slade the sniper wrote: I'm pretty sure this has been before, but what is your preferred version of 40k and related games? You don't have to justify your answers at all...
My preferred version of 40k is 7th.. it had the widest variety of options for psykers, vehicles and troop selection.
My preferred skirmish game is... Shadow War Armageddon.
-STS
7th was my first edition. So I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for it.
But it wasn’t exactly well-balanced… still, it’s fun! (With the right group.)
8th edition. It felt like GW actually cared- and then they just gave up with 9th.
8th wasn't perfect, but it still supported different Mission styles, it had more tactical depth than 3rd to 7th while still keeping some of the narrative stuff that was further reduced in 9th and 10th. It also wasn't plagued by no models no rules as much as later editions.
10th core rules are probably superior to 8th (aside from psyker rules), because they are a refinement of them, but I dislike the current samey mission style, not paying for options and no models no rules.
I played 2nd to 6th. Core rules wise, I think 5th was my favourite. But the codices were hot garbage. 3.5 to 4e codices are the sweet spot with some exceptions like Dark Eldar. As a book I really love the 4e core rulebook, the last hurrah for real hobby content in a GW core book.
I could field a 281 point Last Chancers force against your 1500 point Ultramarines.
Or I could play an Armoured Company, that always goes first, against a sea of daemons.
3rd Edition was the best, because it was the wild west of conversions and any zany idea was creatable.
I too love 3e... it was awesome, buuuuut there are a lot of units that are simply not available. It is for that reason I went with 7th...
The conversions were great, but it was the twilight of making weird vehicles as they made lots of vehicle kits, etc.
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Da Boss wrote: I played 2nd to 6th. Core rules wise, I think 5th was my favourite. But the codices were hot garbage. 3.5 to 4e codices are the sweet spot with some exceptions like Dark Eldar. As a book I really love the 4e core rulebook, the last hurrah for real hobby content in a GW core book.
The 3.5 Codices were pretty awesome.
The silly, fun, wacky hobby was effectively dead and buried with 5th. It became very much a "serious" game with less fun with this edition.
I like 10th best for actual quality of play and balance. It's the most accomplished version of the game as far as I'm concerned.
Beyond that, I have fond memories of 8th, 4th and 2nd, but all of them have major flaws that would keep me from revisiting them. 2nd gets the nostalgia bonus because it's where I started, but it's kind of a fiddly nightmare to actually play outside of Necromunda.
I got experience with all editions from 3rd to 9th. Out of those, my favourite has to lie somewhere between 3rd and 4th.
Felt like it was the period most open to kitbashes and just being a genuinly fun game, instead of churning out things for the sake of it (Centurions, SMAA, ...).
2nd holds a big nostalgic place in my heart, played every editon and have to say 10th is the most fun I’ve had since 2nd, so I would say 10th is the best.
I prefer 2nd, and can't comment on anything after 3rd because I saw the churn coming and opted out.
Many of the defects of 2nd were fixed either through contemporary FAQs and subsequent (pretty widespread) rules corrections/clarification, which one can find in my sig.
2nd is a very different game. I liked it, though I'm not sure me and my friends ever played it properly.
But there was stuff that bugged me about it. Like I felt Orks didn't really live up to their background as fearsome melee combatants, I didn't like everyone using essentially Imperial tech and sometimes it could feel like playing markerhammer.
But if you really loved 2e I can totally see why you would not adopt 3e. Very different game with a different focus entirely. I have to say they won me over with the change to Orks to make them less "toughness 4 Imperial Guard with random weapons" and more their own thing.
I realise this is heresy for some old school Ork players who love the 2e Orks, but I prefer the 3e version.
I should give barebones 8th a try one of these days. It's probably pretty good. But One Page Rules is good enough that I don't really feel the need.
I’ve really been enjoying 8th for the last few years. It has rules for a huge variety of units. I love the faction keyword rules that allow me to throw an eclectic bunch of Imperial units or Chaos units together in an army. The core rules are relatively simple, and you can pretty easily decide not to use some of the additional rules such as stratagems and warlord traits without interfering with the core gameplay loop. Weapons have consistent stats between units, so it’s pretty easy to make custom units for 8th if the codices don’t support a model you have.
For skirmish games, I’ve tried lots of different versions of Kill Team. I am currently trying Shadow War Armageddon and it seems very promising so far.
9th, purely because of the 9th ed Tyranid codex.
I loved having the layers upon layers of Synapse related rules like Synaptic Link and Synaptic Imperatives.
One hell of an information overload but fun when I could remember all of it. Too bad I only had for a few months.
10th isn't awful- I hate what it did to psychic powers, and I preferred costed equipment; I also preferred "detachment rules" to be assigned on the basis of subfaction rather than detachment, but I can live with it as is (there are some advantages even).
I also preferred Daemons they way the were in 9th, and while it was where the "range rotation" of Drukhari Courts and Beasts began, it didn't make it look like the intent was to ultimately remove those units from the game.
Interestingly enough, I think there are some real innovations to both the Core Crusade rules and the bespoke content for 10th. Adding rivals to the Drukhari content and making the Eldar content more active and immediate were great ideas; capping non characters at Blooded unless you burn RP and more aggressive and meaningful battlescars were a excellent core updates.
I enjoyed other editions in their time- 2nd set the hook, 3rd was great accept for its lack of official support for GSC (though Tim Huckleberry's Citadel Journal list was great). Fourth was cool- I think that was were Killt Team and Combat Patrol appeared, as well as a rudimentary progression system appeared. But of course, GSC were well and truly gone by then. Fifth was alright, but it's where Sisters started to really feel neglected, and sixth's treatment of them forced a two edition rage quit.
fave edition of 40K - 1st edition (up to and including 1992's Battle Manual, but without Vehicle Manual and Virus Bombs). It's got it all, the quasi 2nd edition gameplay, and all the zany RPG stuff you can create for it. Requiring a GM makes it possible for having interesting games even when things aren't "balanced" symmetrically, and its just the whole open endedness of it that makes it the ideal sandbox for me.
fave skirmish game - KT24. While I liked KT21, co op games are a refreshing change from the typical versus grind gameplay of othrer 40K games. Gallowdark is fun as heck as well. Not into Beta Dhecima though
3rd & 4th Editions.
In the last year we have gone back to playing 3rd Edition and I have just started to build and paint an Armoured Company along with my regular opponent.
Hmm. It's kind of a weird choice, but I think my favorite may have been 7th edition Combat Patrol? It was basically just low-points normal 40k with a few tweaks. It desperately needed some more restrictive army building restrictions if it wanted to be "balanced," but the small game size kind of breathed fresh life into a lot of units that simply weren't lethal enough or durable enough to do well in full-sized 40k games. And the lack of redundancy meant that things like marine durability stats could shine through more than normal. Something like a single rhino or a squad of assault marines with some melta guns really felt like they got to behave the way you'd expect them to. And on top of all that, games took less than an hour. So even if you ended up with a one-sided game, it didn't feel *that* bad because you could be rewracking and trying again by the time a regular game of 40k would be wrapping up its first round.
For more conventional options:
3rd/4th: Never played them, but I think I might have preferred these. To my knowledge, they lacked the absurd lethality/imbalance of 7th, the randomness upon randomness of 6th, the terrible choices of 5th, and still had a lot of the charm and customization that we gave up from 8th onward. The only thing kind of holding them back to my knowledge is that they don't include some of the "common sense" mechanics that 8th gave us like voluntarily falling back or being able to split fire. But again, I never actually played these. Maybe I'd be full of complaints if I ever got the chance.
5th: My first edition. Probably the worst edition of the game. Parking lots for days meaning the game was basically decided by which player had spent more hundreds of dollars on GW tanks. Only troop units could hold objectives. Fearless rules were weird. A few codices that I really liked though.
6th: Actually a pretty *okay* if forgettable edition. Its biggest sin is just all the random tables that didn't really add anything to the game. Randomized psychic powers were a step backwards in terms of customization. Also, I think this was the edition where flyers became more mainstream and sort of broke the game for a while? Possibly the most mid of all editions.
7th: The *core* rules of 7th were actually pretty decent. It took a lot of the ideas from 6th and polished them, and a lot of codices had some fun mechanics. Still deducting points for the bad psychic phase it inherited from 6th. This edition would have been great if it didn't suffer from such absolutely horrible balance. Formations, though sometimes flavorful, were just all over the place in terms of balance. As were the codices. As were psychic powers. If GW had done a 7.5 and just made a genuine effort to keep things at least a little bit balanced, this might have ended up being the best edition. In fact, I think this one is really up there *if* you and your opponent spend a lot of time pre-game trying to make your lists a good match for eachother, discussing which broken things you're going to avoid, and figuring out a common interpretation of the semi-indecipherable rules. If you put in all that work... 7th was pretty cool.
8th: Probably my favorite edition that I actually played? And I say that while acknowledging all the faults and unpolished ideas of the edition. This was the edition that cut out a bunch of feelsbad rules that had just kind of lingered within the game out of habit for a long time. It gave us things like the option to fall back out of combat so that you weren't stuck slap fighting a unit you couldn't realistically kill all game, gave us split fire so you weren't forced to shoot your bolters into a tank you couldn't realistically hurt, etc. And it gave us subfaction rules, which were nifty even if I prefer the detachment rule approach we have now.
Buuuut a lot of the ideas were unpolished (Strats, CP being granted by detachments instead of detachments costing CP, etc.), and things could easily get imbalanced, albeit not as badly as 7th. Like, 7th you could have a really solid game if you had a pre-game chat with your opponent and tried to build a list that would be a good matchup. And that pre-game discussion could be a lot shorter than in 7th.
9th: I want to like 9th, but it almost made me put down the game for a while. By the end of the edition, I was just like, ignoring all my secondaries because the mental load was just too much. Plus, the lethality had jumped back up to 7th edition levels of silly. There were a lot of flavorful army building options that made it fun to put lists together on paper, but I struggled to enjoy putting plastic on the table this edition. If they'd dialed back the lethality and book keeping by 30% and not given everyone an extra layer of buffs, this one would have been great.
10th: It's the most balanced edition I've played. It's the best execution of ideas they've been trying to get right since 8th edition. It's also the least customizable, and it frequently makes me feel like I'm playing an e-sport style game instead of telling a story with my dudes.
Where 9th made it fun to put together lists but was miserable to play, 10th is kind of the opposite. Most of the flavor has been sucked out of list-building. Customization is at an all-time low. And a lot of the intuitive, viscerally satisfying rules I enjoyed in past editions are gone, to the point that I'm not sure anything of the things that made me love my dark eldar back in 5th edition are still present in 10th.
Yet despite all that, the game plays smoothly enough on the table with *just* enough flavor, that I don't find myself being all that disappointed in it either? The relatively decent balance really is worth a lot, but gosh do I miss the flavorful upsides of past editions.
It's weird. It really feels like the 40k I *want* is an amalgam of a lot of mechanics that have come and gone over the years, many of them forgotten or mutated into something gimmicky like stratagems. Kind of feels like we could have a much more satisfying version of the game if GW would have just taken some of the modern focus on balance and applied it to past versions of the game that had more satisfying customization.
I'd say 3rd, of course, since I am working on the 3rd ed battle bible. It had a lot more depth of optional rules and add-ons than many people seem to remember. It didn't start with flyers and super heavies, but it was the first edition with flyers and super-heavy vehicles/war machines.
I feel like it did need some tweaking, like the updated transport/vehicle rules make the game better.
I also really enjoyed the "do it yourself" attitude that was pervasive back then. Every unit didn't need to have its own box, you could convert models from different kits and boxes for your units, some units needed you to do conversions.
a_typical_hero wrote: I got experience with all editions from 3rd to 9th. Out of those, my favourite has to lie somewhere between 3rd and 4th.
Felt like it was the period most open to kitbashes and just being a genuinly fun game, instead of churning out things for the sake of it (Centurions, SMAA, ...).
100% on board with this, same experience and opinion.
Having started in 3rd and played through 8th, i have to say the obvious general improvement from 3rd-5th was the golden age of 40K as a large battle war game rule set.
5th by and large with a few exception in rule set specifics was the best edition of the game GW ever made. there were a couple major issues that 4th did better (wound allocation) or things that were added back in to improve the game in 6th and 7th (overwatch/grenade throwing). Which is why our group when we decided to go back and pick an edition between 3rd and 7th to play, that worked best, as they were all cross compatible we went with 5th with a few minor tweaks borrowed from other editions and it works very well. Not as a game for tournaments but as a casual thematic war game that fits with the lore of the universe.
As it turns out since we allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be played, aside from some armies that didn't exist before 5th (admech, knights, custodes etc..) the majority of the codexes players gravitate to are 3rd/3.5 and 4th because of the lore aspect of the rules. the most popular 5th ed codexes are space wolves, blood angels, necrons, imperial guard and dark eldar.
Aside from the FW books and a few other 7th ed codexes i have on PDF- these are the codexes i keep on hand for players to use for our 5th ed game.
BanjoJohn wrote: I'd say 3rd, of course, since I am working on the 3rd ed battle bible. It had a lot more depth of optional rules and add-ons than many people seem to remember. It didn't start with flyers and super heavies, but it was the first edition with flyers and super-heavy vehicles/war machines.
Point of order! There were super-heavies in 2nd, but they were rare. Armorcast made them and they popped up now and again. I played against an Eldar tank and had no idea what it was. As was normal in those days, the board was packed with terrain, so it could barely maneuver and my Devastators spent the entire game pinging it as it did pop-up attacks. IIRC, that was the game, because it was so expensive.
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Da Boss wrote: 2nd is a very different game. I liked it, though I'm not sure me and my friends ever played it properly.
But there was stuff that bugged me about it. Like I felt Orks didn't really live up to their background as fearsome melee combatants, I didn't like everyone using essentially Imperial tech and sometimes it could feel like playing markerhammer.
But if you really loved 2e I can totally see why you would not adopt 3e. Very different game with a different focus entirely. I have to say they won me over with the change to Orks to make them less "toughness 4 Imperial Guard with random weapons" and more their own thing.
I realise this is heresy for some old school Ork players who love the 2e Orks, but I prefer the 3e version.
I should give barebones 8th a try one of these days. It's probably pretty good. But One Page Rules is good enough that I don't really feel the need.
I did not get into Orks in 2nd ed., but am playing and building them out right now and they are very capable melee combatants, but you have to be crafty about it. In my most recent game, Stormboys gave the bums rush to some Marine Devastators and mopped them up pretty good. The trick is to replace the axes with swords (for the parry) combine it with a pistol (+1 attack) and attack in quantity, which you can do because they are so cheap.
Playing against them in 2nd was very stressful, because you had no idea what awful thing was going to happen. Is my Land Raider going to be inverted? Shokk attack on the dreadnought? Crazy stuff all over that was quite fun.
I feel 3rd ed. ones were like Tyranids Lite, they had to get stuck in because shooting was largely an exercise in dice-rolling. All vehicles moved slower, so a high speed end-run was impossible, and of course the ramming attacks and spectacular pile-ups were impossible.
Perhaps the weakest point of 3rd was the AP rules, which made Marines extremely durable, and predictably resulted in AP 2 spam. My marines weathered 3rd very well (only lost 2 games) and going through them there is an insane amount of meltaguns and plasma guns and pistols.
For armies like the Orks, which were burdened with low BSand poor AP, GW's solution was the Bucket o' Dice, which was just such a chore. Even worse, they added re-rolls, which meant a significant part of gameplay was rolling, recovering, and re-rolling dice.
As a sidebar, I hate that mechanic. Combat results are about percentages, and designers should know them and use them without resulting to gimmicks that try to make incremental shifts in the odds but at the cost of tremendously slowing down the game. Adding insult to injury, GW already uses a very narrow probability band, so the movements back and forth are already marginal. One of my objectives in Conqueror was to eliminate this by making the numbers meaningful, and combat decisive, and that included eliminating "to wound" rolls. Combats are resolved by kills, not ranks or banners. But I digress.
With 2nd one can feasibly do "shooty" Orks, go for a melee option - or a little of both. To keep my model count (and expenses) low, I'm going with a more elite-style Ork army, using Scarboyz and Nobz in mega-armor, Blood Axe Commandos and every unit is getting weapon upgrades to maximize the close combat mechanics as outlined above.
Plus the wacky artillery and Kustom weapons. Gotta go all in on that.
10th and its not even close. It's the first edition I actually really enjoy my games of. I'm generally a FAR bigger fan of other game systems, but I'll actually rank 10th as something that competes rather than something to play because its all a lot of people have.
It's the first edition where I felt like I've actually seen all the cool weapon options on the table. Units are active and do memorable things. The scenario drives engagement and combat while (random) secondaries shake things up enough to reward thinking on your feet. It's fun on the table in a way I've felt prior editions have mostly only been in theory.
As many others have said, late 3rd through 4th. Solid rules with an excellent array of codexes and options. 4th in particular felt like the most "mature" version of the game.
I'd play 2nd again too (and have). It's very different and has a lot of texture.
In terms of Properly Established And Out Of It’s Shorts 40K?
Probably early 5th Ed. By then the underlying 3rd Ed Ruleset had some flavour brought back. And if your present Codex was cack? You could, with opponent foreknowledge and consent, use an earlier one (for instance, Chaos 3.5).
But the edition of my heart and soul will forever be 2nd Ed. I just adore its rampant silliness. And of course the warm and fuzzy mid-teens memories that came along with it.
The majority of my gaming was the 3-5 edition era just due to my age and financing.
I played some 2nd ed and got into it in 1993, but just didn't have the capacity or people to play much of it.
So, I dont really have a preferred play experience but I have preferred aspects of the game that different editions have.
I prefer 2nd ed background and emersion, the story telling was best.
I prefer some of the 3-5 game play, but hated the ap system..when playing marines the game was fun, but play anything else and it was just not fun taking off dozens of models at a time.
I prefer gws balance attitude and responsiveness in 10th, but don't like the more gamist design philosophy.
So for all I don't like the ap system, I think I probably had the most enjoyable gaming in 4th.
4th or 5th. I think my ideal version would be 4th with 5th vehicle damage chart. Though some of the Forge World army lists from later are some of the coolest things the game has ever had - looking at the 7th edition Corsair list and the 7th edition Renegades and Heretics. Luckily, with a bit of work you can pretty much forward port or backport any of the 3-7th stuff into 4th/5th, its just some things take a touch more work than others.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: That was a pretty decent change. Not a major one, but reduced the outright killiness of stuff like Demolisher Cannons
4e for the half strength partials.
5e took away the ordnance damage chart - aka 'the vehicle is dead, everyone inside the vehicle is dead (no saves), everyone within 6" of the hull may also be dead'
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: That was a pretty decent change. Not a major one, but reduced the outright killiness of stuff like Demolisher Cannons
4e for the half strength partials.
5e took away the ordnance damage chart - aka 'the vehicle is dead, everyone inside the vehicle is dead (no saves), everyone within 6" of the hull may also be dead'
That made me, Lord Solar Macharius, and the 6 Basilisks in my Armoured Company very sad.
Grimdark Future.
Fast and fun and finally my games of "40k" play out with a speed and ease that I always wanted them too. Yet it still "feels" like the 40k universe. Grimdark easily accommodates MASSIVE apocalypse'ish battles (I love ridiculously huge battles) in a reasonable amount of time. Also it's basically free...
I still dig into 40k fluff and play mostly with 40k figures, but for rules it's all Grimdark. I enjoy the rules so much that at this point I've probably played more Grimdark games than all other 40k editions (I played off and on from 2nd-6th) combined.
If I had to choose a GW ruleset for the 40k universe, I do like Necromunda 95 and Shadow War Armageddon (and also Mordheim). Those games take the 2nd edition mechanics and keep them at the small scope of game that they work best at. When you're only dealing with a kill-team-per-player it's no problem to have slightly crunchier old-school mechanics.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: That was a pretty decent change. Not a major one, but reduced the outright killiness of stuff like Demolisher Cannons
4e for the half strength partials.
5e took away the ordnance damage chart - aka 'the vehicle is dead, everyone inside the vehicle is dead (no saves), everyone within 6" of the hull may also be dead'
This is perhaps my biggest issue with the era of 3-5 edition. the graduated rules change across editions and codexes. It wasn't until 6th that they paradigmed the codexes. Until that point, every previous codex worked in the current edition.
So when I say that parts of 3-5 were good, it's frustrating because they add some improvements and then some terrible decisions. So you can't pick an edition or a codex to reflect that era.
The 4th targeting rules and abstract LoS are IMO still the best game implementation they've done and the half S blast was also good. But then they went and did dome things with wound allocation and vehicle damage tables.
And you can see the design shift in codex rules from the restraint of 3rd to the Wardian crap of 5th. Like, I would probably be happy with 3rd ed were it not for the fact that the 3.5 design sensiblities didn't spill into all the codexes before edition change. The eldar were still using a crappy 80pt avatar in 4th while chaos had their much better GDs from their 3.5 codex. It took the 4th ed eldar codex to give us a better eldar army.
Eilif wrote: Grimdark Future.
Fast and fun and finally my games of "40k" play out with a speed and ease that I always wanted them too. Yet it still "feels" like the 40k universe. Grimdark easily accommodates MASSIVE apocalypse'ish battles (I love ridiculously huge battles) in a reasonable amount of time. Also it's basically free...
I too play OPR, fast simple and I don't like current 40k. However it is very much too lean on the crunch to make me completely satisfied. I wish they'd at least add more than two unit stats.
I'd be interested in your experience with the apoc scale battles if you've had any, the idea of using the "use squad leaders as the only measure marker for the unit" is interesting. I also wonder if you could adapt it to the GWapoc rules where you resolve damage at the end.
Wish I had the time to try 5th with my mate (we both started in 5th) but being busy adults OPR is just too handy to play instead when we get together twice a month.
4th edition and its not even close. Yes, vehicle entrapment sucked, but it was a time when skill could still win you a game over just list building and money spent on models.
The game wasn't as much point and click as it has been turned into.
Anyone remember when guess weapons were infact guess? I had a buddy who was a carpenter play and he could nail the back edge of a target within a 1/4" every time. After his forth kill with a basilisk, It felt like he was cheating, but it was in fact just skill.
Jayden63 wrote: 4th edition and its not even close. Yes, vehicle entrapment sucked, but it was a time when skill could still win you a game over just list building and money spent on models.
The game wasn't as much point and click as it has been turned into.
Anyone remember when guess weapons were infact guess? I had a buddy who was a carpenter play and he could nail the back edge of a target within a 1/4" every time. After his forth kill with a basilisk, It felt like he was cheating, but it was in fact just skill.
Guessing distances is not a skill I care about in my war games.
And the game has plenty of skill to it today. 7th, sure, you could have matched that were forgone conclusions before deployment. But the game has skill these days.
Jayden63 wrote: 4th edition and its not even close. Yes, vehicle entrapment sucked, but it was a time when skill could still win you a game over just list building and money spent on models.
The game wasn't as much point and click as it has been turned into.
Anyone remember when guess weapons were infact guess? I had a buddy who was a carpenter play and he could nail the back edge of a target within a 1/4" every time. After his forth kill with a basilisk, It felt like he was cheating, but it was in fact just skill.
Which is exactly why guess weapons sucked.
Clearly, for your friend, the game was kinda point and click- and not because of a game skill, but because he was a carpenter.
Timing strat and unit ability combos to play objectives may not be skills that you enjoy using- I understand that for many players, these feel more like collectible card game skills than wargame skills (a valid point, BTW), but at least they are GAME skills.
Hellebore wrote: And you can see the design shift in codex rules from the restraint of 3rd to the Wardian crap of 5th.
3e had first turn charges, pre-first turn unit removal, literal invulnerability, and all kinds of min-maxing among other fun design choices.
The difference was that 3e seemed to be written by rule of cool and disinterest in actual competitive balance whereas the powerful 5e books felt like they were deliberately pushing the bar up. Credit to Ward that his first book was actually on target, but I guess he had eyes on him after blowing up WHFB, pity it didn't last.
Hellebore wrote: The codex were restrained compared to 5th ed..just compare the 3rd greater daemons to the 5th ed ones. Not to mention stat creep in marine characters.
3rd was basically using index style lists all the way through. 3.5 was a pretty minor change.
Ward definitely snuck an extra stat point or two onto some of the named characters where they weren't needed. In fairness it was somewhat in catch-up to 4e chaos, at least until GK when he was trying to one up himself.
Rulebook to end of 3e codex was night and day though. And daemons were 4e :p
Eilif wrote: If I had to choose a GW ruleset for the 40k universe, I do like Necromunda 95 and Shadow War Armageddon (and also Mordheim). Those games take the 2nd edition mechanics and keep them at the small scope of game that they work best at. When you're only dealing with a kill-team-per-player it's no problem to have slightly crunchier old-school mechanics.
Yes. It's interesting to go through the Wargear book in 2nd and see just how much stuff never appeared in subsequent books. It was just too fiddly and not appropriate to a game that was moving beyond the squad level to the platoon. That is why I looked at ways to cut out the non-essential elements like models being on fire, rolling for plasma diameter, jump pack scatter, etc. Because of the granularity, there is still a practical limit, but if you do things like resolve close combats without re-rolls, it goes a lot faster.
My group settled on it as a point where most of the units are in the game, and also a lot of the units that wpuld be dropped haven't been, so its a good point for us. I use my witch hunters & daemonhunters codecies, and my 5e IG, & SW codecies.
For me, there are a couple of reasons I prefer this. The most important is the mechanics. I dislike the 8th and post mechanics, especially multiwound proliferation and the overall mushiness of the system. The 3rd - 7th structure is much preferred and while its also not my favorite of all the systems I play, its the best of 40k. In this sense, 5th is the best of them, because it is also still at a point where the movement versus shooting trade off is stronger, so while weapons have effect and feel good, the overall effect isn't as catastrophic. In a sense, your guns are more powerful, but you get to use less of them because most of the time you spend moving.
For 5th more specifically, 5th is before that flyers, Lords of War, and Allies became a common part of the game. While I play Witch Hunters, own 6 baneblades and a macharius and 6 malcadors, and a vendetta, so Im aware the all of those were new for 6th and had been around since IA1 at least, but they weren't like normal in the game.
Also 5th is before hull points for vehicles. I dont like hit point mechanics as damage modelling for individual vehicle and person elements, so I dont like the idea of multiwound infantry monstrous creature rules, or vehicle hull points. Fundamentally hitpoints are not an appropriate model for damage modelling in a game at the scale of 40k, and even within 40ks own system, toughness represents the resistance to becoming a casualty, while wounds represent plot armour: a character suffering a wound that would have caused them to become a casualty, but not becoming one.
I'm happy for those who enjoy(ed) 5th edition, but it's shocking to me that so many people still seem to like it. Between the parking lot spam, unkillable vehicles, troop tax, only troops being able to score objectives, the limited missions (including the Dawn of War deployment that really screwed over certain units), etc., it really sticks out in my mind as the worst edition I've played in terms of core rules.
Like, 6th had more randomness than I'd like, and 7th got bonkers due to power creep codices and formations, but I still think of the core rules from both of those editions as waaaay less frustrating than 5th edition. So even if you don't like the overall vibe/stratagem focus of 8th onward, 5th still seems like the worst version of the pre-8th forms of the game to me.
EDIT: I feel like a version of the game that used 7th as a base, made an actual effort to balance things, used the 3rd-5th edition psychic system, and brought in some of the more popular changes from 8th (split fire, fall back voluntarily, etc.) would be pretty snazzy.
Wyldhunt wrote: I'm happy for those who enjoy(ed) 5th edition, but it's shocking to me that so many people still seem to like it. Between the parking lot spam, unkillable vehicles, troop tax, only troops being able to score objectives, the limited missions (including the Dawn of War deployment that really screwed over certain units), etc., it really sticks out in my mind as the worst edition I've played in terms of core rules.
Like, 6th had more randomness than I'd like, and 7th got bonkers due to power creep codices and formations, but I still think of the core rules from both of those editions as waaaay less frustrating than 5th edition. So even if you don't like the overall vibe/stratagem focus of 8th onward, 5th still seems like the worst version of the pre-8th forms of the game to me.
EDIT: I feel like a version of the game that used 7th as a base, made an actual effort to balance things, used the 3rd-5th edition psychic system, and brought in some of the more popular changes from 8th (split fire, fall back voluntarily, etc.) would be pretty snazzy.
Just to comment, since you brought it up and it's something that was very much a lesser object on my radar, but only troops being able to score has been a big improvement in our games; from my personal perspective. It make you troops count go well beyond the "troops tax" and cuts down on the toys-before-boys nature of 40k. It's not the ideal fix for this problem, as that would likely require a fundamental shift in the combat model of 40k away from "the rifleman exists to score points" to make the rifleman and infantry fire team much more of the core fighting element rather than cheerleaders watching with peashooters while all the heavy lifting done by the support, but its a big step up. This is definitely a "your mileage might vary" type thing, however, based on how you want to play 40k, and isn't a plus for everyone.
Yeah, having only troops score was a good thing in 40K. It's one of many reasons 5th will always be my favourite. Opening up scoring to everything was a big mistake, but there's no putting that genie back in the bottle at this point. People want to take whatever they want whenever they want it, and now we're in a place where restrictions don't really exist anymore so a lot of armies no longer look like armies on the table.
creeping-deth87 wrote: Yeah, having only troops score was a good thing in 40K. It's one of many reasons 5th will always be my favourite. Opening up scoring to everything was a big mistake, but there's no putting that genie back in the bottle at this point. People want to take whatever they want whenever they want it, and now we're in a place where restrictions don't really exist anymore so a lot of armies no longer look like armies on the table.
Should Nurglings be better at holding objectives than Terminators?
Wyldhunt wrote: Between the parking lot spam, unkillable vehicles..
I don't think the guard parking lot would ever have gained traction with the 3e codex open topped, single firing point 85+pt chimera and elite slot veterans.
A lack of foresight by GW when the started making transports cheaper in late 4e right before the rules change that made them into portable bunkers. 15pts per rhino and 25pts off of every razorback too, 4e and 5e had their points around the wrong way for their respective damage charts.
JNAProductions wrote: Should Nurglings be better at holding objectives than Terminators?
Nurglings couldn't hold objectives in 5e (no swarms could). IIRC they were scoring units in 4th though.
Hellebore wrote: Like, I would probably be happy with 3rd ed were it not for the fact that the 3.5 design sensiblities didn't spill into all the codexes before edition change. The eldar were still using a crappy 80pt avatar in 4th while chaos had their much better GDs from their 3.5 codex. It took the 4th ed eldar codex to give us a better eldar army.
But that means you can't use it in 3rd ed...
Says who? You can play different editions codexes in the same game, just check if it is OK and as along as your whole army uses the same codex and you don't cherry pick X from this codex and Y from that codex and rule Z from that other edition, it should be fine.
Spot on slade, our group uses the core 5th ed rules but we do allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be used within the 5th ed frame work and it works fine.
I also find the "parking lot" argument out of sync with reality. there are plenty of things that kill armor and do it well within the 5th ed core rules using both older and newer codexes.
As somebody who has gone back and been playing it since 8th ed dropped almost non-stop, and with a dedicated vehicle heavy player in our group, dealing with lots of armor is not a problem for any average player no matter what faction they bring.
aphyon wrote: Spot on slade, our group uses the core 5th ed rules but we do allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be used within the 5th ed frame work and it works fine.
I also find the "parking lot" argument out of sync with reality. there are plenty of things that kill armor and do it well within the 5th ed core rules using both older and newer codexes.
As somebody who has gone back and been playing it since 8th ed dropped almost non-stop, and with a dedicated vehicle heavy player in our group, dealing with lots of armor is not a problem for any average player no matter what faction they bring.
I have followed 40k since Rogue Trader but didn't play till 3E.
I think the core rules of 3E with the sort of rule of cool but not too much granularity really fits my rules preference. Codexes are sort of all over the place for what edition fits my factions correctly. The only rule that I use is the half-strength for Ordnance... it fits my idea of what artillery is, destructive, but not accurate enough for anti-vehicle work except by luck.
Again, I think factions can run from RT to 7th can all be combined easily into a game... but 8th is where the design philosophy shifted and everything became very same-y in my opinion. I don't really like Hull Points or Structure Points, or the keyword spam, and definitely not the CP metacurrency mini game. All of those felt like attempts to shift from a game into a codified rules set that leeched out a lot of the wackiness of the setting. Just my opinion.
aphyon wrote: Spot on slade, our group uses the core 5th ed rules but we do allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be used within the 5th ed frame work and it works fine.
I also find the "parking lot" argument out of sync with reality. there are plenty of things that kill armor and do it well within the 5th ed core rules using both older and newer codexes.
As somebody who has gone back and been playing it since 8th ed dropped almost non-stop, and with a dedicated vehicle heavy player in our group, dealing with lots of armor is not a problem for any average player no matter what faction they bring.
I still remember 5th edition competitive games being transport spam*, because the comination of undercosted transports and damage tables that were very generous to transports.
I don't need to go back to 5th ed, I already lived that reality.
*Or long fang spam, or some flavour of wound abuse death star.
aphyon wrote: Spot on slade, our group uses the core 5th ed rules but we do allow any codex from 3rd-7th to be used within the 5th ed frame work and it works fine.
I also find the "parking lot" argument out of sync with reality. there are plenty of things that kill armor and do it well within the 5th ed core rules using both older and newer codexes.
As somebody who has gone back and been playing it since 8th ed dropped almost non-stop, and with a dedicated vehicle heavy player in our group, dealing with lots of armor is not a problem for any average player no matter what faction they bring.
I still remember 5th edition competitive games being transport spam*, because the comination of undercosted transports and damage tables that were very generous to transports.
I don't need to go back to 5th ed, I already lived that reality.
*Or long fang spam, or some flavour of wound abuse death star.
I suspect that my experiences are very very different than that of other players in that I have never played in any competitive game, and every battle was driven by lore than points... so full narrative on my part.
Points are great, but rather like CR in DnD, BV in Battletech, I consider points in 40k to be guidelines, not something to be followed to the number so if my SoB have too many infernos, oh well, or if my GK are underpointed, I don't really care. My particular OCD is in damage modeling in RPGs, not list building in wargames. For this reason, I really like uneven historical or asymmetrical games and scenarios.
Tyran wrote:I still remember 5th edition competitive games being transport spam*, because the comination of undercosted transports and damage tables that were very generous to transports.
I don't need to go back to 5th ed, I already lived that reality.
I still advocate for 5th Ed core rules with 3rd/4th Ed codices as the best of Oldhammer. Most of the problems associated with 5th really were the result of the codices. You don't get leafblower nonsense using the 3.5Ed Guard codex.
You do still have wound allocation shenanigans, but that can be alleviated by threat of dreadsock.
Wyldhunt wrote: I'm happy for those who enjoy(ed) 5th edition, but it's shocking to me that so many people still seem to like it. Between the parking lot spam, unkillable vehicles, troop tax, only troops being able to score objectives, the limited missions (including the Dawn of War deployment that really screwed over certain units), etc., it really sticks out in my mind as the worst edition I've played in terms of core rules.
Like, 6th had more randomness than I'd like, and 7th got bonkers due to power creep codices and formations, but I still think of the core rules from both of those editions as waaaay less frustrating than 5th edition. So even if you don't like the overall vibe/stratagem focus of 8th onward, 5th still seems like the worst version of the pre-8th forms of the game to me.
EDIT: I feel like a version of the game that used 7th as a base, made an actual effort to balance things, used the 3rd-5th edition psychic system, and brought in some of the more popular changes from 8th (split fire, fall back voluntarily, etc.) would be pretty snazzy.
Just to comment, since you brought it up and it's something that was very much a lesser object on my radar, but only troops being able to score has been a big improvement in our games; from my personal perspective. It make you troops count go well beyond the "troops tax" and cuts down on the toys-before-boys nature of 40k. It's not the ideal fix for this problem, as that would likely require a fundamental shift in the combat model of 40k away from "the rifleman exists to score points" to make the rifleman and infantry fire team much more of the core fighting element rather than cheerleaders watching with peashooters while all the heavy lifting done by the support, but its a big step up. This is definitely a "your mileage might vary" type thing, however, based on how you want to play 40k, and isn't a plus for everyone.
Fair enough and to each their own. I started the game in 5th with eldar as my first army. So most of our troop choices evaporated to bolters/flamers, and I was a broke kid who couldn't afford to spam jetbikes. Avengers were cool (and my first troops), but they, too, were squishy in 5th. So if you wanted to win games with eldar in 5th, you ended up doing that DAVU thing where you just flew tanks full of MSU dire avengers around in circles so that you didn't auto-lose by having no troops. So functionally, the more you invested in units that could stay alive to score points at the end of the game, the less of your army that was actually *fighting* and doing cool space elf power ranger stuff. Whereas 6th edition onward encouraged me to field units that were survivable or cheap enough to be good choices as scoring units, but I didn't have this "keep the avengers in the tanks alive" mini-game hanging over my head the whole time.
When people tell me they liked 5th edition, I half-jokingly ask them which army they played: Marines or guard.
catbarf wrote: You do still have wound allocation shenanigans, but that can be alleviated by threat of dreadsock.
Pre 5e books it was really only the orks. That said dropping the 5e allocation minigame entirely and just using the old torrent of fire rules is waaaay faster for much the same effect.
Wyldhunt wrote: So most of our troop choices evaporated to bolters/flamers, and I was a broke kid who couldn't afford to spam jetbikes
For eldar I think it was more lack of firepower. In 5e you wanted troops you could attack with so that it was practical to take a lot of them.
Inquisition stormtroopers, veteran guardsmen, dark eldar warriors, etc. No more durable than avengers, less durable than jetbikes, but absolutely premium troops choices.
When people tell me they liked 5th edition, I half-jokingly ask them which army they played: Marines or guard
marines (deathwing/ravenwing/dark angels/salamander), sisters, tyranids, and tau...still play using 5th ed core rules-demon hunters(3.5), admech(7th), salamanders(5th), dark angels(3.5), guard (5th), Tyranids (4th)
we house ruled the wound allocation thing to go back to 4th ed- owning player gets to choose what models die, multi-wound models must be removed as casualties first once they are wounded.
slade the sniper wrote: I suspect that my experiences are very very different than that of other players in that I have never played in any competitive game, and every battle was driven by lore than points... so full narrative on my part.
Points are great, but rather like CR in DnD, BV in Battletech, I consider points in 40k to be guidelines, not something to be followed to the number so if my SoB have too many infernos, oh well, or if my GK are underpointed, I don't really care. My particular OCD is in damage modeling in RPGs, not list building in wargames. For this reason, I really like uneven historical or asymmetrical games and scenarios.
-STS
I think this is a very important point. I approached 3rd with an open mind, but besides the way it handled AP/cover the org charts were very off-putting. I get that there was a notion to make the game more balanced in a competitive setting, but in the process it really undercut the concept of collaborative gaming where people talked about scenarios and forces before playing, and that in turn led to horrendous levels of abuse.
There were limits to certain kinds of troops prior to 3rd, but it was more based on the lore rather than game balance and of course if your opponent agreed, you could field whatever you wanted. Even with the larger forces in 3rd, it was still within the bounds of realism to have an all-terminator army or an equivalent elite force because we're talking platoon-sized elements in a much larger battle.
No one took box-checking units in 2nd because you didn't need to. The IG had a more rigid table of organization, but that was fluff, not game balance.
And ultimately, mandatory choices just became one more thing to be gamed, and various lists offered exceptions that were eagerly exploited. Depending on how recent your book was, you might be burdened with boat anchor point sinks or 100% efficiency, which was frustrating.
Put simply, it offered one more mechanic of the game for GW designers to screw up in the name of a yet-to-be-achieved game balance.
I still advocate for 5th Ed core rules with 3rd/4th Ed codices as the best of Oldhammer. Most of the problems associated with 5th really were the result of the codices. You don't get leafblower nonsense using the 3.5Ed Guard codex.
You do still have wound allocation shenanigans, but that can be alleviated by threat of dreadsock.
I'm still annoyed 5th directly nerfed the primary 4th edition Tyranid damage dealing rule that was rending (going from rending on hits to wounds was a massive nerf) while also making it impossible for venom cannons to destroy vehicles (because they could only glance).
1st if you want skirmish narrative
2nd if you want small armies, 3-4 vehicles - 3-4 squads then it struggle.
Small armies to massive battles 3rd edition blows all others away.
Movement simple and intuitive.
Great Codexes with huge variety - I once took a sisters of battle without SOB army to a GT:
1 inquisitor
Priest
Callidus Assassin
120 Zealots in 6 units with IIRC 18 eviscerators to help anti-armour and anti-tank
2 exorcists
It was spectacular to play.
Battles looked and felt like a battle between 2 armies as opposed to the current cowering behind L or box shaped buildings to stand on cirlces.
Mission objectives were limited and made sense.
Almost no paperwork/cards to play in game making the game flow.
Also, it didn't have the bloat the game does now, but you could customise characters or unit weapons and points values for those weapon/armour/ability changes actually meant something.
Wyldhunt wrote: So most of our troop choices evaporated to bolters/flamers, and I was a broke kid who couldn't afford to spam jetbikes
For eldar I think it was more lack of firepower. In 5e you wanted troops you could attack with so that it was practical to take a lot of them.
Inquisition stormtroopers, veteran guardsmen, dark eldar warriors, etc. No more durable than avengers, less durable than jetbikes, but absolutely premium troops choices.
From what I recall, storm troopers and guard vets had the advantage of being able to pack a bunch of meltaguns into a relatively small, cheap unit. Which kind of ties back into the parking lot thing. If everyone spams a million vehicles, the guy who can throw out a dirt cheap squad with multiple meltaguns has the edge.
Kabalite warriors were cheap *and* could bring an anti-tank gun, but critically, they got to shoot that anti tank gun while riding around inside a transport. So where their craftworld cousins were spending however many points avengers cost to turn a tank into a scoring unit, drukhari were spending similar points, turning a vehicle into a scoring unit, *and* adding a handful of guns to its profile at the same time. The lack of fire points was kind of a stealth factor in how frustrating eldar troops were, I think. Because in addition to being squishy, they also only got to contribute their special gun shooting if you exposed them to danger. Whereas marines or even kabalites could hide out in their transports.
My foggy memory breakdown of eldar troops in 5th is something like:
Dire Avengers: The best troop choice by far. Zero ability to hurt most vehicles. Had rad exarch powers that made them fun to use outside of a transport, but you were better off leaving them inside the transport all game to turn it into a scoring unit.
Guardian Defenders: Guardsmen, but make them more expensive and take away their plasma/flamer/melta gun slot. Could technically threaten vehicles with their heavy weapon, but like, one shot hitting on 4+ wasn't much to write home about.
Storm Guardians: Can take two okay guns, and the rest of the squad is ablative wounds for those two guns. Can spend extra points to take a warlock who makes them pretty okay actually. But also you need to take a wave serpent for this squad or they'll accomplish nothing. Meaning you had to buy 4 boxes (storm guardian weapons were a separate upgrade sprue) of stuff to make these guys work as one of your mandatory troop tax units. So viable if you were okay spending $100+ (in 5th edition money) on them.
Rangers: Fun. Flavorful. Neat for what they were. Also got auto-deleted by a single flamer or any melee unit more threatening than guardsmen, and couldn't *really* threaten vehicles. (But rend made it fun to try.) These guys were nifty, but they weren't really good at scoring (too easy to delete; too exposed outside a transport) or at helping against the vehicle meta.
Windriders: Kind of in ranger territory. Flavorful. Quirky. Fun. Not bad as a unit that you hid all game and then turbo boosted at the end in hopes of the game ending and letting you score a hard to reach objective. But being 1 shuriken cannon per 3 bikes at the time meant they weren't actually all that scary to vehicles. Nor were they all that survivable; thus the hiding and tubo boosting while praying for the game to end on the turn you exposed them.
Wraithguard: Sort of a technicality, but you could field these guys as troops if you took a unit of 10 with an upgraded warlock that cost something like 300 points. These guys were a solid way to go, but that was also the sort of playstyle/unit you had to build your whole list around. Plus, this was before there was a box of plastic wraithguard, so collecting a unit like that was prohibitively expensive.
So with all that in mind, craftworld troops really just felt like they weren't designed for 5th. Drukhari troops could be a cheap investment that could be used from inside a transport (kabalites) or else could counter the vehicle meta with haywire grenades (wyches), or else could be sorta kinda durable for their points (wracks). Whereas craftworld troops were some combination of expensive (wraiths), couldn't really participate against the vehicle meta (avengers, rangers, arguably defenders and bikes), or simply couldn't synergize with transports the same way, and also those transports cost way more than the competition.
And then you had marines that could choose between shooting from the safety of their transports (fire point son rhinos; not sure about razorbacks), or they could march around being fairly durable outside the transport to bring their anti-tank weapons to bare. And then if they didn't shoot the enemy tanks to death, they had their choice of either krak grenading the enemy or just punching its rear armor in melee.
EDIT: If craftworlders had learned the advanced technology that was fire points and/or had access to something like a dark eldar venom, I think their troops might have had a better time in 5th.
Wyldhunt wrote: Kabalite warriors were cheap *and* could bring an anti-tank gun, but critically, they got to shoot that anti tank gun while riding around inside a transport / Whereas marines or even kabalites could hide out in their transports.
I tended to find that the troops jumping out is when the damage was done. Light vehicles in 5e were routinely shaken and if you didn't disembark once you closed in you'd just get encircled and 'no escaped'.
Eldar vehicles were actually trying to survive, and were costed as such. Made for poor ablative wounds.
Wyldhunt wrote: And then you had marines that could choose between shooting from the safety of their transports (fire point son rhinos; not sure about razorbacks), or they could march around being fairly durable outside the transport to bring their anti-tank weapons to bare.
5e tactical marines were competing with cruddace-sisters and 3e power armoured GK as the absolute worst troops choices available.
Minimum 10 man squad for a single special and heavy weapon, 170+pts not including a transport. You'd get two squads of rangers for that and chill out behind 2+ cover saves after infiltrating into position... well except for the other thing that eldar troops were not good for - screening against drop pods :/
All the other marines were good though - scouts good, chaos marines good, bikers good, wolves good, BA assault marines good, 4e las/plas templars good, 4e DA terminators good, etc.
Eilif wrote: Grimdark Future.
Fast and fun and finally my games of "40k" play out with a speed and ease that I always wanted them too. Yet it still "feels" like the 40k universe. Grimdark easily accommodates MASSIVE apocalypse'ish battles (I love ridiculously huge battles) in a reasonable amount of time. Also it's basically free...
I too play OPR, fast simple and I don't like current 40k. However it is very much too lean on the crunch to make me completely satisfied. I wish they'd at least add more than two unit stats.
I'd be interested in your experience with the apoc scale battles if you've had any, the idea of using the "use squad leaders as the only measure marker for the unit" is interesting. I also wonder if you could adapt it to the GWapoc rules where you resolve damage at the end.
Wish I had the time to try 5th with my mate (we both started in 5th) but being busy adults OPR is just too handy to play instead when we get together twice a month.
For OPR Apocalypse size games, we pretty much just played them as-written. It's such a streamlined ruleset that nothing really needs to be changed. The squad leader as measure marker is a good idea. I probably wouldn't bother trying to bring in any GWapoc rules, though I'm willing to raid any GW product if it has interesting scenario ideas. I recently bought the Levithan rulebook and cards as potential scenario fodder.
I get the appeal of 5th, but it really offers nothing that I want that OPR doesn't offer. I'm sure those who desire more crunch would differ but I'm fine with two stats as honestly, I'm just looking for a way to get my figures on the table and battling as easily as possible.
Played since Rogue Trader. Gave up when 10th came out before I'd even had a game of 9th, invalidating the dozen or so books I'd bought for 9th, due to covid (I'm a carer for a vulnerable relative so had to essentially shield with them for a couple of years).
4th edition for me. Basically a refined 3rd edition. Still had proper area terrain rules and IIRC height levels, rather than 5th edition's TLOS. No stupid wound allocation shenanigans. It was by no means perfect - there were some oddities, like the way similar units could be wildly different in effectiveness depending on whether they were a vehicle (could be one shotted or stun-locked) or monster (fought at full effectiveness until they lost their last wound).
3.5/early 4th edition codexes were the best, with marine chapter traits, guard regimental doctrines etc, giving an unparalleled level of 'your dudes'. I just wish they'd managed to do all the armies in that style before the paradigm changed in 5th to stripping out all the customisation, and making things like chapter traits dependent on including special characters.
Never entirely got on with the post-8th paradigm, especially with things like vehicles no longer having facings, as I found that quite immersion breaking. The over-reliance on rerolls and strategems along with very abstract missions seemed to make it very 'gamey' and less like a battle. There were a couple of things I liked, like monstrous creatures having degrading profiles, putting them more on a par with vehicles.
Eilif wrote: If I had to choose a GW ruleset for the 40k universe, I do like Necromunda 95 and Shadow War Armageddon (and also Mordheim). Those games take the 2nd edition mechanics and keep them at the small scope of game that they work best at. When you're only dealing with a kill-team-per-player it's no problem to have slightly crunchier old-school mechanics.
Yes. It's interesting to go through the Wargear book in 2nd and see just how much stuff never appeared in subsequent books. It was just too fiddly and not appropriate to a game that was moving beyond the squad level to the platoon. That is why I looked at ways to cut out the non-essential elements like models being on fire, rolling for plasma diameter, jump pack scatter, etc. Because of the granularity, there is still a practical limit, but if you do things like resolve close combats without re-rolls, it goes a lot faster.
Yeah, RT and Second edition are both crunchier than necessary for the sizes of games that players ended up playing. GW essentially wrote rules best suited for armies of a couple squads when players were doing platoon and then for a platoon when folks were moving toward a whole Company.
The war gear book and lists are great for Necromunda 95, but allot of that was never even going to be used even in 2nd edition.
RT is basically an RPG and that legacy carries through to 2nd Edition.
Only played Fantasy as a child, got started in 40K with the 6th edition starter box. 6th and 7th are probably still my preferred editions. They were when I managed to get the most gaming in too - I've probably played more 6-7th than I have 8-10th.
If I was going to bring in stuff from 40K into OPR it'd be blast templates and flamer templates and I'd think about some way to incorporate facings into vehicles and monsters. Maybe something as simple as -1 defense from the rear.
But I'm also just playing Grimdark Future these days.
For me, I think my favourite edition is very different for casual and competitive.
For competitive, I actually think it's the current 10th edition. Aside from my Kroot army being a real army for the first time since 3rd/4th edition, and actually being good for the first time, I do think the overemphasis on the competitive scene has led to a tightly balanced and controlled experience if that's what you're looking for... but it's rarely cinamatic or narrative on that front.
For narrative, I think 5th was my favourite. I loved the Battle Missions book that was released that edition with special scenarios for each major factions as well as a few bonus ones, as well as the introduction of Kill Team, and some other interesting game variants that never caught on as well. I've lost count of the amount of times I've played All Around Defense, or first Tryanid mission whose name I don't recall of the top of my head. They were great little narrative levels that really lent well to stories forming on the tabletop.
A.T. wrote: 5e tactical marines were competing with cruddace-sisters and 3e power armoured GK as the absolute worst troops choices available...
All the other marines were good though - scouts good, chaos marines good, bikers good, wolves good, BA assault marines good, 4e las/plas templars good, 4e DA terminators good, etc.
Fair. I seldom saw anyone fielding vanilla marines once the SW and BA books were out except maybe as part of some salamanders drop pod shenanigans. But my point still stands. Even "bad" troops like the humble tac marine at least had the ability to threaten vehicles (in multiple phases no less!) with all the usual durability that came with being a marine while also having the option to hide inside a cheap rhino without giving up their important guns' shooting. And all of those traits were pretty important in an edition where you needed troops to stay alive to the end of the game and also ideally wanted them to contribute to killing the parking lots full of enemy vehicles.
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Tawnis wrote: For me, I think my favourite edition is very different for casual and competitive.
For competitive, I actually think it's the current 10th edition. Aside from my Kroot army being a real army for the first time since 3rd/4th edition, and actually being good for the first time, I do think the overemphasis on the competitive scene has led to a tightly balanced and controlled experience if that's what you're looking for... but it's rarely cinamatic or narrative on that front.
That's a good distinction to draw, and agreed that 10th edition is probably the best choice to date for relatively balanced competitive games; if that's your cup of tea.
For narrative, I think 5th was my favourite. I loved the Battle Missions book that was released that edition with special scenarios for each major factions as well as a few bonus ones, as well as the introduction of Kill Team, and some other interesting game variants that never caught on as well.
Battle Missions was pretty nifty. Technically, Kill Team started in 4th edition if I'm not mistaken though. Back when you had bosses and brute squads and claxon counters.
I actually think 10th does narrative just fine; its just that in older editions the lack of engaging competitive scenarios meant people were experimenting more since there wasn't a tried and true path that resulted in reliably fun games.
I think if you want narrative you just need to put in that same kind of effort you used to. Make maps and objective markers that are important to your story. Play the asymmetrical missions that most people toss out of the deck. Give a side a random bonus based on how an earlier game of Kill Team played out. Narrative has always required meeting it half way. It's just harder to do when competitive has a nice smooth path all laid out for you.
LunarSol wrote: I actually think 10th does narrative just fine; its just that in older editions the lack of engaging competitive scenarios meant people were experimenting more since there wasn't a tried and true path that resulted in reliably fun games.
I think if you want narrative you just need to put in that same kind of effort you used to. Make maps and objective markers that are important to your story. Play the asymmetrical missions that most people toss out of the deck. Give a side a random bonus based on how an earlier game of Kill Team played out. Narrative has always required meeting it half way. It's just harder to do when competitive has a nice smooth path all laid out for you.
You're not wrong, but I feel like presentation is, in and of itself, a bit of a hurdle when it comes to narrative stuff. Like, a really simple example: older editions didn't tell you exactly where to place objectives; they just said to take turns placing them, sometimes with some parameters. So it was common in my 7th and 8th edition games for us to go, "This belltower is tall and looks cool. It *must* be where your vox operators are hiding out and coordinating the war front." And bam. You've got a little tidbit of story to go with your mission. In contrast, 10th tells you exactly where to put your objectives, and we tend to build (often symmetrical) battlefields around those positions. Which instantly makes it feel like I'm trying to build a symmetrical map for a video game rather than stumbling upon a bespoke battlefield with its own quirks and challenges.
Putting the asymmetrical cards in the latest mission deck has helped a lot, I've found. It saves a group of people (who may be a bit socially awkward) form having to have that extra step of pregame conversation and kind of "legitimizes" the asymmetrical deployment rather than making it feel like you're putting someone out by asking to imbalance the game for the sake of your narrative preferences. (Not criticizing people for using asymmetrical deployments; I'm pointing out that it can *feel* awkward to request to use them if they're not included in the default mission deck.)
And presentation aside, 10th *has* taken away a lot of the tools I used to use to give my characters their own stories and personalities. I have a succubus conversion that I did up to look mandrake-y to go with my edgy fluff about a creepy alliance my cult has with mandrakes. In 10th edition, she lost the ability to attach to mandrake squads. (A thing that was sub-optimal but fit my fluff.) As of the new drukhari codex, she's lost her gun, meaning the flaming mandrake hand I previously represented with blast pistol rules is purely for decoration now.
A.T. wrote: 5e tactical marines were competing with cruddace-sisters and 3e power armoured GK as the absolute worst troops choices available.
Minimum 10 man squad for a single special and heavy weapon, 170+pts not including a transport. You'd get two squads of rangers for that and chill out behind 2+ cover saves after infiltrating into position... well except for the other thing that eldar troops were not good for - screening against drop pods :/
All the other marines were good though - scouts good, chaos marines good, bikers good, wolves good, BA assault marines good, 4e las/plas templars good, 4e DA terminators good, etc.
Gotta disagree about Tacs. 5e gave them some nice boosts. They gained Bolt Pistols, Frag and Krak as default wargear, and then gained the Combat Squads ability. With Bolt Pistols they could shoot before Assaulting, which definitely helps against more numerous, lighter troops. Frag helps against troops in cover, and Krak meant every basic Marine became a pretty serious threat to Vehicles. Combat Squads gave you flexibility in deployment, though I forget if you were able to mix squads in vehicles in 5th.
I came into 5th halfway through it after a brief hiatus from 40k (mostly due to proffessional life). It took me about 6 months to find my footing and start winning regularly again, but when I did it was using Tac-heavy lists with at least 3 full squads.
For my money, Necron Warriors got hit harder for 5th. The change in the Vehicle Damage chart meant they couldn't kill vehicles with their Gauss Rifles anymore, iirc, because they only Glanced. The combat resolution changes hurt as well, making kills matter more for Ld modifiers and making it more likely that they would run (and therefore get Sweeping Advanced on, which they couldn't WBB from).
Insectum7 wrote: Gotta disagree about Tacs. 5e gave them some nice boosts. They gained Bolt Pistols, Frag and Krak as default wargear, and then gained the Combat Squads ability.
This cracked me up because that was standard equipment in 2nd. Gotta love GW: everything old is new again, again, and again!
7th because it had the 6th Ed CSM rules with the Boon Table, 6th Ed Daemons with Rewards and Warp Storm table, and the Khorne Daemonkin Codex which is the single most fun I've ever had playing Warhammer ever.
Not a single Chaos ruleset has come close since then and every book is an exercise in stripping the fun of CSM to the bone but making pretty models at the same time.
Insectum7 wrote: Gotta disagree about Tacs. 5e gave them some nice boosts. They gained Bolt Pistols, Frag and Krak as default wargear, and then gained the Combat Squads ability.
This cracked me up because that was standard equipment in 2nd. Gotta love GW: everything old is new again, again, and again!
Yeah they stripped Bolt Pistols out for 3rd to force harder delineations between troops. They could still buy Frag and Krak though, although few did. 5th just made them standard equipment again.
What I always actually wanted was for Assault Squads to have open access to wargear like they did in 2nd. Unfortunately that never came about. We got "Vanguard" with more options, but no access to Special Weapons. 2nd ed Assault Squads with Plasma Pistols, Hand Flamers, Power Swords/Axes/Fists and two Flamers/Meltaguns/Plasmaguns were where it's at.
I still advocate for 5th Ed core rules with 3rd/4th Ed codices as the best of Oldhammer. Most of the problems associated with 5th really were the result of the codices. You don't get leafblower nonsense using the 3.5Ed Guard codex.
You do still have wound allocation shenanigans, but that can be alleviated by threat of dreadsock.
That switch over to TLOS for forests/ruins/etc. was real rough. The changes to the vehicle damage table/s was pretty hard on some armies too. The other thing that comes to mind is Kill Points which really punished certain types of build, though that was mission specific iirc.
There's a near perfect combo somewhere in there, though...
And presentation aside, 10th *has* taken away a lot of the tools I used to use to give my characters their own stories and personalities. I have a succubus conversion that I did up to look mandrake-y to go with my edgy fluff about a creepy alliance my cult has with mandrakes. In 10th edition, she lost the ability to attach to mandrake squads. (A thing that was sub-optimal but fit my fluff.) As of the new drukhari codex, she's lost her gun, meaning the flaming mandrake hand I previously represented with blast pistol rules is purely for decoration now.
This is where I'm at as well.
I despise the philosophy of 10th, which just seems aggressively anti-player and, frankly, lazy.
If 10th had a motto it would be 'No, you can't have that because we can't be bothered even trying to balance it.'
Hence why we no longer have Points but Power Level in all but name.
Hence why wargear/artefacts have been heavily stripped down (and most of them are just repeats of the same handful of rules).
Hence why armies are only permitted a single faction mechanic. Thus, Eldar no longer have Battle Focus and why DE Wyches are in rehab unless you use one specific subfaction.
Hence why characters can only join ZE DEZIGNATED UNITS.
I appreciate the value of balance but not when it comes at the exclusion of everything else. Especially in a game like 40k, which used to be sold on the narrative aspect and that had heavy emphasis on customisation and Your Dudes.
Now they're ever and only GW's Dudes and you'd better not forget it.
That switch over to TLOS for forests/ruins/etc. was real rough. The changes to the vehicle damage table/s was pretty hard on some armies too. The other thing that comes to mind is Kill Points which really punished certain types of build, though that was mission specific iirc.
There's a near perfect combo somewhere in there, though...
I'm in a similar boat in that I'd lean towards 5th as being the best overall, albeit with some undesirable defects.
Though, I'll admit that the wound allocation was never really an issue for me. There were maybe a handful of units in the entire game that could take advantage of it, and most of those weren't exactly top tier to start with.
I agree on TLoS, though. Having recently got into a game with abstracted LoS, it's amazing how simple and straightforward it is by comparison.
As for other editions, I didn't play enough of 3rd/4th to comment. All I remember of 6th was getting rolled over by Taudar. 7th I considered pretty awful, with a convoluted rulebook that was trying to account for a myriad of units that had no business being in a game of this scale. Knights and Fliers were especially egregious in this regard. The psychic system was absolutely dire, with psyker-heavy armies being able to just do whatever the hell they wanted unless their opponent was equally psyker-heavy, and the powers themselves were 'balanced by randumb' (same as warlord traits, incidentally, though those at least never reached the levels of Invisibility or the like).
Incidentally, I know I said above that balance shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, but 'balance by randumb' is the worst of both worlds - you have horribly-unbalanced powers that are rarely fun to play against, but you also can't ever build towards a particular theme.
All that said, 7th did have the Corsair Codex, which I would consider the best codex Dark Eldar never got. An absolute blast to play and a tragedy that it was wiped from reality in 8th onwards. I guess GW want to ensure that we don't ever overdose on fun,
8th edition had a very rough start but it did get into a good place towards the end, with the designers having found a sweet spot for the cost of most wargear . . .
. . . whereupon they just binned all of that in 9th and went with 'everything is a multiple of 5pts'. It also added so much extra stuff that many armies felt cluttered with too many stratagems and layers of rules. There were some neat ideas buried in there - e.g. Lead Roles for Harlequins were a great way of making a small number of characters feel much more diverse. However, overall I'd consider it more of a sidegrade than anything else.
And then 10th arrived on the scene like a falling septic tank. I won't go though all the reasons why I despise this edition - I've already alluded to some of them above. Suffice to say I'm not a fan.
Da Boss wrote: If I was going to bring in stuff from 40K into OPR it'd be blast templates and flamer templates and I'd think about some way to incorporate facings into vehicles and monsters. Maybe something as simple as -1 defense from the rear.
But I'm also just playing Grimdark Future these days.
Heck yeah to blast templates. I just think they're fun. I've thought about this many times for Grimdark but never actually tried it.
-1 defense from the rear is a very good idea. Very much in the spirit of OPR taking a multi-aspect mechanic and abstracting it for easy game playability.
Wyldhunt wrote: I'm happy for those who enjoy(ed) 5th edition, but it's shocking to me that so many people still seem to like it. Between the parking lot spam, unkillable vehicles, troop tax, only troops being able to score objectives, the limited missions (including the Dawn of War deployment that really screwed over certain units), etc., it really sticks out in my mind as the worst edition I've played in terms of core rules.
Like, 6th had more randomness than I'd like, and 7th got bonkers due to power creep codices and formations, but I still think of the core rules from both of those editions as waaaay less frustrating than 5th edition. So even if you don't like the overall vibe/stratagem focus of 8th onward, 5th still seems like the worst version of the pre-8th forms of the game to me.
EDIT: I feel like a version of the game that used 7th as a base, made an actual effort to balance things, used the 3rd-5th edition psychic system, and brought in some of the more popular changes from 8th (split fire, fall back voluntarily, etc.) would be pretty snazzy.
Just to comment, since you brought it up and it's something that was very much a lesser object on my radar, but only troops being able to score has been a big improvement in our games; from my personal perspective. It make you troops count go well beyond the "troops tax" and cuts down on the toys-before-boys nature of 40k. It's not the ideal fix for this problem, as that would likely require a fundamental shift in the combat model of 40k away from "the rifleman exists to score points" to make the rifleman and infantry fire team much more of the core fighting element rather than cheerleaders watching with peashooters while all the heavy lifting done by the support, but its a big step up. This is definitely a "your mileage might vary" type thing, however, based on how you want to play 40k, and isn't a plus for everyone.
Fair enough and to each their own. I started the game in 5th with eldar as my first army. So most of our troop choices evaporated to bolters/flamers, and I was a broke kid who couldn't afford to spam jetbikes. Avengers were cool (and my first troops), but they, too, were squishy in 5th. So if you wanted to win games with eldar in 5th, you ended up doing that DAVU thing where you just flew tanks full of MSU dire avengers around in circles so that you didn't auto-lose by having no troops. So functionally, the more you invested in units that could stay alive to score points at the end of the game, the less of your army that was actually *fighting* and doing cool space elf power ranger stuff. Whereas 6th edition onward encouraged me to field units that were survivable or cheap enough to be good choices as scoring units, but I didn't have this "keep the avengers in the tanks alive" mini-game hanging over my head the whole time.
When people tell me they liked 5th edition, I half-jokingly ask them which army they played: Marines or guard.
I play IG, Witch Hunters, Space Wolves, and Daemonhunters [i specify because I use the WH and DH codecies]
My friends collectively represent CSM [x2], Eldar, Tyranids, Orks [x2], SM, and Necrons, plus doubling up on Daemonhunters. So you're right, I do play IG.
That also said there's definitely an experience that were looking for that's putting our bars in different places, and that's ok. Everyone wants different things, and the editions have changed over time to cater to different visions of what 40k should be. I'm looking for armies where the bulk of your fighting force is the rifle squad [which includes their carrier/IFV if applicable], and "toys" exist to support them. I've got that in 5e, the bulk of the work I'd done by my 120 guardsmen, 30 Grey Hunter & Razorbacks, Sisters of Battle in Rhinos, etc. Seraphim, Leman Russ Vanquishers, and Vindicators can add capability to pick off threats my infantry cant or aren't in position to handle, but I'll lose if my army consists entirely of "cool stuff" because I wont be able to score.
It sounds like you're looking for an experience more centered around the power units than platoons of infantry, which might make you partial to editions where you don't really need to worry about basic infantry and take more cool stuff to clash with.
I would also not color myself surprised that having infantry without support weapons makes them feel less effective or more vulnerable than a similarly fragile squad with one meltagun and one heavy bolter. There's a good reason that rifle squads have machineguns and AT-4's. There's a good reason that infantry squad tactics changed to center around those machineguns going from WWI to WWII, a movement that is explicitly mirrored in-lore with the codex astartes and post-heresy reorganization of the fighting forces, capturing a movement from "the valour of the rifleman with rifle and bayonet" to a more "find-fix-flank-finish" type model of combat, at least in the minds of military planners in the Imperium. This is part of why I hate what has been done with Primaris Marines. While 40k rules has never really done a good job with combat modelling and never really captured that model of infantry combat, it felt real enough.
I also dont see a problem with Mechanized Infantry [so called parking lot]. I have found that factions that are canonically mostly or fully mechanized, like Space Marines, DEldar, SoB, etc. are well rewarded for being so, while factions that do field large numbers of light infantry, like Necrons, IG, Orks, and Tyranids can field infantry kn foot very effectively.
That also said there's definitely an experience that were looking for that's putting our bars in different places, and that's ok.
Totally, and I'm glad what you're playing is working for you and your group. Definitely not here to yuck anyone's yum.
I also dont see a problem with Mechanized Infantry [so called parking lot]. I have found that factions that are canonically mostly or fully mechanized, like Space Marines, DEldar, SoB, etc. are well rewarded for being so, while factions that do field large numbers of light infantry, like Necrons, IG, Orks, and Tyranids can field infantry kn foot very effectively.
I don't have a problem with it in theory. I just remember 5th edition games where I'd send out multiple squads of fire dragons and storm guardians with some war walker support, and each of those units would kill or stun a vehicle... and then my guard opponent still had half their vehicles remaining, killed my squishy infantry, and I ended up with basically no anti-tank remaining in the second half of the game. And that's after scribbling out all the elite options in my 'dex other than fire dragons to try and deal with the meta.
I didn't really do the seer council thing, but I get why it was such a default part of 5th edition eldar lists: it didn't die to a stiff breeze, and its weapons were effective against tanks.
Gert wrote: 7th because it had the 6th Ed CSM rules with the Boon Table, 6th Ed Daemons with Rewards and Warp Storm table, and the Khorne Daemonkin Codex which is the single most fun I've ever had playing Warhammer ever.
Not a single Chaos ruleset has come close since then and every book is an exercise in stripping the fun of CSM to the bone but making pretty models at the same time.
This is funny to me because the degree to which your play group would have to babysit you for any of that to matter in 7th is hilarious. Especially by the time the KDC book dropped.
'Yeah, so this will be great as long as you bring Sisters of Battle but with no Celestine or Exorcists using their 6th edition codex rules and Dark Eldar with no special characters. Mike can bring catachan guard with no more then 3 tanks. Everybody good?'
Automatically Appended Next Post: For me, anything before 8th edition was uninteresting. Especially considering the first REAL sisters of battle book didn't come out until 8th. No, Witch Hunters doesn't count.
I started in 6th, which was terrible.
Moved on to 7th that was fun for a while, but very quickly became much worse than 6th.
8th edition index era had some absolutely bonkers crap that had to be sorted out, but once it did was extremely fun. It was also the first edition where Sisters of Battle had a rulebook you weren't actively embarrassed to play.
8th edition codex era was fun for the majority of the time.
9th was solid, but was WAY too up and down. Every codex release was Russian Roulette.
10th is probably the best overall edition. They've had a couple 'oh god, we're all gonna die!' armies come out, but they were fixed quickly enough that it didn't really hurt anything too much.
Automatically Appended Next Post: For me, anything before 8th edition was uninteresting. Especially considering the first REAL sisters of battle book didn't come out until 8th. No, Witch Hunters doesn't count.
I started in 6th, which was terrible.
Moved on to 7th that was fun for a while, but very quickly became much worse than 6th.
8th edition index era had some absolutely bonkers crap that had to be sorted out, but once it did was extremely fun. It was also the first edition where Sisters of Battle had a rulebook you weren't actively embarrassed to play.
8th edition codex era was fun for the majority of the time.
9th was solid, but was WAY too up and down. Every codex release was Russian Roulette.
10th is probably the best overall edition. They've had a couple 'oh god, we're all gonna die!' armies come out, but they were fixed quickly enough that it didn't really hurt anything too much.
As a 6e+ player I gather you aren't familiar with 2e.
The 2e SoB codex was decent enough for its time & the edition it was produced for..
Automatically Appended Next Post: For me, anything before 8th edition was uninteresting. Especially considering the first REAL sisters of battle book didn't come out until 8th. No, Witch Hunters doesn't count.
I started in 6th, which was terrible.
Moved on to 7th that was fun for a while, but very quickly became much worse than 6th.
8th edition index era had some absolutely bonkers crap that had to be sorted out, but once it did was extremely fun. It was also the first edition where Sisters of Battle had a rulebook you weren't actively embarrassed to play.
8th edition codex era was fun for the majority of the time.
9th was solid, but was WAY too up and down. Every codex release was Russian Roulette.
10th is probably the best overall edition. They've had a couple 'oh god, we're all gonna die!' armies come out, but they were fixed quickly enough that it didn't really hurt anything too much.
As a 6e+ player I gather you aren't familiar with 2e.
The 2e SoB codex was decent enough for its time & the edition it was produced for..
Yeah, I kind of feel sad for players that started "late" as they wouldn't see how much better that GW used to be as a company... sure their rules were wonky af and it wasn't a set of great rules, but as a game it was fun, and I think a lot of that fun has been lost in later editions as the "rules" became more important than the "game" and the competitive scene edged out the goofiness of older armies that existed because you couldn't get X model so you sort of just used what you had and called it good enough.
Played RT/1st to death, I remember the stat change to marines and the impact it had plus will always love the old style army list design and look.
But absolutely loved 2nd, went to the first GW international tourneys and everything. To me was the right level of models and rules for 28mm. Plus the insanity of cheap space crusade models (and battlemasters for fantasy) and many cool vehicles.
3rd killed off the gaming group. While the continued expansion of model ranges and background was cool, the rules just turned everyone off for different reasons (for me it was the movement stat changes and the prospect of benny hill style chases of guardsmen by genestealers). We tried again for the eye of terror campaign and ultimately ended up doing Epic and BFG battles for it.
Bunch tried again at 8th, but now I don't think anyone is playing, dropping out towards the end of 8th and 9th not taking off.
ccs wrote: As a 6e+ player I gather you aren't familiar with 2e.
The 2e SoB codex was decent enough for its time & the edition it was produced for..
It has a ton of fluff and it's quite effective. Is it a "full" codex? Insofar as it doesn't assume that every army has to have an artillery park, air component, catering service, etc., I suppose not.
But the concept behind it was fun and they are fun to play that way.
I will add that 2nd ed. models and rulebooks are now really, really expensive. It's cramping my style in a major way. Everyone needs to go back to hating 2nd again.
Wyldhunt wrote: I just remember 5th edition games where I'd send out multiple squads of fire dragons and storm guardians with some war walker support, and each of those units would kill or stun a vehicle... and then my guard opponent still had half their vehicles remaining, killed my squishy infantry, and I ended up with basically no anti-tank remaining in the second half of the game.
Sounds about right for the era, especially at higher points levels when the guard could 'cheat' the FoC.
Late 5e eldar had things like the warp hunter, hornets, and wasps to mix things up. Never got around the limitation that while two eldar anti-tank mechanised squads had more speed and firepower than three imperial/chaos/etc melta mech units they also cost three to four times as much, at least against late 4e/5e codex costs and that doesn't work when you are trading out unit for unit.
6e 'fixed' this by giving the wave serpent enough firepower to simply blow away the enemy vehicles from the far side of the board. That they could transport units was just gravy.
Played 5th 6th and 7th, have not played much since. Combination of my collection is getting discontinued, and life happening has precluded me from playing the 10th so far. I may join an escalation league and bring out some Orks to see what I really think, but we'll see. Of the ones that I actually played, I liked the 5th the best even with the overpowered lists. These days good opponents will self regulate, and if they don't, I ghost them with extreme prejudice.
However, I do want to go back and play a few games in the 4th, and perhaps the 3rd.
I use the Crusade rules to fix a lot of the narrative shortcomings of 10th... But that only works if you're campaigning. Stand-alone narrative games have far fewer tools to work with.
I use a few homebrew generic requisitions- so for example, for 1 RP you can add a unit to the list of units this character can join. That would give Wyldhunt's Succubus her Madrakes again. But he'd have to campaign to use it.
I'm okay with 10th, but I don't think I could play it if Crusade didn't exist. Just far too simple to entertain me.
I think that 5th was probably my choice for best edition.
Yes, I know that some armies were crazy OP but the core rules were satisfying and allowed for a decent amount of customization. 6th-7th went off the rails a bit and 8th completely jumped the shark - 9th was probably my favorite edition of Nu-40k even if the balance was all over the place. 10th was such a non-starter for me that I just completely lost interest, even when I get the itch to play I try and build a list in 10th and the complete and utter lack of customization kills that itch.
I played during 3rd and 4th, so while I enjoyed them both it may have been tainted by the fact that my brother was a meta chasing try hard who latched onto things like Fish of Fury and Skimmer spam for Eldar.
Usually threads like these on dakka revolve around 5th and 4th, and usually 5th gets the most votes.
I never read 4th base rules but what makes 5th better?
I read 4th has abstracted los, secondary weapons on vehicles, better wound allocation, fluffier codizes, guess ranges, more morale tests - is it really just the improved vehicle rules that make 5th better for people?
Every now and then I wonder to try out one of these old editions (I started at the tail end of 5th), but then I remember old CC phase and AP system and I'm nope nope nope, but I want at least to give it a read at some point.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I never read 4th base rules but what makes 5th better?
There were quite a few changes, which were good or bad is somewhat subjective. Off the top of my head:
- Infantry gained the ability to run
- Troop unit only scoring (with rulebook scenarios anyway), infiltrate and deepstrike were not restricted by scenario type.
- Normal cover increased from 5+ to 4+
- Infantry were not forced out of vehicles that were hit, or annihilated with all hands (and no saves) on a 6
- Glancing hits had to wear down a vehicle unless it was open topped/AP1 rather than destroying them on a 6. Skimmers didn't turn all hits into glances.
- You could not charge new units with your consolidation move
- Line of sight changes, and the ability to kill all models in a unit with a hail of fire and not just the ones that you can see. Target priority tests were removed.
- Close combat changes - pile in, full attacks from nearby models, results determined by wounds inflicted (especially for fearless units)
- Wound allocation mini-game
- Template changes - determined by scatter not roll to hit, partials are hit without a roll, no guess ranges.
Aside from that there the special and weapons rules were gathered up and adjusted somewhat. Fewer power fist swings, rending weapons had to roll to wound, pistols were single shot only and the maximum strength of defensive weapons was lowered.
5e tended to run a little faster and a little hotter as units could cover more ground and attacks were more decisive. You didn't get the same amount of scattered survivors or models that were excluded from action for various reasons (i.e. entangled, failed priority rolls, in combat but not in range, etc). 50% of your battlecannon shots didn't disolve into mist on firing, etc.
It put some extra pep in the step of infantry and mechanised armies while dealing with some longstanding issues of 4e but then followed through by creating new issues of its own. Mostly but not entirely due to out of control codex writers and a little lack of foresight in making vehicles cheaper towards the end of 4th.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Usually threads like these on dakka revolve around 5th and 4th, and usually 5th gets the most votes.
I never read 4th base rules but what makes 5th better?
I read 4th has abstracted los, secondary weapons on vehicles, better wound allocation, fluffier codizes, guess ranges, more morale tests - is it really just the improved vehicle rules that make 5th better for people?
Every now and then I wonder to try out one of these old editions (I started at the tail end of 5th), but then I remember old CC phase and AP system and I'm nope nope nope, but I want at least to give it a read at some point.
I know some people like the more abstract LOS rules of 4th and i still play some games that use similar rules and both work fine in their own way especially if your player group is all on the same page. that being said i will go through a few points of why 5th was a step up from 4th-
The things 4th did well-snipers, wound allocation, defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles
The thing it did badly-vehicle damage rules-IE made skimmers specifically eldar and tau way to powerful
The things 5th did better- rapid fire rules, vehicle damage rules, target selection (you no longer needed a LD test to shoot at something that wasn't the closest) good simple/clear USRs and not to many to be bloated.
Things 5th did worse-wound allocation and a move away from thematic codexes aside from the few really good ones i mentioned before (blood angels, space wolves, necrons and dark eldar). the only real "bad" codex in the entire edition was the travesty that was the grey knight codex. keep in mind many of the "better" 4th ed codexes lived for a long time in 5th and did just fine like tau, orks, eldar and tyranids when they finally did get a 5ht ed release they were rather "meh" not incredibly good or bad.(chaos was never good again after the glory that was the 3.5 codex).
By the time of 5th the old guess range weapons had been replaced with the 2d6/scatter minus for BS of 3rd (guess range was pretty terrible, when it changed it was universally praised at the time).
When our group decided to go old hammer when we saw the direction GW was going with the release of 8th we went with 5th because it was the pinnacle of improvement in the game. we did however house rule in the 4th ed wound allocation system to keep everything fair as well as using defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles, and the snipers always hit on 2+ rule from 4th. we also borrowed grenade throwing, overwatch and snap fire from 6th/7th to improve 5th without the negatives of formation spam that broke core game mechanics, USR bloat, the double damage system for vehicles in the form of the more lethal damage chat AND hull points at the same time.
I absolutely love the CC rules and AP system. you had a save or you didn't the all or nothing system is simple and easy. the AP- system was a flow over from fantasy that was based on the strength of the attacker. the systems were separate and different and needed to stay that way. The idea of initiative and WS comparison also made it feel more lore accurate Eldar were weak as a normal human but agile as all hell which made sense especially when it came to aspect warriors or drugged up witch cults.
Also keep in mind any edition of the game and any codex could be broken with enough effort by players with the wrong mind set as the game lent itself much more to thematic play than it did tournament play. if you played with the latter in mind it made the game very unfriendly and not much fun.
aphyon wrote: keep in mind many of the "better" 4th ed codexes lived for a long time in 5th and did just fine like tau, orks, eldar and tyranids when they finally did get a 5ht ed release they were rather "meh" not incredibly good or bad.(chaos was never good again after the glory that was the 3.5 codex).
Of those only nids got a release in 5th and had the misfortune of getting Robin 'do you like my guard army?' Cruddace as its author. It had good units but it seemed like a concious effort was being made to push new models by making all of the old classics poor choices... or perhaps that was just Cruddace being unable to balance a unit without some special rule propping it up.
5e nids were particularly poorly suited to the following: assaulting into cover, destroying transport vehicles at range, facing S8 AP3 weapons. And this was half way into 5th where Cruddaces own guard book was the yardstick against which all other armies were measured.
3.5... it had a lot of tremendously flavourful and characterful and so on and so on and oh look here comes that list/unit/combo again. The book it reminded me most of was the old necromunda board game where there were a hundred skills and items and you really only wanted a few ideal paths, to the point of taking two heavies at gang creation so that you could weed out the failures (poor upgrade rolls) early on.
It's a pity that the 4e CSM codex didn't do a better job of bringing the options over and balancing them out as the core codex had decent fundimantals but lacked the gimmicks to offset being badly codex-creeped (by the space wolves in particular).
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Usually threads like these on dakka revolve around 5th and 4th, and usually 5th gets the most votes.
I never read 4th base rules but what makes 5th better?
I read 4th has abstracted los, secondary weapons on vehicles, better wound allocation, fluffier codizes, guess ranges, more morale tests - is it really just the improved vehicle rules that make 5th better for people?
Every now and then I wonder to try out one of these old editions (I started at the tail end of 5th), but then I remember old CC phase and AP system and I'm nope nope nope, but I want at least to give it a read at some point.
I know some people like the more abstract LOS rules of 4th and i still play some games that use similar rules and both work fine in their own way especially if your player group is all on the same page. that being said i will go through a few points of why 5th was a step up from 4th-
The things 4th did well-snipers, wound allocation, defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles
The thing it did badly-vehicle damage rules-IE made skimmers specifically eldar and tau way to powerful
The things 5th did better- rapid fire rules, vehicle damage rules, target selection (you no longer needed a LD test to shoot at something that wasn't the closest) good simple/clear USRs and not to many to be bloated.
Things 5th did worse-wound allocation and a move away from thematic codexes aside from the few really good ones i mentioned before (blood angels, space wolves, necrons and dark eldar). the only real "bad" codex in the entire edition was the travesty that was the grey knight codex. keep in mind many of the "better" 4th ed codexes lived for a long time in 5th and did just fine like tau, orks, eldar and tyranids when they finally did get a 5ht ed release they were rather "meh" not incredibly good or bad.(chaos was never good again after the glory that was the 3.5 codex).
By the time of 5th the old guess range weapons had been replaced with the 2d6/scatter minus for BS of 3rd (guess range was pretty terrible, when it changed it was universally praised at the time).
When our group decided to go old hammer when we saw the direction GW was going with the release of 8th we went with 5th because it was the pinnacle of improvement in the game. we did however house rule in the 4th ed wound allocation system to keep everything fair as well as using defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles, and the snipers always hit on 2+ rule from 4th. we also borrowed grenade throwing, overwatch and snap fire from 6th/7th to improve 5th without the negatives of formation spam that broke core game mechanics, USR bloat, the double damage system for vehicles in the form of the more lethal damage chat AND hull points at the same time.
I absolutely love the CC rules and AP system. you had a save or you didn't the all or nothing system is simple and easy. the AP- system was a flow over from fantasy that was based on the strength of the attacker. the systems were separate and different and needed to stay that way. The idea of initiative and WS comparison also made it feel more lore accurate Eldar were weak as a normal human but agile as all hell which made sense especially when it came to aspect warriors or drugged up witch cults.
Also keep in mind any edition of the game and any codex could be broken with enough effort by players with the wrong mind set as the game lent itself much more to thematic play than it did tournament play. if you played with the latter in mind it made the game very unfriendly and not much fun.
Thanks for the write up. I must admit, it makes me quite wary towards those editions. Having played from 5th on, 8th was a relief for our gaming group. We were always narrative players, so debates about scatters or what have you never were a problem, but CC in those editions just was a terrible gaming experience in my view, with units getting trapped in CC and having no player agency whatsoever in that phase, it was everything I disliked about IGOUGO dialed up to 11, and bad Initiative for factions like orks or necrons was just rubbing it in.
Same with the AP system, every weapon below AP4 was useless most of the time if it didn't also have S6+ or a lot of shots. There are probably other things, but these especially make it a hard sell to go back (and not just stick to OPR where we are now. I guess in the end I just want the occasional flamer template back , because that was actually fun and felt easy to resolve. Also Chaos 3 5 and Orks 5th Edition are just great books I'd like to play around with.)
I know some people like the more abstract LOS rules of 4th and i still play some games that use similar rules and both work fine in their own way especially if your player group is all on the same page. that being said i will go through a few points of why 5th was a step up from 4th-
The things 4th did well-snipers, wound allocation, defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles
The thing it did badly-vehicle damage rules-IE made skimmers specifically eldar and tau way to powerful
The things 5th did better- rapid fire rules, vehicle damage rules, target selection (you no longer needed a LD test to shoot at something that wasn't the closest) good simple/clear USRs and not to many to be bloated.
Things 5th did worse-wound allocation and a move away from thematic codexes aside from the few really good ones i mentioned before (blood angels, space wolves, necrons and dark eldar). the only real "bad" codex in the entire edition was the travesty that was the grey knight codex. keep in mind many of the "better" 4th ed codexes lived for a long time in 5th and did just fine like tau, orks, eldar and tyranids when they finally did get a 5ht ed release they were rather "meh" not incredibly good or bad.(chaos was never good again after the glory that was the 3.5 codex).
By the time of 5th the old guess range weapons had been replaced with the 2d6/scatter minus for BS of 3rd (guess range was pretty terrible, when it changed it was universally praised at the time).
When our group decided to go old hammer when we saw the direction GW was going with the release of 8th we went with 5th because it was the pinnacle of improvement in the game. we did however house rule in the 4th ed wound allocation system to keep everything fair as well as using defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles, and the snipers always hit on 2+ rule from 4th. we also borrowed grenade throwing, overwatch and snap fire from 6th/7th to improve 5th without the negatives of formation spam that broke core game mechanics, USR bloat, the double damage system for vehicles in the form of the more lethal damage chat AND hull points at the same time.
I absolutely love the CC rules and AP system. you had a save or you didn't the all or nothing system is simple and easy. the AP- system was a flow over from fantasy that was based on the strength of the attacker. the systems were separate and different and needed to stay that way. The idea of initiative and WS comparison also made it feel more lore accurate Eldar were weak as a normal human but agile as all hell which made sense especially when it came to aspect warriors or drugged up witch cults.
Also keep in mind any edition of the game and any codex could be broken with enough effort by players with the wrong mind set as the game lent itself much more to thematic play than it did tournament play. if you played with the latter in mind it made the game very unfriendly and not much fun.
Out of curiosity which army/s did you play during that time? In my experience at the time, I found no army except horde or marine armies fun to play, because the AP system blasted everything else off the table. Playing eldar was a chore trying to keep them alive while also needing to get into 12" range with their stupidly nerfed catapults. Playing my space wolves was fun because I could just run across the table and survive long enough to punch people.
The addition of running and boosting of rapid fire also removed any advantage those 12" catapults had being assault weapons, or the eldar had being a fleet of foot force. This was where the eldar suffered most from a single broken unit/army list selection and got tarred for the whole game. So when I was trying to run armies that had no unbreakable grav tanks I was just being slaughtered.
so 4th had the best rules for me, because it DIDN'T have the things you're saying you liked. It allowed for a more enjoyable gaming experience if you weren't a space marine.
Something that insectum has pointed out a few times is that the 3rd ed difference between rapid fire and assault actually offset the 12" range of the catapult a bit, but GW kept chipping away at the differences so marines could do more while leaving assault less and less useful, especially when your mainline troop gun had a 12" range.
aphyon wrote:
When our group decided to go old hammer when we saw the direction GW was going with the release of 8th we went with 5th because it was the pinnacle of improvement in the game. we did however house rule in the 4th ed wound allocation system to keep everything fair as well as using defensive weapons being S5 on vehicles, and the snipers always hit on 2+ rule from 4th. we also borrowed grenade throwing, overwatch and snap fire from 6th/7th to improve 5th without the negatives of formation spam that broke core game mechanics, USR bloat, the double damage system for vehicles in the form of the more lethal damage chat AND hull points at the same time.
I absolutely love the CC rules and AP system. you had a save or you didn't the all or nothing system is simple and easy. the AP- system was a flow over from fantasy that was based on the strength of the attacker. the systems were separate and different and needed to stay that way. The idea of initiative and WS comparison also made it feel more lore accurate Eldar were weak as a normal human but agile as all hell which made sense especially when it came to aspect warriors or drugged up witch cults.
Also keep in mind any edition of the game and any codex could be broken with enough effort by players with the wrong mind set as the game lent itself much more to thematic play than it did tournament play. if you played with the latter in mind it made the game very unfriendly and not much fun.
This touches on one of the things that frustrates me about how the game has changed over the years. I've been playing since 5th, and it doesn't feel like the game has necessarily improved all that much over time; just changed. It feels like every couple editions, GW introduces a bunch of mechanics that actually work pretty well, but then they also yank out a bunch of stuff that was already working and replace it with something weird or add a new wonky problem. It's not even that they're occassionally overhauling the game (even 8th kept a lot of the basics more or less in tact); it's that they seem to be semi-randomly throwing out both the bad *and* the good rather than keeping the good and tweaking things.
So like, 6th and 7th gave us different answers to 5th edition's unkillable stun-locked parking lot problem and introduced warlord traits, but they also implemented those warlord traits badly at first (made them random) and then also gave us the wonky psychic phase rules. 7th got rid of some of the annoying randomness of 6th and kept some of the good ideas, but also threw out any semblance of balance with absurdly power-creepy codices and also formations. 8th added a bunch of solid common sense core mechanics (voluntary falling back, splitting fire as a universal option, etc.), got rid of some of the more annoying mechanics (vehicle spam being immune to bolters, fallback, etc.), but it also broke the game with mortal wound spam and flawed CP generation/detachment rules. Plus it got rid of some of the more interesting core mechanics like jinking, going to ground, etc; sacrificing those mechanics on the altar of stratagems. 9th vastly improved on the CP generation/detachment rule issue, but it also cranked all the lethality up to 11 for no obvious reason. 10th toned down some of that lethality (we're probably currently still in a less lethal state with 10th than we were at the end of 9th) and is probably the most balanced version of the game to date for tournament play, but it had to kill off tons of customizability and (seemingly) flavor to get that balance.
It feels like somewhere along the way they could have taken one of the editions with decent core rules, fixed some of the known problems, and added on the more popular mechanics from later editions. Like, 7th edition with 5th edition's psychic phase as a starting point. Maybe re-evaluate whether you actually want the old fallback or multi-step vehicle explosion rules, etc that got thrown out in 8th. Maybe add in some of the popular mechanics from 8th like splitting fire and voluntary fallbacks. Then toss out those pesky formation rules and replace them with something a little easier to balance like 10th edition detachment rules.
(And then maybe avoid adding stratagems and instead just provide some flavorful expanded detachment rules, but that's probably a more controversial opinion.)
Do something like that, and I feel like you'd end up with an edition that has a lot of the more flexible, intuitive, and flavorful mechanics from recent editions, without the "E-sports" vibe that is often attributed to 10th.
A.T. wrote:Of those only nids got a release in 5th and had the misfortune of getting Robin 'do you like my guard army?' Cruddace as its author. It had good units but it seemed like a concious effort was being made to push new models by making all of the old classics poor choices... or perhaps that was just Cruddace being unable to balance a unit without some special rule propping it up.
5e nids were particularly poorly suited to the following: assaulting into cover, destroying transport vehicles at range, facing S8 AP3 weapons. And this was half way into 5th where Cruddaces own guard book was the yardstick against which all other armies were measured.
3.5... it had a lot of tremendously flavourful and characterful and so on and so on and oh look here comes that list/unit/combo again....
I only played a few games with the 5e codex, but I never understood why it was so hated. There were a lot of cool, flavorful options in that book. Tervigons pooping out babies and spores letting you run 'nids as a drop pod army and Trygons plopping down tunnels all gave 'nids some really cool ways to deploy their army along with still letting you do some of the classic gimmicks like outflanking stealers.
It *was* bad at killing vehicles at a distance, but was that not true of past 'nid books? And further, 5th edition was where they finally got some dedicated shooty tankbusters in the form of hiveguard. Now, I know that hiveguard being spammed in every list stank, as did the fact that spamming them ate up Elite slots and thus limited list variety. But surely that's more of a flaw of the army A.) not having shooty tank killers already and B.) the flaws of the force org chart, no? I'm probably missing something, but from what I recall, the 5th edition bug book basically just added more options rather than taking away or fundamentally changing units that existed. Was this the book that made venom cannons glancing only?
Out of curiosity which army/s did you play during that time? In my experience at the time, I found no army except horde or marine armies fun to play, because the AP system blasted everything else off the table. Playing eldar was a chore trying to keep them alive while also needing to get into 12" range with their stupidly nerfed catapults. Playing my space wolves was fun because I could just run across the table and survive long enough to punch people.
The addition of running and boosting of rapid fire also removed any advantage those 12" catapults had being assault weapons, or the eldar had being a fleet of foot force. This was where the eldar suffered most from a single broken unit/army list selection and got tarred for the whole game. So when I was trying to run armies that had no unbreakable grav tanks I was just being slaughtered.
so 4th had the best rules for me, because it DIDN'T have the things you're saying you liked. It allowed for a more enjoyable gaming experience if you weren't a space marine.
Something that insectum has pointed out a few times is that the 3rd ed difference between rapid fire and assault actually offset the 12" range of the catapult a bit, but GW kept chipping away at the differences so marines could do more while leaving assault less and less useful, especially when your mainline troop gun had a 12" range.
Having never played 4th, this feels pretty consistent with my experience with 5th. It was probably the edition that most felt like it was designed with marines in mind and eldar forgotten. Heavy flamers? Why those are a handy tool for killing horde armies like orks or swarms of gants. What do you mean they're wounding your elite army on 2s and ignoring their 4+ saves? Surely such an army doesn't exist!
Plus all the issues I've already rambled on about regarding parking lots and anti-tank availability on a previous page.
10th kind of has shades of a similar problem in my mind. The shrunken board, reduced mobility options (no turbo boost/flatout/jink/less move-shoot-move), and emphasis on standing in magic circles while you face tank incoming fire all feel like the sort of thing you design when you have power-armored gorillas and horde armies in mind, but it doesn't jive very well with an army that wants room to zoom around and typically prefers to hide from return fire rather than standing around in the open.
I only played a few games with the 5e codex, but I never understood why it was so hated. There were a lot of cool, flavorful options in that book. Tervigons pooping out babies and spores letting you run 'nids as a drop pod army and Trygons plopping down tunnels all gave 'nids some really cool ways to deploy their army along with still letting you do some of the classic gimmicks like outflanking stealers.
It *was* bad at killing vehicles at a distance, but was that not true of past 'nid books? And further, 5th edition was where they finally got some dedicated shooty tankbusters in the form of hiveguard. Now, I know that hiveguard being spammed in every list stank, as did the fact that spamming them ate up Elite slots and thus limited list variety. But surely that's more of a flaw of the army A.) not having shooty tank killers already and B.) the flaws of the force org chart, no? I'm probably missing something, but from what I recall, the 5th edition bug book basically just added more options rather than taking away or fundamentally changing units that existed. Was this the book that made venom cannons glancing only?
It took away upgrades. In particular it took away nid's access to T7 and 2+ saves (in an edition in which TLOS made shooting very dominant and made AP3 very damn common), it also took away Synapse's immunity to Instant Death (and latter introduced 5th ed Grey Knights, making that match up basically an instant loss). It also took away flesh hooks from most of our assault units, making them useless at assaulting into terrain. And neutered Implant attack and Genestealers (which were already neutered by 5th's changes to rending).
Spamming Tervigons with Hive Guard was basically the only way to play that codex competitively, and even that wasn't winning tournaments.
Out of curiosity which army/s did you play during that time?
dark angels, salamanders, sisters of battle, tyranids, tau, but i also had a pretty diverse player group that included lots of chaos, orks, eldar, and guard. in fact the guard player is still somebody i play with to this day.
Playing eldar was a chore trying to keep them alive while also needing to get into 12" range with their stupidly nerfed catapults.
2 of the regulars were eldar players one craftworld and one used the FW corsairs list. both were tough to fight, and surprisingly more often then not the "harder" army to fight (corsairs with loads of hornets, warp hunters, and the like) i often fought to a draw based mostly around playing the objectives.
This touches on one of the things that frustrates me about how the game has changed over the years. I've been playing since 5th, and it doesn't feel like the game has necessarily improved all that much over time; just changed. It feels like every couple editions, GW introduces a bunch of mechanics that actually work pretty well, but then they also yank out a bunch of stuff that was already working and replace it with something weird or add a new wonky problem
That was indeed an issue, change for the sake of change became more obnoxious over time. certain things worked really well. but then when they saw a problem they usually fixed it and threw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak and "fixed" something that was fine.
That is why when our group was deciding on what edition to base our games on, while we felt 5th was overall the best there were a few glaring things that needed to be addressed like the wound allocation shenanigans.
which were already neutered by 5th's changes to rending
In all honesty that was a good change. assault cannons went from worthless (3rd) to (4th) to just about right (5th). remember when they went to 4th they got an extra shot and rending against infantry was a 6+ on the roll to hit and against vehicles it was an additional d6 on the armor pen roll so you basically trashed the most powerfull vehicles in the game on a 3+.
It took away
You also forgot the horrible reworked instinctive behavior rules that made your big fearless bugs run off the table.
I rank it right up there with Jervis's 6th ed "you always assault vehicles on the rear armor (at worst on a 3+) because you deserve it" level of stupidity.
Wyldhunt wrote: I only played a few games with the 5e codex, but I never understood why it was so hated. There were a lot of cool, flavorful options in that book.
They didn't trade well. Units like fexes and stealers were priced as if that T6 3+ save and init 6 weren't frequently translating into 2+ to wound no save and init 1 assaulting into cover.
In 4e you could go cheap and vulnerable or expensive and protected, 5e lost that choice and stuck a lot of units in a worst of both worlds middle ground.
It *was* bad at killing vehicles at a distance, but was that not true of past 'nid books? And further, 5th edition was where they finally got some dedicated shooty tankbusters in the form of hiveguard.
Yes, but transports in 4e were flaming coffins of death, and quite expensive pre 4e chaos marines - 85pts for a chimera. Just not as popular or effective.
Aside from the eldar transports but they reduced all hits to glances so the glance-only nature of the venom cannon didn't matter, and they were multi-shot strength 10 weapons rather than the single blast S6 of 5th edition (the 5e tyrannofex effectively replaced the old venom cannon fex but cost more than two vindicators or a whole squad of broadsides...)
Hive guard were good against transports and tough enough not to get wiped out in return by the survivors small arms. Unfortunately they were somewhat ultra-specialised lacking the strength or range to go after the big tanks and artillery, lacking the AP to deal with elite targets and monstrous creatures. And at the end of the day they were a 150pt squad shooting at a 35pt rhino that was already half way up the board.
They weren't unplayable and they didn't need the big lists of upgrades that 4e had to be good, but they did need (and didn't have) options to adapt units to the changing meta.
And frankly books like the space wolves with their mass discounted missile launchers and 'delete tyranid MC' psychic powers didn't help.
Cheers for the responses regarding tyranids, folks.
I think I just didn't get enough games in with the 4th edition book to be tuned-in to the things we lost with the 5th edition book. I just saw all the shiny new options.
The addition of running and boosting of rapid fire also removed any advantage those 12" catapults had being assault weapons, or the eldar had being a fleet of foot force.
Ah, rapid fire. In 2nd ed., it was a special rule for all Space Marines, loyal and traitor. It posited that Marines train with bolters a lot. All the time, really.
What this meant was that Marines using bolt pistols, bolters or storm bolters who did not move, got to shoot twice (or in the case of storm bolters, roll a second sustained fire die).
This was very fluffy and very cool. Marine players had to put great care into positioning their forces to maximize fire lanes, because friendly models blocked LOS, and the platonic ideal was having every approach covered. Bolters were a bit more effective because of save modifiers (-1, which neutralized flak armor), but rapid fire meant that Marines in position could put down killer amounts of fire. All the cover art showing them just mulching stuff around them came to life on many a tabletop.
And because bolt pistols were also standard equipment for all Marines - and +2 to hit at short range - one got the precursor of the "pistol is faster than reloading" by having troops switch to bolt pistols and just tear things up when the bugs got too close.
I was very upset when it became just another general weapons rule, and actually called GW to complain to the Rulz Boyz (it was a thing back then).
In the end, broken, dispirited, I quit. Traded my beautiful WW I-inspired khaki Praetorians (with six metal Sentiels, no less and a custom Vanquisher with t-shaped muzzle break) for a reinforced platoon WW II Germans and called it a day. I kept my beloved Marines because I could not bear to part with Third Company (a whole codex company!) and its dreadnoughts, old school Razorbacks, and Rhinos. The Chaos Marines I just sold off. I just couldn't afford the new books and the magic was gone.
Then, a few years later, my nephew asked about all these neat models and when I explained what happened he said: "You know, you could just go back to the old rules."
Favorite 40k edition is 7.5, more commonly known as Age of Darkness 1st edition.
It took 7th edition, removed formation nonsense and the invisibility psychic power, and kept the armies in the system playing with a much improved FOC system, Mission set and flavorful rites of war.
It has a few problems still like D weapons, wound allocation and pie plate spam, but otherwise it's an improvement on 7th.
The fact that nobody realizes they can just pick up the red book and play a better 7th edition utterly baffles me. literally all the rules good rules for 7th is right there, and everybody I talk to goes "You're using 7th codexes with HH1? thats strange! That's only for legion lists"
My brothers in the Omnissiah, it's the improved version of the same rules.
Tiger9gamer wrote: Favorite 40k edition is 7.5, more commonly known as Age of Darkness 1st edition.
It took 7th edition, removed formation nonsense and the invisibility psychic power, and kept the armies in the system playing with a much improved FOC system, Mission set and flavorful rites of war.
It has a few problems still like D weapons, wound allocation and pie plate spam, but otherwise it's an improvement on 7th.
The fact that nobody realizes they can just pick up the red book and play a better 7th edition utterly baffles me. literally all the rules good rules for 7th is right there, and everybody I talk to goes "You're using 7th codexes with HH1? thats strange! That's only for legion lists"
My brothers in the Omnissiah, it's the improved version of the same rules.
You can pick up any book and play something better than 7th. 7th sucked.
Age of Darkness 1E was the best available version of the rules but to get there without breaking down entirely, they had to limit you to 1 army. (you do get to paint their armor different colors though!).
You could technically bring Xenos or Real Chaos, but that meant either significantly reworking even the base codexes or babysitting the Horus Heresy armies. Craftworld Eldar and Chaos Daemons books were obscenely strong even with 0 Invis and 0 formations.
Tiger9gamer wrote: Favorite 40k edition is 7.5, more commonly known as Age of Darkness 1st edition.
It took 7th edition, removed formation nonsense and the invisibility psychic power, and kept the armies in the system playing with a much improved FOC system, Mission set and flavorful rites of war.
It has a few problems still like D weapons, wound allocation and pie plate spam, but otherwise it's an improvement on 7th.
The fact that nobody realizes they can just pick up the red book and play a better 7th edition utterly baffles me. literally all the rules good rules for 7th is right there, and everybody I talk to goes "You're using 7th codexes with HH1? thats strange! That's only for legion lists"
My brothers in the Omnissiah, it's the improved version of the same rules.
You can pick up any book and play something better than 7th. 7th sucked.
Age of Darkness 1E was the best available version of the rules but to get there without breaking down entirely, they had to limit you to 1 army. (you do get to paint their armor different colors though!).
You could technically bring Xenos or Real Chaos, but that meant either significantly reworking even the base codexes or babysitting the Horus Heresy armies. Craftworld Eldar and Chaos Daemons books were obscenely strong even with 0 Invis and 0 formations.
nah man, best edition imo. Those problems were with the codexes, not the edition. it's like blaming the base 3rd edition rules cause of Chaos space marines were a bit strong. .
Nah, sorry but I'm in the camp of 7th was borked to the core, too.
From hull points to wound allocation to Monster rules to psychic system it just made some problems I had with the 3-7th framework even worse. (6th was even worse though, as 7th basically was a small patch to 6th). I agree that HH 1 (or maybe even 2?) was the best you could make out of that system and they even used the rules bloat to create something nice, but some problems like the vehicle/Monster split just couldn't be overcome, which showed at Mechanicum (or Tau) just turning their walkers into monsters et voila - immediately they became OP.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Nah, sorry but I'm in the camp of 7th was borked to the core, too.
From hull points to wound allocation to Monster rules to psychic system it just made some problems I had with the 3-7th framework even worse. (6th was even worse though, as 7th basically was a small patch to 6th). I agree that HH 1 (or maybe even 2?) was the best you could make out of that system and they even used the rules bloat to create something nice, but some problems like the vehicle/Monster split just couldn't be overcome, which showed at Mechanicum (or Tau) just turning their walkers into monsters et voila - immediately they became OP.
okay, I will give you those yea, but honestly, I still preffer HH1 to 5th or 4th. The gameplay itself feels better to me baring a few flaws, and army building is my absolute favorite for this edition.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Nah, sorry but I'm in the camp of 7th was borked to the core, too.
From hull points to wound allocation to Monster rules to psychic system it just made some problems I had with the 3-7th framework even worse. (6th was even worse though, as 7th basically was a small patch to 6th). I agree that HH 1 (or maybe even 2?) was the best you could make out of that system and they even used the rules bloat to create something nice, but some problems like the vehicle/Monster split just couldn't be overcome, which showed at Mechanicum (or Tau) just turning their walkers into monsters et voila - immediately they became OP.
okay, I will give you those yea, but honestly, I still preffer HH1 to 5th or 4th. The gameplay itself feels better to me baring a few flaws, and army building is my absolute favorite for this edition.
HH is written for armies that are all T4 3+ save, in no way does it help anyone else play the game.
HH is written for armies that are all T4 3+ save, in no way does it help anyone else play the game.
See my previous example; bring up that HH1 is just 7th edition with some quality of life updates, they reply like this.
The Legions and red army books are balanced around marines, yes, but the core rules (what I like the most) is just 7th ed. you can play a 7th ed codex vs a 7th ed codex with no hiccups outside of the lack of formations.
That implies that anything that wasn't a space marine could play effectively in that game...
Just because eldar could take broken wraithknights didn't make the army effective. Trying playing anything with T3 and 5+sv and tell me that those models were effective at all.
The latter 6th and 7th editions required that a faction only play the most broken combo because everything else was useless. That's not a good system.
Hellebore wrote: That implies that anything that wasn't a space marine could play effectively in that game...
Just because eldar could take broken wraithknights didn't make the army effective. Trying playing anything with T3 and 5+sv and tell me that those models were effective at all.
The latter 6th and 7th editions required that a faction only play the most broken combo because everything else was useless. That's not a good system.
The core system is pretty similar 3rd-7th. There are tweaks (largely with Vehicles) but the bones are the same.
I will 100% agree there were Codex issues aplenty-but that's different from the core rules.
Except that the codex issues are due to the flaws of the core system. You just can't balance AP rules effectively, so they make codexes that work around that to give at least something that's effective in a codex.
I challenge anyone to make an army that relies on T3 Sv5+ models to play using the AP system without having to create all sorts of crutch units or upgrades to support it.
Guard never actually used their troops, guardians were useless.
The codexes were responding to the limitations of the core rules, so only units that were able to ignore core issues like the AP system were effective in their own right.
A guardian weapon platform shouldn't be the only effective model in a squad of 20 guardians.
Hellebore wrote: Except that the codex issues are due to the flaws of the core system. You just can't balance AP rules effectively, so they make codexes that work around that to give at least something that's effective in a codex.
I challenge anyone to make an army that relies on T3 Sv5+ models to play using the AP system without having to create all sorts of crutch units or upgrades to support it.
Guard never actually used their troops, guardians were useless.
The codexes were responding to the limitations of the core rules, so only units that were able to ignore core issues like the AP system were effective in their own right.
A guardian weapon platform shouldn't be the only effective model in a squad of 20 guardians.
Yes, back in 7th it took 18 shots from basic Infantry to kill a single Marine. As compared to today, where it takes... *Checks notes* 36 shots.
So much better and more impactful.
But basic MEQ weren't super great either-let's take some Terminators! In the past, it took 36 shots from a basic Infantry with a Lasgun to kill a Terminator. Today, it only takes... 108. Hm, that feels weird.
Well, Guardians! It took a whole 6 shots to kill a Marine out of cover. If they had a 5+ cover save, it'd increase to 7, and with a 4+, to 8.
But today, it only takes 12 shots to kill a Marine out of cover! And with cover, that increases to 18.
Okay, Terminators vs. Guardians. It used to take 9 shots to kill a Terminator. If they had 4+ Cover, it took 11 shots. And if they had a Storm Shield, hoo boy! It took 14!
But today, it only takes 41 shots to kill a Terminator! Give them cover, and it's 81. Give them a Storm Shield and no Cover, 54 shots. And with a Storm Shield AND Cover, 108 shots.
No my issue is the intrinsic issue with the AP and its inability to be balanced effectively.
The current modifier mechanic IS more easily balanced, but GW have bloated wounds on models which has reduced the effectiveness.
there is no changes you can make to a game that uses AP to balance it, without changing the AP system entirely. But you can just stop adding extra wounds to things in the current game and not give every weapon a save modifier.
It's the binary of AP that makes it impossible to balance, even if you stripped it off every model. It either becomes useless or too effective. At least modifiers can tweak to sit between the extremes, because they are themselves graduated rather than binary.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Nah, sorry but I'm in the camp of 7th was borked to the core, too.
From hull points to wound allocation to Monster rules to psychic system it just made some problems I had with the 3-7th framework even worse. (6th was even worse though, as 7th basically was a small patch to 6th). I agree that HH 1 (or maybe even 2?) was the best you could make out of that system and they even used the rules bloat to create something nice, but some problems like the vehicle/Monster split just couldn't be overcome, which showed at Mechanicum (or Tau) just turning their walkers into monsters et voila - immediately they became OP.
okay, I will give you those yea, but honestly, I still preffer HH1 to 5th or 4th. The gameplay itself feels better to me baring a few flaws, and army building is my absolute favorite for this edition.
7th might be the pre-8th-overhaul edition that I wear the thickest rose tinted glasses for. I think there was plenty that worked about 7th, and if you took the time to tailor your lists to your opponents' with the goal of having a good game, you could have a really solid game. I also think it's the last edition to feel more like "real 40k, " and I suspect the gamey vibe of stratagems are a big part of that.
But while I think most of the problems with 7th are found on the codex level (formations, internal and external balance issues, etc.), the core rules are still probably less than ideal. And that's even setting aside a bunch of the ambiguous wording issues that caused debates in my group like what it means to "throw" grenades.
The psychic system was doing that gimmicky psychic battery, random power, poorly balanced powers thing. A lot of the rules that got dropped in 8th were kind of just rolling for the sake of rolling. Random game length was zany. Etc. (I actually liked hull points though.)
For me personally, I think it's less that 7th was *good* and more that it was the last edition to feel "familiar." 8th overhauled a lot of stuff. And while many of those changes were good ones, it did sort of change the vibe of the game. And then stratagems on top of that kind of started the "e-sports" vibe that people talk about today.
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Well, Guardians! It took a whole 6 shots to kill a Marine out of cover. If they had a 5+ cover save, it'd increase to 7, and with a 4+, to 8.
But today, it only takes 12 shots to kill a Marine out of cover! And with cover, that increases to 18.
Tbf, I still like the general move of marines to having W2 with the new AP system. It feels better to me to kill half a marine with my shurikens AP-1 generally being factored in (unless the marine stook the time to grab cover.) And the second wound on marines makes each marine death feel "earned" whereas it always felt frustrating to lose a marine to a single lucky laspistol shot back in the day.
I enjoy the general sense that defensive and offensive stats are both part of the conversation. I feel like the mistake on GW's part was upping the lethality of every army in the game to compensate in 9th rather than just upping the cost of marines and letting them be both expensive and durable.
JNAProductions wrote: The core system is pretty similar 3rd-7th. There are tweaks (largely with Vehicles) but the bones are the same.
I will 100% agree there were Codex issues aplenty-but that's different from the core rules.
thank you.
Hellebore wrote: That implies that anything that wasn't a space marine could play effectively in that game...
Just because eldar could take broken wraithknights didn't make the army effective. Trying playing anything with T3 and 5+sv and tell me that those models were effective at all.
The latter 6th and 7th editions required that a faction only play the most broken combo because everything else was useless. That's not a good system.
Again, this is a codex problem, and part of the reason why people at the time gravitated to HH1, and played HH1 for 10 years until HH2 came out. When HH1 fully split off into it's own system of 7th ed+, they removed the largest cause of codex imbalance at the time; formations.
I have played against plenty of opponents back then that made guard work, and if you tell me eldar had weak toughness cause they largely didnt get saves outside of wraiths i'm going to fully think you're trolling.
7th might be the pre-8th-overhaul edition that I wear the thickest rose tinted glasses for. I think there was plenty that worked about 7th, and if you took the time to tailor your lists to your opponents' with the goal of having a good game, you could have a really solid game. I also think it's the last edition to feel more like "real 40k, " and I suspect the gamey vibe of stratagems are a big part of that.
But while I think most of the problems with 7th are found on the codex level (formations, internal and external balance issues, etc.), the core rules are still probably less than ideal. And that's even setting aside a bunch of the ambiguous wording issues that caused debates in my group like what it means to "throw" grenades.
The psychic system was doing that gimmicky psychic battery, random power, poorly balanced powers thing. A lot of the rules that got dropped in 8th were kind of just rolling for the sake of rolling. Random game length was zany. Etc. (I actually liked hull points though.)
For me personally, I think it's less that 7th was *good* and more that it was the last edition to feel "familiar." 8th overhauled a lot of stuff. And while many of those changes were good ones, it did sort of change the vibe of the game. And then stratagems on top of that kind of started the "e-sports" vibe that people talk about today.
I admit, those are some good problems. Still disagree on the last parts about 7th not being good, but I can fully admit that a lot of the stuff like random powers / warlord traits, random game length, night fighting happening every game ect is stuff that can be dropped or changed if they stuck with the framework.
still, it's my preffered and favorite. Hell this thread is making me want to write a fan FAQ to help this...
Sure. Like I said on the previous page, I feel like one of my dream versions of 40k would basically steal a lot of the better ideas from various editions and just address the problems with the base edition rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
That's part of why the 3-year cycle has been a little frustrating. It feels like they keep sabotaging efforts to make the game significantly better on the whole by throwing out their refinements and injecting new problems every other edition.
6th had issues. 7th had issues but fixed a lot of stuff that was wrong with 6th. But then also cranked things up to 11 and broke things again.
8th was an overhaul that wiped the slate clean. It had its own issues, but 9th improved on a lot of those. But then also cranked up things to 11 and broke things again.
And then 10th wiped the slate clean. It has its own issues, but 11th will (if the pattern holds) fix some of those problems but then also crank things up to 11 and make us all beg for 12th edition to wipe the slate clean. And they'll throw out a lot of what worked, and they'll introduce new problems, and those problems will get partially addressed in 13th before it all gets thrown out in 14th.
JNAProductions wrote: The core system is pretty similar 3rd-7th. There are tweaks (largely with Vehicles) but the bones are the same.
I will 100% agree there were Codex issues aplenty-but that's different from the core rules.
thank you.
Hellebore wrote: That implies that anything that wasn't a space marine could play effectively in that game...
Just because eldar could take broken wraithknights didn't make the army effective. Trying playing anything with T3 and 5+sv and tell me that those models were effective at all.
The latter 6th and 7th editions required that a faction only play the most broken combo because everything else was useless. That's not a good system.
Again, this is a codex problem, and part of the reason why people at the time gravitated to HH1, and played HH1 for 10 years until HH2 came out. When HH1 fully split off into it's own system of 7th ed+, they removed the largest cause of codex imbalance at the time; formations.
I have played against plenty of opponents back then that made guard work, and if you tell me eldar had weak toughness cause they largely didnt get saves outside of wraiths i'm going to fully think you're trolling.
.
Again, it's not a codex problem it's a core rules problem that required broken codex solutions to work around them. Like the core 'instant death' rule - the only way around that was to create eternal warrior exceptions that negated the value of that core mechanic. If you're having to create work arounds of the core mechanic, it's that rule that needs changing. The codexes will then fall back into line when they don't have to work against such restrictions.
As for eldar 'toughness', you will not find a single instance of that coming from their native T3 Sv5+ profile, all sorts of various vehicle or psychic shennigans are required to give them that.
So again, until the AP system allows a T3 5+ save model to actually function without all sorts of work arounds, it's a broken system. A t4 3+sv model can function in the game without needing any work arounds. All models should be able to do that. a 5+ save is already a liability, it doesn't need to be ignored by 95% of the weapons in the game for that liability to work.
Again, it's not a codex problem it's a core rules problem that required broken codex solutions to work around them. Like the core 'instant death' rule - the only way around that was to create eternal warrior exceptions that negated the value of that core mechanic. If you're having to create work arounds of the core mechanic, it's that rule that needs changing. The codexes will then fall back into line when they don't have to work against such restrictions.
Alright, so change two of the biggest rules when it comes to wounding models, AP and Doubling out toughness and then you would think it would fix 3rd-7th. Like what 8th-10th did.
nah, those two rules don't need changing at all for 3rd-7th man. It honestly just sounds like these editions are just not your cup of tea. That's fine, but I fail to see how these games would remain what people liked.
For the record, the way around the AP system when in the shooting phase is to use cover to get more saves and LOS blocking terrain, use transports or to try and avoid weapons that ignored cover. Target priority also allowed you to avoid such weapons that make that even harder like targeting flamers for elimination. Its easier said than done, but it requires skill and tactics to do so, and several armies were able to do that besides marines.
Instant death scenarios are countered by having mooks to put wounds on to in the same squad as your heroes. for multi-wound squads, high strength weapons were a counter that you had to avoid, or eliminate through target priority. It's as much as a reward for the opponent being able to bring weapons to bear against high value, multi-wound targets, and caused a threat that was a counter to your models so they wouldn't be a damage sponge compared to the majority 1 wound armies on the table.
So again, until the AP system allows a T3 5+ save model to actually function without all sorts of work arounds, it's a broken system. A t4 3+sv model can function in the game without needing any work arounds. All models should be able to do that. a 5+ save is already a liability, it doesn't need to be ignored by 95% of the weapons in the game for that liability to work.
Alright, so you really want a game where an eldar guardian is as survivable as a space marine all the time, without any penalty? like, every model thats T3 with a 5+ save, no matter how many of them there are?
So again, until the AP system allows a T3 5+ save model to actually function without all sorts of work arounds, it's a broken system. A t4 3+sv model can function in the game without needing any work arounds. All models should be able to do that. a 5+ save is already a liability, it doesn't need to be ignored by 95% of the weapons in the game for that liability to work.
Alright, so you really want a game where an eldar guardian is as survivable as a space marine all the time, without any penalty? like, every model thats T3 with a 5+ save, no matter how many of them there are?
That's not what Hellebore said at all, but I do feel like you're both being a bit hyperbolic.
Realistically, you were usually either putting your guardians in cover for a cover save in pre-8th editions, or else you were having a warlock Conceal them. Their durability was pretty crummy even with cover (against non-flamer shooting), but durability also wasn't the reason guardians were bad. You could have made their minimum squad size 5 and let them take a heavy weapon platform at that size and they'd have been fine.
But all that said, being T3 with a 5+ save was brutal in the old AP system. If basic rifles for most armies were Ap6 or AP- it would have been *okay* (not great, but okay), but having a 5+ save basically meant you didn't have a save at all in an edition where most armies' basic guns are AP5. So when you're essentially as squishy as a guardsman but not priced like one, you definitely feel it.
That said, guardians were kind of an outlier. Most eldar non-vehicles were Sv4+ or Sv3+. It still sucked to watch a heavy flamer wound your "elite" infantry on 2s and ignore their saves entirely, but at least you had a little protection against bolters. Still sucked though. I much prefer the current AP system where it feels like both my own armor stat and my opponent's AP stat are factoring into the conversation rather than one being completely negated by the other.
So again, until the AP system allows a T3 5+ save model to actually function without all sorts of work arounds, it's a broken system. A t4 3+sv model can function in the game without needing any work arounds. All models should be able to do that. a 5+ save is already a liability, it doesn't need to be ignored by 95% of the weapons in the game for that liability to work.
Alright, so you really want a game where an eldar guardian is as survivable as a space marine all the time, without any penalty? like, every model thats T3 with a 5+ save, no matter how many of them there are?
That's not what Hellebore said at all, but I do feel like you're both being a bit hyperbolic.
Realistically, you were usually either putting your guardians in cover for a cover save in pre-8th editions, or else you were having a warlock Conceal them. Their durability was pretty crummy even with cover (against non-flamer shooting), but durability also wasn't the reason guardians were bad. You could have made their minimum squad size 5 and let them take a heavy weapon platform at that size and they'd have been fine.
But all that said, being T3 with a 5+ save was brutal in the old AP system. If basic rifles for most armies were Ap6 or AP- it would have been *okay* (not great, but okay), but having a 5+ save basically meant you didn't have a save at all in an edition where most armies' basic guns are AP5. So when you're essentially as squishy as a guardsman but not priced like one, you definitely feel it.
That said, guardians were kind of an outlier. Most eldar non-vehicles were Sv4+ or Sv3+. It still sucked to watch a heavy flamer wound your "elite" infantry on 2s and ignore their saves entirely, but at least you had a little protection against bolters. Still sucked though. I much prefer the current AP system where it feels like both my own armor stat and my opponent's AP stat are factoring into the conversation rather than one being completely negated by the other.
I was just legitimately confused, and needed to clarify tbh, but I get your point
And fair enough I suppose. I personally (if it wasn’t obvious) am a midhammer AP enjoyer, and I take the good with the bad. I lost enough skitarii to feel that pain.
And to each their own in terms of enjoyment, I just personally don’t like the subtractive AP cause it feels like the base save never matters. Every gun seems to be at least -1 to armor saves in the games I played with it
Remember they don't actually "die" to the las pistol, they are just temporarily combat ineffective/wounded for that battle. getting smoked by a battle cannon shell or a las cannon.....well good chance they are dead from that one.
The AP system from 3-7th is probably the main reason I wouldn't want to go back to those rules, right next to the Close combat Resolution which just lacked any player interaction at all. Units got stuck in CC and compared tables for a couple of rounds until one side was dead and it took them until 7th edition to at least make up the "our guns are useless"-rule for anyone who couldn't punch up tanks with their bare fists (so anyone S3, funnily enough for everyone who likes to argue about guardsmen being able to hurt tanks in 8th+).
5+ and 6+ saves only ever came up in Close combat and even then they still were useless because of the number of attacks or the pretty rough wounding table.
Initiative meant that you had to put no less than 29 boyz around your nob and hope for him to be the lonely Survivor because of I2 so he gets a chance to swing his klaw.
I'm not convinced the main flaw of these editions lay in the Codizes. Balance, yes, but that could have been fixed with the update system we have since 8th.
But I'm looking at my CSM Codex from 3.5 or 4th edition Ork codex, or even the library of stuff I had to bring to pull CSM in 7th on a playable Level (Codex+ Crimson Slaughter Expansion + Helbrute Dataslate+ Traitor's Hate ) and there was a lot of fun stuff in there that didn't really translate to the table because of the deep flaws of the basic rules - IGOUGO, CC, AP system, from 6th on also totally useless tank rules etc.
With 10th it's the other way around - very solid base rules but the Codizes aren't as much fun, too much is tied to stratagems, the missions are shallow, the unit special rules are repetitive and mostly "kill betterer".
Sgt. Cortez wrote: The AP system from 3-7th is probably the main reason I wouldn't want to go back to those rules, right next to the Close combat Resolution which just lacked any player interaction at all.
Yes. As noted, AP is inherently unbalanced because it is all or nothing. Cover was also neutered, being ineffective 2/3 of the time and of course it didn't stack with armor.
The stated intent was to move combat out into the open, and make assaults more common, and in this the system was wildly successful.
However, I think it was another case of "careful what you wish for."
Yes. As noted, AP is inherently unbalanced because it is all or nothing.
Abstract representation of warfare.....
As it should be. hell in some games i play you don't get a save because there is no such thing as body armor, you get hit, you get panicked, your fine or your dead.
Cover was also neutered, being ineffective 2/3 of the time and of course it didn't stack with armor.
In our games it would only be neutered if you didn't put any on the table, we consistently use LOS blocking terrain and the majority of cover (hills, ruins wrecks, rocks etc..) tends to be 4+, with a smattering of trees(5+) or fortifications (3+).
Hard cover is a thing unless you are facing flamers and marker lights or those occasional weapons that can ignore it. but most of those have very poor AP. mostly designed to kill orks/guardsman
That's a funny argument in a game in which Space Marines are a thing, who with the combination of 3+ armor and ATSKNF they get hit, don't panic and most of the time are fine (well at least until AP2-3 pie plates started becoming standard).
I wonder if the AP system would have worked better if Marines were 4+ armor and the game was designed around that.
So again, until the AP system allows a T3 5+ save model to actually function without all sorts of work arounds, it's a broken system. A t4 3+sv model can function in the game without needing any work arounds. All models should be able to do that. a 5+ save is already a liability, it doesn't need to be ignored by 95% of the weapons in the game for that liability to work.
Alright, so you really want a game where an eldar guardian is as survivable as a space marine all the time, without any penalty? like, every model thats T3 with a 5+ save, no matter how many of them there are?
That's not what Hellebore said at all, but I do feel like you're both being a bit hyperbolic.
Realistically, you were usually either putting your guardians in cover for a cover save in pre-8th editions, or else you were having a warlock Conceal them. Their durability was pretty crummy even with cover (against non-flamer shooting), but durability also wasn't the reason guardians were bad. You could have made their minimum squad size 5 and let them take a heavy weapon platform at that size and they'd have been fine.
But all that said, being T3 with a 5+ save was brutal in the old AP system. If basic rifles for most armies were Ap6 or AP- it would have been *okay* (not great, but okay), but having a 5+ save basically meant you didn't have a save at all in an edition where most armies' basic guns are AP5. So when you're essentially as squishy as a guardsman but not priced like one, you definitely feel it.
That said, guardians were kind of an outlier. Most eldar non-vehicles were Sv4+ or Sv3+. It still sucked to watch a heavy flamer wound your "elite" infantry on 2s and ignore their saves entirely, but at least you had a little protection against bolters. Still sucked though. I much prefer the current AP system where it feels like both my own armor stat and my opponent's AP stat are factoring into the conversation rather than one being completely negated by the other.
Unfortunately it was the one two combo of bolters and heavy bolters that was the problem. Only 3+ saves available, removing any model that's not a marine on a 2+ or a 3+ if an ork with heavy bolters.
I would argue I'm not being hyperbolic - the game required a lot of additional rules or exceptions to enable a unit with the T3 5+sv profile to function at all. About the only game method that had success was making them so cheap you couldn't kill enough of them. That was the only way guardsmen could work. And then it was just easier to not deploy normal guardsmen if you could avoid it.
Most of the 'effective' army lists for non marine armies revolved around avoiding those units. The windriders were effective when they were rereleased because they were T4 3+sv and carried longer range weapons. Storm troopers were used in preference of normal guard, or everyone took the 4+ save doctrine to avoid having useless units.
And it was trivially easy for virtually all armies to get a heavy bolter profile in large quantities, which removed your 4+saves as well.
The game was objectively slanted towards preserving 3+ saves over any other. And when 3+ saves are also the most popular army, it skews the game massively. So people then start not only trying to avoid their core units because the game is built against them, but also trying to find any way they can to stack specifically anti marine weapons.
And so marines started to feel a small portion of what every other army felt every game - encountering an enemy that just removes you when they wound you. But no one could optimise their weapons against marines the same way ANY army could optimise against anything NOT marine. It was a wholly unbalanced ecosystem.
Yes marines are the flagship army and GW sells to that point but as players in the 3rd-7th ed era there is a reason why the term MEQ was a thing. no matter what army you played you always were prepared to fight against marine equivalent armies rather they were actually marines or some other force like sisters that had a 3+ save.
The fact a host of armies in the game only had majority access to a 4+ or 5+ save didn't make them any less capable. remember i still play guard and tyranids and a large selection of my admech are all in the same area.
Additionally a decent counter to not having access to large amounts of AP3 was simple volume of fire/attacks, I've lost more terminators to las guns than i have to any volume of AP1/2 weapons fire.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: The AP system from 3-7th is probably the main reason I wouldn't want to go back to those rules, right next to the Close combat Resolution which just lacked any player interaction at all. Units got stuck in CC and compared tables for a couple of rounds until one side was dead and it took them until 7th edition to at least make up the "our guns are useless"-rule for anyone who couldn't punch up tanks with their bare fists (so anyone S3, funnily enough for everyone who likes to argue about guardsmen being able to hurt tanks in 8th+).
There was a "voluntary fall back" optional rule in 3rd edition, if combat looked like you were going to have zero chance to win or no reasonable chance to win, you could choose to automatically fall back. Like having a squad with no S6 or higher stuck in combat against an av12 dreadnought.
Yes. As noted, AP is inherently unbalanced because it is all or nothing.
Abstract representation of warfare.....
As it should be. hell in some games i play you don't get a save because there is no such thing as body armor, you get hit, you get panicked, your fine or your dead.
It's a poor representation because it is difficult to quantify "all or nothing" in a point-based system. If you move in increments, it becomes easier because you can match modifiers with saves and determine the true worth. But with AP, that's very difficult to do.
This is a very old discussion, and goes back to how you weight a S4 AP3 weapon. Against 90% of troop types, it confers no advantage over a boltgun, but the game skews into 3+ save troops, so you have to make it pricey even though it really isn't all that capable most of the time.
One also runs into the problem that GW began adding absurd amounts of dice to overcome it, and people could (and did) keep running tallies of exactly how many shots with various weapons you need to punch through it, which makes for a pretty silly and time-consuming game experience.
But it was great for Chessex, who made bank selling every new player a block of 36 dice. Ork Speed Freeks needed two of them.
This is a very old discussion, and goes back to how you weight a S4 AP3 weapon. Against 90% of troop types, it confers no advantage over a boltgun, but the game skews into 3+ save troops, so you have to make it pricey even though it really isn't all that capable most of the time.
That's true for any niche weapon/equipment though, and should be fine for any wargame looking to involve a bit of charachter/flavor.
slade the sniper wrote: I'm pretty sure this has been before, but what is your preferred version of 40k and related games? You don't have to justify your answers at all...
My preferred version of 40k is 7th.. it had the widest variety of options for psykers, vehicles and troop selection.
My preferred skirmish game is... Shadow War Armageddon.
-STS
It hasn't been released yet. I'd like to pick and pull stuff from multiple editions and create the new mashup ultimate edition. Give me psychology from 2nd edition. Probably psychics from 2nd Edition's Dark Millenium set. Maybe bring back Armor Value, but more likely Double down on the S/T changes so the tanks are like T20, and the Lascannon is S20 but hits infantry etc on a 6+ Or worse if they bring back rolling more than a 6 so that Heavy Bolt Rifles have to roll a 6, another 6, another 6 and yet another 6 before they roll their final 6 in a row to wound the T20 tanks. and then bring back initiative, and the make the roll to hit in shooting as oppositional vs Initiative like WS vs WS used to be. Instead of giving everybody and their sister an invuln, now you've got BS 4 Marines needing a 6 to hit the I8 Harlequinn Jester. There are at least three rolls in every attack. Use them all to create variety in the strengths and weaknesses.
This is a very old discussion, and goes back to how you weight a S4 AP3 weapon. Against 90% of troop types, it confers no advantage over a boltgun, but the game skews into 3+ save troops, so you have to make it pricey even though it really isn't all that capable most of the time.
I would say an even "better" discussion is how you price an AP4 weapon? If they are pricey then they end being crap most of the time. If they are cheap then they end being overpowered against everyone that isn't a Space Marine.
And thus a similar issue is how you price a 4+ armour save?
It is that middle of the road value that IMHO really shows all the issues with the AP system within the context of 40k.
I would say an even "better" discussion is how you price an AP4 weapon? If they are pricey then they end being crap most of the time. If they are cheap then they end being overpowered against everyone that isn't a Space Marine.
And thus a similar issue is how you price a 4+ armour save?
It is that middle of the road value that IMHO really shows all the issues with the AP system within the context of 40k.
It is a topic that raged for years, and I recall lots of math showing how difficult it was to quantify because of the skew within the system.
Your example is a good one. Another that used to come up, was how save modifiers actually leveled the playing field, avoiding this skew. The ubiquitous heavy bolter was S5 and -2 save mod, meaning even power armor was vulnerable. Now it was still better than the poor slobs wearing flak or mesh armor, because a 5+ save is better than nothing. Indeed, just the other night I hit three marines with a heavy bolter and all three made their saves.
What AP did was make everything niche, without any real "all comers" options. That put even more emphasis on listhammer, and gameplay suffered as a result. I don't know how many times I heard "well, try that in a tournament" being used as a defense, as if some possible future loss made up for the lop-sided contest here and now.
Because of that problem I saw the first heavy bolters in 8th edition when they could actually kill stuff.
Before that? Autocannon was probably one of the few all comers weapons (and always better than a heavy bolter), it could hurt anything and was reasonably cheap and its weak AP4 wasn't that much of a problem because at least you hit infantry on a 2+ and could even threaten vehicles. Similar to the ubiquitous plasma gun that only fell out of favour in 7th because loyalists got the grav gun that was even more all comers (or, well, the things it wasn't good against were the only things your bolters were good against).
What AP did was make everything niche, without any real "all comers" options. That put even more emphasis on listhammer, and gameplay suffered as a result.
Or to say it another way, AP created greater degrees of differentiation between weapons and models, providing more variety and more sophisticated cost-benefit shot choice analysis using a single D6.
Also as noted there were still "all comers" weapons in high strength, high AP weapons. Starcannons, the upgraded Assault Cannons of 4th, Ordinance weapons, Plasma, etc.
Both systems have their merits. Both have their faults. Imo compared to AP the save mod system feels "mushy", especially in the current implementation. The more weapons are capable against everything the less difficult the choices become, and the less important maneuvering is.
What AP did was make everything niche, without any real "all comers" options. That put even more emphasis on listhammer, and gameplay suffered as a result.
Or to say it another way, AP created greater degrees of differentiation between weapons and models,
Which bring us to what IMHO actually breaks the AP system: the way 40k uses armour (and to lesser degree AP) as faction identifiers.
The AP system could be a good strong system if access to armor and AP was truly diverse instead of Space Marines being the most common faction of mostly 3+ and 2+ saves. If the common "Space Marine" army list was a diverse mix of guardsmen, stormtroopers and/or Skitarri supported by a true but small core of Space Marine elites then the AP system would work amazingly.
But we don't have that and it is highly debatable we could ever have that.
Insectum7 wrote: Both systems have their merits. Both have their faults. Imo compared to AP the save mod system feels "mushy", especially in the current implementation. The more weapons are capable against everything the less difficult the choices become, and the less important maneuvering is.
I guess I just prefer the "mush" over the listhammer approach. Having my opponent end up at -1 to their saves because I brought an AP-2 gun and shot at a unit in cover makes it feel like the points I spent on AP, the points my opponent spent on a good Sv, and the maneuvering decision my opponent made by putting their unit in cover are all factoring into the end result of how many models get removed by my attacks.
Whereas the old AP system was like, "You paid points for an AP4 weapon? That either does nothing at all or else auto-removes models on a 2+ depending on whether you're facing marines or not-marines in today's pickup game."
I can sort of see the appeal of having strong divisions between "classes" of weapons on paper, but I'm just not sure that approach really works out in the context of pickup games where you don't know what you'll be facing when you put your list together.
As for weapons that are "capable against everything," I feel like this falls into two camps:
A.) Weapons that are meant to be generalist and are less efficient than a specialized option but always decent. This is basically working as intended. You're probably incentivized to mix in a few meltas or lascannons to go with those plasma shots or a few anti-horde weapons just in case you run into a list with some tough nuts that you want to crack efficiently/quickly.
B.) Stuff that is not only a generalist option but also *so good* against *everything* that it kind of invalidates the more specialist options. In which case, the generalist option is overtuned compared to the specialist options and something ought to be changed.
So A is what we want to see and B is a problem that can be identified and tweaked with stat changes. Or (in a world where wargear costs points) price changes.
Wyldhunt wrote: Whereas the old AP system was like, "You paid points for an AP4 weapon? That either does nothing at all or else auto-removes models on a 2+ depending on whether you're facing marines or not-marines in today's pickup game."
It worked a bit better when those AP4 weapons were also frequently S5 or higher, where you were paying for the AP against soft elite units but paying for the strength against tough heavily armoured units.
The low strength AP3 weapons were a bit weird in comparison as you were paying for a boltgun against a guardsman and a triple boltgun against a marine.
GW were never quite able to sync up their AP4 and 4+ save prices though, didn't help that there was a two edition lag on codex releases with almost no points updates inbetween. 4+ saves were most decidedly worth it when you weren't paying through the nose, and when GW wasn't handing it out on small arms (looking at you 5e crons...)
In terms of modifiers it similarly depends on how they are distributed. The party trick of 2e eldar for example was that all of those marines paying premium for their power armour were never going to see better than a 5+ save against your small arms. You rarely got to roll an actual 3+ save in 2e and non-marine armies were fishing for 6s more often than not - though perhaps my view of it is skewed by a great deal of necromunda back in the day where armour was most decidedly useless.
In terms of modifiers it similarly depends on how they are distributed. The party trick of 2e eldar for example was that all of those marines paying premium for their power armour were never going to see better than a 5+ save against your small arms. You rarely got to roll an actual 3+ save in 2e and non-marine armies were fishing for 6s more often than not - though perhaps my view of it is skewed by a great deal of necromunda back in the day where armour was most decidedly useless.
I think it depends on your expectations for armor. Marines in 2nd had been boosted to T4, which was significant in and of itself, and combined with a 3+ base save, were difficult to kill with small arms. Add in to hit modifiers, and they were quite durable when in hard cover.
So yes, 5+ is not great, but it's better than no save at all, which was where just about everyone else was against Eldar.
What AP did was put the game in somewhat uncharted territory in terms of armor saves, and for the first time we saw Marines get the full 3+ against everything that didn't go clean through it. In 2nd, it was normal for small arms to have a -1 tacked on, so Marines mostly got 4+ saves, which was still great.
And when looking at the Eldar, they were in for some tough sledding themselves, since mesh armor was reduced to 6+ by bolters, and the heaviest Aspect Warrior stuff was likewise 4+ against them. The key difference was T3 boosted the quantity of saves that had to be made, hence the "glass cannon" reputation of the army.
In 3rd, Marines not only got 3+ against small arms, but even heavy bolters were much less effective. In fact, everything was less effective, because plasma and melta weapons already sliced through it in 2nd. Imperial Guard flashlights were already ice skating uphill, and now they were even more of a joke.
Eldar of course took it on the chin in a big way, which is why starcannon spam happened. You saw similar stuff with other armies because the AP system itself demanded it: if specialization is the key to winning, everyone is going to do it, and they're all forced to do it in the exact same way.
Without the all-or-nothing approach, you could be a bit more flexible, counting on quantity of cheaper weapons like heavy bolters to prevail because they were still decent Marine killers. That in turn enabled more "all comers" lists for pick-up games.
In 3rd, Marines not only got 3+ against small arms, but even heavy bolters were much less effective. In fact, everything was less effective, because plasma and melta weapons already sliced through it in 2nd. Imperial Guard flashlights were already ice skating uphill, and now they were even more of a joke.
There's a lot wrong here. First, Plasma Guns was only a -2 in 2nd, whereas they were AP 2 in 3rd. That's a 5+ Marine save vs no save. Plasma became more effective. Melta was tha same vs Marines, but more effective against Terminators.
As for Guard, you're dismissing heaps of context. In 2nd, the cover adjustments to-hit meant that Guard missed more often with their Lasguns. Hitting on a flat 4+ granting a 3+ save becomes equal lethality to having a -1 to hit but knocking a point of armor off to a 4+. And it's an improvement in lethality compared to having a -2 to hit with 2nd eds Hard cover.
But also! Guardsmen Lasguns weren't limited to one shot anymore, picking up the ability to Rapid Fire for double the shots. Meanwhile Marines lost their extra shot at 24". Comparative lethality for Guardsmen against Marines at range saw a net improvement for Guardsmen, an effect reflected in their points adjustments at the time. Guardsmen went from 10 to 6 (iirc), and Marines from 30 to 15.
The balance and tactics changed. In 2nd, Marines could sit in Heavy Cover and Rapid Fire away at Guardsmen with a heavy advantage, as Guardsmen would fire back fishing for 6s to hit. In 3rd, Guardsmen in cover kept their armor save, saw fewer incoming shots, while being able to return fire more effectively. Marines were more incentivised to take the initiative, use their armor to cross the distance, and assault the Guardsmen to wipe them out in murderous close combat. This is why I will always have a soft spot for the AP system. Yes, on the initial impression there are some unintuitive interactions. But put in context, the battles often had more interesting incentives and outcomes.
Insectum7 wrote: Both systems have their merits. Both have their faults. Imo compared to AP the save mod system feels "mushy", especially in the current implementation. The more weapons are capable against everything the less difficult the choices become, and the less important maneuvering is.
I guess I just prefer the "mush" over the listhammer approach. Having my opponent end up at -1 to their saves because I brought an AP-2 gun and shot at a unit in cover makes it feel like the points I spent on AP, the points my opponent spent on a good Sv, and the maneuvering decision my opponent made by putting their unit in cover are all factoring into the end result of how many models get removed by my attacks.
Whereas the old AP system was like, "You paid points for an AP4 weapon? That either does nothing at all or else auto-removes models on a 2+ depending on whether you're facing marines or not-marines in today's pickup game."
I totally understand the preference. It's more intuitive, and that's a strength. That said, tactics from army to army vary less. Stick to cover and trade shots becomes more the default. And while that's "realistic" in one sense, I find there's a different "realism" in making the smart move for Marines to ignore cover and advance as fast as possible to engage and wipe out in CC. It's more dramatic and more "shock troop-ey".
You overstate the HB. There were still plenty of AV 4+ or worse models with either multiple wounds or toughness greater than 3. Ork 'Ard Boyz, Tyranid Warriors, Ogryns, etc. Another important factor is that all of those 4+save models still got that full save against Bolter equivalents, which dramatically increased survivability.
I can sort of see the appeal of having strong divisions between "classes" of weapons on paper, but I'm just not sure that approach really works out in the context of pickup games where you don't know what you'll be facing when you put your list together.
Personally I thought it worked best in pick up games where you couldn't tailor your list, and had to try to find a balance of gear and tactical potential that allowed you to be flexible.
Compared to today, the listbuilding put more emphasis on gear and simple stats, whereas listbuilding today feels like the emphasis is more on finding combos of bespoke unit special rules. Blech.
The problem was that if you tailored to marines, you would still do fine against anything not a marine, because you would also be ignoring everyone else's saves as well.
Which is basically what happened from what I saw, as marines were the most common army so set the default meta, and the ap system meant you'd still be advantaged against non marines (for saves). Marines especially were notorious for tailoring against other marines with lasplas.
the Eldar got their overly effective star cannon which they tried to nerf but it's utility was too high even at 2 shots.
The kill count difference that was supposed to make heavy bolters and frag missiles a dilemma choice didn't really eventuate.
The advantage of ap2 tailoring was higher than the disadvantages when you fought non marines. There wasn't a big enough kill difference against guard, Tyranids or Orks because you could just use standard rifles or for marines melee to take them out.
Then of course there were the anti Marine blast weapons that negated that anyway.
The cost and or shots were just not enough of a difference. Maxing plasma cannons didn't reduce your army size due to cost enough while heavy bolters at 3 shots just weren't an effective alternative.
Which is where the all or nothing aspect makes it hard, it makes the cost benefit much more clear cut and the winners much more effective.
Edit: the army I was playing the most in 3rd/ 4th was space Wolves (I stopped playing spave wolves in 5th with the increased flanderisation of the faction). My all comers list had virtually nothing that was not anti Marine and it always did fine against non marines. I had:
14 blood claws with power weapons and powerfist and flamer in a land raider crusader led by wolf lord with plasma pistol and frost weapon and Rune priest
10 grey hunters with 2 pp and 1 plasma gun
10 grey hunters with 2 PW and 2 pp 6 grey hunters with 2 pp, 1 pw, 1 meltagun led by a wolf guard leader with a power weapon and combi melta in a razorback with twin heavy bolters
5 long fangs with 2 plasma cannons and 2 lascannons
Vindicator
2 attack bikers with heavy bolters
5 blood claws on bikes with power weapons
Or some combination thereof and maybe some other units depending on the game size.
At no point did I ever wish I had more anti chaff weapons whether I was fighting Orks or guard. The anti Marine weapons worked against everyone without issue.
Genuinely I think a portion of that is more of a meta thing than a balance thing. Regular opponents for me in 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition included a lot of Orks, Dark Eldar, Eldar, Nids and Tau, in addition to Marines and CSM. While I was never a big user of Heavy Bolters, Flamers were often my default Special weapon because of the number of models they could hit in close quarters, and the fact that they could be used when Assaulting. Heavy Bolters appeared on units like Land Speeders and Predators for various reasons, and the other major anti-horde unit I used regularly was the Whirlwind.
I think the other piece is; the thing about the "Heavy Bilter dilema" for arming units like Tactical Squads is, imo, less an issue with AP and more an issue of opportunity cost in missing out on some other weapon (like Lascannons) which isn't taken because it's good against Marines (because they were only marginally better), but because they were good at taking on high value and more threatening targets, like Greater Daemons, Tanks, Carnifexes, Terminators, etc. Anecdotally, even in the systems that used save modifiers that I played (2nd, 8th and 9th), I never took Heavy Bolters on Tacs or Devastators, because there was always some other weapon which was better at knocking out more threatening targets. To me that doesn't speak to an AP problem, that's seems more of a Heavy Bolter problem with those platforms. Heavy Bolters appeared elsewhere on platforms that had fewer choices.
Edit: Responding to list.
I'm gonna call you out on that LR Crusader for anti-chaff work!
I also think an aspect of this is that Marines themselves are good at anti-chaff. I certainly made that calculation at the time. But it might be telling to look at other armies. For example, Imperial Guard forces that I saw brought lots of HBs and Autocannons. CSM Havoc Squads brought Autocannons as well. Tau brought mixes of things, some plasma, but also Burst Cannons and their Missile things (AP4 I think). Necrons often leaned into Immortals and Destroyers with lots of AP 4, and many Necron Players skipped the Heavy Destroyers that rocked the AP2.
The crusader was almost entirely for it's transport capacity, if the normal land raider could carry 16 I'd have used it instead.
The attack bikers and razorback were all conversions from bits boxes I'd won at the local gw, because I couldn't afford everything. So the equipment was limited to what was in the bitz, which was all heavy bolters I think from the plastic land speeder. I'd have done the lasplas on the razorback otherwise.
One of my main opponents was a guard player and I found all this great against them. He deployed lots of lascannons, he tried auto cannons but their output wasn't high enough to be worth it, shifting to heavy bolters if he needed to. Autocannons were in a really weird position, low shots, mid ap, mid s. No one I encountered liked them they'd either go lascannons for AT, or heavy bolters for anti infantry and that was only because of the poor BS being offset by 50% more shots.
But then his main damage came from battle cannon blasts which were all perfect anti Marine weapons.
I see the ap issue in optimising ap2 the way previous editions optimised mortal wounds, you can avoid all the guess work in damage if you just concentrate on the weapons that hit the hardest.
Definitely not here to yuck anyone's yum.
(4th) to just about right (5th). remember when they went to 4th they got an extra shot and rending against infantry was a 6+ on the roll to hit and against vehicles it was an additional 
