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Funny enough, the one time I felt like 40k on the table felt like proper 40k armies, was 8th edition when the loyal 32 made sure every Imperium list had a chunk and maybe 1 lord of war as a centerpiece with the main army sandwiched in between.


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 Overread wrote:
I think if it were alternate unit activation there'd be more room for wildcards to happen because you don't quite get that same alpha-strike impact. So you've got room to adjust your plan around the rolls and such whilst also dealing with your opponents wildcards at the same time.

While most of my favorite games are alternating activation, I don't think you'll find it quite works that way. There tends to be more opportunity for counterplay, so anything that telegraphs itself is often very hard to make work. That doesn't mean it can't be done, just that applying alternating activations to a system doesn't really solve all the problems without heavily redesigning around it. One of the biggest mistakes people make is failing to normalize activation value and activation count. Things get very gamey and weird in my experience in alternating activation systems unless both players have around 5 activations each give or take a couple that can be padded with a pass mechanic.

 Overread wrote:
How do you get an army of Stegadons?

Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.


How do you get an army of artillery?

Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.

Horrible aesthetics aside, the issue with allowing these is that skew generally begets skew. Because now, instead of facing armies that you can expect to be (by and large) well-rounded, you're instead faced with armies composed entirely of artillery or monsters or super-characters.

Thus, anything that can't effectively contribute to killing those things (like, say, a lot of basic troops) gets left on the shelf.

It's the same reason why Imperial Knights should never have existed as a standalone army outside of Apocalypse.

Something like an army of stegadons is a good example of why there should be restrictions, and harsh ones IMHO, to enforce armies "looking like armies" and not skew. Sure you can try to justify it, but these are almost always unfun to play against and just encourage escalating skew until nothing but skew remains.

Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?

You don't get to pick and choose with this. An army's an army, whether you like the concept or not.

Be honest with the reason you lot are complaining about these "skew" lists. It's because they didn't mesh with the TAC approach you seemed to like to play.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 vipoid wrote:

Horrible aesthetics aside, the issue with allowing these is that skew generally begets skew. Because now, instead of facing armies that you can expect to be (by and large) well-rounded, you're instead faced with armies composed entirely of artillery or monsters or super-characters.

Thus, anything that can't effectively contribute to killing those things (like, say, a lot of basic troops) gets left on the shelf.

lol, yes. It was the skew that did it! Not the rise of netlists, weird tourney setups, etc.

It's the same reason why Imperial Knights should never have existed as a standalone army outside of Apocalypse.

This can be said about literally anything.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?

I don't think you're making the point you seem to think you are.

As to your question, this was why the FoC existed. You could have an army that leaned heavily into bikes, with 3 Biker FA units supported by 2 Biker HQs. However, you'd then used up all your FA and HQ slots, and you still needed 2 units of troops. Probably also some more units to fill out remaining points.

Same goes for Terminators and Crisis suits with Elite slots.

You could have armies that leaned heavily into those things but you generally* couldn't have them as your entire army.

*Given the number of editions and the different approaches to army building, I'm sure there have been exceptions (for better or worse), but overall this would seem a good baseline towards avoiding spam armies.

 Kanluwen wrote:

You don't get to pick and choose with this. An army's an army, whether you like the concept or not.

Very true. As we all know, 30 5-star generals charging into a warzone constitutes an army and is every bit as valid as an ""army"" stupidly comprised of artillery, tanks, supporting infantry etc.

 Kanluwen wrote:
lol, yes. It was the skew that did it! Not the rise of netlists, weird tourney setups, etc.

Tourney lists were a thing at least as far back as 5th, yet they still bore far more resemblance to armies than the garbage of 10th.

It's almost as though the rules for how you build an army and what units you are permitted to bring (/spam) actually affect the composition of armies.

 Overread wrote:
How do you get an army of Stegadons?

Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.


How do you get an army of artillery?

Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.




I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.

The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.

The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...

The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.



Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.

I'd argue that GW has not always been more open. The 3-7th FOC paradigm was a good framework for army restrictions, and it was kept pretty tight in places. It was a nice standard for setting expectations, created listbuilding tension via cost opportunity, and offered a way to give armies more character by adjusting the FOC in unique ways.

For those weird "anything can be justfied" situations, I'd prefer those builds to be relegated to specific scenarios or "open play". Yes, anything can technically be justified, but playing against surprising hard-skew lists is often not fun. Imo the general meta is better without it.

My take on the "What does an army look like?"
question is that it does depend on the story of the battle. And I know, many of you are wary of that, because you've met TFG, who doesn't design the story and then decide what they need to play it, but rather chooses the combo of the week and makes up a story after the fact to justify the combo.

Those guys exist, for sure... But there are ways to minimize the odds that this will occur, or limit the impact of it if it does happen. Now you're all expecting me to say Crusade, but it's more the stuff that underpins Crusade that you rely on to figure out what an army looks like.

So first, I think campaign play with a roster system with both balanced and asymmetrical missions, and games of multiple sizes. Then you build your roster, based on which of your chosen faction's resources happen to be in the general vicinity of the campaign. Now you think about where the forces on your roster are located and how they are organized. Over the years, GW has given us some guidelines. If you're marines, you might want to think about whether you're working with the whole chapter, or a few companies, or a single company, or an even smaller force.

If you're a craftworld, which Aspect shrines are located on that craftworld? If you're Nids, what stage is the invasion at, and how close is the next wave?

Then you figure out the rhythm of growth v loss. Are you playing straight escalation, straight attrition, or adding a small degree of fluidity within a general escalation or attrition framework? So then, when a situation erupts in your theatre of war, based on the information above, you decide which elements of your roster deploy in order to achieve the mission at hand.

My system is in Pacificus- I chose that location because I wanted my narrative to intersect with the characters from Blackstone Fortress. I generated the planets in the system using the 9th ed Tau Crusade rules. My primary concern was Sisters; a pivotal location is a church dedicated to Saint Katherine on the system's agriworld. Because this world is sparsely populated, the church is supported by a small mission, obviously OoOML.

The schtick is that Katherine herself was present at the consecration of that church- it was dedicated after Katherine's victory over a splinter fleet of Cardinal Bucharis during the Plague of Unbelief that followed on the heels of the Age of Apostasy. As a result, most of the Missions in the system are OoOML- the only exception is that Progenium facilities in the sector are controlled by the Order of the Sacred Rose.

I drew continents for the Agriworld, and placed settlements on those continents. Each settlement was broken into territories, and I placed a guard garrison in the center of every settlement, then distributed the resources of the OoOML Mission between them.

Finally the antagonists: a single Kill Team of Genestealer purestrains, and a single Chaos cult kill team. Also, a Drukhari force that is trying to rebuild a splinter realm in Commorragh, which contains a stable webway gate to the agriworld. Then we placed civilian NPC noble families, who are made up of Necromunda models. So both Cults recruit from Nobles in skirmish KT battles, growing their rosters by adding the casualties they inflict as Brood Brothers or additional Cultists.

So what does an army look like? Well, an early campaign GSC battle is a Kill Team Game. Two or three games in, that Kill Team may have recruited a full unit of Brood Brothers, and one of the Purestrains will have evolved into a patriarch, and the first generation of Acolytes would be gestating in the wings, waiting for their debut.

The Chaos Cult recruits via psychic control, drug addiction and other crimes. Pieces of lore are spread across all the settlements; some lore fragments give locations of long slumbering Daemon Forges, lost to time in the wilderness between the fields, others contain the key to summon daemons. Recovering these fragments of lore is critical to the growth of the Cult.

Both force evade try to evade notice, but every battle has a chance to alert either the guard or the sisters.

So what does an army look like?

Well, it's a roster that contains distinct battlegroups. Those groups are deployed as needed to form an army. Usually, the core would be a patrol, a battalion or a brigade, because those were "Command Detachments" (ie. CP neutral when they include the Warlord). Often this would be accompanied by a secondary Detachment, usually not a Command Detachment. The force could be allied- a Sisters Patrol + a Guard Spearhead, or a Guard Patrol + a Dominion Outrider detachment. But again, based on what's in the settlement at the time of the battle. If all the Mission's Immolators are located in a different settlement, you aren't getting your Dominion Outrider Detachment.

What does an Army look like? Well, if we assume that the relics included in the Triumph of Saint Katherine are kept at each Order's convent and only brought together to form the Triumph in times of battle, isn't it appropriate for each order to send their relic in the company of a detachment? So might the army be the Triumph + 1 detachment from each Order?

TLDR: If you want a fluffy army, build a roster from which a variety of armies can be assembled, and then let the story determine what your armies will look like within the boundaries you have set for yourself.

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Overread wrote:
How do you get an army of Stegadons?

Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.


How do you get an army of artillery?

Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.




I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.

The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.

The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...

The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.



Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.

I'd argue that GW has not always been more open. The 3-7th FOC paradigm was a good framework for army restrictions, and it was kept pretty tight in places. It was a nice standard for setting expectations, created listbuilding tension via cost opportunity, and offered a way to give armies more character by adjusting the FOC in unique ways.

For those weird "anything can be justfied" situations, I'd prefer those builds to be relegated to specific scenarios or "open play". Yes, anything can technically be justified, but playing against surprising hard-skew lists is often not fun. Imo the general meta is better without it.

I'd second this, the 3-7 FOC charts were fine and made sense for the most part, perhaps some Fantasy style point percentages could help prevent further silliness at times but it was a good structure. Looking to historicals, listing is how you're supposed to develop an army theme in the first place which is why I don't like faction specific rules either. Why the hell should Blood Angels get +1 attack or Imperial Fists have added accuracy with boltguns at the level of abstraction at a company level force? Those mean nothing at that scale. Lists give themes without need for special rules at all. Night Lords? Your list enables raptors and chosen for days while disavowing all daemonic units outside of princes. Armageddon Steel Legion? Lots of room in your heavy slot. Etc.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

March of the Ancients.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

March of the Ancients.

I cannot think of a single time before GW made the meme force in the first place that the 'march of the ancients' was actually a thing. Space Marines deploy as companies, they don't deploy as an exclusively dreadnought force that somehow forgot the infantry, the armor, or the flyers.

So to my personal non-competitive gaze, 10th looks a lot like a 2k game of Kill Team. It's basically to Kill Team what a 2k game is to a 500pt game. It's just the same small units stripped down to its most basic rules. Sure there is a quasi literal megaton of fluff and side rules that CAN be addressed, but it's just small units move, roll shoot, roll, stab, roll, rinse repeat. Nothing actually feels like two major forces clashing on a battlefield. MAybe it's the lack of any large special units like Heavy Tanks or vehicles. Very rarely do I see transports or tanks in 40k these days. About the heaviest thing I saw was a stompa list against a Custodes Bike list, and that was 1k each. The rules are prohibitive against giant slow, single model units. Half the Astartes faction is some form of vehicle. Bikes, Walkers, Flyers, or tanks/Heavy transports. Thats half the main faction that almost never sees the board. Call 7th-9th what you will, at least Bike lists and Lehman Russ list appeared on tables from time to time. Anyone seen White Scar Bike lists lately?

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

That's a step too far imo, there's dozens of minor craftworlds and more again fleets that could use a wraith force, likewise any craftworld could choose to if they wished for some reason or another. Toxic environments, some need for a fight in void conditions, simultaneous engagements with the bulk of the living forces elsewhere etc.

The only reason the colour scheme is remotely relevant was due to subfaction rules (which don't exist now) and mostly thanks to marines hopping between rules to suit whatever was best with the same units that day.

There's no reason to get picky over the colour of a wraith host now and there barely was back then.

I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.

A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.

Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.

Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.

Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.

Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

What the hell is Iyanden paint?
As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....

Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units.
The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+.
And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.

ccs wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

What the hell is Iyanden paint?
As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....

Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units.
The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+.
And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.

Every unique army build in the older editions had trade offs. if you wanted to do the Iyanden list and run wraith guard as troops you had to take them in squads of 10 and purchase a wraithseer to lead them (unless you want them to stand around and stare at their toes). this prevented you from putting them in transports because they would not fit. it also as you pointed out was heavy on points cost same thing for the iconic all terminator army, up until the 5th ed GK codex nobody else could do an all terminator list directly but to do so you had to take 3 unit types and nothing else. land raiders, deathwing terminators, and venerable dreads. although they could be led by any member of the inner circle(librarians, interrogator chaplains etc..) including named characters.

As for the paint schemes. if you recall there was once upon a time when GW were not fething GAKwads when it came to in universe creativity. aside from encouraging kitbashing from any available item they also encouraged you to "create your own" chapter/craftworld/ork clan etc... and you could paint it however you liked as long as your opponent knew which army rule set you were using.

ccs wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Something that actually matches the various example divisions and company level forces we've seen from campaigns and novels. Rather than stuff from prior silly moments like Guilliman and his fifteen Assassin pals, an entire Dreadnought army, or Eldar fielding nothing but Bone Wraith constructs without Iyanden paint.

What the hell is Iyanden paint?
As far as I know there's no lore that says the only colors Iyanden can produce are yellow & blue....

Besides, rules wise every craftworld has always had access to equal #s of wraith units.
The % system of 3e. The FoC of 3e+. The rule of 3 in 8e+.
And wraith units cost enough pts that you can easily run out of pts for nearly anything else. Especially if you play 1k pt lists.

Iyanden is the only force that notably fields all construct, or at least near all construct armies. And other forces don't have equal numbers of wraith units, in that for proportionality for other craftworlds, armies such as aspect warhosts would for the most part be comprised of elite/mechanized infantry with only a construct here or a construct there. This is where Fantasy's percentage based system could be well applied to 40k as well, as it forces you depending on the list to take 'tax' units to fill out necessary parts of a list unless there's an explicit thematic exception. That's how you create flavor, through restriction rather than the incredibly open system of nuhammer.

Klickor wrote:
I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.

A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.

Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.

Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.

Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.

Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.

This feels like a bad idea because it's dealing more with the problem that infests 40k now, where stats are tweaked for asinine reasons that make no logical sense. You don't need to make it so that lists focusing on armor for some reason give a +1 to hit boon against tanks because there's no screening infantry. The rules of the game itself should facilitate that without infantry screening tanks are incredibly vulnerable to anti tank weapons - which for the most part oldhammer did far better than the post 7e system.

 Wyzilla wrote:


This feels like a bad idea because it's dealing more with the problem that infests 40k now, where stats are tweaked for asinine reasons that make no logical sense. You don't need to make it so that lists focusing on armor for some reason give a +1 to hit boon against tanks because there's no screening infantry. The rules of the game itself should facilitate that without infantry screening tanks are incredibly vulnerable to anti tank weapons - which for the most part oldhammer did far better than the post 7e system.

In a better system with more interactive core rules then you wouldn't need to have some special rules like I came up with there of course. Like marines against pure tanks back in the day could crush them easily with short range melta and krak grenades in melee if there was nothing to screen the tanks and thus didn't have a need for such rules. But if GW want players to be able to skew hard in the current rules something like what I wrote is probably a good idea to implement for skew lists.

Making paint a requeriment is silly. You either give Eldar the rules to have Iyanden style Wraith armies or you don't, but don't make paint a requirement.

EDIT: Also none of the above applies to armies like Orks, Daemons or Tyranids that don't operate in anything even approaching the concept of companies or divisions (and in case of Nids can spawn whatever they need as needed).

EDIT#2: Also the whole point of 40k being a galaxy setting is to give freedom for players to come up with their own stuff. There is no rule that only Iyanden can deploy wraith armies because we don't even know how many Craftworlds exist, much less know the details of each and every one.

I don't think paint should matter.

I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.

My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]

Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.

It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.

Hard FOC impositions may not be the best solution. It would mess with people's collections. A lot of competitive 10th lists would, with a few tweaks, almost certainly meet any minimum requirements either.

So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.

Paint only mattered in that edition where GW allowed you to take multiple FOC and thus multiple "armies" as allies. It then got silly because you'd have (esp marines) taking different chapters under the same army, because one chapter would be better at CC and another at ranged and so forth.

So places tried to force paint as a requirement so that people could tell which marines were which on the table.

But it was silly honestly and in general paint should never be a requirement. No one is going to buy a whole new army or repaint a painted one just to gain access to a different sub-army grouping within a battletome/codex. Marines are a bit of a special case since they have unique models for their sub armies and their sub armies have subsub factions of their own.



Plus lets face it; once you leave the official GW schemes for marines most people don't know other army official paint schemes. Some (eg Daughters of Khanie) are officially so similar you couldn't even tell them apart without being told.
Plus it gave a strange advantage to "custom" paint jobs because anyone who used their own scheme could pick and choose at will.

Tyel wrote:
I don't think paint should matter.

I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.

My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]

Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.

It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.

Hard FOC impositions may not be the best solution. It would mess with people's collections. A lot of competitive 10th lists would, with a few tweaks, almost certainly meet any minimum requirements either.

So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.

Part of the problem is the missions are all basically the same. There are myriad different combinations of primary, secondary and mission special rule, but they all fundamentally come down to needing mobile units to score primary or various secondaries. The missions based around killing things pretty much take care of themselves. I think more variety in missions and what sort of units are required to do them well would force armies to be more diverse. You'd also have more situations where you need to use sub-optimal units to complete the missions rather than always knowing you can do it with units X. Y and Z.

Klickor wrote:I think a problem lately have been special lists that focuses on bonuses purely. Or more that any downside to a skew list being that you can't stuff that isn't skew which in practice isn't a downside at all when you try to skew.

A better way would be to have a FOC and then have special detachments that as bonus allows you to skew but the downsides are related to the same models.

Sure you can have an all tank list but since you lack infantry support to protect your vehicles at close range all enemies get +1 to wound against your tanks within 6" and while in melee.

Your all terminator list consist of your entire chapter's veterans and veteran equipment and any losses would be devastating for the survival of the chapter. Any units killed give up 1 additional VP.

Your all bike list is great at mobility but can't hold ground so 1 enemy model can control an objective against you no matter the amount of models you have in range of it or any objective holding rules you might have.

Something like this is how it should be done. The bonus isn't that a kind of unit gets better but that you are now allowed to skew. Then there is a detriment that helps other lists win against you despite your skew.

On paper, I like this approach. Not only does it create clear, exploitable weaknesses that can be easily updated for balance, but it makes the tools used to balance things fluffy in their own right. I can enjoy rules that nerf my army as long as they're flavorful rules!

Ideally, we'd find a way to avoid putting too many units into the same FOC slots or requiring a troop tax if we're bringing back some sort of FOC though.

Tyel wrote:

I don't even care about some of these lists. I mean if you want to go all terminators or all bikes, I kind of think that's fine. Taking a bunch of wraithguard is I think perfectly fine.

My issue is more with lists that look like this:
[Monstrous Character]
[Buffbots]
[Some mobile throwaway chaff for objective play]
[A brick you are going to stick all your buffs on to make OP]
[3 Tanks]

Insert Yncarne, Spinners, Wraithguard etc as you can easily imagine. But quite a few armies end up looking somewhat similar.

It just feels like there should be more meat. You know - guys who could hold ground, man defenses, run into the machine guns etc. Something to give your army more substance.

I do see what you're saying, but I definitely wouldn't want to go back to requiring X number of cost-inefficient troops as the way to make that happen. Some forces (at least on the zoomed-in scale of a 40k battle) just aren't going to be there to hold ground and might not be prone to tossing troops into the machineguns. I could maybe see detachment determining a list of units that you have to have a certain number of (preferably scaling with game size), but I wouldn't want to require that every army go back to fielding underwhelming troops that exist to pay a tax and die.

Or put another way, I can get behind Saim-Hann style detachments needing a minimum number of windriders and/or wave serpents, but I don't want to force Saim-Hann players to field foot guardians and rangers.

So loathe as I am - I wonder if some sort of reversion to 5th's only troops can score is required (I guess you could triple their OC to a similar effect). Admittedly that might take things back to an 8th edition troops spam style builds.

Nah. The only-troops-can-score thing was one of the worst things about 5th edition. It turned games into a race to wipe out the opponent's least threatening units so that they "couldn't hold ground" despite visibly having an overwhelming presence on most of the table. It was both unfun and unfluffy.

"Darn. After taking casualties and slaying every foe in the area, all we have left to hold this ground are 3 full squads of devastators, 25 assault marines, a column of tanks, veteran dreadnaught Obsekius the Ground Holder, and a tech marine who specializes in fortifying positions. But without those two tactical squads we lost, it's all for naught!"

Plus, troops being the only ones to hold objectives screws over factions whose troops don't particularly like sitting still in exposed locations. Heck, OC and the Obsec rule are/were both kind of weird for that reason. Fire warriors and guardian defenders aren't exactly well-suited for jogging out onto an objective that already has an enemy presence and then staying alive long enough to benefit from their OC/obsec. Nor is it particularly fluffy to me that 5 of my guardian defenders are somehow able somehow claim ownership out from under a squad of enemy terminators while 5 of my banshees can't.You'd think the heavily-armored guys would be a lot more concerned about the anti-heavy-armor sword ladies than the struggles-against-heavy-armor millitia unit.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?

You don't get to pick and choose with this.

Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.

More importantly, all three of those examples are functionally heavy infantry spam in terms of defensive profiles, which is not as game-breaking as allowing things like all tanks (which GW did allow with the Armored Company, but came with a huge slew of drawbacks to try to balance it out).

I don't see any problem with using a stricter FOC but carving out exceptions for atypical but fluffy and balance-able army composition, with appropriate disadvantages to offset the skew as needed. Allowing Deathwing doesn't mean you have to allow Oops, All Baneblades, nor are the balance/design implications the same.

Edit: I also want to point out that there is a difference between 'what company-level forces theoretically exist in the fluff' versus 'what company-level forces make for a fun and balanced game when you're building lists in the dark', and for the sake of keeping the game from breaking it may be necessary to put limits on what players can take. Some systems handle skew better than others- and I can think of a few mechanics I've seen that would make skew less of a problem for 40K- but few wargames will allow you to field anything that might conceivably exist in theater.

Slipspace wrote:
Part of the problem is the missions are all basically the same. There are myriad different combinations of primary, secondary and mission special rule, but they all fundamentally come down to needing mobile units to score primary or various secondaries. The missions based around killing things pretty much take care of themselves. I think more variety in missions and what sort of units are required to do them well would force armies to be more diverse. You'd also have more situations where you need to use sub-optimal units to complete the missions rather than always knowing you can do it with units X. Y and Z.

I agree that that's part of the problem, but we have boring, symmetrical, prescriptive terrain layouts and predictable, same-y missions because the sort of unpredictability you're talking about is anathema to the 40K competitive community. There's a strong push for predictability and consistency so that lists can be built to execute pre-planned strategies, rather than having to respond to emergent conditions, and that encourages exactly the sort of min-max lists we see.

Another part of the problem is that the game has a very limited set of things for your units to do besides 'hold objectives' and 'kill the enemy'. The optimal objective-holders for many factions aren't basic troops, they're specialists that can survive on objectives or grab them quickly while also providing credible damage output. Having a high OC stat is less useful than being able to kill whatever might contest your control.

 catbarf wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?

You don't get to pick and choose with this.

Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.

That would be more of an argument if oldhammer didn't had extremely bad faction balance.

Because in practice I remember vehicle skew to be the way to play during 5th (and immediately dying in 6th).

The main issue the game has with missions is simply that its movement is kind of all over the place. For the size of the board, things are very slow and really can't reposition effectively in most situations. On top of that, the charge phase makes things situationally blindingly fast? Most movement also needs to be done before combat begins making it all just not really suit the kind of scenarios people want to see play out.

I'm not really sure what else I'd do for the game. It's very hard to imagine a gameplan that suits say, Nids and Tau. I don't think there's anything really wrong with scenarios whose main goal is just making combat happen, but I'm not really sure how to make that work given the structure of the game.

 LunarSol wrote:
The main issue the game has with missions is simply that its movement is kind of all over the place. For the size of the board, things are very slow and really can't reposition effectively in most situations. On top of that, the charge phase makes things situationally blindingly fast? Most movement also needs to be done before combat begins making it all just not really suit the kind of scenarios people want to see play out.

I'm not really sure what else I'd do for the game. It's very hard to imagine a gameplan that suits say, Nids and Tau. I don't think there's anything really wrong with scenarios whose main goal is just making combat happen, but I'm not really sure how to make that work given the structure of the game.

This is something else that I think a smaller-scale variation of the game could remedy. Imagine a handful of squads per player fighting on a full-sized table so they have room to spread out, take advantage of cover, etc. You could let units move a bit faster (maybe just make Advancing a flat +6" instead of a role for instance, or let bikes turbo boost again) to better take advantage of the map and get back into the action more quickly after going after an objective on the quiet flank or what have you.

With a small number of units to bookkeep and a Kill Team-esque activation system, you could do things like letting units who held still in movement move after shooting. You could bring back a Hiding mechanic that makes units harder to target in exchange for those units neither attacking nor advancing. Stuff like that.

Basically, a lot of ideas that would just be too much bookkeeping or too powerful en masse in a 2k game could work really well in this hypothetical smaller-scale game.

That is fundamentally what Kill Team does and very well may be the game you're looking for. Granted, for a lot of this stuff I'm happy to play entirely different systems. I would really like to see 1000 points better supported with scenarios suited to the smaller table size and something like Rule of 1 or 2 instead of 3.

 Tyran wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Cool, so what restrictions should there be for all-bike armies?
All-Terminator armies?
All-Crisis Suit armies?

You don't get to pick and choose with this.

Why not? That's what GW did in 3rd-7th when some skew lists were facilitated by explicit changes to the FOC that came with attendant limitations and disadvantages.

That would be more of an argument if oldhammer didn't had extremely bad faction balance.

Because in practice I remember vehicle skew to be the way to play during 5th (and immediately dying in 6th).

More importantly, all three of those examples are functionally heavy infantry spam in terms of defensive profiles, which is not as game-breaking as allowing things like all tanks (which GW did allow with the Armored Company, but came with a huge slew of drawbacks to try to balance it out).

I don't see any problem with using a stricter FOC but carving out exceptions for atypical but fluffy and balance-able army composition, with appropriate disadvantages to offset the skew as needed. Allowing Deathwing doesn't mean you have to allow Oops, All Baneblades, nor are the balance/design implications the same.

We have a player in our oldhammer core 5th ed group who is a tread head and he has tried every armored company list GW/FW has rules for.

His list looks good on the table. but it hardly ever wins because he doesn't want to balance it out with infantry. this means he not only suffers from long range AT weapons but the real weakness is when any enemy units get close or into CC with them.

As for 5th ed vehicle skew. as somebody in a large group of oldhammer players that still play that edition. it is a myth based on tournament net lists facing off against each other in tournaments. in friendly local FLGS play most players build take all comers list that can deal with a bit of everything. even if they are thematic like an armored company. especially when table set up/mission type, army set up, first turn and variable game length are all rolled randomly

I played 5th. Vehicle skew definitely wasn't a myth.

It maybe didn't happen outside competitive minded circles, but if a system cannot support competitive minded play without falling apart I have little interest in it.

LunarSol wrote:That is fundamentally what Kill Team does and very well may be the game you're looking for. Granted, for a lot of this stuff I'm happy to play entirely different systems. I would really like to see 1000 points better supported with scenarios suited to the smaller table size and something like Rule of 1 or 2 instead of 3.

I did enjoy past versions of Kill Team, and I picked up the current version recently, so I'm sure I'll be giving it a try! At a glance however, it appears to only really let you field one type of unit at a time. That is, you can play all guardians or all avengers, but you can't mix them like in the previous edition, nor can you play anyything other than the small number of units (usually "troops") currently supported. Which still sounds fun, but it seems like a very different animal than a game where I could have my swooping hawks and fire dragons backing up a couple guardian squads.

aphyon wrote:
We have a player in our oldhammer core 5th ed group who is a tread head and he has tried every armored company list GW/FW has rules for.

His list looks good on the table. but it hardly ever wins because he doesn't want to balance it out with infantry. this means he not only suffers from long range AT weapons but the real weakness is when any enemy units get close or into CC with them.

Does he not just keep his infantry in the tanks so that they count as scoring and stick a couple tanks next to each other so that the can't prevent them from simply back up and continuing to shoot with minimal drawbacks?

As for 5th ed vehicle skew. as somebody in a large group of oldhammer players that still play that edition. it is a myth based on tournament net lists facing off against each other in tournaments. in friendly local FLGS play most players build take all comers list that can deal with a bit of everything. even if they are thematic like an armored company. especially when table set up/mission type, army set up, first turn and variable game length are all rolled randomly

Your mileage may vary. When I started playing, it was 5th edition, and the majority of my games were against parking lots. Playing an S3 army (no punching tank butts to death) without meaningful anti-tank in most of its infantry squads (eldar), the vehicle skew was both real and really frustrating. Passing up non-AT options because I felt like I had to load up on AT was definitely a thing; especially when I branched out into other armies that had more special weapon choices. Rare was the day I'd take a flamer over a melta.