Afraid this is a bit of a rant thread. And given it’s about something that happened….jebbus, 27 years ago? Very much shrieking into the abyss. But as the title says? I hate 3rd Edition. Not just in hindsight. I hated it at the time. Because I’m not a Hobby Hipster. I was there. I came, I saw, it sucked. And not just because I got started on the crazy ape bonkers hatstand 2nd Ed. I mean, that’s a lot to do with it, but it’s far from the whole of the thing.
Much as I still have great affection for 2nd Ed? It wasn’t the neatest of games to begin with, and only got wonkier and dafter as it went along. But it was fun. And it was the first time 40K was properly codified, becoming the setting we know and presumably love to this day.
But between clunky rules, lots of cards, no more than that. More still. Bit more. There you go. And rules being spread between Codex and White Dwarf, it was a colossal mess at the end. So you’ll get no argument from me that an overhaul was overdue. Not just to make the rules make sense, but to allow us to use more of our ever growing collections in a game within the space of an afternoon.
What we got though? That was a travesty. A game which not only decided to cut out the background, but became so…..incredibly dull tactic wise.
In 2nd and subsequent editions, cover made you harder to hit. In 3rd Ed? It was an alternative save. Great for Guard, utterly, utterly pointless for Marines. At least at first.
The different rules for damaging models with a Toughness and Tanks, and how what used to be save modifiers, lead to a lack of subtle differences between weapons. For instance? The Autocannon. Pretty decent against Light Vehicles. Crap against everything else, unless you had some special rule. See….S7 was laughed at by most battle tanks. AP4 saw Big Stuff like Wraithlords and Carnfiex talk about it behind its back in most unkind terms. And Heavy 2 meant it just couldn’t throw enough down range to really worry…anything.
And so either “lots of shots” or “high strength, low AP” became the order of the day for pretty much everyone. Because such weapons punched above their weight. It also meant Marine players had an easier time, because of the golden combo of pretty decent anti-infantry firepower, accuracy and unit resilience. This more than anything lead to MEQ being the norm, and so that in turn influenced what other armies fielded, further compounding that the weapon rules left a significant No Mans Land far, far too many weapons occupied.
Psychics became all but non-existent, turning what had been a potentially make or break phase into a big old lump o’nuffink.
Formerly fearsome units, such as Aspect Warriors, Dreadnoughts and Terminators were completely de-fanged, and rendered less than average. Now I’ve no problem with a game wanting you to focus your strategy on the Little Guys taking and holding ground, but what happened to Elites was embarrassing. They used to be lynchpin units of a line or army. The guys you could rely on to, outside of disastrous generalship, at least punch their weight or see the enemy play keep away.
Battle Tanks became pillboxes, because if you moved at all? One Gun For You. And nothing that really goes bang either, because screw you.
But. Credit where it’s genuinely due? At least Transports ceased being Snazzy Squad Sized Coffins.
Now back on the grump. Ork Clans? What Ork Clans?. You’re all a drab brown now, with no thematic perks on offer anywhere. Oh and your crazy artillery? Now you just get worse versions of Pretty Standard Heavy Weapons. Because screw you. Sure you get some gorgeous new models which would redefine Orks forevermore. But no nice rules for you. Except Choppas, which will beat the snot out of Marines and Terminators, but have no special effect on someone running around in their undies because that makes for a cinematic battle, dunnit.
Psychology received the mother of all Valium. Because it just…..went away. No more fear, terror or panic, nor stupidity, hatred or frenzy. If a Carnifex devoured your squad, you now waited in an orderly line, offering polite applause.
It all felt so….half arsed. And worse? So very incredibly dull. Like all the colour of game and universe had been muted, watered down into an Asylum Movie version of 2nd Ed’s blockbuster.
The biggest example of all these flaws? Dark Eldar. On paper, a very fast, very fragile Glass Hammer army was always gonna require a bit of finesse to get the most out of it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Except….for the most part? You could either move fast….or shoot. Sure your Skimmers could only suffer glances when moving, but not only can Bolters and upwards plink away at you? But Skimmers wound up with two results on the Glancing Hit chart that could destroy it. Destroyed, duh. But also immobilised, which would destroy a Skimmer. Oh and because “everyone now moves 6” because bollocks to subtlety”, your infantry really aren’t that fast. You do have decent Initiative though so you can strike first for the most part. But you have to temper that with the fact you’ll bounce off most things, because screw you. And having been tantalised by the thought and occasional mention of Chaos Eldar in the waning days of 2nd Ed? Double Screw You Because Background In Codexes Is Now Forbidden Because Screeeeeeeeeeeew You!
I am genuinely, genuinely amazed 3rd Ed didn’t kill the game, let alone somehow allowed it to grow. Because it was crap. Really crap. It took a big old steaming dump on everything that made even the wonkiest of rules fun to play with.
Booooo! Boo I say! Booooooooooooooooo! And that’s the bad boo, not the fun spooky boo.
I actually like the Cover system of 3rd-7th, mostly because it promotes the kind of fantasy that fits 40k, in my opinion.
Guardsmen, Cultists, and other lightly-armored models hug cover. They need it to survive against even small arms fire from most factions.
Marines, Immortals, and other heavily-armored models don't. Their armor is more than enough until the big guns get brought out.
Not saying it was perfect, for sure, but it worked well enough.
To-hit modifiers managed that really well though, as your protection came from being less likely to be hit - and everyone benefitted from that equally. It also meant higher BS was a more desirable trait than in 3rd.
In 3rd? Nope. Pretty much a one-way street of most benefit to light and squishy stuff.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: To-hit modifiers managed that really well though, as your protection came from being less likely to be hit - and everyone benefitted from that equally. It also meant higher BS was a more desirable trait than in 3rd.
In 3rd? Nope. Pretty much a one-way street of most benefit to light and squishy stuff.
It did not benefit everyone equally.
A BS4 model suffered a 25% reduction in hits.
A BS2 model got their hit rate halved.
And, to me, Marines generally not needing cover fits their aesthetic. They SHOULDN'T need to duck and cover against a couple of Lasguns.
8th and 9th Edition were definitely the worst, though.
Squad of 10 Cultists? Takes 24 Autogun hits to kill.
Add Cover? 30.
Squad of 5 Marines, at two wounds apiece? Takes 90 Autogun hits to kill.
Add Cover? 180.
Against the lightest, least armor-piercings weapons, Marines got the biggest benefit from Cover. That's just ass-backwards.
I agree with you and will take it one step further. The rules for 8,9,10 are just far superior to the 3-7 rules. I know a lot of people have fondness for 5th (Of the earlier editions my fav is 6th) but ultimately the rules were to complex for the number of models that continuously grew and grew and grew on the table. I know a lot of people are going to give me flak for that statement, but that is just my opinion. A lot of the more complex rules were cool, but in practice just bogged the game down for very little results. Also if you are going to pick on an older edition specifically, 4th was the worst. Remember having to shoot the closest unit? dumb dumb dumb.
Example:
Blast weapons is a cool idea and arguably more thematic than the current blast rules. And it was not an issue if someone brought one or two. But play someone with 6 or so blasts and all of a sudden the shooting phase becomes a 1 1/2 slog, with some of the weapons, like frag missiles, taking all this time to measure, move the blast etc., only to kill like one model.
Vehicle facings is also arguably more thematic, however, models don't interact with terrain the same way as in real life, so positioning could be difficult on boards with terrain, and then the incessant arguments over front v side shots would ensue. Again, one vehicle with a clear facing, not a problem. 5 eldar tanks whose front and side blend together neatly, more of an issue.
Also Vehicle armor v. Toughness was not the best. Armor would either never die, or get one shot killed. There were situations where being a monster with T was just superior to a vehicle, and made for some pretty weird classing by GW, like a riptide being a monster and a dreadnought being a vehicle. and as thematic as it is for small arms to be unable to harm a heavily armored tank, for a game, having half your armies weapons completely useless (as opposed to functionally useless) against a bunch of targets (or all of them when knights came out or for tank armies) is just not fun and engaging. at least now, while it may be unlikely to harm a land raider, at least there is a potential to do some damage with small arms if it comes down to that.
Fixed AP was awful. It was ok early on, but by 5th most units that were even somewhat elite had ap3 weapons, which made marine armor more of a points liability than an actual advantage. The lack of use of modifiers in general is baffling to think about now, as it lead to situations were maybe you want to make something harder to hit or shoot at and instead of just -1 to hit, they had to do mental circles to make things like snap fire so only hit on sixes, can't move and shoot, etc.
Finally the worst part of the 3-7 experience is not even the game rules. It was the complete lack of any quality control or support by GW. This is why when people complain about there being to many rules updates or points updates I just want to claw my eyes out. The alternative is FAR FAR worse. Units that were straight broken would be so for years. Meta lists, like "leaf blower" or "dual lash prince" would dominate tournaments forever until the next broken thing came out. And the casual game would suffer immensely due to this. If your opponent showed up with even one or two meta units, and you were playing one of the many factions that could not compete, you would just get curb stomped. When Eldar got BROKE in 6th, I would play lists trying to handicap myself and still crush some armies best builds. Quite frankly I am surprised 40k survived this as well. And god forbid you had units you liked that were over costed or under powered. They would stay that way for years while you waited for a new codex.
Anyway, that is my rant to follow your rant, and again this is just my opinion, feel free to disagree, tell me how much better 5th edition was etc. But personally I am quite happy with the game at this moment. Could there be improvement? always. but overall this is the most fun I have had in 40k since I started in 2nd.
I think that, as a base, 3rd-7th is superior to 8th-10th.
But your point here...
xeen wrote: Finally the worst part of the 3-7 experience is not even the game rules. It was the complete lack of any quality control or support by GW. This is why when people complain about there being to many rules updates or points updates I just want to claw my eyes out. The alternative is FAR FAR worse. Units that were straight broken would be so for years. Meta lists, like "leaf blower" or "dual lash prince" would dominate tournaments forever until the next broken thing came out. And the casual game would suffer immensely due to this. If your opponent showed up with even one or two meta units, and you were playing one of the many factions that could not compete, you would just get curb stomped. When Eldar got BROKE in 6th, I would play lists trying to handicap myself and still crush some armies best builds. Quite frankly I am surprised 40k survived this as well. And god forbid you had units you liked that were over costed or under powered. They would stay that way for years while you waited for a new codex.
That's the kicker. If they had put the same effort to FAQ, errata, patch, and all that into the earlier editions, they would've been a lot better.
yeah, can't disagree with Grotsnik on anything really, I missed granularity, I missed that scale of mid-level skirmishing, and the relentless enbiggening of 40K has definitely made things less tactical.
2nd edition armies were roughly half the size of 3rd edition ones. Smaller armies meant they were more maneuverable, could make better use of cover, and the rules could be more detailed and characterful. some of that crept back in in later editions but early 3rd was bland as all hell. It didn't matter too much that 2nd edition made you keep track of individual cyclone missiles, or that some game effects and strategy cards took a while to work out, because each unit could be afforded that extra time for its rules.
Didn't hurt that the largest thing you saw in regular play for most armies was their dreadnought-equivalent (unless you knew That Guy with the RT Land Raiders, or That Other Guy with the metal thunderhawk, but nobody ever played him). With a smaller scale of models the power disparity between them could be emphasized.
Dreadnoughts could be imposing wrecking balls that it took concentrated fire to take down because there weren't a hundred things bigger than it that the game system also had to accommodate, so you could have things like a whole page of rules for how Dreadnought heavy weapons were just plain better than the infantry versions (multimeltas having a Heavy Flamer mode, ignoring jams on sustained fire weapons, heavy plasma guns firing on max power every turn without recharging, Salvo-firing missile launchers...)
There was a lot to miss about 2nd edition, but the greatest loss I think was the overall sense of specialness. Zooming out the scope of the game made each of your guys feel less like a battle-hardened warrior who could turn the tide of a battle if he could only rally one more time, and more like one in a sea of faceless mooks there to support the Big (expensive) Stuff or acting as ablative wounds for a character.
EDIT - Thread moved on whilst typing. This is a response to Jnap. Currently working my way through the others.
I’ve not played since….erm…I honestly forget, but maybe 7th? Tail end of 6th? It was 2010 any road due to work, and two years later commute put the proper kibosh on it. So I’m afraid I can’t really comment.
I don’t disagree that thematically, Marines shouldn’t need to hug cover. Indeed among my faint praise for 3rd Ed I’ll concede that unless your opponent min-maxed Las-Plas type combos, it was cool to be able to do that.
But not having to, and getting no benefit whatsoever when your moving behind or through cover isn’t the same thing.
For instance? I might be lining up to give a large, squishy squad a bit of a shoeing. But I realise they’re pretty large, and if I blob it their firepower could overwhelm me. There, I may want to shoot from behind cover to mitigate any and depending on angles, all return fire.
But not in 3rd Ed. Not unless they’re packing loads of AP3 from somewhere.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and among the other things completely de-fanged?
The Assault Cannon.
Once a pretty reliable Jack of all Trades. Not the best range, and relatively (just loyalist Terminators, Dreadnoughts and specifically Ravenwing Landspeeders, I think? Oh wait. Imperial Guard Sentinels of all things!) rare. But an impressive rate of fire, respectable strength and save modifier. And importantly? Multiple wounds.
To……drivel. Which still exploded on occasion, with none of the risk/reward of 2nd Ed.
S6? Crap! AP4? Crap! 3 shots? Yeah OK not too shabby. Shame S and AP gave it no preferred prey. But you could still definitely totally whoopsadoodle kill yourself.
Oh and fun fact? I’ve never, ever, ever had an Assault Cannon explode on me. Ever. Not once.
xeen wrote: I know a lot of people have fondness for 5th (Of the earlier editions my fav is 6th) but ultimately the rules were to complex for the number of models that continuously grew and grew and grew on the table.
The books in 5th were certainly expanding but there was a difference between clunky and complex.
5e was clunky in that you had to muck around positioning blasts, portioning out dice for wounds, and so on, but with so many similar statlines, shared rules, and yes/no conditions rather than modifiers it was quite easy to ballpark the odds of an action, and similarly you could glance at a board and gauge what the situation was, what threats were now and in future turns, and so on without needing to know the odds of the opponent stacking fifteen different conditional modifiers or pulling exodia the forbidden one out of their deck.
Different strokes for different folks of course but I always liked that you would play a style or paintscheme because it matched your faction theme rather than a mechanical bonus - the orks never lost their clans, the Red Sunz were the red ones with lots of bikes not the ones that were statistically 8% more value per point because of their unique stratagem.
But they did lose their Clans. And since ‘Ere We Go and Freebooterz, Orks got some kind of special stuff for speccing into a given Clan.
What happened to Orks in 3rd Ed is a travesty matched only by the fact Eldar didn’t get a Waaargh! The Orks or Realm of Chaos equivalent in Rogue Trader.
You might be able to tell I’m really big on the background 🤣🤣🤣
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: But they did lose their Clans. And since ‘Ere We Go and Freebooterz, Orks got some kind of special stuff for speccing into a given Clan
They didn't lose the clans, just the clan bonuses.
3e competitive CSM players didn't take Iron Warriors because they liked their background and half the Alaitoc players probably thought their craftworld colour was drab green, but a 3e Goff ork player was an honest Goff :p
Unique units are a special case, but beyond them I feel that if players want to play Salamanders (for instance) they should take flamers because it fits the theme, not because it gives them rerolls or the like.
What irritated me the most about the 3rd ed rules engine, was that it disproportionately advantaged marines over any other army, because of the AP system.
It also condensed other armies, like the eldar, into tshirt wearing idiots making suicidal charges with pistol ranged guns.
I was enraged that the shuriken catapult went from a storm bolter with better AP, to a 2 shot bolt pistol.
GW really started riding the marinewank train at this point, trying to make them the best and any better technology was never actually better.
By removing to hit modifiers, it also overly focused the game on purely toughness and armour, again the two best things marines had.
Where in 2nd ed, nids and eldar could get away with poorer armour because if they ran they were at -1 to hit. Speed as defence, the supposed philosophy of the eldar completely ditched for 3rd, whilst still being sold as their aesthetic...
However, I'm not a big fan of the engine for the 8th ed paradigm either.
The game has further devolved into purely toughness, wounds and saves as the man defensive capability. Which only represent a few armies.
They've relied on giving out invulnerable saves to get around this fundamental limitation.
IMO if your mechanics can't represent all the factions equally, instead of focusing on one particular type of play (ie marine wound tough save), then it's a failure.
It would be like creating a game with no wounds, saves or toughness, where shooting auto wounds and only modifiers to hit are used.
You represent the quicksilver eldar with their ability to dodge bullets just fine, but then have to do some weird handstands to explain how a to hit modifier reflects the physical toughness and damage capacity of a marine.
Didn't hurt that the largest thing you saw in regular play for most armies was their dreadnought-equivalent (unless you knew That Guy with the RT Land Raiders, or That Other Guy with the metal thunderhawk, but nobody ever played him). With a smaller scale of models the power disparity between them could be emphasized.
I was a guy with 2 Land Raiders. I knew people, (and became one myself later on), who had armorcast Titans.
I distinctly remember Disarming (Exarch power) one Reaver of it's Turbo Laser Destructor in a round of combat, lulz!
I think HH 2.0 is the pinnacle of what the framework laid down in 3rd edition evolved into. But it took them a long time 'till they got there. And some things they'd never touch in the 40K version, like the AP system you mentioned (with the introduction of hull points in 6th the system reached its all time low as it killed tanks entirely and turned all the pages about vehicles into useless bloat that would be gunned down by any S6 or S7 weapon, no matter what armour you had.) Or the aweful WS table. Sure, you had values reaching from 1-10, but the table made sure that in 90% of cases you rolled a 3 or a 4.
So I'm also in the camp of preferring the framework from 8th-10th, these editions are just mostly held back by GWs desire to kill the edition every three years. Give 10th edition a rework by the FW Team like HH2.0 had and you might end up with GWs best system, yet.
Background wize I only know the Ork and Chaos Codex from 3rd. Chaos 3.5 is still praised rightfully so for its rules, but actual Background in it is slim. The Ork codex features the infamous report of a Magos about the Orks, laying the foundation of "Ork weapons only work because they believe so", an internet meme that some still hold true.
Didn't hurt that the largest thing you saw in regular play for most armies was their dreadnought-equivalent (unless you knew That Guy with the RT Land Raiders, or That Other Guy with the metal thunderhawk, but nobody ever played him). With a smaller scale of models the power disparity between them could be emphasized.
I was a guy with 2 Land Raiders. I knew people, (and became one myself later on), who had armorcast Titans.
I distinctly remember Disarming (Exarch power) one Reaver of it's Turbo Laser Destructor in a round of combat, lulz!
I mean, they were around, and they were fun... but they weren't common. I played a lot of 2nd ed over its lifespan, in a bunch of different clubs and tournies in several different locations, and encountered a grand total of 2 Land Raiders in that time. Partly because they were a sizeable whack of points, and partly because most of the 2nd ed players I came across had started in 2nd, and the Land Raider hadn't been available to buy since the closing days of Rogue Trader.
And the only Armorcast titans I came across were in shop windows.
I would largely agree with the Doc's assessment of 3rd ed. I played a lot of it because it was still the game to play, and I had a lot of free time back then. But really, the only thing it had going for it was that it was faster to play than 2nd ed. I hated how much stuff they stripped out.
Edit: overly aggressive post. I apologize. I'll just like to remind others that 3rd edition was a time in which many factions received their most iconic codes
I also started in 2nd and it is a lot of fun. I've got extremely fond memories of reading the three books from the starter and our wacky games as young teenagers.
But I prefer 3rd edition. It was the first time any game I played had an "update" like that, and although at first I didn't like the change, it grew on me for many reasons.
I liked the "move, shoot, assault" paradigm more than the old style. I liked the more streamlined rules that let you get larger model count games done in a reasonable time. I much preferred the close combat rules.
And I have to say, I felt that the rules for Orks finally represented their background a bit better - it never sat well with me that this army that was talked about as though it had a real preference for close combat was basically a bunch of guardsmen with T4. 3e's switch to their statline made them play as I thought they should, and Brian Nelson's Ork Boyz are still my absolute favourite design for Orks. This edition made me an Ork player and I've stayed an Ork player ever since!
In a broader sense, 3e was exciting because we got Necrons getting their own book, the big campaigns with their own books (including Speed Freaks and Lost and the Damned, two excellent small army lists) and the introduction of a whole new faction in the Tau.
There were misteps, but overall it was a great edition. My main unhappiness back then was in waiting for my Orks to get updated for such a long time, and waiting for models to represent the entries in the book. We were practically in 5e before we got our 4e book. Another point of unhappiness was the introduction of Grey Knights as a full army, never sat well with me from a background POV. And of course, 2e codices are vastly superior to 3e ones when it comes to background.
3rd and 4th were my favorite editions. 5th was okay. Didn't play 6-9 really. Just a few games at home with friends.
It was the artwork from the margins in the unit entries that got me into the game. Specifically the Obliterator with the cannon in his chest from Codex: Chaos.
I never played 2nd but I was reading the codexes for a few weeks before 3rd arrived. 2nd seemed cartoony and goofy compared to 3rd.
I spent almost the entirety of 3rd edition playing daily at Dakka Dakka. I miss those days.
I agree whole heartedly with mad dok, 3rd felt so beige and dull after the joy of second edition. But the biggest crime was what happened to ORKS. My beloved ORKS. It wasn’t just all the flavour being sucked out of the army, it was your whole collection being invalidated overnight. The entire structure and composition of your army, the models you had lovingly built and painted being rendered useless.
I remember going through my mobs and. Trying reconfigure them into workable units for the new edition and how sad it was that they just had to go.
Consider the rage now when a unit gets moved to legends, imaging that to your whole army, but with no legends to back it up, just gone.
However, I think 3rd in 1998 and 3rd in 2004 are very different beasts. The rulebook lists are indeed very bland and I can see why this was jarring from 2nd, but a lot changed over the 6 years. Essentially they kind of released 3rd in beta.
As an example, Orks did have clan rules by the end of 3rd, with effectively 6 distinct lists (in addition to the basic list, Speed Freeks, and Feral Orks).
Andykp: I can totally understand where you are coming from. They definitely radically changed Orks and could have done more to make older models usable.
When I read the 2e Codex Imperialis, the two sections I read over and over were the Ork section and the Squat section. I was a huge tolkien nerd and orcs and dwarves were my favourites back then (and today!) so the idea of sci fi orks and dwarves really tickled my fancy.
The Ork background back then was really creative and fun. But I wasn't that impressed with most of the models or the way the army worked on the table. So for me, 3e was where I really enjoyed playing Orks. But I can totally see if you loved the older aesthetic and playstyle, your army was basically gone.
Hellebore wrote:What irritated me the most about the 3rd ed rules engine, was that it disproportionately advantaged marines over any other army, because of the AP system.
*snip*
GW really started riding the marinewank train at this point, trying to make them the best and any better technology was never actually better.
You really need some therapy for this persecution complex of yours.
Sgt. Cortez wrote:Or the aweful WS table. Sure, you had values reaching from 1-10, but the table made sure that in 90% of cases you rolled a 3 or a 4.
Just for clarity, is your problem with it the concept of the table (as opposed to fixed to-hit values), or just the range of values they used at the time?
Sgt. Cortez wrote:The Ork codex features the infamous report of a Magos about the Orks, laying the foundation of "Ork weapons only work because they believe so", an internet meme that some still hold true.
You say meme, but has it ever actually been rolled back?
Andykp wrote:I agree whole heartedly with mad dok, 3rd felt so beige and dull after the joy of second edition. But the biggest crime was what happened to ORKS. My beloved ORKS. It wasn’t just all the flavour being sucked out of the army, it was your whole collection being invalidated overnight. The entire structure and composition of your army, the models you had lovingly built and painted being rendered useless.
Going to play devil's advocate here for a second - acknowledging that you might have to end up with mixed-Clan mobs, what models were actually rendered useless in 3rd compared to 2nd?
The "ork tech only works because they believe in it" theory is presented as an in universe comment by a Tech Priest who doesn't understand how Ork tech works. That doesn't mean it's "true" in universe, because the Tech Priest might just not be as smart as a Mekboy.
I'm looking the other way. I started in 3rd, and much later, looked back to 2nd. NUTS! is being kind... VERY flavourful, but you had to have the right mood on the right day. I think of 2nd as a sort of mushroom enhanced prequel to kill team - am I wrong?
Da Boss wrote: The "ork tech only works because they believe in it" theory is presented as an in universe comment by a Tech Priest who doesn't understand how Ork tech works. That doesn't mean it's "true" in universe, because the Tech Priest might just not be as smart as a Mekboy.
It is corroborated by the (equally unreliable) memoirs of Commissar Cain, where he recalls a techpriest assessing a stock of captured Ork gear when behind enemy lines. She stated that half of the gear shouldn't be functional, but the humans had been using it to fight Orks anyway (and continued to do so).
Personally, I subscribe to the "psychic lubricant" theory, where Ork stuff is generally functional, but just needs a bit of help to smooth over some of the lax tolerances on Ork production. So bullets that are slightly too big for the gun still fire etc.
Da Boss wrote: Again, just another tech priest who doesn't understand Xenos tech. It's not like tech priests generally understand their own tech that much.
No, but in the Cain example they are talking about sluggas and buggies not shokk attakk gunz and gargants. The impression given is very much that basic gear is frequently so poorly made it shouldn't work, but does. The same techpriest was also able to keep said buggies running for months.
I agree it is still unconfirmed even by 40k standards, but it is very plausible. Especially as we know Orks are an inherently psychic species.
Neither Mekboyz or Techpriests really have any understanding of what they’re doing. Meks just sort of….make stuff. And a lot of the time they don’t know what it is they’re making, or what the resulting gun, gadget, gubbins or gizmo will do. Techpriests may know principles and that, but by no means understand them, or have any capability to apply them to things outside of a given plan.
But back on topic!
I agree with Hellebore that the predominance of Marines really didn’t help 3rd Ed. It was from that the focus on High Strength, Low AP stemmed. And from there the No Man’s Land of weapons which were rarely, if ever, fielded.
Which brings me on to another thought. And I can’t necessarily blame 3rd Ed for it. For with 3rd Ed, came my first faltering forays to Portent. Where I first encountered WAAC, Min-Max and “tournament am all” attitudes. Folk that didn’t care a joy for the background.
Now, 3rd Ed removing pretty much all flavour from Codexes didn’t really help there, but for all I know such discussions were prevalent during 2nd Ed, I just never encountered them because all I knew was my local scene.
I though mid-strength medium RoF weapons were quite popular in 3rd, because they are great at popping Rhinos and equivalent. Transport rush was a major strategy for several armies, and an autocannon is more suited to blunting a Rhino rush or Speed Freeks trukk list than a lascannon.
This sort of discussions is why I'd really love GW to reintroduce all the older editions of the game as viable choices for playing. They wouldn't need to add anything to them, just make them available again with all their expansions and erratas especially. Let the players decide which editions they want to play with their toys. Warhammer vault could be a way of doing precisely this. I know it is possible to do this already, but amassing all those old resources takes quite a lot of effort, and I'm sure more players would be open to playing "vintage" edition games if GW's stance was "play any darn edition you want as long as its one of our games". Novelty would still ensure most players would only be playing the latest and greatest.
As for me personally, I have only played 40K since.. I think 5th edition onwards? So I dont really have much experience on how the games played, but looking back on the books, 1st Edition and 2nd Edition are the ones I keep coming back to.. and I try to envision a world where those two editions would still be playable today, with access to all the current factions and units, and models especially. It would sort of be like the "Old World" of 40K if you will..
Sort of adjacent topic - but I do think this is really echos my issues of 9th->10th.
Speaking as someone "who was just about there" - I started 40k in 2nd, but *really* started in 3rd. Now, admittedly, this is perhaps because in 2nd I was less than 12 years old, but it seemed incredibly complicated, bloated, and just kind of broken. My cousin seemed to have various busted combos (but who knows whether we got the rules right.) You run into a virus or vortex grenade once and maybe you can find it funny. But inevitably all your friends start wanting to chuck them and it gets old.
I can imagine the movement to 3rd did feel like chopping off a leg, as its basically a new game. (Imo 9th->10th isn't really, but lets not argue that again). But I think because I wasn't really into 2nd, and Fantasy being the bigger game, it didn't bother me. I could effectively start fresh in 40k - with a whole generation of other people starting fresh - while keeping the 2nd edition fluff.
And the result was great. Very much non-WAAC, "fluffy" lists, the Quasi-White Dwarf soft-Highlander stuff I've talked about. Cynically, 40k is great if you are 14 and playing other 14 year olds.
I think things started to break up towards the end of the edition. I.E. I think its great all the Chaos chapters have rules, but everyone at the store only seems to be playing Iron Warriors with more heavy support choices.
But that's probably just an indication of us getting older. People who'd got jobs were free to buy better stuff, and did so. I was falling out of the hobby anyway - and it wouldn't be until I returned in 5th where the game seemed to be all WAAC all the time. (Which it probably wasn't really, but you don't need too many people to give the impression it is.)
tauist wrote: So I dont really have much experience on how the games played, but looking back on the books, 1st Edition and 2nd Edition are the ones I keep coming back to.. and I try to envision a world where those two editions would still be playable today
Someone compiled all of the 2nd edition rules into a 'battle bible' pdf that i'm sure is still floating around on the web. Depending on your armies and house rules the game balance was somewhere between 'clown show' and 'the entire circus' but it had its charm, and if you can get your hands on the old necromunda books you can play the old ruleset on a smaller scale to get a feel for it.
Oh, I have 2nd edition box and even the bible I think, but the bible is not an official GW product and is an eyesore to sift through. However, my biggest problem is getting anyone else interested in playing it
Well once I’m done painting my Heresy stuff, my Eldar may be next up on the slate.
I bought the models as part of an experiment, where I start off using the 2nd Ed Codex, then transpose that to 9th Ed.
No real point looking to be made, just thought it would be an interesting project for folk to follow, and see how the game has increased in size and organisation.
Now of course it’ll be 10th. But if you want to do a parallel project, I’ll give you a shout when I’m ready to go.
JNAProductions wrote:I actually like the Cover system of 3rd-7th, mostly because it promotes the kind of fantasy that fits 40k, in my opinion.
Guardsmen, Cultists, and other lightly-armored models hug cover. They need it to survive against even small arms fire from most factions.
Marines, Immortals, and other heavily-armored models don't. Their armor is more than enough until the big guns get brought out.
Not saying it was perfect, for sure, but it worked well enough.
JNAProductions wrote:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: To-hit modifiers managed that really well though, as your protection came from being less likely to be hit - and everyone benefitted from that equally. It also meant higher BS was a more desirable trait than in 3rd.
In 3rd? Nope. Pretty much a one-way street of most benefit to light and squishy stuff.
It did not benefit everyone equally.
A BS4 model suffered a 25% reduction in hits.
A BS2 model got their hit rate halved.
And, to me, Marines generally not needing cover fits their aesthetic. They SHOULDN'T need to duck and cover against a couple of Lasguns.
8th and 9th Edition were definitely the worst, though.
Squad of 10 Cultists? Takes 24 Autogun hits to kill.
Add Cover? 30.
Squad of 5 Marines, at two wounds apiece? Takes 90 Autogun hits to kill.
Add Cover? 180.
Against the lightest, least armor-piercings weapons, Marines got the biggest benefit from Cover. That's just ass-backwards.
Meant to address this before, but I agree with JNA on this. Marines only needing cover against the big guns is more lore friendly than them skulking in the shadows at lasguns. I think it also better represents that a big part of cover is concealment- sure the lascannon can pierce through the wall, but it is much more likely to perforate a bit of masonry than hit the soldier hiding behind.
I think stat modifiers have a place in the game, but I prefer it when they are a result of player choice rather than forced by the enemy, due to the maths pointed out above.
For example, if moving/firing ordnance imposed a hit penalty on vehicle weapons rather than preventing them firing altogether, that is a choice. If you need accuracy, stay still. But moving doesn't tank the efficacy of the vehicle to kill stuff
It’s more that Marines rarely benefitted from Cover in 3rd Ed. Until 5 Man Las/Plas became commonplace.
It’s just a factor of the All Or Nothing save system. I don’t disagree that Marines should be able to walk in the open with relative impunity, but not at the cost of benefitting from cover.
Consider. 10 Guardsmen deployed in cover gain essentially a 5+ or 4+ Inv, depending on the cover. This makes them much harder to shift. Which in itself is fine.
10 Marines deployed in cover gained….nothing. At all. Unless some of the incoming fire happened to be AP3 or better.
But, if Cover gives -1 or -2 to hit? The Guardsmen and Marines receive the same overall benefit, whether or not the Marines have fewer reasons to hug cover in the first place.
People often say your favourite edition is the one you start with, but 5th was my favourite and I started in 2nd.
Now though, with some years to consider, I think my problems with 4th were pretty minor (they made transports death traps, easily fixed by ignoring a couple of rules, and the codex release schedule was bollocks). 5th toward the end was really quite bad for crappy lists and it introduced flyers as a part of the main game, which I was never keen on.
If I was gonna go back I'd go back to 3e or 4e I reckon. I have the 3e book with the lists in, which is a big point in it's favour, but no "black book" lists for Tau or Necrons is a downer. OPR 2.0 scratches the itch well enough for me.
I think MDG has a point that the game did lose something in the transition from 2 to 3, the wacky and whimsy side of things. But the core rules weren't much good for actually playing the game imo.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: It’s more that Marines rarely benefitted from Cover in 3rd Ed. Until 5 Man Las/Plas became commonplace.
It’s just a factor of the All Or Nothing save system. I don’t disagree that Marines should be able to walk in the open with relative impunity, but not at the cost of benefitting from cover.
Consider. 10 Guardsmen deployed in cover gain essentially a 5+ or 4+ Inv, depending on the cover. This makes them much harder to shift. Which in itself is fine.
10 Marines deployed in cover gained….nothing. At all. Unless some of the incoming fire happened to be AP3 or better.
But, if Cover gives -1 or -2 to hit? The Guardsmen and Marines receive the same overall benefit, whether or not the Marines have fewer reasons to hug cover in the first place.
I think that trade off is worth it. Cover also came with significant movement penalties, so not requiring it unless staring down a battlecannon is very thematic IMO.
Plus, Marines did benefit from the melee defense of cover- assault grenades were much rarer in 3rd. They became sadly ubiquitous by 5th and GW may as well have stopped bothering to print the rules for models in cover striking first.
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Da Boss wrote: People often say your favourite edition is the one you start with, but 5th was my favourite and I started in 2nd.
Now though, with some years to consider, I think my problems with 4th were pretty minor (they made transports death traps, easily fixed by ignoring a couple of rules, and the codex release schedule was bollocks). 5th toward the end was really quite bad for crappy lists and it introduced flyers as a part of the main game, which I was never keen on.
If I was gonna go back I'd go back to 3e or 4e I reckon. I have the 3e book with the lists in, which is a big point in it's favour, but no "black book" lists for Tau or Necrons is a downer. OPR 2.0 scratches the itch well enough for me.
I think MDG has a point that the game did lose something in the transition from 2 to 3, the wacky and whimsy side of things. But the core rules weren't much good for actually playing the game imo.
I think 4th with some tweaks as you say, plus a couple of extras is best. I'd prsonally add the 5th edition "go to ground" by choice rules to 4th, and make the "troops bailing out of a penetrated transport" only happen on a failed Ld test for the squad inside. Using 3rd codices with 4th ed rules is my personal preference, for the flavour.
All that demonstrates is Marines and MEQ only suffered detriment from cover, as it slowed them down.
And in 2nd Ed? Terrain could still halve your movement.
No, it highlights that cover has defensive bonuses (including in 2nd) not offensive ones, and the ruleset promoted Marines to go on the offensive unless facing heavy artillery. This is how Marines typically operate in the lore. Cover is slow. Marines don't like being slow, they primary MO is repeated rapid strikes unless their hand is forced into a defensive posture.
The melee defensive bonuses are mainly useful against hordes of infantry with poor access to grenades, like hormagaunts or Ork slugga boyz.
Basically cover becomes a tool for specific situations rather than a requirement for Marines. Which is how they typically fight in the lore...
Yeah re: marines needing cover, that's been quite the experience over the years.
From what I remember from 3rd onwards I found it really boring that marines essentially ignored most terrain in my games; it didn't do anything for them against my nids' ranged attacks*. Morale wasn't that impactful on them either, so all they had to do was move, shoot and/or charge. It felt uninteresting to play against.
Spoiler:
I did really enjoy it when I could get terminators in fleshborer range though, I could never resist trying my luck.
I was really looking forward to a system where they'd use hit and armor modifiers because of it, thinking it'd make the game more tactical. So I walked willingly into 8th after a hiatus of a couple of years, completely falling for the "New GW" marketing. And then I got to experience the math posted above
*disclaimers: nid shooting essentially capped out at ap4.
- My 1-2 available warp blasts mostly went into vehicles, else they bagged maybe 2-3 marines per blast. Which isn't bad, but you couldn't get more than a couple of warp blasters in an army and they were also your only lethal ranged anti-tank weapons.
- I didn't really use the s3 ap3 flamer spore mines that were introduced in 4th(iirc?), they were very unreliable and I disliked the expensive, pewter biovore models.
- Units expecting to be charged did usually take cover. It meant they could strike first and thin out my precious charging genestealers, who somehow never managed to adapt to the fact that some prey uses cover.
All that demonstrates is Marines and MEQ only suffered detriment from cover, as it slowed them down.
And in 2nd Ed? Terrain could still halve your movement.
No, it highlights that cover has defensive bonuses (including in 2nd) not offensive ones, and the ruleset promoted Marines to go on the offensive unless facing heavy artillery. This is how Marines typically operate in the lore. Cover is slow. Marines don't like being slow, they primary MO is repeated rapid strikes unless their hand is forced into a defensive posture.
The melee defensive bonuses are mainly useful against hordes of infantry with poor access to grenades, like hormagaunts or Ork slugga boyz.
Basically cover becomes a tool for specific situations rather than a requirement for Marines. Which is how they typically fight in the lore...
Not how the game worked out though. A highly abstract example follows.
If I was facing say, a Mob of 30 Shoota Boyz? The sensible thing to do in warfare is….not stand in the open. But there was nothing for Marines to gain there. So I was only a few jammy rolls away from having the unit mauled, if not wiped out. There was nothing I could do to mitigate.
That doesn’t feel right, and never will.
The glaring issue in 3rd Ed was how overpowered Close Combat was. Armies keyed to it did really well, as once you got stuck in? You could consolidate from combat to combat, or overrun. This greatly reduced and unbalanced the effectiveness of range favour armies. And that’s before we get to “being angry make it go faster” nonsense like Blood Angel Rhinos, or Black Templars getting bonus movement if I dare shoot at them in any volume. Oh, and don’t forget where I can only shoot in my own turn, combat armies fought in both player turns.
Now, the base, underlying rules did turn out for the good a few more editions in. Tweaks and changes brought it into its own. But 3rd Ed? 3rd Ed sucked more than the biggest vacuum cleaner, filled with Jimmy Carr standup DVDs piping out Dubstep through massive speakers in the middle of a black hole.
Well... in 3rd those 30 shoota boyz might kill a single Marine, maybe 2 within 12". They'd be exceptionally lucky to kill more than 3 or 4. On a D6 system, if the Marines were 2+ in cover they'd be very difficult to shift by shooting and would hit first against most boyz mobz in melee. It is an issue of granularity really.
Also, Blood Angels rhinos are faster because they horde an STC for better engines, not because they are angry...? I find the complaints about autocannons earlier a bit odd when complaining about Rhinos now. That is where autocannon were most effective.
Shuriken Cannon, Scatter Lasers, Assault Cannon and thier ilk were awful, and only taken when you had no choice in the matter. S6 was too niche, and their AP was cack.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: If I was facing say, a Mob of 30 Shoota Boyz? The sensible thing to do in warfare is….not stand in the open. But there was nothing for Marines to gain there.
The alternatives all have their own problems: to hit modifiers penalised innacurate shots more heavily, save modifiers benefitted heavy armour more than light armour, double saves added extra rolling.
Years back when playing with the idea of a 'simplehammer' ruleset I had wondered if the old 'night shield' rule would have been better for light cover and intervening units - no extra saves, the target is just treated as being 6" further away (capped at 12"). But with oldhammer being as slow as it was at times, especially before run moves, it did just seem to give more value to heavy and special weapons and camping whereas the 3e cover system did at least encourage getting stuck in with small arms.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Autocannon is just an example.
Shuriken Cannon, Scatter Lasers, Assault Cannon and thier ilk were awful, and only taken when you had no choice in the matter. S6 was too niche, and their AP was cack.
3e assault cannon were crap. 4e assault cannon were the gold standard.
Autocannon were just too expensive and where you could get them cheaply (i.e. a 5pt upgrade on chimeras) they were excellent upgrades over the S5 and S6 weapons that struggled to shake opposing vehicles and walkers.
The game probably needed more 4+ monstrous creatures to give those weapons a niche.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: If I was facing say, a Mob of 30 Shoota Boyz? The sensible thing to do in warfare is….not stand in the open. But there was nothing for Marines to gain there.
The alternatives all have their own problems: to hit modifiers penalised innacurate shots more heavily, save modifiers benefitted heavy armour more than light armour, double saves added extra rolling.
Years back when playing with the idea of a 'simplehammer' ruleset I had wondered if the old 'night shield' rule would have been better for light cover and intervening units - no extra saves, the target is just treated as being 6" further away (capped at 12"). But with oldhammer being as slow as it was at times, especially before run moves, it did just seem to give more value to heavy and special weapons and camping whereas the 3e cover system did at least encourage getting stuck in with small arms.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Autocannon is just an example.
Shuriken Cannon, Scatter Lasers, Assault Cannon and thier ilk were awful, and only taken when you had no choice in the matter. S6 was too niche, and their AP was cack.
3e assault cannon were crap. 4e assault cannon were the gold standard.
Autocannon were just too expensive and where you could get them cheaply (i.e. a 5pt upgrade on chimeras) they were excellent upgrades over the S5 and S6 weapons that struggled to shake opposing vehicles and walkers.
The game probably needed more 4+ monstrous creatures to give those weapons a niche.
I'm a bit confused. Autocannons cost 5pts more than a heavy bolter in almost every example I could find, to match the Chimera difference. They were cheapest for CSM squads, at 10pts. The only examples I can find where autocannons cost 10pts more than heavy bolters in the same unit was for Chaos chosen and Imperial Guard fire support squads in the rulebook lists, kept by fire support squads in the first Imperial Guard codex (but not the second). I agree this was too much, and it seems GW agreed as they reduced the price difference as 3rd progressed.
3rd did increase the price of special and heavy weapons on most units that could spam them compared to the single weapons on troop squads. This would have been good if they'd done it a bit more consistently.
A.T. wrote: The alternatives all have their own problems: to hit modifiers penalised innacurate shots more heavily, save modifiers benefitted heavy armour more than light armour, double saves added extra rolling.
Apologies if I’m seeming contrary for the sake of it, I promise that’s not the case.
In terms of 2nd Ed only…
I’d argue it made units with high ballistic skill feel more special, because unless you literally hid (Hiding being a defined thing)? They could still hit a reasonable amount of the time.
So stuff like Terminators, or Devastators with their Targetters were terrors of the battlefield, because they weren’t just accurate, they were reliably accurate.
Also worth keeping in mind that at least in 2nd Ed, to the best of my current recollection buffs to stats were fairly difficult to come by for Squads, with aforementioned Targetters being a notable instance of +1 BS on mooks.
BS2 was super rare though, as BS3 was standard, BS4 the premium, and BS5 and higher for Proper Elite and Characters.
So this factors in to Terminators, Aspect Warriors etc losing all their teeth in 3rd Ed. They just weren’t special anymore, at all.
Haighus wrote: I'm a bit confused. Autocannons cost 5pts more than a heavy bolter in almost every example I could find
15pt heavy bolters weren't the most in-demand options in most armies.
When it came to squad weapons though the 20pt autocannon had to compete against the 20pt missile launcher and that wasn't really a choice for the targets you'd shoot them at.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’d argue it made units with high ballistic skill feel more special, because unless you literally hid (Hiding being a defined thing)? They could still hit a reasonable amount of the time.
Something interesting about the way 2nd editions shooting rules worked showed up if you played necromunda campaigns for too long. At first the starting teams would be able to move around in and out of cover and the games flowed as players took risks but play for long enough and the BS scores and weapon bonuses outweighed the cover and you'd get rows of 'hidden' tokens everywhere.
That's why the plasma cannon was always the premium long-term investment (blast marker - shoot the barricade itself).
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’d argue it made units with high ballistic skill feel more special, because unless you literally hid (Hiding being a defined thing)? They could still hit a reasonable amount of the time.
Something interesting about the way 2nd editions shooting rules worked showed up if you played necromunda campaigns for too long. At first the starting teams would be able to move around in and out of cover and the games flowed as players took risks but play for long enough and the BS scores and weapon bonuses outweighed the cover and you'd get rows of 'hidden' tokens everywhere.
That's why the plasma cannon was always the premium long-term investment (blast marker - shoot the barricade itself).
True, but I’d argue that said flaw didn’t manifest in the same way in 2nd Ed as it did in Necromunda, because we were playing with pretty static stat lines.
Mordheim struck a nice balance though. Sure your Leader, Heroes and Youngbloods could get filthy, but your Henchmen could only increase a given stat once, which dealt with the above concern before it really manifested.
I'm too lazy to write a long counter-argument, but I need to address this:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Ork Clans? What Ork Clans?. You’re all a drab brown now, with no thematic perks on offer anywhere.
In the 2nd edition Boyz from different clans were only really differentiated by how many special or heavy weapons they could take. If you wanted to play mono-clan, your choices were very limited. In the 3rd edition, using the Chapter Approved clan rules, different clans actually had different army composition with restrictions, yet still more options than in the 2nd edition, where e.g. playing a themed Death Skulls clan meant your only themed option was Boyz that were the same as every other clan's Boyz, but they could be given kombi-weapons. In the 3rd edition Lootas actually had access to looted Imperial weapons and Death Skulls could even take more looted vehicles than other clans. Yeah, looted vehicles, something most players would consider extremely Orky, only became a thing in the 3rd edition.
Santtu wrote: I'm too lazy to write a long counter-argument, but I need to address this:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Ork Clans? What Ork Clans?. You’re all a drab brown now, with no thematic perks on offer anywhere.
In the 2nd edition Boyz from different clans were only really differentiated by how many special or heavy weapons they could take. If you wanted to play mono-clan, your choices were very limited. In the 3rd edition, using the Chapter Approved clan rules, different clans actually had different army composition with restrictions, yet still more options than in the 2nd edition, where e.g. playing a themed Death Skulls clan meant your only themed option was Boyz that were the same as every other clan's Boyz, but they could be given kombi-weapons. In the 3rd edition Lootas actually had access to looted Imperial weapons and Death Skulls could even take more looted vehicles than other clans. Yeah, looted vehicles, something most players would consider extremely Orky, only became a thing in the 3rd edition.
Plus, a lot of units were clan-locked in 2nd- only the Evil Sunz had bikers, only the Blood Axes had kommandos. In 3rd, any clan could use these. If you used the Chapter approved clan rules, certain units might not be available to some clans, but very, very few options were fully restricted to one clan only (Evil Sunz warboss on bike, Blood Axe looted Chimera as dedicated transport for HQ, some Snakebite units taken from the Feral Orks list, all of which are available in some form to other Ork forces, and some equipment options).
I've honestly never been a big fan of 40K's cover system. I much prefer the way KT21 deals with cover with its distinction between concealed/engaged.
I suppose my ideal brew of 40K would be something like KT21 but with added vehicles and monsters, and games being sized about the same as in 1st and 2nd edition 40K.. And epic scale for anything larger than that
It seems to me that everybody that complains that third edition robbed the game of flavor are more referring to the fact that you didn't really get held to an actual military organizational structure with your armies. Your compositional requirements in second edition where twenty five percent plus must be spent on squads. An example of a squad? Literally the most elite of elite that you have in your army. You might come across a stipulation where you must run x boring squad in order to run y awesome squad and that's about it. It's like assuming that any combat or extended warfare that Britain were to get involved.It was loaded with nothing but SAS, SBS, and tactical nukes.
Army's look like actual structured armies. Not some teenager's action movie fantasy.
Also, third edition is being criticized in this thread as being the most stripped down, dull, bland, optionless version of the game ever. I went back to third edition when I had the choice of going retro and could pick any addition out of the entire field of systems that Games Workshop had made for for decades. There was extra content available for every army, including a massive number of alternative lists for said armies. This way, higher than what we got for years afterwards. Fluffers aside, more people had their cankles up for third edition because they could no longer have their cake and eat it, too.
Haighus wrote: I'm a bit confused. Autocannons cost 5pts more than a heavy bolter in almost every example I could find
15pt heavy bolters weren't the most in-demand options in most armies.
When it came to squad weapons though the 20pt autocannon had to compete against the 20pt missile launcher and that wasn't really a choice for the targets you'd shoot them at.
Well, only units that could mass them had 20pt or 25pt(!) autocannons. They were 15pts in most Guard units and 10pts for a lot of CSM units.
I don't think they hold up that badly compared to missile launchers. The latter has more versatility, but autocannons are superior against AV10, 11, and 12 and against 4+ armoured infantry (granted, this is relatively rare thanks to the popularity of Space Marines). If you are facing a lot of transports, autocannons are more likely to fare better.
...once again the meta of Marines everywhere comes back as a problem.
Santtu wrote: I'm too lazy to write a long counter-argument, but I need to address this:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Ork Clans? What Ork Clans?. You’re all a drab brown now, with no thematic perks on offer anywhere.
In the 2nd edition Boyz from different clans were only really differentiated by how many special or heavy weapons they could take. If you wanted to play mono-clan, your choices were very limited. In the 3rd edition, using the Chapter Approved clan rules, different clans actually had different army composition with restrictions, yet still more options than in the 2nd edition, where e.g. playing a themed Death Skulls clan meant your only themed option was Boyz that were the same as every other clan's Boyz, but they could be given kombi-weapons. In the 3rd edition Lootas actually had access to looted Imperial weapons and Death Skulls could even take more looted vehicles than other clans. Yeah, looted vehicles, something most players would consider extremely Orky, only became a thing in the 3rd edition.
Looted Vehicles are indeed Orky. As is nicking guns off the enemy and using them against them. But rules wise? They were cack, because Orks had BS2. However I honestly can’t remember if you got a discount on Looted Vehicles. I don’t think you did, but as always am open to me just not remembering.
But so are Shokk Attak Guns, Lifta-Droppas, Traktor Cannons, Pulse Rokkits, Bubble Chukkas, Squig Catapults. Indeed I’ll argue they’re the epitome of the Orky outlook on life. All make use of quite phenomenal, sometimes physics bending technology. Stuff which could be put to good use in industrial settings, engineering and so on. Orks use it to make stuff go splat in new and amusing ways. Like picking up an enemy Tank, and dropping it on the enemy infantry. All thrown out for 3rd Ed, along with Bioniks, Wildboyz, Madboyz and Boarboyz. Even Weirdboyz went bye bye.
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tauist wrote: Isn't Heavy Bolter (or equivalent) the de facto standard in anti-marine weaponry?
In 2nd Ed? Yes. S5, -2 Sv, D4 Damage (power to the people*) and two sustained fire dice. It was also my go-to shooter for messing up Avatars.
3rd Ed? Much less so, because AP4.
*bonus internet for anyone who recognises that reference, for you too are old.
Boarboyz and weirdboyz were in the 3rd edition rulebook appendix for the Ork list, and reappeared in the Feral ork list alongside wildboyz and mad boyz. Boarboyz also featured in the Snakebites clan rules.
Just Tony wrote: It seems to me that everybody that complains that third edition robbed the game of flavor are more referring to the fact that you didn't really get held to an actual military organizational structure with your armies.
This was something that GW noticeably started to remove in 4th edition, and occasionally made a hash of in 3rd.
Obliterators and Raptors in chaos for example were 0-1 in 3rd edition and free choice in 4th edition - in either case if you wanted to play a 3 raptor squad night lords force you could but it was a choice you made to follow the fluff rather than a restriction placed upon you or a bonus that you could gain.
Just Tony wrote: It seems to me that everybody that complains that third edition robbed the game of flavor are more referring to the fact that you didn't really get held to an actual military organizational structure with your armies.
This was something that GW noticeably started to remove in 4th edition, and occasionally made a hash of in 3rd.
Obliterators and Raptors in chaos for example were 0-1 in 3rd edition and free choice in 4th edition - in either case if you wanted to play a 3 raptor squad night lords force you could but it was a choice you made to follow the fluff rather than a restriction placed upon you or a bonus that you could gain.
Well, there is also the concept of a FOC in general.
Da Boss wrote: People often say your favourite edition is the one you start with, but 5th was my favourite and I started in 2nd.
Funny enough, I've never really felt this way. I dabbled in the game a bit around 5th but didn't really start an army until 7th and honestly, hated it. I enjoyed the modelling and painting but I can't say I ever really enjoyed playing beyond the people I played with. Particularly compared to its contemporaries, it just felt devoid of interesting decisions and engaging mechanics.
I didn't feel nearly the same way about 8th. Though it still was far from my favorite game I can say I enjoyed games of it on their own merits. Still full of notable issues. I actually liked that Guardsmen were everywhere visually, but it was obviously a gamey issue from a first draft economy. Most of my issues at this point focus on GWs update strategy and dated reliance on printed materials. Still, it was fun overall, but in need of work.
9th felt like it really took all of 8ths problems to heart and created a really great base ruleset that it proceeded to spend years making a total mess out of. Making things worse, due to releasing during the lockdown, I didn't really get to play until the mess had already been made and by the time I tried 9th it had become a mess of dozens of pages of strategems spread across 4+ books and just not particularly worth the effort to play in a time where getting people to game was a challenge.
10th has, by contrast, so far been the first edition that I wholeheartedly enjoy without much in the way of caveats. Granted, I'd probably be happier if my faction existed, but even there I've had a blast with the base Space Marine codex and I'm really enjoying branching into Orks. It's fun. Units have cool weapons and do cool things beyond move and shoot. The missions are interesting and for the first time I can say I'm actively choosing games of 40k over other options. Honestly, the biggest trepidation I have with 10th is it leaves me absolutely dreading 11th.
Haighus wrote: Well, there is also the concept of a FOC in general.
The FoC did make sense in how the game had a 'right tool for the right job' kind of design.
Allowing players to overload in one area created skew scenarios where bad list match-ups were more significant. When done properly having three fast slots meant you wouldn't get rushed by a whole army turn 1, having three heavy slots meant you weren't getting shelled by a whole army on turn 1, and so on.
Haighus wrote:
Also, Blood Angels rhinos are faster because they horde an STC for better engines, not because they are angry...
In the period we're talking about, the marines deliberately overcharged their engines, it wasnt a described as an advanced pattern until six years later, and the vechicles were subject to spontaneous breakdowns on the table. They had these rules because the marines are behaviorally unstable. Even the layer had to have some amount of bravura, or risk tolerance.
tauist wrote:Isn't Heavy Bolter (or equivalent) the de facto standard in anti-marine weaponry?
The ap4 problem even changed the background of the game. It's more of a story for a guard infantry platoon to be fighting right ext to a Griffon mortar vehicle as their support than it does for them to have a single basilisk on the field supporting them. However a griffon has ap4 which doesn't bother marines, and nobod'y uses it. It's effectively been written out in Imperial Armour and in- universe is rare due to officers thinking its under-powered.
JNAProductions wrote: I think that, as a base, 3rd-7th is superior to 8th-10th.
But your point here...
xeen wrote: Finally the worst part of the 3-7 experience is not even the game rules. It was the complete lack of any quality control or support by GW. This is why when people complain about there being to many rules updates or points updates I just want to claw my eyes out. The alternative is FAR FAR worse. Units that were straight broken would be so for years. Meta lists, like "leaf blower" or "dual lash prince" would dominate tournaments forever until the next broken thing came out. And the casual game would suffer immensely due to this. If your opponent showed up with even one or two meta units, and you were playing one of the many factions that could not compete, you would just get curb stomped. When Eldar got BROKE in 6th, I would play lists trying to handicap myself and still crush some armies best builds. Quite frankly I am surprised 40k survived this as well. And god forbid you had units you liked that were over costed or under powered. They would stay that way for years while you waited for a new codex.
That's the kicker. If they had put the same effort to FAQ, errata, patch, and all that into the earlier editions, they would've been a lot better.
Sorry to bring this back around, but I am in my office this morning with little to do.
Yes, I believe that if there was the support for say, 5th or 6th edition the way there is now, things would have been better. I liked 6th more as it was when they brought back the psychic phase and it really felt like psychic powers were meaningful again. But things like invisibility were bonkers and needed to be fixed. Points were way out of whack, especially when you compare an early book like CSM to a later book like Eldar. Those armies were playing a different game and had very different design philosophies and it showed (I played both extensively in 6th). So yea if the game had the support it has now maybe my opinion would be different, but right now I am enjoying 40k more than I had in a long while. This also again shows why I hate hate hate when anyone suggests that GW does too frequent updates and complains about having the find the updated points and balance pass, especially now that both are free.
All that demonstrates is Marines and MEQ only suffered detriment from cover, as it slowed them down.
And in 2nd Ed? Terrain could still halve your movement.
No, it highlights that cover has defensive bonuses (including in 2nd) not offensive ones, and the ruleset promoted Marines to go on the offensive unless facing heavy artillery. This is how Marines typically operate in the lore. Cover is slow. Marines don't like being slow, they primary MO is repeated rapid strikes unless their hand is forced into a defensive posture.
The melee defensive bonuses are mainly useful against hordes of infantry with poor access to grenades, like hormagaunts or Ork slugga boyz.
Basically cover becomes a tool for specific situations rather than a requirement for Marines. Which is how they typically fight in the lore...
Not how the game worked out though. A highly abstract example follows.
If I was facing say, a Mob of 30 Shoota Boyz? The sensible thing to do in warfare is….not stand in the open. But there was nothing for Marines to gain there. So I was only a few jammy rolls away from having the unit mauled, if not wiped out. There was nothing I could do to mitigate.
That doesn’t feel right, and never will.
Haha, 100% disagree!
The right thing to do was get supporting fire from nearby units to pick off some Boyz, move in close to Flamer a bunch of them, and the Assault the Boyz so you got your extra attacks while denying them the charge bonuses they we're gonna get next turn when they charged you (bonus Attacks and Initiative for passing Mob Check).
FOC was one of the things I really liked in 3e. When did it drop out of the game, 6e? I really liked the way it made you have a core to your force and gave it all some structure, and it made list building a lot of fun.
I pretty much stopped playing in 6e. It didn't solve any of the issues I had with 5e and introduced new ones, and I became disillusioned with edition churn. I followed the discussion about 7e and it seems like it went even more in the wrong direction (from my POV).
At this point, I've been out of 40K for 5 editions. More editions than I was "in". Hmph. Guess I'm not really a fan!
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: It’s more that Marines rarely benefitted from Cover in 3rd Ed. Until 5 Man Las/Plas became commonplace.
Las/Plas was pretty immediate. Also those Starcannons, big time.
But also Ordinance weapons like Battlecannons and Demolishers. Vindicators were on the table by the time my first 3rd ed tournament rolled around, and I think that may have been only half a year into 3rd. Battlecannons were terrifying for Marines in 3rd.
Da Boss wrote: FOC was one of the things I really liked in 3e. When did it drop out of the game, 6e? I really liked the way it made you have a core to your force and gave it all some structure, and it made list building a lot of fun.
I pretty much stopped playing in 6e. It didn't solve any of the issues I had with 5e and introduced new ones, and I became disillusioned with edition churn. I followed the discussion about 7e and it seems like it went even more in the wrong direction (from my POV).
At this point, I've been out of 40K for 5 editions. More editions than I was "in". Hmph. Guess I'm not really a fan!
It actually lasted all the way until 10th got rid of it, though 9th seemed pretty determined to make it irrelevant.
I think 7th had some interesting ideas with some of the formations and unique FOCs but GW couldn't help themselves and wrote utterly bonkers rules for them which is a major reason why 7th is remembered the way it is.
I think it's perfectly fair to dislike 3rd edition. It's not like people didn't compare it to the modifier system in WHFB 6th edition at the time and think that would be a superior system due to greater granularity. I'm pretty sure I participated n arguments on Portent about it at the time.
Every edition of the game has had its ups and downs, though, and to some degree your fav edition is mostly down to it hitting several notes you like. Not like you can't praise the granularity and game scale of 2nd ed in the same breath as you curse the book-keeping and the army composition rules.
Da Boss wrote: FOC was one of the things I really liked in 3e. When did it drop out of the game, 6e? I really liked the way it made you have a core to your force and gave it all some structure, and it made list building a lot of fun.
I pretty much stopped playing in 6e. It didn't solve any of the issues I had with 5e and introduced new ones, and I became disillusioned with edition churn. I followed the discussion about 7e and it seems like it went even more in the wrong direction (from my POV).
At this point, I've been out of 40K for 5 editions. More editions than I was "in". Hmph. Guess I'm not really a fan!
The most fun is when just a person, a trooper with a regular weapon, can set up a cross fire with a weapons team, or give a screening bonus to them, or be a spotter for fog of war rules. These are all things to do for a regular trooper, whose main traits are being ordinary, more likely to be in the right place at the right time.
Or in absence of having rules for crossfire, screening and fog of war that make I important to have front line regular troops, they can just require people to have a few filler troops that most people grow to despise and do anything they can to minimize or avoid taking at all. I think this was a bad thing.
The other fun games come from infantry rec9n or paratroopers running into armour and having to bail their way out of theirnpredicament, or a cavalry raid on artillery and the desperate defense of the guns. At the scale that we play, a 6x4 or 44x60 board and one and a half platoons per side, it makes a lot of sense for one side to have a tank or be all tanks. It makes no sense for both sides to have tanks getting that close to each other, and every effort should be made to minimize balanced armies facing off against each other.
When did it drop out of the game, 6e?
It was 2023. You could make a case for 2017, but not a good one. 8th and 9th edition overwhelmingly demanded three or even six troops to qualify for battalion or brigade bonuses.
Huh, I had the feeling FOC was meaningless/gone much earlier than that! Glad to be educated!
One of my gripes with using One Page Rules to teach my friend to play Wargames is that there's no FOC at all, and he naturally makes quite odd lists due to that, to my sensibilities. I like an army to look like an army, but it's hard to get that across without having the classifications or whatever built into the game.
The FOC was, to me, an example of a pretty good idea done really badly.
1 HQ, 2 Troops then you get to have some fun is fine with me, in principal.
But too many Codexes blobbed it, with overly stuffed and unbalanced Elites being common place. In short, when (numbers out my arse for now) 9 units categorised as Elite competing for just 3 Elite slots? It’s not a good look, and I guess outright encourages the boredom of pure Mathammer.
Even the vaunted 3.5 Chaos Codex suffered from this. Elites absolutely rammed with options. Fast Attack? Three slots, three choices. One of those choices was 0-1, the others were Bikes and Daemonic Cavalry.
And so armies ended up with a marked lack of variety, not because the FOC was restrictive (that was its purpose after all), but because unit distribution in Codexes could be super wonky.
CSM were not about their Fast Attack options, no. An effect of the de-teching they got during 2nd ed. I don't think it would've been a huge problem if bikers in general weren't so points-heavy throughout 3rd ed.
Eldar were pretty packed with elites choices, too, but there weren't a lot of other places to put Aspect Warriors and there was the Biel-Tan list later on that changed that.
Not to mention most Aspects went from Terrors Of The Field to….massive wusses who could neither take it (they never could) or dish it out (which was entirely new to them).
Automatically Appended Next Post: Might do a separate thread for How Should Cover Work, as I think it’s a really interesting conversation unto itself, and best off? One where nobody is objectively wrong.
Do I recall correctly that I think it was Hellebore from this forum that suggested a way to improve Eldar in the core rules was to switch BS from being a flat number to hit to being a comparison between Initiative and BS like how WS is compared to WS for assault?
That way, it'd be slightly harder to hit Eldar with shooting, representing their natural agility.
It would work out pretty similarly for a lot of the factions, though Orks would be a bit screwed by their I2 and maybe would need a boost to I3 or something to compensate.
An interesting thing to think about anyway - giving more ways to be defensive than just big armour or toughness.
In a system like that, being in cover could boost initiative scores, meaning you're more likely to go first in CC and less likely to get hit by shooting.
It's certainly come up before - I prefer to have a purely defensive "Evasion" stat than using Initiative for it, that way you're splitting "difficulty to hit with a gun" and "striking quickly in combat".
How much did people use the alternative FOCs for battles, raids etc? They seemed like a really neat idea and a great way of adding flavour by forcing asymmetry in force design.
3rd (and 4th) had some really interesting mission types in the main rulebook. They really played with deployment to simulate very different encounter types. The sentry rules are a great example- if you wanted a narrative mission, it gave a place for things like snipers to shine (sniper rifles being fairly bad otherwise) as they could take out sentries silently. A mission with a bunch of scouts sneaking in and taking out sentries around a key target is really evocative.
Sadly most of those cool missions were stripped out in 5th, with some being re-released in separate rulebooks (that cost more money of course). Not that it would have mattered much, my friends always wanted to play kill points
I got to play breakout and meatgrinder many times, which did have their own focs for attacker/defender, and variants of capture the flag where units would have to carry the objective back to their dz
There were also several pieces of wargear, usually battle standards, you could take as a normal piece of wargear but counted as a victory point for opponent if they killed the model in close combat. All of these are great games and I think playing without them is fairly impoverished.
Its possible the only reason this happened for me because we were kids and there was an adult who just told us what scenarios we were going to play. It seems like most people don't have this experience, and most games are two people using whatever the standard FOC or detachment is, without regard to a special scenario like a breakout.
There is someone named Wyddr who posts really good battle reports of scenario based games. When I get to play games I think of hims as a role model
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Even the vaunted 3.5 Chaos Codex suffered from this. Elites absolutely rammed with options. Fast Attack? Three slots, three choices. One of those choices was 0-1, the others were Bikes and Daemonic Cavalry.
Five choices - the cavalry entry was three different units in one.
I believe that gave them the second most fast attack units in 3rd edition behind space marines (who had their three landspeeder variants as distinct units despite just being a single weapon swap).
Last place belonged to GK with their dedicated fast attack units, the only thing you could do with the slots was to put troops into them.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Even the vaunted 3.5 Chaos Codex suffered from this. Elites absolutely rammed with options. Fast Attack? Three slots, three choices. One of those choices was 0-1, the others were Bikes and Daemonic Cavalry.
Five choices - the cavalry entry was three different units in one.
I believe that gave them the second most fast attack units in 3rd edition behind space marines (who had their three landspeeder variants as distinct units despite just being a single weapon swap).
Last place belonged to GK with their dedicated fast attack units, the only thing you could do with the slots was to put troops into them.
And the Chaos 3.5 codex only has a whopping three Elite options. Chosen, Possessed, and Obliterators.
The usual suspects, Berzerkers, Noise Marines, Plague Marines and Thousand Sons are in the Troops section, with the note that they are Troops if your Chaos Lord has the same Mark. Basically you buy basic CSM as Troops, and if you Mark them they remain Troops if they're "on theme". But if you add Plague Marines in an army that is led by a Slaanesh Lord, then they're Elites. Very flavorful limitation.
Chosen were also interesting in that the number that you had depended on the size of battle being played. For a 2K battle you could have 20 chosen. And if you split them up into separate units (multiple retinues and one standalone unit) they still only counted as one Elites slot. So Chosen were one Elite slot, Obliterators were only 0-1, so also one Elite slot, and then Possessed and off-Mark CSMs. The Chaos 3.5 Elites didn't really seem that limiting.
I respect 3rd for its design ethos. They took a wargame that was too convoluted to play at more than platoon scale in an afternoon, and made a company-level wargame you could knock out in two hours. Many of the changes were things that on paper seem weird, but showcase excellent design-for-effect abstractions and in practice work well.
Cover has already been mentioned and I think that's a perfect example, but also things like making rapid fire a core rule, the all-or-nothing AP system (though I do have issues with that- namely what it does in a Marine-focused game), twin-linked, or master-crafted weapons were elegant ways to modify trials through number of dice rolled rather than needing to track modifiers. The more abstract melee system allowed for all-at-once rolls like shooting rather than opposed rolls. Psychology was simplified into a morale system that could be either army-breaking or irrelevant depending on who you played. Psychic powers became part of the relevant unit profiles rather than a separate minigame. The changes made in 3rd were a massive leap forwards for playability, though of course YMMV as to whether it threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Subsequent editions would fix 3rd's issues in many ways, but none of the subsequent edition changes (including the paradigm shift of 8th) were as coherent in vision and execution as 3rd. I have no desire to replay 3rd- I think 4th and 5th iterated on it significantly, before 6th and 7th went off the rails- but I'd love to see a competent designer give 40K the same treatment nowadays, throwing out the atavistic remnants of a long-abandoned design paradigm and making something fresh and clean and holistically designed.
I started in 2nd Ed, and after a while I was playing "Grand Tournament Rules" which restricted certain wargear and Psychic Powers. Eldar were busted but we all just lived with it. Then the fellows that took all Wolfguard Terminator armies each with Assault Cannons and Cyclone Missile Launchers came along.
I have some nostalgia for 3rd Ed because there seemed to be a growth of the gaming scene that accompanied that edition and I had fun for a while. Still, I really didn't like:
- the FOC - no to hit modifiers or save modifiers
- bad abstractions to make the doubled model count fit// concealed Powerfists etc...I missed the individual duels of 2nd Ed
- sweeping advances
- the vehicle rules that made most vehicles more static (although Ordnance templates were kinda fun at first)
- wonky transport rules (although in 2nd they were just death traps that nobody used, so maybe a wash)
- they killed the Assault Cannon - it never really recovered
- my own main force was in a bad state (Dark Angels)
Having said all that, I did have some fun gaming and I get it if 3rd Ed is someone's jam.
Da Boss wrote: People often say your favourite edition is the one you start with, but 5th was my favourite and I started in 2nd.
Now though, with some years to consider, I think my problems with 4th were pretty minor (they made transports death traps, easily fixed by ignoring a couple of rules, and the codex release schedule was bollocks). 5th toward the end was really quite bad for crappy lists and it introduced flyers as a part of the main game, which I was never keen on.
I've generally said in 'What was the best edition' discussions in the past that 2nd edition was the most fun, while 5th was the best written ruleset (and thus the most functional and playable game). It wasn't perfect - vehicle rules and wound allocation needed work, most prominently - but was the best the game has been, IMO.
4th was a mess, and was the edition that saw me take a break from the game due to just not being at all fun to play.
tauist wrote: This sort of discussions is why I'd really love GW to reintroduce all the older editions of the game as viable choices for playing. They wouldn't need to add anything to them, just make them available again with all their expansions and erratas especially. Let the players decide which editions they want to play with their toys. Warhammer vault could be a way of doing precisely this. I know it is possible to do this already, but amassing all those old resources takes quite a lot of effort, and I'm sure more players would be open to playing "vintage" edition games if GW's stance was "play any darn edition you want as long as its one of our games". Novelty would still ensure most players would only be playing the latest and greatest.
This would be a lovely thing, but would, I think, just serve to fragment the player base, and would be a nightmare from an inventory point of view, particularly since a lot of codexes spanned several editions and/or were replaced during editions.
I loved the Witch Hunter dex. I think it instilled my love of eclectic multi-faction armies. I bult a 1500 point Penitent Legion- Priests, Inquisitors, and Arbites to oversee Arcos, PE's, Repentia and DCA's. Then I built a 1500 point Holy Choir- Sisters, Doms, Seraphim.
Most of the games I fought were 1500, so I could use one force or the other- great for territorial control in map-based campaign play. But in times of great peril, against foes so numerous that neither saints nor sinners can defeat them alone, the forces unite to manifest the God Emperor's holy wrath.
I've generally said in 'What was the best edition' discussions in the past that 2nd edition was the most fun, while 5th was the best written ruleset (and thus the most functional and playable game). It wasn't perfect - vehicle rules and wound allocation needed work, most prominently - but was the best the game has been, IMO.
4th was a mess, and was the edition that saw me take a break from the game due to just not being at all fun to play.
That's funny, I'd flip those two. I found 5th to be a downgrade from 4th, and I'd put 4th at top tier 40k.
I also liked 2nd, but it got so clunky and easy to abuse. But if you can reign things in a bit, it was an awesome game and had more "texture" than anything since.
Da Boss wrote: Do I recall correctly that I think it was Hellebore from this forum that suggested a way to improve Eldar in the core rules was to switch BS from being a flat number to hit to being a comparison between Initiative and BS like how WS is compared to WS for assault?
That way, it'd be slightly harder to hit Eldar with shooting, representing their natural agility.
It would work out pretty similarly for a lot of the factions, though Orks would be a bit screwed by their I2 and maybe would need a boost to I3 or something to compensate.
An interesting thing to think about anyway - giving more ways to be defensive than just big armour or toughness.
In a system like that, being in cover could boost initiative scores, meaning you're more likely to go first in CC and less likely to get hit by shooting.
It has been something I've posted about in the past, although I doubt the idea has been unique to me.
Orks had I2 in 2nd ed when all it did was make them lose CC ties, which was a pretty minimal effect.
My reasoning was more around the lack of scalability for BS and the opposed value of WS. They could quite easily have an opposed value for BS and then you get great scalability, rather than the effectively 3 BS values, 3, 4, 5.
And the design strategy was around reusing the 2nd ed profile to its max, rather than adding or removing stats.
So you can take the 2nd ed profile (which is the 3rd ed profile with M instead of Sv) and use I as the opposed value for BS and WS (or have I oppose BS but determine strikes first in melee) and you have built a design paradigm that allows for multiple styles of game player rather than T,W, Sv that we got in 3rd and now.
And, like the change to stats for 3rd in order to fit that design paradigm, you might change stats for this to ensure I2 units aren't mowed down. IMO the value of the opposed BS far outweighs the issues of trying to stick with stats that weren't designed around it.
You could take the current S vs T mechanic and apply it here.
3rd jaded me so hard on my space wolf army, changing how I played so that I now just ran as fast as I could down the centre of the board because AP and Sv were now my best friends. I hated playing with my marine armies in the 3rd paradigm because of this. And I didn't like playing non marine armies because of the opposite problem. The all or nothing of the game was just not appealing.
But that involves reading the books, which I won’t ever do again ever. So Nyeah
Well I guess there's nothing like a strong opinion and an unwillingness to do research to liven up internet discourse.
Mostly because I don’t own them, and given how boring the 3rd Ed ones are? I just can’t bring myself to pay good money for such glorified pamphlets
Automatically Appended Next Post: There was also the loss of stuff like Overwatch which again heavily favoured close combat oriented armies.
If memory serves, in 2nd Ed any unit could go on Overwatch. The squad gave up its movement, and suffered negative modifiers to hit on Overwatch if the resulting target was move from, into or between cover. It also gave up its shooting in my own turn (though I could break Overwatch the same turn I set it).
Now, Overwatch is a double edged sword for sure, and can ruin the game for close combat oriented armies. Consider modern Tau where the entire army can just stand still, and wait to react to your movement in your turn. That would be lame.
But in-keeping with 3rd Ed’s ‘baby, bath water and sod it let’s just chuck the bath too’ approach, they just entirely removed it.
There was so much lost it’s not even funny. And it resulted in a bland, flavourless, boring set of rules of limited subtlety.
[img]"Glorified Pamphlets" eh? Imo some of the best codex lore came out of that era. The Necron Codex is fantastic. The Space Marine snippets about how careless the Space Marines can be when responding to Imperial worlds, the nature of their battlefleets and of course the Ultramarine chapter roster, also great. The IG doctrines and regimental references. The introduction of the Tau. It wasn't a lot of lore, but a lot of what was there was quality.
And a lot of the flavor came in the form of rules. Oh look, Imperial Guard Drop troops with chem inhalers. It wasn't some passing mention in the lore, it was something you could use.
Necrons are a genuinely notable exception. But if memory serves, that was a 4th Ed Codex? Certainly by that point there’d been a shift from the early ones, like Dark Eldar.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Necrons are a genuinely notable exception. But if memory serves, that was a 4th Ed Codex? Certainly by that point there’d been a shift from the early ones, like Dark Eldar.
Mid 2002, after all of the 'normal' releases but before all of the 3.5 books and the two inquisition books.
The early 3rd codices mostly express lore through in-universe lore snippets from an Imperial perspective. These remain some of the best examples of such, but the books were understandably light in lore overall (there were also lore snippets alongside the unit entries).
Starting with the Tau codex in 2001 (IIRC), the codices shifted to what was broadly the pattern going forward to this day- a segment of lore for several pages at the beginning followed by snippets with the unit entries- these are much more substantial books and include some of the best-regarded codices ever from a lore perspective and how the books translate that lore into rules. The late 3rd codices also kept the in-universe notes too.
In contrast to later editions, the lore section also appears to be an in-universe perspective, although not overtly credited as such. This is most apparent in the second Imperial Guard codex of 3rd edition, where there is a historical analysis of the Guard with a lot of speculation. I reckon the Tau lore is from the perspective of a Water caste diplomat too.
I like how it covers a lot of the typical deployments a Guard unit might be engaged in, as well as highlighting how much regiments change over their lifespan. This one has picked up surviving units from three other regiments and is now on garrison duty following heavy casualties in frontline combat. The garrison environment suits itself to small forces making a difference in small engagements (such as the mentioned Eldar raid). I really like lore that expands the scope of the setting and gives ideas for your own wargaming.
If you wanted lore in 3rd, you needed to head to WD, not the codexes. While there were a ton of little snippets in the codexes, the real meat was in the chapter approved articles of the era.
While they did collect them and put out a few books, I could see how it would suck if you didn’t subscribe (or regularly pick up) WD.
Not to “Got mine” the issue, but I did regularly pick them up, so I don’t personally feel the lack of lore in 3rd. I started picking it up at the tail end of 2nd, and stopped in March of ’04, so just missed the last few issues for 3rd.
Classic 40k has always been an elusive game that exists only in the platonic world of the forms.
40k is what would happen if a movie studio filmed a version of romeo and juliet, and the studio decided that the ending is bad, they can only film a version where juliet wakes up before romeo takes the poison. Also the original play was never finished and nobody ever produced or read it.
tauist wrote: So does this all basically corroborate a theory that "classic 40K" lives somewhere within rulesets MKII, MKIII & MKIV?
The 'oldhammer' ruleset runs all the way through to 7th, but past 5th it was an increasingly bloated apocalypse-style game with aircraft, superheavies, piles of random tables and detachments and extra actions.
Yes I dropped 40k with the advent of 3rd. What did it for me was the change in movement rates. Now everything moved the same, be it genestealer or guardsman. And running/charging became random and the same for everyone. Of course we played with 2nd ed model densities, not realising if we crammed the board everyone caught everyone else. But still games because benny hill chases.
Insectum7 wrote: [img]"Glorified Pamphlets" eh? Imo some of the best codex lore came out of that era. The Necron Codex is fantastic. The Space Marine snippets about how careless the Space Marines can be when responding to Imperial worlds, the nature of their battlefleets and of course the Ultramarine chapter roster, also great. The IG doctrines and regimental references. The introduction of the Tau. It wasn't a lot of lore, but a lot of what was there was quality.
Agreed entirely. I started in 3rd and actually got my Tyranids codex before I got the main rules, so I had no understanding of the universe at all, but what was in the codex painted a perfect picture of the faction and how the Imperials respond to it. When you open the codex the very first thing you see is a full-page black-and-white art piece of scary-looking monsters swarming across the terrain at night, with an accompanying couple of paragraphs, told in first person, about spotting the Tyranids moving silently, wordlessly, through the tall grass. Then there's a propaganda/public awareness poster, a speculative lineage, a dissection report, communiques from Imperial officers struggling to hold the line, the last testimony (before execution) of one of the guys that dug up Old One Eye.
It might have been light on fictional in-universe history, but it was so much more evocative than twenty dry pages of 'this happened and then this happened and then Captain Beefcake punched out the Swarmlord and the threat was stopped (but it will return)'.
(Also, I'd be curious to hear why you prefer 4th over 5th. Aside from wound allocation shenanigans that can be avoided by casually spinning up the dreadsock, my only major complaint with 5th is how the codices broke it.)
(Also, I'd be curious to hear why you prefer 4th over 5th. Aside from wound allocation shenanigans that can be avoided by casually spinning up the dreadsock, my only major complaint with 5th is how the codices broke it.)
Wound shenanigans have already been mentioned, but a few others that really got me were:
1: Vehicles toughened up and became cheaper, and while that's nice for vehicles I felt it took a lot of emphasis away from infantry. Imo 4th was the last edition that was infantry focused. Deployment in 5th ed often looked like a parking lot.
2: High AP weapons ballooned in their availability. It's not a rules thing, just a codex thing. It began to hurt balance in a way that, again, took more focus away from basic infantry.
3: Which coincided with more-better invulnerable saves. 3++ proliferation and 4++ cover save as default (rather than starting at 5++ in 3rd-4th)
4: The Chaos replacement codex to 3.5, the Necron rewrite, the Ward era, and the corresponding loss of a very open-ended, highly customizable army paradigm (IG doctrines, chapter traits, etc.)
5: Kill Point missions, which was terrible for armies that favored large unit counts. Great for deathstars though. . . 6: Changes to post-Combat leadership modifiers (from outnumbering to kills) was really hard on some armies (mainly Crons for me).
And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
Larger in spoiler, just in case that's hard to read:
Spoiler:
One last one, that I can't confirm now but is sorta my memory - 8: Locking options or builds behind named characters. Imo it was always much more fun to make your own Captain in your army, rather than "I take this character to unlock build X", which I think started happening more.
On related note 8.5: The loss of Rites of Battle as a default ability of Space Marine Captains, and locking it behind Sicarius. (Who I then took as Captain for every SM army through 7th edition, mainly for that rule)
Oh, 9! : I really liked 4th ed's Use Leadership For Shooting Target Choice rule. That was a great way to differentiate troops. I think 5th was "Shoot whatever you want!"
Wound shenanigans have already been mentioned, but a few others that really got me were:
1: Vehicles toughened up and became cheaper, and while that's nice for vehicles I felt it took a lot of emphasis away from infantry. Imo 4th was the last edition that was infantry focused. Deployment in 5th ed often looked like a parking lot.
Which led directly to hull points in 6th which made non skimmer and non flyer vehicles useless. Which led to things like riptides and wraithknights being classified as MC which ultimately led to the end of AV as a mechanic in 8th.
5: Kill Point missions, which was terrible for armies that favored large unit counts. Great for deathstars though. . .
It was a deliberate balancing effort because otherwise MSU was always advantaged. Locally we had lots of players who only ever wanted to use KPs because all they wanted to do was have their models fight. Objectives were for sissies.
And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
Larger in spoiler, just in case that's hard to read:
Spoiler:
Put a 24" range bubble on that model and it looks a lot less scary.
^But my Tactical Squads had 48" range Lascannons, and my opponents had 72" range Battlecannons or Railguns.
As in, the big, heavy, damage dealers could shoot nearly everywhere with little maneuvering effort. Unrelated, "leafblower" lists became popular for some reason. . .
Re: Kill Points - Understandably doing something about MSU made sense, but there are armies which naturally had higher unit counts. Orks in Trukks, or DE in Raiders, for example. It was a poor solution.
I mean, yes, if you were playing on a table with just half a dozen forest bases, you didn't have a lot of cover.
While the specifics of how it works have varied over the years, 40k has always worked best when the table has as much terrain as possible on it. From my experience, most people who complained about LOS and cover in 5th were just not using enough terrain.
I respect the opinion that made this thread, but I could not disagree with it more.
2nd ed was a convoluted mess. It was basically multi-model DnD with a bizarre injection of MtG. The models were bad - I do not care what anyone says - and the rules were a tangled mess.
3rd wasn’t perfect by any means. But it was a necessary cleansing to make the game actually playable. Likewise the lore shifted from info-dump to high-quality snippets with plenty left open to interpretation; a style which is not appreciated by nerds 40 years down the line, but is an objectively superior writing style and method of delivery.
And likewise, 4th ed was the closest 40k had ever come to greatness in almost all respects.
TLOS is the big reason why I think 4e was better than 5e these days. TLOS is bad and area terrain is good.
On the other missions, I could sometimes badger people into doing raids or attacker defender missions in my club, but not that often. A real shame, there were a lot of really cool ideas in those scenarios.
Although I do like some of the Imperial perspective background in 3e, as a primarily Xenos player I wanted stuff from MY perspective too. Makes sense for Tyranids, but I preferred the 4e Ork codex for background much more.
My problem with 2e was always just finding out that we'd been doing something wrong, in basically every game. Too many fiddly rules to remember for us, as teens.
I will say though, despite the obviously less technically impressive miniatures, the 2e starter was really good. Those cardboard ruins were a godsend when you were a kid starting out, because you could actually get a relatively decent game underway pretty much immediately. And the little book of scenarios with the background for the 2nd War for Armageddon was brilliant. I wish I could find a copy or even a pdf of that, but no one seems to have scanned it. The 3e starter by comparison was pretty lame.
Insectum7 wrote: And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
The change was to area terrain only - all of those ruined walls worked exactly the same way in 4th and 5th unless the players declared them as area terrain. Forests were the big affected piece of scenery as 4th used true line of sight for everything except area stuff.
IIRC by the rules as written a size 3 tank perched on top of a size 1 molehill could - by the rules - claim total concealment behind a size 2 bush. But only a sufficiently wide bush as true line of sight was still used to determine if area cover rules applied...
4e FAQ:
Q. Does an infantry model on a Size 3 hill count as size
3 or as size 5 (3+2) in regards to LOS into/over Area
Terrain and over other models? And what about a Size
3 tank on a hill?
A. The size of the hill is not added to the model’s size,
but rather the model counts as being the same size as
the hill. Both models therefore count as Size 3 for the
purpose of LOS over Area Terrain and other models.
Insectum7 wrote: And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
The change was to area terrain only - all of those ruined walls worked exactly the same way in 4th and 5th unless the players declared them as area terrain. Forests were the big affected piece of scenery as 4th used true line of sight for everything except area stuff.
IIRC by the rules as written a size 3 tank perched on top of a size 1 molehill could - by the rules - claim total concealment behind a size 2 bush. But only a sufficiently wide bush as true line of sight was still used to determine if area cover rules applied...
4e FAQ:
Q. Does an infantry model on a Size 3 hill count as size
3 or as size 5 (3+2) in regards to LOS into/over Area
Terrain and over other models? And what about a Size
3 tank on a hill?
A. The size of the hill is not added to the model’s size,
but rather the model counts as being the same size as
the hill. Both models therefore count as Size 3 for the
purpose of LOS over Area Terrain and other models.
Nice find. Also this right here (the insanely complex terrain rules) is one of the reasons that 4th edition was so terrible. And the shoot the closest unit. So so so bad.
Insectum7 wrote: And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
The change was to area terrain only - all of those ruined walls worked exactly the same way in 4th and 5th unless the players declared them as area terrain. Forests were the big affected piece of scenery as 4th used true line of sight for everything except area stuff.
IIRC by the rules as written a size 3 tank perched on top of a size 1 molehill could - by the rules - claim total concealment behind a size 2 bush. But only a sufficiently wide bush as true line of sight was still used to determine if area cover rules applied...
4e FAQ:
Q. Does an infantry model on a Size 3 hill count as size
3 or as size 5 (3+2) in regards to LOS into/over Area
Terrain and over other models? And what about a Size
3 tank on a hill?
A. The size of the hill is not added to the model’s size,
but rather the model counts as being the same size as
the hill. Both models therefore count as Size 3 for the
purpose of LOS over Area Terrain and other models.
Nice find. Also this right here (the insanely complex terrain rules) is one of the reasons that 4th edition was so terrible. And the shoot the closest unit. So so so bad.
3rd Ed. had it right in this respect. Essentially the Area Terrain rules without the complications, and no level shenanigans to botch the game.
Insectum7 wrote: And in a big, BIG way 7: The return of TLOS being used for everything, turning tables into shooting galleries overnight. This change really hurt the importance of maneuvering, as well as encouraged uglier tables. Forests were out, big opaque walls were in.
The change was to area terrain only - all of those ruined walls worked exactly the same way in 4th and 5th unless the players declared them as area terrain. Forests were the big affected piece of scenery as 4th used true line of sight for everything except area stuff.
IIRC by the rules as written a size 3 tank perched on top of a size 1 molehill could - by the rules - claim total concealment behind a size 2 bush. But only a sufficiently wide bush as true line of sight was still used to determine if area cover rules applied...
4e FAQ:
Q. Does an infantry model on a Size 3 hill count as size
3 or as size 5 (3+2) in regards to LOS into/over Area
Terrain and over other models? And what about a Size
3 tank on a hill?
A. The size of the hill is not added to the model’s size,
but rather the model counts as being the same size as
the hill. Both models therefore count as Size 3 for the
purpose of LOS over Area Terrain and other models.
Nice find. Also this right here (the insanely complex terrain rules) is one of the reasons that 4th edition was so terrible. And the shoot the closest unit. So so so bad.
Those rules were the last gasp at attempting to add some kind of tactical requirement to the game...
Shoot the closest unit was a great way to reflect the psychological pressures on the battlefield and the imperfect conditions of war. No general gets to point their dudes exactly where they want them and have them act perfectly every time.
Similarly the LoS and size rules reflected far better how a unit acts on the battlefield than the 'maintains bombastic shouting pose in all locations at all times' rules we've had since.
We don't have to say it was a great way to reflect that.
It seems mostly to have functioned as a [poop] coating of the concepts of fog of war or morale. We made a feeble attempt, it didn't work, therefore no further attempts should be made again.
There's definitely a version of target priority that's good and would make a better game than any edition of 40k so far. However in the minds of some people who were there, possibly xeen, the whole concept is discredited
Is that yes, you could see more as the firing model, but targets shot through cover, if memory serves, would still receive the benefit of that cover? As in a 5+.
This went a long way to addressing the gross imbalance 3rd created between close combat and shooting.
With 3rd Ed, not only did the overall combat rules really favour fast moving assault, where you could then move from combat to combat with being shot at? But “sorry you can’t see me because terrain blocks LoS through it” created far too many dead zones, where I couldn’t target anything closing the range.
That’s not to say “therefore TLOS is the best”. Just that it had upsides which aren’t immediately apparent, as they come from interactions with the wider rules set of the time.
4e FAQ:
Q. Does an infantry model on a Size 3 hill count as size
3 or as size 5 (3+2) in regards to LOS into/over Area
Terrain and over other models? And what about a Size
3 tank on a hill?
A. The size of the hill is not added to the model’s size,
but rather the model counts as being the same size as
the hill. Both models therefore count as Size 3 for the
purpose of LOS over Area Terrain and other models.
The really fun part of this FAQ response was that, due to not being Area Terrain, hills weren't actually supposed to even have a Size. Only models and area terrain had Sizes. But then, a couple of chapters later, they go on to tell you to use the Size of hills or buildings you're standing on.
The constant arguments over how the LOS rules were supposed to work was one of the biggest turn-offs with 4th edition, along with everyone piling out of transports and just standing around every time something so much as scratched the paint.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hellebore wrote: Shoot the closest unit was a great way to reflect the psychological pressures on the battlefield and the imperfect conditions of war. No general gets to point their dudes exactly where they want them and have them act perfectly every time.
Except in actual practice, the target priority rules actually did allow generals to use LOS-blocking shenanigans to shoot at exactly what they wanted to. (and for what it's worth, 2nd edition had this same problem, but even worse, since every individual model shot at the closest target in their limited LOS arc, allowing you to point specific models at exactly the enemy units you wanted them to shoot).
Hellebore wrote: Shoot the closest unit was a great way to reflect the psychological pressures on the battlefield and the imperfect conditions of war. No general gets to point their dudes exactly where they want them and have them act perfectly every time.
Except in actual practice, the target priority rules actually did allow generals to use LOS-blocking shenanigans to shoot at exactly what they wanted to. (and for what it's worth, 2nd edition had this same problem, but even worse, since every individual model shot at the closest target in their limited LOS arc, allowing you to point specific models at exactly the enemy units you wanted them to shoot).
The shennigans like using rhinos to LoS block are actual tactics used by soldiers though... using apcs for cover to fire on priority targets. Forcing your opponent to form up their units in particular ways in order to protect them from proximity threats to strike further targets is realistic and a trade off when receiving incoming barrages because they're all close together.
It's when tactics used don't reflect warfare that it looks weird. Like a unit of guardsmen standing 4" from a bloodthirster but firing their lasguns at some chaos marines 20" away (without requiring some insane discipline, rather than just assumed automatic discipline).
.
There are less tactics in that, than blocking the thirster with a chimera to do the same. And requiring an apc to support you to do this action creates a risk tradeoff
Da Boss wrote: Andykp: I can totally understand where you are coming from. They definitely radically changed Orks and could have done more to make older models usable.
When I read the 2e Codex Imperialis, the two sections I read over and over were the Ork section and the Squat section. I was a huge tolkien nerd and orcs and dwarves were my favourites back then (and today!) so the idea of sci fi orks and dwarves really tickled my fancy.
The Ork background back then was really creative and fun. But I wasn't that impressed with most of the models or the way the army worked on the table. So for me, 3e was where I really enjoyed playing Orks. But I can totally see if you loved the older aesthetic and playstyle, your army was basically gone.
I did learn to love the new (3rd edition) aesthetics of ORKS and still do but it was the lack of character I found so jarring. Death of squats really hurt as well. My mates army and main opponents to my ORKS was a squat army.
Rules wise there was stuff that sucked too. Vehicles felt slow and clunky, and killing them was a bland attrition. And I never got to grips with universal special rules. Special rules should feel special, not universal, by the time they got rid of them they were a massive mess.
Hellebore wrote: .
There are less tactics in that, than blocking the thirster with a chimera to do the same. And requiring an apc to support you to do this action creates a risk tradeoff
It's a minimal 'risk' when transports are cheap and useless as actual transports. The rules overall made LOS blocking the sole purpose of transport vehicles, and that always felt both gamey and unfluffy.
Hellebore wrote: .
There are less tactics in that, than blocking the thirster with a chimera to do the same. And requiring an apc to support you to do this action creates a risk tradeoff
It's a minimal 'risk' when transports are cheap and useless as actual transports. The rules overall made LOS blocking the sole purpose of transport vehicles, and that always felt both gamey and unfluffy.
My recollection is that some transport heavy armies, like Speed Freaks, still did pretty well. And those Eldar tanks. In fact Tau Fish of Fury was at that time too I think.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: EDIT - Thread moved on whilst typing. This is a response to Jnap. Currently working my way through the others.
The Assault Cannon.
Once a pretty reliable Jack of all Trades. Not the best range, and relatively (just loyalist Terminators, Dreadnoughts and specifically Ravenwing Landspeeders, I think? Oh wait. Imperial Guard Sentinels of all things!) rare. But an impressive rate of fire, respectable strength and save modifier. And importantly? Multiple wounds.
To……drivel. Which still exploded on occasion, with none of the risk/reward of 2nd Ed.
S6? Crap! AP4? Crap! 3 shots? Yeah OK not too shabby. Shame S and AP gave it no preferred prey. But you could still definitely totally whoopsadoodle kill yourself.
Oh and fun fact? I’ve never, ever, ever had an Assault Cannon explode on me. Ever. Not once.
Actually, the assault cannon rolling triple 1's did NOT kill the user, it simply broke the assault cannon. Your terminator roll triple 1's? He's still alive, but without a ranged weapon.
Insectum7 wrote: My recollection is that some transport heavy armies, like Speed Freaks, still did pretty well. And those Eldar tanks. In fact Tau Fish of Fury was at that time too I think.
Open topped transports fared better because troops could bail out of them more effectively. Rhinos were death traps.
Actually, the assault cannon rolling triple 1's did NOT kill the user, it simply broke the assault cannon. Your terminator roll triple 1's? He's still alive, but without a ranged weapon.
Yeah, in 2nd edition the model was killed. Third just killed the gun.
Insectum7 wrote: My recollection is that some transport heavy armies, like Speed Freaks, still did pretty well. And those Eldar tanks. In fact Tau Fish of Fury was at that time too I think.
Open topped transports fared better because troops could bail out of them more effectively. Rhinos were death traps.
Devilfish, Falcons and Wave Serpents were all closed-topped though.
Edit:
Is this more about not bring able to Assault out of a Rhino anymore? Because iIrc that's a change in 4th too.
I've been playing since early 3rd edition, and looking back, and trying NOT to use rose-colored glasses, in my honest opinion a lot of things sucked about EVERY edition.
Now, don't get me wrong, there was GREAT stuff about every edition. If I had a magic lamp I'd make the genie hybridize the editions' best qualities into a good game.
Ugly things I hated: Rhino rush, Total imbalance issues that would go unFAQed for years, Vehicles and monsters having different abilities, etc.
Stuff I did like: What edition was it that you could jump from high places and take damage from falling?
I hate 10th with its "take any equipment you want, it's all the same cost". However, other than that I think the game is relatively smooth.
While I like vehicles with a toughness value instead of 3-7 having an armor value, it has brought its own issues. Personally, I think vehicles and monsters SHOULD be easier to kill if you can come up behind them. Also, I think they should bring back turret shooting arches for vehicles and monsters while drawing line of site from the weapon. I hate that you can draw line of site from the prow of a Landraider and get LOS for the HK missile that still behind the building.
I also like older editions where it was easier to kill a falling back unit, or prevent them from regrouping by keeping a unit too close to them. Also, blocking access points on vehicles to kill passengers inside.
I know many of you love true line of site. For me, it's more of a love/hate relationship. It just doesn't work well with some terrain that is, but it's nature, unable to be modeled in a way that both blocks correctly rules wise while being physically able to move models around. I think a return to some form of abstraction would be preferable.
Another thing I miss, certain special rules for terrain. When was the last time you saw a river on the field? I loved that the Chimera used to be amphibious.
Is this more about not bring able to Assault out of a Rhino anymore? Because iIrc that's a change in 4th too.
No, not being able to assault out of enclosed vehicles was only a part of it. Passengers having to bail out anytime the vehicle was penetrated made transports unreliable. Passengers dying really easily when the vehicle took damage made them unsafe. And the disembarking rules forcing you to drive up to the enemy and then just sit there for a turn made them ineffective.
Access points were a nice idea for realism, but caused no end of arguments and just slowed things down on the table.
And really, that sums up the transport rules in a nutshell - the changes made for 4th added realism, but made for a worse gaming experience, because they went too far in neutering the effectiveness of transport vehicles in the majority of armies.
4th ed transport rules weren't perfect by any means, but I'd say it was a vastly improved experience over the Rhino rushes of 3rd, and the parking lot deployments of 5th.
" the disembarking rules forcing you to drive up to the enemy and then just sit there for a turn made them ineffective." Ahh, so this is about Assaulting then . You could disembark and shoot. Hence the Tau 'Fish of Fury' maneuver, and related Eldar Wave Serpent with Fire Dragons one. Pretty sure I saw CSM rock up with special weapons in Rhinos then, too. Imo using the transports was all about using cover and threat saturation, which seems reasonable.
As for being deathtraps, getting every model onboard killed was only a result of Ordinance penetrating the vehicle and rolling a 6. Most weapons couldn't trigger it. Otherwise it was 4+ to wound for each model, and then saves were allowed. That's not too many casualties unless your armor is bad, which again, seems appropriate.
Transports feels like something GW has always struggled with.
In 2nd Ed? They were death traps. Especially for Marines as Rhinos were your main option, didn’t bring much to the party, and when they went tended to take the embarked squad with them. When your basic Marine was 30 points? That could be a significant chunk of your army lost to a single shot. Land raiders were of course much tougher, but few people had them on account the model was unavailable.
3rd Ed it swung too far the other way. At its worse, combat armies like Blood Angels could make massive movements. 12” move, potential 6” “angery” move, 2” disembark, and 6” charge for 26” assault range. Where as covered, once engaged the squad was pretty safe. (Again if memory serves. Not only a long time ago, but so many editions all blur into one)
And every edition has had flaws and foibles about Transports.
The problem is that if there is a problem with transports in one edition, they tend to swing the pendulum back too far in the next edition.
3e: Assaulting out of transports was very strong, and Rhino Rush was a powerful build.
4e: Now you can't assault any more, and transports that get a penetrating hit cause you to bail, and you can be straight out wiped. No one uses transports outside of a few special cases like skimmers.
5e: Okay, that was too much so let's reduce the points for transports across the board, take away some of the penalizing rules from 4e, and give vehicles in general more offensive output. Now we get the "parking lot" phase of the game, where a transport was often just a cheap mount for a relatively strong gun.
If they had made the 5e changes without the points changes, I think we'd have had a more even result.
I prefer Area Terrain and more abstract terrain rules generally because TLOS sort of implies that your model is always in whatever dramatic pose it's modelled in, and could never crouch, drop prone, or otherwise take advantage of it's surroundings.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Blood Angels could make massive movements. 12” move, potential 6” “angery” move, 2” disembark, and 6” charge for 26” assault range. Where as covered, once engaged the squad was pretty safe. (Again if memory serves. Not only a long time ago, but so many editions all blur into one)
You forgot the BA Supercharged Engines adding an extra 6" for a potential 32" move+charge. May codex author Gav Thorpe never live it down.
Da Boss wrote: If they had made the 5e changes without the points changes, I think we'd have had a more even result.
The points changes started back in 4th edition with cheap chaos codex rhinos. That said the real damage was done with chimeras in the particularly poorly written guard codex - as strong as transports were you didn't actually see all that many rhino parking lots outside of the sisters (who still paid 50 for most of 5th) and the last codex of the edition with GKs overcharged psybolt assault cannons.
5e damage issues though was more an resistance to death by attrition rather than damage itself. Hull points were a bad fix, all the game needed was +1 damage results on immobilised vehicles and some consideration of being able to wipe out all 'minor' weapons with one hit and/or replacing the weapon/engine damage result with an attackers choice...
...and not giving guard what amounted to a mobile bunker.
If memory serves, there was a small risk if you piled out of a fast moving transport. As in, roll a die for each model, on a 1 it takes a wound?
But, with a potential 32” charge, that might be the most danger one of your models actually faced.
I'll doublecheck my books but I'm pretty sure that the ONLY armies that could deploy out of a vehicle that moved further than 12" were Blood Angels and Orks,,and it was the Orks who had the potential to take damage while disembarking. And yeah, Khorne Angels getting all those perks for no points increase was probably the biggest ding 3rd had going for it.
Hellebore wrote: Shoot the closest unit was a great way to reflect the psychological pressures on the battlefield and the imperfect conditions of war. No general gets to point their dudes exactly where they want them and have them act perfectly every time.
Except in actual practice, the target priority rules actually did allow generals to use LOS-blocking shenanigans to shoot at exactly what they wanted to. (and for what it's worth, 2nd edition had this same problem, but even worse, since every individual model shot at the closest target in their limited LOS arc, allowing you to point specific models at exactly the enemy units you wanted them to shoot).
The shennigans like using rhinos to LoS block are actual tactics used by soldiers though... using apcs for cover to fire on priority targets. Forcing your opponent to form up their units in particular ways in order to protect them from proximity threats to strike further targets is realistic and a trade off when receiving incoming barrages because they're all close together.
It's when tactics used don't reflect warfare that it looks weird. Like a unit of guardsmen standing 4" from a bloodthirster but firing their lasguns at some chaos marines 20" away (without requiring some insane discipline, rather than just assumed automatic discipline).
.
There are less tactics in that, than blocking the thirster with a chimera to do the same. And requiring an apc to support you to do this action creates a risk tradeoff
So I am not to worried about "what would real troops do" as real troops would not just stand there and wait their turn to shoot etc. Also in a setting where you can nuke things from space, but guys fight with swords, I mean are we that worried about the tactics being "realistic"? Also shooting the closest unit is not even that realistic. Do you think troopers armed with TOW anti-tank missiles shoot them at infantry when there is a tank anywhere in proximity? No, that is what the guys with M16s are for. Do you think a tank shoots it's main gun at infantry charging (which is suicide by the way) at it? No it uses its machine guns or lets the infantry deal with it while it destroys its primary targets.
The 4th edition targeting rules were very very bad, not just because they require a unit to shoot at the closest unit, but how they were implemented (I believe someone else stated this as well). First, I don't believe there was a range restriction, so you had to shoot the closest even if all enemy units were on the other side of the board, so the whole idea that the unit was in immediate danger is nonsense. Then at certain ranges, it was arguable who was in fact that closest unit, yet another opportunity to argue with your opponent (tac on firing a blast weapon and we have a full on debate) It was also an all or nothing system, meaning it did not affect each model individually, so if your squad failed all their guns had to shoot the target, even if they could not hurt it. It also hurt some armies way more, which is a bad mechanic. Leadership 7 on guard or orks meant about a 50/50 to pass. However elite units like space marines with a 8 or 9 LD rarely failed. In fact in some match ups, the mechanic was just extra dice rolling with very very very minimal impact on the game, which is bad game design (which is also why battleshock is the worst rule in 10th). It also does nothing to affect CC units, who were free to charge right past units if they like.
And for true line of sight, it is the worst way to do LOS in a game except for every other way that has been tried. Every game I have played that uses some abstraction is clunky, complex, and leads to arguments which is why many use TLoS. 10th edition actually fixes the main concern with TLoS with using area terrain as blocking regardless of if you can see though. And the +1 for the save for even the minimalist of cover is also a great cover rule, (to the extent that +1 to armor is meaningless sometimes, I would actually like if they reduced ap further for many multiple shot weapons and blasts, with ap-3 being basically single or low shot AT weapons only, and high rate of fire mid weapons, like plasma, being reduced to -2 and blasts being reduced to -1, but that is my preference and I can see if others don't agree).
Just Tony wrote: I'll doublecheck my books but I'm pretty sure that the ONLY armies that could deploy out of a vehicle that moved further than 12" were Blood Angels and Ork
3e - Can assault after disembarking, but can only disembark after a move of 12" or less.
Blood Angels ignored this 12" limit entirely while orks could ignore the extra D6" from their turbo boosta and +1" from red paint jobs.
4e AND 5e - Disembark and charge only if stationary for normal vehicles, or after moving up to 12" for assault and open topped vehicles (DE raiders, ork vehicles, landraiders, etc).
There was also the dark elf 'boarding torpedo' trick of turbo-charge ramming an enemy tank and then assaulting out of the crater of the now exploded raider.
xeen wrote: The 4th edition targeting rules were very very bad, not just because they require a unit to shoot at the closest unit, but how they were implemented (I believe someone else stated this as well).
4e shooting :
1) Pick a target. Targets are split into large (tanks, MCs) and normal
2) Make a leadership test. If you fail you instead shoot the closest target of the type you picked in step 1.
-DO NOT count targets that cannot be seen, which are engaged in combat, or those that are fleeing
-DO count that one grot in hard cover 21" away that can only be shot at by a single guy because they are closer than the ork horde 21.1" away visible to everyone, out in the open, and standing on the objective.
3) Check range. Under no circumstances should you check range prior to this step and definitely not have long measuring tapes in the movement phase...
4) Determine valid targets in the opposing unit - these are only targets you can see.
-remember this is all TLoS so by all means back your rhino up to block your own LoS to unimportant models in the squad. Also works for target selection.
5) Roll to hit and to wound, etc (big page of mixed armour rules here). Your opponent picks which valid models to remove.
xeen wrote: It also hurt some armies way more, which is a bad mechanic.
"This mechanic affects some factions more than others, therefore it is a bad mechanic." is certainly... a take.
Not a good one, admittedly, but a take.
Armour Save Modifiers, to-hit modifiers, damage modifiers, etc, all affect some armies more than others, as they should do. If your default position is that you're naturally inaccurate, something making you more inaccurate should be expected to hurt you more, for example - but the impact of this is something that should be taken into account when calculating points costs.
If we're choosing in an edition to model that lack of control that we, as the eye in the sky that can see everything, would experience, then it makes sense that troops that are less disciplined (generally reflected by a lower Ld) are going to have more issues with following commands than those with greater discipline/experience.
The Guard could (from memory) take advantage of Officer leadership bubbles as required, and even Orks could boost their Ld with characters. I don't have the 4th BRB anywhere near to hand, but wasn't it closest unit or vehicle/monster, or is my memory letting me down there?
I never minded the target priority rules, I like rules that make Leadership meaningful.
I will say I never had the experience of people gaming it by putting vehicles in the way intentionally. Most of the time, it worked pretty well. And it meant you could use tactics like screening with some effectiveness too.
1) Pick a target. Targets are split into large (tanks, MCs) and normal
2) Make a leadership test. If you fail you instead shoot the closest target of the type you picked in step 1.
-DO NOT count targets that cannot be seen, which are engaged in combat, or those that are fleeing
-DO count that one grot in hard cover 21" away that can only be shot at by a single guy because they are closer than the ork horde 21.1" away visible to everyone, out in the open, and standing on the objective.
3) Check range. Under no circumstances should you check range prior to this step and definitely not have long measuring tapes in the movement phase...
4) Determine valid targets in the opposing unit - these are only targets you can see.
-remember this is all TLoS so by all means back your rhino up to block your own LoS to unimportant models in the squad. Also works for target selection.
5) Roll to hit and to wound, etc (big page of mixed armour rules here). Your opponent picks which valid models to remove.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/05/03 16:01:08
I am pretty sure this supports my argument. So it wasn't just shoot the closest (that is how I remember it and couldn't find the exact rules, glad someone did) but much much more complicated. I forgot the whole you couldn't even measure to see who the closest was prior to picking your shot, that is pretty dumb. I mean look how overly complicated this is. OK target large or not? (BTW what happens if you split fire into a large and non-large or was split fire not allowed?) Who is closer of those targets? But wait that unit can't be seen (A whole other complex issue with the abstract terrain). Oh wait this one is in combat, so not that one. Oh those are fleeing so they don't count (side note, can I shoot at the fleeing models freely then?) ok, who is closest now. BTW don't measure for any of this. And you need to do this with every unit prior to shooting, because anyone who has played 40k knows target priority is a big deal, so you need to consider what happens if you fail the test, so you need to look at this just in case most of the time. And then you pass and it was all for nothing. How much extra time does this add to a game? How much value does it add? Especially when two armies are both high leadership elites, where the test is failed almost never.
Then the example provided, having to shoot the one grot, shows how dumb this is even considering "real troops on the battlefield need to engage threats" logic. One grot that is closer by an inch is not more of a threat to a unit than 20 boys. Also this shows the level of gaminess this mechanic caused. Is it tactics to move one grot closer to my heavy weapons team to potentially block the shots against the boys? Does the ability to do that improve game satisfaction for everyone involved?
Also how do you account for this in points? How much is it worth to be able to pass this test better? Just another layer of balance that needs to be figured out and adjusted on top of everything else like base stats, abilities, etc.
Finally, yes some rules affect armies differently, and that is part of the game. But this rule affects the very basic ability of picking a unit to shoot. This is a fundamental core element of the game which is move, shoot, charge, fight (then moral). While there can be many differences in how a unit preforms in those phases, the idea that a unit fundamentally does get to participate in one of them due to a failed LD test (and having to shoot one grot with your heavy weapons is basically equal to not shooting) and that affects some armies worse than others is not good game design.
I mean if people like all of that, then cool that is your preference. But I just don't see it.
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
I can see how an uncooperative opponent could
give you a miserable time with those rules. I didn't play that many tournaments in 4th and those I did were pretty chill affairs, so my experience is as Insectum says - almost all the time it was obvious to both players what the closest unit was.
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
I think Tau could do it too with multi-trackers.
I am in the camp of "make Ld meaningful" and really like target priority (and I say this as a Guard player, not Necrons or something that had great Ld by default). My thoughts were that split fire could also be available after a Ld test, except for the aformentioned units who could do it by default as a nod to their superior training and/or equipment.
No pre-measuring was the norm until 5th. It had pros and cons. I like the concept, but can also see how it is a problem in more competitive settings when people try to game it in the movement phase etc. Goven that oldhammer is now entirely an optional thing, I think such concerns are less important as it is almost always going to be a game between like-minded friends.
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
Yea so we add all this unnecessary complexity (and accounting for it in points) for something that matters only 5% of the time. And I would believe that at least one turn per game it mattered far more than that.
But our points are well laid out. Like I said if you liked 4th cool, I just don't get it. I mean I like 6th, and I know a lot of people don't like that edition (like all old editions it needed balance updates like we have now badly).
So long ago but I have only fond memories of 3rd edition. Collected Eldar and Tyranids, which might not have been balanced but I loved the options for the craftworld lists and the custom tyranids. Modern 40K has lost a lot of that kind of fun, and become an almost inflexible tournament game. Even more so comparing it to the original Rogue Trader.
One thing that rekindled my interest in 40K was the craftworlds supplement which featured a seer council/guardian focus for Ulthwe, which I wanted to do at the time but had to give up wargaming to pursue computing. Over two decades later I now have that Ulthwe army, which features only Farseers, Warlocks and Guardian themed units. I really want to add a Wraithknight to the collection for modern 40K games, but I think that might break the theme; it would look too much like an Iyanden army instead...
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
I think Tau could do it too with multi-trackers.
I am in the camp of "make Ld meaningful" and really like target priority (and I say this as a Guard player, not Necrons or something that had great Ld by default). My thoughts were that split fire could also be available after a Ld test, except for the aformentioned units who could do it by default as a nod to their superior training and/or equipment.
No pre-measuring was the norm until 5th. It had pros and cons. I like the concept, but can also see how it is a problem in more competitive settings when people try to game it in the movement phase etc. Goven that oldhammer is now entirely an optional thing, I think such concerns are less important as it is almost always going to be a game between like-minded friends.
Tau multitrackers were for firing more than 1 weapon. Target lock allowed split fire, but you would only have 1-3 suits per squad and if they had a target lock then only firing a single or twin-linked weapon.
It was a pretty unique thing for them though.
Also some smaller units got target locks to go with markerlights.
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
Yea so we add all this unnecessary complexity (and accounting for it in points) for something that matters only 5% of the time. And I would believe that at least one turn per game it mattered far more than that.
Haha no, it mattered all the time. It was only difficult to resolve 5% of the time.
Choose target. Not the closest of <type>? Take Leadership test. Simple.
Pinning. One of the very, very few psychological rules in the game.
On paper? I genuinely like it. Barrages and Sniper fire literally pinning the enemy in place is a fantastic head image.
But in practice? Well, I needed to force the rest in the first place. And the relevant weapons were either….kinda lame (very crap AP), or too good (Basilisk make squad go splat. Maybe stopping remnant getting up smol bonus, because most you go splat now). But even if I could do that? You then had to fail a Ld test.
And so, so many units were all but immune due to high leadership married to solid saves? Pinning just never became a particularly viable tool.
When it worked against the right target? Yes it could mess up your opponent but good. But the chances of it working were pretty negligible, so it went to waste.
Dysartes wrote: Pretty sure split fire wasn't a thing in 4th, with the possible exception of Long Fangs.
Yeah that's right. It's one of the few things I would change about those editions. I understand it, design-wise, but I think it felt inaccessible to many, not the least of which was because often the default starter unit was a Tactical Squad, and that was one of the units most punished by no-split-fire.
@xeen: You're really overcomplicating it. It was pretty obvious what the available targets were 95% of the time.
I think Tau could do it too with multi-trackers.
I am in the camp of "make Ld meaningful" and really like target priority (and I say this as a Guard player, not Necrons or something that had great Ld by default). My thoughts were that split fire could also be available after a Ld test, except for the aformentioned units who could do it by default as a nod to their superior training and/or equipment.
No pre-measuring was the norm until 5th. It had pros and cons. I like the concept, but can also see how it is a problem in more competitive settings when people try to game it in the movement phase etc. Goven that oldhammer is now entirely an optional thing, I think such concerns are less important as it is almost always going to be a game between like-minded friends.
Tau multitrackers were for firing more than 1 weapon. Target lock allowed split fire, but you would only have 1-3 suits per squad and if they had a target lock then only firing a single or twin-linked weapon.
It was a pretty unique thing for them though.
Also some smaller units got target locks to go with markerlights.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I usually get those two mixed up.
Pinning. One of the very, very few psychological rules in the game.
On paper? I genuinely like it. Barrages and Sniper fire literally pinning the enemy in place is a fantastic head image.
But in practice? Well, I needed to force the rest in the first place. And the relevant weapons were either….kinda lame (very crap AP), or too good (Basilisk make squad go splat. Maybe stopping remnant getting up smol bonus, because most you go splat now). But even if I could do that? You then had to fail a Ld test.
And so, so many units were all but immune due to high leadership married to solid saves? Pinning just never became a particularly viable tool.
When it worked against the right target? Yes it could mess up your opponent but good. But the chances of it working were pretty negligible, so it went to waste.
I do think pinning was an underutilised part of the game. It was better in 3rd and 4th than later editions though- at least ordnance barrages had a -1 modifier for pinning tests.
It did pair nicely with preliminary bombardments though, which had the chance of pinning defending units for the first turn.
To me, it’s just so symptomatic of 3rd as a whole.
A pretty good idea, implemented horribly.
Snipers, outside of Eldar Pathfinders (or were Rangers the super version?) were….kind of a waste of points. They rarely Pinned anything. And lacked the raw firepower to really influence a battle. They just couldn’t reliably do the job Snipers exist to do.
Automatically Appended Next Post: You know what I think bugs me most?
2nd Ed was waaaaay overly complex. Lots and lots of rules (like losing penetration over distance for Anti Tank), lots of templates, lots of markers, some of which could and would move around in the End Phase.
Psykers were key, and a jammy phase could and would win you the game.
But for all that nonsense and wobbliness and wonky game design? It. Was. Always. Fun. Whilst rose tinted and our inherent bias for remembering the fun bits as hoomans? It was always a spectacular game.
Blasting the turret off an Immolator, and having it land on a character was complex, but fun. Shooting up a Dreadnought, causing it to stagger back before exploding, was a complex interaction of rules and phases, but fun.
Whilst it had its cheese (oh hi, Eldar!) and more than it’s fair share of wonkiness? There were so, so many moving parts it feels like it was impossible to Mathammer. Like you just took what you fancied, tried your best and hoped the dice gods didn’t have in for you that game.
Again, significant rose tinted glasses on. The sort of glasses prescription that if you don’t normally wear glasses will let you see through time itself, but that’s my impression.
3rd Ed was as bland as overcooked Cauliflower in a cheese sauce made from fat free milk, using vegan, gluten free flour, where the cheese was introduced solely by interpretative dance.
I’d say that that’s certainly an opinion, but it’s definitely one not everyone shares; nor would they share if they tried it. While complex things can certainly be fun complexity is very much anti-fun; it’s just a barrier of entry / action which winds up being ‘you cannot attempt to enjoy this without studying X amount and memorizing Y steps first’. And again, there are fun things which are complex; I enjoy dwarf fortress. But complexity is very much the antithesis of fun itself, which is kind of why Rimworld blew the socks off that genre.
And just before someone gets salty: Complexity and depth are not the same thing. Depth is good but does not require complexity, where as complexity is usually an inelegant and unskilled attempt at adding depth.
In terms of 3rd (and 4th) they definitely didn’t do things perfectly. Those editions had a metric ton of stuff wrong with them and many ideas which weren’t properly implemented / executed. And I’d argue they were still signing more fun than 2nd edition despite that.
Also, the griping lf “this stuff didn’t work well enough” just baffles me. Very few people will tell you that 3rd or 4th were perfect, and most people who play old hammer shore up the edition to make it better. So the complaint that Pinning was a good idea not implemented well enough and therefor it deserves ire, which also uplifting the insanity of 2nd ed mechanics (yay lasguns reducing marine armor; yay virus bombs; yay psykers; yay cards) just baffles me.
2nd Ed was waaaaay overly complex. Lots and lots of rules (like losing penetration over distance for Anti Tank), lots of templates, lots of markers, some of which could and would move around in the End Phase.
Psykers were key, and a jammy phase could and would win you the game.
But for all that nonsense and wobbliness and wonky game design? It. Was. Always. Fun. Whilst rose tinted and our inherent bias for remembering the fun bits as hoomans? It was always a spectacular game.
It's not rose-tinted glasses. I still play 2nd and still enjoy it.
The chief issue was the complexity, and that was being resolved in real time by the players. If one clicks on my 2nd ed. fixes, keep in mind that I did not make them, up, I complied them from what I saw and what other people recommended.
It was a marvelous thing, but players actually came together and were able to achieve consensus on what was wrong, and how to fix it.
It was also the last GW product that included "if both players agree" kind of language. From 3rd ed. on, it was "suck it up, it's legal" and the tournament mentality really took over as a result.
It was also the last GW product that included "if both players agree" kind of language. From 3rd ed. on, it was "suck it up, it's legal" and the tournament mentality really took over as a result.
Oh that's certainly not true. For starters in 3rd there was the "get permission to use" for named characters. And both 3rd and 4th offered a bunch of optional scenarios that were antithetical to tournament play. Iirc 4th had progression mechanics for campaigns, too.
Insectum7 wrote: Oh hell yeah! How could I forget the glorious VDRs! Talk about fun.
All of that was the glorious Last Stand of old 40k.
Instead of missions there were scenarios and that was what the players wanted to use. Fixed GW-endorsed scenarios.
So many games about fighting for table quarters. What a useless exercise that was.
And with the increase of factions, 40k got to experience the joy of the Army of the Month, along with the Oops, Models Aren't Selling Well rules changes.
I really, really tried to like it and my win percentage was awesome. But in the end, I just like 2nd better. De gustibus non disputandum and all that.
Insectum7 wrote: Oh hell yeah! How could I forget the glorious VDRs! Talk about fun.
Until your local Goon abused the intent of those rules to VDR a “flat bed Rhino” purely to deliver Moriar to your line far, far faster than Moriar’s own points cost allowed for.
I’m afraid that, whilst I love the concept of the VDR (Vehicle Design Rules) as a back to Rogue Trader type affair? They, like Tyranid Mutations and the lesser recalled Tyranid Design Rules, only served to demonstrate why fans should be kept far from the levers of in-game power.
No rule of cool. No conversion/kit bash/scratch build first, rules second. Only Mathammer abject boredom, as increasingly sad cases could and would only fixate on what was “optimal”, and how best to take the piss.
Which for me is again, a massive strike against 3rd Ed. Yes heavily informed (probably misinformed for sake of absolute honesty) by the gimps and weirdos on Portent/Warseer who only ever advocated for “pLaY tO WiN” worst opponent ever WAAC Douchery. Nevermind having fun, that only came if you not only won a game, but by the largest possible margin.
I mean you could absolutely cheese 2nd ed to bits if you wanted to. It's not true that it was immune to cheese. And those same players who were having fun with 2e could have the same kind of fun with the VDR or TDR.
For sure, those rules weren't meant for a competitive situation, but arguably very little of 40k has ever been meant for that.
Insectum7 wrote: Oh hell yeah! How could I forget the glorious VDRs! Talk about fun.
Until your local Goon abused the intent of those rules to VDR a “flat bed Rhino” purely to deliver Moriar to your line far, far faster than Moriar’s own points cost allowed for.
I’m afraid that, whilst I love the concept of the VDR (Vehicle Design Rules) as a back to Rogue Trader type affair? They, like Tyranid Mutations and the lesser recalled Tyranid Design Rules, only served to demonstrate why fans should be kept far from the levers of in-game power.
No rule of cool. No conversion/kit bash/scratch build first, rules second. Only Mathammer abject boredom, as increasingly sad cases could and would only fixate on what was “optimal”, and how best to take the piss.
Which for me is again, a massive strike against 3rd Ed. Yes heavily informed (probably misinformed for sake of absolute honesty) by the gimps and weirdos on Portent/Warseer who only ever advocated for “pLaY tO WiN” worst opponent ever WAAC Douchery. Nevermind having fun, that only came if you not only won a game, but by the largest possible margin.
A: Using the VDR constructions required opponents permission.
2: People have fun in different ways. Some people liked building ultra competitive lists with likeminded vehicle designs.
and D: No rule of cool, eh? Here's the "Battle Mansion" my brother built. I did the paint job. He made another four or five VDR creations for his Orks (smaller than this one ) and they're all super cool.
I only made two VDR creations: the "Grot wall" which was a guard creation that had AV10 (juuuust enough to be immune to grots) and 20 embedded lasguns) and a twin-CCW dreadnought for my Death Guard because the metal Furioso had just come out and I wanted one. the first one was more of a hypothetical one but I modelled the second and loved it.
I'm always a fan of custom stuff and I really miss being able to do things like that, the lame Land Raider variant rules from a few years back just aren't the same
Da Boss wrote: I mean you could absolutely cheese 2nd ed to bits if you wanted to. It's not true that it was immune to cheese. And those same players who were having fun with 2e could have the same kind of fun with the VDR or TDR.
For sure, those rules weren't meant for a competitive situation, but arguably very little of 40k has ever been meant for that.
It was harder to cheese 2nd because the game was more tactically demanding. There were obvious exploits like the Virus Grenade (which was rightly banned) and psyker powers were a source of abuse, but not everyone bothered to use them. That was a common query, in fact: "Wanna play? Are we using psykers?" People had default lists with and without them.
The issue with 3rd was that it was so abstract that it could be bent into a pretzel, turned inside out, and bent again. GW was fully on board with rules lawyering, at one point clarifying that yes, you could declare a vehicle stationary but also fire its Boosta Rokkits and so it could move without counting as moving and therefore use all its weapons. Oh wait, unless you rolled under a 4, because GW's bizarre randomness fetish.
2nd ed. was the last edition where the rules approximated some sort of simulation. One of the discussions in the game design forum is about mechanics, the mechanics of 3rd I think are what utterly wrecked peoples' opinion of IGOUGO because while in 2nd you could have troops respond in the opponent's turn, in 3rd you were basically a passive observer.
It was just so stupid to have player "time" their movement so that units could move through the open in plain sight of the enemy but because they started in cover and ended in cover, they couldn't be shot at.
This was also the period where the alpha strike came of age, with rhino rushes deciding the game on the first turn.
There was almost zero in terms of tactical decision making. Troops no longer had the option to run, or throw hand grenades rather than engage, or fire pistols for extra accuracy at close range. Actual real-world style maneuvers became impossible to perform.
In 2nd you could have one unit firing on a position, another uning maneuvering to engage in close combat, and a third unit on overwatch, covering the second in case the defenders sortied. In 3rd you just ran everyone at the thing or buried it with buckets of dice.
Because of all the tactical elements, it was much harder to build a WAAC army in 2nd edition. Everyone talks about the vaunted Space Wolves all terminator army, but what could you really do with it? Unless playing on ping-pong table, terrain will screen them, they have no mobility, and therefore can be bypassed, or overrun in detail by opponents with greater mobility.
It was 3rd that brought us the ultra-beardy lists that won just by showing up, and that was when tournament prep because a major focus of the game. I remember people arguing that cheaty lists weren't a problem because they won't win in a tournament setting.
Because the game was dumbed down with vastly fewer decision points for the players, mathhammer became preponderant and I admit I was one of the worst offenders, losing only two games with my Vanilla Marines over several years, (making me something of a local legend). The thing was, it was all formulaic. The battlefields all had less terrain, the scenarios everyone wanted to play were the same, so the formula was simply to load up on AP (including Razorbacks), conduct a slow retreat until the enemy was within reach of Captain Whirlingdeath and that's the game. I had to switch armies because it was so dull and predictable but my shiny new IG guys (Praetorians in metal, I had a decent job and no kids) were just as dull, only in different ways.
Then I tried Chaos Marines. Same result.
Every army was like that. People were grinding out lists, modding them with each update, and it was just setup and roll the dice. So I quit and after a few years, got into 2nd, where I remain happy.
Ok . . . But if "abuse" is your qualifier the same could be said about the entirety of 2nd edition, despite what Commissar is saying. 2nd was very easy to abuse, and I'd argue easier than 3rd.
2nd had a lot of options. One benefit of this was that there were many ways to approach a given issue. But all those options also meant there were many ways to WAAC the very same system. I was totally "That Guy" in 2nd, and played against many of "Those Guys". Swarms of Discs of Tzeentch. Armies of 100 Hormagaunts. Multiple invuln saves stacked on characters, walls of Rhinos, Lascannon Spam on Mega Armored Orks, Plasma missile fusillades, dirty, dirty Exarchs, Pulsa Rokkit spam, Jump Pack lvl 4 psyker Inquisitors casting Vortex through units, even an army spamming Techmarines to act as individual model screens, because you had to target the closest unit. We tore the hell out of that system.
The lessons of both 2nd and 3rd are the same. Play with like minded people, play with enough terrain, play with mission variation.
2nd Ed had so much random and weird and wonky as a result of its overly complex rules? Mathammer required a degree in advanced physics. I was only ever one specific hit on a vehicle and then some favourable randomised rolls for sending its turret flying off and squishing your commander.
3rd, as is my main bugbear, overly simplified it all. And that for me is where the rot set in. Folk not interested in the spectacle, but the outcome. Those for whom a victory wasn’t a victory unless it was by the largest possible margin.
And that’s not to knock those hobbyists who enjoy the competitive scene.
Rather it’s when those on the most extreme of that end of the hobby spectrum made it all a chore. Those who rendered down all aspect of chance to a pathetic equation, and then dared to claim the game was broken when you got lucky and wrecked their army by using stuff they’d long since declared ‘sub optimal’ to kick their teeth down the throat.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Folk not interested in the spectacle, but the outcome. Those for whom a victory wasn’t a victory unless it was by the largest possible margin.
If you think those people didn't exist in 2nd then you are horribly, horribly wrong.
Insectum7 wrote: Ok . . . But if "abuse" is your qualifier the same could be said about the entirety of 2nd edition, despite what Commissar is saying. 2nd was very easy to abuse, and I'd argue easier than 3rd.
I'm going to call you out on this, because it's manifestly not true, and you're going to prove it for me.
2nd had a lot of options. One benefit of this was that there were many ways to approach a given issue. But all those options also meant there were many ways to WAAC the very same system. I was totally "That Guy" in 2nd, and played against many of "Those Guys". Swarms of Discs of Tzeentch. Armies of 100 Hormagaunts.
Hormaguants were famously only available inmetal. Same with Discs of Tzeentch. Unless you were spitting out proxies like Weimar Republic Reichmarks, you spent a fortune to do that. This is not the "own" you think it is.
Multiple invuln saves stacked on characters, walls of Rhinos, Lascannon Spam on Mega Armored Orks, Plasma missile fusillades, dirty, dirty Exarchs, Pulsa Rokkit spam, Jump Pack lvl 4 psyker Inquisitors casting Vortex through units, even an army spamming Techmarines to act as individual model screens, because you had to target the closest unit. We tore the hell out of that system.
Yeah, that's your other admission: you were fully embracing the WAAC concept. The thing was, you had to work a lot harder for it in 2nd, didn't you? How much did all those Techmarines cost?
The lessons of both 2nd and 3rd are the same. Play with like minded people, play with enough terrain, play with mission variation.
You've just shown that they aren't. You could spam 3rd edition with little more than the contents of two starter boxes, some rhinos and black and white paint. To do what you did meant blowing a fortune on models. Not even remotely the same thing.
As I've noted (and you haven't denied this) 2nd had more tactical options, so even your WAAC-y armies could have been brought up short without proper use and care.
A squad in 2nd has multiple options. It can move and shoot, or run, or assault, or go on overwatch, or hide. It could also throw grenades or use pistols instead of primary weapons.
The 3rd edition stripped all this out, making min-maxing so easy that a child could do it. As the Doc correctly noted, trying to calculate out a 2nd ed. army like that was a nightmare.
Oh, you've got a level 4 psyker who is going to wreak havoc with Ultimate Force? Say hello to my Demonic Attack card, smart guy. Oh, you have a Vortex Grenade? Meet my Detonator.
The reason 2nd was balanced was because everything was so deadly that you couldn't reliably munchkin your way to victory.
Let me put it this way: in all my games of 2nd (including recent ones), I have never seen armies so thoroughly curb-stomped on turn one as I did in 3rd, and apparently this practice continues to the present day.
Younger folks may not realize this, but every army had a thing called a Strategy Rating, which was added to the die roll to determined who got to move first. Space Marines got a 5, Tyranids a 1, and so on. So what this meant was that both sides set up knowing who was likely to go first.
That was okay, because units could start hidden, terrain was much more effective, and so on.
It was 3rd edition that introduced the alpha strike, which was another reason for me to quit.
Ok right. Like, whilst I agree with and support CvT’s critique it’s all getting overly heavy, yeah?
So let’s all take a nice deep breath and get back to vigorous but polite conversation, yeah? If you can’t respect the next person, you can’t respect yourself. Or something.
Second edition was a war game trying to be a role playing game or a role playing game trying to be a war game which is what created all of its problems. Third edition had the benefit of knowing exactly what it was and the people who really detest 3rd edition are the ones who got their role playing game left behind.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Ok right. Like, whilst I agree with and support CvT’s critique it’s all getting overly heavy, yeah?
I should think that Insectum7 knows from prior interactions that I mean no disrespect in my spirited engagement, but I will make that clear so that there is no misunderstanding.
Just Tony wrote: Second edition was a war game trying to be a role playing game or a role playing game trying to be a war game which is what created all of its problems. Third edition had the benefit of knowing exactly what it was and the people who really detest 3rd edition are the ones who got their role playing game left behind.
I think 2nd - especially in the stripped down mode linked in my sig - was closer to a true wargame than anything that came after. It features real wargame mechanics, like hidden units, overwatch, and important decision points like whether to conduct an actual assault or to throw grenades.
Seriously, one can't really have a squad-level game without some form of overwatch. Third edition didn't, and so I rate it as an inferior wargame design.
Just Tony wrote: Second edition was a war game trying to be a role playing game or a role playing game trying to be a war game which is what created all of its problems. Third edition had the benefit of knowing exactly what it was and the people who really detest 3rd edition are the ones who got their role playing game left behind.
I think 2nd - especially in the stripped down mode linked in my sig - was closer to a true wargame than anything that came after. It features real wargame mechanics, like hidden units, overwatch, and important decision points like whether to conduct an actual assault or to throw grenades.
Seriously, one can't really have a squad-level game without some form of overwatch. Third edition didn't, and so I rate it as an inferior wargame design.
Just Tony wrote: Second edition was a war game trying to be a role playing game
It was a small squad-scale game trying to be a larger wargame.
Everything was built to be played model by model with the squad stuff taped on top.
That's a better way to put it. Hats off and all that.
I should have consulted with you first about establishing what criteria actually counts a war game as a war game. I honestly think overwatch is one of the most garbage tier mechanics in the game and having it come back was one of the death knells of me ever playing modern 40K again.
The lessons of both 2nd and 3rd are the same. Play with like minded people, play with enough terrain, play with mission variation.
You've just shown that they aren't. You could spam 3rd edition with little more than the contents of two starter boxes, some rhinos and black and white paint. To do what you did meant blowing a fortune on models. Not even remotely the same thing.
No matter the game, the edition, the genre, or how much one spends/doesn't spend on models, that's always been the lesson you should learn.
And the sooner you've learned it? The happier everyone will be.
And if you don't think people spent fortunes on models back then.....
Is it at all possible for us to agree that we all find different things we like and dislike in different editions? Just because somebody doesn't like the same thing as you doesn't make you right and them wrong.
Personally I detest the competition mindset as I feel it doesn't have the narrative or storytelling aspect I enjoy, it's too much about "best" units rather than most fun to play.
Note this is only my feeling so there's no need for personal attacks which seem to be happening more often to people recently. I don't try to tell people how to play and I certainly won't listen to anyone telling me I'm wrong.
My tuppence worth on the subject matter is that I also heartily disliked 3rd as I found it bland and totally without much in the way of gaming flavour. I know some won't agree but that's up to them, it doesn't bother me at all. Each to their own.
I'm going to quickly flag one advantage 3rd ed had over 2nd, assuming my memory is correct, and that's that all the dice you needed came in the box.
2nd used most of a polyhedral set in various combinations for armour penetration, but (if I'm remembering correctly) didn't include such a set in the starter box, nor did GW sell them in-store.
If you, like me, were starting back in '96, this was before the t'internet got going, and as such it was difficult to know where to go to get these weird dice - especially if the local staff didnae know (or wouldn't say) if there were any local shops stocking them anywhere.
With 3rd just being d6 + scatter + artillery dice, at least all of those came in the starter box...
Dysartes wrote: 2nd used most of a polyhedral set in various combinations for armour penetration, but (if I'm remembering correctly) didn't include such a set in the starter box, nor did GW sell them in-store.
Yeah, it had a handful of white and red D6s, and the scatter, artillery and sustained fire dice. The others you had to get elsewhere.
Even here in Oz where game stores were few and far between, they weren't hard to find, though. Plenty of places sold D&D.
"2nd wasn't broken if you remove these rules, and because hardly anyone can afford the broken builds" doesn't sound like a particularly strong endorsement of the sentiment.
At least if the broken builds are readily available it makes it fairer for the majority if more prone to mirror matches.
Plus, if playing old rules with modern models, hormagaunts etc are readily available nowadays.
Yeah as a kid in rural Ireland I had no idea what a D12 was or where I was supposed to get one - I'd only vaguely heard of Dungeons and Dragons back then. We approximated the correct numbers with D6.
Insectum7 wrote: Ok . . . But if "abuse" is your qualifier the same could be said about the entirety of 2nd edition, despite what Commissar is saying. 2nd was very easy to abuse, and I'd argue easier than 3rd.
I'm going to call you out on this, because it's manifestly not true, and you're going to prove it for me.
Ok, I'll do you one better. See below vvv
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: The battlefields all had less terrain . . . so the formula was simply to load up on AP (including Razorbacks), conduct a slow retreat until the enemy was within reach of Captain Whirlingdeath and that's the game.
Tadaa!! There's your problem! If all you need to do is back up and shoot, you've got a terrain issue.
Hormaguants were famously only available inmetal. Same with Discs of Tzeentch. Unless you were spitting out proxies like Weimar Republic Reichmarks, you spent a fortune to do that. This is not the "own" you think it is.
Multiple invuln saves stacked on characters, walls of Rhinos, Lascannon Spam on Mega Armored Orks, Plasma missile fusillades, dirty, dirty Exarchs, Pulsa Rokkit spam, Jump Pack lvl 4 psyker Inquisitors casting Vortex through units, even an army spamming Techmarines to act as individual model screens, because you had to target the closest unit. We tore the hell out of that system.
Yeah, that's your other admission: you were fully embracing the WAAC concept. The thing was, you had to work a lot harder for it in 2nd, didn't you? How much did all those Techmarines cost?
The lessons of both 2nd and 3rd are the same. Play with like minded people, play with enough terrain, play with mission variation.
You've just shown that they aren't. You could spam 3rd edition with little more than the contents of two starter boxes, some rhinos and black and white paint. To do what you did meant blowing a fortune on models. Not even remotely the same thing.
I'm not sure a good defense of a game is "It was pay to win". If the game breaks down because players decide to use proxies (we often did), or a shop owner buys his models at cost rather than retail, or because a model becomes cheaper in $$ (I am the proud owner of 90 Hormagaunts now, is 2nd not a good game for me?) well it's an odd position to take.
And of course other things like Inquisitors, Assassins, Chaplains on Bikes, Wolf Guard, Plasma and Blind Grenades/Missiles were not heavy on the wallet.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: Oh, you've got a level 4 psyker who is going to wreak havoc with Ultimate Force? Say hello to my Demonic Attack card, smart guy. Oh, you have a Vortex Grenade? Meet my Detonator.
That's a little like saying "my counter-tactic is to roll boxcars on 2d6". The Demonic Attack card was one card out of (I think)36, with an equal chance of me picking it up instead of you. And I don't think I ever once encountered a Vortex Detonator despite fairly consistently bringing that pesky Chaplain on a Bike, because Detonators were expensive and had a limited range.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: The reason 2nd was balanced was because everything was so deadly that you couldn't reliably munchkin your way to victory.
Let me put it this way: in all my games of 2nd (including recent ones), I have never seen armies so thoroughly curb-stomped on turn one as I did in 3rd, and apparently this practice continues to the present day.
Younger folks may not realize this, but every army had a thing called a Strategy Rating, which was added to the die roll to determined who got to move first. Space Marines got a 5, Tyranids a 1, and so on. So what this meant was that both sides set up knowing who was likely to go first.
That was okay, because units could start hidden, terrain was much more effective, and so on.
It was 3rd edition that introduced the alpha strike, which was another reason for me to quit.
I can recall a number of 2nd ed games that ended in a capitulation after my first round of firing. Two of them were in tournament settings. And two that I recall of them were literally Opposition deploys in hiding - I go on Overwatch my first turn - Opposition moves - I fire my overwatch - Opposition finishes turn - I fire again in my turn - opposition forfeits. In short: they hide, I wait, I fire in their turn and my turn, and they were done.
Early curbstombing via heavy weapons is not a game system thing, it's a terrain thing. In no way was poor terrain limited to 3rd, or were WAAC players and cheesy lists limited to 3rd.
Just Tony wrote: I should have consulted with you first about establishing what criteria actually counts a war game as a war game. I honestly think overwatches one of the most garbage tear mechanics in the game and having it come back.Which one of the death knows of me ever playing modern forty k again
I agree that terminology matters. As someone who came to 40k from the hard-core wargaming hobby (pushing little cardboard squares around hexsheets), I consider something like overwatch essential to squad-level combat. If a unit moves across my front in the open, my troops should get to shoot at it, regardless of whose "turn" it is. Sometimes it's called "reaction fire" or "opportunity fire," but every serious tactical/platoon level wargame has it (alternating activation lets units "hold" in a similar manner).
Similarly, may barrage of Insectum7 clearly was a bit wide of the mark because my point wasn't that 2nd was impossible to metagame with WAAC armies, it was that it was not easy. Buying 100 hormaguants was not "easy," it was rather expensive.
Creating lop-sided armies in 3rd was easy. Just add some black and white paint to your space marines and you're good to go!
Insectum7 wrote: Tadaa!! There's your problem! If all you need to do is back up and shoot, you've got a terrain issue.
Terrain was pointless in 3rd, serving only as an LOS obstruction or movement obstacle. Trying to conform to terrain would leave you vulnerable to sweeping advance, which was far more consequential than getting a 6+ save you didn't even need against heavy bolters.
You can look at the WD magazines and buzz back into forum archives to see how armies fought each other - out in the open, which GW said was the idea. Faster gameplay, and less emphasis on shooting, more emphasis on assault combat. Again, those were the stated goals and they were achieved.
When I switched over to IG and lost the huge boost of power armor, my troops formed in the open, in ranked lines like I was at Waterloo. Intervals were essential because each line needed the one volley it got under sweeping advance.
Oh, and because ordnance can't move and shoot, armor became fixed defenses. GW started pushing tanks with heavy weapons as the main armament as a solution but that left the sponsons redundant, and so those disappeared, creating a weak, pathetic armored force, that couldn't actually outrun infantry that made contact with it.
If you were a treadhead, 3rd was an nightmare.
I can recall a number of 2nd ed games that ended in a capitulation after my first round of firing. Two of them were in tournament settings. And two that I recall of them were literally Opposition deploys in hiding - I go on Overwatch my first turn - Opposition moves - I fire my overwatch - Opposition finishes turn - I fire again in my turn - opposition forfeits. In short: they hide, I wait, I fire in their turn and my turn, and they were done.
I ran into that as well, always against first-time players. Overwatch caused a lot of peoples' brains to lock up, but once they understood its limitations (same targeting rules apply, less accurate, you get to shoot next), it was used in its proper place.
Did those games use mission cards? I find those an essential part of the game, because if it's just "sit there and plink for points," you're not really doing anything meaningful. A mission makes it worthwhile to lose a tank while trying to force a flank or take an objective and 3rd incorporated these directly into the scenarios, which was a good thing.
There is no debate that 2nd was a more mentally demanding game in terms of player decisions because there were more options to chose from. Even stripping out a lot of the special rules kludge (individual jump pack scatter on every move???), the core rules forced you to think harder. There's a telling passage from the Orks codex that warns players against simply shouting "WAAAGH!" and racing across the tabletop because the weapon lethality will do them in. Some form of tactical movement is essential.
All that changed in 3rd. Direct frontal assault worked, and the first turn was a huge advantage. In 2nd, it was often better to go last, because you could sneak onto the objective, push across a line or get a last shot at killing a character.
I shall conclude by humbly acknowledging your dedication, because if you actually bought all that metal, your commitment to the game was epic. I should have enjoyed going toe to toe with you back in the day, and reading your tactics and force compositions, I can't help imagining how I might have countered them.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: All that changed in 3rd. Direct frontal assault worked, and the first turn was a huge advantage. In 2nd, it was often better to go last, because you could sneak onto the objective, push across a line or get a last shot at killing a character.
All of those things you could do by going first in 2nd edition.
5e was the odd one with its 'only the last turn counts' objectives, along with the second player setting up with full knowledge and counter-positioning against the opponent (whereas 2nd ed was blind setup). Increased firepower throughout later codex releases pulled things back toward the gunline but second turn was always strong and further aided by changes to rules like rapid fire.
Just Tony wrote: I should have consulted with you first about establishing what criteria actually counts a war game as a war game. I honestly think overwatches one of the most garbage tear mechanics in the game and having it come back.Which one of the death knows of me ever playing modern forty k again
I agree that terminology matters. As someone who came to 40k from the hard-core wargaming hobby (pushing little cardboard squares around hexsheets), I consider something like overwatch essential to squad-level combat. If a unit moves across my front in the open, my troops should get to shoot at it, regardless of whose "turn" it is. Sometimes it's called "reaction fire" or "opportunity fire," but every serious tactical/platoon level wargame has it (alternating activation lets units "hold" in a similar manner).
Similarly, may barrage of Insectum7 clearly was a bit wide of the mark because my point wasn't that 2nd was impossible to metagame with WAAC armies, it was that it was not easy. Buying 100 hormaguants was not "easy," it was rather expensive.
Creating lop-sided armies in 3rd was easy. Just add some black and white paint to your space marines and you're good to go!
Insectum7 wrote: Tadaa!! There's your problem! If all you need to do is back up and shoot, you've got a terrain issue.
Terrain was pointless in 3rd, serving only as an LOS obstruction or movement obstacle. Trying to conform to terrain would leave you vulnerable to sweeping advance, which was far more consequential than getting a 6+ save you didn't even need against heavy bolters.
You can look at the WD magazines and buzz back into forum archives to see how armies fought each other - out in the open, which GW said was the idea. Faster gameplay, and less emphasis on shooting, more emphasis on assault combat. Again, those were the stated goals and they were achieved.
When I switched over to IG and lost the huge boost of power armor, my troops formed in the open, in ranked lines like I was at Waterloo. Intervals were essential because each line needed the one volley it got under sweeping advance.
Oh, and because ordnance can't move and shoot, armor became fixed defenses. GW started pushing tanks with heavy weapons as the main armament as a solution but that left the sponsons redundant, and so those disappeared, creating a weak, pathetic armored force, that couldn't actually outrun infantry that made contact with it.
If you were a treadhead, 3rd was an nightmare.
I can recall a number of 2nd ed games that ended in a capitulation after my first round of firing. Two of them were in tournament settings. And two that I recall of them were literally Opposition deploys in hiding - I go on Overwatch my first turn - Opposition moves - I fire my overwatch - Opposition finishes turn - I fire again in my turn - opposition forfeits. In short: they hide, I wait, I fire in their turn and my turn, and they were done.
I ran into that as well, always against first-time players. Overwatch caused a lot of peoples' brains to lock up, but once they understood its limitations (same targeting rules apply, less accurate, you get to shoot next), it was used in its proper place.
Did those games use mission cards? I find those an essential part of the game, because if it's just "sit there and plink for points," you're not really doing anything meaningful. A mission makes it worthwhile to lose a tank while trying to force a flank or take an objective and 3rd incorporated these directly into the scenarios, which was a good thing.
There is no debate that 2nd was a more mentally demanding game in terms of player decisions because there were more options to chose from. Even stripping out a lot of the special rules kludge (individual jump pack scatter on every move???), the core rules forced you to think harder. There's a telling passage from the Orks codex that warns players against simply shouting "WAAAGH!" and racing across the tabletop because the weapon lethality will do them in. Some form of tactical movement is essential.
All that changed in 3rd. Direct frontal assault worked, and the first turn was a huge advantage. In 2nd, it was often better to go last, because you could sneak onto the objective, push across a line or get a last shot at killing a character.
I shall conclude by humbly acknowledging your dedication, because if you actually bought all that metal, your commitment to the game was epic. I should have enjoyed going toe to toe with you back in the day, and reading your tactics and force compositions, I can't help imagining how I might have countered them.
Oh my God, we get it.You really dislike Black Templars. Wake me up when you're willing to discuss the other ninety eight percent of the forces used in third edition...
Now that I got that out of my system, let's point to your other bizarre fixation about third edition: the first turn alpha strike charge. Other than Blood Angels, what armies could make a first turn charge in any mission other than Cleanse or Night Fight? Go on, I'll wait.
You also have a rather massive problem pointing out things that you claim were broken and only doable in third edition. Yet several examples have been pointed to the exact same things being broken in second edition, or in similar manners broken in second edition using those edition-specific game rules.
I'm gonna once again default to the fact that something you enjoyed doing or using got unfairly in your mind affected by the rules change, and you slammed your feet down to say "Argleblargle it's the worst." I will not personally attack second edition because the Crimson Fists went from a founding chapter to a successor chapter. I will attack it, however, because the Army structures were absolute pants and every single possible exploit was baked into do the rules, meaning that any player could choose to run the most elite stuff in their list would with no compunction to do anything otherwise except for the Fluff Mongers. You'll notice that I will not disparage anyone choosing to play that edition and who enjoys that stuff though I will disparage the edition itself. I will simply choose to play the edition I prefer with people who prefer to play it.
Just Tony wrote: Other than Blood Angels, what armies could make a first turn charge in any mission other than Cleanse or Night Fight?
Chaos, orks, harlequins, daemonhunters. A lot of them were fairly marginal and limited to specific units though and the errata did away with one of the chaos options (the infiltrating, 12" move 12" assault lord) though i'm not sure they ever restricted the infiltration/jump pack combo.
So all of those armies could execute a twenty four inch plus move, deployment, and charge combination? I'm flipping through my books and failing to find those combos. The one I was most skeptical of was in the Ork codex and the most they can do is gain 3 inches to their overall travel. So it remains that first turn charges by the player getting first turn are extremely limited and is drastically unfair to hold an entire edition as bad simply because there's an outlier.
Just Tony wrote: You also have a rather massive problem pointing out things that you claim were broken and only doable in third edition. Yet several examples have been pointed to the exact same things being broken in second edition, or in similar manners broken in second edition using those edition-specific game rules.
The title of this thread is "Why I hated 3rd Ed 40k." I am merely staying on topic.
As for some of the exact same things being broken in 2nd, that's more of an indictment on 3rd, isn't it? Why didn't they fix it?
Not only wasn't it fixed, it was made worse by turning tanks into pillboxes and wrecking the iconic image of a Leman Russ rolling forward, firing all it's weapons. Nope, can't do that any more. The special ability of Space Marines to double-tap with their bolters? Gone. Rapid fire became just another weapon type.
And then there was AP, a horrible mechanic that caused rampant army list abuse because it was impossible to fairly price it into the system. How much is an S4 AP3 weapon worth? Well, against Orks, 'Nids, IG, not all that much. But it was pure gold against power armor. Conversely, a heavy bolter is pretty effective against everyone but power armor, so what should it cost?
Oh, the long-winded debates on THAT particular subject.
Just Tony wrote: You also have a rather massive problem pointing out things that you claim were broken and only doable in third edition. Yet several examples have been pointed to the exact same things being broken in second edition, or in similar manners broken in second edition using those edition-specific game rules.
The title of this thread is "Why I hated 3rd Ed 40k." I am merely staying on topic.
As for some of the exact same things being broken in 2nd, that's more of an indictment on 3rd, isn't it? Why didn't they fix it?
Not only wasn't it fixed, it was made worse by turning tanks into pillboxes and wrecking the iconic image of a Leman Russ rolling forward, firing all it's weapons. Nope, can't do that any more. The special ability of Space Marines to double-tap with their bolters? Gone. Rapid fire became just another weapon type.
And then there was AP, a horrible mechanic that caused rampant army list abuse because it was impossible to fairly price it into the system. How much is an S4 AP3 weapon worth? Well, against Orks, 'Nids, IG, not all that much. But it was pure gold against power armor. Conversely, a heavy bolter is pretty effective against everyone but power armor, so what should it cost?
Oh, the long-winded debates on THAT particular subject.
Ah yes, because AP Mods affect everyone equally.
The humble Lasgun's AP-1 increased damage against a 6+ Cultist by 20%. And against a 2+ model (not a Terminator, since they rolled 2d6 on a 3+) it increased damage by 100%.
That's the same, right?
Also, Terminator saves. 2d6 for each save roll meant that, if you were to roll a lot of saves with AP values from -1 to -8, you could not fast roll with one die rerolling.
3+ on 2d6 is pretty easy-roll 1d6 for each save. Any 1s get rerolled, and only if there's a second 1 do you take a wound.
12+ on 2d6 is also easy-roll 1d6 for each save. Any 6s get rerolled, and only on a second 6 do you avoid damage.
But any other value (well, besides the 2+ Abaddon had) could not be solved with one die per save.
Can we have a discussion on what we'd cherry pick from every edition to make the best game possible?
Stuff I actually liked in 3rd edition: Moral High Ground. Pretty insignificant rule, but I liked it. Disabling vehicles: this should also happen with monsters. The different flavors of missions in the back of the book. Some of how terrain worked.
4th-5th, some of how terrain worked (area terrain that is). I like characters joining and leaving squads.
The AP system was an issue, because as covered it consigned too many weapons to “meh” status.
S5 AP4 had a wider appeal than S6 AP-, so S6 AP- was rarely fielded.
With Save Modifiers, you can explore different niches.
Consider the Hellgun. In 3rd, it was….a Bolter. Essentially it was a Bolter. When it went to AP3 in a later edition, it was overly good, as it could do massive damage to Marines, Tau Battlesuits etc.
Now, introduce Save Modifiers again? And it’s no longer All Or Nothing. S3 -2 occupies a very different niche to S4 -1, because that AP elevates it beyond its humble S3.
I just prefer the granularity (a term I hate, as it’s an overused buzzword) of an AP system.
Even when done wonky, it’s easier to tweak into some semblance of competence.
Likewise I missed the range modifiers of 2nd Ed. Granted in a game much bigger than 2nd Ed’s overall scale they can become clunky, but they were another way to differentiate weapons and units.
Though let’s also be honest that 2nd Ed just didn’t have the variety of weapons 3rd Ed had. And that mattered. A Lasgun was a Lasgun was a Lasgun. Whether carried by a Guardsman, Guardian or Swooping Hawk, it was the same weapon profile. Likewise Bolters were a gun shared by Marines, Chaos Marines and Orks.
Thinking on Lasguns? They really benefitted from their -1 Save Modifier. So they’d ignore Flak armour, and could put a dent in all infantry units barring Terminators with just a smidge of luck,
When that granularity (ewww) was removed? It did affect how people approached the game. If you didn’t squeeze in as much AP3 and Power Weapons as possible, you were just at a disadvantage against Marines.
Consider the application of a Heavy Bolter, and a Lascannon. In 2nd Ed, both had their roles. Thanks to its -2 save modifier andD4 wounds? The relatively humble Heavy Bolter was a real work horse when it came to infantry and monsters. As I think I mentioned before, it was my go-to shooter for messing up my mate’s Avatar. The Lascannon of course was your bread and butter anti-tank and anti-monster, due to long range, high strength, decent damage and impressive save modifier. But with just a single shot, it was largely wasted being used against non-Terminator type infantry. Though a wee snipe at an exposed enemy character could reap dividends.
In 3rd? The Lascannon was just better. Sure, it could only delete a single Marine or Terminator at a time, but by comparison the Heavy Bolter had a far from negligible chance of doing nothing, because it couldn’t penetrate 2+ or 3+. And against Monstrous Creatures, even if I did force a wound. It was just the one wound.
So, points allowing? You were just better off taking that Lascannon, because its damage output against all targets was just better than a Heavy Bolter. It had a ubiquity granted because the AP system was bobbins.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and in 3rd Ed thanks to Instant Death, the Lascannon could still blat exposed characters if the opportunity presented itself.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I just prefer the granularity (a term I hate, as it’s an overused buzzword) of an AP system.
Even when done wonky, it’s easier to tweak into some semblance of competence.
Likewise I missed the range modifiers of 2nd Ed. Granted in a game much bigger than 2nd Ed’s overall scale they can become clunky, but they were another way to differentiate weapons and units.
Though let’s also be honest that 2nd Ed just didn’t have the variety of weapons 3rd Ed had. And that mattered. A Lasgun was a Lasgun was a Lasgun. Whether carried by a Guardsman, Guardian or Swooping Hawk, it was the same weapon profile. Likewise Bolters were a gun shared by Marines, Chaos Marines and Orks.
Thinking on Lasguns? They really benefitted from their -1 Save Modifier. So they’d ignore Flak armour, and could put a dent in all infantry units barring Terminators with just a smidge of luck,
When that granularity (ewww) was removed? It did affect how people approached the game. If you didn’t squeeze in as much AP3 and Power Weapons as possible, you were just at a disadvantage against Marines.
Consider the application of a Heavy Bolter, and a Lascannon. In 2nd Ed, both had their roles. Thanks to its -2 save modifier andD4 wounds? The relatively humble Heavy Bolter was a real work horse when it came to infantry and monsters. As I think I mentioned before, it was my go-to shooter for messing up my mate’s Avatar. The Lascannon of course was your bread and butter anti-tank and anti-monster, due to long range, high strength, decent damage and impressive save modifier. But with just a single shot, it was largely wasted being used against non-Terminator type infantry. Though a wee snipe at an exposed enemy character could reap dividends.
In 3rd? The Lascannon was just better. Sure, it could only delete a single Marine or Terminator at a time, but by comparison the Heavy Bolter had a far from negligible chance of doing nothing, because it couldn’t penetrate 2+ or 3+. And against Monstrous Creatures, even if I did force a wound. It was just the one wound.
So, points allowing? You were just better off taking that Lascannon, because its damage output against all targets was just better than a Heavy Bolter. It had a ubiquity granted because the AP system was bobbins.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and in 3rd Ed thanks to Instant Death, the Lascannon could still blat exposed characters if the opportunity presented itself.
I think you are ignoring weapons cost here. An Imperial Guard heavy bolter kills a Marine in power armour at ~80% efficacy compared to the lascannon if shooting a Marine in the open (0.33 wounds vs 0.41), but you can also take 2 or 2.5* heavy bolters per lascannon (in infantry squads).So at that point, 2+ heavy bolters is killing more Marines than a single lascannon, and don't lose any efficiency if the Marines take cover, unlike the lascannon fire. You lose anti-tank capability as a trade-off but a heavy bolter does synergise better with lasguns.
Obviously characters and terminators swing towards the lascannon being better, but that doesn't make the heavy bolter useless. Both can have a place in the list (especially if your next opponent is Orks or something where AP4 is sufficient for most targets).
*The lascannon went up 5pts in the second codex.
Edit: even against Terminators, lascannon were only more points efficient prior to them receiving the 5+ invulnerable save. After that, heavy bolters are more efficient per point against every non-character infantry in 3rd I can think of except meganobz, Crisis battlesuits (without shield generators) and Broadside battlesuits. In all three of these latter cases it is the instant death on the lascannons making the difference on 2W models.
cuda1179 wrote: Can we have a discussion on what we'd cherry pick from every edition to make the best game possible?
It strongly depends on what kind of game you are working towards.
Prohammer for example tries to bring in a lot of rules so you've got all books from 3rd to 7th covered, superheavies and forgeworld stuff, some of the latter edition rules like overwatch and snapshots, etc. At the other end of the spectrum you stripped down rules or re-worked (i.e. different dice) rules, etc.
Just Tony wrote: So all of those armies could execute a twenty four inch plus move, deployment, and charge combination?
They were outliers. Blood Angels just happened to be an entire army of outliers.
I can't see anything offhand in chaos 3.5 preventing jump troops from infiltrating. Orks could get a 16" vehicle move, 2" disembark, 6" charge - plus an inch or so by starting with the vehicle side on and rotating at the end. Harlies had a teleporter and a 12"/12" character, daemonhosts had among other things a first turn deepstrike and charge (entirely at random). Off the top of my head.
One thing I forgot that I actually liked, the Initiative stat in a model's statline. Also, while I know having weapon skill be a set number is faster, comparing two dueling guys WS does seem more realistic to me.
Well, you did have Initiative in 2nd Ed. It was mostly used for tests, but in a drawn combat the highest Initiative broke the tie.
Another thing I found much too simplified in 3rd was vehicle damage. Not necessarily the table and loss of Datafax Cards. But the D6 + S.
That, like the AP system, altered how weapons were viewed. You wanted solid anti-tank? You went with Lascannons. Sure Multi-meltas could get 2D6 + S and really slag stuff. But….only within 12”. On a move or fire weapon was….not especially useful. Krak Missiles at S8 were decent enough because they had solid range. But once Landraiders and Monoliths became available? Soon lost some appeal to the Lascannon, who at least had some chance of a Penetrating hit.
Any wargame is gonna boil down to Paper/Scissors/Stone to some degree. But with 3rd Ed removing the subtle niches we had in 2nd Ed, it became overly predictable. Which again fed into metagaming.
Insectum7 wrote: Tadaa!! There's your problem! If all you need to do is back up and shoot, you've got a terrain issue.
Terrain was pointless in 3rd, serving only as an LOS obstruction or movement obstacle.
Those both sound like pretty important points in their own right. A couple of simple hills blocking LoS can drastically shake up where units need to be positioned.
Trying to conform to terrain would leave you vulnerable to sweeping advance, which was far more consequential than getting a 6+ save you didn't even need against heavy bolters.
So... all of your terrain was bushes, high grass, crop fields, fences, or railings? Those are the 6+ types of cover. That sounds like pretty light terrain. Everything more substantial is 5+ or 4+ saves that are more meaningful. In addition, I'm not really seeing why units cannot be spaced out in cover either, especially as difficult terrain halved the sweeping advance distance and also dropped the initiative of any models without assault grenades.
You can look at the WD magazines and buzz back into forum archives to see how armies fought each other - out in the open, which GW said was the idea. Faster gameplay, and less emphasis on shooting, more emphasis on assault combat. Again, those were the stated goals and they were achieved.
When I switched over to IG and lost the huge boost of power armor, my troops formed in the open, in ranked lines like I was at Waterloo. Intervals were essential because each line needed the one volley it got under sweeping advance.
Why does each line only get a single volley? Units advancing into contact could be shot at normally in the following shooting phase before the melee began proper. Every line could shoot the advancing unit, so lines further back would get multiple volleys.
So, I'm sitting in front of the 3rd edition rulebook. The vast majority of the photographs show armies in dense terrain, including a rather nice trench system. They also feature lots of scatter terrain in the more open areas. Several of the missions in the book are assaults on fortifications (which are terrain). All of the 3rd edition battleforces included terrain, as well as the starter*. All of this terrain was also 5+ saves, not 6+.
One of the early codices in 3rd was Codex: Catachans, featuring extra rules for super-dense jungle terrain. Codex: Cityfight came later with specific rules for urban combat (this was really a separate, related system so not going to dwell on it much).
The battle reports that come to mind most from 3rd edition are the linked reports from the 3rd War for Armageddon global campaign and the similar reports from the Eye of Terror. Both of these featured dense urban terrain on the main battlefield, and had varying levels of terrain on the supporting battles to suit the theme (the ash wastes battlefield was much more open than the space hulk battlefield, for example). I can't think of any battle reports that didn't feature terrain in an important way.
I'm really not seeing where 3rd was intended to be played on planet bowling ball. Obviously planet bowling ball favours firepower over all else.
*I think part of the reason 5th edition had an issue with leafblower lists is not just TLOS, but also that GW stopped selling terrain in army boxes. Lots of people just didn't bother to buy terrain separately, which lead to sparser terrain set ups. The 5th edition starter also lacked terrain, unlike the previous two.
Further thoughts on 3rds lack of granularity? It only took one wee boost to make a middling gun suddenly really good.
Consider Chaos Space Marine Havocs with Tank Hunters. That bonus made Autocannons really, really flexible.
A unit of 5 had solid range, solid strength against Infantry, and a pretty decent rate of fire en massed. But, would struggle against Battle Tanks.
Give them that +1 penetration against Tanks, and suddenly they could merrily glance even a Landraider (but not a Monolith, who’s own special rule negated Tank Hunters, I think) into oblivion, whereas before they couldn’t do diddly to it.
When a single perk like that fundamentally changes a weapon’s ubiquity, your system is probably overly simplistic.
Later editions (maybe as early as fourth?) brought damage bonuses against tanks if you had AP1 or AP2..maybe AP3 as well? And yes that brought in some much need nuance. But 3rd didn’t. And that’s why 3rd was rubbish.
There was nothing more iconic about the Tyranids than small units of tall warriors directing the lesser yet far more numerous creatures of the swarm, while also being "special forces" due to their excellent variety of melee and ranged weapons. In 3rd edition Warriors could be taken as either HQ or Elite units, but that has been lost with the usual run-of-the-mill big powerful characters and singular lieutenants.
On the other hand, the Tyranids have gained a lot of cool characters in return, although the Prime thats been leading my swarm has been demoted. Damn. I suppose I'll just have to treat myself to a new HQ character or two...
Looking at 10th edition index for Tyranids and the Prime is just another warrior in all but name - not even an extra wound or attack to speak of. Does it have any benefits in the codex?
So, points allowing? You were just better off taking that Lascannon, because its damage output against all targets was just better than a Heavy Bolter. It had a ubiquity granted because the AP system was.
Fortunately someone else has dug into how the heavy bolter was more points efficient at taking down marines than lascannons, so the weapons were actually fulfilling the same niches across those editions despite doing it somewhat differently, so I won’t dig into that.
However I will talk about this particular point, as it’s something you and I have butted heads about before: Your feelings are not how math works.
The heavy bolter, as stated, was actually better into all appropriate targets than the lascannon and even so into marines (in that case because you’d get a higher ratio of heavy bolters for less points). It doesn’t really matter how you feel about it, because that’s just how the math boils down. Furthermore, I find it extremely telling that your gripes are always about how one weapon was only useful in a particular and then unrecoverable trash in the next, as if this is a result of the overhauling of all of the systems involved. Pinning this on the 3rd editon systems (ap changes and such) rubs me the wrong way because it’s demonstrating false.
So let’s talk about 30k 2.0.
The new HH edition, which I know you’re familiar with, upped the heavy bolter from 3 shots to 4. This single change made heavy bolters more effective into marines (or the 1w 3+ variety) than lascannons at a 1-1 ratio. A single heavy bolter has a better chance of killing a tactical marine than a single lascannon; though the lascannon shot is definitely more lethal than a single heavy bolter shot.
I bring this up because we have ABSOLUTELY seen weapon profiles change between editions of 40k without systems overhauls. So even if your point were correct, that the 3rd edition heavy bolter were worse ppm than a lascannon into all targets (a fairly hilarious claim when orks and guard exist, but I digress), using that as a point of why everything that came after 2nd was worse is just bizarre, because such a problem was absolutely fixable between editions or even during them, if it had been a problem at all.
Now whether or not GW would make such changes or recognize their need is definitely a valid argument. It’s also an argument that applies equally if not more so to 2nd edition, as even it’s most vocal advocates in this thread have admitted that the game needed multiple gentlemen’s agreements, the tossing out of a few cards, and a price cap on how much money you could spend on an army (as and an unwillingness to convert) to avoid being a hilariously imbalanced dumpster fire. So GW hasn’t ever been great at balance.
I don't understand the nature of the complaint to begin with. Yeah, the anti-light/medium infantry gun was about as effective as the anti-vehicle/monster gun when used against heavy infantry, while being significantly cheaper (and obviously much better against anything with a 4+ save or worse). What's wrong with that?
The real loser there was the autocannon, and there were a number of ways that could have been addressed.
If anything, the tendency to compare every weapon's performance against MEQs just highlights how much of a warping effect the predominance of 3+ saves has on the game- something that the switch back to modifiers improved but did not fix.
The issue is that if you do that, the heavy bolter becomes kinda ridiculus againts 4+ save models.
Which IMHO is the issue here, Marines were the standard to defeat so AP4 was considered worthless and thus AP4 weapons needed absurd amounts of improvements in other areas to compete... except that means 4+ save models and factions in which their majority of models are 4+ or worse may as well not exist in terms of defensive stats.
The binary AP/Save system is such a powerful mechanic, and saves and AP was distributed so poorly across different factions outside Marines, that it is pretty much impossible to balance it beyond assuming Marines are the only faction people play and balance everything around them.
IMHO for such binary system to work, Saves and AP would need to be evenly distributed across factions instead of being basically a faction defining trait.
catbarf wrote: I don't understand the nature of the complaint to begin with. Yeah, the anti-light/medium infantry gun was about as effective as the anti-vehicle/monster gun when used against heavy infantry, while being significantly cheaper (and obviously much better against anything with a 4+ save or worse). What's wrong with that?
The real loser there was the autocannon, and there were a number of ways that could have been addressed.
If anything, the tendency to compare every weapon's performance against MEQs just highlights how much of a warping effect the predominance of 3+ saves has on the game- something that the switch back to modifiers improved but did not fix.
It’s that the Lascannon held the greater ubiquity.
Decent against Tanks. Solid against exposed characters. And against MEQ, because of how the AP system worked? Surprisingly good, because it had a high chance of killing One Marine. Sure the Heavy Bolter had a chance of killing three Marines, and some chance is waaaay better than no chance. But again, thanks to how AP worked? The Heavy Bolter also had a chance of doing nothing, without a big swing against average.
So, points allowing (something I did mention in my earlier post which has been overlooked) Lascannons were just more appealing if you had no idea what army you might be facing. It’ll wreck light vehicles and Dreadnoughts. It’ll do reliable damage to Carnifex and Wraithlords and the ilk. And against the objectively Most Common Army? Knock holes in the enemy squads just fine.
And remember this is in comparison to 2nd Ed. There, off the top of my head? Heavy Bolters were 36”, S5, -2 Sv, D4 wounds, two sustained fire dice. Armour Penetration D6 + D4 + 5. Those stats made it a fairly handy weapon. Whilst like 2nd Ed you’d still need Dedicated Anti-Tank, it chewed up infantry short of Terminators quite nicely, and even against bug scary stuff like Carnifex, you could knock serious lumps out of them with just a modicum of luck.
Extreme example? Sister of Battle scored a single, unsaved hit on Abaddon. D4 damage killed him stone dead.
The Autocannon had a lower rate of fire, but a ridiculous range, S7 and more damage. So you could turn it on enemy infantry with reasonable success, but it was a proper threat against light vehicles. Come 3rd Ed? The distinction was much lessened.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: So, points allowing (something I did mention in my earlier post which has been overlooked) Lascannons were just more appealing if you had no idea what army you might be facing
The FoC of the old editions also included an opportunity cost - the function of heavy bolters could be replaced with small arms, the lascannon could not. So you never saw heavy bolters in those all important heavy support slots.
I think the old strength 6 AP - weapons are underappreciated though. 2+ to wound marines, instant death against a number of factions and swarms, often at the lower range of the points scale but higher range of shots even before the idiocy of eldar scatter-bikes.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: So, points allowing (something I did mention in my earlier post which has been overlooked) Lascannons were just more appealing if you had no idea what army you might be facing
The FoC of the old editions also included an opportunity cost - the function of heavy bolters could be replaced with small arms, the lascannon could not. So you never saw heavy bolters in those all important heavy support slots.
I think the old strength 6 AP - weapons are underappreciated though. 2+ to wound marines, instant death against a number of factions and swarms, often at the lower range of the points scale but higher range of shots even before the idiocy of eldar scatter-bikes.
I agree opportunity cost is the bigger factor here. Especially for elite armies with limited heavy weapons slots.
Tyran wrote: The binary AP/Save system is such a powerful mechanic, and saves and AP was distributed so poorly across different factions outside Marines, that it is pretty much impossible to balance it beyond assuming Marines are the only faction people play and balance everything around them.
IMHO for such binary system to work, Saves and AP would need to be evenly distributed across factions instead of being basically a faction defining trait.
Yes, that was the issue in a nutshell. The utility and lethality of all the weapons in 2nd against everyone created a better balance, even if it was accidental.
With 3rd it was heavily situational, and I think part of the frustration was that players had to completely retool their armies. The assault cannon went from terror of the battlefield to a joke. And, as mentioned, vehicles got completely crushed. Imperial Guard tanks, which used to come crashing across the board belching death now just sat there, or crawled along at a walking pace firing 1/4 of their weapons. It was terrible.
Going back a bit, terrain started disappearing because it wasn't necessary. In 2nd units in the open got shot to pieces; in 3rd all the 3+ save guys just ran through it, and besides melee combat was far more effective and decisive. Shooting was kind of besides the point for a lot of armies.
I mean that's another part that really shifted things. A melee monster in 2nd could only kill what he could physically touch, and unless the enemy squad was in a really weird position, he typically maxed out with two guys. If he killed them, he got a bonus move, but in situations like that, it was often advisable to break the unit voluntarily because surviving models not in base to base contact could run away. You could also shoot into melee as a last resort, and every Imperial Guard player at some point would utter the famous phrase: "Sir, you'll hit our own men!" "They're already dead." So grim. So dark.
Too dark for 3rd, so that went a way. Instead we got the famous rule that models in contact got their full slate of attacks, which flowed right through the enemy squad. Guys farther away got to "throw rocks." What this meant that characters just destroyed footsloggers. In 2nd, it was actually possible to dogpile a lone character piling up bonuses so that after the four punks died, the sergeant with the power fist could clean things up.
Not in 3rd. I've long since gotten rid of the books (and apparently the electronic files of army lists, hmmm), but the core point was that a four-turn game had only four shooting phases for each player, but eight melee phases, and since characters had multiple attacks (IIRC a space marine captain with terminator honors and power sword/pistol got 5), they could just slice right through enemy troops.
A lot of the game was therefore about making that happen or stopping it from happening, and if you're a shooty army, cover is not something you worry about - the primary thing is just to shoot as much as possible before being overrun.
I'll say this, Imperial Guard got a heck of workout and my fleeting victories felt a lot more earned that the ones with Space Marines.
I should note that in going through my archives, as early as 2002 I was going back to 2nd ed. and by 2004 was playing regularly with my reconstituted group (which had disintegrated because of 3rd).
I liked 3e, but I agree that save mods are better than all or nothing AP.
All or Nothing AP was clearly designed around Marines as the baseline, and if you played a non-Marine army you could really feel that.
The 2e AP system wouldn't have worked with the more flattened nature and generally lower stats of 3e, so it'd have to be no AP for normal weapons, -1 AP for AP4, -2 AP for AP3 stuff, -3AP for AP2 stuff and -4AP for AP1.
Heavy close combat weapons like choppas could have been -1 AP and so on.
I think it just works better, and gives those 6+ and 5+ save armies at least the feeling that they sometimes get to use the save they paid points for!
By all means reduce save modifiers some, but don’t do away with them entirely.
Imagine how much better received the 3rd Ed Shuriken Catapult might’ve been received if it at least retained its -2 save.
Even with its inexplicable 12” range? With -2 to saves, the rest of its stats would allow Guardians to pack a decent punch. Certainly it would’ve given even Terminators pause for thought before just blundering about in the open.
Save Modifiers meant I couldn’t rely on my Power or Terminator armour to just shrug it off.
To Hit Modifiers gave me more reason to consider working my way through cover at a slower, but ultimately safer, pace.
3rd Ed (whilst later editions would improve the underlying system) essentially lead Marine players to just ask “yes, but is it a Lascannon/Plasma Gun/other decent AP weapon”. If the answer was No? I was pretty safe, unless it was seriously massed firepower.
It was just too binary. Lightly armoured stuff infested cover, as that’s how you got survivability. Well armoured stuff just waltzed about where they wanted.
Over simplified, with too much nuance and situational decision influences removed.
But as I said, I’m not saying “therefore 2nd Ed was fine”. Because it wasn’t. It needed streamlining. But 3rd Ed went way too far in the other direction. Especially with said inexplicable guff like 12” range Shuriken Catapults.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Even with its inexplicable 12” range? With -2 to saves, the rest of its stats would allow Guardians to pack a decent punch. Certainly it would’ve given even Terminators pause for thought before just blundering about in the open.
But you end up in 10th edition where everything has two wounds and toughness 5 to offset the fact that otherwise your terminators have the durability of guard vets.
-2 save mods drastically shrink the difference between no save and power armour.
While true, you can offset save mods with other defensive characteristics. You cannot really offset binary saves/AP because of how powerful it is as a system.
You can give a model T5 and 2 wounds and it would still feel fragile with a 4+ save in a binary AP system.
They threw out the baby with the bathwater going 2nd to 3rd. They would strip it down and remove really easy things like the movement stat and modifiers (because modifiers are too hard?) and had to put on a bunch of special rules to make up for what had been lost because the core set of rules didn't cover enough basic ground to model everything they wanted in the game (but as long as those special rules were not modifiers because it would make player's brains implode apparently).
Dishing out multiple wounds to squad level models is something I like - at least in theory. So don’t read this as universal praise for its implementation.
But when a model’s overall resilience is determined by toughness, wounds and save? You get more design space overall.
For instance, bog standard Marines are now twice as resilient against Small Arms fire, but heavier weapons can and will still make them go splat. That works for me (again at least in theory), as it feels quite cinematic. The extra wound representing that even though a given wound may be horrific (your arms off!), a Marine can still fight on through it, where lesser beings would be crippled at best.
Tyran wrote: While true, you can offset save mods with other defensive characteristics.
True, but if you want armor protection to be sufficient to make a model feel very durable, and it doesn't do that, so you have to use not-armor stats to represent armor, clearly the mechanic is flawed.
Armor modifiers and the all-or-nothing system were vastly different in their effects, and where GW went wrong was treating it as if they could just extrapolate from one to the other while keeping the values the same. The relationship between a 5+ save and a 3+ save is very different when comparing the two systems, and they have different implications on the gameplay.
The all-or-nothing system created stronger contrast between good and bad saves. It made armor and your exact save, where you exist in the weapon-target pairing hierarchy, very important. The modifier system makes poor armor more valuable, but also devalues good armor, and makes countering heavily armored units easier. If you want weapon-target pairing to be very important, and for heavily armored units to be highly resilient to anything short of anti-tank weapons, the all-or-nothing system is better for that. If you want armor to be a defensive boon but easily devalued and not a defining characteristic, the modifier system is better for that.
I've said before that I didn't particularly like the all-or-nothing conceptually- and I think the fact that the game is a Marinefest caused problems with critical breakpoints (AP3) that wouldn't exist in a more equally represented game ecosystem- but it had a purpose and was better at capturing a particular vision than the modifier system. The writers on 8th didn't seem to understand the implications, and they've been doing damage control ever since.
Part of why the game's stat model is such a bloated mess is because the stats don't do what they're supposed to do, and rather than rework mechanics to fit their vision for the setting, GW resorts to inflating other characteristics to compensate or tacking on special rules. The relationship between T, W, and Sv is essentially arbitrary at this point; any sort of coherent modeling is long gone and there are a lot of weird side effects.
Tyran wrote: While true, you can offset save mods with other defensive characteristics. You cannot really offset binary saves/AP because of how powerful it is as a system.
You can give a model T5 and 2 wounds and it would still feel fragile with a 4+ save in a binary AP system.
How much of this is feelings though? A T5 W2 Sv4+ model is markedly more durable than T4 W1 Sv3+ against all AP5+ weapons below S10, more durable against all AP1-3 weapons unless they are S10 (then it is equal) and is only less durable against S10 AP4+ (just some weapons on Carnifexes in 3rd) or a fairly small range of AP4 weapons like heavy bolters and autocannons (there are more AP1-3 weapons than AP4 weapons across the game in 3rd). These latter are also pretty close in durability if the S is low- heavy bolters are only a bit more effective at killing the W2 model than the Marine, but autocannons are a lot better.
As it happens, the only such model I can think of in 3rd is Ork Nob bikers, and those are pretty expensive due to their other benefits (like speed, firepower, and melee damage).
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: and even against bug scary stuff like Carnifex, you could knock serious lumps out of them with just a modicum of luck.
The Heavy Bolter only wounded a Carnifex on a 6 (S5 to T8), then the Carnifex saved on a 5+ on 2D6 (7/36 to fail). By my math each HB shot had a bit over a 3% chance to do something, which ain't a lot. Cut that in half if the Carnifex was rocking the fairly popular 4++ from a Voltage Field.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: The Autocannon had a lower rate of fire, but a ridiculous range, S7 and more damage. So you could turn it on enemy infantry with reasonable success, but it was a proper threat against light vehicles. Come 3rd Ed? The distinction was much lessened.
The Autocannon in 2nd was S8 rather than 7. But even at S7 in 3rd ed, the reduced armor levels still made the AC a fine option against light vehicles. It's role stayed pretty intact between editions. It could Glance a Predator from the front on a 6 even, (with better odds than the HB against a C-fex above). And if Memory serves me, the 4+ needed to have an effect on a Rhino in 3rd was actually slightly more likely than the averaged chance against a Rhino's parts in 2nd.
In some ways it's the same end result - save modifiers get less effective as they go up and armour goes down just as high AP weapons are wasted on overkill.
But the AP system has clear benefits/penalties on matching the right/wrong gun to the right target whereas with save mods guns are just equally better against everything until they overmatch and start to trail off.
In 2e what you had instead of binary AP was the somewhat more random multi-wound weapons where you big guys would, sometimes, get rather rapidly popped..
I admit that it is part feeling, but also part that in a Marine skewed meta those AP4 weapons are going to be very cheap because they are otherwise worthless against Marines.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: and even against bug scary stuff like Carnifex, you could knock serious lumps out of them with just a modicum of luck.
The Heavy Bolter only wounded a Carnifex on a 6 (S5 to T8), then the Carnifex saved on a 5+ on 2D6 (7/36 to fail). By my math each HB shot had a bit over a 3% chance to do something, which ain't a lot. Cut that in half if the Carnifex was rocking the fairly popular 4++ from a Voltage Field.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: The Autocannon had a lower rate of fire, but a ridiculous range, S7 and more damage. So you could turn it on enemy infantry with reasonable success, but it was a proper threat against light vehicles. Come 3rd Ed? The distinction was much lessened.
The Autocannon in 2nd was S8 rather than 7. But even at S7 in 3rd ed, the reduced armor levels still made the AC a fine option against light vehicles. It's role stayed pretty intact between editions. It could Glance a Predator from the front on a 6 even, (with better odds than the HB against a C-fex above). And if Memory serves me, the 4+ needed to have an effect on a Rhino in 3rd was actually slightly more likely than the averaged chance against a Rhino's parts in 2nd.
On the Carnifex, it’s those odd unsaved wounds doing D4 wounds that knocked the lump off. In 3rd Ed? I got more reliable but inherently lesser volume of fire. Wounded on a 5+, and had to overcome a 2+ save. Manage that? A whole single wound. Sing hosannas!.
The 2nd Ed Autocannon, outside of additional rules like Tank Hunter? Was again only really a threat against Light Vehicles, and the occasional T3 character caught out in the open away from friendly units. Even then? A Lascannon was doing more reliable damage against Light Vehicles, and could blat T4 characters to boot, and fairly swiftly strip wounds off of Monstrous Creatures.
I admit that it is part feeling, but also part that in a Marine skewed meta those AP4 weapons are going to be very cheap because they are otherwise worthless against Marines.
In fairness, I should acknowledge that feeling is important here, given the thread is all about perceptions of the edition. Even if a heavy bolter isn't useless against Marines, a lot of folk clearly perceived it as such and that is a problem in its own right.
I think a lot of players value shots that bypass armour, perhaps disproportionately to the actual maths effects*. It might be a psychological thing of seeing your shots bounce off. I do sympathise with it and experience it myself.
*For example, a hotshot lasgun is no better against a Marine than 3 lasguns, and you could take three 5pt Guardsmen for every 16pt Stormtrooper. But the hotshot felt good burning though that armour...
Think it might help if I grab my 2nd Ed Wargear book to offer up some stat lines. 3rd Ed ones I’ll try from memory, on the caveat they’re entirely open to correction.
Similarly, may barrage of Insectum7 clearly was a bit wide of the mark because my point wasn't that 2nd was impossible to metagame with WAAC armies, it was that it was not easy. Buying 100 hormaguants was not "easy," it was rather expensive.
Creating lop-sided armies in 3rd was easy. Just add some black and white paint to your space marines and you're good to go!
It was easy to be cheesy in 2nd too. Tellingly, the "sportsmanship" award was a big part of GW sanctioned tournaments back then, because people would otherwise show up with WAAC style lists.
Insectum7 wrote: Tadaa!! There's your problem! If all you need to do is back up and shoot, you've got a terrain issue.
Terrain was pointless in 3rd, serving only as an LOS obstruction or movement obstacle. Trying to conform to terrain would leave you vulnerable to sweeping advance, which was far more consequential than getting a 6+ save you didn't even need against heavy bolters.
I wonder what else you think terrain is good for? It's used for cover, concealment, movement obstruction and occasionally greater visibility (gain high ground to see over other obstacles), as well as providing a defensive bonus against assaults, all of which were a part of 3rd ed. Unless this is just a complaint about how Marines didn't get a cover bonus against Heavy Bolters and small arms, in which case I'd argue you're missing the point.
I can recall a number of 2nd ed games that ended in a capitulation after my first round of firing. Two of them were in tournament settings. And two that I recall of them were literally Opposition deploys in hiding - I go on Overwatch my first turn - Opposition moves - I fire my overwatch - Opposition finishes turn - I fire again in my turn - opposition forfeits. In short: they hide, I wait, I fire in their turn and my turn, and they were done.
I ran into that as well, always against first-time players. Overwatch caused a lot of peoples' brains to lock up, but once they understood its limitations (same targeting rules apply, less accurate, you get to shoot next), it was used in its proper place.
Did those games use mission cards? I find those an essential part of the game, because if it's just "sit there and plink for points," you're not really doing anything meaningful. A mission makes it worthwhile to lose a tank while trying to force a flank or take an objective and 3rd incorporated these directly into the scenarios, which was a good thing.
There is no debate that 2nd was a more mentally demanding game in terms of player decisions because there were more options to chose from. Even stripping out a lot of the special rules kludge (individual jump pack scatter on every move???), the core rules forced you to think harder. There's a telling passage from the Orks codex that warns players against simply shouting "WAAAGH!" and racing across the tabletop because the weapon lethality will do them in. Some form of tactical movement is essential.
All that changed in 3rd. Direct frontal assault worked, and the first turn was a huge advantage. In 2nd, it was often better to go last, because you could sneak onto the objective, push across a line or get a last shot at killing a character.
"Your opposition players just weren't good enough." is a very easy accusation to make. I could simply say the same thing about your experience in 3rd edition. Your opposition wasn't good enough and your boards didn't have enough terrain to make your battles interesting. See how easy that is?
In every edition of 40k it is incumbent on the players themselves to come together and tune their experience. For 3rd and 4th particularly, since I was the host I built terrain that made tables look nice while also functioning well to adequately break up LOS, give cover and provide options for each player to leverage. The fact that you say "terrain was pointless in 3rd" is very telling, imo.
As for "mentally demanding", it could also be called "cumbersome". I don't think I have an opinion on that other than the observation that a lot of the fiddly bits of 2nd weren't necessarily a plus. Personally I appreciated the more abstracted approach which let me focus on the bigger picture rather than all the details. And despite the details of 2nd, "Spam Assault Cannons with high BS and use Blind Grenades to control my firing arcs and therefore target selection." wasn't exactly rocket science. Same as any 40k, you find your bread and butter tricks and units, and rely on them 90 percent of the time while keeping a few tricks in your back pocket for when you have to tackle oddball stuff.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: On the Carnifex, it’s those odd unsaved wounds doing D4 wounds that knocked the lump off. In 3rd Ed? I got more reliable but inherently lesser volume of fire. Wounded on a 5+, and had to overcome a 2+ save. Manage that? A whole single wound. Sing hosannas!.
Scoring one wound off of 5 isn't far off from 2.5 off of 10, especially when the former is more likely.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: The 2nd Ed Autocannon, outside of additional rules like Tank Hunter? Was again only really a threat against Light Vehicles, and the occasional T3 character caught out in the open away from friendly units. Even then? A Lascannon was doing more reliable damage against Light Vehicles, and could blat T4 characters to boot, and fairly swiftly strip wounds off of Monstrous Creatures.
Don't you mean 3rd ed? I think a lot of people favored Autocannons because they were cheaper than Lascannons and the two shots meant it was more likely for lesser troops to score a hit.
I admit that it is part feeling, but also part that in a Marine skewed meta those AP4 weapons are going to be very cheap because they are otherwise worthless against Marines.
In fairness, I should acknowledge that feeling is important here, given the thread is all about perceptions of the edition. Even if a heavy bolter isn't useless against Marines, a lot of folk clearly perceived it as such and that is a problem in its own right.
I would point to the Heavy Bolter being a pretty devastating weapon agaonst Marines in 2nd, but the change to 3rd really didn't nerf the HB so much as it improved the effectiveness of Power Armor.
But also, people thought the HB was worthless against Marines even if they started post 2nd, having never experienced it's effects with a -2 sv mod. So it wasn't a comparative "feeling" either.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the potential opportunity cost of using the Heavy. In a Tac squad, firing your Lascannon at a vehicle meant you gave up your squad bolter fire, as they couldn't shoot at a different unit, and couldn't hurt the vehicle. The HB was more of a complimentary weapon in the squad,
I still never bought the Heavy Bolter though . . . Always the Lascannon. High AP weapons were in short supply, and I figured I could put enough bolters on the table to deal with lesser threats. I'd use the Heavy weapon choice to give me more chances to knock out high value or high threat targets, even if it meant my bolters would lose a few rounds of shooting from time to time.
I admit that it is part feeling, but also part that in a Marine skewed meta those AP4 weapons are going to be very cheap because they are otherwise worthless against Marines.
In fairness, I should acknowledge that feeling is important here, given the thread is all about perceptions of the edition. Even if a heavy bolter isn't useless against Marines, a lot of folk clearly perceived it as such and that is a problem in its own right.
I would point to the Heavy Bolter being a pretty devastating weapon agaonst Marines in 2nd, but the change to 3rd really didn't nerf the HB so much as it improved the effectiveness of Power Armor.
But also, people thought the HB was worthless against Marines even if they started post 2nd, having never experienced it's effects with a -2 sv mod. So it wasn't a comparative "feeling" either.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the potential opportunity cost of using the Heavy. In a Tac squad, firing your Lascannon at a vehicle meant you gave up your squad bolter fire, as they couldn't shoot at a different unit, and couldn't hurt the vehicle. The HB was more of a complimentary weapon in the squad,
I still never bought the Heavy Bolter though . . . Always the Lascannon. High AP weapons were in short supply, and I figured I could put enough bolters on the table to deal with lesser threats. I'd use the Heavy weapon choice to give me more chances to knock out high value or high threat targets, even if it meant my bolters would lose a few rounds of shooting from time to time.
Well, as pointed out up-thread, a heavy bolter wasn't terrible against Marines in 3rd (superior per point than a lascannon), although I am sure it took a downgrade from 2nd in that role. It was essentially equivalent to a S5 AP3 Heavy 1 weapon mathematically.
I touched on synergy with squad weapons in one post, but as you say most people accepted that hit. Opportunity cost is a big factor though. You would see heavy bolters most commonly on vehicles that came with them. I also would not be surprised to see them cropping up in foot guard lists, where the availability of heavy weapon slots is high, possibly higher than you can fill. There you can take enough lascannon for the big stuff and still have room for some heavy bolters.
^Agree. In my lists the AP 4 came from vehicle mounts, generally Land Raider, Predator or Whirlwind in 3rd, and the Assault Cannon in 4th when it was rightfully upgraded again. Rarely did AP4 appear on troops, probably only as the Heavy Bolter in a Scout Squad.
But to be honest I never deployed a Heavy Bolter on a troop model in 2nd either, since a Missile Launcher with Plasma Missiles had about same impact with potentially much more disruptive results, came on a weapon that offered a nice AT option in the Krak missile, and didn't jam
Insectum7 wrote: "Your opposition players just weren't good enough." is a very easy accusation to make. I could simply say the same thing about your experience in 3rd edition. Your opposition wasn't good enough and your boards didn't have enough terrain to make your battles interesting. See how easy that is?
I noticed you didn't answer any of my questions. Were the players experienced? Did they have missions? If your troops have Dawn Raid as a mission and you're afraid of tripping Overwatch, that's a player issue.
If you're on overwatch, all your units will hit less effectively. Your opponent can then exploit this, by selecting what you can see and pushing relatively invulnerable units (like tanks) out front. If you fire on them, he should have reserve assets that then torch your revealed positions. You don't fire, the opponent can push forward until your units are detected, and plaster them with blast weapons.
Or use blind grenades, which you know all about. Did they?
This is not a complex tactical puzzle, so I'm struggling to find a charitable explanation as to why your opponents didn't come up with something. Again, I assume they were simply unused to the game.
In every edition of 40k it is incumbent on the players themselves to come together and tune their experience. For 3rd and 4th particularly, since I was the host I built terrain that made tables look nice while also functioning well to adequately break up LOS, give cover and provide options for each player to leverage. The fact that you say "terrain was pointless in 3rd" is very telling, imo.
But it was. Marines didn't need it, assault armies didn't like it, shooting armies got punished by it.
The heart of 3rd was melee combat. One space marine captain could throw more attacks - and deadlier ones - than multiple turns of squad shooting. Third ed. was specifically designed to make assault combat easier to achieve, and it did.
As for "mentally demanding", it could also be called "cumbersome".
Well yes, thinking tactically can be cumbersome. It sure is easy when your troops have only three options - move, shoot, assault. You are spared the difficulty of weighing whether they might also run, hide or go on overwatch.
Similarly, "big picture" gaming is a lot easier when units moving in plain view of the enemy don't have to worry about reaction fire.
So we both agree that 3rd was easier to play.
And despite the details of 2nd, "Spam Assault Cannons with high BS and use Blind Grenades to control my firing arcs and therefore target selection." wasn't exactly rocket science. Same as any 40k, you find your bread and butter tricks and units, and rely on them 90 percent of the time while keeping a few tricks in your back pocket for when you have to tackle oddball stuff.
No one has ever said that it was not possible to optimize armies in 2nd.
What I have said is that the simpler, AP-focused armies of 3rd lent themselves to more uniform list types and that these were capable of sweeping an opponent out of contention by the end of the first turn. That simply did not happen in 2nd unless one of the players was a novice or did not understand the rules, and the examples you gave support that.
You yourself have pointed out the many and varied ways the many and varied lists in 2nd all have seriously deadly and effective options. That was not the case in 3rd. IIRC, GW had to redo some of the 3rd ed books because the lists were so feeble. IG treadheads really took it on the chin as well, and I don't notice anyone disagreeing with me so I will count that point as settled.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: But it was. Marines didn't need it, assault armies didn't like it, shooting armies got punished by it.
The heart of 3rd was melee combat. One space marine captain could throw more attacks - and deadlier ones - than multiple turns of squad shooting. Third ed. was specifically designed to make assault combat easier to achieve, and it did.
Some armies could throw out a whole lot of low AP fire and/or superior small arms fire. There is a reason why Iron Warriors were top tier and it wasn't melee.
3e space marine captains - two MEQ kills on the charge with a sword, three with a fist (assuming all the extra attack upgrades).
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: But it was. Marines didn't need it, assault armies didn't like it, shooting armies got punished by it.
The heart of 3rd was melee combat. One space marine captain could throw more attacks - and deadlier ones - than multiple turns of squad shooting. Third ed. was specifically designed to make assault combat easier to achieve, and it did.
Some armies could throw out a whole lot of low AP fire and/or superior small arms fire. There is a reason why Iron Warriors were top tier and it wasn't melee.
3e space marine captains - two MEQ kills on the charge with a sword, three with a fist (assuming all the extra attack upgrades).
I'd argue 4th made melee more deadly with the chain consolidations into combat - my broodlord feasted well that edition.
Whilst it is undeniable that 3rd markedly reduced the flexibility of gun vehicles with the shooting penalties incurred by moving or firing ordnance, I don't think that alone made it a bad edition for treadheads.
This is the era of Imperial Guard armoured companies and mechinised companies, mechanised Tau, Eldar skimmer tanks, and 3.5th Iron Warriors.
Does anyone remember what was changed from the beginning of 3rd edition, to the "3.5 edition" where they tweaked a ton of core rules through White Dwarf? I know most of it was for the assault phase.
cuda1179 wrote: Does anyone remember what was changed from the beginning of 3rd edition, to the "3.5 edition" where they tweaked a ton of core rules through White Dwarf? I know most of it was for the assault phase.
The assault rules were trial rules. The big Chapter Approved change was to transports, adding fire and access points and some extra special rules.
Haighus wrote: Whilst it is undeniable that 3rd markedly reduced the flexibility of gun vehicles with the shooting penalties incurred by moving or firing ordnance, I don't think that alone made it a bad edition for treadheads.
This is the era of Imperial Guard armoured companies and mechinised companies, mechanised Tau, Eldar skimmer tanks, and 3.5th Iron Warriors.
3.5 Iron Warriors were no slouch in HTH. When your basic Chaos Marine could have Bolter, Bolt Pistol and Chainsword, you end up with very fighty base infantry. Defilers, whilst fairly poorly armoured, had a Battlecannon and Dreadnought CCW. Even Obliterators wielded paired Powerfists, at S10, in HTH.
Which is a big part of why Iron Warriors were so beardy. They just had no real downside.
Haighus wrote: Whilst it is undeniable that 3rd markedly reduced the flexibility of gun vehicles with the shooting penalties incurred by moving or firing ordnance, I don't think that alone made it a bad edition for treadheads.
This is the era of Imperial Guard armoured companies and mechinised companies, mechanised Tau, Eldar skimmer tanks, and 3.5th Iron Warriors.
3.5 Iron Warriors were no slouch in HTH. When your basic Chaos Marine could have Bolter, Bolt Pistol and Chainsword, you end up with very fighty base infantry. Defilers, whilst fairly poorly armoured, had a Battlecannon and Dreadnought CCW. Even Obliterators wielded paired Powerfists, at S10, in HTH.
Which is a big part of why Iron Warriors were so beardy. They just had no real downside.
Wait, I thought it was the codex AFTER the 3.5 that had the "armed both ways" thing.
I really hope I'm wrong as I'd feel dirty for the rest of my life defending any aspect of the 3.5 codex...
Haighus wrote: Whilst it is undeniable that 3rd markedly reduced the flexibility of gun vehicles with the shooting penalties incurred by moving or firing ordnance, I don't think that alone made it a bad edition for treadheads.
This is the era of Imperial Guard armoured companies and mechinised companies, mechanised Tau, Eldar skimmer tanks, and 3.5th Iron Warriors.
3.5 Iron Warriors were no slouch in HTH. When your basic Chaos Marine could have Bolter, Bolt Pistol and Chainsword, you end up with very fighty base infantry. Defilers, whilst fairly poorly armoured, had a Battlecannon and Dreadnought CCW. Even Obliterators wielded paired Powerfists, at S10, in HTH.
Which is a big part of why Iron Warriors were so beardy. They just had no real downside.
Wait, I thought it was the codex AFTER the 3.5 that had the "armed both ways" thing.
I really hope I'm wrong as I'd feel dirty for the rest of my life defending any aspect of the 3.5 codex...
You are correct. 3rd edition had a pretty strict rule of two weapons per (humanoid) model that I only recall being broken in one unit (the Last Chancers character unit) and I suppose servo arms. The second Chaos Codex of 3rd was no exception. Plus, getting both bolter and CCW/boltpistol was an upgrade that cost points in later editions.
This was also the start of basic CSM having two special weapons so you could have a melee squad with two plasma guns. Iron Warriors had a little opportunity cost in that they restricted the marks you could take and didn't let you have daemons but that pretty much amounted to not being able to take Bloodletters.
IIRC it was Iron Warriors, the Siren minor psyker power and daemon bomb armies that were complained about. In about that order.
Anyone got a quick pick of the relevant 3.5 codex entry?
Yup: CSMs
"Weapons: Each model may have a Close Combat Weapon and either a Bolter or Bolt Pistol."
It was the late 4th codex where they could have both, which to be fair, I preferred. Terribly disappointing codex compared to the great 3.5, but that detail was one that I would keep.
Both 3rd ed CSM codexes had the option of bolter or pistol/CCW and then future codexes expanded it to always be both so it's easy to see why some confusion might arise. It was 20 years ago, after all.
Insectum7 wrote: "Your opposition players just weren't good enough." is a very easy accusation to make. I could simply say the same thing about your experience in 3rd edition. Your opposition wasn't good enough and your boards didn't have enough terrain to make your battles interesting. See how easy that is?
I noticed you didn't answer any of my questions. Were the players experienced? Did they have missions? If your troops have Dawn Raid as a mission and you're afraid of tripping Overwatch, that's a player issue.
If you're on overwatch, all your units will hit less effectively. Your opponent can then exploit this, by selecting what you can see and pushing relatively invulnerable units (like tanks) out front. If you fire on them, he should have reserve assets that then torch your revealed positions. You don't fire, the opponent can push forward until your units are detected, and plaster them with blast weapons.
Or use blind grenades, which you know all about. Did they?
This is not a complex tactical puzzle, so I'm struggling to find a charitable explanation as to why your opponents didn't come up with something. Again, I assume they were simply unused to the game.
Two of the battles that come to mind are from tournaments, so I have no idea how experienced the players were since I'd never met them before. But they did show up with nicely painted armies, so I imagine some.
The thing is, a Dreadnought started out at a 0+ to-hit (BS 6 + targeter), so lumping up enough modifiers to make it miss was hard. I remember a fast moving Exarch with a holo-field getting a -5 to-hit, but that still meant a Dreadnought hit on a 5+, and with two weapon systems (Assault Cannon and Missile Launcher) that's still better than a 50% chance to hit with something. (I rolled a 5 with the Assault Cannon, btw. Dead Exarch.) I recall the use of screens, but Plasma Missiles into screening units blocked opposition LOS, as well as well as potentially expanded to disrupt things further. I recall firing into gretchin, and a plasma ball expanded enough to knock Orks in Mega armor out of unit coherency, forcing them to move back (and thus forfeiting their own counterfire) enough to see a forfeit because of that plus the other damage already done (probably bike related shenanigans) was just too hard of a hill to climb. Another ingredient was using my own Blind grenades to choose non-screening targets by way of adjusting LOS on high powered weapons that could move and fire, the Terminator Cyclone launcher comes to mind. And of course there was the first turn pressure units like Chaplain on a Bike and Attack Bike with Heavy Flamer, which could get in and do lots of damage quickly without costing too many points. Of the battles I'm thinking of, one was an Eldar Army, one Chaos-Slaanesh, and one Ork.
In every edition of 40k it is incumbent on the players themselves to come together and tune their experience. For 3rd and 4th particularly, since I was the host I built terrain that made tables look nice while also functioning well to adequately break up LOS, give cover and provide options for each player to leverage. The fact that you say "terrain was pointless in 3rd" is very telling, imo.
But it was. Marines didn't need it, assault armies didn't like it, shooting armies got punished by it.
The heart of 3rd was melee combat. One space marine captain could throw more attacks - and deadlier ones - than multiple turns of squad shooting. Third ed. was specifically designed to make assault combat easier to achieve, and it did.
Ok so terrain was "pointless" except when it mattered? I don't see how it was irrelevant to Marines when there's a focus on high AP weapons (which incidentally was a great asset to the Guard, high AP Ordinance). And if your narrative is that armies were getting blasted off the board turn 1 with high AP weapons, but terrain somehow didn't matter "because shooting armies got punished by it". . . I would argue that you've stopped making sense.
As for "mentally demanding", it could also be called "cumbersome".
Well yes, thinking tactically can be cumbersome. It sure is easy when your troops have only three options - move, shoot, assault. You are spared the difficulty of weighing whether they might also run, hide or go on overwatch.
Similarly, "big picture" gaming is a lot easier when units moving in plain view of the enemy don't have to worry about reaction fire.
So we both agree that 3rd was easier to play.
My eyes cannot roll enough. Deciding what my units would do in 2nd was easier than in 3rd. What was cumbersome was that I felt like I was winning though wargear/list-building quirks, overwatch abuse, extensive rolling for grenade results, and a Psychic Phase minigame. In 3rd there were harder limitations on what an individual units shooting could do, and effective ranges were reduced, meaning that I had to play a more interesting positioning game if I was going to effectively grapple with opposing forces. In 2nd I would have just cropped my lines of fire with Blind grenades and picked my targets, or annihilated any assaulting unit on Overwatch again. And because Marines didn't get a cover bonus against small arms in 3rd+, I felt more free to move them about once I'd dealt with any high AP targets.
And despite the details of 2nd, "Spam Assault Cannons with high BS and use Blind Grenades to control my firing arcs and therefore target selection." wasn't exactly rocket science. Same as any 40k, you find your bread and butter tricks and units, and rely on them 90 percent of the time while keeping a few tricks in your back pocket for when you have to tackle oddball stuff.
No one has ever said that it was not possible to optimize armies in 2nd.
What I have said is that thesimpler, AP-focused armies of 3rd lent themselves to more uniform list types and that these were capable of sweeping an opponent out of contention by the end of the first turn. But somehow terrain didn't matter. . . That simply did not happen in 2nd unless one of the players was a novice or did not understand the rules, and the examples you gave support that.
You yourself have pointed out the many and varied ways the many and varied lists in 2nd all have seriously deadly and effective options. That was not the case in 3rd. IIRC, GW had to redo some of the 3rd ed books because the lists were so feeble. IG treadheads really took it on the chin as well, and I don't notice anyone disagreeing with me so I will count that point as settled.
Cyan insert mine
I found 3rd to be quite good for Leman Russ tanks in particular. The Battle Cannon was a weapon that kept it's range and increased its potency against Marines. Given that Marines had improved their save against many weapons on the menu, and many other weapons had lost potency (Assault Cannon), a unit with a high strength Ordinance weapon had a threat potential many other units couldn't match. Tanks may have gotten slower, but their importance might have increased. Maybe . . . just maybe, CvT, maybe you didn't like that you had to think more to use your Leman Russ, since you could no longer move and fire it. . . "tactically thinking can be cumbersome and all" right?
The long story short is:
A: I can't understand how you can say terrain doesn't matter and then say you saw armies get blasted off the table in the first turn with high AP weapons.
and B: I felt that in 3rd I had to win with more overall positioning play using my basic units, rather than the fiddly super-character, exotic wargear, and psychic power combos I did in 2nd. In 3rd I found I could finally use Tactical Squads, for example. That was a nice break from 2nd where they sat on the shelf because they were underpowered compared to Terminators, Dreadnoughts and Devastators I could buy for similar amounts of points, or pumped up Characters that did all the exotic work. I didn't feel like I was winning with "tactics" in 2nd, I felt I was winning with dirty tricks.
Insectum7 wrote: "Your opposition players just weren't good enough." is a very easy accusation to make. I could simply say the same thing about your experience in 3rd edition. Your opposition wasn't good enough and your boards didn't have enough terrain to make your battles interesting. See how easy that is?
I noticed you didn't answer any of my questions. Were the players experienced? Did they have missions? If your troops have Dawn Raid as a mission and you're afraid of tripping Overwatch, that's a player issue.
If you're on overwatch, all your units will hit less effectively. Your opponent can then exploit this, by selecting what you can see and pushing relatively invulnerable units (like tanks) out front. If you fire on them, he should have reserve assets that then torch your revealed positions. You don't fire, the opponent can push forward until your units are detected, and plaster them with blast weapons.
Or use blind grenades, which you know all about. Did they?
This is not a complex tactical puzzle, so I'm struggling to find a charitable explanation as to why your opponents didn't come up with something. Again, I assume they were simply unused to the game.
Two of the battles that come to mind are from tournaments, so I have no idea how experienced the players were since I'd never met them before. But they did show up with nicely painted armies, so I imagine some.
The thing is, a Dreadnought started out at a 0+ to-hit (BS 6 + targeter), so lumping up enough modifiers to make it miss was hard. I remember a fast moving Exarch with a holo-field getting a -5 to-hit, but that still meant a Dreadnought hit on a 5+, and with two weapon systems (Assault Cannon and Missile Launcher) that's still better than a 50% chance to hit with something. (I rolled a 5 with the Assault Cannon, btw. Dead Exarch.) I recall the use of screens, but Plasma Missiles into screening units blocked opposition LOS, as well as well as potentially expanded to disrupt things further. I recall firing into gretchin, and a plasma ball expanded enough to knock Orks in Mega armor out of unit coherency, forcing them to move back (and thus forfeiting their own counterfire) enough to see a forfeit because of that plus the other damage already done (probably bike related shenanigans) was just too hard of a hill to climb. Another ingredient was using my own Blind grenades to choose non-screening targets by way of adjusting LOS on high powered weapons that could move and fire, the Terminator Cyclone launcher comes to mind. And of course there was the first turn pressure units like Chaplain on a Bike and Attack Bike with Heavy Flamer, which could get in and do lots of damage quickly without costing too many points. Of the battles I'm thinking of, one was an Eldar Army, one Chaos-Slaanesh, and one Ork.
In every edition of 40k it is incumbent on the players themselves to come together and tune their experience. For 3rd and 4th particularly, since I was the host I built terrain that made tables look nice while also functioning well to adequately break up LOS, give cover and provide options for each player to leverage. The fact that you say "terrain was pointless in 3rd" is very telling, imo.
But it was. Marines didn't need it, assault armies didn't like it, shooting armies got punished by it.
The heart of 3rd was melee combat. One space marine captain could throw more attacks - and deadlier ones - than multiple turns of squad shooting. Third ed. was specifically designed to make assault combat easier to achieve, and it did.
Ok so terrain was "pointless" except when it mattered? I don't see how it was irrelevant to Marines when there's a focus on high AP weapons (which incidentally was a great asset to the Guard, high AP Ordinance). And if your narrative is that armies were getting blasted off the board turn 1 with high AP weapons, but terrain somehow didn't matter "because shooting armies got punished by it". . . I would argue that you've stopped making sense.
As for "mentally demanding", it could also be called "cumbersome".
Well yes, thinking tactically can be cumbersome. It sure is easy when your troops have only three options - move, shoot, assault. You are spared the difficulty of weighing whether they might also run, hide or go on overwatch.
Similarly, "big picture" gaming is a lot easier when units moving in plain view of the enemy don't have to worry about reaction fire.
So we both agree that 3rd was easier to play.
My eyes cannot roll enough. Deciding what my units would do in 2nd was easier than in 3rd. What was cumbersome was that I felt like I was winning though wargear/list-building quirks, overwatch abuse, extensive rolling for grenade results, and a Psychic Phase minigame. In 3rd there were harder limitations on what an individual units shooting could do, and effective ranges were reduced, meaning that I had to play a more interesting positioning game if I was going to effectively grapple with opposing forces. In 2nd I would have just cropped my lines of fire with Blind grenades and picked my targets, or annihilated any assaulting unit on Overwatch again. And because Marines didn't get a cover bonus against small arms in 3rd+, I felt more free to move them about once I'd dealt with any high AP targets.
And despite the details of 2nd, "Spam Assault Cannons with high BS and use Blind Grenades to control my firing arcs and therefore target selection." wasn't exactly rocket science. Same as any 40k, you find your bread and butter tricks and units, and rely on them 90 percent of the time while keeping a few tricks in your back pocket for when you have to tackle oddball stuff.
No one has ever said that it was not possible to optimize armies in 2nd.
What I have said is that thesimpler, AP-focused armies of 3rd lent themselves to more uniform list types and that these were capable of sweeping an opponent out of contention by the end of the first turn. But somehow terrain didn't matter. . . That simply did not happen in 2nd unless one of the players was a novice or did not understand the rules, and the examples you gave support that.
You yourself have pointed out the many and varied ways the many and varied lists in 2nd all have seriously deadly and effective options. That was not the case in 3rd. IIRC, GW had to redo some of the 3rd ed books because the lists were so feeble. IG treadheads really took it on the chin as well, and I don't notice anyone disagreeing with me so I will count that point as settled.
Cyan insert mine
I found 3rd to be quite good for Leman Russ tanks in particular. The Battle Cannon was a weapon that kept it's range and increased its potency against Marines. Given that Marines had improved their save against many weapons on the menu, and many other weapons had lost potency (Assault Cannon), a unit with a high strength Ordinance weapon had a threat potential many other units couldn't match. Tanks may have gotten slower, but their importance might have increased. Maybe . . . just maybe, CvT, maybe you didn't like that you had to think more to use your Leman Russ, since you could no longer move and fire it. . . "tactically thinking can be cumbersome and all" right?
The long story short is:
A: I can't understand how you can say terrain doesn't matter and then say you saw armies get blasted off the table in the first turn with high AP weapons.
and B: I felt that in 3rd I had to win with more overall positioning play using my basic units, rather than the fiddly super-character, exotic wargear, and psychic power combos I did in 2nd. In 3rd I found I could finally use Tactical Squads, for example. That was a nice break from 2nd where they sat on the shelf because they were underpowered compared to Terminators, Dreadnoughts and Devastators I could buy for similar amounts of points, or pumped up Characters that did all the exotic work. I didn't feel like I was winning with "tactics" in 2nd, I felt I was winning with dirty tricks.
I'd also like to point out as someone who has actually BEEN in combat involving tanks that having that sized ordinance be stationary is quite logical and necessary to engage targets.
Insectum7 wrote: I found 3rd to be quite good for Leman Russ tanks in particular. The Battle Cannon was a weapon that kept it's range and increased its potency against Marines. Given that Marines had improved their save against many weapons on the menu, and many other weapons had lost potency (Assault Cannon), a unit with a high strength Ordinance weapon had a threat potential many other units couldn't match. Tanks may have gotten slower, but their importance might have increased. Maybe . . . just maybe, CvT, maybe you didn't like that you had to think more to use your Leman Russ, since you could no longer move and fire it. . . "tactically thinking can be cumbersome and all" right?
No, I hated the vehicle rules because they were stupid. They made no sense in-universe. There was also the obvious cash-grab element of it ("Well, your standard Leman Russ is now a point sink, but hey, we've got new variants right here!").
I liked the extra detail the fighting platforms had in 2nd, the variations in speed, armor locations and thickness, and 3rd threw all that away. No hit locations, no cool turrets flying off, no flank speed dashes across the battlefield - all of that was gone. I loved vehicles popping actual smoke. That was great. Third killed all of it.
The long story short is: A: I can't understand how you can say terrain doesn't matter and then say you saw armies get blasted off the table in the first turn with high AP weapons.
That's not what I said. I said that it was possible for the game to be effectively decided on turn 1. This was a combination of firepower and the ability of units to crash into melee with horrific results that often decided the game before it really got going. Are you saying that didn't happen?
Terrain was no longer as important because models in melee don't need it - you magically can't shoot them once they made contact, so all they have to do is get there. The fighting then provides a portable force shield to screen other units behind them. In 2nd, that wasn't an issue. If the scrum's going sideways, kill it, and then the bad guys behind it. This has a very 40k feel.
I felt that in 3rd I had to win with more overall positioning play using my basic units, rather than the fiddly super-character, exotic wargear, and psychic power combos I did in 2nd. In 3rd I found I could finally use Tactical Squads, for example. That was a nice break from 2nd where they sat on the shelf because they were underpowered compared to Terminators, Dreadnoughts and Devastators I could buy for similar amounts of points, or pumped up Characters that did all the exotic work. I didn't feel like I was winning with "tactics" in 2nd, I felt I was winning with dirty tricks.
It sounds like you were, but that's on you and the people you were playing. I also played a few games of 2nd that were all-out and they were okay, but I found collaborative games more interesting. I'm sure playing against you in 3rd would have been just as unpleasant.
One of the strengths of 2nd is that is very amenable to a collaborative play, and by that I mean you could say: "Okay, I'm going to do Marines, I know you play Eldar, let's come up with a scenario and than plan for that," as opposed to just having a maxi-cheddar beardy army that is packed with rules exploits.
That didn't work in 3rd because it was so binary. This ties back into the terrain discussion as well, because it every aspect of the game was either minimum or maximum. For example, in playing against troops in power armor, what was the "fair" number of AP 3 weapons?
Similarly, I agree that in some aspects positioning was more important in 3rd because the system was so unrealistic. Melee bubbles were a problem and so was sweeping advance which IIRC required you to keep a certain distance between the melee and other units for it to even kick in.
And of course the whole model positioning thing was huge. If your captain makes base to base contact, that's 5 attacks, but if he doesn't he gets just one.
We now know that 3rd ed. was not what the designers wanted. It was pushed on them by management. It took IGO-UGO to an illogical extreme and I think that it is telling that when Alessio Cavatore and Rick Priestly were finally able to make their own rules without restraint, the result is far closer to 2nd than 3rd.
2nd edition was better because it was played by like-minded folk is not an argument that the system is better. It’s an argument that the people you knew around the time were better for you.
3rd was the death of having to allow for random happenstance. Those shots which could have unforeseen consequences.
In 2nd Ed? I’ve had a poorly positioned Dreadnought staggered back into a friendly squad, only to explode at the start of my turn.
I’ve sent turrets flying off to land on and squish enemy characters.
I’ve had a Librarian desperately running away from a Vortex template, Rincewind style. I’ve also used shotguns to knock enemy characters into their own Vortex template. I’ve had my pride and joy patched up and kitbashed Landraider shunted around by a Traktor Cannon, then lifted up and dropped on a squad by a Smasha Gun. I’ve had a crashed Ravenwing Landspeeder gun down Abaddon, because despite being downed, the weapons were still functional and the Big Goon just stood there, laughing. Until he copped a face full of Assault Cannon.
Lots of things you couldn’t entirely predict, and absolutely could impact the game. Not necessarily winning it outright, but tipping the scales to a more winnable situation for either player. Things you were best off being at least mindful of as a possibility.
Including really daft stuff. Like a last ditch, desperation bolt pistol shot from a lone surviving Blood Claw, taking out the pilot of a War Walker, which then went out of control, staggering into its densely packed mates causing quite the domino effect.
Very cool, very cinematic, sometimes very frustrating moments.
3rd Ed by comparison felt like pure number crunching. Which in itself? Is fine, if that’s your jam. But it’s not what 40K was about for many folks. And it’s just not as spectacular or cinematic.
There are no bold tales of derring do and Stupid Deaths of 3rd Ed in my mind, because the game system was by comparison dull as dish water. Bragging rights felt more “well I spammed and cheesed and broke the FOC with this supplement, which combined oddly with this WD rule, aren’t I a tactical genius”
It’s like…..2nd Ed was the tall tales of a swashbuckling hero, regaling us with possible, but improbable happenings, where it looked like Curtains until in a flash of inspiration, the ruins of a tank came crashing down atop the villain in the middle of his monologue.
3rd Ed? That was your pain in the neck weirdo neighbour subjecting to a slideshow of his favourite bus stops, with the promise of a second slideshow of his and Marjorie’s annual holiday to Filey.
Both are telling a tale. But only one of them was interesting.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: 3rd Ed by comparison felt like pure number crunching. Which in itself? Is fine, if that’s your jam. But it’s not what 40K was about for many folks. And it’s just not as spectacular or cinematic.
Yes. Some folks may have thought I was bragging about my 3rd ed. Space Marine win/loss record. I wasn't. I was lamenting it.
I'm an old-school boardgamer, and I know how to crunch numbers. In 2nd, it was always something of a crapshoot because of all the aforementioned hilarity.
Like the time my friend and I were taking on Tyranids with a Space Marine force and got utterly crushed. Our opponent decided to go for the full sweep and wipe us out entirely, and to that end he surrounded the last model we had left - a terminator - with genestealers. And just to be safe, he fired the Hive Tyrant's venom cannon into the melee for good measure.
The result? A miss, which scattered onto a genestealer and then the Thudd Gun template traced a perfect doughnut around the terminator, leaving him completely untouched. Glorious.
In 3rd, you didn't have stories like that. All my games were math-hammer, grinding out percentages and my marine army won not because I was a tactical genius but because I'd created a working system that was almost flawless. It was also crushingly boring.
And the thing was, 3rd was so binary that you didn't dare not use it. You would go from winning every game to losing all of them.
In the 1998 rules, no infantry model can have three weapons. They have a max of two weapons, and only one of those can be two-handed.
Chaos Marines carrying three weapons in the 2007 codex is informally called "ultragrit," since it is a much simpler alternative to the previous true grit special rule. The general categories of one- or two- handed rules don't exist from the 04 edition onwards, and are only replicated in very specific examples like the relic blade.
40K 3rd: Wanted to like but didn't (Compared to now it was real simple to play, but there didn't seem to be much of a sense of strategy other than army building and even that was limited)
Gorkamorka: Still like
Mordheim: Liked
BFG: Still like
Now in 2024, I have a new Generation of Gamers with my kids and the number one GW game is...
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: Yes. Some folks may have thought I was bragging about my 3rd ed. Space Marine win/loss record. I wasn't. I was lamenting it.
I'm an old-school boardgamer, and I know how to crunch numbers. In 2nd, it was always something of a crapshoot because of all the aforementioned hilarity
Two different types of games. And 3e onwards it wasn't just crunching the list for optimal units - a better player would win with a worse list through decision making.
You could certainly make a custom 3e ruleset - have D20 table for vehicle damage results, swap out the psychic powers with the warhammer fantasy set that let you reposition whole board tiles, use the original apocalypse assets and formations and then score the whole thing based on randomly drawn and entirely arbitrary mission objectives like 'score points only for units that run off the board' and 'score 10 points if you are wiped out'.
pelicaniforce wrote: In the 1998 rules, no infantry model can have three weapons. They have a max of two weapons, and only one of those can be two-handed.
Chaos Marines carrying three weapons in the 2007 codex is informally called "ultragrit," since it is a much simpler alternative to the previous true grit special rule. The general categories of one- or two- handed rules don't exist from the 04 edition onwards, and are only replicated in very specific examples like the relic blade.
Well, not EXACTLY there are models that have more than three weapons. The restriction was in the armories, that stated that models upgraded from the armories couldn't be equipped with more than 2 weapons. If they could get weapons other ways, they had a loophole. In the first 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, Rough Riders could have a pistol, CCW, hunting lance, AND a lasgun. Also of note, any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider Squad got a horse for free.
A.T. wrote: You could certainly make a custom 3e ruleset - have D20 table for vehicle damage results, swap out the psychic powers with the warhammer fantasy set that let you reposition whole board tiles, use the original apocalypse assets and formations and then score the whole thing based on randomly drawn and entirely arbitrary mission objectives like 'score points only for units that run off the board' and 'score 10 points if you are wiped out'.
Or I could just stick with the rules that I liked - 2nd - and use some simple fixes to curb their obvious excesses.
A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
A.T. wrote: You could certainly make a custom 3e ruleset - have D20 table for vehicle damage results, swap out the psychic powers with the warhammer fantasy set that let you reposition whole board tiles, use the original apocalypse assets and formations and then score the whole thing based on randomly drawn and entirely arbitrary mission objectives like 'score points only for units that run off the board' and 'score 10 points if you are wiped out'.
Or I could just stick with the rules that I liked - 2nd - and use some simple fixes to curb their obvious excesses.
A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
When I decided I was done staying current with GW games I had the opportunity to go to ANY game system I wanted. I chose 3rd. That should tell you how I feel about it.
A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
While still far from perfect, 4th was the closest 40k has ever come to being great; and that very much includes 2nd edition. It would've taken relatively little to make that a great edition in terms of core rules.
pelicaniforce wrote: In the 1998 rules, no infantry model can have three weapons. They have a max of two weapons, and only one of those can be two-handed.
Chaos Marines carrying three weapons in the 2007 codex is informally called "ultragrit," since it is a much simpler alternative to the previous true grit special rule. The general categories of one- or two- handed rules don't exist from the 04 edition onwards, and are only replicated in very specific examples like the relic blade.
Well, not EXACTLY there are models that have more than three weapons. The restriction was in the armories, that stated that models upgraded from the armories couldn't be equipped with more than 2 weapons. If they could get weapons other ways, they had a loophole. In the first 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, Rough Riders could have a pistol, CCW, hunting lance, AND a lasgun. Also of note, any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider Squad got a horse for free.
Did they have to take the free horse? Because I now have the image of a really crappy commissar insisting that he does not ride and forcing the cavalry to move at his pace
When they are out of sight over the nearest dune there may be a tragic hunting lance accident.
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
4e was kind of a 3.5 ruleset. Rapid fire changes encouraged moving up, transports were deathtraps, vehicles were more mobile and close combat was streamlined. Codex books started to move away from the big bags of combo-rules to more defined units.
5e brought in running for more mobility around the table, cover was very strong and vehicles were easy to neuter but hard to kill. Pile-ins made close combat brutal usually followed by the winner standing around and getting shot. Consolidated rules, more rerolls and increasing use of AP3 and invulnerables. Somewhat defined by its mission rules and codex creep after release.
6e piled a whole load of rules into the game - flyers (when not all factions had fliers or anti-air weapons), hull points, snapshots, hammer of wrath, random charges, weird psychic phases, allied madness, superheavies, and a pile of random tables. I can't remember offhand if it was 6th or 7th with the daemon summoning madness.
7e was 6e turned up another couple of notches with increasingly bonkers formations at its core - such as the admech one that just gave you all of your wargear for free, and stacked special rules, and no gets hot, and a supercharged superheavy... and there were a range of factions above them despite it all.
I recall adding up one of the marine formation costs - they could field gun for gun and transport for transport a copy of a 2000pt sisters army, except the SMs would only pay 1500 for it... and get game-long rerolls, and army wide obsec, and so on
8e and 9e I haven't played all that much, early (index) games were incredibly bare bones but worked for the most part with some houseruling over how mission card decks were created. But over time the game increasingly felt like pokemon, particularly 8e where everything seemed to move so fast and/or fall out of the sky that the main tactical element seemed to be generating points to throw out a wombo-combo to punch through a knight and then move again and punch through a landraider and so on... (I only exaggerate slightly - you had units like the blood angels 'smash captain' that could be 46" deep onto the board on the first turn, cost peanuts, and could punch out a primarch in one go).
I'd say from 6e onwards the game lost its paper-scissors-stone structure. It was now rock paper scissors lizard spock and some factions had rocks so big they could just smash anything regardless.
Once 8e got rolling a lot of the planning and positional play seemed to be gone with stuff leaping across the board, massive deepstrikes, the the power of any given unit fluctuating wildly.
A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
While still far from perfect, 4th was the closest 40k has ever come to being great; and that very much includes 2nd edition. It would've taken relatively little to make that a great edition in terms of core rules.
100% agree.
It also had the best hand to hand combat rules of any edition.
Just Tony wrote: When I decided I was done staying current with GW games I had the opportunity to go to ANY game system I wanted. I chose 3rd. That should tell you how I feel about it.
I wish there were more people like in you 2011! We were moving and while I would have preferred to sell the books, their market value was zero. Stores didn't want them, online they got no bids so with great sorrow I had to pitch them after my efforts toward giving them away failed.
Well, not EXACTLY there are models that have more than three weapons. The restriction was in the armories, that stated that models upgraded from the armories couldn't be equipped with more than 2 weapons. If they could get weapons other ways, they had a loophole. In the first 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, Rough Riders could have a pistol, CCW, hunting lance, AND a lasgun. Also of note, any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider Squad got a horse for free.
Are you sure about that being the first 3rd Ed IG codex? It’s been 20 years, but I read that a lot as a kid, and recall Commissars being exclusively part of the command squad (on foot).
Well, not EXACTLY there are models that have more than three weapons. The restriction was in the armories, that stated that models upgraded from the armories couldn't be equipped with more than 2 weapons. If they could get weapons other ways, they had a loophole. In the first 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, Rough Riders could have a pistol, CCW, hunting lance, AND a lasgun. Also of note, any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider Squad got a horse for free.
Are you sure about that being the first 3rd Ed IG codex? It’s been 20 years, but I read that a lot as a kid, and recall Commissars being exclusively part of the command squad (on foot).
Unless I've mixed up which one is the 3e 'dex, cuda is right:
Codex pg 13 wrote:Options: The Commissar may be given additional equipment from the Armoury. Commissars accompanying a Sergeant who is leading a unit of Rough Riders must also ride a mount, although he receives one at no additional point cost.
The bit about "accompanying a Sergeant" is due to their deployment rules being weird (each Commissar accompanies a specific officer, starting with the highest rank and going to the lowest. This means the first Commissar always deployed with the Command HQ, but subsequent ones could join a RR squad if you had more Commissars than Colonels/Captains/Lieutenants) - maybe that's what you were thinking of?
Unless I've mixed up which one is the 3e 'dex, cuda is right:
Codex pg 13 wrote:Options: The Commissar may be given additional equipment from the Armoury. Commissars accompanying a Sergeant who is leading a unit of Rough Riders must also ride a mount, although he receives one at no additional point cost.
The bit about "accompanying a Sergeant" is due to their deployment rules being weird (each Commissar accompanies a specific officer, starting with the highest rank and going to the lowest. This means the first Commissar always deployed with the Command HQ, but subsequent ones could join a RR squad if you had more Commissars than Colonels/Captains/Lieutenants) - maybe that's what you were thinking of?
The one with the green cover and the guard in the trench.
I never had enough commissars to get to the Sergeant level, so I suppose I just didn’t think of it enough to have it stick. There we go.
Thanks for the fact check.
pelicaniforce wrote: In the 1998 rules, no infantry model can have three weapons. They have a max of two weapons, and only one of those can be two-handed.
Chaos Marines carrying three weapons in the 2007 codex is informally called "ultragrit," since it is a much simpler alternative to the previous true grit special rule. The general categories of one- or two- handed rules don't exist from the 04 edition onwards, and are only replicated in very specific examples like the relic blade.
Well, not EXACTLY there are models that have more than three weapons. The restriction was in the armories, that stated that models upgraded from the armories couldn't be equipped with more than 2 weapons. If they could get weapons other ways, they had a loophole. In the first 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, Rough Riders could have a pistol, CCW, hunting lance, AND a lasgun. Also of note, any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider Squad got a horse for free.
Did they have to take the free horse? Because I now have the image of a really crappy commissar insisting that he does not ride and forcing the cavalry to move at his pace
When they are out of sight over the nearest dune there may be a tragic hunting lance accident.
I believe (and this is YEARS since I saw it in person) the rules stated that any Commissar attached to a Rough Rider unit is equipped with a mount at no additional cost. So, no, I don't think it was optional. I did convert a Commissar, but being both broke, and funny, he didn't get a horse. He got to ride a pig, I believe it was the one available to the Fantasy Ork Boarboyz at the time. I found it in the store's bits box. "Sorry Sir, this is the best we could find you on short notice, lol".
Edit: Looks like someone posted the actual quote from the codex.
Just Tony wrote: When I decided I was done staying current with GW games I had the opportunity to go to ANY game system I wanted. I chose 3rd. That should tell you how I feel about it.
I wish there were more people like in you 2011! We were moving and while I would have preferred to sell the books, their market value was zero. Stores didn't want them, online they got no bids so with great sorrow I had to pitch them after my efforts toward giving them away failed.
Why throw them away? You could have donated them to a book shop, Goodwill, ANYTHING. I detest 8th and 9th 40K but I'd never throw the Ork codex I was gifted into the trash.
On "was 3e the best"...
I dunno, it's hard to say. Taking just the core rules, I think I liked 4e the best.
But playing during 3e was great because there was so much going on - 3rd war for Armageddon, even the 13th Crusade. That was when BFG was released as well, so it was just a really cool time to be into 40K.
4e for me was soured by waiting pretty much the entire edition to get my codex, and the knowledge that other factions had waited the entire edition and never actually gotten a codex at all. And I'd say the codices of that era were probably worse than the 3e ones in terms of their rules, though better for background.
5e had decent core rules but TLOS is a bugbear of mine, and it lost the run of itself with the codices and the tone as it went on.
6e, I read the core rules, played a game, and stopped playing 40K. Checked back in in 7e and everything seemed worse, and then in 8e GW wanted me to rebase my stuff so I noped out.
When going back to this era, it was the 3e book I picked up, but that's mostly because it had all the army lists in it, so it's kind of a complete package. One of these days I'll get round to making "Black Book" style Tau and Necron lists and introduce my buddy to middlehammer 40K.
One thing I did like about 3rd was the cross fire rule. I'd build a Dark Eldar army around using that rule and successfully table a couple of different armies. One game I was so wrapped up in what I was doing I didn't realize the game was over. Forcing fall backs and exploiting the cross fire rule with raider transports. Nice gimmick for a little while.
I did not enjoy the close combat rules. I guess they weren't the worst but they weren't all that good either. I recall a conga line of terminators with power fists still swinging on Initiative 1 because they had been in combat at the start but the models they had been in base with were already removed, didn't matter they still got to throw their pounces.
I did like the guess weapons, I liked guessing and I got fairly good at it. It wasn't all that difficult to get reasonably good at.
as far as scatter dice went, I would roll the dice as close to the target unit as possible so the scatter direction was easy enough to get as correct as possible. I do remember the issues people had with those dice, this really mitigated the problem.
Terrain was squirrely some times.
Nothing chatting about terrain ahead of time couldn't sort out.
I really enjoyed the City Fight campaign. We had a lot of good games playing with those rules. I ran the campaign for the club and we seemed to all have a good time.
warhead01 wrote: One thing I did like about 3rd was the cross fire rule. I'd build a Dark Eldar army around using that rule and successfully table a couple of different armies. One game I was so wrapped up in what I was doing I didn't realize the game was over. Forcing fall backs and exploiting the cross fire rule with raider transports. Nice gimmick for a little while.
I did not enjoy the close combat rules. I guess they weren't the worst but they weren't all that good either. I recall a conga line of terminators with power fists still swinging on Initiative 1 because they had been in combat at the start but the models they had been in base with were already removed, didn't matter they still got to throw their pounces.
I did like the guess weapons, I liked guessing and I got fairly good at it. It wasn't all that difficult to get reasonably good at.
as far as scatter dice went, I would roll the dice as close to the target unit as possible so the scatter direction was easy enough to get as correct as possible. I do remember the issues people had with those dice, this really mitigated the problem.
Terrain was squirrely some times.
Nothing chatting about terrain ahead of time couldn't sort out.
I really enjoyed the City Fight campaign. We had a lot of good games playing with those rules. I ran the campaign for the club and we seemed to all have a good time.
Power Fists didn't reduce you to Initiative 1 in 3rd. That was later editions. I'm also gonna check that combat rule in the book when I get home. I'm not sure but your group may have been playing that wrong.
Just Tony wrote: Power Fists didn't reduce you to Initiative 1 in 3rd. That was later editions. I'm also gonna check that combat rule in the book when I get home. I'm not sure but your group may have been playing that wrong.
Power fists reduced you to initiative 0 (or more accurately - strikes last regardless of initiative) - page 66 of the core 3e book.
warhead01 wrote: as far as scatter dice went, I would roll the dice as close to the target unit as possible so the scatter direction was easy enough to get as correct as possible. I do remember the issues people had with those dice, this really mitigated the problem.
Something I did while playing around with a 'simplehammer' system was to mark up numbers on the blast template.
You'd place the template with '1' pointed directly at the firing unit and then roll a single dice for scatter - moving the template in the direction of the matching number. Straight lines drawn on the template let you align your measuring tape.
We also used to use measuring straws - 6" straws cut back exactly the width of one base. Put the straw against the base and move the model to the end for instant accurate movement (normally just for the first couple of models then we'd shove the rest up behind unless a half inch on a back-row model was important).
Just Tony wrote: Power Fists didn't reduce you to Initiative 1 in 3rd. That was later editions. I'm also gonna check that combat rule in the book when I get home. I'm not sure but your group may have been playing that wrong.
Power fists reduced you to initiative 0 (or more accurately - strikes last regardless of initiative) - page 66 of the core 3e book.
warhead01 wrote: as far as scatter dice went, I would roll the dice as close to the target unit as possible so the scatter direction was easy enough to get as correct as possible. I do remember the issues people had with those dice, this really mitigated the problem.
Something I did while playing around with a 'simplehammer' system was to mark up numbers on the blast template.
You'd place the template with '1' pointed directly at the firing unit and then roll a single dice for scatter - moving the template in the direction of the matching number. Straight lines drawn on the template let you align your measuring tape.
We also used to use measuring straws - 6" straws cut back exactly the width of one base. Put the straw against the base and move the model to the end for instant accurate movement (normally just for the first couple of models then we'd shove the rest up behind unless a half inch on a back-row model was important).
Thank you, It's been a very long time ago now!
I do like the idea of numbering the template ect. Wish we'd thought of that.
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Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’ll never understand why Terminators also struck last, given the armour’s whole purpose is protection, and to make the unwieldy, wieldy.
I can see where you're coming from. Honestly I think it was just each weapon needed to behave a little different than the next. TDA could have had an exception sure but 3rd was very streamlined compared to 2nd. If it had turned up in 3.5 or 4th that would probably have worked.
I recall the Space Marine codex being very difficult to use well.
My favorite missions for a fun pick up game was cleans and later clean 2. With the right amount of terrain those could be really good games even as simple as they were.
warhead01 wrote: One thing I did like about 3rd was the cross fire rule. I'd build a Dark Eldar army around using that rule and successfully table a couple of different armies. One game I was so wrapped up in what I was doing I didn't realize the game was over. Forcing fall backs and exploiting the cross fire rule with raider transports. Nice gimmick for a little while.
Doing this kind of thing is the game unto itself in a lot of ways. You need at least two units, one to force the morale check and one to get between the fleeing unit and its board edge. This makes it a lot more of a game than most other parts of 40k, game as in Go or connect four, or rummy or billiards. It's another embodiment of what people are talking about when they say they liked rear armour shots, except it's a better example since it takes more planning to set up and has a better payoff.
So that's an alternative question to "what's the best edition?" I really want to know if any of the editions cross the minimum threshold demanding this kind of challenging in-game planning.
The answer is universally no. Third edition you could use this crossfire mechanic if you really wanted to, but it didn't necessarily help that much. You could set up pinball shots of sweeping advances from on combat to the next, but this was mostly thought of as an exploit and less as a big strategic victory
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’ll never understand why Terminators also struck last, given the armour’s whole purpose is protection, and to make the unwieldy, wieldy.
I can see where you're coming from. Honestly I think it was just each weapon needed to behave a little different than the next. TDA could have had an exception sure but 3rd was very streamlined compared to 2nd. If it had turned up in 3.5 or 4th that would probably have worked.
I recall the Space Marine codex being very difficult to use well.
My favorite missions for a fun pick up game was cleans and later clean 2. With the right amount of terrain those could be really good games even as simple as they were.
There are five very true explanations for always-strikes-last. I think answering those questions, and Mezmorki's 3rd-7th compatible perfect rules posted on dakka do solve most of those problems, doesn't really do anything. This thread has a lot of back and forth about the two different versions of AP that 40k has used, and those rules have the best practical solution for AP that's still compatible with GW codexes. There's also some platonic ideal for the best practical solution to powerfists vs power swords. I thibk that perfectly tweaking these rules does not move the ball on whether 40k is good or not.
Cleanse missions means claiming table quarters, which like you say is pretty fun and simplistic at the same time. To some extent it's a compromise game between people who want to put their models down amd roll dice and people who want a maneuver game
warhead01 wrote: One thing I did like about 3rd was the cross fire rule. I'd build a Dark Eldar army around using that rule and successfully table a couple of different armies. One game I was so wrapped up in what I was doing I didn't realize the game was over. Forcing fall backs and exploiting the cross fire rule with raider transports. Nice gimmick for a little while.
Doing this kind of thing is the game unto itself in a lot of ways. You need at least two units, one to force the morale check and one to get between the fleeing unit and its board edge. This makes it a lot more of a game than most other parts of 40k, game as in Go or connect four, or rummy or billiards. It's another embodiment of what people are talking about when they say they liked rear armour shots, except it's a better example since it takes more planning to set up and has a better payoff.
So that's an alternative question to "what's the best edition?" I really want to know if any of the editions cross the minimum threshold demanding this kind of challenging in-game planning.
The answer is universally no. Third edition you could use this crossfire mechanic if you really wanted to, but it didn't necessarily help that much. You could set up pinball shots of sweeping advances from on combat to the next, but this was mostly thought of as an exploit and less as a big strategic victory
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’ll never understand why Terminators also struck last, given the armour’s whole purpose is protection, and to make the unwieldy, wieldy.
I can see where you're coming from. Honestly I think it was just each weapon needed to behave a little different than the next. TDA could have had an exception sure but 3rd was very streamlined compared to 2nd. If it had turned up in 3.5 or 4th that would probably have worked.
I recall the Space Marine codex being very difficult to use well.
My favorite missions for a fun pick up game was cleans and later clean 2. With the right amount of terrain those could be really good games even as simple as they were.
There are five very true explanations for always-strikes-last. I think answering those questions, and Mezmorki's 3rd-7th compatible perfect rules posted on dakka do solve most of those problems, doesn't really do anything. This thread has a lot of back and forth about the two different versions of AP that 40k has used, and those rules have the best practical solution for AP that's still compatible with GW codexes. There's also some platonic ideal for the best practical solution to powerfists vs power swords. I thibk that perfectly tweaking these rules does not move the ball on whether 40k is good or not.
Cleanse missions means claiming table quarters, which like you say is pretty fun and simplistic at the same time. To some extent it's a compromise game between people who want to put their models down amd roll dice and people who want a maneuver game
To the cross fire Eldar list, I remember there were vehicle upgrades that would/could inflict the checks as well as wargear for characters if I remember. There may have been something in there for the vehicles that would lower enemy LD but I can't recall.
I got the Dark Eldar from a Game store kid with too much money. I traded him a CSM army for his DE collection after I'd tabled him with my CSM army one time. I think I ended up with about 750 dollars with of DE. After I ran that DE list and tabled the army he'd just gotten from me he bought that from me. Meh. I still had DE left over that I would eventually get rid of. Most of his stuff was in bad shape so of course it would never have been worth the full value from the catalogue.
That silly kid kept trying to buy winning armies from everyone and was fixated on winning tournaments. Kids stuff really.
I wish my friends would give Mezmorki's rules a try but they seem to have little to no interest in that or even 40K any more. Keeping up with the new rules ruined 40K for a lot of us. Some ideas were clever but other ideas were just better in that they were more consistent or at least easier to play and didn't really need to be replaced. People love 5th but some of the mechanics in there are just trash when it comes to playing some armies. My Orks were constantly being punished. I'm told that codex was really good but it had only a few builds most of which excluded my style of play, lots of Boys on foot. 2 good builds does not a good codex make.
The simplicity of cleanse was a bit of a joy. those games could come down to a close loss, close win or a tie and be a blast the whole time.
I didn't pay to get off the rollercoaster I paid to take the ride. Sadly 40K stopped being fun some years ago, a disappointing here and there and what have you. Rules might have looked good but then power creep just takes off. The lesson is never play the army that gets the first codex of an edition. In 7th that was Orks.
Sorry, my mind is wandering.
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Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Also, on Terminators? Would I be right in thinking the Squad Sarge had to have a Power Sword?
Honestly can’t remember if that was just a result of the basic kit, or compulsory?
That's how I remember it. I'd open the codex and look but I've mislaid them some time ago.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Also, on Terminators? Would I be right in thinking the Squad Sarge had to have a Power Sword?
Honestly can’t remember if that was just a result of the basic kit, or compulsory?
In 3rd, Terminator sergeants came with power sword and storm bolter as standard, but had access to the armoury and could exchange for any weapons compatible with Terminator armour. Pricy option though, as they didn't get a discount for already having a power sword and storm bolter.
warhead01 wrote: People love 5th but some of the mechanics in there are just trash when it comes to playing some armies. My Orks were constantly being punished. I'm told that codex was really good but it had only a few builds most of which excluded my style of play, lots of Boys on foot. 2 good builds does not a good codex make.
5e orks were 4e orks who could run and get 4+ cover saves from screening units.
But the biker abuse was more popular, and kan walls, and the battlewagon meatgrinder, the occasional smuggled 'ambush' character, deffkopta slingshots (a theoretical 26" first turn assault)... Orks had several very different builds in 5th and were pretty much impossible to listhammer against reliably as a result.
But combat resolution in 5th did absolutely suck for low save fearless units and orks holding a home objective often sat out a lot of the game.
warhead01 wrote: I did not enjoy the close combat rules. I guess they weren't the worst but they weren't all that good either. I recall a conga line of terminators with power fists still swinging on Initiative 1 because they had been in combat at the start but the models they had been in base with were already removed, didn't matter they still got to throw their pounces.
I'm certain terminators didn't go last - I'd have remembered that rule.
As for the conga line, troops were supposed to move deeper into contact if neither side broke, and only troops in contact got to fight with their special weapons. All others with 3" of the enemy got to "throw rocks" (make 1 attack at their normal strength with no special abilities).
This was why positioning was so important, and units were set into specific formations to either maximize models in contact or minimize it. In a lot of ways, it felt like a skirmish-level WHFB.
Since this is all about things I hated, I hated the fact that boltguns were inferior to bolt pistols in almost every application. Given the choice, pistol and sword was the way to go, especially if you're in power armor. If you do the math, a squad armed with boltgun and chainsword will defeat a squad armed with bolters even advancing on foot in open terrain.
Oh, and since it came up, I tossed my books because at that time, none of the local stores would take them. Glut on the market from all the edition churn, I expect, and since I was moving, it was "keep or toss" mode. I wasn't going to do extra innings with my wife over books I didn't like and never planned to use again.
Terminators didn't get any special rules for power fists in 3rd ed. They did get to always count as stationary when firing ranged weapons, though.
3rd was not a great edition for terminators. Their defences were cost-inefficient against the most popular kind of firepower their melee abilities were niche and expensive, and their mobility was mediocre at best.
As a Deathwing player, I can assure you they definitely did strike last when wielding fists. 3rd Edition did Terminators dirty in almost every conceivable way. Considering they weren't exactly stellar in 2nd, this was a bit of a gut punch.
They started with a 2+ save, no invuln, and their primary assault weapon struck last. They were costed around/above the mid 40's in terms of points (DW cost 52 freaking points), but died like chumps to any sort of anti-armour. Add in the neutering of their support weapons and they were pretty terrible (and stayed that way for a good long time).
It never helped that my primary opponent was Eldar... so he had whole units that could wipe a squad each turn between Howling Banshees and Fire Dragons. The move from save mods to binary AP was not kind to terminators and they really needed something more for quite a while.
As for the topic, I'll generally agree with Mad Doc. I hated 3rd with a passion. 3rd was the edition that pushed me away from 40k and introduced me to the wider hobby (I came back a couple times, but it never felt great to me). It lost all the cinematic and narrative mechanics and became a cold, sterile affair of placing your rocks near the opponent's scissors and hoping they didn't have paper within striking distance. The friction was gone. A lot of the character was stripped out and the moment-to-moment tactical considerations were streamlined below what I preferred (especially as, to me, 40k was supposed to be a platoon level skirmish game; but 3rd was the start of turning it in to wrong-scale epic with too much crammed on the table).
I won't begrudge those who remember it fondly, but 3rd was the nail in the 40k coffin for me. These days, if I do play, I play 2nd. I prefer my 40k goofy, random, and prone to creating memorable stories regardless of the outcome of the game.
warhead01 wrote: People love 5th but some of the mechanics in there are just trash when it comes to playing some armies. My Orks were constantly being punished. I'm told that codex was really good but it had only a few builds most of which excluded my style of play, lots of Boys on foot. 2 good builds does not a good codex make.
5e orks were 4e orks who could run and get 4+ cover saves from screening units.
But the biker abuse was more popular, and kan walls, and the battlewagon meatgrinder, the occasional smuggled 'ambush' character, deffkopta slingshots (a theoretical 26" first turn assault)... Orks had several very different builds in 5th and were pretty much impossible to listhammer against reliably as a result.
But combat resolution in 5th did absolutely suck for low save fearless units and orks holding a home objective often sat out a lot of the game.
Combat resolution is the think that jumps out the most when I think about 5th. Yuck. Such a bad rule.
Wait, I think we all forgot the BEST part of 3rd ed. The red "whippy stick" measurer/pointer thing that came in the starter box. Kids would wack the gak out of each other with those. If I remember GW stopped selling those after a kid took the pointy end into their eye.
As a Deathwing player, I can assure you they definitely did strike last when wielding fists. 3rd Edition did Terminators dirty in almost every conceivable way. Considering they weren't exactly stellar in 2nd, this was a bit of a gut punch.
I stand corrected. Truth be told, for exactly the reasons you outlined, my terminators collected dust for most of 3rd, which is probably why I didn't remember that much about them.
Obviously I (infamously) tossed my books years after the fact, but if memory serves, in place of terminators I took a "gunboat" dreadnought (lascannon/krak missile) which gave me mobility and accurate firepower. I also went with marines with terminator honors and power weapon/pistol combos because they sliced through armor (even terminators!) for a fraction of the cost.
A.T. wrote: You could certainly make a custom 3e ruleset - have D20 table for vehicle damage results, swap out the psychic powers with the warhammer fantasy set that let you reposition whole board tiles, use the original apocalypse assets and formations and then score the whole thing based on randomly drawn and entirely arbitrary mission objectives like 'score points only for units that run off the board' and 'score 10 points if you are wiped out'.
Or I could just stick with the rules that I liked - 2nd - and use some simple fixes to curb their obvious excesses.
A question for those who stuck with the hobby: was 3rd better than its successors? How do you feel it has stacked up against 4-10?
3rd was great, but 4th was better . Better terrain being the hallmark. Keep in mind, I'm talking about the portion of 4th that the 3 5 codex was relevant . Once the "4th edition" CSM codex was released, it became garbage.
5th edition suffered from the aforementioned problem.
6th was garbage
7th was rescued,IMHO, by Forge World and the release of IA13..
3rd was not a great edition for terminators. Their defences were cost-inefficient against the most popular kind of firepower their melee abilities were niche and expensive, and their mobility was mediocre at best.
3rd edition simultaneously nerfing both powerfists and lightning claws, just in completely different ways, is just one of its many sins.
Part of my vitriol against 3rd is that it symbolizes the shift in GW policy from focusing on pushing new and creative products to the sale-centric churn, with rules quality no longer being a concern.
Recently-released interviews with GW production staff confirm what was long suspected: the desired revision of 2nd was derailed by Upper Management, which did not prioritize quality rules or game integrity. As we all know, 2nd was flawed because it was a work in progress. By 1998, however, a series of FAQs had been released to curb its worse excesses. The codicies saw a consistent improvement in quality as well as broadening the model range in appropriate ways (Eldar tanks, for example).
We can get a glimpse of what "2nd ed., Revised" would have looked like in Bolt Action, but what we got was a dumbed-down revision that destroyed much of the fluff, was inadequately playtested and couldn't even go a year before major rules had to be changed.
That set the tone for everything that has come since. "Codex creep" became a thing, but some armies were so pathetic that GW pushed out a 2nd edition within the edition. The model count increased but so did the per-model cost, and GW became quite open that it was a miniatures company, not a game company.
I recall back in the day that a lot of people seemed to really like 3.5 because of those revisions, but it was merely a rest stop before 4.0, which screwed up different things in different ways. That told me that GW wasn't listening to the players, wasn't interested in a "finished" design and just wanted to boost those shareholder dividends so that when the CEO cashed out, he could buy a castle.
To put it another way, 2nd had problems because it was new and it came out in an era where player feedback moved at the speed of a postage stamp. By the time 3rd was released, it was possible for designers to crowdsource playtesting as never before and within weeks understand what wasn't working - along with reasonable suggestions for fixing it. GW hated this and resisted it whenever possible.
So it wasn't just that dreadnoughts suddenly sucked, vehicles moved at a brisk walking pace, the AP system was inherently unbalanced, etc., it was that none of this was ever going to get sorted out.
2nd Ed? Even a basic sword could be used to Parry - forcing your opponent to re-roll an attack die (typically their highest), which could allow you to win that fight. Power Swords also hit at S5 with I think -3 to your save.
Power Axes could be wielded one or two handed for different hitting power and so on.
Come 3rd Ed? Close Combat weapon could be a knife, or a Space Marine Chainsword and its…..hit at your own strength, and opponent gets their full save. Power Weapons just ignored armour.
It was a nice, simple rule that made all Marines - loyal and rebel - unique. It was also super-fluffy, showing that Marines took small-arms training to the next level.
The iconic image of Marines piled back to back, fighting off endless hordes in a doomed last stand actually could happen. How many time did a game come down to a tactical squad just dumping rapid fire and totally chewing up enemy troops?
And they wrecked it. And Shuricats. So much fluffy fun goodness destroyed.
Marines went from feeling tough and highly trained, to just feeling tough.
Consider the Assault Squad. If you weren’t thrifty in 2nd Ed, you could spend a ridiculous amount of points kitting them out with a variety of Power Weapons and Pistols.
I can’t remember the loadout my assault squads had, and they were sold some time ago. But I favoured a few Hand Flamers in each squad. Because despite the template being tiny? They could really hose down light infantry if it was densely packed.
Combat squads were of course something that carried through from 2nd Ed. But, in 2nd Ed opposing squads were never all that large, so it felt like you got more bang for your buck divvying a squad up that way, especially if you split off 5 Bolter Marines to occupy terrain and just rapid fire.
I think we’ve previously discussed Grenades in 2nd Ed? Yes the sheer variety was mind boggling and often bogged the game down, working out what happened to smoke, blind, rad and vortex template by template. But when you’ve had a Scout Squad and snowball a Carnifex to death with Krak Grenades, making them “well one unit member can use one in combat against tanks” just didn’t feel the same.
And throwing Krak at big monsters was cinematic. Literally. We see Dizzy take out a Tanker Bug in Starship Troopers by lobbing an explosive into its mandibles, making its head asplode.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I think we’ve previously discussed Grenades in 2nd Ed? Yes the sheer variety was mind boggling and often bogged the game down, working out what happened to smoke, blind, rad and vortex template by template. But when you’ve had a Scout Squad and snowball a Carnifex to death with Krak Grenades, making them “well one unit member can use one in combat against tanks” just didn’t feel the same.
And throwing Krak at big monsters was cinematic. Literally. We see Dizzy take out a Tanker Bug in Starship Troopers by lobbing an explosive into its mandibles, making its head asplode.
Dropping grenades from the tops of buildings is super-fun. Well, for the people dropping them, at least.
Good point about the cinematic aspect of the game being wrecked. Almost every game had wonderful moments like that. One of my first games against Imperial Guard I completely underestimated how many tanks they could bring to bear. Happily, I had chaplain in hiding with a haywire grenade, and so he did the perfect movie thing of breaking cover and wrecking the lead vehicle before massive fire cut him down. Great stuff.
As a Deathwing player, I can assure you they definitely did strike last when wielding fists. 3rd Edition did Terminators dirty in almost every conceivable way. Considering they weren't exactly stellar in 2nd, this was a bit of a gut punch.
I stand corrected. Truth be told, for exactly the reasons you outlined, my terminators collected dust for most of 3rd, which is probably why I didn't remember that much about them.
Obviously I (infamously) tossed my books years after the fact, but if memory serves, in place of terminators I took a "gunboat" dreadnought (lascannon/krak missile) which gave me mobility and accurate firepower. I also went with marines with terminator honors and power weapon/pistol combos because they sliced through armor (even terminators!) for a fraction of the cost.
Unless you're looking at a special codex like the Space Wolves or potentially the Black Templars, only veterans sergeants or characters could carry power weapons or power fists outside of Terminators. Veterans squads could take terminator honors and then be equipped with bolt pistol and close combat weapon. I know this because I ran a squad in every single game I ever played.
As a Deathwing player, I can assure you they definitely did strike last when wielding fists. 3rd Edition did Terminators dirty in almost every conceivable way. Considering they weren't exactly stellar in 2nd, this was a bit of a gut punch.
I stand corrected. Truth be told, for exactly the reasons you outlined, my terminators collected dust for most of 3rd, which is probably why I didn't remember that much about them.
Obviously I (infamously) tossed my books years after the fact, but if memory serves, in place of terminators I took a "gunboat" dreadnought (lascannon/krak missile) which gave me mobility and accurate firepower. I also went with marines with terminator honors and power weapon/pistol combos because they sliced through armor (even terminators!) for a fraction of the cost.
Unless you're looking at a special codex like the Space Wolves or potentially the Black Templars, only veterans sergeants or characters could carry power weapons or power fists outside of Terminators. Veterans squads could take terminator honors and then be equipped with bolt pistol and close combat weapon. I know this because I ran a squad in every single game I ever played.
You could get 4 power weapons into a command squad, but with Terminator honours it cost a minimum of 43pts/model for the specialists (44pts if you wanted a bolt pistol) and 45pts for the veteran sergeant. Terminators cost 42pts/model and got deepstrike, a storm bolter/twin lightning claws/TH/SS and 2+ save into the bargain, albeit with less attacks or no ranged fire. They also got a 5++ midway through the edition.
Blood Angels honour guard could take a power sword on every model for a total of 38pts/model (40pts on the veteran sergeant) with Terminator honours. Technically that is a fraction of the cost of Terminators (19/21), but not a small one.
Veterans with power weapons and Terminator honours have always been a pricey option.
crammed on the table).
