My Big Issue with Warhammer 40,000 Xth Edition

So I know my last post was about the hyperbole and negativity surrounding 10th edition. But there is one problem that I think will kneecap 10th edition if it isn’t addressed. Granularity. Army building is a mess because you just pay for the units. This is mostly fine for units with simple, similar options. Terminators for example have relatively few expensive options and even those are broadly similar. Other units have far more uneven options. The Wraithknight has been the standout poster child for this so far. The Wraithknight is 475 points no matter what you equip it with. Ghostglaive and Scattershield? 475 points. 2 Heavy Wraithcannons? 475 points. 2 Heavy Wraithcannons and 2 Starcannons? 475 points. This is… not great. The first one has no ranged weapons and good if not spectacular melee as well as some defensive boosts. The second has amazing ranged fire (2d6 wound shots with Devastating Wounds) and the 3rd is literally just an upgrade from that.

This loss of granularity isn’t just a problem here, it’s also a problem with unit sizes. A 5 man squad of Intercessors costs 95 points. A 10 man squad costs 190. Pretty straightforward right? 19 points / Intercessor. Well guess what a 6 man squad costs. 190 points. Between this and the loss of weapon options, army building has gotten FUNKY. You might be building a 2000 point army and be at 1970 and unless there’s an Enhancement for a character that really works… you have to remove whole units rather than shuffle options around. For someone like me with a MASSIVE collection of models spanning decades (God I’m old) this isn’t that much of a problem, I can shuffle around units and get to 2k using other unit combinations but it has meant tearing some army ideas completely apart and rebuilding whole groups of units.

I’m a fan of interesting decisions in gaming. I like granularity and I like making choices with impact. Picking the most optimal weapon for every situation because it’s an obvious choice and all other factors are the same isn’t an interesting decision. It’s pretty profoundly flawed, in fact. Certain choices will just never be used. By the same token reducing army building choices in other categories just reduces the number of decisions you can make while at the same time making some of them more difficult, especially for people without the resources I have. This is the opposite of what GW should be doing.

So why did they do it?

The app. GW has invested… some… time and money into an app for army building. While I’ll be the first to admit it’s MUCH better than their last attempt, that bar is so low you need a metal detector and shovel to find it. But I think it’s a lot easier to do an app fast and cheap if you want it to do the bare minimum. And if you change what it has to do you can really make that bare minimum a lot more minimal. Now this might be because they just announced that they are linking it to their much-maligned Warhammer+ subscription service, but it really just seems like a business decision made without regard to the effect it has on the game. I hope they revert to more granular army building, that they give us back flexibility and meaningful choices in army building, but for now this is definitely the rotten apple in the barrel for me.