warzone Nachmund

[Jack Shrapnel]

another campaign book with more rules... you wanted more tagged on rules didn't you? 

there's sisters in it:


www.warhammer-community.com/2022/01/11/the-order-of-the-bloody-rose-get-even-more-fanatical-and-ferocious-in-their-new-codex-supplement/

[dave]

I feel like someone in charge of the 40k design team heard the phrase "know thy enemy" and countered with "good luck with that, shitheads. Now buy this paper!"

In other words, I'm looking forward to getting back into 40k with tau (and later CSM), but damn there's no way I'm ever going to catch up with all the rules out there.

To be fair, I hear bloody rose doesn't see much play and could definitely use a power boost.

[lightcavalier]

I'm still baffled that they banned specialist detachment from matched play....then created exactly the same thing.

IMHO the supplements should have been narrative/open play oriented. Instead of being treated as a backdoor way to buff sub factions

[raceygaming]

I mean the new army of renown are literally just 7th edition FORMATIONS that have been re-skinned for people who hate the word formation and they learned you can't make them so busted that the game falls apart. At least this time around I think they made it so you at least still need to take troops to get the benefit ( looking at you Riptide wing, Aspect host, Liberius conclave)

[artonas]

Jan 11, 2022 9:40:23 GMT -5 lightcavalier said:

I'm still baffled that they banned specialist detachment from matched play....then created exactly the same thing.

IMHO the supplements should have been narrative/open play oriented. Instead of being treated as a backdoor way to buff sub factions

100% I was hoping that's what they would do with them which makes sense in the contexts of the narrative, another good option would be to have these as a way to somewhat buff armies that don't have their books yet but then I just realized that what psychic awakening was. 

[Malarks]

FFS.... I'm just going to play Dawn of War... I do not have the brainpower to keep up with GW and their clusterfuck of rules and them constantly cycling.

Which previous edition wasn't shit? Can we just go play that?

[dave]

I feel like these warzone supplements were originally conceived as fun ways to direct your narrative/crusade games. Then they realized they would sell WAY more copies if they made them a matched play option* too.

I think white dwarf has been doing a much better job with the supplements, ironically. A lot of them are fluffy crap, but hey, that's what most of them should be. While at the same time, a couple of genuinely good ones have propped up a struggling army while they wait for their army book.


*not actually optional, everyone will expect to play with them.

[dave]

Jan 11, 2022 11:10:30 GMT -5 Malarks said:

Which previous edition wasn't shit? Can we just go play that?

As far as I've been told, they were all mostly shit. So I guess we just make the best of what we've got. Kind of an unfortunate side effect of the company making money by selling more models, and more rules. There isn't much incentive for them to make the game too balanced, or let it reach any level of completion.

[artonas]

I'm pretty sure 3rd was a good edition, everyone had their army books I'm pretty sure, though that might be nostalgia and the fact that chaos had the 3.5 book lol

[lightcavalier]

The difference now is the veneer of a competative/balanced game

3e was balanced at first because everyone had basically the same flavorless equipment and next to no special rules

But the only real mode of play was always intended to be "lots roll dice and see how my cool model kills your cool model"

[Hi I'm Derek]

The editions, even the good(ish) ones, ended up ruined by GW's general lack of interest in refining what they'd built. 5th edition and 4th edition core rules had a lot of good stuff but were ultimately ruined by bad codex support - 5th had one of the most busted and punishing metas in its second half. 6-7 core rules were a step backwards overall and also had massive rules bloat AND a crushing soupy metagame full of formations so awful it nearly killed the game entirely. 1-2 were very messy and probably anyone who remembers them fondly wouldn't feel the same if they had been around during the internet age where people get much better at these games much faster. A solved 2nd edition meta would probably look pretty bad even by modern standards.

3e is probably the peak of 40k from a game design perspective although there's definitely a ton of stuff later editions did better. GW has a tendency to never learn from mistakes and throw out the baby with the bathwater essentially every edition change that wasn't a cleanup edition.

As dave has alluded to, every edition all the rules are drip fed in such a way as to push model releases. It'll never get better because making the game something other than a firehose of patchwork DLC with permachurn would just lose them money.

[lightcavalier]

Jan 11, 2022 12:49:18 GMT -5 Hi I'm Derek said:

The editions, even the good(ish) ones, ended up ruined by GW's general lack of interest in refining what they'd built. 5th edition and 4th edition core rules had a lot of good stuff but were ultimately ruined by bad codex support - 5th had one of the most busted and punishing metas in its second half. 6-7 core rules were a step backwards overall and also had massive rules bloat AND a crushing soupy metagame full of formations so awful it nearly killed the game entirely. 1-2 were very messy and probably anyone who remembers them fondly wouldn't feel the same if they had been around during the internet age where people get much better at these games much faster. A solved 2nd edition meta would probably look pretty bad even by modern standards.

3e is probably the peak of 40k from a game design perspective although there's definitely a ton of stuff later editions did better. GW has a tendency to never learn from mistakes and throw out the baby with the bathwater essentially every edition change that wasn't a cleanup edition.

As dave has alluded to, every edition all the rules are drip fed in such a way as to push model releases. It'll never get better because making the game something other than a firehose of patchwork DLC with permachurn would just lose them money.

The biggest thing that has hampered them in line with what you are saying above is the fact that they keep changing lead design staff.

3rd edition was when they decided to fully morph from from a pseudo RPG into a "wargame"....all under the directorship of Andy Chambers

4th edition they let Alessio Cavatore (who was a fantasy and LOTR designer) who wanted to make the game more mechanically similar to WFB...and basically tossed out most of Andy Chambers design philosphy now that he was gone.  Alessio then left and went to Warlord Games and Mantic

5th Edition was an attempt to get back to similar principles of 3e....and one of the reasons that it as a core rule set was pretty tight (but was limited by the fact that you still had codexes from 3rd edition)

6 and 7 were just bloat versions of 5e that were experimenting with all sorts of rules ideas....largely because all the mechanical design staff from 2-4e were all long gone leaving just Jervis Johnson (creative director) and Gav Thorpe (more of a storyteller) left as continuity.

9e as a core rules is doing some great stuff....but and I really like some of the inovation im seeing...but they have a whole host of other problems due a lack of a united vision for what the game is.

[lightcavalier]

Like if 10e was a mishmash of the best mechanics from 9e and 5e and a set of 3rd/8th style Indexes to get everything kicked off....I would think they were going in the right direction.

[Jack Shrapnel]

9th is the best edition of the game I've played. Mind you I've only played since fourth, so missed the earlier editions completely. Not sure if there's anything GW can do to make everyone happy as basically everything they're doing now are things that the community have been asking for during earlier editions of the game.

This edition, 9 times out of 10 you can have a balanced fun game (the outliers seem to be when you don't communicate what you're looking for beforehand). The FAQ updates are quick and are pretty focused on the problem builds out there. Codexes are coming out for armies to have everyone set up with a dex within a two year span of the edition. That was UNHEARD of in previous editions, where some armies would not get a dex at all during an edition. This is happening even with the covid delays, which is not just GW, everyone is experiencing shipping delays. The codexes that have come out have NOT been clunkers, and all have multiple ways of playing armies.

Crusade / Narrative is built into the game now, so you have a fun way of playing non-competitively if that is your vibe. It's totally supported in EVERY codex and in the base rules now. Again - unheard of in previous editions.

Is there a TON of rules bloat? Yep. They're churning out content really, really fast. We asked them to do that for the first 20 years of 40k and they listened. Is it a little too much? yup. Are all these extra supplements mandatory to play? NOPE.

[Hi I'm Derek]

The problem is that re-indexing us gets is back into the eternal cycle of building up a ruleset from nothing block by block just in time to knock it over and start again so they can sell more books. So should they keep what they have and fix it up, or throw it out and start again? The answer is it doesn't even matter because for the game to be in a good state you'd need to have a complete ruleset available closer to the start of an edition cycle rather than the end, something that is anathema to GW's release schedule. It's fundamentally a business problem that I can't see GW ever fixing because it's against their interests to do so.

My dream has always been some kind of semi-stable community rules set built on the best elements of the game through the ages. I've seen a few crop up over the years just nothing that quite captures the sheer scope the official product has to offer, probably because it's just such a monstrous (and probably endless) task.