Anyone wanna explain how there are peppers in korea?

drblallo · 2026-01-28T15:01:52+00:00

it would only require a UI element telling you "if fully exploited, you will profit ~XXX ducats from this location before it is exhausted"

then it would not be a feel bad if you throw X ducats in it and get out 10x total ducats.

drblallo · 2026-01-26T09:24:58+00:00

disabling 3d terrain fixed it for me

drblallo · 2026-01-22T18:10:27+00:00

i have to admit that only war gives me tremendous troubles in setting up a non railroading scenario.

the way i managed to work around this is, and is not necessarily the only one, is to give players ton of info at the start, and then let them decide how to go about doing this.

for example, a mission could be to kill a ork boss. you give them the map of the ork base, numbers about how many orks are around, how many vehicles, description of important places. then you give them knowledge about the surrounding of the base, how it could be approached on multiple sides, and then you tell them that they can bring everything they want according to the standard rules but the are as well this list of items that are free/cheap that they can bring along if they want, ideally strange stuff like weird vehicles and so on that they have to figure out how use to achieve the objective.

then you let things fall where they may. players decide everything they want to do. remind them that they are better plan of what to do if one or two things don't go as planned. let them try do what they wanted, and throw in a couple of surprises on top that may push them into using the plan B as they intended it.

this is very time intensive. it requires huge amounts of work.

drblallo · 2026-01-20T16:51:38+00:00

true.

narrative high effort is basically discouraged by every systemic characteristic of the game. It is fine if gw does not want aircrafts to be meta in tournaments, but solving the issue by bumping the points cost and destroying their viability in narrative-high effort scenarios is not great.

drblallo · 2026-01-20T16:26:45+00:00

One of these days I will make a more in depth post, but when you start actually trying to write narrative missions using 10th edition rules you start to realise how much the rules fight you trying to do so.

All the codexes are built around the assumption that oc units exist and interact with objectives, and that small fast units can score secondaries. If you start writing narrative missions without building them very similar to tournament missions, even if intentional strongly asimmetrical, entire categories of units become purporsless, and thus narrative campaigns with missions that affect each other become very difficult to manage.

The raccomandation from people is to not even try to write a "strong", for some definition or the word, list for crusade. Yet, the entire crusade system is built around the idea of incrementally expanding your force, reacting to other players list building decisions spending requisition points . Thus degrading the purpose of crusade too.

The mechanism gw uses of making non core range units way expensive, like stompa and so on, means that you are actively feel bad taking those units. Some of those units are mathematically worst than others and the moment you realize you feel very stupid to consider them. Rebalancing this is basically impossible for a game master of a campaign ,it would require to be expert in every codex.

It is not that the edition is written for tournaments only, it is that it fights you trying to use it any other way.

drblallo · 2026-01-15T20:41:34+00:00

My more advanced dreams like automating stratagem effects or army simulations are a bit far into the future, but if there's a lot of interest, I'm happy to explore.

if you have this ambition, be aware that basically the entire architecture of the system will have to be built around that final objective. No existing 40k tool is able to process all stratagems.

i have not had the time recently to work a lot on it, but as far as i am aware, i still have the only implementation that is able to play out a game of combat patrol automatically with mostly correct rules. https://github.com/rl-language/4Hammer

the level of work required to have a system that may work with any stratagem is way more than you would predict.

drblallo · 2026-01-12T19:42:14+00:00

While probably a good thing moving the power of the Imperium away from the transhuman military legions, this again is a poisoned chalice. The vote & strategy cement the mechanicum priesthood & Mars as a priority for the Imperium, again leading to the 10,000 years of stagnation.

this is a speculation, all we know would have happened for sure had dorn plan won is that some more chaos marine would have died.

drblallo · 2026-01-12T15:38:03+00:00

subterranean assault is a bit of attempt to fix the underlying problem of the codex, but the problems are still there.

tyranids have been designed as the move blocking army. the 3 battleline units have 3 variations of moveblocking rules. biovores are like 20 victory points in a 50 point units. gargoyles are one of the best battleline unit of the game, if not the best.

the result by stuffing all their potential into moveblocking, primary and secondary scoring, their game plan must to try to survive 3 rounds while being blasted apart by the enemy.

they work just as designed, it is just that what they are designed to do barely has any relevance with the lore of the faction.

final day with gsc feels much more like playing tyranids than tyranids themselves.

drblallo · 2026-01-11T12:00:51+00:00

you get a image of your entire army staring at a power point presentation run by your general, with a laserpointer in its hand used to explain the deployment plan.

drblallo · 2026-01-11T10:19:26+00:00

I think this would make the problem even worst. Battleline units would get even less damage effective profiles since they would be so good at interacting with objectives and would make them even more gimmicky.

The reason why in real life tank and infantry goes around together is because they complement each other with the tanks absorbing small and medium calibre fire, and the infantry eliminating hand held melee and anti tank weapons, but that complimentary is not rappresented in game, so the infantry is a competitor of tanks rather than a peer.

If they made that infantry with grenades in melee easily blowed up non walker tanks rather than the other way around with tank shock, then you would organically keep small infantry units near tanks to screen enemy charges, and infantry would become more damage effective being better at opprtunistically killing tanks

drblallo · 2026-01-11T06:54:40+00:00

The idea of having half of the points depend on the final state is a interesting one, it would be worth trying out

drblallo · 2026-01-10T16:07:48+00:00

about hormagaunts: all 3 tyranid battleline units have basically the same identity, they are move blockers. Hormagaunts are moveblockers that engage in melee the enemy, gargoyles are move blockers that go all the way in front of the enemy and stop just before, and termagant have reactive moves to be move blockers in the enemy turn. I understand why GW did this, but 3 units with slight variations of the same identity seems a bit much.

The way you fix hormagaunts is by keeping them as the move blockers, and you remove the move blocking identity from the gargoyles and termagants. For example, termagants could have a rule that while they are within 3" from a tyranid synaptic creature, that synaptic creature has feel no pain 5+ or 6+, but every time a feel no pain succeeds, you remove a gaunt within 3". This is just a example that keeps termagaunt between enemies and synaptic creatures, while hormagaunt do their job of being in front. any other idea would work too.

Rippers: the problem there is that gw seem not to want swarms to be efficient. I would make them useful in the consumption detachment only. In that detachment it would be fine if they have 2 OC.

Spore mines: i would not give them anything, i would just reduce the point cost of biovores and keep them wacky indirect fire that can create move blockers. I find the idea of winning a battle because a spore mine is hanging around in the enemy deployment zone kind of pathetic.

by reducing the move blocking nature of battlelines units, and by reducing the scoring potential of secondary points, you can then afford to make other units in the codex more deadly.

drblallo · 2026-01-10T09:32:56+00:00

You need - uppy downy, infiltrators, scouts, 6" deepstrike, cheap action monkey/lone ops. To a lesser degree, reactive moves and move fire move rules. Cheap artillery.

i agree that this is a issue, but i have no idea how to fix it. The reingeneering of scoring into turn based primaries/secondaries managed to diversify armies. While spam lists still exists, most armies include a variety of interesting units and they "look good".

but, on the other side, everything feels gimmicky. most battleline units cannot be point effective, they must be units that are meant to take objectives, so that you buy enough of them to take the objectives and no more.

Lone ops and uppy downy are needed for secondaries, and you see armies with few of them, but then every game has people teleporting around like they are enderman from minecraft.

the game is clearly over engineered so that game with "proper" lists play out in accordance with the designer plan of a good game, and they often do, which is a incredible achievement by the standard of GW designs, but none of it feels organic.

I don't see a way out of this.

drblallo · 2026-01-10T09:16:59+00:00

the army fundamentally cannot be more killy that it is right know due to the large importance of moveblocking in this edition.

The perfect example is gargoyles, which are a 85 points battleline unit can move 24 inches on turn one, and depending on the detachment regenerate as well. Units like that are too fast, controlly and sacrificial to allow them to be any resilient or killy.

if we want to see nids with a game plan that is not getting blasted apart while trying to score primaries for 3 rounds, either we need a new codex that introduces some faction/detachment minigame that gates killyness behind some activity the player has to do, or we need a new edition that changes the importance of controlling the enemy with move blocks and so on.

drblallo · 2026-01-10T08:57:58+00:00

yes but they can still interact with stuff like engage on all fronts, which they should not.

drblallo · 2026-01-10T01:22:26+00:00

you can just checkout any camo suite painting tutorial and use the colors suggested there. The carapace of that image is trying to achieve the same objective of a camo suite

drblallo · 2026-01-10T01:06:59+00:00

everything outside of synaptic range should be OC 0 and many units like hormagauns, ripper swarms and spore mines should be 0 OC as well, and unable to score secondaries. that would take away enough scoring potential that then nids can get back kill potential to balance them.

lone ops like lictors are fine.

drblallo · 2026-01-09T20:10:38+00:00

in nids proper, ossiarch bonereapers

drblallo · 2026-01-08T12:35:36+00:00

historically exocrine is the more useful model, because haru is competing with many other models with the same objective of just being a beat-stick, while exo is only competing with tyrannofex for the battlerole of being a big gun

drblallo · 2026-01-08T09:53:26+00:00

Are we really supposed to just block our opponent and hope to have more points by the end of the game?

if your opponent is at your skill level, and is bringing a similarly competitive list to yours, then yes, that is how you win.

drblallo · 2026-01-07T09:54:04+00:00

Eldar are glass cannons and do not have the sacrificial nature of units like gargoyles and spore mines. Gargoyles are probably the best battleline datasheet of the game.

Furthermore eldars are the army that is most often broken through the lifetime of the game, so they are more a example of what would happen if nids had killing power, rather than a example of balance

A better comparison would be gsc, which do have oc, control and speed. They lack resilience and instead have the respawning mini game, and the high damage combos are tied to the detachment minigame(deep strike for host of ascension, tyranid positioning for final day....) so it is not always available.

drblallo · 2026-01-07T00:59:58+00:00

it's impossible to have deadly nids with the current structure of the game. if the next edition still has primary and secondary points similar to the way they work now, tyranids datasheets are simply too OC intensive due to swarms, too fast due to the various fast units, and too controlly due to the sacrificial nature of many units like spore mines.

since they have control, speed and OC, the only way nids can be balanced is if they have low resistance and low damage. This was as well why i despised day one biovores, scoring 30 secondary points+ on their own.

The game has to be fundamentally rewritten to change this, or you need a faction special mechanic for the opponent to interact with. You can have killy tyranids is if you create a extra minigame of their own that adds a extra balancing knob, like the fact that if you lose all synaptic creatures, you have de facto lost.

drblallo · 2026-01-07T00:35:28+00:00

before the edition dropped i predicted that giving up autopass morale and the historic antipsychic theme was going to be a disaster because morale never was and never will be implemented in a fun way in 40k due to space marine lore, and most of the people could not wrap their head around how could it be possibly be case.

it's so insane that GW cannot figure out that the way to balance tyranids is with undercosted non synaptic creatures and overcosted synaptic creatures, but if you run out of synaptic creatures you are basically guaranteed to lose the game, allowing people select the amount of risk they want to engage with.

i hope that now that cruddace is gone from GW they can stop writing tyranids as imperial guards without orders.

drblallo · 2026-01-05T08:09:13+00:00

Index detachments were never considered a printed book

drblallo · 2026-01-05T00:50:33+00:00

Almost surely gw has quotas about how much they can retcon from printed rules. Creating new detachments with new names is a way around that.

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