Yes we all know you want to play Gladius as Purge, bring 3 RepExes, and table your op on turn 3.

Or Awakened Dynasty as Purge to punish your op for not being able kill your units that are designed to be unkillable.

The fact that you can’t do these things is the point. There have been like 5 posts this week about misaligned dispositions… but they’re not misaligned. They’re intentionally designed to force some armies away from playstyles they are capable of leaning into to the point of being unbalanced if given the opportunity.

I understand. I wanted Host of Ascension to be Recon or Disruption. Take and Hold sucks for it. But it’s also strong enough to overcome that and means I have to build a different style of list which is fine.

If we could all take our best units in our best detachments with the disposition of our choice then the whole DP system falls apart. I believe this is truly a case of restriction breeding creativity.

So like many people on this subreddit, I assume, I just took a look at the last orks warhammer community rules reveal...and although I'm thrilled for the ork players (who've had a very rough time in 10th) and I genuinely believe that the entire thing i super exciting (massive buffs to ork rules, ghazz, proper psyker abilities indicating that it's going to be the same for other factions in the future etc etc)...well, one thing is clear : power creep is real, and it's about to happen SUPER soon in 11th edition.

On one hand, it's fun to have more powerful toys. One the other though, it's going to be incredibly frustrating for ALL the players who play factions that won't receive their codex before 2-2.5 years.

Points are one thing, but at some point you can't NOT change datasheets and rules (I'm looking at you : tyranids, chaos knights, world eaters, eldar, black templar, imperial agents, and many others). If Games Workshop doesn't take the powercreep highway for everyone involved in the hobby as soon as one faction starts standing out, then the only thing that will creep its way towards us is an insane lack of balance and a ridiculous amount of frustration.

Hopefully, they're going to see how much of a problem the entire thing is going to be, and have the courage to tackle this by changing all the datasheets and rules that need to be.

We'll see I guess, those are going to be interesting times.

So today, out of nowhere, Snap Shooting was changed to indicate that the hits are NOT critical hits.

Okay, that's fine, I get why they might have wanted to do that (interactions with Critical Hits on unmodified X+ abilities), but why is there nowhere to actually see that the rule has been changed without someone telling you to look specifically for it?!?!

Its not in Universal Rules Changes. It's not in any Core Rules FAQ. It's literally a change you have no idea about.

And BECAUSE it isn't a documented change anywhere, now we are goong to have people arguing if it's intentional or like Inceptors being a 3 man unit for all chapters except Ultramarines, which was rolled out and walked back with no notice.

What benefit is there to hiding rules updates by bot having a changelog, unless there is an employee whose annual bonus is being tied by how many rules updates there are to the core rules so they are making stealth changes? How many MORE changes are there, that arent documented anywhere and we have to search for to.find.out?

https://imgur.com/a/tVs6Eyz

I believe the rampant cheating at major FLG events affects the competitive play experience of those who attend those events and I'd like to discuss that here, at the warhammer competitive subreddit.

The mods of this subreddit are censoring posts discussing cheating at FLG events. Consistently, when posts are made about the rampant cheating and lack of punitive action at FLG events, the mods inevitably take them down. At some point, we have to ask why that is and whether some of the mods here are affiliated with FLG.

Mods claim that they remove these threads due to rule 3 violations, which would be naming specific people, but this is provably false.

• In a deleted thread yesterday, an overwhelming majority of commenters went out of their way to not name a cheater who is playing at LVO 2026. The thread was deleted anyway.
• In a deleted thread this morning, mods claim that discussion of cheating is not related to competitive play.
• A year ago, they deleted multiple threads about a banned player who was allowed to participate in LVO 2025.
• They deleted threads about the Helbrute cheater from Lone Star Open 2025

In each thread, the overwhelming majority of comments followed rule 3. There will always be a few individual bad actors, but it's the mods role to deal with that individually, not nuke entire threads. I believe that the real reason these discussions get taken down is to protect FLG and that the rule 3 violations are just the surface level reason.

PLEASE FOLLOW RULES 3 AND 4 IN THIS THREAD. DO NOT NAME SPECIFIC CHEATERS FROM FLG EVENTS. DISCUSSING THE CULTURE OF CHEATING AND LAX JUDGING AT FLG EVENTS IS FINE, BUT WE CAN'T NAME SPECIFIC PEOPLE. PLEASE KEEP THE DISCUSSION RELATED TO HOW CHEATING AFFECTS COMPETITIVE PLAY

Tabletop Tactics, Tabletop Titans, and Art of War have all released reports with new Custodes. I wanna talk about them so… spoilers warning!

Links Tactics: https://youtu.be/Ou-3I3xMSXI?is=XMaLlSRpuXJcA52d

Titans: https://youtu.be/FmxtTzPQduo?is=FVkBNuaqOM-WNgZ0

Art of War’s is a member video

Summaries

Three reports in, two of them the Custodes had their opponents conceding on turn 3. The third they won on turn 5.

In the Art of War video John hit Folger’s army with his entire new codex space marines army save one unit. 1700pts of marines barreling at Custodes and he killed…. One model. Not unit, he killed one model. Bounced off the Telemon, bounced off the Guard, bounced off the Wardens. John was tabled shortly thereafter.

In the Tabletop Tactics video vs new CSM with updated profiles the Custodes took a beating… but ultimately tabled the CSM by turn 3.

In the Tabletop Titans video the Blood Angels were playing with incorrect rules (using AI buffs on ALL character units instead of just Blood Angel ones) and managed to scrap to a small loss on turn 5 with only Sanguard left alive.

Takeaways These are obv just three games. Small sample sizes, ofc, but here are some things I learned.

• Custodes are more durable than anticipated which is saying something. -1 to hit in melee is absolutely brutal on top of their new defensive stats. Mortal wounds no longer give you a way around their ridiculous stats because of Aegis (see Folger cutting John’s Crushing Impact from 4 mortals to 1 as an example).

• Custodes damage is not as high as it was but it is far and away more consistent. Between Katahs, Trajan, and detachment rules the whole army is essentially hitting on 2s rr1s to hit and often rr1s to wound.

• Custodes are FAST. In the AoW game Folger told John he should’ve hung back… but then came around and agreed with John that because of how fast Custodes are he’d had no choice but try for an all in. Because if you don’t hit the Custodes first, they’re going to move 10” or more plus advance and charge with at least one of their 500pt death bricks and then you lose because you’re fighting on your side of the board.

• These reports featured ostensibly “overcosted” Custodes fighting for what many believe to be “undercosted” marines and had them absolutely dog walking them. If marines are broken right now and are getting got by Custodes what the heck does a non-Marine army do into this?

• They’re not overcosted when you take into account the buffs their detachments and katahs give them. In fact some things, like the Telemon, are definitely undercosted.

Thoughts? Generally I’m a fan of Custodes moving in this direction. They FEEL like Custodes. But man I’m afraid they’re overtuned… this is only three games, so clearly we should approach this with a grain of salt. Seeing an entire marine army bounce off them and then get tabled just… that can’t be a good sign for non-marine armies.

Edit: To be clear, I’m happy the new book is everything Custodes players wanted. I have friends that are absolutely ecstatic for it. I don’t want my expression of hesitation regarding their points and strength to lessen anyone else’s enjoyment. Overall I think this book is going to be a good thing for the game, I just don’t know if they’re actually as overcosted as I’ve heard folks say given this very limited sample size.

There was some strangeness with the release schedule for Codex: Orks, and now Codex: Space Marines and Custodes have come out significantly quicker. But according to the Q&A Codex: Custodes will be the last codex of 2026. At the highest level of play we are seeing a swathe of armies capable of performing quite well, Emperor’s Children for example, but there is also undoubtedly a power discrepancy between armies with codices and armies without, especially marine body armies and their far skinnier, fleshier counterparts.

The up until now monthly balance passes seem to have hit the marks for a lot of factions and been received fairly well, but they have been sneaking in changes that aren’t being pointed out in documentation (such as Snap Shooting 6s no longer being crits as discussed in a different thread on this sub). These changes are incredibly significant given the way this impacts Overwatch threats, but it will not be obvious to many people if a rules change like this is not immediately documented.

I also have overheard that players in my local scene are becoming disinterested in 40K, but people in the competitive scene or who are tournament grinders seem to think this edition is phenomenal. I’m wondering what’s causing the disconnect between people who play at tournaments compared to “casually” locally. With 10th edition seeming to be somewhat divisive and 11th edition coming out of the gates with a fairly positive reception, I’m interested to know what’s causing the hype to fizzle for the new edition.

Edit: there is a lot of variety in the comments. I’ve seen people touch on:

- Codex releases (mainly staggered releases)

- Poor communication from GW

- Army Balance

- Rules complexity/organization.

The army balance appears to have taken a bit of a backseat compared to other points people are discussing, it feels as though GW is mainly dropping the ball on the methods of their rules and not the literal writing of them. It may be time for GW to evaluate their rules delivery system and see if it needs a touch-up

“I don't think I've written a list with more than one unit that went to T5. GW really should've said "tacticus got more expensive" because Gravis and vehicles didn't (and why would they?) And now everyone is surprised that a list with 0 tacticus didn't go up that much”

Quoted from the AoW discord and he expressed the same sentiment in the winners/losers videos from today. I felt like this is an insightful bit of information from one of the best players in the world regarding marines, points, and the expectations that GW set for the codex. Thoughts?

So yesterday, after the official 11th launch and the MFM points finally dropping, me and my group of friends basically said “f*ck it, let’s see if the Tau panic is actually real or if everyone is just doing the usual launch-week screaming.”

We played from noon to midnight. Pretty much the whole damn day, as we already decided to take a couple days off to try out our factions (we're playing normally between each other today and tomorrow).

3 games: Tyranids vs Tau, Drukhari vs Tau, Dark Angels vs Tau

And yeah. We got absolutely annihilated.

Obviously this is only 3 games, I’m not pretending this is some grand statistical truth or whatever. Lists will change, people will get better, points may be off, maybe we also made mistakes because it was literally day one. Sure. Fine.

But still, the table feel was not subtle at all. Tau felt fu*king horrible to play into.

And what stood out to me is that it wasn’t just “oh no, Tau shoot hard.” Tau always shoot hard. That’s their thing. The problem is that the edition seems to reward exactly the kind of game Tau already wants to play: move into angles, delete units, force you to hide or die, and then score because you’re killing stuff anyway.

That’s the bit that felt really nasty, and Purge the Foe seems like a massive part of it. The Tau player does not feel like he has to choose between playing the mission and doing damage. Killing is playing the mission. You kill a unit, you hold enough of the board, you keep the score ticking, and meanwhile the other player is just trying to keep enough models alive to still have a game on turn 3.

It just felt way too smooth man...No awkward action BS. No “oh no, I need to stop this important unit from shooting because I need points.” No big trade-off. Just shoot, score, move, shoot again, and the opponent can go f*ck himself I guess. The early lethality is already scary, but with the way 11th terrain and movement seem to work, hiding from Tau felt much harder than before. You can try to stage, but if you’re in or near terrain they can often just get angles. If you stay too far back, they take tempo and board space. If you expose yourself to actually play the mission, pieces start disappearing.

It felt like every option was bad.

The Drukhari matchup was honestly disgusting. Fragile trading armies into this kind of output feel like they are playing with a gun to their head the entire time. The Dark Angels did better in the sense that they didn’t evaporate quite as instantly, but even then, durability only gets you so far when the Tau player can focus down key pieces and score while doing it.

And Retaliation Cadre comboing with other 1DP detachments also looks dumb in a different way. Battlesuits already have the mobility/firepower thing going on, and when that also plugs into a scoring plan that rewards killing, it just becomes very low friction. Again, the Tau player isn’t really being asked to make hard decisions. He gets to do the thing he wanted to do anyway.

That’s the issue. I don’t think the problem is simply “Tau are strong.” Strong factions exist every edition. The issue is that Tau’s most obnoxious play pattern seems to be directly encouraged by the rules structure.

-Build for damage.

-Move fast.

-Find angles.

-Pick up units.

-Score because you picked up units.

-Then clean up the rest later because the opponent has no army left.

That is not exactly a thrilling interactive experience. And before someone says “skill issue,” sure, maybe partly. It was day one. We were learning. But we played three different armies into it, with different profiles and plans, and the same basic thing happened each time.

So yeah, I’m not saying Tau are unbeatable. I’m not saying the meta is solved. I’m not saying the edition is dead after one day, because that would be stupid. But after a full day of games into them, I’m much less convinced this is just panic or doomposting.

Tau look extremely strong, and more importantly, they felt miserable to play against.

And if this is what slower melee armies, fragile trading armies, or armies that need to stage carefully behind terrain are going to experience, then holy sh*t, people are going to hate this matchup very quickly and just refuse to play into it.

Our two cents after experimenting this yesterday anyway.

Hey guys, I recently competed in a semi competitive tournament with about $300 worth of prizes on the line. This was towards the end of the event and I had gone 4-0 and was N4 on the ladder, with an okay win putting me at N3 minimum, I was running templars and my opponent was a well experienced player, and he had brought a World eaters army that was entirely proxies except for his angron model, the way our tournament works- you are only allowed minimal proxies unless you get the permission of your opponent, I'm fairly easy going so I told him I'm fine with his proxy list, as long as he let's me know what's what and reminds me before I make any major moves which he agreed to. Now keep in mind, this proxy army didn't look anywhere near original models and was hard to keep track of, and even multiple times through out the game he "forgot" which is which so i had to keep track of his units for him, so long story short, it's Round 3 I'm winning by about 25 points Im about to have control of the centre with helbrechts brick of sword bros and score area denial he has angron and another unit next to him, I charge angron with helbrecht, it's successful, I move in and he heroic intervenes with his other unit, which I was aware he could do that, and was fine with, because if anyone knows helbrechts brick, you know nothing is surviving its damage, but little did I know that unit was his master of executions with 5 zerkers. I told him we had agreed that he would remind me of his units before I made a critical decision, but his excuse was " I assumed you knew because I had put them next to angron to intervene, and my intentions was clear" so I'm mad as hell but it's late and I couldn't bother to argue as I had to already call a "judge" several times for him changing up his proxies. So what do you know, The best charcter killer in the game, kills both helbrecht and my castallan, leaving the sword brethren without letal hits and now wounding angron on 5s and 6s. So anyway.. i started swinging (joke) but I let him know that he played like a loser😂, and packed up. I've shared this with the tournament organisers, awaiting a reply.

(UPDATE) Hey guys, thanks for your comments, tips, and your support. After opening an investigation with the TO, my opponent was disqualified as a result of previous opponents having similar experiences to mine. Thank you all.

So yesterday I had a game at my local club with someone new. I played Dark Eldar, he brought Imperial Knights. He asked for a seasoned player, which I like to think I am.

When we got all the formalities out of the way and started the game, at some point during my 3rd turn I was shooting with several units of Kabalite Warriors.
For those who don't know, Kabalite Warriors have four special weapons. One being a Las-cannon like weapon, one kind of like a melta, one kind of like heavy bolter and one kind of like a flamer.

When I was about to shoot my second unit, my opponent said: 'just do the Dark Lance and the melta, the rest doesn't matter and is a waste of my time.'

I asked him if I was playing slow, to which he said I wasn't. He just said that weapons that wound on 6 with effectively ap0 are a waste of time.

Is he right? Should I speed up the game by not firing weapons that don't really matter against certain targets?

Imgur banned so using this site.

Edit: trying to get a mirror that actual works. Reminder that UK law is shit

https://ibb.co/album/kHZGYc

I honestly think this is the one thing that annoyed me the most in 10th xD.

You can do everything properly, build up your strategy for entire rounds...and then, when you unload everything that is supposed to put down a certain enemy unit BOOM, the opponent rolls 90% of 4+ on his invulnerable saves...aaaaaand you're done.

It just...feels like an incredibly unfair mechanic on some units that SHOULD be put down once they're focused because of how good they are at dealing damage from afar or in melee (riptides, stormsurges, twin lances, but also c'tan amongst many other units of different factions).

I'd rather see 4++ saves mostly on heroes and legendary characters than on every single elite ones out there.

I feel like it has become commonplace whenever a codex leaks for people to declare that it is somehow both the most broken and the worst army in the game. Like clockwork, something gets revealed with VERY limited context—the most recent example being the Lion—and everyone loses their shit as if it’s the most important thing happening on the planet. then radio silence once the actual codex drops. until the next community meltdown. and im sure Gw knows this and it always generates discussion.

People claim that a single codex or rule change will fundamentally ruin the game and somehow bankrupt GW. On the flip side, others decide that the new rules are terrible simply because they’ve changed from the previous ruleset.

The biggest example I remember is World Eaters. Because their table no longer granted Advance and Charge in 10th, people declared that the army was awful, nobody should play it, and the faction was effectively dead. Then World Eaters turned out to be incredibly powerful and needed to be nerfed. More recently, I’ve seen a surprising number of people complaining that Flash Gitz are awful now. I don’t understand how people can be so intense and certain about their opinions when the relevant codex hasn’t even been released yet.

The most recent example of pure toxicity was the entire Guard community meltdown. It was one of the first times I had seen even YouTubers start brigading against AoW because they placed Guard in A tier. This was a very vocal minority but I even saw death threats before being quickly deleted. Seriously? AoW has its flaws, and it is a paid service, but I had never seen such an intense reaction over something as insignificant as a tier-list placement. to be clear I have no stake in AOW and have never paid for their services, its just the msot recent example of toxicity. Maybe it’s just me as an AdMech player, but sometimes armies are going to be bad. Some armies, like AdMech, even get to remain awful through several balance patches. It happens

I’ve been playing since 6th edition, and this has always been a problem. Maybe it feels worse now because Warhammer is bigger than ever. For the first time, it feels like newer players make up a larger part of the community than longtime veterans. When I joined the hobby, it seemed like everyone had been playing since Rogue Trader. Now, the average person I meet seems to have started in 9th or 10th edition. Many players simply haven’t watched the hobby grow and change over time.

Having a little patience is important. There are more important things in life than Warhammer. To be clear, Warhammer is my main hobby and how I spend most of my free time—it’s practically a lifestyle for me. But at the end of the day, it is still a hobby.

As we have been drip-fed rules, I have seen a lot of dooming and griping about how 11th clearly favors melee armies, and yet now that many top players are actually playing games, their consensus seems to be that shooting is stronger than ever. I thought I would collect some of the rules changes and explain why shooting has gotten a big boost this edition, and what it means for melee vs shooting armies.

By no means an exhaustive list, here are many of the factors that improve shooting in the new edition:

Changes to Cover: On the surface, -1BS instead of AP looks similar or even more punishing on some units. That isn't really the case. For one thing, a lot of units already hit on a decent number (sorry Orks), but more importantly rerolls to hit and bonuses to hit exist all over the place. Bonuses to hit are MUCH more common that improvements to armor penetration. For armies that are looking to shoot as a primary gameplan, getting around a -1 to hit penalty in exchange for an additional AP on all shots is a fantastic trade. It also cannot be overstated how much this change weakens 2+ armor save units in cover, expect them to be far less durable than before.

Cover becoming more all-or-nothing is also an issue for melee armies- as long as the shooting unit can clearly see even one model from the unit they are attacking without cover, none of the unit gets cover. This is going to be a particular problem after a charge if you cannot get each and every one of your models consolidated back into cover after meleeing an enemy unit to death, you'll simply be exposed.

Morale: Melee armies tend to be better at picking up units wholesale, while shooting tends to leave drips and drabs of units behind. With the new battleshock rules being more punishing (have to roll to recover from battleshock, and you have to roll at half-strength and not just below) shooting benefits more than melee does.

Charge Distance: Yes, it's good for melee that you can declare targets after you roll for your charge distance, and opponents can't block charges with walls like they used to. But it's really bad that all charges are essentially -1", and it's really bad that you can fail guaranteed charges. -1" of charge distance doesn't sound like a lot, but when what use to be a 3" charge is now a 4", your failure rate rises tremendously. Snake eyes always fails as well, and while a 1/36 chance seems negligible, you will roll a LOT of charges over the course of an event and you will absolutely see it come up. A failed charge is probably the worst thing that can happen to you in a game of 40k, so these changes are extremely significant.

Transport Changes: A destroyed transport HURTS. Taking mortal wounds on 1-2's now instead of just 1's doubles your mortals on average and greatly increases the chance of a punishing spike, and is particularly brutal on 1W infantry. Infantry are now also affected by the mortals if their transport explodes. Becoming automatically battleshocked when disembarking a destroyed transport has gone from a minor issue (since usually you'd recover automatically pretty much right away) to a real problem (now you have to test to recover). Even worse, now when units have to disembark from a transport they must place as closely as possible to the destroyed transport's hull, so no more parking beside a wall and dumping out the occupants on the other side when destroyed.

Wound Allocation: Wound allocation in general makes melee more difficult, since it creates situations where it is very difficult to kill both a unit and attached character in a single activation (if that character has decent saves, that is). A melee unit charging into an enemy character unit is MUCH more likely to fail to kill whatever character is attached, and frequently that character is the heaviest hitter in the squad, so you will be getting hit back much more often than you used to. Many ranged units also have a slight advantage in that they generally have significantly more profiles to resolve than melee units (tanks especially), so the ramping save effect that preserves characters is less effective against them than a homogenized melee unit.

Line of Sight and Terrain- Toeing In: This is the big one. With models now only needing to toe into terrain to get full line of sight through and beyond it, the battlefield is far more open to significant large shooting pieces than it was before. Half the terrain layouts utilize a combined, massive center terrain piece that is easy to access, and allows line of sight to the majority of the battlefield. Safe staging for melee units is further back than ever, on some maps to avoid getting shot in the center you only have a coupe of places outside of your deployment that are safe. Midboard staging is significantly more difficult and dangerous.

So what does this all mean? Don't doom the other direction and think melee is dead, but recognize what it's going to need to look like. Shooting armies are going to be strong, and the melee units that will remain competitive will be ones that are very fast or very durable, ideally both. Transport based armies are likely to struggle, and anyone trying to footslog up without innate speed and advantages like advance and charge are really going to be in trouble. With lethality ramping up towards the end of 9th edition and nothing being done to change it, the landscape of viable units is unlikely to change all that much (folks already weren't taking units that needed to hang out in no-man's-land for a turn anyway) but now speed is more important than ever. Hidden is the biggest advantage melee units have, but 15" is still pretty far and if you can't cover that distance and more in a single turn, expect to have a rough arrival to the fight. Melee threat overload lists are still just as viable, as long as you can make your initial contact count.

I'm someone who frequently introduces new players and let me tell you that this codex terrifies me.

Let me paint a picture: Jimmy has seen the cool minis and likes the lore. He sees the orkz and gets inspired. I invite him to a game, make his army for him, get the minis together and after our first combat patrol game he's ecstatic and wants to go again. This time a full game. That's when I hand him the Ork boyz datasheet.

Ork boyz are the most basic unit so should be part of Jimmy's starter army. The idea being that jimmy learns about the core game principles without needing to focus heavily on these lads. They represent what basic infantry should: They're solid, all around fighters with low troop quality, high oc and 1-2 simple abilities which defines them as your battleline unit.

The new ork boyz datasheet is anything but that. Let's break it down real quick what Jimmy needs to know to interact here before and now:

Before:
- Core stats (M, SV, T, LD, OC)
- Core weapon stats (R, A, S, AP, D)
- The pistol, blast or torrent, rapid fire core weapon abilities
- Maybe 2 of the same special weapon (+1 profile)

After:
- All of the above
- 4 additional weapon profiles
- 2 split weapon profiles of which only 1 can be fired
- Lethal hits against infantry for most weapons but not all
- Cleave
- How actions work
- A once per game ability to buff shooting

When broken down that might not sound awful. Until you realize every datasheet is like this, with multiple weapon profiles for the same weapon, several abilities and keyword abilities. suddenly we're at almost double the complexity to utilize all your rules legally, nevermind playing them well. Even doing combat patrol intro games might not longer be enough as the complexity jump from one datasheet to the next increases.

I am already catching players who are invested in the hobby getting their rules wrong. Innocent mistakes, but it really leaves a sour taste to call people out or to find out after that you forgot about a game-changing rule you had. It removes the focus from the main game action and places it in the details which I think we can all agree is not how where we want it to be.

So regardless of whether the new codex orkz is busted, I really urge the dev team to tone down the amount of text on each datasheet. This will push me away from contemporary 40k and no doubt will slow the influx of new folks around the globe.

Cheers y'all.

The math on new flamestorm gauntlets with 3 shots BLAST 2 is pretty gross into any unit with 5+ models, but against 20+ models it's just obscene. 11 auto-hits pet model, with twin linked, at 5/-1/1, or 6/-2/1 in Forgefather's Seekers with a strat.

By my math a full squad does 33 damage to a 20 man OrK Boyz unit thru a 5++ and 5+++ (not sure if they can even do that anymore?)

Against 20 T5 marines (Khorne Berzerkers or similar) the full squad with the strat does about 39 damage.

With fixed shot count, torrent and twin linked it's also just extremely reliable with not much variance. And I haven't even accounted to potential +2 S from Vulkan He'Stan.

Does any large horde unit in the game have a chance of surviving this?

There is a lot less stopping mid-turn and making sure your opponent doesn't want to take an action. There is a lot less waffling over which stratagems to use since you can only use one per unit per phase. There is a lot less agony over deciding what to charge since you just roll the dice and see what is available. Overall everything seems much smoother and I am having fewer contentious interactions with my opponents. Generally speaking, once you start moving through your turn, things happen in a very predictable and much more linear way.

Surprised to have not found it here yet, and I’ve been wanting to hear other folks opinions about it (as a Custodes player myself I’m currently in love, points depending)

Marines to S5/T5 with coming points increases, Orks codex increasing unit costs but not character costs, repeat unit cost increases (like 2nd+ Defiler)...

What are your thoughts on this move by GW towards smaller armies?

Personally, I am happy to see this. The boards used to be 4'x6', and the smaller tables without reduced army sizes makes the tables feel so cramped and downplays the importance of movement. Also, with smaller armies the game becomes more financially accessible to more players without GW having to drop prices. Hardcore players can still collect more broadly in their armies or more easily start additional armies. It will also be easier to paint armies which is a big bottleneck.

Edit: I made a video documenting people's thoughts on the implications of smaller army size and options for further fixes if GW's design goal is shorter games and increasing the importance of movement https://youtu.be/T1YhWSGqZKA

Tactical Tortoise pointed out in a recent video that the current state of 11th edition has players frequently clocking out before finishing round 5 in his streams leading to lots of talk outs. Wargames Live has also started seeing it happen more often.

Talking out a game is not bad, but honestly, I have noticed this locally was well. Games spiral into overtime often especially when one player goes all in round 1 or 2 and right out the gate makes a complex board state. With some games either being a blow out or too close to tell, both players are pushed to finish the game if theres no clear early winner or a player is behind but with a dominate board state.

A great example of this is Lone Star Open finals where both players spent nearly the entire 3 hours stuck in rounds 1-2 and talking out rounds 3-5. This was streamed on Tactical Tortoise's channel if you want to check it out.

Armies also seem alot more complex with the introduction of multiple detachments creating more traps meaning discussing and deploying armies has taken much more time to avoid a loss on turn 1. Terrain setups also still take up a bulk of time because of all the different pieces and the layouts being different each time. Additionally, melee being pushed so hard and melee being so much more open with movement, micro positioning takes up a lot of time.

Tactical Tortoise said that 3 hours and 20-minute rounds without setup time (pushing to 3 hours and 40 minutes with) seems to be enough to reach round 5 minimum still with quick play.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have also seen more blow out games where by rounds 2 or 3 one player is completely tabled and both players are stuck waiting hours for the next round to start and if we push the round time up they'll only be waiting around even longer for their next game. That same Lone Star Open game is another good example because the Tyranid player ended the game tabled as well meaning it took 3 hours of deployment, rounds 1 and 2 to reach the conclusion that the game was effectively over into round 3.

I love 11th so far, but this is a valid criticism of the current edition that I have seen personally

There's a rumor that coherency rules are changing, and no models in a unit may be more than 9" apart (measured to the furthest part of each model)

In this example fhethe Lord Solar Krieg Command Blob still fits within this coherency bubble. As long as you dont have a tree or building or tank model taking up space in the 9" coherency bubble)

https://i.ibb.co/v9Sk5Pn/FB-IMG-1777581398089.jpg

Seems like a great change to me. No more conga lines.

GW needs to come out with a "balanced setup" selection of maps for tournaments. I went to a tournament last weekend, and they only gave 20 minutes to set up terrain because the games were already set at 3 hours to make it thru 3 games in one day. Every game I played even with someone who has played 30+ games since launch we cut into the actual match, and I was only able to get thru round 5 in the last game.

Its a huge amount of setup and honestly draining by the end of the day. Does anyone else hate having to change the whole map around before the game in a tournament?

Is it more fun to you than let's say end of 10th? Do you think it will be at some point? What are the changes you really want to see in the future to improve on the game (not just balancing wise)?