[OSSR]Warhammer Dwarfs (vs Dwarfs vs Dwarfs)

[Ancient History]

Well, caveat to that: if they split the army book (Chaos), they add a bunch of units. With a new edition, they often try to add a unit, though as with Dwarfs, not always. And they occasionally try something like Ogre Kingdoms were essentially every Ogre unit is a Dog of War that can be fielded in any army as one (or two) rare choices. For those days when the Brettonians decide they just can't go to battle without Rhinox Cavalry.

[Username17]

Then there are guys like the Fimir. They were a race made in 1988 for 3rd edition who did not get ported into 4th edition. I'm not sure when they were declared actually illegal in tournaments. Some time during the early 90s I think.

There is apparently a single Fimir on a monster base that was declared tournament legal in 2011, which means that the Fimir players went 20 years without current rules for their models, and when current rules were finally made they were for only a single model rather than the full army.

-Username17

[Ghremdal]

The basic rules are in the main rulebook. Units from a particular armies use a combination of rules from the main rulebook and the armybook. Also units are characterized by type (Such as infantry, cavalry, etc...), meaning that even if the rulebook changes, the units themselves still function.

As of now, in the 8th edition, there are 3 armies that have not had 8th edition rulebooks (out of 15). Those are Skaven and Beastmen (both late 7th edition books, meaning they are well adapted to the new ruleset) and Brettonia (still in 6th edition, but it handles itself fairly well in the new ruleset, and is due to be updated in July).

[Prak]

Ok, so this is a 40k question, but as we're talking WH rules at this point--

A friend of mine moved recently and off loaded a bunch of gaming stuff onto the group. I wound up with what I quickly realized was a load of Tao units. Whats the learning curve like on WH, and what all does one need to play at base?

[Ancient History]

Well, the basics of play are move, shoot, and melee. That doesn't sound like much, but remember that combat is one of the biggest chapters in any RPG and this entire game is basically an extended combat chapter with a few bits of fluff on either end. So you can get the basics of movement and dice to roll to hit and resist taking damage down on a quick start guide, but the devil is literally in the details - options for movement, armament, bonuses, special rules, psychology, etc. That can take longer to master, and basically you only ever really learn by playing a couple skirmishes.

[Stahlseele]

Tao Units?
You mean TAU Units?
The biggest hurdle for me would be getting models, gluing them together and painting them up.
I bought the black reach starter set and imagine my surprise opening it to find little bits and bobs of plastic needing gluing together and not even paint included.
If you can go over that, then in the box there are 3 different kinds of dice i think and then there's 3 differently shaped rulers as well.
If you can get over that for a beginners shock, then there is not much of a difference to most other wargames left i guess.

Tau are really shooty as a race for the most part, but pretty poor at close combat in return.

[Laertes]

Tau are really shooty as a race for the most part, but pretty poor at close combat in return.

This is totally true. It was a shock to me as an Imperial Guard player that when matched up against them, I suddenly became a hand-to-hand combat army.

[TheFlatline]

Tau units are in 40k and not Warhammer Fantasy for starters.

And if memory serves, games don't take quite as long as they used to back in the day. You can play a couple rounds in an afternoon that probably bleeds into evening instead of the 6 or 7 hours you'd need to play one 2000 point army encounter.

Other than that, yeah, glue, paint, patience. The core rulebook is needed, as is a dice set. Technically you don't need anything else but you're going to want the templates and shit too.

[Prak]

Yeah, Tau. I think that was auto-correct. That or autopilot.

As for the assembling and painting... Fortunately what I got was this:

Well, this is a representative sample... I think there's a complete army here.

There's some that are primered but not painted, and one unpainted. A lot of them are metal, too, if not all.

Looks like I have

• 27 Fire Warriors (4 w/ Rail Rifle, 15 w/ Pulse rifles, 8 w/Pulse Carbines)
• 6 Drones with Pulse Carbines, 1 with a single antenna, 1 with double antenna, 4 with none, and I have no clue whether that matters
• 2 XV8 Crisis Battlesuits, 1 w/ Flamer, Burst Cannon and Missile Pod, 1 w/ Fusion Blaster, Plasma Rifle and Missile Pod. They both seem to have a support system I can't identify.
• 4 XV15 Stealth units
• Etheral Aun'shi

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, that's pretty much a Battle-Suit Shooty Tau Army right there.
If you want a close combat/infantry Tau Army, you need to get Kroot and Vespid.
The Vehicles of the Kroot are fast and even more shooty, but very weak compared to anyting else . .

@Laertes:
Obviously.
NOTHING can really out gun a shooty Tau Army.
So you do what the Orks usually do and stop them from using their reach/shooty advantage by shifting the battle into close combat.

[OgreBattle]

Warhammer 40k 7th edition introduced "unbound" enemies that are ANYTHING GOES armylists.

If you use a 'battle forged' (regular organization) army though, you get to reroll your warlord traits and your troops will always claim territory vs unbound lists. So if you wanted ork boyz backed up by Tau battlesuits and lead by an Eldar Farseer, you can do that.

Or an army consisting of Wraithknights, Riptides, and a mob of grots encircling them.

[Stahlseele]

That will have the additional bonus effect of sending all neckbeards in the building into a frothing rage.

[Prak]

I love the idea of Tau teaming up with Mekboyz.

Tau1: "There ideas are completely illogical, there is no reason that painting my armour red or making my gun louder shoul-"
Tau2: "Look, it works, just let them do their thing."
*Mekboyz in the back throwing red paint on drones and adding noise makers to plasma carbines*

[Stahlseele]

That one isn't actually too far fetched, seeing how there are orks that are doing mercenary stuff for just about anybody willing to actually deal with them.
Same for Imperials and Orks.
Chaos and Orks.
Eldar usually just use them without the Orks knowing it i guess . .

[Ghremdal]

I would say that the learning curve on 40K is smaller then for Fantasy. Especially as Tau, as you have to know two phases, movement and combat.

Get the main rulebook, read up on the basic rules. After that its easiest to go unit by unit. Find their unit type, their special rules, and their weapons, and then look up rules for that.

For example Battlesuits are Jet Pack infantry that gives them the Relentless special rule (among other things) that allows them to shoot heavy weapons at full BS even after moving.

[rasmuswagner]

I'd say 40K is easier to learn than Fantasy Battle. Especially the new 7th edition, where the rulebook is mostly a rulebook, and has an index, and you get two additional hardcovers full of fluff.

[souran]

Ok, so this is a 40k question, but as we're talking WH rules at this point--

A friend of mine moved recently and off loaded a bunch of gaming stuff onto the group. I wound up with what I quickly realized was a load of Tao units. Whats the learning curve like on WH, and what all does one need to play at base?

Honestly, the "learning curve" for warhammer depends on your familiarity with wargamming in general.

Warhammer die hards would tell you that its like playing chess and magic the gathering at the same time. In reality warhammer is a rules LIGHT wargame (the sort that used to be refered to as a "beer-and-pretezels game") that is mostly a vehicle for selling model kits and paint.

Warhammer is really about the same complexity as Steve Jackson games "J.E.V." or "O.G.R.E." Warhammer Fantasy and 40k are not as complicated and have a lot lower learning curve, and allow a lot more army compositions that are "cool" than say "flames of war" or the various neapolonic miniatures games that you can buy in europe.

Similarly, the "serious" wargammers in the U.S. are still playing squad leader 30+ years on and John Pardos now owns the rights to make new versions of "panzer blitz/panzer leader" and has done so and made all the money you can make selling die-cut games in the U.S.


The "engine" that makes 40k run is identical to the one that makes fantasy run. The combat results charts all work the same. I do not think that its "easier" to start with one or the other because once you know how to play one playing the other is just the differenace between playing with units that move as blocks and units where everbody is in skirmish formation.

If you were given Tau models I would suggest you start with 40k.....

In the 90s fantasy was defiantly more popular. Now, its basically the exact opposite.

You can probably go to your FLGS and get somebody to teach you how to play using whatever your friend gave you. However, after a couple of friendly games the FLGS and that community will almost certianly expect you to invest in their style of play.

Every Warhammer community has their own meta, just like magic. This acutally makes internet discussion about what is good, what is too good, and what sucks almost impossible. The metagame in your area could have unwritten rules like "your army must reflect the nominal fighting style that the fluff for your faction represents" or "your army must make an attempt to represent the correct fighting force structure of your faction from the fluff"

Then there are things like how literally do you take every word in your rulebook. Some communities play with special rules like magic the gathering where everything does EXACTLY what it says, even if it defies logic. Othergroups use RAI interpurtations for everything and this will never be posted so be prepared to have a game go south when it is explained that your plan was "beardy-bullshit" and that they don't play that way.

If you don't adopt the "unwritten" rules of your communities metagame you wont' get to play. That simple. Also, your local meta will have a "preferred game size." Usually for 40K its between 1000-2000 points, with 1500, 1600, and 1750 being the most common I have seen. Getting much bigger than this is kinda pointless unless you like painting becuase your opposition won't have the models to play larger games.

The newest 40K rules do basically let you build an army of "whatever you have" but at Dakka-Dakka and Warsear the general impression of this seems to be that this is the style of game for 12 year olds and that "real men" will continue to use force org charts so that the game has basic troops and not just all the cool stuff.


Theoryhammer is even worse for skewing the game than theorycrafting is in rpgs. There are some armies builds and set-ups that are legal that are broken as hell and the balancing factor is that they cost a crapton of money to put together.

On the other hand, ther are also no armies that you cannot win with because just playing a "good" army doesn't mean a whole lot if you go up against a vet who knows their own (and probably your) strengths and weakness better than you know your own capabilities. Skill actually has a meaningful impact on the game even after force selection. Although good force selection is basically about generating army lists that minimize failure chances/don't need luck to win.

TLDR; Its a wargame. Its learning curve is low but it has lots of wierd bullshit you have to discover, some of which is basically local, before you can play for keeps.

[Stahlseele]

Well, as beer and pretzels as 3 different kinds of dice and rulers can be, really. otherwise, yes, pretty much that.

[OgreBattle]

The 'hardest' part to learn in Warhammer is that morale and capturing territory matters. I was used to videogames where you just kill everyone to win, so losing because the other guy has troops hunkered down across the table was a different experience, and part of the balancing effort against armies being just one unkillable blob of superkillers that kills everything it touches (but can't kill everything on the field by itself within 6 turns)

[souran]

Well, as beer and pretzels as 3 different kinds of dice and rulers can be, really. otherwise, yes, pretty much that.

There is only 1 ruler for measurment, and now you are allowed to pre-measure in 40k. The others are templates. You literally place them on top of the models to see if things work.

All the dice are 6 sided dice. The 2 funky ones are used with a VERY small number of weapons like mortars and indirect fire weapons to determine where things move after scattering.

In earlier editions of warhammer they just gave you a chart and told you "roll a d6 and consult this chart" for both those funky dice. They just put the chart results on the dice. (the scatter dice works better because you can do true direction instead of a chart that says forward/left/right etc.)

The templates too used to be done by measuring with a ruler. You were told a blast effect had a radius, you put a die on the table and measured with your ruler. The "flamer" template was done by placing two measuring sticks with the ends together at the base of the firing model and a set width at a set distance (basically you needed 3 rulers).

However, again O.G.R.E. had ALL THIS SHIT it just used hexes and printed maps instead of tables that cost a $1000 dollars to make. Its still beer and pretzels.

[souran]

The 'hardest' part to learn in Warhammer is that morale and capturing territory matters. I was used to videogames where you just kill everyone to win, so losing because the other guy has troops hunkered down across the table was a different experience, and part of the balancing effort against armies being just one unkillable blob of superkillers that kills everything it touches (but can't kill everything on the field by itself within 6 turns)

It took them literally 4 freaking editions of 40K of the game to figure out that maybe "who killed more models" is not a very good way to score a wargame. Fantasy still basically uses a "who killed the most points" method of scoring.

The objective based scoring they have now is somewhat better, although it looks like the new 7th edition ruleset "rule of cool" army composition is back to scoring by who killed the most plastic mans.

The game really still does not grasp concepts like "phyric victory" or acceptable losses.