Lord of Battles Leaves Me Cold

I don't play competition wargames. Winning ain't that important to me compared to having fun pushing toy soldiers around a table to create a story. I suppose in that sense I haven't changed so much from the little boy in the 60s who used to line up his Airfix figures to fight the Zulu wars.


If you need a more rational explanation, I don't play competition games partly because of my personality type and partly because wargames suck as competitive games.


Wargaming has always for me been a means of escape from a highly stressed lifestyle. I am a competitive personality type and I just don't need more stress.


But if I wanted to play a competitive game I would choose one that works, like chess or bridge. Wargames are always unbalanced because they are too freeform and the point systems can't work.


Consider, what is a lascannon worth? In 40K it has a fixed value dependent on the firer but a moments reflection will show that this is nonesense.


The properties of a lascannon are long range and the ability to punch through heavy armour. The former is at a premium in open terrain and the latter is only valuable if the opposition fields heavy armour. So the points value is dependent on two variables, at least one of which is outside the player's control.


It gets worse. The value of that lascannon is also variable dependent on your opponent's playing style, on yours, and on what other units you field. For example, lascannon have restricted mobility so they are valuable to a player who hangs back than to one who moves forward - and so on, and so on.


It is noteworthy that competitive players seem to spend most of their time devising killer army mixes, or to put it another way, exploiting the fact that the points systems don't work.


So what has all this got to do with the Lord of Battles? Right, I'm coming to that. The transformation of 40K from an RPG combat system to a competition game is killing the back story that made it so fascinating because it is making armies carbon copies of each other. They all have to have the same types of units to be competitive, to give an equal chance of winning. The end result of this is chess with novel shaped playing pieces.


So I won't be buying the Lord of Battles because this huge clanking machine is an anathema to the Khorne story line.


Khorne loonies charge screaming at the enemy waving vicious objects. Who gets killed is almost irrelevant. Spend time building giant tanks? Why?