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My question is about timing. Did the Emperor drop the Dragon shard on Mars during the Dark Age of Technology? Or the Age of Strife?

Because the Mechanicus had a Machine God then that they took with them to the stars on Sleeper Ships (The Knight Houses) and set up distant forgeworlds during the Age of Strife, which is 10k years before the Emperor's Unifcation.

And when the new Imperium came a knocking, the Mechanicus was already working, and some were none to pleases to have to swear loyalty to Mars.

Space Marines. I wish they were more Gothic in Design and less obviously Heroic good guys. Also i wish primarch were not a thing, Xenos support can only suffer from the primarch focused narrative that is being pushed on 40k.

Adeptus Custodes. Should have stayed in 30k. I feel they and Grey knights occupy the same elite slot to the Detriment of GK support.

Genestealer Cults. They belonged in Necromunda, maybe kill team. Not 40k.

The whole skitarii angle of the mechanicus. Its ugly, and boring. We wanted 30k robots.

Knights. They are in the wrong game mode, making infantry lists kind of non desirable (as do all super heavies to be fair)

Flyers of all factions. They do not belong in a game that Was supposed to be an infantry skirmish game with some vehicles.

Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

Most definitely GSC, they just don’t feel like they belong as an army in 40K but more of an opponent in some specialist game. They do literally nothing for me.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

The only issue with that is that you also have to kill all the hopes and dreams of treadheads and their Armoured Companies also if you follow that train if thought.

I would be willing to accept an AdMech/Knight Combined arms list.


But beyond the table, are there any forces you don't like reading about?

Groups that you can't imagine Black Library novels being written for?

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

I'd keep them around as the Add-One-To-Imperial/Chaos lists, and on the backburner try and create some sort of chaff + Knight list with nothing in the middle faction. Repair/Support Crews that run around with almost negligble weapons and armor next to the supersize knights for the Objective game...

I think Knights and other superheavies should be part of a special game mode where each side gets a superheavy.

So taking a superheavy would be built in to that game mode, and each faction would have one.

I understand why they don't do that from a sales POV, and I understand people who've shelled out for an expensive centrepiece wanting to be able to use it, but I think the game would be better if it was restricted like that to let the "normal" game breathe a bit. But at this point the core rules seem to have been changed to accommodate superheavies quite a lot so maybe it's pointless without also re-writing the whole game.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
My question is about timing. Did the Emperor drop the Dragon shard on Mars during the Dark Age of Technology? Or the Age of Strife?

Because the Mechanicus had a Machine God then that they took with them to the stars on Sleeper Ships (The Knight Houses) and set up distant forgeworlds during the Age of Strife, which is 10k years before the Emperor's Unifcation.

And when the new Imperium came a knocking, the Mechanicus was already working, and some were none to pleases to have to swear loyalty to Mars.

The implication was that the Emperor defeating the Void Dragon (shard) was the inspiration for the story of St George and his dragon, so while presumably it wasn’t immediately taken to Mars (or even for millennia), it could have been quite early in the scheme of things. Early in the DAoT (or even immediately prior) is quite possible.

Breton wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

I'd keep them around as the Add-One-To-Imperial/Chaos lists, and on the backburner try and create some sort of chaff + Knight list with nothing in the middle faction. Repair/Support Crews that run around with almost negligble weapons and armor next to the supersize knights for the Objective game...

So... the Grotmas detachments they got?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Pardon my ignorance on the subject, since I'm not up to date on the Necron lore, how did a player in the Atlanta GT run a 6 C'Tan Necron List, if there aren't that many C'Tan total?

There are 3 named unique Epic Hero CTan in the Codex.
There's also a unit called Transcendent Ctan - basically a shard of one of the destroyed ones. It's not unique/Epic, so you could run 3 copies.
So, pts permitting, you can run 6 CTan.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

But beyond the table, are there any forces you don't like reading about?

All of them? I don't really find 40k lore all that interesting to read about beyond "Read new version of Codex: ____ about every 3 editions." And even then I'm not studying it in depth like so many of you.
I just need the armies overview refreshed now & then.
But I essentially quit caring about 95% of 40Ks lore a looong time ago. So 2eCrons (virtually no lore) Oldcrons (3e+), Newcrons (5e?+), FutureCrons.... Doesn't matter to me. I play Necrons simply because I like the models.

I don't really bother ranking factions. I collect the faction that I like (pretty much just Orks nowadays and Necrons in the past), and move on with my life.

That said, Games Workshop's restoration of the Squats was really poorly done. They got a small codex at the end of an edition, had some overpowered beam abilities that forced people to change the entire movement phase, got nerfed in 10th Edition, and not a single book or tie-in or anything about them since 2022.Gameplay-wise, they have absolutely nothing unique about them now that the OP beam cannons are gone and story-wise they aren't interesting either. Literally Deep Rock Galactic but 40k.You couldn't have made their introduction worse if you tried.

I also wish Loyalist Space Marine Chapters didn't get their own codexes. It just makes the fans of other Space Marine chapters jealous and hog even more of Games Workshop's attention. The Chaos Space Marine codexes should be bundled with the demons for that god.

Knights are an odd fit for 40k both lore-wise and gameplay-wise, but I'm glad that an all-titanic army is in the game; it adds a lot of variety to matchups you won't get in other games.

Custodes fighting all across the galaxy is strange fluff-wise, but I like Custodes from a gameplay perspective and they're a great starter army due to how few models you need.

FYI Calbear, the Leagues got their first novel released last year.

You’ll also want a copy of Necromunda, Halls of the Ancestors.

My take on Votann is that they are just weirdly normal.

There's lots of stuff in their new fluff that could be played on to make them... idk, Grimdark. Or at least unique.

But the mini range - and army rules - is painfully "Dwarfs in Spaaace".

As examples:
"We are all clones" - it doesn't matter.
"We have self-aware robots" - it doesn't matter.
We obey/worship hyper advanced machine intelligences that are breaking down - eh... it doesn't matter.

 BorderCountess wrote:

Breton wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

I'd keep them around as the Add-One-To-Imperial/Chaos lists, and on the backburner try and create some sort of chaff + Knight list with nothing in the middle faction. Repair/Support Crews that run around with almost negligble weapons and armor next to the supersize knights for the Objective game...

So... the Grotmas detachments they got?

Closer to the inverse. The army is ~75% Guard or Mechanicus, and ~25% knight. The Knight is just the big bad centerpiece option for that faction instead of being its own faction. The faction wasn't designed for objective play, and they haven't figured out how to make it work yet.

Tyel wrote:
My take on Votann is that they are just weirdly normal.

There's lots of stuff in their new fluff that could be played on to make them... idk, Grimdark. Or at least unique.

But the mini range - and army rules - is painfully "Dwarfs in Spaaace".

As examples:
"We are all clones" - it doesn't matter.
"We have self-aware robots" - it doesn't matter.
We obey/worship hyper advanced machine intelligences that are breaking down - eh... it doesn't matter.

My problem with them is they're not even dwarfs in space. Nothing about them tells me dwarfs in space. They're as much dwarfs as the elves were elves in that aweful witcher spinoff series. They're old scale Space Marines with runes and Tau guns.

Mechanic wise all the type of uppy down list, which would include GK. Closely followed by the "I shot at your from behind LoS blocking terrain and you can't do nothing about it". Mechanic wise, too good or too bad, I can more or less accept the existance of it most of the time.

Pure faction wise, eldar. The existance of the faction warps how editions are played, and when unfixed, which sometimes takes GW a lot of time, they generate more NPE then any other too good to be true army. Because with every other faction you know that, they probably will suck next time around. With eldar, you know that a codex or edition reset will make them more unfun to play.

Breton wrote:

 BorderCountess wrote:

Breton wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

I'd keep them around as the Add-One-To-Imperial/Chaos lists, and on the backburner try and create some sort of chaff + Knight list with nothing in the middle faction. Repair/Support Crews that run around with almost negligble weapons and armor next to the supersize knights for the Objective game...

So... the Grotmas detachments they got?

Closer to the inverse. The army is ~75% Guard or Mechanicus, and ~25% knight. The Knight is just the big bad centerpiece option for that faction instead of being its own faction. The faction wasn't designed for objective play, and they haven't figured out how to make it work yet.

The old Mechanicus Codex was like what you want, where you could take Lord of War Knight Detachment.

About the OC issue, all lists that focus on small elite forces will suffer from this... AC, GK, IG:AC, etc.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

My problem with them is they're not even dwarfs in space. Nothing about them tells me dwarfs in space. They're as much dwarfs as the elves were elves in that aweful witcher spinoff series. They're old scale Space Marines with runes and Tau guns.

Grudge tokens are pretty on brand for GW Dwarves.

Not Grimdark?

A genetically engineered slave species, programmed to gather and export resources. And without the free will to care even if you pointed this out to them?

That’s pretty gnarly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Thinking about it? I’m probably least fond of Grey Knights.

In 2nd Ed, they were a powerful allied unit. Good shooting, excellent close combat, excellent armour, and psychic powers to boot. And that’s largely how they were described in the background. Heading out in small numbers for precision damage control against Daemons, such as Teleporting in near the locus of the invasion, be that a possessed Psyker, a Warp Breach or powerful Daemon, and kicking its teeth down its throat.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Not Grimdark?

A genetically engineered slave species, programmed to gather and export resources. And without the free will to care even if you pointed this out to them?

That’s pretty gnarly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Thinking about it? I’m probably least fond of Grey Knights.

In 2nd Ed, they were a powerful allied unit. Good shooting, excellent close combat, excellent armour, and psychic powers to boot. And that’s largely how they were described in the background. Heading out in small numbers for precision damage control against Daemons, such as Teleporting in near the locus of the invasion, be that a possessed Psyker, a Warp Breach or powerful Daemon, and kicking its teeth down its throat.

Back in the day, I had 5 classic metal GK Terminators to go with my Inquisitor in Terminator armour; he was from 2nd ed, though I'm less certain about the GK- I think they arrived in 2nd, but it might have been 3rd. The terminator connection implies to me that the GK were seen as the Chamber Militant of the Malleus as far back as those models go even if it wasn't explicit.

When the Daemon Hunters dex dropped in 3rd, the chamber Militant concept was made explicit for all three Ordos, but since I never owned a copy of Daemon Hunters, I don't remember what did or didn't exist for the GK part of the range beyond the Terminators, or what it said about them as an independent army. Sisters from the Witch Hunter dex could be fielded with or without Inquisition forces, but I don't remember if GK could.

I like the new Squats, and I like the Guard and even the Tau. Having some relatively normal factions is good and when everyone is "grimdark" nothing is grimdark.

Imagine the game was just Chaos v Necrons v Tyranids v Dark Eldar v Arco-flagellants, to maximize "grimdark". Oh no the Dark Eldar might kidnap that Necron and torture him! Oh no Lord Skullripper might get eaten by a Carnifex! Not very scary is it? If everyone is evil and/or living in endless suffering then who cares if everyone dies?

As far as my least favorite factions, they're all basically the same thing: some group from the Imperium that can't justifiably be a 40k army but has been shoehorned into being one anyways. Knight Titans (inc Chaos), Custodes, and Grey Knights specifically. AdMech and Sisters I'm okay with because they could field large numbers of troops.

Lore-wise the Necrons and the C'Tan are a complete mess, with two totally different narratives that are both terrible. They're a fine faction otherwise though.

They could have also gone the other way with the c'tan and instead of trying to keep them as gods that somehow how get defeated by a race they completely control and whose technology is derived from them, they could have made them more atavistic predatory creatures with godlike power but no intellect to use.

so the necrons see them and their power and try to catch them to use as a power source to fuel their own biotransference science, which succeeds with a cost they didn't realise.

the core issue is the intelligence and power of the c'tan and the inexplicable ability for necrontyr who couldn't even defeat the old ones, to be able to defeat the creatures that enabled them to defeat those enemies they couldn't defeat...

Either the c'tan become a lot dumber in comparison, or the necrons lose the control they shouldn't be able to have. Trying to run both at the same time just makes the whole thing look dumb.

Just keep in mind that most "Gods" in 40K are not actually what we'd call true Gods. They are more god-like

As for the Necrons defeating them. The C'Tan gave the Necrons a huge tech boost in one massive leap. That allowed them to beat the Old Ones, but also meant that they could turn those same weapons on the C'Tan. The C'Tan just figured the Necrons wouldn't do that.

And if that doesn't sound believable then consider that has happened in history more than once. Those rebels that an outside nation armed and trained to defeat one opponent can certainly then turn those same weapons and training on the ones that gave them to them in the first place.

 Overread wrote:
Just keep in mind that most "Gods" in 40K are not actually what we'd call true Gods. They are more god-like

As for the Necrons defeating them. The C'Tan gave the Necrons a huge tech boost in one massive leap. That allowed them to beat the Old Ones, but also meant that they could turn those same weapons on the C'Tan. The C'Tan just figured the Necrons wouldn't do that.

And if that doesn't sound believable then consider that has happened in history more than once. Those rebels that an outside nation armed and trained to defeat one opponent can certainly then turn those same weapons and training on the ones that gave them to them in the first place.

The scope is nothing like the wholesale species wide victory and breaking of godlike creatures. From slave to god in one move is just bad narrative.

The deceiver isn't that stupid and was never described as such nor has his background been changed. So we are left with genius deceiver being dumb so necrons look cool. But the main point about those weapons is that the c'tan shouldn't actually be threatened by them - using necrodermis against a c'tan would be an exercise in futility. It's like firing nukes at nuclear man...

The problem is that the rebellion was there to serve necron coolness, not to make sense. The brief was clearly, we need to sell the new necron army, please create the most Wardian levels of coolness you have done for everyone else and damn the consequences. We aren't doing anything with the two existing c'tan models, so don't need to worry about those.

It would have been like the eldar create slannesh, but through their magic asspull psychic powers they use the souls eaten to break slannesh and turn them into avatars, all in the span of a single event so the damning consequences of their actions have no chance to impact, they just side step them. If GW wrote it, it would be official, but that wouldn't make it good. And it would treat eldar players the same way OG necron players were treated - a central core identity of your faction has been upturned.

Had the necrons needed 60 million years to weaken the c'tan to break them that would be one thing, but to go from crap, to slaves to masters to sleepy in one single event was just terrible writing. Especially in the context of godkillers now needing to sleep making less sense than the original story.

 Overread wrote:
Just keep in mind that most "Gods" in 40K are not actually what we'd call true Gods. They are more god-like

But no other "god" in 40k has anything to do with the C'Tan. They're all warp entities that obey the rules of warpspace.

The C'Tan are... people made out of "electromagnetism" I guess? And they were born during the Big Bang, and are like an animal that evolved(?) instantaneously(??) and is made out of photons(???) and they eat stars. But watch out because they don't just eat stars anymore, they also eat your "soul". But not your supernatural warp-soul because they're not from the warp. They eat all the electricity(?) from your body(??). And you may think that's only like 100 Watts but it makes them super powerful, way more powerful than when they were eating entire stars.

And that to me is a bigger problem than them dying like chumps in the Newcron lore though I agree that's stupid. I don't even understand what they're supposed to be or what they're supposed to be doing to you. Because their entire concept of "well they're exactly like the Chaos Gods but with real physics instead of magic" fundamentally doesn't make sense. And that's why GW had to kill them off I guess.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Just keep in mind that most "Gods" in 40K are not actually what we'd call true Gods. They are more god-like

But no other "god" in 40k has anything to do with the C'Tan. They're all warp entities that obey the rules of warpspace.

The C'Tan are... people made out of "electromagnetism" I guess? And they were born during the Big Bang, and are like an animal that evolved(?) instantaneously(??) and is made out of photons(???) and they eat stars. But watch out because they don't just eat stars anymore, they also eat your "soul". But not your supernatural warp-soul because they're not from the warp. They eat all the electricity(?) from your body(??). And you may think that's only like 100 Watts but it makes them super powerful, way more powerful than when they were eating entire stars.

And that to me is a bigger problem than them dying like chumps in the Newcron lore though I agree that's stupid. I don't even understand what they're supposed to be or what they're supposed to be doing to you. Because their entire concept of "well they're exactly like the Chaos Gods but with real physics instead of magic" fundamentally doesn't make sense. And that's why GW had to kill them off I guess.

There were explanations for that, but they were all inferred from the limited background rather than spelled out. Their origin was as massively spread out energy waves that were the size of stars and worked at larger scales, they didn't need to react on a microsecond timescale. When they condensed down into something as small as they became, it concentrated and overlapped their energy multi dimensionally (in a similar way to enough mass in one spot creates a black hole) and that vast intellect was concentrated and brought out at 'human' scale. It would be like our brains being compressed down to an atomic scale so we could react to quantum reality from higher orders.

The concentration of their energy is also where a lot of their power came from, being in a single point rather than spread across millions of kms.

The consumption of bioenergy (they never ate souls in the oldcrons as the warp was anathema) was not for temporal power, it was basically an addiction. The unique EM signature of sentient life was like crack, it didn't give them any power it just tasted really good (although at a large enough scale consuming quintillions of lifeforms would eventually add up and that scale is what happened during the war in heaven). A sun was nutritious but flavourless. Their increase in power came mostly from eating each other, concentrating that power down into 4 individual c'tan rather than uncounted millions.

It was quite an interesting psychological study on the scale of consciousness and how changing it affected their sense of self and personality, making them more 'human' with cravings they didn't comprehend in their giant state. It's almost like they started in nirvana and fell from grace by being dragged down to the level of mortals and were forever tainted by it.

The system they built with their necron slaves was basically a giant crack factory, farming lifeforms to feed the need for that taste of strange. But now they were tainted by the mortal world they were also interfering with it in a way that wouldn't have occurred to them in their floaty glowy state. The need for pleasure now extended into machinating by the Deceiver, slaughter by the nightbringer, tech madness by the dragon etc.


Now you can find all sorts of things to change or improve in that area, but the concepts were there already. People not being able to tell the difference between a soul as a warp reflection of consciousness tethered to realspace by your mind and the literal EM field of a brain was the reason the confusion of c'tan eating souls happened.

I would have loved to see an evolution of that original story, rather than a total upending of it.

They could even still salvage all of this with the current paradigm by having the c'tan split themselves deliberately as a protective measure to ensure some of themself survived and the stasis tombs and unbound c'tan were never actually enslaved. The necrons in their hubris thought they had contained them but the c'tan were setting it all up for their return to the galactic stage.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Oh shoot. How did I not say imperial/chaos knights earlier? They're just... fundamentally flawed as a concept. They automatically bring a skew list to every game. Their very existence in the meta makes non-anti-tank units less desirable. If I had to cut a faction from the game, I'd absolutely cut both knight factions. And then someone would have to take the scissors from me before I reached the custodes.

(Knight lore is cool though. They seem like a great concept... for Titanicus or Legions or whatever.)

The only issue with that is that you also have to kill all the hopes and dreams of treadheads and their Armoured Companies also if you follow that train if thought.

Honestly, the game would benefit from some anti-skew rules for armies like that too. Knights are just extra annoying because they're skew lists by default. There are lots of ways to run a guard army without it being a skew list. The closest you can come to running a non-skew knight list is to use the grotmas detachmenet to take a handful of admech guys. (Who will generally be spending their time healing your knights thus making the durability issues of a skew list even more severe.)

I like freedom in army building, but it might be a good idea to frame skew lists as an "ask your opponent in advance" type thing. Normalize letting your opponent add a bunch of lascannons into his list last minute so that he can have a good matchup against your all-vehicles-all-the-time list.

But beyond the table, are there any forces you don't like reading about?

Groups that you can't imagine Black Library novels being written for?

I don't think there are any factions that can't have good stories written for them, but I think marines have had a lot of their more intuitive stories told a dozen times over at this point. We still get good, distinctive marine stories from time to time, but there's always like a 50% chance that a new marine novel is just going to be another copy+paste of,

"Brother! Grr. I hate these xenos-and-or-heretics, brother, but the very slight differences between the two of us annoy me, brother! Brother! I have fallen to chaos for my petty dickishness! Avenge me brother!"

Similarly, I just don't think custodes have a ton of interesting intuitive stories to tell in the first place.

 Overread wrote:
I really don't get why GW hasn't fleshed out Sisters of Silence at the very least in 30K

to be fair, they have a pretty sizable army in 30k. some weaknesses, like a lack of true heavy support, but there's a good amount of variety that can even support several different playstyles

models for that army? that's another issue

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

Tyel wrote:
My take on Votann is that they are just weirdly normal.

There's lots of stuff in their new fluff that could be played on to make them... idk, Grimdark. Or at least unique.

But the mini range - and army rules - is painfully "Dwarfs in Spaaace".

As examples:
"We are all clones" - it doesn't matter.
"We have self-aware robots" - it doesn't matter.
We obey/worship hyper advanced machine intelligences that are breaking down - eh... it doesn't matter.

My problem with them is they're not even dwarfs in space. Nothing about them tells me dwarfs in space. They're as much dwarfs as the elves were elves in that aweful witcher spinoff series. They're old scale Space Marines with runes and Tau guns.

I think Age of Wonders Planetfall did Space Dwarves aesthetics much better:



The new Squats look like someone found a bunch of generic 80s sci-fi toys and tried to make them into a faction.