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[Loud Whispers]

what's all this malarcky about GW retconning wraithbone into being a generic material made from refined minerals

[Jopax]

Possessed tyranids also circumvent the fact most of the troops are meant to last hours/days. Isn't stated somewhere some/most of them don't even have a digestive system? Although my guess is only big and powerful nids get to be possessed?

Hadn't thought about gaunts being used but there might be a way to use them as a cultist equivalent and general cannon fodder. In such cases they don't need to last long either. Smaller ones might not have enough to get possessed tho.

In that case I'm thinking some grafted on tech to pump them full of nutrients and combat stims could be an option. A roid-rage hormagaunt would be a pretty scary sight I reckon.

[Grim Portent]

what's all this malarcky about GW retconning wraithbone into being a generic material made from refined minerals

A hamfisted effort to give the Eldar a reason for trade and imperialism I think. Make the craftworlds less self sufficient to remove the glaring question of why they even bother interacting with anything else. Could have been done better, the Eldar already have one resource they can't make on the Craftworlds; soulstones. Possibly the most important thing to them as a society. But then I suppose that still leaves them with no rational reason to ever deal with the Imperium on a friendly or hostile basis.

GW is slowly working towards having the loose 'Order' alliance become more official in 40k I think. Probably planning to take another proper crack at allied detachment mechanics or mercenaries, like they have in AoS and Old World. Classic route they've tried before is Imperium, Eldar, Tau and Necrons on one team, Chaos, Dark Eldar and Orkz on the other, Tyranids by themselves, with there being some overlap in the more nebulous groups like the Dark Eldar and Eldar allying well, but the Dark Eldar not allying well with Imperium the way the Eldar do.

With the stready drip of primarchs getting 40k models they're probably building up to some big story of Chaos vs Order. I don't really feel such a thing is necessary. 40k worked with a more or less frozen timeline for decades at a time, but then I'm not in an office crunching sales numbers for GW.

[Loud Whispers]

A hamfisted effort to give the Eldar a reason for trade and imperialism I think. Make the craftworlds less self sufficient to remove the glaring question of why they even bother interacting with anything else. Could have been done better, the Eldar already have one resource they can't make on the Craftworlds; soulstones. Possibly the most important thing to them as a society. But then I suppose that still leaves them with no rational reason to ever deal with the Imperium on a friendly or hostile basis.

Was about to say, GW must've forgotten about Eldar and their obsession with soulstones, crone worlds, and the existence of maiden worlds & exodite worlds. We already have plenty of lore examples of eldar forming mixed species societies with humans and other aliens, and it's usually the imperium who shows up to kill everyone. So it's not like the eldar don't have plenty of reasons to interact with other species beyond compulsion. Eldar corsairs as well occasionally sell their services / negotiate ransoms so there must be eldar who have a fondness for things that money buy that wraithbone can't make. And someone is selling imperial cold traders eldar weaponry. Exodites as well are very well-traveled, and dark eldar are... Open for negotiations. So there's plenty of reasons why eldar would trade for stuff, and even then, there's an abundance of examples where eldar have still been interested in the wider galaxy just because they are interested. There's even a craftworld that negotiated a treaty, giving them an exclusive imperial battlefleet for protection every time they pass through imperial space

GW is slowly working towards having the loose 'Order' alliance become more official in 40k I think. Probably planning to take another proper crack at allied detachment mechanics or mercenaries, like they have in AoS and Old World. Classic route they've tried before is Imperium, Eldar, Tau and Necrons on one team, Chaos, Dark Eldar and Orkz on the other, Tyranids by themselves, with there being some overlap in the more nebulous groups like the Dark Eldar and Eldar allying well, but the Dark Eldar not allying well with Imperium the way the Eldar do.

I miss the old allies matrix. It was fucking hilarious because nearly all imperials were happy to ally with imperials. Certain xenos like tau, eldar and the imperium could be wary allies. Orks and chaos could kill the same enemy in the same room together, but afterwards it'd get interesting. Necrons and tyranids could only ally with themselves. And every faction in the game treated allied contingents from their own faction as battle brothers - except dark eldar, who trusted no one, including other dark eldar from their own faction.

With the stready drip of primarchs getting 40k models they're probably building up to some big story of Chaos vs Order. I don't really feel such a thing is necessary. 40k worked with a more or less frozen timeline for decades at a time, but then I'm not in an office crunching sales numbers for GW.

Ngl my enthusiasm for 40k has been slapped to death like a seal in the club club. When I talk to players who came in from 8th edition onwards it feels like there is a gigantic gulf between us over what 40k is. They do stuff like play 40k to win, build competitive lists, the whole game feels like an attritional card game where you design optimised metas on a spreadsheet. There's no importance to vehicles, army comps or positioning. Everyone's just placing fat centre-piece heroes with stacking modifiers, rerolls, no thought to the lore of their army. Even the lore itself feels like a marvel comic where it's no longer a grim dark future where no one matters, but a very small setting where 5 people matter and get all the attention forever, forest gumping into every single relevant occurrence. It is the groggiest thing ever to argue over 40k but damn. It genuinely just doesn't feel like 40k anymore xD

I guess it's part of the natural evolution of an old IP when they shift target demographics. But I also think it is possible to change things without abandoning core principles or components of the genre that made the IP big in the first place. I felt like after they restructured their design process, so that the art teams, writing teams, games rules teams and modeling teams worked in separate buildings, you could feel 40k being hollowed out in the absence of creative leads like Alan Bligh. Codexes stop being cheap little books full of artwork, custom rules, short stories, modeling guides and gaming tactics - and become overpriced shit with an online app DLC live service model. Sculptors no longer get credits, creatives are kept separate from one another, GW makes a deliberate policy of keeping even their content creators anonymous and their writers on short leashes to avoid making more celebrities like Abnett or McNeil. Games designers being treated like disposable unskilled workers getting £24k salaries and vague marching orders from above.

It's a bit like the equivalent of going to a nice little family restaurant where you know everyone, they know you. The food is great and there's a sense of community. Then it gets bought when the owner dies, the new manager turns it into a michelin 2* restaurant, but the prices are sky high and the place is deliberately exclusionary, with the chefs and waiters becoming anonymous employees. Yeah I know I'm not the target demographic of michelin 2* restaurants, same way I'm not the target of competitive card games, bolter porn & luxury collectible monopose miniatures. But I was there Gandalf, I was there when it was still a family restaurant 

[Grim Portent]

IMO the problem a general back and forth escalation of overbuffing something, then overcorrecting on the counterbalance. If I had to pick specific things that have gotten worse since I started; shooting has gradually become more and more powerful, rules a bit simpler to carry out, units less durable, several faction's armies bigger and default board sizes smaller. These have all been problems that have been cropping up since about 6th edition to various extents, but by this point the gradual shift is quite progressed.

Necromunda and Kill Team are the games that play more in line with older 40k at this point, but they are significantly smaller in scale.


40k has also generally kept trying to streamline the game, to reduce the amount of extra bits you need to bring and time you need to spend on things like positioning. I think this is both to make 40k faster while keeping the armies at a similar size, but also to try and make it harder for people to be rules lawyery dickheads in tournament play by quibbling over angles and blast marker placement. As someone who used to play 40k for 4-6 hours at a time on the weekend, I don't particularly want faster games, but then I also have more free time than most.

The loss of vehicle armour facings is something I'm more torn on. Before hull points anything that wasn't a Necron Monolith would anti-climacticaly blow up in the first two turns far too much, making them just outright worse than monsters, after hull points monsters became sad little jokes in comparison to walkers and tanks, giving vehicles wounds and toughness 100% made balancing them with their counterparts in non-vehicle factions easier, but it lost a little something. I'm sure there was a way to keep the armour facings, I used to like the struggle of having an Imperial Knight surrounded by enemies on multiple sides and deciding if it was better to place their invulnerable save on the facing with the strongest anti tank aimed at it, or the more numerous weaker anti-tank, but then I had more than a few games against guard where my daemon engines wrecked all their tanks and heavy weapons teams in about 2 turns and were then able to just walk through the rest of the army because most imp guard infantry couldn't hurt AV 12 with a 5++.

[Loud Whispers]

IMO the problem a general back and forth escalation of overbuffing something, then overcorrecting on the counterbalance. If I had to pick specific things that have gotten worse since I started; shooting has gradually become more and more powerful, rules a bit simpler to carry out, units less durable, several faction's armies bigger and default board sizes smaller. These have all been problems that have been cropping up since about 6th edition to various extents, but by this point the gradual shift is quite progressed.

Yeah plus the usual stuff with power creep and power scaling. 40k's in a weird spot where they added apocalypse game-tier greater monsters, superheavy tanks and titans into the base game, and near every unit has seen a growth in stats and reduction in points costs. So there's just more stuff on the table, with more buffs, more power, more toughness

Necromunda and Kill Team are the games that play more in line with older 40k at this point, but they are significantly smaller in scale.

Also 30k ruleset. But 30k doesn't appeal to me because it's all about space marines and primarchs xD

40k has also generally kept trying to streamline the game, to reduce the amount of extra bits you need to bring and time you need to spend on things like positioning. I think this is both to make 40k faster while keeping the armies at a similar size, but also to try and make it harder for people to be rules lawyery dickheads in tournament play by quibbling over angles and blast marker placement. As someone who used to play 40k for 4-6 hours at a time on the weekend, I don't particularly want faster games, but then I also have more free time than most.

Maybe, but it also significantly buffed just spamming dudes + made template armies like salamanders completely pointless + introduced new ways to be rules lawyery. One of my friends was a new 40k player and he said it was an incredibly off-putting experience for him trying to figure out all the [adverbus] [adjectivus] [nounicus] units and their [keywordicus] logic chains. Any time he tried to do something he would be corrected by the other players who knew his faction's rules and units better than he did, and he just got stomped every time

The loss of vehicle armour facings is something I'm more torn on. Before hull points anything that wasn't a Necron Monolith would anti-climacticaly blow up in the first two turns far too much, making them just outright worse than monsters, after hull points monsters became sad little jokes in comparison to walkers and tanks, giving vehicles wounds and toughness 100% made balancing them with their counterparts in non-vehicle factions easier, but it lost a little something. I'm sure there was a way to keep the armour facings, I used to like the struggle of having an Imperial Knight surrounded by enemies on multiple sides and deciding if it was better to place their invulnerable save on the facing with the strongest anti tank aimed at it, or the more numerous weaker anti-tank, but then I had more than a few games against guard where my daemon engines wrecked all their tanks and heavy weapons teams in about 2 turns and were then able to just walk through the rest of the army because most imp guard infantry couldn't hurt AV 12 with a 5++.

I would've just kept them as is and accepted some vehicles will die turn 2 if they were out in the open with no smoke launchers heading downwind of enemy heavy weapons. The alternative system where positioning doesn't matter, tanks can 360* shoot with all their weapons, getting behind a tank changes nothing, orchestrating a coordinated tank push that shows your enemy your best face and keeps your buttcheeks covered is irrelevant, every weapon can wound on a 6+ e.t.c. means that the game becomes one all about system mastery and statistical optimisation. It was a core part of the game's mechanics that tanks and heavy walkers are nigh immune to small arms fire but vulnerable to anti-tank fire, whilst monstrous creatures could tank lascannons but were scared of autocannons or bolters, whilst and bolters and autocannons were scared of tanks. Remove any benefit from flanking vehicles and it legit just becomes a game all about system mastery; maximising your buffs, maximising your output of damage and buidling a list which tanks the most hits. You don't need to think about making a well-rounded army where every component covers the weaknesses of the others - just think about the stats before GW releases a new balance slate to encourage sales 

The current version is just weird and too video gamey. Like it feels like a worse version of starcraft 2 or a card game. My friends drive me up the wall because most of them will tell me how horrendous the state of the game is going up against players dropping 5 c'tan and a sea of primarchs, turn 1 and turn 2 annihilations, but then they'll 180 and say 10th is well designed. And one of my friends new to 40k said he was crushed deep striking his terminators behind a land raider only to find it made no difference which side he attacked from. Intuitively, it just feels better when tanks behave like tanks, and your tanks/defilers/titans aren't being killed by lasguns. It's just so strange to try and fix things by making every single unit equally competitive against every single counter-unit. Listening to people trying to buff titans so they don't get annihilated by common infantry throwing pebbles at them when blast templates and armour values were a thing is like listening to 5e players constantly trying to torture 5e into doing things it can't do