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 Orkeosaurus wrote:

So when I see a squad of guardsmen and they have some genestealers a mere 30 yards away from them, I tend to think of the chain of command and who's wounded as irrelevant; they'll consider that after the game, when they aren't seconds away from being ripped to shreds. But if you think of those genestealer models as representing a threat that's ten minutes away that does change things, and I don't think that question has a right answer because there just is no underlying logic keeping it consistent.

I think "how much time is a game of 40k meant to represent" is quite important for deciding "what should a Wargame have"?

Because there's quite a difference between a game representing a 3-5 minute action sequence (forget Movie Marines, its Movie Everything) - and a battle that takes place over an hour, a day, or a week.

 Hellebore wrote:

You can absolutely discuss what parts of warfare you want to model and how to make the game 'fun' as a result. But there will be a pyramid hierarchy of warfare challenges going from biggest impact to least impact that will naturally show which ones are more likely to be relevant and deleting them because the players don't want that challenge undermines the cohesion of what you're trying to represent. You can keep stripping 'unfun' warfare challenges out, but you are left with nothing to play.

I'm absolutely nitpicking here, so feel free to tell me to buzz off.

I'd argue that you might be misdiagnosing things slightly. We don't prioritize modeling things in a wargame based on the biggest impact; we prioritize them based on what's "cool"/"fun". Logistics is arguably one of the most important parts of warfare, but I'm not dying to make a bunch of pre-battle Spreadsheet Tests to see how many units of corpse starch my troops had for dinner the night before the battle. I'm being pedantic here, but I point out the distinction because pinning being "impactful" to irl warfare doesn't necessarily make it a priority for things to model on the tabletop, especially if the way it's modeled isn't necessarily entertaining.

These arguments keep conflating concepts with execution..I never claimed bad pinning should exist. But people.keep saying it should go because the implementation was bad. It's beholden to the designer to create good rules around necessary concepts. I think th concept of pinning is necessary which necessitates good execution for an enjoyable game experience. Removing the concept entirely is not a good execution.

I definitely get that you're not advocating for a bad implementation of pinning, and I should probably mention that I think a good implementation of it is a cool concept to include in the game. I just want to split hairs and point out that we don't necessarily *need* to include pinning to have a good game. Being a thing that's impactful during battle and being a thing that could hypothetically be implemented well don't necessarily mean that pinning deserves to be modeled on the tabletop. In the same way that we don't necessarily need Spreadsheet Tests even if you come up with an elegant mechanic to go along with them. Ultimately, the overall impact on the end gaming experience is what matters. But again, I'm just being annoyingly pedantic at this point.

Hence why personal feelings are a poor measure because if I'm playing someone who likes current 40k I want it changed and they don't, and vice versa with older editions.

Thus expectation management and objective design are better than personal preference.

I don't know. To torture an analogy... Anchovies are a thing that happens on pizza sometimes. Not everyone likes anchovies, and GW has a history of somehow cooking their anchovies poorly. Furthermore, GW has more recently switched to anchovie-less pizza that a lot of people seem to like.

It's fair for you to wish GW would provide a good anchovie pizza experience in the future, and it's fair to say that not all anchovie pizzas are bad just because GW has historically handled them poorly, but it's also fair enough if GW just decides to give up on anchovies so long as their pizzas are good in other, less fishy ways.

(But again, I think I agree with what you're saying on the whole. I, too, would like to see a bit more variety in strategy.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

So when I see a squad of guardsmen and they have some genestealers a mere 30 yards away from them, I tend to think of the chain of command and who's wounded as irrelevant; they'll consider that after the game, when they aren't seconds away from being ripped to shreds. But if you think of those genestealer models as representing a threat that's ten minutes away that does change things, and I don't think that question has a right answer because there just is no underlying logic keeping it consistent.

I think "how much time is a game of 40k meant to represent" is quite important for deciding "what should a Wargame have"?

Because there's quite a difference between a game representing a 3-5 minute action sequence (forget Movie Marines, its Movie Everything) - and a battle that takes place over an hour, a day, or a week.

The time a 40k battle is meant to take is kind of hard to figure out, too. Some things (like the flavor text on some secondaries) suggests that the actions you take on a given turn are taking you minutes if not hours. But it really drains any fast-paced action-packed feeling from the game to think that my fire prisms aren't engaged in a swooping, zooming firefight but are instead tossing out a handful of shots over the course of multiple hours.

I almost feel like time speeds up and the scale zooms-in the closer units are together. Guardsmen shooting at genestealers as they rush in are engaged in a panicked, close-quarters firefight. Artillery lobbing shells from the backfield are casually picking out targets over a leisurely fifteen minute time period per salvo. It's weird, and it does make it a bit more tricky to figure out what should and shouldn't be represented on the tabletop.

Personally, I've always felt "I need to stay behind this building this turn to avoid being shot" is a fine implementation of pinning.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:


Current 40k plays like a computer game where you figured out your optimal attack pattern and just press the same 5 buttons over and over again. Feels bad is when people don't get the victory they were expecting from their 5 button action.

Stack strategies, alpha strike, chuck as many dice as possible the end. There's no nuance at all. It's very binary.

I'm not exactly going to disagree, because the rules DO facilitate what you describe quite effectively. I understand what you and others dislike about modern 40k, and there are elements of 10th that I don't like much either.

But I do think that a great deal about "how the game plays" does depend on how you play it; I know that some people's control over the way they play is limited to some degree by external factors beyond their control, and I'm certainly not telling anyone they are playing wrong.

But when I play, the game doesn't feel like what you describe at all. I mean, I'm playing 500 point Crusade games using Boarding Actions rules with an overarching narrative that that is designed to escalate to 3k armies and incorporates Kill Team games into the campaign structure. It's a lot of work, but I take as much pride in the campaigns that grow my armies as much as I do about my armies.

500 point Crusade games combined with Kill Team side missions really does capture the warband feel of the Rogue Trader Era. It is the perfect format for exploring novel experiments like the WD Blanchitsu/ Pilgrim project. I think that was actually 7th or 8th ed, but man, systems like Crusade and Spec Ops really open the doors on campaign play; they're best when employed co-operatively by a small group of like minded players.

Now it's entirely possible that I may encounter some of the things you write about with more frequency once my armies grow to a more cumbersome size; I might also encounter these problems more often if I played a greater variety of opponents... I'm working on that, with another game scheduled in the last week of August once my vacation wraps up. I'm using the time until then to get the raiding party fully painted, and I might be able to snap off an Arena fight next week so that I can bring the proper Wych Cult models to the battle.

Granted, some people just don't like small games, and want all their games to be 2k, and that's a valid choice. Some people aren't going to want to invest as much time into protracted narratives, and that's a valid choice too. And some people have already tried every flavour of the game and still can't find one that feels the way they want it to feel. But if you haven't tried the small escalating warband style of campaigning, and you're disillusioned with stand-alone 2k games, it might be worth your while to try it before you invest in a whole other game. It might not work for you, but then again it might.

At the moment, it's doing a decent enough job to give me what I want from it. Good luck man.

I'm glad you're getting what you want from it, but the amount of work you're putting in makes it stone soup in my opinion.

Reminds me of DND where they kept pushing social interaction rules onto the players and only giving people punching rules. You could build a satisfying experience in non combat situations but you had to do it yourself. Many other games managed to do both.


Basically if the game can't offer you this itself, it's not well designed. GW relies on its loyal customers to do their work for them rather than put the effort in themselves.

Imperfect control in a wargame would be a fanatic way to design a game. The problem is that 40K is not designed with imperfect control as the standard.

Generally speaking, especially in later versions of 40K, you get to have your troops do exactly what you want them to do. They can move exactly this distance. They can choose to fire their weapons exactly the way you want them down to each weapon on each model. You always get to choose when you charge and who you charge. You lose exactly the models you want to out of an entire unit of models.

Then GW starts layering on small bits of imperfection, but mostly leaves you in charge of that also:

Want to Advance your unit? Roll the dice to determine your adjusted move and then move exactly where you want to go.

Charge distance is random, but you still get to move to exactly where you want to within that distance.

You can choose to Pile-In or Consolidate rather than them being compulsory, and then move exactly as you want to when doing so with some stipulations.

The reason for this is two-fold:

Not requiring you to do specific things means the rules are simpler. Fall Back and Regroup in 5th Edition took 2 pages of text. Battle-Shock in 11th is 1/4 a page (really half that since that quarter is half bullet points of the other half).

The game is short, so forcing you to do things feels bad. If you only get 5 turns to use your model, you don't want to lose a turn to a compulsory action. Compulsory moves (or non-moves) and loss of Shooting are a much bigger deal with it takes 20% of your choice with that unit away (1 of 5 turns) than it would be if the game was longer.

Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

I think more interesting would be a combination of less precision in actions along with graduated levels of Morale that can be mitigated by your choices.

For example, if you simplified movement overall, you could also have space for more randomized movement. I know some systems use a Squad Leader based movement where you move the SL and then move the other models to within a certain distance of them. If you did that, you could have lots of movement semi-randomized (talking 4" + 1d3" instead of always 6") to create the ability to underachieve your target if not being conservative. Could be a bit too gamey for some, but could also be interesting to fail on occasion.

On the Morale side, unit can be less effective as they lose Cohesion, with more and more effects as they lose more and more Cohesion. You can take time to Regroup up to higher levels, spending some of your actions to get back up. It would wouldn't be "I failed one roll and am screwed", instead being "I failed multiple rolls and made choices that left me in a really bad state".

Wyldhunt wrote:So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Epic: Armageddon does this- you need to pass a command check to issue any order you want to a formation. If you fail, you can still issue a basic order that lets the unit move or shoot, just no moving triple or assaulting into melee and so on.

The depth, and the element of control, comes from the fact that you can try to order multiple units in a row, but with a penalty to the check. You also take a penalty if the unit is under fire. So there's an element of gambling on whether it's worth risking failing that test, whether you should just hedge your bets and let your opponent activate, or whether you should prioritize a unit in combat (and more likely to fail) or bring in support instead before the enemy can disrupt it too.

Giving the player choices that influence the odds is how you make randomness fun, IMO. But everyone has different tolerance for different amounts of loss of control- I remember a lot of people didn't like the Synapse rules for Tyranids that required you to take a Ld check or go on autopilot, and that was a mechanic you absolutely had a lot of control over.

 catbarf wrote:

Giving the player choices that influence the odds is how you make randomness fun, IMO. But everyone has different tolerance for different amounts of loss of control- I remember a lot of people didn't like the Synapse rules for Tyranids that required you to take a Ld check or go on autopilot, and that was a mechanic you absolutely had a lot of control over.

Because it was different tables in which pretty much all the results except rolling 6s were awful.

So it wasn't just an issue of losing control, it was an issue that the unit in question could easily and likely be permanently out of the fight by either killing itself or running out of the table.

The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

 Jayden63 wrote:

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

Yeah, I looked at my list.
It went up about 30 points. That's, uh... Not much.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

That's why it's important to kill them ALL.
If you shoot at something, make it go away.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Jayden63 wrote:

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

Yeah, I looked at my list.
It went up about 30 points. That's, uh... Not much.

This says you are not using the “best” units in the Codex. Every unit in the Lone Star Open winning list has a points increase as does one of the 2 Enchantments taken.

Now that is theoretically a good thing since they are not punishing the entire army for the sins of the most efficient units.

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

That's why it's important to kill them ALL.
If you shoot at something, make it go away.

Sometimes the lasgun brigade couldn't kill them all, especially when a Land Raider Crusader just Hurricane Boltered away your heavy weapon guys in the same turn it regurgitated a blob of Templars on your doorstep.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

Yeah. I'm not ready to defend the idea, but I do wonder if that sort of thing might be better received if it were an army-wide thing for most/all armies. It would dramatically change up the game, making it much more of a "wind up your toys and watch them walk towards eachother" situation, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a terrible thing? Letting players automatically pass the test to have better control over a certain number of units each turn would mean you'd be guaranteed to pull off at least a few of the most critical maneuvers each turn, and I could see a lot of room for fun mechanics representing the various ways that different factions go about controlling their armies. Marine leadership meaning that they're more likely to pass the leadership check, guardsmen issuing orders via vox networks, tyranids auto passing while within range of synapse units, etc.

Players would have to be okay with the idea that big chunks of their army might opt to go on autopilot and behave suboptimally, but managing that could be a fun game in its own right and add to the feeling that you're in the role of the commander trying to get your orders through the fog of war to your troops. It might even give "psychology factions" like night lords a little more room to operate. Give them rules for making enemies more likely to go on autopilot (and thus easier to plan around) or else change up the behavior of enemy units when they do go on autopilot (ex: forcing them to run for cover instead of marching forward and shooting.)

Idk. Could be cool to see the idea fleshed out.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

Yeah. I'm not ready to defend the idea, but I do wonder if that sort of thing might be better received if it were an army-wide thing for most/all armies. It would dramatically change up the game, making it much more of a "wind up your toys and watch them walk towards eachother" situation, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a terrible thing? Letting players automatically pass the test to have better control over a certain number of units each turn would mean you'd be guaranteed to pull off at least a few of the most critical maneuvers each turn, and I could see a lot of room for fun mechanics representing the various ways that different factions go about controlling their armies. Marine leadership meaning that they're more likely to pass the leadership check, guardsmen issuing orders via vox networks, tyranids auto passing while within range of synapse units, etc.

Players would have to be okay with the idea that big chunks of their army might opt to go on autopilot and behave suboptimally, but managing that could be a fun game in its own right and add to the feeling that you're in the role of the commander trying to get your orders through the fog of war to your troops. It might even give "psychology factions" like night lords a little more room to operate. Give them rules for making enemies more likely to go on autopilot (and thus easier to plan around) or else change up the behavior of enemy units when they do go on autopilot (ex: forcing them to run for cover instead of marching forward and shooting.)

Idk. Could be cool to see the idea fleshed out.

That would be very cool and definitely is something I could see working in many games, just not in GW ones. There would probably be very many exceptions to this sort of rule that would quickly make it something for NPC factions to deal with while plenty of other armies get away scot free. Just like basically all leadership things in the history of 40k. I also fear that it might very easily lead to deathstars becoming an even bigger deal than they already are because they will also be guaranteed to be in control.

But generally, it would be really cool.

Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

The target priority stuff wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It actually forced people to consider how to move across the field and not just ram everything up the center. It actually helped make the game feel tactical.

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test? Because that always struck me as the biggest problem with a lack of control over unit targeting.

It's one thing to have to shoot your bolters at some gaunts instead of the warriors behind them. It's another thing altogether to waste your devastators' lascannon shots on those gaunts instead of shooting the hive tyrant.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test?

No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

It was pretty intuitive - it was:

1: What's the closest threat? Shoot it
2: are there bigger threats in range than the closest one? See 1.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test? Because that always struck me as the biggest problem with a lack of control over unit targeting.

It's one thing to have to shoot your bolters at some gaunts instead of the warriors behind them. It's another thing altogether to waste your devastators' lascannon shots on those gaunts instead of shooting the hive tyrant.

IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

 Jayden63 wrote:

The target priority stuff wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It actually forced people to consider how to move across the field and not just ram everything up the center. It actually helped make the game feel tactical.

I don't remember it feeling more tactical, but it sure felt more like a wargame. I actually played 4th last year and it isn't rose colored glasses - the game feels as I remember it.

Also as Arschbombe pointed you still had to shoot at the closest enemy monster and tank and you could ignore targets which are not eligible (can't see them, are in combat etc) or are fallling back.

Arschbombe wrote:No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

Hm. I've probably just been away from competitive play for too long, but that seems pretty fun and reasonable, actually. It would give cheaper screening units and even cheaper monsters/vehicles more of a job by keeping your heavy hitters safe, and it would make positioning/deployment that much more important. It feels like there should maybe be some rule that lets you ignore the lone termagant you failed to kill, but that's not a huge thing.

waefre_1 wrote:
IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

That was a thing through 7th edition, iirc, so I imagine it was a thing in 4th too. That seems like a pretty easy fix though. Let units split fire per now, but:

* No shooting at more than 2 units at a time to avoid complicated scenarios.
* Let units shoot at the closest big thing OR non-big thing automatically. Shooting at the non-closest big or little thing requires a Ld test.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Arschbombe wrote:No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

Hm. I've probably just been away from competitive play for too long, but that seems pretty fun and reasonable, actually. It would give cheaper screening units and even cheaper monsters/vehicles more of a job by keeping your heavy hitters safe, and it would make positioning/deployment that much more important. It feels like there should maybe be some rule that lets you ignore the lone termagant you failed to kill, but that's not a huge thing.

waefre_1 wrote:
IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

That was a thing through 7th edition, iirc, so I imagine it was a thing in 4th too. That seems like a pretty easy fix though. Let units split fire per now, but:

* No shooting at more than 2 units at a time to avoid complicated scenarios.
* Let units shoot at the closest big thing OR non-big thing automatically. Shooting at the non-closest big or little thing requires a Ld test.

Not sure if this was 3rd or 4th, but I remember shoot the big ones allowed units to "shield" units behind them that were up to one size category larger. So gaunts shielded warriors, warriors shielded tyrants. It promoted sending in a wave of smaller gribblies first, I remember really liking it.