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Atlas Hugged posted:Honestly this thread is at its best and least biased when it is talking about game mechanics and dissecting financial reports. I kinda reckon the fundamental reason 40k is boring is that running a gunline is a totally uninteresting exercise in procedural resolution. Rules that did something about that would spice up the entire game.
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Apr 26, 2017 07:29
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I kinda reckon the fundamental reason 40k is boring is that running a gunline is a totally uninteresting exercise in procedural resolution. This is a problem that a lot of games have, but there are ways around it. Most obviously is objectives that force the players to move. But sometimes players will hold off on grabbing the objectives until after their firing line has done its job. So one possible workaround is to make objectives time sensitive and more valuable early in the game than later in the game. In other words, objectives come and go or move during the game and if you control one on turn two or three, it's worth more than on turn two or four. Similarly, just reduce the length of the game. Your army is a limited resource and players tend to measure out acceptable losses over the expected number of turns. If the game is six turns long, then players will be more conservative than if the game is four turns. It also means they have less time to sit back and pound their enemy into dirt before rushing for the objective. A more complicated approach is to give every unit its own objective and have these drawn from fluff and story elements. This unit of Dire Avengers must occupy this cliff ledge on turn 2 or 3 because there's some kind of solar event and their shadows will have certain portents in them for the future. This squad of terminators wouldn't normally deploy in a battle of such a small scale, but they're actually here to retrieve one of the chapter's lost artifacts that was spotted in the area recently. And so on. If we get away from looking at objectives, the turn structure encourages players to sit back and shoot. It's just the nature of the I go you go system. Alternating activations with pinning forces you to move units maybe before you want to because you might not get an opportunity. I think most games have moved towards some kind of system like this, but 40k still has each player complete their full turn before passing play. It also means that one player spends a great deal of time doing nothing while they wait for their opponent, something that's much less of a problem in other games. And you can always limit the number of actions you get in a turn in total by implementing some kind of command rule. You might bring 8 units, but it's possible only 4 of them will act. If you need to capture objectives, you can't risk having everyone stand still and accomplishing nothing.
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Apr 26, 2017 08:19
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Making vehicles have toughness is a good change, now there is more incentive to use vehicles when they can't be all be blown up in one shot on turn 1. I'm kinda curious how the Strength vs Toughness roll scales. Is there a point where something is tough enough to be immune to small arms fire? I can't remember how the previous edition handled this. I'm still eagerly waiting to hear about Leadership stat becoming useful again. Currently it's completely worthless, since a majority of the armies ignore it completely.
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Apr 26, 2017 10:10
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Lord Hypnostache posted:Making vehicles have toughness is a good change, now there is more incentive to use vehicles when they can't be all be blown up in one shot on turn 1. I'm kinda curious how the Strength vs Toughness roll scales. Is there a point where something is tough enough to be immune to small arms fire? I can't remember how the previous edition handled this. Warpath doesn't do Strength vs Toughness, but instead like Kings of War units have a Defense stat that acts as a target number to damage them. So when an attack roll is made, the attacker checks their "to hit" stat and then rolls that, all the dice that hit are then rolled against the target's Defense stat. It's like Age of Sigmar but it makes sense. In Warpath, vehicles also have a Defense stat instead of an armor value. AP works by reducing Defense. For example, a weapon with AP 1 against something with Defense 5+ lowers the Defense to 4+. So theoretically light arms with an AP or 1 or 2 can hurt a light vehicle with a Defense of 7+ or 8+. But heavy vehicles with Defenses 9+ or higher aren't going to be affected by them.
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Apr 26, 2017 11:54
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Lord Hypnostache posted:I'm kinda curious how the Strength vs Toughness roll scales. Is there a point where something is tough enough to be immune to small arms fire? I can't remember how the previous edition handled this. From what they've said, everything can wound everything else, but it won't be easy. If Strength is much higher than Toughness, it will take 2s. If Toughness is much higher than Strength, it will take 6s. I'm nervous about this change, but vehicles getting saves and double digit wounds could make this a non issue. I math-hammered how many Lasrifle shots it would take to bring down an 8 wound, T7, 3+ Dreadnought and it's something in the neighborhood of 290, which seems acceptable to me.
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Apr 26, 2017 11:56
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Rolling 290 dice to accomplish something is the reason I stopped playing guard. Buckets of dice is actually quite a tedious affair for everyone involved. I wonder what they've done to speed this aspect of the game up, as one of the main selling points of the new edition is reducing the playing time by more than half (from 3.5 hours to 90 mins).
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Apr 26, 2017 13:29
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Sir Teabag posted:Rolling 290 dice to accomplish something is the reason I stopped playing guard. Buckets of dice is actually quite a tedious affair for everyone involved. I wonder what they've done to speed this aspect of the game up, as one of the main selling points of the new edition is reducing the playing time by more than half (from 3.5 hours to 90 mins). Don't shoot Land Raiders with Lasrifles?
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Apr 26, 2017 13:44
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Broken Record Talk posted:Don't shoot Land Raiders with Lasrifles? Yeah, this--his point was that you wouldn't try to use lasrifles to take down a dreadnought because of how difficult it is, so being *able* to wound one with small arms fire isn't as big a deal as it looks you don't *have* to roll 290 dice, and in fact, you shouldn't It does mean that you could weaken something with heavy weapons and try to take it down with small arms fire, though. TheChirurgeon fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Apr 26, 2017 |
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Apr 26, 2017 14:18
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Sir Teabag posted:Rolling 290 dice to accomplish something is the reason I stopped playing guard. Buckets of dice is actually quite a tedious affair for everyone involved. I wonder what they've done to speed this aspect of the game up, as one of the main selling points of the new edition is reducing the playing time by more than half (from 3.5 hours to 90 mins).  One of the nice things that the Rune Wars minis game does is still just have a single base dice roll (between 1-3 dice) for each unit, but have larger units give bonuses to those dice. It's a regimental game, so files give multipliers and ranks give rerolls, but there's plenty of ways to reduce such a large bucket of dice to a manageable number. Of course, whether GW would implement something like that is another question.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:27
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TheChirurgeon posted:True story: The only good thing to come out of the Death Thread was that it convinced me to watch Gurren Lagann, which owned Boomboomboom was too good for this sinful earth
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Apr 26, 2017 14:40
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The death thread is good because some people take great pleasure in criticising and complaining about things, that seems fair enough and is part of the culture of this dead forum. The clash between the death thread and the bad thread seems to be a clash of narratives: GW is getting better, says the GW fan, so my hundreds and thousands of quid invested in toys wasn't mis-spent. GW is getting worse, says the death threader, so there will be hundreds of hours of entertainment on the horizon. Which at core seems to be about whether you think AoS was a hilarious fuckup or actually very cool and good, which will change how you regard the imminent AoSification of 40k.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:02
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They are two sides of the same coin. There is a dualism that is required for both to exist in harmony. Without the people buying sigmarines, there wouldn't be anything funny about the action. Without people making fun of the sigmarines, there would be nobody that needed to defend their purchases and perhaps purchase more. As much as proponents of both sides hate to admit it, we need the other to continue.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:08
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Atlas Hugged posted:This is a problem that a lot of games have, but there are ways around it. Most obviously is objectives that force the players to move. But sometimes players will hold off on grabbing the objectives until after their firing line has done its job. So one possible workaround is to make objectives time sensitive and more valuable early in the game than later in the game. In other words, objectives come and go or move during the game and if you control one on turn two or three, it's worth more than on turn two or four. Similarly, just reduce the length of the game. Your army is a limited resource and players tend to measure out acceptable losses over the expected number of turns. If the game is six turns long, then players will be more conservative than if the game is four turns. It also means they have less time to sit back and pound their enemy into dirt before rushing for the objective. A more complicated approach is to give every unit its own objective and have these drawn from fluff and story elements. This unit of Dire Avengers must occupy this cliff ledge on turn 2 or 3 because there's some kind of solar event and their shadows will have certain portents in them for the future. This squad of terminators wouldn't normally deploy in a battle of such a small scale, but they're actually here to retrieve one of the chapter's lost artifacts that was spotted in the area recently. And so on. The other part of the problem is the weapons themselves are so uninteresting. You never have to consider suppressing/covering fire, beaten zones or any other mechanic that might force you to think. You touch on the lack of pinning but it goes to the heart of the issue: weapon systems are almost completely undifferentiated. Imperial guard clearly want to be an army of fire and maneuver but you don't actually have fire or maneuver in the ruleset. I don't know how you add surpression to the game given the fluff.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:19
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:The other part of the problem is the weapons themselves are so uninteresting. Yeah, I 100% agree with this. The game needs suppressing fire really badly. Pinning would be this in theory, but it's both too strong an effect and simultaneously worthless against most of the game's armies.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:23
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TheChirurgeon posted:Yeah, I 100% agree with this. The game needs suppressing fire really badly. Pinning would be this in theory, but it's both too strong an effect and simultaneously worthless against most of the game's armies. It really be considered some sort of shock mechanic, and the various fearless armies can elect to ignore the shock by taking a bunch of automatic hits - the reason an artillery barrage is surpressive is all the shrapnel, and while you might not be scared to get out of your trench you're just going to get hit. The game also needs smoke/LOS screening rules.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:29
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:It really be considered some sort of shock mechanic, and the various fearless armies can elect to ignore the shock by taking a bunch of automatic hits - the reason an artillery barrage is surpressive is all the shrapnel, and while you might not be scared to get out of your trench you're just going to get hit. Yeah, agreed on both accounts. It looks like Ld *might* be more of a factor in the new edition--dropping Space Marines from 8 Ld to 7 is significant, but it's still not clear what that will actually mean if Space Marines just end up ignoring most morale effects again The game also really needs more unit interaction/synergy--outside of psykers and Tau, there are very few 40k units that interact with other units in the same army. I wouldn't want them to go overboard Warmachine style, but it would be cool to see things like Scouts being able to act as spotters for long-range artillery strikes. Doing more of this also creates ways to represent army personalities mechanically--Chaos armies can have fewer unit buffs/positive interactions to reflect their selfish nature, and more abilities that drain one unit to power another, for example. e: From a design standpoint, one of 40ks biggest issues--besides 6th and 7th editions having horrible, incompetent designs--is that the design feels completely top-down
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Apr 26, 2017 15:35
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Unit syngeries would help another beef I have. With the fluff guard are usually presented as being fielded in Brigade(+) as the smallest unit. But unless you are totally insane the maximum number of models you want on the table is a Coy(+) - and frankly doing anything with 120 individually based models is going to get tedious, particularly if you crack the fire and maneuver thing and make me actually move my dudes. So you don't actually really get the feel of being a small unit at the pointy end of a big machine. FOs and FACs would help this massively.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:45
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I think I suddenly have two metal Stegadons. eBay is dangerous.
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Apr 26, 2017 15:52
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:The other part of the problem is the weapons themselves are so uninteresting. Morale and different weapons would actually do something if the damned marines were also beholden to them. There was no point in taking carbines or any number of pinning weapons because it just didn't matter. Either they get killed before pinning matters anyway (IG, Orcs), or you couldn't affect them via pinning and had to kill them outright (MEQs). Tau were in that sweet spot where Tau v Tau was kinda interesting with pinning and the armor save was just enough to make weapon stats more relevant but that was one army out of a dozen. 
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Apr 26, 2017 16:01
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I suppose you could add a suppression mechanic where taking fire applies some sort of penalty to a unit's checks, potentially building up to seriously hamper them. Different weapons could have either have or not have a suppression effect, or have a stronger or weaker one to represent how effective they are at it. Have a unit take something like LD check to reduce its suppression, or have it drop a certain amount each turn based on LD. Although adding a whole new mechanic is possibly not the way you want to go.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:01
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Ashcans posted:I suppose you could add a suppression mechanic where taking fire applies some sort of penalty to a unit's checks, potentially building up to seriously hamper them. Different weapons could have either have or not have a suppression effect, or have a stronger or weaker one to represent how effective they are at it. Have a unit take something like LD check to reduce its suppression, or have it drop a certain amount each turn based on LD. Although adding a whole new mechanic is possibly not the way you want to go. I mean you basically just described Warpath/Firefight.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:03
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Oh. Problems solved then, I guess? I think that there was something similar in Epic where units would build up blast markers as well as taking damage.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:04
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Atlas Hugged posted:I mean you basically just described Warpath/Firefight. And Epic. Ashcans posted:Oh. Problems solved then, I guess? I think that there was something similar in Epic where units would build up blast markers as well as taking damage.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:05
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Chill la Chill posted:The funny part is that Tau were the best at doing what IG were supposed to do. Tau had superior gunlines. Tau had combined arms. Tau had mechanized infantry. I loved playing mechTau with fast crisis suits doing JSJ back in 4e. The ruleset made it a lot better and more mechanized than in 3e when you couldn't actually do much while loading and unloading from devilfish. Gunline was boring but Tau did it better than IG with the pathfinder spotters and giant railgun templates. Tau are easily the game's best-designed faction, partly because they had actual unit synergies and because, along with Necrons, they weren't cluttered with 30 years of unit additions, so they could just be bad at some things. Armies like Marines and Eldar have so many goddamn units as a result of getting new units every release that many of them are redundant, operating in the same battlefield role. They did the same thing to Tau, too, basically giving them bigger and bigger mech suits. I'd estimate that something like 30% of 40k's problems come from being a game that's 30 years old and having to accommodate models/fluff/gameplay decisions that were made in the 90s
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Apr 26, 2017 16:05
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Ashcans posted:I suppose you could add a suppression mechanic where taking fire applies some sort of penalty to a unit's checks, potentially building up to seriously hamper them. Different weapons could have either have or not have a suppression effect, or have a stronger or weaker one to represent how effective they are at it. Have a unit take something like LD check to reduce its suppression, or have it drop a certain amount each turn based on LD. Although adding a whole new mechanic is possibly not the way you want to go. I mean GW has made multiple games with suppression in the form of Epic and blast markers, so its not like they've never come up with these rules themselves.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:09
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berzerkmonkey posted:And Epic. Yeah I've always heard that Epic is one of the best sets of rules that GW ever put out. I have an Eldar legion sitting on my hobby desk that I'll get to ~some day~ and I occasionally peak at eBay to see if Eldar titans are available at reasonable prices, but I haven't committed to anything else just yet. So I guess I'm not surprised that guys with GW ties would borrow from it. Pin tokens in Warpath are even represented by little exploding blast markers.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:10
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I still laugh at the latest tau release with the giant kickstands because holy poo poo they can't be arsed to put rear toes on something that doesn't support its weight like reverse-jointed birds. I did buy a riptide when I considered getting back in the game and had a bunch of store credit at an LGS. Then X-wing came out and I was getting into board games and that was that. That suit is still partially built and might get built and painted now that I have an airbrush, but I have a couple other gundam kits I can build instead that actually have moving joints. I'm extremely lucky I didn't get back in because my friends tell me how ridiculous the death stars are. It was starting to become a thing with the Farsight blob back then too but nowhere near as bad as they are now. Chill la Chill fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Apr 26, 2017 |
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Apr 26, 2017 16:11
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Atlas Hugged posted:I think I suddenly have two metal Stegadons. eBay is dangerous.  Dinos Riding Dinos
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Apr 26, 2017 16:12
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Chill la Chill posted:I still laugh at the latest tau release with the giant kickstands because holy poo poo they can't be arsed to put rear toes on something that doesn't support its weight like reverse-jointed birds. I did buy a riptide when I considered getting back in the game and had a bunch of store credit at an LGS. Then X-wing came out and that was that. That suit is still partially built and might get built and painted now that I have an airbrush, but I have a couple other gundam kits I can build instead that actually have moving joints. Yes but you see it has a design language and furthermore Lord_Hambrose posted:
Cross posting from the Mantic thread! Atlas Hugged posted:I did a thing.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:13
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Seeing my hated foes the Lizardmen always is a good thing. It is always weird to me they never did a 40k army of Space Dinos. The Dark Eldar snake man should be made into a Tau
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Apr 26, 2017 16:58
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Seeing my hated foes the Lizardmen always is a good thing. It is always weird to me they never did a 40k army of Space Dinos. The Dark Eldar snake man should be made into a Tau They had space slann waaaaaaaaaaay back in the day but ended up dropping them in 2nd edition. I assume that at some point they wanted to start making 40k its own thing and not just "fantasy in space" The snake dudes being a Tau race would have been cool. Though I think fluff-wise they got wiped out during the Horus Heresy or something (I don't read the novels so I can't go into detail on this)
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Apr 26, 2017 17:05
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Seeing my hated foes the Lizardmen always is a good thing. It is always weird to me they never did a 40k army of Space Dinos. The Dark Eldar snake man should be made into a Tau So you'd want to see some Slann... in space? When I first started putting together my Kings of War Salamander army, I was thinking that I wanted them to be a sci-fi "survivors of the fall of the Old Ones" style force. So instead of flying around on Terradons, the skinks would be on hover bikes. Instead of using monsters as artillery, they'd have literal artillery. The problem was that it was just cost prohibitive to do and I could find pieces that I liked.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:05
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Atlas Hugged posted:So you'd want to see some Slann... in space? I think Diehard Minis basically had the same idea as you for their kickstarter.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:12
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Atlas Hugged posted:I mean you basically just described Warpath/Firefight. I definitely should read the rules some day, considering how much I love KoW. What's the status on them? Are the rules ready or are they still in open beta?
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Apr 26, 2017 17:23
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Atlas Hugged posted:So you'd want to see some Slann... in space?  That's pretty much what I'm planning to do with the left DKOK and tau stuff I have left. After arguing about it in the warhammer thread I'm just going to straight up combine them with bretonnians and tomb kings to make a kings of war army. There's plenty of places that make cutout MDF bases so you can just have a cohesive base layout and remove them for skirmish games like infinity and scrappers. I think I'll use whatever force comp people suggested for Brets or go with KOW historicals and hope there's something resembling a napoleonic army.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:23
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Some of my worries include how they're going to handle cutting down playtime with regards to damage allocation (which is bad right now) and random movement (the worst). At least they're handling this better than the AoS launch (which isn't saying much that was awful) with some actual community outreach and something resembling rules previews? I guess they'll have an answer out pretty soon.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:25
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Kroot?Chill la Chill posted:They are two sides of the same coin. There is a dualism that is required for both to exist in harmony. Without the people buying sigmarines, there wouldn't be anything funny about the action. Without people making fun of the sigmarines, there would be nobody that needed to defend their purchases and perhaps purchase more. This was definitely true during the first couple of years of the death thread. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. nopantsjack posted:GW is getting worse, says the death threader, so there will be hundreds of hours of entertainment on the horizon. The consensus of the death thread over the last six months to a year has been that GW is getting better. But that it still has a long way to go before it's even hit the baseline of "an OK company" by the standards of game companies. In particular they need to establish a multi-year track record of not screwing over customers who invested in their games, and they need to make games with better rules. But I really don't think anyone has argued in a very long time that GW is getting worse. It hit a nadir in 2014/15 and has made significant improvements since then, albeit with some hilarious backsteps (total failure to give Total Warhammer players anything to buy from GW once they're captured by the game, for example). The company is doing better at engaging via social media, seems to be actually running game events again, added points to Age of Sigmar converting it from not even a game at all to merely a bad game, has been going back to its much beloved back catalog of old properties like blood bowl and necromunda (albeit without modernizing the rules), and the new CEO does not express naked contempt for the company's customers via official company documents (although paid executive member of the board Tom Kirby is still hanging around and he still gets to paste his crazy manifestos to the frontmatter of financial reports). So do the death thread posters actually need GW proponents, in order to have conversations? I dunno, man. There's definitely one or two posters who like to comment on just how terrible the warhammer 40k players are or whatever, but I think that's a minority. Most of us like to just watch this clowncar of a company swerving around crashing into things, but most people seem to be happy to give GW credit where it's due for the minor and incremental changes its making, and we don't need staunch defenders coming in to insist that 1+1 = 4 all the time in order to do that.
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Apr 26, 2017 17:24
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How could a company be bad if they make such good miniatures? Say what you want about GW, but nobody can touch them in terms of quality
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Apr 26, 2017 17:44
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Every time I see the SW flyer I die a little inside
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Apr 26, 2017 17:51
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Info on weapons if you have not checked the main 40 k thread. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/04/26/warhammer-40000-weapons/
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