Commissar von Toussaint wrote: I'm going to stake out what is likely a hugely unpopular position, but I have no interest in the Rogue Trader stuff because it was before my time. Any nostalgia would be fake - I'd be retrofitting memories that aren't mine. Yes, I did play a game of Rogue Trader back in the day and didn't like it. It feels pretentious to pretend that I was a fan.
The materials of 2nd are plentiful and provide good depth, and so I'm content with collecting that era.
This may be surprising from a history nerd, but I suppose it's inspired by the depth of my loyalty to "my" edition.
Yeah, fair enough.
For me, Rogue Trader, as seen in a bookshop downtown back in the day, is not only a nostalghia trip down memory lane, but also represents significant Historical and cultural pieces of the 40,000 universe as we know it today.
There are at least a couple of levels to the thing - First and foremost you obviously have the whole backbone of "Warhammer" style game mechanics, the whole WS/BS/S/T/W base that still is the most significant metric in establishing most combat rules of these sorts of GW games.
Then you have the RPG-layer, currently absent from the modern rules, where you (or GM) can design new vehicles, monsters and whatnot, and the roster of many armies playing in the game are generated, not unlike characters and NPCs in other RPG games. Pretty much everything was malleable, all the way in the "Open Play" mindset.
Then you have the "UK scifi" angle, where illustrators from 2000 AD are working on the 40K material and are cross-pollinating it. Furthermore, GW staff was apparently into 2000 AD as well, so influences went back and forth (Heck, I recall an entire thread discussing this connection). Rogue Trader feels spiritually closest to 2000 AD, compared to anything in 40K since (And now with Rebellion branching out into movies and video games, I suppose GW & Rebellion are competitors with little regard towards each other?)
Add the backbone of the 40K universe as we know it into the above and you have an idea of just how multifaceted and influential Rogue Trader was in its time. It was a mashup of many things which had been isolated from each other before. A singularity of sorts, if you will.
For me, Rogue Trader, as seen in a bookshop downtown back in the day, is not only a nostalghia trip down memory lane, but also represents significant Historical and cultural pieces of the 40,000 universe as we know it today.
I fully get the idea of collecting them as historical items, and of course younger generations have every right to be enthralled by the work of their elders.
And then there are those that wanted, but never could. I've been doing a bit of that, buying games I wanted as a teen or young adult but couldn't afford. It's fun to be able to see what you missed.
I guess for me it just hit a sour spot. I was not into their aesthetic then, and while I now have more affection for the GW look and feel, I prefer the more polished form of 2nd ed. (both artistically and as a matter of rules).
Overread wrote: I can't see how you can argue that GW are selling less when right now there's products that people want which are out of stock and GW only semi- recently built a whole new factory on their main site.
The first US print run of the Fellowship of the Ring sold out. But the US printer only printed 1500 copies, then imported copies from the UK rather than printing a new run in the US.
Selling out does not automatically mean you are selling a lot relative to the potential market, or even that you have hit a fraction of your entire possible, likely market for the product in question, all it means is that you sold all the stock you had.
A Town Called Malus wrote: The first US print run of the Fellowship of the Ring sold out. But the US printer only printed 1500 copies, then imported copies from the UK rather than printing a new run in the US.
Selling out does not automatically mean you are selling a lot relative to the potential market, or even that you have hit a fraction of your entire possible, likely market for the product in question, all it means is that you sold all the stock you had.
This is doubly true for a company like GW, which has a vast catalog of figures to support. Presumably, they do a production run on something when it comes out and then move on. I doubt there is much inventory space at this point to keep huge stockpiles of minor units, especially with a three-year product cycle.
The old model was fairly stable product lines that gradually filled out existing, defined factions, replacing older, cruder sculpts where necessary. One of the smart decisions GW made was the notion of limited vehicle production, where the Imperium's vehicle production was centered on Rhino and Chimera variants. It made sense, and was a good way to balance inventory.
Now the model ranges are a mile wide, but the inventory is likely an inch deep.
Question for the board on 3rd edition, I'm looking at mounting up Command squad characters in attack bike sidecars, as describes in chapter approved 2002. If they do, does the attack bike retain it's HB/MM, and can they fire it? it's not clear in the rules.
ProfSrlojohn wrote: Question for the board on 3rd edition, I'm looking at mounting up Command squad characters in attack bike sidecars, as describes in chapter approved 2002. If they do, does the attack bike retain it's HB/MM, and can they fire it? it's not clear in the rules.
I'm pretty confident that the character is intended to replace the gunner, but not the gun, and that they can then fire the gun in the same manner as any other rider on a bike. Note the upgrade cost is more for attack bike over standard bike- I think this is likely to be due to the increased firepower of an attack bike over a standard bike and makes little sense if the attack bike loses its heavy gun.
Could combo well with an auspex to use that firepower on infiltrators. A signum on a techmarine would also be good.
ProfSrlojohn wrote: Question for the board on 3rd edition, I'm looking at mounting up Command squad characters in attack bike sidecars, as describes in chapter approved 2002. If they do, does the attack bike retain it's HB/MM, and can they fire it? it's not clear in the rules.
I'm pretty confident that the character is intended to replace the gunner, but not the gun, and that they can then fire the gun in the same manner as any other rider on a bike. Note the upgrade cost is more for attack bike over standard bike- I think this is likely to be due to the increased firepower of an attack bike over a standard bike and makes little sense if the attack bike loses its heavy gun.
Could combo well with an auspex to use that firepower on infiltrators.
Gotcha, that was my plan. Do a techmarine and then an apothecary with an arm swap to an ancient (since my apohecaries use mainly chapter colors). My LGS had a bunch of attack bikes on Black Friday clearance so I bought them up. And, since the squad already has an attack bike, That means 2 multi-meltas in one squad. Nasty.
I can also decorat the the bike itself to add to the flavor.
ProfSrlojohn wrote: Question for the board on 3rd edition, I'm looking at mounting up Command squad characters in attack bike sidecars, as describes in chapter approved 2002. If they do, does the attack bike retain it's HB/MM, and can they fire it? it's not clear in the rules.
I'm pretty confident that the character is intended to replace the gunner, but not the gun, and that they can then fire the gun in the same manner as any other rider on a bike. Note the upgrade cost is more for attack bike over standard bike- I think this is likely to be due to the increased firepower of an attack bike over a standard bike and makes little sense if the attack bike loses its heavy gun.
Could combo well with an auspex to use that firepower on infiltrators.
Gotcha, that was my plan. Do a techmarine and then an apothecary with an arm swap to an ancient (since my apohecaries use mainly chapter colors). My LGS had a bunch of attack bikes on Black Friday clearance so I bought them up. And, since the squad already has an attack bike, That means 2 multi-meltas in one squad. Nasty.
I can also decorat the the bike itself to add to the flavor.
Sounds great!
Re. weapon- it is less clear to me that the attack bike could be upgraded with a multi-melta, as the Chapter Approved entry does not mention this. Having said that, this is an optional rule from 7 editions ago and it is reasonable for character attack bikes to be upgraded with multi-meltas. Plus techmarines firing multi-meltas from attack bike sidecars is cool and that is enough reason.
ProfSrlojohn wrote: Question for the board on 3rd edition, I'm looking at mounting up Command squad characters in attack bike sidecars, as describes in chapter approved 2002. If they do, does the attack bike retain it's HB/MM, and can they fire it? it's not clear in the rules.
I'm pretty confident that the character is intended to replace the gunner, but not the gun, and that they can then fire the gun in the same manner as any other rider on a bike. Note the upgrade cost is more for attack bike over standard bike- I think this is likely to be due to the increased firepower of an attack bike over a standard bike and makes little sense if the attack bike loses its heavy gun.
Could combo well with an auspex to use that firepower on infiltrators.
Gotcha, that was my plan. Do a techmarine and then an apothecary with an arm swap to an ancient (since my apohecaries use mainly chapter colors). My LGS had a bunch of attack bikes on Black Friday clearance so I bought them up. And, since the squad already has an attack bike, That means 2 multi-meltas in one squad. Nasty.
I can also decorat the the bike itself to add to the flavor.
Sounds great!
Re. weapon- it is less clear to me that the attack bike could be upgraded with a multi-melta, as the Chapter Approved entry does not mention this. Having said that, this is an optional rule from 7 editions ago and it is reasonable for character attack bikes to be upgraded with multi-meltas. Plus techmarines firing multi-meltas from attack bike sidecars is cool and that is enough reason.
Now I want to go back, get the third one, and have a distinct attack bike for each character.
I was looking at my assortment of chaos stuff (some of it in several pieces after being jostled around through several moves, others half or never painted). I wondered if I had enough for a 1750 point army for use with aphyon’s 5th ed adaption. I cracked open codex 3.5.
Immediately my mind reeled from thoughts of double lash daemon prince nonsense. I was falling back into terrible habits, like “what’s the most effective unit per points? What were tournament players running?” I quickly remembered I don’t have to worry about that and just built a list from what I had.
Only way I could pull it together was going chaos divided with random khorne and nurgle units. It ended up looking like a fun little list with a diverse bunch of units. All that stupid, arbitrary pressure melted away. No more “make sure you have at least two of everything.” It was just a motley of cool stuff thrown together, and it’s finally got me motivated to glue it back together and get it all painted.
I'm a big fan of older editions. 2nd edition and 3rd edition being my all time favorites. I would gladly play any of them before 10th edition
But I'm also very fond of the models from back then and I have 2 ork armies, 1 for 2nd edition with only models from RT/2nd and then I have a 3rd ed ork army with only models from that time period. I love them both.
3rd edition ork codex was my first ever warhammer product, I still have that codex. I love it to death.
We're 4 friends who used to play a team tournament together and we still do every year. It's always the newest edition of course but we still go and we have fun. Not doing very well (since we basically only play once a year) but it's more of a nostalgic get-together for us, even if the game is a newer edition.
My frustration is more borne of the fact that I've seen so many "3.5 was broken! Don't you remember Double Lash?" posts, when Lash wasn't a thing in 3.5. It's annoying.
H.B.M.C. wrote: My frustration is more borne of the fact that I've seen so many "3.5 was broken! Don't you remember Double Lash?" posts, when Lash wasn't a thing in 3.5. It's annoying.
Should be complaining about Siren Princes instead!
H.B.M.C. wrote: My frustration is more borne of the fact that I've seen so many "3.5 was broken! Don't you remember Double Lash?" posts, when Lash wasn't a thing in 3.5. It's annoying.
Back when I was "going retro" and the back to 2nd movement was starting, GW-linked members on another forum would constantly talk it down even to the point of citing rules that didn't exist or were grossly misapplied. It was weird for GW to trash its own design, but that's where things were back then.
The implementation and impact of the rules entirely aside?
The 3.5 Chaos Codex was truly superb.
The differences between given former Legions was tangible, and turned out very different on the board.
Bringing the rules back into consideration? There’s no doubt at all some were just better than others.
Consider Iron Warriors. Their Legion rules offered us the chance to trade two Fast Attack choices for a single additional Heavy Support.
Now that may sound like a genuine consideration. Except, if memory serves?
Iron Warriors couldn’t field Daemons. At all. And so when we look at the Fast Attack options left? It was Raptors and Bikers. Of those, Raptors were 0-1 anyway.
Add in that as a player I’ve never been terribly convinced about Bikers? What was I actually giving up?
Raptors with their squad wide Daemonic Visage were excellent, but I could only have one unit anyway. And as I could never, and still can’t, see the point of Bikers? The drawback simply didn’t exist. Not when I could add a fourth Defiler or Predator. Maybe Basilisk but I’m not sure I remember that was definitely an option.
What came after remains a travesty. Chaos became far, far too ordered. A galactic power known for its random and eclectic nature became all codified and that. And the true threat (cults. No. That’s an L, dirty boy) barely represented.
Don’t make me make yet another thread bemoaning the state of Chaos forces.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Iron Warriors couldn’t field Daemons. At all. And so when we look at the Fast Attack options left? It was Raptors and Bikers. Of those, Raptors were 0-1 anyway.
Add in that as a player I’ve never been terribly convinced about Bikers? What was I actually giving up?
Raptors with their squad wide Daemonic Visage were excellent, but I could only have one unit anyway. And as I could never, and still can’t, see the point of Bikers? The drawback simply didn’t exist. Not when I could add a fourth Defiler or Predator. Maybe Basilisk but I’m not sure I remember that was definitely an option.
I hated Raptors because it undermined the lore that Chaos didn't have jump troopers. They were new tech and without proper support, they couldn't work reliably. All the 2nd ed. Chaos stuff was rugged, simple, sometimes dangerous, but not just the Chaos version of something Imperial.
As for bikes, in 3rd and later, I supposed they were worthless, but in 2nd (and before) when they were conceived, they were super-fast, super-maneuverable, perfect for crashing into a deployment zone or hunting down an enemy leader. It may be strange to say it, but my Chaos Marines only got bikers in the last few years and I recognized (as did my opponents) a deep deficiency in fast maneuver elements.
They are fragile, no question. In my last game, the Eldar made chutney out of two squadrons without breaking a sweat, but that was because they were caught between Swooping Hawks and two jetbike squadrons backed by Vipers. Very ugly.
My Ultra-successor chapter has no bikes because it has land speeders and jetpacks. Plus Razorbacks. Tons of mobility.
But 2nd Chaos was limited in support options, which was part of what made them interesting. Like the warriors themselves, you needed a little demonic help to make things work.
It’s was the Daemonic Visage which tipped them. Reducing the enemy’s Ld by -2 meant an otherwise tight squeak of a victory would reliably send them packing.
As for the in-universe tech levels? All feeds into the issues with Chaos.
All views and interpretations of Chaos are valid. Because it’s Chaos.
But, it’s not helped them on the field. Some want to just be Marines with Spikes and other perks. Some like myself want a proper hodgepodge riot of options, viability of a given combination be damned. And everything in between.
To be fair, Raptors were introduced as small, rare, mercenary bands. Index Astartes then expanded them to all Night Lords all the time, and then subsequent editions removed all restrictions on them.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Which 2nd Ed allowed for: You could bring things you weren't supposed to have, they just cost more.
3rd Ed came along and went "Nope. Jump Packers are totally normal and were here all the time, just off camera!".
And I was fine with that, because the only options were Imperial models, which either meant your troops were modern renegades or had looted loyal Marines. Great for the flavor and feel. Only a fraction of my Chaos Marines use Chaos models; most are converted Imperials or off-brand to give them the "scavenged from the battlefield/homebrew" look.
Over time, I really came to hate 3rd because of the force selection, which meant every army had to have fast attack, heavy support, etc., destroying their original assymetry. Add in the 31 flavors of marines, and I was out for good.
Thing is, 20 years later, there's still things to collect for my armies, units I can upgrade, factions I can expand. GW never needed to explode the catalog to keep selling figures. 2nd provided so much variety, it just needed to be cleaned up and filled out.
Had a guy come in interested in playing oldhammer, as he wasn't certain which faction he was interested in i broke out the 40K porn...er i mean codexes.
This is a collection of stuff i have with me every game day in case we need them. i am only missing 3 physical codexes out of all the ones i consider to be the best of the 3rd-7th ed.
aphyon wrote: Had a guy come in interested in playing oldhammer, as he wasn't certain which faction he was interested in i broke out the 40K porn...er i mean codexes.
This is a collection of stuff i have with me every game day in case we need them. i am only missing 3 physical codexes out of all the ones i consider to be the best of the 3rd-7th ed.
Spoiler:
Nice. I see you're missing the 3rd ed Necron book, is that one of the three? I have two copies of it. I'd offer you my spare, but it's in spanish.
I don't speak spanish, btw. Local store was shipped them by mistake and they gave one to me and for some reason I kept it for 20 years.
It isn't missing, i only grab the codexes i feel best represent the faction. while the original 3rd ed codex was ok, it was really 1 dimensional as it lacked very many options. you were basically limited to 3 army builds-warrior spam, destroyer spam, or monoliths. especially given the phase out rules.
i have a couple duplicates in there because they add something different. the 4th ed space marine codex has the trait system, however generally the 5th ed codex is better. so i have a copy of each.
For what i am missing-i do not have a physical copy of custodes, knights or GSC from 7th ed(when they were added as complete new factions). i had a copy of 4th ed demons, but i gave that to the only guy at the store who plays a chaos demon army.
Wasn't 3rd edition also where Necrons first appeared as an army as well? So yeah that was a really limited edition in what they had. I think they just had the leader, Warriors, Scarabs, Impportals, Destroyers and the Monolith at the time.
Necrons first appeared in 2nd with Lord, Scarabs, Destroyers and Warriors.
3rd ed added Heavy Destroyers, Wraiths, Immortals, Monoliths, Tomb Spiders, Pariahs, Flayed Ones and the C'tan.
Imo the 3rd ed incarnation is the best. Options were added later, but too much of the flavor was lost. Many units took a big downgrade, Pariahs dissapeared, and the army lost Phase Out. They gained named characters, but lost character.
As for spam, that was definitely a simple way to play them. But my favorite and possibly most successful army wasn't spammy at all. Lord, Immortals, Flayed Ones, Warriors, Wraiths, Heavy Destroyers and a Monolith iirc. I'll see if I can point it out . . .
Thing is Phase out was one of those things some loved and others hated (esp with how GW used it). I think in some ways knocking out a Necron army without killing anything didn't feel good to some players even though they won.
They did have that "we are undefeatable unless you make us phase out" issue. Which I think in a way kind of made them all or nothing on the phase out. It's a little like how earlier versions of Tyranid Synapse made them REALLY vulnerable to losing if you took out the synapse models which made the whole focus on attacking them purely about killing the synapse.
Thematic yes, but honestly I prefer how GW has moved toward synapse being more of a boon to have than a necessity.
A downgrade has happened for most armies as they've grown. Carnifex used to be the powerhouse of the Tyranid army, now they are not. But at the same time we now have Trygons and Exocrines and such. So for me its happy compromise.
Overread wrote: Thing is Phase out was one of those things some loved and others hated (esp with how GW used it). I think in some ways knocking out a Necron army without killing anything didn't feel good to some players even though they won.
I mean . . . You definitely had to be killing models to trigger Phase Out . . .
Yeah, Phase out worked for the original Necron Raiders list because you only had a handful of models and permanently killing any of them was hard. As the army was expanded and individual models became less resilient so that you could have more of them on the board, Phase Out became less important, increasingly gamey, and slowed things down as you had more models to track to calculate it.
insaniak wrote: Yeah, Phase out worked for the original Necron Raiders list because you only had a handful of models and permanently killing any of them was hard. As the army was expanded and individual models became less resilient so that you could have more of them on the board, Phase Out became less important, increasingly gamey, and slowed things down as you had more models to track to calculate it.
^Did the Necron model count significantly change between 3rd and 5th edition though? 5th introduced more high-priced models like the Stalker, Bikes and other vehicles. Keeping track of dead Crons wouldn't have been a problem.
Insectum7 wrote: ^Did the Necron model count significantly change between 3rd and 5th edition though? 5th introduced more high-priced models like the Stalker, Bikes and other vehicles. Keeping track of dead Crons wouldn't have been a problem.
No, but from 2nd to 3rd it most certainly did. Phase Out should have been left out of the 3rd ed codex, and I'm leaving it out of my homebrew 2nd ed Codex. YMMV, obviously, but I'm not a fan of it with larger armies.
Insectum7 wrote: ^Did the Necron model count significantly change between 3rd and 5th edition though? 5th introduced more high-priced models like the Stalker, Bikes and other vehicles. Keeping track of dead Crons wouldn't have been a problem.
No, but from 2nd to 3rd it most certainly did. Phase Out should have been left out of the 3rd ed codex, and I'm leaving it out of my homebrew 2nd ed Codex. YMMV, obviously, but I'm not a fan of it with larger armies.
Ahh, no way. Phase Out was critical to retaining the balance in the 3rd ed book. It allowed Necrons to punch above their weight in a number of categories, but gave the opposition an alternative method of fighting them. It helped make Necrons fight very differently than other factions, in particular Space Marines (whom they shared their statline with almost exactly). It also helped put a soft limit to the number of high-powered models you could take. Like you could take three Monoliths and a C'tan, but it cut into your overall Necron count considerably, and you'd start risking an easy Phase Out win for your opponent. Imo it was beautiful design.
Insectum7 wrote: ^Did the Necron model count significantly change between 3rd and 5th edition though? 5th introduced more high-priced models like the Stalker, Bikes and other vehicles. Keeping track of dead Crons wouldn't have been a problem.
No, but from 2nd to 3rd it most certainly did. Phase Out should have been left out of the 3rd ed codex, and I'm leaving it out of my homebrew 2nd ed Codex. YMMV, obviously, but I'm not a fan of it with larger armies.
It also made things like the monolith risky and was the final nail in the coffin for pariahs (which didn’t count towards Phase Out numbers)
If the Necron player took something cool but pricey, their opponent would just shred MEQ warriors unit the whole army vanished, which just encouraged warrior/destroyer spam.
Phase Out is also a rule that became more negatively impactful over time. All units blocked line of sight by default in 3rd edition, so you had more ability to force the enemy to target your tough units not counted for Phase Out by screening the "Necron" units. In 4th target priority required shooting the closest unit unless passing a Ld test (easier for some armies than others). By 5th, neither factor was in effect. These edition changes also coincided with a general increase in lethality, so wiping the "Necron" units was easier.
Insectum7 wrote: Ahh, no way. Phase Out was critical to retaining the balance in the 3rd ed book. It allowed Necrons to punch above their weight in a number of categories, but gave the opposition an alternative method of fighting them. It helped make Necrons fight very differently than other factions, in particular Space Marines (whom they shared their statline with almost exactly). It also helped put a soft limit to the number of high-powered models you could take. Like you could take three Monoliths and a C'tan, but it cut into your overall Necron count considerably, and you'd start risking an easy Phase Out win for your opponent. Imo it was beautiful design.
I'm of two minds about Phase Out. It was a cool and flavorful rule, but had a tendency to produce curbstomps one way or the other. Either the Necron player got blown off the board and phased out, or you got overwhelmed by their up-front superior firepower.
I always liked how Battlefleet Gothic handled Necrons- they got to ignore a bunch of the normal limitations of the game and had some weird mechanics that gave them the feeling of technological superiority. But more importantly they also punched way above their cost, balanced out by extremely lopsided VP calculation, in which (IIRC) crippling a Necron ship (reduced to half health) was worth full VP and actually destroying it was worth triple VP. So Necron ships were scary as hell, but would tend to disengage once significantly damaged, and if you could actually take a couple out then you could win even if you got wiped out.
A lot of people didn't really enjoy that you-got-tabled-but-technically-won outcome, and I get it, but I feel it captured that feeling of sheer overwhelming superiority more elegantly than 40K's approach did. IMO it wasn't just the 5th Ed recharacterization of Necrons that killed the 'cosmic horror' feel, but also rebalancing them to the same power level as every other faction.
It took a while for this game to happen but we finally got around to it. on the fully painted eldar table to boot-
2k points house 5th ed.
dark angels (3.5 codex) with allied death watch
VS
eldar 4th ed codex with a few FW units.
the armies-
Dark angels-
Spoiler:
Eldar
Spoiler:
Nothing fancy with this one, got the deathwatch in early and they carried their weight.
taking down most of the large wraith guard unit and eventually both wraith lords. they finally got pushed back by the wraith knight failed their test and fell back out of close combat. allowing the knight to take ranged fire again. all told deathwatch was almost wiped out to a man, but they managed to kill 7 wraithguard, a wraith lord, wraith seer and a wraith knight (with a little help from the dark angels).
Insectum7 wrote: Ahh, no way. Phase Out was critical to retaining the balance in the 3rd ed book. It allowed Necrons to punch above their weight in a number of categories, but gave the opposition an alternative method of fighting them. It helped make Necrons fight very differently than other factions, in particular Space Marines (whom they shared their statline with almost exactly). It also helped put a soft limit to the number of high-powered models you could take. Like you could take three Monoliths and a C'tan, but it cut into your overall Necron count considerably, and you'd start risking an easy Phase Out win for your opponent. Imo it was beautiful design.
I'm of two minds about Phase Out. It was a cool and flavorful rule, but had a tendency to produce curbstomps one way or the other. Either the Necron player got blown off the board and phased out, or you got overwhelmed by their up-front superior firepower.
I always liked how Battlefleet Gothic handled Necrons- they got to ignore a bunch of the normal limitations of the game and had some weird mechanics that gave them the feeling of technological superiority. But more importantly they also punched way above their cost, balanced out by extremely lopsided VP calculation, in which (IIRC) crippling a Necron ship (reduced to half health) was worth full VP and actually destroying it was worth triple VP. So Necron ships were scary as hell, but would tend to disengage once significantly damaged, and if you could actually take a couple out then you could win even if you got wiped out.
A lot of people didn't really enjoy that you-got-tabled-but-technically-won outcome, and I get it, but I feel it captured that feeling of sheer overwhelming superiority more elegantly than 40K's approach did. IMO it wasn't just the 5th Ed recharacterization of Necrons that killed the 'cosmic horror' feel, but also rebalancing them to the same power level as every other faction.
I agree with this on the whole. I think asymmetric mechanics can make for very thematic games, but are also somewhat hard to balance and/or not particularly fun for some or many folks to play. I think it also is unfavorable to new players, as the specific tactics are often less intuitive.
Aphyon, it looks good fighting Eldar on that Eldar terrain.
Very thematic that Deathwatch made the difference in a fight against xenos.
the entire point of playing classic 40K is because it is thematic, win or loose i would not have it any other way.
that aside frag cannons and special ammo for the deathwatch were brutally effective against wraith constructs as a counter to that high T value..... although my dreadnought did nothing after initially shooting his bike squad...we just sat there and missed each other a bunch in close combat
Do it frankly; they're only getting more expensive as time goes by.
I'm on that road too tbh But also all the weapon variants of the Mechanicum Land Raider which isn't supported any more thanks to the Macrocarid Explorator superseding the MLR.
Which is now OOP...
I bought a Mk2b a few years ago and when i disassembled it the upgrade parts were all a pure white colour and paint didn't stick to it properly - decided it was a fake and split the kit for MLRs.
That stung a bit because i paid decent money for it.
Its looking like FW could make a very nice slice of cash re-releasing LR variants with certificates of authenticity.
Id pay ~£150 per model for that and not feel burned.
epic scale Iyanden craftworld force VS imperial guard. in full scale terms it would be like 8k per player facing off. even at epic scale it was a slog of a fight.
Both sides lost their titans, but the eldar really started pushing the guard back at the end.
A bit of a nail biter again with this one. 3.5 chaos VS 3.5 dark angels.
we had 5 objectives.
The game went a full 7 turns and even though i lost my helios turn 1 i still put up a good fight. at the end it was 2 objectives VS 1 in the favor of chaos.
In the process neither of us had much left on the table. so a good fight to the end.
one of the guys at the store has been a fan of 40K for a while but he has never had the money to get into it. we scored him a deal from an estate sale for about 2,400 points of 4th ed black templar.
So to get his feet wet with his very first game of oldhammer 40K we put together a 2K list of face my dark angels from the 3.5 mini dex.
He put together a pretty solid 2k list with crusader squads in land raiders, Grimaldis, emperors champion, venerable dread in a drop pod and some terminators.
Spoiler:
Imagine my shock and surprise that by turn 3 he pretty well had every one of his units in the game locked up in close combat. well except some of my plasma gunners since i had to kill a couple of those myself or it would not have been a normal game.
It was a pretty hard fight and he lost lots of marines, but he still managed to kill a couple dreadnoughts his vow for this game was "accept any challenge" giving him preferred enemy against me (hit on 3+ in CC regardless of weapon skill).
the game ended with the dice roll at the end of turn 5 giving him 4 points to my 2 as i only managed to kill one of his dreads and a land raider. he killed 2 of my dreads, and the last one with it's drop pod was not on the table yet and counted as destroyed for victory conditions (mostly because i forgot about it).
Did some fun training games as i walked some new players and returning players through oldhammer
the first game was a sisters (3rd ed witch hunters) VS a black templar force(4th ed codex).....one hell of a way to have a break up.
the game was pretty brutal. the black templar player won on objectives with only 7 models left on the table-the emperors champion (locked in a fight with the cannoness) both land raider crusaders and 4 terminators.
the SOB side was only marginally better with about 10 models left on the table between troops and vehicles. the game was a 2k match that went to turn 6.
to shoehorn in the new models we let the sisters player run his predators as relic predators. as it best represented their loadout.
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Spoiler:
Spoiler:
The second game was much faster as it was a reset of black templar VS 3.5 iron warriors.
The templars went first and started out strong....taking out most of the enemy infantry and even killing a tank.....but then the obliterators came in.....after the smoke cleared the templars had 3 infantry left on the table. facing 2 tanks, a basilisk, a warpsmith, and 5 obliterators.
Though templars were quite the gunline themselves after the 5e revision, which is a weird thing for a marine faction with no devastators or artillery units.
Speaking of older editions, I'm planning to start playing Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine 1st edition again, but with modern minis, once I get enough of them collected. Would talking about those qualify for this thread? Or need I take my ramblings elsewhere, since its not strictly a Warhammer fork..?
We are playing core 5th ed rules so all storm shields are a 3++ no matter who is using them. i remember it took them 2 years to errata that for dark angels, but since we were playing friendly we already treated it that way even back then- all general war gear is the same.
I'm not sure that the 5th edition update(s) was really intended to help balance with Black Templars.
It just helped to untangle some of the mess caused by having wargear having different rules depending on what colour dude was holding it.
'I'm sure that Assault Squads having 3pt 3++ won't do anything weird with balance' said probably the same person who let Sanguinary Priests take Exsanguinators and Nartheciums.
Storm shields are not 3 points you might be thinking of combat shield that are a 5++ but i think those were 5 points. the price also varies depending on who is carrying it. it is more expensive for independent characters.
aphyon wrote: Storm shields are not 3 points you might be thinking of combat shield that are a 5++ but i think those were 5 points. the price also varies depending on who is carrying it. it is more expensive for independent characters.
They were 3pts for Black Templars Assault Squads (codex 4th ed. pg.39).
I was just going by the armory where they are listed at 10 points. apparently only the jump guys get them cheap, sword brethren still pay the full points.
aphyon wrote: I was just going by the armory where they are listed at 10 points. apparently only the jump guys get them cheap, sword brethren still pay the full points.
In the context of the 5e update they had to increase the points, though I think they went a little overboard pushing it all the way to 15 given that the templar assault marines were already more expensive and less well equipped than their counterparts.
In the context of prohammer the old costs with the new rules may well work. Their damage output against infantry is anaemic, but 27 points a model for 3++ and meltabombs is a tempting meatshield for a jump-pack chaplain in games where low volume high AP weapons are common.
Well he doesn't have any jump troops in the force he picked up, just grimaldus, helbrecht, the emperors champion. crusader squads, terminators, land raiders, land speeders and dreadnoughts. more than enough to get the job done.
aphyon wrote: Well he doesn't have any jump troops in the force he picked up, just grimaldus, helbrecht, the emperors champion. crusader squads, terminators, land raiders, land speeders and dreadnoughts. more than enough to get the job done.
Sounds solid enough for the 4e book.
I played them for a bit back in 5th as part of a 'tale of four warlords' painting thing, they were mid tier with a lot of trap choices but also some good stuff to lean in to. I had a 'Vinculus Crusade' theme going on, as much for the inquisitor as anything else as playing a BT terminator rush without a psy-hood against chaos players would just see the unit shuffled into a corner for the whole game with lash :p
Well fortunately none of the chaos players in our group do the lash thing, we have a couple iron warriors, khorne berserkers and word bearers but they all use the 3.5 codex for obvious reasons.
So dead edition and all so can do my own thing, but just idly curious on what others think.
I finally got my hands on Codex: Eye of Terror, and mentally thinking of doing a Lost and the Damned list. The Arch Heretic is specifically a Chaos Lieutenant/Sorcerer from the Chaos Space Marines book - which in its entry specifically states can have a unit of Chosen as their retinue. The Lost and the Damned do not list Chosen as an Elites choice though, which is the slot they take up.
Me personally, I like the idea of a small time Chaos Lord and their one badass squad leading traitors and mutants, and the people I play with will be fine with it I'm sure. I'm just kind of curious how others read the list I suppose. And if nothing else, the list specifically allowed you to ally in select Chaos Space Marine units, including 0-1 elites, so its honestly kind of an academic thing here - i just like the idea of them being the personal retinue of the lord.
kurhanik wrote: So dead edition and all so can do my own thing, but just idly curious on what others think.
I finally got my hands on Codex: Eye of Terror, and mentally thinking of doing a Lost and the Damned list. The Arch Heretic is specifically a Chaos Lieutenant/Sorcerer from the Chaos Space Marines book - which in its entry specifically states can have a unit of Chosen as their retinue. The Lost and the Damned do not list Chosen as an Elites choice though, which is the slot they take up.
Me personally, I like the idea of a small time Chaos Lord and their one badass squad leading traitors and mutants, and the people I play with will be fine with it I'm sure. I'm just kind of curious how others read the list I suppose. And if nothing else, the list specifically allowed you to ally in select Chaos Space Marine units, including 0-1 elites, so its honestly kind of an academic thing here - i just like the idea of them being the personal retinue of the lord.
If you look at the concurrent Chaos codex (3.5th), the Chosen entry states "However many Chosen are included in the army they occupy a single Elites choice in the force organisation chart."
I'd play the retinue as taking up your allied CSM elites slot, but you can still take a standalone unit of Chosen as part of the entry too (provided your list is enough points to include the numbers).
A side note on retinues, yes you can take them as a retinue and as an elite, but if taken as a retinue the independent character may not leave the squad until it is all dead(keeping him alive is kinda what they are there for to begin with so it makes sense). It counts as his own single unit unlike any other unit he could freely join or leave in the movement phase.
Yeah, that's all fair. Actually glancing through my 3.5 dex for the first time in awhile and I forgot/misremembered a few things. Namely that Obliterators are Elite and not Heavy Support, I think that memory leak is because I remember Iron Warriors giving more Heavy Support slots which is what I mentally mathed as the extra Obliterators, and completely forgot their whole thing was just completely removing the 0-1 limit on them.
I got to say, its really fun mentally thinking up a list to run with Lost and the Damned, even if actually building it will be a long way off since part of the impetus of finally grabbing the book is that the Wargames Atlantic kickstarter 'totally not traitor guard' should be shipping later this year. Still fun to at least roughly plan things out.
And yeah, on Chosen on further reading you are right on it eating the allied elite slot. Still, I think most of my friends would be fine with me using a non allied slot on them so long as its not a full spam and I then don't take the allied slot as Obliterators. Ie: twist the rules to take Chosen + Obliterators bad, but twist them to take a small Chosen retinue + 1 squad of Chaos Marines with a Mark would be fine by them. Also kind of moot as the sample list I built to give rough idea of what I'd want to build around maxed out its Elite slots anyways with a unit of Chosen + 2 Daemon packs (to give me a reason to finally break out some Daemonettes I grabbed long ago and then forgot about).
Well i hope you have fun with it. we have a few 3.5 chaos players in our group and they run the gambit from word bearers, iron warriors and khorne berserkers. loads of silly fun. one of the best moments was khorne dedicated chaos cultists attacking a dark eldar raider, causing it to explode and kill every last cultist. good times indeed.
kurhanik you might be interested in the advarsaries list from the 3rd edition Witch Hunters codex to supplement your traitors (print only, not the free PDF version).
It was a reprint/update of the traitors/mutants units plus two mortal HQ choices - the rogue psyker and the apostate cardinal, the latter giving you more troop slots to fill out in higher point games.
A.T. wrote: kurhanik you might be interested in the advarsaries list from the 3rd edition Witch Hunters codex to supplement your traitors (print only, not the free PDF version).
It was a reprint/update of the traitors/mutants units plus two mortal HQ choices - the rogue psyker and the apostate cardinal, the latter giving you more troop slots to fill out in higher point games.
Somewhat annoyingly, the adversary rules are the only source of a non-Marine HQ for the Lost and the Damned in 3rd edition. Although retrospectively I think adding Rogue Psykers to the LatD list would be very appropriate.
As it happens, the Adversary rules only allowed LatD to take Rogue Psykers, not Apostate Cardinals or Pyschic Apocalypses. The barring of Apostate Cardinals in particular was baffling to me.
You know what is silly, I *have* that book and never noticed that part somehow. Never read through it as thoroughly as the Daemon Hunters book which also had rules for waves of daemons and such. Main thing I remember from the book outside of the Sisters themselves is Stormtroopers with shotguns to represent Arbites.
Looking through them, that is neat and I'll have to remember both hq choices for the future, especially the Apostate Cardinal. Mind you the usual point level I build and play at is 1500 points, but dang at higher points values just being able to spam Traitors without worrying about running out of slots sounds fun since you can run them with as few as 5 members of the squad and they get Infiltrate when not led by an Aspiring Champion. So even at low point values could be a fun little hq to just thrown down a bunch of speed bumps while the main force advances.
Edit: huh wow you are right on the Cardinals, that really is baffling. Well, that is a rule that I think the group will just ignore.
kurhanik wrote: You know what is silly, I *have* that book and never noticed that part somehow. Never read through it as thoroughly as the Daemon Hunters book which also had rules for waves of daemons and such.
I think people mostly ignored advarsary rules back in the day as only the 'psychic apocalypse' option in Witch Hunters could be taken in casual / tournament games without altering you list, and giving your HQ the 'psychic' tag against witch hunters wasn't always a bonus.
The 'puppet dance' psychic power was particularly ineffective against 3e sisters due to their anemic close combat abilities and mechanised lists. It was disproportionately effective outside of fighting the WH codex though - imagine full units of thunderwolves or a dreadnought squadron getting hit with it.
As for the daemonhunters advarsaries i've only seen them used once, the greater daemon possession applied to a jump pack/blessed weapon canoness to represent a generic saint. A bit steep at 197pts but the regular saint Celestine was a risky pick, as demonstrated in one of the first white dwarf battle reports where she was killed early by a tau railgun and disabled all faith powers for the rest of the game.
Fun things GW used to do. the 4th ed main rulebook had a bunch of rules sets for sub games of 40K-kill teams, combat patrol etc... including special scenarios-
We pulled the convoy ambush rules for a full sized game. it started out ok with his entire turn of ambush shooting failing to kill the lead land raider. the real saving grace for the army, is that his chaos lord lived long enough to kill it with close combat attacks. then his close combat outfitted chaos dreadnought proceeded to get the magic 1 for rage 3 turns in a row killing 2 more land raiders. because of the way the VP system works in the scenario it ended up being a much closer game than expected. but still a victory for chaos.
My buddy has a tough game planned against our 3.5 iron warriors player so we decided to get in a pre-training game to test his list out
2k game with 5 objectives.
He went first and started out pretty strong. managing to take down both my land raiders. but i got super lucky with an overwatch from his ironclad scoring 2 hits and a kill shot when it charged. using my dreadnoughts i managed to take out most of his and tie up and then dismember his leviathan with my deathwing command squad.
i ended up holding 3 of 5 objectives and there was no real way for him to get me off them. tough game but the dark angels stood their ground, as they should.
aphyon wrote: My buddy has a tough game planned against our 3.5 iron warriors player so we decided to get in a pre-training game to test his list out
Out of curiosity do you find you get much list variation, particularly with the older books? - i.e. are the iron warriors always heavy/oblit focus 'netlist' type things or do you get some off-speed stuff?
aphyon wrote: My buddy has a tough game planned against our 3.5 iron warriors player so we decided to get in a pre-training game to test his list out
Out of curiosity do you find you get much list variation, particularly with the older books? - i.e. are the iron warriors always heavy/oblit focus 'netlist' type things or do you get some off-speed stuff?
I realize I'm not who you're directly asking, but as an obsolete edition player, I feel like I can go ahead and answer this one.
Since the edition is effectively dead, you have more opportunity to deep dive and figure out exactly what the weaknesses are for the netlists from old. Certain things like the Alaitoc Ranger list from the Craftworld Eldar codex are gonna be difficult to beat no matter how you try, but other things that are not nearly as scary can be focused on a little better. Infiltrators and fast attack Units are really good at tackling this list as long as you're not facing an opponent who insists on playing on planet Bowling Ball.
aphyon wrote: My buddy has a tough game planned against our 3.5 iron warriors player so we decided to get in a pre-training game to test his list out
Out of curiosity do you find you get much list variation, particularly with the older books? - i.e. are the iron warriors always heavy/oblit focus 'netlist' type things or do you get some off-speed stuff?
It really depends on the player and on their collections. the one guy only has a small collection and uses what he has including a basilisk with is predators. because he likes the theme as an old guard player. another playing iron warriors has invested in less oblits but more dreadnoughts even with their unpredictability.
Most of the guys really try to play the lists in the manner you would expect the armies to act in the lore. especially our khorne/word bearers player.
We have a guard player currently building a steel legion themed army as he already has an air drop force and a tank company.
Some of the list can get silly and would seem not to work on paper like the jakero list. but somehow it still works. much of that has to do with the players and their attitude towards the game.
aphyon wrote: Some of the list can get silly and would seem not to work on paper like the jakero list. but somehow it still works. much of that has to do with the players and their attitude towards the game.
aphyon wrote: Some of the list can get silly and would seem not to work on paper like the jakero list. but somehow it still works. much of that has to do with the players and their attitude towards the game.
The old 5e GK jokaero rending acolytes list?
sillier than that
land raiders, Inquisitor Coteaz, jakero and death cult assassins
aphyon wrote: land raiders, Inquisitor Coteaz, jakero and death cult assassins
Can't say I ever saw jokaero and cultists in the same squad, though cultists certainly minced units - particularly the white dwarf sisters variant with Jacobus giving them FnP, reroll to hit, +1 attack, and of course his ever useful frag grenades. Not always well suited to a parking lot though.
Has been a while since my old 5e GK era inquisitor saw the tabletop:
Well 20 or so jakero were good enough to deal with most armor, and a couple dozen assassins delivered via land raiders dealt with most infantry well enough. it was a surprisingly effective list.
aphyon wrote: Well 20 or so jakero were good enough to deal with most armor, and a couple dozen assassins delivered via land raiders dealt with most infantry well enough. it was a surprisingly effective list.
Ah, guard heavy weapon squad equivalents but with backup heavy flamers. Probably too prone to getting mortared off the board turn 1 in 5e meta (Emperor help them against one of the old renegade guard artillery spam lists) but i'm not sure i'd want to be drop-podding into 700 points of reaction fire lascannon :p
aphyon wrote: Well 20 or so jakero were good enough to deal with most armor, and a couple dozen assassins delivered via land raiders dealt with most infantry well enough. it was a surprisingly effective list.
Ah, guard heavy weapon squad equivalents but with backup heavy flamers. Probably too prone to getting mortared off the board turn 1 in 5e meta (Emperor help them against one of the old renegade guard artillery spam lists) but i'm not sure i'd want to be drop-podding into 700 points of reaction fire lascannon :p
Well especially since Inquisitor Coteaz has the "i knew you were coming" rule that inquisitors used to get from mystics in the demon hunters codex. he and his squad of jakero he joined will get to shoot you at full BS if any of your units arrive to close to him, before you get to do anything.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Woohoo!
Opportunity knocks for me. Jumped on eBay to see if there were any reasonably priced Codex Angels of Death.
Found one for £25.00 buy it now. And it’s not that melt selling coasters with the book art neither. It’s the actual, honest to goodness book.
Depends on the codex, most 3rd-5th codexes i see for about $10, but occasionally you will see the odd thing like the 4th ed black templar codex that goes for excessive amounts for some reason.
Odd question: does the demonic thing that uses the Defiler chassis have a cannon left over? I'm wanting to convert a Dogs of War cannon for my Beastmen army.
Just Tony wrote: Odd question: does the demonic thing that uses the Defiler chassis have a cannon left over? I'm wanting to convert a Dogs of War cannon for my Beastmen army.
The Soul Grinder?
I didn't even know they were the same box!
Just Tony wrote: Odd question: does the demonic thing that uses the Defiler chassis have a cannon left over? I'm wanting to convert a Dogs of War cannon for my Beastmen army.
The Soul Grinder?
I didn't even know they were the same box!
They aren't the same box, but they share one sprue of parts (the legs bit).
Just Tony wrote: Just picked up the errata edition of the third edition Dark Eldar codex along with a mint fresh copy of the Ork codex
3e DE were short on units but not short on punch - sadly it was errated that no, you cannot assault 12" on a jetbike with combat drugs. Their strong troop units made them surprisingly effective in 5th.
They were every bit as effective in 3rd if you knew how to run them. The SECOND I saw my opponent was running Dark Lances on infantry models I knew I wasn't going to have issues fighting them.
Overread wrote: I recall Dark Eldar early on were the skilled players glass cannon. Powerful and fragile, but had to be run a certain way and quite well to work.
It wasn't so much that they were underpowered, they just weren't built with every unit being generically good like marines can often end up being.
It was more that every unit wasn't as ubiquitous as Marine unit choices. Everything in the Dark Eldar army had a role, and were good at that role when utilized, but were grossly outclassed if used outside of that role. It took a developer's diary article from Gav Thorpe to really get people to use that army right. Marines were essentially on autopilot.
Just Tony wrote: It was more that every unit wasn't as ubiquitous as Marine unit choices. Everything in the Dark Eldar army had a role, and were good at that role when utilized, but were grossly outclassed if used outside of that role. It took a developer's diary article from Gav Thorpe to really get people to use that army right. Marines were essentially on autopilot.
Was that online, in white dwarf or chapter approved?
My limited playtime with them tended to be more hammer than finesse - dozens of dark lances and disintegrators and then adding CC hitters past a certain points level. Never found much use for warp beasts, hellions, mandrakes, scourges, or most of the named characters.
It was a Chapter Approved article that ran in White Dwarf, but I'm not sure if it was reprinted in one of the Chapter Approved volumes. As soon as I can lay hands on it again, I will provide you with the specific source issue.
And it's funny that the most successful 3rd Ed. lists I saw used all of those non-named character units you listed except for the Hellions. And Dark Lance squads had to stand still, which was the LAST thing you wanted to do with Dark Eldar.
Just Tony wrote: And it's funny that the most successful 3rd Ed. lists I saw used all of those non-named character units you listed except for the Hellions. And Dark Lance squads had to stand still, which was the LAST thing you wanted to do with Dark Eldar.
Perhaps an edition thing. In 5e having two lances and bodies in cover on/near an objective was ideal, similarly without 4 editions glancing-only skimmers rule there was no reason to keep throwing the small raider units around the board.
Warp beasts had an agoniser but zero durability and no frags, Mandrakes had no teeth at all, and Scourge can't justify their weapon costs making them a very dubious use of a heavy weapon slot IMO.
Just Tony wrote: And it's funny that the most successful 3rd Ed. lists I saw used all of those non-named character units you listed except for the Hellions. And Dark Lance squads had to stand still, which was the LAST thing you wanted to do with Dark Eldar.
Perhaps an edition thing. In 5e having two lances and bodies in cover on/near an objective was ideal, similarly without 4 editions glancing-only skimmers rule there was no reason to keep throwing the small raider units around the board.
Warp beasts had an agoniser but zero durability and no frags, Mandrakes had no teeth at all, and Scourge can't justify their weapon costs making them a very dubious use of a heavy weapon slot IMO.
Showcasing exactly why, when given the chance to go retro instead of staying current, I went to third instead of fifth.
Just Tony wrote: Showcasing exactly why, when given the chance to go retro instead of staying current, I went to third instead of fifth.
'Glancing hits only' is something of a mixed bag.
Considering that the only meaningful difference between Eldar in 4e and Eldar in 5e was that one rule and it changed their codex from top shelf to one of the weakest overnight. Fortunately it's not as much of a crutch for DE who benefitted less and did perfectly well without it.
3e rules or not warp beasts still had no durability, mandrakes still had no teeth, and scourge were still paying 36 points per model for a pair of stormbolters in a heavy support slot :p
Fragile, but pretty nippy. But that nippiness also prevented your main anti-tank from firing. Because screw you, I guess.
Wyches without their Invulnerable saves just felt utterly pointless. Even against a 4+, they struggled to get their many attacks to actually do anything, outside of dreadful save rolls for your opponent. And in return you went splat to a stiff breeze and harsh language.
They were very good against Wraithlord spam though, as massed Splinter Rifle fire soon dropped those T8 lumps of boredom.
Mandrakes had that really cool rule. But once they popped up? Just….couldnt do anything. Pathetic shooting, pretty weedy in close combat. And again stiff breeze and harsh language would see them off.
Grotesques were interesting too. But the models were bloody awful, and again other than “surprisingly tough. Against shooting” they just didn’t really do anything, as once in HTH I was able to wound them normally. And they were crap in HTH.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Wyches without their Invulnerable saves just felt utterly pointless. Even against a 4+, they struggled to get their many attacks to actually do anything, outside of dreadful save rolls for your opponent. And in return you went splat to a stiff breeze and harsh language.
All the durability was reliant on getting into melee - hit first, kicked down to WS2, losing bonus attacks and facing a 4++. So many DE units felt like agoniser / character delivery platforms.
And the wyches were packing blasters for chump change, which was nice.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: When they first came out, they didn’t have the 4+ Invulnerable in combat. Can’t remember exactly when they gained that though.
Chapter approved 2003, it was one of the changes for the updated 3.5 codex along with the new wych weapons that crippled the unit they were fighting - at the cost of making the wyches more expensive and no better protected against shooting.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: When they first came out, they didn’t have the 4+ Invulnerable in combat. Can’t remember exactly when they gained that though.
Chapter approved 2003, it was one of the changes for the updated 3.5 codex along with the new wych weapons that crippled the unit they were fighting - at the cost of making the wyches more expensive and no better protected against shooting.
That's what Raiders or Webways were for. Also, there's a lot of talk about how ineffective strength 3 units were in combat. I argue that they were only really at a disadvantage against Marines or Marines equivalents and absolutely decimated armies like Guard, Eldar, or Tau. Tyranids and Orks were an exception to this as their swarm nature kind of played havoc on your low numbers as a Dark Eldar player. More often than not, you wound up playing avoidance against these armies.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I think I’m gonna do a separate thread for why I loathe 3rd Ed so much, as I think I need to go on a rampage about it, and don’t want to derail.
LOL well it had it's problems, but as you played through the editions you could see the gradual improvements the design team made through 4th and 5th.
removing guess range weapons and being able to fire and move with ordinance weapons was a huge improvement for example post 3rd.
When were sonic weapons introduced? There's no mention of them in the Emperor's Children list in Slaves to Darkness and the little army booklet you got with the 2nd edition box mentions that if you don't have the rules for sonic weapons you just treat your noise marines as if they had storm bolters.
So they seem to have been introduced somewhere at the tail end of RT or at the very beginning of 2nd ed, but where and how? WD? Citadel Journal?
That does indeed seem to be the case, then. Thank you. That'd be in 91 then, two years before 2nd edition was released. I guess referring to an issue of a magazine printed two years ago and for the previous edition was just how they rolled back then.
While the rules in WD were indeed for Rogue Trader, they're written in such a way as to be compatible with 2nd ed.
I never saw anyone use them, though... we all just treated sonic blasters as storm bolters (as per the Black Codex) until the Chaos codex was released.
It is worth keeping in mind that Rogue Trader at the end was pretty far from Rogue Trader at the beginning.
Which for me is part of the appeal of reading through its various collected volumes in order. To be able to map the evolution and refinement, without jumps between editions is really interesting, especially as a fair few of the articles offer a designer’s commentary as to why the changes were being introduced.
For instance, Marines received changes to make them feel more elite. Tougher, stronger, better armour.
Now having a physical collection like wot I gathered back in…2020, I think, is expensive, and only getting more so as Oldhammer comes ever more in vogue, But if you can find PDF versions it’s all definitely worth a read. Even the First Book Of The Astronomicon, which is well messy!
To me, the biggest appeal of Rogue Trader is its open-endedness. You can basically create rules for anything for it. Now, this does also unfortunately mean that a GM of sorts is mandatory for playing it, but it has potential like no other 40K ruleset since.
As I have dug more deeply into oldhammer resources and lore, it is becoming clear to me that the older editions differed from the new ones in one very fundamental way: All the rules, missions and other resources were chaotically scattered across the main rulebook, campaign books, and WD, and I doubt many people had access to everythning from those 3 food groups. Therefore, peoples impressions on the games differ wildly, often no doubt reflected by the amount of resources they themselves played/had access to. Would be very interesting to see all the material for any given edition of the game compiled into a single, 100% comprehensive resource, including all the commentary and extras that were ever published for em.
The problem lies in the fact that only GW themselves could pull off such a thing long-term, as including everything an edition included would also require access to all the IP protected assets, such as artwork etc.. I mean, take a look at something like the Space Hulk bible.. it looks hideous and is a pain to read
tauist wrote: To me, the biggest appeal of Rogue Trader is its open-endedness. You can basically create rules for anything for it. Now, this does also unfortunately mean that a GM of sorts is mandatory for playing it, but it has potential like no other 40K ruleset since.
As I have dug more deeply into oldhammer resources and lore, it is becoming clear to me that the older editions differed from the new ones in one very fundamental way: All the rules, missions and other resources were chaotically scattered across the main rulebook, campaign books, and WD, and I doubt many people had access to everythning from those 3 food groups. Therefore, peoples impressions on the games differ wildly, often no doubt reflected by the amount of resources they themselves played/had access to. Would be very interesting to see all the material for any given edition of the game compiled into a single, 100% comprehensive resource, including all the commentary and extras that were ever published for em.
The problem lies in the fact that only GW themselves could pull off such a thing long-term, as including everything an edition included would also require access to all the IP protected assets, such as artwork etc.. I mean, take a look at something like the Space Hulk bible.. it looks hideous and is a pain to read
Some editions would be a particular nightmare for this- 3rd and 7th come to mind due to the sheer number of publications.
Plus, a lot was published on GWs old websites, and only a fraction of this has been saved on internet archives. Many of those rules are simply not available to the general public anymore.
As an example: the 3rd edition rules for Ork teleporta mobz appeared on the website for the Armageddon global campaign. These were not printed anywhere else to my knowledge.
tauist wrote: To me, the biggest appeal of Rogue Trader is its open-endedness. You can basically create rules for anything for it. Now, this does also unfortunately mean that a GM of sorts is mandatory for playing it, but it has potential like no other 40K ruleset since.
As I have dug more deeply into oldhammer resources and lore, it is becoming clear to me that the older editions differed from the new ones in one very fundamental way: All the rules, missions and other resources were chaotically scattered across the main rulebook, campaign books, and WD, and I doubt many people had access to everythning from those 3 food groups. Therefore, peoples impressions on the games differ wildly, often no doubt reflected by the amount of resources they themselves played/had access to. Would be very interesting to see all the material for any given edition of the game compiled into a single, 100% comprehensive resource, including all the commentary and extras that were ever published for em.
The problem lies in the fact that only GW themselves could pull off such a thing long-term, as including everything an edition included would also require access to all the IP protected assets, such as artwork etc.. I mean, take a look at something like the Space Hulk bible.. it looks hideous and is a pain to read
This is why my Oldhammer dream-of-dreams isn't a reprinting of any specific model or material but a computer game that compiles RT, WHFB 3rd ed and the various additional rules(Siege, Realm of Chaos, army lists etc) into one neat package sold on Steam and using their servers for multiplayer. With, of course, a solid mission generator and editor. Pick an appropriately low-fi aesthetic for the graphics, make sure it runs smooth as butter and off you go. Day 1 purchase. I'd buy it for my friends online too.
tauist wrote: To me, the biggest appeal of Rogue Trader is its open-endedness. You can basically create rules for anything for it. Now, this does also unfortunately mean that a GM of sorts is mandatory for playing it, but it has potential like no other 40K ruleset since.
As I have dug more deeply into oldhammer resources and lore, it is becoming clear to me that the older editions differed from the new ones in one very fundamental way: All the rules, missions and other resources were chaotically scattered across the main rulebook, campaign books, and WD, and I doubt many people had access to everythning from those 3 food groups. Therefore, peoples impressions on the games differ wildly, often no doubt reflected by the amount of resources they themselves played/had access to. Would be very interesting to see all the material for any given edition of the game compiled into a single, 100% comprehensive resource, including all the commentary and extras that were ever published for em.
The problem lies in the fact that only GW themselves could pull off such a thing long-term, as including everything an edition included would also require access to all the IP protected assets, such as artwork etc.. I mean, take a look at something like the Space Hulk bible.. it looks hideous and is a pain to read
Some editions would be a particular nightmare for this- 3rd and 7th come to mind due to the sheer number of publications.
Plus, a lot was published on GWs old websites, and only a fraction of this has been saved on internet archives. Many of those rules are simply not available to the general public anymore.
As an example: the 3rd edition rules for Ork teleporta mobz appeared on the website for the Armageddon global campaign. These were not printed anywhere else to my knowledge.
Tell me about it. I'm still trying to find the comp packes from GW sanctioned events that were used to score army comp in Fantasy and 40K...
Did some guard on guard action at 2K points. 5 objectives.
My opponent was having a bad dice day. by the end of turn 3 he had managed to immobilize a chimer and blow the autocannons off the the other 2. in return he lost a centaur, an elite tank and his bane blade. i ended up never getting any of my infantry out of the transports before he called it.
We did the rematch game of the previous. this time around my dice were not as happy with me. we again had 5 objectives on a space marine outpost table. he managed to kill all of my basic guardsman save 3 and all my chimeras, i still managed to give him a good fight taking out his centaur, command squad and storm troopers scoring 1 objective to his 2.
I've got the models for a Demiurg force (I loved Squats in 2e, but I think the idea of them as a proper Xenos faction is cooler nowadays).
Mantic Forgefathers, the ones in the heavy armour suits with enclosed helmets, and their versions of terminators, Iron Ancestors, and then some of the Vermyn tunneling tanks and a Forgefather tank.
Looking at my options to play them in 3e with minimal messing, I think 3e Salamanders work best - lots of meltas and flamers, which fits with my conception, tough and well armoured but a bit slower than the average space marine.
Hero: Space Marine Captain Living Ancestor: Salamanders Librarian Exo Armour: Terminators Forgefather Squads: Salamanders Tactical Squads Forgefather Squads with Jump Packs: Salamanders Assault Squads Forgefather Squads with Heavy Weapons: Devastators Iron Ancestor: Dreadnaught Forgefather Tank: Predator
Then use the VDR to make a tunnelling Rhino for the tunnellers and I think it works really well. Any arguments for using a different 3rd-7th edition and codex?
I love the mantic forge fathers stuff! have a bit of it myself.
As for the drill i would just use the rules for the termite assault drill. for codexes if you want to use the salamanders the codex armageddon is the most flavorful followed by the 4th ed space marine codex trait system as the best representations IMHO. as far as rules go 5th ed is my gold standard as i pointed out in the very first post of this topic so many years ago.
P.S. i also love the demiurg ships in BFG. but i only have space for my chaos fleet. i leave them up to the TAU player in the group.
So, generally what was the power levels of factions at the end of 9th ed? thinking of just going back to play that sometime, as well as dabbling in 7th ed and such.
Tiger9gamer wrote: So, generally what was the power levels of factions at the end of 9th ed? thinking of just going back to play that sometime, as well as dabbling in 7th ed and such.
Depends on how much of a jerk you want to be, like 9th ed stratagems 7th ed had it's own spam in the formations department. i recommend avoiding them.
If you really want to enjoy oldhammer you need to focus on thematic play. build and play the armies the way they are supposed to work in the lore. the older editions used the FOC but also allowed you to take just about any unit you liked and still have a chance to win given the way objectives worked. you need to put the thought of "power level" completely out of your mind or you will have a terrible experience.
Keep in mind that everything post 8th ed. is a completely different game. That happens to just use some of the same models.
If your more interested in 9th you might want to do a topic search. there are more than enough of them on DAKKA to break down the factions.
Tiger9gamer wrote: So, generally what was the power levels of factions at the end of 9th ed? thinking of just going back to play that sometime, as well as dabbling in 7th ed and such.
Depends on how much of a jerk you want to be, like 9th ed stratagems 7th ed had it's own spam in the formations department. i recommend avoiding them.
If you really want to enjoy oldhammer you need to focus on thematic play. build and play the armies the way they are supposed to work in the lore. the older editions used the FOC but also allowed you to take just about any unit you liked and still have a chance to win given the way objectives worked. you need to put the thought of "power level" completely out of your mind or you will have a terrible experience.
Keep in mind that everything post 8th ed. is a completely different game. That happens to just use some of the same models.
If your more interested in 9th you might want to do a topic search. there are more than enough of them on DAKKA to break down the factions.
I'll keep the 9th edition topic search in mind, but yea I am starting to get into 7th ed gaming. I am going to try and avoid formations with the small group i'm forming, but other people are interested in trying some stuff they never used back then. I am trying to get them to check out prohammer as well!
but yea, I think thematic play is what I would be mainly focused on, but I am also an admec player through and through. I like my knights, I like my skitarii, and I like my robots. I just like having options for fun, and I like the kind of stuff 9th and 7th bring in different ways
Automatically Appended Next Post: oh yea, I stopped playing 9th edition before nephlim landed. What is the deal with super heavy auxillary detachments in warzone nephlim?
Like, If I wanna bring an imperial knight with my admec, will it still cost me 3cp?
I run a 7th ed admech army in our 5th edition games. it is quite fun. i built it around the lucius FW since i own a macharius and they make them there. so i can add it as my superheavy detachment in 5th ed rules. since it is basically just 2 russ's slapped together it also isn't game breaking. but most of my force is cataphron breachers/destroyers. and i also picked up the great looking 3d printed dune crawlers from station forge.
aphyon wrote: I run a 7th ed admech army in our 5th edition games. it is quite fun. i built it around the lucius FW since i own a macharius and they make them there. so i can add it as my superheavy detachment in 5th ed rules. since it is basically just 2 russ's slapped together it also isn't game breaking. but most of my force is cataphron breachers/destroyers. and i also picked up the great looking 3d printed dune crawlers from station forge.
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Hey what a coincidence! I run a lucius army as well My army swings the opposite way. I was flooding the board with skitarii since they first came out, with neutron laser onagers following them everywhere and with knight support in the back for counter charge / heavy firepower. My 3d printer is out of wack but you best believe that I'm getting some admec STL's when I can get it running again. Even in 5th edition, I have plans.
Hell, I kinda want to reverse engineer some of the newer admec stuff to 7th edition, like the transports and jump packers. It would be a neat experiment.
I run my breachers the same way, but my destroyers rock the heavy grav cannon and flame thrower (for wall of death overwatch when and if they get charged). i run 6 of each along with some infiltrators, 2 neutron laser crawlers and the 3rd crawler with the AA loadout. a termite assault drill with electro priests (the staff ones) and the macharius. led by a tech priest dominus of course.
Yeah 3rd-7th core mechanics wise are pretty well the same. that's why our group allows any codex to be used form those editions. it would work the same for HH. in fact we use HH stuff for the custodes that isn't in the 7th ed codex alone to expand the model line.
We do refine it a bit to keep everything on the same page by restricting it to mostly 5th ed main rules/USRs with the given fixes i put at the start of this topic so many years ago.
just had my first game of 7th ed in years against an assault based, demon summoning army.
it was fairly good, if it was one sided in my favor. Still was a lot of fun. My opponent managed to summon a demon with my first armor saves of the game from a formation, got a demon prince off a challenge from a skitarii alpha, and summoned a lord of change. I was basically playing demon Wack-a-mole at that point. He called it after I killed the lord of change with a vanguard squad, seeing as I had a knight and another squad left to shoot.
Dunno how much I like formations still, but He brought up a good point; I won against three formations really good
Having fun games is the point. GW pushing tournaments may be good for sales. even back in the day with early rouge trader and grand tournaments it brought in the worst kind of players. it took us away from hanging out with friends enjoying epic battles in the 40K setting where certain armies would do certain silly things because we all know that is what they would absolutely do no matter what....like khorne cultists killing themselves in the explosion they caused destroying a vehicle.
aphyon wrote: Having fun games is the point. GW pushing tournaments may be good for sales. even back in the day with early rouge trader and grand tournaments it brought in the worst kind of players. it took us away from hanging out with friends enjoying epic battles in the 40K setting where certain armies would do certain silly things because we all know that is what they would absolutely do no matter what....like khorne cultists killing themselves in the explosion they caused destroying a vehicle.
Here's the thing though, if your the Chaos player VS a vehicle focused ork army and you always lose each week because most of your army gets killed just killing the ork vehicles, who then go on to win - at some point the fun of the silly loses out to the "Oh I can't win this/Oh I keep losing".
It's always been the case that a well balanced game will work great for both competitive play AND casual play. The fact that GW gets it wrong most of the time isn't really a factor of their focus, its more a factor of their general approach to rules. I'd also argue that they aren't chasing the tournament crowd. They are doing bits for them, bits for casuals, bits for regular people and throw that all over a management framework (eg every unit must have an ability to be unique) and then smatter that with limited resources and a very short development timeframe.
Basically GW's rules keep having issues because of fundamental ways in which they approach rules.
I'd also argue that their "3 ways to play" is not allowed to flourish as it should under this structure. In theory GW should have one single solid set of rules that's pretty much set in stone for Matched Play and forms a balanced (between factions and within factions) approach to the game. They could then smatter that with a bunch of layered additional rules. Bringing in fluffy and fun things and wild stuff for the Open and Narrative Play formats as optional layers.
aphyon wrote: Having fun games is the point. GW pushing tournaments may be good for sales. even back in the day with early rouge trader and grand tournaments it brought in the worst kind of players. it took us away from hanging out with friends enjoying epic battles in the 40K setting where certain armies would do certain silly things because we all know that is what they would absolutely do no matter what....like khorne cultists killing themselves in the explosion they caused destroying a vehicle.
Here's the thing though, if your the Chaos player VS a vehicle focused ork army and you always lose each week because most of your army gets killed just killing the ork vehicles, who then go on to win - at some point the fun of the silly loses out to the "Oh I can't win this/Oh I keep losing".
It's always been the case that a well balanced game will work great for both competitive play AND casual play. The fact that GW gets it wrong most of the time isn't really a factor of their focus, its more a factor of their general approach to rules. I'd also argue that they aren't chasing the tournament crowd. They are doing bits for them, bits for casuals, bits for regular people and throw that all over a management framework (eg every unit must have an ability to be unique) and then smatter that with limited resources and a very short development timeframe.
Basically GW's rules keep having issues because of fundamental ways in which they approach rules.
I'd also argue that their "3 ways to play" is not allowed to flourish as it should under this structure. In theory GW should have one single solid set of rules that's pretty much set in stone for Matched Play and forms a balanced (between factions and within factions) approach to the game. They could then smatter that with a bunch of layered additional rules. Bringing in fluffy and fun things and wild stuff for the Open and Narrative Play formats as optional layers.
So you could get back your wild fun.
I think that better balance helps, but equally mission variety counters skew lists. The all-vehicle Ork army is going to struggle in the Stronghold Assault mission when it immediately alerts the sentries and therefore cannot get into a good position before the turn count-down starts (which is only 4 turns in Stronghold Assault). To take one example.
Agreed and honestly GW would possibly have an easier time selling narrative and creative missions like that if they settled down on the core rules and left them alone for a long span. I feel like with 3 year rotations everyone is spending time learning the rules (remembering casual players might not game more than once a week at best and not every single week in a month either) and just about gets them before it gets shaken up again.
So they don't want the bother of additoinal layers to the rules because they are still getting the core mechanics settled
aphyon wrote: Having fun games is the point. GW pushing tournaments may be good for sales. even back in the day with early rouge trader and grand tournaments it brought in the worst kind of players. it took us away from hanging out with friends enjoying epic battles in the 40K setting where certain armies would do certain silly things because we all know that is what they would absolutely do no matter what....like khorne cultists killing themselves in the explosion they caused destroying a vehicle.
Oh yea. I never been jump scared in a table top game like when Kairos fateweaver was tossed down in the middle of the field, right in front of my gunline! Some omnisiah blessed gunfire helped out a lot in removing them.
That said, his list was mostly assault focused, so next time I hope my guys hold up to gunfire .u.
Dunno if this has come up here before, but I've been reading some old rulebooks over the last few days.
Man, I wish 4e had army lists in the book! The 3e book is great, and ends up winning due to those army lists, but I always felt it did the non-Imperial factions dirty in the background section, and the colour section is great but...
The 4e colour section is just the best it's ever been. It's got gorgeous art for all the factions (I realised looking at it that the impression that art made on me is probably the REAL reason my marines are Crimson Fists and my chaos marines are Word Bearers!) and a fairly decent spread of background for all of them. The miniatures are close to my favourite versions of most of them.
And then it just keeps going - loads of advice on how to make terrain, cardboard city and bunker templates, photo examples of cloth battlefields with lichen and other "real" examples. Alternate game modes like Kill Team and Combat Patrol, really well developed with lots of hobbyists actual models painted with a skill level achievable by the average gamer. Advice on how to make minefields and other markers. Army profiles and how to paint guides that are actually realistic, and again, show real hobbyist's collections. And then another section of lovely terrain boards for inspiration.
And then it keeps going some more, with campaign rules, advice for how to make campaigns, and a whole example campaign at the back!
Just glorious stuff. And it'd be the last time we'd get a book like this with so much hobbyist content. In 5e it was all GW kits, and not nearly as hobby focused. One page on customising your miniatures, but nothing that wasn't GW terrain and all miniatures 'eavy metal painted. Gorgeous, of course, but not really showing a new gamer what is achievable and "normal".
It's a shame. I think of it as being the last hurrah for "old GW" cramming all that stuff in. It feels like someone thought "We've got to show kids that this is something they can do!"
Some of those editions were also when GW had some concept of how to layout information too.
These days you get the feeling that they've a bunch of game info that just gets thrown into the books (esp codex) as they are done with no real thought as to how the information flows or how easy it is to navigate. Eg Tyranids right now they "could" have put all the models in alphabetical, but nope instead they are just randomly inserted. So as there's no "hq, troop, heavysupport etc..." to break it down it takes ages to find a model.
Da Boss wrote: Haha, wow really? Not even alphabetical?
Smacks of being too used to search functions and forgetting how books work, honestly...
I've no idea how they do it but yeah its just a jumble; but its been that way for a few editions. Honestly makes me wonder if GW lost a key editor or some phase ni their development of codex.
Though they aren't the only ones to blame - people doing photo and art books STILL keep doing double page spreads or creating 100s of pages long books and printing images over the entire page right into the spine...
Da Boss wrote: Dunno if this has come up here before, but I've been reading some old rulebooks over the last few days.
Man, I wish 4e had army lists in the book! The 3e book is great, and ends up winning due to those army lists, but I always felt it did the non-Imperial factions dirty in the background section, and the colour section is great but...
The 4e colour section is just the best it's ever been. It's got gorgeous art for all the factions (I realised looking at it that the impression that art made on me is probably the REAL reason my marines are Crimson Fists and my chaos marines are Word Bearers!) and a fairly decent spread of background for all of them. The miniatures are close to my favourite versions of most of them.
And then it just keeps going - loads of advice on how to make terrain, cardboard city and bunker templates, photo examples of cloth battlefields with lichen and other "real" examples. Alternate game modes like Kill Team and Combat Patrol, really well developed with lots of hobbyists actual models painted with a skill level achievable by the average gamer. Advice on how to make minefields and other markers. Army profiles and how to paint guides that are actually realistic, and again, show real hobbyist's collections. And then another section of lovely terrain boards for inspiration.
And then it keeps going some more, with campaign rules, advice for how to make campaigns, and a whole example campaign at the back!
Just glorious stuff. And it'd be the last time we'd get a book like this with so much hobbyist content. In 5e it was all GW kits, and not nearly as hobby focused. One page on customising your miniatures, but nothing that wasn't GW terrain and all miniatures 'eavy metal painted. Gorgeous, of course, but not really showing a new gamer what is achievable and "normal".
It's a shame. I think of it as being the last hurrah for "old GW" cramming all that stuff in. It feels like someone thought "We've got to show kids that this is something they can do!"
I have to admit I am exceedingly happy that the only "special edition" GW books I have is the faux-leather 4th edition rulebook and the matching 4th ed SM codex. I love those books!
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Overread wrote: Eg Tyranids right now they "could" have put all the models in alphabetical, but nope instead they are just randomly inserted. So as there's no "hq, troop, heavysupport etc..." to break it down it takes ages to find a model.
Yeah i also have a copy of the 4th ed main rulebook. it has so much stuff in it. when we do combat patrols and kill teams it is what we base our games on. keep in mind that when 4th was made all the original team were still there. by the end of 5th they were pretty much all gone. helps you understand why 6th was so bad.
Even the 5e rulebook is not as good from a hobby and creativity perspective. Much more of a "buy this stuff to play the game" and much less creative and inspiring.
Also, the art for the colour section is nowhere near as good. Those 4e single figures for each faction are iconic.
Da Boss wrote: Even the 5e rulebook is not as good from a hobby and creativity perspective. Much more of a "buy this stuff to play the game" and much less creative and inspiring.
Also, the art for the colour section is nowhere near as good. Those 4e single figures for each faction are iconic.
I think the 4th ed book is better overall, but I will defend some aspects of the 5th ed book. It showed a lot more army showcases, which was inspiring to me. I still occasionally think about the Khorne force with all the soul faces painted on the armour. Plus, the 5th ed book included line-art style images for many factions which were great references that I still use today (esp. the Guard ones, example below) and the faction-specific galaxy maps began in 5th and they were really cool. I like how they found different ways of showing faction activity.
My ideal book would probably be a mash-up of the best parts of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th ed books.
The art I was talking about:
Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Craftworld Eldar, Tau, and Tyranids got art like this.
Example of the great faction maps:
So not as good for hobby advice, but better at fleshing out the world and faction identities, and giving creative hooks for your own force.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to admit I am exceedingly happy that the only "special edition" GW books I have is the faux-leather 4th edition rulebook and the matching 4th ed SM codex. I love those books!
Yeah, I splashed out for the limited ed version of the 4th ed book, because it was really pretty. Ironic that it turned out to be my least favourite edition... which turned me off from buying any more limited edition books.
About a decade ago i sold off most of my tau army to a regular at the time and he has recently started gaming again and wanted to focus on his crimson fists so he re-sold the army to a newer player in our oldhammer group. so i ended up getting my butt kicked by myself.
the tau list was effectively an armored company with 3 scout and 2 fire warrior squads with devilfish, a crisis suit commander, 3 man broadside team and 2 hammerheads.
A bunch more 40K this weekend. one of our regulars was out for about a month so he was amped to get in some games.
first he did 2 games against my guard. the first one was a really close games against his iron hands. with 5 objectives he managed to hold on to 3 to my 2-
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The second game against chaos we went quick and dirty with no objectives. this game was also pretty close. but he managed to pull ahead by 2 kill points at the very end.
Used some of the store terrain with my out post mat and i think it turned out pretty good-
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The first game was 4th ed tau at 2k
X3 pathfinder teams, X2 fire warrior teams, X2 2 man broadside teams, commander r'alai, and a hammerhead.
The 5th ed guard brought the FW armored company with vendetta support. turned into quite the drubbing for the guard.
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The second game went big at 3k points and 5 objectives. both players using the 3.5 chaos codex as the core of their armies. they also included some big boys on the khorne side like a 3rd party brass scorpion and scarbrand. it ended up being a close game with a 3/2 objective margin of victory for the iron warrior player....blod was spilled and skulls were taken, so we all know who really won.
In my bid to do weird things...who expects a guard army to assault you, especially against iron hands?
The game 2K points 5th ed core rules iron hands Index astartes/4th ed VS 5th ed guard with bullgryn-
5 objectives-as usual my opponent managed to go first. and quickly dominated to right flank of the table. i used the outpost to shield a left push. i lost half my Bullgryn in the fight but i managed to kill an ironclad and his librarian and get one of my Vet squads on an objective....then a silly thing happened the top of 5 my opponent decided the game usually goes to turn 6 on a 3+ so he stepped off both objectives he held to get better shots at my units. it cost him the game because i was the only one holding an objective when the game suddenly ended on the bottom of turn 5 with a roll of a 2 on the dice.
there were 2 regulars who planed a couple 3k games using our house 5th ed rules. as it was above 2,500 points the FOC restrictions were removed
One was a crimson fists player, i forgot to get a full pic of his army as i was in another game at the time.
in no particular order he had pedro cantor, terminator squads, dreadnoughts, storm talon, a land raider transport, vindicators, devestator squad, razor backs, rhinos, tactical squads, sternguard squads in drop pods, a legion of the damned squad.
The other player sent me pics of his full armies-the first being an imperial guard armored company-
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The second an index astartes (3.5) iron hands themed list-
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The table was an imperial city-
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Both games had 5 objectives
Game 1 went to the guard
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Game 2 i am not sure how it ended, but from the wreckage on the table, i am pretty sure it was close-
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I had my own game on this table.
5th ed guard VS 4th ed black templar-5 objectives and the game went all 5 turn-
These are the armies at 2k points-
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I lost all my regular guardsmen, all my chimeras, 3 of my bullgryn and 2 of the 3 structure points on the doom hammer, but i managed to sit on 3 objectives at the end of the game to his one giving me a solid victory.
His surviving force was 3 land speeders, one land raider crusader (immobilized), 4 assault terminators, Grimaldus, and a drop pod.
there were 2 regulars who planed a couple 3k games using our house 5th ed rules. as it was above 2,500 points the FOC restrictions were removed
One was a crimson fists player, i forgot to get a full pic of his army as i was in another game at the time.
in no particular order he had pedro cantor, terminator squads, dreadnoughts, storm talon, a land raider transport, vindicators, devestator squad, razor backs, rhinos, tactical squads, sternguard squads in drop pods, a legion of the damned squad.
Well everybody had a fun time so i think that is enough, but i can only speak for my game, you can tell by the surviving units (he had 9 in various states of damage, and comparatively i had 8) it was equally brutal for both sides and came down to objectives.
aphyon wrote: Well everybody had a fun time so i think that is enough, but i can only speak for my game, you can tell by the surviving units (he had 9 in various states of damage, and comparatively i had 8) it was equally brutal for both sides and came down to objectives.
hey, fair enough! I enjoy close games like that. I know i'm mostly going to be building towards a HH / old editions list anyways
Did a test game tonight VS one of our regulars 3.5 iron warriors army.
i ran salamanders led by Brey'arth ashmantle with a squad of sniper scouts and a squad of flanking scouts in a storm speeder. a doredeo dreadnought a storm eagle, storm hawk, and an allied grey knight grand master w/retinue in terminator armor.
He started out very lucky with danger close deep strikes with his obliterator. and he even managed to kill brey'arth for a moral victory.
I lost 5 of my GK terminators taking out all his oblits by this time i had the flyers the doredeo and 5 terminators left. he had 1 CC dread, his 2 chaos lords. and a badly damaged leviathan dreadnought.
Ran a bit of a different list from last week. traded out the dreads for more infantry to give my opponents black templar army some boots on the ground to fight with.
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The templar player was doing some proxy testing to see if he would like to run land raider spartans. they fit in the superheavy detachment for our 5th ed house 40K games as light super heavies (2 structure points).
The game was pretty brutal, with both our terminator squads killing each other. i failed to kill either spartan and he slowly removed my AT weapons from the game giving him a win.
aphyon wrote: The templar player was doing some proxy testing to see if he would like to run land raider spartans. they fit in the superheavy detachment for our 5th ed house 40K games as light super heavies (2 structure points)
Given how fragile and cramped the land raider felt at times in 5th the spartan certainly was a much more suitable 'centrepiece'. And a rough time for any eldar players if taken with the Templars blessed hull.
Though IIRC the award for most durable went to the achillies, pre-hull points that thing was just about unkillable without armourbane or railguns. Or meltabombs as they curiously didn't count as having the melta rule...
Yeah i have an Achilles and they are tough with a price tag to go along with it, they are immune to lance and the melta special rules. along with the -1 on the damage chart results.
In my handy 40K folder i bring with me i have the data sheets for every official land raider made for the game including the Ares, and Achilles.
Tonight's table by request was the imperial guard outpost.
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Game 1 was a brawl against iron hands fighting to a tie. we both scored 2 of 5 objectives, contested the last. he had first blood and i had slay the warlord but we both also had line breaker.
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Game 2 was a test fight with the tau player loaning out his army while he was in a different game. we never finished but it was a close fight.
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The last fight started out in favor of the Tau with more hate being spewed at the deathwatch allies in all 3 games. it turned at the end of 6 with the tau loosing most of it's heavy firepower and deciding to do the tau thing and give ground for future victory.
One of our regulars wanted to get his entire iron hands force on the table.
Just a bit over 3,200 points
So we ended up doing a big apocalypse level battle.
I borught along some deathwatch with my salmanders
The table was a mix of 3d printed and the new gale force 9 versions of the space marine outpost from war scenery/dawn of war.
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Since we were doing such a big game we just went without objectives, as usually happens when i fight him he won first turn.
fun notes. my scout sgt. managed to kill an iroclad with a melta bomb before he died. and his leviathan was nigh unkillable making invul save after save.
When the smoke cleared at the end we both had lost about 10 units. for a good solid tie game. We technically should have gone another turn but he had to go so we wrapped it up there.
so for old editions, I had a thought... how do you balance the insane codex's of 7th ed? Tau, Eldar ect seem to be way overtuned in the close of 7th ed. I love 7th ed, but I am slowly remembering what sucks and what doesnt lol.
We default to 5th ed core rules. with the exceptions mentioned in the beginning of this topic. (using snap fire, overwatch, grenades throwing etc.. from 6th and 7th)
For example FNP in 7th is only a 5+ or 6+ but works against all damage where as 5th ed it is a better save (4+) but it does not work against weapons with AP1/2 profiles or weapons that are double the T of the target model.
If a rule from 7th is not in 5th ed USRs we either ignore it or use it's appropriate counterpart. for example the impact attack thing is just ignored as there are no corresponding 5th ed rule. some rules in 7th are used to represent the equivalent of fleet of foot or move through cover in 5th but do it in a different way, those rules revert to the previous version.
Because the overall mechanics are effectively the same it is an easy fix.
The delima many new players face is power creep VS theme or specialization. sure you can get more units VS points cost in some of the 7th ed codexes but you lose access to many of the things that make armies play in accordance with lore. as above the iron hands player uses the older index astartes rules because he gets a super master of the forge in the iron father that is unique to his chapter as well as a venerable HQ dread with some special rules.
He also has a guard armored company and tried out the 7th ed version but went back to the older version because it gave him more tools to work with-variant ammo, sponson gunner upgrades, etc... as he felt this made a more impactful force than just adding more tanks.
7e books had lots of ups and downs and several that were propped up heavily by formations - the admech/skitarii books were insanely skewed by formations and somewhat reasonable without, while others like the Eldar could crush even the most formation-abusive admech lists on raw strength alone. But arguably they were more exception than rule.
Yea, i'm mostly thinking about 7th ed specifically and addressing those problems tbh. I do like 5th, but I am way more involved on trying to make this edition work better beyond using the Age of Darkness.
Eldar is one of the big problems in that because... well... the big D weapons.
Well if you wanted to talk about D weapons specifically-
Destroyer weapons do not exist in normal games of 5th ed so what we do is either use the original rules for those weapons (pre apocalypse rules) as found in imperial armor 1 I.E. a turbo laser is a longer range las cannon with a small blast template.
For anything else AT pretty much nailed it we just use S10 AP1 with certain weapons like volcano cannons doing D3 structure points VS 1 for their special ability against superheavies.
Distort weapons and haywire/emp have their own set of rules that exist in 5th ed.
As a side note-Eldar have always been considered pretty powerful. no matter what edition. they were the glass canon-super specialized force for a very long time.
The eldar power problem is almost entirely due to the popularity of space marines.
They have specialists for many things including killing marines. And when marines are statistically the most commonly encountered army, building your force with the anti marine specialists as standard is always going to be the best option.
It's also like left handers playing sport - everyone is familiar with playing with and against marines so they aren't a mystery.
Any army, not just eldar, that aren't played as often will be harder to deal with.
Hellebore wrote: The eldar power problem is almost entirely due to the popularity of space marines.
That was true of 3rd edition eldar with their AP2/AP3 firepower.
4e eldar were dominant via near indestructible skimmers and that same codex under 5e rules was average at best.
6e and 7e were entirely different beasts - using their transports as anti-tank, their AP 5 and worse weapons as anti-marine, running S3 AP- deathstars, spamming daemon summonings, and d-weapons for days.
Plus they would sometimes use melta-weapons against tanks like normal people but the latter edition eldar had enough hammer to make any peg fit any hole.
We did something silly today, both of us went max infantry with minimal vehicles.
we each had over 40 boots on the ground. he brought a contemptor dread in a lucius pod, and i brought a hellfire pattern venerable dread and a typhoon varinat land speeder.
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It was a fun fight but sadly my eversore assassin didn't get to do anything thanks to a lucky overwatch melta shot when he charged(failed his invul save).
We had 5 objectives with him using the 4th ed black templar codex and i was using the 5th ed marine codex for my salamanders with an allied bit of grey knights from the demon hunter codex.
The knights themselves cleaned house with pretty much anything that got close to them. but the emperors champion shrugged off 3 thunder hammer hits and managed to prevent a tie by contesting an objective. giving him 2 to my 1, solid victory for the templars.
We ended up with a big table to fit in the marine outpost (game force 9 bits and 3d printed bits from war scenery)
I finally got my turn facing the 3.5 nurgle army. i was running a mix of salamanders (5th) and grey knight allies(3rd)
I had a MOTF on a bike with conversion beamer, tac squad with razorback, scout sniper team, doredeo dreadnought, storm hawk and storm eagle (ROC pattern)
with an allied GK grand master w/retinue and a GK terminator squad.
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The game was 2K points with a single "king of the hill" center objective.
Chaos went first, managing to take out my razorback and dread, i never managed to kill his raider but i got his "predator" proxy, he was running the named great unclean one-Ku'gath who i managed to shoot to death. my scout snipers did a number on his terminators and when the GKs showed up they turned the tables quickly. he managed to contest the objective on turn 7 and we ended up without a tie breaker as he had first blood and i had slay the warlord. the game was pretty fun and went very fast. it took maybe and hour to get through 7 turns.
In the end i had my GK grand master and 3 terminators left. my storm eagle and master of the forge. he had his land raider, 2 obliterators, and the squad of plague bearers that had walked back onto the table thanks to the GK demonic incursion special rule.
It was time for a switch up. my salamanders have been in rotation for several months now so it was time for something other than marines.
It is time for the machine god
My list is pretty easy and well rounded. i play FW lucius-i also use mostly 3rd party or 3d printed minis to represent the army as i was going for more of a spider walker themed force.
.tech priest dominus
.cataphron breacher squad
.cataphron destroyer squad
.sicarian infiltrators
.X3 dune crawlers
.super heavy detchment-macharius tank
Game 1 i did battle against the forces of nurgle. we had 5 objectives. as per my suggestion since i had grave cannons he brought a demon heavy force. it was a pretty fun game and we basically fought each other to a tie in every way.
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Game 2 the black templar decided to just try and purge me.....it didn't go well for him.
At the end of the game he had 2 models left on the table....one being a drop pod.
i lost my destroyer squad, a single crawler and a few sicarians
aphyon wrote: I finally got my turn facing the 3.5 nurgle army. i was running a mix of salamanders (5th) and grey knight allies(3rd)
I had a MOTF on a bike with conversion beamer, tac squad with razorback, scout sniper team, doredeo dreadnought, storm hawk and storm eagle (ROC pattern)
with an allied GK grand master w/retinue and a GK terminator squad.
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The game was 2K points with a single "king of the hill" center objective.
Chaos went first, managing to take out my razorback and dread, i never managed to kill his raider but i got his "predator" proxy, he was running the named great unclean one-Ku'gath who i managed to shoot to death. my scout snipers did a number on his terminators and when the GKs showed up they turned the tables quickly. he managed to contest the objective on turn 7 and we ended up without a tie breaker as he had first blood and i had slay the warlord. the game was pretty fun and went very fast. it took maybe and hour to get through 7 turns.
In the end i had my GK grand master and 3 terminators left. my storm eagle and master of the forge. he had his land raider, 2 obliterators, and the squad of plague bearers that had walked back onto the table thanks to the GK demonic incursion special rule.
Yes our group runs core 5th ed with a few house rules imported from other editions to prevent abuse or add a bit of flavor to the game. it is stuff i put on this thread on page 1.
It is quite easy, it only works with cross compatible 3rd-7th ed codexes.
For new units imported into old codexes-IE heldrake into 3.5 chaos
1.take the new base points cost
2.take all upgrades and rules from the 3.5 chaos codex
For new codexes that never existed in 5th- IE admech
use all the rules and points from the codex however all USRs must comply with their 5th ed counterparts or are outright ignored.
.example-dunestrider-adds an extra 3" movement to represent the ability to traverse rough terrain.
in 5th all non-jump infantry have a fixed 6" move, the comparable USR would be move through cover-roll 3d6 instead of 2 and take the highest when rolling for difficult terrain.
If a compatible USR does not exist in 5th the special rule is ignored.
We also disallowed certain rules that were abusive like the "blind" psychic power. or the wound allocation shenanigans from 5th (we use the clear and simple 4th ed version)
1.0 only as it was based on 7th. in fact that is what we use for the lion share of custodes rules as the mini dex they had in 7th doesn't cover all their units.
Also most of the "rare" 30K variant units can be used 1 per army as a "relic" such as a predator with a melta cannon i occasionally use for my salamanders etc...
In addition to all the old codexes i have with me at all game nights ( 4th ed demons codex was added after this pic was taken)-
i also have hard copies of all the index astartes books and the 3rd ed chapter approved with VDR rules as well as most of the FW books(HH and regular FW), and those i don't own hard copies of i have on PDF. so our gameplay options are large.
2 games tonight with my admech. doing some house 5th ed
Since i was playing admech i broke out the admech table,
game 1 was against a guard armored company circa IA volume 1. he brought out all the toys, infernus shells, a hell hammer etc. he managed to go first and his dice were rolling hot, lost half my army on turn 1. i never recovered but it was still a fun game-
set up was table quarters with 4 objectives-
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Game 2 was against chaos(3.5) and it was a much closer thing-
5 objectives with standard setup. he got to do something he hardly ever do and use his raptors as an HQ delivery system.
It was a good fight and we were both running on fumes by the end. i had 2 dune crawlers, my tech priest dominus and a squad of sicarian infiltrators left on the table, and he had 1 chaos lord (the other one picked a fight with my dominus and got bonked repeatedly by his axe until he stayed down). a chaos leviathan dreadnought, and 3 obliterators. he won by doing the smart thing and hiding as best he could on 3 objectives to my 2. good close game.
Something i don't get to do all that often-break out my epic 40k Using the Armageddon rules-
I let my opponent borrow a force of my guard (elysians/deathkorps) with titan support.
against my Iyanden wraith list.
The table
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We each chose a target building in our enemies deployment zone to be our objectives.
It was a pretty brutal game with me killing everything but his reaver and his elysians (who broke and then rallied). my wraith unit and my fighters were the only things had left on my side of the table.
By request i broke out my old 4th ed tyranid assault list and did 3 games-
I ended up borrowing some minis but the other guy didn't have enough warriors so i had to proxy with 40MM bases-rippers, hive guard, tyrant guard etc...
My list
.brood lord
.X2 gene stealer broods (12) with scuttling
.X2 warrior broods (9) with leaping
.X2 super carnifexes (barbed strangler, venom cannon and all the bells and whistles
.X3 zoanathropes(squad)
Game 1 was against iron hands, he tooled his list up just to fight me as i designed to the army as a melee force.
he put some infantry forces on the flanks to slow down the stealers and it worked to a point but i managed to get close enough to him to lock up most of his units in CC and when the leviathan was about to be ended by a carnifex he called the game.
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Game 2 was a bit tougher as i had to battle my way through the defenses. the stuff that did come out to play didn't last long. his venerable dread got smashed by a carnifex and his terminator squad misshaped when it tried to drop in on the stealers assaulting his left bunker.....so i got to place them......in between 2 warrior broods and a stealer brood-the dinner bell was rung.
It took the battering ram of a carnifex to open up his walls and at that point it was basically over (that fex also regenerated 3 wounds in one turn)
The primaris tank was being proxied as a typhon siege tank.
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The last game was against black templar- it was nice of them to come out and fight me, and it was the closest game. neither carnifexes regenerated and both died this game, however the templars also lost both spartans and almost all their infantry. only the emperors champion and a squad of crimson fists thrown in as a joke survived the game.
My side had a brood lord, a single zoanathrope and parts of the 2 stealer squads left.
I started back in 2nd edition. I was solely a fantasy player before that. Never really looked back after moving to 40k.
I have fond memories of 2nd through 5th but I would probably say 5th was my overall favorite. I moved across the country at the end of 5th and had just found a new local game group when 6th landed. It killed that group pretty quickly unfortunately. So I didn't get into 6th as much as I had wanted to. I dabbled in 7th and 8th a bit but nothing stuck. I don't think I played 9th at all that I can recall. I moved back to my original location and my old group of friends have gotten into 10th quite a bit. So I'm giving that a go for now.
If 5th had the codex release pace of 10th along with the frequent points and balance changes, I don't think id have ever moved to a new edition.
The god machines walked once again (using the original 3rd ed stats from FW for normal games of 40K)
It was something new for my opponent...he actually brought infantry for his guard instead of running an armored company.
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I ran a mix of 3rd party mins to represent my admech force of cataphrons and skitarii with the warhound and dominus being actual 40K minis. and i even used the flame cannon this game on the warhound.
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We did a 4 objective game and he moved quickly to occupy the center of the table, my infantry was tough but he managed to wear them down. i did manage first blood for killing the hellhound/bane wolf (it became important later) he actually went hard the first few turns, by the end of the game he had me down to 2 cataphron destroyers, the dominus and the warhound with a single structure point remaining...and then it all fell apart. i had taken out almost all of his weapons above S7 so he was relying on the vendetta to finish off the titan and he just couldn't pull it off. i had taken the main gun off his medusa, and he had threatened to repair it with his tech priest....i answered that with the appropriate amount of force...a vulcan mega bolter, lets say no further repairs were made that day.
The end of the game technically was a tie as we both held a single objective. so we had to go to tie breakers. he had line breaker, i had slay the warlord for taking out his command squad....it came down to first blood, the one i mentioned earlier.
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The next game he did was his entire force at 4K points VS a black templar list-it was a sight-
Three Vindicators is a fun move in that era. I approve.
Ah... Just realized that can't be a list though, because you have at least four Heavy Support units and five HQs.
It's my model pool for forming a list. If I total it all up, including those three Tornadoes I'm working on, then it may very well get it to 3,000 points, in which case you can double the FOC.
Three Vindicators is a fun move in that era. I approve.
Ah... Just realized that can't be a list though, because you have at least four Heavy Support units and five HQs.
It's my model pool for forming a list. If I total it all up, including those three Tornadoes I'm working on, then it may very well get it to 3,000 points, in which case you can double the FOC.
Ahh gotcha. Nice.
I'm still on the same army I started in 5th edition. If I ever finish my last 4 Rhinos (of 10) I'll post a picture of the completed company + auxilliaries.
Reading the old editions just makes me sad with nostalgia because it shows when GW actually cared (or pretended to care). I was skimming the 5e book for example and it's so much better than the crap we have now it's like night and day.
The problem is finding people to play it, and then having to hunt for old models on ebay because it doesn't look right to be playing like 3rd edition 40k but proxying Primaris.
It's a goddamn shame that 3d printing hasn't taken more of that niche of "here are the old type models that GW won't make anymore so you can play Oldhammer"
Wayniac wrote: Reading the old editions just makes me sad with nostalgia because it shows when GW actually cared (or pretended to care)
It certainly felt like the codex writers were more active in playing the game as a hobby, though that also showed in things like blatant favoritism at times.
I think, even though they did do FAQs and ocasional updates, when you didn't have prevalancy of PDF's and online updates, you kinda had to have things more hammered down and less likely to NEED updated when you had things out in books, though they did have White Dwarf available to publish updates in. From what I see people are just constantly waiting for and/or reacting to PDF updates that come out and it seems like a bad cycle to be in.
Wayniac wrote: Reading the old editions just makes me sad with nostalgia because it shows when GW actually cared (or pretended to care)
It certainly felt like the codex writers were more active in playing the game as a hobby, though that also showed in things like blatant favoritism at times.
I mean it's also no shock that pretty much all of the designers who are considered good, who made 40k what it is, left GW and went to work for competitors (or as consultants in Alessio's case), while the current 40k team are dunderheads like Robin Cruddace still.
BanjoJohn wrote: I think, even though they did do FAQs and ocasional updates, when you didn't have prevalancy of PDF's and online updates, you kinda had to have things more hammered down and less likely to NEED updated when you had things out in books, though they did have White Dwarf available to publish updates in. From what I see people are just constantly waiting for and/or reacting to PDF updates that come out and it seems like a bad cycle to be in.
Actually the rules still had problems back then - the difference is without an FAQ/Errata you had to house-rule it or (at least in the UK) Phone Da Rulz Trollz (ergo phone GW customer support) for an answer.
The cycle we are in now is BETTER because GW is publishing updates to regular questions and errors more promptly and on a more defined cycle. I've said it before, but I still recall when Tyranids got their edition FAQ in the last month of that edition of rules. We also had armies skip whole editions, both Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle skipped editions and didn't get codex updates so they were still legal, but running on rules systems that were outdated to the core rules.
What we have now is BETTER. The problem is alongside this better deployment and swifter attention to the rules we have the 3 year cycle. A 3 year edition of rules that are wiped clean at the end of those 3 years. This is the cornerstone of the problem; the rules aren't able to settle because as soon as we start to get toward that the new edition appears and the slate is wiped clean and it starts over all again. When you add on top the fact that GW publishes new rules and codex for every army for every edition now; this means the writers are likely working at a bonkers speed to get codex after codex out and then the new edition and more codex etc....
There's no time for the system to settle into a polishing phase; there's no time for it to ease off the pressure and shift to where codex updates might be more a collection of all the FAQ/Errata into an updated book along with a few new models etc...
Basically GW is doing a lot right, but with the 3 year cycle its too fast for it to actually work. A 10 year cycle on rule editions (with perhaps 3 cycles of updated publications) would be VASTLY superior and would really let things get polished up.
If you go back and read the designers' notes from 4th and 5th editions, it's clear that they had actual reasons for making changes (nobody was using Man Alone checks anyway, so we removed them, having no wound allocation meant specialists were always the last models alive regardless of unit size so we added Torrent of Fire, etc.)
Whereas by 8th ed. we'd got to 'rules had to be short so we cut morale to save pages'.
Just as long as we can chose to forget the great evil that was the Blood Angels and their Deep Striking Land Raiders (I want to blame Mat Ward, but he was Ultramarines, if my memory serves).
Lathe Biosas wrote: Just as long as we can chose to forget the great evil that was the Blood Angels and their Deep Striking Land Raiders
Not Creed and his outflanking warlord titan?
I used to play Imperial Guard, so I see no issues with this. It is 100% fluffy and makes sense rules wise and.... err... ummmm... uhh... some really good reasons.
Unlike a bunch of Crimson Mobile Drop Pods of Lascannon Death that dislodge 1500 points of pain behind you, before lascannoning your poor Chimeras and gleefully giggling while your guardsmen are atomized in a fire explosion.
Lathe Biosas wrote: Unlike a bunch of Crimson Mobile Drop Pods of Lascannon Death that dislodge 1500 points of pain behind you, before lascannoning your poor Chimeras and gleefully giggling while your guardsmen are atomized in a fire explosion.
Are you saying you didn't castle up in the corner for the entire game with an ordo malleus inquisitor and two mystics?
Lathe Biosas wrote: Unlike a bunch of Crimson Mobile Drop Pods of Lascannon Death that dislodge 1500 points of pain behind you, before lascannoning your poor Chimeras and gleefully giggling while your guardsmen are atomized in a fire explosion.
Are you saying you didn't castle up in the corner for the entire game with an ordo malleus inquisitor and two mystics?
Not the first time, I was used to the Blood Angels driving across the tabletop, not falling from the skies.
I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
At the time it was seen more as a humorous example of rampant codex creep than any particular offense against game balance or lore - 5e deepstrike was exceptionally dangerous for the unit, delayed for most of the game, and Cruddace had already jumped that particular shark with things like the triple-double lascannon Valkyrie.
But there was the impression that units were getting extra rules for the sake of extra rules.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
At the time it was seen more as a humorous example of rampant codex creep than any particular offense against game balance or lore - 5e deepstrike was exceptionally dangerous for the unit, delayed for most of the game, and Cruddace had already jumped that particular shark with things like the triple-double lascannon Valkyrie.
But there was the impression that units were getting extra rules for the sake of extra rules.
Yeah, My current impression of 10th edition is "special rules for the sake of special rules", like.. strategems and formations and whatnot, it all feels overly complex and "for the sake of themselves" rather than anything about game balance or making a good/fun game.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
Technically every space marine chapter has access to thunderhawk transporters, they can carry 2 rhino hulls or a single land raider. the difference in game play with the blood angels codex was, you didn't actually need to own a physical model of a transporter to drop in a land raider via "deepstrike"
What that codex did was also make the blood angels very unique in there own way with assault squads being troops and reduced scatter range for jump infantry of all types. the codex is fantastic in the fact you can build so many varied lists from it. -all jump infantry, all death company, all elite jump infantry, dreadnought heavy, all fast vehicles etc... or any combination there of.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
Technically every space marine chapter has access to thunderhawk transporters, they can carry 2 rhino hulls or a single land raider. the difference in game play with the blood angels codex was, you didn't actually need to own a physical model of a transporter to drop in a land raider via "deepstrike"
What that codex did was also make the blood angels very unique in there own way with assault squads being troops and reduced scatter range for jump infantry of all types. the codex is fantastic in the fact you can build so many varied lists from it. -all jump infantry, all death company, all elite jump infantry, dreadnought heavy, all fast vehicles etc... or any combination there of.
So kinda like how marines should be in general? Like... 2nd edition. Like if it was up to me I'd have tactical squads, assault squads, and dev squads, each squad could be upgraded to veterans (+1ws/+1bs/+1a) and all 3 could be troops by default. Let your paintjob/list building reflect what your chapter should be, but the generic list would be as expansive/full of options as possible. GW really did take the wrong road with marines in general. When you have elite veterans still having ws/bs4, the same as normal troops, then the extra equipment options don't feel all that great, and normal assault squads always felt nerfed.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
Technically every space marine chapter has access to thunderhawk transporters, they can carry 2 rhino hulls or a single land raider. the difference in game play with the blood angels codex was, you didn't actually need to own a physical model of a transporter to drop in a land raider via "deepstrike"
What that codex did was also make the blood angels very unique in there own way with assault squads being troops and reduced scatter range for jump infantry of all types. the codex is fantastic in the fact you can build so many varied lists from it. -all jump infantry, all death company, all elite jump infantry, dreadnought heavy, all fast vehicles etc... or any combination there of.
So kinda like how marines should be in general? Like... 2nd edition. Like if it was up to me I'd have tactical squads, assault squads, and dev squads, each squad could be upgraded to veterans (+1ws/+1bs/+1a) and all 3 could be troops by default. Let your paintjob/list building reflect what your chapter should be, but the generic list would be as expansive/full of options as possible. GW really did take the wrong road with marines in general. When you have elite veterans still having ws/bs4, the same as normal troops, then the extra equipment options don't feel all that great, and normal assault squads always felt nerfed.
If your interested in the more thematic game play for space marines like i am most of the 3rd/index astartes or 4th ed dexes had the most flavor. for 5th the blood angels and space wolves were the exceptional stand outs. the 5th ed GK codex was a travesty of what they were supposed to be. probably the one of the worst of the 5th ed codexes. It is the reason our hybrid 5th ed group sees many of the 3rd/4th ed codexes being used in 5th- the chapter/craftworld etc.. should fight on the table the way the lore describes it. the 3.5 dark angels mini dex rules spends 2 pages doing more rules for the theme of the chapter than every entire codex that came after it.
BanjoJohn wrote: I dunno, aren't there thunderhawks that can transport land raiders? deep striking a land raider as a mobile drop operation from a thunderhawk does sound ridiculous but isn't out of bounds of a reasonable thing that you could see in the 40k universe.
Technically every space marine chapter has access to thunderhawk transporters, they can carry 2 rhino hulls or a single land raider. the difference in game play with the blood angels codex was, you didn't actually need to own a physical model of a transporter to drop in a land raider via "deepstrike"
What that codex did was also make the blood angels very unique in there own way with assault squads being troops and reduced scatter range for jump infantry of all types. the codex is fantastic in the fact you can build so many varied lists from it. -all jump infantry, all death company, all elite jump infantry, dreadnought heavy, all fast vehicles etc... or any combination there of.
So kinda like how marines should be in general? Like... 2nd edition. Like if it was up to me I'd have tactical squads, assault squads, and dev squads, each squad could be upgraded to veterans (+1ws/+1bs/+1a) and all 3 could be troops by default. Let your paintjob/list building reflect what your chapter should be, but the generic list would be as expansive/full of options as possible. GW really did take the wrong road with marines in general. When you have elite veterans still having ws/bs4, the same as normal troops, then the extra equipment options don't feel all that great, and normal assault squads always felt nerfed.
If your interested in the more thematic game play for space marines like i am most of the 3rd/index astartes or 4th ed dexes had the most flavor. for 5th the blood angels and space wolves were the exceptional stand outs. the 5th ed GK codex was a travesty of what they were supposed to be. probably the one of the worst of the 5th ed codexes. It is the reason our hybrid 5th ed group sees many of the 3rd/4th ed codexes being used in 5th- the chapter/craftworld etc.. should fight on the table the way the lore describes it. the 3.5 dark angels mini dex rules spends 2 pages doing more rules for the theme of the chapter than every entire codex that came after it.
I remember those times, it was very fun. Recently I started doing a collection of 3rd edition materials. Rulebook, codex's, white dwarf articles, the campaign books, city fight. I have a compiled 2200 page pdf so far that I'm still organizing. There were many more army lists in WD than I had previously remembered, and there were some assault rules changes and objective based missions were introduced at the end of 3rd, and presumably incorporated into 4th because it was only a month or two before the release of 4th.
Hopefully I will be able to cobble together a coherent "3rd edition battle bible" of sorts, or at least something other people can use to make something like it.
Ah yes back in the day when Eldar stole those superior "advanced" imperial vehicles.
2nd ed was kind of a mess lore wise, they didn't really decide what the official lore was until 3rd. that's why you see space marine models with eldar rifles, sisters of battle in space marine armor, imperial beast men...etc.
To be fair to GW, they just made a new tank, so why shouldn't every "faction" get to buy it? hehe. it's actually kinda brilliant, make something that everyone can buy to sell more.
I was today years old when I found out that the 3rd Edition Ork Codex had multiple printings, and that I managed to pick one up last year. Why is this important? Because I had the Ork Codex at release before, and they didn't have a summary page like every other Codex. Well, that was apparently fixed and I just NOW found that out...
In fairness one thing GW does really badly is actually putting version info on their books. It's really bad recently where they've had a few with exactly the same cover art or the same image but slightly altered but still very much the same image.
So yeah really easy to think that there's just one codex edition
Lord Damocles wrote: Ah, the good old fashioned fun of 3.5 Iron Warriors players trying to claim that they had just no idea that there was ever a 2nd printing. Happy days.
Okay, you have me curious because I'm not sure what you mean.
Lord Damocles wrote: In the second printing, Obliterators were changed from T5 to T4(5).
It's one of the changes mentioned as a 'typographical error to be corrected at first' in the 2003 errata. Wonder when the reprint came out.
Full list of corrections :
P12 - Fearless rule misprinted. Use generic rule.
P14 - Servo-arm is Iron Warriors only. Juggernaut of Khorne 35 points, Talisman of Burning Blood 10/5. All Marks of Chaos should be asterisked as they can be used by models in Terminator armour.
P16 -Reference to Favour of Khorne under bionics should refer to Feel No Pain
P17 - The Terminator armour entry should state that models in Terminator armour count as stationary when shooting, even if they move.
P27 - Obliterator Toughness should be 4(5).
P32 - The line, The squad may be an Aspiring Champion should read The squad may include an Aspiring Champion.
P33 - Screamers of Tzeentch have the Furious Charge ability.
P34 - Predator Side Armour should be 11.
P37 - Maximum indirect fire range for a Defiler battle cannon is 72.
P47 - Axe of Khorne should be 20/15 points.
P47 - Kharn has Daemonic armour not Chaos armour.
P59 - An Aspiring Champion with the Mark of Tzeentch automatically passes any Psychic tests taken. All models with the Mark of Tzeentch are Fearless. A Disc of Tzeentch costs 30 points.
P60 - Thrall Wizards have T3 W1.
And a dozen more pages of errata that covers... some of the questions. Including the amusing RAW vs RAI :
(from the book) "A model with Daemonic Stature is at least 10' tall, and should always be based on a 40mm diameter base"
Q. Do models with Daemonic Stature really have to be 10 feet tall?
A. Only to scale.
Thinking about it after talking "Old editions" with a friend, the biggest issue I have currently is that playing 5th with modern figures feels wrong, and looks off (due to scale). But then you either have to find old models on eBay (often being ripped off) or 3d print, and 3d printed models understandably so don't look quite right either due to copyright.
So as much as I want to play old editions, I can't do it in a way that actually feels like playing old editions, rather than using new models with old rules or using 3d models that don't look right (at which point I'd rather pitch OPR or something where they WOULD look right)
Wayniac wrote: Thinking about it after talking "Old editions" with a friend, the biggest issue I have currently is that playing 5th with modern figures feels wrong, and looks off (due to scale). But then you either have to find old models on eBay (often being ripped off) or 3d print, and 3d printed models understandably so don't look quite right either due to copyright.
So as much as I want to play old editions, I can't do it in a way that actually feels like playing old editions, rather than using new models with old rules or using 3d models that don't look right (at which point I'd rather pitch OPR or something where they WOULD look right)
That's a matter of personal aesthetics, game platy wise the base size being slightly larger (primaris VS first born) isn't an issue. back when i started terminators were on 28mm bases, they didn't move to 40MM until 5th ed. and GW used to allow you to place the model on larger than normal bases they just had to be on the base the model came with or larger. our group plays with "counts as" primaris all the time. the models themselves look great we just treat them as true scale marines. Besides the vehicles have never been to proper scale. a rhino should be the size of a land raider and a land raider should be the size of a bane blade even with the size of first born marine models.
Yeah, people have been 'true scaling' marines since 3rd or 4th edition, so Primaris are not more out of place than those ever were. And base sizes have never been particularly important in 40K.
I can certainly agree that it's potentially off-putting having modern models on the table against or with their smaller classic counterparts (one of the reasons I largely stopped buying GW models post Primaris and the accompanying scale-jump in everything else), but, again, that was always a problem... back when I started, it was 2nd edition and later models against the generally smaller RT-era sculpts. And Orks just kept getting bigger every time new models were released...
Which, I guess, is a rambling way of saying use the models you like with whichever edition you want to play. There's nothing intrinsically tying models of a particular size to any specific edition.
More sillyness, our chaos player wanted to play test a little titanic struggle. he proxied a great unclean one as the gargantuan scabithrax to face off against my admech with warhound titan.
Since i had nothing but guns (no battle claw) i used my superior speed to stay at range and shoot him to death. he did manage to take down most of my ground troops with only handful of sicarian infiltrators surviving the game.
Best moment-dropping a twin turbo laser destructor on the lone chaos champion chasing my titan with a power fist.
I've started working on the "Rogue Trader bible".. and I can already tell you, this will be a multiyear affair
Thousand+ pages of rules to sift through, 73 issues of WD on top of that. It's not going to be as easy as I thought it'd be, even with the aid of modern tools.. But it will be worth it in the end
insaniak wrote: Which, I guess, is a rambling way of saying use the models you like with whichever edition you want to play. There's nothing intrinsically tying models of a particular size to any specific edition.
One of the advantages in going full-retro on 2nd is that models are something insanely cheap. Lots of one-pose stuff out there that no one wants to flesh out your armies and give you that 90s vibe.
My armies are split between GW and alternates. The Eldar are almost all VOID 1.1 stuff when the company went under and a store did clearance. They look great, though I did get some vintage Vypers.
Orks are all GW, but of course need lots of kit-bashing.
Chaos is hybrid VOID, GW and some other stuff.
My marines are all stock 2nd ed. It was my primary army, though I did sell off some of the 3rd/4th vehicles and buy vintage to flesh it out.
IG is WW II historicals with kit-bashed tanks and sentinels. A smattering of GW heavy weapons.
SOB are all VOID.
Tyranids are vintage 2nd, with the exception of plastic hormogaunts. Very cheap to find one-pose genestealers.
I don't have separate SW or BA/DA since my imperial marine collection is big enough to have them be a successor chapter of anyone I want.
VOID also provided a lot of material for Imperial Agents, Adeptus Arbites and other oddball stuff. Given the smaller size of the games, you can build a 2,000 point army for about $100 if you know what you are doing. The books are getting pricy, but still not too bad, plus there are battle bibles out there.
Those armies look so cool. And you can imagine even a teen collecting one of those. 3 dreads, 20-30 marines, 2 land raiders and extras. Easy to transport, easy to get. No wonder w40k was "killing" WFB over time.
I think when I started my army, it was was one of such armies. 15 metal terminators, 3 dreadnoughts, 1 Draigo, 1 Librarian. 5 power armoured dudes and a razorback. The modern w40k seems to have a much different feel to it, both army wise, and how it is played. But the classic stuff and classic style armies are just great. Size wise they feel a bit like OPR games.
Karol wrote: Those armies look so cool. And you can imagine even a teen collecting one of those. 3 dreads, 20-30 marines, 2 land raiders and extras. Easy to transport, easy to get. No wonder w40k was "killing" WFB over time.
I think when I started my army, it was was one of such armies. 15 metal terminators, 3 dreadnoughts, 1 Draigo, 1 Librarian. 5 power armoured dudes and a razorback. The modern w40k seems to have a much different feel to it, both army wise, and how it is played. But the classic stuff and classic style armies are just great. Size wise they feel a bit like OPR games.
That Dark angels force pictured is actually over 2,700 points so i can swap out things for variant lists. using the normal FOC it allows for some enjoyable versatility. i also have 2 additional dreadnoughts with alternate weapons, 2 more variant land raiders and a land speeder to choose form if i want to bring them along.
The reason the game feels different now, is because it is. In filmdeg's interview on YT with Rick Preistly he pointed out the influences of many of the original game designers for 40K was in 15mm WWII war games, where as most of the current GW game designers have a background in board games and card games.
Lathe Biosas wrote: Just as long as we can chose to forget the great evil that was the Blood Angels and their Deep Striking Land Raiders (I want to blame Mat Ward, but he was Ultramarines, if my memory serves).
Anything Matt Ward touched during that era was always dunce worthy. GK Paladin wound spam and the stupidly OP Daemons WFH army book that basically forced a new rule edition being the worst offenders.
Lathe Biosas wrote: Just as long as we can chose to forget the great evil that was the Blood Angels and their Deep Striking Land Raiders (I want to blame Mat Ward, but he was Ultramarines, if my memory serves).
Anything Matt Ward touched during that era was always dunce worthy. GK Paladin wound spam and the stupidly OP Daemons WFH army book that basically forced a new rule edition being the worst offenders.
I argue Pete Haynes paved the way for Mat Ward's excess. Basically, too many writers were allowed to write their favorite army and GW editorial didn't bother to restrain them at all.
The only codex by Matt i have a problem with is the 5th ed grey knight codex. it totally destroyed what the lore position of the GKs were-just a part of the Odro malleus of the inquisition an ordo militant arm. As such they never deployed as a full space marine chapter which is what the 5th ed codex turned them into. they work both lore wise and on the table as the demon hunters codex lays them out. as part of a combined inquisitorial force or better yet as an allied contingent attached to another imperial force. The demon hunters codex also focused them more on the actual job they do as anti-chaos/demon forces with the rules and wargear available to them.
As for the blood angels codex, i actually rather enjoy it. it provides quite a bit of variance to build from as a divergent chapter-a death company themed army, a normal tactical army, a jump infantry army, an elite sanguinary guard army, A fast vehicle armored company for space marines etc...or a combination there of. the deep striking land raiders was silly and hardly ever used, it just meant you didn't have to buy the actual FW thunderhawk lander model to use it's rules.
Oh and shortly before the codex came out our group was actually joking about flying dreadnoughts.......
Deep striking Land Raiders sounds like something best reserved for games of Apocalypse/Epic. Thunderhawk transporter models did look cool though, I hope HH 2.0/3.0 brings them back in some form. Never been a fan of the humongous cannon on them Thunderhawks
aphyon wrote: The demon hunters codex also focused them more on the actual job they do as anti-chaos/demon forces with the rules and wargear available to them.
Giving the grey knights power weapons to fight against daemons (invulnerables across the board) was certainly a choice.
5e Blood Angels were marines +1 in an almost pure sense. To hit credit the core marine book wasn't crazy but if you weren't playing scoring bikes, null zone, or a named character then BA probably did it better.
BanjoJohn wrote: I have always thought thunderhawks were best used to deliver boarding parties in BFG, their use in epic/40k always felt lackluster to me.
Isnt that what Dreadclaws and Caestus Assault Ram are for though? Thunderhawk doesn't seem to have any hull busting drills nor armament..
BanjoJohn wrote: I have always thought thunderhawks were best used to deliver boarding parties in BFG, their use in epic/40k always felt lackluster to me.
Isnt that what Dreadclaws and Caestus Assault Ram are for though? Thunderhawk doesn't seem to have any hull busting drills nor armament..
The Thunderhawk has weapons to destroy fighters who might try to intercept them, in BFG terms they survive on 4+ against fighters, and then its the space marines themselves who punch through the ship's hull and cause the hit-and-run damage to the enemy ship in BFG, possibly with the battle cannon on the T-Hawk helping to punch a hole too.
tauist wrote: I'm guessing BFG is so old that Dreadclaws and Caestus Ram werent invented when it was out
BFG came out in 1998 I think. There were in general three kinds of "assault craft" that could be launched from the space ships, fighters, bombers, and assault boats.
Fighters can intercept other fighters, bombers, and assault boats to protect the big ships from being attacked by them.
Bombers can deal damage to the big ships directly.
Assault boats punch into the big ships and have troops storm in to cause damage to critical systems.
The imperial navy has "fury interceptors" as fighters, "starhawk" bombers, and "shark" assault boats.
Chaos fleets have "Doomfire" bombers, "swiftdeath" fighters, and "Dreadclaw" assault boats.
The eldar have "darkstar" fighters, "eagle" bombers.
Orks have "fighta bommas" which are kind of like fighters that can also do bombing, and "assault boats"
Space marine navy's launch "thunderhawk gunships"s which count as assault boats and fighters. And, if their ships have torpedoes, they are "boarding torpedoes" instead of regular torpedoes.
Oh and shortly before the codex came out our group was actually joking about flying dreadnoughts.......
Speaking of, 40K's relationship to mechs with jump jets is kind of an odd one, really. 1st ed Imperial dreadnoughts had a variant with a jump pack and then you had afaik nothing until Tau showed up and 3rd ed and later Eldar started getting some of their Epic titans done by Forgeworld. But even then it wasn't anything common. The 3rd ed vehicle design rules don't even have it as an option despite letting you build tunneling vehicles. I guess the GW design team didn't much care for Battletech?
Eldar titans have always been able to jump 36", but then again regular titans/knights could walk 12, sprint for 18 and still fire a single gun system or flat out run for 24"
I think it was meant to show how big they are by how much they could move. superheavy walkers can literally step over any area terrain feature that is less than 12" across.
BanjoJohn wrote: I have always thought thunderhawks were best used to deliver boarding parties in BFG, their use in epic/40k always felt lackluster to me.
Isnt that what Dreadclaws and Caestus Assault Ram are for though? Thunderhawk doesn't seem to have any hull busting drills nor armament..
Imperial marines don't use the Dreadclaw and its larger cousin at scale anymore (they're a bit too "sentient" and enjoy killing stuff too much, and thus are likely to become a liability), and the Caestus is rather rare and not able to transfer larger amounts of marines. The chief method for combat/hot boarding is thus either the boarding torpedo, while thunderhawks are used for boarding derelict ships and such, can also be used for hot drops against enemies that have similar enough ship structures that you can find a convenient point of ingress (hangars, open gun bays etc.) and are needed anyway to get the boarding party back.
But anyway, boarding actions are something you'd best not think too hard about, or the numbers and logistics break down pretty fast - at the rates ordnance supposedly gets shot down, cramming your marines with their oh-so-precious progenoids and irreplacable chapter artefacts into torpedoes and throwing them at the enemy is madness, and that's before you factor in that both success and failure of a boarding strike might lead to the whole party being unrecoverable either way. At least with Terminators, you can theoretically teleport them back, but then teleport assaul is supposedly also hella dangerous.
Just going to toss this out there and let it roll around like a (Vortex, Virus) grenade with the pin pulled.
GW has always sucked at actually writing rules. Always. In every edition, 40k or WFB. Strap in kids, get ready for an old man telling you stories.
I started this addictive BS back in '89, when I went to college. WOOO! old. So, my opinions must matter, right? Rogue Trader era and 2nd edition 40k was a nonsensical roller coaster of overpowered garbage, just like 3rd edition Fantasy. Can you say "Vortex Grenade?" "Virus Grenade?" "Parasitic Weapon?" "Summon Elemental Horde?" "Wind of Death?"
I knew you could.
I still have nightmares (not really, figure of speech) of 2nd edition 40k. The rules required you to shoot at the nearest model. That was often a Space Marine Terminator Hero with a Power Shield, making first a 3+ save on 2d6 followed by a 2+ Invulnerable Save if he somehow failed the first, while a bunch of Terminators with Cyclone Missile Launchers were literally dropping 12" pizza-sized Krak Missile templates on your army. Countered with Suicide Jetpack Heroes with Vortex Grenades landing on top of them and triggering, Distortion Cannons galore, Orc Pulsa-rokkits knocking half your army prone every turn, and a ridiculous amount of other BS.
3rd edition revamped everything, toning the garbage down like a pendulum had swung in the other direction. Now, first turn meant literally everything, as if you went second you were likely picking up 25%-33% of your army before you moved a miniature. "3.5" and 4 were no better. It was at this point I focused on WFB instead, because I was sick of games being decide by a single die roll to see who went first. Ask me sometime about the 15-minute game my Eldar played at a GT against a Khorne Terminator army. Just...stupid. And I won without losing more than a handful of models.
WFB was better, but every edition was another insane pendumlum swing. 4th-5th editions? Herohammer, where I could win games with single models picking the right magic item and spell cards. 6th edition? Ruled by specific units with specific rules, i.e. Brettonians and a couple other books.
7th edition WFB? The sweet spot, if there ever was one. A decent mix of unit-based tactics and Hero abilities, Magic was reasonable, the game was actually semi-tactical and fun.
8th edition? Toss that out the window with another pendulum swing...bring a L4 Wizard, or lose. Period.
Then GW just...obliterated their own product with AoS. Let's just play 40k with Fantasy miniatures. WTF is the point, at that point?
What are the best games GW has ever published? Original Necromunda (minus the Ratskin BS), Original Mordheim, Original Blood Bowl/Dungeon Bowl, and Epic Armageddon. They are complex (but not ridiculously so), reasonably fair/balanced, cheap to get into, and ACTUALLY FUN to play in a league with your buddies. Everyone gets together on a weekend evening, drinks some beer, plays a few games of these (each takes only an hour or so), laughs and cries at the ups and downs, and has a generally good time. Next week? Roll to see how your team/gang improved, make new match-ups in the group for the next games scenarios.
GW lost its way a long, long time ago. They're now in the top 100 of UK companies, stock-market-wise, IIRC a news article I read not long ago. They care about one thing...selling you wildly overpriced pieces of plastic. Go look at the substitute armies available on Etsy (with superior visuals in a lot on instances, 3D printed), or illegal casting/printing services for less than a quarter of the price. GW is here to keep you addicted to a hobby you shouldn't be willing to attempt to afford. Their rules are always flawed. After 40 years and billions of games, you would think that enough playtesting would've been accomplished to come up with a consistently good, fair, and balanced set of rules. That's death to their business model. If they come up with a consistent set of rules, overpriced plastic miniature sales will suffer as they won't make you buy new things every three years, every new edition, every new army book.
Do yourself a favor. Make this an actual hobby. Relax a bit. Model and convert minis. Learn to paint to a decent degree. Play the game with the minis you have, with friends, or even at tournaments. Ignore the shiny new squirrels, and adapt what you have to new editions with as minimal expense as you can.
Or, chase the dragon and keep feeding GW enough money to pump up their stock price. That's not wrong either, just be aware of what you're doing, and why.
Just an old man, shouting at a cloud. But to be fair, the cloud started it.
So I've been re-reading 3rd edition recently for a personal project. I've been wondering what other people think, did you like the original rule where half the occupants of a transport could shoot from the vehicle? Or the update where there were limited firing points that units could shoot from? I remember things like the "6 man tactical squad in a razorback" spam that a few people did where you'd have the razorback shooting a lascannon and plasma gun, and the 6 man tac squad with lascannon and plasma gun shooting out from the razorback too. So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
BanjoJohn wrote: So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
Wave serpent with fusion guns, blood angels assaulting out of the front viewport of rhinos... (not that later edition spinning top rhinos were better).
Fire points were an improvement, or rather removing them was a poor choice as even 2e had them (albeit in a 'figure it our yourself' way).
BanjoJohn wrote: So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
Wave serpent with fusion guns, blood angels assaulting out of the front viewport of rhinos... (not that later edition spinning top rhinos were better).
Fire points were an improvement, or rather removing them was a poor choice as even 2e had them (albeit in a 'figure it our yourself' way).
I had forgotten about those tricky eldar drive-byes, though the assaulting out of a rhino could be solved by pivoting the rhino which would have been allowed. Y'know I was realizing that you could technically have six terminators in a Chimera but very few factions could actually take advantage of this and it was more like an inquisitor in terminator armor would join another squad in a chimera.
I'm feeling inspired to try and do an alternative vehicle damage table that combines glance and penetrating hits, and gives bonuses to roll on the damage table the more hits have penetrated it, kinda try to extend the life of a vehicle but it still can be destroyed on a really unlucky first hit, but the more hits it takes the more likely it is to be destroyed hmm.
Kagetora wrote: . . . Terminators with Cyclone Missile Launchers were literally dropping 12" pizza-sized Krak Missile templates on your army.
Because I was totally "that guy" in 2nd (with some tournament wins, even) I have to point out that it was a 6" blast, not 12". 1/2" diameter per missile fired, not radius. I know it well because I saw that "mistake" a couple times.
+1 for AP1, +1 open topped, -1 AP -, -2 for glancing. Ordnance rolled twice and chose the best.
3 & 4 spill over into one another if the vehicle is already unarmed/immobilised, and then spill over into wrecked.
Something like a flat +1 damage on any penetrating (not glancing) hit against a vehicle that has already taken either just an immobilised or either 3-4 result would up the damage without overdoing it.
Vehicles in 5e were notoriously easy to disable (one glance = no shooting at a minimum) but hard to knock out as they absorbed repeated 1-4 results. Mostly a transport thing where they were bunkers that at worst might singe a model or two as the squad walks away from the crater, whereas in 3-4e non-skimmer transports were flaming coffins of death prone to pitching their passengers out onto the road, entangling them, or just instantly killing everyone inside.
BanjoJohn wrote: So I've been re-reading 3rd edition recently for a personal project. I've been wondering what other people think, did you like the original rule where half the occupants of a transport could shoot from the vehicle? Or the update where there were limited firing points that units could shoot from? I remember things like the "6 man tactical squad in a razorback" spam that a few people did where you'd have the razorback shooting a lascannon and plasma gun, and the 6 man tac squad with lascannon and plasma gun shooting out from the razorback too. So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
I play 3rd completely unaltered. That's my opinion on it. When given a choice to go back to ANY edition after giving up on modern 40K I chose 3rd. I have no issues with the rules as presented. You also have to understand the level of abstraction in the deploy and charge rules. Having actually assaulted an enemy position from an M113 I can say that the rules as stated accommodate for the speed and level of training.
I just had a flashback to the old tournaments from GW...
I hated tournaments because your opponent could decide to knock your points down with low "sportsmanship" scores.
I remember one event where it got pretty ugly in the parking lot where the guy who was undefeated didn't win because of two guys who always gave low sportsmanship scores to their opponents when they lost.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I just had a flashback to the old tournaments from GW...
I hated tournaments because your opponent could decide to knock your points down with low "sportsmanship" scores.
I remember one event where it got pretty ugly in the parking lot where the guy who was undefeated didn't win because of two guys who always gave low sportsmanship scores to their opponents when they lost.
Passive-aggressive tactics for the win.
Yeah, tournaments have always been kinda disgusting to me because its too competitive, like.. you're going to do stuff like abuse sportsmanship to win a toy wargame competition? But trying to do a fun scenario with friends with a goal that is different than just "kill the whole army" like.. escaping off the table edge, or rescue an objective, destroy a bunker/generator, whatever. There's so much you can do in the game that's better than a toxic tournament.
BanjoJohn wrote: So I've been re-reading 3rd edition recently for a personal project. I've been wondering what other people think, did you like the original rule where half the occupants of a transport could shoot from the vehicle? Or the update where there were limited firing points that units could shoot from? I remember things like the "6 man tactical squad in a razorback" spam that a few people did where you'd have the razorback shooting a lascannon and plasma gun, and the 6 man tac squad with lascannon and plasma gun shooting out from the razorback too. So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
I play 3rd completely unaltered. That's my opinion on it. When given a choice to go back to ANY edition after giving up on modern 40K I chose 3rd. I have no issues with the rules as presented. You also have to understand the level of abstraction in the deploy and charge rules. Having actually assaulted an enemy position from an M113 I can say that the rules as stated accommodate for the speed and level of training.
Unaltered like, no white dwarf or chapter approval changes? just straight out of the book? Do you use the codex's? Or the army lists in the book? I think that's an interesting way to play.
As somebody who played progressively through those editions 3rd had some serious issues un altered-guess range weapons were huge as were rapid fire weapon rules. as you went through the editions things slowly improved overall but as always there was always a thing or 2 that were bad. skimmers were overpowed in 4th for eldar and tau (only being able to glance them) and the rules for wrecks/passengers as mentioned above. even though i find 5th the OVERALL best rule set. it still had a few issues that ironically were added that were not needed-like wound allocation rules (better in 4th). the other gripe was that a vehicle that was stunned/shaken suddenly contributed nothing since it could at best move unless it was a walker that could do CC.
We fixed those problems by reverting wound allocation to 4th ed(owning player allocates wounds/saves based on majority stats but wounded models always must take the next wounds in the case of multi wound models) and snap fire for vehicles and heavy weapons ala 6th/7th ed. this makes the game much more enjoyable for both players.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I just had a flashback to the old tournaments from GW...
I hated tournaments because your opponent could decide to knock your points down with low "sportsmanship" scores.
I remember one event where it got pretty ugly in the parking lot where the guy who was undefeated didn't win because of two guys who always gave low sportsmanship scores to their opponents when they lost.
Passive-aggressive tactics for the win.
Yeah, tournaments have always been kinda disgusting to me because its too competitive, like.. you're going to do stuff like abuse sportsmanship to win a toy wargame competition? But trying to do a fun scenario with friends with a goal that is different than just "kill the whole army" like.. escaping off the table edge, or rescue an objective, destroy a bunker/generator, whatever. There's so much you can do in the game that's better than a toxic tournament.
BanjoJohn wrote: So I've been re-reading 3rd edition recently for a personal project. I've been wondering what other people think, did you like the original rule where half the occupants of a transport could shoot from the vehicle? Or the update where there were limited firing points that units could shoot from? I remember things like the "6 man tactical squad in a razorback" spam that a few people did where you'd have the razorback shooting a lascannon and plasma gun, and the 6 man tac squad with lascannon and plasma gun shooting out from the razorback too. So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
I play 3rd completely unaltered. That's my opinion on it. When given a choice to go back to ANY edition after giving up on modern 40K I chose 3rd. I have no issues with the rules as presented. You also have to understand the level of abstraction in the deploy and charge rules. Having actually assaulted an enemy position from an M113 I can say that the rules as stated accommodate for the speed and level of training.
Unaltered like, no white dwarf or chapter approval changes? just straight out of the book? Do you use the codex's? Or the army lists in the book? I think that's an interesting way to play.
I should have said "No house rules" As I play it with every supplement and addendum that was posted for 3rd, except for the trial vehicle rules that became the 4th Ed. vehicle rules.
I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
I certainly remember blood angles having to roll to see how many of their veterans had to join the death company, rolling to see if they can't hold back their rage and move forward, and the turbo charged rhinos.
Some of it is fun, some also feels bad like when your commissar shoots your officer in IG.
BanjoJohn wrote: I certainly remember blood angles having to roll to see how many of their veterans had to join the death company, rolling to see if they can't hold back their rage and move forward, and the turbo charged rhinos.
Some of it is fun, some also feels bad like when your commissar shoots your officer in IG.
I think the "feels bad" on the BA part was pretty minor. I'm mostly remembering that because of Black Rage coupled with the turbocharged Rhinos they could get a possible 32" (6+18+2+6) Assault off at the start of the game. That was craaaazyy.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
And nowadays, with a smaller board...
Outriders move 12", Advance 9" (for 2 CP, admittedly) and Charge 2d6" for a threat range of 23"-33".
And they've got 4 attacks at S5 AP-1 D2 on the charge.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
Gav has got to Gav, I suppose. The Chaos 3.5 codex was worse in my mind, but the Blood Angels codex never should have been released.
BanjoJohn wrote: I certainly remember blood angles having to roll to see how many of their veterans had to join the death company, rolling to see if they can't hold back their rage and move forward, and the turbo charged rhinos.
Some of it is fun, some also feels bad like when your commissar shoots your officer in IG.
I think the "feels bad" on the BA part was pretty minor. I'm mostly remembering that because of Black Rage coupled with the turbocharged Rhinos they could get a possible 32" (6+18+2+6) Assault off at the start of the game. That was craaaazyy.
For me it felt bad to see beautiful blood angel terminator squads reduced by unlucky rolls as members got moved into the death company right before a battle.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
And nowadays, with a smaller board...
Outriders move 12", Advance 9" (for 2 CP, admittedly) and Charge 2d6" for a threat range of 23"-33".
And they've got 4 attacks at S5 AP-1 D2 on the charge.
So, yes that's true. But the paradigm is so different I'd argue it's not a worthwhile comparison. When your basic Marine (or most troops actually) can't shoot farther than 12" on the move, and has to choose between shooting and Assaulting, and Heavy Weapons have to stand still to fire. . . The whole system was primarily balanced around these distinct and limited hard choices. And then BA Rhinos are just blazing around delivering troops into Assaults faster than Dark Eldar can. Mad silly.
Gav has got to Gav, I suppose. The Chaos 3.5 codex was worse in my mind, but the Blood Angels codex never should have been released.
Gav did have to Gav! Do you remember the Harlequin army from the Citadel Journal? The one where the Solitaire got an extra attack for every inch of unused charge range (which was 12").
I thought the Chaos 3.5 book made way more sense thematically speaking, and the crazy stuff it could do usually came at a cost. Plus, with so many options I think it's more understandable that some of them get wonky. The BA book was so thin, but somehow got all crazy anyways. Also the BA wackiness came almost free, iirc. I think just some extra points for the supercharged engines, and the rest of it was just free special rules to get that 32" potential range. (Gav did not have a hand in the Chaos book, btw. Not sure if you were implying that or not)
Speaking of old editions though! I've got a pic of my WIP Full Metal Eldar army:
Some of these models were bouncing around a friends garage for a decade or two, and the rest is a slow collection from ebay to round things out. The big hiccup is all the old metal Guardians without arms. I have a couple of the original arm sprues with a collection of guns and CC weapons, but not nearly enough to do all the bodies I have. I'll probably wind up sculpting and printing arms with Shuriken Catapults to restore all those guys. I'm missing a few things, like Asurmen, Karandras and Eldrad which I'll find on ebay at some point. Not pictured are some Striking Scorpions (5th ed? metals), and a couple plastics like a Wave Serpent, Jetbikes (2nd ed versions) and a Vyper.
I'll try to gather some closeups of the few finished models and put them up on dakka later.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
Undercosted Starcannon? Please. As someone who played Eldar through 2nd, 3rd, and 3.5, give me a break. You must have a Marine army. 3 shots, 2 hits, 1.666 wounds, no Save unless Inv. So, you kill 1.666 things per round. Doesn't matter if it's IG, SoB, other Eldar, 'Gaunts, or...Marines. *gasp.* *insert eyeroll here* You know, unless they had a cover save, in which case that Starcannon probably killed 1 model per round.
FFS. Meanwhile I'm facing Lascannon Razorback Spam with 5-man squads each carrying the heavy weapon of their choice and a plasma gun. Literally the only people who snotted and bawled about Starcannons were the 67% of you who played Marines/Chaos Marines and didn't like actually taking casualties. Never mind that the 2x5 Dark Reapers I put in cover in the backfield with Farseers giving them Fortune were making you pick up entire squads.
Nope. The Starcannon was broken.
Those entire editions were broken, just like every "modern" one. There's ALWAYS something meta-defining. Parasitic Weapons. Virus Grenades. Brettonian Lances. Razorback Spam. Pick your poison.
But the Starcannon? A strawman argument.
What defined every game in those editions was who went first.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
Undercosted Starcannon? Please. As someone who played Eldar through 2nd, 3rd, and 3.5, give me a break. You must have a Marine army. 3 shots, 2 hits, 1.666 wounds, no Save unless Inv. So, you kill 1.666 things per round. Doesn't matter if it's IG, SoB, other Eldar, 'Gaunts, or...Marines. *gasp.* *insert eyeroll here* You know, unless they had a cover save, in which case that Starcannon probably killed 1 model per round.
FFS. Meanwhile I'm facing Lascannon Razorback Spam with 5-man squads each carrying the heavy weapon of their choice and a plasma gun. Literally the only people who snotted and bawled about Starcannons were the 67% of you who played Marines/Chaos Marines and didn't like actually taking casualties. Never mind that the 2x5 Dark Reapers I put in cover in the backfield with Farseers giving them Fortune were making you pick up entire squads.
Nope. The Starcannon was broken.
Those entire editions were broken, just like every "modern" one. There's ALWAYS something meta-defining. Parasitic Weapons. Virus Grenades. Brettonian Lances. Razorback Spam. Pick your poison.
But the Starcannon? A strawman argument.
What defined every game in those editions was who went first.
Hehe
I thought the Starcannon was a fine weapon, and I was sad that it got knocked to two shots in the 4th edition book. The issue with it was that it was too cheap on things like Vypers, where it was only a 10 or 15 point upgrade, iirc. Or that Guardians and War Walkerss were so cheap that a Starcannon unit was sub 100. You could get a lot of them in your army and it performed both the anti infantry role and the anti-elite (and anti-tank when flanking) role well, making it a no brainer when compared to most other options, especially with its range.
Las-Plas Razorback is it's own thing, and like I said, every codex had it's flaws.
Reapers. . . I honestly never worried about them because, unlike the Starcannon on it's platforms, they couldn't move and fire. They were a T3, AV4+ unit priced at almost 40 points a model. There were few targets that were juicier!
The idea that whoever went first won is pretty flawed, imo. In my experience that meant that your table didn't have enough terrain on it. I saw a lot of pretty lousy tables back in the day, and made a conscious effort to have a good collection of terrain so that there was enough on the table to mitigate the first-turn-win potential. Terrain also relates to the Starcannon vs Reaper comparison too. Mobile heavy firepower is more valuable on a table that has more LOS blocking terrain. Reapers on a table with lots of LOS blocking terrain are just Whirlwind bait.
Every time I hear the "every game was won/lost by who got the first turn", I cannot help wondering how much, or rather, how little terrain those games had.
In some of our games, there is so much terrain that even if you get to alpha strike, you only have 1-3 viable targets to shoot at during the first turn. And if its a high priority target, you can bet dollars to doghnuts it wont be one of the exposed ones..
BanjoJohn wrote: So I've been re-reading 3rd edition recently for a personal project. I've been wondering what other people think, did you like the original rule where half the occupants of a transport could shoot from the vehicle? Or the update where there were limited firing points that units could shoot from? I remember things like the "6 man tactical squad in a razorback" spam that a few people did where you'd have the razorback shooting a lascannon and plasma gun, and the 6 man tac squad with lascannon and plasma gun shooting out from the razorback too. So some kind of fix is understandable, but I wonder if this made friendly games less fun or different somehow.
Oh man, I was not a fan of 2nd edition "herohammer" and was excited for 3rd. I built my first marine force and painted them up like the box art as Templar and would run las/plas squads in Las/Plas razorbacks. 3.5 nixed that, but then 4th came out and my eldar tanks were suddenly better than land raiders! Ah man, armored mechdar in 4th and even 5th was great.
Insectum, i have a buddy who would give you a big hug, he loves all the old metals. he is currently building an all metal necron army. he also loves playing 3rd-5th any chance he gets.
Much of the first turn mythos was indeed due to lack of adequate LOS blocking as well as good cover save terrain. event tables were notorious for being open fields because of the number of tables they needed terrain for. in a casual game you can put up both effective terrain that also looks like it belongs on the table. many of the terrain mats i have bought over the years were for specific terrain i envisioned well ahead of time, and have found new life with different terrain sets.
Take for example a mars mat i bought for admech-
Spoiler:
re-imagined as a space marine outpost when i got new terrain.
Spoiler:
My current roster of mats usable in 40K(not counting space/water or for specific games like MCP, warmachine or monpoc) include-
.imperial city*
.hive city*
.tech city* (mostly for infinity)
.desert generic*
.mars*
.jungle outpost* (an original 6X4 mat made for infinity)
.tundra outpost (another infinity mat designed for ariadna usable for that as well as battle tech)
.tau city*
.farm land*
.mystic ruins* (for eldar)
.river delta
All the ones with the * next to them have matching terrain i got just for them with the intent of preventing tables with said lack of terrain but also with tables that are inviting and make sense.
i remember starcannons getting 2 wounds a turn usually, mainly from assistance from warlocks/farseers, rerolling rolls to hit, getting good cover saves sitting in some woods, but it wasn't something I think I'd complain about, its just playing well with the rules in mind.
Mordekiem wrote: ... but then 4th came out and my eldar tanks were suddenly better than land raiders! Ah man, armored mechdar in 4th and even 5th was great.
Locally our last 4e game was a big apoc match with no superheavies. Early on a good 5000+ points of marines and guard opened up on an Eldar skimmer formation with lascannons, missiles, battlecannons, etc, and killed exactly nothing.
Without the invulnerability in 5e they were arguably undercosted, Eldars one 'weak-ish' edition.
As for losing on the first turn... never a good idea to not be meched up against craftworld ranger spam, though technically that is losing before the first turn :p
I started playing around the end of 2nd, if I recall correctly about 2 years before 3rd came out. I went with Blood Angels because they were in the starter and the Vengeance of the Blood Angels game I had played on Playstation that was my intro to the universe, and although I loved the Ork background the starter box miniatures were not as cool as the Blood Angels ones.
At the time I didn't even know Blood Angels had their own Codex - it wasn't clear to me when I saw "Codex Angels of Death" in the local toy shop that it was meant for me, so I just played them as normal space marines because as far as I knew that's what they were! I had Captain Tycho but I just built him using the existing wargear rules, I just thought his background sounded cool.
So in 3e when the Blood Angels codex came out and was so cheap I was really excited. And then I was just so confused by it! I hadn't ever heard of the Death Company, and now suddenly in any game ANY of my dudes could turn into them?! What? I need to buy a whole load of new metal models to represent this and then paint them up in a different, much trickier scheme?
I liked the background but the rules just left me scratching my head and feeling I was "doing it wrong" and as a kid with limited access to miniatures (whatever the toy shop in the nearest small town had, and whatever my limited pocket money could stretch to) it was rough to suddenly have to buy a bunch of new guys to play "properly".
The supercharged engines stuff just passed me by, because my only vehicle was a Predator, and I didn't have any Rhinos. It also didn't strike me from reading the book that Blood Angels were "supposed" to be much of a mechanised force - it wasn't mentioned in any of the background so I just ignored it. So my fun and flexible tactical squad based Space Marines became these sort of weird maybe-berserkers with really fast vehicles, and I just felt like it was kind of a rug pull. The codex fell really flat for me.
The end result was I just sort of moved on from them to Orks, especially once the codex came out and all those fantastic new Brian Nelson sculpts. I loved the 3e orks anyway - finally I felt they played on the table the way they were described in the background and I was a die hard Ork player for years.
On that note, those bloody skimmers were the bane of my life as an Ork player. In the 3e codex, if you didn't have Zzap Guns or just craploads of Rokkits, the only reliable anti-tank was a power claw wielded by a Nob into the rear armour of enemy tanks. Skimmers made that job even harder, zipping around the board, hovering on top of ruins, and needing 6s to hit in close combat. I would have had to restructure my force around tank hunting to deal with them. In the end with the release of the 4e codex I had a LOT of fun blowing skimmers out of the sky with Lootas, and I enjoyed the irritation of my tormentors when I rolled 45 shots on a squad of 15 and just tore a falcon apart in a hail of solid slugs!
Orkeosaurus wrote: The worst was the Hammerhead with that upgrade that damages every model that attacks it in melee.
The possibility to cause a wound on an infantry model on a 4+ you mean? of which you get an armor save against. not really broken considering a tau army (not a kroot army) has almost zero CC ability, they really do need it.
Orkeosaurus wrote: The worst was the Hammerhead with that upgrade that damages every model that attacks it in melee.
The possibility to cause a wound on an infantry model on a 4+ you mean? of which you get an armor save against. not really broken considering a tau army (not a kroot army) has almost zero CC ability, they really do need it.
Yeah, I never bothered with it. If your hammerheads were getting caught in CC, you were doing something wrong as you could keep them highly mobile without sacrificing their firepower, plus for best effect they should be supporting infantry who can provide a screen.
I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
The only model I can think of that would want to do that would be Cypher.
Orkeosaurus wrote: The worst was the Hammerhead with that upgrade that damages every model that attacks it in melee.
The possibility to cause a wound on an infantry model on a 4+ you mean? of which you get an armor save against. not really broken considering a tau army (not a kroot army) has almost zero CC ability, they really do need it.
Not broken, but pity the poor Ork Boy who got a 6+ save! Not much use, but I suppose it's one of the few times they actually got to take it!
Tau were frustrating to play against as Orks, you'd run toward them as they blasted you with ordinance railgun shots, they got an extra 6" worth of shooting you with their basic weapons, and their elite units could shoot you and then scoot away. Sure, when the Nob, usually the last guy left in his unit and shot full of holes, finally connected with a squad of Fire Warriors he'd evaporate it, but it wasn't a fun experience playing against that army.
I love Tau btw, I think they were a great addition to 40K. Great models, great background. And I think vs. the 4e Ork book they were a pretty fair fight, but that 3e book was outmatched unless you tailored, in my opinion.
Insectum7 wrote: I have to ask if you have a Blood Angels player in the group I found 3rd to be mostly pretty great except for their particular involvement. That Rhino rush attack was very irritating.
A full LOD army sorted out the Blood Angels on one occasion. Simply going first sorted them out on other occasions. Them being stupid enough to sweeping advance and get shot by the entire army also sorted them out. That codex was OP gak but it was mitigatable if you knew what to target.
Oh I agree that it was counterable, and our local player at the time quit once I found the counters, but it was sooo annoying that it was even a thing. Like, every codex had mistakes or flaws (such as an undercosted Starcannon), but that's a simple thing. The 32" assault potential was like . . . mind boggling how that was allowed to print. Too many stacked special rules.
Undercosted Starcannon? Please. As someone who played Eldar through 2nd, 3rd, and 3.5, give me a break. You must have a Marine army. 3 shots, 2 hits, 1.666 wounds, no Save unless Inv. So, you kill 1.666 things per round. Doesn't matter if it's IG, SoB, other Eldar, 'Gaunts, or...Marines. *gasp.* *insert eyeroll here* You know, unless they had a cover save, in which case that Starcannon probably killed 1 model per round.
FFS. Meanwhile I'm facing Lascannon Razorback Spam with 5-man squads each carrying the heavy weapon of their choice and a plasma gun. Literally the only people who snotted and bawled about Starcannons were the 67% of you who played Marines/Chaos Marines and didn't like actually taking casualties. Never mind that the 2x5 Dark Reapers I put in cover in the backfield with Farseers giving them Fortune were making you pick up entire squads.
Nope. The Starcannon was broken.
Those entire editions were broken, just like every "modern" one. There's ALWAYS something meta-defining. Parasitic Weapons. Virus Grenades. Brettonian Lances. Razorback Spam. Pick your poison.
But the Starcannon? A strawman argument.
What defined every game in those editions was who went first.
Hehe
I thought the Starcannon was a fine weapon, and I was sad that it got knocked to two shots in the 4th edition book. The issue with it was that it was too cheap on things like Vypers, where it was only a 10 or 15 point upgrade, iirc. Or that Guardians and War Walkerss were so cheap that a Starcannon unit was sub 100. You could get a lot of them in your army and it performed both the anti infantry role and the anti-elite (and anti-tank when flanking) role well, making it a no brainer when compared to most other options, especially with its range.
Las-Plas Razorback is it's own thing, and like I said, every codex had it's flaws.
Reapers. . . I honestly never worried about them because, unlike the Starcannon on it's platforms, they couldn't move and fire. They were a T3, AV4+ unit priced at almost 40 points a model. There were few targets that were juicier!
The idea that whoever went first won is pretty flawed, imo. In my experience that meant that your table didn't have enough terrain on it. I saw a lot of pretty lousy tables back in the day, and made a conscious effort to have a good collection of terrain so that there was enough on the table to mitigate the first-turn-win potential. Terrain also relates to the Starcannon vs Reaper comparison too. Mobile heavy firepower is more valuable on a table that has more LOS blocking terrain. Reapers on a table with lots of LOS blocking terrain are just Whirlwind bait.
Yeah, there was NEVER enough terrain at any LGSRT event or even GT's. And since the LGS was the central place for everyone to meet for leagues and such, it was the same problem. Never enough terrain to do anything.
I didn't have any Vypers, Guardians, or War Walkers. I have a Biel-Tan army, so it was expensive elites and vehicles. The pair of Falcons and the pair of Wave Serpents had Starcannons, but that was it, and I often took Bright Lances instead to deal with the vehicle spam. The Eldar vehicles with Spirit Stones and Holo-Fields were literally indestructable for the most part...IF got the first turn and could move them to take advantage of the skimmer rules. If not, you just picked them up, and rolled to see who died inside them.
I eventually just left them on the shelf and played all-on-foot Biel-Tan. 40 Banshees, 10 Reapers, 2 Wraithlords (1 BL, 1 SC), and 2 Farseers with Fortune. I think I had enough left for some Hawks with a Web of Skulls on the Exarch. For some reason, when 40 Banshees and 2 WL's are charging your lines, those Marines pretty rarely got around to shooting the Reapers, who were making them pick up two 5-man squads every turn and sitting in cover with re-rolled armor/cover saves and a Farseer to assign occasional wounds to. It didn't fare as well against horde-style armies, but since 67%-75% of the people at an event were playing Marines/Chaos Marines every edition, I didn't really care. All the models on foot made them easier to hide with what little terrain there usually was and made losing the first turn less devastating. Suddenly Razorbacks are dumping lascannons into WL's that I didn't really care about all that much, they were just a giant distraction.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
The only model I can think of that would want to do that would be Cypher.
It was definitely an edge case, but if you had a model within charge range without moving, you could shoot twice with a pistol and then charge, which is something that Rapid Fire weapons prohibited.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
The only model I can think of that would want to do that would be Cypher.
It was definitely an edge case, but if you had a model within charge range without moving, you could shoot twice with a pistol and then charge, which is something that Rapid Fire weapons prohibited.
Sergeants, and assault squads are the only models I can think who regularly had pistols, but you'd want them to assault instead of shoot, unless maybe getting those extra shots with plasma pistols could be worth it, say a squad of 6 assault marines with 2 plasma pistols, getting 4 plasma shots and 6 bolt pistol shots isn't bad. Or a tac squad that stood still to rapid-fire boltguns would allow the sergeant to shoot twice with pistol too. At least the bolt pistol would have AP5 when shooting, assault marines would allow armor save in combat.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
The only model I can think of that would want to do that would be Cypher.
It was definitely an edge case, but if you had a model within charge range without moving, you could shoot twice with a pistol and then charge, which is something that Rapid Fire weapons prohibited.
Sergeants, and assault squads are the only models I can think who regularly had pistols, but you'd want them to assault instead of shoot, unless maybe getting those extra shots with plasma pistols could be worth it, say a squad of 6 assault marines with 2 plasma pistols, getting 4 plasma shots and 6 bolt pistol shots isn't bad. Or a tac squad that stood still to rapid-fire boltguns would allow the sergeant to shoot twice with pistol too. At least the bolt pistol would have AP5 when shooting, assault marines would allow armor save in combat.
Rapid Fire and Heavy weapon models which remained stationary to fire could not Assault, but models with pistols could, so these Sergeants, Assault Squads, or equivalent models could fire twice with pistols and then assault.
It'd be a circumstance forseeable in situations where an opponent has Assaulted your models and won the combat, but might not be able to reach any more models after consolidation or advance from combat resolution. There'd be enemy models very close to other troops ready for counterattack.
Or sometimes you didn't really want to charge anyways. I saw a lot of Bloodthirsters in action during 3rd ed, and I wasn't excited to charge 'em! Dumping Plasma Piatol fire into them instead of charging would be a pretty enticing option.
Yeah, there was NEVER enough terrain at any LGSRT event or even GT's. And since the LGS was the central place for everyone to meet for leagues and such, it was the same problem. Never enough terrain to do anything.
I didn't have any Vypers, Guardians, or War Walkers. I have a Biel-Tan army, so it was expensive elites and vehicles. The pair of Falcons and the pair of Wave Serpents had Starcannons, but that was it, and I often took Bright Lances instead to deal with the vehicle spam. The Eldar vehicles with Spirit Stones and Holo-Fields were literally indestructable for the most part...IF got the first turn and could move them to take advantage of the skimmer rules. If not, you just picked them up, and rolled to see who died inside them.
I eventually just left them on the shelf and played all-on-foot Biel-Tan. 40 Banshees, 10 Reapers, 2 Wraithlords (1 BL, 1 SC), and 2 Farseers with Fortune. I think I had enough left for some Hawks with a Web of Skulls on the Exarch. For some reason, when 40 Banshees and 2 WL's are charging your lines, those Marines pretty rarely got around to shooting the Reapers, who were making them pick up two 5-man squads every turn and sitting in cover with re-rolled armor/cover saves and a Farseer to assign occasional wounds to. It didn't fare as well against horde-style armies, but since 67%-75% of the people at an event were playing Marines/Chaos Marines every edition, I didn't really care. All the models on foot made them easier to hide with what little terrain there usually was and made losing the first turn less devastating. Suddenly Razorbacks are dumping lascannons into WL's that I didn't really care about all that much, they were just a giant distraction.
Lack of terrain was a common thing to see. I usually was the guy who made sure our local games had enough stuff to make a good table.
40 Banshees in an army sure would have caught me by surprise! I almost never saw them during 3rd. That could have been an interesting fight.
BanjoJohn wrote: I had forgotten completely, or never knew, but pistols could shoot twice if your model stood still in 3rd edition, hmmm, I guess I didn't read carefully enough back then. Not that it makes a huge difference but it is interesting.
That was before they started equipping everyone with a free sidearm (and grenades) IIRC. Generally the only people with pistols wanted to be in CC. There may have been a handful of edge cases (SoB jump pack gunslingers maybe?) but it was almost never used.
The only model I can think of that would want to do that would be Cypher.
It was definitely an edge case, but if you had a model within charge range without moving, you could shoot twice with a pistol and then charge, which is something that Rapid Fire weapons prohibited.
Sergeants, and assault squads are the only models I can think who regularly had pistols, but you'd want them to assault instead of shoot, unless maybe getting those extra shots with plasma pistols could be worth it, say a squad of 6 assault marines with 2 plasma pistols, getting 4 plasma shots and 6 bolt pistol shots isn't bad. Or a tac squad that stood still to rapid-fire boltguns would allow the sergeant to shoot twice with pistol too. At least the bolt pistol would have AP5 when shooting, assault marines would allow armor save in combat.
Veteran squads could be ran with pistols, and that was my preferred loadout.
on condition of future pictures of the assembled models!
response.
My army swings the opposite way. I was flooding the board with skitarii since they first came out, with neutron laser onagers following them everywhere and with knight support in the back for counter charge / heavy firepower. My 3d printer is out of wack but you best believe that I'm getting some admec STL's when I can get it running again. Even in 5th edition, I have plans.
Whaaa?
