Warhammer tabletop - rules and opinions

[Margalis]

I'm looking for some information and opinion on warhammer/gw tabletop games. What I'm looking for is:

Basic intro to rules.
How unit pointing works. (As I understand it different units cost different points)
The general opinion on unit pointing - do people like it, opinions of it, etc.

If anyone could point me to some good resources or just reply directly that would be great.

[Daeven]

IMO the precedence for the 'goodness' of the rulesets are Warmaster Ancients > Warmaster > Warhammer > 40k I just like the scale of the 10mm battles, and the ancients ruleset seems to have worked out all of the kinks in the Warmaster ruleset.

On Warhammer, I have a very pretty mixed 5th and 6th ed Lizardman army that I can never find the time to play. So *shrug*

[Hoax]

The point system is based roughly along:

-stat lines
-armor save
-starting weapons
-upgrade options (for example space marines in a devastator squad used to cost more then tactical marines because 4 of them could be upgraded to carry heavy weapons)

Point systems are cool when they are balanced but annoying as fuck at times when min/max'ing reveals obvious bargins that become default pics if you are playing to win.  Refer to plasmaguns, wraithlords, starcannons, etc etc.

I'm not really sure what we're supposed to be explaining but here is a basic breakdown to how WH40k works

Player turns are seperate, so each player's turn has a movment/shooting/assault phase rather then both players taking turns moving then firing then assaulting.

I'm not sure what else to say, so I'll leave it at that.  Also I haven't really played WH since 2nd ed. 40k so I'm hardly the expert these days.

[Margalis]

That sort of point-system imbalance is sort of what I am looking for.

How often do people find these imbalances, are how are they fixed? Are they a big problem?

Do people tend to prefer lots of cheap guys or a few expensive ones? That sort of thing.

[Righ]

Back when I did this stuff, I used to prefer lots of inexpensive ones, but part of the attraction for me was painting and displaying the figures. As for the rules... no bearing on modern day Warhammer. :)

[Hoax]

Some codex/army lists are considerd more uber then others.  Gav Thorpe's 3rd ed Eldar codex was notorious for having under-priced overpowered units for example.

The tournament scene in 40k evolved to handle this quite brilliantly if you ask me.  A component of tournament scoring is called sportsmanship, but even more importantly there is an army selection score.  Basically if you min-max the fuck out of your army you will get docked on army selection and often on sportsmanship by the players you face.

This means if you take an space marine army with the minimum number of troop choices and max those by taking 5 marines and giving one a hvy weapon and one an assault weapon.  Then loading up on assault/heavy/elite choices would get you 0 army selection which alone would knock you out of a shot at first.  But also many players will dock sportsmanship because playing against such an army isn't fun if you have a balanced "fluff" army which means you might not even be able to score top3 even with a perfect win/loss and perfect painting score.

Eventually people learned that the only way to successfully cheese an army was to pick an army that you could make "fluffy" and still play to their cheesy tactics.  But really that made the whole metagame about as skill-based as things can get imo and let to lots of people playing armies because it was cool not because it was designed to be min/max'd.

[Daeven]

That sort of point-system imbalance is sort of what I am looking for.

How often do people find these imbalances, are how are they fixed? Are they a big problem?

Do people tend to prefer lots of cheap guys or a few expensive ones? That sort of thing.

Fantasy 6th ed is much better than 5th in that regard. You can *mostly* avoid the army comprised of peasants and the 'single unbeatable unit o horor'. Mostly.

[Trippy]

As Hoax alluded to the army creation system in WH/WH40K is more complex than just counting up the point values of your models. I'll talk about WH40K since I'm more familiar with it than WH but the same basic concepts apply. The most basic army in WH40K consists of an HQ unit and two Troop units. An HQ unit is typically one model (e.g. a Space Marine Force Commander) but there are special HQ units that can contain more than one model (e.g. a commander + bodyguards). A Troop unit is your army's basic combat troop, e.g. in the case of the Space Marines it's the Space Marine (though Scouts count as basic Troops as well).

Each specific unit has a min and max number for the number of models that constitutes "one unit". This is another way that the game tries to balance armies -- i.e. very powerful models not only are more expensive but you are limited to the number of models you can "buy" in one unit. In the case of things like tanks and such that number is usually 1. In addition to what Hoax talked about regarding tournament armies there's are also two other disadvantages with going with a smaller number of models per unit. One is that small units tend to "break" more easily since they require fewer absolute number of casualties to force a morale check to see if the unit falls back. The second disadvantage is that you use up your unit choices faster if you make small units, which is explained more below.

The final way that the game tries to balance things is that for any given scenario you are limited in what unit types you can use. The unit types in WH40K are HQ, Troop, Heavy Support, Fast Attack, and Elite. So for a particular scenario you choices might be:

HQ: 1 (mandatory)
Troops: 2 - 4 (must have at least 2)
Heavy Support: 0 -2
Fast Attack: 0 - 2
Elite: 0 - 2

or a scenario might be setup something like this:

Attacker:
HQ: 1
Troops: 2 - 4
Fast Attack: 0 - 4
Elite: 0 - 2

Defender:
HQ: 1
Troops: 2 - 4
Heavy Support: 0 - 4
Elite: 0 - 2

This system means you can't buy, say, lots and lots of Elite units (e.g. lots and lots of Terminators in the case of Space Marines) unless for some reason the scenario allows for it.

[angry.bob]

How often do people find these imbalances, are how are they fixed? Are they a big problem?

The sort of player that finds and exploits them will usually do it the same day a new codex/army book is released. It's not as big a problem as it used to be back in the old days when they used to write the rules for new miniatures so that they were sooo good you had to have them, but it can still be bad. Sometimes it's really, really bad like an all Obliterator/Basilisk/Heavy weapon squad Iron Warriors army. It's an army so cheesy and overpowered I've seen people quit games halfway though the first turn. OTher times it's more subtle, like Bretonnian calvary being horribly underpriced and being able to make an army completely out of it.

Usually though most stuff has a rock/paper/scissors counter to it. SOme of it's just really hard to spot or come up with.

Do people tend to prefer lots of cheap guys or a few expensive ones? That sort of thing.
[/quote]

That depends a lot on what army you're using and who you're fighting. That's really the biggest factor in what you need to use. Troop selection is almost a game unto itself. I've got a 2000 point skaven army I'm using in a league right now that's pretty versatile and doesn't really require any swapping. It's about 300 models and is a mix of dirt cheap horde units to act as tar babies and a much smaller nuber of expensive specialty troops to pack a  punch. Skaven are a special case though in that I can fire into melee.

[koboshi]

My earlier comments on this issue:  http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=4985.msg128327#msg128327

I still stand by my last idea.  Your game (which I assume this is about) is digitally distributed; you should take advantage of that. You don't have to write anything in stone like the old warhammer games did when they came out with a codex.  Besides you could spend your whole life seeking out exploiters or you could make your game more adaptive and only worry about the worst cases, like you said back then, it doesn’t have to be 100% automatic.

[eldaec]

Back when I played this (and we are talking WFB third edition here) the most important thing to do was to not play competitively.

The balance and rules loop holes were so far out of whack it was crazy.

I always remember the first time I played, running an undead army against goblins, turn one wind of death from my lich (or whatever the hell it was that wounded one third of the enemy) and immeadiately routing 80% of the opposing enemy. Good times.

That said, so long as you didn't play too aggressively and rule out a few degenerate tactics, the rules were a lot of fun and had more depth than anything else I ever played on tabletop or PC. I've seen young'uns playing new fangled WFB, not sure it's the same thing at all. Never trust a wargame where you cannot do serious physical damage to your opponent WITH THE RULEBOOK. That's my motto.

[Bunk]

Point systems like WFB will always be at risk of min/max unbalancing. I still remember the first time my buddy put down his High Elf army of a two units of generic cheap warriors, 6 Charriots and 6 Elven Ballistae. The seige engines routed half my army on the first turn, the charriots ran over the rest...

I prefered the earlier versions of WFB because they allowed for more varied strategy - formations and such. The newer releases were dumbed down to two big units marching at each other, and a bunch of heroes. Who ever had the most paper route money to buy $40 hero figures would win.

[Scadente]

I played WFB from 3rd ed. to 6th ed.. It was mostly the rules that kept me going and making new armies. It's fun, looking back, to see how your own powergamer development at a young age changed to a more balanced and more fun setup. The game is, if both players are somewhat sane, very balanced. The only real problem is that a bad streak of rolls can cost you a whole battle, no matter how many odds you stacked up in your favour. The points based systems is pretty balanced, but a horde army with a few hard hitting units; Orc and Goblin army with a wyvern, trolls, some chariots and giants will almost always win the day. These require less strategy, mostly just deploying right and rushing and killing. While a elven force will be hard pressed to defeat them once those hard hitting units get into the right position.

The rules were very bad early on, people call it Herohammer today. You usually had filler, then a few heros on dragons riding around and annhilating everything else. Thing is; it's alot in the mentality of the player. In tournament play you get points on army composition aswell, as to how it fits the character of your race, and a sportsmanship point. So you do see the tards that just bring the minimum ammount of troops and two dragons. But you'll also see these armies fall apart with a few wellplaced artillery shots.

If you want a deeper look into the community, check out; http://www.warseer.com/

Alot of forums about rules and army composition, and good feedback.

I got to disagree with Bunk, the new system really favors smaller units, and more of them. The incorporated alot of restrictions on heroes (at least in 6th ed.), my Orc and Goblin force ends up really varied and full of different units. It lends itself more strategy, and the siege armies aren't as strong as they used to be. But most people seem to play it for fun, not winning; it's more fun getting into chracter and laugh when your opponment nukes your pathetic goblins off the table :)

[Margalis]

Cool, thanks for the info. I will take a look at some links.

I am starting to move away from a pointing system, and after playing PoxNora a bit that gives me futher fuel to do that. I just don't think composing armies where you spend points is very balanced but more importantly, very interesting.

One thing I have been struggling with is deck composition, deployment of units, etc. If you look at Magic: The Gathering the costing of units runs very deep into the gameplay. If a unit costs more you can deploy it later, can do less on that turn, are subject to a tempo disadvantage, etc.

Imagine M:TG where you could make any deck and it just had to have a total cost of less than X total mana. Kind of boring. In M:TG it is much more fluid and interesting than that in that you can make a deck with all cards that cost 10 - but that confers no advantage in gameplay.

In a game where you just have to come under X threshold the rules seem somewhat arbitrary and 2X is always better than X. In M:TG doubling the cost of every card (along with effectiveness) doesn't do much.

The same with mixing factions. In Magic you can mix colors as much as you want, but the rules of gameplay make that a disadvantage at some point. In PoxNora if you have 10 or 20 of the same faction you get a bonus but again that feels like an arbitrary rule. In Magic the gameplay itself confers advantages and disadvantages to a mono-colored deck.

The great thing about the Magic rules (and the resourcing is the best part of Magic really, all the other rules are pretty interchangeable with other games) is that the basic setup of land and mana leads to a bunch of tradeoffs and decision making that does not feel forced. Want to field an expensive guy? That's fine except he has to come out later, or you have to run more acceleration instead of threats. Want a 4 color deck? That way you can have every tool in your toolbox but again you have to run fixers instead of threats or have a very inconsistent deck.

PoxNora is similar in a lot of ways. It isn't quite there but it is close.

I have toyed with the idea that instead of starting with a standing army you deploy it over time. But I was afraid that would confer too large an advantage to defenders. As your units get deployed and trickle into the enemy base they can deploy at their base and set up a good defense.

But that isn't a problem in PoxNora, or in games like Starcraft, so I don't know why I was so afraid of that. Deploying guys at your base and running them out one at a time confers some huge disadvantages, but the key is to make it advantageous as wel. In PoxNora and Starcraft this is done by providing extra expansion resources. Or a rush can work fine even without resource advantages if your opponent has some slow early tempo.

So I'm thinking about a resource system that involves some interesting tradeoffs and makes both cheap and expensive units useful without having arbitrary rules. A system more interactive and deep than just "total cost can only be X"

[Scadente]

I don't really know what your game is or how it works, but I'll put in my 2c.

Well, I've never been a huge fan of how magic works. In theory, nice, but once you sit down and meet some guy who's got a crazy lockdown deck... forget about it. He isn't really abusing rules, but he's not really playing like a sportsman. Which I often find the problem with competitive games that are supposed to be FUN. Not just min/max'ing or powergaming. Enforcing some gentlemans code of conduct is always nice, imho :)

Yes starcraft rewards experience and skill, but getting base zerged in your 50 first games isn't really my idea of fun. The learning curve in these games is often way too steep, so it only caters the hardcore. It would be like playing counterstrike with predictable recoil... Think it's some game called Rainbow 6 , imho it's not fun. You get trashed around way too much untill you start learning. It's because the hardcore can predict most of the randoms the game throws at them. So a new player will just be swamped, trying to figure out whats what, and then gets raped by some guy who knows the game like the palm of his hands.

I'm not saying points systems is the way to go, but try to keep new players in mind. I know CS is lacking in alot of places, but you can always get lucky even though youre not skating your mouse on some icemat-thing.

But then again... It might just be me that's a carebear, more interested in a game being fun for all parties 

[Sky]

That's why internet games suck. Someone minmaxes the fun out of a game, you can punch him and tell him to knock it off. Online...you just have to deal with it as part of the game.

[Margalis]

A casual play area solves that problem pretty well. Similar to "no rush" games in SC. All it takes is having a couple different lobbies with different names and players will come up with appropriate rules of conduct.