The Kill Team Problem

[ThePenitentOne]

The new announcement of the cheap entry Kill Team set today hit me the wrong way.

 

As many of you know, I've been grappling with the demise of Spec Ops. For me, spec ops was the soul of Kill Team, and it was a development tool for factions; all the cool little bits of flavour stuff really helped find a theme for your collection. Home bases and assets, faction specific skill trees, requisitions... It gave us so much to work with, and now it's gone. And while the instinct here is to rage quit, that doesn't work either... Because there are good things about the new version.

 

Going back to numbers instead of shapes is obviously huge- the decision to do shapes in the first place is literally the only thing wrong with KT 21... And it was almost the stupidest business decision that I've ever seen, so correcting it is excellent. Also, solo and coop rules are excellent; soloing Spec-Ops would have been peak gaming for me. Finally, new teams are going to keep coming, and I'm going to want a fair number of them.

 

I've been dealing with this angst by allowing myself to hope that at some point, GW will come to their senses and release a narrative supplement for Kill Team. And I think that's why and how today's announcement- something that should have been good news- managed to hit me the wrong way. GW seems more interested in getting simpler and simpler, not giving us back our sandboxes, and unfortunately, that means my hope for a narrative mode was misguided wishful thinking.

 

It is possible for GW to release a half-hearted attempt at a narrative gaming campaign companion book as a stop-gap solution for people like me, which I suppose would be better than nothing. But it isn't possible for them to do what spec ops did; operatives no longer have the archetypes which told you which specialism they could take, and requisitions and assets are bespoke, so they have to be released with each team's rules- you can't put out a book with reqs and assets for every team in the edition. And just bringing back the generic spec-ops stuff from the KT21 core book without the bespoke content is just an empty gesture. If they produced such a thing, people like me would see it as unsatisfying for it's lack of bespoke content, and GW would use the poor sales data to conclude that no one really liked narrative campaigning in the first place. 

 

So is solo and coop play enough to make me buy the new book? I don't think so. The free rules, as predicted, aren't all of the rules that you need in order to play even a basic game. Heck, it doesn't even sound like the rules in this new box are enough to do that. I wish people had embraced the sandbox nature of 9th rather than whine about how hard it was to memorize every rule for every faction so they could win as often as possible. If that had happened, maybe we wouldn't be stuck with checkers the miniatures game in both the deluxe (40K) and entry level (KT24) versions.

[INKS]

Oh boy I could go on and on with the problems with kill team.

1: It's too complicated. Some of you will disagree, but in earlier editions it was much more simple. I know some people will enjoy the complication of the rules. I am not one of them. Sometimes things are vague and just hard to understand. cover for example in the previous edition... So while they were preaching an more streamlined game and easier to get into, I don't think that it is. It's still very complicated in my mind. The free rules are stated above aren't all fully accessible. The app is terrible honestly. Guess that should be it's own point.

 

2: Classified teams and unclassified. I've come to terms with this, teams will just rotate out and it isn't that different from any other game they make, this one is just more clear about when that is going to happen. And if you are a casual player then it matters even less. We will see how often the rules are actually updated for unclassified teams.

 

3: Advertised as one box teams when they are not. Again if you are a casual player who doesn't care much and just wants to throw dice then this isn't a problem but the game itself is often advertised as one box and you are done. But for most teams that isn't true. You will need 2-3 boxes to be competitive and or to not just get stomped sometimes. And this is if you aren't playing a team that isn't already bad. Space marines? 3 boxes to get a number of options you need. Striking scorpions, Nope you need howling banshees and dire avengers. GSC - I sometimes forget the official names. You need a number of special characters, you need the basic troops box and you need a guard box. New Aquillions? 2 boxes. Vespids are a 1 box team. New squats? 2 boxes. You'll want Ogryn's. I could go on and on, look into it. Some of them are 1 box, but a lot are not. This is misleading in my opinion because until you delve into the team the rules and so on, the advertisement leads you to believe it's all 1 box 65-80 dollars (yeah I am not even going to get into the dollar spread here) team and you are set.

 

Now all that sounds very negative. And you might say, so what! move on.

But the co-op is good,

the solo is good.

the game, when you learn the rules and get your head around them are not too bad most of the time.

despite the cost being deceptive it's cheaper than 40k still, though not cheap.

Even myself who is SUPER PICKY, and I mean to the extreme can find 1-2 teams I enjoy and might collect or have collected. (Gellerpox for one - I had custodes and deamons but those are gone)

33 teams in 3ish years, I would expect them to continue this. Means 66 teams in 3 more years. That is a lot and why they have to do classified and not.

There is a lot of overlap between teams, rules and how they feel on the table but that is expected with 33 active teams.

 

As for the above post, I apologize if this feels like I've derailed the thread. That was not my intention. I think KT has a lot of issues.

Narrative, was sacrificed at the cost of co op and solo play and I don't understand why. I don't understand why that had to be the cost of it. When Narrative was a pretty big and popular part of the game. Ever been to a tournament? Because Narrative tournaments were popular and part of every event

[Indy Techwisp]

On 10/14/2024 at 7:37 PM, ThePenitentOne said:

<snip>

It's the classic case of GW catering to the Competitive crowd rather than the Campaign crowd.

I suppose once people are more comfortable with the new Rules someone on the KillTeam reddit will probably put together a Spec-Ops system (assuming they haven't already).

[zulu.tango]

The narrative/spec-ops blow was a big surprise for me. I played 3 "full" narrative campaigns in KT'21 and while I would say the spec-ops rules were at BEST an afterthought in '21, they were fun and added to my enjoyment of non-competitive games. I was genuinely excited for Narrative games in KT'24 once I read about the PVE modes introduced, but unfortunately it wasn't meant to be. 

The "free online" rules are certainly a problem for this edition. Instead of an actual 1.0 rules primer its essentially a keyword cheat sheet best used as a quick-reference for players who already know the game (and kind of a bad one at that). Hopefully the new starter box rule-book is actually helpful in teaching the game, but I *suspect* it'll be meh. 

I think the future for kill-team is bright generally speaking - my local club has EXPLODED with new players with the new edition so far. We've had both "new to the hobby" players checking it out after playing Space Marine 2, and "new to the game" players who are migrating over from Warcry or 40k. Popularity growth or no, I think Indy's above comment regarding community driven Spec-Ops rules will happen, and the more popular it appears to be the more likely we'll get some kind of official GW support...but I'm not holding my breath on it.