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I think you have to balance lore and enabling armies to play the game though. All armies should have a way of dealing with say, a Knight or an Avatar or something like that. You can argue the toss over whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ in combat but the fact is its incomprehensible that the Hive Mind bred something specifically to smash apart the enemies toughest units but in reality it only hits or punches through armour (wounds) 50% of the time. Plus it leads to poor playing experiences because if my friend brings his Knight or my Eldar player brings his Avatar, I have absolutely no reliable way of dealing with them apart from Zoanthropes and even they only wound on 4+ (5+ if the Avatar gets his -1 to wound thing).

Even the Norn Emissary is meant to be an Elite assassin in the lore but on the table its actually a tank that is meant to stand on an objective and hold it. Its ability to actually kill characters is not great.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
For the same reason it was stupid when Defilers hit on a 4+. They're more skilled than Guardsmen in close combat.

What makes you say they are skilled in close combat? Not just deadly based on their power, but skilled.

Necronmaniac05 wrote:I think you have to balance lore and enabling armies to play the game though. All armies should have a way of dealing with say, a Knight or an Avatar or something like that. You can argue the toss over whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ in combat but the fact is its incomprehensible that the Hive Mind bred something specifically to smash apart the enemies toughest units but in reality it only hits or punches through armour (wounds) 50% of the time. Plus it leads to poor playing experiences because if my friend brings his Knight or my Eldar player brings his Avatar, I have absolutely no reliable way of dealing with them apart from Zoanthropes and even they only wound on 4+ (5+ if the Avatar gets his -1 to wound thing).

Even the Norn Emissary is meant to be an Elite assassin in the lore but on the table its actually a tank that is meant to stand on an objective and hold it. Its ability to actually kill characters is not great.

It's absurd that any army would deploy anything with the intent of it missing half the time. You can rationalise almost any unit for any army doing a fixed volume of damage practically with the fluff if you try hard enough. The defining factor is the relative variables between them, the need for a game balance choice and as we see "I want it to have better stats" from players.

vict0988 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
For the same reason it was stupid when Defilers hit on a 4+. They're more skilled than Guardsmen in close combat.

What makes you say they are skilled in close combat? Not just deadly based on their power, but skilled.

I think that's the crux of this argument. What is skill? I asked the same thing last page and didn't really get a response.

Dudeface wrote:
It's absurd that any army would deploy anything with the intent of it missing half the time. You can rationalise almost any unit for any army doing a fixed volume of damage practically with the fluff if you try hard enough. The defining factor is the relative variables between them, the need for a game balance choice and as we see "I want it to have better stats" from players.

Actually, most modern militaries deploy infantry knowing they will "miss". For every insurgent killed in Afghanistan, for example, around 250,000 rounds were fired. This is because most shooting is not with the intention of actually killing your target, but rather suppressing them so that you can bring in other elements to finish them off, be that artillery, air support, or a flanking manoeuvre. But 40K has no meaningful rules for suppression.

They should have put a blast like rule into sweep attacks.

Ie a carnifex makes 4 attack rolls and a success scores 3 hits.

Large creatures need not have a high accuracy when they are smashing into several targets at once.

A Carnifex hitting on 4's would be much better if its Scything Talons weren't only a -2 Save Mod. Pre 8th this is a unit that ignored armor saves and IIrc nearly always wounded Infantry on a 2+ because of the Wound chart.

The Carnifex is also a unit which has been progressively pushed out of its role by a constant stream of new big monsters which do specific jobs better.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
The Carnifex is also a unit which has been progressively pushed out of its role by a constant stream of new big monsters which do specific jobs better.

I must say that I really don't get the mindset behind squelching unit capabilities in order to open up niches for other units. Like, make a bunch of big, nasty CC monsters, all of which are effective, and let the player choose which they like. Role redundancy is perfectly fine.

It is less a mindset and more that GW really sucks at role redundancy. They always make one better than the others and not necessarily the one that is newer.

I mean it took forever for Haruspexes and Maleceptors to be good units.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
It's absurd that any army would deploy anything with the intent of it missing half the time. You can rationalise almost any unit for any army doing a fixed volume of damage practically with the fluff if you try hard enough. The defining factor is the relative variables between them, the need for a game balance choice and as we see "I want it to have better stats" from players.

Actually, most modern militaries deploy infantry knowing they will "miss". For every insurgent killed in Afghanistan, for example, around 250,000 rounds were fired. This is because most shooting is not with the intention of actually killing your target, but rather suppressing them so that you can bring in other elements to finish them off, be that artillery, air support, or a flanking manoeuvre. But 40K has no meaningful rules for suppression.

Surprised it took this long for this to come up.

Hitting half the time with any sort of front-like weaponry is CRAZY good by any sort of realistic margin. And while I’m a bit young to have any first hand experience on medieval battlefields, I can comfortably say that arrows and sword strokes did not have a 50% return rate on corpses (or even hits).

I understand that “my big beasty only hits half of its shots” feels bad, but it’s an argument that’s purely about feeling. And the issue isn’t actually that only 50% of shots hit, that’s merely a symptom of 40k being puddle deep and we’ve seen where trying to treat this symptom leads. Absolutely abused levels of lethality flying around so that every attack feels impactful, because it always kills. The actual issue is that the only reason to attack in 40k is to kill, so any attack which doesn’t cause critical existence failure is a waste of time / feels bad. The solution to the ACTUAL ISSUE is to give means of interaction beyond “I kill you or I don’t”. Mechanics like suppression, moral that actually matters, and a variety of malaise would make attacks more about killing and also widen the field for weapons which are useful beyond their sheer killiness. Not to mention allow actual tactics and maneuvers, like flanking, to be worth while snd rewarding.

But that kind of design takes effort, so it’s reserved for specialist games and 40k will never see it.

The actual issue is that the only reason to attack in 40k is to kill, so any attack which doesn’t cause critical existence failure is a waste of time / feels bad. The solution to the ACTUAL ISSUE is to give means of interaction beyond “I kill you or I don’t”. Mechanics like suppression, moral that actually matters, and a variety of malaise would make attacks more about killing and also widen the field for weapons which are useful beyond their sheer killiness. Not to mention allow actual tactics and maneuvers, like flanking, to be worth while snd rewarding.

But that kind of design takes effort, so it’s reserved for specialist games and 40k will never see it.

It could be cool to see a system where attacking is more about putting layers of pressure on enemy units to debuff them before you actually start inflicting significant casualties. It definitely sounds like it would be more tactically interesting.

I do wonder if the aesthetic of 40k would interfere with that though. Generally, I want my games to be full of over-the-top blood and guts. popping enemies like zits every time I shoot at them might get that feeling across better than spending multiple turns suppressing an enemy before finishing them off all at once.

I think the main issue is keeping the pace of 40k pretty fast. Suppression is great, but you want to make sure that the good stuff still happens enough to provide ample reward. You don't want the game to slog down into immobile firefights.

But I think that balance can totally be struck for 40k.

The problem with the game focusing on purely killing is that it's a zero sum experience.

To win you have to be the killier player. It means someone isn't enjoying being slaughtered.

Too much dopamine chasing for the one player to get the kill.

Mild dissatisfaction for both players is a better game than one player feeling great and the other hating it.

The loss of initiative is an example of this in microcosm - now you just take turns choosing who gets to kill who first. The game is just a string of mini alpha strikes

 morganfreeman wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Actually, most modern militaries deploy infantry knowing they will "miss". For every insurgent killed in Afghanistan, for example, around 250,000 rounds were fired. This is because most shooting is not with the intention of actually killing your target, but rather suppressing them so that you can bring in other elements to finish them off, be that artillery, air support, or a flanking manoeuvre. But 40K has no meaningful rules for suppression.

Surprised it took this long for this to come up.

Hitting half the time with any sort of front-like weaponry is CRAZY good by any sort of realistic margin.

If you take BS4+ to be a literal representation of hitting half the time you are assuming a single attack represents a single pull of the trigger.

If you take a single attack to represent a single pull of the trigger you are assuming a turn represents approximately the, I dunno, one to ten seconds it takes to identify a target and fire in a combat environment.

If you take a turn to represent one to ten seconds then you have officers shouting contradictory orders to multiple units simultaneously on the vox net every few seconds, dudes going from dug in to dead sprint in an instant, troops failing their morale test (in prior editions) and fleeing at breakneck pace before recovering all in less time than it takes to respond to 'how's the weather?', tanks exploding and all the stunned occupants piling out immediately like candy disgorging from a pinata, reinforcements being kept in reserve for key moments like thirty seconds after contact, epic duels between legendary heroes over the instant they make contact.

And then you might as well just treat all the distances as 100% literal too, and rationalize how an anti-tank missile launcher has a maximum range of approximately eighty feet and your supersonic jet cruises at about 40MPH.

This is all absolute bugfuck insanity. 40K is a highly abstracted game; there's simply no way to rationalize weapon ranges and movement rates and implied timescales in a way that makes sense. Weapon Skill and Ballistic Skill are stats that reflect the abstracted skill of the user by doing more damage or doing less damage. That's all they are, and trying to take them as representative of anything 'real' just does not work.

Who thinks that BS4+ actually represents a 50% hit rate and that troops are firing one shot for every dice you roll?

These are abstractions. Obviously.

no, every model is realistically represented
each dice is a single shot, otherwise the 1 magazine the models carry would not be a realistic representation

/s

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Who thinks that BS4+ actually represents a 50% hit rate and that troops are firing one shot for every dice you roll?

From a once over of this page of the thread:

Dudeface wrote:
It's absurd that any army would deploy anything with the intent of it missing half the time. You can rationalise almost any unit for any army doing a fixed volume of damage practically with the fluff if you try hard enough. The defining factor is the relative variables between them, the need for a game balance choice and as we see "I want it to have better stats" from players.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Whether the Carnifex is a "generalist" or not, it should still hit more often than baseline infantry.

Should it though? I don't know as I agree with that. At a baseline I don't think a Carnifex is particularly "skilled" at close combat. It's a huge multi-limbed alien trying to smash (generally) smaller things with weapons bigger than they are. It's big and dangerous but kinda slow and not that dextrous. Plenty of attacks can be avoided by a mad dive out of the way, and sometimes it just hacks several dudes to paste with a single blow. Sometimes everyone moves out of the way of its body-slam charge, other times it turns an entire squad into a smear on the ground with nothing but making should contact and letting gravity take over. 4+ feels like a fairly accurate representation of this. Not perfect by any means, but not unacceptable. And more over, the abstraction wasn't even really the point of my post; it was the introduction to the main thesis of the hit %, and your tears over not liking it, being a symptom rather than the cause.

Without restating my central point I'll just say this: We've done it your way before. Cranking the hit and wound % are cranked to satisfying people who simply want stuff to do more damage leads to the insane lethality of 8th and 9th edition. It leads to high RoF D weapons armies by numerous bricks at a time. It leads to plate-sized templates that wipe out multiple squads at once.

The carnifex not feeling good to use / like it does anything is not rooted in someone making it hit on a 4+ rather than a 3+. That is merely a symptom of the underlying problem. So much so that a competently designed symptom would probably make said Carnifex have a harder time hitting smaller numbers of numble infantry skittering around it, while also making sure that near every blow is going to land when it charges into fisticuffs range of an equally sized battle-tank.

The problem with Nids though is that their supposed monsters are either inaccurate (they hit on 4+ or worse) or are not strong enough to punch through most armoured targets (they are S9 or less with a couple of exceptions which hit the heady heights of S12).

So whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ is not really the point. The point is that it is simply implausible that the Hive Mind, which is in the lore supposed to regularly evolve new creatures to combat new threats, has yet to evolve a creature which can both hit enemy super heavies regularly AND hit hard enough to actually do something when they do. Meanwhile, every Eldar gun seems to have the power to kill anything it touches.

And no I'm not saying every army should have masses of s13+ weaponry, but every army should have SOME.

Necronmaniac05 wrote:

So whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ is not really the point. The point is that it is simply implausible that the Hive Mind, which is in the lore supposed to regularly evolve new creatures to combat new threats, has yet to evolve a creature which can both hit enemy super heavies regularly AND hit hard enough to actually do something when they do. Meanwhile, every Eldar gun seems to have the power to kill anything it touches.

I wish that were the case. If it were my Rangers sniper rifles & the scatter lasers on their bikes would be alot more dangerous.

Necronmaniac05 wrote:
The problem with Nids though is that their supposed monsters are either inaccurate (they hit on 4+ or worse) or are not strong enough to punch through most armoured targets (they are S9 or less with a couple of exceptions which hit the heady heights of S12).

So whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ is not really the point. The point is that it is simply implausible that the Hive Mind, which is in the lore supposed to regularly evolve new creatures to combat new threats, has yet to evolve a creature which can both hit enemy super heavies regularly AND hit hard enough to actually do something when they do. Meanwhile, every Eldar gun seems to have the power to kill anything it touches.

And no I'm not saying every army should have masses of s13+ weaponry, but every army should have SOME.

You get to S12?
I run Nurgle Daemons. I cap at S8.

That does tie into a perennial issue of 40k, which is some factions are left to languish (rules and/or models) without all the tools they need, while others get new stuff every other week.

 morganfreeman wrote:

Spoiler:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Who thinks that BS4+ actually represents a 50% hit rate and that troops are firing one shot for every dice you roll?

From a once over of this page of the thread:

Dudeface wrote:
It's absurd that any army would deploy anything with the intent of it missing half the time. You can rationalise almost any unit for any army doing a fixed volume of damage practically with the fluff if you try hard enough. The defining factor is the relative variables between them, the need for a game balance choice and as we see "I want it to have better stats" from players.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Whether the Carnifex is a "generalist" or not, it should still hit more often than baseline infantry.

Should it though? I don't know as I agree with that. At a baseline I don't think a Carnifex is particularly "skilled" at close combat. It's a huge multi-limbed alien trying to smash (generally) smaller things with weapons bigger than they are. It's big and dangerous but kinda slow and not that dextrous. Plenty of attacks can be avoided by a mad dive out of the way, and sometimes it just hacks several dudes to paste with a single blow. Sometimes everyone moves out of the way of its body-slam charge, other times it turns an entire squad into a smear on the ground with nothing but making should contact and letting gravity take over. 4+ feels like a fairly accurate representation of this. Not perfect by any means, but not unacceptable. And more over, the abstraction wasn't even really the point of my post; it was the introduction to the main thesis of the hit %, and your tears over not liking it, being a symptom rather than the cause.

Without restating my central point I'll just say this: We've done it your way before. Cranking the hit and wound % are cranked to satisfying people who simply want stuff to do more damage leads to the insane lethality of 8th and 9th edition. It leads to high RoF D weapons armies by numerous bricks at a time. It leads to plate-sized templates that wipe out multiple squads at once.

The carnifex not feeling good to use / like it does anything is not rooted in someone making it hit on a 4+ rather than a 3+. That is merely a symptom of the underlying problem. So much so that a competently designed symptom would probably make said Carnifex have a harder time hitting smaller numbers of numble infantry skittering around it, while also making sure that near every blow is going to land when it charges into fisticuffs range of an equally sized battle-tank.

I appreciate I don't agree with H.B.M.C. on all of this but I think I've been misquoted to some degree. I don't genuinely think 4+ represents a 50% chance of hitting, I also know its absurd that anyone/thing in our real world can be expected to hit 100% of the time. I was merely stating if such a thing existed where a near 100% hit rate were possible, whoever owned or employed that tool/person/weapon would be daft not to want to use it all the time.

Regards the carnifex, I'm glad we've reached the point of acknowledging the dice rolls are an abstraction, because at that point there's no reason for anyone to claim skill or anything else for higher dice rolls on them, it's not a regression, it's a mathematical abstraction to make them do the right amount of damage. None of our opinions matter over the fluff and nor do historic values either.

Bonus anecdote I'm reading genefather atm and the defiler is noted as employing "clumsy flailing" when engaging a knight acheron. Both have ws 3+.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:

Necronmaniac05 wrote:
The problem with Nids though is that their supposed monsters are either inaccurate (they hit on 4+ or worse) or are not strong enough to punch through most armoured targets (they are S9 or less with a couple of exceptions which hit the heady heights of S12).

So whether a Carnifex should hit on a 3+ or 4+ is not really the point. The point is that it is simply implausible that the Hive Mind, which is in the lore supposed to regularly evolve new creatures to combat new threats, has yet to evolve a creature which can both hit enemy super heavies regularly AND hit hard enough to actually do something when they do. Meanwhile, every Eldar gun seems to have the power to kill anything it touches.

And no I'm not saying every army should have masses of s13+ weaponry, but every army should have SOME.

You get to S12?
I run Nurgle Daemons. I cap at S8.

That does tie into a perennial issue of 40k, which is some factions are left to languish (rules and/or models) without all the tools they need, while others get new stuff every other week.

Whilst I don't disagree with your point, I always struggle to accept using a chunk of codex daemons on its own as much beyond a self imposed limitation which I do respect and acknowledge, but lack of range is part of the proce for your choice there. That aside, muegle soul grinders have S9 ranged and S16 melee and don't break theme for you.

Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
Hitting on a 4 should be normal, it should be acceptable, 3+ should be above average.

*sheds tears of the T'au finally accepted*

As part of this change, base Tau BS is being reduced by one step - any 4+ units move to 5+, etc.

Overread wrote:I'd agree the Carnifex isn't supposed to be a specialist.

It kind of was a generalist specialist originally. You'd take specific gear and upgrades to make its generic core into a specialist for set roles back when Tyranids didn't have any other super-heavies to really cover all bases.

You keep using this word, "originally" - I do not think it means what you think it means...

 catbarf wrote:
40K's gone down the same road with mechanics like 'anti-X' for the same reason: the core rules don't work for what they want them to do. The core mechanics aren't impactful enough to make units behave how they should, or for weapons to have the appropriate targets, so these abilities are used to shortcut or magnify mechanics in lieu of the actual directly relevant attributes.

Where do you draw the line with special rules though? I think to the several pages of Weapon Qualities in the 40k RPGs, covering everything from Twin-Linked, Storm, Toxic, Concussive, Overcharging and so on.

Do these rules only exist because the core rules are don't work for their intended purpose? Or do they exist to add flavour and differentiate weaponry using more than just the raw stats?

 vict0988 wrote:
What makes you say they are skilled in close combat? Not just deadly based on their power, but skilled.

Do you think a bio-engineered monster whose entire purpose of to destroy things in close combat should have about the same chance as smacking something in close combat as the basic infantry of the Imperium?

Might want to sort those quotes out, there's a lot of stuff incorrectly ascribed to me there

Ahh the spoiler tags messed me up. Let me fix that.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Ahh the spoiler tags messed me up. Let me fix that.

Much appreciated, thank you.

Dudeface wrote:
Whilst I don't disagree with your point, I always struggle to accept using a chunk of codex daemons on its own as much beyond a self imposed limitation which I do respect and acknowledge, but lack of range is part of the proce for your choice there. That aside, muegle soul grinders have S9 ranged and S16 melee and don't break theme for you.

Fair enough on Soul Grinders.
But Primaris-only or Firstborn-only Marines are both perfectly valid, with plenty of options. And there's much less distinction between them than between the Daemon factions.

I’ve not counted, but I think either half of Marines has more units than all 4 gods of Chaos Daemons

 alextroy wrote:
I’ve not counted, but I think either half of Marines has more units than all 4 gods of Chaos Daemons

Pretty sure that's a yes.
Which leads back to the "Some armies get it all, some armies don't" issue.

It's especially blatant with Marines, as they've been stated as being1,000,000 strong. Even if that's off by a factor of ten or a hundred... They can still be outnumbered, in their entirety, by one planet's worth of Guard, or Orks, or Nids, or Daemons.

That's old lore, and they've been fudging the numbers for while.