Kill Team minimum buy-in

[osbad 4279xp 1]

So I have plenty of 40k minis and terrain, but I’m Kill Team-curious.  What’s the minimal buy-in.  Obvs the Core Rules, but do I also need the Compendium and the tokens and other gubbins as well?

[avernosKeymaster 33947xp 1]

from what I’ve heard the compendium has the unit rules so that is needed and the gubbins is needed as GW have changed all the ranges to silly symbols. Unless you choose to go through the rule book with a biro and amend everything

[templar007 52376xp 1]

That is the way I’ve read it, it’s needed.  Also many YouTubers who cover ‘Kill Team’ have said the Compendium is an absolute must.

 

Many are grumbling about it as the book is really split in two books and they are charging $50 for each, where as the first edition rulebook was just $40 and had all the information needed to play.

 

Myself I’m on the fence for buying into Kill Team 2.0

 

I have to make up my mind before the end of the day to lock in the new box set.

 

Decisions decisions…………. ?

[horus500 11505xp 1]

I am a massive Kill Team fan. Or to be more accurate, I was a massive Kill Team fan. It was a great way to design a squad of 40K warriors that you customised to do a job and do it well. Now GW will tell you what to take and how to take it. They have also repeated the Necromunda trick of multi-book buy-in required. The base game no longer gives you every faction minus Elites and commanders. Now it gives you two factions. The Compendium gives you the factions but no Elites of Commanders. I can only guess there are 2 more books coming meaning you are looking at twice the previous cost.

GW sucks balls

[pagan8thParticipant 10863xp 1]

Kill Team 2.0 has done to Kill Team what X-Wing 2.0 did to X-Wing… split the community.

I didn’t upgrade to X-Wing 2.0 and won’t upgrade to Kill Team 2.0.

You only need the new rules if you want to play in tournaments. If it’s freindly you can stick with what you have.

By the sound of it… if you don’t have Kill Team already you might as well get the starter box as at least you’ll have two faction ready to go. The extra cost of compendium kicks in if you want to use existing teams, or make your own.

All this upgrade stuff is really annoying. I backed Mythic Battles: Pantheon and Endure the Stars, both of which returned to KS for the 1.5 rules. D&D 3 went to 3.5 to fix bugs in rules. Descent, Runebound and Arkham Horror went to new rules with no backward compatibility.

Makes you feel like a beta tester.

[limburger 21707xp 1]

GW will always try to tell you what to do and buy, because that’s their business.

As for ‘minimal buy in’ … if you want the ‘new’ version then that’s the new core set which has the gubbins and rules.
Rules aren’t separate (yet), but the gubbins & tokens are.

You can still buy the ‘old’ rules … it’s cheaper too and no one is holding a gun to your head telling you that you ‘need’ the latest version of the rules, or are they ?

The old version had cards to buy as well I think. Not sure how ‘essential’ the cards are in this version, but I suspect they’re duplicates of the core set.

And please consider the fact that there are non-GW versions of Killteam out there!
Stargrave, 8 parsecs from home, Starbreach, Zona Alfa …

 

[osbad 4279xp 0]

I must admit the silly symbols bollocks is putting me right off. 3″ is easy to understand,  but 1 triangle or whatever…. wtf?  Can’t be arsed.

I have the old starter set, but the rules sucked donkey balls.  Roll about 17 billion dice and one model folds over with a slight cold.  The cards were confusing af as well.  Not the game for me.

This edition seemed to get better reviews (apart for the stupid symbols nonsense)  but if I’ve got to buy £100 of rulebooks just to play with the stuff I already have…. hmmm.  Less than impressed.  Definitely not feeling it.

Not particularly having dig at GW.  They can charge what they like.  Similarly I’m free to not bother buying it.  I’ll stick with Stargrave for now and maybe go for Deadzone 3 when it comes out.

[blinky465 17028xp 3]

Uncle Atom is a massive GW fan, yet even he said he was disappointed with Kill Team 2.0

It’s big selling point when it launched was lack of obstacles: small squads mean you’re up and playing with little paint/assembly time required, simple rules and everything in one place meant quick-to-the-table. It looks like they’re trying to bloat it now, just as they did with 40k.

[slayerofworldsParticipant 3449xp 0]

The compendium is literally one of the worst rip offs in recent hobbie years.  Period, end of story.

Fifty dollars for what is essentially a temporary “patch” for players to use until GW releases the “real” rules for each faction with their upcoming new box sets.   Its an index, but way over priced.   Its a hold over until new rules come for every other faction and honestly just about any other wargame company would have released it as a free PDF.  Or at the very least had the book priced at “cost”.

Compendium forces will always be inferior to all the other future forces yet to be release.  Just look that the Deathkorps and Orks, and you can already see they are better and more put together then compendium.

Purchasing the compendium is truly a Moronic waist of hobby dollars.

 

[limburger 21707xp 1]

GW was damned if they do and damned if they didn’t provide rules for all the factions …
The current choice does get everyone playing with their current killteams (more or less).

Is it ‘good’ from a consumer point of view ?

Jein …  Yes & No
What happened is that GW has ‘confirmed’ that we will be getting codex/codices for factions in Killteam just like we get for AoS/40k.

Is this bad ?
That depends on what those books are going to be like.

Does it suck ?
If you wanted everything in one book … then yes, but if you did then you forgot one thing : GW is a business and they need to be able sell stuff to punters once they have the rules. They can do this with models or with extra fluff like faction books or whatever the heck GW is going to call them.

They could have said : screw you … you ain’t getting squat. (we’re definitely not getting squatz ;))
Instead we got something that at least (in theory) allows the game to keep its momentum post release.

And unlike the initial Killteam release there appears to be a plan for support.

It’s not the most customer friendly business model out there.
And it’s not ‘fun’ …
But it works within the constraints of the market as it exists.

No amount of whining by fanboys is going to change GW’s strategy, because there still is enough of an audience that doesn’t mind how GW does things. They get everything in nice easy to digest bits and they get the (illusion of) support for their game.

And unless there is a competitor with a bigger budget and a model range that can match GW’s in terms of (production) quality and flashy advertising that isn’t going to change …

[callidusx3Participant 197xp 2]

The answers to the OP’s questions are overly cynical in my opinion.  I get the annoyance with GW.  I had parted ways with GW for 13+ years before KT’18 brought me back (and Underworlds kept me a customer).  KT’21’s ruleset is surprisingly good, one of the best I have experienced (better than Stargrave or Starbreach, and certainly an improvement on KT’18 where the game was mostly won at the list building stage and where a faction’s basic trooper barely impacted the game).

I wouldn’t let the buy-in issues, such as they are, put you off Osbad.  Here is what I have suggested to others:

Buy the Rulebook;

Buy the Compendium if you need rules for more than 1-2 factions, otherwise just use the Battlescribe app or carefully watch video reviews of the book (like Glass Half Dead’s vid) for the info on your faction.  If your one faction is either Imperial Guard or Orks, then skip the Compendium and buy the Octarius book on eBay come Aug. 28th;

Buy the essentials pack if you can’t be bothered to come up with alternatives for the counters and the 6 barricades (2″ x 1″, these are necessary).  The measuring tool is unnecessary, just use your measuring tape;

Buy the TacOps card pack unless you want to make your own (these secondary objectives are listed in the rulebook, so one could print them onto heavy paper and sleeve them).

A few targeted rebuttals…

Blinky465 – You mischaracterize TM’s opinion on KT’21.  He was disappointed with the Compendium.  He liked the ruleset, even if he had issues with certain aspects of it (like the lack of a morale phase, though much of it irrelevant to gameplay, such as the measurement symbols and terminology).

Slayerofworlds – The Compendium has been stated by a few reviewers to provide competent army lists that are balanced even against the two Octarius forces.  Yes, they lack the load of specialist operatives with their bespoke special rules but these Compendium lists are not subpar forces.  And they may not be superseded by the release of a faction’s bespoke team.  I could see a Tyranid release that is nothing but genestealers, perhaps with a lictor.  A Tyranid player might not be enamored with genestealers (I, for one) and would continue playing with a warrior/gaunt force from the Compendium.

[limburger 21707xp 1]

@callidusx3 those forces may not be subpar, but they sure as hell are boring as f*ck compared to the ones in the boxed set.
It may (thematically) make sense for Spacemarine killteams to just be a single squad of the same dude, but that isn’t what you’d want to see in a game with teams that have 10 guys. Especially if the other team has specialists that can do something other than shoot stuff in the average scenario.

I sure hope that the Spacemarine faction book (or whatever GW is going to call it) has a bit more than just the bits shown by Uncle Atom in his Compendium preview …

I find it is best to be cynical with GW releases, because you never quite know when they stop supporting stuff. It does look like they’ve planned ahead for a year, but at the same time I wonder if there is anything left after this year. And all of the plans are clearly designed to please the shareholders and less likely to please us as consumers. The compendium is the Index-equivalent for this version of Killteam. Yes, you can infer a bit of rules for factions as we’re dripfed new info, but we shouldn’t have to do that if the rules were designed to expandable with new factions.

GW’s modus operandi has shown that they don’t give a f*ck about balancing their armies, because there will be new rules that will have an effect on how the game plays with every faction that is released.

I sure as hell prefer Stargrave, because the release schedule doesn’t feel like they split things up on purpose just to sell stuff. The rules may be a bit flat and the background could have been a bit fluffier, but at the same time neither of that was needed as it was meant to inspire people to create their own stuff.

[tuffyears 23171xp 0]

rule book £30
Compendium £30
Gubbins £20
Tac ops cards £12

£92

or box set £125

the boxset don’t have the  Compendium in it

 

[recon63 5075xp 0]

I’m kinda interested in getting into the killteam, but I have 2 main issues,

 

1)the Bloody prices we get charged here in Australia

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/kill-team-octarius-2021-eng

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/kill-team-core-book-2021-eng

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/kill-team-tac-ops-cards-2021-eng

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-AU/kill-team-compendium-2021-eng

and 2) this bloody notice we got because of the rampant covid outbreak along the east coast of Australia with NSW & VIC virtually being leper colonies  due to rolling lockdowns…

 

So not only would getting into the game cost me an arm & leg, but I cannot order it here anyways due to 1/3 ( the main 1/3 where 90% of imports actually arrive in Australia) of the country being in lockdown.

 

I am tempted to wait till someone at the local gaming club rocks in with a copy , and then just proxy mantic minis when we play ( yes I am that guy, and I have been challenged to bring an enforcer army nee “space marines” in to play 40K & the old killteam) But I will watch and wait until it is available then decide if GW actually deserves my $$ for the game…

[tuffyears 23171xp 0]

The Oz/NZ has reopened

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/08/19/australia-and-new-zealand-your-warhammer-warehouse-is-reopening-just-in-time-for-kill-team/

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