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

Just out of curiosity, what's the most lopsided game you've had (here in 10th). Doesn't matter wich side of the W/L you were on.

Mine:
On the Loss side?
2 weeks ago the jet bike portion of my Eldar got cut to ribbons by the bottom of the 2nd turn. Leaving me only two Autarchs & 13 foot Rangers. :(
All hope wasn't completely lost though as this was in a team game. It just made it really really tough on my partner when the majority of my half of our force vanished leaving him to face about 1700 pts of enemies turn 3+. My rangers did what they could - wounded some stuff & scored some VPs - but I was effectively not a factor & was completely wiped out in turn 4.
VPs ended up Enemy Team = 60something, Us = high 20s. :(

In the Win column?
Using the full Iyanden Avatar/WL/WG portion of my Eldar I destroyed a SM force the other day 91-zero, completely tabling the marines top of turn 4. We didn't tally up turn 5.
And while everyone likes seeing Ultramarines get stomped on, that was a bit brutal....
I think I'll bring the Ranger/Fire Dragon potion of my Eldar the next time I know I'm facing this player.
*Of special note? This was the 1st time I've ever encountered Marneuus Callgar on the table. I made a special effort to kill him with the Avatar.

Daemon vs custodes. Bringing heavily khorne army vs custodes that basically counter melee did not work out well

Charging 2 bloodthirsters into not even their nuttiest melee unit and ending with 2 dead bloodthirster without killing custodes unit...Yup yup.

Add to that them getting to all objectives first giving them easy lead in primaries unless I kill them when I can kill them only in melee where I will get killed first...

Yeah that did not end well

Only my first game of 10th felt particularly one sided.
The balance is a lot better than 9th and I've now played against T'au, Daemons, and Necrons while playing CSM and Deathwatch. In our group I've got Tsons, Nids and basic Marines left to play against.
Our games have always come down to our last turn with a lot of maneuvering and desperate plays to win.

first game using the combat patrol rules, T'au Empire v Dark Angels

where it essentially felt as if there was a marine unit I was facing, which was the only thing I could hurt that simply hid as there was nothing that could seriously hurt the dreadnought or the flying T6 marines with a silly number of dice that just deleted the T'au infantry to the point of feeling like a passenger.

otherwise win or loose it hasn't actually felt too bad

Every game I try to play my Orks as the lore intends.

Melee specialists...

Unfortunately Orks is the cheap bodies for zoning and board control army now... not really what I signed up for.

Win:
My (not even close to optimized) eldar basically tabled my opponent's sisters without losing a single eldar unit all game. The score was actually pretty close though.

Loss:
My lance spamming drukhari into an Iyanden list. My opponent's saves were hot, and he was functionally putting wraiths back on the table faster than I could take them off. (I made the mistake of trying to take advantage of flying up on top of ruins and it ended up just making me slow and bad at getting sight lines instead.

Any game pre first rules changes vs eldar would probably count. My opponent deploys his army. I deploy my army. I start my turn with minus 1.9 unit, because of overwatch , he kills two more units on his own turn. Ah and he avatars on my own turn, after killing my second unit. Begining of turn 2, I have a 5 man of paladin in deep strike and one unit of 3 (out of 10) terminators in my left most quarter.

Of my latest games the fastest lost was a game vs orks. Ork player goes first. moves his entire army on to objectives, with a huge footprint of his army makes it basicly impossible for me to teleport anywhere outside of my deployment zone. On my turn my units bounce of with their shoting vs vehicles and large squads of infantry (which is the norm, not a orc specific thing) and on orc player turn 2 we have a 30pts VP difference, with no way for me to score points on primary and half my units charged or shot up.

Worst loss ever at Bolt action. Dice wanted me dead and helpless, so after the (legit) loss of a veteran squad turn 2, it was a long agony until turn 4 where I had no troops left and did not kill any American soldier so I was forced to concede. Truly awful gama that was.

On the win side, a game of 40k when I used to spam Léman russes because I really love tanks. All went wrong and I shattered half of my friends chaos army. At 1500 points. First turn. Then his temrinators and obliterators deep struck and failed to score any kill. In the end of my turn 2 ye had virtually no army anymore and quitted.

After that game we sat down and both agreed that from now on I'd never again spam that many russes in a list because that made for stupid games.

Whenever I do, the scenario is arranged in a way that makes it fair.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Worst loss ever at Bolt action. Dice wanted me dead and helpless, so after the (legit) loss of a veteran squad turn 2, it was a long agony until turn 4 where I had no troops left and did not kill any American soldier so I was forced to concede. Truly awful gama that was.

Not relevant as I asked you about your 10e 40k game experience.

Oops my bad read wrong. Do you want me to delete?

Unfortunately 2of my only 3 games of 10th already qualify.
Death Guard against Harlequins before the patch- felt like I was playing with half the points and despite managing to kill all Troupes, the remaining characters just stomped everything.

Orks vs. Power armour horde Ravenguard. By the end of turn 2 most Marines were dead while Orks had lost a unit of lootas and a unit of Kommandos. We didn't continue at that point. To me it was pretty clear that there's still a lethality problem in 10th, with some outliers, like his army couldn't hurt my Boss on Squigosaur with the shooting of 3 units (I wish my Death Guard (!) had a unit as tough as an Ork...).

I played a mixed arms 1k list of sisters against a fluff bunny list of Imperial Guard and tabled him pretty handily turn 4.

A lot of that comes down to it being a pick up game between a player that primarily engages in 40k as a tournament game (me) vs a player that is more interested in narrative/painting/modeling and there being a resulting knowledge gap.

The majority of my 10th games have been lopsided. Very few have been nailbiters that go down to the final few turns. A big contributor is the mission system which because of the randomness often makes people lose more when they're already behind, or win more while they're already ahead. If you end up losing too much early on and then keep drawing difficult to achieve kill objectives which also force you into making bad trades or killing easy units when you actually need to be stopping their killy units it just results in a death spiral that few lists can pull themselves out from.

To be fair the last dataslate and points changes did stabilize things a little bit, so now it's more one side winning 90-60 rather than 100-20. A very stark contrast from my experience of 9th where most of my games were full 5 turn affairs.

Shout out to Tyranids though in that while I have won all my games vs the new dex they have actually, genuinely, been close games pointswise.

Thought I'd try giving 10th an actual empirical test today, instead of continuing to explain why it's terrible without having played it. In the space of one afternoon of 1000-pts-a-player random-doubles games no game made it past turn three and one player was entirely off the table by the bottom of turn two every game. Particularly irritating when the SM player who brought all Dreadnaughts spent the whole game whining about why the Eldar are allowed any dice fixing at all, while killing 75% of my army in one Shooting phase.

I maintain that the 8e to-wound table was the death blow that will kill 40k, and it's just taking a very long time to finish bleeding out.

There's so many wildcards there, that sounds like the absolute opposite of an empirical test.

I can't even tell what the conclusion is related too. Certainly not that an all-dreadnought army is too tough, right?

I do find it interesting to see how others are finding 10th because so many of the experiences here I'm just not seeing.
I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert because I think I've played sub-10 games so far but every single one has been to the final turn with Gambit's and all.

I do only play with my small group of friends so maybe it's entirely the environment we're in that makes it that way but I've been really enjoying it so far while also enjoying HH alongside it.

 Bosskelot wrote:
The majority of my 10th games have been lopsided. Very few have been nailbiters that go down to the final few turns. A big contributor is the mission system which because of the randomness often makes people lose more when they're already behind, or win more while they're already ahead. If you end up losing too much early on and then keep drawing difficult to achieve kill objectives which also force you into making bad trades or killing easy units when you actually need to be stopping their killy units it just results in a death spiral that few lists can pull themselves out from.

To be fair the last dataslate and points changes did stabilize things a little bit, so now it's more one side winning 90-60 rather than 100-20. A very stark contrast from my experience of 9th where most of my games were full 5 turn affairs.

Shout out to Tyranids though in that while I have won all my games vs the new dex they have actually, genuinely, been close games pointswise.

I'm in the same position, i've only have had 2 games pull close. Mechanized GSC vs Mech-less Tau, and I mainly just pulled the objective game, and DG vs my "firstborn still got it going on" list which was mainly me making them go the run-around while I scout-sniper'd their lords from above.

Everything else is horribly one-sided, though the worse was probably GSC vs Chaos Knights with a Questoris, Tyrant, and then as many wardogs as the list would allow. Which, if you'll recall, is a problem when the highest S value among all our weapons is 12, either on 6" demo charges or on the Vehicle-mounted Heavy mining laser. This was the battle that prompted me put a shadowsword in my list so I never had to worry about AT again.

Voss wrote:
There's so many wildcards there, that sounds like the absolute opposite of an empirical test.

I can't even tell what the conclusion is related too. Certainly not that an all-dreadnought army is too tough, right?

I thought playing in an environment with a wider range of opponents and armies would give me more data than committing to a miserable experience over a longer period of time.

The conclusion r.e. the 8e to-wound table is based on my observation that despite blowing up the range of stats wildly since 8th/9th the exact same underlying problems with the math of that table remain the same. As Strength and Toughness stats climb the range of things a mid-power weapon wounds on 5+-3+ gets wider and wider and wider, which GW then uses as an excuse to pump the Toughness of mid-Toughness units so they don't get wounded on 3+ too easily, which pushes the required Strength of mid-power weapons they do want to be able to kill them even higher, which pushes vehicle Toughness up further to compensate.

If I have, say, a S4 weapon using the 7e to-wound table it's wounding T1-2 on 2+, T3 on 3+, T4 on 4+, T5 on 5+, and T6-7 on 6+, yay, fine spot, good. If I pump it to S5 because HQ says "we're not selling enough of this gun!", then, okay, yay, we're now wounding T1-3 on 2+, T4 on 3+, T5 on 4+, T6 on 5+, and T7-8 on 6+.

Jumping to the 8e to-wound table pumping the same weapon from S4 to S5 causes us to go from wounding T1-2 on 2+, T3 on 3+, T4 on 4+, T5-7 on 5+, and T8+ on 6+ to wounding T1-2 on 2+, T3-4 on 3+, T5 on 4+, T6-9 on 5+, and T10+ on 6+. We're not only changing the parts in the middle, but we're bumping parts of the Toughness range much further from the Strength value up; and keep in mind, here, that the bump from wounding on 6+ to wounding on 5+ is by far the most significant since it doubles the number of shots that get through that step (one in six to two in six). Extending this into the range of S/T values I see in 10th the knock-on effects from slight bumps to Strength and Toughness are rippling further and further out from the actual magnitude of the change, and when the central problems of stats come from GW's continuing failure to parse the effects of high-rate of fire mid-power weapons on both the top and the bottom end of the T/Sv distribution...

If you kept the 7e to-wound table, and extended it to post-S/T-10 numbers, you could have this same power creep in S/T and the relationships would remain linear, and you'd just have a game you could effectively re-normalize back to the same game; the relationships between the numbers don't change if you pump everything by a point. With the 8e table when you pump everything by a point the top end gets worse.

Now, if GW had the discipline to stop pumping numbers for hype this wouldn't be that much of a problem; they could find an equilibrium where they, and we, had a good sense of what a given S or T value meant and avoid deviating much from that, but the effect of the 8e to-wound table is to magnify the effect of GW's off-by-one errors and continuing failure to realize that when they do things to the equilibrium of, e.g., character weapon stats and their effect on fights against other characters that has a big knock-on effect when those characters want to punch vehicles, and vice versa. Coupled with their continuing refusal to go back and edit things down when they make the numbers too big by mistake I wouldn't be surprised if 12th edition launched with Strength 50 weapons needed to damage the new T25 Land Raider on 2+, and light infantry will still be pegged at T3.

As to the existence of an all-Dreadnaught army whether or not it's too tough doesn't really enter into it; the problem that creates is that if you want to play 10e you have to build a list that can efficiently deal damage to a 2,000pt list of fifteen T10 Dreadnaughts or two hundred T5 Orks, which means that either you need to spam anti-everything guns or that you need to have a list which can meaningfully damage your opponent's list when half your firepower is ineffectual, which squeezes you into taking only the most cost-effective options and means your Codex can't really compete if the most cost-effective options aren't cost-effective enough.

tl;dr: Skew creates upward pressure on stats that, because of the 8e to-wound table's magnifying effect on small changes in the S/T stat, is going to give GW a nice scam for the next few editions where they can run about frantically pointing at the broadening range of stats as evidence that they're "improving" the game without actually fixing anything.

(p.s. "dude, this is just how GW has always done business?" ...Yup, that's exactly the point. If you want to play and enjoy 10th, by all means, have fun, you do you, but if you then want to tell me that the game is getting better I'm going to laugh at you.)

A problem with the current wound table is also the amount of +1 to wound abilities and rerolls to wound you can find here and there. The old table had a cut so that at some point you couldn't wound at all.

Maybe having lasguns and heavy bolters wound heavy tanks on 6s isn't really a problem in itself even if it feels a bit weird that a lasgun can do it at all. Even if you add in +1 to wound and/or rerolls to wound a Lasgun with now a suddenly 55% chance to wound a Land Raider might still not be too bad since they are unlikely to get those buffs and they only deal 1 damage if they can get pass the saves. But the mid range weapons like the heavy bolter with Ap -1 and D2 with the same buffs have a decent chance of getting an extra AP in there somewhere to go along with that sudden bump from 17% chance to wound to 55% chance to wound. Weapons that should at most be able to scratch the paint can now seriously put in a lot of wounds on models that have toughness twice or more than the attacking strength.
You now also can have ridiculous Strength values that fail to kill very low toughness models, especially if they a 5+ or 6+ invulnerable save. A S50 AP-10 D10 weapon vs a crappy Skitarii still needs to hit, then not roll a 1 to wound and then pass a 5++ to kill.

If they made it so if a model with toughness more than twice the strength couldn't be wounded at all then they wouldn't need to up the T value or add in abilities that prevent rerolls or wound bonuses against the tougher models. If they can't wound it to begin with then it doesn't matter how many +1 to wound, +1 to ap or reroll to hits/wounds or lethal hits/sustained you stack on a weaker weapon. It won't be able to wound unless they also get a strength boost in there. At the same time they could make it so if you have more than 2x the strength you auto wound and if you have 3x or more you even prevent any types of saves. Now you could slightly reduce the amount of shots certain weapons have because they will still be able to kill terminators.

So many S and T values in the game and all it can change is really the 3+ to 5+ as 1s always fail and 6s always succeed. It would work fine if there weren't things larger/tougher than light transports and the game were 95% or more just infantry. But having no extra difficulty to wound the heaviest tank in the galaxy vs wounding an aggressor for a light gun shows a real problem with the mechanics. 1s always failing on both hit and wound and so many things with at least a 6+ save make it so the best guns still have a decent chance to fail even the weakest targets while the reverse is true and the worst guns still have a decent chance to wound the hardest targets. (when you consider how cheap and plenty lasguns and bolters are they do decent damage for their points even if individually they are useless. But you can have 100 of them in a list)

Do wonder if the table could go to a 7, 8 or 9 to wound, being a 6/4, 6/5 & 6/6. so +1 to wound doesn't become "wound everything on a 5+"

I had a seriously lopsided game at 1k points in our escalation league recently. My opponent was fairly new and running Custodes, I had a fairly optimized Dark Angels list (pairings for our league are randomized). My opponent's inexperience caused her to make some rather poor choices as far as movement and she played way too cagily, allowing me to pretty much just own the center of the board and shoot anything that peeked out. It didn't help that her dice were pretty cold too. I think the final score was like 77-19 (I lost a lot of points due to scoring incorrectly on the servo skull mission and didn't feel like going back and figuring it out afterwards). After the game, I talked with her about her mistakes and tried my best to make it an educational experience rather than rubbing her face in it, showing her how she could have played it better, how to use terrain to her advantage a bit, and encouraging her to keep playing. I was a new player myself once, after all, and made plenty of rookie mistakes in my time.