Adeptus Astartes

In short, Space Marine straddles on the fence between good and excellent. It never crosses it, though. Let’s see how it could have.

Warhammer 40k is an interesting setting. I think many people would enjoy its uncompromising nature and big events. The problem is that 40k games tend to be quite heavy. The titular game is not for the faint-hearted, Dawn of Wars are complex (compared to mainstream games a la Gears of War) strategy games, Space Hulk and all its variants are mercilessly difficult and almost every supplemental game (Battlefleet Gothic, Dark Heresy) are leaning on the heavy side. So Space Marine, a light fighting game in the style of God of War and Gears of War, is the perfect game to introduce new people into the setting with minimal input.

5-minute 40k

As you know, I’m not a fan of how Games Workshop handles its secondary flagship product, Warhammer 40k. They release their new codexes with long time gaps, put emphais on the Space Marines and put price hikes on their products. This time, however, they seem to have outdone themselves.

There is a 40k-army called the Grey Knights. In the 40k-lore, Imperial Guardsmen are the cream of the crop recruited from the armies of billions of worlds. The Space Marines are even more elite, with every single marine being hand-picked from the best of the best, having endured training and genetic enchancements that kill about 90% of any given recruit batch. And the Grey Knights are the best of the Space Marines. They hunt demons with their psychic powers and swords that kill anyone instantly, and never in their lifetime has any Grey Knight fallen to the temptations of Chaos. Apparently there is a short story of a Grey Knight who was randomly teleported into the Warp, arriving in a Daemonic city filled with Warpspawn. He immidiately began a rampage through the city, slaying demons until they teleported him back so he would stop ruining their dimension. He apparently defended some convoy from an entire enemy army single-handedly, killing enemies with bolter fire and power fist (or something).

With GW spreading their creative wings with the new codexes, they are going to make the Grey Knight army the most elite army ever. Big point costs and insane power levels. Psychic flamethrowers that straight-out remove models from the board. Imperial guardsman, poof. Older-than-Warp-Star Vampire Gods encased in living, self-repairing metal, poof. Gone. While to me as a Necron player the thought is horrid, one choice they are (apparently) making is so idiotic that it trancends the game and hurts me as a game designer.

They are making them murderous against Daemons.

Now, this might seem like a sensible thing to do. The Grey Knights are meant to fight Daemons, so should they not be effective against them? Effective, yes. Not murderous.

Apparently, the Grey Knight models/squads will have a special 10” field around them that will cause Deep Striking units automatic mishaps. So a few units spread around will make about half of the game table deadly to Deep Striking units. This wouldn’t be as bad as the fact that every Chaos Daemon unit comes into play via Deep Strike. So in a Grey Knight-Chaos Daemons-matchup the Daemon player will likely lose at least one unit to that field. I’m not certain, but I remember that the models are quite expensive, meaning that the loss of any unit might be catastrophical. And to top it off, the Grey Knights also have Preferred Enemy – Daemons, meaning that they can reroll their attacks against them in close combat.

Why do I rave about this? 40k is a long and heavy game. You invest money into the models, you clip them out, glue them together and paint them. Then you make a game table, some tiny terrain, study the rulebooks before you can actually play. And then you find another sad tosser who plays the damn game, get yourselves to the game table, deploy the models and spend up to several hours playing it. If Grey Knights automatically win every match against Chaos Daemons, why would you even want to go through the game itself? Imagine that you and your friend are the only 40k-players you know. Imagine that your first army that you put so much thought and money in would always lose to your opponent’s army. Always. How long would you want to play the game?

Now, I think that Grey Knight and Chaos Daemon matches should be something special. After all, they are mortal enemies to each other, moreso than any other army. But instead of designing the other army to perfectly counter the other, they should make the battles different. I’m not sure, but I recall hearing something about a rule that the old Grey Knights used to have bonuses against the Daemons, but every dead Daemon unit came back into the fray the next turn. That would be great: The other army is efficient, but the other one has a special advantage. Instead of accepting the inevitable loss, the Chaos player would just have to shift his strategy to utilize the new advantage. That way the matches would not end after revealing which armies the players brought with them.

Love-hate relationship

Image via Wikipedia

For long I ignored miniature wargaming. I already had Magic the Gathering, an expensive collectible hobby. I did not want another. Then, at some point, my friend forced me to install Dawn of War on my computer.

I had some contact with Warhammer 40k when I briefly played Battlefleet Gothic with one guy. Feeling cheap, I invested into a Dark Eldar fleet, since the ships were expensive point-wise so I needed only few of them. They were also quite versatile. I got my friend to paint them, and the outcome was not very charming. The game was fun, but not very inviting. The setting was somewhat interesting, but I didn’t feel a connection.

Dawn of War changed that. We played it over LAN, and everyone else knew more about the game and the armies and chose the most obvious choices, like Space Marines, Chaos and Eldar. I, wanting to feel unique, chose to learn one army that everyone else ignored; The Necrons. And lo, I was in love. Ranks and ranks of ponderous metallic warriors, silently marching on, killing things with green lightning. Merciless, snakelike Wraiths who cut tiny men into shreds with sleek metallic arms. Simple geometric buildings carved from black metals, pulsing with evil greenish glow. And on the top, the ponderous Monolith, teleporting in the middle of the enemy ranks, spewing death at every corner and rythmically pounding the enemy with huge green explosions. Compared to the fanatical humans, mysterious eldar and idiot orks, the Necrons were truly different.

I studied more. I looked into the background and found it very exciting; The Necrontyr were a race of short-lived people millions of years ago, who declared war against the beautiful and perfect Old Ones because of their jealosy. The Necrontyr found the C’tan, ancient star vampire gods. The Star Gods enslaved the whole race, moving their consciousness into a legion of self-repairing robotic skeletons. When the warp happened, the remaining Star Gods went to sleep, waiting for the galaxy to calm down and repopulate. Now, millenia later, the Necrons are slowly awakening. Most of the current Necrons are just advance scouts, and no-one knows how many Tomb Worlds there are. While the Necrons are old and malfunctioning, the Necron Lords gone mad over the millenia and the Star Gods weak from their slumber, they are still one of the greatest threats to the Imperium of Man and the entire Galaxy. Holy damn the background was awesome.

I bought an army and meticulously glued them together and painted them. And then I joined the 40k-players of my friend circle. And found out that the game itself is god damn stupid.

The game has one rulebook describing the general rules of the game, the setting and the different armies. But since every army has dozens of different units and rules (except Necrons),  each army has a book of their own, containing the army-specific rules. These are called Codexes. The problem is that Games Workshop, the company that manufactures the game, wishes to sell miniatures. They employ top of the line sculptors and painters, designing miniatures nonstop. To accomodate the new miniatures, they update the armies. And when they update the armies, they update the rules. And they do it one at a time, with several months between new codex updates. This wouldn’t be a problem, but GW has a tendency to update the more popular armies more often.

In the ten years since Necrons came out, GW has updated the main rule book twice, the Space Marines at least twice, and nearly every other army at least once.

The Necron Codex is old. It contains references to rules that haven’t existed in several years. It was written for the 3rd edition rulebook, when the game was about killing stuff. Now its about controlling objectives, which is catastrophic for the slow and transportless Necrons. When the Necrons came out, the army was very overpowered, and to compensate, the designers added a rule that when enough Necrons have been destroyed, the army phases out and the Necron player loses. Over the years, every other army has slowly increased in power, leaving the Necrons behind. Now not only are they very limited and overpriced, they also have a completely idiotic drawback.

A clever person would ask at this point “Why haven’t they updated the Codex then?” The answer is that because they only do that when the entire miniature line is updated. And that requires new artwork, new sculpts and new paints on the new sculpts. Since the Necrons aren’t as popular as the other armies, the management will rather update them, since profits are more likely gained from popularity. The same clever person would now ask “Well, why won’t they just change the rules? For example, take the drawback away?”

I do not know the answer to that question. I have no idea why GW won’t update the rules.

The internet is full of rage because of this. The Phase Out rule is the major culprit; It forces the Necron players to take the below-average basic troops to combat it. It can theoretically allow a player with a single ork on the board to win against a player with a functioning Monolith and an unharmed Nightbringer. Merely removing it would cause the tournament players to consider the Necrons as a potential army, boosting the sales of the miniatures themselves. Hell, tweaking the army rules, point costs and statlines would elevate them to the same level as the other armies. It wouldn’t even cost much; One designer could do the changes in a few weeks. They wouln’t even need to update the book, just putting the changes to the internet in an errata would be enough.

But no. The army continues to be bad, and become even worse as other codexes are updated. I have one personal anecdote I always use to describe 40k: When the Blood Angels, a Space Marine subsect, came out, I played a game against my friend, who already owned the old miniatures. Over the course of the game he complained to himself that he was making mistakes, he deployed like an idiot, he rolled badly and made stupid maneuvers. I recall playing fairly well, rolling quite well and not making any major mistakes. And I lost that game.

The worst about the situation is that otherwise 40k is a nice game. The rules function well, the miniatures look gorgeous, painting and crafting them is a lot of fun and the setting is quite interesting. An otherwise good hobby and a game is ruined by completely idiotic management. If they would just tweak the rules between codex updates, it would go long way towards making the game better. But no.

Their number is few. Their name is underpowered.