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Ganigumo

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Everything posted by Ganigumo

  1. Game design is separate from narrative yes. They're different fields. Call of Duty and Doom are both shooters but their narratives are very different. I'm not saying verisimilitude isn't important, but we (and designers) should be very careful about letting narrative make the game worse, or stop us from making it better. Its very much a case by case basis too, and representation of narrative can come in many forms. Like narratively sometimes a single space marine can kill hundreds if not thousands of something like orks or tyranids. But in gameplay a single grot with a rusty pipe could get lucky in a 1v1. In the example giving plasma more AP and a bolt more shots represents that plasma is more powerful well enough, it just means that it isn't strictly better than the bolt option. Maybe people will make dumb jokes and complain about it, but nobody is going to stop playing because of that. They will stop playing because of bad design. Since they're rewriting everything I would be very happy if they just rolled all the profiles into various "assortments of weapons". I guess when you have a shield option they should probably relent a little. Blood knights did it too. Everything going to 3" range makes most spears obsolete so its a good time to do it. I addressed verisimilitude a bit above, but tl;dr we make sacrifices to it because the game needs to be an abstraction of narrative that functions as a game. The points complexity is a pain point, you need to respect your players time, and there isn't a great way to lay it out in a rule book without making the points section intimidating and complex. I know it appeals to people, but I feel like its better suited for narrative or smaller scale games where the options can matter more. I think necromunda goes pretty deep into that stuff. With respect to customization I'm not against it, but the decisions you ask your players to make should actually be impactful. I would actually trade every warscroll option in the game, as well as most enhancements, to get a cleaned up version of anvil of apotheosis put into the core matched play rules.
  2. A unit being the same cost is regardless of weapon options, with the options balanced against each other is good design. If one of the options somehow changes the units role entirely, IE from an anvil to a ranged hammer you should probably have a different entry entirely to point it appropriately, and to make things clearer to the players. The complaint that "A boltgun and Plasma gun costing the same is ludicrous" is not a game design argument. Its a verisimilitude argument. The only reason its a problem is because the narrative says plasma guns are better than boltguns. There's no reason a plasma gun couldn't be 1 high AP/STR shot, and the boltgun would get enough low AP/STR shots to be comparable. Maybe the meta favors high AP stuff, but its not impossible to have them be roughly comparable. Customization of troops to that level just isn't impactful enough to the game as a whole to bother with the complexity. I understand some people enjoy the quartermaster simulator aspects, but its a lot of overhead the game doesn't need.
  3. Good design: Not forcing players to consult spreadsheets to figure out points Bad design: Not balancing the weapon options A failure to properly balance the options does not make this bad design. They fail to balance weapon options constantly, and which one is good changes from edition to edition, which punishes players with the wrong loadout. Even with my previous experience with 40k that was the case. You'd always run tankbustas with max rokkits, one edition nobs with big choppas would be good, and another power klaws would be the thing. I remember buying models with no upgrades as ablative wounds just so my fights last power klaw nobs would get a chance to fight last, the klaws were more expensive than the model itself. You play GW games long enough and you just kind of accept they're going to ****** up loadout balance constantly. Happens in AoS too, Tzaangor used to run shields, and are now best even ignoring the special weapon options with dual blades, gore gruntas used to bring choppas, now they bring spears. There are probably hundreds of examples across tons of editions.
  4. Power level, or points how we have them in aos, were always better design. I was happy at this change but I don't play 40k much. Weird that good design was one of the things that pissed people off the most. Hopefully the AoS community gets upset at something that is bad rather than good if we do. They said it had an unexpected ending. What if Khul wins, Khorne rejects him because he is still not devoted enough or something, and so khul rejects khorne and gets reforged and turned into a stormcast? Pretty much beat for beat like Maybe khorne doesn't trust him because he's devoted to himself instead of khorne, and just "using" khorne to get power. We have valkia to resculpt for that!
  5. Maybe they'll have some kind of rage or frenzy mechanic? Losing their sense of humanity while in the midst of battle. That could fit the vibe of the chamber maybe.
  6. Plenty of content creators have talked about the issues with BTs, but it basically comes down to it having a bell curve of value. BTs are bad for new players, bad for experienced players, and kind of okay, or even good, for people in between. If it just sucked for the good players it would be much better, and it would still be better if the value of it got better with skill, but its in this weird place where its too complex for new players, but also solvable.
  7. This is an argument for the existence of a secondary scoring system, not for the battle tactic system. Faction battle tactics are just a balance problem. Battle tactics themselves being an overly complex system that are battleplan agnostic and make your games feel similar by being busywork at high skill levels, and bring games to a halt at low skill levels are problems at the conceptual level.
  8. They like to keep their ranges separate to track sales. When they get around to doing chaos in old world its gonna be the old plastic marauders, chaos warriors, resin chosen, and old knights. Same way they're bringing back old trolls and giants for the O&G stuff instead of using the aos models.
  9. This was confirmed fake a long time ago wasn't it? Heywoah did a video reviewing it, and IIRC correctly somebody said their wishlist got posted as a fake leak. It would take me forever to dig up the tweet though. sounds like no USRs? good this better not be what made indexes a necessity. Not worth it good change good change, might hurt a few armies with multiple lores (spiderfang) but those might get the axe... battle tactics 🤮 On a more serious note this doesn't actually do anything. Pretty much the only time to actually take a double is when you can immediately win the game. This doesn't really shift the math, or make controlling prio any weaker. Took them 4-6 years to get all the armies they wanted around into books and to squat the leftovers. 3 years later they reopen the issue. At this point everything should either be in or out. Its ridiculous. Gutbuster Ogors are 100% in, they're not getting old world support, plus we got new gorgers and a new terrain piece. Spiderfang on the other hand are definitely on the chopping block too.
  10. There's definitely other people that did too, a bunch of content creators seemed to be pro index. I just have 0 faith they'll be any good because I know they didn't have enough time to design or test properly. It will be exciting though.
  11. Is it suspicious to anyone else that in the article for indexes they say "Each faction in the new edition" and "every faction in the new edition" will get new rules. They never said all factions would get new rules. Is squatting back, again?
  12. I forgot to mention just how much I love the OBR stuff. Not my army, but the thing I wanted to see most from them was their take on beasts and monsters and the warband definitely delivers.
  13. There is a learning curve attached to USRs before you don't need to cross reference them. Most players probably play less than once a month, and those players are not going to remember the USRs. What I'm kind of getting at is that all USRs do is obscure complexity. Being honest and putting that complexity on full display on the warscroll is both better user experience, and also will make the designers think twice about the complexity. Going digital would help, but some people like analog If you play once a week you probably play more often than 99% of the playerbase.
  14. We can re-use names and text, like we shouldn't have 37 variants of flying. But every model that has flying should say: Same with stuff like bodyguards etc. I get the urge to consolidate it into one central location, so you don't end up repeating yourself endlessly, but it really is bad user experience. There's a rule of thumb for UX design that important information should never be more than 3 clicks away, because your user will get increasingly annoyed with each subsequent click. There's some pushback, but its mostly a rule that reminds you to be cognizant of the amount of time it takes for your user to get to the desired information. All rules on the warscroll: A bit more cluttered, but you just open up your battletome/app and find the warscroll for all the info. USRs: Clean warscroll, but to figure out what each rule does you need to: Find the rule on the warscroll, open up the core book to the index, find the USR in the index, flip to the page number, find the rule. Also pray any other USRs you need are on the same page. Their comments on the double turn are just exactly how I think it already operates. A lot of battleplans give strong incentive to not take them for scoring reasons.
  15. Sort of unironically yes. needing to swap pages to figure out what a unit does will always be a chore. We're not so hard pressed for real estate that we can't. Absolutely nothing interrupts a game worse than needing to spend 1-5 minutes scrambling through the rulebook to check what a rule does. Its bad for new players for that exact reason. When you add USRs everybody is a new player. Once you're experienced you probably already know what your warscroll does anyway, so it doesn't actually help. Pretty much the only scenario its good for is when you're reading rules that aren't your own rules, which in a real game can often be summarized by your opponent quicker anyways.
  16. A single USR is a USR too many. But it sounded like they were referring to stuff like unit champions and musicians? I wouldn't even consider those USRs.
  17. Good lord I hate the mission deck. Why are my rules in a pamphlet and cards. Just design the actual battleplans. I'm not even sure its good for casual players, since its so much easier to just flip to a page that has all your battleplan rules in one place. Its fine as a supplemental thing, but definitely not for me.
  18. I'm not looking forward to indexes. Honestly AoS 3 has been pretty good and we only needed minor revisions and simplifications, nothing that would necessitate an index. Balance is literally the best its ever been too. Even the way they talked about it screamed "We didn't have enough time to give all these the proper amount of attention". Since they were talking about how they lined up models and kind of decided the stats relatively, which is basically admitting to making the warscrolls more symmetrical, a common tactic to balance things quickly since symmetry is balanced by default. I really feel like indexes need to be a LAST resort. the change to weapon range didn't necessitate this, the game balance isn't bad enough to justify it, so what on earth is changing so thoroughly that they need to rewrite everything? A potential hero phase magic removal? Thats going to make magic armies feel less unique in a way. To make things worse we all know they aren't given any more development time to make an "index edition" than any other edition. so in the time it took them to write and balance 3rd edition, which was a refinement and expansion of 2nd edition, they're rewriting huge swathes of the core rules and rewriting 25 factions, and hundreds of warscrolls. There's a saying in software development, about "The great redesign in the sky", where people want to go back and start fresh instead of fixing what they have, since they feel hopeless about the mess they've built over time. But its rarely actually productive to do that, because unless you've addressed the factors that caused you to make those mistakes in the first place you're just going to make them again. And if you do fix those factors you should be able to just fix the mistakes instead of starting anew. Every army is going to feel like bonesplitterz going into 3rd edition, which always feels bad. We'll need to see how things turn out, the article stated the double turn was still in the game, which is good, but they said this anyone who has played the game much understands that controlling the priority is already super impactful, and will hold off on taking doubles, or give them away pretty frequently. Pretty much the only time you want to take it is if you immediately lose if you don't or you can immediately cripple your opponent so badly you win. Could just be a throwaway statement though. Rant over, all the model reveals were super cool, especially the lady of ruin, and the animation was sick, skaven collectors will be eating good.
  19. I really like the idea of using fellwaters with snarlfangs. snarlfangs can pile in from 6" and fight over the troggs, and the fellwater vomit can help the snarlfangs with rend.
  20. Keeping their humanity and memories, but being forced to serve under nagash is a kind of torture is it not? Like sure, maybe nagash lets them fight chaos, but at some point they'll inevitably be forced to fight the followers of sigmar as well.
  21. While not as well established as the heresy, the idea of deathcast vs stormcast is possibly more interesting than SM vs CSM. A huge point could be that deathcast get cured of the reforging problems, which creates interesting motivations, as they need to struggle with their duty and faith, or their sense of self. To push things even further they can still continue the fight against chaos alongside nagash, so maybe siding with nagash will make them more effective in the fight against chaos since they might retain their memories etc.
  22. I'm on the hopium that warclans will see an end of edition book. I'm much less convinced bonesplitterz are leaving now that their presence in old world is basically limited to a unit option. I really don't want indexes. 25 sets of army rules written in the time it takes them to write 1 or 2 books sounds disastrous (look at the balance results of every other time they're done index rules)
  23. 1. I agree bandaid rules like reinforcement points, rally, and aos3 coherency didn't seem properly thought out. 2. There are only so many ways to write similar heroes (foot, cav etc) without them looking the same or getting overly complex. They could do stuff like 10 attacks with 1 damage vs 5 at 2, but thats mostly splitting hairs. Making your own character is largely aimed at narrative play now, and I'm not sure I have a problem with that. 3. I don't think this is a problem. Typecasting units by performance (i.e hammer, chaff, anvil, support) is just as viable a method. If anything I prefer this, because it gives more freedom for asymmetrical armies. There was a bit of an arms race in older editions of wfb/40k whenever a new unit type was introduced as each army would get (or not get) that unit type as well. 4. Battleshock should stay irrelevant, because if it mattered more everybody would hate it. If you want an anecdote ask your local destruction player. Its also not really accounted for in balance at all since its assigned purely for narrative reasons. (covering the ones I didn't cover above) 5. Battle tactics suck. Hopefully they get the axe. Put the secondary objective into the battleplan, and vary them. Having a universal secondary system makes games too similar. 6.This is not true. Skew lists are just abusing broken units, MW or not. MW spam has a natural counter in high wound armies and ward saves (squigs, nurgle, bonesplitterz, etc), but its a natural response to the armor stacking meta created by stuff like mystic shield and AoD. I think they've overcosted raw wounds, and undercosted armor saves as a general rule this edition. 7. 6 month seasons were a mistake, and the seasons were generally too impactful on how the game played.
  24. I don't think we need the extra granularity of a d10/12 system? There's a point where what you get out of it stops being worth the complexity and a d6 is probably fine. I know a die change isn't that big, but how important is it for us to be able to hit on 3.5s or get a +/-0.5 to hit? You could build a system around it and it would be fine, but it seems like a lot of work for not much benefit.
  25. I'd like to see dirty tricks just scrapped entirely. We can get a rule with the same name, but the current rule just doesn't feel like a kruleboyz rule? The flavor is almost entirely in the names and they don't really change how you play the game. If we're going to keep the name something like command abilities that apply debuffs to enemy units would be pretty fitting I think.
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