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.

I was making a proposed rules thread, about designing missions for factions that emphasize their skills and are more accurate to what they'd be doing in the lore... But I realized, the only one I had a solid idea for was Marines.

Obviously some factions are great for pitched battles (Guard, Nids, Orks) but of the factions that probably SHOULDN'T be fighting like happens on the tabletop, what should they be doing instead?

This already exists.
We call it Kill Team.

What factions shouldn't be fighting pitched battles?

And how do you define "pitched battle" - as it applies to the tabletop?

In my (probably unpopular) opinion a lot of factions should not even be full armies to fight pitched battles, but just a squad and/or character allied into a main force.

Kill Team is the obvious answer for doing things not on the epic armies clashing scale.

Crusade is another option. With agendas you have army-specific reasons for what they are doing there. Taking slaves, bioforming the planet, twisting the strands of fate. You are not just standing in circles to gain points, or meatgrindering the enemy. You have a plan.

 Nevelon wrote:
In my (probably unpopular) opinion a lot of factions should not even be full armies to fight pitched battles, but just a squad and/or character allied into a main force.

Kill Team is the obvious answer for doing things not on the epic armies clashing scale.

Crusade is another option. With agendas you have army-specific reasons for what they are doing there. Taking slaves, bioforming the planet, twisting the strands of fate. You are not just standing in circles to gain points, or meatgrindering the enemy. You have a plan.

...and your plan doesn't necessarily line up with the mission objectives which, for the record, I'm okay with. Sometimes, the battle isn't the point. Maybe it's a distraction to cover for taking slaves, for example.

 KingGarland wrote:
This already exists.
We call it Kill Team.

Kill Team doesn't really fit the vibe I'm going for. I do get your point, but Kill Team is still symmetrical-Marines, as the most well known ones, would have a decapitation strike mission. So you'd have the other side have a decent chunk of models, with a VIP that the Marines have to take down. Bonus points for the Marines surviving long enough to be extracted.

I think you first have to specify which factions you're thinking of to get an idea of what story/structure might work with them.

I can think of a few outliers; but often as note GW has already rolled them back into main forces. It also ignores the fact that most factions we see, even small ones, are still Galactic Small; which means they can still operate a huge standing army by modern day Earth standards.


Even the Eldar - the classic dying race - still have untold billions in population and that's before you get to their wraith constructs that they can call on.

If you drop down to Imperial Agents and Harliquins I can agree but they've also (at least right now) rolled back into being subfactions of main factions. Both still rely (typically) on allies from their core faction to build full armies; with it being rarer/niche to field a pure army

While GW suggests that 500 point games are exclusive to Boarding Actions, I've had fun with regular 40k at 500 points.

That said, I am a Crusader, and those are the missions I use. Agreed about the mention of Agendas above BTW- Agendas are one of the best parts of Crusade- they absolutely can be used as the building blocks of campaigns.

Map based campaign play (whether matched or Crusade) can be sweet with multiple 500 point armies- especially 500 point armies that can ally.

ccs wrote:
What factions shouldn't be fighting pitched battles?

And how do you define "pitched battle" - as it applies to the tabletop?

I believe JNA is referring to factions that generally avoid "fair fights" or battles where they're likely to take a high number of casualties. So for example, craftworlders would rather operate through cat's paws, manipulation, etc. And when they do have to use violence, they'd prefer to throw an overwhelming force against a horribly out-matched enemy to ensure victory and minimize how much it costs the eldar. Alpha Legion also come to mind. Sure, they'll take to the field of battle as needed, but ideally the enemy should be at a massive disadvantage, starting the fight with half their tanks demolished by booby traps, half their soldiers killed at the "top of turn 1" by a well-executed ambush, etc.

I think it's hard to represent most of these scenarios in a game of 40k even with a modified mission because it's hard to make it fun for your opponent to take on your 2k army with their 1k army because your eldar successfully outmaneuvered them or because the alpha legion sabotage efforts went off without a hitch. Those sorts of interactions can be cool, but people don't want to spend 2 irl hours getting their butts kicked to resolve them. Those sorts of things maybe make more sense as part of some kind of campaign-level quick interaction. Like playing your "Alpha Legion Sabotage" card and spending 10 seconds resolving it instead of 2 hours.

So with the above in mind, I think on-the-table representations of those sorts of things have to avoid being represented as some sort of massive points advantage or some other benefit that makes the game un-fun for one side. Instead, you have to focus on making the game play *differently* while still giving people the core experience of pew pewing eachothers' armies in a relatively even fashion.

So for eldar, maybe you do the BFG thing. That is, you give them missions where they're trying to engage the enemy and then withdraw in a hit & run style offensive. So they show up, have to kill specific enemy assets (warlords/characters/the most expensive non-character unit, etc.) and then have to get off the table, and you compare how many points of designated non-eldar were destroyed vs how many points of eldar were destroyed.

Or maybe you frame the mission as being innately one-sided in the enemy's favor with whatever asymmetrical tricks the "tricky" army has up their sleeve merely being a way to even the odds to give them a chance in the first place. So maybe the Alpha Legion army needs to kill a VIP at all costs. So maybe they start the game with some advantage (mass scout, weakened infiltrate, turn 1 reserves, whatever), but the enemy gets infinite respawns for their units. So the AL *must* fight their way through to an extremely defended VIP unit and end the game before they're inevitably drowned in reinforcements.

Basically, whatever cool trickery you give the tricky army has to be less or equally as advantageous as whatever huge benefit you give the non-tricky player. The starting premise has to be that the trickky army is using tricky tactics because they can't afford to just bully the enemy with overwhelming power.

I think Jake is right to call out Agendas and campaigns in general. Some Agendas let you accumulate some kind of resource or advantage that can be used to make future battles easier. And in the context of a style of campagin that allows armies to "power up" over time, this can essentially translate into short-term disadvantages for long-term advantages. So my sneaky alpha legion can spend a few missions focusing on harvesting blackstone, effectively keeping some units out of the fight as they hide and perform actions to achieve some of the pariah nexus agendas. And then once I'm ready for my efforts to pay off, they can show up sporting some big, flashy relics or other advantages and suddenly have a marked power advantage over opponents who weren't focusing on the long-game as much.

Campaigns that have a decent injury and retreat system can achieve something similar. If we're playing an attrition campaign where units can become permanently removed from your roster over time, then having my eldar show up, go for some easy kills, and then run away off the table before they take too many casualties in return can be a winning strategy in the long-term without any special mission being needed. It still makes them feel like they're "avoiding" a pitched battle in that they're just sort of poking at the enemy and prioritizing their own safety, even though they're bringing a 2k army to fight a 2k army.

I think a big reason it’s hard to represent this in 40K is that terrain is so awful rules wise, and the current game has stripped a lot of tactical depth to trip up on.
40K was never particularly good at it, but it could be used.

Most of this edition has been for us redoing our home rules to make it far better for narrative. But it becomes a point where we just are not playing current 40K half the time at all.

But I think every faction has the ability and when forced too play the pitched battle at the scale 40K is at.
And it can represent a lot of battles that come from attempts at gaining the advantage.

I actually wish apocalypse had been given a better chance, rather than turned into a joke event to just put everything on the table.

I suppose my problem with this sort of thing is that every military force is always trying to give themselves these kinds of advantages, so I can't really see why it should be limited to just some factions.

Old School Kill Team, where you had a protagonist Kill Team up against antagonist mooks and bosses was a good model for this sort of thing, and a game mode that resolved quickly so you could swap sides and let the other person be the protagonist for round 2.

But in reality most battles in history and the present are heavily asymmetric, and stand up fights are rare.

If we went back to the roots of wargaming, fighting with unbalanced forces is much more common in Historical wargaming.

Another answer is to have these games run with a GM who designs the scenario and can tweak it in play to ensure a fun experience for all involved.

But doing this in the pick up game environment where both players expect a fair shot at winning and they also want a pre-written scenario that will structure a fool proof game of that nature - I just don't think it really works all that well.

That said, you can also look at some of the missions in older editions of 40K. 3rd edition had awesome Raid missions that represented the sort of thing you're talking about - but hard to do it in modern 40K with no force org.

 PenitentJake wrote:
While GW suggests that 500 point games are exclusive to Boarding Actions, I've had fun with regular 40k at 500 points.

Another thing I've also found fun is using the boarding action rules and then just stack a ton of terrain onto a 4'x4' or 44"x44"your table. The more restrictive targeting rules and small units give a nice close quarter feeling, without playing the corridor/blastdoor/chokepoint game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
That said, you can also look at some of the missions in older editions of 40K. 3rd edition had awesome Raid missions that represented the sort of thing you're talking about - but hard to do it in modern 40K with no force org.

I used one of the raid missions (the one where where you democharge an objective) as the final mission of a crusade I organized this edition. There were six buildings in the imperial stronghold and they would lose if the last building was demolished. We also placed down some extra walls (think wall of martyrs, but self made) which could also be demolished if someone wanted to make a hole somewhere.
It worked really well.

The convoy has been in pretty much every edition, but never works too well. From 5th to 10th, game has always been to lethal to allow units under fire to escape. Arks of Omen had one which worked OKish because it had auto-turrets to prevent the attack from blocking the escape route.

The last one was the about destroying fortifications. If you give the "bunker" the stat line of the fortress of redemption it tends to work well enough. Another crusade I organized ended this way - an Imperal command bunker in the middle with Magnus approaching it form one side and Mortarion from the other.

FOC really isn't needed to make these scenarios work. People will naturally take the "right" units when they are told to attack or defend a position in advance.

I think there is also an aspect here that's not really discussed.

Marines physically cannot fight pitched battles. A real pitched battle would have millions of troops on the opposite side. Even a whole chapter of marines is not fighting a pitched battle against those numbers.


If marines are ever lined up and charging across no mans land like they're guardsmen, their mission has either gone horrendously awry and they're about to be gunned down by the superior numbers of their enemy, or they've found the unicorn moment where the only force they're facing is of the same size and also charging across no man's land.

No amount of marine armour and organs survives heavy bombardment and any frontal pitched assault is going to have far more heavy weapons then there are marines.


Marines are only designed for decapitation strikes and there is no good way to represent them fighting like guardsmen that doesn't give them ungodly amounts of ridiculous plot armour.


If craftworlders are caught in a pitched battle, things have gone wrong. None of their advantages are being used and they will suffer for it. they can still fight more conventional battles compared to marines, but even then on the scale of 40k their best position is an asymmetric one, even if not a super targeted decapitation strike ala marines.

Custodes are worse than marines at this and should never have been made an army.

Harlequins rarely actually fight wars in general and are more likely to show up as surprise allies to another faction that didn't expect it.

The armies that can line up with massed troops and charge at one another across no mans land are - orks, nids, guard, necrons, tau. Maybe Votann.


No other army has enough troops to do it.


The scale of a pitched battle is going to be dictated by the size of the biggest force - because pitched battles are massed troop deployments. and whoever has the most troops uses them.


The other side of this which is entirely unsatisfying but meets the technical demands, is the 'fog of war' effect where your 'clearly too small a force to ever fight a real pitched battle' faction is a zoomed in point on the total war map that's fighting their decapitation strike in the middle of a larger war.

It allows for a seemingly pitched battle for a faction that would never actually do it. But it means that your hero boys are not even a blip on the real battlefield. Marines are always playing second fiddle to the real war, so they aren't the protagonists of their own battle because they're stepping into someone else's.

 Da Boss wrote:
That said, you can also look at some of the missions in older editions of 40K. 3rd edition had awesome Raid missions that represented the sort of thing you're talking about - but hard to do it in modern 40K with no force org.

I used one of the raid missions (the one where where you democharge an objective) as the final mission of a crusade I organized this edition. There were six buildings in the imperial stronghold and they would lose if the last building was demolished. We also placed down some extra walls (think wall of martyrs, but self made) which could also be demolished if someone wanted to make a hole somewhere.
It worked really well.

The convoy has been in pretty much every edition, but never works too well. From 5th to 10th, game has always been to lethal to allow units under fire to escape. Arks of Omen had one which worked OKish because it had auto-turrets to prevent the attack from blocking the escape route.

The last one was the about destroying fortifications. If you give the "bunker" the stat line of the fortress of redemption it tends to work well enough. Another crusade I organized ended this way - an Imperal command bunker in the middle with Magnus approaching it form one side and Mortarion from the other.

FOC really isn't needed to make these scenarios work. People will naturally take the "right" units when they are told to attack or defend a position in advance.

That's cool! I liked the Force Org because it immediately sets you thinking on a different track and gives it a different "feel", like having limited Elites for example gives you the idea that this is not the front lines where all the really good troops are.

But you're right, players with a decent sense of things can easily do that without the guardrails.

In that context though, you were acting as a GM, which is honestly the best way to do this sort of thing.

Copping out with 'players figure it out' is my least liked form of rules design. That's a given on literally anything that exists, you don't need permission.

But when it's written in as if it's the designers giving you their ring to kiss for the special favour of allowing your own input into the game is just blegh.

And tournament players will loudly complain that the rules need to be balanced so they can have a fair game. And we accept that.

the same should hold true for non tournament players, expecting the game to provide you a fair base to play something more interesting that L - terrain DDR action zones is not unreasonable.

I didn't really do anything beyond setting up the mission and the table though. The games played out by themselves under the editions respective crusade rules without me interfering.
While 9th was still lacking in many ways, 10th edition's crusade has proven to support narrative play naturally without jumping through any extra hoops or artificial restrictions.

And yes, terrain is a fairly big part of the making a narrative game work. Rocks, containers, walls, stackable crates and solid buildings with platforms on them are direly needed as part of your terrain collection to get out the "DDR action zone" trap.

Yeah, it really highlights the issue with more specialized armies that, lore‑wise, shouldn’t be fighting pitched battles. Warhammer 40K rules force everything into the same kind of engagement, so factions like Space Marines, Adeptus Custodes, Genestealer Cults, Aeldari, etc., all end up playing the same style of game.

Instead of the current 40K setup—where you generally win by standing on certain points and performing certain actions—it would make more sense to have a more asymmetrical game. One side could be the attacker, the other the defender, with the attacker getting special bonuses, and the match built around acting out specific lore‑based scenarios.

Of course, there are huge issues with that approach. First, most 40K players only own a handful of armies, which greatly limits the scenarios they’d be able to play. Second, it’s extremely difficult to make asymmetrical missions both balanced and fun for both sides.

There’s also a logistical problem: if the game were more accurate to the lore, Astra Militarum or Tyranids would need ten times as many models as they do now, while Space Marines would only need a fraction of the models they currently field for a complete game.

 Calbear wrote:
Yeah, it really highlights the issue with more specialized armies that, lore‑wise, shouldn’t be fighting pitched battles. Warhammer 40K rules force everything into the same kind of engagement, so factions like Space Marines, Adeptus Custodes, Genestealer Cults, Aeldari, etc., all end up playing the same style of game.

Instead of the current 40K setup—where you generally win by standing on certain points and performing certain actions—it would make more sense to have a more asymmetrical game. One side could be the attacker, the other the defender, with the attacker getting special bonuses, and the match built around acting out specific lore‑based scenarios.

Of course, there are huge issues with that approach. First, most 40K players only own a handful of armies, which greatly limits the scenarios they’d be able to play. Second, it’s extremely difficult to make asymmetrical missions both balanced and fun for both sides.

There’s also a logistical problem: if the game were more accurate to the lore, Astra Militarum or Tyranids would need ten times as many models as they do now, while Space Marines would only need a fraction of the models they currently field for a complete game.

Ideally a standard game of 40K represents where two sides are focusing forces to complete an objective on a front line of the battlefield (this is actually what warmachine used as its narrative. The place where focus was places ether as offensive or defensive of a position.) weather 40K represents that well is a bit up for debate, but I think it does personally. It’s not that custodes are the only force in the battle, it’s just this is where they are at this moment, and without going to like 6mm scale for 40K you probably can’t do wider fronts on a tabletop. Apocalypse could do it, but I think that’s been such a joke that any value to narrative there is lost.

I also think terrain being so meh in 40K makes the battlefield itself feel off, from a visual often it’s just fighting over some rocks that maybe at some stage was some buildings, there isn’t the narrative of defending a city with civilians in it, or a base that absolutely needs defending at all costs. The rules make that awkward.

Wyldhunt wrote:And when they do have to use violence, they'd prefer to throw an overwhelming force against a horribly out-matched enemy to ensure victory and minimize how much it costs the eldar.

That's not how Eldar uniquely fight. That's how anyone fights, if they're not an idiot. The rule of thumb in the real world is a 3:1 force advantage for offensive operations, combined with whatever other assets (artillery, air support, psyops, sabotage, etc) can be leveraged to weaken the adversary's combat power.

Evenly matched pitched battles represent something going wrong. The enemy is much stronger than anticipated, the objective must be captured at any cost and there are no alternatives, miscommunication sends the Light Brigade off after the wrong target, and so on.

A fair fight is never the goal, but wargaming intrinsically focuses on the edge cases. Those are the battles that have drama and significance and happen for narratively interesting reasons. It's not fun to play one side slowly amassing forces and then sweeping an objective with no fanfare, or special forces conducting a well-prepped raid where they shoot five guys and extract the VIP in thirty seconds. It's fun to play the dramatic climactic battles, the ones that are significant because they were in contention despite the best efforts of the generals to avoid a fair fight.

I don't think the issue is that nobody ever fights a pitched battle. It's more that racking up magic victory points by standing on five tokens is so narratively abstract that it doesn't provide good 'hooks' to contextualize why you're fighting a pitched battle.

 Apple fox wrote:
I also think terrain being so meh in 40K makes the battlefield itself feel off, from a visual often it’s just fighting over some rocks that maybe at some stage was some buildings, there isn’t the narrative of defending a city with civilians in it, or a base that absolutely needs defending at all costs. The rules make that awkward.

And that ties in with the above, which is that it's hard to make a narratively thematic battlefield when the game relies on prescriptive terrain setups choked with LOS blockers to constrain lethality and maintain balance.

The scale of 40K is small enough that a Marine task force deploying to the enemy's command bunker to capture/kill the general (against great odds) is something that you can plausibly represent on the tabletop- provided you have a mission type for capturing VIPs, and rules that can support a thematically-arranged battlefield focused on a command bunker without going up in flames turn 1 for lack of L-shaped ruins.

 catbarf wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:And when they do have to use violence, they'd prefer to throw an overwhelming force against a horribly out-matched enemy to ensure victory and minimize how much it costs the eldar.

That's not how Eldar uniquely fight. That's how anyone fights, if they're not an idiot. The rule of thumb in the real world is a 3:1 force advantage for offensive operations, combined with whatever other assets (artillery, air support, psyops, sabotage, etc) can be leveraged to weaken the adversary's combat power.

Evenly matched pitched battles represent something going wrong. The enemy is much stronger than anticipated, the objective must be captured at any cost and there are no alternatives, miscommunication sends the Light Brigade off after the wrong target, and so on.

A fair fight is never the goal, but wargaming intrinsically focuses on the edge cases. Those are the battles that have drama and significance and happen for narratively interesting reasons. It's not fun to play one side slowly amassing forces and then sweeping an objective with no fanfare, or special forces conducting a well-prepped raid where they shoot five guys and extract the VIP in thirty seconds. It's fun to play the dramatic climactic battles, the ones that are significant because they were in contention despite the best efforts of the generals to avoid a fair fight.

Sure. I pretty much agree with all that. I think the distinction for eldar, alpha legion, etc. is that the smarty pants manipulative sneaky tactics are both a big selling point of the faction and also not usually represented very well on the tabletop.

So like, the power fantasy of World Eaters is (to be reductive) to basically just charge across the table and stab your way through whatever is in front of you. This is pretty easy to represent on the table with good melee stats, surge moves, etc. The power fantasy of my Alpha Legion is more the "You Activated My Trap Card!"[b] feeling of seeing a more obviously powerful enemy caught unawares or debuffed in a way that leaves them vulnerable to your smaller force, etc. And stuff like infiltrating a marine unit forward pre-game doesn't necessarily capture that feeling particularly well.

Understandable. Because starting every battle inside of a trap would be really unfun and frustrating for the opponent, but it feels like one of these factions gets to see their faction's gimmick on the tabletop and the other kind of doesn't. Or doesn't to the same degree.

If 40k were built around some sort of campaign system, I feel like the obvious answer would be to give factions like alpha legion or eldar big edges in the zoomed-out "campaign phase" but then make them less overtly powerful on the tabletop in a vacuum. But obviously that's not feasible with the 40k we have right now.

I don't think the issue is that nobody ever fights a pitched battle. It's more that racking up magic victory points by standing on five tokens is so narratively abstract that it doesn't provide good 'hooks' to contextualize why you're fighting a pitched battle.

I'm not sure how closely connected magic circles are to the topic at hand, but I do agree that they kind of take me out of the narrative of the game. (Despite being better mechanically than end of game scoring was back in the day.)

I remember having conversations like this back in the 90s

Broadly speaking, you have "Raider" factions and you have "Massed Battle" factions

Raider factions are Eldar (all types), Genestealer cultists, awakening Necrons, the Leagues, things like that

If these forces are engaged in a massed battle it's because something has gone very wrong for them.
These armies should be engaging in hit-and-run tactics. Their objectives should be tied to reaching areas within an enemy's deployment zone, assassinating targets, etc. They either do not have the numbers or the resilience to be engaging in large-scale pitched battles. Every Eldar life lost is a tragedy of generational proportions, and Genestealer Cult uprisings are goiing to be vastly outnumbered by the forces coming to quell them.

Massed Battle factions are the ones that have the resources, logistics and staying power to withstand a protracted conflict. These are your Astra Militarum, Orks, fully awakened Necrons, Tyranids, etc.
These forces can afford to engage in long drawn out sieges or bloody melees and weather numerous casualties, either because individual losses are cheap, or they have methods to revive them. They set up somewhere and either hold it, or march onwards and steamroller whatever they face

Space Marines and equivalent elite forces occupy an awkward middle ground in that they are small, but they project a force that far exceeds their number and they have enough staying power to withstand attacks. They are usually going to be fighting alongside other forces (one more capable of holding ground or weathering protracted conflicts) and they are deployed to give a Massed Battle force the mobility and ability to strike deep into enemy territory of a Raider force. Astartes operate on a scale between the two that vacillates depending on the particular forces involved.

The Death Guard are known for their massed Infantry assaults, but the majority of those infantry are not (in 40k at least) going to be the Marines themselves, they're going to be Cultists and Poxwalkers and a variety of infected beasts and nurglings that push ahead of the main advance. Iron Warriors are renowned for siege warfare but they aren't marching a thousand warriors into enemy gunfire, they're also using mortal forces to dig their trenches and weather the storm while they coordinate and perform strikes. Depending on their methods the Astartes (and Custodes, and sisters of silence) can operate either as a raider force or a massed battle force, depending on the size of the conflict and who they have to aid them.

When these forces face off against each other they may be operating with wildly divergent objectives and their win conditions may not even be mutually exclusive. A massive Imperial Guard force deployed to defend a manufactorum from an incoming Eldar attack may be completely unaware that the Eldar's actual objective is to eliminate a particular platoon leader fated to become a great foe, or to recapture a relic the Guard didn't know even existed. Asymmetric missions was something I loved about 2nd edition, where half the metagame was trying to figure out what your opponent was trying to do while keeping your own objective close to your chest.

After some thought and this thread, I think I’d like to design asymmetric and hidden scenarios. Notably for Eldar and Marines, given their proclivities, but ideally for every faction.

I’m at work, but expect a Proposed Rules thread later.

@Charax: That reminds me of a joke. How do you play a fluffy eldar army? Play orks and say you were tricked into krumping the enemy because you were chasing pointy-ears.

@JNA: Looking forward to seeing them!

Got two done so far. Plus some special rules for use.

eldar, dark eldar, space marines, gray knights, sisters of battle

BanjoJohn wrote:
eldar, dark eldar, space marines, gray knights, sisters of battle

Sisters of Battle are almost as numerous and ubiquitous as Guard. They ABSOLUTELY should fight pitched battles, and absolutely have in existing codex-based lore. The reason OoOML have the red in their colour scheme is because of the sheer number that died in one of the Armageddon Wars.

While I sort of agree about the others, I'd say that Drukhari CAN muster large forces... They just don't tend to stick around after surgically striking. So yeah... They don't fight pitched battles often... But not because they're incapable of it, but because it rarely serves their interest.

Grey Knights, similarly COULD fight a large battle, but they only ever would against a huge daemonic incursion.

But yeah, change the thread title to "Factions that usually don't Fight Pitched Battles..." and I'd agree on everyone, except Sisters.

 PenitentJake wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
eldar, dark eldar, space marines, gray knights, sisters of battle

Sisters of Battle are almost as numerous and ubiquitous as Guard. They ABSOLUTELY should fight pitched battles, and absolutely have in existing codex-based lore. The reason OoOML have the red in their colour scheme is because of the sheer number that died in one of the Armageddon Wars.

While I sort of agree about the others, I'd say that Drukhari CAN muster large forces... They just don't tend to stick around after surgically striking. So yeah... They don't fight pitched battles often... But not because they're incapable of it, but because it rarely serves their interest.

Grey Knights, similarly COULD fight a large battle, but they only ever would against a huge daemonic incursion.

But yeah, change the thread title to "Factions that usually don't Fight Pitched Battles..." and I'd agree on everyone, except Sisters.

Factions that avoid pitched battles is probably a good way to look at it, because even orks would move around to try and get an advantage. Tyranids as a hive move there force In which ever way it believes its forces will best serve.
All the eldar seem to be able too, but would avoid it. And then factions like tau seem to consider losses quite important as a factor.

It really does to me seem like when considering all the factions, the table top should represent a specific place on a battlefield that’s exciting for players to play. And push GW to make it as accessible to the theme as possible.

I actually think it’s where the rules of 40K sort of slide off where a lot of other games don’t. I have done recently several attacking and defensive scenarios in Battletech and even with odds stack against me, it was still a close game thanks to the way so many of the rules interact.
Warmachine I also think does well, or infinity.
But GW has gamify a lot of there games, to try and use a word to describe it. Very much like a boardgame, that really requires there specific set of circumstances to get feeling right.

This might sound like special pleading - but 40k doesn't really simulate a pitched battle.
The armies are too small.

The game instead represents a small force aiming to achieve some fairly limited objective tied up with the "magic victory points". Or I guess "Kill Team+".

That might be gathering/uploading intelligence or a technovirus.
Or finding an STC.
Or activating/deactivating some satellite based weapon platforms.
Or carrying out a ritual - or stopping a ritual.
Or holding the line for a small time so reinforcements can arrive/people can escape. Or in turn seizing a point so you can then break through and/or kill/capture all the civilians.

Most factions could fight a pitched battle - but the armies would be far larger. Guard for instance don't fight "battles" with say 100 guys and 3 tanks. Orks and Tyranids the same.

Honestly whenever you try and argue what the game on tabletop simulates it hits a brick wall. Fundamentally it doesn't represent anything and people head-cannon all kinds of arguments.

Consider that you have artillery, aircraft, rifles, snipers, close combat, infantry, tanks all squished into a space on terrain that basically often simulates a couple of buildings (which oddly enough are about the size of a few garden sheds or a very small house).


Does one model represent one thing; or a dozen; or a thousand? Is that even uniform?

It's a mishmash because its a game not a simulation. You can head canon everything from it being smallscale skirmishes up to huge wars

 Overread wrote:
It's a mishmash because its a game not a simulation. You can head canon everything from it being smallscale skirmishes up to huge wars

That's fair.
I guess the issue is that at a certain point head canon can have issues. If you want the game to simulate an effect you'd see in a battle between a million soldiers, its probably not going to be represented by moving one squad 6" forward and round a garden shed.