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1st: don't know

2nd: pure inasanity and nails to play as a 6 year old (thanks Jim!)

3: wow! This game is so bloody cool, look at all the cool new stuff!

4: wow! Look at all the customising I can do, make my own guard and chapter!

5: the hell did all my cool stuff go??? Ok, it plays quite well.

6th: what is gods name is this crap??

7th 40k: sweet Jesus they won't stop, leave that poor horse alone!

7th 30k: wow! This is like 3rd, so much cool stuff!

8: what on earth have you done to my game??

Love these descriptions. Can totally see why people would think that, at the same time kicking myself for not remembering some of them.

 techsoldaten wrote:
2nd - , Realms of Chaos, 'Ere We Go. Sq

Both of these are from Rogue Trader.

1 - Who's the dungeon master?
2 - Metal Hormagaunts, Virus bombs, Sisters of battle and Necrons released.
3 - 9 Tyranid Warriors with Venom Cannons, GW Forum shuts down, 3 Wraithlords everywhere, codexes were pamphlets.
4 - You like close combat? Watch these Wyches destroy a unit, then consolidate into another unit. Lash Prince Time!
5 - Bell of Lost Souls becomes a power gaming sewer - reflecting the player base. Does my deffrolla do damage to units? Matt Ward.
6 - Ignored, due to 5th edition
7 - Ignored, due to 5th edition
8 - Ignored, due to 5th edition, for now... We'll see.

I've only played RT & 8th so;

RT flying rodent gak insanity
2nd squats

RT - We have this new idea for a model-heavy RPG ... in space
2nd - He're an actual ruleset for that game we made - make sure to play Chaos. Just uh, don't use the virus grenades, okay?
3rd - What the hell happened to the game I was playing?
4th - Alone and forgotten
5th - Gentlemen, we have arrived - assemble the Necrons!
6th - Flying Circus incoming!
7th - The only way I can kill your Eldar is if my stuff that does a damn comes free
8th - Thanks for the free rules - wait, this only half of them. Where'd the other half of the game go?

Granted, I stopped playing (but not collecting in 2E) and came back late 5E, but I've watched folk play games for years and did my best to keep in the look while I was elsewhere (what I heard was the main reason I stayed away, TBH).

1st: RPG with minis

2nd: Actual wargame but best in a small scale with a ton of terrain. (Caveat: I played 3rd before 2nd and we played 2nd with a 3rd mentality Ie. Only basic equipment with a relic or two aside)

3rd: my entry to the universe. Very fun and I fell in love with thw lore but got a bit bland compared to our main game 6th-7th Fantasy.

4th: very similar to 3rd but too abstract for our tastes Ie Transports and Terrain. ( I played adjusted 2nd during this)

5th: By all accounts a very streamlined and tournament focused edition(ruleset wise anyway) undermined by codex imbalance (Fantasy 7th edition suffered a similar fate...) We continue to play 2nd during this time period.

6th: This is actually the edition that brought us back (JY2 battle reports are mostly to blame) actually quite fun at first but the codex imbalance and core rules inefficiencies (Flyers, Invisibility etc hurt our groups interest)

7th: Mostly the same but tried it out with new people after 6th killed my previous group. Ended up playing AoS/ LotR/WMH with these people so not a total loss.

8th: A very 3rd type reset more fun and quick than the previous two editions. Definitely still has issues ( It has cleaned up much of the unkillable nonsense of the earlier editions but has now shifted a bit too far to horde/screenhammer.) The one important change here is the current regime actually has my trust after the previous contemptuous asshat brigade at the helm.

Those I've played:

3rd: grungy awesome art-style, absurd levels of grimdarkness. Bland early on but was turning that around with stuff like Daemon Hunters/Witch Hunters, Imperial Guard 3.5 ed (where you could pick n mix regimental doctrines), cool campaign supplements like Eye of Terror and the insanely flavourful but potentially very OP glory that was Chaos 3.5.

4th: reblandified the game after the advances towards flavour of late 3rd (especially Chaos), a lot of stuff like LoS, cover and casualty removal was a lot more abstract. Aside from that, and stuff like target priority and defensive weapons on vehicles (which stick out in my mind because I liked them), it felt pretty similar. On balance though I'd have rather stuck to late 3rd with more codex revisions.

1st Edition: RPG, not serious
2nd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
3rd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
4th Edition: Scale creep to platoon, more serious
5th Edition: Scale creep to company, serious enough to play competitively
6th Edition: WHAT IS COMPETITIVE PLAY FORGE THAT NARRATIVE, also hive tyrants have to respond to challenges from Space Marine sergeants because reasons. Not serious.
7th Edition: Cool models, cool concepts, bad bad bad bad awful wrong crappy execution. Also not serious.
8th edition: Cool models, some concepts removed others emphasized, jury is out. Also not serious.

I can forgive the 4e-5e players for wanting the serious back, but I am still not convinced Warhammer is meant to be as taken as seriously even as competitive Starcraft, not to mention competitive Chess or Go.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
1st Edition: RPG, not serious
2nd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
3rd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
4th Edition: Scale creep to platoon, more serious
5th Edition: Scale creep to company, serious enough to play competitively
6th Edition: WHAT IS COMPETITIVE PLAY FORGE THAT NARRATIVE, also hive tyrants have to respond to challenges from Space Marine sergeants because reasons. Not serious.
7th Edition: Cool models, cool concepts, bad bad bad bad awful wrong crappy execution. Also not serious.
8th edition: Cool models, some concepts removed others emphasized, jury is out. Also not serious.

I can forgive the 4e-5e players for wanting the serious back, but I am still not convinced Warhammer is meant to be as taken as seriously even as competitive Starcraft, not to mention competitive Chess or Go.

Eh id say semi serious considering GW is going kinda hard into tourny support and feed back. rather than the previous editions faq half way through then dgaf.

 Desubot wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
1st Edition: RPG, not serious
2nd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
3rd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
4th Edition: Scale creep to platoon, more serious
5th Edition: Scale creep to company, serious enough to play competitively
6th Edition: WHAT IS COMPETITIVE PLAY FORGE THAT NARRATIVE, also hive tyrants have to respond to challenges from Space Marine sergeants because reasons. Not serious.
7th Edition: Cool models, cool concepts, bad bad bad bad awful wrong crappy execution. Also not serious.
8th edition: Cool models, some concepts removed others emphasized, jury is out. Also not serious.

I can forgive the 4e-5e players for wanting the serious back, but I am still not convinced Warhammer is meant to be as taken as seriously even as competitive Starcraft, not to mention competitive Chess or Go.

Eh id say semi serious considering GW is going kinda hard into tourny support and feed back. rather than the previous editions faq half way through then dgaf.

I think that remains to be seen. I would have agreed with you before Chapter Approved, but Chapter Approved has just as much IDGAF as earlier editions. They certainly changed some things, but the changes were ill-thought out or just incomprehensible. Just as an example, people claim that the price of Titans or whatever was so drastically increased so as to make them "non-viable in matched play."

What does that even mean? Why is it okay that my Baneblade is viable for matched play but my buddy's Warhound is non-viable? Why should it be the case that some units are viable and some aren't, and why go out of your way to make them non-viable even if they didn't really show up in lists before?

Just as an example of the IDGAF I mean. The same thing could be said of the re-written character rules.

5th edition: Too expensive for college student me. Starter box was neat.

7th edition: Fun for casual only. Requires significant self policing to be playable. The rest of this comment is defined in Special Rule: Fourth Sentence. Please buy Codex: Continued Commentary.

8th edition: Fun for tournament & casual. Requires some self policing for casual play. Less flavor than 7th but a better overall game.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
1st Edition: RPG, not serious
2nd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
3rd Edition: Skirmish, not serious
4th Edition: Scale creep to platoon, more serious
5th Edition: Scale creep to company, serious enough to play competitively
6th Edition: WHAT IS COMPETITIVE PLAY FORGE THAT NARRATIVE, also hive tyrants have to respond to challenges from Space Marine sergeants because reasons. Not serious.
7th Edition: Cool models, cool concepts, bad bad bad bad awful wrong crappy execution. Also not serious.
8th edition: Cool models, some concepts removed others emphasized, jury is out. Also not serious.

I can forgive the 4e-5e players for wanting the serious back, but I am still not convinced Warhammer is meant to be as taken as seriously even as competitive Starcraft, not to mention competitive Chess or Go.

Eh id say semi serious considering GW is going kinda hard into tourny support and feed back. rather than the previous editions faq half way through then dgaf.

I think that remains to be seen. I would have agreed with you before Chapter Approved, but Chapter Approved has just as much IDGAF as earlier editions. They certainly changed some things, but the changes were ill-thought out or just incomprehensible. Just as an example, people claim that the price of Titans or whatever was so drastically increased so as to make them "non-viable in matched play."

What does that even mean? Why is it okay that my Baneblade is viable for matched play but my buddy's Warhound is non-viable? Why should it be the case that some units are viable and some aren't, and why go out of your way to make them non-viable even if they didn't really show up in lists before?

Just as an example of the IDGAF I mean. The same thing could be said of the re-written character rules.

Eh dunno maybe it could also just have been that those titans might of been causing problems in GW own neck of the woods. we will never know. alternatively FW just seems to be behind for some reason. its possible their side are dgafing but im not a mind reader. (things could of been missed new information may have not been errata ed before stuff was sent to the printers. printer related things are done WAY ahead of time so things that may be obvious now wasnt obvious when the final draft went through. stuff like that is ALWAYS possible)

lets see if they go through with this whole dedicated bi annual update and see how it goes this time. its possible they could just revert back to no feths given and then id be disappointed.

Didn't play much of 3rd and earlier, but starting from 4th:

4th: Highly customizable. Weird RPG-esque artifacts left over in the rules (e.g. number of crew in a vehicle). Clean/straightforward to play with clear and well-defined LoS rules, highly constrained army building gave the whole thing more of a Bolt Action/historical wargame feel where wild skew to one target type was difficult, if not impossible.

5th: Clean/clear core rules, great at the start with 4e Codexes, but started to get wildly out of control when the Codexes started to appear. Beginning of the age of overcompensation, the crappy non-skimmer transports of 4th were replaced by godlike non-skimmer transports that carried tournament lists. Beginning of WS/BS escalation with Marine characters pumped to WS6. Beginning of size escalation with the introduction of the T6/2+ MCs (Dreadknight, Riptide) and the normalization of heavy vehicle squadrons. Special Characters were used to introduce variant army builds and things that generic characters used to do became unique to them. True line of sight made the game simpler to read the rules for but required more arguing to play.

6th: Godawful mess. Allies led to weird combos which led to an after-the-fact clampdown that made them kind of pointless, except in a few edge cases. Vehicles got thrown wildly out of whack by hull points and jink, the interaction between cover and ignores-cover became more important than armour a lot of the time. Game became a lot more rock-paper-scissors-y than it used to be with the introduction of Flyers and Superheavies as things to expect in normal-sized games. Powerful single shot AT got cut out of the loop in favour of volume of mid-power by hull points.

7th: Patch edition. Tried to fix 6th without rolling back any of the major changes that sent 6th all to hell, was kind of better but when they started to introduce all the unique detachments/meta-detachments it took a nosedive again as powerful free buffs on a grand scale started to lock down army-building.

8th: Back to basics. Recognized that the hellhole of 7th wasn't solvable while allowing its army books to remain intact and threw it all out and started over. New damage system has chosen to entrench volume-of-midpower as premier anti-tank, list-building has chosen to entrench skew over diverse lists, and Primarchs/Cawl and the like have chosen to entrench named-characters-trump-generic-characters. Reads like a cleaned-up 6e more than anything else.

I don't want the rules of 4th/5th back, I don't even want the seriousness back; I want the feel of units/armies back. I want one tank to feel scary, rather than needing to be spammed to get anything out of it. I want armies to feel like armies instead of taking whatever unit type happens to be the most OP at the moment and spamming it. I want named characters to stop being the cornerstone on which effective army builds must rest with a long list of unique powers that generic characters can only dream of competing with.

I don't long for the days of 4e because the game was more "serious" or more "competitive" or even more "balanced"; I want the game to feel grounded, I want to have to build an army to deal with a varying array of targets because I'm going to see armies composed of a varying array of targets rather than having to spam the weapon that's the least inefficient against all possible targets so my entire army remains functional against whatever wild skew build my opponent pulls out. And I want the characters I wrote to be relevant rather than a walking joke that gets sidelined by whatever badass-mary-sue GW happens to be pushing who is on every battlefield in the galaxy at the same time to show off how great the creators' pets are.

I like 8th a lot better than 7th or 6th, and in some ways better than 5th, but it isn't without its problems.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Didn't play much of 3rd and earlier, but starting from 4th:

4th: Highly customizable. Weird RPG-esque artifacts left over in the rules (e.g. number of crew in a vehicle). Clean/straightforward to play with clear and well-defined LoS rules, highly constrained army building gave the whole thing more of a Bolt Action/historical wargame feel where wild skew to one target type was difficult, if not impossible.

5th: Clean/clear core rules, great at the start with 4e Codexes, but started to get wildly out of control when the Codexes started to appear. Beginning of the age of overcompensation, the crappy non-skimmer transports of 4th were replaced by godlike non-skimmer transports that carried tournament lists. Beginning of WS/BS escalation with Marine characters pumped to WS6. Beginning of size escalation with the introduction of the T6/2+ MCs (Dreadknight, Riptide) and the normalization of heavy vehicle squadrons. Special Characters were used to introduce variant army builds and things that generic characters used to do became unique to them. True line of sight made the game simpler to read the rules for but required more arguing to play.

6th: Godawful mess. Allies led to weird combos which led to an after-the-fact clampdown that made them kind of pointless, except in a few edge cases. Vehicles got thrown wildly out of whack by hull points and jink, the interaction between cover and ignores-cover became more important than armour a lot of the time. Game became a lot more rock-paper-scissors-y than it used to be with the introduction of Flyers and Superheavies as things to expect in normal-sized games. Powerful single shot AT got cut out of the loop in favour of volume of mid-power by hull points.

7th: Patch edition. Tried to fix 6th without rolling back any of the major changes that sent 6th all to hell, was kind of better but when they started to introduce all the unique detachments/meta-detachments it took a nosedive again as powerful free buffs on a grand scale started to lock down army-building.

8th: Back to basics. Recognized that the hellhole of 7th wasn't solvable while allowing its army books to remain intact and threw it all out and started over. New damage system has chosen to entrench volume-of-midpower as premier anti-tank, list-building has chosen to entrench skew over diverse lists, and Primarchs/Cawl and the like have chosen to entrench named-characters-trump-generic-characters. Reads like a cleaned-up 6e more than anything else.

I don't want the rules of 4th/5th back, I don't even want the seriousness back; I want the feel of units/armies back. I want one tank to feel scary, rather than needing to be spammed to get anything out of it. I want armies to feel like armies instead of taking whatever unit type happens to be the most OP at the moment and spamming it. I want named characters to stop being the cornerstone on which effective army builds must rest with a long list of unique powers that generic characters can only dream of competing with.

I don't long for the days of 4e because the game was more "serious" or more "competitive" or even more "balanced"; I want the game to feel grounded, I want to have to build an army to deal with a varying array of targets because I'm going to see armies composed of a varying array of targets rather than having to spam the weapon that's the least inefficient against all possible targets so my entire army remains functional against whatever wild skew build my opponent pulls out. And I want the characters I wrote to be relevant rather than a walking joke that gets sidelined by whatever badass-mary-sue GW happens to be pushing who is on every battlefield in the galaxy at the same time to show off how great the creators' pets are.

I like 8th a lot better than 7th or 6th, and in some ways better than 5th, but it isn't without its problems.

It sounds like a lot of your problems come from three things:
1) Competitiveness. "Taking whatever is the most OP at the moment and spamming it" is competitive behavior.
2) Fluff. Armies are spam. Even in World War II, armies were spam. 4th Edition may have felt a lot like a historical wargame to you, but it didn't to me. Historical wargames, like Flames of War, have different types of companies (e.g. armour/infantry/mechanized) and that wasn't really possible in 4th. It was Infantry Company or bust, because mech was bad and tank companies were impossible with how the FOC worked, except for one specific list.
3) Superhero-ism. 40k has always had a tension between effective characters and ineffective characters. Back when "Special Characters" were in that weird netherverse where they were kinda-sorta-but-not-always okay, people wanted to be able to take them because they wanted neato superhero characters. Before that, in 2nd, superhero characters were the name of the game and people called for "regular troopers" to be relevant again.

I think 8th edition actually does just fine, making the superhero characters good because they themselves make the line troopers good (through auras and such).

GW could easily fix spam by simply restricting everything to 2 units max for duplicates in matched play. Troops or otherwise.

To me this makes a lot of sense... but it won't happen.

Sorry for the derail.

20 dark reapers still wins.

 Marmatag wrote:
GW could easily fix spam by simply restricting everything to 2 units max for duplicates in matched play. Troops or otherwise.

To me this makes a lot of sense... but it won't happen.

Sorry for the derail.

That's alright, spam is a trans-Edition discussion I think.

And that would absolutely fix spam in a mechanical sense, but it would destroy any semblance of sanity. It'd be like restricting Russian tank companies to two T-34s, or Persian War-era Greek phalanxes to 2 64-man blocks. I'm not sure a mechanical fix that totally butchers logic (in the sense of real-worldness) and also fluff (in the sense of the world of 40k) is a good idea.

Rarely do fluff and reality agree on something, but in this case, they do.

Martel732 wrote:
20 dark reapers still wins.

Nah.. one or two units of reapers is manageable. It's when they have 30 reapers across a bunch of units, with all those tempest launchers... that's a problem. Big squads don't worry me. You can make a fat dent in them and don't worry about overkilling. The second someone starts losing reapers to morale - that's when you start laughing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
GW could easily fix spam by simply restricting everything to 2 units max for duplicates in matched play. Troops or otherwise.

To me this makes a lot of sense... but it won't happen.

Sorry for the derail.

That's alright, spam is a trans-Edition discussion I think.

And that would absolutely fix spam in a mechanical sense, but it would destroy any semblance of sanity. It'd be like restricting Russian tank companies to two T-34s, or Persian War-era Greek phalanxes to 2 64-man blocks. I'm not sure a mechanical fix that totally butchers logic (in the sense of real-worldness) and also fluff (in the sense of the world of 40k) is a good idea.

Rarely do fluff and reality agree on something, but in this case, they do.

Many of the tanks in this game can be taken in squads. You could have 2 units of Leman Russ tanks, and a total of 6 tanks.

 Marmatag wrote:
Many of the tanks in this game can be taken in squads. You could have 2 units of Leman Russ tanks, and a total of 6 tanks.

Well, yes, that's true. But why is 6 in two units of 3 better than having 6 in 6 units of 1? It just seems so artificial and mechanical.

Besides, a Russian tank company limited to 6 vehicles is hardly any more sensible than one limited to two. You might as well reduce the game from company to platoon scale and call it a day.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
Many of the tanks in this game can be taken in squads. You could have 2 units of Leman Russ tanks, and a total of 6 tanks.

Well, yes, that's true. But why is 6 in two units of 3 better than having 6 in 6 units of 1? It just seems so artificial and mechanical.

Besides, a Russian tank company limited to 6 vehicles is hardly any more sensible than one limited to two. You might as well reduce the game from company to platoon scale and call it a day.

Not everything is about Imperial Guard specifically.

Or is our jumping off point that imperial guard needs nerfs? If so i agree but this isn't how it should be done in their case.

1st & 2nd - Didn't play.
3rd - Rhino Rush.
4th - Vehicles sucked.
5th - Vehicles ruled.
6th - Didn't play much.
7th - "Forge World is game legal now!"
8th - TBA

1st- Never played it, but the genesis of 40k with some great ideas and also a lot of stuff that is not relevant today (e.g. Space Marines as ex cons and Tigurius the half-Eldar).

2nd- Came in at the tail end of this edition. This is where my fondest memories of GW lie. Playing 2nd ed. on Sunday beginners listening to Lithium and Buddy Holly (among other songs) playing on GW's instore music.

3rd- Where 40k found its feet and became the game I know and love. Although this core system should have been put out of its misery long before the near-20 year mark it got to.

4th- The much needed overhaul after 3rd had got to a point where the only relevant parts in the rulebook were the to hit and wound tables.

5th- Single best edition of the game (too early to say with 8th, although I enjoy it immensely). Most of the "issues" people had with the game and/or background at this point were from rare units and/or came at the tail end of the edition.

6th- So much hope. but we all know what that is the first step on the road to... Played exactly 3 games of this edition as I could see where it was going.

7th- And I was totally correct there- as this was the edition where 40k gak the bed. The rules were creaking under the weight of a core system that was over 15 years old at this point and GW just decided to full slow and add in rules more suited to a skirmish game and formations and yet more rules that contradict other rules. This is the single worst edition of 40k ever.

8th- Excellent so far. A fair few niggles and other silly things such as model's equipment et al that's tied to GW's legal team's edicts but coming back after wisely sitting out the two worst editions of the game has been a good decision so far.