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So far all the army rules are unit type agnostic. Any model can benefit.

I doubt GK units will have smite or if they do it will be in tandem with something else.

Each type of GK unit could have a different power- in an edition where psychic powers are assigned to individual units with no player input, this is the only way to make it feel like there are a variety of powers available to the army as a whole.

So units that typically fill a melee role will probably have a CC based buff or debuff; a unit that is typically shooty would have a shooting buff or debuff, and objective holders might have defensive buffs.

Characters will have access to more than one power based on their status- very powerful characters will have the most.

Karol wrote:
I think after seeing the stats for GK termintors with a "smite" and some one psychic power that doesn't really do much, I will move on to playing even more AoS.

As you move further away from 40k, do yourself a favor (space permitting) and DON'T sell off your GKs.
Editions wax & wane, as does ones interest in any given game no matter how good/bad the rules are.
What doesn't change is the ever increasing cost of buying into game. GW games especially.
It's cheaper to store an army in the bottom of a closet for an edition or two until things improve/interest returns, than re-buying it later.
And then there's the assembly & painting time....

PenitentJake wrote:
Each type of GK unit could have a different power- in an edition where psychic powers are assigned to individual units with no player input, this is the only way to make it feel like there are a variety of powers available to the army as a whole.

So units that typically fill a melee role will probably have a CC based buff or debuff; a unit that is typically shooty would have a shooting buff or debuff, and objective holders might have defensive buffs.

Characters will have access to more than one power based on their status- very powerful characters will have the most.

That's how they used to work. Specific units got abilities suited to their roles. It worked quite well as you had the combination of esoteric equipment and lots of mini buffs across all your units making them feel suitably elite. It was a much better approach than 8th and 9th where GK and TS basically get a whole extra phase with little interaction with their opponent and lots of dice rolling without much player agency.

 warmaster21 wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
Sisters of Battle Faction Focus Tomorrow! A good number of our questions should be answered soon.

hopefully they wont arbitrarily skip showing a troop unit like with the daemon article

They may not have shown a troop unit, but they did show more depth to their "playstyle" - The Shadows Of Chaos thing looks like its going to be pretty interesting, between 6" Deep Strikes, corrupting objectives, mortal wounding battle shocks, and Be’lakor running around with a permanent Ouch Zone.

They also gave us a sneak peak at one of the questions we've been having when they gave us the "extra attacks" ability glimpse. I wonder if that will be on Desolators and some of the other two non-twin-linked ranged stuff or if it'll just be melee only. Also interesting is the Keeper with Armor save, Invuln, and FNP all three - but its not


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 Daedalus81 wrote:
This edition will be the true test at making troops interesting. So far the datasheets are enticing, but whether or not vehicles and other stuff still smother them is unknown.

I don't think vehicles were doing it because they were vehicles. I generally like what they're doing with the objective/combat rules. I think the "bad" vehicles will be better, and the Elite/FA/HS infantry getting OC is nice. I think the biggest improvement to what used to be troops is how so much is being keyed off of objective proximity and/or control. I'm hoping that each faction gets offensive and defensive version on assorted troops/whatever though - for example the Chaos Marine ability we saw was offensive while the Necron Warrior was defensive - if those don't match up with an Attacker/Defender scenario that bends the "rules" when it comes to victory conditions or such it could cause some imbalances so I worry a bit about that.

Slipspace wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
Each type of GK unit could have a different power- in an edition where psychic powers are assigned to individual units with no player input, this is the only way to make it feel like there are a variety of powers available to the army as a whole.

So units that typically fill a melee role will probably have a CC based buff or debuff; a unit that is typically shooty would have a shooting buff or debuff, and objective holders might have defensive buffs.

Characters will have access to more than one power based on their status- very powerful characters will have the most.

That's how they used to work. Specific units got abilities suited to their roles. It worked quite well as you had the combination of esoteric equipment and lots of mini buffs across all your units making them feel suitably elite. It was a much better approach than 8th and 9th where GK and TS basically get a whole extra phase with little interaction with their opponent and lots of dice rolling without much player agency.

You have a right to your opinion, and I get where you're comiing from, but I'm going to HARD disagree.

People complain about how subfaction rules "Flanderized" subfactions. Well, in my opinion bespoke psychic powers on units "Flanderizes" those units. If I want my GK Termies to perform a given function, I should be able to equip them and give them psychic powers that suit the role I want them to perform. If GW decides they must have power X, that means they only have one role, and it isn't me, the guy who bought, assembled and painted them that gets to make that choice.

Any gains in "Player Agency" to the defender during my psychic phase are had only at the expense of MY player agency as the Psyker.

It used to be fun to include more than one Librarian in an army when they could have different powers- now they can't, so it isn't. And this can be said of GK units too; having six units of strikes would be WAY more interesting if I could give three of them defensive powers and three of them offensive powers. But NOPE. ALL Strikes must have the same power because reasons. It's total bs.

If enough other stuff in the game is handled well, the game itself will be fine, but the way they've handled psykers this edition is definitely one of the biggest things that I personally dislike about the edition. I also hypothesize that once all the dexes are out, GW will release a psychic expansion like they did in second ed that brings real psychic powers back to all factions (or at least psychic mitigations to increase the agency of factions that are not typically psychic)... But we'll see.

I'm not sure they should go back on psychic.

I lament the same things, but honestly being able to make it so the 'haves' and 'have nots' aren't so far apart is not a bad thing. People largely avoided psykers if you weren't GK / TS / Nids. Now having one in other armies is viable and we don't need to have abhor the witch tilting against TS and GK.

Ultimately we need to see the enhancements and other facets to see how technical the psyker factions can get.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I'm not sure they should go back on psychic.

I lament the same things, but honestly being able to make it so the 'haves' and 'have nots' aren't so far apart is not a bad thing. People largely avoided psykers if you weren't GK / TS / Nids. Now having one in other armies is viable and we don't need to have abhor the witch tilting against TS and GK.

Ultimately we need to see the enhancements and other facets to see how technical the psyker factions can get.

This is a reasonable response... There certainly is a lot of Wait and See.

As for folks not taking psykers if they weren't GK, Ksons or Nids... That may have been true, but it doesn't mean that psykers weren't viable in other armies, it just means that they didn't suit competitive min/max meta for those other armies.

As for Abhor, you fix that problem by removing Abhor, not by curb stomping, flanderizing and blandifying psykers.

But again, you're right; there are ways that psychic powers can be made interesting in the context of synergy from other rules, so wait an see is a better approach than shaking my fists at the internet.

The thing that I like about specific powers for specific units is that it gives psyker-heavy armies more choice- for my Tyranids at least, when everything had the same set of powers it meant there were certain platforms that were better than others. It's like having a set of heavy weapons and then four or five units that each pick exactly one; their roles end up being redundant and there are usually winners and losers. By instead tying different powers to different units, they can instead have more distinct roles.

But I 100% sympathize with the complaint that it's bland for certain units to be locked into just one power. I wouldn't mind some of the more powerful psykers (eg Librarians) having a choice of a couple of powers.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I'm not sure they should go back on psychic.

I lament the same things, but honestly being able to make it so the 'haves' and 'have nots' aren't so far apart is not a bad thing. People largely avoided psykers if you weren't GK / TS / Nids. Now having one in other armies is viable and we don't need to have abhor the witch tilting against TS and GK.

Ultimately we need to see the enhancements and other facets to see how technical the psyker factions can get.

Games should avoid, as much as it is possible, not leting people play with their stuff or punishing people for playing with their stuff. A tau player should be happy that he is playing with a lot of suits, tyranid player should be happy to have a lot of big monsters and an ork should feel the same playing his horde of vehicles. They shouldn't feel "If only I had X, Y, Z my army wouldn't be unfun" and if that still somehow happened the fix should be not to remove X, Y and Z from other armies, but making the armies that don't have X, Y and Z fun in their own way. But that is magical happy land that is not GW. GW is a company that lets knight player have a rule set that doesn't work under a new edition or makes all GK/1ksons players chuckle telling 3-4 months before an edition end that Abhore is kind of a bad.


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ccs 809777 11531506 wrote:

As you move further away from 40k, do yourself a favor (space permitting) and DON'T sell off your GKs.
Editions wax & wane, as does ones interest in any given game no matter how good/bad the rules are.
What doesn't change is the ever increasing cost of buying into game. GW games especially.
It's cheaper to store an army in the bottom of a closet for an edition or two until things improve/interest returns, than re-buying it later.
And then there's the assembly & painting time....

Oh I would never sell the model. I hated 8th, like it was really bad for my mental health I think. 9th was much better, not for my terminator army, but in general it was much better then 8th. In the end terminators are the models I like, and not just any termintors, the GK one or similar ones, like the EC ones from HH. I don't like power armoured GK, no idea why , they just don't feel right to me.

The comperation to AoS in fun/quality of gaming is like heaven and hell though. And remember I play in the same place and the same people. AoS wasn't even a councious choice I picked. My aunt bought me starter set, then for some unexplained reason bought the copy of it again year later. The things waited 1+year for me to even start assembling them G


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 Daedalus81 wrote:
So far all the army rules are unit type agnostic. Any model can benefit.

I doubt GK units will have smite or if they do it will be in tandem with something else.

Then I hope that psycanons become like the new auto canons and not heavy bolters. without MW, killing all those vehicles or monsters , assuming there not being some army that invalidates those type of units/armies, is going to be hard.

I think the best thing I could expect is "smite"/"overloaded smite" and then 1-2 psychic powers to pick for units, or one to pick and one build in (so purfires always get flame etc). And then characters getting their smite+1-3 powers depending on type with certain powers being build in. It is going to be a meh world going down from potential 13 to non potential 1-2, maybe 3.

 catbarf wrote:
The thing that I like about specific powers for specific units is that it gives psyker-heavy armies more choice- for my Tyranids at least, when everything had the same set of powers it meant there were certain platforms that were better than others. It's like having a set of heavy weapons and then four or five units that each pick exactly one; their roles end up being redundant and there are usually winners and losers. By instead tying different powers to different units, they can instead have more distinct roles.

I don't buy this.

You're saying that a psychic unit that can choose from 6 powers is limited because there will usually be a best-power build... But in the new system, you don't get to make the choice at all, so what you get is not the BEST build, it's the ONLY build.

Now, because some units get multiple powers, it is technically possible that the total number of psychic abilities available to the army is greater than the number of powers, but that's far from guaranteed, and even if it's true, it's still only 6 choices:

Include unit A: Y/N and how many (if not unique)
Include unit B: Y/N and how many (if not unique)
Include unit C: Y/N and how many (if not unique)
Include unit D: Y/N and how many (if not unique)
Include unit E: Y/N and how many (if not unique)
Include unit F: Y/N and how many (if not unique)

Under the old system, if even two of the six powers are viable, you've got twice as many choices. And if you decide to take more than one of a particular psychic unit because you like the unit, you aren't forced to take the the same psychic power, meaning you can have variety if you want to... Though you're still just as free to build all of the units if you want to.

And for the record, there's usually three powers I like for each unit... though four some it's only two. Fours are very rare.

Literally the only way 10th can provide more choice than 9th is if there are more psychic units in 10th than there were in 9th. And for some armies- Nids in particular, that is going to be true. And that's assuming that there is only one viable 9th option for each of those units... And whether that "FEELS" true to you or not, I think it's pretty safe to say it objectively isn't.

PenitentJake wrote:
You're saying that a psychic unit that can choose from 6 powers is limited because there will usually be a best-power build

No, I didn't say that at all.

I'm not comparing different powers for a single platform. I'm comparing different platforms that all get the same powers, such that they don't do anything really different from one another.

I think that removing all choice with psychic powers was a mistake. More a mistake was putting specific powers with specific types of characters. Even if each psyker had a choice between 2-3 powers, with some overlap between types, that would be better.

 catbarf wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
You're saying that a psychic unit that can choose from 6 powers is limited because there will usually be a best-power build

No, I didn't say that at all.

I'm not comparing different powers for a single platform. I'm comparing different platforms that all get the same powers, such that they don't do anything really different from one another.

Either way, different platforms that choose from the same six powers still give you more choice than different platforms whose powers you don't get to choose- unless there are more platforms to choose from. For every "choice" you get to make, I get to make six.

You can choose a Farseer or not. So can I... But if I do, I can chose more versions of that farseer than you can.
You can choose to include a unit of Warlocks. So can I, but if I do I have more versions of them to choose from than you do.

Every choice you can make, I can make too. But I have access to choices you don't.

Now, you're a smart guy, and I agree with almost everything you post, so I think what you mean is that assigning powers to specific models allows DESIGNERS to create powers or suites of powers that allow them to ensure that each psychic unit is well suited to a role without having to worry that every power they create has to be able to work for every unit that has access to the discipline. And I could agree with that- some of the new psychic powers or suites of powers may turn out to be more interesting/effective/fluffy simply because they were designed specifically to work with a given unit's unique characteristics and role within the army.

But none of that increases player choice- that's all I'm saying.

Maybe set psychic powers will mean that Zoanthropes finally get 'Warp Blast' back and we can start using them to blow tanks apart once again.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I'm not sure they should go back on psychic.

I lament the same things, but honestly being able to make it so the 'haves' and 'have nots' aren't so far apart is not a bad thing. People largely avoided psykers if you weren't GK / TS / Nids. Now having one in other armies is viable and we don't need to have abhor the witch tilting against TS and GK.

Ultimately we need to see the enhancements and other facets to see how technical the psyker factions can get.

I didn't avoid Tiggy, but I didn't really take him for the psychics. They were a bonus against most armies, and something I didn't count on otherwise. I took him for the beat stick + bespokes (nullify, and Precog)


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Karol wrote:


Games should avoid, as much as it is possible, not leting people play with their stuff or punishing people for playing with their stuff. A tau player should be happy that he is playing with a lot of suits, tyranid player should be happy to have a lot of big monsters and an ork should feel the same playing his horde of vehicles. They shouldn't feel "If only I had X, Y, Z my army wouldn't be unfun"

You're fighting human nature there, not the game system. People focus on "My stuff dies twice as fast as Marines" more than "I have twice as many as Marines".


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PenitentJake wrote:


You're saying that a psychic unit that can choose from 6 powers is limited because there will usually be a best-power build...

I always thought what they should have done is every psyker has access to all their faction/subfaction/thematic-thing-goes-here powers, and the powers should have been varied and take turns as "the best power" - i.e. against this skew like Knights X was the "best" power, or against skew like "hordes" Y was the "best" power. And all of the powers should have been set up for one of the main-ish playstyles.

You're fighting human nature there, not the game system. People focus on "My stuff dies twice as fast as Marines" more than "I have twice as many as Marines".

My skills with english are not precise to show what I am thinking about. I will try to use an example. I know that most people would like to have their faction "lore accurate" which boils down to close to what is "the best". I don't have a problem with that. What I do have problems with, is something like this. A knight player looks at the new 9th ed core rules, with his codex and his collection, and suddenly understand that without infantry (which all other factions have) he is not going to be able to take part in a game of 9th ed w40k without an automatic assumption of losing on both primaris and secondaries.

At the fix to that, should not be, "the removal", of infantry from all other faction. By lets say making the rules extremly skewed in favour of vehicles/monsters/etc

In the case of marines something similar would be something like all marines are meh or bad, save for those that have TWC or Sang Guard, which by some fluke of core rules and army rules interaction make those units (and not even those armies) REALLY GOOD. In that case the fix should be either giving/making other marines good/fun to play too, and not making Sang Guard and TWC real bad.

That goes for all factions. If skimers over perfrom and all other armies underperform, then the fix should be killing of skimers as a valid unit options. etc.

PenitentJake wrote:Now, you're a smart guy, and I agree with almost everything you post, so I think what you mean is that assigning powers to specific models allows DESIGNERS to create powers or suites of powers that allow them to ensure that each psychic unit is well suited to a role without having to worry that every power they create has to be able to work for every unit that has access to the discipline.

That, and because it helps the designers differentiate the units themselves, giving them distinct roles rather than just being platforms to slot spells into.

For example: For the longest time a Maleceptor was basically just a Zoanthrope duct-taped to a Carnifex, a big critter that did big critter things and also had psychic powers. But then GW gave it the Encephalitic Diffusion rule, a unique psychic ability, and now it has a protective capability that no other unit provides. Similarly, Neurothropes are just character Zoanthropes, but have the Spirit Leech ability, allowing them to heal nearby Zoanthropes by inflicting damage. And Zoanthropes get a boosted Smite, making them good for raw damage output. These are unique powers that give the units distinct roles.

Conversely, Astra Militarum had Primaris Psykers and Wyrdvane Psykers. They drew from the same pool of powers. You never saw Wyrdvanes in 8th, because they were strictly worse as psykers. You also never saw Terrifying Visions (wow, -2 to one enemy unit's leadership for one turn) taken when you could choose Psychic Barrier (+1 to save on a friendly unit) instead. The ability to mix-and-match any psyker with any power meant there were a couple of combos that were worth considering and a bunch of combos (and entire units and powers) that were just bad. Ultimately, GW just nixed the Wyrdvanes entirely.

Tying the powers to the units might mean fewer theoretical combinations of powers, but if they can be individually balanced, then they can all be made worth taking. If Terrifying Visions was tied to Wyrdvane Psykers, GW could see that that unit underperforms and balance accordingly, without risking either Terrifying Visions becoming OP when taken by a Primaris Psyker, or Wyrdvanes becoming OP when given a different power. If Wyrdvanes had Terrifying Visions and Primaris Psykers had Psychic Barrier, they'd have distinct roles (offensive vs defensive) that make the choice between the two more significant, rather than the false choice of Good Psyker or Bad Psyker and then good powers or bad ones. Having a number of equally viable, distinct, different options offers more real choice than having dozens of potential combos of which two are worth considering and the remainder are strictly inferior, while also being easier to appropriately balance.

All that said- as mentioned before, I do still think there are units that ought to have a choice rather than being locked into a single power. But I don't mind the concept of tying powers to units, rather than having a universal roster of powers that all your psykers draw from. There's a middle ground.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Balance, not important. Fun, important.

Definitely on team Gadzilla.

Never got the obssession with "balance" in games. If you're the type of player who "has to win", then just get whatever is the most powerful army and have fun.

The rest of us can have fun winning or losing playing a side that we find the most fun/interesting/creative. I used to play Halflings in bloodbowl (old school bloodbowl, no idea what the new one is like) just because it was fun trying to achieve anything. Scoring a touchdown was a victory, even if I lost the match 7-1. They were hopeless. And that's what made them fun.

P.S. I do get it for serious tournament play. But I also think that designing complicated games like 40K with serious tournament play foremost in mind is a mistake. It's just not suited to it.

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Balance, not important. Fun, important.

Definitely on team Gadzilla.

Never got the obssession with "balance" in games. If you're the type of player who "has to win", then just get whatever is the most powerful army and have fun.

The rest of us can have fun winning or losing playing a side that we find the most fun/interesting/creative. I used to play Halflings in bloodbowl (old school bloodbowl, no idea what the new one is like) just because it was fun trying to achieve anything. Scoring a touchdown was a victory, even if I lost the match 7-1. They were hopeless. And that's what made them fun.

P.S. I do get it for serious tournament play. But I also think that designing complicated games like 40K with serious tournament play foremost in mind is a mistake. It's just not suited to it.

I think balance is important for a fun game.

It's certainly not the only thing that goes into a fun game, but if I make a competently-built list and then play a game where I have virtually no chance of winning or no chance of losing because of power imbalance, I won't have a fun time.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Balance, not important. Fun, important.

Definitely on team Gadzilla.

Never got the obssession with "balance" in games. If you're the type of player who "has to win", then just get whatever is the most powerful army and have fun.

The rest of us can have fun winning or losing playing a side that we find the most fun/interesting/creative. I used to play Halflings in bloodbowl (old school bloodbowl, no idea what the new one is like) just because it was fun trying to achieve anything. Scoring a touchdown was a victory, even if I lost the match 7-1. They were hopeless. And that's what made them fun.

P.S. I do get it for serious tournament play. But I also think that designing complicated games like 40K with serious tournament play foremost in mind is a mistake. It's just not suited to it.

I think balance is important for a fun game.

It's certainly not the only thing that goes into a fun game, but if I make a competently-built list and then play a game where I have virtually no chance of winning or no chance of losing because of power imbalance, I won't have a fun time.

It's important to a point.

And yes, maybe there is a point in 40K more than some other games.

I play old-school AD&D too and sometimes I hear or read about how this or that is "underpowered". Really? You're complaining that your character is not as good a warrior as that 7-foot tall barbarian? And you're complaining about "balance"? If you don't want to be crap at fighting, don't choose to be a 3-foot tall Halfling. There is no "balance" there.

Similarly, if someone has built an army solely designed to wipe-out heavy armour ... and your army is full of heavy armour ... well guess what? It's just not your day. You can't balance that. You just have to rememeber that while that dude's army might wipe the floor with yours, there's probably some other specialist army that can expose his weaknesses and will wipe the floor with his.

If you try and "balance" that kind of thing out of the game, you just end up with a beige blob of sameness. Nothing is unique or special anymore.

Sure, in 40K, when you have a points system, you kind of expect that you will get an even competition. And I agree with that, but only up to a point. Stuff still needs to be unique and it's mission impossible to try and balance it all.

'Balance' also encompasses things not working as they should. Even if you don't care about the winner or loser of the battle, it was annoying when a Vanquisher (a specialized anti-tank gun lauded in the lore for one-shotting other tanks) wasn't nearly as effective at anti-tank duty as a basic battle cannon.

Even in something like AD&D, if I find that my seven-foot-tall barbarian isn't as good a fighter as the three-foot-tall halfling rogue due to how the rules work, that's frustrating.

Similarly, if someone has built an army solely designed to wipe-out heavy armour ... and your army is full of heavy armour ... well guess what? It's just not your day. You can't balance that.

You can design the game so that lopsided matchups like that either don't occur or aren't one-sided stomps. There is a reason that the 40K style of listbuilding is increasingly rare nowadays, as other games find fun solutions to these imbalances rather than throwing up their hands and saying 'sorry, too bad, live with it'.

And it's never been fun for the apex final battle of a hard-fought campaign to end in one side stomping the other in two turns. No amount of 'I don't actually care who wins' prevents that from being an anticlimactic letdown.

Balance and design and fun aren't mutually exclusive concepts, they're all part of a cohesive whole.

PenitentJake wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I'm not sure they should go back on psychic.

I lament the same things, but honestly being able to make it so the 'haves' and 'have nots' aren't so far apart is not a bad thing. People largely avoided psykers if you weren't GK / TS / Nids. Now having one in other armies is viable and we don't need to have abhor the witch tilting against TS and GK.

Ultimately we need to see the enhancements and other facets to see how technical the psyker factions can get.

This is a reasonable response... There certainly is a lot of Wait and See.

As for folks not taking psykers if they weren't GK, Ksons or Nids... That may have been true, but it doesn't mean that psykers weren't viable in other armies, it just means that they didn't suit competitive min/max meta for those other armies.

As for Abhor, you fix that problem by removing Abhor, not by curb stomping, flanderizing and blandifying psykers.

But again, you're right; there are ways that psychic powers can be made interesting in the context of synergy from other rules, so wait an see is a better approach than shaking my fists at the internet.

People didn't take psykers outside of armies like GK, Ksons, and Nids because if you ran into those armies, they had 0 value because the amount and quality of deny the witch meant it was impossible to get any psychic powers off.

It wasn't a question of 'min/max' it was a question of 'does anything'. It also very explicitly means that psykers WEREN'T viable in other armies unless they were useful INDEPENDENT of the fact that they were a psyker.

 catbarf wrote:
'Balance' also encompasses things not working as they should. Even if you don't care about the winner or loser of the battle, it was annoying when a Vanquisher (a specialized anti-tank gun lauded in the lore for one-shotting other tanks) wasn't nearly as effective at anti-tank duty as a basic battle cannon.

Yeah, I can agree with you here. That kind of stuff annoys me too, because it not only interferes with the balance of the game, it also interferes with the believability/imaginative side.

 catbarf wrote:

Even in something like AD&D, if I find that my seven-foot-tall barbarian isn't as good a fighter as the three-foot-tall halfling rogue due to how the rules work, that's frustrating.

Well ... it wouldn't be. Because the Halfling would be hopeless. Because the game is not "balanced" that way.

 catbarf wrote:

Similarly, if someone has built an army solely designed to wipe-out heavy armour ... and your army is full of heavy armour ... well guess what? It's just not your day. You can't balance that.

You can design the game so that lopsided matchups like that either don't occur or aren't one-sided stomps. There is a reason that the 40K style of listbuilding is increasingly rare nowadays, as other games find fun solutions to these imbalances rather than throwing up their hands and saying 'sorry, too bad, live with it'.

I'm not sure how you could. Going back to your example of the Vanquisher and you wanting it to work as expected in the game mechanics ... if an army that was specifically built to smash heavy armour and nothing else actually had a hard time smashing heavy armour ... that to me would be a far bigger problem. Just like your Vanquisher not being any better at what it's designed to do than a normal cannon.

The "balance" exists in that such an army would also have weaknesses that could be exploited by other armies (or even just a "balanced" jack-of-all trades one). So while it might score an overwhelming lop-sided victory over a force that it was specifically designed to smash, it should struggle against anything else. And actually be smashed itself by an army that it is specifically not designed to combat - a fast moving, lightly-armoured, ambush style army, for example.

But ... in a way I agree with you, because in a way, what *I* am describing is actually "balance". It just not balanced for every single possible combination. And nor should it be.

 catbarf wrote:

And it's never been fun for the apex final battle of a hard-fought campaign to end in one side stomping the other in two turns. No amount of 'I don't actually care who wins' prevents that from being an anticlimactic letdown.

I'd argue you just can't manufacture "excitement" ... or if you can, it's not by making every combination perfectly "balanced" against every other combination. Sometimes, just like in sports and all other competition, there's going to be a one-sided match.

You don't care about balance in D&D because there is a Dungeon Master. The guy can and should move stuff behind the curtains so that challenges appear as challenges no matter how balanced the fight actually is.

There is no such figure in warhammer.

Spoletta wrote:
You don't care about balance in D&D because there is a Dungeon Master. The guy can and should move stuff behind the curtains so that challenges appear as challenges no matter how balanced the fight actually is.

There is no such figure in warhammer.

I am the Dungeon Master.

While it's true there is a smidgen of that going on, I try and keep it to a minimum. In order for it to be exciting and satisfying, there has to be danger and there has to be consequences to bad decisions. If they get themselves into a fight where they're hopelessly outmatched I won't "secretly balance" it for them.

But you are broadly right - it's a different game so maybe a bit off topic.

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:


Never got the obssession with "balance" in games. If you're the type of player who "has to win", then just get whatever is the most powerful army and have fun.

.

I think some factions have the problem of existing in a GW created world, where GW sometimes tries to "balance" some factions. Which almost always means nerfs, "streamlining" of rules and generaly making armies less fun to play. And there are other armies which GW goes hog wild while writing their rules. It is hard to exist in a world, where for 3-6 years you are driving a scooter and people in your playgroup are driving around in tanks.

Plus this get less or more serious the easier it is for players to buy a new army, in case the one their picked is unfun. Buying a new kill team for Killteam is easy, and changing factions is fun. Buying 2000pts of w40k is not easy to some people, which creates local settings where people take the game a lot more serious, then some place else.

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
You can design the game so that lopsided matchups like that either don't occur or aren't one-sided stomps. There is a reason that the 40K style of listbuilding is increasingly rare nowadays, as other games find fun solutions to these imbalances rather than throwing up their hands and saying 'sorry, too bad, live with it'.

I'm not sure how you could.

Sideboard mechanics are a big one, allowing users to change the composition of their army after they know the opponent and the mission. Or recycling destroyed units, so your token anti-tank can be reused and pose a credible threat. Or more restrictive listbuilding so that wild skew isn't an option. Or throw out listbuilding entirely and have units bring in 'reinforcements' in lieu of a fixed list. Or more comprehensive design to avoid the notion of hard counters altogether.

Lots of ways that cat has been skinned. Mostly it's out of a general recognition that creating a fixed list in a vacuum with no idea what the mission or enemy look like is A. not particularly realistic, and B. tends to result in a game that breaks easily, and telling players 'hey, sometimes your battle's just going to suck' is not an ideal outcome.

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:
I'd argue you just can't manufacture "excitement" ... or if you can, it's not by making every combination perfectly "balanced" against every other combination. Sometimes, just like in sports and all other competition, there's going to be a one-sided match.

'Perfect balance' is a phrase I've only ever heard as a straw man. Good enough to have a tense game, or at least one where it's not immediately apparent whether it's the game design or the dice that produced a skewed outcome, is sufficient.

Perfect isn't necessary, it's just that a poorly balanced game is harder to have fun with, even if you never take it to tournaments.

 The Pig-Faced Orc wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Balance, not important. Fun, important.

Definitely on team Gadzilla.

Never got the obssession with "balance" in games. If you're the type of player who "has to win", then just get whatever is the most powerful army and have fun.

The rest of us can have fun winning or losing playing a side that we find the most fun/interesting/creative. I used to play Halflings in bloodbowl (old school bloodbowl, no idea what the new one is like) just because it was fun trying to achieve anything. Scoring a touchdown was a victory, even if I lost the match 7-1. They were hopeless. And that's what made them fun.

P.S. I do get it for serious tournament play. But I also think that designing complicated games like 40K with serious tournament play foremost in mind is a mistake. It's just not suited to it.

I've seen far too many players who have no interest in tournament or any form of full-on competitive play leave the hobby due to bad balance to agree with this. If balance is bad it affects everyone. I'd argue it has a greater effect on more casual players. If you're a cut-throat tournament player, part of that means acquiring and playing the best stuff and using it against other players doing the same. In most cases that's achievable and often there are multiple armies that are good enough to do that with. You don't care if 90% of the units in the game are terrible because you're never going to use them.

More casual players often get into the game by picking armies they like the look of, or styles of play they're interested in. If the GW balance pendulum is against you, you're out of luck. Sure, you can claim you don't mind if you win or lose, but at some point losing every single game with no chance of winning at all gets annoying. With armies taking a lot of time and effort to build and paint and games easily taking 3 hours to play, that's a problem. I witnessed it with a couple of Tau players in 9th, prior to their Codex. They bought all the typical Tau stuff - Firewarriors, Crisis Suits, some Devlifish and Hammerheads, etc, and lost every single game because the army was terrible. They weren't doing anything wrong, the balance was just so bad there wasn't much they could do. I've seen the same pattern with other armies and other game systems over the years.

I've seen it from the other side too. Space Marines were bad in 8th edition. Then they got their second Codex and they went form bad to broken overnight. As a SM player it was absolutely no fun playing the army at that time because it was so vastly overpowered compared to everything else your victories felt unearned. Worse, it was so powerful it was really difficult to tone it down to try to provide a more even match-up. I stopped playing SM pretty quickly after that. Luckily I had other armies to play.

I would have liked to have seen more synergy for "fluffy" list building.

Similar to the old Demi-Company system but not so Monte Haul'ish. In addition to getting some "free" stuff for taking the fluffy 30 Tacs, 10 Assaults, 10 Devs there would also be in-game synergies. Assaults (all varieties: Terminator, Vanguard, Jump Marines, whatever) can jump(Deep Strike) closer than 9" to an enemy if they're also jumping within 9" of a Tac - and similar things for other factions where the "troops" open up scenarios for the "elites" etc. Lictors near Guants and Gants. Increased Accuracy for Biovores near Warriors