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In any tabletop war-game, especially ones in a “sci-fi/fantasy” setting, perhaps the most iconic and archetypal battle is the “horde versus elite” showdown. Who wins between the grizzled veterans or the faceless, overwhelming horde?

Unfortunately this exceptionally engaging narrative foundation is completely undermined by the mechanics of gameplay itself.

As anyone who has ever suffered the misfortune of moving or playing against someone moving 75-100 infantry models in turn as they struggle to agonistically position each one in rubble, or a forest and so on knows. It is boring and awful. It has no redeeming qualities in any way, whatsoever. Even if one tries to be fully immersed in the deep strategy of it all “I must position these soldiers one by one in such a way to maximise shooting/cover saves/ etc etc” knows deep down inside that the tedium of actually going through those motions really does undermine the intrigue of a compelling game of strategic wit.

In my last 40k game as I limped along with my fluffy and terrible Tyranid list: a termagant horde led by Tervigons (god they’re awful!) simply shoving a tumbling mass of plastic jumble across the board I realised, enough is enough. I’m not doing this anymore.

I found some tarot cards, which are very illustrative and arcane and look great face up on the tabletop. I took some poster tack and stuck the Gaunts onto the cards. Boom - flexible movement trays.

Next I measured the cards length and width. When Serious Rules Lawyering times emerged, such as wanting to move my horde into buildings and so on, we simply did some geometric measurements and applied approximate values: how many can fit inside the volume of the terrain foot print? How many of that volume are in range to shoot?

We found this to be a fantastic solution. Maybe it doesn’t work in “meta”, but I’m skeptical of that. 40k falls apart when your opponent looks to game edge-cases no matter how “by the book” you try and play it.

All of a sudden my movement phase took a fraction of the time. Because its poster tack the models can be easily moved and assembled into other formations as needed or positioned in specific ways.

When I realised I had essentially just created what fantasy/historic war-games have done for decades once again, I finally accepted that unit formations and the simple geometry of “battle lines” and particular formations that are found in other wargaming rules are vastly superior and more elegant solutions.

40k is a skirmish game being played on a mass scale, and it is completely going in two contradictory directions at the same time for that very reason. If the rules designers don’t confront some of these clunky mechanics, the game will suffer a deep identity crisis in coming editions.

For now it is fine as it holds me out until the Old World returns and I enjoy other various skirmish fantasy rulesets and so on.

For 40k to thrive in the way it works it needs, imo, to return to a size approximate to what one finds in LOTR SBG. But that is a bit of a tangent.

The point of this: horde players, use playing cards as your movement trays. Free yourselves from the tedium of positioning. You’re fighting a losing battle anyway. Use geometry and reason with your opponent. Or just play Custodes. Either way: free yourself.

Part of this is the design consideration:

Do we need to know the position of every individual model for rules reasons? If so, we should be playing a game where the armies are small enough that this is not onerous.

If we don't need to know the position of every individual model, we can scale up game size and use appropriate tools (e.g. movement trays, Unit Leaders as a unit "centerpoint" with abstract LOS rules, etc etc).

If it works for you keep doing it! I've been thinking about adding some movement trays to help sped things up for a few of my large model count armies for sure. What I have in mind is that over half my unit will be on some kind of tray with the rest being just around those for the flexibility. I think this will help in the first few turns but be less important in the mid to late game as I take my casualties. Even with out movement trays I just move out my front models and scoot my back model up. It's worked well enough for me but ya, anything to save a little extra time. Not that I expect to field huge armies in 9th now where near the 120+ Orks now. My conscripts on the other hand, this should help them a lot. I don't really play timed events or anything but I am also not trying to slow play my games.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Part of this is the design consideration:

Do we need to know the position of every individual model for rules reasons? If so, we should be playing a game where the armies are small enough that this is not onerous.

If we don't need to know the position of every individual model, we can scale up game size and use appropriate tools (e.g. movement trays, Unit Leaders as a unit "centerpoint" with abstract LOS rules, etc etc).

This. w40k feels like a non skirmish system , considering the number of models used, run with a system that tries to be a skirmish system. Stuff like true LoS has no space in a game which often is played with tens of models per side.

What is really boring is to roll countless dice for no result. Looking at you, Custodes, or any other unkillable elite oriented army. The solution is to play Orks, or any other horde army .

Isn't 150 models armies a good the representation of a skirmish battle? In real life large scale battles are fought with thousands of soliders and vehicles.

 Blackie wrote:
What is really boring is to roll countless dice for no result. Looking at you, Custodes, or any other unkillable elite oriented army. The solution is to play Orks, or any other horde army .

Isn't 150 models armies a good the representation of a skirmish battle? In real life large scale battles are fought with thousands of soliders and vehicles.

Don't confuse "skirmish" wargame with "skirmish" battles.

Skirmish wargame is a term derived from back in the day when, in Napoleonic games, players wanted to investigate the use of "skirmisher" units (that did not fight in rifle lines like the rest of the army!). This new emphasis on the position of individual models, combined with the fact that skirmisher units were considerably smaller than line units, meant that such "skirmish" games were fundamentally different, mechanically, from larger mass battle games.

A "skirmish" in real life isn't really related at all save sharing the same name.

Proper skirmish wargames are something like Necromunda, which are played with 5-10 models per faction, at most.

Elite armies in 40k have 30-40 typically, which are way more models (4x to 8x).

I'm curious what GW is going to do with Nids. They've definitely dis-incentivized taking lots of horde units.

 Blackie wrote:
Proper skirmish wargames are something like Necromunda, which are played with 5-10 models per faction, at most.

Elite armies in 40k have 30-40 typically, which are way more models (4x to 8x).

Hence the problem in this thread...

I suspect they won’t do anything.

What they could do is use large bases with multiple gaunts, degrading profiles, and special rules like “Damage is reduced to 1” to prevent lascannons from blowing the whole base off the table.

Would speed things up in movement, but not effect much else.

40k's rules have always been a bit of a mess when model counts are low or high. TLOS and finicky unit coherency have absolutely no place in a game where you can easily have 200 models on a table. Yet they've gone towards making unit coherency even finickier in 9th, not less finicky.

A less proud, more sensible company would have adopted cloud coherency and abstract LOS a decade ago. At this point it just feels like stubbornness that they refuse to do so.

I had thought it would be a neat idea if Tyranids and Orks recycled their units. In Andy Chamber's Starship Troopers (1st edition) you could even buy infrastructure, including holes for the Bugs to recycle dead bugs back onto the board. My notion would be while 10 Ork Boyz or 10 Termagants are easy enough for 10 Space Marines to kill, the question is whether they can kill enough (six turns worth these days right?). Since it's Warhammer you could roll to see if they came back on the board with bonuses for synapse and penalties for units being monsters and characters.

Especially now that templates are gone, it seems weird that we're still doing everything on a per-model basis.

Maybe something like assigning unit leaders to units (could be a single leader or maybe something like 1 per 5 models). So for 30 gaunts, you'd only need to worry about the positions of 6 models, with the rest effectively just being wound-counters. Something like that, at any rate.

Until that happens, I think stuff like movement trays are a good idea. I played against a nid player a while back who used plastic ones (possibly the round-to-square conversion ones for WHFB). It did make movement a lot quicker, especially since neither of us were interested in pedantry on that front.

If you're looking for a 40k style skirmish game, you'd be better served with either Necromunda or Kill Team.

As for 40k itself, it's never really bothered me. I play a fair few horde armies, but I don't get too picky about what unit was where. Even back in the days when blast templates were a thing, I just took my extra hit or two because I didn't want to be "that guy" that had to have each of his 50 freaking conscripts exactly 2" apart because I had a single missile launcher... but I digress.

My point it, if you're not playing super competitive, it shouldn't matter, to be fast and loose with your movements so long as your trying to play fair. I'll carefully measure the first model, then just pick up four or five and move them to about the right spot. If you are playing competitive, people are likely to get annoyed no matter which of these methods you use.

 Nurglitch wrote:
I had thought it would be a neat idea if Tyranids and Orks recycled their units. In Andy Chamber's Starship Troopers (1st edition) you could even buy infrastructure, including holes for the Bugs to recycle dead bugs back onto the board. My notion would be while 10 Ork Boyz or 10 Termagants are easy enough for 10 Space Marines to kill, the question is whether they can kill enough (six turns worth these days right?). Since it's Warhammer you could roll to see if they came back on the board with bonuses for synapse and penalties for units being monsters and characters.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if that's where GW is going with nids. Orks got T5 as their gimmick but lost their respawn stratagem, probably to help differentiate the two main horde xenos factions. I wouldn't be surprised if gaunts retain the same stats but get free respawns.

 vipoid wrote:
Until that happens, I think stuff like movement trays are a good idea. I played against a nid player a while back who used plastic ones (possibly the round-to-square conversion ones for WHFB). It did make movement a lot quicker, especially since neither of us were interested in pedantry on that front.

I just checked and GW actually still sell the Apocalypse movement trays for some reason. That game had the best way to deal with hordes - just keep track of damage then remove the whole unit at once like a monster.

@xttz: I've been expecting free respawns for Tyranids since 3rd edition, even though it was a thing in the seminal 2nd edition codex for the Tyranid Attack mission.

Also, I buy those Apocalypse movement trays. They're fantastic!

My Salamanders killed sooooooooo many guants due to that mission.

What I used to do with my hordes back when I ran green tide in fifth edition was to put a "footprint" unit on the table and leave the rest in the case.

So I'd have a ring of about 12 ork boys on the table, with enough room in the middle that I could put the other 18 if I needed to. The ring indicates the entire area the unit would take up without all of the tedium of moving so many models. So instead of shuffling 120 Ork boys around I was only moving about 40 or so.

This was of course purely casual games though and I'd pre agreed with my group that I was allowed to do it.

IMHO movement trays need to become a thing for hoard armies.

I think the slowness factor is compounded with Gaunts because they don't do anything. Ork Boyz' gimmick doesn't work anymore, but when it did, you'd take 30 of 'em and Da Jump them and they'd be right killy in melee. Guardsmen don't do a ton of damage but you had orders to turn them into heroes. Termagants... die. They're weaker than Guardsmen and Ork Boyz, and they shoot worse unless you pay a bunch of points for devourers. Okay, then, maybe that's not a bad idea, but they're less hordey because you get fewer of them.

Gaunts, like almost everything else Tyranids have, are just appreciably worse than corresponding units for some reason. Those Gaunt carpet lists win by clogging up objectives until they've been held long enough that your opponents can't win. How is that fluffy and Tyranid-esque? I think fixing Hormas is pretty easy. Make them faster, make them S4, and give 'em more attacks. They can still hit on 4s but make them more like Boys, trading buffability for speed. I don't know how I'd fix Termagants -- the respawning fix isn't awful but I'd like to see Termagants hit harder and maybe take a hit a little better too. In the fluff, they're the size of Dobermann Pinschers (I've seen descriptions that they're larger than that too) with chitin plating; why does that translate to T3 6+ Sv?

Now, I say all this and I think it's important that Nids lists retain that hordability -- I wouldn't want to change Gant stats too much. But Mr. Samsa, that situation you described pre-solution, and the sensation of running Nids period are... kafkaesque

ETA from Lexicanum: Gants are 2m long, 1.3m tall, and weigh 400 pounds -- no, they're not a Space Marine, but sure doesn't make sense that they're less hardy than a Guardsman.

BrianDavion wrote:
IMHO movement trays need to become a thing for hoard armies.

They are a thing. Have been for decades.
You just don't need any official rule/product in order to use them. I know, that must baffle some players....

I thought GW had done something about horde armies?

1. Blast weapons kill any "horde" of 6+ models more efficiently.
2. "Hordes" of 6 or more models suffer from idiotic coherency rules.
3. The morale or "more casualties that I can't save against!" phase kills off whoever survived after point 1.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I thought GW had done something about horde armies?

1. Blast weapons kill any "horde" of 6+ models more efficiently.
2. "Hordes" of 6 or more models suffer from idiotic coherency rules.
3. The morale or "more casualties that I can't save against!" phase kills off whoever survived after point 1.

Hey, don't forget about the co$t!
Doesn't really effect players who already have hordes, but I've definitely seen it deter people from building new "horde" forces.

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:
I think the slowness factor is compounded with Gaunts because they don't do anything. Ork Boyz' gimmick doesn't work anymore, but when it did, you'd take 30 of 'em and Da Jump them and they'd be right killy in melee. Guardsmen don't do a ton of damage but you had orders to turn them into heroes. Termagants... die. They're weaker than Guardsmen and Ork Boyz, and they shoot worse unless you pay a bunch of points for devourers. Okay, then, maybe that's not a bad idea, but they're less hordey because you get fewer of them.

I suspect two-point Devourers are GW's hot-patch for Termagaunts. They're three times better in shooting without even considering the longer threat range, going from 150 to 210 for a full squad is well worth it. And being less numerous isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I still hope they do something to make the base Termagaunt better in the 9th ed codex though, if only to make Tervigons less woeful. As-is they're completely pointless.

I started using movement trays for my 'Nids after I got some pointers in a 6E escalation league (first time I'd used a horde force).

Doesn't GW still make and sell them? I know they released some for the latest Armageddon a few years back. Etsy is full of them, and making them from scratch is probably one of the easiest modeling projects out there (they're just big bases).

Personally, I think someone who doesn't use movement trays these days for their horde army needs to be Dreadsocked.

Am I the only one that doesn't see any issue in moving hordes of models?
It usually takes a really short time compared to the other phases.
What really really eats time when playing hordes are the dices. If you want to change something to make things faster, act there, implement combined attacks or things like that.

Movement is the lesser of the issues.

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:
I think the slowness factor is compounded with Gaunts because they don't do anything. Ork Boyz' gimmick doesn't work anymore, but when it did, you'd take 30 of 'em and Da Jump them and they'd be right killy in melee. Guardsmen don't do a ton of damage but you had orders to turn them into heroes. Termagants... die. They're weaker than Guardsmen and Ork Boyz, and they shoot worse unless you pay a bunch of points for devourers. Okay, then, maybe that's not a bad idea, but they're less hordey because you get fewer of them.

Gaunts, like almost everything else Tyranids have, are just appreciably worse than corresponding units for some reason. Those Gaunt carpet lists win by clogging up objectives until they've been held long enough that your opponents can't win. How is that fluffy and Tyranid-esque? I think fixing Hormas is pretty easy. Make them faster, make them S4, and give 'em more attacks. They can still hit on 4s but make them more like Boys, trading buffability for speed. I don't know how I'd fix Termagants -- the respawning fix isn't awful but I'd like to see Termagants hit harder and maybe take a hit a little better too. In the fluff, they're the size of Dobermann Pinschers (I've seen descriptions that they're larger than that too) with chitin plating; why does that translate to T3 6+ Sv?

Now, I say all this and I think it's important that Nids lists retain that hordability -- I wouldn't want to change Gant stats too much. But Mr. Samsa, that situation you described pre-solution, and the sensation of running Nids period are... kafkaesque

ETA from Lexicanum: Gants are 2m long, 1.3m tall, and weigh 400 pounds -- no, they're not a Space Marine, but sure doesn't make sense that they're less hardy than a Guardsman.

It's worth noting that the "Clog objectives with termas until you win by points" is... actually pretty fluffy for Tyranids.

Termagaunts are, in lore, not really deployed to kill things. They're sent in to make the enemy run out of ammunition, bog-down tank treads with their guts, and make corpse-ramps over which the actually dangerous tyranids can reach the enemy and do work.

Clogging the board and winning via objectives with is very much in keeping with this sort of army.

Spoletta wrote:
Am I the only one that doesn't see any issue in moving hordes of models?
It usually takes a really short time compared to the other phases.
What really really eats time when playing hordes are the dices. If you want to change something to make things faster, act there, implement combined attacks or things like that.

Movement is the lesser of the issues.

Here's another who finds that.

Rolling like 200 hundred dice to resolve attack and get odd wound here and there...That takes time.

tneva82 wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
Am I the only one that doesn't see any issue in moving hordes of models?
It usually takes a really short time compared to the other phases.
What really really eats time when playing hordes are the dices. If you want to change something to make things faster, act there, implement combined attacks or things like that.

Movement is the lesser of the issues.

Here's another who finds that.

Rolling like 200 hundred dice to resolve attack and get odd wound here and there...That takes time.

True. But other than simply forgoing some of the attacks you can't really do anything about that aspect of the horde armies game.
Movement of the horde though.... There, by spending a few minutes outside the game ONCE, you can save some time each turn.

ccs wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
Am I the only one that doesn't see any issue in moving hordes of models?
It usually takes a really short time compared to the other phases.
What really really eats time when playing hordes are the dices. If you want to change something to make things faster, act there, implement combined attacks or things like that.

Movement is the lesser of the issues.

Here's another who finds that.

Rolling like 200 hundred dice to resolve attack and get odd wound here and there...That takes time.

True. But other than simply forgoing some of the attacks you can't really do anything about that aspect of the horde armies game.
Movement of the horde though.... There, by spending a few minutes outside the game ONCE, you can save some time each turn.

We can't do anything...except vote with wallet with GW that this isn't acceptable.

THEY are doing the issue. Hordes worked fine until GW decided to hide the crappyness of the rules with silly amount of dice rolling.