Hi all so I wanted to post this up just to gauge interest and a bit of clarifications before I begin this hobby journey.

I'm not a hater of 9th ed. I enjoy it as much as any other user. Why I'm 'updating' this edition is mainly for nostalgic reasons. The model range is a lot better than before and I just feel there is just so much more that could have been with this edition. Now that older editions are essentially sandbox, I'm making this edition to be the best it can be as though it was made in current times. Below are the attachments of just the structure and plan going forward with this project. Just bear in mind I am a hobbyist in all parts of the game so making this edition will be a very, very slow endeavour.

Right now, I will post up a link to a drive that all should be able to view, however this will be empty for a long time as I have to make the units then make the pages look pretty.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1W3rNlOpJq_aWSzyXmWRYdt9zyCUZGWM9?usp=sharing

So you're basically retooling old 'dexes and adding new ones but keeping the 5th edition rules unchanged? Sounds cool. I was pretty burned out on 5th by the time 6th came out and don't really want to return to that particular rule set, but I am curious to see what your changes/additions end up looking like.

Godspeed to you.

You may find some use for my old 5e skirmish-hammer notes -

Marine books(all) - there were sweeping points adjustments from 4th and through 5th. Primarily these relate to heavy weapon costs - you will probably want to pick a single points level (such as the 5e marine costs) and apply them to chaos, wolves, templars, DA and BA. 5e also introduced a few freebies for the later marine books (i.e. wolf special weapons, blood angel transport discount) that could do with rolling back.
It's not always going to be matching to the marine dex as some later changes (i.e. +5 points for a thunderhammer/stormshield terminator) were sensible.

Templars / Dark Angels - For the most part are probably easier to work backwards from the marine dex on shared units and wargear. For Dark Angels you can pretty much copy the codex 1:1 with only changes for the characters, deathwing, and ravenwing. Templars are more significantly different in terms of subtle wargear differences and squad characters, but it's the vows and (4e vintage) veteran skills that defined their playstyle.

Chapter / Legion traits - Didn't exist for anyone in 5th edition outside of a few named characters (which also extended to broad army traits granted by named characters from a few other factions). While I don't think it will be a problem you'll want to be wary of the older edition situation of all devastators with tank hunters, all melta squads with infiltrate, all assault marines with furious charge, and so on and it creates problems when setting the points costs of shared weapons.

Tau - are a tricky one in 5th. Work to do on crisis suit weapon costs. They suffer as other factions up-gun and up-speed throughout the edition. Some solid forgeworld choices but the codex has a serious case of 'always take unit X over unit Y'

Craftworld Eldar - Another case of obviously better units. Like a lot of earlier stuff they look worse as the edition power creeps up. The Dark Eldar should give a solid point to balance against, but keep in mind that the eldar had some very good stuff to go with their not at all good stuff. Forgeworld offered some extra scope (neware the warp hunter)

Sisters of Battle - A book of two parts. The inquisition/ecclesiarchy units were butchered when they were shoehorned into a single 'henchman' unit in codex GK, but with that having been said they were mostly stronger as a result (WD codex jacobus leading crusaders and death cultists were a staple of late 5e sisters).
While Cruddace phoned in the 5e rules something fierce it wasn't all bad - dominions got their scouting, repentia replaced their armour with FnP (original sisters were released pre-scout/fnp rules), Celestine wasn't a hinderance to the army and repentia were arguably less of a joke unit. At the other end of the scale though the core of the faction was gutted through and through with the loss of faith and wargear - battle sisters were a troops tax, celestians useless, the canoness ineffectual and the immolator was just a very expensive razorback.
Somewhere in between the two books is a better faction, of the two the 3rd edition book was better in 5th edition that the 5e book despite by that point blood angels being able to field troops cheaper than sisters.

Tyranids - I was looking to change instant death to overkill (2 wounds), grant full init on charge to units with move through cover, and be a bit less liberal with how tank shocks could be placed and troops scoring from vehicles before re-assessing the 5e nids. They have unit cost issues but but core rule changes were the first stop for them. As with many factions the cheaper heavy weapons and more tanks/artillery through the edition put a strain on them, and tweaks to vehicle damage rules would help them against transports.

Necrons - Were so powerful that the local cron player got significantly worse at the game after playing them. Grab a croupier stick and push them up the board, the vulnerabilities of 3e WBB rolls to AP1, power weapons, and instant death all gone leaving it to the whim of the dice. My first game with the crons (to help a player warm of for a tournament) saw be win by essentially just shooting whatever I had at whatever was infront of me while moving forward, and solar pulses had to be banned from apoc games.
In terms of balancing strength across the edition the points drops of the +1 marine books and the overkill of the guard are comparatively easy to reign in as you can compare the units, weapons, and costs directly to a 'target' books like 5e marines and dark eldar. Crons however are their own thing.

GK - Ludicrous in their power, but also as shallow as a childs paddling pool without it. Another one that is tricky to deal with as bringing them down to a sensible level just makes them a poor mans marines, my preference was to ignore them and work on an improved witch/daemonhunters book (as the two were effectively interchangable in early 5th) but your mileage may vary.

Wyldhunt wrote:So you're basically retooling old 'dexes and adding new ones but keeping the 5th edition rules unchanged? Sounds cool. I was pretty burned out on 5th by the time 6th came out and don't really want to return to that particular rule set, but I am curious to see what your changes/additions end up looking like.

Godspeed to you.

Thanks! I get you. As a CSM player of those days I was really, really burnt out fighting GK's and such, so I get the issue.

A.T. wrote:You may find some use for my old 5e skirmish-hammer notes -

Marine books(all) - there were sweeping points adjustments from 4th and through 5th. Primarily these relate to heavy weapon costs - you will probably want to pick a single points level (such as the 5e marine costs) and apply them to chaos, wolves, templars, DA and BA. 5e also introduced a few freebies for the later marine books (i.e. wolf special weapons, blood angel transport discount) that could do with rolling back.
It's not always going to be matching to the marine dex as some later changes (i.e. +5 points for a thunderhammer/stormshield terminator) were sensible.

Yeah, I hear you! points are going to be interesting but I think with all the new units available it will turn out really good.

Templars / Dark Angels - For the most part are probably easier to work backwards from the marine dex on shared units and wargear. For Dark Angels you can pretty much copy the codex 1:1 with only changes for the characters, deathwing, and ravenwing. Templars are more significantly different in terms of subtle wargear differences and squad characters, but it's the vows and (4e vintage) veteran skills that defined their playstyle.

Yeah, I was thinking on overhauling these, BT just need a good big update and DA need their new units with their SC to really define their playstyle.

Chapter / Legion traits - Didn't exist for anyone in 5th edition outside of a few named characters (which also extended to broad army traits granted by named characters from a few other factions). While I don't think it will be a problem you'll want to be wary of the older edition situation of all devastators with tank hunters, all melta squads with infiltrate, all assault marines with furious charge, and so on and it creates problems when setting the points costs of shared weapons.

Yeah, I've been sitting on this one tbh. I think I will add more characters from each Legion (Like Zao Sahaal, Warsmith Honsou, etc) to really define the Legions and grant the Legion trait, no different to the Space Marines and their Chapter Tactics. I think my only issue here to think of at least one character for each Legion that doesn't already have a character, like the Alpha Legion?

Tau - are a tricky one in 5th. Work to do on crisis suit weapon costs. They suffer as other factions up-gun and up-speed throughout the edition. Some solid forgeworld choices but the codex has a serious case of 'always take unit X over unit Y'

Yeah, I totally get that. My idea was to overhaul them to be play in a bit more playstyle rather than just 'gunlines' all the time. I'm not saying we give them a radical change (like make them a rip n' tear CC army) but more give them multiple themes back similar to how DA have Deathwing and Ravenwing, so Tau have characters that can promote Fish or Fury, Characters like Farsight and Crisis Suits, Shadowsun and an elite stealth team, etc.

Craftworld Eldar - Another case of obviously better units. Like a lot of earlier stuff they look worse as the edition power creeps up. The Dark Eldar should give a solid point to balance against, but keep in mind that the eldar had some very good stuff to go with their not at all good stuff. Forgeworld offered some extra scope (neware the warp hunter)

I get you! Eldar just suffered in this edition so I think I will reinforce their psychic might and obviously make a character for every craftworld that doesn't have an existing character already. Trouble is that I'm unsure what characters to bring into the edition since my Eldar knowledge is limited.

Sisters of Battle - A book of two parts. The inquisition/ecclesiarchy units were butchered when they were shoehorned into a single 'henchman' unit in codex GK, but with that having been said they were mostly stronger as a result (WD codex jacobus leading crusaders and death cultists were a staple of late 5e sisters).
While Cruddace phoned in the 5e rules something fierce it wasn't all bad - dominions got their scouting, repentia replaced their armour with FnP (original sisters were released pre-scout/fnp rules), Celestine wasn't a hinderance to the army and repentia were arguably less of a joke unit. At the other end of the scale though the core of the faction was gutted through and through with the loss of faith and wargear - battle sisters were a troops tax, celestians useless, the canoness ineffectual and the immolator was just a very expensive razorback.
Somewhere in between the two books is a better faction, of the two the 3rd edition book was better in 5th edition that the 5e book despite by that point blood angels being able to field troops cheaper than sisters.

I totally get this! My thoughts were just to totally reboot the codex. I think what I'm planning to look at is look at the previous edition codex and also ask on Dakka what personally made each codex they played from 5th backwards, so much fun or the themes that made them fun? For example I know Acts of faith made SoB fun for many players and then focus on things like that, etc.

Tyranids - I was looking to change instant death to overkill (2 wounds), grant full init on charge to units with move through cover, and be a bit less liberal with how tank shocks could be placed and troops scoring from vehicles before re-assessing the 5e nids. They have unit cost issues but but core rule changes were the first stop for them. As with many factions the cheaper heavy weapons and more tanks/artillery through the edition put a strain on them, and tweaks to vehicle damage rules would help them against transports.

Tyranids were always a mixed bag with me. I always found them a hard game to play against but I feel that may have been because I was around competent players in my area so I never felt the burn of the issues with this codex. if folks told me what the issues were then I would happily look deeper with the Codex.

Necrons - Were so powerful that the local cron player got significantly worse at the game after playing them. Grab a croupier stick and push them up the board, the vulnerabilities of 3e WBB rolls to AP1, power weapons, and instant death all gone leaving it to the whim of the dice. My first game with the crons (to help a player warm of for a tournament) saw be win by essentially just shooting whatever I had at whatever was infront of me while moving forward, and solar pulses had to be banned from apoc games.
In terms of balancing strength across the edition the points drops of the +1 marine books and the overkill of the guard are comparatively easy to reign in as you can compare the units, weapons, and costs directly to a 'target' books like 5e marines and dark eldar. Crons however are their own thing.

GK - Ludicrous in their power, but also as shallow as a childs paddling pool without it. Another one that is tricky to deal with as bringing them down to a sensible level just makes them a poor mans marines, my preference was to ignore them and work on an improved witch/daemonhunters book (as the two were effectively interchangeable in early 5th) but your mileage may vary.

Ah, yes. I remember GK as a CSM player... Yeah, I think we both know the level of power of GK back then. Personally I'm ok with the power level atm, only because my aim is to balance all codex's between the SM book to the GK book in terms of power. With the addition of new units and rules I feel we can balance these boys out to be on par with the rest of the edition which is why these boys will probably be one of the last codex's I'll be looking at. Funnily enough one of my main opponents was Necrons at the time and I felt the power of the book, but I was never really taken back by the book. To me it felt no different than the SM book in terms of how powerful they were. A great book but dealable. My ONLY gripe with that book was Mindshackle Scarabs. That can go die in a fire, especially when it turned even Abaddon into the most special kid in the class on a regular basis, but it might not be as bad when updating the rest of the edition.


To everyone reading, just asking for a little help but if someone could catalogue all the new GW units that aren't in the 5th ed. codex's and all (whether they had rules or not) FW units separately, then that would help me immensely with just getting on with the edition next year. Cheers to any help!

Ok from what I remember about Tyranids in 5th:

- Extremely vulnerable to Instant death.
- Lack of reliable anti-tank shooting.
- Lack of defensive options against low AP weapons.
- Over-costed monsters (aside of the Tervigon).
- Lack of assault grenades.
- Lack of upgrades.
- Punishing Instinctive Behavior.
- Ineffective Shadow in the Warp.
- Monsters capped at T6.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
...To everyone reading, just asking for a little help but if someone could catalogue all the new GW units that aren't in the 5th ed. codex's and all (whether they had rules or not) FW units separately, then that would help me immensely with just getting on with the edition next year. Cheers to any help! ...

Everything? I'll do what I can but I may miss things.

SM: All the flyers other than the Stormraven (which was GK/BA only in 5th), Centurions. Stalker/Hunter. Primaris models, obviously. Most of the Space Wolves' wolfwolfwolf stuff was around in 5th, but I think the planes were 7th. BA didn't get any new minis post-5th. DA got a big expansion with the new Deathwing/Ravenwing in 6th, DW/RW Knights, lots of the command-squad stuff, the planes, and the big Land Speeder are from then.

Guard: MT models were almost just a Stormtrooper resculpt in 5th, but the Taurox was new, as were Bullgryn.

AdMech, Custodians, Sisters of Silence, Knights: Whole army.

Inquisition: They got deleted in 5th. I've got a giant 5e-era fandex sitting around that patched/updated the 3e Inquisition content and added Deathwatch that I like better than anything GW's done with the Inquisition since. GK have had no new models since 5th, Sisters' range overhaul is all resculpts and named characters except for the sword/pistol Seraphim option, Assassins have had resculpts.

Chaos: Almost the whole Daemons range is 5e-vintage or resculpts. Named characters and the Slaaneshi harp-Herald are it, I think. CSM have gotten every daemon engine, the greater possessed, slightly expanded Thousand Sons, and largely new Death Guard stuff. Chaos Knights are all new. Khorne Blood Slaughterer was in 6e Apocalypse.

Craftworld Eldar: Planes came from 6th, as did the new Wraithguard kit with its alternate weapon options. Jetbikes existed before but the kit with the option for scatter lasers on everyone was new in 7th and was one of the worst mistakes of that edition, be sure to keep heavy weapons at one per three. Harlequins got spun out into their own Codex in 7th.

Dark Eldar: Voidraven had rules and no model in 5th, I don't think they've gotten anything else new since.

GSC: Whole range is new.

Necrons: 9th releases only. I can't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but they got nothing in 6th-8th.

Orks: Speed Freeks buggies, new Meganobz kit, new Mek Gunz kit.

Tau: Ghostkeel. Razorshark/Sun Shark. New Commander, Broadside, Pathfinder, and Warriors/Breachers kit with extended weapon options. Stormsurge.

Tyranids: I think everything they've gotten since 5th was resculpts.

If you want an exhaustive list of all Forge World stuff that'll take a while. A summary:

30k SM/CSM: Alternate loadouts for the LR/Predator/Vindicator, new tank chassis (Sabre, Fellblade, Arquitor, Sicaran, Spartan, Mastodon), Fire Raptor/Storm Eagle, Leviathan/Contemptor/Deredeo Dreadnaughts, Rapiers, Legion artillery, Legion-specific units for all eighteen Legions.

Other SM: Astraeus, named characters and Chapter rules for a bunch of Chapters in the Badab War books.

AdMech: Secutarii, Adescularii, four sorts of Battle-Automata, three tank chassis, Ordinatus, Thallax/Ursarax, Myrmidons, Scyllax, Termite drill.

Guard: Macharius chassis, Malcador chassis, Minotaur, crewed artillery, Carnodon, engineering vehicles, Vulture, Lightning, Avenger, Thunderbolt, Marauder.

Inquisition: Repressor, LR/Razorback with psycannons.

Daemons: "Daemon Lords" (really big greater daemons).

CSM: Kytan, Brass Scorpion, Hell Talon, Hell Blade, Decimator, Blood Slaughterer, Blight Drone

Eldar: Revenant, Phantom, Skathach, Scorpion, Lynx, Cobra, Hornet, Wasp, Firestorm, Warp Hunter, Wraithseer, Shadow Spectres, Nightwing, Phoenix. Properly-scaled Avatar. DE: Tantalus, Reaper.

Necrons: Pylons, Tesseract Ark, Seraptek, Night Shroud, Tomb Stalker, Acanthrites.

Orks: Squiggoth, Big Squiggoth, Grot Tanks, Mega Dread, alternate Stompa parts, big tanks, Chinork.

Tau: Manta, Tiger Shark, Barracuda, Riptide variants, Tau'nar, XV9 suits, Remora, Tetra, Knarloc Riders, Great Knarloc, alternate Hammerhead turrets, sentry drone turrets.

Tyranids: Malanthrope, alternate Carnifex parts, better Rippers, flying Rippers, Heirophant, Heirodule, Harridan, Dimachaeron, giant spore mines.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Tyranids: I think everything they've gotten since 5th was resculpts.

They have gotten new units: Neurothrope, Maleceptor, Toxicrene, Exocrine, Haruspex, Hive Crone, Tyrannocyte, Mucolid Spores and Sporocyst. The Broodlord also returned to being a separate unit like in 4th.

For options, Carnifexes and Genestealers regained the upgrades that had model support, also specialized Carnifex datasheets for Scream-killer and Thornback variants. Hive Guard got shockcannons and Tyrant Guard got crushing claws and bonesword & lashwhip.

 Tyran wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Tyranids: I think everything they've gotten since 5th was resculpts.

They have gotten new units.

Neurothrope, Maleceptor, Toxicrene, Exocrine, Haruspexe, Hive Crone, Tyrannocyte and Sporocyst.

Hive Guard also got shockcannons and Tyrant Guard got crushing claws and bonesword & lashwhip. The Broodlord also returned to being a separate unit like in 4th.

Neurothrope was initially a zoanthrope squad leader in the zoanthrope resculpt box. Tyrannocyte is a Mieotic Spore, which had rules but no model in 5th. I've been skipping "fortifications" generally given how many of them have been pointless since release and how infrequently they ever appear on the table. Harpy had rules in the 5e book, but since there's no Haruspex that might have been a rules-no model situation there. Exocrine/Toxicrene definitely later, though, thanks for the catch.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Neurothrope was initially a zoanthrope squad leader in the zoanthrope resculpt box.

Which was a 7th edition release.

Tyrannocyte is a Mieotic Spore, which had rules but no model in 5th.

While they fulfill the same role, being a drop pod, the Tyrannocite has remarkable differences like being capable of movement and having guns.

Harpy had rules in the 5e book

The Harpy yes, but the Hive Crone was a 6th edition addition.

, but since there's no Haruspex that might have been a rules-no model situation there.

The Haruspex was introduced in 6th as it shares kit with the Exocrine.

 The Warp Forge wrote:

I get you! Eldar just suffered in this edition so I think I will reinforce their psychic might and obviously make a character for every craftworld that doesn't have an existing character already. Trouble is that I'm unsure what characters to bring into the edition since my Eldar knowledge is limited.

Good news! There were actually a couple of named craftworld characters back in 3rd edition that didn't survive into the 4th edition codex.

Nuadu Fireheart of Saim-Hann is an "autarch." Sort of. Technically, his job is to lead the wild riders (a subculture unique to Saim-Hann that seems to mostly involve shirking grown up responsibilities to go on jetbike-related adventures) specifically. His gimmick is that he rides on the back of a modified vyper and uses it as a sort of high-speed chariot. My inclination would be to make him a beefier laser lance autarch with an AV and the ability to join vyper squads with the independent character rules. Maybe give him a special rule that makes vypers more appealing or something. Did vypers have JSJ in 5th edition?

Iyanden already has prince Yriel, but it also has Iyanaa Arienel, the named spirit seer character. Both of these characters have ties to the ynnari these days (especially the latter), but still. She's basically just a super duper spirit seer with a fancy ancestral spear. She's besties with a fire dragon exarch walking around in a wraith lord body (though canonically he's back in infantry-sized armor these days iirc.)

Alaitoc already has Illic Nightspear. Ulthwe has Eldrad. I think Biel-Tan is the only one of the main 5 to have never had a named character with tabletop rules?

Hi and welcome to the 5th edition group

Rake has already made an appearance i see

He has his "old hammer" project

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/790996.page


and Mezmorki has his

pro-hammer project

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/791731.page


And i myself run a topic on all old editions of the game but my focus is also on a slightly modified version of 5th we play at the FLGS where we do not make up any of our own rules just import a few superior rules from other compatible editions into 5th.


https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/789567.page


You might notice that much of what we all like about 5th and how to improve upon it seems very similar, something GW seems to have missed the mark on time after time.

But then again we aren't a for profit model company trying to push merch. we just want to play in the 40K universe with our toy soldiers and want ti to feel like it is that universe.

 Tyran wrote:
Ok from what I remember about Tyranids in 5th:

- Extremely vulnerable to Instant death.
- Lack of reliable anti-tank shooting.
- Lack of defensive options against low AP weapons.
- Over-costed monsters (aside of the Tervigon).
- Lack of assault grenades.
- Lack of upgrades.
- Punishing Instinctive Behavior.
- Ineffective Shadow in the Warp.
- Monsters capped at T6.

I would remind you that almost all of those problems are solved by a simple solution-the 4th ed tyranid codex.

It was used for half of 5th ed and is fully compatible. newer units (trygons, drop pods hive guard etc..) are easy enough to put back into the old rules (5th ed points costs and stat line-4th ed cost and effects for biomorphs). your zoanathropes are not nearly as durable but everything else becomes better.

 The Warp Forge wrote:

A.T. wrote:You may find some use for my old 5e skirmish-hammer notes -

Marine books(all) - there were sweeping points adjustments from 4th and through 5th. Primarily these relate to heavy weapon costs - you will probably want to pick a single points level (such as the 5e marine costs) and apply them to chaos, wolves, templars, DA and BA. 5e also introduced a few freebies for the later marine books (i.e. wolf special weapons, blood angel transport discount) that could do with rolling back.
It's not always going to be matching to the marine dex as some later changes (i.e. +5 points for a thunderhammer/stormshield terminator) were sensible.

Yeah, I hear you! points are going to be interesting but I think with all the new units available it will turn out really good.

My personal preference is to drop the separate Codexes for SW/BA/DA and do one SM book with appendixes detailing different Chapters' unique stuff, like the 30k book or the 3e book with the Index Astartes supplements. It makes it much easier to handle the overlapping units/options, lets you expand content for the other six First Founding Chapters without adding more Codexes, and spreads the narrative focus more evenly.

Chapter / Legion traits - Didn't exist for anyone in 5th edition outside of a few named characters (which also extended to broad army traits granted by named characters from a few other factions). While I don't think it will be a problem you'll want to be wary of the older edition situation of all devastators with tank hunters, all melta squads with infiltrate, all assault marines with furious charge, and so on and it creates problems when setting the points costs of shared weapons.

Yeah, I've been sitting on this one tbh. I think I will add more characters from each Legion (Like Zao Sahaal, Warsmith Honsou, etc) to really define the Legions and grant the Legion trait, no different to the Space Marines and their Chapter Tactics. I think my only issue here to think of at least one character for each Legion that doesn't already have a character, like the Alpha Legion?

30k is a great resource for considering how to write named characters/unique units for Chapters/Legions that don't have 40k content; they've given all eighteen Legions a lot of stuff to play with.

Tau - are a tricky one in 5th. Work to do on crisis suit weapon costs. They suffer as other factions up-gun and up-speed throughout the edition. Some solid forgeworld choices but the codex has a serious case of 'always take unit X over unit Y'

Yeah, I totally get that. My idea was to overhaul them to be play in a bit more playstyle rather than just 'gunlines' all the time. I'm not saying we give them a radical change (like make them a rip n' tear CC army) but more give them multiple themes back similar to how DA have Deathwing and Ravenwing, so Tau have characters that can promote Fish or Fury, Characters like Farsight and Crisis Suits, Shadowsun and an elite stealth team, etc.

My own Tau fix was to put melee profiles on the Crisis/Stealthsuits weapons after the pattern of the Fusion Blades and the DoW Tau commander. It doesn't make them a rip-tearing melee army, but it gives the lighter suits a role distinct from the big suits as perimeter defense and objective clearing rather than just making them compete for the role of most efficient leafblower unit.

Craftworld Eldar - Another case of obviously better units. Like a lot of earlier stuff they look worse as the edition power creeps up. The Dark Eldar should give a solid point to balance against, but keep in mind that the eldar had some very good stuff to go with their not at all good stuff. Forgeworld offered some extra scope (neware the warp hunter)

I get you! Eldar just suffered in this edition so I think I will reinforce their psychic might and obviously make a character for every craftworld that doesn't have an existing character already. Trouble is that I'm unsure what characters to bring into the edition since my Eldar knowledge is limited.

You'll also want to do something about holofields if you're starting from the 4e book; they were good in 4th but with the vehicle durability boosts from 5th the holofield Falcon was nigh-unkillable.

 Tyran wrote:
Ok from what I remember about Tyranids in 5th:

- Extremely vulnerable to Instant death.
- Lack of reliable anti-tank shooting.
- Lack of defensive options against low AP weapons.
- Over-costed monsters (aside of the Tervigon).
- Lack of assault grenades.
- Lack of upgrades.
- Punishing Instinctive Behavior.
- Ineffective Shadow in the Warp.
- Monsters capped at T6.

All of that is true. I can also add their monsters sucked in melee. When 6th edition came with smash attack they became much more playable until all the flyer models came.

Everything about nids was bad in 5th besides the tervigon. And what little was not inherently bad was over costed by about 40 points.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
The fundamental problem with 5th was two fold.

Vehicles essentially have a vehicle save, because of the d6 damage table. Where they only died on a 5 and 6, often on a d6 - 1. That turned 5th edition deployment zones into parking lots.

The missions had very little variance. Kill points was shoot each other. One of the two objective once turned into defend your own. Very repetetive.

Cover rules where great though.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Yeah, I hear you! points are going to be interesting but I think with all the new units available it will turn out really good

Interesting how many oldhammer projects start at the same point and head in entirely different directions - my old skirmish 5e for instance was limited to ~25-26 core units per faction, the other oldhammers on the board also take entirely different approaches in terms of rules, rewrites, unit availability, etc.
No right or wrong direction IMO, as long as all of the factions get a fair shake.

I think my only issue here to think of at least one character for each Legion that doesn't already have a character, like the Alpha Legion?

4e chosen had infiltrate. Add cultists are that's pretty much 3.5 alpha legion - lack of character was one of their defining characteristics :p
In my old dex I had been playing around with making chosen the core troops choice with a couple of non-combat options on their veteran skill (i.e. infiltrate, stealth&night vision, fearless). Players could match a skill and mark to their chosen legion/warband, but paid the price in being all veterans all of the time.

Sisters of Battle - I'm planning to look at is look at the previous edition codex and also ask on Dakka what personally made each codex they played from 5th backwards, so much fun or the themes that made them fun?

Working backwards - the 5e WD codex gave the army some playstyle options with celestine as a harrasment unit, early turn options with dominions, and a little of the power of the GK codex in the form of a few of their henchmen. The core units however were mostly poor, the troops were a tax, and the faith didn't scale with army size (500 pt skirmish? d6 faith. 40000pt apoc? d6 faith). Common to see lists built around expectation of faith points to make the units viable - one retributor squad, two dominions, and one seraphim unit were about as much as the army could sustain.
3e Witch Hunters could burn faith to bolster a unit anywhere on the board but they were sensitive to unit sizing and positioning - if you were to test-play them against most 5e books you'd probably get wrecked, but actually they were pretty good at mech lists until you get to the business end of 5e codex creep. They are very clearly priced as a 3e book though with high cost heavy weapons, taxes on specialist units, jump packs, and grenades, old vehicle costs(until errataed), and they featured some of the worst units in the game this side of the tau space pope.
3e Chapter Approved/Citadel Journal were a prototype for the WH sisters. Not particularly significant other than the last appearance of the ecclesiarchy and named character rules.
3e Rulebook Sisters were mostly garbage - BS3, no faith, the exorcist was a rhino with a missile launcher.
--the underlying premise of old sisters was that you'd get three sisters for every two marines, but low toughness and combat ability means that on paper marines would trade evenly in shooting and favourably in melee, offset by the sisters greater density of special weapons, greater numbers bullet sponges, and ability to use faith to switch the match-up around for a phase here and there.

Tyranids were always a mixed bag with me. I always found them a hard game to play against but I feel that may have been because I was around competent players in my area so I never felt the burn of the issues with this codex. if folks told me what the issues were then I would happily look deeper with the Codex.

Their large models were very vulnerable for their cost - the (very)common missile launcher was 2+ to wound with no saves and 5e was an edition of greatly lowering heavy weapons costs (as well as things like the Space Wolves 'tyranid model deletion power' jaws of the world wolf, or CSM just pushing the important models back with lash and blast lists).
The small nids by comparison could not easily get past vehicles - wall them off, tank shock and flame them, or just tank shock onto an objective straight through the horde with no repercussions. Even those that made it into range were typically fighting into cover, so striking last.
Of course it did depend on what faction you were playing against.

Ah, yes. I remember GK as a CSM player... Yeah, I think we both know the level of power of GK back then. Personally I'm ok with the power level atm, only because my aim is to balance all codex's between the SM book to the GK book in terms of power.

In the short term then you'll probably want to plan out how you do this. The GK weren't strong because of unit selection (they barely had any), they were strong because their stuff was just much better for the points.
In terms of new units you'll find that forgeworlds support is extremely lop-sided - subfactions and bands of heroes for some factions, sweet FA for others. There are 24 named marine/tyrant legion characters in the badab war update pdf alone for example, and nine whole books of 30k-era units so far in the horus heresy series. You've got some reading ahead.

Wyldhunt wrote:I think Biel-Tan is the only one of the main 5 to have never had a named character with tabletop rules?

They used to run the avatar and the court of the young king rather than a single lead character.

Vehicles essentially have a vehicle save, because of the d6 damage table. Where they only died on a 5 and 6, often on a d6 - 1. That turned 5th edition deployment zones into parking lots.

The missions had very little variance. Kill points was shoot each other. One of the two objective once turned into defend your own. Very repetetive.

1. Not really a problem as others have noted the availability of AT weapons increased across the board to balance that out. i just did a game of 5th a few weeks back where my brood lord rended a chaos land raider with a single pen 5. the thing is 5th both represented the durability of vehicles and also the fact they can be outright destroyed. 5th requires quite a bit more focus on unit role since some things are specifically designed to hurt specific types of targets.

2. any player who has played for more than 1 edition can think of all sorts of objectives-
3-5 objectives spread across the table. using the 6th ed mysterious objectives. having a single center objective (king of the hill in effect),
having a single center movable objective that can by carried no more than 6" per player turn(move more than 6" and it gets dropped but can also be passed off to other units). having an objective in each table quarter the one opposite of the quarter you start in is worth double points, kill points for quick and dirty games or tie breakers and of course the default warmachine style of fallback win-wipe out your enemy.

In terms of new units you'll find that forgeworlds support is extremely lop-sided - subfactions and bands of heroes for some factions, sweet FA for others. There are 24 named marine/tyrant legion characters in the badab war update pdf alone for example, and nine whole books of 30k-era units so far in the horus heresy series. You've got some reading ahead.

Back in the day aside from marines and guard who got the most FW love the TAU and eldar both got some really fantastic units followed by orks. there were a few gems here and there for other factions like the SOB repressors, but they were few and far between.

 aphyon wrote:
Not really a problem as others have noted the availability of AT weapons increased across the board to balance that out

Beyond that there are a few areas where the abuse of the old system can be toned down:
- immobile vehicles take +1 damage (clear roadblocks)
- attacker chooses immobile/weapon destroyed (and which weapon to destroy) - no more 4+ stormbolter saves
- units in vehicles don't score and/or final tankshock position cannot be on an enemy model
- models in exploded vehicles are pinned and/or cannot charge (the old dark eldar boarding torpedo trick)
- immobile walkers don't lock a squad in combat (and/or any suitable fall back from unwinnable combat rule)

Just off the top of my head, mainly as I think the game suffers as the quantity of heavy weapons goes up.

-------------

The killpoint objective in 5th was not great.

i am not one for creating my own rules, the only mods we used were importing rules GW made from other editions that make 5th a better game. like snap fire and grenade throwing.

- attacker chooses immobile/weapon destroyed (and which weapon to destroy) - no more 4+ stormbolter saves

That already exists. weapon destroyed results are chosen by the attacker.

- units in vehicles don't score and/or final tankshock position cannot be on an enemy model

easily fixed by having everything score, but include troops being OBSEC units, and there has been no edition where two models can occupy the same space.

- models in exploded vehicles are pinned and/or cannot charge (the old dark eldar boarding torpedo trick)

Already existed as well-it's called a pinning check

- immobile walkers don't lock a squad in combat (and/or any suitable fall back from unwinnable combat rule)

don't agree, your adding to many layers to the rules. it slows the game down. something like warmachines free strike when you walk out of close combat is nice in a skirmish setting but not at the level 5th ed 40k is played.

Just off the top of my head, mainly as I think the game suffers as the quantity of heavy weapons goes up.

It really doesn't though because the lethality was much lower in 5th. there were far less shots, less damage output (there were weapons that did multiple wounds but they were very rare) and hard cover saves to counter that.

I'm also a fan of 5th edition but mostly because of the codexes, not the general rules. I'd love to play 9th edition with revised 5th edition codexes for example.

 aphyon wrote:
That already exists. weapon destroyed results are chosen by the attacker.

I'm mixing 5th and 6th there. Been a while.

 aphyon wrote:
easily fixed by having everything score, but include troops being OBSEC units, and there has been no edition where two models can occupy the same space.

Tank shock moved everyone else out the way. Standard last turn objective taking - place you tank on top of the objective and tell your opponent to move all his models off it.

 aphyon wrote:
Already existed as well-it's called a pinning check

This actually refers back to a loophole in the rules where DE players could shoot their skimmers at an opposing tank/transport. The resultant S10 hit would frequently wreck the target and and the fragile open-topped skimmer - the DE could then assault without penalty from the crater a it overruled the restictions on disembarking at that speed. I mention it only as it was a first turn charge exploit in the 5e ruleset, several different ways to close it.

don't agree, your adding to many layers to the rules. it slows the game down

It was something you noticed when playing the older books (or factions without free krak grenades). A single sentinel could tie up a unit forever - you couldn't shoot it, couldn't leave combat, and in some cases couldn't even get another unit in there to fight it. It was an uncommon but frustrating problem, albeit more of a pre 5e codex on.

It really doesn't though because the lethality was much lower in 5th. there were far less shots, less damage output (there were weapons that did multiple wounds but they were very rare) and hard cover saves to counter that.

Between the start and end of 5e the cost of heavy weapons carried by space marines dropped by 30-40%. Costs were roughly halved from the start of 4e to the end of 5e (except for dark eldar, who went from having a wall of darklances to something more sensible...)

Thanks to all replies, all really appreciated.

For a bit more clarity:

I don't plan on making many, if any at all changes to the core rulebook. If I were it would literally be only two additional rules which would be an 'Out of Control' rule for vehicles (like in the visuals of DoW II) and to bring in Warlord Challenges similar to 6th but reworded into 5th, but these changes won't be incorporated until I've had a few codex's done under my belt.

When it comes to the codex's I'm not trying to fully redo all the books, just the ones that were in dire need of them, hence why I'm making supplements for the factions that were already decent. I'm not trying to invalidate all of what folks already own in hand, just add to them so all factions have a better chance.

I feel FW will be the variable that will take this project so long to make. because of the amount of FW items within certain factions. When it comes to the 30k stuff, I plan on making a lot to incorporate but not everything, just due to unit clashes and unit bloat between factions.

There was the mention of Badab War, I'm not really going to touch those lists due to those lists being decent in their own right. IIRC they were created during 5th ed. and so I will leave them be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


30k is a great resource for considering how to write named characters/unique units for Chapters/Legions that don't have 40k content; they've given all eighteen Legions a lot of stuff to play with.

Yeah, there's a ton but I'm looking at the characters that survived the Heresy. It would look a bit odd if there was a character that just waltzed into 40k when they are meant to be dead...

 The Warp Forge wrote:
It would look a bit odd if there was a character that just waltzed into 40k when they are meant to be dead...

Two out of the original five sisters of battle/ecclesiarchy characters died in their fluff entry :p

(not counting Celestine or Ephrael)

 aphyon wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Ok from what I remember about Tyranids in 5th:

- Extremely vulnerable to Instant death.
- Lack of reliable anti-tank shooting.
- Lack of defensive options against low AP weapons.
- Over-costed monsters (aside of the Tervigon).
- Lack of assault grenades.
- Lack of upgrades.
- Punishing Instinctive Behavior.
- Ineffective Shadow in the Warp.
- Monsters capped at T6.

I would remind you that almost all of those problems are solved by a simple solution-the 4th ed tyranid codex.

It was used for half of 5th ed and is fully compatible. newer units (trygons, drop pods hive guard etc..) are easy enough to put back into the old rules (5th ed points costs and stat line-4th ed cost and effects for biomorphs). your zoanathropes are not nearly as durable but everything else becomes better.

It still leaves the issue of lack of reliable anti-tank shooting in an edition defined by tanks and lack of invulnerables in the edition that started the creep towards low AP and invulnerables/FNP. Power-creep, specially in the second half of 5th edition, was an issue. Personally I would like to include some of the 8th edition design decisions regarding the Tyranids, specifically 8th edition Tyranid ranged weapons, improvements regarding Shadow in the Warp and Instinct Behavior and defensive options like Dermic Symbiosis and Encephalic Diffusion.

Moreover you would have to put in like half of the current model line, 4th is still back when the Tyranids' biggest creature in the codex was the Carnifex, which nowadays is the cheapest and more expendable of the Tyranid monsters.

That being said, 4th would make a fine base design to be improved to fit 5th, but it wouldn't be as simple as a plug and play.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Blackie wrote:
I'm also a fan of 5th edition but mostly because of the codexes, not the general rules. I'd love to play 9th edition with revised 5th edition codexes for example.

I'm of the opposite opinion, I really like the 8th edition Tyranid codex even if it has been left behind by 9th power-creep. And I hated the 5th edition codex.

I have toyed with the idea of refitting the 8th edition codex for 5th edition rules.

 aphyon wrote:
It was used for half of 5th ed and is fully compatible. newer units (trygons, drop pods hive guard etc..) are easy enough to put back into the old rules (5th ed points costs and stat line-4th ed cost and effects for biomorphs). your zoanathropes are not nearly as durable but everything else becomes better.

Of the various changes made I could understand GWs desire to move away from aspects of the old nid codex such as their weapon profiles - i.e. Str S-1, AP-, Assault 2X, and the individual stat tweaking and of the biomorphs where an opponent couldn't eyeball the odds of attack or defense without first each unit against their opponents list.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


30k is a great resource for considering how to write named characters/unique units for Chapters/Legions that don't have 40k content; they've given all eighteen Legions a lot of stuff to play with.

Yeah, there's a ton but I'm looking at the characters that survived the Heresy. It would look a bit odd if there was a character that just waltzed into 40k when they are meant to be dead...

I'm not trying to suggest that Dynat or Skorr should literally be waltzing onto your 40k battlefield, I'm suggesting reading their abilities and then cloning them wholly or partially for a new character with a different name that does similar things. The distinguishing feature of Dynat, the Harrowmaster, for instance, is an ability called "The Harrowing" that gives your army bonuses while in the enemy deployment zone, so you could make a new Harrowmaster for the 40k period that has The Harrowing adapted to 5e and a different loadout. Also Exodus is a title, not a name, and should totally just waltz onto 40k battlefields.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


30k is a great resource for considering how to write named characters/unique units for Chapters/Legions that don't have 40k content; they've given all eighteen Legions a lot of stuff to play with.

Yeah, there's a ton but I'm looking at the characters that survived the Heresy. It would look a bit odd if there was a character that just waltzed into 40k when they are meant to be dead...

I'm not trying to suggest that Dynat or Skorr should literally be waltzing onto your 40k battlefield, I'm suggesting reading their abilities and then cloning them wholly or partially for a new character with a different name that does similar things. The distinguishing feature of Dynat, the Harrowmaster, for instance, is an ability called "The Harrowing" that gives your army bonuses while in the enemy deployment zone, so you could make a new Harrowmaster for the 40k period that has The Harrowing adapted to 5e and a different loadout. Also Exodus is a title, not a name, and should totally just waltz onto 40k battlefields.

Ok, I hear you. Just make some self-proclaimed 'Harrowmaster'. I can get behind that

Also, would Necron folks like Pariah units to return in this edition?

Pariahs were a cool and creepy idea for Necrons (press F for Tomas Macabee) and they were kind of...just disappeared from the fluff with 5th.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Pariahs were a cool and creepy idea for Necrons (press F for Tomas Macabee) and they were kind of...just disappeared from the fluff with 5th.

Yeah, well I'm going to put Primaris units into the game eventually so now there's no real reason not to add Pariahs again in a growing story.

Ok, so a bit of a bump here but it may help with progression of what I aim for with the factions.

If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?

Why did you play those factions?

What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ok, so a bit of a bump here but it may help with progression of what I aim for with the factions.

If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?

Why did you play those factions?

What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

Going to ignore the last question because it's frankly been too long for me to have a lot of accurate, specific memories about that. Also going to try to stick to mechanical reasons I enjoyed each faction because saying, "I liked their fluff," doesn't really help you unless I explain what mechanic it was tied to.

Eldar
My first army. These guys had a rough time this edition, but most aspect warriors still felt like they were specialists who were effective at their job back then. My fire dragons could reliably kill a tank without being a massive points sink. My banshees and scorpions could kill things in melee (thanks in part to sweeping advance). I also really liked...
* Always-on warlock powers and warlock sergeants. They were distinct from other factions' psykers and made me go, "Yeah, this guy can be a psyker for several millenia without his head exploding."
* I actually really liked the spirit sight rule on wraith units. They had a 1 in 6 chance of shutting down if they weren't near a psyker. It was a purely detrimental rule that forced you to babysit them with "synapse" psykers. It was flavorful.
* Autarchs being able to grant +/- 1 to reserve rolls. Let me feel like my army was good at sucker punches; again, fluffy.
* Purchasable exarch powers. The current version of this is okay, but it was nice to customize your exarchs and squads for different jobs with different power + weapon combos.
* Blade Storm avengers go SWISHSWISHSWISH! Knowing which turn to use your bladestorm (because you couldn't shoot at all the following turn) was cool.

Dark Eldar
Pre-Codex, their armory was a thing of beauty. Tons of flavorful wargear options with which to customize your HQs and sergeants. Some options were a little better than others, but you could really make your archon feel distinct from your archite.
Post-Codex, the Pain Token version of Power From Pain was viscerally rewarding. A little complicated, but really juicy and rewarding.
In general, moving an open-topped transport forward, disembarking from it, advancing, and then charging made every melee unit in my army feel like a missile . Heck, the transports themselves could basically be missiles with the old ramming rules... Most games, it felt like I was basically throwing my models into the enemy army like darts and then winning games by locking down key units in melee.
Also, one-shotting enemy vehicles with an abundance of dark light felt pretty good in an edition where I absolutely loathed enemy parking lots. Oh, and the troops not feeling like a tax was nice.

Tyranids
Played these guys less and mostly only after they got a new 'dex. But I really loved fielding outflanking armies with tons of genestealers, lictors, and whatever the Hive Commander tyrant sent to help them out. My opponents probably didn't enjoy it as much, but I loved getting that outflanking "sucker punch" with these guys in much the same way I enjoyed eldar reserve manipulation lists. Again, the troops (almost exclusively genestealers) didn't feel like a tax.

Marines
Didn't play them a ton and tried most flavors of them. SW and BA were really good at deepstriking things in, lighting them up with melta, and then tearing things apart in melee in subsequent turns. I think I mostly played them when I wanted a low-effort army that I could just sort of push forward and kill tanks with. Again, I loathed parking lots.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ok, so a bit of a bump here but it may help with progression of what I aim for with the factions.

If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?

Why did you play those factions?

What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

1. salamanders space marines
2. tyranids
3. tau


1. salamanders because fire/dragons and well they were the "good guys" who look like drow, plus i am a techmarine fan as well as i love dreadnoughts so when the badab war book came out with dreadnoughts as troops for salamanders i was sold.

2. i liked the look of warriors and my wife was a big fan so i built the army partially for her to have an army to play

3. i liked the vehicle designs.

I think they were the most enjoyable because as a casual gamer all my lists had a theme but were also viable to get a good battle in on the table.

I don't have a single enjoyable game i loved more than others since i played hundreds of matches in 5th against dozens of opponents.

There were key fights that stand out...like brey'arth ashmantle getting into a 4 turn (8 combat rounds) brawl with the avatar of kaine

Or the many games where i fought those crafty eldar corsairs (FW list) to a tie when i should have lost....and then there is the power gamer dude who kept copy/pasting tourney lists he would learn about and utterly fail against me because he didn't know how to use said lists.

Cheers for the comments folks! All helpful!

Currently trying to upload the latest codex editions bit-by-bit on the google drive

 The Warp Forge wrote:
If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?
Why did you play those factions?
What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

Long post incoming -

Daemonhunters - My main faction going into late 4th/early 5th after a break. Chosen for the models as on the tabletop they were extremely lacking, pure daemonhunters had this odd defensive but poor at shooting style (stormbolters weren't half bad early on but got weaker and weaker as they faced more vehicles and heavy weapons).
Their terminators and grand master were very solid, and stormtroopers could park cars with the best of them. Ultimately they were more allies than an army, particularly with Witch Hunters as the codex cross-over between the two meant that hybrid lists could be flipped between books with almost no change.
Best game - probably one of the early ones against CSM, where the arrival of the single GKT squad heralded a shift in the game as they shut down psychic powers and went after the daemon prince(s) - albeit very ineffectually if the prince ran off :p Honourable mention to the occasional daemonhost game, they were mostly terrible but sometimes rolled well at opportune moments.

Witch Hunters - My most played faction in 5th. Higher rewards for planning and positioning due to the faith mechanic being used to bypass the defenses of elite unit or to invulnerable up and hold for a turn before deliberately removing squad vets to ensure a well timed squad break/death. The rules effectively punished the opponent for wiping out squads by giving the sisters more faith (and on the flipside damaged squads quickly lost their mojo). Later into 5th the sisters were a high second tier parking lot codex and ran it with more style than most (unless you went all in with stormtroopers for maximum hulls and minimum style) - the witch hunters sisters were one of the better/best mechanised troops choices for some time in an edition where troops were troops and transports were top notch.
On the downside they were very limited and outdated, half my games were trying to find a different list to break up the monotony including krieg inductions and possession rules from the DH codex to make a proto-saint (which turned out to be far too powerful)
Best game - early on in the edition I turned up to a game where the opponent had set up the board and deployed already. Rows of vehicle-blocking mid height walls, range markers, and a chaos army dug in on the high ground with a ton of artillery and a lash prince. With no reason to hold onto faith for the bulk of the army crawling through the killing zone I blew it all on a single seraphim squad which hit and run clean across the board in a series of improbable rolls and invulnerable saves before running out of faith and promptly dying instantly. By that time they had taken out every heavy unit on the board (including the prince) and kept things occupied long enough to the rest of the army to clear the tank traps and sweep up the defenders.
Honourable mention - I told a CSM player I was going to run a penitent list for a change. He turned up with a zerker list full of light troop-mulching units. I turned up with zealots... led by nine penitent engines and karamazov. Turns out that penitents are terrible right up until your opponent doesn't bring anti-armour weapons, and they swept across the board so quickly that the rest of the army couldn't keep pace even at full run.

Sisters of Battle - Late 5th Cruddace. Flipped the faction on its head making troops dead weight, faith non-scaling and mostly unplannable, but also brought out a fair few units that weren't used in the previous book including dominion scouts, affordable retributors, and the ultimate spoiler unit in the form of a literally unkillable celestine. After three editions of running mostly the same lists and units it was a nice change in a way, but overall weaker than the 3e book mostly due to its troops.
Best game - end of 5th against newcrons playing an old spearhead(vehicles) game. The objective was for players to go end to end on a long-length board aiming to push through the midfield clash and reach the opposition deployment zone to score (3-4 turns flat out) with almost all units starting in reserve. The cron player disabled everything I had on the board turn 1 while my return fire (a lot of big guns) killed exactly one Cron... who stood up again. Turn 2 he had his entire army in my deployment zone including multiple flyers and wraith units.
At that point the game was dead and over, or at least it should have been with crons barely any losing models no matter what was thrown at them. Somehow a small bastion of sisters held out in the middle of the deployment zone and then on the last turn the cron player failed _everything_ as his nearly pristine army was wiped off the board by small arms, late arrivials, and stragglers.
By no means a good showing for the sisters, but damn satifying with the cron player going for the wipeout rather than the win and leaning on the vast superiority of his codex over positioning and tactics.

Imperial Guard / Krieg - As inducted units only. The temptation was always there to take less sisters/daemonhunters units in favour of the stronger guard units. Notable for being strong enough to keep the games worst player ever in the fight... almost.
Best game - gunlines and parking lots don't make for the best games, but I do have vague memories of an al'rahem inducted force that rolled in right over the top of a denied flank deployment.

Grey Knights - Played them for a couple of games and shelved them. Night and day compared to the daemonhunters dex in both power and style - they were marine hunters (and nid hunters) at heart, not daemonhunters. Several radically different playable lists and all top tier with some serious shenanigans on top.
Best game - arguably worst game, a doubles match with a nid player against two marine lists. The GK were across the board in stormravens and wrecked both marine players pretty much single handedly before the nid player had much across the midfield line. No tactics, just hammer.

Chaos Marines (4e) - When we ran 'good vs evil' type tournaments i'd usually switch to my chaos force. Tzeentch player at heart but warband player in practice, against marines in the early years of 5th (pre wolves particularly) there was a lot of local superiority to be found in the chaos list - tough fearless objective holding plague marines, the infamous lash which was just as abusive as you might imagine, plenty of big guns, termicide drops, and I was fond of the occasional daemon driveby (4e lesser daemons could be summoned out of a passing rhino directly into close combat). They felt 'old' next to newmarines, but much less vanilla and one up-ed them in a few areas (melta on jump troops!) until later marine+1 books pushed the power level up.
Best game - the opponent had spent a huge chunk of points on a maxed-out marine command unit, 2+/3++ everywhere. The lash prince pushed it back into the corner each turn while the rest of my army ignored them and beat up on the undersized remaining opposition. Not strategic brilliance by any means, but amusing at the time.

Black Templars (4e) - Came about as a result of a 'tale of four gamers' style monthly painting event. When their points were updated mid-5th I ran them for a while - they had a number of units that would be considered 'bad' in the 5e marine book which were actually good when used by the templars - i.e. terminator squad with one heavy weapon vs templar squad with two heavy weapons and tank hunters, and the fairly uninspiring tactical marines vs the minimalistic las-plas units. In particular they were a good foot-based marine army in an age of rhinos and drop pods.
Best game - another denied flank deployment. My usual go-to core unit was a full block of assault terminators with a chaplain, servitors, and champion which promptly mistook itself for an eldar skimmer and zealed clean across the board in double quick time. Templars could be bizarrely rapid.

Orks - Another case of 2nd ed models getting time off the shelf (with generous use of proxies). While bikes, lootas, etc were usually considered the premium list I always liked to run an extreme skew battlewagon list. The orks really didn't need their wound shenanigans to be good, particularly early on, and could run a couple of different styles of play which was good when most of your games were against the same players and tailored lists were an issue.
Best game - five battlewagons wheel to wheel against a 5e space wolves list. Full speed ahead. The wolves firepower didn't put a scratch in them, one particularly brave death or glory dreadnought did not find glory under the deffrollas as the wolves got pretty literally run over in this one.

Dark Eldar (3e) - The classic glass cannon army, 1000pts got you 40 troops, 10 dark lances, 9 dissies - and that wasn't even trying. Proxied them a few times against marine books and it was more a numbers game than any sense of tactics - you could end up with more high strength AP2 shots than your opponent had significant models and the dark eldar were accurate, mobile, and mostly scoring.
I remember that the codex ran out of steam as soon as you got into the higher points levels, you literally ran out of good units to field.
Best game - against an unwary blood angel opponent running mephiston and terminators as a hammer. First turn mephiston jumped too far ahead and had to go to ground as his terminator bodyguards couldn't catch up with him. Second turn he had to go to ground again because the terminators were all dead, and the rest of the army was in the midst of being outflanked by more lances, dissies, skimmers and horrorfexes. When you matched up badly against 3rd edition DE it could get very ugly very quickly.

Tyranids (5e) - The local nid player ran gaunt hordes, zoanthropes, tervigons and mawlocs -the usual 5e fare. I had a lot of old nid models from my 2nd ed and space hulk days so I figured i'd give them a go as well, running a shock force simply because it was different from the nid players lists. Smaller games only with the parasite leading gargoyles, infiltrating stealers, trygons and raveners. The whole army would hit the enemy lines together 2nd or 3rd turn and in the smaller games there wouldn't be enough to shoot them off the board. At higher points it didn't really scale up to something that would work, similar to DE.
Best game - n/a. Mostly just quick hashed out theory games seeing how different lists actually performed.

Newcrons (5e) - Only played one game with the newcrons, all proxied, after a couple of local players wanted a warm-up for a tournament. Took what looked strong from the codex, deployed in a way that seemed sensible, and pretty much just moved forward shooting dead ahead.
The local cron player took a lot of victories with the newer book but his skill level went down the pan and my views of them are probably biased by how much better he did despite how much worse he was playing.
Best game - only one game. From what I remember some kind of line attack wrecked a dreadnought and it's pod on turn 1 (scythe lord?), the marine player also lost a devastator squad off the back of the board to a 'take morale test now' ability, and I don't think the crons had even lost any material going into their first turn. Called it after two turns of not even trying, back to the drawing board for the marine players.
Dishonourable mention - The local cron player brought them to an apoc game and solar flared _every_ _single_ _turn_. We would have been more annoyed but his marine allies brought an army consisting of dozens of individual single combat bike models...

Blood Angels - Dishonourable mention for the blood angels as an example of the codex creep of 5th compared to the original dex. Only played two games - one was a mock sisters list with assauld marines in infernus razorbacks (considerably cheaper than WH sisters), the other was a planetstrike game that ended on the first turn after the deepstriking angels charged and/or blew up everything - the old planetstrike and spearhead rulesets really didn't hold up well to the newer books.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ok, so a bit of a bump here but it may help with progression of what I aim for with the factions.

If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?

Why did you play those factions?

What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

I primarily played Orks in 5th edition, gradually moving away from doing a 'horde' army to using increasing mechanization in order to keep up with the encroaching brutality that was massed Razorbacks or other powerful 40k armies. The fun thing with Orks was the fact that they had the ability to hit like a glass sledgehammer, with just the right mix of fragile-yet-cheap combined with durable-for-its-cost. There were almost no melee invulnerable saves in the army, yet clever angling and multi-assaulting allowed the army to hit hard while minimizing the return damage they suffered; in one particularly nasty game, my opponent wielded a Draigostar with tooled up melee of mass destruction...and so I charged the center of the unit with a throwaway unit of five Lootas, while hitting the flanks with Meganobz. The Lootas died horribly of course, but only counted as five wounds for Combat Resolution purposes. Each dead Grey Knight Paladin counted as two points for combat Resolution, and Meganobz have a lot of combat resolution...

Then there were the quirky shenanigans. The ability to use Deffkoptas to 'slingshoot' a Warboss into melee on turn 1 was notable; this was done by using a unit of two Deffkoptas to Scout, then biking the Warboss into coherency with the rear Kopta before they all collectively charged. Then there was the Snikrot shuffle which had its own series of memes.

Killa Kans were amazing for their cost in 5th edition, before 6th introduced Hull Points and made them a glass cannon. 7th gave them a triple nerf of lowering the Strength of their melee from 10 to 7, giving them a morale debuff (literally one of the only unique Special Rules in the game that was an outright disadvantage), and upped their base cost by at least 40% each despite them being nowhere as durable as they used to be...

Several units were just awful however. Tankbustas and Flash Gitz were both absolutely horrible in 5th, and got notably buffed in 7th (despite the rest of that Codex falling short of decency and being riddled with flaws).

I played Tau in 5th.
I enjoyed the mobility and close range firepower.

There were almost no melee invulnerable saves in the army,

Unless your fighting the mad doc cybork body army...man that thing was hard to kill. imagine hordes of orks with a 5++.... kicked the hell out of my dark angels.

 aphyon wrote:

There were almost no melee invulnerable saves in the army,

Unless your fighting the mad doc cybork body army...man that thing was hard to kill. imagine hordes of orks with a 5++.... kicked the hell out of my dark angels.

Ah right, there was that army. I didn't go down that route given the 5th ed FOC slots were so crammed/condensed. Elites were "will taking this unit remove my ability to run more Lootas," and so the Warboss or Ghaz tended to be one of the two HQs, if only for a unit of Troop Nobz (though I personally went for Troop Meganobz). That plus the KFF did not leave a whole lot of wiggle-room, so to speak.

So my builds at 2k ended up being two units of Lootas, 2 minimum MAN missiles in Deffrolla Wagons, Shoota Mobz to borrow the wagons, two units of Kanz, and I believe I had a Big Gunz Kannon Battery as my 3rd HS.

Now, the real bigbrain was having Grotsnik join Snikrot's Kommandos...

Cheers for the responses folks! Keep them coming. Why I'm asking is because I want to know what made these armies fun so when they come to being updated I want to keep their spirit alive and not take that feel away from players who remember them fondly

Ok, so here's a rather niche question for the veterans here. Could anyone remember what Chaos Androids were armed with, and what they could be equipped/upgraded with?

 The Warp Forge wrote:
...Ok, so here's a rather niche question for the veterans here. Could anyone remember what Chaos Androids were armed with, and what they could be equipped/upgraded with?...

That might be the oldest question anyone has ever asked. According to cursory research that model was in Space Crusade, which was the 40k precursor to WarhammerQuest, and the only other lore reference on the wiki is to an Epic rulebook. I don't think it ever had real 40k rules, but that looks like a lasgun in the picture if that helps.

Cheers! I've asked around and they were equippped with a custom gun called a "Doom Balster" (Will probs make that a special weapon) in Space Crusade, and it was a Lasgun in Epic.

Still, it's a good start for a core basic infantry for Dark Mechanicum

 aphyon wrote:

There were almost no melee invulnerable saves in the army,

Unless your fighting the mad doc cybork body army...man that thing was hard to kill. imagine hordes of orks with a 5++.... kicked the hell out of my dark angels.

Mad dok was terrible in 5th edition. He alone had the same cost of 20 boyz including a nob with bosspole and power klaw. If you gave cyb.bodies to the squad that's another 5ppm, which means 100 for a 20 man squad, or 150 for a 30 man blob. So mad dok + 30 boyz (nob, klaw) with cyb bodies were 545 points, while 2x30 boyz (nob, pole, klaw) and a big mek with KFF were only 525 points for more staying power and more lethality. You can clearly see how terrible the dok was, and I'm not even considering his curse to chase the closest enemy unit.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Cheers! I've asked around and they were equippped with a custom gun called a "Doom Balster" (Will probs make that a special weapon) in Space Crusade, and it was a Lasgun in Epic

In terms of their epic rules it was a lasgun, high close combat value, and disobedient behaviour (which you could incorporate by having them always be the first unit to act each turn for instance). They were considered daemons for rules purposes and to my knowledge didn't have rules in the slaves to darkness book.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Cheers! I've asked around and they were equippped with a custom gun called a "Doom Balster" (Will probs make that a special weapon) in Space Crusade, and it was a Lasgun in Epic.

Still, it's a good start for a core basic infantry for Dark Mechanicum

I'd suggest taking a look at the 30k AdMech rules. Between Skitarii, Secutarii, Thallax, Adsecularii, Scyllax, and Castellax the Mechanicum/Dark Mechanicum are possibly over-supplied with Troops already.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Cheers! I've asked around and they were equippped with a custom gun called a "Doom Balster" (Will probs make that a special weapon) in Space Crusade, and it was a Lasgun in Epic.

Still, it's a good start for a core basic infantry for Dark Mechanicum

I'd suggest taking a look at the 30k AdMech rules. Between Skitarii, Secutarii, Thallax, Adsecularii, Scyllax, and Castellax the Mechanicum/Dark Mechanicum are possibly over-supplied with Troops already.

Will do! I'll probs not give DM all of that, and make a few new units instead as I'm not trying to replicate 30K DM, but showing how they have progrerssed within the Eye since their exile into The Warp. I will have some units (Thallax, Skitarri, etc) but not all of them (or some will be shifted to other slots).

If you buy into the lore explanation for why GW can't be bothered to update any of the resin AdMech to 40k rules (the Cybernetica bots and Thallax were deemed to be pushing the bounds of AI and sidelined in favour of the more lobotomized Servitors and dumber robots that are plastic) you'd expect the Dark Mechanicum to have more of the 30k Mechanicum stuff than the loyalists. You might do different variants of the Cybernetica Cortex rules to represent that the Dark Mechanicum's stuff is less shackled than the loyalists, with fewer limitations but make it more likely that they'll go berserk and start attacking the nearest model if you push them.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
...you'd expect the Dark Mechanicum to have more of the 30k Mechanicum stuff than the loyalists.

They kind of do in things like the plague drones (vultarax).

But the 40k Dark Mechanicum seem to be all about daemonic possession and technology fused with warp energy - anything they still have would most likely be warped in the same way as chaos knights and titans if not moreso.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ok, so a bit of a bump here but it may help with progression of what I aim for with the factions.

If you played 5th ed. what factions did you play?

Why did you play those factions?

What made those factions you played so much fun? What was the most enjoyable game you had in 5th ed. with this faction?

Tyranids: Big and small bugs from space. Did interesting things rule vice. Genstealers where cool. Biggest downfall was they they could not beat tanks.

DE: OH boy. Baron satonyx with beats was great fun. They where very unique to play as what usually was great VS everything else was bad here and vice versa. Mektagun sucked VS night shield (count as 6 away) but the bolter was suddenly good. Loads of stuff like that.

SW: I loved thunder wolf's, long fangs, Grey hunters and lone wolf's. The only good guys in the galaxy.

A.T. wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
...you'd expect the Dark Mechanicum to have more of the 30k Mechanicum stuff than the loyalists.

They kind of do in things like the plague drones (vultarax).

But the 40k Dark Mechanicum seem to be all about daemonic possession and technology fused with warp energy - anything they still have would most likely be warped in the same way as chaos knights and titans if not moreso.

Yeah, this.

Like I said, I'm not trying to make 30k Mechanicum for a 'Chaos' side, nor am I making 40k Ad. Mech, with spikes. I'm trying to portray how the Traitor side of the Mechanicum on how it's 'progressed' since the times of the Heresy. They have a ton of 30k units that will be used but I don't think I will be using them all, instead, making some new units recycling lore from places like FFG's, BC Combat Servitors and Chaos Androids as such.

To me the Dark Mechanicum is a cross between Skynet, Short Circuit and DOOM! The boys really just do what they want for their own personal sakes and goals and I'll try to replicate this feel in units and rules.

Reviewing 5th ed, the Tyranid Codex had its share of bad, including broken (as in, "didn't work") Lictors and Trygons.

Lictors granted +1 to Reserves if they started their turn on the table...but had to start the game in Reserves, with no bonus3s to actually arrive themselves.

Trygons had the ability to create Tunnels for infantry to emerge through in subsequent turns...but did not actually give any means for infantry to wait for a tunnel before arriving on the Tyranid board edge.

Ok, so bit of an update:

Been working on Word with the current project Chaos Space Marines. Only model I have left to translate is the Master of Possession, then I'll be updating existing characters with one extra rule (Legion Trait to give to their Legion in the same way Chapter Tactics are given to Marine characters), then I'll be making a character for each Legion. Afterwards I'll be making allies rules which is something as a point of discussion.

So I was looking at the old witch hunters codex and I liked the idea of a heavily restricted Force org. chart to lend to other codex's. when some armies (like CSM) got gutted with separation of codex's, I'd like to implement the following rules, for all intents and purposes I'll be using CSM as the example below for the rules:

"Codex: Chaos Space Marines can be used as allies with the following Codex's:

- Codex: Renegades and Heretics
- Codex: Chaos Daemons
- Codex: Dark Mechanicum

To use Codex: Chaos Space Marines as allies alongside these codex's, you may pick the following options as an additional Force Organisation chart alongside the main army this Codex is accompanying:

- HQ: 1
- Troops: 0-2
- Elites: 0-1
- Fast Attack: 0-1
- Heavy Support: 0-1

If Codex: Chaos Space Marines are used as allies to the accompanying Codex's then you cannot take named characters. If you chose this codex as your allies for another force then you cannot select any other codex to be allies with the accompanying army".

I feel if the following rules were incorporated it would be quite fair since it's a really restrictive field, that attempts to minimise cheese by limiting units and excluding characters but also would give more variety to armies and give some more individuality to forces in which would be flavourful.

Question is, what do you think? You think this could be a fun addition?

Also when the document is finished I'll leave it as a word document for now as I'll get on with other codex projects, but what I'd ask is when it's published, I'd like feedback, see what folks think, then if I see a correlation with a groupthink I can make changes and amendments to the document, before I make it look pretty and give it any more effort in photoshop.

Ok, another update:

Currently making the special character for each legion and I've ran into Warsmith Honsou for the Iron Warriors. My issue is that I don't know too much about him and while I've tried looking at Wikis, they don't seem to help too much as I'm trying not to read too much into it as I'm currently reading the Omnibus for the first time and don't want it spoiled.

So question for folks who already know the character. What is Honsou like? What is his main characteristics, traits, goal ambitions etc.

What's he armed with? Does he wield a Daemon Weapon?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Reviewing 5th ed, the Tyranid Codex had its share of bad, including broken (as in, "didn't work") Lictors and Trygons.

Lictors granted +1 to Reserves if they started their turn on the table...but had to start the game in Reserves, with no bonus3s to actually arrive themselves.

Trygons had the ability to create Tunnels for infantry to emerge through in subsequent turns...but did not actually give any means for infantry to wait for a tunnel before arriving on the Tyranid board edge.

Cheers for the heads up! I'll take a look at them. I think the bugs may be my next project of updating after CSM.

Cheers for the heads up! I'll take a look at them. I think the bugs may be my next project of updating after CSM.

the 4th ed nid codex was used halfway through 5th and was a much better dex as it still had the biomorph abilities of the nids but not to the extreme of the 3rd ed codex. it gave nids many units immune to instant death, frag grenade equivalents and didn't have the stupid instinctive behavior chart. the only thing that really got better in the newer dex was zoanthropes that went from a 2+/6+ to a 3++

the 5th ed codex was a cash grab to promote new models(some of FW line got moved to plastic) at the expense of older models who got rules downgrades and points hikes(people already had loads of them by this point so GW wasn't making as much money off them). It is a very easy plugNplay to pull the new units from the 5th ed codex and place them in the 4th ed codex-hive guard, mawloc/trygon, tervegon etc...

Take 5th ed codex base points costs-then pay for the upgrades and use their effects from the 4th ed codex.

The last game i played before our new lockdown started last month was a 5th ed game using our hybrid rules. i was using the 4th ed nid codex horde warrior/gene stealer army VS a 3.5 chaos khorne berserker army. had a great game loads of fun and lots of killing on both sides.

Interesting. Cheers for the heads up! I was thinking on using the new units to help with plastering-in and cover the weakness' of the 5th ed. codex.

The one thing I found was lacking in the 5th ed. codex when reading on it was the fact they had little no support pieces that were versatile. I feel if you, say, made the Neurothrope a new unit profile with new abilities such as one Psychic Power to grant Eternal Warrior to one MC and another where it could double the shots of one ranged profile on a MC, then there could be something to grow from there.

I'll take a look at the 4th ed. codex though as I have it on the Goolge Drive.

One thing I'm not understanding from critique that keeps popping up is the lack of immune to Instant Death. I'm having trouble understanding this because whilst your MC don't have Eternal Warrior or anything close to that, you're still T6 which means against shooting at least you're immune to Instant death because nothing in the rules is over Strength 10. Was this just a Force Weapon issue where if you fought GK it was a rough time as they had Force Weapons en. masse?

 The Warp Forge wrote:
One thing I'm not understanding from critique that keeps popping up is the lack of immune to Instant Death. I'm having trouble understanding this because whilst your MC don't have Eternal Warrior or anything close to that, you're still T6 which means against shooting at least you're immune to Instant death because nothing in the rules is over Strength 10. Was this just a Force Weapon issue where if you fought GK it was a rough time as they had Force Weapons en. masse?

Tyranid Warriors were toughness 4 and S8 missile launchers and power fists were common.

This wasn't a uniquely tyranid thing as (other than thunderwolves) most 'tough' units were T4 or T4(5) - still prone to instant death by missile launcher or marine power fist but it made warriors a poor proposition. Not that it would have helped them against jaws of the world wolf which was instant death not defended by eternal warrior.

Late edition GK were just overkill. Ironically Gav Thorpe had made all daemons immune to force weapons for some reason.

Personally in my own skirmish game I just changed instant death to overkill - two wounds instead of one, with an eye on giving the bigger units odd numbers of wounds. Jury is still out on various forms of blanket instant death immunity as at the end of the day your opponent is still paying for it (unless they are GK)...

 aphyon wrote:
...it gave nids many units immune to instant death, frag grenade equivalents and didn't have the stupid instinctive behavior chart.

I recall a common problem of 5e books was that everyone and their dog (other than nids) got free frag grenades on just about everything. Guard heavy mortar teams got frag grenades...
I mean it was a kind of false choice at the end of the day as anything combat-related with an initiative higher than 1 wanted them because the penalties were so easy to get and so punitive, but it made taking cover against assault rather futile at times.

I think a fair few 4e biomorphs fall into a similar category of being an obvious enough choice that it would have made more sense to pre-fit and cost the units with some of them, reducing the size of the upgrade and making units more recognisable on the table.

I guess Cruddace may have been trying to do that and did it badly. Then again Cruddace...

 aphyon wrote:
It is a very easy plugNplay to pull the new units from the 5th ed codex and place them in the 4th ed codex-hive guard, mawloc/trygon, tervegon etc...

5th ed units had their own issues: Tyrannofex's rupture cannon was a lackluster profile on a very expensive gun, the Trygon tunnel rules did not work, the Mawloc rules just were weird and the Pyrovore was the worst unit ever.

And that still leaves 6th edition units: Exocrine, Haruspex, Hive Crone and Shockcannon Hive Guard, and 7th edition units: Toxicrene, Maleceptor, Tyrannocyte, Sporocyte and Neurothrope.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 The Warp Forge wrote:


One thing I'm not understanding from critique that keeps popping up is the lack of immune to Instant Death. I'm having trouble understanding this because whilst your MC don't have Eternal Warrior or anything close to that, you're still T6 which means against shooting at least you're immune to Instant death because nothing in the rules is over Strength 10. Was this just a Force Weapon issue where if you fought GK it was a rough time as they had Force Weapons en. masse?

It is a middle bug issue, in which Warriors, Raveners and other mid size Tyranids were worthless as the whole unit could die to a single S8 large blast, in an edition in which everyone had S8+ large blasts (except Tyranids).

This, in combination to the awful lack of anti-tank options meant Tyranids couldn't fight mech armies like the IG.

It also meant that any psyker with a force weapon could happily duel and kill even the Swarmlord, which meant it was impossible to win against GK.

 Tyran wrote:
5th ed units had their own issues: Tyrannofex was worthless because AP4 on an anti-tank weapon meant it was gak at its supposed role

AP4 wasn't its problem in 5th - as an anti-tank weapon it was functionally a lascannon with higher strength and twice as many shots.

But it was also 265 points and cross eyed at a time when you could buy a tau broadside suit with a twinlinked railgun for 70. Quantity of shots on target for points paid was not a good return.

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
5th ed units had their own issues: Tyrannofex was worthless because AP4 on an anti-tank weapon meant it was gak at its supposed role

AP4 wasn't its problem in 5th - as an anti-tank weapon it was functionally a lascannon with higher strength and twice as many shots.

But it was also 265 points and cross eyed at a time when you could buy a tau broadside suit with a twinlinked railgun for 70. Quantity of shots on target for points paid was not a good return.

AP 1 would have helped at its main role, but yes it was simply to expensive for what it did.

 Tyran wrote:

 The Warp Forge wrote:


One thing I'm not understanding from critique that keeps popping up is the lack of immune to Instant Death. I'm having trouble understanding this because whilst your MC don't have Eternal Warrior or anything close to that, you're still T6 which means against shooting at least you're immune to Instant death because nothing in the rules is over Strength 10. Was this just a Force Weapon issue where if you fought GK it was a rough time as they had Force Weapons en. masse?

It is a middle bug issue, in which Warriors, Raveners and other mid size Tyranids were worthless as the whole unit could die to a single S8 large blast, in an edition in which everyone had S8+ large blasts (except Tyranids).

This, in combination to the awful lack of anti-tank options meant Tyranids couldn't fight mech armies like the IG.

It also meant that any psyker with a force weapon could happily duel and kill even the Swarmlord, which meant it was impossible to win against GK.

 The Warp Forge wrote:

I hear you, but isn't that why Venomthopes existed, to provide a cover save to those creatures against Blast templates and such? I dunno about giving Warriors and Raveners Eternal Warrior-like rules on a 3 wound beast sounds a bit OP.

The points issue I totally get though. Bugs may need an overhaul in points.

Venomthropes didn't really provide that much protection in practice.

So would it be better to give the Warrior-esque stuff FnP, or make a new psychic power that grants FnP on a unit?

I'd rather see T5 Tyranid Warriors than T4/EW Tyranid Warriors. It still fixes the ID to S8 problem, but you can still one-shot them with S10 or Force Weapons, and it makes them more resistant to small arms. There were plenty of multi-wound T5 units in 5th (Thunderwolves, Grotesques, Ogryn, Bloodcrushers, Beasts of Nurgle) and most of them are about the same size/base as Warriors. It'd also expand the higher-T/lower-Sv corner of the design space that GW never seemed to bother with, and make higher-S/weaker AP weapons more relevant.

Still needs a way to deal with all those force weapons the GK bring.

Definitely. In my opinion EW and force weapons should both be very rare, we shouldn't be handing out EW to patch handing out too many force weapons.

I hear you all! Cheers for the responses.

So my thoughts would be to buff The Warrior profile and have the Neurothrope as a support piece that can just buff MC, like grant EW against Force Weapons and maybe FnP to other non-MC units.

I wouldn't do "grant EW against force weapons". If you roll back Warddex force weapons then force weapons are a thing you get on one, maybe two models an army that a lot of Codexes don't even have. A whole "bubble of shut down SM Librarians" special ability seems unnecessarily granular to me.

If you're that worried about the potential effects of force weapons on Tyranid MCs why not make Catalyst grant Eternal Warrior as well as FNP? It gives a counter that isn't just a blanket "this ability no longer does anything to my army ahahahaha!".

I do believe that at the very least the Swarmlord should have inbuilt EW, like all the Marines characters.

Swarmlord sure. Almost nobody had EW in 5th, even among Space Marines (Grimnar, Calgar, the Sanguinor, Draigo, and Lysander, which is under 1/book considering that the DA and BT didn't have any), but giving the biggest named character in the book EW seems fine to me.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I wouldn't do "grant EW against force weapons". If you roll back Warddex force weapons then force weapons are a thing you get on one, maybe two models an army that a lot of Codexes don't even have.

The swarmlord itself was one of the most powerful instant-death inflicting units in the game. Any hit in close combat was instant death regardless of toughness, regardless of psychic protection, no armour saves, no FnP, and re-rolling all invulnerable saves. All this while usually hitting first and wounding on 2+.

Regular models with force weapons were hitting on 5s (or worse), fishing for 6s to wound it, 4++ save and and then had to take an LD test on 3d6.

It was an insane close combat monster. At the same time though it suffered from the dreaded T6 3+ profile that so many nid creatures had - missile launcher bait.

I wouldn't say it was an insane CC monster.

Sure it hit hard, but characters like Abaddon, Calgar, Draigo, etc. hit harder.

Of the examples given Draigo will wipe the floor with the Stormlord (on average rolls the Swarmlord's down to ID in the second round, Draigo's up with 2 wounds remaining), Abbadon's a pretty even fight (ID doesn't come into it either way, he doesn't have Draigo's 3++ so he goes down in 3 turns rather than 4, but the +d6A means he'll take the Swarmlord down in 3 turns as well, so it comes down to the dice), and the Swarmlord eats Calgar easily (he doesn't have the T5 of the other two or the 3++ of Draigo to keep him alive, he doesn't have the volume of attacks or the force weapon to kill the Swarmlord quickly, so he just gets chewed up and spat out).

The only matchup where giving the Stormlord EW makes a difference is vs. Draigo since the other two can't ID him anyway, and that just turns the fight between the 280pt giant beatstick and the 275pts giant beatstick from a stomp into a close fight.

 Tyran wrote:
Sure it hit hard, but characters like Abaddon, Calgar, Draigo, etc. hit harder.

Swarmlord - Four attacks, WS 9, Init 6, Strength 6, Instant Death, Reroll Invulnerables, Reroll to hit
Abaddon - Four attacks, WS 7, Init 6, Strength 8, Reroll Wounds, Daemon weapon (d6 extra attacks, punching self in the face on a 1)
Calgar - Four attacks, WS 6, Init 1, Strength 8, Reroll Wounds
Draigo - Four attacks, WS 6, Init 5, Strength 5, One reroll to hit per turn, Force Weapon, Immense Shenanigans.

Against the Swarmlord both Draigo and Abaddon would give and take wounds fairly evenly - but Draigo wins out on shenanigans while Abaddon does not. Calgar is outmatched.
Of course all three characters have eternal warrior otherwise the swarmlord would have killed them several times over, and against alternate targets - for instance a pack of thunderwolves - you'd want your money on the swarmlord.

Edit - ninjaed...

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Of the examples given Draigo will wipe the floor with the Stormlord (on average rolls the Swarmlord's down to ID in the second round, Draigo's up with 2 wounds remaining)

Not being able to use its psychic powers in close combat really limits the Swarmlords options here, along with Draigos strength boost apply to psykers and well as daemons. His odds at his usual strength 5 don't look so great, and at WS1 he'd be hit on 2s and hitting on 5s which is rough (and even worse for the other two).

Against the Thunderwolves giving the Swarmlord EW again wouldn't make any difference given their lack of any weapons that'll ID it.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Against the Thunderwolves giving the Swarmlord EW again wouldn't make any difference given their lack of any weapons that'll ID it.

True, but the swarmlords own instant death means he instantly doubles his damage output when not faced with one of the few models in the game (outside of the entire 4e daemon codex) that has eternal warrior - in a question of who hits hardest the swarmlords problem was never a lack of punch, at least by 5e standards.

S6/ID does the same thing to multi-wound T4/T5 things as having S10 (like, say, a Dreadnaught) would, but makes it better against T6+ multi-wound models and worse against vehicles. I don't think it's that disruptive.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
S6/ID does the same thing to multi-wound T4/T5 things as having S10 (like, say, a Dreadnaught) would, but makes it better against T6+ multi-wound models and worse against vehicles. I don't think it's that disruptive.

I wasn't suggesting it was - just replying to an earlier post.

While the swarmlord one-ups Calgar, Abaddon, and other big names you were always dragging him up the board behind his tyrant guard trying to avoid getting your 500pt unit stuck behind a 35pt rhino.

i think we are missing a few points here
Warriors were a glaring example of why EW was important but it also was important for all other synapse creatures like zoanthropes and hive tyrants.

aside from force weapons there are a number of unique wargear options in 5th across multiple factions that cause instant death especially on popular characters that were a threat to even the big bugs.


As for the compatible 6th and 7th ed editions to the nid line we treat them the same way for import into the 4th ed codex. one of our current nid players noted how trash the haruspex is but if he were using the upgrades from the 4th ed codex it actually makes it worth playing, even if it is quite a bit more expensive.


Similarly the chaos player wanted to use a helldrake from 7th in his 3.5 chaos book. he paid the 7th ed codex points for it and bought parasitic possession out of the 4th ed codex so it could regrow damage and the FW chaff/flare upgrade for all vehicle flyers available previously.

I think a fair few 4th ed biomorphs fall into a similar category of being an obvious enough choice that it would have made more sense to pre-fit and cost the units with some of them, reducing the size of the upgrade and making units more recognizable on the table.

That's not entirely accurate. that may be true in a way as an example if you say option set A is a no-brainer for a CC themed warrior (that can be broken down further into anti-tank and anti-infantry roles)however option set B is better for a fire support warrior. the joy of the 4th ed codex biomorphs is that you had so many options to build is vary different directions depending on what kind of force you wanted to play. you also could mix and match individual models in broods as well. in the battle i posted about i had rending warriors (instead of lash/sword) because i knew i would be facing vehicles. along with a single shooting warrior to provide some ranged fire when needed.

The big thing is that our group uses hybrid rules in the sense of just importing the rules that were better in various editions into the template of 5th instead of creating our own rules from the ground up. since it is already there in the core rulebook or the chosen codex it is easy enough to just look up in print.

 aphyon wrote:
the joy of the 4th ed codex biomorphs is that you had so many options to build is vary different directions depending on what kind of force you wanted to play. you also could mix and match individual models in broods as well. in the battle i posted about i had rending warriors (instead of lash/sword) because i knew i would be facing vehicles. along with a single shooting warrior to provide some ranged fire when needed

The weapon and wargear options were straightforward enough - no different from any other faction.

Where 4e got messy was that half the statline of any given unit was up for change, and then each model had primary attacks and sometimes secondary attacks which were derived from the model statline as much as the weapon itself.

The attack profile of a single 4e carnifex could look like this (with the model using all indicated attack profiles each phase) :
Close combat:
- X, S?, AP2, Reroll to wound on first turn, two wounds per wound, +2X on charge
- D3, S/2, AP2, I1, Only when engaged by 4+ models
- 1, S?+1 (<=10), AP-, I*2, Always hits on 4+
Ranged:
- 12", S?(<=6), 5, X, Reroll to hit
- 18", S?-1(<=6), -, 2X, Reroll to hit and wound
- 36", S?+2(<=10), 4, X, Glancing only

 aphyon wrote:
aside from force weapons there are a number of unique wargear options in 5th across multiple factions that cause instant death especially on popular characters that were a threat to even the big bugs.

Daemon soul devourer, chaos blissgiver, tyranid bonesabres, DE huskblade. And a few instant death on 6s. By no means a complete list, though no ranged instant death effect springs to mind unless you look at the ET-ignoring jaws of the world wolf and orks curse power.

I think the trouble with giving everything eternal warrior is that you are screwing the players who bought those expensive items out of their use, much in the same way that the Ward-knights blanket force weapon access screwed nids out of their multi-wound models.

The rules for 4th-ed Tyranids were that Synapse prevented Instant Death from double-strength. Not Instant Death period.

I imagine that hybridizing 4th and 5th/7th Nids would be an interesting experiment. There are several decisions to consider in the process. Some of my initial thoughts are:

1) Venom Cannons use 4th-ed/style rules, instead of being small blasts, making them an Autocannon-like support tool, and not turning that into "take Hive Guard, or else."
2) Warriors are Troops unless given wings. Remove Warriors as an HQ, replace with the Tyranid Prime.
3) The Broodlord is his 4th ed profile, but has Fleet so he doesn't slow down his army.
4) Most other guns use 5e-profiles, save Deathspitters being single-shot small-blast, and Brainleech Devourers perhaps firing 4 instead of 6 shots. 2shot "Reroll wound" was...wonky. Bioplasma is a template instead of a small-blast.
5) Units with the ability to create Spore-Mines (e.x. Biovore/Harpy/Sporocyst) can choose the type they lay down for extra utility.
6) "Without Number" units can respawn from Trygon Tunnels; however, Trygon Tunnels are treated as a structure/building that can be attacked to collapse said tunnels.

 MagicJuggler wrote:

1) Venom Cannons use 4th-ed/style rules, instead of being small blasts, making them an Autocannon-like support tool, and not turning that into "take Hive Guard, or else."

Also drop that "can only make glancing hits" or "-1 to vehicle damage table" (depending on edition). For some reason GW was obsessed with making venom cannons specifically bad against vehicles.
There is also the issue with strength depending on if toxin sacs give +1 strength like in 4th or give poison instead like in 5th.

 Tyran wrote:
For some reason GW was obsessed with making venom cannons specifically bad against vehicles

Looks like the rule was introduced in the 3e codex when the cannon went from being a fixed two shots at S8 AP4 to a variable profile, perhaps to discourage railfexes.

Cheers for the responses folks!

Looking at the 4th ed bug book and there seems to be a few things to take away from said book, but I agree with another poster in that it gets very convoluted, very quickly with the customization.

So what I'm seeing for the Tyranid Codex is to bring in the 4th edition buffs that allowed bugs to be synergistic but that also upheld variety while bringing in the conformity and streamlined simplicity that the 5th ed. Codex brought.

MAJAOR UPDATE:

So I'm excited and delighted to announce the first project that is completed:

Chaos Space Marines have now been updated with the current range and new custom units and characters in this supplement!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sUYjf8QFtdp1wHLy4-9Kyu7AmMedYwne?usp=sharing

Right now it's just a PDF. I will make the attempt to give it the good looking codex PDF treatment once all codex projects are completed. I feel this should be the correct course of action so that folks can play with their toys sooner rather than later.

What I'd like to ask everyone is if they can take a look at the PDF update, see if I'm missing anything (Wargear, units, etc) and I like to know peoples thoughts on what they think of the additions and changes?

If anyone does try out this supplement for a game, please give us a report here (with pics ).

Next project will be the Tyranids!

It's taken a considerable amount of time to get this made so I would appreciate any feedback and constructive criticism.

Cheers to all responses!

Ah the 4e book, it has been a while.
If you are making the rules a supplement to another book you may wish to include the errata in some form?

It's late so just a few initial thoughts:

Venomcrawler - lasher tendrils included in profile?
-stat wise the AP3 blast weapons stand out as they would be an uncommon profile in 5th edition (several armies actually lacked any AP3 weaponry)

Maulerfiend - the assault and heavy types are interchangable for vehicles in 5th. You may want to consider making the magma cutters a single heavy 2 weapon unless the extra durability of having two distinct weapons is intentional.
-the lasher tendril option is unclear on whether you replace one or both

Forgefiend - first impression was the return of the notorious psybolt autocannon dread from the grey knight codex - at about the right price if the GK codex is your balance target.
-upgrade option for third cannon unclear - do you need to take two cannons to get the option for a third
-in practical terms the ectoplasm cannons are plasma cannons with the instant death rule against 95% of the infantry and characters in the game (a lot of T5 stuff is T4(5) in 5th)

Greater possessed - are weaker than the unit they lead? (possessed are strength 5 base)
-no reference to the possessed table (page 29) - rending automatic?
-they don't have the independent character rule, or a comparable rule locking them to a possessed unit
-60 points is what the DE players pay for a T3 archon with a splinter pistol

Master of the daemonforge - seems reasonable, though i'm seeing a bit of a theme on 12" movements and AP3 weapons
-pairs of close combat weapons - on units like the servitors and greater possessed with no wargear options why not make this a single weapon and add +1 to the attack profile?
-self destruct timing unclear (and very important)

Dark Apostle - free flamer?

Dark Disciples - wouldn't you just take the regular cultists?

Master of Executions - ...

Master of Possession - you'd be surprised how dangerous the dangerous terrain in 5th was (it ignored armour, so one in every six models that get anywhere near this model are dead - and area effect psychic powers like this are measured from a vehicles hull for added effect).
-cursed earth doesn't affect the actual daemons in the book

Cultists - oddly high priced flamer

Warpsmith - ...

Mutilators - no attack characteristic

Warp Talons - a 5e vanguard veteran with a jump pack and single lightning claw costs 45 points per model with no invulnerable or access to init 5. A mundane assault marine with a chainsword costs 18 points - these are drastically undercosted by the standards of the edition.
-unit is paying a 25 point unexplained surchange for its starting models
-warpflame strike interaction with attached characters unclear

Heldrake - baleflamer does not specify number of shots

------------

Zao Sahaal - captain shrike that trades in infiltrate for d3 extra attacks, rerolls on everything, and a better than 50% psychic negation. In practice i'd guess he would be put forward early-ish to force a bunch of Ld6 pinning and break tests from small arms on things.
-not clear if the two Ld reducing effects stack

Erebus - seems straightforward enough... hahaha no. Seriously, killing three cultists to boost the strength, toughness, and weaponskill of a unit by 3? Go go squad of possessed wraithlords.

Honsou - no limit given on which friendly units can use his rule - part of his unit, radius, trait, or entire army?

Harrowmaster - a note on army wide infiltrate. In 5th edition this essentially allows you to deploy nothing onto the board, wait for your opponent to set up, and then place everything exactly where you want it within the range limitations. If you rolled to go first you totally screw your opponent over, if you rolled to go second then you essentially deploy within first turn charge range with cover and LoS blocking to everything that matters. Chosen with this rule combination can inflitrate, scout, disembark and walk up to within melta/flamer range before their opponent has moved an inch.
And all this has cost you what? 40 points, give or take on a model that keeps coming back from the dead and grants the entire army re-roll sweeping advances and +1 attacks (because lets face it - you are all but deploying into your opponents deployment zone here).

------------

Veterans of the Long War - just the usual warning of enemy-specific rules. If you make everything better against one set of factions then they are either going to be balanced against them and weak against everyone else, or else balanced against everyone else and unbalanced against their favoured opponents.

Allies - 5e allies didn't include heavy support, but that was a legacy 3e thing that you can ignore
-the original allies were also limits, not extra slots. If you took an allied HQ that left you with only one HQ slot for your own faction (and all compulsory slots had to be filled from the main dex)

Legion traits - general - have no mark of chaos restrictions. Lucius can bestow the blessings of slaanesh upon berzerkers and plague marines alike (for instance)
Legion trait - Abaddon - preferred enemy already rerolls all misses in combat
Lucius - a +1 initiative boost is significant in 5th edition, but applies to almost nothing in this instance (off the top of my head)
Kharn/Fabius bile - it is hard to understate how powerful rending is in this context, even the weaker rending of 5th edition compared to previous editions. Similarly furious charge - these kinds of abilities are far and away more powerful than the few comparable abilities that exist elsewhere in the edition and in larger games outweigh the value of the character itself.
Huron - relentless is similarly a high impact rule, albeit more specific in its use. Infantry heavy weapons in 5e were particularly immobile for the most part but once you get relentless you'll see a lot of change to first turn deploments and perhaps more significantly 'gun trucks' - squads shooting heavy weapons out of speeding rhinos, leaping out with multimeltas, etc.

----------

Thunder hammer - sorcerers do not have a power weapon or close combat weapon to replace

the dark apostle is a fallen chaplain. they existed in the 3.5 chaos codex as a special word bearers only HQ choice.

It was also the way to build an all demon army without the need for a separate demon codex as word bearers special thing was the ability to replace every singe unit selection in the FOC with the demonic counterpart.

 aphyon wrote:
It was also the way to build an all demon army without the need for a separate demon codex as word bearers special thing was the ability to replace every singe unit selection in the FOC with the demonic counterpart.

The rule was that World Bearers could trade up an elite, fast attack, and heavy support slot for three extra troop slots but they didn't need to fill them with daemons (or in fact take any daemons at all).
The 4e daemons are already slotless troops so the rule doesn't help them.

Looking at the CSM now, but I can't find the main rulebook. I checked in the Core and FAQ, but nothing.

Why would a Helstalker be only T4? Seems odd to me.

Ok, cheers to all responses folks! I have made a few amendments, the new file is in the folder.

A.T. wrote:
Ah the 4e book, it has been a while.
If you are making the rules a supplement to another book you may wish to include the errata in some form?

It's late so just a few initial thoughts:

Venomcrawler - lasher tendrils included in profile?
-stat wise the AP3 blast weapons stand out as they would be an uncommon profile in 5th edition (several armies actually lacked any AP3 weaponry)

They may stand out but I don't see the issue here. As far as I'm aware there's no downside, nor anything to frown upon by making them AP: 3.

Maulerfiend - the assault and heavy types are interchangable for vehicles in 5th. You may want to consider making the magma cutters a single heavy 2 weapon unless the extra durability of having two distinct weapons is intentional.
-the lasher tendril option is unclear on whether you replace one or both

The two distinct weapons were intentional for the use of durability. I've swapped Assault to Heavy type for this weapon.

Forgefiend - first impression was the return of the notorious psybolt autocannon dread from the grey knight codex - at about the right price if the GK codex is your balance target.
-upgrade option for third cannon unclear - do you need to take two cannons to get the option for a third
-in practical terms the ectoplasm cannons are plasma cannons with the instant death rule against 95% of the infantry and characters in the game (a lot of T5 stuff is T4(5) in 5th)

Yeah I get you, I've given the Cannon gets hot! so it has the chance to not fire at all being its drawback.

Greater possessed - are weaker than the unit they lead? (possessed are strength 5 base)
-no reference to the possessed table (page 29) - rending automatic?
-they don't have the independent character rule, or a comparable rule locking them to a possessed unit
-60 points is what the DE players pay for a T3 archon with a splinter pistol

Ammended. Took away rending from them, made them Strength 6 and gave them the Daemonkin rule. Bumped points to 95pts. My only concern is accidently making them just as powerful, or more, than a DP.

Master of the daemonforge - seems reasonable, though i'm seeing a bit of a theme on 12" movements and AP3 weapons
-pairs of close combat weapons - on units like the servitors and greater possessed with no wargear options why not make this a single weapon and add +1 to the attack profile?
-self destruct timing unclear (and very important)

Amended the Maulerfiend to auto-passing dangerous terrain tests and not to be slowed by difficult terrain. It no longer moves 12".

Amended the Servitors by granting an extra attack by the pairs of CCW (included in profile)

Dark Apostle - free flamer?

Dark Disciples - wouldn't you just take the regular cultists?

Ammended. Apostle is now 5pt flamer and Dark Discpiles now have a rule called Dark Ritual.

Master of Executions - ...

Master of Possession - you'd be surprised how dangerous the dangerous terrain in 5th was (it ignored armour, so one in every six models that get anywhere near this model are dead - and area effect psychic powers like this are measured from a vehicles hull for added effect).
-cursed earth doesn't affect the actual daemons in the book

I'd like to see this play tested. see what happens. DT is quite powerful but it's only a 6" bubble.

Cultists - oddly high priced flamer

Warpsmith - ...

Mutilators - no attack characteristic

Amended. Cultist flamers are 5pts and Mutilators have A: 3

Warp Talons - a 5e vanguard veteran with a jump pack and single lightning claw costs 45 points per model with no invulnerable or access to init 5. A mundane assault marine with a chainsword costs 18 points - these are drastically undercosted by the standards of the edition.
-unit is paying a 25 point unexplained surchange for its starting models
-warpflame strike interaction with attached characters unclear

Ammended. WT are now 50pts a piece and the Warpflame Strike rule has no effect if an Independent character has joined them in reserve.

Heldrake - baleflamer does not specify number of shots

Amended to Assault 1

------------

Zao Sahaal - captain shrike that trades in infiltrate for d3 extra attacks, rerolls on everything, and a better than 50% psychic negation. In practice i'd guess he would be put forward early-ish to force a bunch of Ld6 pinning and break tests from small arms on things.
-not clear if the two Ld reducing effects stack

Ammended. The results are not cumulative.

Erebus - seems straightforward enough... hahaha no. Seriously, killing three cultists to boost the strength, toughness, and weaponskill of a unit by 3? Go go squad of possessed wraithlords.

Amended. Now the 'chosen' unit must choose the characteristic rather than having all the characteristic buffs.

Honsou - no limit given on which friendly units can use his rule - part of his unit, radius, trait, or entire army?

Amended for clarification. If his Legion trait is chosen then it's his whole army.

Harrowmaster - a note on army wide infiltrate. In 5th edition this essentially allows you to deploy nothing onto the board, wait for your opponent to set up, and then place everything exactly where you want it within the range limitations. If you rolled to go first you totally screw your opponent over, if you rolled to go second then you essentially deploy within first turn charge range with cover and LoS blocking to everything that matters. Chosen with this rule combination can inflitrate, scout, disembark and walk up to within melta/flamer range before their opponent has moved an inch.
And all this has cost you what? 40 points, give or take on a model that keeps coming back from the dead and grants the entire army re-roll sweeping advances and +1 attacks (because lets face it - you are all but deploying into your opponents deployment zone here).

Amended. Units just gain Scout with the exception of Chosen. Chosen may increase or decrease the value by 1 when choosing deployment/outflanking sides. Harrowmaster also just regains 1 wound rather than D3.

------------

Veterans of the Long War - just the usual warning of enemy-specific rules. If you make everything better against one set of factions then they are either going to be balanced against them and weak against everyone else, or else balanced against everyone else and unbalanced against their favoured opponents.

Yes, but also to note that most of these existing codex's can hold up their own in their own regard and the ones that can't will be getting the retool/overhaul

Allies - 5e allies didn't include heavy support, but that was a legacy 3e thing that you can ignore
-the original allies were also limits, not extra slots. If you took an allied HQ that left you with only one HQ slot for your own faction (and all compulsory slots had to be filled from the main dex)

Now this is interesting as I've never known allies in 5th ed. 40k.Might have happened in 4th ed, but never known it in 5th ed. I chose to make this a separate force org. chart so it clarifies any convulsion about 'sharing' or overlapping rules for unseen combos and I've further clarified this in the allies entry. I find this ok as your still paying points for this and it's still a heavily restricted chart to minimise exploits.

Legion traits - general - have no mark of chaos restrictions. Lucius can bestow the blessings of slaanesh upon berzerkers and plague marines alike (for instance)
Legion trait - Abaddon - preferred enemy already rerolls all misses in combat
Lucius - a +1 initiative boost is significant in 5th edition, but applies to almost nothing in this instance (off the top of my head)
Kharn/Fabius bile - it is hard to understate how powerful rending is in this context, even the weaker rending of 5th edition compared to previous editions. Similarly furious charge - these kinds of abilities are far and away more powerful than the few comparable abilities that exist elsewhere in the edition and in larger games outweigh the value of the character itself.
Huron - relentless is similarly a high impact rule, albeit more specific in its use. Infantry heavy weapons in 5e were particularly immobile for the most part but once you get relentless you'll see a lot of change to first turn deploments and perhaps more significantly 'gun trucks' - squads shooting heavy weapons out of speeding rhinos, leaping out with multimeltas, etc.

Amended Lucius and Kharn to be only Icons and Marks of Khorne/Slannesh. Amended Khorne to be just +1 Strength.
Hurons trait has been amended so that the Relentless rule has no effect when a unit is embarked in a transport.
Bile has been amended as all non-vehicle units may roll on his enhanced warriors chart.

----------

Thunder hammer - sorcerers do not have a power weapon or close combat weapon to replace

Amended. Took away the option for Sorcerers.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Looking at the CSM now, but I can't find the main rulebook. I checked in the Core and FAQ, but nothing.

Why would a Helstalker be only T4? Seems odd to me.

Amended. Granted the Hellstalker +1 Toughness.

The 4th ed. CSM Codex is in the folder as shown here.

I meant the MAIN main rulebook. Like, your version of the 5th Edition rules. I can see the CSM dex.

Ah, yeah, I haven't uploaded them yet, gimmie a few hours. That's a huge file to fit there.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ah, yeah, I haven't uploaded them yet, gimmie a few hours. That's a huge file to fit there.

Garch.

Also, T5 Helstalker? Really? That thing is bigger than a Daemon Prince-it's more on par with a Maulerfiend or Forgefiend. A little spindlier, but not that much.

I'd make it T6, and just charge an appropriate price for that durability.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 The Warp Forge wrote:
Ah, yeah, I haven't uploaded them yet, gimmie a few hours. That's a huge file to fit there.

Garch.

Also, T5 Helstalker? Really? That thing is bigger than a Daemon Prince-it's more on par with a Maulerfiend or Forgefiend. A little spindlier, but not that much.

I'd make it T6, and just charge an appropriate price for that durability.

I made it T:5 because it can be upgraded to T:6 with the Mark of Nurgle. With that in mind having a T:7 unit was incredibly uncommon and T: 8 were only seen very occasionally.

Also core book is now uploaded.

Maybe make it a vehicle then? In 8th/9th, it’s right about as durable as a Mauler or Forge Fiend.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Maybe make it a vehicle then? In 8th/9th, it’s right about as durable as a Mauler or Forge Fiend.

I might, I'll give it some thought.

I wouldn't do that; the helstalker seems comparable in size and role to a Bloodcrusher to me, +1T/+1W coupled with the extra weapon mounts seems perfectly reasonable.

Cheers for the heads up! It's also less of headache to rebuild.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
They may stand out but I don't see the issue here. As far as I'm aware there's no downside, nor anything to frown upon by making them AP: 3

Just something to watch in playtesting. There are a number of ways to bunch up units in 5th edition (not to mention deepstrikers being bunched on deployment) - it was actually something of a speciality of the 4e chaos army.

I'd like to see this play tested. see what happens. DT is quite powerful but it's only a 6" bubble.

It isn't entirely out of order for a 5e psychic power - wolves have a few dangerous terrain effects for example.

Ammended. WT are now 50pts a piece and the Warpflame Strike rule has no effect if an Independent character has joined them in reserve.

I suspect that will just flip them all the way over to too expensive to field. Warp Talons are in the awkward position of having too much gear on too little a base unit (units like vanguard would field a lot of cheap bullet catchers). Just an awkward one to get right.

Amended. Now the 'chosen' unit must choose the characteristic rather than having all the characteristic buffs.

Playtest toughness 8 possessed. Remember that this makes them completely immune to all small arms short of pulse rifles and the majority of units in close combat.

Yes, but also to note that most of these existing codex's can hold up their own in their own regard and the ones that can't will be getting the retool/overhaul

To clarify - if they can hold up against an opponent that is gaining table-wide rerolls against them surely they would be stronger against all those that do not.
It's just the nature of faction-on-faction bonuses, it is very hard to be equally good against those with the bonuses and those without.

Now this is interesting as I've never known allies in 5th ed.

The last legacy of the allies rules could be found in the daemonhunters and witch hunters books (the full codex, not the free pdfs that they put up on the games workshop site). They were valid throughout most of 5th, probably best remembered for the ordo malleus inquisitor that turned up in all of the leafblower lists to screen against drop pods.
Mainly the restriction was to prevent players circumventing the FoC limits by taking units from different books.

A.T. wrote:

Ammended. WT are now 50pts a piece and the Warpflame Strike rule has no effect if an Independent character has joined them in reserve.

I suspect that will just flip them all the way over to too expensive to field. Warp Talons are in the awkward position of having too much gear on too little a base unit (units like vanguard would field a lot of cheap bullet catchers). Just an awkward one to get right...

I don't know that 5e VV are a good comparison here; 1-wound units in 4e-6e tended to have horrendously expensive upgrade equipment if it wasn't already baked into their profile since GW priced out everything for characters and didn't start fixing any of it until 7e. In the 4e SM Codex, for instance, you could get a Terminator with twin lightning claws for 83pts if you used a Veteran and took kit out of the character armoury, compared to the 40pts you'd pay off the Terminator statline. In 7e the twin-LC VV is 35pts, and the Dark Fury in 30k is 30pts for similar stuff.

Consider also that a twin-LC Terminator in the 4e CSM book you're pricing this against is only 40pts, and a GK Interceptor with falchions in the 5e book is all of 36pts (with one fewer attack, no Inv, but the choice between ID and S6 and a whole Storm Bolter).

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I don't know that 5e VV are a good comparison here

Same statline, assault from deepstrike with power weapons. They are vanguard.

Now i'd agree that they shouldn't cost as much as lightning claw vanguard if for no other reason than that the vanguard aren't forced to take lightning claws on every model, and nobody ever ran them that way because as you say they get very expensive very quickly.

Also, for what it's worth, you didn't even see that many vanilla vanguard in 5e after the novelty wore off. There was a real gulf in capability between them and the more common blood angels vanguard when it comes to pinning all your points on a reserve roll followed by a deepstrike scatter roll. But the original 20 points was waaaay off the mark for a 5e jump assault veteran with an invulnerable, rerolling to hit and wound, probably coming in at I5 and perhaps even scouting... at those points you'd run at least two squads every game.

A.T. wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I don't know that 5e VV are a good comparison here

Same statline, assault from deepstrike with power weapons. They are vanguard.

Now i'd agree that they shouldn't cost as much as lightning claw vanguard if for no other reason than that the vanguard aren't forced to take lightning claws on every model, and nobody ever ran them that way because as you say they get very expensive very quickly.

Also, for what it's worth, you didn't even see that many vanilla vanguard in 5e after the novelty wore off. There was a real gulf in capability between them and the more common blood angels vanguard when it comes to pinning all your points on a reserve roll followed by a deepstrike scatter roll. But the original 20 points was waaaay off the mark for a 5e jump assault veteran with an invulnerable, rerolling to hit and wound, probably coming in at I5 and perhaps even scouting... at those points you'd run at least two squads every game.

Fair comparison for the statline/kit/role, yes, but a terrible benchmark for pricing. If VV were priced like they are in 7th, sure, but hiking the price of Warp Talons to match such a horrendously overpriced unit is just going to make them useless.

Ok so, done one last update in and re-uploaded.

I've changed voice of the Gods' rule from tuning up toughness to Initiative.

I've also priced WT at 40pts now. This makes them on par with other elite units in the points bracket. Lychguard for example are also 40pts with a bunch of stuff they have. It's also important to remember that you will be spending 40pts to make them I: 5, so for two bare minimum of two units you'll be paying 480pts which is a huge chunk out of your points.

For the Tyranid book, I'll be making making that update slightly different to the CSM one. The Bug book will be separated into different documents. One for bug special USR. Others for each Force Org Slot. I'm doing this because it means that I won't get lost as easy as I did in one document.

 The Warp Forge wrote:
This makes them on par with other elite units in the points bracket. Lychguard for example are also 40pts with a bunch of stuff they have.

You'll get a better feel for them once you get them on the board. Vanguard were always hugely swingy outside of the BA book as assault from deepstrike so do also run them as regular deployment (especially with scouting) and off of any deepstrike beacons when you test them. You may just come to the conclusion that vanguard cost too much.

A.T. wrote:

 The Warp Forge wrote:
This makes them on par with other elite units in the points bracket. Lychguard for example are also 40pts with a bunch of stuff they have.

You'll get a better feel for them once you get them on the board. Vanguard were always hugely swingy outside of the BA book as assault from deepstrike so do also run them as regular deployment (especially with scouting) and off of any deepstrike beacons when you test them. You may just come to the conclusion that vanguard cost too much.

Noted, Hopefully I'll get to playtest these rules. Now onto the Bugs!

When you mean Updated Renegades and heretics?
Do you intend to update Vraks? Or do you want to make a general R&H army that covers more then a specific type of uprising?

Not Online!!! wrote:
When you mean Updated Renegades and heretics?
Do you intend to update Vraks? Or do you want to make a general R&H army that covers more then a specific type of uprising?

General R&H. Something that can be a bit more versitile than just one specific campaign.

 The Warp Forge wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
When you mean Updated Renegades and heretics?
Do you intend to update Vraks? Or do you want to make a general R&H army that covers more then a specific type of uprising?

General R&H. Something that can be a bit more versitile than just one specific campaign.

So basically a backwards Adapted ia 13 list?

Not Online!!! wrote:
So basically a backwards Adapted ia 13 list?

Forgeworld released an updated generic list for 5th edition. Warp - I think there was a copy of it in the FAQs/Erratas I uploaded for you, if not i'll dig it out. IA 6 and 7 were also 5e rules for renegades.

IA13 was a 6th edition ruleset. Just look at the ogryns entry for example - hammer of wrath, rampage, soul blaze...

---------------------------

In terms of editions of the various imperial armour books -

IA 1 - use IA1update28AUG.pdf - Imperial Guard and Guard armoured battlegroup rules
IA 2 - use IA2update28AUG.pdf - Space Marines, Inquisition, and Sisters of Battle unit updates for 5e. Inquisition characters updated for GK codex in greyknightsupd.pdf
IA 3 - use Tauupdate.pdf - 5e tau units
IA 4 - tyranids. 4th edition, i'm not aware of any 5th edition specific update for it, but there are rules in the apocalypse books (imperial armour 2008 is a good start)
IA 5 - use renegades and heretics 5e.pdf
IA 6 - Krieg and Renegades - this is the khorne variant of the renegades. Released 2008 (the renegades and heretics pdf above was 2010)
IA 7 - Krieg armoured battlegroup and Renegades - nurgle variant
IA 8 - Orks and Elysians - the Impgupdate.pdf file has rules for the D-99s from IA2 for use with rules from this book
IA 9 - Tyrants Legion
IA 10 - Marine Siege Assault Vanguard
IA 11 - Eldar Corsairs (and vehicles for regular eldar)

Apocalypse Reloaded, Imperial Armour Apocalypse (2nd edition), Imperial Armour Apocalypse 2 are the 5e era apocalypse releases.

IA 12 and onwards and the 2nd edition releases are all 6e or later. You can also start to see the power ramping up as you work through the books - the last 5e book (IA11) has such wonders as the eldar warp hunter.

There was a no vraks specific one in 5th? Wow that went over my head completely, mind sharing it?

Not Online!!! wrote:
There was a no vraks specific one in 5th? Wow that went over my head completely, mind sharing it?

I've sent you a link to the same pack of errata and update I sent Warp Forge. It was an update for the IA5 (5th edition) rules, and was released a couple of years after IA6.

Cheers! Uploaded R&H to drive!

As i mentioned in a conversation with A.T.

The list is "still" vraks. From xaphan disciples to AL legionaires to the heavy focus on defense.

It is workable though , however you relly need the corresponding FAQ for multiple reasons.

-Minefields, basically the FAQ makes them work.

- Artillery strikes; Frankly you might need to revise the pts.

-The list is unaligned early Vraks so there's a lack of marks.

The net positives of you using this is that it is more balanced torwards the edition you are rewriting for. It's a fun list. Allbeit some of the options need maybee a look at, especially the emplacements.

GL with your rewrite, it looks decent.


PM me if you want to see another version of the R&H list.

Worth noting that with the exception of the ork codex there are no factions (to my knowledge) that have any mine removal ability outside of forgeworld rules.

Playtest a few scenarios and see if any of them have you throwing the rulebook at your opponent. Examples include mining the entire no-mans land infront of your opponents deployment (especially on narrow deployment - can really screw the nids), mining every piece of good/los blocking cover, and mining your own tanks/artillery/emplacements (as long as your vehicle doesn't move it is safe).

A.T. wrote:
Worth noting that with the exception of the ork codex there are no factions (to my knowledge) that have any mine removal ability outside of forgeworld rules.

Playtest a few scenarios and see if any of them have you throwing the rulebook at your opponent. Examples include mining the entire no-mans land infront of your opponents deployment (especially on narrow deployment - can really screw the nids), mining every piece of good/los blocking cover, and mining your own tanks/artillery/emplacements (as long as your vehicle doesn't move it is safe).

Aye the minefield is also rather devastating, and has an extremely high reliability rate.I found the 2010 FAQ i printed again, they changed the minefield in that one i'll quote here:

SPECIAL RULES

Minefield
the minefield is made up of 6 minefield markers, each non a 40mm base. These are deployed alongside the renegade force, and can be placed anywhere on the battlefield outside of the enemy deployment zone. Mines can never be held in reserve, and must always be deployed on the tabletop at the start of the game.
As soon as a unit (friend or foe) moves within 2" of a minefield marker, roll a D6. On a roll of a 1, the maker is a dud - the mines are faulty, or have been defused by forward sappers prior to the battle. On a 2+ however centre a 5" template on the marker the area defiend counts as Dangerous Terrain for the rest of the game.

this can lead to massive issues since one buy of a minefield is 6 markers.

Hey folks! Hope everyone's had a good new year!

A small update: Started the 'Nid codex. This projects gonna take a lot longer as I'm re-creating a codex from the ground up but also taking a lot from previous codex's and regurgitating them on an A4 Microsoft Word Document. This isn't a task that can be done quickly whilst I have other things going in life. Once I have a few more things done this week I'll be getting back to this project, but I'll also be working on adding the new units from the Ork stuff as well in the meantime as I feel that will be quicker and easier to release than the fully-fledged Tyranid codex.

Thanks for your patience and understanding folks!

Codex writing can take time. I've been through a lot of different word and open office frameworks over the years and nothing seems to cut and paste between them properly when you are trying to format things :p

Hey folks! It's been a 'lil while. Been rather busy making Lore for my own game, painting commissions and graduating from my Masters Degree.

So I'm planning on making future additions to be a bit more bite-size than one big release like the CSM update.

I'll be doing them in sections, especially for the new/overhauled codex's and to show a snippet I've done some Ork units to add to its existing range:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kiPMiGAy0wGffhhmeAbvyRcJuJYzYUBg/view?usp=sharing

Yes, I said I would do bugs next, which is true, I'm just taking that project as a slow ride as there is just so much to go through and read. I just needed something a bit smaller to motivate me into the swing of things again. I'll probably post up their new Army-specific special rules soon!

In the meantime, can folks give me feedback on the additional units to the Ork Heavy support roles please?

Cheers to all your responses so far! We're gonna make this the potential 5th should have had!

I'm such a fan of this idea that I had to sign up just to get involved!

I started 40K in 5th Edition, and though I later got into 6th Edition as well, when 7th came out and looked like a pointless extension of 6th, I realised there was no point in just chasing the next Edition all the time. To this day I play 5th and 6th with friends and family, and I haven't bothered with any of the current Editions.

I'm in full support of this idea of expanding and balancing out 5th, as it's something I'm already doing for 6th. I especially approve of your decision to exclude Imperial Knights and Primarchs from the standard 5th rules - those things really ruined 40K for me as they were the catalyst for the "mine's bigger" arm's race that now exists in the current editions, and were another reason why I didn't get into 7th or later Editions. By no means should fans of those units be barred from fielding them in Apocalypse, which was designed for everyone to bring their biggest and most OP units to the field, but certainly they shouldn't be allowed in the standard game. The same goes for the Wraithknight for Craftworld Eldar, which started the mess in the first place.

I notice you're already working on an updated ruleset for Tyranids, but I'd be happy to write 5th updates for the following factions if you're happy to divide the work of rules writing:
Orks
Necrons
Genestealer Cults
Squats/Leagues of Votann
Chaos Space Marines
Dark Eldar
Craftworld Eldar

As these are the other factions that I play or am interested in.

I'm also writing some 6th Edition rules for some new Xenos factions that I'd be willing to translate into 5th if you're interested in those as well.