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So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 09:11:33


Post by: Nerak


This weekend a friend asked in our common game chat if someone was up for doing a game of 4th ed. I checked my storage and was able to find my old rulebook and codexes. After much digging we also acquired the blast and flamer templates. We decided to go kind of low on points, playing two games of 1k p. The first game was tyranids vs guardsmen. The second was grey knights vs orks, with a twist. He included the deamons found in the deamonhunter codex with his ork army. So I guess you could call it possessed deamon orks. After both games we talked about how it felt and what was different. I’ll go over the major points here, maybe it’ll spark some discussion on the state of the game. Note, a lot of this information will be redundant for veteran players but I wanted to have everyone on board.

TLDR: 4th is less complicated and has less layers then 9th. It's slower place and a less demanding game. Things make more sense from a "what if this was an alien battlefield" perspective but less sense from a "let's make a good and smooth tabletop game" perspective. Many things felt like common sense but with some expenses where gameplay is concerned. We really enjoyed the game, to the point where I'd prefer another game of 4th over a game of 9th. Though some things could benefit from some tweaking.

-list building.
It was really quite fun making the lists. For those that don’t know there’s no allies or such in 4th (with the one exception of the inquisition and their deamon enemies). So everything was restricted to a single codex. You have a list of wargear that characters can chose from. This goes for independent characters and squad leaders. It means sergeants and captains generally have access to the same equipment. So I could make imperial guard sergeants with refractor fields, powerfists and storm bolsters. I also don’t need to put a 4+save or involve save on my imperial guard captain. why would he need anything other then the reliable 5+ flak armour? I had lots of fun with this for both my armies. Also it was very easy and enjoyable to make a list. If I make a list in 9th I commonly sit with 3-5 books open, if I don’t use battlescribe. I’d forgotten the pleasure of tailoring my army with one book. I also experienced a great deal of control. Many choices I feel are made for me in 9th, like an imperial guard captain will always have a 5+invo save and a 4+armour save. I enjoyed the sensation of tailoring stuff with minimal choices being forced on me. Also the ability of picking gear for my sergeants was welcome. You are also bound to just one FOC in 4th as opposed to the infinite detachments in 9th. That means you always need to bring 2 troop choices, 1hq choice and a maximum of 3 elite, 3hvy support and 3fast attack. No extra FOC allowed, this is what you get.

-gameplay
Let’s start with the overarching stuff. The whole game had a much slower pace to it. It also felt much less deadly. We both quickly realized that the games would continue until the last turn. Also both players had plenty of units left, though I got tabled at the final turn of the second game. This we figured was also welcome. The slower pace and longer game meant we could chill a bit more during gameplay. There's also a certain design philosophy we both liked. In 9th a lot of gameplay feel very... "gamey". Like things are made to be smooth and to make a good game. In 4th many rules felt very reasonable. As in if the miniatures actually where soliders on an alien battlefield, what would happen and how would they act? I wouldn't go so far to call it realistic. But it certainly makes more of an effort to be somewhat reasonable then some later editions. One more big thing we noted was that ranges are very important. 24" is a real limitation in 4th. You generally deploy 24" or further from each other so getting a shot of first turn with 24" weapons is not at all guaranteed. You can't shot a rapid fire weapon at full range if you move, and only heavy weapons if you remain stationary. This means the 24" works as a area denial kill zone. I quite liked this. You really had to think about movement and weapon ranges. Also leadership is an incredibly important strat. You have to test it to shot at any enemy that's not the closest. Test it after taking 25% casualities from enemy fire. Test it after losing combat and it suffers a -1 if your unit is below 50% of it's starting str. I quite liked this.

-mission select
In 4th every army has a stat called "strategic rating". It's a number added to a dice roll deciding which mission to pick. Since we didn't know the various missions we skipped this rule. It's seemed a bit unnecessary. When you roll for the standard missions you roll 1-5 for missions and a 6 uses the strategic rating rule. So It's an interesting concept but I don't really see why it's there at all. Also all missions had three levels which governed the amount of special rules allowed. We where indifferent to this, good for newer players I guess.

-Deployment
This was way more fun and interesting then I anticipated. In 4th both players take turns deploying units one at a time. Units must be deployed in the following order: heavy support, troop, elite, hq, fast attack. Though some mission variation might occur. The concept of "no mans land" didn't exist. Instead a unit is deployed certain amount of of inches from table edge or table center (or different, depending on the mission). No opposing models can be deployed within 24" of each other. This lead to some mind games of where to deploy certain units and where to commit the force. I really liked this. Since both players deny each other one had to formulate a plan on how to achieve either the mission objective or go for the kill everyone strat. when coupled with the cover rules it provided a very fun experience.

-Cover
It's all about the area terrain in 4th. You can see 6" into a terrain piece but not further. There's no universal d6 run move, so most unit's move either 6" or 2d6 (pick highest) in terrain. This means that during deployment terrain is key. You need to keep check on how far your opponent can see your models and vice versa. I really liked the cover mechanics and the larger terrain pieces dominated the focus of the game. Much as I imagine a real battlefield might have.

-Vehicles
wow, vehicles really are vehicles in this edition. They can't fight in close combat but they also cannot be locked in close combat. This means they'll just fire away at the surrounding models. You measure visibility and range from each guns location. At one point I didn't want to pivot a leman russ because it might get immobilized by the terrain it was in. This lead to it only being able to fire two of its 3 heavy bolters against a group of gaunts. I quie liked this. I made a choice in the movement phase that directly affected the shooting phase. I guess that the vehicles are more fragile in 4th but honestly I didn't really feel it much. Whenever my vehicles died I felt like they would have died regardless of edition. Also it was quite cool when a vehicles gun was destroyed by an enemy missile or a track was destroyed immobilizing the vehicle. I guess what I'm saying is that I really enjoyed the sensation of vehicles feeling like vehicles. Also tank shocking was absolutely hilarious. I was able to set up fire zones for blasts and proper charges with tank shocks.

-Close combat
A charge is 6". That's it. Close combat is one of the things I remembered most fondly from 4th. Sadly it was the part of the game I found the most tedious now, and it did not really feel like a swirling melee. It worked just fine with a unit vs another unit. But once multiple units get involved, as well as independent characters it got very clunky. Units are very limited in who they can hit. This means they can get tied up by models in base to base contact with them. If that happens they can't target their attacks at units not in base contact with them... It's a little difficult to explain. But in essence close combat was the part of the game I enjoyed the least.

-Stratgems, warlord traits and so on.
no stratgems, no warlord traits, no relics, no psyichic phase, no orders. This was actually surprisingly welcome. We both felt like we could focus more on the game at hand and not keep so many other aspects in mind, like when to spend CP or how to maximize our re-rolls. It was actually a much less demanding experience. Also most guard players have at some point made mistakes with orders. It was actually kind of nice not having to think about all these extra layers during game. Though this is highly subjective. I guess you could argue that doctrines and such are a replacement. They are mostly important during list building though and are more like a permanent upgrade for units during the game. So less to think about.

-Final thoughts
If you made it this far then I hope you enjoyed reading this summary. We overall really enjoyed our time spent with 4th. Did I like it more then 9th? Yes actually, I think I did. Mostly because 9th is such a demanding game to play. We often feel like games are decided on the 1-2 turn in 9th. In 4th we felt like games will probably go on until at least turn 5 and still being somewhat inconclusive. You generally don't lose that many models turn 1 in 4th, which we both considered a plus. An alpha strike seems much harder to pull of. The whole game also has a much more relaxing less demanding slow pace to it. You have to do many calculations while playing 40k anyway so we enjoyed the reduction in mental demands. We're planning on trying out 5th next. We figured maybe of making a house rule for the stuff in 4th we found tedious or weird (close combat mainly) and run a sort of 4.5 game in the future. Also to expand unit entries for some models that didn't have rules at the time. I hope this post provides some food for thoughts for people. There's a constant debate of "then vs now" going on in 40k. So at least now I have a bit of experience with the "then". This ended up becoming more about my experience then a proper discussion thread. Any thoughts on the then and now things here is very welcome. I'd recommend trying out playing the older editions for all players. It really does put interesting perspective on the game.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 09:19:05


Post by: AngryAngel80


I would agree with you on what you point out, glad you enjoyed your game of 4th.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 09:27:26


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Nice post.

I preferred 3rd to 4th, but it's interesting to hear the talk of the game being less demanding.

There aren't so many layers of rules piled upon layers of rules (makes sense - the game had done away with most of that nonsense when it moved away from 3rd). It's unfortunate that 9th got to the state 3rd was in so quickly into its life cycle.

Ah well. 10th will be out in 18 or so months, so it won't matter.



So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 09:52:42


Post by: Aash


Really nice post!

I fondly remember 4th edition.

Out of curiosity, especially as you mentioned the importance of 24” ranges, what are your thoughts on the game not allowing pre-measuring for ranges?

Though my memories of 4th edition are mostly good, I do remember there were some match-ups that were really one sided. Specifically nids vs tau or eldar.

I played Tyranids back then, and they were very limited in anti-tank ranged weapons. If some genestealers with their rending claws or a monster hit in base contact with a tank they could take it down, but skimmers had a rule where you couldn’t hit it in CC unless you rolled a 6 or something like that. It made taking out things like hammerheads and wave serpents all but impossible.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 10:15:38


Post by: Sarigar


4th was an enjoyable edition. It still had some quirks, as every edition has such as the overly resilient Falcon and, IIRC, Nob Biker wound allocation shenanigans.

Cool that you all gave it try.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 10:48:09


Post by: Da Boss


I'd say 3rd/4th/5th was my best time with the game, with 5e being when I had the most fun.

I mostly just played Orks through that entire time, and I often was frustrated waiting for an update to my codex due to how weak it was for a long time. But I enjoyed playing a lot. Probably my least favourite rule from those games was the rules for skimmers. They made sense, but certain armies just didn't have a good answer to them. I'd probably do something like let monstrous creatures attack skimmers normally instead of hitting on sixes, and maybe give a couple extra wargear options for taking them down in melee or something.

I liked how those editions tried to some extent to simulate a battlefield, and I find it offputting for 8e that it's a lot more gamey. Which is weird, because I like 4e D&D which is the gamiest edition - but then again, I also like 3e and 5e.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 10:54:38


Post by: Karol


Very interesting thing to read about, as I had no expiriance with editions other then 8th and 9th.

The 4th ed deployment seems to be cool, at least on paper.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 11:26:30


Post by: aphyon


Welcome back brother!

3rd - 5th were the best of times, some rules implementations were better in one edition then tossed out for the next, which is why my group as well as Mezmorki's pro-hammer bases most of our rules on 5th but borrow the better rules from 3rd/4th or 7th to make 5th better.

As in if the miniatures actually where soliders on an alien battlefield, what would happen and how would they act? I wouldn't go so far to call it realistic. But it certainly makes more of an effort to be somewhat reasonable then some later editions.


This right here is why i prefer old hammer above the current edition. playing the game and having the armies behave like they should in the lore is the best part of enjoying "the play" of the game not just the winning/loosing part.

++ The imperial saint, Andy Chambers...blessed of the emperor, we shall not see his like again. ++


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Da Boss wrote:
I'd say 3rd/4th/5th was my best time with the game, with 5e being when I had the most fun.

I mostly just played Orks through that entire time, and I often was frustrated waiting for an update to my codex due to how weak it was for a long time. But I enjoyed playing a lot. Probably my least favourite rule from those games was the rules for skimmers. They made sense, but certain armies just didn't have a good answer to them. I'd probably do something like let monstrous creatures attack skimmers normally instead of hitting on sixes, and maybe give a couple extra wargear options for taking them down in melee or something.

I liked how those editions tried to some extent to simulate a battlefield, and I find it offputting for 8e that it's a lot more gamey. Which is weird, because I like 4e D&D which is the gamiest edition - but then again, I also like 3e and 5e.


Well everybody hated eldar skimmers, all the marines had was a land speeder and nearly every gun in the game could shoot them down. So not all skimmers were created equal, however always counting as moving over 6" was a dumb rule for hitting them in CC so our group just uses the actual movement so it is still auto/4+/6+ even for skimmers.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 11:35:03


Post by: the_scotsman


I've always been of the opinion that the best edition of the game is the one where nobody's powergaming. The things you can do to make life miserable for the other person varied, edition by edition, but there's always been *something* that if you avoid it, tends to make the game vastly better.

I will agree, 100%, on thinking the current game is way, WAY, WAYYYY too deadly, and occasionally for me that's the only reason I need to play an older ed. There's things I do not miss at all about them (I'll spare my rant about random breakpoints in stats) but man, just...please god, give me a version of the game where everything doesn't evaporate instantaneously, please.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 12:07:08


Post by: tneva82


 the_scotsman wrote:
I've always been of the opinion that the best edition of the game is the one where nobody's powergaming. The things you can do to make life miserable for the other person varied, edition by edition, but there's always been *something* that if you avoid it, tends to make the game vastly better.

I will agree, 100%, on thinking the current game is way, WAY, WAYYYY too deadly, and occasionally for me that's the only reason I need to play an older ed. There's things I do not miss at all about them (I'll spare my rant about random breakpoints in stats) but man, just...please god, give me a version of the game where everything doesn't evaporate instantaneously, please.


Problem is with GW making core rules slower and slower making things deadlier is only way it can keep games go reasonably fast. Unless GW wants to scale points down so that 2k would be more like current 600 pts.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 12:27:45


Post by: Da Boss


I think if you want a "IGOUGO" kind of game, then lower lethality is kinda required to allow for a fair game.

I'm probably gonna track down the 4e and 5e rulebooks on ebay at some point. I got the 3e book again and it really struck me how many scenarios there were and how cool they all were. I'm gonna use those scenarios for Grimdark Future because they're just so flavourful and enjoyable! I also like all the hobby advice in the 3e and 4e books, all the different battlefields they show and the crafting tips. That disappears in 5e because they want to sell their own kits, so that's something I miss from back then as well - the kitbashing creativity of those days. They had guides for making your own sentry models, and entire game modes and stuff included.

I'm pretty sure I could play 8e/9e and enjoy it especially if I played someone else who was learning and we discovered it together. But I find the barrier to entry just a bit too high for me when I can get into similar games with a lot less hassle. I'm not really interested in investing in rules when the edition change seems to be locked down to such a short cycle nowadays. 40K goes through editions at double the rate of D&D for example, and I'm not really interested in that. It's about 3 years per edition nowadays and I'm not really in a position to play enough to get a lot out of that.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 13:42:43


Post by: Deadnight


4th was the edition I played most of. It refined a lot of the issues of third, but didn't solve all,and created some of its own.

Vehicles were a lot more vulnerable in this edition, and aside from skimmers (tau, eldar) I remember a lot of factions turning to their footsloggers and camping. 6mas las/Plas was a staple of the edition.

One frustration I remember was the vast gulf of difference between monstrous creatures and tanks. One rail gun shot could obliterate vehicle, it wouldn't even cause a hiccup to an MC. And there were some disgusting MCs back then.

Overall it was a solid baseline, with some tweaks it would have been amazing.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 14:04:40


Post by: the_scotsman


 Da Boss wrote:
I think if you want a "IGOUGO" kind of game, then lower lethality is kinda required to allow for a fair game.

I'm probably gonna track down the 4e and 5e rulebooks on ebay at some point. I got the 3e book again and it really struck me how many scenarios there were and how cool they all were. I'm gonna use those scenarios for Grimdark Future because they're just so flavourful and enjoyable!


GDF is if anything more deadly than 9e. Have you had a different experience with it?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 14:06:39


Post by: Da Boss


Yeah I've played it and it is very lethal. I think the fact that it's AA mitigates it, but overall I'm into it because it's easy, not because I think the balance is great. I'd say 5e is much more balanced than GDF, but I can't get my wife to play that with me unfortunately!


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 14:11:19


Post by: kirotheavenger


I've heard GDF recently did a big balance patch?
Have you any experience with that?

Although I'd heard the main change was reducing most 2+ save infantry to 3+, so I'd imagine it's only gotten more lethal.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 16:34:50


Post by: Unit1126PLL


This is why I think it is silly that people say "40k has never been about a battle in the real setting and has always been a gamey mess!"

Well, it was once.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 16:40:41


Post by: the_scotsman


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
This is why I think it is silly that people say "40k has never been about a battle in the real setting and has always been a gamey mess!"

Well, it was once.


Aaaaaaaaaaas long as you and your opponent both abstained from such tactics as, you know

-using close combat as a nya nya cant touch me zone and sweeping across the battlefield using pile in moves to always stay in combat
-using wound allocation shenanigans to make sure every single ork nob biker in a unit gets a boo-boo before the first one starts dying
-forcing every single unit to string across the battlefield in perfect 2" grid spacing to avoid blast weaponry
-bitching and moaning at your opponent about base to base contact, quibbling over percentages of obscurement for cover saves, insisting on exact RAW for doors and ladders/staircases for every terrain feature (myeeeeeeeh unfortunately you've placed a ruin in my deployment zone that doesn't have any ladders or stairs to the upper floor, so while I am allowed to deploy my unit on top of it, you are not allowed to climb up to the top with anyone)

etc, etc, etc.

....because those turned the game into a gamey mess. It's almost like the attitude one takes into the game system matters quite a bit more than the actual content of the rules when it comes to avoiding immersion-breaking scenarios.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 16:48:09


Post by: Gnarlly


Very nice to read your overview. 4th is still my favorite edition of 40k (hence my avatar image).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 16:50:12


Post by: Daedalus81


Yep. Any edition of warhammer can be a blast if you're playing in a carefree environment when no one looks to abuse mechanics.

I had tons of fun in those editions, but they just don't hold up to today's scrutiny.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 17:00:15


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 the_scotsman wrote:
 Unit1126PLL wrote:
This is why I think it is silly that people say "40k has never been about a battle in the real setting and has always been a gamey mess!"

Well, it was once.


Aaaaaaaaaaas long as you and your opponent both abstained from such tactics as, you know

-using close combat as a nya nya cant touch me zone and sweeping across the battlefield using pile in moves to always stay in combat (something you had control over as the player since they could only overrun 1d6)
-using wound allocation shenanigans to make sure every single ork nob biker in a unit gets a boo-boo before the first one starts dying(wrong edition, this was 5th)
-forcing every single unit to string across the battlefield in perfect 2" grid spacing to avoid blast weaponry (this is a tactical choice that has consequences, and spacing out as far as possible in case of explosion is a realistic thing)
-bitching and moaning at your opponent about base to base contact, quibbling over percentages of obscurement for cover saves, insisting on exact RAW for doors and ladders/staircases for every terrain feature (myeeeeeeeh unfortunately you've placed a ruin in my deployment zone that doesn't have any ladders or stairs to the upper floor, so while I am allowed to deploy my unit on top of it, you are not allowed to climb up to the top with anyone) (true but this happens regardless of game - ANY game can have quibblers over distances and rules and coverage)

etc, etc, etc.

....because those turned the game into a gamey mess. It's almost like the attitude one takes into the game system matters quite a bit more than the actual content of the rules when it comes to avoiding immersion-breaking scenarios.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 17:03:28


Post by: a_typical_hero


Seconded and thirded.

The game had issues back then as it got issues today.

A big part of how much they affect you and your enjoyment is up to having the right people to play with.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 17:13:56


Post by: AnomanderRake


 the_scotsman wrote:
...-bitching and moaning at your opponent about base to base contact, quibbling over percentages of obscurement for cover saves, insisting on exact RAW for doors and ladders/staircases for every terrain feature (myeeeeeeeh unfortunately you've placed a ruin in my deployment zone that doesn't have any ladders or stairs to the upper floor, so while I am allowed to deploy my unit on top of it, you are not allowed to climb up to the top with anyone)...


I'm going to pick this one out specially for ridicule; if you're going to whine about base contact you're probably going to whine about "within 1" and pull out the Warmachine measuring tools, if you're going to quibble about percentage-obscured you're going to quibble about whether your antenna can actually see my antenna, and you didn't need ladders/stairs to move up or down in ruins in 4th. Any game can be ruined by being a dick. This isn't news.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 kirotheavenger wrote:
I've heard GDF recently did a big balance patch?
Have you any experience with that?

Although I'd heard the main change was reducing most 2+ save infantry to 3+, so I'd imagine it's only gotten more lethal.


Not necessarily; AP3 shooting is way rarer/more expensive in 4e than it is in 5e-7e (Guard Stormtroopers are still AP5, no hellchickens, no volley guns, no Knights, three Russes maximum per game (no squadrons, one detachment only, no tank commanders), Basilisks indirect-fired with 24" minimum range and had to scatter 3d6", etc.) and power weapons are still "ignore all armour" (and still very expensive to take anywhere other than on HQs). On top of that there was almost no 2+-save infantry in the first place (off the top of my head that's just Terminators, Obliterators, Meganobz, and I think you could put extended carapace on hive guard), unless you wanted to try paying HQ prices for artificer armour on SM Veterans and end up paying 75-100pts/model for your "broken deathstar" of 1-W bikers.

I haven't heard of this GDF balance patch and Googling it isn't turning anything up, do you have a link?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 17:38:14


Post by: the_scotsman


 AnomanderRake wrote:
 the_scotsman wrote:
...-bitching and moaning at your opponent about base to base contact, quibbling over percentages of obscurement for cover saves, insisting on exact RAW for doors and ladders/staircases for every terrain feature (myeeeeeeeh unfortunately you've placed a ruin in my deployment zone that doesn't have any ladders or stairs to the upper floor, so while I am allowed to deploy my unit on top of it, you are not allowed to climb up to the top with anyone)...


I'm going to pick this one out specially for ridicule; if you're going to whine about base contact you're probably going to whine about "within 1" and pull out the Warmachine measuring tools, if you're going to quibble about percentage-obscured you're going to quibble about whether your antenna can actually see my antenna, and you didn't need ladders/stairs to move up or down in ruins in 4th. Any game can be ruined by being a dick. This isn't news.



It's bizarre to write "I completely agree with your point" as "I'm going to pick this one out specially for ridicule."

to be clear: My point is that the best edition of any wargame to play is the one where people aren't specifically finding ways to game the mechanics as much as possible to pull out a win at the cost of the other player's enjoyment.

There's no edition of 40k where you can't and where competitive players playing during that edition's run didn't find every single mechanic that could be abused to make the game miserable for their opponent. Most of the time, when people go back and play old editions or go and play a different game is either a shared ignorance of, or conscious rejection of, that edition or game's abusable mechanics.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 18:42:20


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 the_scotsman wrote:
to be clear: My point is that the best edition of any wargame to play is the one where people aren't specifically finding ways to game the mechanics as much as possible to pull out a win at the cost of the other player's enjoyment.

There's no edition of 40k where you can't and where competitive players playing during that edition's run didn't find every single mechanic that could be abused to make the game miserable for their opponent. Most of the time, when people go back and play old editions or go and play a different game is either a shared ignorance of, or conscious rejection of, that edition or game's abusable mechanics.


While this may be fact, I don't think it's helpful to bring up - at least, unless you're making the claim that no edition can be better than any other edition because dicks will be dicks regardless of edition (which is quite the claim).

I don't think you're trying to make that claim, so why bring it up?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 18:48:00


Post by: DarkHound


 the_scotsman wrote:
Most of the time, when people go back and play old editions or go and play a different game is either a shared ignorance of, or conscious rejection of, that edition or game's abusable mechanics.
I think this is a critical point, and I think that players only go back and play one or two games of the older edition so the novelty doesn't wear off. I'm absolutely not going to say that the older editions have no merit. However, if you engage with it you'll remember the internal codex balance was usually out of whack, and the diversity of options didn't really create choices. It's not even abuse of mechanics, merely adaption to the demands of the system; if you're at all trying to play well, then you will make such considerations. If a unit doesn't do anything useful for a few games, you'll probably swap it out with a better one.

And actually, here's an interesting video on the changes the game went through. Essentially, the complexity of the game got shifted from stats and special abilities in 2nd, to core rules in 3-7th, and now to complex army rules with simplified everything else in 8th and 9th. That may be why the older edition feels less intense to play: once you've memorized the core book, you're basically there and 4th and 5th weren't so complicated yet as 6th and 7th would become.



So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 18:54:38


Post by: AnomanderRake


 the_scotsman wrote:
...Most of the time, when people go back and play old editions or go and play a different game is either a shared ignorance of, or conscious rejection of, that edition or game's abusable mechanics.


Well, yeah. The reason I go back to old editions isn't because the old edition as written as a tournament game was perfect or not abuseable, it's because they're way less work to fix than 8th/9th. (Also because 8th/9th are really abstract/deterministic and vehicle damage tables, fire arcs, blast templates, and scatter die added a lot to my own sense of immersion in the game.)


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 19:00:45


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 DarkHound wrote:
 the_scotsman wrote:
Most of the time, when people go back and play old editions or go and play a different game is either a shared ignorance of, or conscious rejection of, that edition or game's abusable mechanics.
I think this is a critical point, and I think that players only go back and play one or two games of the older edition so the novelty doesn't wear off. I'm absolutely not going to say that the older editions have no merit. However, if you engage with it you'll remember the internal codex balance was usually out of whack, and the diversity of options didn't really create choices. It's not even abuse of mechanics, merely adaption to the demands of the system; if you're at all trying to play well, then you will make such considerations. If a unit doesn't do anything useful for a few games, you'll probably swap it out with a better one.


This isn't a bad thing in a normal wargame.

Let's talk about "behave the way they really would on an alien world". If you want your players and troops on the table to fit into the setting, having rules that encourage things to "behave they way they really would on an alien world" is actually a positive thing.

Other wargames do this all the time, like LOTR encouraging pike models to form pike formations. You could view it as an "abusable mechanic" that pikes can attack in 3 ranks deep, or you could view it as a drawback to bring a pike since you're paying points for something that you get no use out of in a disorganized melee (which is the easiest kind of melee to force). Or you could view it as the game naturally encouraging players to rank their pikes into blocks at least three ranks deep, in order to foster a sense of the models/players "behaving the way they really would".

Another example, and more appropriate, is the spreading out against blast templates. That's not an "abusable mechanic" - that's realism. Units of men really should spread out when confronted with explosive weapons and area-of-effect threats. I never really got the critique of this, other than "it takes a lot of time" which is fair enough if you're bored or you have a time limit - no arguments there, it can take a while. Still, there are consequences for this choice to spread out and a clever player can take advantage of them.

The downside, of course, is that GW is crap, and so in the natural push to have things "behave as they would", sometimes they would feth up and apply pressure to make things "behave in totally disconnected and bizarre ways incongruous with the setting." I would submit, however, that this was less bad in 4th than in, say, 9th. In fact, a common refrain today (that horrifies me!) is "Game is not equal to Lore". Just an admission that things being totally disconnected and incongruous with the setting is *shrug* par for the course.

EDIT: To add a TL;DR:
It is okay for wargames to encourage behavior in armies and players. It just needs to make sure that the encouraged behavior is congruous with the setting, rather than incongruous.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 19:29:35


Post by: DarkHound


I agree, and I think in the abstract that the core rules of 4th and 5th lend themselves to that (I do miss vehicle facings and weapon arcs). My contention was the concrete issue of the codexes themselves. You have lots of options, but it's clear that so many of them are bad. You can only take so many purposefully bad choices before the fun of the army buckles. The force organization chart is so strict that the end result is a pretty narrow band of functional builds that are only coincidentally fluffy.

Again, not that this issue rears its head immediately, but it's something you have to confront after continuous play.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 19:37:10


Post by: AnomanderRake


 DarkHound wrote:
I agree, and I think in the abstract that the core rules of 4th and 5th lend themselves to that (I do miss vehicle facings and weapon arcs). My contention was the concrete issue of the codexes themselves. You have lots of options, but it's clear that so many of them are bad. You can only take so many purposefully bad choices before the fun of the army buckles. The force organization chart is so strict that the end result is a pretty narrow band of functional builds that are only coincidentally fluffy.

Again, not that this issue rears its head immediately, but it's something you have to confront after continuous play.


And the sheer size of the spectrum between good units and bad units, plus whatever your faction's required support stack is, ends up with a pretty narrow band of functional builds that are only coincidentally fluffy in 8th/9th. I know the problem exists now/existed then, but I don't think it was worse in past editions.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 19:50:06


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 DarkHound wrote:
I agree, and I think in the abstract that the core rules of 4th and 5th lend themselves to that (I do miss vehicle facings and weapon arcs). My contention was the concrete issue of the codexes themselves. You have lots of options, but it's clear that so many of them are bad. You can only take so many purposefully bad choices before the fun of the army buckles. The force organization chart is so strict that the end result is a pretty narrow band of functional builds that are only coincidentally fluffy.

Again, not that this issue rears its head immediately, but it's something you have to confront after continuous play.


Yes, codex design is an issue for sure, one that once again GW is pretty crap at, and has repeatedly shown to be. I'm not really sure what the solution to this is (outside of doing it yourself or waiting for GW to improve... someday... maybe.) 8th and 9th isn't really better on this point at all.

I certainly would never argue that going back to past editions helps the "trap options" problem, but it can help the "WARgame" vs "warGAME" problem, which isn't really related (and seems to be more what the OP was praising about 4th).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/06/30 20:29:08


Post by: jeff white


Thanks for the summary. Brings back a lot of memories. Second third and fourth we’re best dependent on player partner… second was my fav but 3rd and 4th were great.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 10:05:18


Post by: A.T.


 Nerak wrote:
The whole game had a much slower pace to it. It also felt much less deadly.
An era when getting a 4th heavy support slot was considered a significant advantage, and when an inquisitor with a few servitors (one plasma cannon) was a viable fire support unit.
I think 3e got a little carried away with the big guns in places (1000pts of DE was 1000pts of lances...), 4e pulled it in, and then 5e gradually ramped it back up.

Depending on factions 5e can be even less deadly in the first turn or so, going second was often a winning strategy though having to castle against pods was tedious.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 10:51:33


Post by: Sarigar


One thing to note about previous editions is terrain. It is hard to extrapolate the differences between now and then, but I can definitely say the games I play now utilize a LOT more terrain than 4th edition (or any edition prior to 8th, for that matter).

I wonder what some of the older editions would play like with modern terrain? I don't recall specifics of old terrain rules, but definitely remember boards we played on that would now be called planet bowling ball.

In my opinion, who you game with is generally more important than any single edition in 40K. Having a solid core of players with like minded goals for what you want to get out of the game has made every edition enjoyable. Every edition had significant exploits which could certainly impact the enjoyment if players were not on the same page on how said exploits will be managed (everything is fair game and build the meanest breadstick you can; do we mitigate x, y, and z?; etc...)

The one thing I do remember that I did not like about 4th was the change in Codex design philosophy. The change from the 3.5 Chaos Codex to 4th ed Codex was really not well received in many circles.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 11:03:19


Post by: A.T.


 Sarigar wrote:
I wonder what some of the older editions would play like with modern terrain? I don't recall specifics of old terrain rules, but definitely remember boards we played on that would now be called planet bowling ball.
Some tournaments back then were also criticised for being planet bowling ball, though it was a compromise in 5th in particular as you needed a few LoS blockers but you didn't want to overdo it on the 4+ cover saves or make deepstrikes suicidal.


 Sarigar wrote:
The one thing I do remember that I did not like about 4th was the change in Codex design philosophy. The change from the 3.5 Chaos Codex to 4th ed Codex was really not well received in many circles.
It was certainly dry.

Nothing survived the move to late 4th/5th edition with the old veteran skills and 'abuse your own tradeoffs' rules intact. IIRC Gav Thorpe said something along the lines of the old system being a million options that ultimately resulted in only handful of highly optimized combinations, whereas books that didn't let you twink out your units meant that players could play their prefered models without such a wide gap between the 'good' and the 'bad' options.
And that was 4e chaos to a degree, you could play lash princes and plague marines but the gap back to something like a pure thousand sons list wasn't anything like as large as the gap between 3.5 siren/iron warrior type lists and a 3.5 casual list. It would probably be better remembered if rampant 5e codex creep didn't walk over it (looking at you, Space Wolves).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 11:46:30


Post by: aphyon


 Sarigar wrote:
One thing to note about previous editions is terrain. It is hard to extrapolate the differences between now and then, but I can definitely say the games I play now utilize a LOT more terrain than 4th edition (or any edition prior to 8th, for that matter).

I wonder what some of the older editions would play like with modern terrain? I don't recall specifics of old terrain rules, but definitely remember boards we played on that would now be called planet bowling ball.

In my opinion, who you game with is generally more important than any single edition in 40K. Having a solid core of players with like minded goals for what you want to get out of the game has made every edition enjoyable. Every edition had significant exploits which could certainly impact the enjoyment if players were not on the same page on how said exploits will be managed (everything is fair game and build the meanest breadstick you can; do we mitigate x, y, and z?; etc...)

The one thing I do remember that I did not like about 4th was the change in Codex design philosophy. The change from the 3.5 Chaos Codex to 4th ed Codex was really not well received in many circles.


It is actually just the opposite the terrain was a lot more important to the game play in previous editions. the main complaint was that tournaments never had enough terrain because they had to transport so much for so many tables.

The attempt to go from nearly zero impact 8th ed terrain to 9th ed terrain makes new players think it was a huge improvement when actually it was a minor step back to previous edition where terrain rules were better and much more involved. directly affecting movement, cover, as well as LOS etc.. . 5th ed terrain rules could go from a 2+ cover save to a 6+ or be difficult, dangerous or impassable.depending on what was out there. but it was much more reliant on the players to make their own terrain. . as GW didn't really start pushing their own terrain products until late 5th ed.

As somebody who regularly still uses 5th ed terrain rules i can say modern terrain would be absolute rubbish if you are talking GWs new stuff as it had no defined borders for area terrain and loads of holes for true LOS. we use terrain mats to keep things fresh because they are modular but my FLG also has pre-made terrain tables (mostlymade for tourneys) that you added terrain to to make the game more interesting.


Here are a few examples

mid 5th ed GW sanctioned GT terrain (or lack there of) table i played on when i still went to those events-

Spoiler:


Compared to our own store tables

4th ed at my first FLGS tabletop (still miss the place)

Remember this was 4th so those templates blocked LOS (also hats off to steve and rags miss you guys )

Spoiler:



And some 5th ed games on custom tables with added terrain in the age before mats

Spoiler:


Spoiler:



Most 3rd and 4th ed codexes were still very focused on the lore in how the armies behaved a few in 5th still retained this kind of direction. As in the first post talked about how your soldiers would behave on this battlefield. using the chaos dex is a bad example. going from the best, most rewarding codex ever made for playing to the lore, to the watered down generic codex that was 4th is hardly a good comparison.

That is why we let players use whichever codex that is compatible (3rd-7th) in our house rules 5th edition games that they feel best represents the lore/rules of the armies they play. as it turns out there are quite a few 3rd and 4th ed codexes on the preferred use list.











So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 11:59:54


Post by: H.B.M.C.


 aphyon wrote:
Spoiler:


Spoiler:
Both these tables are absurd, but for completely opposite reasons.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:03:50


Post by: kirotheavenger


GW seems to consistently sell terrain that is absolute gash for the games they make.

The convoluted 'Obscuring' rule seems to be an attempt to remedy this.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:06:02


Post by: Sarigar


I remember GW run events and the lack of terrain was significant.

Forest outlines were very important back then. I don't ever recall playing with that much on a table. I could literally hide my entire army in the one pic with all the forest outlines.

Nowadays, the games I play there is plenty of options to ensure no player can get shot off the table on turn one unless one deploys poorly. It simply could have been the case we just used less terrain back then. I'll dig through some photos to check. I've played through every edition as they were released and it is easy for me to blend editions together, especially 3-4th and 6-7th.




So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:09:20


Post by: a_typical_hero


Am I the only one who didn't like terrain rules back then at all?

Flat cover save for standing inside terrain or even just behind your own unit, while there were very little to no weapons (Basilisk I think?) that ignored cover AND were powerful enough to still ignore any decent armor.

Tanks immobilising over every little piece of terrain with a chance of 1 in 6.

Difficult terrain for infantry was alright, dangerous terrain sometimes too.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:09:25


Post by: the_scotsman


 aphyon wrote:
 Sarigar wrote:
One thing to note about previous editions is terrain. It is hard to extrapolate the differences between now and then, but I can definitely say the games I play now utilize a LOT more terrain than 4th edition (or any edition prior to 8th, for that matter).

I wonder what some of the older editions would play like with modern terrain? I don't recall specifics of old terrain rules, but definitely remember boards we played on that would now be called planet bowling ball.

In my opinion, who you game with is generally more important than any single edition in 40K. Having a solid core of players with like minded goals for what you want to get out of the game has made every edition enjoyable. Every edition had significant exploits which could certainly impact the enjoyment if players were not on the same page on how said exploits will be managed (everything is fair game and build the meanest breadstick you can; do we mitigate x, y, and z?; etc...)

The one thing I do remember that I did not like about 4th was the change in Codex design philosophy. The change from the 3.5 Chaos Codex to 4th ed Codex was really not well received in many circles.


It is actually just the opposite the terrain was a lot more important to the game play in previous editions. the main complaint was that tournaments never had enough terrain because they had to transport so much for so many tables.

The attempt to go from nearly zero impact 8th ed terrain to 9th ed terrain makes new players think it was a huge improvement when actually it was a minor step back to previous edition where terrain rules were better and much more involved. directly affecting movement, cover, as well as LOS etc.. . 5th ed terrain rules could go from a 2+ cover save to a 6+ or be difficult, dangerous or impassable.depending on what was out there. but it was much more reliant on the players to make their own terrain. . as GW didn't really start pushing their own terrain products until late 5th ed.



My personal recollection from terrain in 5th was that it (and also 6th and possibly 7th) were editions in which GW presented a huge, convoluted mess of terrain rules and types and traits, and the players simply picked the one that provided the most impact for the least effort to remember. Usually "Everything Is Ruins."

I do not recall 2+ cover saves being a potential thing in 5th edition purely from the terrain alone - are you talking like, if I have a unit of Eldar Rangers or Space Marine Scouts I could get into terrain and thru their rules get a 2+? Because I very much recall the complaint with terrain in 5th was "what's the point of terrain, I play Marines and Cover saves are always worse than my 3+ save." Or was there actually a terrain type like "ultra hardened bunkers that give a 2+ cover save". I just remember Forest = 5+, Ruin = 4+.


As an Ork player, I LOVED terrain because I was I2 and basically never got to fight first anyway so charging into terain without Stikkbombs wasn't an issue usually but terrain provided me with a 4+ save when I was essentially not getting any save otherwise. But I believe 'terrain as modifier' came into effect precisely because of this complaint with the MEQ players and terrain not being impactful usually.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
a_typical_hero wrote:
Am I the only one who didn't like terrain rules back then at all?

Flat cover save for standing inside terrain or even just behind your own unit, while there were very little to no weapons (Basilisk I think?) that ignored cover AND were powerful enough to still ignore any decent armor.

Tanks immobilising over every little piece of terrain with a chance of 1 in 6.

Difficult terrain for infantry was alright, dangerous terrain sometimes too.


I do miss my personal favorite rule to make fun of: "Eyeing the Terrain". When you rolled a d6 to see what your movement would be if you were going to move into terrain, and you could actually roll low enough that you don't get to go in the terrain the explanation was "you're eyeing the terrain."

........and then your squad would always get exploded because they didnt make it into cover. Starting your move 2" from cover and rolling a 1 for your difficult terrain rule, one of the truly classic Womp Womp moments, lost to time like tears in rain...


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:15:21


Post by: kirotheavenger


In general I find the old edition's combination of cover, armour, and AP quite unsatisfying.

9th's system is a definite improvement, although I've not had a lot of experience with 9th's cover rules to really say.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:15:43


Post by: aphyon


How about these


Spoiler:



Spoiler:


I do not recall 2+ cover saves being a potential thing in 5th edition purely from the terrain alone - are you talking like, if I have a unit of Eldar Rangers or Space Marine Scouts I could get into terrain and thru their rules get a 2+? Because I very much recall the complaint with terrain in 5th was "what's the point of terrain, I play Marines and Cover saves are always worse than my 3+ save." Or was there actually a terrain type like "ultra hardened bunkers that give a 2+ cover save". I just remember Forest = 5+, Ruin = 4+.


Bunkers were a 3+ but modifiers like (tech marine) fortification, cammo cloaks, cammo netting, stealth, shrouding etc could boost it by +1 or +2, of course it ddin't matter if something got close to you with a flamer or an artillery piece that ignores cover.

There were also quite a few weapons in the game where marines needed cover saves especially against, chaos eldar and imperial guard.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:19:59


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Virtually unplayable. That second one especially.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:21:25


Post by: a_typical_hero


They are nice tables for a showcase, but I wouldn't want to play on them.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:25:07


Post by: aphyon


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Virtually unplayable. That second one especially.


Our DKOK players love that second table. for obvious reasons.

We do not always use as much LOS blocking i am trying to find a good pic of our rocky desert table.

Found one, we were playing dust but we use the same sort of setup for 40K


Spoiler:



So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:48:03


Post by: the_scotsman


Personally I find 9th ed's terrain system to be good, but a bit overly fiddly. The AOS 3.0 terrain system in my opinion is absolutely ideal. With a little bit of a boost up to account for the increased deadliness of 40k's ranged weaponry, it'd be the best terrain system 40k has ever had.

It's got everything I love:

1) abstracted building terrain that works like entering and exiting a transport vehicle, and which conveys a drawback in addition to a powerful benefit (units taking shelter in fortified positions are no longer operating at peak offensive efficiency)

2) Quick, easy to resolve verification of whether or not terrain interferes with the shot, due to being based on 'the shortest possible line that can be drawn between the bases/hulls' instead of TLOS or every possible line that can be drawn

3) Just three different terrain traits, which stack up - standard cover for +1sv, Dense cover for -1 to hit, and Defensible cover for both, and each layer has the rules of all previous layers so you can claim regular cover from a Defensible structure (by standing nearby and behind it, for example) or standard cover from a Dense cover piece, or suffer the penalty from Dense cover for firing thru a defensible piece.

No need to track a billion terrain traits, much more usable by most unit types, and real decision points as a player where taking advantage of a lot of terrain feature traits involves reducing your own offensive power in some way.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 12:53:19


Post by: kirotheavenger


I really like that "shortest line" approach, how does that work for squads?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 13:10:55


Post by: the_scotsman


 kirotheavenger wrote:
I really like that "shortest line" approach, how does that work for squads?


Each firing model to closest enemy model in target unit - just like you do when you draw range for the squad when firing their guns.

if that line passes thru any terrain piece that the target unit is within 2" of - +1 to sv
If that line passes thru any dense cover terrain (which includes Defensible pieces as well) - -1 to hit
If that line passes thru 3" or more of dense/defensible - line of sight is blocked for the attack.

And if a unit enters a Defensible terrain piece to garrison it, you now draw your line of sights to the terrain piece instead of the unit, and the unit gets both -1 to hit and +1 to sv.

The biggest adjustment from 9th is that entering Defensible basically takes you off the battlefield, so you cant use strats, secure objectives etc, it's a huge defensive buff but you're not going to be using the squad to hose people off with your sick strat/reroll combo wombos, and there's no way to benefit from Dense without also suffering the penalty yourself. If you're in the woods, you only don't suffer -1 to hit by shooting out if you move up to the very edge of the woods (in which case, an enemy firing back at you would not be doing so at -1 to hit, you'd just be claiming standard +1sv cover)

After an initial reaction upon reading it of 'ew, I don't like any of that' when I actually tried it in game I REALLY enjoyed how it played on the table, and the way it incentivised playing in a way that felt natural and not game-y which was the very first time I'd ever felt that about a 40k terrain system. After editions of "oooh I just gotta get the very last model to fit with its toe touching the base surrounding this building and then I get Cover!!!" it was very nice to approach a terrain piece and go

"Ok, I have 3 options - stand my unit behind this cover, and protect them from shooting but they can't shoot. Or I can enter the cover, gain -1 to hit and +1 to sv but I can't do my offensive stuff, or I can walk around the cover and unleash my maximum offense but gain no additional defenses."

"Ok, I've got a piece of Dense Cover - I can walk out to the edge, get +1 to sv, and hit at normal BS, or I can get my squad inside it, suffer -1 to hit myself but get -1 to hit +1sv, or I can stay behind it, and be out of LOS"

Worked fantastically with 9th edition's numerous different objectives and secondaries and actions and such.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 13:22:05


Post by: kirotheavenger


I don't like that it's impossible to benefit from cover whilst not being affected by it yourself.
Logically a unit should be able to stand behind a barricade and shoot over it without it obscuring their vision.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 13:22:50


Post by: Sarigar


I located some older photos. I think any photos of 3rd edition are not digitally saved and in print, haha.

Terrain back then, from my experience, was much more sparse than tables I play today.

The first 5 photos are from the old Ard Boyz and an Endless Games GT (4th or 5th edition, IIRC) and an in house game with a buddy and his Cobra themed IG. The last photo was from a tourney in Atlanta during 6th edition.


[Thumb - Vs. Tyranids.jpg]
[Thumb - VS Cobra IG.jpg]
[Thumb - Endless Games GT.jpg]
[Thumb - Endless Games GT Tables.jpg]
[Thumb - Ard Boyz Game 2 (keeping the distance).jpg]
[Thumb - 2014 6th Edition.jpg]


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 13:50:56


Post by: H.B.M.C.


That last one is passable. The rest are planet bowling ball.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 14:10:31


Post by: A.T.


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That last one is passable. The rest are planet bowling ball.
The first one wouldn't be terrible, that scenery in the middle would probably block all LoS to normal sized 3e-5e infantry.

Less of a fan of the corner buildings with an empty killing zone between them.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 16:59:05


Post by: DarkHound


 the_scotsman wrote:
Personally I find 9th ed's terrain system to be good, but a bit overly fiddly. The AOS 3.0 terrain system in my opinion is absolutely ideal. With a little bit of a boost up to account for the increased deadliness of 40k's ranged weaponry, it'd be the best terrain system 40k has ever had.

It's got everything I love:

1) abstracted building terrain that works like entering and exiting a transport vehicle, and which conveys a drawback in addition to a powerful benefit (units taking shelter in fortified positions are no longer operating at peak offensive efficiency)

2) Quick, easy to resolve verification of whether or not terrain interferes with the shot, due to being based on 'the shortest possible line that can be drawn between the bases/hulls' instead of TLOS or every possible line that can be drawn

3) Just three different terrain traits, which stack up - standard cover for +1sv, Dense cover for -1 to hit, and Defensible cover for both, and each layer has the rules of all previous layers so you can claim regular cover from a Defensible structure (by standing nearby and behind it, for example) or standard cover from a Dense cover piece, or suffer the penalty from Dense cover for firing thru a defensible piece.

No need to track a billion terrain traits, much more usable by most unit types, and real decision points as a player where taking advantage of a lot of terrain feature traits involves reducing your own offensive power in some way.
Honestly, that's pretty much how we play the terrain at our shop. We use lines from bases instead of "TLOS", and I've actually come around to using the Obscuring rule to extend to the entire terrain base footprint. It particularly helps vehicles actually use cover. It makes up for situations where 'the edge of my base can just see the edge of yours' because getting around that intervening basing actually demands the models be pretty exposed to each other; otherwise, even if they can see the butt of your tank, it will often still be obscured.

In practice, I don't think 9th's terrain keywords are hard to remember. Most things are ruins, barricades, craters, or forests, and the sum of their keywords makes them work exactly like you expect. Forests are defensible, slowing, and dense, instead of obscuring or light cover. Craters are light cover and slowing, but not defensible or anything else. Barricades are the most complicated, but again they work exactly like you'd expect: they only give cover if they're intervening and you're not standing on top, they're defensible and slowing, and they have that nifty "engagement range is 2" to models behind it" so you can fight over it.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/01 18:15:21


Post by: the_scotsman


 kirotheavenger wrote:
I don't like that it's impossible to benefit from cover whilst not being affected by it yourself.
Logically a unit should be able to stand behind a barricade and shoot over it without it obscuring their vision.


it can. Standard cover and Defensible cover works like that. The only thing that doesn't is Dense cover - which is basically the type of cover that provides protection by making it difficult to see through. So if you're not standing at the edge of the tangled vine forest or whatever and looking out, you suffer the -1 to hit as youre just as much affected by it as the opposing unit that's trying to see you.

And you do still claim standard Cover from being in defensible terrain, even if you move right to the edge to maximise your offense. You just dont claim both standard cover AND dense.

mostly, I just like the interplay of options, and I like the fact that terrain isn't just a thing that only works for INFANTRY and BEAST models - because god knows vehicles could use a little extra protection right now, LOL. The only thing Vehicles/monsters can't do is Garrison, and FLYERS/TITANIC ignore and are ignored by Dense (which because Dense and Obscuring are kind of combined, means you can't hide from or hide flyers and titanic units unless you're truly out of LOS - they're too tall, they can see you.

Every terrain system is going to involve some abstraction and some moments that dont quite seem to make perfect sense, but there's a lot that the AOS 3.0 modified system gets rid of that was a major gripe of mine in 8th and still in 9th. No more 'everyone can see me now the second I touch my toe to the terrain feature', no more 'sorry, your tank that's 99% obscured in a perfect hull down position is essentially the same as if it was sitting in the open', no more 'gotta carefully place every single model and measure every movement up and down in this rickity ruin that can just barely fit all my models in an incredibly complex coherency puzzle' and a lot of issues it kind of organically solves. All dense and defensible being effectively obscuring if you pass over more than 3" means that ALMOST every one of those bs 'i can see your antenna from my antenna across the board' LOS calls just fail instantly, and drawing the shortest line from model A to model B usually means nobody's firing all their guns out of the back rear corner of a tread to draw line of sight to a target.

The biggest thing you have to kind of wave your hands and imagine is when you've got a close combat involving a unit garrisoned in a building. As you move your models in the attacking unit such that theyre all within fight range of the building, you kind of have to imagine that they're trying to climb up walls and break down doors and climb through windows to get at the enemy unit inside, rather than them all lining up to punch the building.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 01:43:47


Post by: Sarigar


A.T. wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That last one is passable. The rest are planet bowling ball.
The first one wouldn't be terrible, that scenery in the middle would probably block all LoS to normal sized 3e-5e infantry.

Less of a fan of the corner buildings with an empty killing zone between them.


That was what I generally played in multiple venues a decade or so back. The GW events (GTs and RTTs at Games Days) had even less. I look at modern boards now and wonder how we even played on older boards.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 03:42:28


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Sarigar wrote:
A.T. wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That last one is passable. The rest are planet bowling ball.
The first one wouldn't be terrible, that scenery in the middle would probably block all LoS to normal sized 3e-5e infantry.

Less of a fan of the corner buildings with an empty killing zone between them.


That was what I generally played in multiple venues a decade or so back. The GW events (GTs and RTTs at Games Days) had even less. I look at modern boards now and wonder how we even played on older boards.


Maybe...you couldn't wipe the other guy from across the table in older editions with the ease you can today?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 04:15:02


Post by: DarkHound


Nah, they called 5e Imperial Guard artillery spam the "leaf blower" for a reason. Totally tabling your opponent in a couple turns was absolutely possible. Granted, it got famous after a serious of tournaments with less terrain, but that's more to my point.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 05:49:17


Post by: kodos


the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 06:17:20


Post by: Jidmah


 kirotheavenger wrote:
I don't like that it's impossible to benefit from cover whilst not being affected by it yourself.
Logically a unit should be able to stand behind a barricade and shoot over it without it obscuring their vision.


Barricades are obstacles and you need to be within 3" of obstacles to receive the benefit of cover. In general the rules for barricades are rather complicated, but make perfect sense for how barricades should work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 kodos wrote:
the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)




I faced multiple leafblower lists at that time, I specifically had deff koptas in my tournament list just to shake manticores. Some of those players still talk about the glory times of imperial artillery while looking at their now worthless hydras with teary eyes.

On the other hand, we had almost no longfang spamming space wolves here, which seemed to be the bane of everyone here on dakka until GK were released.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 07:02:07


Post by: Altruizine


I'm enjoying this thread's transition to nostalgic terrain talk across multiple eras/editions of the game.

"More terrain = better game" has been true of every edition, but the planet bowling ball paradigm lasted a long time. I think the sea change came when GW began producing and selling actual substantial terrain kits. When I started playing in 3rd the official terrain offerings were, like, a group of 3-4 trees that were provided unbased, and were only slightly taller than an infantry model, and a set of ruins corners that got up to Dreadnought-height for at least a fraction of their (puny) perimeter.

Nothing LoS-blocking, nothing with a default footprint, nothing with impressive height... if you wanted that kind of terrain you generally had to scratch build it. If you wanted enough for a tournament, you'd have to find builders (and funders) to make it happen on that scale. I sort of doubt that any WH tournament in the world had adequate terrain prior to the Cities of Death releases, whatever year that was (and even those kits were imperfect in combination with their edition of origin, since they didn't fully block LoS).

I do kind of miss the prevalence of homemade scenery, and I wish GW included more generic/nature pieces in their lines, but the ease of getting a decent board put together has advanced pretty far in the last 10-15 years.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 09:30:38


Post by: A.T.


 kodos wrote:
the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)
It was a 2500pt list, while EU games were (IIRC) typically 2000pts or less.

Even 2000pts was pushing it for some armies with the old FoC system as some books would run out of good choices whereas others (i.e. guard with its artillery squadrons) could take advantage of it. And at 2500pts your deployment zone was just one large block of targets that the guard literally couldn't miss with artillery.

Locally we only ever played 1500-1850 which worked much better. Smaller games worked but the lists could get more skewed without the same FoC pressure to vary units.

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

For what it's worth the original 2500pt leafblower consisted of :
-One inquisitor (anti-deepstrike)
-Two command squads in chimeras (plasmaguns)
-One infantry platoon (six squads in chimeras)
-Two veteran squads in chimeras (meltaguns)
-One psyker squad in chimera (single blast template)
-Two valkyries (rocket pods)
-Two medusas
-Two hydras
-One manticore

The artillery was only half the problem. Chimeras (like rhinos) had been made significantly cheaper and tougher and doubled up as mobile bunkers.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 09:34:52


Post by: aphyon


I do kind of miss the prevalence of homemade scenery, and I wish GW included more generic/nature pieces in their lines, but the ease of getting a decent board put together has advanced pretty far in the last 10-15 years.


There are currently loads of terrain suppliers now that do everything from the very basic to the very detailed.

I like most of what gale force 9 puts out in the form of rocks, rivers, water hazards and forests but the limited print runs makes it hard to find their stuff sometimes.

I am huge fan of the german ESLO hobby guys for fantastic finished terrain. and noble knight keeps it in stock

https://www.nobleknight.com/Publisher/ESLO-Hobby


That's not counting great 3d print designers like- district 12, war scenery, 2nd dynasty, dragons rest, hero's hoard, theprintpire


Available on EBAY and etsy stores like
canvas temple

https://www.ebay.com/sch/canvastemple/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=


district 12

https://www.etsy.com/search?q=District%200012

scatter terrain sets from theprintpire

https://www.etsy.com/listing/852171195/6-pc-spaceship-engine-room-mechanical?ref=shop_home_active_28

And many more.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 10:28:52


Post by: Jidmah


A.T. wrote:
 kodos wrote:
the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)
It was a 2500pt list, while EU games were (IIRC) typically 2000pts or less.

Even 2000pts was pushing it for some armies with the old FoC system as some books would run out of good choices whereas others (i.e. guard with its artillery squadrons) could take advantage of it. And at 2500pts your deployment zone was just one large block of targets that the guard literally couldn't miss with artillery.

Locally we only ever played 1500-1850 which worked much better. Smaller games worked but the lists could get more skewed without the same FoC pressure to vary units.

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

For what it's worth the original 2500pt leafblower consisted of :
-One inquisitor (anti-deepstrike)
-Two command squads in chimeras (plasmaguns)
-One infantry platoon (six squads in chimeras)
-Two veteran squads in chimeras (meltaguns)
-One psyker squad in chimera (single blast template)
-Two valkyries (rocket pods)
-Two medusas
-Two hydras
-One manticore

The artillery was only half the problem. Chimeras (like rhinos) had been made significantly cheaper and tougher and doubled up as mobile bunkers.


This argument keeps popping up every time, but essentially "leafblower" referred to the whole archetype, not just one specific list.

The core units of those lists were the manticore, hydras, valks and chimeras filled with plasma, melta and the psyker squad. They covered the entire board in large blast templates while just exposing a wall of AV12 to the enemy.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 10:34:25


Post by: a_typical_hero


As someone who played Guard in 5th, I can testify that it was really strong at 1850p as well.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 12:48:19


Post by: The_Real_Chris


 aphyon wrote:


3rd - 5th were the best of times, some rules implementations were better in one edition then tossed out for the next, which is why my group as well as Mezmorki's pro-hammer bases most of our rules on 5th but borrow the better rules from 3rd/4th or 7th to make 5th better.


Interesting view - did the game get better with each edition? 3rd ed killed 40k as a game for me. I didn't play again until 8th edition. Was 4th and 5th an improvement on 3rd?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 13:11:57


Post by: Jidmah


5th definitely was a great edition, but 6th was bad and 7th worse.

5th edition with the balance and tight rules writing of 9th would probably be a really awesome game.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 13:30:23


Post by: A.T.


a_typical_hero wrote:
As someone who played Guard in 5th, I can testify that it was really strong at 1850p as well.
Indeed. We had a local tau player and decent scenery so the hail of strength 10 wasn't quite as disconcerting.

Not being able to hide out of LoS, and having to fight something that could fight back when you closed the distance was somewhat trickier. The local guard player didn't have enough chimeras to really wall up though.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 18:28:04


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
5th definitely was a great edition, but 6th was bad and 7th worse.

5th edition with the balance and tight rules writing of 9th would probably be a really awesome game.


Maybe? The power creep/scale creep that characterized 6th/7th did definitely get their start in 5th; people complain a lot about Flyers but the plastic Flyer models that blew a lot of the game's speed assumptions out of the water got their start in 5th, mid-power-spam AT got its start because of 5e's revised vehicle damage tables and the efficiency of psyflemen Dreads and psycannons, spam-enabling tank squadrons started in 5e, the Dreadknight started the trend of throwing the vehicle/monster balance so out of whack it never recovered, and using named characters to change detachment rules was a pretty dumb idea.

That said the core rules barely changed going from 5th to 6th/7th; the problems with all three editions were there because of things in the Codexes, and any problems I've heard people grumble about with the core rules were mostly because of how stats were assigned. The only core rules from the entire 3rd-7th era I'd read as serious problems that need fixing rather than as stylistic changes you could easily write Codexes to accommodate were the CAD superheavy slot in 7th (which you could fix with the 30k rule that you can't spend more than 25% of your points on any one model), "Look Out, Sir!" in 6th-7th (which I've fixed in my own patched version of older rules by making it one 4+ for the whole attack sequence, and if you pass it you can't come back to that model until everyone else is dead or you attack again, but you could also easily fix by just going to older editions' wound allocation rather than casualties-to-closest), and the blast changes in 5th (in 4th you rolled to hit and only scattered the blast template if you missed, which means you scattered less often and scattered further when you did, while in 5th-7th you always scattered but often didn't scatter very far, which meant tiny differences in angles and distances suddenly made a huge amount of difference to the game). Flyers, monster/walker balance, the irrelevance of morale, snap shots, unfair distribution of reliable Reserves, unfair distribution of safe Deep Strike, Initiative balance, deathstar units, psyker balance, vehicle durability, mid-power spam AT, and D-weapons are all completely fixable Codex/statline problems.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 18:45:07


Post by: Jidmah


I disagree - since my orks only got a codex in 7th almost all their problems came from 6th edition's core rules, 7th fixed a

7th compared to 5th has many core rules that I seriously dislike: psychic phase, challenges, USR mess, cover nerf, hull points, remove casualties from the front, rhino sniping.
No deal. I'm never, ever giving the edition which made me quit the game a second chance.

It's also wroth noting that planes in 5th were just fast skimmers, a dakkajet was just as fast as a wave serpent, and a blast hit was a hit unless you were shooting something outside of LoS with barrage.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 18:56:13


Post by: AnomanderRake


The_Real_Chris wrote:
 aphyon wrote:


3rd - 5th were the best of times, some rules implementations were better in one edition then tossed out for the next, which is why my group as well as Mezmorki's pro-hammer bases most of our rules on 5th but borrow the better rules from 3rd/4th or 7th to make 5th better.


Interesting view - did the game get better with each edition? 3rd ed killed 40k as a game for me. I didn't play again until 8th edition. Was 4th and 5th an improvement on 3rd?


In my view with a few exceptions the core rules got better each edition from 3rd-7th, since GW spent their time and energy standardizing/cleaning up stuff and expanding what you could do with the system, but the Codexes got worse each edition because they kept making bad decisions (cutting out options, decreasing flexibility, adding bloat) that they then felt compelled to stick to in the next book, and because the writers have never been very disciplined about trying to make their rules make sense with the core rules/alongside other books. The change from 7th to 8th was a pivot to a different target audience; GW lost the tournament players to Warmachine in the 6th/7th period and they set out to try and get them back with 8th (its launch coincided with a botched rollout for 3e Warmachine, which was pretty much the dream scenario for GW), so the game's a lot more buff-stacking/synergy-dependent than it ever was before, has tried to pay more attention to scenario design, and focused the core rules on making an internally-consistent abstraction over making sense (so we get things like flamers auto-hitting airplanes).

My own rules rewrite has been based more on 30k (alternate army books written for the 7e core rules) than anything else because 30k's army books feel to me like the first time the army books and the core rules interact in a sensible and interesting way since 4th; 7th has a lot of rules that are widely ignored/ignoreable (ex. SM vs. Eldar don't care about the Unwieldy rule since you're going last already, every 7e army's got easy access to Fearless so combat resolution never does anything, that kind of thing), 30k actually uses the whole rulebook.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 19:07:05


Post by: Andilus Greatsword


 Jidmah wrote:
I disagree - since my orks only got a codex in 7th almost all their problems came from 6th edition's core rules, 7th fixed a

7th compared to 5th has many core rules that I seriously dislike: psychic phase, challenges, USR mess, cover nerf, hull points, remove casualties from the front, rhino sniping.
No deal. I'm never, ever giving the edition which made me quit the game a second chance.

It's also wroth noting that planes in 5th were just fast skimmers, a dakkajet was just as fast as a wave serpent, and a blast hit was a hit unless you were shooting something outside of LoS with barrage.

I agree with this take, 6th made some big changes from 5th ed that totally changed how the game played. Plus it screwed over melee armies and vehicles and very much incentivized shooting.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 19:28:34


Post by: xeen


I know editions are a preference, but I still don't get the nostalgia for the old editions. I just like then new ones better even with all the warts but that is just my preference.

And I will provide some "core rule" issues with 3-7th version of the rules:

The "all-or-nothing" armor saves did not allow for any variance in weapons. A marine got a 3+ save against a lowly las gun, and a auto cannon, then no save against a battle cannon. So they were either very hard to kill, or died to stiff breeze, with no in between. And then it got really bad in 5th when basically everything outside of standard troop small arms had at least ap3. Does anyone else remember the phrase "die like a marine". On the other end of the spectrum, armor saves of 5 or 6 were completely and utterly pointless in almost every game as only a hand full of weapons did not have an AP of at least 5.

This "all-or-nothing" ideal also bled into the shooting, wounding, fighting etc. Since there were no modifiers used, if they wanted to give a unit something like being hard to hit (aka skimmers) they had to ham fist rules like "re-roll hits" or "sap shots only" (only hit on 6s) or if you moved you couldn't shoot. This lead to crazy things like skimmers only being able to be hit on 6's in close combat if they moved. Yea that wasn't hard to balance assault armies v. armies with lots of skimmers. Instead of the simple -1 or +1 they needed to create endless rules to get around the static and locked to hit and to wound rolls.

4th Edition in particular had the very bad rule about targeting the closest unit, and the abstract terrain rules, which could have been done right (see, obscuring) but were so poorly written they just lead to endless disagreements about what could see.

The vehicle rules for 3-5 also had the issue that if you just kept rolling ones on the damage chart vehicles would never die.

I am not saying liking the older editions is bad, I would play a game of 3rd or 5th if everyone had the right rules (and no OP lists), but people saying there were no issues with the 3-7th core rules and the only problem was from the codexes are incorrect.



So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 19:29:42


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
I disagree - since my orks only got a codex in 7th almost all their problems came from 6th edition's core rules...


I'm saying that I think the problems with 5th-7th were problems with the writers of the Codexes not paying attention to the core rules, not problems with the core rules themselves.

...7th compared to 5th has many core rules that I seriously dislike: psychic phase, challenges, USR mess, cover nerf, hull points, remove casualties from the front, rhino sniping.
No deal. I'm never, ever giving the edition which made me quit the game a second chance...


I'm not telling you that you should, I'm telling you that I read most of these as stylistic/personal preference changes. If you don't like them you don't like them, but if you wrote the army books more intelligently you could have a game that had all of those and worked way better than any edition of 40k GW's written.

I'll give you Rhino-sniping, though; I'm still working on making LoS rules that are functional without being cumbersome or allowing dumb interactions like that.

...It's also wroth noting that planes in 5th were just fast skimmers, a dakkajet was just as fast as a wave serpent...


I don't know the Dakkajet off the top of my head. I know the Razorwing, Valkyrie/Vendetta, and the Night Scythe all had special rules that let them shoot more weapons after moving and a rule that made them turbo-boost 36" instead of 24".

...and a blast hit was a hit unless you were shooting something outside of LoS with barrage.


I may have gotten the edition wrong, that blast change may have happened in 6th.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 19:49:47


Post by: Jidmah


 AnomanderRake wrote:
 Jidmah wrote:
I disagree - since my orks only got a codex in 7th almost all their problems came from 6th edition's core rules...


I'm saying that I think the problems with 5th-7th were problems with the writers of the Codexes not paying attention to the core rules, not problems with the core rules themselves.

Yes, I understood that. I just don't think that it's true. 6th introduced a slew of terrible things and for every thing that 7th fixed, it broke two more.

I'm not telling you that you should, I'm telling you that I read most of these as stylistic/personal preference changes. If you don't like them you don't like them, but if you wrote the army books more intelligently you could have a game that had all of those and worked way better than any edition of 40k GW's written.

I don't think any amount of codex writing could have fixed inherently flawed things like invisibility, challenges or allies - all part of the core rules.

I don't know the Dakkajet off the top of my head. I know the Razorwing, Valkyrie/Vendetta, and the Night Scythe all had special rules that let them shoot more weapons after moving and a rule that made them turbo-boost 36" instead of 24".

I dug up the White Dwarf with their rules (actually the last one I've ever bought ) and you are right. It just never came up because they were 10/10/10 and I just kept them in my deployment zone, out of harms way.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 20:02:20


Post by: AnomanderRake


 xeen wrote:
...And I will provide some "core rule" issues with 3-7th version of the rules:

The "all-or-nothing" armor saves did not allow for any variance in weapons. A marine got a 3+ save against a lowly las gun, and a auto cannon, then no save against a battle cannon. So they were either very hard to kill, or died to stiff breeze, with no in between. And then it got really bad in 5th when basically everything outside of standard troop small arms had at least ap3. Does anyone else remember the phrase "die like a marine". On the other end of the spectrum, armor saves of 5 or 6 were completely and utterly pointless in almost every game as only a hand full of weapons did not have an AP of at least 5...


I think all-or-nothing AP and AP-as-modifiers are both breakable, and have both been broken by GW with badly-assigned stats. All-or-nothing AP was broken by stat creep (it was way too easy to get masses of AP2/AP3 from 5th on), and mostly had the effect of forcing everyone to be in cover or die. AP-as-modifiers has been broken by stat creep (army-wide -2 AP like you can get on Primaris Marines these days shouldn't exist), and by GW not understanding that the value of improved saves/improved AP isn't linear (upgrading from AP-0 to AP-1 against 2+ armour doubles the damage you get through, going from -1 to -2 against 2+ only improves it by half), which has resulted in underpriced mid-AP and overpriced high-AP for most of 8th/9th's history. AP modifiers are great, I've used them in other projects, but you can screw them at least as badly by assigning stats without paying attention to your rules.

...This "all-or-nothing" ideal also bled into the shooting, wounding, fighting etc. Since there were no modifiers used, if they wanted to give a unit something like being hard to hit (aka skimmers) they had to ham fist rules like "re-roll hits" or "sap shots only" (only hit on 6s) or if you moved you couldn't shoot. This lead to crazy things like skimmers only being able to be hit on 6's in close combat if they moved. Yea that wasn't hard to balance assault armies v. armies with lots of skimmers. Instead of the simple -1 or +1 they needed to create endless rules to get around the static and locked to hit and to wound rolls...


I've tried writing 40k rules using hit-mods, and I can guarantee you that the reason they never went for hit-mods earlier in the life of the game was because some idiot decided that a primary defining faction identity of Orks was BS2 (BS5+, in modern parlance). If you don't have an all-BS5+ army in the game hit mods work fine (WHFB uses hit mods and its orcs/goblins are BS3 (4+), Bolt Action uses hit mods and the crappiest greenest troops in the game hit on 4s shooting). Also if you want a game with hit mods to work at all you need to be a lot more disciplined than GW usually is with how many hit mods actually exist (I count "maximum modifier -1" as a half-assed band-aid patch that only exists because GW couldn't be bothered to write their hit mods intelligently); in Bolt Action your hit mods are range, cover, and moving-shooting, there are no special rules on anything that grant hit mods.

...4th Edition in particular had the very bad rule about targeting the closest unit, and the abstract terrain rules, which could have been done right (see, obscuring) but were so poorly written they just lead to endless disagreements about what could see...


I'd read that as implementation rather than a conceptual flaw; you can use closest-target a lot more intelligently than they did (ex. in Mordheim you can ignore the closest target to shoot the closest big target, so you can't screen a troll with goblins), and I don't think abstract terrain's arguments about what could see are any worse than true LOS's arguments about what a unit could see.

...The vehicle rules for 3-5 also had the issue that if you just kept rolling ones on the damage chart vehicles would never die...


Well, yeah. If you just keep rolling ones to wound a vehicle in 8th/9th will never die either. If you just keep rolling ones on the damage chart at least the vehicle will be stun-locked and unable to shoot.

...I am not saying liking the older editions is bad, I would play a game of 3rd or 5th if everyone had the right rules (and no OP lists), but people saying there were no issues with the 3-7th core rules and the only problem was from the codexes are incorrect...


My issue is people saying the 7th core rules were bad because of D-weapons, flyers, superheavies, scatterbikes, unkillable deathstars, etc. when those are almost entirely Codex problems (D-weapons wouldn't be a problem if the cheap spammable Eldar ones weren't there, Flyers wouldn't be a problem if GW hadn't grotesquely underpriced them in every Codex, superheavies wouldn't be a problem if you didn't have the detachments to shove them into small games, scatterbikes are purely a Codex problem, everyone's favorite rerollable-2+ deathstar was enabled by one Daemons relic...). The core rules of 3rd-7th weren't perfect and there are absolutely things I'd rewrite, but I think in 8th/9th more of the things I don't like are written into the core rules, so it's easier for me to get a game I enjoy using 3rd-7th than it is using 8th/9th.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Jidmah wrote:
 AnomanderRake wrote:
 Jidmah wrote:
I disagree - since my orks only got a codex in 7th almost all their problems came from 6th edition's core rules...


I'm saying that I think the problems with 5th-7th were problems with the writers of the Codexes not paying attention to the core rules, not problems with the core rules themselves.

Yes, I understood that. I just don't think that it's true. 6th introduced a slew of terrible things and for every thing that 7th fixed, it broke two more.

I'm not telling you that you should, I'm telling you that I read most of these as stylistic/personal preference changes. If you don't like them you don't like them, but if you wrote the army books more intelligently you could have a game that had all of those and worked way better than any edition of 40k GW's written.

I don't think any amount of codex writing could have fixed inherently flawed things like invisibility, challenges or allies - all part of the core rules.


What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").
-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).
-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)
-Challenges/the psychic phase happened (which were mostly problematic because they didn't look at ten years of playtesting for WHFB challenges/magic phase, learning a few lessons from WHFB (control melee character stat ranges intelligently, don't put out armies that have no ability to compete in a challenge with any other army, don't let non-HQ units generate magic dice, don't write giant spells that end the game when they go off) could have made either or both work fine)
-Jink happened (which would have been fine if it was 7e jink from the start, the free defensive buff without any trade-off in 6th was dumb).
-Allies happened (which would have been fine if they'd thought to write character/special ability rules to reference the faction when they added the allies rules instead of letting people use cross-faction buffs and then slowly FAQing them out one by one).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 21:21:57


Post by: jeff white


Rake is on fire. Exalted.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/02 22:18:15


Post by: KidCthulhu


It's funny, 4th edition is the one I remember sitting out (because of our player base, not because of the rules).

I started with 2nd, quit after 3rd, and then came back for 5th-7th. I remember 5th and 6th being a great time, but that was because I was playing Guard for the first time (brood brother-themed with old metal Hybrids for characters) and my beloved Dark Eldar got a beautiful face lift & new plastic kits.

I played ONE game of 8th. We were using the indexes, so things weren't too insane. It was nice to use actual GSC since I retrofit my metal hybrids with leftover bits from the Neophyte box. The hardest thing for me was trying to wrap my head around the AOS-style morale.

I found myself flipping through my 3rd rulebook recently and seriously considering giving that edition a go again.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 03:05:32


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 05:58:49


Post by: aphyon


I will start off with flyer rules

Most people didn't know they existed prior to 6th because they were FW flyer rules to go along with FW anti-air units.
The big problem was that the FW flyer rules had them move on to the table during the enemies movement phase, 6th/7th flyer rules fixed most of that however it upped the AV of most vehicles (because 5th made them fast skimmers by default and not aircraft at first)and removed key things that made the FW flyer rules good. almost every flyer in the game was AV 10/10/10 with few exceptions (even most super heavies) being the thunderhawk at 12/12/10, manta at 12/12/12 and the vulture at 11/10/10. Our group blends the 2 rules sets by keeping most of 7th but putting back in the key things that made the FW rules good. immobilizing results=crashing not vector lock, jump units can assault flyers, 12" range penalties for shooting at flyers because they are flying high (and also needing 6+ to hit for non-AA units All pintle mounted weapons are considered AA mounts) but flyers never benefit from terrain because of flying high.


The_Real_Chris wrote:
 aphyon wrote:


3rd - 5th were the best of times, some rules implementations were better in one edition then tossed out for the next, which is why my group as well as Mezmorki's pro-hammer bases most of our rules on 5th but borrow the better rules from 3rd/4th or 7th to make 5th better.


Interesting view - did the game get better with each edition? 3rd ed killed 40k as a game for me. I didn't play again until 8th edition. Was 4th and 5th an improvement on 3rd?


Others have pointed it out but there was a clear attempt in the rules development to gradually improve the game from 3rd-5th while also solidifying the lore of the universe. blast templates are a good example going from "guess range" weapons where you literally had to guess how far your target was away and if you guessed wrong you could not shoot it....to the 2d6 scatter with BS reduction for direct fire.

That is not to say all of the changes were good. with Andy Chambers leaving the company right as 5th was being developed it allowed Jervis Johnson to come in and wreck some really good mechanics that should have stayed in the game.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...


No i am right there with you, it was elegantly simple and easy to follow as well as making perfect sense from an immersive perspective. even space marine armor cannot save them from dedicated heavy anti-tank weapons
If i wanted to play an AP reduction system i would have played WHFBs


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 09:55:42


Post by: Jidmah


 AnomanderRake wrote:
What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").

Unless you were a dumb xenos, of course. Then your opponents just got a slew of free buffs.

-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).

Flyers were annoying, and not every army had anti-air units. But the real abominations here were flying monstrous creatures that could move around the board nigh invincible.

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.

-Challenges/the psychic phase happened (which were mostly problematic because they didn't look at ten years of playtesting for WHFB challenges/magic phase, learning a few lessons from WHFB (control melee character stat ranges intelligently, don't put out armies that have no ability to compete in a challenge with any other army, don't let non-HQ units generate magic dice, don't write giant spells that end the game when they go off) could have made either or both work fine)

I think these actually deserve two points, but I think in general you are agreeing with me here. Essentially both these massive parts of a game had absolutely no playtesting outside a single marines vs marines game. Challenges effective neutered all characters with low I because they either were fed a cheap guard sergeant at a time or killed by a space marine/eldar with a force sword. Psykers were worthless unless you were eldar, daemons or GK because not only were they almost guaranteed to roll the most powerful powers in the game and cast them at will, but also could deny the two casts your psyker had with 10 dice each.

-Jink happened (which would have been fine if it was 7e jink from the start, the free defensive buff without any trade-off in 6th was dumb).

I actually don't remember that one as being that bad, but sure.

-Allies happened (which would have been fine if they'd thought to write character/special ability rules to reference the faction when they added the allies rules instead of letting people use cross-faction buffs and then slowly FAQing them out one by one).

That would still have allowed all that battle brother nonsense though. With all that happened during 8th I really don't believe that there is any good way to implement allies for 40k. Either they are totally overbearing free buffs for those that can take allies, or they are fluffy options that allow fluffy lists, but don't actually work well. The only solution I can see would be providing severely limited army lists for specific combinations of allies found in the background - for example an inquisitorial force could have a selection of certain sisters, grey knights and inquisitorial units in one army an get a replacement trait for whatever rules they've lost for souping.

And there are more:
- Removing model closest to the firer. This allowed a single character to tank battle cannon hits for an entire unit, sniping of special weapons and unit leaders. It was especially awkward for melee specialists who wanted to be near the front of the unit to fight, but had to hide in the back so they wouldn't get shot. This also enabled barrage sniping, making an imperial basilisk more accurate at taking out the enemy general than eldar snipers.
- Standard cover save went down to 5+. On top of all the massive buffs shooting had received in this edition, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
- A slew of melee nerfs. In addition to challenges disallowing your best fighter to fight properly, melee units losing movement when taking casualties, you also had disordered charges, furious charge nerf, overwatch and more.

Note that I'm going from memory, I gave away my 6th edition book to a new player so they could read up on the fluff. At least it was good for something
There probably is even more.

So 6th already was pretty borked when it dropped, and the codices allowing beautiful things like screamer star, the flying circus and taudar didn't exactly help making it an enjoyable edition. And to be honest, 7th never stood a chance by building on that rotten foundation.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 10:10:44


Post by: a_typical_hero


Help me out here with my memory, didn't Tau count as close allys for Ultramarines or something like that?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 10:18:37


Post by: Jidmah


a_typical_hero wrote:
Help me out here with my memory, didn't Tau count as close allys for Ultramarines or something like that?


Tau were "brothers in arms" with Eldar and Space Marines, i.e. on the same level as two Space Marines armies.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 11:09:18


Post by: Strg Alt


A.T. wrote:
 kodos wrote:
the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)
It was a 2500pt list, while EU games were (IIRC) typically 2000pts or less.

Even 2000pts was pushing it for some armies with the old FoC system as some books would run out of good choices whereas others (i.e. guard with its artillery squadrons) could take advantage of it. And at 2500pts your deployment zone was just one large block of targets that the guard literally couldn't miss with artillery.

Locally we only ever played 1500-1850 which worked much better. Smaller games worked but the lists could get more skewed without the same FoC pressure to vary units.

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

For what it's worth the original 2500pt leafblower consisted of :
-One inquisitor (anti-deepstrike)
-Two command squads in chimeras (plasmaguns)
-One infantry platoon (six squads in chimeras)
-Two veteran squads in chimeras (meltaguns)
-One psyker squad in chimera (single blast template)
-Two valkyries (rocket pods)
-Two medusas
-Two hydras
-One manticore

The artillery was only half the problem. Chimeras (like rhinos) had been made significantly cheaper and tougher and doubled up as mobile bunkers.


How well does this list perform in the current edition?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 11:41:08


Post by: Da Boss


From my POV the game was going off the rails toward the end of 5e with the introduction of all the different fliers and stuff. I was looking at the battlefields and just feeling like these enormous fliers didn't fit on the table properly, and like the game hadn't really been designed to include them.

So when 6e was coming I was excited to see if they would fix these issues, but to my view they just doubled down on all of that and made some really silly changes the rules like challenges. No thanks. I also really disliked that it had basically done away with army list restrictions in any meaningful sense, and advantaged Imperial players who could ally across a tonne of different factions.

I was already out of the game for 7th, but when I looked back into it I could see they were just going further down the bad design rabbit hole.

8e and 9e have a lot of cool aspects to them like save mods and to hit mods coming back, unified rules for monsters and tanks with built in degradation, and so on. I'd be delighted if those core rules came with some of the other stuff from 5e to make a sort of hybrid between the two. Unfortunately some of the other aspects of the games are pretty offputting to me so I stay away.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 14:21:33


Post by: waefre_1


 Strg Alt wrote:
A.T. wrote:
 kodos wrote:
the famous leaf blower list which by unkown reason was only famous in the US and never made it into EU meta (might be because of different scenario design, or terrain or different lists of other factions, or all together)
It was a 2500pt list, while EU games were (IIRC) typically 2000pts or less.

Even 2000pts was pushing it for some armies with the old FoC system as some books would run out of good choices whereas others (i.e. guard with its artillery squadrons) could take advantage of it. And at 2500pts your deployment zone was just one large block of targets that the guard literally couldn't miss with artillery.

Locally we only ever played 1500-1850 which worked much better. Smaller games worked but the lists could get more skewed without the same FoC pressure to vary units.

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

For what it's worth the original 2500pt leafblower consisted of :
-One inquisitor (anti-deepstrike)
-Two command squads in chimeras (plasmaguns)
-One infantry platoon (six squads in chimeras)
-Two veteran squads in chimeras (meltaguns)
-One psyker squad in chimera (single blast template)
-Two valkyries (rocket pods)
-Two medusas
-Two hydras
-One manticore

The artillery was only half the problem. Chimeras (like rhinos) had been made significantly cheaper and tougher and doubled up as mobile bunkers.


How well does this list perform in the current edition?

I can't speak to the performance, but from a rules standpoint, it doesn't. By my estimation, the list is still around 2500-2750 pts (depending on wargear) and would fit into a Battalion excepting a single Elites choice (presuming the list includes Command Squads for each CC/PC), but the Chimera's rules at the time allowed units to fire out of the top hatch - IIRC the point of the meltavets/plasma command squads in the list were to do high-speed drive-bys of high-value targets without leaving their vehicles. With the top hatch now being ornamental, both the psykers and the infantry would need to get out to do any damage (thus preventing them from benefiting from the Chimera's former-AV/current-T+Sv).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/03 14:41:51


Post by: A.T.


 Da Boss wrote:
From my POV the game was going off the rails toward the end of 5e with the introduction of all the different fliers and stuff
Arguably the rot started with the 5e guard codex, the second book of the edition. It really pushed the boat out on what you needed an army to deal with in a game,


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 07:18:23


Post by: Nerak


OP here. I’ve really been enjoying reading the transition of this thread.
Aash wrote:

Out of curiosity, especially as you mentioned the importance of 24” ranges, what are your thoughts on the game not allowing pre-measuring for ranges?

Though my memories of 4th edition are mostly good, I do remember there were some match-ups that were really one sided. Specifically nids vs tau or eldar.

I played Tyranids back then, and they were very limited in anti-tank ranged weapons. If some genestealers with their rending claws or a monster hit in base contact with a tank they could take it down, but skimmers had a rule where you couldn’t hit it in CC unless you rolled a 6 or something like that. It made taking out things like hammerheads and wave serpents all but impossible.

Not being allowed to pre-measure was actually kind of a big deal. I frequently found myself pulling out my measurer by reflex and stopping. It did lead to some interesting situations. Like on one occasion I had to make a call whenever send a chimera forward or not. It had a heavy flamer in it’s hull and some gaunts where a prime target. After moving 6” the flame template was just out of range. It was then exposed to be charged by said gaunts. Had I been allowed to pre-measure there wouldn’t have been a decision making process. I would have known the best course of action right away. So I guess it added another layer of decision making. I kind of liked it but can see someone who has a hard time head measuring distances finding it bothersome. It did make heavy weapon ranges more important since you’re guaranteed a greater area your shot can cover.

I’ve heard that tau and skimmers where incredibly powerful in 4th. In particular the dreaded “fish of fury” strat (two devilfishes with two squads of fire warriors behind in a tight formation). Tanks worked like this in close combat: if it was stationary then any unit attacking it automatically hits it’s close combat attacks. If it moved up to 6” then any unit attacking it hits on a 4+ or better. If it moved more then 6” then any unit striking it hits on a 6+. Skimmers where always hit on a 6+ in close combat. Dice roll modifiers where non existing to my knowledge, only re-rolls where sometimes available with certain conditions (like chaplains or master crafted weapons). A 6+ is what you get. For tanks this wasn’t a problem because they could only shot their guns if they travelled up to 6”. So to be harder to hit in melee you would have to sacrifice firepower. For fast veichles and skimmers this would be a big problem, if you relied on bringing them down in melee. As I imagine it would be if you try striking a flying tank or a speeding trukk with a chainsaw.

Edit:
 Da Boss wrote:
From my POV the game was going off the rails toward the end of 5e with the introduction of all the different fliers and stuff. I was looking at the battlefields and just feeling like these enormous fliers didn't fit on the table properly, and like the game hadn't really been designed to include them.

I remember that I didn’t mind the fliers much. Rule wise they where similar to skimmers. We actually already used them to a much lesser extent in 4th. The rules where first in Imperial armour and later in apocalypse. It arrived in accordance with the reserve rules. As I recall you placed at your table edge but it wasn’t allowed to move or shoot on the turn it arrived. This was to symbolize it appproaching from the distance. The opponent was allowed to shoot it this turn. Then it could move and act normally but always had to travel a minimum distance and could only Turn 45 degrees or something like that. Overall I recall 5th ed as pretty solid. Except for this one big issue I had with it...

My issue with 5th was different. It had to do with list building. 5th introduces special characters with army wide special rules. For example, one special character might allow you to infiltrate 3 units from your army whilst another let you give 3 units furious charge. I found that this locked specific play styles behind a special character choice. Let’s say I had a sneaky army in 4th but now my sneaky army could only use it’s ability if I picked one of GW:s characters with pre decided upgrades and gear. Also that Squads where given buffs if bought in 5 man or 10 man squads. I think it gave them a free heavy weapon. In 4th squads could be as big as you wanted up untill it’s max number. I recall writing that I felt a great deal of control making my list last weekend. I felt like 5th was when GW actively started trying to limit or outright deny that control in list building and army composition. That was my big issue with 5th ed.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 11:43:23


Post by: A.T.


 Nerak wrote:
I’ve heard that tau and skimmers where incredibly powerful in 4th. In particular the dreaded “fish of fury” strat (two devilfishes with two squads of fire warriors behind in a tight formation).
Fish of fury involved driving up to an enemy unit and disembarking with the devilfish between the firewarriors and their target. The firewarriors would then open up with a full round of rapid fire under the fish and in return the enemy were unable to effectively engage them - not enough movement to get around the transport to the squad with any survivors.
In their next turn the tau were free to board up and move out.

The eldar skimmers were worse though - it was impossible to inflict more than a glancing hit on a fast moving skimmer no matter what you rolled and you had to roll damage twice and pick the worst result against them. If either dice came up 3 or less you would basically just inconvenience it and you needed boxcars to actually destroy one outright.
As you might imagine this was even worse in apocalypse where squadrons of skimmers could palm off all of their hits to one tank at the back and escape titan-wrecking firepower with little consequence.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 11:59:58


Post by: kirotheavenger


I find I dislike most of the core rules changes between 5th and 7th.

Some I just dislike as a concept, like Challenges. Melee is just a roll-off and unless you write big complex rules it'll never feel any different, and challenges on a battlefield just feel silly conceptually.

Others I think were solid concepts but just implemented horribly, like Flyers and Psychic rules, as was already explained perfectly by Anomander.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 12:02:54


Post by: Da Boss


I mean, 6/7th were so bad they had to basically start the system again from scratch because they crashed the playerbase.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 18:37:57


Post by: aphyon


 Da Boss wrote:
I mean, 6/7th were so bad they had to basically start the system again from scratch because they crashed the playerbase.



6th was so bad it killed the game at my FLGS and actually got me to build armies for infinity and warmachine, even GW killed it after what a yeah and a half?

7th at the start actually saw some resurgence, but then the formation spam killed off all the good effort.

Oh and we just got in 2 games of our hybrid 5th ed games, one to teach anew player the old system and another...that was old school apocalyptic with something like 8K per side...it was loads of fun. way more entertaining than anything i have experienced with 9th.





So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 20:53:01


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
 AnomanderRake wrote:
What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").

Unless you were a dumb xenos, of course. Then your opponents just got a slew of free buffs.


Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).

Flyers were annoying, and not every army had anti-air units. But the real abominations here were flying monstrous creatures that could move around the board nigh invincible.


Which, again, is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.


Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 21:57:30


Post by: kodos


 AnomanderRake wrote:
I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?

yes, that an Edition is not made of core rules alone but the sum of all releases
and the core rules were never a problem, yet those are the things GW keeps changing the most instead of fixing the codex rules

6th was bad because the Codex rules were never updated to match the new core rules, 7th was bad because of the power creep with formations, yet the core rules were always ok so the big change with 8th to remove the core rules (but keep the old profile values and rules) was not necessary


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 22:43:03


Post by: Glumy


I started with 4th and had the most fun playing 40k during that time.
I was playing IG. Mostly footslogging with few tanks to support. Wanted to play all infantry in the end. I liked the rules, liked tournaments, etc. Had the most fun back then.

When 5th happened and it buffed tanks over the top i was really devastated. My footslogging IG became a really crappy army and i refused to invest in the 10+ tanks to make it more competetive. Disliked stuff like wound allocation immensely. I played 3 times less during this edition.

I played like 1 game of 6th and i dont remember i ever played 7th.

Came back to the HH several years ago and i enjoy it very much. The only thing in the original 7th edition rules i would change is the 2d6 charge to a fixed number.

Tried 8th several times. Was at the receiving end of BA hammer captains. Thought it was idiotic and came back to HH where armies resemble armies.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/04 22:52:17


Post by: H.B.M.C.


 AnomanderRake wrote:
-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.
Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.
No, that one's a core rules problem. Hull Points being slapped onto the vehicle rules as some weird extra-wound patch helped nothing.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/05 01:42:47


Post by: Jarms48


A.T. wrote:
 Da Boss wrote:
From my POV the game was going off the rails toward the end of 5e with the introduction of all the different fliers and stuff
Arguably the rot started with the 5e guard codex, the second book of the edition. It really pushed the boat out on what you needed an army to deal with in a game,


I actually really liked that Guard book. Personally if they kept the doctrine rules from the 3.5/4th edition codex (at least the point upgrades not the unit restrictions) and the amount of options you had from the 5th book it would have been the best Guard book GW ever made.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/05 04:48:56


Post by: aphyon


Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/05 06:21:36


Post by: Jidmah


 AnomanderRake wrote:
 Jidmah wrote:
 AnomanderRake wrote:
What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").

Unless you were a dumb xenos, of course. Then your opponents just got a slew of free buffs.


Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).

Flyers were annoying, and not every army had anti-air units. But the real abominations here were flying monstrous creatures that could move around the board nigh invincible.


Which, again, is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.


Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?


Oh, you're just being dishonest again, not only skipping half the arguments but also handwaving the few you did bother to quote. And here I thought it was possible to have an actual discussion with you. My fault, really.

And yes not getting a codex is a codex problem. And guess what? When orks did get a codex it changed nothing about any of those problems.

Changing the core rules in a way that requires a codex not only to change but to get completely new units and rules is not a codex problem. It's called writing gakky core rules that don't work with the game that exists.

It's also not surprising that rules biggest flaw was that they apparently were only tested for eldar and marines and fell appart for almost every other army would work if every codex would have been re-written to be eldar and marines.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/05 18:48:52


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
...Changing the core rules in a way that requires a codex not only to change but to get completely new units and rules is not a codex problem. It's called writing gakky core rules that don't work with the game that exists...


In a well-functioning game the Codexes would be written to account for the core rules and for each other. My assertion is that 6e/7e didn't work because the people writing the Codexes didn't understand or account for the core rules or other books, and if you rewrote the Codexes to account for the core rules and each other the game could work fine without changing anything about the core rules. Your assertion, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that the core rules should have been written to not break the previous edition's Codexes, and if GW had written a set of core rules while paying attention to the Codexes they could have made a better game.

I think I'd describe what's happening here as "arguing past each other". The problem (game that doesn't function because there's no overarching vision for how it should work, therefore everything gets written in a vacuum and doesn't end up making for a game that works) is the same, and the end state (game that does function because there is an overarching vision for how it should work, therefore everything is written to create a functional play environment) is the same, but I'd rather get there by burning all the Codexes down and starting over (which you don't like because GW's demonstrated that they can't do that in a competent way) and you'd rather get there by burning the core rules down and starting over (which I don't like because GW's demonstrated that they can't do that in a competent way).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/05 23:45:46


Post by: Jidmah


That's a fine theory and would totally be correct if we would be talking about a video game existing in a vacuum.

However, the codices are connected to models and a background, so you are quite limited what unit does what.
If the core rules are designed to make getting hordes of badly armored lumbering melee combatants terrible, an army that is lore-wise made up of badly armored lumbering melee combatants can either be redesigned to no longer match its lore or have no chance but remain terrible. Psychic factions were designed to crush other less factions, challenges were designed so agile combatants would always defeat less agile ones. All these are problems with the core rules, which were written in the knowledge what each army was representing and that orks would never gain enough armor, initiative or speed to reach combat, eldar would never be matched in psychic prowess by space wolves and that nobz would never strike before a space marine sergeant.

My argument is that both 6th and to a slightly lesser extent 7th were flawed to the core in a way that it would not have been possible to write good codices for armies as different as orks, marines, craftworlds, daemons, tau, drukhari and tyranids. And I think that is precisely the reason why 30k is working well and 7th was not, despite sharing the same flawed core rules.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 00:25:07


Post by: Jarms48


 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.


What do you mean a loss of orders? Orders were introduced in 5th edition, but you rolled Ld tests to use them.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 02:50:34


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
That's a fine theory and would totally be correct if we would be talking about a video game existing in a vacuum.

However, the codices are connected to models and a background, so you are quite limited what unit does what.
If the core rules are designed to make getting hordes of badly armored lumbering melee combatants terrible, an army that is lore-wise made up of badly armored lumbering melee combatants can either be redesigned to no longer match its lore or have no chance but remain terrible. Psychic factions were designed to crush other less factions, challenges were designed so agile combatants would always defeat less agile ones. All these are problems with the core rules, which were written in the knowledge what each army was representing and that orks would never gain enough armor, initiative or speed to reach combat, eldar would never be matched in psychic prowess by space wolves and that nobz would never strike before a space marine sergeant.

My argument is that both 6th and to a slightly lesser extent 7th were flawed to the core in a way that it would not have been possible to write good codices for armies as different as orks, marines, craftworlds, daemons, tau, drukhari and tyranids. And I think that is precisely the reason why 30k is working well and 7th was not, despite sharing the same flawed core rules.


I don't think that's the case, for a long litany of reasons. By point:

-Lumbering, badly-armored melee combatants: Sure, the Orks are badly-armored, lumbering, and melee-oriented. That shouldn't be the start and end of their faction identity; they have shooty units, which GW neutered by nailing themselves to "BS2" as a core part of Orkish faction identity (which I notice they've started to move away from in 8th/9th), they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include), they have tanks (which under 7e blast rules were almost accurate). And even then the horde of Boyz running at the enemy waving choppas and screaming "Waaagh!" was let down by a) including too many things that ignored morale, which made shock melee not that useful, b) overpriced Boyz, and c) underpriced low-power blasts in other armies. I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

-Psychic factions were not designed to crush other factions. Daemons had exactly one power build with the 2++ deathstar; almost everything else in their Codex was more unplayable than the Orks. Eldar psykers were icing on a badly-broken cake. Grey Knights were at least as useless in 7th as they are now. Thousand Sons haven't been good since 3rd edition.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 05:40:58


Post by: aphyon


Jarms48 wrote:
 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.


What do you mean a loss of orders? Orders were introduced in 5th edition, but you rolled Ld tests to use them.



Sorry i meant doctrines i was thinking of "close order drill" and the like


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 07:01:16


Post by: Jarms48


Sorry i meant doctrines i was thinking of "close order drill" and the like


Ah yep. Those were fantastic. So much customisation. For them to have worked in 5th edition they just had to slightly tweak the costs, such as:

You may choose 1 Alternate Regimental Organisation and 1 option from Skills & Drills/Special Equipment, otherwise you may choose 2 options from Skills & Drills and Special Equipment.

Alternate Regimental Organisation:
- Drop Troops: Any Guard Infantry unit (without a Chimera transport) or Sentinel squadron may Deep Strike if the mission permits. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit for +2 points per model, or to any Sentinel units at a cost of +5 points per model.
- Grenadiers: This regiment may take Storm Trooper squads as Troops. These Storm Trooper squads may not Deep Strike or use Special Operations.
- Close Order Drill: No changes, the increased lethality of blast is enough of a restriction here.

Special Equipment:
- Cameleoline: Any Guard Infantry unit with cameleoline adds 1 to any Cover save they are allowed. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit for +2 points per model.
- Carapace armour: Any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider units with carapace armour change their Armour save from a 5+ to 4+. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider squadrons for +2 points per model.
- Cyber-enhancement: Any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider units have an Invulnerable save of 6. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider squadrons for +1 points per model.
- Warrior Weapons: Any model armed with a lasgun replaces it with a laspistol and close combat weapon.

There were others as well, but making them point upgrades and then limiting the list to a maximum of 2 would have made the 5th edition codex the best Guard codex GW released.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 07:59:31


Post by: Jidmah


First of all, I want to point out that I'm not separating the quote to pick your post apart, but to answer properly to each argument.
Some people are sensible to this, but I mean no ill.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
-Lumbering, badly-armored melee combatants: Sure, the Orks are badly-armored, lumbering, and melee-oriented. That shouldn't be the start and end of their faction identity; they have shooty units, which GW neutered by nailing themselves to "BS2" as a core part of Orkish faction identity (which I notice they've started to move away from in 8th/9th)

I agree, though they haven't really moved away from the orks = BS5+ yet. Most improved BS stems from either grot gunners or targeting squigs.
I hope you are right though and they drop that gak for the 9th edition codex.

BS 5+ was not an issue in 6th though, because -1 to hit mostly didn't exist. Orks could shoot perfectly fine in 5th and lost that ability to some degree in 6th. The issue was that low AP guns could no longer reliably disable vehicles, which simply was all orks guns, be it dakkajets, lootas or rokkits. Luckily that era ended with the "mek wave" in 7th.

they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include)

'ard boyz were never common (one per army upgrade at the time) and should never be as durable as power armor. Due to how AP worked a 4+ armor upgrade was quite useless, IIRC someone mathhammered it to be worth roughly 1.5 points for boyz.

they have tanks (which under 7e blast rules were almost accurate)

The had two tanks, looted wagon and the battlewagon. The deff rolla was one of the orks two options of hurting vehicles, and since you can't ram and fire ordnance at the same time, relying on blasts was not an option - even if killkannon hadn't been one of the worst weapons in the codex, which also fell into the category of "bad AP, bad strength".
It also wasn't uncommon to lose three BW in turn 1, because nerfed cover made them more vulnerable.

And even then the horde of Boyz running at the enemy waving choppas and screaming "Waaagh!" was let down by a) including too many things that ignored morale, which made shock melee not that useful

Morale had literally nothing to with it. Not only would orks regularly lose combat to even necrons or imperial guard, but even if you did win you really didn't want them to run away, because your unit would automatically die to flamers and blasts thanks to how the core rules handled the whole thing. Winning combat = death is a major flaw of the core rules.
And of course, against well-armored foes like marines or aspect warriors there was a good chance of just getting sweeped despite charging, because the one guy who was able to crack armor was killed in a challenge.

b) overpriced Boyz

Orks were 6 points at the time, you could literally field hundreds of them. But since your removed the model closest to the enemy all the time, it wouldn't have mattered whether you had an extra row of boyz or two, it would only delay a tabling by a turn. If anything, more boyz would have prevented me from spacing them out during deployment, voiding the extra models even as soon as the first blast hit.

c) underpriced low-power blasts in other armies.

Since I was already used to the core rules essentially forcing me to waste everyone's time by spacing out each and every single one of my models by exactly 2", blasts and templates weren't as much outside of situations where the core rules forced my to clump up my models - most notably during charges or forced disembarks, something that happened quite regularly.
And, to be fair, the costs of blasts are a codex issue.

I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

The core rules gave a massive advantage to well armored shooting armies with good initiative values and melee weapons, good psykers and flying monsters on top of all the advantages they already had during ealier editions.
At the same time they severely punished melee armies with horde units, low AP weapons and low initiatives. Orks just happened to tick all the "you suck" boxes while failing to get any of the "you rock" options, but armies like nids, non-tzeench daemons or drukhari were in very similar situations.

-Psychic factions were not designed to crush other factions.

I wasn't referring to the faction as a whole but that a psychic faction like eldar, GK or daemons could simply void the use of psykers for all other armies.
There simply was no point in bringing one or two warpheads, librarians or sorcerers when the opposing army could just burry each of them in deny dice to "nope" anything they were trying to cast, while they could just roll more dice than the opponent could possibly deny to force stuff like invisibility through.

Daemons had exactly one power build with the 2++ deathstar; almost everything else in their Codex was more unplayable than the Orks.

Two, they also had the flying circus which died a tragic death in 7th when FMC were nerfed. I'm also not sure if 6th already had summoning.
But yes, you are essentially agreeing with me that the core rules completely screwed over daemons because they also suffered from the same issues as orks, except they didn't even have terrible shooting. I remember a friend of mine playing his daemonette army against IG on a table next to me and not a single one of his daemonettes reached combat before they were gunend down.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

Yeah, my warboss would totally snap an autarch in half, but I'm not talking about HQs and named characters. I'm talking about squad leaders. These should never have had the ability to issue and accept challenges to beging with, and this one of the biggest flaws of 6th which all by itself was sufficient to make it completely unplayable.
Nobz had two wounds and 4+ armor(5pts) which was essentially ignored by everyone and the power weapon change gave many unit champions better wound rolls against them. The thing with orks at the time is that PK nobs were the only way of handling vehicles, monsters, characters or even power armor. You essentially had to have a PK on every nob you could possibly stick one on, because otherwise you found yourself unable to handle things like wave serpents or dreadnoughts.
So when you charged any unit, you had four options:
1) The enemy unit did not have any characters. Congratulations for playing against necrons, but they still get to fight at the same time as you.
2) The enemy had a character with a melee weapon not worse than chainsword and pistol. You now start praying that it doesn't cause two wounds. If it does, the whole ork mob is neutered and will likely be sweept this combat.
3) The enemy had a character that can't fight well. He just tosses that character at your nob with 30 points of mandatory wargear and counts as just one casualty. Under 6th edition's rules not even the emperor himself could fight himself out of a blobbed up guard squad because can only kill one of the five+ characters per combat.
4) Rejoice, your opponent also has an unwieldy weapon! You now get to kill each other. And that sad part is that this is one of the better outcomes.

Orks weren't the only ones suffering from this. Every army which had powerful squad leaders (CSM, for example) would have their characters either sniped by high I characters or were fed regular dudes with +1ld one at a time to completely neuter their combat efficiency.

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).

I don't know a whole lot about 30k, so I'm just going to take your word for it. But I must say outside of daemons it doesn't seem to that any of these armies are vastly different from those already working well in 6th/7th, meaning good armor and/or long range shooting. Do any of these have to rely on close combat?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 09:39:35


Post by: Blackie


 AnomanderRake wrote:


-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.


All ork characters were t-shirt save T4 dudes with low I. Nobz always died in challenges against any kind of squad sargeants in the game, even cheap ones. Units of boyz without the nob were totally useless, and I mean really totally useless. So best way to deal with challenges for orks were:

1) MSU trukk boyz: deliver them away from characters and bring many so even if one or two got stuck (and killed) in combat duelling with high I characters a couple of pks with their ablative wounds could reach a juicy target anyway.

2) Slap a 15ppm bare bones useless mek into boyz squads so he can refuse the challange while the nob get to strike normally.

3) Keep the warboss away from any character.

In practise bring tons of characters in order to avoid challenges, at least for most of them. Challenges were probably the thing about core rules that I hated the most, so dumb. Probably the thing that I most often asked to remove by using house rules back then, other than formations. And I actually liked 7th edition overall.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 09:49:03


Post by: Jidmah


Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 10:27:10


Post by: Blackie


 Jidmah wrote:
Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.


Yeah, I have close to zero experience with 6th and I usually mess it with 7th. Now that I think about it, in 6th orks still had to use the codex from late 4th edition so you're definitely right, there was no mini mek in that codex.

So challenges were even worse than in 7th, nice .


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 11:22:51


Post by: Galas


One of the biggest problems for balance un 40k is the fact most factions have a single statline for most of their units because if course they are the same RACE.
That naked stuff like initiative useless because It IS not a back and fort of using my fast units agaisnt your slow units but a army wide quality check.
"Well , looks like you are just a faster army and theres nothing I can do agaisnt that" makes for a bad experience and the games were this can work IS games were everithing is the same baseline like históricals with humans, 30k with marines, etc


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 20:24:56


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include)

'ard boyz were never common (one per army upgrade at the time) and should never be as durable as power armor. Due to how AP worked a 4+ armor upgrade was quite useless, IIRC someone mathhammered it to be worth roughly 1.5 points for boyz.


It doubles your durability against small arms. What it's actually worth depends on what you assume about the prevalence of high-ROF AP4-. And GW handing out good AP too generously is, again, a Codex problem, not a core rules problem. All-or-nothing AP works fine so long as you're not making it too easy to spam low AP.

I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

The core rules gave a massive advantage to well armored shooting armies with good initiative values and melee weapons, good psykers and flying monsters on top of all the advantages they already had during ealier editions.
At the same time they severely punished melee armies with horde units, low AP weapons and low initiatives. Orks just happened to tick all the "you suck" boxes while failing to get any of the "you rock" options, but armies like nids, non-tzeench daemons or drukhari were in very similar situations.


Flying monsters were only playable if they had effective shooting; Daemon flying circus was incredibly random, because it relied on you getting the right rolls for witchfire powers that were effective against your opponent's list, Tyranid flying circus only worked because the brainleech Devourer was too efficient a gun. "Well-armoured shooting" doesn't describe many of the power lists to me; Eldar were horribly underarmoured, they were overpowered because their offense was ludicrous, their mobility let them guarantee alpha strikes, and the Wave Serpent ticked a few boxes that made them very durable against most peoples' anti-tank shooting. Their high-I units were also pretty terrible in melee. Vanilla Space Marines became a power list because they got a 550pt handicap built into the rules, not because their statline was any good.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

Yeah, my warboss would totally snap an autarch in half, but I'm not talking about HQs and named characters. I'm talking about squad leaders. These should never have had the ability to issue and accept challenges to beging with, and this one of the biggest flaws of 6th which all by itself was sufficient to make it completely unplayable.
Nobz had two wounds and 4+ armor(5pts) which was essentially ignored by everyone and the power weapon change gave many unit champions better wound rolls against them. The thing with orks at the time is that PK nobs were the only way of handling vehicles, monsters, characters or even power armor. You essentially had to have a PK on every nob you could possibly stick one on, because otherwise you found yourself unable to handle things like wave serpents or dreadnoughts.
So when you charged any unit, you had four options:
1) The enemy unit did not have any characters. Congratulations for playing against necrons, but they still get to fight at the same time as you.
2) The enemy had a character with a melee weapon not worse than chainsword and pistol. You now start praying that it doesn't cause two wounds. If it does, the whole ork mob is neutered and will likely be sweept this combat.
3) The enemy had a character that can't fight well. He just tosses that character at your nob with 30 points of mandatory wargear and counts as just one casualty. Under 6th edition's rules not even the emperor himself could fight himself out of a blobbed up guard squad because can only kill one of the five+ characters per combat.
4) Rejoice, your opponent also has an unwieldy weapon! You now get to kill each other. And that sad part is that this is one of the better outcomes.

Orks weren't the only ones suffering from this. Every army which had powerful squad leaders (CSM, for example) would have their characters either sniped by high I characters or were fed regular dudes with +1ld one at a time to completely neuter their combat efficiency.


In 6e overkill wounds done in challenges didn't kill models but did count towards combat resolution. In 7e overkill wounds done in challenges did spill out into the rest of the unit. You've never been able to feed troops into a challenge to tank it; except for a very few 30k command squads you either put a character into the challenge or the other guy gets to pick one of your characters to turn off (can't attack, unit can't use their Ld, etc.). The big Guard blob with cheap characters to keep feeding you exists, yes, but that's there to challenge-tank deathstars/HQs, it's really not cost-effective if you're trying to challenge-tank Nobs with it.

As to the actual performance of other people against Nobz the chance of you actually getting sniped out before getting to swing was pretty low; the second wound means that an enemy with S4 ignoring your armour (ex. a Space Marine sergeant with a power sword) swinging with four attacks (assuming he gets the charge, this is worse if you charge him) at WS4/I4 is going to leave the Nob alive about 3/4 of the time. Remember people with equal WS hit you on 4+ in 6th/7th, and there are nothing like as many re-rolls. And as to extra damage in 7th you needed Instant Death to do that, which meant you needed S8 at Initiative (so...monsters?), a force weapon (HQs, GK sergeants, TS sergeants), or a Diresword (which has been unplayably bad almost as long as I've been playing). Complaining about full force weapons on sergeants is a legitimate complaint, but again, it's a Codex complaint more than a core rules complaint. Complaining about your Nobs losing challenges isn't a reasonable complaint. If they're losing challenges reliably they're either suicide mutual-killing to someone else with a powerfist, or fighting something way more expensive than they are.

And even then you could get around the whole problem without touching the core rules by giving the Orks the option for hidden melee weapons (melee upgrade weapons on non-character models).

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).

I don't know a whole lot about 30k, so I'm just going to take your word for it. But I must say outside of daemons it doesn't seem to that any of these armies are vastly different from those already working well in 6th/7th, meaning good armor and/or long range shooting. Do any of these have to rely on close combat?


Tainted Flesh/Cult Horde is a combination of faction traits that forces your militia to snap-shoot all weapons. I won't claim they're taking top tables at tournaments, but fifty-man mobs of 2pt Stubborn abhuman mutants with Rending on all their melee attacks are pretty terrifying, despite being a melee horde.

As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 20:32:10


Post by: Rihgu


As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.

Do they not have invuln saves in 30k?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 20:32:24


Post by: AnomanderRake


 Jidmah wrote:
Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.


If you're playing 5th your Warboss then gets killed by Trooper McNobody instead of Justicar McNobody, because there was no Look Out, Sir! and the whole squad had force weapons. To me the problem with the Warboss getting killed by Justicar McNobody isn't the fact that challenges exist, it's that some idiot decided that all Nemesis weapons needed to be literal ID-everyone-at-any-T force weapons, which turned what used to be a perfectly functional and reasonably balanced melee army into a half-assed joke that's been pretty useless since 6e. The drop from WS5/2A to WS4/1A, the loss of The Shrouding, and the push to pump their firepower has turned the GK into a weird shooty glass cannon that wrecks face in a few narrow situations and just gets eaten in any other situation.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Rihgu wrote:
As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.

Do they not have invuln saves in 30k?


Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 20:38:59


Post by: Rihgu


Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?

It's not armor, but something that is tailored to deal with 3+ armor is going to be... not at all tailored to deal with 5++ invulnerable?
Like if you shoot a marine with an AP3 weapon, they're getting nothing. If you shoot a Daemon with an AP3 weapon, they're getting a 5+ save.
I'd say 5++ is a good defense but not good armor, since it's not armor.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/06 20:52:56


Post by: AnomanderRake


Rihgu wrote:
Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?

It's not armor, but something that is tailored to deal with 3+ armor is going to be... not at all tailored to deal with 5++ invulnerable?
Like if you shoot a marine with an AP3 weapon, they're getting nothing. If you shoot a Daemon with an AP3 weapon, they're getting a 5+ save.
I'd say 5++ is a good defense but not good armor, since it's not armor.


Given that the discussion is about pointing out that people with statlines not dissimilar to Orks can function perfectly well with the 7e core rules I'm going to roll with it and say "yes, if T4/4+/5++ Ruinstorm Daemons can work as a melee horde in 30k then T4/4+/5++ 'Ard Boyz under a KFF should be able to as well."


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 12:37:34


Post by: the_scotsman


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...


I just always despised the random break points created by the AP system coupling with "Doubling Out"

A S7 AP4 gun like an autocannon would take 18 hits to kill a 5-wound MEQ character, wheras just ooone more point of strength and just oooone more point of AP - say a Krak missile - literally two hits guarantees death (one hit is an 83% chance of death).

It could be fine, if gw perfectly evenly placed armor values and toughness values throughout the game, but they never did - T4 and Sv3+ were wayyyy more common than T5 and Sv4+, which made the value of AP4 to AP3 humongous. And as now, gw basically just increased the numbers concurrently on every weapon - there were very few 'high strength high AP' and 'low strength low AP' weapons out there.

I find the current AP system to be more intuitive, easier to introduce people to (because it works in a similar way as the S vs T roll players are familiar with) and from a game perspective providing a fewer 'lost value stats'.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Galas wrote:
One of the biggest problems for balance un 40k is the fact most factions have a single statline for most of their units because if course they are the same RACE.
That naked stuff like initiative useless because It IS not a back and fort of using my fast units agaisnt your slow units but a army wide quality check.
"Well , looks like you are just a faster army and theres nothing I can do agaisnt that" makes for a bad experience and the games were this can work IS games were everithing is the same baseline like históricals with humans, 30k with marines, etc


^

And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 15:13:21


Post by: Nerak


 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.


Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 15:24:59


Post by: Tyran


 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.

Because that codex is the power creep that started to break 5th.

I mean, rules for ignoring the FOC everywhere (platoon and vehicle squadron rules), spamming tanks in the edition in which tanks were at their strongest, and spamming ap3 and ap2 weapons everywhere, many which were high strength large blasts.

It was great to be a mech IG player in 5th, but it sucked to fight a mech player in 5th.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 15:37:57


Post by: a_typical_hero


Only thing that was more fun was to be a mech GK player with Psycannon and Acolyte special weapon spam drive bys out of Chimeras


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 15:53:28


Post by: catbarf


 Nerak wrote:
 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.


Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?


I play Legio Cybernetica. They're the robots, and they're all monstrous creatures, so anti-vehicle stuff doesn't apply, they have invulns so high-S guns sometimes bounce off, and they're pretty tough, so things meant to kill T4 Marines and Terminators don't work well. They have some very nasty tricks if built appropriately. Also their core robots used to be cheaper and accrued a lot of salt before they got nerfed; I don't know if those complaints still persist.

There is an Imperial Militia list as a catch-all that you see sometimes, and Solar Auxilia who are super-Guard, but there are no Orks and non-Marine armies are a tiny minority in HH.

I agree with the_scotsman that 30K shows why the all-or-nothing save system has issues. The game actually does have some 'atypical' profiles- Lightning Guns, for example, are high strength and have Shred, so against Marines they wound on a re-rollable 2+... but it doesn't matter, because at one shot and AP5 it only kills a Marine once in a blue moon. Heavy bolters are mediocre because they can't get through Marine armor, but up the S and AP by 1 to become the Mauler bolt cannon (standard issue on Legio Cybernetica robots btw) and suddenly you eat Marines for breakfast.

I will say though that because the game uses the old cover system, the question is more whether they're getting a 3+ from their armor or a 4+ or 5+ invuln from cover, so it's not a huge deal, but you do notice a very clear distinction between weapons that allow saves and weapons that don't on the rare occasion that you catch a unit out in the open.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 16:19:33


Post by: the_scotsman


 Nerak wrote:
 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.


Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?


99% of the time in practice a 30k list is a power armor and terminator armor heavy marine army that includes 1 primarch. There are, in theory, GEQ armies, monster heavy armies, knights, flyer heavy armies, but typically if someone is paying the money to get into 30k its because they are compelled by the popular 40k shonen battle anime novel series Horus Heresy and they've got a favorite big muscleboy they want to bring to the table.

Legio Cybernetica is a variant list of Mechanicum that allows you to run basically 100% monsters (which is why I like mechanicum - all the cool retrofuturistic robots, which are sadly still bizarrely absent from 40k)

Legio Cybernetica bots just happen to be armed primarily with AP3 Mauler Bolt Cannons as a main ranged weapon, just happen to have AP3 power blades as a main melee weapon, and the big Thanatar bots happen to have AP2 giant plasma pie-plates that require successful saves to be re-rolled. Also, one of the benefits of building Legio Cybernetica is +1 to initiative - which bumps Castellax from I3 to I4 and Vorax from I4 to I5. And since, in practice, almost every single 30k list happens to be composed overwhelmingly of I4, Sv3+ MEQ models, your Legio Cybernetica list gains a massive amount of power from that little +1 stat bump.

30k feels superficially much more balanced than 40k because of that fact I mentioned above: A huge percentage of its players are just getting into the game to larp as their favorite anime hero man, so the shape of almost every list is very, very similar compared to the variety present in larger 40k. If you've always got the general framework of one big super beefed-out HQ leading a MEQ or TEQ elite death star, a couple big troop units all armed with boltguns marching in formation, a couple special/heavy weapon squads, and a couple support tanks, then you're starting from a much, much more balanced place than a game where one person has a huge horde of infantry, the next guy has 5 superheavy walkers, the next guy has a mechanized transport force of light infantry, the next guy has a pure melee army with army-wide invulnerable saves, etc etc.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 16:37:40


Post by: catbarf


 the_scotsman wrote:
30k feels superficially much more balanced than 40k because of that fact I mentioned above: A huge percentage of its players are just getting into the game to larp as their favorite anime hero man, so the shape of almost every list is very, very similar compared to the variety present in larger 40k. If you've always got the general framework of one big super beefed-out HQ leading a MEQ or TEQ elite death star, a couple big troop units all armed with boltguns marching in formation, a couple special/heavy weapon squads, and a couple support tanks, then you're starting from a much, much more balanced place than a game where one person has a huge horde of infantry, the next guy has 5 superheavy walkers, the next guy has a mechanized transport force of light infantry, the next guy has a pure melee army with army-wide invulnerable saves, etc etc.


My usual opponents have shown a pretty good variety in lists, within the boundaries of all being Marines:
-Fists army of a few units of heavy infantry (T5 boarding shield dudes) but mostly heavy vehicles gunlining it up
-Same player with an avalanche of Dreadnoughts
-Sons of Horus force with Dreadclaws, Terminators, light tanks, and fast assault infantry moving up the board
-Alpha Legion with mostly infantry and lots of outflanking shenanigans
-Night Lords with in-your-face terror troop drop pod assault

Each of these has played quite differently on the tabletop, so I'm not sure it's fair to characterize every 30K list as homogenous. More similar to one another than in 40K, absolutely, and that definitely helps for balance. The game also seems to have rectified some of the bigger complaints about 7th Ed.

Surprisingly, I have yet to go up against a Primarch. Oh, and you left out the bit where in addition to the Mauler and Helix mortar, there's also the Darkfire Cannon which eats Terminators for breakfast and also blinds the survivors every so often. That one's entertaining when suddenly WS3 bots hit on 3+ in melee and clean up the survivors. Wish the Mechanicum had 40K rules...


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 16:38:24


Post by: A.T.


 catbarf wrote:
... the question is more whether they're getting a 3+ from their armor or a 4+ or 5+ invuln from cover
The ease of getting 4+ cover was something of a problem in 5th in devaluing armour saves, particularly the expensive (at the time) 4+ saves. Just dropping generic cover saves to 5+ improves a few aspects of the game IMO.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 18:11:48


Post by: Nerak


Thanks for the explanations. Cleared it up nicely. I’m surprised to hear that orks aren’t a thing in 30k. Especially since the story of the beast happens very soon after.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 18:41:12


Post by: the_scotsman


 Nerak wrote:
Thanks for the explanations. Cleared it up nicely. I’m surprised to hear that orks aren’t a thing in 30k. Especially since the story of the beast happens very soon after.


Again, purely anecdotal, but my experience with 30k has shown that the lack of xenos or other non-marine armies is a feature, rather than a bug, and the 30k scene tends to swell any time marine players get dissatisfied with their lot in the meta, take their toys and head on up the ol' "no non-marines allowed" treehouse.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/07 19:16:26


Post by: AnomanderRake


 the_scotsman wrote:
 Nerak wrote:
 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.


Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?


99% of the time in practice a 30k list is a power armor and terminator armor heavy marine army that includes 1 primarch. There are, in theory, GEQ armies, monster heavy armies, knights, flyer heavy armies, but typically if someone is paying the money to get into 30k its because they are compelled by the popular 40k shonen battle anime novel series Horus Heresy and they've got a favorite big muscleboy they want to bring to the table.

Legio Cybernetica is a variant list of Mechanicum that allows you to run basically 100% monsters (which is why I like mechanicum - all the cool retrofuturistic robots, which are sadly still bizarrely absent from 40k)

Legio Cybernetica bots just happen to be armed primarily with AP3 Mauler Bolt Cannons as a main ranged weapon, just happen to have AP3 power blades as a main melee weapon, and the big Thanatar bots happen to have AP2 giant plasma pie-plates that require successful saves to be re-rolled. Also, one of the benefits of building Legio Cybernetica is +1 to initiative - which bumps Castellax from I3 to I4 and Vorax from I4 to I5. And since, in practice, almost every single 30k list happens to be composed overwhelmingly of I4, Sv3+ MEQ models, your Legio Cybernetica list gains a massive amount of power from that little +1 stat bump.

30k feels superficially much more balanced than 40k because of that fact I mentioned above: A huge percentage of its players are just getting into the game to larp as their favorite anime hero man, so the shape of almost every list is very, very similar compared to the variety present in larger 40k. If you've always got the general framework of one big super beefed-out HQ leading a MEQ or TEQ elite death star, a couple big troop units all armed with boltguns marching in formation, a couple special/heavy weapon squads, and a couple support tanks, then you're starting from a much, much more balanced place than a game where one person has a huge horde of infantry, the next guy has 5 superheavy walkers, the next guy has a mechanized transport force of light infantry, the next guy has a pure melee army with army-wide invulnerable saves, etc etc.


Cybernetica's tough, but contrary to it's reputation it's far from unbeatable. Mauler cannons are nasty, yes, but your hundred-point robot with its giant S6/AP3 gun is killing slightly fewer Marines in the open than a hundred points of boltguns in rapid-fire range. Plasma mortars are nasty, yes, but you can a) space to avoid getting too wrecked assuming you don't get greedy and try to deep strike/shoot somewhere it can hit you, b) they're very range-limited (12-24 if they move, 12-48 if they don't), c) don't do a whole lot to most vehicles unless you get lucky, and d) that's a 250pt model that doesn't do a whole lot else. The I buff is cool, but if you can't kill T6/4+ Vorax moving 6" a turn before they get to melee with you then your army may be underarmed.

I think there are Legion lists that break 30k far more effectively than Cybernetica does. Guard of the Crimson King, for instance. Questoris isn't even that bad if you're playing 2,500pts+, you may have a lot of superheavy walkers but the ion shield is still only one arc, their shooting isn't anything like as mean as it is in 40k, and non-tailored lists still have ways of dealing with them.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/08 22:50:28


Post by: Rikerwota


To this day, 4th remains my favourite edition. Bringing in true line of sight has been a big negative, IMO.
4th also truly had a variety of different scenarios, which I still go back to.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/09 15:17:19


Post by: TinyLegions


I never played a game of the 4th, but it is great to hear that you got one in and liked playing it. Hopefully you can get more played in the future.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 15:05:40


Post by: Smitty22


At the original poster. I first got into 40k as an outrider during the launch of 4th edition. So it certainly has some nostalgic feels for me. The things I really liked from it was how easy the codex's where to use to build your forces and how most army listed pushed you to put troops on the table versus trying get mostly "rare" stuff on the board. The things I remember not liking was how few guns could kill space marines and how overpowered hand to hand combat was. The game seemed to become more of building the best hand to hand combat army then a balanced or good ranged combat army. I always felt a game that included guns, should favor the army with guns versus swords and axes.

I think it is absolutely great that you and your friend took the time to run this experiment and the fact ya'll had fun was the real "test" that you passed to show it was worth it.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:00:08


Post by: Insectum7


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...
You are definitely not the only one. It was solid, imo. It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:10:24


Post by: A.T.


 Insectum7 wrote:
It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.
*Laughs in 3e eldar/dark eldar*

Though you did start to see quite a bit more in the way of AP3 templates and small arms, and on the flip-side more invulnerables and cover generators popping up.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:23:50


Post by: the_scotsman


 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...
You are definitely not the only one. It was solid, imo. It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.


"The main problem with the armor piercing system was those times when my armor got pierced and I didn't get any save, then it sucked. When I got to ignore the opponent's stats entirely and got my full save, I really liked it!"

I'm mostly kidding here, but this tends to be the general attitude I see from the (mostly space marine fans) who liked the old AP system. They grumble and go 'this is bs' when an AP-1 weapon causes them to make 4+ saves instead of 3+ saves, and they'd grumble and go 'this is bs' when you told them some weapon your army had was AP3 under the old system. Weapons that are unfluffy because they are AP3/AP2 under the old system generally included:

-Anything in a horde army
-Anything with a blast template
-Any psychic power
-Any special/heavy weapon that differs from ones imperials have
-Any special/heavy weapon that works the same as an imperial one but looks different

For me who played Orks basically the whole time I was playing with the old AP system, the way the system worked was, you didn't have armor saves, basically ever. The times when I got to make save rolls, it was basically like a little mini joke, and I would gently pat the one boy out of the trukk boyz squad who made his save on the head and tell him he was a good little ork before he promptly ran away due to morale at the end of the turn.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:27:20


Post by: Insectum7


A.T. wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.
*Laughs in 3e eldar/dark eldar*

Though you did start to see quite a bit more in the way of AP3 templates and small arms, and on the flip-side more invulnerables and cover generators popping up.
My bro played DE in 3rd and 4th, and yeah they could pack the AP2-3 pretty heavily. But they were also made of paper! In that army it wound up balancing quite well.

I remember picking up my SM codex for 5th, seeing that Sternguard were now a thing (replacing Veteran Squads), and rolling my eyes at their ability to give every model a combi-plasma. Like: "Oh I guess we're doing this now :/"


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:29:45


Post by: Tyran


There was only one model in the whole Tyranid army with access to AP3 and AP2 ranged weapons, the Zoanthrope (and it was actually a psychic power).

Even venom cannons and rupture cannons were AP4 for some weird reasons (and venom cannons also had -1 to damage table to make them even more worthless).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:39:24


Post by: Insectum7


 the_scotsman wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...
You are definitely not the only one. It was solid, imo. It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.


"The main problem with the armor piercing system was those times when my armor got pierced and I didn't get any save, then it sucked. When I got to ignore the opponent's stats entirely and got my full save, I really liked it!"

I'm mostly kidding here, but this tends to be the general attitude I see from the (mostly space marine fans) who liked the old AP system. They grumble and go 'this is bs' when an AP-1 weapon causes them to make 4+ saves instead of 3+ saves, and they'd grumble and go 'this is bs' when you told them some weapon your army had was AP3 under the old system. Weapons that are unfluffy because they are AP3/AP2 under the old system generally included:

-Anything in a horde army
-Anything with a blast template
-Any psychic power
-Any special/heavy weapon that differs from ones imperials have
-Any special/heavy weapon that works the same as an imperial one but looks different
Many Space Marine players feel entitled, news at 11

AP2-3 was certainly justified in many places, and prior to 5th I felt it worked well. 5th+ began to have major issues with how heavily it was spread around, even among SM armies.

 the_scotsman wrote:
For me who played Orks basically the whole time I was playing with the old AP system, the way the system worked was, you didn't have armor saves, basically ever. The times when I got to make save rolls, it was basically like a little mini joke, and I would gently pat the one boy out of the trukk boyz squad who made his save on the head and tell him he was a good little ork before he promptly ran away due to morale at the end of the turn.
Well. . . those Boyz wouldn't have gotten a save in 2nd ed either (even Lasguns had a -1). . . and how often are they getting a save against Intercessors these days?

Actually my bro played Orks in 3rd-4th too, and I remember KFFs and smoke screens from Bikes if I'm remembering correctly. And I remember a lot of those games being tight AF.

Orks had the Choppa then, too, which reduced both PA and T-armor to 4+. You wanna hear SM players cry BS? That Ork Choppa brought it out! Terrifying weapon.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:46:12


Post by: Da Boss


The old AP system and to an extent cover saves are two of my least favourite things about those editions. Modifiers are much better in my opinion and represent the fictional universe in a more satisfying way.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 17:56:07


Post by: the_scotsman


 Da Boss wrote:
The old AP system and to an extent cover saves are two of my least favourite things about those editions. Modifiers are much better in my opinion and represent the fictional universe in a more satisfying way.


Old AP and old vehicle rules worked a whole hell of a lot better in systems where weapons don't have QUITE the length and breadth that the weapons represented in warhammer do - like the WW2 systems they were probably adapted from originally.

if the smallest gun someone's going to be firing at a tank is something like a soviet anti-tank rifle and the biggest a german 88mm flak cannon, you can make a 'roll to pen' D6 based system work a whole lot better than if the range is between a basic infantry pistol and a planet-cracking gigundus laser beam.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 18:43:00


Post by: catbarf


I've wondered if it would be mechanically satisfying to just use a table (boo, hiss), instead of doing either modifiers or all-or-nothing.

Like, maybe have AP4 (autocannons, heavy bolters, etc) do this:
-2+ stays at 2+
-3+ gets degraded to 4+
-4+ gets degraded to 6+
-5+ or worse gets no save at all

It's not quite all-or-nothing (which gets real skewed when a majority of armies on the table are Sv3+ or better), nor is it purely linear degradation (which makes AP-1 doubly effective as AP0 against Terminators, and yet not able to ignore a Guardsman's armor). Plot five different save values against six different AP values and it wouldn't even be that big of a table.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/13 23:08:55


Post by: H.B.M.C.


When we did our own version of the rules we took the name of a rule that existed in Necromunda at the time (High Impact) and made it a -1 Save Mod. This allowed us to remove some of the weirdness that came with the AP system by allowing some of the outlier weapons to have an effect on armour.

Basically High Impact could be applied to any weapon, and automatically applied to any weapon S8 and above. Choppas gained High Impact, so that their effects were even (ie. -1 vs Terminators and Guard, rather than reducing to 4+ vs Terminators and nothing vs Guard, which never made much sense).

Meant that Terminators saved on a 3+ vs Krak Missiles, Marines on 4+ vs Autocannons. That sort of thing.

Worked quite well, even if it was just a patch.



So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/14 09:46:20


Post by: Blackie


 Insectum7 wrote:

Orks had the Choppa then, too, which reduced both PA and T-armor to 4+. You wanna hear SM players cry BS? That Ork Choppa brought it out! Terrifying weapon.


Indeed. But choppa boyz were S3 and also quite expensive at 9ppm which balanced things out. SM were always quite tough for orks in 3rd, considering TAC lists at least.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/14 12:00:30


Post by: A.T.


 Insectum7 wrote:
Orks had the Choppa then, too, which reduced both PA and T-armor to 4+. You wanna hear SM players cry BS? That Ork Choppa brought it out! Terrifying weapon.
Statistically speaking a charging 4e ork with a mundane AP- choppa will do exactly the same damage to a marine as the 3e ork, and you'd get 50% more of them.

Cognitive difference between 'my orks are stronger because they are charging in' and 'I disregard your armour save and substitute my own'


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/14 14:12:22


Post by: Iron_Captain


I started playing during late 5th ed. so I never played 4th, but this thread makes me want to give it a try. I miss the vehicle rules and big blast templates from the earlier editions sometimes.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 04:41:48


Post by: Insectum7


A.T. wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
Orks had the Choppa then, too, which reduced both PA and T-armor to 4+. You wanna hear SM players cry BS? That Ork Choppa brought it out! Terrifying weapon.
Statistically speaking a charging 4e ork with a mundane AP- choppa will do exactly the same damage to a marine as the 3e ork, and you'd get 50% more of them.

Cognitive difference between 'my orks are stronger because they are charging in' and 'I disregard your armour save and substitute my own'
Interesting. I didn't wind up playing against the 4-5th ed Ork book (it came out very late in 4th iirc.), but right off the bat I'm thinking the results were not the same vs. Terminator Armor .


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 06:05:21


Post by: aphyon


I own a copy of the 4th ed ork book to use in our 5th ed hybrid games and i must say it is very orky and a fantastic codex. i posted a batrep in my old editions topic where i fought a boys horde army using that dex. it was a bloody brawl and the orks ended up winning in the end even though most of them had "t-shirt" saves.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 07:23:35


Post by: Da Boss


That codex is the most fun I've ever had playing 40k. Loads of different viable builds, really fun and flavourful, and a great model release alongside it.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 09:20:54


Post by: Blackie


I prefer the 3rd edition ork codex, as that 4th-5th already encourages and allows to spam the most competitive stuff. There was no cheese at all in the 3rd edition ork codex, and yet it let players build quite competitive lists. But I also adore that 4th edition ork codex and 5th edition of 40k (never played 4th, with my group we kept playing 3rd until 5th, mostly because we weren't aware of the new edition, we were kids in an era of no internet), don't get me wrong.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 10:20:20


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Wait, the 3rd Edition Ork Codex? You mean the one that didn't even have a weapon summary because it was in the main rulebook? That one?

That was immediately post-Gorkamorka, when all the flavour (not to mention colour) had been drained from the Orks. Where their wierd and wacky artillery became "Kannon" and "Lobba". Where everything was a generic Goff.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/15 10:32:55


Post by: Blackie


Yeah, and what's the problem, you needed the rulebook anyway. Just 5 weapons (slugga, shoota, big shoota, rokkit launcha, grot blasta) were actually missing from the codex and available only by weapons summary from the rulebook. Not a big deal.

Lots of stuff were removed from the previous codex but I never liked 2nd edition ork silly stuff anyway . The 4th edition codex also removed stuff from the previous one.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 05:52:40


Post by: Jayden63


I started playing in third edition and I stopped playing 40K at 6th edition. I disliked the direction it was going and never looked back.
Me and my buddies still play a hybrid of 4th and 5th edition, basically taking the best of both editions and throwing out the stuff we don't like. Lots of rule changes and trying to balance as best we can. Incorporate newer models with older rules so that they still work.

Its now our game and is still fun to push figure around the table making pew pew noises every now and them. Its just become comfortable.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 06:46:39


Post by: Hellebore


 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...
You are definitely not the only one. It was solid, imo. It just began to break because of the AP2-3 creep that began in 5th ed.


you could say the same about the ASM system as well - it's fine so long as it doesn't creep up.

All or nothing didn't make sense, and skewed heavily in favour of marine armies, which is perhaps why it's looked at fondly.

IMO, they need to strip back the ASM system again, to only 3 values:

Anti infantry: -1ASM
Anti Tank: -2 ASM
Anti Materiel: -3 ASM

And these rules should only be attached to specialist weapons, not standard line weapons.

If you removed the AP system from 4th/5th and applied this instead with no exceptions, you'd be fine.

Take weapons from 4th and apply the above like this:

AP4 = -1
AP3 = -2
AP2 = -3
AP1 = -4 (if you really have to...)

AP5 and 6 become 0.

I would probably apply the above to melee weapons in 4th as well:

Chainsword/choppa -1
Power sword -2
power fist -3




So long as they don't give the majority weapons ASM then the game should play fine. Marines get taken out be special/heavy weapons like they should, line weapons get used in volume etc.


I would also make BS and WS vs target's initiative instead of the previous rules and have attacks made in the order of whose turn it is. Now Initiative directly affects your ability to be hit, so tyranids and eldar actually use their speed for defence.









So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 07:22:00


Post by: kirotheavenger


If you wanted to tie to-hit to initiative you'd need to significantly revamp initiative. Initiative in general is a poorly implemented stat even for the purpose it was designed. It would be a lot more interesting if for example Devastators were slower than Tacticals to represent heavy equipment.

I do definitely agree on armour save modifiers though. The all or nothing system is quite unsatisfactory to me. Modifiers are much better, you just need to not hand out AP2 to standard fething small arms!
It does somewhat devalue invulns though. If the highest AP you'll ever get hit by is -3 then a 5+ invuln is never useful to 2+ armour (see: Terminators).


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 10:29:53


Post by: Hellebore


 kirotheavenger wrote:
If you wanted to tie to-hit to initiative you'd need to significantly revamp initiative. Initiative in general is a poorly implemented stat even for the purpose it was designed. It would be a lot more interesting if for example Devastators were slower than Tacticals to represent heavy equipment.

I do definitely agree on armour save modifiers though. The all or nothing system is quite unsatisfactory to me. Modifiers are much better, you just need to not hand out AP2 to standard fething small arms!
It does somewhat devalue invulns though. If the highest AP you'll ever get hit by is -3 then a 5+ invuln is never useful to 2+ armour (see: Terminators).


Back in 2nd you got to roll both.

I don't see why you couldn't do it here. Invulnerable saves become effectively a failed save reroll. So a Terminator gets a 5+, fails then gets to roll their 5+ invuln.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 10:37:17


Post by: kirotheavenger


Rolling both would make sense, but you'd need to significantly reduce the number of rolls needed in a normal roll.
Even just the standard 3 (hit/wound/save) is on the higher end of what I'd like for a normal sequence, when you throw in 'explosions', rerolls, and FNPs there's waay too much as it is.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 10:40:33


Post by: lord_blackfang


I too think 4th was the best edition.

Regarding AP, it was just a mistake to give small arms AP5, leaving practically everything outside MEQ without a save at all against shooting.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 14:19:21


Post by: A.T.


 lord_blackfang wrote:
Regarding AP, it was just a mistake to give small arms AP5, leaving practically everything outside MEQ without a save at all against shooting.
It made hordes less clunky. Similar to power weapons, a general lack of invulnerable saves combat wipeouts and unrecoverable moral failures at lot of stuff in the 3e re-write was there to streamline things by making outcomes more immediately decisive when the correct hammer was applied to the correct nail.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/19 15:11:29


Post by: Da Boss


I think the 3e family of editions would have worked better with negative to hit penalties from cover and negative penalties to armour from AP rather than the all or nothing systems. You'd have had to toughen up some of the elite units to do so, but that would have been easily done.


So I played a game of 4th ed with a friend  @ 2021/07/20 01:28:22


Post by: Hellebore


I think 3rd pattern 40k had the right damage and stat scale, I'd just change instant death to be 2 wounds rather than 1 or something similar. ie if the strength of the attack is 2x the toughness of the target, it takes 2 wounds for each failed save instead of 1.

I'd probably still shift stats to be the same rather than using AV, but I'd probably redo the way it works.

ie, if a monster or vehicle is wounded compare it to this table:

wound roll = minimum, glancing hit
wound roll = higher than minimum, penetrating hit.

ie T6 vs S7, glance on a 3 to wound, penetrate on a 4+.

This is mechanically identical to roll 1D6 and add to strength (as T6 is basically AV10).

You'd then roll on a table to see what effect you've caused:

Glancing hits

1-2 shaken (-1 to WS/BS)
3-4 stunned (can't move, -1 to WS/BS)
5-6 Damaged (-1 wound)

Penetrating

1-2 Stunned
3-4 Damaged (1 wound)
5-6 Massive damage (2 wounds)*
*if the target is reduced to 0 wounds from massive damage and is a vehicle, all models within 1D6" are hit with a a strength equal to the exploding unit's Toughness)

Rear arcs
Any attack that originates in the rear arc of a monster or vehicle gains +1 Strength.


This is pretty similar 3rd ed, but standardises monsters and vehicles.