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I was watching a couple streams of games, trying to figure out how to play Custodes...

And I noticed something odd.

A lot of players will not use all of their ranged attacks, especially on vehicles.

For instance, I noticed that most people never use the Rhino Storm Bolter.

Sometimes, I know it's because firing at Imperial Knight or Angron seems like a waste of time, but it feels odd not to at least attempt the attack.

Or shooting at a block Termagaunts won't do much.

Is it forgetfulness, or is there something I'm missing?

Time limits, sometimes.
If you need to move fast, a Bolter into a Primarch is a waste of time.

Unless I actually forget, I always shoot everything. More then once a stray bolt pistol shot has plinked a wound that turned out to be important off something.

Time savings is one. Statistically it might not be relevant, but the mechanics take time to process.

Sometimes you don’t want to shoot for tactical reasons. If you land a unit 9” away from something, that charge is going to be dicy to make in the first place. If you shoot your pistols and kill a guy or two? If the closest guys are removed, you might now be looking at a 10-11” charge, which is even more unlikely.

Overkill is another reason. If said assault blender is about to plow into something with a zillion powerfists, more then enough to reduce the target to a lingering mist, do you want to spend the time popping a few bolt rounds into them? They will be dead in a phase anyway...

Is this a stream where they show "everything", or a slightly abridged version where they perhaps cut that stuff out? (Although frankly even 3-4 hour streams often fast roll stuff to save time and only flag it to the audience if you get to making armour saves.)

You might deliberately not shoot a unit because you want it alive to charge. But while shooting say a Knight with a Rhino's storm bolter is probably a waste of time, I can't really see why you wouldn't.

I think time pressure comes into it, but also if you have a lot of shots you might feel awkward if you are shooting bolt pistols into something tough. saying that, i really do try and fire everything when playing CSM as Lethal Hits make such a difference

Time constraints and also just real-world pacing. Like, if I know I have a few Strength 4 shots floating around that I haven't resolved yet, but they'd be unlikely to accomplish anything, I might just opt not to shoot them for the sake of not turning my turn into a slow, boring slog.

Do you consider it bad form to fire weak weapons at a tough target?

I forgor.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Do you consider it bad form to fire weak weapons at a tough target?

No.

Anything has a chance to take a wound off. And our 6-sided little friends are fickle as all get out. We’ve all see things hanging on by their last wound. Sometimes we plink it off with a lucky shot on the last turn. But other times? It would not be on that last wound if the lucky shot had landed on turn 2. But if you don’t take it, it will never happen.

I will never begrudge someone firing stuff that I could potentially, even with just a small chance, effect the game.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Do you consider it bad form to fire weak weapons at a tough target?

Nope.
My goal is to chip wounds off targets. To that end I will fire everything at my disposal + the kitchen sink at a target.
+ I find it amusing when my Gretchin take down things like Terminators.

I had a game where I shot a drop pod with my soul grinder once, its bolter was going to cost me the win on a lucky turn. Games can go weird, but usually I think you can math it out if the chance even makes a difference unless you get basically perfect results now. So an extra wound or two probably doesn’t matter a lot of the time.

The way attacks in 40k are resolved is very old-fashioned, design-wise: too multi-step, too long, clunky and tedious and hardly interactive. To be fair it's a pretty boring menial process that already takes up too much time, compared to actual gameplay. No surprise players just skip this process when results aren't going to be relevant, to avoid wasting everyone's time and to faster get back to doing something actually interesting.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Do you consider it bad form to fire weak weapons at a tough target?

It's never considered bad form, but it's widely accepted practice if you have limited time to play. The reasons for that vary - tournament time limits, you ride home being at fixed time, wife and children at home waiting, venue closing down, etc.

Most people simply prefer to play a game to its conclusion rather than fish für fractions of a percentage chance to deal a wound.

Me personally? I wouldn't be an ork player if I didn't want to roll the maximum amount of dice every game

I’ve long encouraged cheeky pot shots.

Time issue aside (because fair enough), back when we dealt with AV on vehicles? I’ve caused more than a few upsets by shooting something in the rear with Bolt Pistols and taking it out.

Not a tactic I’d ever rely on, but sometimes there’s just nothing else to shoot at, and the look on your opponent’s face was always, always worth it when it worked!

Can be a few reasons

1) Statistically very unlikely to do anything. If the attack is unlikely to achieve anything at the viable targets then it might well be worth not bothering in the view of the player.

2) Abridged game video that cuts out some of the waste moments. Videoing games is hard and sometimes cutting out wasted moments can speed things up and keep it feeling more action heavy and intense

3) Forgot - warhammer has a lot of rules; elements that change a good bit (3 year cycle) and someone on a video might well run several armies. So its very possible to forget.

4) Time pressure - sometimes you're against the clock and its more important to finish promptly so you might well cut out things like weak attacks which are seen as less likely to produce a result so that you've more time to do the big things.

5) Different rule edition. Esp if you've found yourself on an older video don't forget that the rules might be different. People don't always state the edition number, esp if recording during a "current" edition. Might be there was a rule reason that the weaker weapon wasn't able to attack (eg different range). It could even be that the attack is even weaker/less likely to do anything than the current.

Note that some of these can add up - eg time pressure might mean that you forget more steps because you're more focused on the time aspect than the game. Which causes you to be more likely to forget

Also warhammer gets fans who like stats, no matter if they are good at them or not. So some people will make calls based on what they think the numbers will turn out to be.

Heck there's players who math-out the whole win-loss purely from the army lists involved.

If you're watching a stream I'm sure they don't want to bore the audience. In my home games, with no time constraint, I shoot pretty much everything.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ve long encouraged cheeky pot shots.

Time issue aside (because fair enough), back when we dealt with AV on vehicles? I’ve caused more than a few upsets by shooting something in the rear with Bolt Pistols and taking it out.

Not a tactic I’d ever rely on, but sometimes there’s just nothing else to shoot at, and the look on your opponent’s face was always, always worth it when it worked!

I don't think that example compares well to the type of shooting people are skipping. penetrating on 6 and then neutering a whole unit on a 5+ is great odds compared to wounding on sixes to then get a one in six chance to take off a single wound off a 10+ wound tank.

During those times, unit of ork shootas had a decent shot at wrecking a chimera from the side. In 10th a whole unit of shootas doesn't even average a whole wound. In theory, that wound might make a difference in the end, but in reality you either overkill that transport because it needed to be stopped/scored VP or it's alive because you had better things to do than shoot an empty transport.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Do you consider it bad form to fire weak weapons at a tough target?

Nah. But also sometimes those little shots here and there just aren't likely to matter. I play a lot of 2v2 games, so I try to be mindful of not leaving anyone sitting around twiddling their thumbs for an extended period of time. So if I have the option to spend 5 minutes resolving a few potshots here and there that have a very low chance of making a difference, especially if I'm pretty confident I'll be able to kill what I want to kill in the fight phase, I might opt not to shoot some of those fiddly little weapons just for the sake of keeping people engaged.

If my handful of banshee pistol shots floating around could be the deciding factor in whether or not my opponent's dreadnaught goes down, you can bet I'll be resolving those pistol shots. But if I'm about to charge 10 banshees into 3 intercessors, maybe I don't bother pausing to resolve some pistol shots.