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 vipoid wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.

I was going to suggest that detachments could make the units they want to encourage Troops and/or Core.

Then I remembered that neither Troops nor Core exist in 10th.

I'm still honestly staggered we didn't see a rule for making battleline units have additional OC and then moving battleline around based on detachment.

I've said this before, but Battleline should not be a keyword. It should be a USR.

"A model with this rule adds +1 to their OC characteristic, and the player may take 6 of that unit rather than the usual 3."

... and nothing in the game has it by default. Then every detachment lists what models get Battleline, and which ones are restricted (where applicable). This means you can have an Armoured Company or Ghostwalker or Deathwing or whatever list, it lets you take more of the core choices those armies should have (Russes, Wraithguad, Deathwing Terminators, etc.) and makes them better at holding objectives.

 vipoid wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
If you ban all the things you don't want seen in the detachment without changing the rules to encourage taking the the things you want to see taken in the detachment, you just won't take the detachment.

I was going to suggest that detachments could make the units they want to encourage Troops and/or Core.

Then I remembered that neither Troops nor Core exist in 10th.

And so you call them Battleline.

Dudeface wrote:


I'm still honestly staggered we didn't see a rule for making battleline units have additional OC and then moving battleline around based on detachment.

Not that you said you wanted this, just that you wouldn’t be surprised, but Objective Secured and force org was a net negative from the first day.

I think Wyzilla and catbarf were talking about the usefulness of bargain/generic units in WHFB. Being screened allows your important units to March move. Having a weak unit join combat for the flanking bonus lets your strong unit crush in close combat. There’s an inherent value to bargain rate, less-strong units. There’s no waiting around for GW to confer OC+1 on a unit or formation, or take it away.

It’s true, Battleline should not be a keyword, or a USR. It’s superfluous, it’s bad.

You could have a Battleline list per detachment, which is probably my favorite option personally, though I'm not wildly fond of encouraging spam and "theme force only" purchases.

Yes, Detachments should list what constitutes Battleline.

pelicaniforce wrote:
I think Wyzilla and catbarf were talking about the usefulness of bargain/generic units in WHFB. Being screened allows your important units to March move. Having a weak unit join combat for the flanking bonus lets your strong unit crush in close combat. There’s an inherent value to bargain rate, less-strong units. There’s no waiting around for GW to confer OC+1 on a unit or formation, or take it away.

That approach requires that the core rules are deep enough for those chaff units have value beyond their raw combat ability. It's mchanics like march moves, flanking, rank bonuses, where the raw power of the unit is irrelevant and the fact that you have a unit in position is what matters.

Meanwhile 10th is the edition of stats and special rules being the sole metrics for unit capabilities. There just isn't the framework for chaff to have utility without either relevant combat ability (for the points) or some flavor of objective control.

And honestly, in that context- where so much of the game boils down to min-maxing firepower and stacking layers of buffs- it would have been nice for detachments to be more about army composition and objective control, and less about what conditions let you re-roll 1s.

I think depth is the issue - but its also a questionable subject.

Obviously not played TOW - and don't want to bash TOW. But I think its interesting how a lot of people are saying its a "proper" ruleset.
Yet from the perspective of 2024 - it seems proper only because there are piles and piles of rules. The book that tells you how to play is big enough to kill a man.
But the overwhelmingly majority don't seem to obviously impact decision making - they just determine outcomes of decisions you've already made. So really it feels like a relatively simple game, where the simplicity is obscured with a whole range of noise.

That noise however means there's lots of things you could do - before we get into whether you ever should. Most units as far as I can see remain too slow - and there are too few turns - to dramatically change how you play the game. You can decide what to bring, you decide how to deploy, and from then on your army is kind of a wind up toy. Units are sort of stuck in spacetime from there on. (This isn't to claim there's no decisions - but most of the time its obvious).

The difference I think is that there's no real illusions in 10th edition 40k. I'm not sure for instance there was that much "depth" in say taking 8 guys in a squad rather than 10. Or being able to take a flamer, plasma gun or none. (Whereas now you may get both) with the proviso this gave you a few points to spend elsewhere. Standard compositions were identified and became standard.
But this was something to think about, theorise about, dream about. And now its gone. You don't get that moment of thinking/learning/experimenting "X is good, I should take it" or "Y is a waste of points, I can cut it and get Z instead". Admittedly, in practice I'm not sure how much of a revelation this has been since 5th or even 3rd edition. The bigger impact is that its hard to feel your army is yours - because odds are its identical to someone else's, down to each individual bit of wargear.

Maybe they need to look at the missions again (which very rarely get discussed online). There's a question to be had on whether you should want to consider the missions and design a list - or design a list and select secondaries. This should be where you establish whether unit A is good for objective X but unit B is good for objective Y. Arguably though I think this is the case - but people aren't interested. When we look back at 9th, debates about army composition were rarely objective led.

I guess I just wonder what reactions would be to GW chucking 10th and rolling out 7th 2.0 instead as 11th. Much rules. Much optionality. Much depth? But I thought that the game kind of sucked (can we go back to the last year of 9th instead?) Partly though that was the chronic imbalance and GW making no effort to resolve it. But also because the vast majority of 7th's rules were just noise that made it incomprehensible to a new player, but didn't add much optionality to a veteran.

Well put, Tyel. Have an exalt.

40k has definitely felt like a game of wind up armies for a while now. At least for me. The "illusion" provided by points and options in the past provide a sense of ownership and choice. It felt like it was *my* windup army clashing with yours, and the fun was in seeing how well my quirky little choices performed.

In 10th, that illusion is gone, and it kind of took the sense of ownership with it. Add the standardized terrain layout to that (if you use those rules), and you have samey missions on samey boards with pre-approved cookie cutter armies going at it.

I feel like the experience we "should" be having with 40k is treating your opponent's army like a puzzle and then figuring out how to solve that puzzle while they solve yours. The IGOUGO structure maybe interferes with this as instead of reacting to your opponent's moves and interfering with their short-term choices with your own, you instead just have to wait for them to take their turn, then send your own wind-up units to do their thing.

Maybe army size is part of the problem. If the default for 40k were 1k games, things like alternating activations or more game turns or added complexities like flanking/crossfire might seem like more viable things to include in the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've said this before, but Battleline should not be a keyword. It should be a USR.

"A model with this rule adds +1 to their OC characteristic, and the player may take 6 of that unit rather than the usual 3."

... and nothing in the game has it by default. Then every detachment lists what models get Battleline, and which ones are restricted (where applicable). This means you can have an Armoured Company or Ghostwalker or Deathwing or whatever list, it lets you take more of the core choices those armies should have (Russes, Wraithguad, Deathwing Terminators, etc.) and makes them better at holding objectives.

I don't think I like that approach. Right now, OC is helping add value to those units who have OC greater than 1. Slapping it onto wraithguard instead of guardians is a nice little nod to fluff, but wraithguard didn't really need that particular boost, and the guardians might kind of miss it.

That said, I agree that obsec/OC isn't a great rule and has always been a little bit of a bandaid for troop units being weaker than non-troops. My preferred way to remedy this is to give troops a role. Like how they turned guardians into fate dice batteries in 10th. I don't love the Strands of Fate mechanic, but I do like that there's a clear incentive to take guardians even if they're the least killy thing in your army.

Also agreed on letting players take 6 of their detachment's "main" unit instead of 3. As an Iybraesil player, I don't necessarily need 3 squads of overpowered banshees; I just need lots of squads of competent banshees. Similarly you could give saim-hann their bike troops back, Iyanden their wraiths, etc.

Tyel wrote:
The difference I think is that there's no real illusions in 10th edition 40k. I'm not sure for instance there was that much "depth" in say taking 8 guys in a squad rather than 10. Or being able to take a flamer, plasma gun or none. (Whereas now you may get both) with the proviso this gave you a few points to spend elsewhere. Standard compositions were identified and became standard.

You open with mechanical depth and on-the-board decision-making, but then talk about older editions of 40K solely in the context of listbuilding. Listbuilding has never been a good source of mechanical depth, it's purely out-of-game decision-making. A good game is one where two players might bring the same list for different reasons and execute them differently on the tabletop, or where the mechanics are sufficiently far removed from raw input/output calculations that picking the 'right' unit is difficult.

It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.

40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules. It used to be that restrictions on weapon types forced you to balance maneuver and firepower. Close combat being a much more reliable way to break enemies meant shooting a unit to soften it up before charging could result in a broken unit and much higher net damage than the raw firepower implied. Vehicles were nigh-invulnerable to small arms but very vulnerable to melee, so positioning was key. Lots of things that didn't boil down to listbuilding or weapon/target pairing, and especially lots more tradeoffs where you had to sacrifice one thing to do another.

I mean, 40K has never really been what I would consider an especially deep game, but the depth arising from core rules has been gradually replaced with special rules and stratagems as the main source of tradeoffs and tactical decision-making. That's not necessarily a bad choice for a game (though whether it's the right choice for a wargame is another matter), it's just different, and has different implications.

All that said I would not like to see a return to the 7th Ed paradigm because I agree entirely with your last sentence. I enjoy playing Horus Heresy, but even after a couple of years of playing it I don't feel like I have a great grasp on the rules, which are byzantine and riddled with minutiae that ultimately doesn't amount to much. GW's best games have always been the specialist titles written by guys who understood that complexity and depth are not the same.

Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.

But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.

But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.

Maybe they are noise to you, because eldar rules got transfered in to 8th in the form of Ynnari faction mixing etc. On the other hand for armies like various marine factions, who had good working rules one their own or could play superfriends lists, they got a bare bone codex that didn't really work. And armies like GK when compared to what they had in 6-7th and what they got in 8th, is like losing melee ability, losing shoting upgrades, losing all special gear. Having str 5 storm bolters on every GK, and having to pay 2CP to get it once per turn on one unit wasn't just losing "noise". And some armies that came from 6-7th builds didn't get a proper list till 9th ed. Heck marines, got theirs at the end of 8th and then promptly got the rules removed when 9th started. And in 10th, playing something else then ultramarines out of vanguard is playing a marine army minus, and if someone is crazy enough to want to play an own detachment army or have a "lore" army, then it gets even worse or in some cases is just impossible to do, like in the case of White Scars.

In 7th maybe playing vs some armies wasn't fun, but at least people had rules to play with and could build working armies of their own. 8th and later editions made it, so that a lot of armies can not just play the game within the given core rules, even vs mid tier armies, and never mind vs the top. And the top armies are so top, that match ups like custodes vs csm or eldar are decided, before any rolls are even made.

It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.

40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules. It used to be that restrictions on weapon types forced you to balance maneuver and firepower. Close combat being a much more reliable way to break enemies meant shooting a unit to soften it up before charging could result in a broken unit and much higher net damage than the raw firepower implied. Vehicles were nigh-invulnerable to small arms but very vulnerable to melee, so positioning was key. Lots of things that didn't boil down to listbuilding or weapon/target pairing, and especially lots more tradeoffs where you had to sacrifice one thing to do another.

^-this

It is the reason i still enjoy 40K as one of many games i play. although 7th ed had a few good ideas i would not want to play it either(formations, bloat, and a few of the core rules killed the edition). it is why our FLGS group went back to 5th which is still the high water mark for the 3rd-7th ed game design. you can take "mismatched" armies and through what you do on the table top (your skill as a general) and the blessings of the dice gods. you have the ability to pull of a victory even if it is a hard fought one.

Karol wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Personally, I'm not necessarily eager to go back to playing 7th edition, but 8th edition onward is where the game introduced stratagems and started introducing subfaction benefits in their modern form. So I think it's less that I want to go back to 7th and more that I'm okay with the idea of ditching strats and overhauling some of the mechanics we've seen in 8th-10th.

But yeah, a lot of the rules that got cut going from 7th-8th were basically "noise." That is, they didn't necessarily add a lot of interesting choices to the game or even impact the game all that much, but they made it feel like stuff was happening. 8th had some pretty decent rule changes like allowing universal splitfire and getting rid of snake eyes difficult terrain rolls that I really like.

Maybe they are noise to you, because eldar rules got transfered in to 8th in the form of Ynnari faction mixing etc. On the other hand for armies like various marine factions, who had good working rules one their own or could play superfriends lists, they got a bare bone codex that didn't really work. And armies like GK when compared to what they had in 6-7th and what they got in 8th, is like losing melee ability, losing shoting upgrades, losing all special gear. Having str 5 storm bolters on every GK, and having to pay 2CP to get it once per turn on one unit wasn't just losing "noise". And some armies that came from 6-7th builds didn't get a proper list till 9th ed. Heck marines, got theirs at the end of 8th and then promptly got the rules removed when 9th started. And in 10th, playing something else then ultramarines out of vanguard is playing a marine army minus, and if someone is crazy enough to want to play an own detachment army or have a "lore" army, then it gets even worse or in some cases is just impossible to do, like in the case of White Scars.

In 7th maybe playing vs some armies wasn't fun, but at least people had rules to play with and could build working armies of their own. 8th and later editions made it, so that a lot of armies can not just play the game within the given core rules, even vs mid tier armies, and never mind vs the top. And the top armies are so top, that match ups like custodes vs csm or eldar are decided, before any rolls are even made.

I was referring more to the edition rules rather than the army-specific rules. Things like rolling to see if you explode to roll for explosion distance to roll for wounds to roll for saves, difficult terrain checks that could be pretty feelsbad, morale tests that were a whole lot of random rolls and fussing about with models with no real chance for interaction from the controller, the mess that was tank shock rules, the special snowflake exceptions for walkers compared to other vehicles, etc... There was just a lot of stuff in 7th that you had to resolve and remember, and a lot of it felt like leftovers from previous editions that didn't necessarily add much to the game.

I disagree with the notion that there was more decision making before 8th.
8th introduced decision making in CC, before that the whole CC phase played itself until o e side was dead without anything you could do about it.
8th also introduced stratagems as a kind of decision making and yes, it still has its flaws but it adds a kind of Ressource management and reactions to break up the static IGOUGO(I'll repeat that I'd focus strats on these kinds of reactions like overwatch or rapid ingress and throw out all "kill more" and "should be a unit equipment" strats).
8th made decisions return when building your army because remember, in 6th and 7th you had to roll for your psychic powers and warlord traits, which was beyond stupid.
The current wound table and AP system is not perfect, but broadened the range of weapons you'd use and where you could shoot them, again, that's additional decision making.
Overall in 6th and 7th I personally had the feeling when playing 40K that the game played itself. It was watching fireworks. Yes, it was fun to clash these armies against each other with all the nerdy special rules and stuff, but in the end you hardly had to think and when it was your opponents turn you could walk away for half an hour because there was nothing to do but roll for saves.
You'd hope for good rolls when placing reserves or blast templates, but there was little player agency (or it was restricted to armies that would just ignore all the randomness).

See, I'm not advocating for 10th being great and without flaws, it can't be when GW decides to rewrite everything every 3 years. But 40K wasn't better since at least 6th edition, and some problems like the very uninteractive CC and IGOUGO plagued the game since 3rd.

8th introduced decision making in CC, before that the whole CC phase played itself until o e side was dead without anything you could do about it.

Going to nitpick this point a bit. While technically true, it's very rare that I find there's a "real" decision to be made in the fight phase. Sure, I get to choose which of my units activates first, but it only matters if we're in a protracted combat (kind of rare) or I have multiple units with always-strikes first. And when the choice does matter, there's usually a clear correct choice. I.e. I want to swing first with the unit that's actually good in melee/stands to kill something significant rather than punching futilely at the dedicated melee unit that charged them.

For the choices in the fight phase to matter, I have to be alternating activations with my opponent (kind of rare) AND I have to be in a position to lose multiple units that also have a good chance of doing significant damage if they survive long enough to swing.

Or put more simply, if my opponent has a smash captain attacking my Drazhar and another smash captain attacking my kabalites, it's pretty much always a no-brainer to swing with Drazhar instead of the kabalites.

As for whether there were more decisions to be made pre-8th, it kind of felt like there were. Like, opting to jink or go to ground definitely felt like a genuine trade-off for any unit you wanted to shoot with on your turn. Turbo-boosting to reposition a significant distance at the cost of your offense felt like a trade-off. Ditto deciding whether to move a little or a lot and having to give up more or less of your vehicles' shooting as a result. Deciding whether to gamble on an enemy unit failing more and getting swept made whether or not I went for a charge more of a conscious decision than just mentally crunching the numbers to determine whether I'll win the war of attrition. Plus, some of the randomness (ex: reserves coming in in places you might not have wanted) made you think on your feet.

Granted, 8th added some good decision points of its own. Being able to intentionally fall back out of combat, while kind of a problem for melee armies, *is* an interesting decision. Trying to screen characters with multiple units in 8th/9th was kind of an interesting (if gamey) decision.

I liked 8th, and I'm not trying to cut it short, but I've definitely felt like 40k is more of a "football play" game in recent editions. That is, you sort of mentally sketch out what every unit is going to do during deployment, and then the next couple of hours are mostly just executing on that without a ton of mid-game changes. Unless you mess up and get surprised by something or your dice flub at a crucial moment, you can probably guess on turn 1 where most units will be on turn 3 and what they'll be doing.

I don't disagree about the minutiae of 8th Ed's implementation of close combat affording some opportunity for player skill, but I would contend that it was

1. Unintended by GW and largely based on loopholes (eg tri-pointing, the consolidation trick),

2. Generally more about whether you know the tricks or not than about making contextually relevant gameplay decisions, and most of all

3. A collection of fiddly mechanics that went against the general scale and conventions of the game (ie, making decisions at a squad level) and instead involved micromanagement of millimeter positioning of individuals models.

So yeah I'll agree that it was there, but it was a bad system and felt more like a gotcha than a deliberate mechanic, so I don't hold it as a like-value replacement for all the decision-based systems thrown out in the 7th->8th transition. The choice of whether to fall back from CC is a better example of a core rules based decision added in 8th, but again GW kinda screwed up that one by making it a no-brainer that defanged melee entirely.

Like I said before, it's not that 8th and onwards don't have decision space for players, it's that the decisions are largely derived from special rules and stratagems, not the core rules. Again, it's a different approach with its own implications.

I'm afraid the following is a bit of a ramble, but I think eventually gets to the point.

 catbarf wrote:
You open with mechanical depth and on-the-board decision-making, but then talk about older editions of 40K solely in the context of listbuilding. Listbuilding has never been a good source of mechanical depth, it's purely out-of-game decision-making. A good game is one where two players might bring the same list for different reasons and execute them differently on the tabletop, or where the mechanics are sufficiently far removed from raw input/output calculations that picking the 'right' unit is difficult.

It's the decision-making on the tabletop that matters, and depth is when meaningful player decisions drive the outcome of the game more than luck or pre-game conditions (ie lists). Part of the draw of WHFB/TOW is that the mechanics reward maneuver as a force-multiplier and involve trade-offs that force hard choices; it's explicitly about more than just bringing the right wombo-combo of units and faction abilities.

40K used to have more decision-making driven by core rules.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that mechanical depth - or decision making on the tabletop - is the issue. Yes - in the old days you couldn't split fire. You couldn't move and shoot heavy weapons. You couldn't rapid fire and charge etc. Some units however could and that was their advantage. (Whether or not they were correctly pointed for this was another question).

But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th. Identifying the best choices to a certain game state still comes down to experience. I don't think its that important whether that game state was a function of core rules or special rules.

Its a bit like flanking being valued in TOW. Yes - it is. But to be in a position to charge in the flank in turn 3/4/5 etc, the unit has to have got there. Which means it must have moved in turns 1 and 2 etc, from being deployed at the start of the game. Which means your opponent has had plenty of time to see it coming. Which in turn means your opponent didn't get flanked because of your skill if that makes sense. Was it a decision for you to crush the rival flanking force and then move in for a decisive charge in the centre of the board? Yes - but what else were you going to do? Your opponent would presumably be doing the same if the dice had turned the combat on that flank differently.

Maybe that leads to strategic considerations. Most people will flank with cavalry/monsters - so maybe you want to guard your flanks with anvil units that have a better chance of weathering a charge. But this must in turn mean you weaken your centre, which could be an issue. But we are back to list building and deployment being important. If you suddenly decide your M4" infantry brick is in the wrong place it will take half the game to rectify.

This is a bit of a strawman/exaggeration - I don't think TOW or 40k is that reductive, or has ever been that reductive. But I'm not sure its that different to how it ever was.

I mean I'd argue the "skill" in 9th was really all about trading units on objectives. Due to the lethality everything died - but since you had cheaper and more expensive units this gave rise to good and bad trades. Did it make it deep though? I think at least on Dakka the take was often quite negative. (The fact 2021 through to about mid 2022 was dominated by overpowered factions perhaps didn't help - but arguably that's been the norm for 40k since year dot).

I'm sort of focusing on list building because I think that's where 10th's real issue lies. People in the hobby have always enjoyed building lists. I know I have. Its far easier (and certainly cheaper) to build a list than actually collect (let alone paint) 2k points and play with it. But its also the springboard for going and collecting stuff.

But as various people have said - building lists in 10th just isn't fun. I'd agree with them. The question therefore is "why?"

This may be me being jaded rather than the wider public - but even the darker days of 7th, 8th, 9th, I often felt the pull of "new year, new army". And I guess I am, sort of, collecting some Ad Mech. But I'm not really enthused. None of the codexes have really inspired me. We can perhaps turn to my main army. The laments of the Dark Eldar mafia no doubt grow tedious to everyone else - but their index is so uncompromisingly boring. They could half the points of everything - and it would be incredibly overpowered. But still boring.

Is it that you can take anything you like subject to rule of 3 etc? Is it that you have a fixed unit size and special equipment loadout? I know some people have argued that. I don't see why that would bother me.

Basically having condemned a lot of rules as noise - I feel I need some noise to have something to latch on to. I don't think for example having a special rule to give elves +1 initiative in the first round of combat in TOW is good design. Especially when they have such high initiative anyway. Just give them +1 initiative on stats and move on with your life. But maybe that's me and someone else out there is really inspired that their elves are super fast. Maybe that's where I need somewhere in the Dark Eldar rules to make the faction interesting again.

Tyel wrote:

What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that mechanical depth - or decision making on the tabletop - is the issue. Yes - in the old days you couldn't split fire. You couldn't move and shoot heavy weapons. You couldn't rapid fire and charge etc. Some units however could and that was their advantage. (Whether or not they were correctly pointed for this was another question).

But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th. Identifying the best choices to a certain game state still comes down to experience. I don't think its that important whether that game state was a function of core rules or special rules.

Hmm. I'm inclined to agree with you here. Being able to suddenly shift my entire army to the opposite flank by turbo boosting/moving flatout or basically skiping my offense next turn for the protection of a jink save felt like meaningful decision making, but maybe the decisions themselves were sort of obvious. Maybe the difference is that those decisions either visibly changed the board state (i.e. my army is now on the opposite side of the table) or very tangibly altered how units behaved (compare jinking multiple units a turn and thus giving up offense to using a -1 to-hit strat now and still attacking with those units next turn).

I'm sort of focusing on list building because I think that's where 10th's real issue lies. People in the hobby have always enjoyed building lists. I know I have. Its far easier (and certainly cheaper) to build a list than actually collect (let alone paint) 2k points and play with it. But its also the springboard for going and collecting stuff.

But as various people have said - building lists in 10th just isn't fun. I'd agree with them. The question therefore is "why?"

I'm not sure I'd dismiss the mid-game issues entirely, but I do somewhat agree with this. 10th mostly plays fine once I'm actually at the table. It's between games that I have trouble enjoying thinking about possible armies.

The laments of the Dark Eldar mafia...

They're called kabals.

For the sake of identifying the "why," here are the things that I've realized I miss about building DE lists in previous editions compared to now:

* Nasty levels of anti-tank. Obviously the modern dark lance on warriors is doing just fine, but it's a warrior squad's only real anti-tank now that the blaster has been downgraded. Last edition, I could fit 2 blasters and a lance into a raider, and they were all threatening to tanks. In previous editions, it was only 1 blaster and a lance, but the those two special weapons had more anti-tank threat than the 4 special weapons warriors pack today. And prior to this edition, you could always just take a cheap 5-man squad with a single blaster, and that felt like a nice, dangerous little unit for its cost. Basically, warriors always felt like they could really punch above their weight class, being top-heavy with good anti-tank, and now they just can't. And that's not getting into the loss of haywire grenades for both warriors and wyches over the years.

Cost-efficient anti-tank units felt spicy. What we have now feels... nutritious but bland.

* Just sticking characters in with different types of squads. This seems really minor, but I was able to project a ton of fluff onto my succubus choosing to hang out near mandrakes or my haemonculus hanging out with grotesques and not fielding wracks and so forth.

* Character wargear. Drukhari wargear has traditionally been full of evocatively-sinister options. Picking which toys you want to play with was, in and of itself, fun. Like, the Poisoned Tongue relic pistol was never *optimal* (even in 8th when it was quite good), but it was quirky. And giving a succubus a less lethal option like a shardnet + impaler so she could serve as a wandering tarpit was a fun gimmick to pull out here and there. All the little options lost by our sergeant types this edition also probably warrant an honorable mention. I remember writing lists in 5th edition (pre-codex) and thinking how cool it was to have a wych squad with haywire grenades and a poisoned blade succubus (now called a hekatrix). That squad was all about taking down enemies with perfectly tailored weapons, working smarter not harder, heck yeah! Now? No haywires for wyches. The only poison is in their pistols.

* Subfaction options to fit any unit. The 8th/9th subfaction rules had plenty of problems, but there was always an option available to support whatever unit I happened to want to field. Whereas now, the only detachment we have available tells me to field some very specific options in a pretty specific way, and it highly suggests I take some cronos to go with those units. Also, while jumping through the hoops was a pain, a lot of the drukhari subfaction rules, relics, and warlord traits were *really cool*. I absolutely loved the Cursed Blade cult's "stop hitting yourself" rules even though it barely ever seemed to kick in.

Tyel wrote:
But I'm not sure you could persuade me that 5th or 7th was a deeper game than 10th.

Like I've said repeatedly, I don't think 8th-10th are shallower games than 3rd-7th, so I think you're arguing against a bit of a straw man here. The core rules are shallower, and instead the depth comes from the interplay of army-specific and unit-specific special rules and stratagems.

The reason this tangent came up was a point about whether Battleline and OC are necessary mechanics, when games like WHFB were able to make chaff units viable and useful without being effective in raw combat ability. I argue yes, because the core rules do not provide a framework for points-inefficient chaff to be useful, so the value of those units has to come from external factors like an OC stat. Which is fine.

The relevant difference between 3rd-7th's approach and 8th-10th's approach is the learning curve and cognitive burden imposed by the vast number of special rules and abilities, as opposed to a more 'universal' core ruleset that applies regardless of what army you're facing. But that's not a matter of depth, it's a matter of complexity and learnability, and 7th's byzantine USR soup wasn't really any better in that regard.

I'd also argue that modern 40k (and AOS too) have some mechanics and decisions that make them actively harder to learn and more unintuitive than certain aspects of a game like TOW. Unit/weapon profiles being the big one here, and especially in 10th ed where a lot of previously universal stuff now has bespoke stats depending on the unit it is on. I've played about 70 games of 10th. Played god knows how much of 9th and 8th. The complete lack of consistency over if two lascannons stapled together is two separate shots or just one twin-linked is inherently confusing, as is wondering if a model equipped with two of the same close combat weapon is twin-linked or has some other weirder esoteric statline. I would consider myself a veteran player and it still trips me up, 7 months into the edition.

Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.

And to be clear I don't mind bespoke profiles for equipment and units, but it's the total lack of consistency that actively starts to make 10th difficult to play once you get past the initially "easy" introduction to its rules.

I think the big problem there is really that two separate weapons isn't represented on the datasheet in a way that lets you go down the list of weapons the rest of the time. That one is definitely not ideal and I'd love to see fixed. The Corvus having a twin linked nose cannon and 2 missile launchers drives me nuts.

That said, I think its the kind of thing that's trivially fixed. If GW would stick with the current framework they could definitely fix it. They're not going to, but its definitely not a problem beyond salvaging.

 Bosskelot wrote:
I'd also argue that modern 40k (and AOS too) have some mechanics and decisions that make them actively harder to learn and more unintuitive than certain aspects of a game like TOW. Unit/weapon profiles being the big one here, and especially in 10th ed where a lot of previously universal stuff now has bespoke stats depending on the unit it is on. I've played about 70 games of 10th. Played god knows how much of 9th and 8th. The complete lack of consistency over if two lascannons stapled together is two separate shots or just one twin-linked is inherently confusing, as is wondering if a model equipped with two of the same close combat weapon is twin-linked or has some other weirder esoteric statline. I would consider myself a veteran player and it still trips me up, 7 months into the edition.

Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.

And to be clear I don't mind bespoke profiles for equipment and units, but it's the total lack of consistency that actively starts to make 10th difficult to play once you get past the initially "easy" introduction to its rules.

I've not seen many of TOW profiles, but I thought great weapon was equivalent to a usr much like an assault weapon in 40k is always an assault weapon. The great weapon can also pick up armourbane etc.

If you are talking WHFB then yes. it is a fixed USR from the main rulebook. great weapon has a strength stat bonus, initiative penalty etc... it doesn't matter what the great weapon is-sword, axe, hammer etc... or what faction it is from.

 Bosskelot wrote:

Meanwhile, in TOW, a great weapon is always a great weapon.

Well... yes, but no.
A great weapon is a great weapon.
But a White Lion Axe is a different weapon. So is a Sword of Hoeth. And a Ranger's Glaive. And a Hammerer's Hammer. They all have 'requires two hands,' but NOT all of them strike last, and the strength bonus and the AP is not consistent.

Its very modern GW in that sense. With a bonus head shake for 'strikes last' doesn't mean 'strikes last,' it means I = 1, but can be modified to be higher. Charging White Lions still fight before most every non-elf, despite their 'strike last' weapons.

Having looked at tow rules and loving them, I think a big part is because movement and positioning matter. It's more than "combo stack a unit" or "apply firepower to threat". That's part of what 40k,and AOS, are lacking.

Now 40k never had the depth of maneuvering like WHFB had but from my recollection of previous editions, it had a lot more depth and nuance than current (or from 8th onward)

 catbarf wrote:
I don't disagree about the minutiae of 8th Ed's implementation of close combat affording some opportunity for player skill, but I would contend that it was

1. Unintended by GW and largely based on loopholes (eg tri-pointing, the consolidation trick),

2. Generally more about whether you know the tricks or not than about making contextually relevant gameplay decisions, and most of all

3. A collection of fiddly mechanics that went against the general scale and conventions of the game (ie, making decisions at a squad level) and instead involved micromanagement of millimeter positioning of individuals models.

So yeah I'll agree that it was there, but it was a bad system and felt more like a gotcha than a deliberate mechanic, so I don't hold it as a like-value replacement for all the decision-based systems thrown out in the 7th->8th transition. The choice of whether to fall back from CC is a better example of a core rules based decision added in 8th, but again GW kinda screwed up that one by making it a no-brainer that defanged melee entirely.

Like I said before, it's not that 8th and onwards don't have decision space for players, it's that the decisions are largely derived from special rules and stratagems, not the core rules. Again, it's a different approach with its own implications.

Do you think it could be saved?

40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.

I've noticed more and more that complex core rules are a major barrier to players. They are where all the gotchas come from because in truth, the vast majority of players learned the game on the table and haven't really read the rules. If it wasn't in the demo, it'll come up as a feels bad later.

The other issue is the refresh every 3 years or so means that established players are just getting to grips and then BOOM its all change.

However its worse than a new game because a lot of the elements of the game remain kind of the same with similar names and such. So you can very easily end up getting confused and making mistakes because you're playing something as it was played 2 or 3 editions ago.


You can even see how this impacts the writers of the rules because they leave things out in the flow of the game/description because they just assume everyone will know how X happens because its the same as before. Which is no use to new people and confusing when they made a subtle change to other rules that influence how X works in the flow of the game .


Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own

Overread wrote:The other issue is the refresh every 3 years or so means that established players are just getting to grips and then BOOM its all change.

However its worse than a new game because a lot of the elements of the game remain kind of the same with similar names and such. So you can very easily end up getting confused and making mistakes because you're playing something as it was played 2 or 3 editions ago.


You can even see how this impacts the writers of the rules because they leave things out in the flow of the game/description because they just assume everyone will know how X happens because its the same as before. Which is no use to new people and confusing when they made a subtle change to other rules that influence how X works in the flow of the game .


Again GW's rules approach is just baffling because it never really seems to have a focus beyond change for the sake of change. Even when there is a clear focus its undone by the next edition changing that focus; or by making the focus so extreme that it becomes a problem of its own

I feel this. I've been playing from 5th and was extremely active in 7th and 8th. I took something like a 6 month break during 9th due to life stuff. When I came back, the mental load was just way too much to the point that I kind of hated 9th edition missions with all their moving parts. It felt like I'd missed a critical "training period" where everyone else had gotten used to the missions and changes in 9th.

I haven't played a ton of 10th yet, but found myself just yesterday struggling to remember when a vehicle can and can't shoot out of combat, and what the penalties involved are and just lots of basic stuff that worked similarly or slightly differently at the start of the edition/in 9th.

vict0988 wrote:
40k isn't really trying to be a squad game is it? Otherwise it'd just be Apocalypse. In some ways like removing meaningful options from list building it is more like Apocalypse, but you still technically have the option for adding a heavy bolter, lascannon or multi-melta.

Honestly, I feel like 2k point 40k is kind of the worst of both worlds. I think I'd prefer playing actual Apoc for 2k games for the better game flow/lack of a need to juggle minutia. I'd also prefer a version of the game built around something like 500-1000 points where the smaller number of units means we have space to add in things like crossfire mechanics, more nuanced movement, maybe alternating activations, etc.