Codex Orks - Informed discussion.

[daboarder]

now, now cait.

we can't know that. Not for roughly another 3 months.....

Unless of course you meant all that in a good way, in which case of course, feel free to share your opinion, it sounds very valid


Did I do that right?

[John Bower]

GW has, for a long time, fostered an attitude of non-competitive competition among their player base. I mean, we've got a lot of words and acronyms for players who try to win too much (employing cheesy combos and exploiting the best options in their codecies).

The attitude is that game balance is up to the players, not the game designers- and leads many to believe that GW isn't actually trying to create a balanced game.

It may be true, or maybe they try and fail (as you suggest) but the perception is certainly there.



Yeah, it's a PVP game, and therefore competitive in nature. Each game ends with one player "winning" and another player "losing" and there's a social expectation that players will try to "win."

With 40k, there's the attitude that trying to win too much is immoral, but we still expect each player to try to win within the hazy boundaries of non-cheesy game play.

Dunno who you play D&D with but if they're playing like that it's just wrong... It's meant to be working together as a team. WH40k is PvP, albeit on a grander scale.

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

I've won a couple of games with my new Orks. One against Tau, the other against Marines. Good fun. My Battlewagon is one of the most awesome models that I've built.

[Erik Setzer]

The problem with the GW rules is that they do have a narrow selection of people they run things past. And it's all in house, has been since 2nd ed.

Not quite. In 3rd edition they had a much more open group of playtesters. Problem is, someone walked off with some of the playtest codices and they ended up spread to the many corners of the Internet. They weren't enthused with that, so they tightened things up, but still had playtesters that weren't actual GW employees (just they had to make sure it was people they could actually trust). And then one day they started getting uber-paranoid about everything, and suddenly the playtesting became only in-house and they shut down as much flow of information as possible, even to their own store managers. With the current release schedule, there's no way their limited development staff can try to give each new release a proper amount of playtesting, so here we are today.

They don't just need to bring in more people to test, they also need more time to test, which means slowing down the releases of new rules.

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GW runs tournaments........

They pretty much started the 40K tournament scene. The major tourneys grew out of the GW Grand Tournaments (people wanted versions closer to home, so independent versions known as IndyGTs sprang up, which became the tourneys we have today). GW also created the Rogue Trader Tournament system, which is why people in this town got used to tournaments pretty much every month. And then GW did 'Ard Boyz, which was just "bring unpainted models and throw out your nastiest army list and do your best to literally WAAC"... and that was that. It went over so poorly that they swung the pendulum in the opposite direction completely.

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I've won a couple of games with my new Orks. One against Tau, the other against Marines. Good fun. My Battlewagon is one of the most awesome models that I've built.

What tricks and units did you use? Share some Orky wisdom!

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

I had 3 units of Boyz with shootas in Trukks, a big mob of 30 foot slogging shoota Boyz, some Flash Gitz in a Trukk, 5 Mek Gunz with Kustom Mega-Kannons, 6 Killa Kanz, a Warboss with some gubbins, some Meganobz, in a Battlewagon, and like 4 Weirdboyz, because I could. Some other stuff.
Wiped out the enemy both times.

Turns out that Riptides don't like taking 15 armour saves.

[Pyredragon]

So, you won with unbound? Cause there's no way you can squeeze 4 weirdboyz into that as a battleforged list. Even with the ork special force org of 3 hqs and 9 troops you can't make that legal with only four troops as the special force org would require 6 troops total to double up on.

Great, good to know we can win if our opponents aren't sticklers for battleforged...

[daboarder]

Turns out that Riptides don't like taking 15 armour saves.

?? did you mean invul? because unless your rolling absolutely red hot (or dark brown seeing as this is your opponents rolls) a 2+sv model shouldn't give a damn about 15 saves, thats 2 MAYBE 3 wounds

[odinsgrandson]

Dunno who you play D&D with but if they're playing like that it's just wrong... It's meant to be working together as a team. WH40k is PvP, albeit on a grander scale.

Um... I think we're in complete agreement, so I must have made my point poorly.

What I meant to say is that D&D is actually a very poor comparison for game balance (as is any tabletop RPG against a tabletop war game). Because RPGs are cooperative (even the GM) and war games are PVP. I believe that GW's attitude towards their game balance is too much like a non-competitive RPG- and not as a competitive tabletop miniatures game.

In D&D it is important that all players in the group make characters at about the same power level (ie- either they all munchkin together or they all make misfits together). Balance can be fudged a bit by the DM when it comes up.

In 40k, both players should try to defeat their opponent. But as a community, we have developed the attitude that we should be balancing the game like in D&D- and we have loads of terms for people who play too winningly like, Cheesy, Beardy, WaaC and others.

I've found this attitude of "game balance is on the player's head" coming from GW (in White Dwarf, for example). And I think that's just a shame.

[Ghostofman]

When it comes to game balance they probably don't really have much of a choice, at least not without doing major ground shaking changes across the board and taking extreme risk.

The company isn't big enough or have the resources to fully and extensively playtest every dex to the level needed to ensure total balance. Even farming it out to the playerbase proves too hard because then the dex ends up on the internet before it can hit store shelves (GW has never really "got" the information age, but that's a rant for elsewhere). Additionally to get a solid balance you'd have to develop a new ruleset and all new codexes in parallel to avoid a single rule tweak from having a chain reaction that gives one codex a buff and another a nerf. Then you've got to release all the dexes at the same time as the ruleset. Then just to be sure, they'd have to be willing to things like adjust individual unit rules and point values in the errata.

Every one of those points has a critical flaw that hurts GW, where the "sorta balanced, but you gotta make the final call yourself" model they have now is at least functional from the perspective of keeping GW afloat.

[DWest]

The company isn't big enough or have the resources to fully and extensively playtest every dex to the level needed to ensure total balance.

Games Workshop made 7.7m£ net profit on 60m sales last year. That argument doesn't hold water. Furthermore, it's not like anyone is asking for a massive, exhaust-every-possible-permutation; we just want a "does this even make sense?" check when they change things, and we're not getting that. It's very hard not to assume that GW is being run incompetently; looking at the amount of typos, day 1 erratas, and other embarrassing mistakes (I count 7th edition in this category as well; the rules are virtually identical to 6th, with the exception of the Psychic Phase, it doesn't begin to justify being a new edition, nor does it justify leaving us hanging for a year on FAQs because they were going to go into this book), it doesn't paint a pretty picture.

This goes double for the idea that "we can't let the playerbase playtest it; they'll just leak the rules"- 1) GW already leaks like a sieve; 2) of course if you just hand out the playtest materials randomly you're going to get leaks; 3) the playerbase will self-select your ideal playtesters for you- just look at who's on the top tables at the various major tournaments. Simply by being there, those players have proven that they can identify and exploit unanticipated rules interactions, they can keep a secret (at least, hiding their tricks until it's time to use them), and they can handle standing around a table for days on end till the job's done.