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Just something I was curious about, as the title says are you happy with the way the game has developed since 3rd ed?

I exclude RT and 2nd ed because the jump from 2nd to 3rd was so vast that you can't really call it a development so much as two drastically different games. People still play 2nd with the old rules sometimes. As fiddly, stupidly overpowered and not at all balanced as they were they had a lot of potential for cool stuff and it was more of a narrative game. Also they form the basis for necromunda which I understand still has a loyal following.

But nobody I know still uses 3rd or 4th ed rules and nobody seems to complain about the changes. I take this to mean that overall people are happy with the way the game has developed since 3rd ed. Are you?

I am and I'm going to list my reasons why as a series of bullet points

3rd ed to 4th ed

Pros

- removed the ability to assault from rhinos which crippled rhino rush and ended the stupidest era of the game to date, when armies were split into "rush at you" and "stand still in a line"
- improved missions slightly so they were less dependent on just killing everyone
- new rapid fire rules opened up the game to more movement and made gunlines less mandatory
- USR's made the game more streamlined, keeping most of the special rules that people liked and that made the game more tactically varied but removing the confusion of not having say, hit and run or feel no pain in your own codex.
- removed screening from units which opened the game up to movement more
- vastly better assault rules sped up the game, simplified assault and made assault troops more dangerous

Cons
- vehicles got far too fragile and transports swung from essential to practically deathtraps
- gets hot was far too punishing for some armies
- unbelievably powerful skimmers


4th to 5th
- run adds even more much needed mobility and movement to the game
- vehicles toughened up and became essential choices again, particularly transports
- the new missions mean the game truly is not just about killing things but about movement, holding objectives, last ditch stands and clever turn 5 shenanigans
- all games are random game length meaning a tenser and more exciting game
- ability to add anything to reserves opens up a whole new score of tactical options
- the improvement of cover makes cover a much more important resource than ever before
- coupled with the improvement of cover the new torrent of fire mechanic i.e. needing to allocate finally means that plasma spam is gone for good
- assault is now truly deadly and simpler and more elegant than ever before particularly with defender pile in, this makes leadership an important part of the game finally
- no consolidate into a fresh unit means shooting armies lost their inherent inferiority to assault
- a better approach to deep strike which makes it easier to use and potentially more effective (if you have the balls for it)
- new line of sight rules (if I can see one I can see all) are intuitive and speed up the game immensely
- go to ground adds new tactics and options
- killpoints, initially loathed by many, force people to think about builds, balances out strong builds in the other two missions (when there was little reaosn not to MSU in4th) and is quicker and easier to work out than victory points

Cons
- p-fists nerfed a little too hard for some armies
- having to allocate wounds is open to abuse and slows the game down considerably
- arguments about line of sight vis a vis cover



I look at the game I played in the tail end of 3rd when largely regardless of mission 1 army would line up against another, they would either charge at each other or 1 would charge and the other shoot and after 6 turns some math was done to see who the winner was.

I look at the game now and see a game of manouvering with clever use of charges, counter charges and reserves. Where cover is important and everything can hinge on a turbo-boost in the last turn, a valiant last stand or a leadership test. Where leadership counts for something. Where assault isn't "safe" for assault troops but potentially lethal for either side as a win can leave you in a fire lane. Where deepstrike, infiltrate, scouts and turbo-boost serves as just more than assault delivery systems but can potentially win a game all by themselves.


For all the mistakes and overbalancing GW does do I think looking at the game as a whole it is undeniably a richer, better experience than when I started.

Thoughts?

I started out by reading the 3rd ed book, but didn't get into things until 4th edition. By and large, I'm very satisfied with the game as of 5th ed. There's still some wonkiness here and there, but it's seldom prevalent enough to mess up the game for me. There's some individual codices and builds that bother me, but the core rules are pretty solid these days. While I really hated killpoints for a while (we played victory points for a bit in 5th ed) I've come to tolerate them just fine. Can't say I'm a fan of Dawn of War deployment, but overall I'm liking 5th edition.

The emphasis on troops is something you should add to the pros in the OP. It never felt right when a Marine player brought on 30 terminators, Lysander, and two 5 man squads of scouts, did it?

5th ed is the best set of rules since 3rd ed, and luckily so far the codexes are balanced too, making the overall environment fun and varied...

When 3rd came out, I read the rules and quit the game for nearly 3 years. Afterwards, I played it a bit, but really was unhappy with the rules. The Trial Assault and Trial Vehicle rules were released and I was enjoying it more.

4th Edition was a fun edition, but there were some issues with it. (IC's and units held in Reserve was one big issue IIRC). However, I noticed that despite the rulebook, all terrain seemed to become area terrain and with levels.

5th Edition is fun in some areas, but lacking in others. Getting cover saves seems overly common. I liked 4th ed Defensive Weapon rules but am a bit befuddled on how much tougher vehicles in general became. Codexes written for 5th ed seem to be a better value and the amount of plastic miniatures available now is fantastic.

I came back into 40K at the back end of 3rd ed, and played around 5 odd games. It was a genuinely awful game, the rules combined with the codices to do everything they could to emphasise specialisation in out and out shooting, or standing completely still and shooting. The first game I played, once deployment was complete it was clear what we were each going to do for the rest of the game. By the end of last game of 3rd, it was pretty clear what was going to happen before deployment. It was probably a better game than 2nd ed, but that's faint praise.

I kept painting, but had no interest in playing again until I got dragged into a 4th ed game. 4th ed had turned 40K into a fun game. The game encouraged shooting and moving, while taking assaulting and moving back, breaking the stand and shoot vs chaarge! dynamic of the previous game. It made cover worthwhile. It got rid of the screening rules that encouraged everyone to deploy in column formation, which might not have been huge at a tactical level, but it looked really stupid. Perhaps most importantly, this edition saw GW releasing loads more terrain, so boards became a lot prettier and added so much to the strategy of the game. It became what a beer and pretzels game should be, where almost every game involved interesting tactical decisions and also plenty of moments of laugh out loud craziness.

5th ed is an improvement again, although to be honest the rules changes are mostly minor, and are ultimately hit or miss for me (the new LOS rules replace old problems with new problems, as does running, while troops only on objectives is an odd way to solve the problem of troops not being worthwhile - surely the answer is to make troops worth their points cost?). The recent improvements have been entirely in the codices, with the Space Marine, Ork and Guard codices being the most interesting I've played with or against. Getting rid of the old CSM helped as well, the new one isn't great but it's so much better than before.

The game still has plenty of odd bits, and I really wish they'd take a consistant stand on the level of abstraction in the game (the very abstract roll to hit and cover, compared to the hyper detail resolution of assault). But none of the issues do any harm at the strategic level, where the game is exactly as challenging as it should be.

Hey, quick question from someone who has only played 5th ed:

bravelybravesirrobin wrote:...
3rd ed to 4th ed
...
- unbelievably powerful skimmers

What made them so powerful in 4th?

Eight Ball wrote:Hey, quick question from someone who has only played 5th ed:

bravelybravesirrobin wrote:...
3rd ed to 4th ed
...
- unbelievably powerful skimmers

What made them so powerful in 4th?

Skimmers moving fast downgraded all penetrating hits to glancing hits.

Skimmers only needed to move 6" to gain skimmers moving fast.

Defensive weapons used to be str6.

With certain wargear choices it was possibly for a tau or eldar gunship to move fast enough to get skimmers moving fast and fire all of its weapons. Hellish firepower and you could only kill them on a 6+ damage roll (or a 5+ in the case of the eldar). Tri-falcon lists would do this for several turns and then launch banshees/harlequins at you to finish off what was left.

Hi all.
As the 3rd ed rules were an 'eleventh hour' rushed buchery of the 2nd ed rules (aparently).
The development over the last TEN YEARS , from 3rd ed to 5th ed has given minor improvments in game play.
In less time than this other game companies, have devloped entire new rules to completion.
(Systems with provable levels of game ballance, and fully customisable army lists.)

So yes, 40k is slowly getting better.If I waited another 20 years the 40k rules might be at the level I expect from a rule set.
(Minumum amount of written rules ,delivering the maximum gameplay.)
OR I can just use other rule sets that are this level already .


TTFN
Lanrak.

bravelybravesirrobin wrote:Just something I was curious about, as the title says are you happy with the way the game has developed since 3rd ed?

Yeah, pretty much. Especially as I came in at the end of 2nd.

GW is doing a generally good job, and the 5th ed rules are the clearest by far. Really, if you're coming in as a new player, the game and models are very good.

bravelybravesirrobin wrote:- removed the ability to assault from rhinos which crippled rhino rush and ended the stupidest era of the game to date, when armies were split into "rush at you" and "stand still in a line"

IMHO - This is one of the WORST changes in V4. It didn't stop rhino rush... it only changed rhino rush from run up, shoot, assault into run up, shoot x2 (new rapidfire). This could have been taken care of by the rapidfire rule alone, that way you could 2x shoot - OR - assault, instead of the 2x shoot you get now. I say this rule is bad as it also unneccesarily removed the ability to assault from Waveserpents, Falcons and Chimeras which was kind of unwarranted, as the assault elements you'd naturally put in any of those are very expensive (and in the case of eldar, fragile), and not good at anything else. Keep in mind that both vehicles are inflexible as transports as they only have a single hatch, mounted on the weakest armor, which must be turned to FACE the opponent should you wish to assault with the contents. (Waveserpents and Falcons also lost all fire points). While it is still possible to transport assault elements... this restriction in assault timing artificially prohibits players from pinning enemy shooters in place with mobile assault elements (outside of landraiders and open topped vehicles).

The other thing you failed to mention is the generally unneccessary "assault what you shoot" rule. This did nothing to enhance the metagame other than hurt small elite type armies as the rule now artificially limits how many of their inferior, yet more numerous foe they can target in one turn.

I'm all for "streamlining" - but these two rules introduced in V4 removed volumes of tactical flexibility from the game and put the final nail in the coffin for true "combined arms" mechanized armies.

There can be no arguement that 5th is a vast improvement over 4th. If they brought back split shooting and assaulting targeting (when pigs fly...) and gave Eldar tanks assault ramps (while I'm dreaming, I'd like a million dollars), I'd be over the moon.

Personally, what I'd like to see is making assault weapons defensive, and allowing units to shoot out of vehicles even at higher speeds to some degree, maybe depending on if the vehicle is open topped or not.

I agree with the original poster: the 5th edition is a definite improvement.

I actually started out in 3rd, took a few years absence, then got back into 40k during 5th.

5th edition is a far better and balanced game and much more fun; especially love the new IG codex.

Yeah, 5th is just all-around best so far.

For every two steps forward GW has taken since 3rd Ed they've taken one and a half steps back and then a step sideways.

In other words, they improve things (steps forward), break some other things (steps back), and then just make some nonsensical choices for seemingly no reason that don't hinder the game, but don't help it either (steps sideways).

That's just the rules. The Codex development is akin to someone just walking in circles.

No party you can't ruin is there, party pooper?

Being a 2nd ed vet, I'd have to say that 3rd edition was the worst in the series and 5th is easily the best.

H.B.M.C. meant to write:
Get off my lawn, you darn kids.

Personally, someday I'd like someone at GW to find where they left the rest of the deployment rules.

i played the hell out of 3rd edition pretty much from beginning to end (got into 40k with 3rd ed release and out about a month after 4th came out due to burn out). when i came back into 40k in 5th edition, i was suprised to see how LITTLE it had changed. the only major change was the WYSIWIG line of sight and the generalizing of cover saves to 4+. smoke 4+. forrest 4+ ruins 4+ shooting through figs 4+. shooting through ALL OF THE ABOVE... yup, you guessed it... 4+. i miss the old days when you didn't need to stand behind barbed wire to get a different cover save. the only other thing i don't like is that all blast template now deviate but i can see why they need that to balance the rule that if you're partially under you're in (it used to be a 4+ roll to be "in").

obviously there have been tweaks since 3rd edition (as stated in the OP) but i agree that (except for LOS and cover saves) the changes in general have been for the better.

RxGhost wrote:No party you can't ruin is there, party pooper?

Sorry I interrupted your gushing circle-jerk.

Please, continue without me...

I'm starting to get alerts off this thread, because some people are not following Rule no.1 quite as closely as we would prefer.



If backbiting continues, I will be forced to lock the thread.

I started playing in 4th, I had been painting models for a while but I have no idea what edition was current. From 4th to 5th edition, I liked most of the changes they made. 5th edition feels more simplified and streamlined.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

RxGhost wrote:No party you can't ruin is there, party pooper?

Sorry I interrupted your gushing circle-jerk.

Please, continue without me...

Far from a circle jerk HBMC I am curious what you think is a step backward? or a step sideways?

In terms of codecii I can think of a few examples but in terms of the main rules the only thing I can think of is the move away from 4th ed LOS rules to 5th ed ones which more closely resembled 2nd/3rd ed rules. Even then I like the new LOS rules.

Some examples please?

I loved the change from 2nd to 3rd. It took games which would have taken all day and cut them down to an hour or two, but yield the same outcome. Vastly simplified the game by cutting out TONS of superfluous nonsense. I loved the change from 3rd to 4th as well because the whole focus was to tighten things down further by playing out large exchanges with one handful of dice without fussing as much with odd rules here and there. Plus the los in 4th was fantastic in it's simplicity. The 1-3 height scaling was a godsend that made shooting into a simple yes-or-no question, and allowed for extravagant modeling with no penalty. I played against a guy who's Bloodthirster was about 2 ft. tall, and another who's landspeeders were mounted 6-8 inches above the base. Very stylish and fun to see on the table yet they were not penalized by los because they just had to say "they're not actually up so high at the moment, they're hiding behind this size 3 area terrain."

Anyway, I thought the jump from 4th to 5th was odd and a little uncalled for. There are things I like about 5th for cutting out even more superfluous crap, but there are other things which added unnecessary length to the game, like having to hunker down to check los for every model in your army... That worked great for Necromunda because you only had a dozen models to worry about. Not so great in 40k. Like HBMC said, 5th was 2 steps forward, one and a half steps back. A little better in most ways, but a few of the changes were not helpful, or even very cool imo.

I started playing in 3rd, skipped 4th, and came back for 5th. 5th edition seems like the best edition yet by far.

I've been playing 40k since the middle of 1989 and on and off since then. I've played in all five editions to some extent. I've played more RT than anything else, was pretty active in 2nd (although my being newly married during that period cut down on my gaming a bit), gave 3rd a try and then quit in disgust, I tried the game again in 4th but was still not satisfied, and have been playing 5th on a regular basis. Of all the post 2nd editions, 5th is clearly the most polished and I hate to say it, has more going for it than problems....thus my being more active with it than any edition since 2nd.

The OP was right in breaking off his discussion with the advent of 3rd ed, as indeed the change over was revolutionary rather than evolutionary. I like to compare what happened to 40k to what recently occured with D&D. I'm a long time D&D player as well, having started with the "Blue box" basic set in 1980 and once again have played every incarnation to some extent. My current group was pretty excited by the change over from 3.5 edition to 4th edition and we actually played a couple of sessions using the new rules when it occured. However our final assessment was that 4th was a decent new game for what it was tyring to do, but the change had been radical enough that it no longer was really D&D, despite sharing the name. We saw no reason to change over to the new rules and continue to play version 3.5. (although we are currently considering changing to the lisensed version of the 3.5 mechanics recently released as "Pathfinder", mainly to have a currently supported game system)

Likewise, while the game that started out as 3rd edition and has been tweeked to the point that it's now 5th edition is decent for what it's trying to acomplish and is in my opinion enjoyable enough, it's NOT real 40k. 40k died in 1999 with the advent of 2nd. Like 4th edition D&D it only shares the name, some of the background, and some mechanics.

That all being said, as I stated before, I actually do enjoy playing 5th and am more active in the game than at any time since RT. I feel that it's developed in the right direction (with some exceptions..more on that in a moment) and it's the strongest post 2nd incarnation of the game.
It's not without it's problems of course. Things I dislike about 5th are:
-The removal of hit and save modifiers. They still work for WFB (and just about every other wargame system out there today) so they should still work for 40k. You can't tell me that a little simple 6-2=4 type math slows the game down to any extent...especially with a bit of experience. I'm sorry, but every 40k player is not an ADHD suffering tween with the attention span of an excitable puppy and the rules should not be written to cater for that demographic.
-The removal of the move stat. This was a move that still makes no sense to me and has led to such half-a--ed "solutions" such as "fleet of foot" and the like. I'm all for streamling, but I'm not in favor of stupid design decisions that "dumb down" the game.
-The horrible vehicle movement and shooting rules. Apparently in the grim darkness of the far future they have forgotten how to make gyro-stablizers....a piece of WW2 era technology! Given my real life experience with tanks, this is one that really strikes me as absurd.
I have other beefs, but these are the major ones. Note that all of these changes occured in 3rd. However they are mistakes that GW made that remain uncorrected in the current edition.

I'll close this mostly negative rant with something positive.

I used to rail against the way that weapons and wargear had been absurdly abstracted to the point that much of the flavor that initially attracted me to the game (it was those pages and pages of cool gun stats that made me pick up RT all those years ago) was gone. But over the last ten years much of that has returned. That's a welcome change. Likewise used to rant about the way that GW spits on it's own history and seems to embrace the foolish "change for the sake of change" mindset. However in recent years I have been plesantly suprised to see weapons and troop types that had been mostly absent from the game for years pop up again in recent codexes. Finally the greater emphasis on "counts as" is a boon to the older gamer with long obsolete models and in some cases whole armies. (I own both Squats and Space Slaan in large numbers) Yes, the "counts as" rule is there largely to encourage modeling more than anything else, but it does have the effect I previously mentioned.

TR


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Now a quick off topic aside...

loved the change from 2nd to 3rd. It took games which would have taken all day and cut them down to an hour or two, but yield the same outcome. Vastly simplified the game by cutting out TONS of superfluous nonsense.

What do you consider "all day"? I suppose my long history with real wargaming (were long play sessions are more accepted) has made me much more tolerant of such things, but I do see this complaint about 2nd edition alot. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. 2nd worked well as long as players were willing to use some common sense and sportsmanship in army building and as long as the players did not attempt to over-scale it.

Over-scaling was probably the cause of the majority of the complaints you see today about 2nd being "too complex" or "taking too long to play". 2nd edition worked quite well if you played no more than 2000-2500 points per side and broke down if you played larger games than that. Over-scaling is not just a problem with 40k of course. You see this sort of thing occuring in real wargaming as well. For example if you try to refight Waterloo with a battalion based game like "Empire" or try to field an entire tank division in a one to one scale micro-armour game like "Challenger" then you will over-tax the game mechanics and bog your game down to the point it becomes unplayable. (But I've seen people try to do both) This does not mean that these games are somehow broken. It just means that they are designed for a certain level of play. Likewise 2nd edition was not designed for huge games...that's why you play Epic after all.

TR

Given that I know that you can be very specific HBMC, could you please go into the steps Forward, Backward, and Sideways in terms of the core rules?

Codex stuff I think we can all agree is as you say it, akin to walking in circles with some codex's being terrible/inflexible, and others being ridiculously full of options.

I also miss the wargear shopping lists for heroes and sargeants. I find the current options in the army lists very limiting. Otherwise, however, I am very happy with 5th edition.

I started playing in Second Edition. I loved 3rd when it came out, I felt it made playing Orks much closer to the background I had read for them. We played a lot of fun games with those rulebook lists, though our local meta was not tournament competative- I never really saw a rhino rush until I started attending tournaments in college. I thought the game really lost it's way towards the end of third and the start of fourth, with the introduction of what I saw as fanboyish lists that were the designers pets rather than maintenence of lists they had already put out. I became very bitter as I waited and waited for my Orks to be updated and watched new armies come out and get updated before them.
4th edition continued in the same vein. I liked the new rapid fire rules enough, I suppose, but most other considerations were not important to me, or a least, as important as the stupidity of the release schedule. I liked how tanks could move and shoot to a reasonable degree, but I didn't think much of the transport rules. Assault also seemed stupid at times, and skimmers were ridiculously hard to kill with assault based armies.

I began to cheer up when the ork codex got released and I could finally build flexible lists around miniatures I liked. The new chaos codex had it's major flaws, but it got rid of iron warriors and daemonbomb, which I didn't much care for.

The changeover to fifth was another mixed bag. I despise killpoints, but like the objective missions. I like the new transport rules, but feel that gun toting vehicles are fairly boring now. Run has given some old units a new lease on life, but wouldn't it be easier to have a Move stat? Mostly I like fifth, and combining it with my new, workable ork codex I'm having a lot more fun with 40K than I ever have before. I can't say that's just down to editions though- it really does come down to that terribly bloated and clogged release schedule as the biggest problem with the game.
Edit: Oh, and the new codex layout is AWFUL. Why can't they just reprint all the special rules in the armoury section? That's what it's FOR!

Da Boss wrote:Oh, and the new codex layout is AWFUL. Why can't they just reprint all the special rules in the armoury section? That's what it's FOR!

Oh, yeah, seconded.

It boggles the mind how GW managed to screw up Codex layout so badly.

Wargear / Armoury should be simple reference, with pictures and descriptions of everything, not further pointers back and forth. How hard of a concept is that?

And why are the army unit entries in random order, both in the Army List and the Unit Descriptions? Cannot GW simply follow the same HQ-Elite-Troops-Fast-Heavy consistently? With the little Icons that are now everywhere?

It's like GW's got a bunch of retards editing the thing, because the alternative means that GW is deliberately trying to obfuscate the rules.

It might be something to consider that when a decision appears to be of the "Evil or Stupid" variety that there may be a third option you haven't seen. Just sayin'...