality of rules is another thing but for a change cost of rules isn't unreasonable.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 stonehorse wrote:
They have released all the rules for free, what more do you want them to do?

Write good rules.

If they released a free PDF which just said "The players take turns swinging a dreadsock at the opponents groin until one quits. The player who didn't quit is the winner and gets to stamp on their opponents model collection whereas the loser has to walk barefoot over their own scattered leftover bits." would you praise that because it was free?

Quality still matters, even if it is free.

the eldar dreadsock needs a nerf, it has too many spikey bits