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A.T. wrote:In practice AP2 was cheap and common while many of the factions in the game had neither 2+ saves nor AP3 artillery.

Common, sure, but cheap- absolutely not. You certainly could load up on meltaguns and lascannons, but there was nothing I liked more than seeing a squad of five Devastators with four lascannons. One Basilisk shot later and my artillery had earned its points back.

AP1/AP2 weapons were expensive, they were low volume, and they were almost always either short-ranged or Heavy, both of which significantly limited their utility. Put them in infantry squads and lack of split fire made them hard to use. Stack them in dedicated squads and they became vulnerable. Take too many, and then you had a ton of points tied up in weapons that usually got just one shot and wasted potential any time they shot at something with a 3+ or worse.

...Then come 8th Ed and now you can just spam high-volume, moderate-strength, moderate-AP guns and drown Terminators in a volley of autocannon or Disintegrator fire. Put em wherever you want, because split fire is easy and you can always move and shoot, and if your opponent doesn't have a lot of 2+ armor that's fine because they work on everything else too.

Like I said, there were positive effects of the old system- unintuitive though it may have been- that the modifier system has not replicated.

BanjoJohn wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
They are talking about the 3rd and 4th edition Tyranids in which Synapse gave Eternal Warrior and Warriors could assault 12" with Leaping (and rending worked on hit rolls)
5th to 7th was rough on Tyranids (damn Cruddace).

No, in the 3rd edition codex Synapse were not immune to Instant Death

Correct, it was 4th that made Synapse Creatures immune to Instant Death. Target saturation, smart use of cover, and embracing Warriors' identity as a dual-role unit were essential to keeping them alive.

Eh by the end of 5th ap3 was both common and cheap (long fang spam) and by the end of 6th Grav cannons could put 5 AP 2 shots (so a Centurion squad was putting 15). So it kinda depended on the edition.

 catbarf wrote:
Common, sure, but cheap- absolutely not.

5-6 points for a plasma gun depending on BS 3 or 4.
Though not cheap beyond those with range and/or volume until later in 3rd, and somewhat erratically at that.

I can only speak to 3rd-5th, but checking my old books, Imperial Guard plasma guns were 8pts in 3rd, 10pts in 4th (tied with meltaguns), and 15pts in 5th (the most expensive special weapon). Space Marine plasma guns were 6pts in 3rd, 10pts in 4th, and still 10pts in 5th on top of the part of the cost baked into the Tactical Squad (flamers free, meltaguns 5pts).

Plus in addition to being relatively expensive they were Rapid Fire, so limited to 12" on the move, and Gets Hot triggering on a 1 or 2 if you shot twice (and of course, no easy access to re-rolls to mitigate it) meant actually rapid firing had worse than a fifty-fifty chance of it not blowing up.

We took them en masse anyways because it was the specialized anti-MEQ weapon in a game where 'take-all-comers' means 'designed to face Marines', but against anything not in power armor there were better options.

As Tyran alluded to it wasn't stuff like plasma guns that were the problem, it was codices in 5th Ed starting to hand out AP3 to weapons that didn't have these deliberate limitations baked into the statlines since the start of 3rd. There was no reason that, say, hot-shot lasguns should have ever been AP3.

5th minus the "new" flyer rules

 catbarf wrote:
As Tyran alluded to it wasn't stuff like plasma guns that were the problem, it was codices in 5th Ed starting to hand out AP3 to weapons that didn't have these deliberate limitations baked into the statlines since the start of 3rd. There was no reason that, say, hot-shot lasguns should have ever been AP3.

I think two different threads of discussion have crossed paths unintentionally - I was replying to Insectum7s note that the lack of save modifiers and how it led to cliff-edge situations like no saves on marines and then full saves on terminators.


5e stormtroopers were just another variation on 4e thousand sons and vespid - an ill advised gimmick as you might agree.

But the edition did also see a rise in more practical AP3 (sternguard), as well as AP3 flamers, a race to the bottom for heavy weapon costs, and artillery just hitting a whole lot more models. GW had finally hiked the cost of plasma up to take it or leave it levels from its 3e starting point and knocked rending weapon spam on its head but didn't quite prove capable of taking one step forward without taking one step back.

If you're gonna go the modifiers route as others have said, you've gotta be really sparing with them. No basic weapon should get a modifier at all in my view in a system like that (No, not even the holy bolter or the pulse rifle), it should be strictly reserved for special weapons.

But the paradigm in the modern game is to have mono-equipment squads generally so it's probably not even worth talking about in that context.

As for the AP system, I played Orks mostly from 3e to 6e with some small dips into Chaos Space Marines and normal Space Marines. I disliked the AP system from the word go and I felt it was a clear sign that the game had been designed around marines. Even as a horde army player, I felt quite bad that my Ork Boyz (who were not THAT cheap in 3e and almost all of 4e, 9 points a model for a Slugge Boy!) almost never got to use their armour save. The vaunted toughness of the Orks was very poorly modelled by that and in reality you were usually removing vast handfuls of boyz every shooting phase unless you were sitting them in cover, and if they were in cover they were moving more slowly and struggling to make it into melee to get some juice out of those 9 points of melee ability.

The Choppa rule also really annoyed me because it showed that even my army was designed around Marines as the baseline - it was a core army rule that essentially only worked against MEQ and was useless against everyone else.

I liked a lot of the changes in 3e but the AP system was not one of them and I always felt we'd have been better off keeping modifiers.

 Da Boss wrote:
No basic weapon should get a modifier at all in my view in a system like that (No, not even the holy bolter or the pulse rifle), it should be strictly reserved for special weapons.

brandishes tin opener WORMS! WORMS! WORMS!

What edition of the game finally made a distinction between AP1 and AP2? Was that 5th? Where AP1 granted you +1 on the vehicle damage table.

I have to say, I do mis damaged vehicles. Yes, yes it sucked keeping track of exactly what was wrong with what tank. Seeing tanks get stuck in a ditch or a tank with it's turret frozen in place was pretty cool (3rd ed). Also lived skimmers randomly drifting if stunned.

 cuda1179 wrote:
What edition of the game finally made a distinction between AP1 and AP2?

In 4th edition AP1 turned glancing hits into penetrating hits, though defenses like eldar skimmers would then turn those back into glancing hits.

5e changed that to +1 and moved all the damage charts back one step.

6e changed to +2 to AP 1 and +1 for AP 2, but pushed the damage chart up another step and you no longer rolled damage for glancing hits at all.

A.T. wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
What edition of the game finally made a distinction between AP1 and AP2?

In 4th edition AP1 turned glancing hits into penetrating hits, though defenses like eldar skimmers would then turn those back into glancing hits.

5e changed that to +1 and moved all the damage charts back one step.

6e changed to +2 to AP 1 and +1 for AP 2, but pushed the damage chart up another step and you no longer rolled damage for glancing hits at all.

Yep, yep, coming back to me. After 25 years in the hobby editions start to bleed into each other in my mind. While I do admit that I like when 8th edition gave vehicles wounds (despite my early concerns about it), something got lost too. Vehicles being weaker on the back just makes sense. I wish they'd do something to bring just a hint of that back. Also, make terrain (especially water features) mean something again.

 cuda1179 wrote:
What edition of the game finally made a distinction between AP1 and AP2? Was that 5th? Where AP1 granted you +1 on the vehicle damage table.

I have to say, I do mis damaged vehicles. Yes, yes it sucked keeping track of exactly what was wrong with what tank. Seeing tanks get stuck in a ditch or a tank with it's turret frozen in place was pretty cool (3rd ed). Also lived skimmers randomly drifting if stunned.

Another thing that I love about 2nd - having parts blow off of vehicles and land on someone else.
It's a little more work, but adding some cotton to the damaged part (or covering a dead exposed crewman with it) also looks pretty cool.

I mean, it just feels wrong not to have Orks flying across the board at high speed crash into stuff when they get hit. It's an integral part of the weapon system.

Chaos actually had an improvement where they put a grinder on the front and you could use a Rhino with it as a battering ram to just wreck other vehicles.

And having grav tanks go piling into something was a neat take on "death from above."

 Da Boss wrote:
If you're gonna go the modifiers route as others have said, you've gotta be really sparing with them. No basic weapon should get a modifier at all in my view in a system like that (No, not even the holy bolter or the pulse rifle), it should be strictly reserved for special weapons.

But the paradigm in the modern game is to have mono-equipment squads generally so it's probably not even worth talking about in that context.

As for the AP system, I played Orks mostly from 3e to 6e with some small dips into Chaos Space Marines and normal Space Marines. I disliked the AP system from the word go and I felt it was a clear sign that the game had been designed around marines. Even as a horde army player, I felt quite bad that my Ork Boyz (who were not THAT cheap in 3e and almost all of 4e, 9 points a model for a Slugge Boy!) almost never got to use their armour save. The vaunted toughness of the Orks was very poorly modelled by that and in reality you were usually removing vast handfuls of boyz every shooting phase unless you were sitting them in cover, and if they were in cover they were moving more slowly and struggling to make it into melee to get some juice out of those 9 points of melee ability.

The Choppa rule also really annoyed me because it showed that even my army was designed around Marines as the baseline - it was a core army rule that essentially only worked against MEQ and was useless against everyone else.

I liked a lot of the changes in 3e but the AP system was not one of them and I always felt we'd have been better off keeping modifiers.

I have to say, and don't take this the wrong way, but it's a strange thing to read that you missed armor saves on Orks coming in to 3rd, when I think they got even fewer saves in 2nd. By default hey had Flakk armor in 2nd, which was a 6+ save as in 3rd, but Bolters and Lasguns had a mod of -1. Also Chainswords in 2nd hit with a -1, and I believe a basic Marine punch hit with a -1 because they were Strength 4. By my recollection, Orks gained a save against Lasguns, Chainswords and other common CC weapons, as well as barefist Marine hits. Overall they should have been taking more saves in 3rd than in 2nd.

A.T. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I think an even better example is you have this anti-tank missile with AP 3, but it gives you zero benefit when striking Terminators with a 2+.

When you look at what had 2+ and AP3 in the original 3rd edition rulebook it does have a more deliberate feel to it.
- Anything AP1 to AP3 was functionally 'ignores all armour'.
- Terminators and meganobz almost uniquely were protected against a specific subset of these weapons - missiles and artillery (aka AP3)

I think that take makes some sense, but it's hard to then figure why there are two more levels above "ignores all armor" for armor saves. It's a little strange to me that AP 1 didn't practically mean anything until a few years later.

A.T. wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
As Tyran alluded to it wasn't stuff like plasma guns that were the problem, it was codices in 5th Ed starting to hand out AP3 to weapons that didn't have these deliberate limitations baked into the statlines since the start of 3rd. There was no reason that, say, hot-shot lasguns should have ever been AP3.

I think two different threads of discussion have crossed paths unintentionally - I was replying to Insectum7s note that the lack of save modifiers and how it led to cliff-edge situations like no saves on marines and then full saves on terminators.


5e stormtroopers were just another variation on 4e thousand sons and vespid - an ill advised gimmick as you might agree.

But the edition did also see a rise in more practical AP3 (sternguard), as well as AP3 flamers, a race to the bottom for heavy weapon costs, and artillery just hitting a whole lot more models. GW had finally hiked the cost of plasma up to take it or leave it levels from its 3e starting point and knocked rending weapon spam on its head but didn't quite prove capable of taking one step forward without taking one step back.

Add to all that the TLOS paradigm of 5th making it so a bunch of terrain blocked less LOS. Cheaper and more plentiful heavy weapons combined with greater visibility accross the table made for a helluva shift.

I found I had to just give in to the new paradigm and drop Sternguard loaded with combi-plasma into enemy lines to compete. It felt real dirty after the more deliberate movement feeling of 3rd-4th.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
So my metric for 'good' rules, is whether those rules handle themselves without additions. It's not an objective truth, but it's why my thought processes come out the way they do.

If your core mechanic requires additions to resolve its inconsistencies, then there are issues with the core mechanic. How many exceptions you need to create before the core framework is no longer fit for purpose is subjective though.

I that in general a lot of game designers would agree with you. Aiming for simple and effective rules is definitely a solid target. But additions or exceptions are often great ways to express certain concepts. Even in our beloved 2nd, with Save modifiers, Terminators were an exception because they took their save on 2D6 instead of 1. There were also Invulnerable saves as well, which were also an exception, and helped bring the universe to life. Likewise Vortex Grenades . . . the exception to the exception, as you couldn't take Invulnerable Saves against them. . . buuut then you had the Assassins Dodge which could dodge a Vortex Grenade. the exception to the exceptions exception. All of which felt reasonable because of the context and how they were explained. Or at least, reasonable to some of us.

All of which is to say that just because exceptions were made to the AP system doesn't mean it's a failed system at the core. I will certainly admit that it's a less intuitive system. And because of this I think if I were doing my own system I would lean more on save modifiers.

But the AP system manages to do things on a single D6 that a save modifier system would really struggle with, such as the interaction between basic troops. For example, under AP, Guardsmen get a 5+ save (33% chance!) against incoming Ork fire. But they get 0 save against incoming Space Marine fire (because huurr duur Shpeeesh Mahrines. . . but also Tau and Eldar because they all have fancy guns). But at the same time, there's no difference to a Space Marnie whether they're being hit with Space Marine shooting or Ork shooting. You can't recreate that relationship in a save mod system without leaning into making other rules or exceptions.

 Insectum7 wrote:

I have to say, and don't take this the wrong way, but it's a strange thing to read that you missed armor saves on Orks coming in to 3rd, when I think they got even fewer saves in 2nd. By default hey had Flakk armor in 2nd, which was a 6+ save as in 3rd, but Bolters and Lasguns had a mod of -1. Also Chainswords in 2nd hit with a -1, and I believe a basic Marine punch hit with a -1 because they were Strength 4. By my recollection, Orks gained a save against Lasguns, Chainswords and other common CC weapons, as well as barefist Marine hits. Overall they should have been taking more saves in 3rd than in 2nd.

I think he was saying that the Orks were not worth the points cost given how AP worked.

If you go back to 2nd, Orks have boltguns, so Marines only get a 4+ save against them, vs 3+ in 3rd, so maybe it's not so much about Ork survivability as their inability to inflict punishment on power armor.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

I have to say, and don't take this the wrong way, but it's a strange thing to read that you missed armor saves on Orks coming in to 3rd, when I think they got even fewer saves in 2nd. By default hey had Flakk armor in 2nd, which was a 6+ save as in 3rd, but Bolters and Lasguns had a mod of -1. Also Chainswords in 2nd hit with a -1, and I believe a basic Marine punch hit with a -1 because they were Strength 4. By my recollection, Orks gained a save against Lasguns, Chainswords and other common CC weapons, as well as barefist Marine hits. Overall they should have been taking more saves in 3rd than in 2nd.

I think he was saying that the Orks were not worth the points cost given how AP worked.

If you go back to 2nd, Orks have boltguns, so Marines only get a 4+ save against them, vs 3+ in 3rd, so maybe it's not so much about Ork survivability as their inability to inflict punishment on power armor.

Well if it's a points thing that's a whole different conversation I think. Orks underwent a pretty hefty paradigm shift for 3rd ed, giving them a statline and gear much more focused on CC. I think there was a lot of adjustment to go around in that edition change. Both Eldar and Marines used to plink away at 24" from cover, then suddenly Marines were down to only one shot at 24" and only standing still, and Eldar double tapping on the move at close range. Everything shuffled around.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well if it's a points thing that's a whole different conversation I think. Orks underwent a pretty hefty paradigm shift for 3rd ed, giving them a statline and gear much more focused on CC. I think there was a lot of adjustment to go around in that edition change. Both Eldar and Marines used to plink away at 24" from cover, then suddenly Marines were down to only one shot at 24" and only standing still, and Eldar double tapping on the move at close range. Everything shuffled around.

Points calculations tie heavily into the problems of AP because it is all or nothing. So there is no real balance, just a bunch of imbalances that are supposed to work out in some vague way.

"Yes, your army sucks against these factions but will dominate those, so it's balanced!" - GW apologists in 1999.

I think that ties into the Choppa thing as well. Orks in 2nd had the option of going very shooty without rolling buckets of dice. There were options to field BS 4 troops and the Kustom Blastas had random range and strength, but also no roll to hit, so they ignored cover. Very useful in an urban environment.

That was taken away in 3rd through AP and also BS 2, which forced more assaults, even though that design space was already dominated by Tyranids. By way of compensation, GW offered...buckets of dice. So many dice. I can see why Ork players might not have been happy.

I started playing Orks as soon as the 3e book came out because I felt that the statline changes made them more what I felt they should be from reading the background.

But I played with that 3e codex for a long, long time before the 4e codex came out at the end of 4th edition and I was pretty aware of how weird and janky it was by the end. It was also a kid with limited money dipping my toes in tournament play with my cobbled together army so I had a lot of pretty rough experiences because to get the most out of that army book you really had to maximise certain things like Rokkits and not waste points on anything, and I couldn't really afford to do much about that.

The 4e book was a big improvement in a lot of ways, but I did feel they could have powered boyz up a bit instead of weakening them and dropping their points by a third (which really shows how poorly costed they were to begin with).

And yeah, as the Commissar says, the AP system really encouraged that sort of Rock-Paper-Scissors approach to game balance that was often frustrating.

Modern 40K doesn't appeal to me at all, as I really dislike the direction Marines have gone and I dislike the way they've been dealing with their list building and metacurrency stuff. It's just not the kind of Wargame I want to play any more (even if they hadn't upscaled all the models so that my collection needs extensive work to even use!). I actually think 3e-4e, looked at as a whole, was a great time for the game in a lot of ways. Just not a great time for me personally playing games compared to late 4th and early 5th when I got a decent book for the first time!

Well I'm gonna have to go the YMMV route because my brother played Orks in the 3rd/4th era and it was a very dangerous army. Sure, boyz were 9 points, but they hit hard with their 4 attacks on the charge+deny saves better than 4+. The 3rd ed codex got long in the tooth as it didn't get a 3.5 replacement like many armies did, but what Orks got instead were expanded lists from Codex Armageddon and Chapter Approved, keeping them quite deadly. It was also a really tough army to play against in Cityfight, because that was essentially a low visibility brawl.

Opposite to you I suppose, he was dissapointed with the changes to the basic Boyz in the 4th ed book. I think part of this was the change in "density" of lethality, because Trukks could only carry 10 Boyz and they hit less hard.

Yeah I never ran Kult of Speed or truck boyz, very footslogger focused. A lot of the frustration is probably my fault!

Yeah my brother typically ran at least a few trukks and a Battlewagon (built from a Land Raider), then Stormboyz too. They were on me pretty quick. What followed was a series of what felt like desperate knife fights in a phone booth. We got pretty good at gaming the CC rules for max advantage.

Fighting against Kult of Speed was hellish. They had a rule where, when they failed Ld, they ran to the nearest transport and mounted back up again. They might have rallied automatically at that point? I feel like they were everywhere. Whenever I won my army was typically in tatters, iirc.

But also with Orks terrain made such a huge difference. Because different metas have different terrain 'normalcy' they can feel way different. Orks, or CC armies in general also have the psycological hump of feeling like your losing for the first few turns because you haven't reached anything. It makes losses feel extra bad brcause if you never connect well, it feels like a slaughter. I've seen a lot of players grumble through the first few turns, thinking there's no hope, and then wind up crushing the opponent once the CC starts.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah I never ran Kult of Speed or truck boyz, very footslogger focused. A lot of the frustration is probably my fault!

A lot of the fun of orks is the sheer goofiness of the vehicles. The infantry is tough, but the armor is trash. The vehicles for the Orks are great.

-STS

At the time GW only sold trucks and tracks, you had to scratchbuild or convert everything else and at the time I lacked the skills or confidence to do that for more than a looted vindicator. It just seemed rough to shell out full price for a vehicle kit and then have to find more bits to orkify it and also risk messing it up and ruining it so being very cost conscious I avoided it. Building from scratch was beyond me back then.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Sure, boyz were 9 points, but they hit hard with their 4 attacks on the charge+deny saves better than 4+.
Opposite to you I suppose, he was dissapointed with the changes to the basic Boyz in the 4th ed book. I think part of this was the change in "density" of lethality, because Trukks could only carry 10 Boyz and they hit less hard.

3e orks could cram in a ton of special weapons and were especially strong against more elite units. IIRC a squad of 10 un-upgraded orks in 3e would take out a whole 5 man squad of assault terminators in a single turn without even needing a nob.

4e you got three orks instead of two, it was a net gain but not a 5e Ward style 'everything gets stronger, especially the already strong stuff' type codex.

 Da Boss wrote:
At the time GW only sold trucks and tracks, you had to scratchbuild or convert everything else and at the time I lacked the skills or confidence to do that for more than a looted vindicator. It just seemed rough to shell out full price for a vehicle kit and then have to find more bits to orkify it and also risk messing it up and ruining it so being very cost conscious I avoided it. Building from scratch was beyond me back then.

Yeah, see, the Orks I fought against had quite the vehicle pool. Trukks and Trakks, Looted Leman Russ, Basilisk, Land Raider Battlewagon, plus a bunch of custom vehicles from the Vehicle Design Rules, such as the "Hotbox" (A closed-topped, fast transport sporting a Zzap Gun) and the "Hotbox Deluxe" (a closed-topped, fast transport with two Zzap guns).

There was also the "Battle Mansion", but that was more of a display piece than actually used. War Engine and all.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Sure, boyz were 9 points, but they hit hard with their 4 attacks on the charge+deny saves better than 4+.
Opposite to you I suppose, he was dissapointed with the changes to the basic Boyz in the 4th ed book. I think part of this was the change in "density" of lethality, because Trukks could only carry 10 Boyz and they hit less hard.

3e orks could cram in a ton of special weapons and were especially strong against more elite units. IIRC a squad of 10 un-upgraded orks in 3e would take out a whole 5 man squad of assault terminators in a single turn without even needing a nob.

4e you got three orks instead of two, it was a net gain but not a 5e Ward style 'everything gets stronger, especially the already strong stuff' type codex.

By my math, un-upgraded gets 3.333 (4×.5×.333×.5×10), but a Nob with Power Claw or a couple Burnas for Burna Boyz gets it to or past 5 pretty quick I think.

Depends on what the Assault squad is armed with as well, surely. If they have lightning claws they'll either go before or simultaneously with the Orks and kill a bunch of them.

But Terminators were the weird edge case of the Choppa rules where we were extremely efficient against them.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Yeah, see, the Orks I fought against had quite the vehicle pool. Trukks and Trakks, Looted Leman Russ, Basilisk, Land Raider Battlewagon, plus a bunch of custom vehicles from the Vehicle Design Rules, such as the "Hotbox" (A closed-topped, fast transport sporting a Zzap Gun) and the "Hotbox Deluxe" (a closed-topped, fast transport with two Zzap guns).

Orks are the ultimate coin-toss army. They can self-destruct by turn 2, or annihilate you by turn 3. It's part of their charm.

The AP system coupled with their reorientation towards close combat over shooting (but compensated by absurdly huge dice pools desperately seeking the long tail of the probability curve) made things very hard to balance. GW has always had a problem with conflating "random" with "balance." There's nothing balanced about having huge swings in outcomes - it's randomly decided imbalance, removing player agency and is essentially the designer shrugging off doing the hard work.

AP could only work in a game environment where armor saves had a similar distribution across the factions. Think Battletech, where no one side has a monopoly on mechs. They have flavors and fighting styles, but the energy/heat/ammo interaction is the same for everyone (though tech can vary).

GW deliberately created factions with certain levels of armor in order to differentiate them, and that creates a lot of skew, which is further exacerbated by the fact that 3+ saves are the flagship of the game, and disproportionately represented.

That in turn puts force selection ahead of tactics, which became much more simplified to enable larger model counts. Add in a mandatory overhaul every three years which is deliberately not about iterative product improvement but wholesale revision with the conscious intent to render the current edition not only obsolete but also incompatible with the new one, and you get problems. When I saw GW got rid of AP, I was mildly interested in "getting current," but as I wander through my local store, I realize I barely know what anything is anymore, and the prices are insane.

So while I'm willing to entertain the idea that this - or 11th or 12th or 13th edition might be better, the upgrade cost at this point is prohibitive. For the same money I can continue to build out existing factions or - as I'm doing right now - build whole new fantasy armies under my proprietary system.

As a sidebar, I am grateful to GW for its churn, because buying people's cast-off stuff is quite cost-effective. I don't even know what some of this stuff even is, but it looks nice and is cheap, so I win.

Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

Looking at it now, with a fully complete range, it seems far more attractive to me to play 3e or 4e. At the time I was extremely annoyed that we didn't have our main battle tank available as a kit you could buy for over a decade. It's all well and good to say "You're an Ork player! You're supposed to love kitbashing!" but like, it doesn't say that anywhere in the published materials does it? It doesn't say "you're a second rate faction, we won't be properly supporting you with a complete model range, just do it yourself!" or even have articles in WD showing how to kitbash a battlewagon or what the dimensions should be, or a note in the codex about it or anything.

From that perspective, as a game at the time, it felt very incomplete. And seeing Marine Codex after Marine Codex come out (even in the Armageddon codex, a campaign entirely about fighting Orks, there was 1 Ork list and 3 Imperial, 2 of which were Space Marines!) with new variants and so on was really salt in the wound.

That's why 5e was my favourite time actually playing the game, though I agree about a lot of it's rules issues - I got a battlewagon miniature and updated trucks and an update to the plastic kit to actually include the rokkits that were so essential to playing the army.

But like I said, as an old fart now looking back at the editions, I think I'd quite like to give some 3e or 4e a go with my complete collection.

Insectum7 wrote:Sure, boyz were 9 points, but they hit hard with their 4 attacks on the charge+deny saves better than 4+.

A friendly reminder also that when Boyz were 9pts, Guardsmen were 8pts. All the chaff infantry got significantly reduced in cost in 4th Ed, so it wasn't just Orks that got horde-ier.

Insectum7 wrote:Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

Yeah, the problem in implementation was that when about half the factions are 3+, and those factions were played by a disproportionate percentage of the playerbase, there was direct incentive to optimize against 3+ and just grit your teeth when you play someone else. It's a great example of how meta can skew balance, much like how Knights being the boogeyman in 8th left the door open for horde armies to win against players optimized to kill Knights.

So like I said earlier I think this is one area where the diversity of your local meta could have a lot of impact on your perceptions of earlier editions. If you had a wide variety of opponents then the AP system meant you needed a variety of tools to deal with various threats. If you mostly fought MEQs, then you took AP3 where possible and relegated worse AP weapons to being situational at best. If your experience was the former, then recent editions can feel more bland in that there are less hard counters and more generically effective weapons. If your experience was the latter, then recent editions can feel more liberating in that weapons that used to be ineffective due to not reaching a relevant breakpoint now have more utility.

I've toyed over the years with the idea of a system that is neither all-or-nothing nor linear modifiers, but rather logarithmic/exponential. Eg instead of an autocannon completely denying a 4+ save but doing nothing to a 3+ save, maybe it drops the 4+ to a 6+, but the 3+ to a 4+. The problem is just finding a way to implement that without requiring an AP-vs-save chart, bespoke armor penetration profiles per weapon, or some other solution that might approach mathematical perfection while being obnoxiously inelegant to actually play.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Faction differentiation is a *good* thing. What it does is require different tactics depending on your faction match-up. Skew happens, but that's fine as long as you still have available solutions to effectively counter it, and trying to build armies with the flexibility to fight horde Orks, gunline Tau, and stompy Nidzilla made for some really interesting problem solving, both off and on the table.

Like catbarf said, it's a feature not a bug.

List building isn't tactics.