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 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:
Once you realize all the armies are bad it becomes less about being awful and more about whether or not you can come up with a cool reason for Sgt. Ironpants to have that conversion beamer.

Or, more accurately, a reason for every HQ in your army to have a power sword and bolt pistol because GW removed all the other options.

Or they give you the option of taking a Laspistol or a Bolt Pistol for the same cost.

Why would anyone say, "Thanks l, Jerry, but I'll take the weaker of the two guns."

Because that's what some of my lovely, fully painted metal IG Sgts are armed with.
It wasn't worth my time to convert them to bolt pistols ages ago BEFORE they became painted minis & it's not worth my time + effort (to paint match & touch ups) to convert them here in 2025.
Don't fret, my squads are still able to do their jobs with only a S3 pistol vs a S4.

So what about converting to plasma pistols?
Well;
A) I didn't have enough extra plasma pistols back then. Or maybe I deemed it too expensive for the effort/result....
B) STILL not worth my 2025 time/effort to convert & retouch finished models.

Different basic weapons also have different upgrade potential if you're playing Crusade. My Drukhari leaned into splinter in 9th because I planned narrative missions that involved intrigues to secure access to Commorrite poison distilleries, which would in turn build the narrative case for poison upgrade Battle Honours. Blasters, blastguns and dark lance have way better starting profiles, but the missions we planned and played just felt better when the poison upgrade affected every model in the unit, and it made them kinda unique. Three units of Kabalites firing from Raiders with Splinter racks, each with a different poison? Perhaps less mathematically efficient than the same three units with maximum lance and blast, but certainly more versatile and interesting.

Now you can argue that this feels like powergamey combo-building... And it certainly has the potential to be exactly that. But we design missions specifically around acquiring exactly the resources we would need to achieve the goal: my Archon Lord Ascendant has a bet with Lhamaean on an arena battle, and if his team wins, she is the key to the aqcuisition of his first distillery. If he loses, she's going to demand more of him before sharing her knowledge= perhaps demanding that raid spoils be applied in such a manner that reinforces her personal power, or perhaps she'll insist he replace one of the Kabalite warriors in his Archon's hand unit with one of her own personally trained Disciples of Yaelindra.

The end result may be a powerful combo, but believe me when I tell you that the combo is nowhere near as cool as the journey I'm gonna have to go through to get it. Lots of stories to ell over the post battle beer.

Now, the Drukhari don't have their 10th ed dex yet, and I'm terrified GW is going to mess it up; their bespoke content in 9th was hands down my favourite for any of the many factions I engaged with in 9th. I'm not sure if there will be bespoke poison upgrades- I may have to imprt the rules from 9th if GW drops the ball.

This is a problem that I had for a LOOOONG time. I don't know your specifics (maybe you don't even know what's going on), but I can tell you what happened to me.

1) I don't like chasing what's popular. This is a big handicap, because in WH40K what's popular is what's effective, so I frequently am trying to find enjoyment in playing models that have less-than-stellar rules in the current meta. This is compounded by
2) I'm not very good tactically at the game. Due to 1, above, I sometimes lose battles in the list-building stage (definitely a thing that happens). Due to 2, I sometimes lose games in the Deployment stage of the game, and for the longest time I didn't even understand that the game had been lost there. My opponents didn't usually tell me "hey, the reason I crushed you is because you deployed this unit in a position where it couldn't impact much of the table after turn 2." Once at a tournament, when I was wiped at the end of turn 3, in like 45 minutes, I asked my opponent to explain what had happened and he was gracious enough to explain how my deployment had pretty much prevented me from having any chance of winning.
3) For a very long time I couldn't afford to buy new units that fixed holes in my army, even if I liked them. This meant making armies out of parts of the edition box - rarely a recipe for success.

I'm not much better now - I think my win rate at the FLGS is 40%, but I went through a period of about 4 months where I didn't win a single game. That was intensely frustrating and decades ago would have caused me to quit playing.

I liked the suggestion in the comments about "not spending too much time painting your models". I found that, until I was good enough to understand why I was losing, investing a lot into painting a model or unit really invested me in their success and caused me to be even more frustrated when I lost. Switching to an extremely simple color scheme that can meet the most stringent tournament requirements but still get individual models painted in less than half an hour helped a lot.

Other things that helped:

-Keeping a "diary" that tracked the armies I played against, points levels, and outcome. I tried to include notes on where I thought the major turning point was in the battle, and what caused it to go the way it did. Sometimes my notes are "bad deployment - I screwed myself" or "did well until turn 3 when my dice went cold and couldn't finish him off". Stuff like that helped me look back on my results and try to recognize if I needed to improve my skills (get better at deployment) or if I just needed to accept that sometimes I'll lose (because statistics are a thing).

-Playing the exact same army list repeatedly. I played the same Votann army list for something like 20 games in a row. Instead of trying to find a solution to a problem with a unit, I kept searching for solutions that involved using my units differently. That allowed me to see the difference between doing this and doing that with this same unit. Over that period I was playing against maybe 4 opponents, but really just 3 consistently. Practice makes perfect.

-Try to get a game in at least once a week. Before our FLGS opened, I was only able to play every once in a while - usually at tournaments. 5 games in 2 days isn't conducive to learning what you're doing wrong. Usually, if you're bad at the game, it's just conducive to making you want to ragequit. It's hard to separate the games in your head after the tournament, and if it's 3 months before you play again, it's hard to remember and apply the lessons. Playing a game a week, or every two weeks, or two games every two weeks, is much more likely to result in learning and improvement.

-Recognize that some people just absolutely do not understand that this is a problem for you. Some of my opponents would tailor their list to beat my Votann list, knowing I wasn't going to change it up. This was very frustrating for me - it led to more losses and made it harder for me to apply newly-acquired skills. But it's supposed to be fun for them too, so I just bit my tongue and tried harder to learn. Once I started beating them with my Votann it got very annoying for them.

-If you have the resources, and that's a big IF, because the game is definitely not cheap, no matter how many people on the internet tell you you should just "buy the right units", then spread a wide net. Buy a wide array of units that you think might work for your army, especially if you like them. In an edition or two they'll probably end up with overpowered rules and you can cruise to victory (/sarcasm).

-Another big if - IF you enjoy the lore, make your own lore about your army and figure out a way to kitbash special leaders/characters/models. I don't enjoy painting very much, but I really enjoy making extra kitbashed Space Marine captains. I have like 12. Maybe one of them (the new Gravis captain) is assembled the way the box instructs. Even my two chaplains are kitbashed.

Please, no matter what, do not just quit because it's hard to have fun. You might not be a skilled player, you might not be great at painting, you might not be a tournament winner, but you've chosen a game that almost single-handedly created a genre and when you find some people who ARE fun to play against EVEN WHEN YOU LOSE, you're going to love Warhammer 40K even more.

EDIT: I just wanted to add that if you realize that you aren't very good at the game parts of the game, keep playing and you might get there. IF you get there, you will know for sure that you have improved. I remember like it was yesterday a game in 7th edition where I sacrificed a unit of scouts turn 1 and it helped me win the game. I wouldn't shut up about it because that was the first time I took an action in-game that I knew was the smart thing to do and could "see" the downstream consequences - and it worked out just like I thought it would! If you haven't ever had this experience, then you need to play more. If you've already had this experience then you need to diary your battles.

How you analyze your games? Do you photoshoot every game(deployment, turns, movements?) or just as you remember it?

It depends.

First thing I look at is whether I’m using the army right. Am I missing synergies and buffs? Is there anything here I’m overlooking?

Certainly some of my more esoteric lists became deadly when I figured them out.

But….sometimes it’s a stinker. In which case it’s back to the Codex to see if there’s maybe a character or unit which might be a missing cog.

But, I don’t think I’ve ever retired an army because it isn’t performing?

Last game I took very rough notes- I'm hoping to be better prepared for my next game, which should help.

There's also a special arena fight mission I've been planning for a really long time, and when it finally happens I'll be documenting that one fairly extensively. But that's going to be a solo game in order to capture the amount of material I want to generate.