Crablezworth

There is a statline in the book for fortification-style structures but they may be too strong, good news is they can only hold one detachment. We've been toying with capping infantry detachments at 6 anyway, so could probably see like 4-6 bases taking refuge inside. I sorta long for like a planetstrike style expansion but instead of pure attack/defend, maybe just a game mode or scenario where both side have to spend a certain amount of points on defense/structures/bunkers/trenches etc. Might be fun to have higher value structures be worth vp's if destroyed or become the objectives or something along those lines.

They're drop coffins, big automated bulk carriers. Grimdark terrain makes the files. https://grimdarkterrain.com/product/july-2024-stl-package/

Pretty much as the title says, inspired by the glassic rts but at li scale. Not sure what purpose if any the terrain might serve game-wise other than eye candy, but it is immersive.

Dawn of war style raven guard forward operations base :)

Some pics from today's game, we did 2k "half-titandeath", so approx 1k of titans/knights and a 1kish list.

So it worked pretty well in terms of shifting focus back to shooting. We only saw I think 3 combats all game. Did a short write up about it:

I think it's worth looking at other rule sets. If anything just to compare and contrast li to them. Same time, without an established community it's an even more uphill battle I feel to get others to want to play that rule set, even if one is raving about how awesome it is. The sunk cost is real in terms of li, at least for myself. I'd rather stuffer it or try and improve it than learn a whole new ruleset. Would rather try and extract the good from the other ruleset or sets and use that to help improve li. The relevance problem is real, example, today warcom finally dropped some info on the mechanicum tank release. Is this something that'd be relevant to an old school epic group/epic armageddon group? They've likely had files for those tanks for years. Not that everything must revolve around "current thing", I myself have had karacnos as you know for a while now as well, but like, I'm not sure what there is to discuss about them in some group where they're old news I guess. I think it'd be a lot easier to get into epic armageddon in the uk where there's a big following. Other consideration is stuff like stalkers/dark mech not having rules.

It's often the case it seems of players wanting/needing the scale to justify itself in terms of having a BIGGER army than they ever would in 30k/40k and the problem is there is never enough time allocated to the point level events try and do. I sorta feel like any event doing more than 2k is a bit out to lunch, especially with only 3 hour rounds. We used to allocate like 6-8-10 hours for big 40k games back in the day, we were at least realistic about what was involved, now a days, no to defend gw, but it feels like players somehow want a game with hundreds of models to play like kill team, and already this games biggest problem is its trying to do that, make alternating activation work at scale, and its one of the games biggest problems. A point myself and others made about 30k 2nd edition was its introduction of reactions would basically destroy larger/multi player per side games, and it created an absolute cluster f for them. LI needed to be like sm2 and suggest 1500pts to start, but modern gw marketing team would never have that. That's also why they don't even bother showing games or trying to have a realistic standard, its all aspirational so no one puts any limits on their spending. It's a nice thing you guys did for mr sawyer, sad to hear attendance wasn't as high as one might hope for such a thing. It just deviates too much and in too many ways from sm2 for no real reason. SM2 for example had fairly common sense rules around like march order/transports and they functioned very similarly to older 40k. They've also done zero to even remotely faq/errata anything, so its no surprise to have differing opinions/takes on some rules. Speaking of granularity, just wrapping one's head around order of operations can sorta leave one spinning, like how detachments in transports function, basically we joke the transports are "booting them out" because its not a fluid interaction, one can't have troops get out for example half way through a transports move and get inside a structure, oh no, the transports have to finish their move, and you have to wait for a whole other activation to do anything with the squad that gets out. Then you have stuff like point defense allowing units to move and shoot in the movement phase, what even is first fire then? Why isn't overwatched tied to it? Its complex in a bad way most of the time. It doesn't help either that stuff has been left totally unfunctional, the cyclops bombs still can cause their own formation to break (speaking of pointless book keeping) and worse still, can't actually damage structures because their small blast has to be centered over the cyclops, meaning it will never be able to be over the structure. I feel like enough of these things add up and people just lose interest. No question it looks amazing. The book keeping was noticed very early on, tracking break points feels like being an accountant at the morgue, absolute opposite of fun. Add to that, resolving combat is a slog, it feels like working as a cashier in a cash only business and you're forced to do the mental math for every damn transaction. Definitely feels like a slog. I do think the game is at its most "fun" when things are just exchanging fire. But so many things can bog the game down. The fact that templates feel too rare, and things like plasma just feel wrong not having some sort of overheat mechanic or optional fire mode with better ap or range or both but rolls of 1 like cause a wound or something. Also why the titan weapons don't seem very fun either, very little usage of secondary fire modes or any kind of heat damage or risk/reward stuff. Rounding back to how good the minis look, for me that's enough to sustain my interest in the game, just an excuse to photograph cool minis on cool boards. Because the thread was meant to round back to how to fix li. I still think it's possible to improve it with a clear vision/direction of where to go with it. I still think simple global objectives like shifting back towards more focus on shooting (on account of all the granularity and special rules largely being on the shooting side) and making combat perhaps more difficult to engage in successfully, or more granular/contextual and less hammer loves nails that it is currently. Part of fixing the game is also a re-alignment of expectations. A lot of new players on reddit or facebook are surprised to find people suggesting just a battlegroup box for starters, and that game of 1k are a lot more practical for learning than thinking 3k is the starting point. A lot of people somehow though they'd be banging out 3k games on a weeknight at a games store and like, if that's what makes one stop playing its unfortunate but 3k was never going to work in that amount of time. I get gw marketing doesn't want to show off the game at 1k or 1.5k but we all can. A bit of a tangent but, if LI like say full spectrum dominance, could be played initially on a 2x3 at I dunno somewhere between 500 and 1000pts (like not all deployed at once) it would mean gw could make double side card-style boards like they do for kill team. A boxed game with that and a handful of civitas buildings or hell card buildings would do wonders, like the hawk wargames citysape stuff but civitas style. The biggest thing holding this back is the fact that the close combat rules as they stand would make it a silly game. It doesn't make sense at any scale of play/board size, but at this small of one, 10-14 inch blind charges (possibly through empty structures) would do enough on its own to poison th whole thing, So to round back to fixing the game, something closer to sm2 for infantry movement and charge ranges feels like a must, would also make transports more needed.

I don't think much of the rumours For one, the only thing that checks out is the plastic knights, but those were previewed like 3 days before this was posted anyway, and its a trajectory that seems pretty obvious given fw has apparently pulled down the resin ones and its fair to assume we'll see all knight kits in plastic in time. Molech as a setting has already been done for AT, and was used to introduce knights into AT, I don't think it makes much sense for LI. In a GW video last year where they briefly discussed the tallarn book before its release, they mentioned I believe it represented just the opening salvoes of the battle for tallarn. A part 2 to that would make more sense to finally introduce legion super heavies to the game, molech seems like an odd choice for that. The biggest missing in action units/detachments are legion artillery and solar aux light armour, both are the sole remaining things from the rulebook's formations that literally cannot be taken currently. 14-15 months later, so I fee like until we see either of those its all just speculation.

The funny thing too about sm2 is, the suggested point level was a much more realistic/reasonable 1500pts. If gw marketing had just started there and had the boxed battlegroups/armies ready to go from the start I think there would have been more uptake, instead that 3000pts white dwarf report like impressed/scared off players in equal measure. You also realize they just bolted on modern mechanics to sm2, sm2 make more sense in terms of how its transport rules work and infantry not being all kenyan suicide bombers. Its scoring was better as well, was like end game mixed with sudden death conditions, still way better than progressive scoring's nba basketball on crack vibe.

I think I agree on just about everything, but the sunk cost fallacy still makes me think something can be salvaged. I think its more about how much effort is worth putting in, and to your point, it is in a state where it likely needs a re-write, so in other words a lot of work to salvage entirely. That said, with clear intentions and a philosophy of changing as little as possible rules as written, a lot can be done with caps and terrain setup/scenario. And a clear statement of purpose, like "here's how I would fix li: I'd rebalance close combat and shooting, so that shooting was more prevalent than close combat". So maybe not "I'm gonna save LI and make it universally more enjoyable" but perhaps just "if you agree with the premise that LI's close combat is too prevalent/boring/long/tedious etc try this". That's sorta the best formulation I can think of at this point. On the purely table side, if an event advertised its tables as VERY sparse compared to the usual urban hell of 20-40 structures, and players knew ahead of time that was the sorta table they'd be fighting on, they could at least build to that "table meta" in mind. Scenario wise, if the event advertised the scenario scoring as end game as opposed to progressive/per turn would also surely at least factor in to how attendees made their lists/armies. If infiltrate simply wasn't possible in the scenario but was replaced by outflank/forward deployment there'd be a positive re-alignment in terms of stuff like drop pods actually having something to offer more units. Transports may even become more common than just cheap ifv's to cover all that open ground. I still think things like titans/knights and hell even a lot of non-transport flyers are a bit of a headache no matter what. I actually like what some events of have done where they just flat out require everyone to take at least one titan or knight detachment. I also think a hard detachment cap is a good idea, though finding a good number at any given point level may not be simple, 14 at 2k sounds decent, I do think indexing it like 1 every 100pts doesn't really work that well as its likely too punitive at the low end and not very useful at the high end in terms of points levels. (1000k-3000k 10 activations seems to low, but 30 activations seems to high at 3k.)

Ya close combat is weird in that so few rules even interact with it like other than reach and rend. The whole idea of blanket no saves was a huge mistake. That's a really good point on the hidden order thing, it does indeed feel like the orders revealed are rarely surprising. Especially charge order. Overwatch was a bridge too far, if it was going to exist it should have only been on first fire. It's existence with flyers also only conspires to mess with stuff like interceptor special rule. Tracking should be moot honestly, morale already has that weird inconsistency between combat and shooting, I don't think it's helped by the amount of work it takes to make break point function as it should. And in larger games its just not feasible to track. I get not liking house rules, but it seems like infilrtate at a bare minimum likely needs some kind agreement between players, even if its just a handshake agreement to avoid it, or replace it with something else like forward deployment or outflank.

You're not wrong, but this is also a game that wants you to track which formations those 10 of 50 stands belong to for the purposes of tracking break point, something that is equally as difficult to track as who has what wargear. By formation could still work though, look at the harpax formation that lets them count as scale 2 in combat, its possible to have a list with some harpax coming from that formation and others not and having the same problem, telling apart which ones can hold scale 2 and which ones can't. But I will say that formation isn't a good example balance wise because it doesn't really have any tax units or anything or caps.

I think however the math works out there has to be a pretty heavy incentive to not charge a lot of these things however that shakes out. And using the tarantula example of a detachment that can't itself charge, but can still fight in close combat. It's one thing for a tank to initiate combat with a line of infantry that are lets say blocking its path, that still has tremendous value defensively however. We've also not scratched the surface on specialization. Like units that might have 0 caf on the charge but a higher caf if charged or a baseline caf but a buff fighting certain unit types. But to make combined arms work, they either need to just force in the form of actual army construction rules/tax units/something like a force org chart. But man, to have all the detail in terms of shooting/weapon special rules rendered largely pointless by making close combat so stone stupid/swingy is just a huge bummer. The baseline in 40k before it sucked was frag grenades no bueno, krak grenades u might have a chance, meltabomb now we're talking, 10 meltabombs, backup!, but li just feels like everything has meltabombs when it comes to tanks and larger units and close combat, its so dumb. I get that they don't want to get into wargear, how they ultimately achieve improvement has many paths. They've already gone down the lazy road of entire formation special rules, so assuming that can't won't be put back in the box anytime soon, and keeping with that sort of design. Could still do buffs and taxes, like "bla bla bla tank hunter formation, all infantry are considered to have demo charges and as such count their caf as x when fighting detahments of vehicles. But all infantry must purchase dedicated transport" yada, that sorta thing. Would also help put some daylight between units like walkers/vehicles/cav (skimmers) and so on. If its like a conditional stat buff too it wouldn't require re-writing any unit cards.

I'm just hoping it means less combat and more shooting :)