40K Editiorial: You Don’t Know Better

[Lucidum]

Lucidum here, pitching a small editorial here on behalf of my blog: [URL="http://khornesbrassballs.blogspot.com"]By the Brass Balls of Khorne[/URL]

You Don’t Know Better
I know I’m going to catch flak for this, but before we get into my plans for a new army (coming soon, i promise), we need to discuss one thing: Warhammer 40,000 itself.

Now, as an Imperial Knight player, I am more than accustomed to hearing “oh Knights are so OP!” and “spamming super-heavies is ridiculous!” from my opponents. And this is where I know most players are going to hate me, because to all the naysayers and rabble-rousers, I say this: Quit Your *****ing.

Warhammer 40,000 is in its 7th Edition now, the game has experienced a steady power creep for nigh on twenty years now, steadily increasing in the size of armies, doing away with 0-1 Force Organization choices, and yes, now even allowing super-heavies and gargantuan creatures into the normal game. **** gets real with the latest edition, fortifications are doable, unbound army lists make for some serious spam-worthy choices, and yes, super-heavy vehicles are troublesome. But the key thing to remember is: YOU DON’T MAKE THIS GAME.

- Read the rest [URL="http://khornesbrassballs.blogspot.com/2015/03/you-dont-know-better.html"]Here[/URL]

[DrBored]

Part of me agrees with you, part of me doesn't. I read the full article and I like it for what it is: an opinion and editorial, and I think you make some good points.

Yes, 40k is a game. I think the more we compare it to Magic the Gathering, the more we'll see that the two are quite similar. New editions, packs, rules come out and players must adapt to that. You can't play with the same army you've had for 10 years and expect the game to be exactly the same, unless you use the same rules and only battle the same other guy that's just as backwards as you are. For the rest of us, we adapt, we add to our armies.

For veterans, the number of models they've gone through, bought, built, and sold on e-bay, to keep up with the meta, is probably quite similar to the process that Magic card game players go through when they go through decks.

Honestly, a lot of the complaints against Wizards of the Coast are very similar to complaints that GW gets. How could they make a card so broken? My deck was dominating a month ago, but now it's getting trashed! This combo that I spent hundreds of dollars to build became totally ineffective with the new competitive meta! Curse you Wizards of the Coast! In both situations, the players very much do it to themselves.

It's the game. We may not have been wise to it when we started. Just like in any game, you don't know all the rules and nuances before you play your first (hundred) game(s). Whether you stick with it or not is your choice.

The trouble, and the reason people get so heated, is that so much money and time is involved, and people hate to think that their desperately earned money or their dwindling time were wasted on something. I bought and built a Land Raider Redeemer, and instead of magnetizing like a smart person, I built it that way and painted it all up, only to find out it's probably the worst of the three variants. That's a fat 80 dollars that is sitting on a shelf that won't see as much play, and because of it, I have to invest more money to fill that hole that the Land Raider and it's squad's 500 points took up before it. That means that if I want to continue playing the game with a different army, my collection must grow, I must spend more money to make it do that, and I must learn new strategies to incorporate into the new list to make it better.

To people averted to change, those things are terrifying. To people with smaller wallets, those things are terrifying. To people that aren't so good at strategy, those things are terrifying.

But there are people that LIKE to go through that process, and, ironically, it's these people that GW is catering to: the collectors. It's one thing to make your Magic deck and then sell it at the end of the season, but it's another thing to build a 40k army, and when you want/need to move on to a different list or army, you have the option of keeping what you crafted. Sure, you could sell it, but if you built it yourself, painted it yourself, why wouldn't you keep it? After all, with how the game changes by the month, those older models might become useful again. Maybe in the future, my Land Raider Redeemer will gain the Torrent rule for its Flamestorm cannons and become the new hotness. Then I'll be glad I got it, and I'll be able to take it off the shelf and play with it again.

That's the benefit of sticking around with the game. Typically, stuff comes full circle.

[Mr Mystery]

Every game has their little cash traps.

MtG? The Singles Market. Not a market I involve myself in. Instead I buy s booster box and fat pack, as I consider this the most economical way. Means I'm usually short of having every card I want, but more than enough variety to put together a few unusual decks.

Star Wars X-Wing? How the upgrade cards are distributed. Oh this is a cunning one! At £10 a model, ready to play it looks cheap to play. Then you really get into it. And you know one particular upgrade could make your fleet filth.....and that card is only available through a ship you don't want to field....and you may want multiples of them....

40k? Just like the previous two, it's not the manufacturer driving the cash trap. It's us. A player who follows the meta and wants to do well in all their games (not win all their games, just not get reliably stomped every time) will try to keep pace. Sometimes that's buying up the newly released kits, sometimes it's going round the bits sellers to swap out all your examples of Weapon A for Weapon Z, because Weapon Z fits the meta better.

Now, in all three of the above examples, the drive behind the cash trap is the determination to keep on succeeding. None of the games require that level of investment. In each one the big spend is part of chasing the meta.

I make no judgement nor comment upon that, other than its not my approach I'm one for going with what I think is fun. Sometimes that sees me do well, as it happens to work well against those who do the meta, other times quite the opposite. Wouldn't say its necessarily cheaper in all cases.

MtG, £100 tops per block. X-Wing? I buy loads! GW? Been a while since I last committed to an army, but that hasn't stopped me buying the random kits I like the look of...which happen to be the pricier ones!

But to kind of echo OP's sentiments - each to their own. My experience is my experience. Your experience is yours. We all play the same games, but in our own unique manner. Don't talk in absolutes, try to steer clear of sweeping statements, and let each enjoy their thing!

[Reldane]

"GET OVER IT. ‘nuff said. Warhammer 40,000 is constantly growing and evolving" -quote from Lucidum's blog post

Okay so first of all your post looks more like you are trying to justify your choice of army rather than making any real comment on the state of the game. Like it or not super heavy's are a thing, multiple force organisations and even unbound are all part of the game and we as gamers need to consider this when writing our lists, there is a meta (which will depend on area).

However to link back to your blog it seems pretty clear that the game you played was very one sided, and it is understandable that your opponent would be unlikely to enjoy that game. As DrBored comments we generally invest a lot of time into our hobby : building, converting and painting can stretch into tens or even hundreds of hours per model, a fully assembled and painted army can and should be something of pride.

in the case of knights, they are as a whole a very strong choice and very efficiently costed for their output and durability, but come with a couple of weaknesses, namely being out maneuvered and ap1 (and a lesser extent ap2) hits. In order to deal will a knight you need multiple units to threaten it in multiple arcs and in doing so mitigating the 4/3++ which is possibly rerollable. Some armies do suffer greatly in this regard; either designed before super heavies needed an answer or just because someone decided that was the way it should be. for example tyrnaids have very little (excepting forgeworld LoW) ranged firepower that can threaten a knight and for the most part too low an Initiative to engage the str D knight.

I have seen a lot of comments about how flyers counter knights, however non interaction isn't a counter. If the flyer doesn't pose a threat to the knight then it doesn't matter if the flyer can avoid the knights attacks, to expand on the earlier example a winged hive tyrant can avoid a knights attacks, but with only str 6 shooting it can't touch front armour, glances on a 6 vs side and rear factor in the 4++ and the knight can weather 6 turns of firepower quite happily.

Moving back to your blog post. You argue that "before you jump down my throat for spamming Imperial Knights... know that my opponent was a regular to the league, he’s played often and he should know by now that the meta" however as DrBored says it leads to a situation where you expect other players to jump onto whatever bandwaggon Games workshop has just released rather than playing the army they feel most attached too.

on other notes; the redeemer is my preferred land raider, it has just enough transport capacity unlike the standard pattern, and still has a reasonable shooting presence at least close up. that said I think all the land raider variants need to come down by 50points to make them even close to competitive

[Erik Setzer]

Hmm. "I beat your face in with a nasty army full of expensive models that are over the top when there's just one in an army, but obnoxious with a whole army of them. But don't hate the playa, hate the game. Even though the playa knows damn well he's gaming the system for the biggest advantage and doesn't give a damn what his opponent thinks."

You know, that's also the kind of defense banks use when they screw people out of their money. What they're doing is perfectly legal, so that makes it moral and okay, and since the people don't make the rules, they can't complain, right?

WRONG.


Oh, and "flyers counter Knights" might have been true with just the two basic Knight kits, but they've released more Knights since, and if you're playing a Knight army, it's likely you have one or two of those FW Knights.

- - - Updated - - -

in the case of knights, they are as a whole a very strong choice and very efficiently costed for their output and durability, but come with a couple of weaknesses, namely being out maneuvered and ap1 (and a lesser extent ap2) hits. In order to deal will a knight you need multiple units to threaten it in multiple arcs and in doing so mitigating the 4/3++ which is possibly rerollable. Some armies do suffer greatly in this regard; either designed before super heavies needed an answer or just because someone decided that was the way it should be. for example tyrnaids have very little (excepting forgeworld LoW) ranged firepower that can threaten a knight and for the most part too low an Initiative to engage the str D knight.

Knights have a weakness in maneuverability? Seriously? Are you aware they have 12" move and Move Through Cover (with it corrected via FAQ to be double the top roll)? I can get a Knight anywhere on the table fast.

And when you have multiple Knights, it becomes hard to get around them to get into multiple arcs, because you need to try to focus fire on one Knight, and a Knight army can position itself so that when you do that, you make your units vulnerable to the other Knights. If a Knight isn't destroyed quickly but its destruction is imminent, you can throw it into the middle of the enemy army to either cause a mess when it blows up, or panic your opponent into repositioning units to avoid the explosion.

[Reldane]

Knights have a weakness in maneuverability? Seriously? Are you aware they have 12" move and Move Through Cover (with it corrected via FAQ to be double the top roll)? I can get a Knight anywhere on the table fast.

I never said it was a big weakness, but being able to shoot it from multiple arcs helps make them slightly more manageable

[40kGamer]

I've never been happy with the gradual move to turn old school EPIC into 40k. They were distinctly different for good reasons, not the least of which being you can't accurately represent and at the same time balance a titan in the 40k gamescale. They never fully managed to do this in epic.

Now we have the fabulous disaster that is 7th and the level of abstraction for 40k has reach epic proportions.

What has been added to the game with 6th-7th?

> Groundscale and Timescale are virtually meaningless.
> The probability of one sided games has increased exponentially.
> Rules complexity has increased with no corresponding payoff in enjoyment.
> Randomness has been inserted everywhere to compensate for poor design.

Knights/Superheavies are just a symptom, not the problem. Games now take longer and require more preplanning to be enjoyable. As long as everyone knows the tone of the game ahead of time it's all good. However it is not cool to bring 5 knights to random pickup games.

[Captain Bubonicus]

However it is not cool to bring 5 knights to random pickup games.

This. And no amount of passive-aggressive blogging will change that fact.

[Lucidum]

This. And no amount of passive-aggressive blogging will change that fact.

For the record, i only use 3 Knights, all the standard Paladin and Errant models because my local store doesn’t allow Forge World.

[Auticus]

Sounds like you are trying to write a page 5 for 40k. (warmachine reference)