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I think the sandbox idea of 7th can work really well within a small gaming group as long as your group lays down a few house rules and expectations. My games have been working pretty well with a few general guidlines: 1. No unbound 2. No LoW 3. No more than two CAD 4. No maelstrom (great for fun games not so much competition) 5. We're trying to work out a limit on warp charge dice that would be fair to both sides.

I've played since second, and I'll put my vote in for seventh.

Second was a good ruleset for a skirmish game, but got clumsy very quickly as the number of models went up, and it probably had the worst balance of any edition. Also the models were, to be kind, not very nice, suffering badly from the prevalent 80's/90's aesthetic and less advanced production techniques.

Third was a huge game-changer, and probably the best balanced (at least at first), but it seems crude by today's standards. Definitely a good first step in the right direction.

Fourth and fifth were fine but felt like they'd lost a lot of their freshness to me. And vehicles were stupidly overpowered relative to infantry.

Sixth was a breath of fresh air, and rebalanced the game to make shooting as important as melee, as it should be. Introducing flyers, super-heavies, and fortifications expanded the scope of the game enormously and brought it new life.

Seventh has been more of a "6.5", with a lot of clarifications, general tightening up of the rules and rebalancing things that needed it. Also it's been the most fun so far, Maelstrom missions especially. So I'll say that yeah, it's the best edition on that basis alone.

PhantomViper wrote:Stop comparing a card game to a miniature game, the two have nothing in common.

?

MTG and 40k have a lot in common. They probably have more general similarities than general differences. Just because one uses dice and the other uses cards doesn't mean that they can't both be strategy games with a huge random element and is largely determined by what choices a player makes before they show up to a game (and the existence of meta, and changes over time causing a thriving trading community, and a few ways of doing things being much better than most others. etc. etc. etc.)

office_waaagh wrote:rebalanced the game to make shooting as important as melee, as it should be.

If by "rebalanced" you mean "crucified assault" and "as important" you mean "overwhelmingly dominate", then I totally agree.

5th ed was shooty, nearly exclusively outside of a few armies. Then they heavily nerfed assault...

 Ailaros wrote:

office_waaagh wrote:rebalanced the game to make shooting as important as melee, as it should be.

If by "rebalanced" you mean "crucified assault" and "as important" you mean "overwhelmingly dominate", then I totally agree.

5th ed was shooty, nearly exclusively outside of a few armies. Then they heavily nerfed assault...

That's essentially what I mean. Assault has greater effectiveness by default because you can inflict casualties in your opponent's turn as well as your own, whereas with shooting you only get to inflict casualties half as often. So it needed a bit of tweaking to make shooting a more viable strategy, ie to be able to inflict crippling casualties on a unit and render it combat ineffective without having to assault it, and before it can assault you.

I like the idea of the assault being used as a final measure to clear the remnants of an enemy unit from a fortification or entrenchment rather than as a primary strategy. I'm a longtime ork player mind, so it disadvantages me somewhat, but it also makes the game more tactical and more about maneuver, as well as giving me more options. Assault is still a viable tactic (a Nobz mob can usually be relied upon to clean house) but it needs to be used with a bit more thought. They added Hammer of Wrath, removed "fearless" wounds, and did a few other things that made the assault phase more viable as well, especially against vehicles, so it definitely still has a place and can be quite decisive if one plans one's charges with care and lays the groundwork with firepower first.

But hey, the question was "what is my favourite edition", so it's going to be subjective, and the things I like won't always be the things you like. This is a thing that I like, it makes the game more fun and cinematic for me. If you don't agree and you liked it better when assault was more powerful, then you're not wrong. I just like it better this way.

Random Dude wrote:I think the sandbox idea of 7th can work really well within a small gaming group as long as your group lays down a few house rules and expectations. My games have been working pretty well with a few general guidlines: 1. No unbound 2. No LoW 3. No more than two CAD 4. No maelstrom (great for fun games not so much competition) 5. We're trying to work out a limit on warp charge dice that would be fair to both sides.

This is the fatal flaw of 7th ed. It pretty much requires the community to break up into a bunch of little cliques.

These cliques then work hard to make the game playable for them.

This creates barriers to pick-up games and to bringing in new players.

It does so via the "this is the way we play" mentality. So either the new guy becomes indoctrinated in a play style that is not his cup of tea or he goes out to try and find another group that better fits his view on the game.

There are reasons that 40k community is disappearing. Those reasons are 6th ed, 7th ed and GW's overall attitude.

office_waaagh wrote:I've played since second, and I'll put my vote in for seventh.

Second was a good ruleset for a skirmish game, but got clumsy very quickly as the number of models went up, and it probably had the worst balance of any edition. Also the models were, to be kind, not very nice, suffering badly from the prevalent 80's/90's aesthetic and less advanced production techniques.

Third was a huge game-changer, and probably the best balanced (at least at first), but it seems crude by today's standards. Definitely a good first step in the right direction.

Fourth and fifth were fine but felt like they'd lost a lot of their freshness to me. And vehicles were stupidly overpowered relative to infantry.

Sixth was a breath of fresh air, and rebalanced the game to make shooting as important as melee, as it should be. Introducing flyers, super-heavies, and fortifications expanded the scope of the game enormously and brought it new life.

Seventh has been more of a "6.5", with a lot of clarifications, general tightening up of the rules and rebalancing things that needed it. Also it's been the most fun so far, Maelstrom missions especially. So I'll say that yeah, it's the best edition on that basis alone.

Agree somewhat with your opinion on 2nd, though I think that you downplayed just how bad the rules were. Remember that certain army who auto lost to the Eldar Harlequins? That as soon as the models hit the table they had to pack up and leave.


3rd? It was a rough draft that needed refinement.


4th? Was better but the interaction between abstracted los and area terrain was a mess. Got models behind a solid wall with no sight holes? No problem, bring up the flamer it's area terrain. .....wtf, How do you see my guys? ...Don't need to, it's area terrain. ....what?


5th ed? Really balanced. Both shooting and assault. All hope for balance went out the window when GW decided to update pretty much only Imperial factions with an average 40% points reduction.

If Rhino's had stayed closer to their 55-60 point initial cost
If IG had not gotten vehicle squadron rules every where, Valk/Vendettas and Chimera's dropped from their 80-ish points all at the same time 5th ed would not have been Tankhammer.


6th ed ? GW took everything good that Allessio had done and let Ward and Company wipe their buttocks with it.

Their were a few good ideas but none of them were implemented well. As a long time Tau player I hated what GW did with 6th ed and with the Tau Codex. Long time Tau players didn't want a $50 single build auto win codex. We wanted to be updated to 5th ed standards in a balanced manner.


7th ed? As you say it's 6.5. ... And that is not a good thing, imo. For everything from 6th they half-a$$'d fixed (I mean it is tough times for Imperial factions that want to ally )....they added another game breaking problem.


Personally, I almost believe that 6th & 7th ed are a part of some Machiavellian plan that Tom Kirdy has cooked up to drive the stock price down to a point where he can buy back the majority of shares and take the company out of public trading.

Note, I said almost

Later,
ff

I agree with 2nd edition as well. I think it had a lot more character. Bring back the days where you had multiple charts for vehicle damage. A lot of the kids playing today have NO idea how neat that was. Right now only a few of them can say theyve been immobilized or had a weapon destroyed. 2 hullpoints later its dead anyway.

OK anyway that was my rant. I just thought 2nd really had the fatansy/space feel

Another reason 7th is my least favorite edition, Despite all the "Anything goes!" attitude, you still can't ally Chaos and Imperial Guard or have Chaos Imperial Knights.
(Okay, pretty minor complaint in comparison.)
I really liked 2nd, but as others said, only works in much smaller games and it was riddled with more holes than my zombie targets after a Saturday at the shooting range. But it had imagination and character. Best edition? Sadly, not for me. Rules wise I had to give it to 5th.

 focusedfire wrote:

Random Dude wrote:I think the sandbox idea of 7th can work really well within a small gaming group as long as your group lays down a few house rules and expectations. My games have been working pretty well with a few general guidlines: 1. No unbound 2. No LoW 3. No more than two CAD 4. No maelstrom (great for fun games not so much competition) 5. We're trying to work out a limit on warp charge dice that would be fair to both sides.

This is the fatal flaw of 7th ed. It pretty much requires the community to break up into a bunch of little cliques.
These cliques then work hard to make the game playable for them.
This creates barriers to pick-up games and to bringing in new players.
It does so via the "this is the way we play" mentality. So either the new guy becomes indoctrinated in a play style that is not his cup of tea or he goes out to try and find another group that better fits his view on the game.
There are reasons that 40k community is disappearing. Those reasons are 6th ed, 7th ed and GW's overall attitude.

I disagree that 7th is somehow unplayable as a PUG or inherently divides the community. I think it's only a problem that exists on the internet. For regular gaming groups, house rules are fine. My group had a number of tweaks we added to 6th, but these took a lot of back and forth over Facebook for a few weeks until we were all happy.

For PUGs, house rules are a bad idea. Just follow the rules as published in the rulebook and you'll be fine. When you start house-ruling no LoWs and limiting detatchments it will of course create conflict.You could cite the part in the rulebook that suggests you should agree on how to select armies, but the only rules provided are for Unbound and Battle Forged. Of course it makes much more sense in a PUG to use the published rules. In my group we ran narrative games with bespoke missions and FOC restrictions, but I would never turn up to a PUG looking to impose this sort of thing. However lots of people do something very similar [e.g. refusing to play against LoW], then report that 7th is broken for PUGs.

I organised a game the other day, and it was very simple. Three questions. Points limit? Unbound or Battle Forged? Maelstrom or normal missions? Where's the problem? If someone wants to use Unbound and you don't like it, find another opponent, in the same way as you would if they were running a legal list that you found offensive. If you don't like allies or LoW because you don't like the direction 40k is going, or because it makes the game less competitive, then 7th probably isn't the game for you. I think it's unfair to spoil it for those who are happy with the direction the game is going through imposing restrictions to turn it into your idea of what 40k should be.

I think it is great that we have all of this choice. If I wanted I could run an all Repentia army in Landraiders [I didn't, because we agreed on Battle Forged, but I could]. I could also use all of my Sisters models even in a Battle Forged list, and get to take choices that always go edged out by more competitive ones, e.g. Penitent Engines. I can also add in Inquisition allies along with Guard and Space Marines and make a fluffy Wit Hunters list.

 focusedfire wrote:

Random Dude wrote:I think the sandbox idea of 7th can work really well within a small gaming group as long as your group lays down a few house rules and expectations. My games have been working pretty well with a few general guidlines: 1. No unbound 2. No LoW 3. No more than two CAD 4. No maelstrom (great for fun games not so much competition) 5. We're trying to work out a limit on warp charge dice that would be fair to both sides.

This is the fatal flaw of 7th ed. It pretty much requires the community to break up into a bunch of little cliques.

These cliques then work hard to make the game playable for them.

This creates barriers to pick-up games and to bringing in new players.

It does so via the "this is the way we play" mentality. So either the new guy becomes indoctrinated in a play style that is not his cup of tea or he goes out to try and find another group that better fits his view on the game.

There are reasons that 40k community is disappearing. Those reasons are 6th ed, 7th ed and GW's overall attitude.


The thing is, EVERYONE I've played with agrees with the 4 guidelines I laid down. At least where I live, the community is not breaking down into cliques.

For all of its flaws, 5th edition. 6th fixed these flaws but introduced much bigger ones. I might ask my group if they're up for trying a homebrew 5th edition, with some rules tweaks.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:

 focusedfire wrote:

Random Dude wrote:I think the sandbox idea of 7th can work really well within a small gaming group as long as your group lays down a few house rules and expectations. My games have been working pretty well with a few general guidlines: 1. No unbound 2. No LoW 3. No more than two CAD 4. No maelstrom (great for fun games not so much competition) 5. We're trying to work out a limit on warp charge dice that would be fair to both sides.

This is the fatal flaw of 7th ed. It pretty much requires the community to break up into a bunch of little cliques.
These cliques then work hard to make the game playable for them.
This creates barriers to pick-up games and to bringing in new players.
It does so via the "this is the way we play" mentality. So either the new guy becomes indoctrinated in a play style that is not his cup of tea or he goes out to try and find another group that better fits his view on the game.
There are reasons that 40k community is disappearing. Those reasons are 6th ed, 7th ed and GW's overall attitude.

I disagree that 7th is somehow unplayable as a PUG or inherently divides the community. I think it's only a problem that exists on the internet. For regular gaming groups, house rules are fine. My group had a number of tweaks we added to 6th, but these took a lot of back and forth over Facebook for a few weeks until we were all happy.

My experience is, while not necessarily the opposite, certainly very different. As a club, we felt we had to take steps to outline what exactly constituted a PUG, so people knew where they stood when coming without a game planned in advance, and also to guard against one or two "more competitive" sorts exploiting the new formats to the detriment of other people's enjoyment of the game.

For PUGs, house rules are a bad idea. Just follow the rules as published in the rulebook and you'll be fine. When you start house-ruling no LoWs and limiting detatchments it will of course create conflict.You could cite the part in the rulebook that suggests you should agree on how to select armies, but the only rules provided are for Unbound and Battle Forged. Of course it makes much more sense in a PUG to use the published rules. In my group we ran narrative games with bespoke missions and FOC restrictions, but I would never turn up to a PUG looking to impose this sort of thing. However lots of people do something very similar [e.g. refusing to play against LoW], then report that 7th is broken for PUGs.

Except you can't, significant portions of the rules are written so badly that they cannot be played "as published." The independent Psykers losing their ability to generate warp charge or cast powers if attached to a non-psychic unit for one. Or, if you play that they can, they cannot apparently cast their own powers independently of a psychic unit if attached to them. Neither works properly, neither is technically wrong if played RAW.

I organised a game the other day, and it was very simple. Three questions. Points limit? Unbound or Battle Forged? Maelstrom or normal missions? Where's the problem? If someone wants to use Unbound and you don't like it, find another opponent, in the same way as you would if they were running a legal list that you found offensive. If you don't like allies or LoW because you don't like the direction 40k is going, or because it makes the game less competitive, then 7th probably isn't the game for you. I think it's unfair to spoil it for those who are happy with the direction the game is going through imposing restrictions to turn it into your idea of what 40k should be.

The "find another opponent" fallacy is a great one. If I attend my club, and there's an even number of players looking for a 40K game, and everyone else has paired off, how do I "find another opponent?" My choices are, in fact: don't play, force/persuade my opponent into compromising the way they want to play or compromise the way I want to play. Yeah, technically I have a choice, but it's hardly a good one. The "find another opponent" argument is the same logic as "this unit sucks because it isn't any good against this other unit that I've just constructed in my head" tactics argument. Fine in theory, doesn't really survive contact with reality.

I think it is great that we have all of this choice. If I wanted I could run an all Repentia army in Landraiders [I didn't, because we agreed on Battle Forged, but I could]. I could also use all of my Sisters models even in a Battle Forged list, and get to take choices that always go edged out by more competitive ones, e.g. Penitent Engines. I can also add in Inquisition allies along with Guard and Space Marines and make a fluffy Wit Hunters list.

Except that the one thing that seems unanimous, amongst those who want the game to be better and those with lower standards, is that the fluff is awesome, what Unbound does is codify abusing the game irrespective of the fluff for those who want to exploit every single unbalanced unit and loophole in order to win their games of toy soldiers. Being able to run whatever models you liked has always been possible, allies have always been possible, all you needed was opponents permission, and outside of a competition environment I'm sure that an understandable army construction (such as Sisters with Guard and Inquisition) wouldn't likely encounter too many issues with getting that.

But hey, if it did, you could always find another opponent.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Except you can't, significant portions of the rules are written so badly that they cannot be played "as published." The independent Psykers losing their ability to generate warp charge or cast powers if attached to a non-psychic unit for one. Or, if you play that they can, they cannot apparently cast their own powers independently of a psychic unit if attached to them. Neither works properly, neither is technically wrong if played RAW.

Agree the psychic phase is a cockup on the part of GW, although I think this is the only glaringly incompetent section of the rulebook though, and the rest is better written than previous editions [certainly better than 6th]. This isn't an issue with arranging a game though, this is a rules issue that will come up should one or both sides be using psykers, and if those psykers join another psyker unit.

 Azreal13 wrote:


The "find another opponent" fallacy is a great one. If I attend my club, and there's an even number of players looking for a 40K game, and everyone else has paired off, how do I "find another opponent?" My choices are, in fact: don't play, force/persuade my opponent into compromising the way they want to play or compromise the way I want to play. Yeah, technically I have a choice, but it's hardly a good one. The "find another opponent" argument is the same logic as "this unit sucks because it isn't any good against this other unit that I've just constructed in my head" tactics argument. Fine in theory, doesn't really survive contact with reality.

In my experience of clubs [correct me if I'm wrong when it concerns yours] players usually pair up beforehand on the club forum, which also gives them an opportunity to discuss rules in advance, so I wouldn't consider that to be a PUG. If I went to a GW shop to get a game [/shudder] I would go with a very flexible attitude, and because I was flexible, I would have more chance of getting a game. Even if I was set on running an unbound list the rules allow my opponent to run a Battleforged list. The more restrictions and expectations I place on the game [e.g. no LoW, no Unbound, only two detachments etc.] the less likely it is that I will find a game, but that's not the fault of the rules, that's my fault for being inflexible.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Except that the one thing that seems unanimous, amongst those who want the game to be better and those with lower standards, is that the fluff is awesome, what Unbound does is codify abusing the game irrespective of the fluff for those who want to exploit every single unbalanced unit and loophole in order to win their games of toy soldiers. Being able to run whatever models you liked has always been possible, allies have always been possible, all you needed was opponents permission, and outside of a competition environment I'm sure that an understandable army construction (such as Sisters with Guard and Inquisition) wouldn't likely encounter too many issues with getting that.

But hey, if it did, you could always find another opponent.

Except that, before 7th, I met a lot of resistance, even in my regular gaming group, to any deviation from the FoC. I also met resistance to using FW, and superheavies,despite Escalation and GW allowing FW units in tournaments. This caused a lot of splits and conflict in my gaming group, and with 7th, this is no longer the case. The game changed in my favour, in line with what I wanted from 40k, and I'm really happy about that. If it hadn't, I would have either quit, or stopped asking to use my titan and more than one ally. You can imagine how frustrating it is for me having to still have to justify things like LoW and fluffy lists, even though it's in black and white in the rules, just because these things don't fit in with someone else's idea of what 40k 'should' be.

While I haven't played 6th or 7th so could admittedly be missing the finer points, some of the arguments I am hearing for them don't really make sense to me. Yes, it is a matter of personal preference and tastes differ, I get that. What doesn't make sense is that it isn't like fliers and super heavies etc were introduced with 6th. We had those with Apocalypse and forge world long before. So if you liked that stuff you could play it.

Same thing with rules like combining with allies, unbound etc which I summarize in perhaps an overly simplistic way as being a rule that you can simply play whatever you feel like fielding. You'll need an opponent to agree and apparently many won't and gaming groups are house ruling that stuff out, so how is this any different than before? Here's a little secret: you could always play allies, unbound, etc if your opponent agreed. 6th and 7th didn't invent that.

So basically in order to allow people to do something they could always do anyway, GA introduces a bunch of core rules that large swathes of the player base don't like and forces people and groups to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to alter the core rules in a way that they find reasonably workable. I think it made much more sense when the game had a simpler core rule set and various supplemental rules that people could use for an expanded game.

--


I also wanted to commentake on a previous post mentioning terrain rules in 4th which I think were great terrain rules. Most of the criticism I've seen of those rules is based on not having actually understood those rules. Not everything was area terrain and not all area terrain was level three. So in the example above of shooting a flamer through a solid wall, that shouldn't have happened. The wall shouldn't have been area terrain. What did happen all to often was people treated every piece of terrain as level three area terrain. That misuse of the rules was the problem much more so than the rules themselves.

I remember telling an opponent "Let's treat this low rubble as lever two area terrain" and he looked at me like i was speaking a foreign language. TLOS makes it impossible to play with something like thick jungle because you can't place models in it and have it block line of sight like it should. The abstraction that was area terrain allowed greater diversity of terrain to be represented. Perhaps it didn't make sense for one inch to block line of sight, but a small tweak to the area terrain rule would have been better than simply abandoning it. And that is an example of something GW consistently gets wrong. They fix small problems with sweeping changes rather than small tweaks.

tyrannosaurus wrote:

Azreal13 wrote:

The "find another opponent" fallacy is a great one. If I attend my club, and there's an even number of players looking for a 40K game, and everyone else has paired off, how do I "find another opponent?" My choices are, in fact: don't play, force/persuade my opponent into compromising the way they want to play or compromise the way I want to play. Yeah, technically I have a choice, but it's hardly a good one. The "find another opponent" argument is the same logic as "this unit sucks because it isn't any good against this other unit that I've just constructed in my head" tactics argument. Fine in theory, doesn't really survive contact with reality.

In my experience of clubs [correct me if I'm wrong when it concerns yours] players usually pair up beforehand on the club forum, which also gives them an opportunity to discuss rules in advance, so I wouldn't consider that to be a PUG. If I went to a GW shop to get a game [/shudder] I would go with a very flexible attitude, and because I was flexible, I would have more chance of getting a game. Even if I was set on running an unbound list the rules allow my opponent to run a Battleforged list. The more restrictions and expectations I place on the game [e.g. no LoW, no Unbound, only two detachments etc.] the less likely it is that I will find a game, but that's not the fault of the rules, that's my fault for being inflexible.

OK, your wrong. Consider yourself corrected.

Really, Players arranging a meet online is the exact opposite of a PUG.

Also, if everyone is pre-arranging games to make sure that they are playing like minded individuals then it means that the gaming community is excluding those that wish to pop in for a quick game.

This is a major failing of GW as of late. We in other parts of the world (not england) don't have 5 hours to waste trying to get a quick game.
The time investment GW expects for us to play the game is unrealistic if we are going to have friends outside of 40k and spend time with family.

tyrannosaurus wrote:

Azreal13 wrote:
Except that the one thing that seems unanimous, amongst those who want the game to be better and those with lower standards, is that the fluff is awesome, what Unbound does is codify abusing the game irrespective of the fluff for those who want to exploit every single unbalanced unit and loophole in order to win their games of toy soldiers. Being able to run whatever models you liked has always been possible, allies have always been possible, all you needed was opponents permission, and outside of a competition environment I'm sure that an understandable army construction (such as Sisters with Guard and Inquisition) wouldn't likely encounter too many issues with getting that.

But hey, if it did, you could always find another opponent.

Except that, before 7th, I met a lot of resistance, even in my regular gaming group, to any deviation from the FoC. I also met resistance to using FW, and superheavies,despite Escalation and GW allowing FW units in tournaments. This caused a lot of splits and conflict in my gaming group, and with 7th, this is no longer the case. The game changed in my favour, in line with what I wanted from 40k, and I'm really happy about that. If it hadn't, I would have either quit, or stopped asking to use my titan and more than one ally. You can imagine how frustrating it is for me having to still have to justify things like LoW and fluffy lists, even though it's in black and white in the rules, just because these things don't fit in with someone else's idea of what 40k 'should' be.

Actually, those things were not in the game before.

Apoc Flyers were still skimmers and Forge world was a separate game that used the same stat charts.

Yes you could use them with an opponents permission but there no "you're afraid to play the core game judgement".

They were not a part of the core rules for good reasons. GW chose to ignore those reasons to desperately grab for money with 6th ed.
They cluttered up the game with a bunch of unnecessary bloat. It was the Windows Vista of the 40k editions.

We hoped that 7th would be the windows 7 of 40k but instead we got Windows 8. A system with even more bloat and balance problems.

Your comment about being frustrated says a lot. Now if you could somehow lok at it from the other players perspective. Whoah, they are frustrated too.

Frustrating, probably the most apt one word descriptor for this edition.

Gwaihirsbrother wrote:

---snip---

So basically in order to allow people to do something they could always do anyway, GA introduces a bunch of core rules that large swathes of the player base don't like and forces people and groups to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to alter the core rules in a way that they find reasonably workable. I think it made much more sense when the game had a simpler core rule set and various supplemental rules that people could use for an expanded game.

I edited out the stuff already addressed in the reply to tyrannosaurus.

This last part I agree with and is at the crux of the problem.

Instead of letting the player community grow into things such as Flyers and Superheavies with rules that the players worked out for themselves, GW crammed them into the base game in a very shoddy manner.

The few proponents of 6th and 7th out there love to proclaim how much freedom these editions have.

I posit that they have less because they took something we could always "choose" to do before and codified them into the core rules. By creating rules they limited the game to there always being an "expectation" to play by the core rules.
Basically, Apoc and Flyers as supplements = More Freedom

Apoc and Flyers in the core rules = Less Freedom

Many of us want a "game" free of lawyer level negotiations. Matter of fact, I think this should be the tag-line for 7th ed:

"Made by lawyers for lawyers".

Gwaihirsbrother wrote:
I also wanted to commentake on a previous post mentioning terrain rules in 4th which I think were great terrain rules. Most of the criticism I've seen of those rules is based on not having actually understood those rules. Not everything was area terrain and not all area terrain was level three. So in the example above of shooting a flamer through a solid wall, that shouldn't have happened. The wall shouldn't have been area terrain. What did happen all to often was people treated every piece of terrain as level three area terrain. That misuse of the rules was the problem much more so than the rules themselves.

I remember telling an opponent "Let's treat this low rubble as lever two area terrain" and he looked at me like i was speaking a foreign language. TLOS makes it impossible to play with something like thick jungle because you can't place models in it and have it block line of sight like it should. The abstraction that was area terrain allowed greater diversity of terrain to be represented. Perhaps it didn't make sense for one inch to block line of sight, but a small tweak to the area terrain rule would have been better than simply abandoning it. And that is an example of something GW consistently gets wrong. They fix small problems with sweeping changes rather than small tweaks.

Seeing as this is about what I said previously, I'd like to correct your eronious assumption about lack of rules familiarity being the issue.

The problem was that the rules stated that you could see and shoot up to x inches into and out of area terrain.

They then went on to define area terrain as pretty much anything with a base or a group of individual pieces that created an area of sorts.

Because almost all terrain had some form of base at the time, this meant that pretty much everything was area terrain.
Which then triggered the area terrain los exception.

What you had to do was actually go through in pregame and explain that this solid wall did indeed block los. Very counter-intuitive.
It also led to constant arguing as to which terrain peices had been called as los blocking.

This is the reason for my distaste for 3rd&4th eds abstracted terrain system. The sheer number of times I had to interrupt my game to help another table with an impartial call. The number of times my games were interrupted by loud arguments from a near by table.

Basically, abstracted terrain led to very "gamey" exploitation of the rules.


--'

Want to address those that think 3rsd and 4th ed were magical paradises for shooty armies.

Area terrain blocked los for purpose of shooting through to domething on the other side.
Almost all terrain was area terain.

The IG excelled because of guess ranged weapons not needing los.


Later,
ff

They then went on to define area terrain as pretty much anything with a base or a group of individual pieces that created an area of sorts.

Because almost all terrain had some form of base at the time, this meant that pretty much everything was area terrain.
Which then triggered the area terrain los exception.

What you had to do was actually go through in pregame and explain that this solid wall did indeed block los. Very counter-intuitive.
It also led to constant arguing as to which terrain peices had been called as los blocking.

This is the reason for my distaste for 3rd&4th eds abstracted terrain system. The sheer number of times I had to interrupt my game to help another table with an impartial call. The number of times my games were interrupted by loud arguments from a near by table.

Just a couple thoughts. TLOS does not eliminate gamey exploits and arguments.

Part of what you are saying is what I was talking about that GW should do small tweaks rather than massive changes. A few more examples and small changes to the rules for greater clarity could have made the combined area terrain/TLOS system work well.

Gwaihirsbrother wrote:
While I haven't played 6th or 7th so could admittedly be missing the finer points, some of the arguments I am hearing for them don't really make sense to me. Yes, it is a matter of personal preference and tastes differ, I get that. What doesn't make sense is that it isn't like fliers and super heavies etc were introduced with 6th. We had those with Apocalypse and forge world long before. So if you liked that stuff you could play it.

Same thing with rules like combining with allies, unbound etc which I summarize in perhaps an overly simplistic way as being a rule that you can simply play whatever you feel like fielding. You'll need an opponent to agree and apparently many won't and gaming groups are house ruling that stuff out, so how is this any different than before? Here's a little secret: you could always play allies, unbound, etc if your opponent agreed. 6th and 7th didn't invent that.

Apocalypse was never optional for me, because it was never an option [and never will be]. If you've got room to host, can spend two days playing, and have friends who are also prepared to give up two days to play, then great. For the vast majority of people with jobs, partners and/or kids, Apocalypse games just aren't going to happen. However, I always wanted to play with titans, and in 6th I finally got to do that in 'standard' games as it was allowed by Escalation, which, as a supplement, was just as valid as using Iyanden. Titans were also allowed in 30k games and didn't seem to be causing any problems. However there was still lots of resistance, with people citing the D weapon rule as being too powerful.

Now that D has been nerfed, the arguments have now been reduced to "I just don't like it" "It just doesn't fit". I have a rulebook that says I am allowed to take titans, and your argument "I just don't like it" should be considered just as valid? One argument that I have repeatedly put forward, and haven't adequately had answered, is why people feel comfortable with refusing to follow certain rules in 40k, but then treat the rules in other games they play as sacrosanct. Imagine if I turned up looking for a game of X-Wing and refused to play against Tie-fighters because "I just don't like them". Actually, most LoW are much more of a liability than a strength. The Knight titan, which isn't a LoW, appears to be the most effective and popular of this type of unit, and seems to be widely accepted, despite having a D weapon, and considered by many to be OP.

In regards to allies, yes you could do that before 6th, but not without prior agreement and discussion, which pretty much kills them for the vast majority of games, in particular PUGs. Again, should the fact that you don't like allies or more than two detachments stop me taking a perfectly legal, fluffy, Inquisition/Sisters/Space Marines list? I shouldn't have to justify something that is in the rules.

6th and 7th took 40k in a new direction, a direction which I'm really pleased with, and finally allows me to play the game the way I want to without having to argue or justify my reasons. If people don;t like it, there are plenty of other alternatives, or they can play an earlier edition [5th seems popular!]. However saying that it is impossible to play PUGs in 7th is misleading, and forcing others to play your bastardised version of 7th so it fits your vision, despite the rules being on their side, is totally unreasonable.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
The Knight titan, which isn't a LoW

Isn't a titan either....

7th is great. An improvement over 6th which was also fun. I started in 2nd and it was the edition that won my heart, but in hindsight, it was way more clunky and unbalanced than today's 40k.

I got into the game on the tail end of 3rd so fourth editionreally holds a lot of fantastic memories for me. I only barely touched on 5th, missed 6th entirely, but so far I'm really enjoying 7th. The raw amount of variety that you can see in armies is really fantastic.

My favourite edition is 5th by far. The changes they made to rules after it and the power creep (which i felt also in the end of 5th - especially in GK codex) were really bad.

I kinda hate 7th edition, truly.

4th was the best for me. It was the most tactical edition. Mostly because of no true line of sight and abstract rules for terrain. The addition of true line of sight and the removal of abstract terrain rules killed a very large part of the strategy of 40k and were introduced in fifth by Jervis Johnson. Its been a downward spiral from fifth to seventh. The game now is chutes and ladder with a cost of $400.00. The strategy has been completely removed by Jervis Johnson.

I know I'm in the tiny, old, crusty minority that remembers 2nd Edition, but it still is, and perhaps at this rate always will be, my favorite edition.

It wasn't perfect, but it isn't like any of the subsequent editions have been either. But what it was, was a wargame. If 3rd edition had been a streamlining of 2nd Edition, and not a jumbled mess of setting up models, rolling dice, and removing them, the game would be in a far better state today.