As I begin to write this, it's clear that the 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 is entering it's final months. Almost every faction has received its codex, and a big new campaign is under way. The pattern is there. So, as something a bit different, I’m gonna talk about 10th ed’s balance for a bit.
The most obvious gameplay challenge, the one everyone can spot and I have already written about, is that half the game is space marines. That is to say, half the game is based around super soldiers, and this has become a baseline average rather than anything noteworthy. This has created a sort of exceptionalism treadmill, where marines have to be the favoured sons of any style of warfare, with that one thing they are very good at, but still pretty good at everything else. Especially when it's your chapter. Yes, yes, with the arguable exception of horde infantry, space marines != horde, but Black Templars give that a good go too. People want their super soldiers to feel like super soldiers, which is fair, but that's a matter of comparisons and vibe, and it's deeply undercut if every second person is beakies. It also leads to a certain degree of envy and petty entitlement whenever a non-marine faction does well or somehow shakes up the meta. I'm not sure how you actually address this as a problem, except to say people keep confusing "The Emperor’s Finest", with the absolute best of the best, and given GRIMDARK they should probably loose more. Practically, what this means is that, for basically 'ever, a consistently prudent way to build an army is to build it around killing marines. But let's put a pin in that for a moment, and bring in another issue, tanks and other vehicles. 10th ed has done a solid job of making these durable, but granular. These often need to be worn down, but everything in the game can technically harm everything else, as opposed to previous editions where vehicles could be functionally immune to infantry in some situations. It's a more nuanced discussion these days, although vehicles, and/or big monsters, can create a scaling issue. Imperial Knights for example obviously only have vehicles, which presents a problem in smaller battles where anti-tank is often more difficult to field. You might also point to troop transports as a problem for similar reasons, although those function more as a force multiplier than the brute force of Knights. Ultimately, vehicles aren't an obvious balance issue, except in the skew-build way. Which, of course, Knights of either flavour actually are. They are big, but they aren't clever. You either have a plan to drop a knight in one turn, or you play the objectives, but I digress.
Now, here's the thing. For a lot of units, and arguably some entire factions, marines and vehicles have the same solution. To kill marines, you want an attack with a high strength, good AP, and multiple damage. Mortal Wound effects are also very handy, as they bypass the usual dice rolling. The requirements for a tank are basically the same, adding only a preference for strength 12+, and/or a higher amount of raw damage. A weapon that can kill tanks will liquefy a marine, it's a weight class thing that nobody could argue against, while a weapon that is especially good at killing a marine is gonna have at least some secondary use against tanks. This is why you see plasma, melta and Lascannon weapons together so often. It's also why Orks take rokkit launchers over big shootas when they can. Going in on such weapons allows you to deal with hard targets, and whatever else the unit has is probably good enough to deal with any soft targets you might run into. And people generally don't do battleline units these days unless they have to, so raw numbers is often not a concern. This may sound like I'm making a case for individual weapon prices in 11th edition, and while that would be nice, it doesn't address the wider issue. The game is top heavy. And there is a further effect of this. GW has been hard on horde armies this edition, and I wonder if that might have been an attempt to manage this phenomenon. A force based on quantity rather than quality does not reward the type of weapon described above. Yes, put a load of plasma and melta into that Krieg unit, its overkill. Take flamers and heavy bolters instead? Well, that's largely gonna bounce off marines and especially tanks, but your average light infantry enjoyer might feel that's tailoring your list just to murder him, rather than actually playing the game. Is that a double standard given what I said about marines above? Maybe. Just maybe. But there's a difference between assuming you'll face the most common foe, and tooling your force to deal with someone specific. And tends to die in droves anyway. And nobody likes having to totally retool their force every game, do they? Also: just swamping the board with cannon fodder isn't any smarter than fielding Knights or your entire tank collection, is it? So I will give GW the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they're trying to minimise the people they upset with 10th ed. But if we assume all weapon options need to be valid, because they are priced the same, this needs to be addressed. Because the anti-infantry option, and especially generalists like missile launchers, just don't appeal.
As a case study, let's talk big shootas. Big shootas are the Ork equivalent to the heavy stubber, and they turn up wherever you'd expect a machine gun to. It is usually seen either as part of a rack of options, or as an inoffensive secondary weapon on a vehicle. In an earlier, scrapped version of this article I wrote a little history, ran some numbers, and did a few comparisons. Then I realised it was suffering for two reasons, A) it's anti-infantry role is largely redundant in this context and B) as the rokkit launcha has the blast rule, it can handle horde infantry just as well as having some use against hard targets. There's edge cases where the big shoota functions better, but the rokkit launcha is more useful most of the time. It's actually the generalist option rather than the anti-tank option you might think it is; they averaged out a missile launcher. Your basic rokkit lacks the accuracy and raw punch to worry a proper tank, but it's well placed to kill marines, APCs and the blast gives it use against hordes. Meanwhile, your typical Ork unit, ie Boyz, frankly has little issue with other hordes, but does need that extra bit of boomy. See also kan shootas as an example of an attempt to address this imbalance. Big shootas are only good when there is no opportunity cost. And historically, the only time when big shootas were particularly good was in 3rd edition or so, when you could get more of them in a mob, and rokkits didn't explode. So, in a world where every second army is marines, and every army has something like a tank, you aren’t gonna do the big shoota option, are you? And you see this dynamic anywhere where there’s a choice between an anti-tank gun and a machine gun.
Is this fixable? And how would you do it? Possibly, but I think these issues are kinda baked in at this point. As GW actively maintains the rules these days, I’m confident they’ll keep things steady. I suppose you could put in some kind of mechanism whereby weapons would work differently based on the target, as opposed to merely everything having a common statblock. Say a weapon would have different accuracy based on its target? That way you could have more nuance, and more levers to pull as a game designer. Or you could make everything generic? I dunno. We’ll see how 11th ed turns out.
Oh and there's Battleshock. I forgot about that. But then, so does everyone else....
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