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Yay, it's this thread again, exactly one year after the last one.

The game has changed a bit in the last year and there are some new ways to play the game now.

I'm aware that for some of you enjoy your warhammer universe by playing using other rules, and that's great, but that's not the kind of data I want to collect.
Even though I added an option to vote, third party rulesets, 30k and previous editions are explicitly off topic for this thread, please use one of the threads on those topics to discuss them with like-minded dakkanauts.

If you have added homebrew rules, for example a hex-based campaign, pick the game type you based your homebrews on.
If you use resources from both mission packs and rules from the campaign books for your crusade, check both of them.

Please select all the ways to play you use regularly.

Will be interesting to see the results here. One thing that already stands out is the sheer number of different ways to play, which seems insane to me. A couple of the options are things I don't even recognise - the Tactical Deployment Mission pack, for example.

If 10th is coming next year, I think GW need a way to better manage their various publications. Many of these options might be quite good, but I'm not paying GW £20 for a book with 2 missions in it and dozens of pages I'll never need.

There's no option for 'badly'.

:p

Slipspace wrote:
Will be interesting to see the results here. One thing that already stands out is the sheer number of different ways to play, which seems insane to me. A couple of the options are things I don't even recognise - the Tactical Deployment Mission pack, for example.

If 10th is coming next year, I think GW need a way to better manage their various publications. Many of these options might be quite good, but I'm not paying GW £20 for a book with 2 missions in it and dozens of pages I'll never need.

Tactical Deployment was a half-finished flop, there was no error in management. Having the words to convey what you want is cool, bad releases need to be rewritten not republished.

Slipspace wrote:
Will be interesting to see the results here. One thing that already stands out is the sheer number of different ways to play, which seems insane to me. A couple of the options are things I don't even recognise - the Tactical Deployment Mission pack, for example.

To be fair, that thing is super unpopular - in last year's poll 0 people voted for it
It's the book with terrain rules where you had to buy a set of terrain datasheets to actually be able to play it. I guess the cash-grabby nature of that alone was sufficient to drive people away.

If 10th is coming next year, I think GW need a way to better manage their various publications. Many of these options might be quite good, but I'm not paying GW £20 for a book with 2 missions in it and dozens of pages I'll never need.

Outside of the Book of Rust, which was more expensive than all the other campaign books and had the least narrative content, I've found almost all of the crusade books to be good value. The only one I don't have is the last crusade mission pack because it was out of print faster than I could buy it.

Last time I picked Crusade and Matched Play, by now we switched to homebrew, so I ticked "I don't play 9th edition".

About 95% of my 9e games are some sort of Crusade.
3% are matched play/some GT pack.
The other 2% covers everything else.

Mostly Crusade (drawing missions from various books and packs).

Open War decks for any non-Crusade games.

Looks like most of the people who play 9th Edition 40k, don't play 9th edition 40k.

 jaredb wrote:
Looks like most of the people who play 9th Edition 40k, don't play 9th edition 40k.

thats not how you should interpret that data LMAO

19% != most

I’ve been doing Tempest of War lately

 jaredb wrote:
Looks like most of the people who play 9th Edition 40k, don't play 9th edition 40k.

Every time this poll is done 40-50 people reply that they don't play the current edition, that's a fairly constant thing. The only reason why I add this option is so people don't spam the thread about not playing the current edition as if they were some special snowflake for doing so.

Open play, and not much beyond the basic starter set contents.

Interesting to see Tempest of War Deck being one of the highest play modes. Anyone care to comment what they like so much about it?

My favorite way to play 40k is Open War drawing 3 objective, deployment and twist cards with each player vetoing a card from each group. It doesn't completely prevent skewed mission draws, but it does greatly reduce it.

At the same time, I won't say no to Tempest of War... which I will play the Open War portion, but I'll be that one D&D player that never knows which die to roll when it comes to some secondaries. I mean, I know a few of them, but occasionally it's my opponent that informs if I scored some of the secondaries or not. And if they don't, they might just sit there in my hand.

And my favorite, favorite way to play 40k is custom missions with old fashion miniatures war gaming discussion between the players as to who commanded the force more expertly despite battlefield conditions. Or, at the very least, what actions during the game each player did impressed the other the most. However, this sort of game is very rare as it takes far more effort, like-mindedness and trust than the others.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Interesting to see Tempest of War Deck being one of the highest play modes. Anyone care to comment what they like so much about it?

For me, it has the right balance of varied setup and known, but random order, secondaries to mean games are don't have the formulaic feel of GT missions but aren't wacky like the maelstrom cards were in 8th.

Each game I have played has been in the balance up until at least the bottom of round 4, as opposed to round 3 for GT games.

It also requires a more diverse list to ensure that you can score the various secondaries (which are mostly shorter versions of the GT secondaries).

I haven't had a bad game of the 7 or 8 so far.

Syrup_of_Fig wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
Interesting to see Tempest of War Deck being one of the highest play modes. Anyone care to comment what they like so much about it?

For me, it has the right balance of varied setup and known, but random order, secondaries to mean games are don't have the formulaic feel of GT missions but aren't wacky like the maelstrom cards were in 8th.

Each game I have played has been in the balance up until at least the bottom of round 4, as opposed to round 3 for GT games.

It also requires a more diverse list to ensure that you can score the various secondaries (which are mostly shorter versions of the GT secondaries).

I haven't had a bad game of the 7 or 8 so far.

Interesting you'd say that. Perhaps I need to give it another chance. My group tried it twice, both times after I proposed it, but both were terrible non-games, first was ruined by draw RNG, second by the extra objective my opponent got. I personally much prefer the 8th Maelstrom cards in their final form with a "hand" of cards you'd keep to play with.
Which is why I only voted war-zone Nephalim, as my group more or less only plays current matched play rules and all other players in my group are unlikely to try Tempest with me again any time soon. We do play quite a lot of 2v2 or 3v3 games though, which while using current matched play rules, aren't exactly what you'd call competitive matched play.

 Jidmah wrote:
The only reason why I add this option is so people don't spam the thread about not playing the current edition as if they were some special snowflake for doing so.

I play a combined hybrid-9th homebrew edition mixed with a bit of Mahjong and Ultimate Frisbee.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Interesting to see Tempest of War Deck being one of the highest play modes. Anyone care to comment what they like so much about it?

Multiple things.

- Maelstrom of War and its random objectives were already popular and this is the most recent implementation of that mode
- Any game mode that requires you to pick secondaries gets dull fast if you have a limited pool of opponents. After 10-15 games it becomes repetitive really quick, and every game feels the same. On top of that, those modes force you to optimize your armies and gameplay to play the mission rather than creating an epic battle with miniatures. Not saying that people enjoying this are doing it wrong, there are just quite a few people who don't enjoy playing like that.
- To say the same thing in a positive way, tempest of war generates a whole new game each time. Each game has a different combination of primary mission, deployment map and a twist, objectives aren't in the same spot each time (deployed by players, but with sensible limitations), and secondaries force you to focus on things which aren't your armies strength.
- Tempest of war is actually surprisingly well done by GW standards, almost as if someone actually invested a lot of time into actually playing and improving the mode before releasing it. I couldn't tell you any big flaw of the mode.
- Tempest of war somehow managed to solved the "I got lucky, I win" problem of previous iterations of maelstrom. Between primaries being a constant source of VP, no more "can't score this card" issues, no more random VP, all cards being of equal value, reduced number of cards and being able to discard any number of cards at the end of your turn, games tend to be very close in terms of VP, even if you drew the worst possible cards for the first one or two turns.
- Once your group develops a Tempest of War meta, armies start being more varied to be able do more secondary cards well. This seems to reduce lethality a bit as people don't just go all in on one strategy dictated by their secondaries.
- No new books needed to keep playing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Castozor wrote:
Interesting you'd say that. Perhaps I need to give it another chance. My group tried it twice, both times after I proposed it, but both were terrible non-games, first was ruined by draw RNG, second by the extra objective my opponent got. I personally much prefer the 8th Maelstrom cards in their final form with a "hand" of cards you'd keep to play with.

How did the RNG screw you over? Did you use the rule to discard objectives at the end of the turn properly?
How did the extra objective mess up the game? It needs to be deployed into no man's land like all the others.

Many cards which would automatically reward VP cannot be scored on turn 1, so when you discard two or even three cards in T1 you are usually not far behind. Plus, you always have the option to just go for objectives instead of scoring cards. Also keep in mind that you cannot score more than 9 cards (45 VP cap), so you can blank out on two turns (though I wouldn't expect scoring a lot of things in T5).
The times when the games were clear losses or wins in our group tend to be the ones where one player did not pay attention to their objectives, or when one army was built for playing tempest of war and the other wasn't.

I tapped out with nephilim. I’ve played consistently since 8th ed dropped but I cant stay on the treadmill any longer. I shifted all my hobby projects to oldhammer and other, mostly osprey skirmish games.

Mostly did an escalation Crusade but after five games, my opponents T'au were still nuking my Deathwatch, and then I started a new job where I lost a lot of my previous game time. Then the CSM dex came out and that was the final nail.
With the lack of time and interest I've sold my Drukhari, all my CSM, and only kept the Deathwatch because I've spent a lot of time, effort, and money on them as a passion project.
I now haven't played a game of 40k in about 5 months and HH has once again replaced it as my primary game (with a bit of Necromunda on the side).

 Jidmah wrote:



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Castozor wrote:
Interesting you'd say that. Perhaps I need to give it another chance. My group tried it twice, both times after I proposed it, but both were terrible non-games, first was ruined by draw RNG, second by the extra objective my opponent got. I personally much prefer the 8th Maelstrom cards in their final form with a "hand" of cards you'd keep to play with.

How did the RNG screw you over? Did you use the rule to discard objectives at the end of the turn properly?
How did the extra objective mess up the game? It needs to be deployed into no man's land like all the others.

Many cards which would automatically reward VP cannot be scored on turn 1, so when you discard two or even three cards in T1 you are usually not far behind. Plus, you always have the option to just go for objectives instead of scoring cards. Also keep in mind that you cannot score more than 9 cards (45 VP cap), so you can blank out on two turns (though I wouldn't expect scoring a lot of things in T5).
The times when the games were clear losses or wins in our group tend to be the ones where one player did not pay attention to their objectives, or when one army was built for playing tempest of war and the other wasn't.

It was deployed in No Man's land but due to the way we laid out terrain and the way my opponent laid down the last extra objective, whoever got to pick sides had an extra "free objective" near his deployment. He lucked out and got it, meaning he always easily outscored me on primary since I could never realistically get Hold More for at least the first 3 turns. In hindsight there were a few ways I could have played around it more, but that game soured it perhaps moreso for the spectators than for me. They have all more or less decided that Tempest is an rng crapshoot.
The first game, on reflection, was probably more a listbuilding issue than anything to do with the flaws/lack of them with Tempest. But early draw luck and poor luck for me meant I had no chance of winning after his Turn 2. His list was tailor-made to table mine, and seeing as he already completed 5 cards to my 1, with my army in shambles there was no way back.
Your post is so positive though I'll try to convince at least one of them to try it again with me, hopefully with a better and closer game as a result. I still stand by my preference for old 8th Maelstrom though, once they added the deckbuilding element there were no impossible to score cards either unless you can't read, and more so than in Tempest I think it minimized bad luck. I did not know about the 45 VP cap on cards though, that might have helped in at least game 2. We did play the other rules correctly though.

Tempest of War deck and Open War deck only.

I was getting some fun with Tempest of War before the CSM codex soured me on 9th completely, and have since moved on to a game that suits my preferences much better.

Since we are getting close to the same number of votes as last year, some amazing trends can be seen:

- Big winner of this year is clearly tempest of war, securing its place as one of the most popular game modes.
- The big loser are game modes using the ITC style secondaries. Just barely more than a third of dakka's posters play using those, down from two thirds.
- The people playing crusade straight from the book took to rather big drop, but there are more people using crusade mission packs and campaign books now.
- There is no "default way to play" anymore. BRB Matched Play, Crusade, Nephilim and Tempest of War are played by roughly the same number of people.
- Despite its horrible balance, Matched Play straight from the book is still more popular than War Zone Nephilim: Grand Tournament.
- Quite a few people have been lost by rapidly changing seasons and stuck with one of the older GT packs for their private games.
- Crusade players now outnumber tournament players.
- The open war deck has become more popular than it was last year, despite Tempest of War fitting into a similar niche.
- The number of people not playing the most recent edition has remained roughly the same.

The one big conclusion I draw from this is that when picking what game mode to play, fun and variety seem to be a bigger driver than balance. People are either willing to shell out money for crusade books or decks of cards to play games, or they just stick with what they have. Which kind of matches with what people write on these forums.
If the trend continues, GT packs will have less and less people playing them, it will be interesting in what way GW will overreact at that point

What makes you say that rulebook Matched Play is less balanced than Nephilim?

 vict0988 wrote:
What makes you say that rulebook Matched Play is less balanced than Nephilim?

The combination of a massive first turn advantage combined with badly balanced secondaries and missions makes me say that. There is plenty of data to support that, goonhammer did a bunch of articles on it if you like to read it up.

Even by my personal experience, most matched play games seem to be decided more by codex choice and who goes first than by what you do on the tabletop.

Many people ticking that box might not be playing that mode on a cutting edge though, I know the people in my group who play it don't. If you aren't building your lists with secondaries in mind and don't play the mission to win, those problems might not be as prominent as they are when both player are focused on winning.

Has Goonhammer done an article on Nephilim? I haven't played Nephilim so that is why I am curious. Do you have a theory on how going first has been fixed?

 vict0988 wrote:
Has Goonhammer done an article on Nephilim? I haven't played Nephilim so that is why I am curious. Do you have a theory on how going first has been fixed?

I don't think they have done one yet on Nephilim yet unless I missed it, but it's not that old yet anyways and there has been vacation season as well. If you look at the multiple different data sinks collecting game data, you see that most armies are withing the magic 45-55% balance corridor and the top listings in tournaments are a mix of everything. There are still armies which can't compete well, but it's the best it has been in 9th.

Going first was fixed through multiple iterations of the GT pack and was already in a decent state for Nachtmund - measures included changing objective placement, changing how primaries and some secondaries are scored and outright removing certain secondaries. Essentially the newer packs prevent armies from getting too much of a lead by surging forward and grabbing all of the objectives and score "be somewhere/do stuff somewhere", while rewarding taking back objectives/punishing not being able to keep an objective for whole turn.

I'm surprised on 18% said they dont play. Ive been playing since 5th competitively (not well) and this edition has IMO become not so much 'unplayable' as 'un-fun'. Worse than the end of 8th. I was still playing to the bitter end of that one. I bought the Eldar dex and then never even played with my 2.5k painted army. Have full compliment of kitbashed squats ca wolves, knights and guard. One game with them. 12k orks. After new ChapAppr. Zero. 9th edition seems a mess. GW reaching.