We all know lore wise eldar would not last at all, they will be the first race to fall because they are even more limited then SM or CSM, they would pull out pretty damn fast or just sit back and relax doing some minor pushes here and there to let others wage war at each other, Eldar tactic they would just sit back and observe and not even participate as much in the war until finally they see a surgical strike to tip it all to their favour and make a push for their victory.

Space marine can stand their ground alone lore wise, but are they deployed alone? nope they are not, in almost most cases i have seen or read they are always in a team a squad a strikeforce always.

So when of course the inferior IG lore wise comes around how are they deployed? they rely greatly on moral support and communications, not to mention enough weaponry of all types to make an ork looter fall into a coma as well as their vehicles which play a heavy role in the defence and push back.

The basic concept of them has always been quantity over quality when it comes to troops and some certain weapons, later on the quantity diminishes to only leave the quality where we find storm troopers or the ksarkrin / other noteworthy regiments they have been in combat and survived they have become veterans in fighting.

So if we are in the battlefield and an imperial guard is alone he should get raped by pretty much most of the factions perhaps not ork boyz should be not to big of a gap there but why are you running alone into the fight, not how the faction works, here is where we add lore.

We add buffs of all types, your in a squad of 12? let us say with that many you all get bonus to health, the more guardsmen you lose in the squad the more everyone becomes weaker so if one IG in the squad is getting close to death fall back in line and heal up if you got a healer, with the help of vox that squad gets fire rate increase, if you attach a player who is a commissar the accuracy gets improved, if you have nearby vehicles you get defence bonus as long as you are pushing close by the armoured vehicle.

This all could fall into lets say "universal morale buffs" greater morale to stand tall and fight because in numbers you think you wont die so easy someone else might die before you, defensive morale due to the vehicles you feel more protected you can hide behind them or alongside them, its a friggin tank i feel safe already, the commissars shouting and telling the squad who tot arget first gives us a focused fire so accuracy is increased.

"Bring it all together, and stack up the buffs, then you got a force to be reckoned with."

Yet its quite lore specific with a bit bending.

If someone bitches about dying easily in a 1 vs 1 IG vs SM then your playing it wrong, simple as that, IG is teamwork and play as a damn team.

Ork´s have the same virtues of the buff system, but they have no structure only thing they got is one buff the waaaggghhh the rest is just, point shoot and see if it dies, if not shoot some more, they rely more on their leaders then the IG does in numbers so only buff they can get would be if they got a Nob squad up, with the boyz, to keep them in line helps them stay focused, if the nob dies the squad breaks up.

I've never understood what defines 'supported gamesworkshop lore'. The closest I've seen is catch-all 'it's ALL lore' statements, but then those same people turn around and claim that only applies to the books, and as such the tabletop isn't lore anymore.

Well, if it's all lore, then the TT is still lore. Never mind the fact that it's clearly a better system to base video game balance off of because it's fully specified. Nothing is subjective. Dice rolls can be converted directly into statistics, and it's already fairly well balanced itself. The books may well be very entertaining reading, but nothing in them is clear because it's all subjective, you're dealing frequently with heroic figures rather than run of the mill grunts, which we will be playing as, and they aren't terribly consistent because there's a natural author bias towards the faction being represented as protagonists in the present book, and the protagonists are more often than not Space Marines.

im not saying that. orks stand up to space marines easily. same with eldar. chaos ARE space marines. Dark eldar would stand up to space marines as well.

alright...although you shouldnt need buffs. having more guys together in and of itself should be enough...though i see what your going for.

Oh its all an example to show it can actually work, if its buffs or gear or equipment, its all manageable of what can be allowed or not, even if we go with buffs like i mentioned the numbers can be tweaked so its a lot of minor buffs in a few percentages across the boards to beef them up in statistic.

Heck we can even have temporary buffs or no buffs at all, it has to be tested and talked through to see how feasible it is and how will it compare versus other races and their buffs / gear and the like.

The fact is, that table-top is a strategy game with miniatures. Like chess but with much more random (to simplify calculations) It's actually ruled by balancing and GW business decisions.
Table top cannot be ruled by lore by definition.
The system must make everyone equal, so that players will have no problem playing. Only decorations are different (race, chapters, etc) because people have different preferences and, well, because table top is based on lore containing those races.

Look at ANY tactical tabletop existing based on a specific setting: chess based on real life, Game of Thrones tabletop based on books, even Space Hulk is somewhat detached from lore. Because they have a certain game mechanic that binds them. Making lore-accurate game means making it way too complex. Roleplaying games are the closest ones to lore, but - boy - should I mention how complex the game gets? Especially for the game master? But, anyway, RP games are not tabletop, that's a different story

The table-top is emulating lore, editing some things out to satisfy it's need to be balanced and simplified. Because we are sometimes talking huge armies here and miniatures that need to be sold.
It's still one hell of a fun game to play, but don't get carried away considering tabletop an absolute lore-accurate creation.

Well that's alright, because this game will need to be balanced and simplified too.

Of course, since we have a computer to crunch the mathhammer for us we can get away with a lot less simplification than a tabletop game. For example, many weapons that have the same RoF on tabletop will have different RoFs in EC, because we're operating at a higher level of detail and it fits our balance better.

But at the end of the day we do have to make a game, and we do have to make it balanced. For that purpose, other balanced games are much better references than inherently imbalanced novels. And where the games are unbalanced, or their balance falls apart in the transition to a TPS? We change it to make it balanced.

The funny thing is that the TT created the lore, it didn't emulate it. The books went on to expand upon said lore, and it's gone through two decades of mutation at the hands of the writers. While half of the books are quite good the other half boarders on trash and are frequently inconsistent.

While the TT strives to make each faction equivalently powerful overall (something that is required for the TT and will be for EC as well), it doesn't in anyway require that individual units are equivalent. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say it 'makes everyone equal.' The factions have different strengths and play styles.

In exactly the same way that the table top isn't going to perfectly emulate the books, because there are basic limitations for how many miniatures the weak-but-numerous can reasonably fit on someone's table, EC won't be able to perfectly emulate the books. Because there aren't going to be population hard caps preventing hoards of space marines (which is strictly contrary to their lore), and Ork Boyz aren't going to be as weak, Eldar are unlikely to have quite as potent psychic powers but won't be quite as frail, etc, etc.

I believe that truth lies somewhere in the middle, really. I do not agree, that TT "created" lore, since lore was written in the beginning and then in the process of creating tabletop. Tabletop is lore's child. It's always like that, when you create games of your own: you think of the setting first, then you think how to put it into limitations of the game.

I do agree that some of the books are trash, some of them are exaggerated. Better judge from canon though, when you read actual descriprions in rulebooks, then add some from Warhammer RP series (which have very good canon descriptions as well, expanding deeper) with the flavor of some books to spice things up.
Table top is only trying to put all this into tactical game's mechanic and doing all those aforementioned things
It's doing a good job and it's one hell of a collectible, but it's still only a tabletop

Now, Eternal Crusade lies somewhere in the middle: it's not a miniature "chess"-tactical game, but it's still a game.
Just like Rasczak mentioned, PC offers more versatility and power in terms of crunching different variables
AND we will have hundreds upon hundreds individual players with their own will

They've changed the stats in recent editions, I've got codices from 1st editions onwards and in the earlier ones a powerfist was a powerfist, Commisar Yarrick's powerclaw had the the same stats as any Ork power Claw.

I don't own the newer codices.