u/RealSonZoo

For example, are there camera locations? All Army select hotkey? Go to last alert? Can hotkeys be customized and re-bound? Stuff like this? (Basically... look at Starcraft 2 as the gold standard I guess.)

Maybe someone who's done the alpha testing can give a nod or not without breaking their NDA lol.

Just curious what to expect here.

It may be time for me to get a new laptop, so having enough VRAM to run this might be something worth considering for me.

Any details mentioned? Any reasonable estimates?

First of all, all of the Zergs are amazing players. I kid you not, every Z I have faced at my humble D3 level has 220+ APM. I don't know how or why. At least they play strong honest builds with minimal cheese.

With Protoss, if they have APM over 100, I cannot win. The psi storm spam just wins every fight and I am helpless after about 9 mins. If the Protoss has under 100apm, I can sometimes do a strong mid game push and catch them before storm kicks in.

I'm just a humble 150apm T player who gets wrecked by splash damage I guess :( And clearly vs a few years ago, everyone else has gotten a lot better.

Is this acceptable?

To be clear, I understand (and appreciate!) that HH has a (much?) higher hobby standard than modern 40k.

I am very much enjoying building and slowly painting my first 3k HH army. And I'm excited to try playing sometime!

But is it acceptable to play before being fully painted? Like maybe I could prime and base coat my dudes so at least they are broadly readable as my chosen legion?

Because otherwise I worry that by the time I get this army fully painted, it will be HH 4.0 or something. This stuff takes time, and I'm not the fastest.

But I also respect having a high hobby standard and not wanting to play against grey plastic.

What do people think on this topic? What is generally acceptable, common, and reasonable with respect to this?

I am slowly growing a force without thinking too hard into the specifics about how 'good' it'll be. Basically, I am just going for balance - a few generic characters, core of troops, handful of elite squads, handful of vehicles/walkers.

If one were to do a somewhat random but balanced approach to collecting as described above, how would their power level look like? Are most units "decent" so the overall army would be decently playable?

And then as a follow up, what are some "don't get too much of this" in terms of avoiding overpowered/distasteful units?

Let this also be a general discussion about internal balance, feel free to call out anything not doing well or maybe doing too well.

One thing I keep thinking about and noticing is this idea that so many lifters are "heaving" the weight, rather than lifting it with the target muscles. And I think this is contributing to some awful physique development. Let me explain.

When people are trying to lift heavy and progressively overload, eventually in their sets they get into the 'body english', swaying with their core, and even just heavy breathing and rocking their torso to change the ROM and help move the weight. 'Cheating' if you will.

I won't say cheating reps should never be done, nor should one be a robot, but here's the problem: the muscles you put weight on, tense up, and eventually struggle with, are the ones that actually grow. If you stop lifting properly part-way through your set and start engaging your core, that becomes your baseline form, and those core muscles start growing.

Something I see so often in arm training, but even for something like a seated machine press, is this pattern: first few reps look mostly clean, then the heavy breathing and swaying and squirming start. Do you get a bit of extra arm or pressing stimulus by going past technical failure? Sure, but your energy also goes into your core. I swear I see people with leg and calf pumps after their upper body lifts sometimes.

(Why not just save that energy, cut the set off, and do another proper set? This would be my top-level suggestion.)

And I truly believe that as a result, we are seeing people with thicker cores and smaller other muscles as a result. Because that's where a lot of energy, fatiguing and failure energy, is going. It's not controlled bodybuilding targeting a specific muscle.

What do you think happens when you breathe in hard and heavy, hold your breathe and tighten your core, and then "heave" a weight? There are actual muscles around your stomach, ribs, and waist that get involved and get trained and hypertrophy... Look at powerlifters, this is what they do and look at what type of physique they build. Even when they cut down, taking bodyfat out of the equation, they do not look like bodybuilders.

My hypothesis is that this poor pattern of lifting is driven primarily by 1) ego, 2) chasing progressive overload, and 3) looking at examples of people on drugs who can do anything and still build relatively nice physiques. Number 2 is especially pernicious because it's the trap smarter people get into. They think it's the main factor that matters, so they optimize for it. And overtime their form slips, and the heaving starts.

What do you guys think, any merit to these ideas?

General discussion and slight ranting, heh. I started feeling this in 10th, which to me was a fairly big downgrade from 9th. Now in 11th, they're making a 'better 10th', but it's better in a direction I don't really care for very much.

To explain, the main problems I have are:

- At a high level, there is little-to-no narrative element in the game. There is immense focus on competitive points-scoring and mathhammer (bring the best units), this is by design and percolates down into how local players think and play the game around me. The new missions in 11th really don't do anything to help with this - those who have played even a handful of games know what I mean.

- The game is hyper lethal, things die very fast. Narrative issue number 1 imo. This means there are generally few on-going combats, back-and-forth shooting, or even unlikely combacks. Why put care and work into specific minis if they're just going to die or "trade" very quickly in games? What epic stories are there to tell if things are just dying right away to lethal and sustained hits, re-rolls, etc? What drama is there in individual dice if even a small unit rolls 20 die in one go?

- The terrain is SO bland. There are like 5x5x3 maps or something (via the GW app), with the new dispositions, and they all look and feel the same. Wasn't player-placed terrain the norm, with some guidelines? Instead there's like 15 minutes of set up of the most boring symmetrical scripted gameplay maps to start every game. Scripted gameplay as in: you stage combat units here, you poke out into this shooting lane there, etc. You can literally "prepare" all this beforehand, and it'll be the same the next time you play.

- The gameplay encourages meaningless actions that don't tie to anything relating to a war gaming narrative. Move to this board edge; throw a unit in the center; do an "action" on some terrain piece. These mechanics' only purpose is to slow down armies that overkill and force trade-offs. To be fair, if you are purely competitive-minded, this does actually create somewhat interesting gameplay choices, but in the sense of chess, not a war game.

- Army list building is just boring. Absence of wargear is lame; a plasma gun on a redemptor barely counts; characters always have a single best melee weapon since they all cost the same, etc. You can't easily find/fiddle 5-10 points, can't kit out squads much at all over the standard box set loadouts. Many of us used to love upgrading and customizing even a single squad Sergeant, giving him a backstory, etc.

- The force org, while controversial, was also probably a really good thing to have. It prevented gross skew builds, and made many armies actually look like real armies because they were forced to take some troops (or at least pay a price with different force org options). But now the flood gates are open, take anything as long as you have a warlord, and you can have a nice 3x unit spam of 'strongest thing' until it gets nerfed 3 months later. Really good business model I guess.

- (Edit) Got another one, the 3 month 'balance updates'. Balance is a great goal, but you're clearly not in it for 'balance' if you're shuffling things around every 3 months while simultaneously releasing new power creep models and minis. I strongly suspect this is a business model heavily related to getting competitive gamers to buy stuff off the shelves. I remember reading a study about how in many pay-to-play products, there are 'whales', wherein a small (like 5%) of the customer base are responsible for a disproportionately large (like 50%+) of the revenue. This would not surprise me at all when it comes to WH40K, and 'competitive gaming' is the perfect avenue for this.
For the rest of us? It means my damn army that I'm trying to paint keeps changing. And without flexible wargear options, it's even harder to swap things around. And with power creep, if we don't keep up with new minis and changing lists (which usually means new minis), we have a generally bad time.

I don't know, I've just been down on modern 40K lately, but have honestly forgot what Midhammer was like since I was a teenager back then. Is it a heavy dose of nostalgia, or were there legitimate design decisions that made 40K a better war game in many ways? Is 'wargaming' at odds with 'competitive tabletop gaming', which seems to be the direction 40K is heading?

Curious to hear your thoughts. Even if you haven't played much modern 40K, what keeps you going with Midhammer?

It's been my experience dabbling in CSM 40k armies that you generally always want to replace bolters whenever possible with melee weapons. I don't mind having a bunch of melee dudes of course, but I'd like to know that having some Marines with Bolters isn't a terrible choice somewhere in my army.

Also from a practicality perspective of modeling, I don't exactly have pure melee weapons for all my legionaries for example.

So what units, detachments, combos, etc can actually do this decently?

Well Battleline seems fairly obvious from the GW codexes/app, but the others I'm less sure about, and can't find an organized reference anywhere.

It looks like most BRs are painted with the black shoulder trim, which if memory serves from the DoW games, is the Third Company.

I was wondering if anyone has theirs painted as a different company, and wouldn't mind sharing :) Looking for some ideas and inspiration.

Also for those that did, what was the motivation? Do you have some interesting lore to share on your Company? For example I was thinking of trying to make a new BR army that came about from recent Primaris reinforcements and would be a less common chapter. ​​

Have heard of HH being more about narrative gameplay, so I figure the game mechanics themselves must be involved in creating more narrative and memorable elements.

Coming from a 40k background, I'm interested in learning more and seeing if it's right for me to finally invest in the game system. What I'd say about 40k is that I think it's become very good at what it's aiming to do now - tightly balanced competitive gameplay - but that seems like something orthogonal from HH, which I find very fascinating and want to learn more about.

* So what specific gameplay mechanics, rules, interactions, etc, make your games feel memorable, and create more of a feel of immersion? *

For example, I've heard about characters issuing epic challenges to each other, that seems pretty darn cool. In 40k I'll seek out a character vs character fight only if it's on the path to me scoring more points, I guess. Are things like this incentivized more so in HH somehow?

Another more general point is that I understand there are far less re-rolls, and volume of dice (is this right?). I think this is actually pretty important for 1) reducing lethality, so models stick around longer and you can see your guys do stuff rather than trade out instantly, but also 2) having and living with unlikely and crazy outcomes. In contrast, 40k has become very 'tight' statistically, so then with re-rolls and pluses to hit or wound, when you want something to happen, it generally does. Variance and randomness probably aren't great for balance, but I think it helps create a fun story.

Final question, does HH feel more fun and rewarding when you *lose* your game? In 40k it's more like, oh I didn't score the points, sort of like chess where it's like, oh I made a tactical mistake on turns 3 and 4. But for HH I was thinking of doing something completely different and fun like making a traitor legion army that ideally doesn't achieve too high of a win rate, to follow the overarching story lol.

Very interested in hearing your feedback!

Or if a Marine is an Intercessor, Inceptor, Bladeguard, etc that's that?

What I'm getting at is, are roles - and thus armor and weaponry - more fixed, or are they more fluid and flexible?

And does a modern Space Marine need special training to jump between these armor and weapon systems, or are they trained for all of them?

Any lore sources appreciated as well, thanks.

Looking at the maps, it seems pretty easy to get onto your natural expansion objective on turn 1. This, for me, was a primary reason to take something to infiltrate or was fast enough to get there.

But now if the closer objective terrain piece can be easily walked on from the deployment, is it less necessary?

Or why else would one want infiltrators?

Either way, seems helpful for armies without these units/abilities.