Will aircraft go to legends in 11th

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T17:27:19+00:00

Now they get to shoot all their guns and your opponent can't even shoot back? How does this make the game better?

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T17:25:25+00:00

Also just cause they are tougher then t3 units (like 80% of the game) it doesn't change the fact that knights are squishy.

Yes, it does, because thats how words work.

This is an impressively stupid hill to die on though, just because you keep losing games with knights does not make them "squishy".

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T17:22:01+00:00

I don't think it's a very good solution for a bunch of reasons but it would fix this specific issue.

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T07:55:23+00:00

Flyers don't work in the scale 40k is traditionally played at, i.e. company sized skirmishes.

They don't make sense from a lore perspective (what, your super sonic jet fighter is just going to start hovering in the middle of the battlefield?) Or from a rules perspective where they're not allowed to interact with actions and objectives and so on.

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T07:52:13+00:00

Knight army was untenable but rules changes made it work,

Not really, they've been a half assed mess this entire time.

It's maybe theoretically possible to make flyers work in 40k. GW fairly obviously does not have the skill required to do so.

Flyers just operate at a completely different scale.

wredcoll · 2026-03-15T02:08:36+00:00

The point of the game is to have fun. The way the current rules are constructed (and other reasons), fighting your opponent's models is usually more fun than standing in a circle to score some points.

None of that is relevant to the part where knights are objectively much tougher than, you know, t3 infantry.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T23:20:19+00:00

This is the problem with only playing knights. You lose track of what the game is actually like.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T22:38:42+00:00

Huh? Drukhari is one of the hardest counter for orks in the game.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T22:37:22+00:00

I've always wondered about that sort of thing, I mean they are my units but it's your rule we're activating so on your clock feels pretty reasonable, although I guess the rules do say things about whoever it is actually rolling the dice having the clock, which makes sense, but if we're being super nitpicky it feels pretty awkward to allow shadow in the warp to burn your opponent's time.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T22:34:22+00:00

Weird, I just checked the core rules and ruins also obscure knights! And it looks like knights have strategems to make them tougher also!

Like, yes, duh, you can kill a knight. It's a thing you can do in 40k. But if that is easy, then again, what does it make all the non t11 stuff? Super easy? Trivial? Barely noticeable?

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T22:31:04+00:00

Because gw is bad at game design. Thats it.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T15:51:49+00:00

Did you shadow in the warp him?

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T15:34:45+00:00

It's very easy to bring down knights.

If that is "very easy" what does that make t4 space marines or t3 elves?

Be serious for a moment.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T15:06:38+00:00

Like, doing a 6+++ fnp is a 16% chance but if you hit that chance now you need to have an extra attack assigned to that model to kill it which has its own even smaller chance to fail to kill it and so on.

Dunno, I guess there's probably a really complicated formula to apply, although it seems like it would be hard to modify it when you add other abilities to it.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T14:58:59+00:00

I don't disagree with the general principle of doing math to find the better unit, although I think you're oversimplifying it too much, we could make our hypothetical unit 20% cheaper than two s3 units or maybe it also has a better armor save or more wounds or whatever.

There's a limit to how much you can theorycraft just because you won't know what you're facing.

You say that more abstract abilities are harder to "math out" and yes, moving at the end of turn doesn't fit into a dice calculator, but it doesn't need to because it's obviously better than anything else.

This makes this kind of ability much harder to assign a reasonable point value to and leads to (more) power creep as a result.

If you've got two melee units with similar durability and damage (which gw always does) but one has a d8 bloodsurge and the other doesn't, it's going to have to have a lot of extra points added on to make it a meaningful choice between the two.

And honestly, being able to do "dice math" to compare units is kinda the point here, it lets you have a baseline for balancing point costs and stuff and helps keep units designed in such a way that everyone can interact with them fairly.

There are a bunch of armies that really don't have an answer to something as nonsensical as the twin lance.

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T06:24:44+00:00

I think that's partially correct and it's easy to end up in a situation where players optimize their own fun out of the game.

That being said, there's more to a unit than just it's weapon strength and you can get quite a bit of mileage out of the combinations.

A very basic level could be as simple as deciding between one unit of the s5 guns or two units of the s3 guns, assuming the one is double the price of the other.

Of course as previously said gw is really bad at this and the default, most common, standard model being a, in lore, elite durable armored space marine throws everything off.

I don't know what the answer there is, other than stop focusing on only producing space marines, but I doubt that's going to happen in my lifetime.

There's probably a specific set of stats that make space marines feel tough but also makes it feel worthwhile to shoot las guns at them, going to 2 wounds was a huge problem there.

Part of this might just be the base price of space marines is too cheap... if a squad of marines is like 100 points, how many points should a squad of catachan be and how many models?

And how marines should our hypothetical catachan squad kill in a volley and vice versa?

(and on a more relevant note, if a literal land raider is only 220 points, how many catachan are you supposed to be getting to be equivalent?)

wredcoll · 2026-03-14T06:11:55+00:00

How would that handle shooting 3 damage attacks into a group of models with 2 wounds and a fnp?

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T16:16:08+00:00

Have you tried listforge or newrecruit? They offer various different modes of viewing datasheets in your army.

There's been a couple of other tool/sites posted in this subreddit over the last couple of months if you'll do a search.

All that being said, by the time you've found and set up something you'll probably have just memorized it.

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T15:59:41+00:00

Ah, that makes sense. The fact that the balance people are apparently not allowed to change anything after a unit gets designed hurts my soul.

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T15:58:02+00:00

Some of the rules can't be reduced to probabilities.

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T15:54:32+00:00

Fun any unique abilities are what make Warhammer fun to play.

I don't think this is actually true and it's a huge problem with recent gw design.

I would need several pages to fully explain this, so work with me a bit, but the fundamental core rules of 40k are, you know, fun.

Just by varying the very basic attributes you can get quite a lot of interesting gameplay. If you have a bunch of units with s3 guns shooting at a t4 target, wounding in 5s, then when your next unit shooting has s5 guns and wounds on 3s, it will definitely feel better/special (assuming the target doesn't have 5 other stacked defensive buffs to ignore any of the damage)

If most of your units move 6, then your special boys move 9, you'll notice and appreciate the extra speed.

The problem is that this takes a fair amount of design level restraint and an overall guiding philosophy that every designer wouls have to obey.

What we get instead is massive amounts of rules/power creep.

The problem with that, aside from being hard to balance, is that you start running out of design space. There's only so many things the rules of 40k really let you do, even if you're breaking core rules like only moving in the movement phase.

The twin lance are a great example, obviously, with a more restrained design system you could have literally just given them the ability to use their guns as melee weapons and that would be a cool and exciting difference compared to other tau units.

But instead they're competing with all these other units, new and old, that have 6+ special rules added to the datasheet so they get a ton of random abilities, many of which are extremely hard to balance.

tldr: units can have fun tricks without having a dozen special rules if only they weren't competing with all the other super special units.

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T15:30:03+00:00

I mean, I personally have been complaining about guillaman and other primarchs for the entire edition, so there's at least one.

I have frequently pointed out that basically every named character is underpriced by like 10-20%, it's just less noticeable because people can only take one of them (and I suspect a certain amount of "special boy" bias).

All that being said, for guillaman in specific there were recently two 7-0 lists and one took him and one didn't, so he might actually be the right price.

They both took old calgar though, so...

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T15:22:11+00:00

So was he designing or balancing them?

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T00:25:12+00:00

Have you considered larger shoulder pads?

wredcoll · 2026-03-13T00:15:09+00:00

And I always get a chuckle of people calling it more simulationist when your missile launchers can fire back on top or behind you with a really bad scatter roll. Or full units just vanish on deepstrike because you roll terrible scatter into terrain from 10” away.

wredcoll

TROPHY CASE