How in the frick did GW make this so useless?
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
How in the frick did GW make this so useless?
How in the frick did GW make this so useless?
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
breaking news, morale is shit since 8th, like most things in 40k.
Morale has always been shit. Failing a morale check = unit instantaneously becomes uncontrollable, abandons cover and attempts to flee off the board regardless of context is also fricking moronic, there's a reason that ultimately evolved into everything just getting fearless so you don't have to deal with it.
shit take. please remove yourself from the hobby.
>Failing a morale check = unit instantaneously becomes uncontrollable, abandons cover and attempts to flee off the board regardless of context is also fricking moronic
Morale is like 60% of what allows you to win a battle irl, therefore it'd be even more moronic if there wasn't a mechanic that incorporated it into the game somehow. Not to mention how boring it is if your guard were all just cold unfeeling automatons who didn't respond at all to a giant alien behemoth who just charged them and wiped out half their friends.
You really just sound assmad on account of a couple of times a morale check bit you in the ass- it's a factor you have to learn to manage like everything else that adds strategic depth to the game.
>Not to mention how boring it is if your guard were all just cold unfeeling automatons who didn't respond at all to a giant alien behemoth who just charged them and wiped out half their friends.
But that's only a small fraction of the playable armies? In fact, the majority of them are in fact comprised of literally unfeeling automatons, sentient aliens who are capable of physically removing their emotions from their minds or bodies, non-sentient and/or mind controlled bio-engineered killer aliens, bio-engineered sentient mushrooms, gene-warped supermutants, absolutely bat shit insane fanatics, immortal supermutants, etc.
The setting has no shortage of in-lore ways to make morale irrelevant for most of the participants in the forever wars.
I'm not saying that's a great excuse for treating it like a joke, just that some justifications actually exist.
They used to compensate for this back in earlier editions by having things like phase out for necrons and losing control of tyranid swarms if you lost too many ‘node’ creatures. Not sure they ever nailed it but I would love to see something like that come back instead of having some factions affected by morale and some ignoring it
I miss Phase Out. I liked how necrons were weirdly simultaneously fearless and chickenshit.
I actually liked 8th's morale system. At least, I liked it before they added rules to every army that made them auto pass all morale checks, this rendering the system pointless.
They've realized it's offensive to the brave men who served, so they are quitly phasing it out. Making it weak at first and ditching it completely next edition.
People hate battleshock now?
They hate anything that takes autonomy from them in a game, because they think anything controlling another person against their will is tantamount to rape.
They probably had an idea like a lot of other games where battle-shocked units can't move but decided late in 10th's dev. that they didn't want to do that and dropped it just before launch.
It's like most of 10th where people that it was going to be an overall improvement to 9th because it did make some actually good changes but overall it's the same level of shittiness.
>make a rule
>make rule central to several armies
>make armies and units that are immune to that rule or don't give a frick
The cycle begins anew.
It's not in keeping with the current mainline game design ethos.
The point is to have extremely simple core rules where you're in complete control of your troops, then have a bunch of ancillary rules for each faction spiralling off those that provide complexity for the game.
Proper morale rules would have units falling back or failing to move, thus removing control from the players and adding complexity to the core rules, which goes against what GW's trying to do. Instead it becomes a specifically labelled debuff for army rules to play off (or mostly negate).
I don't think it's actually useless, it's just that it's a niche problem to deal with. *Sometimes*, it will legitimately screw you over (depending on what you're playing) when you needed to use a strat on a specific unit. If leadership stats were worse across the board and there weren't flat-out immmunities, I'm sure people would start b***hing about it being a constant problem. As it stands, it's a usually irrelevant mechanic that *sometimes* causes you a problem, but is usually something that can be worked around.
What I feel bad for is armies/abilities that focus on making Battle-Shock important, when the mechanic is usually only useful to apply in a niche.
The design choice is to stay away from things that remove your ability to make decisions. Adding in "complexity" by removing control and decision-making isn't really adding in complexity, it's just adding a very lame gotcha mechanic. It generally feels bad when you can't make a decision, rather than having a chance to make a decision. If anything, avoiding total control removal from the player increases the "skill" (lol) required to play around the mechanic, rather than just being gotcha'd by a mechanic with no counter-play (ie. something like battle-shock making a unit unable to be controlled or outright fleeing). The chance to make a decision creates the chance to make a *wrong* decision, which is imo requires more skill and is a more complex design than simply removing the decision all together.
Beyond that, units being forced to fall back (ie. flee) doesn't thematically fit with 40k. I can't fault them for not forcing a fall back on that note.
Having cowards running away in a wild west setting makes sense, having cowards run away in 40k doesn't. Even IG, the most obvious army that would suffer from cowardice, has a canon solution for cowards to make sure that people don't just run away.
Laughing stock of an army rule when playing against half the games factions
Even then, oh my orks failed a battleshock test?
I’ll just slaughter you off the objective
Legitimately the worst army rule in The game atm. It’s the only one that doesn’t grant a direct benefit to your army.
tbf morale rules are usually pretty lame. It's always either
>you can't do anything until you rally lol
>you flee board = dead
GW has never had good morale rules and they almost shouldn't even bother and just remove it from the game. Everything has stacks of sources of fearlessness and immunity and rerolls and whatever anyway.
Does any wargame have morale rules that aren't awful?
Epic Armageddon has a cool one, but it's more about how you get to the breaking point, with suppression and blast markers, than what happens after you break (you don't flee off board, but have enough penalties that the unit is wasting a turn out of 3-4 rallying, so like 25% of the game, and it's either too under strength to do much afterwards, or is getting focused on while broken to destroy it or make it ineffective anyway)
There's an indie wild west Skirmish game called Dead by Lead that handles it well, IMO. The game allows you to assign negative traits to your gunslingers, the "Coward!" quality essentially acting as an opt-in morale failure system with the benefit being that it gives you the steepest discount on a model out of all of the negative qualities. Otherwise, fleeing the battlefield is purely up to the player, so it obviously doesn't come off in one-off battles but the game is designed for campaign play and the lethality of the injury chart makes retreating wounded models off the board to live another day an attractive proposition much of the time.
Pinning is a good interim mechanic too I think.
It's not much but in xenos rampant if you fail morale and retreat, you can instead move into any cover in range, and I'm pretty sure if you're in cover you can choose to stay unless it's from a lost melee.
Otherwise it's pin/retreat/take damage. Still, it's neat that you can reasonably try to keep your head down under fire and more games should try it.
Dawn of War did it very well IMO.
Units have a morale value which is essentially a second health bar that regenerates much faster. As the unit takes damage, it also loses morale. Some weapons are especially damaging to morale such as flamers or snipers.
Once the unit hits 0 morale, it breaks. It will continue fighting but their weapon accuracy plummets to the point they are not combat-viable. At the same time they also gain a speed increase to help retreat or find cover.
Once their morale recovers back to a sufficiently high level, they are no longer broken.
No loss of control, just makes it a very costly decision to keep then fighting.
Memoir 44. If you roll any flags, enemy unit must flee 1 hex per flag. Simple.
In 2nd edition they were alright, if unit suffered 25% or more casualties during single turn, they would have take a break test against the highest leadership in unit. If broken, they would dash 2d6 inches towards nearest full cover directly away from the enemy. If at the end of the next turn they were at cover, nearest friendly unit was not also broken and they could not draw line of sight into enemy, they could try a leadership test to rally. If they rolled double 6, they get instant out of sequense turn, but if enemy kept harassing them, they would have to continue fleeing. If unit was broken at the ens of the game, it counted as destroyed. In theory you could cause mass panic and make whole enemy force run away but Ive never seen that happen
Remember when GW said this rule would be game changing?
I haven't played 10th yet. How is rendering a unit unable to hold objectives useless?
If you’ve played 10th you’d see how that situation almost never arises
GW assigns their most moronic game designers to 40k because they know 40kiddies will gobble it up no matter how shit the game is. Literally every single specialist game the currently make is better by several orders of magnitude, and many of them aren't even particularly good - 40k is just that shitty.
They need to redo it all over in 11th.