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I'm looking at playing with some friends but we can't keep up with the game as fast as it's evolving. So we decided to pick an edition and go with it. Problem is that I haven't really read a big rule book since 3rd edition. So I need your help picking an edition to play. What are the core differences between editions (3rd through 7th), some of the highlights, and known issues?

Also please note which edition had the mass cover saves, what a terrible idea.

Biggest differences for me coming from 3rd to 7th, not including Fliers, LoW, Armor Points and the other ridiculously obvious ones are Run, Blast and Rapid Fire.

Running used to be pretty much Tyranid exclusive giving us the advantage to cross the board quickly. Fleet of Claw let almost the entire army, certainly the entire swarm bit of it, run.

Blasts are now taken from the closest models. That was a hell of a surprise.

Bolters are no longer 'if moved, 1 shot at half range, if stationary, two shots half range and one shot max'. I think that's Salvo now? Rapid fire is now 'can't assault'. Never even noticed that change and had to have it pointed out to me by my opponent.

Also, the massive amount of AP2 weapons and S7+. The concept of bad units is also fairly new. There used to be buffs for everything to bump up strength or BS, like Chaos marks, but everyone had something of the sort.

3rd: First actual "tabletop" edition with heavily cut-down RPG elements from RT.

4th: Streamlined 3rd, edges rounded off. Extremely easy to pick up and play, fluent gameplay. Transports are death traps and need to be kept out of sight. Absolutely.

5th: TRANSPORTZ. YOU NEED MORE METAL BAWKSES.

6th: FLYERS. ZOOOOM.

7th: WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING feth RULES!

6th edition is also the shootiest of the editions.
It's where overwatch came in.
Its when it became illegal to assault after deepstriking or coming in from reserves.
It's where vehicle Hull Points came in making it easier to blow up a landraider with a couple lucky dice rolls and a str8 weapon.

What happened between 4th and 5th that changed the nature of transports?

A little threadromancy but does anyone have any opinions on the best BRB edition, especially for lower point games? 750 or less

 Twoshoesvans wrote:
What happened between 4th and 5th that changed the nature of transports?

You had a table for glancing hits, penetrating hits, and ordnance penetrating hits.

For glancing 5 immobilized, 6 destroyed. On the pen table, 4-5 destroyed, and 6 made it explode, and wound passengers was a flat 4+. The unit was then also auto-pinned. The ordnance table was much the same, except that a 6 autokilled everyone in the transport.

 Portugal Jones wrote:

 Twoshoesvans wrote:
What happened between 4th and 5th that changed the nature of transports?

You had a table for glancing hits, penetrating hits, and ordnance penetrating hits.

For glancing 5 immobilized, 6 destroyed. On the pen table, 4-5 destroyed, and 6 made it explode, and wound passengers was a flat 4+. The unit was then also auto-pinned. The ordnance table was much the same, except that a 6 autokilled everyone in the transport.

That was 4th Ed to clarify. 5th Ed Glancing hits were a straight up -2 modifier to whatever roll you made on the table.

Personally speaking 6th Ed is fun but not to melee armies. The best ruleset I find is one that takes the 6th Ed book, adds Daemonology discipline and any rules that are bad for assault get replaced with the 5th Ed ones that do support it: ie, charging from Scout, reserves, Infiltrate. But always use the most recent book.

But if you want 1 book to go with take 5th Ed for simplicity and fairness to melee forces. If you are a shooty group, go 6th. For randomness out the bejeesuseses, go 7th.

 Twoshoesvans wrote:
What happened between 4th and 5th that changed the nature of transports?

They made vehicles in general harder to kill in 5th from 4th, but also in 4th you had to auto-disembark if the vehicle was penetrated *at all*, passengers took damage a lot easier, and pinning was basically automatic if they got shot out of their transport, if your exit was blocked then the transported unit died if the transport was killed, and you couldn't score while in a transport. In 5th, passengers only took damage on an Explodes result, they took a normal pinning test if shot out of the transport, they couldn't be killed unless completely surrounded, the auto-disembark on a pen got removed, and you could score while embarked. The damage table was (and still is) heavily built around shutting down guntanks while transports that simply care about going from Point A to Point B care about far fewer results on the table.

For my money and personal enjoyment since you have to house rules some stuff anyway for back editions.

Take 4th edition rules.
1 - completely throw out the Entanglement rule all together
2 - Add in Overwatch but instead of snap shots all overwatch shots are taken at BS skill -2 instead of BS 2 (overwatch can't go below BS1)

There was recently a poll around that had 4th and 5th as the most popular editions with 5th being the most popular. That thread has lengthy discussion of the merits and flaws of various editions you may find helpful. If you don't mind doing a little rules crafting yourselves, you might want to get 4th and 5th and pick and choose your favorite elements to make your own preferred rules blend. 4th and 5th combined for about 60% of the vote, 6th and 7th about 25%.

 Twoshoesvans wrote:
What happened between 4th and 5th that changed the nature of transports?

What was said and also, many books got drastically cheaper transports. For example, Codex: Space Marines had Rhino cost drop from 50 to 35 points in 5th, and Razorback from 70 to 40 points (!).

5th edition was nice that setting up the battle was simple and felt much more straightforward than somewhat cluttered setup of 6th/7th edition. However overall I preferred 6th over 5th:

-Wound allocation. Modern system ain't perfect but it sure as heck is better than 5th edition one.
-the way IC's were handled in close combats.
-AP values for close combat weapons. Towards the end of 5th, Codex creep had got so bad that 2+ armour save was essentially meaningless. Everyone had power weapons. (Silly me, though, when I thought that Terminators would get better...)
-5th edition had too many abstractions. You saw one guy's nose, and shot entire squad dead.
-4+ cover saves everywhere.
-Multi-assaults. These were just crazy powerful in 5th. It was almost hopeless playing Tau, when large enemy squad could wipe half your army out in one turn.
-too few and too simple book missions.