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I'm pretty sure this has been before, but what is your preferred version of 40k and related games? You don't have to justify your answers at all...

My preferred version of 40k is 7th.. it had the widest variety of options for psykers, vehicles and troop selection.

My preferred skirmish game is... Shadow War Armageddon.

-STS

I think, barring the extrene bliat of strats, mine would be late 9th ed.

slade the sniper wrote:
I'm pretty sure this has been before, but what is your preferred version of 40k and related games? You don't have to justify your answers at all...

My preferred version of 40k is 7th.. it had the widest variety of options for psykers, vehicles and troop selection.

My preferred skirmish game is... Shadow War Armageddon.

-STS

7th was my first edition. So I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for it.
But it wasn’t exactly well-balanced… still, it’s fun! (With the right group.)

My favorite was the obscene wackiness of 3rd edition.

I could field a 281 point Last Chancers force against your 1500 point Ultramarines.

Or I could play an Armoured Company, that always goes first, against a sea of daemons.

3rd Edition was the best, because it was the wild west of conversions and any zany idea was creatable.

8th edition. It felt like GW actually cared- and then they just gave up with 9th.
8th wasn't perfect, but it still supported different Mission styles, it had more tactical depth than 3rd to 7th while still keeping some of the narrative stuff that was further reduced in 9th and 10th. It also wasn't plagued by no models no rules as much as later editions.
10th core rules are probably superior to 8th (aside from psyker rules), because they are a refinement of them, but I dislike the current samey mission style, not paying for options and no models no rules.

I played 2nd to 6th. Core rules wise, I think 5th was my favourite. But the codices were hot garbage. 3.5 to 4e codices are the sweet spot with some exceptions like Dark Eldar. As a book I really love the 4e core rulebook, the last hurrah for real hobby content in a GW core book.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
My favorite was the obscene wackiness of 3rd edition.

I could field a 281 point Last Chancers force against your 1500 point Ultramarines.

Or I could play an Armoured Company, that always goes first, against a sea of daemons.

3rd Edition was the best, because it was the wild west of conversions and any zany idea was creatable.

I too love 3e... it was awesome, buuuuut there are a lot of units that are simply not available. It is for that reason I went with 7th...
The conversions were great, but it was the twilight of making weird vehicles as they made lots of vehicle kits, etc.

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 Da Boss wrote:
I played 2nd to 6th. Core rules wise, I think 5th was my favourite. But the codices were hot garbage. 3.5 to 4e codices are the sweet spot with some exceptions like Dark Eldar. As a book I really love the 4e core rulebook, the last hurrah for real hobby content in a GW core book.

The 3.5 Codices were pretty awesome.

The silly, fun, wacky hobby was effectively dead and buried with 5th. It became very much a "serious" game with less fun with this edition.

-STS

I like 10th best for actual quality of play and balance. It's the most accomplished version of the game as far as I'm concerned.

Beyond that, I have fond memories of 8th, 4th and 2nd, but all of them have major flaws that would keep me from revisiting them. 2nd gets the nostalgia bonus because it's where I started, but it's kind of a fiddly nightmare to actually play outside of Necromunda.

I got experience with all editions from 3rd to 9th. Out of those, my favourite has to lie somewhere between 3rd and 4th.

Felt like it was the period most open to kitbashes and just being a genuinly fun game, instead of churning out things for the sake of it (Centurions, SM AA, ...).

2nd holds a big nostalgic place in my heart, played every editon and have to say 10th is the most fun I’ve had since 2nd, so I would say 10th is the best.

I prefer 2nd, and can't comment on anything after 3rd because I saw the churn coming and opted out.

Many of the defects of 2nd were fixed either through contemporary FAQs and subsequent (pretty widespread) rules corrections/clarification, which one can find in my sig.

2nd is a very different game. I liked it, though I'm not sure me and my friends ever played it properly.

But there was stuff that bugged me about it. Like I felt Orks didn't really live up to their background as fearsome melee combatants, I didn't like everyone using essentially Imperial tech and sometimes it could feel like playing markerhammer.

But if you really loved 2e I can totally see why you would not adopt 3e. Very different game with a different focus entirely. I have to say they won me over with the change to Orks to make them less "toughness 4 Imperial Guard with random weapons" and more their own thing.

I realise this is heresy for some old school Ork players who love the 2e Orks, but I prefer the 3e version.

I should give barebones 8th a try one of these days. It's probably pretty good. But One Page Rules is good enough that I don't really feel the need.

I’ve really been enjoying 8th for the last few years. It has rules for a huge variety of units. I love the faction keyword rules that allow me to throw an eclectic bunch of Imperial units or Chaos units together in an army. The core rules are relatively simple, and you can pretty easily decide not to use some of the additional rules such as stratagems and warlord traits without interfering with the core gameplay loop. Weapons have consistent stats between units, so it’s pretty easy to make custom units for 8th if the codices don’t support a model you have.

For skirmish games, I’ve tried lots of different versions of Kill Team. I am currently trying Shadow War Armageddon and it seems very promising so far.

9th, purely because of the 9th ed Tyranid codex.
I loved having the layers upon layers of Synapse related rules like Synaptic Link and Synaptic Imperatives.

One hell of an information overload but fun when I could remember all of it. Too bad I only had for a few months.

The edge goes to 9th ed Crusade for me.

10th isn't awful- I hate what it did to psychic powers, and I preferred costed equipment; I also preferred "detachment rules" to be assigned on the basis of subfaction rather than detachment, but I can live with it as is (there are some advantages even).

I also preferred Daemons they way the were in 9th, and while it was where the "range rotation" of Drukhari Courts and Beasts began, it didn't make it look like the intent was to ultimately remove those units from the game.

Interestingly enough, I think there are some real innovations to both the Core Crusade rules and the bespoke content for 10th. Adding rivals to the Drukhari content and making the Eldar content more active and immediate were great ideas; capping non characters at Blooded unless you burn RP and more aggressive and meaningful battlescars were a excellent core updates.

I enjoyed other editions in their time- 2nd set the hook, 3rd was great accept for its lack of official support for GSC (though Tim Huckleberry's Citadel Journal list was great). Fourth was cool- I think that was were Killt Team and Combat Patrol appeared, as well as a rudimentary progression system appeared. But of course, GSC were well and truly gone by then. Fifth was alright, but it's where Sisters started to really feel neglected, and sixth's treatment of them forced a two edition rage quit.

fave edition of 40K - 1st edition (up to and including 1992's Battle Manual, but without Vehicle Manual and Virus Bombs). It's got it all, the quasi 2nd edition gameplay, and all the zany RPG stuff you can create for it. Requiring a GM makes it possible for having interesting games even when things aren't "balanced" symmetrically, and its just the whole open endedness of it that makes it the ideal sandbox for me.

fave skirmish game - KT24. While I liked KT21, co op games are a refreshing change from the typical versus grind gameplay of othrer 40K games. Gallowdark is fun as heck as well. Not into Beta Dhecima though

3rd & 4th Editions.
In the last year we have gone back to playing 3rd Edition and I have just started to build and paint an Armoured Company along with my regular opponent.

Hmm. It's kind of a weird choice, but I think my favorite may have been 7th edition Combat Patrol? It was basically just low-points normal 40k with a few tweaks. It desperately needed some more restrictive army building restrictions if it wanted to be "balanced," but the small game size kind of breathed fresh life into a lot of units that simply weren't lethal enough or durable enough to do well in full-sized 40k games. And the lack of redundancy meant that things like marine durability stats could shine through more than normal. Something like a single rhino or a squad of assault marines with some melta guns really felt like they got to behave the way you'd expect them to. And on top of all that, games took less than an hour. So even if you ended up with a one-sided game, it didn't feel *that* bad because you could be rewracking and trying again by the time a regular game of 40k would be wrapping up its first round.

For more conventional options:

3rd/4th: Never played them, but I think I might have preferred these. To my knowledge, they lacked the absurd lethality/imbalance of 7th, the randomness upon randomness of 6th, the terrible choices of 5th, and still had a lot of the charm and customization that we gave up from 8th onward. The only thing kind of holding them back to my knowledge is that they don't include some of the "common sense" mechanics that 8th gave us like voluntarily falling back or being able to split fire. But again, I never actually played these. Maybe I'd be full of complaints if I ever got the chance.

5th: My first edition. Probably the worst edition of the game. Parking lots for days meaning the game was basically decided by which player had spent more hundreds of dollars on GW tanks. Only troop units could hold objectives. Fearless rules were weird. A few codices that I really liked though.

6th: Actually a pretty *okay* if forgettable edition. Its biggest sin is just all the random tables that didn't really add anything to the game. Randomized psychic powers were a step backwards in terms of customization. Also, I think this was the edition where flyers became more mainstream and sort of broke the game for a while? Possibly the most mid of all editions.

7th: The *core* rules of 7th were actually pretty decent. It took a lot of the ideas from 6th and polished them, and a lot of codices had some fun mechanics. Still deducting points for the bad psychic phase it inherited from 6th. This edition would have been great if it didn't suffer from such absolutely horrible balance. Formations, though sometimes flavorful, were just all over the place in terms of balance. As were the codices. As were psychic powers. If GW had done a 7.5 and just made a genuine effort to keep things at least a little bit balanced, this might have ended up being the best edition. In fact, I think this one is really up there *if* you and your opponent spend a lot of time pre-game trying to make your lists a good match for eachother, discussing which broken things you're going to avoid, and figuring out a common interpretation of the semi-indecipherable rules. If you put in all that work... 7th was pretty cool.

8th: Probably my favorite edition that I actually played? And I say that while acknowledging all the faults and unpolished ideas of the edition. This was the edition that cut out a bunch of feelsbad rules that had just kind of lingered within the game out of habit for a long time. It gave us things like the option to fall back out of combat so that you weren't stuck slap fighting a unit you couldn't realistically kill all game, gave us split fire so you weren't forced to shoot your bolters into a tank you couldn't realistically hurt, etc. And it gave us subfaction rules, which were nifty even if I prefer the detachment rule approach we have now.

Buuuut a lot of the ideas were unpolished (Strats, CP being granted by detachments instead of detachments costing CP, etc.), and things could easily get imbalanced, albeit not as badly as 7th. Like, 7th you could have a really solid game if you had a pre-game chat with your opponent and tried to build a list that would be a good matchup. And that pre-game discussion could be a lot shorter than in 7th.

9th: I want to like 9th, but it almost made me put down the game for a while. By the end of the edition, I was just like, ignoring all my secondaries because the mental load was just too much. Plus, the lethality had jumped back up to 7th edition levels of silly. There were a lot of flavorful army building options that made it fun to put lists together on paper, but I struggled to enjoy putting plastic on the table this edition. If they'd dialed back the lethality and book keeping by 30% and not given everyone an extra layer of buffs, this one would have been great.

10th: It's the most balanced edition I've played. It's the best execution of ideas they've been trying to get right since 8th edition. It's also the least customizable, and it frequently makes me feel like I'm playing an e-sport style game instead of telling a story with my dudes.

Where 9th made it fun to put together lists but was miserable to play, 10th is kind of the opposite. Most of the flavor has been sucked out of list-building. Customization is at an all-time low. And a lot of the intuitive, viscerally satisfying rules I enjoyed in past editions are gone, to the point that I'm not sure anything of the things that made me love my dark eldar back in 5th edition are still present in 10th.

Yet despite all that, the game plays smoothly enough on the table with *just* enough flavor, that I don't find myself being all that disappointed in it either? The relatively decent balance really is worth a lot, but gosh do I miss the flavorful upsides of past editions.

It's weird. It really feels like the 40k I *want* is an amalgam of a lot of mechanics that have come and gone over the years, many of them forgotten or mutated into something gimmicky like stratagems. Kind of feels like we could have a much more satisfying version of the game if GW would have just taken some of the modern focus on balance and applied it to past versions of the game that had more satisfying customization.

I'd say 3rd, of course, since I am working on the 3rd ed battle bible. It had a lot more depth of optional rules and add-ons than many people seem to remember. It didn't start with flyers and super heavies, but it was the first edition with flyers and super-heavy vehicles/war machines.

I feel like it did need some tweaking, like the updated transport/vehicle rules make the game better.

I also really enjoyed the "do it yourself" attitude that was pervasive back then. Every unit didn't need to have its own box, you could convert models from different kits and boxes for your units, some units needed you to do conversions.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
I got experience with all editions from 3rd to 9th. Out of those, my favourite has to lie somewhere between 3rd and 4th.

Felt like it was the period most open to kitbashes and just being a genuinly fun game, instead of churning out things for the sake of it (Centurions, SM AA, ...).

100% on board with this, same experience and opinion.

Apocalypse 2019, which pretty much is how modern 40k should be played.

Having started in 3rd and played through 8th, i have to say the obvious general improvement from 3rd-5th was the golden age of 40K as a large battle war game rule set.

5th by and large with a few exception in rule set specifics was the best edition of the game GW ever made. there were a couple major issues that 4th did better (wound allocation) or things that were added back in to improve the game in 6th and 7th (overwatch/grenade throwing). Which is why our group when we decided to go back and pick an edition between 3rd and 7th to play, that worked best, as they were all cross compatible we went with 5th with a few minor tweaks borrowed from other editions and it works very well. Not as a game for tournaments but as a casual thematic war game that fits with the lore of the universe.

As it turns out since we allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be played, aside from some armies that didn't exist before 5th (admech, knights, custodes etc..) the majority of the codexes players gravitate to are 3rd/3.5 and 4th because of the lore aspect of the rules. the most popular 5th ed codexes are space wolves, blood angels, necrons, imperial guard and dark eldar.

Aside from the FW books and a few other 7th ed codexes i have on PDF- these are the codexes i keep on hand for players to use for our 5th ed game.



Mod edit - image spoilered because of size

BanjoJohn wrote:
I'd say 3rd, of course, since I am working on the 3rd ed battle bible. It had a lot more depth of optional rules and add-ons than many people seem to remember. It didn't start with flyers and super heavies, but it was the first edition with flyers and super-heavy vehicles/war machines.

Point of order! There were super-heavies in 2nd, but they were rare. Armorcast made them and they popped up now and again. I played against an Eldar tank and had no idea what it was. As was normal in those days, the board was packed with terrain, so it could barely maneuver and my Devastators spent the entire game pinging it as it did pop-up attacks. IIRC, that was the game, because it was so expensive.


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 Da Boss wrote:
2nd is a very different game. I liked it, though I'm not sure me and my friends ever played it properly.

But there was stuff that bugged me about it. Like I felt Orks didn't really live up to their background as fearsome melee combatants, I didn't like everyone using essentially Imperial tech and sometimes it could feel like playing markerhammer.

But if you really loved 2e I can totally see why you would not adopt 3e. Very different game with a different focus entirely. I have to say they won me over with the change to Orks to make them less "toughness 4 Imperial Guard with random weapons" and more their own thing.

I realise this is heresy for some old school Ork players who love the 2e Orks, but I prefer the 3e version.

I should give barebones 8th a try one of these days. It's probably pretty good. But One Page Rules is good enough that I don't really feel the need.

I did not get into Orks in 2nd ed., but am playing and building them out right now and they are very capable melee combatants, but you have to be crafty about it. In my most recent game, Stormboys gave the bums rush to some Marine Devastators and mopped them up pretty good. The trick is to replace the axes with swords (for the parry) combine it with a pistol (+1 attack) and attack in quantity, which you can do because they are so cheap.

Playing against them in 2nd was very stressful, because you had no idea what awful thing was going to happen. Is my Land Raider going to be inverted? Shokk attack on the dreadnought? Crazy stuff all over that was quite fun.

I feel 3rd ed. ones were like Tyranids Lite, they had to get stuck in because shooting was largely an exercise in dice-rolling. All vehicles moved slower, so a high speed end-run was impossible, and of course the ramming attacks and spectacular pile-ups were impossible.

Perhaps the weakest point of 3rd was the AP rules, which made Marines extremely durable, and predictably resulted in AP 2 spam. My marines weathered 3rd very well (only lost 2 games) and going through them there is an insane amount of meltaguns and plasma guns and pistols.

For armies like the Orks, which were burdened with low BS and poor AP, GW's solution was the Bucket o' Dice, which was just such a chore. Even worse, they added re-rolls, which meant a significant part of gameplay was rolling, recovering, and re-rolling dice.

As a sidebar, I hate that mechanic. Combat results are about percentages, and designers should know them and use them without resulting to gimmicks that try to make incremental shifts in the odds but at the cost of tremendously slowing down the game. Adding insult to injury, GW already uses a very narrow probability band, so the movements back and forth are already marginal. One of my objectives in Conqueror was to eliminate this by making the numbers meaningful, and combat decisive, and that included eliminating "to wound" rolls. Combats are resolved by kills, not ranks or banners. But I digress.

With 2nd one can feasibly do "shooty" Orks, go for a melee option - or a little of both. To keep my model count (and expenses) low, I'm going with a more elite-style Ork army, using Scarboyz and Nobz in mega-armor, Blood Axe Commandos and every unit is getting weapon upgrades to maximize the close combat mechanics as outlined above.

Plus the wacky artillery and Kustom weapons. Gotta go all in on that.

10th and its not even close. It's the first edition I actually really enjoy my games of. I'm generally a FAR bigger fan of other game systems, but I'll actually rank 10th as something that competes rather than something to play because its all a lot of people have.

It's the first edition where I felt like I've actually seen all the cool weapon options on the table. Units are active and do memorable things. The scenario drives engagement and combat while (random) secondaries shake things up enough to reward thinking on your feet. It's fun on the table in a way I've felt prior editions have mostly only been in theory.

As many others have said, late 3rd through 4th. Solid rules with an excellent array of codexes and options. 4th in particular felt like the most "mature" version of the game.

I'd play 2nd again too (and have). It's very different and has a lot of texture.

5e before the codex creep. I preferred the extra mobility over 4th and there were very few 'gotcha' moments.

In terms of Properly Established And Out Of It’s Shorts 40K?

Probably early 5th Ed. By then the underlying 3rd Ed Ruleset had some flavour brought back. And if your present Codex was cack? You could, with opponent foreknowledge and consent, use an earlier one (for instance, Chaos 3.5).

But the edition of my heart and soul will forever be 2nd Ed. I just adore its rampant silliness. And of course the warm and fuzzy mid-teens memories that came along with it.

7th may be, at least this is edition when I play the most and have clear memory of.

The majority of my gaming was the 3-5 edition era just due to my age and financing.

I played some 2nd ed and got into it in 1993, but just didn't have the capacity or people to play much of it.

So, I dont really have a preferred play experience but I have preferred aspects of the game that different editions have.

I prefer 2nd ed background and emersion, the story telling was best.

I prefer some of the 3-5 game play, but hated the ap system..when playing marines the game was fun, but play anything else and it was just not fun taking off dozens of models at a time.


I prefer gws balance attitude and responsiveness in 10th, but don't like the more gamist design philosophy.


So for all I don't like the ap system, I think I probably had the most enjoyable gaming in 4th.

As an elder millennial I can only say second and that may be 75% nostalgia but I think I also do prefer the chaos over the streamlining that followed.