It Continues

In my last post I talked about the inconsistencies and inbalances within different iterations of rules and army lists in the game of Warhammer 40,000.

It has recently been found out that the Tyranids are receiving a new unit that can appear in the middle of one of your units and will inflict a whole load of high strength hits that negate most armour.

The Tyranid army looks a lot like Aliens crossed with bugs from Starship Troopers and have traditionally tended to march across the table and then crash upon you like a wave of claws and teeth. During this time you would be able to shoot them and cripple parts of the army you couldn't deal with in close combat and then soften up the teeming hordes of grunt troops.

They are very much like the Zerg in that swarms of small creatures shield larger, more devastating creatures. This balance of them having to run into a hail of bullets before meeting your army in close combat tended to work quite well with games being fairly even sided. Tyranids have always had units that can avoid this by coming on to the table in different positions but that was something that could be coped with if you were clever.

So understand that 40K is played like this: two armies line up in front of each other and then engage in moving, shooting and close combat across the width of a table. This is a massive generalisation and simplification but that is the idea that the original rules were conceived around and it is how they have evolved.

So in this situation we have the Witch Hunters which are weak, under powered and difficult to use effectively. Across the board from them is a swarm of close combat based creatures that can shoot but are weak at shooting and must run across the board to get into close combat. They must survive a hail of bullets and doing so will allow them to enter into combat and tear apart the Witch Hunters but the game will be pretty close and exciting and interesting.

The Witch Hunters are relying on a couple of turns of long range shooting and one turn of rapid firing and flame throwing to thin out the numbers. They must focus their entire force into weakening the incoming bugs.

Now imagine that during those crucial shooting turns a huge monster appears in one of the Witch Hunter's units and destroys them. There is nothing in my army that can match it in close combat so it is free to munch through my troops. I can turn to fire at it with several units and this *may* take it down in a turn. So at least one important and crucial turn is spent shooting at that creature as the rest of the Tyranids charge toward me. And there are double the number of bugs as there used to be. And, under the new rules, can out shoot an army which is all armed with guns.

The balance of the game has been destroyed. Fun with Warhammer is two balanced armies facing off against each other and letting the battle be decided by the best general. It is not fun to have the battle decided by who has the newest army list.

So now I can't really have fun playing against one of my best friends. We bond and relax over a good game of 40K and now that has been ruined.

An old business model of releasing books and escalating the power and reducing the cost of troops has left some armies far more 'playable' than others.

This is a game design post and not a rant post. A good analogy would be if in Left 4 Dead's Versus mode the infected could make a Witch spawn in a safe room and then double the number of zombies in the map. Imagine if when you are playing Gears of War the Locust could suddenly make a Corpser spawn behind you when you are in cover.

Games Workshop used to make fantastically balanced games. They were consistently fun and fair and now we have a situation where the game is decided as soon as people choose who to play against.

If this was a videogame this would be patched within a week. I get to wait for at least 12 months for a new army list. The modern world is leaving Games Workshop behind.