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It has been a while now - what are people's impressions of 6th edition? Loving it, hating it?

Loving it. Overwatch, grenade rules, hull points, battlefield terrain rules, all of them are awesome. The only things I dislike are A) Hammer and Anvil deployment and B) random psychic power rolls. Best edition so far!

This edition seems much slower then the one we have before it , but in as a guard player I like it . The focus on shoting and the ability to include good counter ally units helps a lot.

It's a broken mess that took a huge number of steps forward and then flopped around and broke its fall with its face because it thought doing so would look cool.

For every thing that was fixed or enhanced (e.g. wound allocation, psychic powers, cover saves, Overwatch), something else broke (tanks end up being jokes thanks to Hull Points and the new vehicle CC rules), or something completely and utterly unnecessary was added (Challenges, First Blood) or was extremely poorly executed (Flyers).

There is some cool stuff this edition, I like the inclusion of fortifications (even if they feel somewhat market-ey), I like many of the new rules, but so much of the other stuff just feels like either over-compensation (hull points) or stuff shoved in for "cool factor"/"cinematic feel" without regard for the scale of the game.

Overall, my opinion of 6E is that it's an unorganized mess that never went through proper playtesting and doesn't know if it wants to be an RPG, a skirmish game, a company battle game, all of the above or something else entirely.

I find it more enjoyable than 5th, and I think the armies are much better balanced against each other, than they were in 5th.

That being said, it does have it's issues. Such as the large nerf to assault, the dominance of flyers early on (which is being fixed as time moves on) and a few other things.

Overall, I'd say positive experience for sure.

I dislike the concept of taking allies. Imo a good army has to have weaknesses. You mitigate that fact by adding allies. The rest i have no idea about since i started with this edition.

I loke it, just don't "love" it. It has some severe problems, like necron warriors being able to glance a land raider to death without any good luck at all.

I think the current edition of the rules is the best.

It took all the cool things of 1st and 2nd ed and cleaned up the garbage the Chambers made out of 3rd ed.

Overall, the best new stuff is ..

Flyers
Fortifications
Overwatch
Allies

I think 6th is the best edition thus far. Although I do miss my 4th edition chapter traits for my space marines.

wilsjur wrote:
I loke it, just don't "love" it. It has some severe problems, like necron warriors being able to glance a land raider to death without any good luck at all.

They've been able to do that since the Necron's first came out.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think 6th is the best edition thus far. Although I do miss my 4th edition chapter traits for my space marines.

Rumors are that this might come back (probably wishlisting, but seems to fit in with other new codices).

I've been playing since the RT days. If only prices came down about 10% and stayed there for a few years I'd have no complaints. This really is the best edition yet.

Most fun edition of 40k I've played since 2nd edition (through rose tinted glasses syndrome). I never fail to have fun when I play it, even when I lose horribly.

Best version since the early days of RT (not the late 1st edition crap where it was all out of balance and unplayable). Better than 5th, better than 4th (except if you're a Nid player, that was when they had their best codex), waaaay better than 2nd or 3rd.

Still plenty of problems, mind you, but less than the usual.

Still better then 3/4/5 to me.

I liked 2, but it was more for fun because of its crazy things.

Some good some bad.

The good:

- Reduced many sources of cover to 5+
- Better wound allocation / model removal
- More interesting psychic powers
- Flier rules (about time)
- Decent vehicle rules. Hull points were a necessary nerf.
- Codices have generally trended toward greater balance, though DA and CSM are lackluster compared to Tau.

The bad:

- Close combat was heavily nerfed. In an edition that saw shooting gain pretty serious buffs, this wasn't necessary. One or the other would have been sufficient.
- Variable assault distances are ridiculous. I have no idea if my unit is going to sprint 12" (same as a jump pack trooper moves!) or fart 2" forward. Makes no sense whatsoever. 3" + D6 or something like that would have been much better.
- Allies. I like that there are rules for allies. I dislike that they are not optional.
- Fortifications. Again, I like that there are rules for them, but I dislike that they are not optional.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
Some good some bad.


- Allies. I like that there are rules for allies. I dislike that they are not optional.
- Fortifications. Again, I like that there are rules for them, but I dislike that they are not optional.

Uh what? Since when are these not optional?

I really don't like it much. It's a decent game to have a few beers over, but its no longer worth actually paying much attention to.

My main issues:

- Random charge length. So, you have a guy who, thanks to premeasuring, can know exactly whether he's in range or not with his lascannon, and another set of guys who can set up exactly on the 12" line to maximize their rapid-fire guns, but your charging guys have no idea whether they can make it 4" or 10".

- Random psychic powers, warlord traits. The basic idea behind a game with points is that two players who spend the same number of points will have a roughly equivalent matchup. Warlord traits and random psychic powers just chuck this out the window. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that almost all of the witchfire powers are not-so-good, while the buffs are awesome. So, you roll some witchfire, and I get Iron Arm and Warp Speed, and we'll see how equal that is. Warlord traits are another case of the same. Too often, one player gets something that makes their army rock, and the other player gets nothing that helps them at all.

I think they made all this stuff random because they pretty much proved that they have no idea what's good and what's not. When you look at how they priced psychic powers in books where you could pick them, and you see things like Lash of Submission being cheap, well, it's just easier for their designers to make them random than to try and price them.

- First Blood. The number of games that have come down to this pisses me off. So I'm going to dedicate 2-3 hours to gaming, only to have the outcome decided in the first 15 minutes. Really, what's the point?

- Flyers. Blatant money-grab. Flyers are responsible for more "bad matchup" games than anything else I've seen. If one player goes heavy aircraft and the other doesn't, it gets one-sided in a hurry. There's a reason there were so many Necron lists in the top-ten at Adepticon.

First blood is weird in that I can see the issue - if both people claim the same amount of objectives, kill the warlord and get line breaker, whoever got First Blood will win, but I just haven't ever experienced that.

In my experience, the games tend to have landslide wins, though that might just be the lists my friends and I play. Even if both sides are butchered by the end of the game,one person is comfortably winning so First Blood has never really mattered.

Why is there no "meh" option?

 SickSix wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
Some good some bad.


- Allies. I like that there are rules for allies. I dislike that they are not optional.
- Fortifications. Again, I like that there are rules for them, but I dislike that they are not optional.

Uh what? Since when are these not optional?

He means in that they're not opponents permission. They're optional for you to take, but outside of saying 'I just won't play you', there's no agreement to use them, like the old Special Characters used to have.

The Good:

-excellent allocation rules
-Fliers
-Allies
-Pre-measuring

The Bad

-Massive Assault nerfs
-Sometimes nonsensical allies matrix

The Ugly

-Appalling Implementation of fliers (Seriously, One paragraph in an errata would have made thins much better all round)
-randomness for randoms sake
-Everything else GW has been doing with it's bussiness model


That being said, I am somewhat less than fond of 6th because it shafted both my armies. This, and GW's other actions led me to find better ways to spend my time.

Even though it's in my favor most of the time, I've seen First Blood determine enough games to dislike it.

It doesn't always come into play, but I've seen it enough where it has, and it's just too easy for some armies to get (hello long range shooty army that went first, why yes, take the free VP why don't you) and really doesn't mean anything (unlike Slay the Warlord where there's a merit in having removed the enemy commander from the field, and Linebreaker where advancing troops into the enemy rear usually has its own merit).


It's just too much of a "gimme" and doesn't have the same "moral" standing that the other secondary objectives do. This coming from an IG player who usually gets it.

Love almost everything. Really hate flyers. Now its just bring as many flyers as possible. But me and my friends usually don't bring any or if we do we make sure the opponent has one too. So I guess its not that big of a deal.

Flyers are overrated. That's the only thing I don't like about 6th, everyone thinking they're so taboo. The more you have the more likely you can be wiped from the board on turn one.

I really just dislike challenges and random charge. I think the 5th edition version of charging was much better and challenges seem very unnecessary and gimp some armies heavily (orks in particular from my experience). Overall I like it, but there is some things that were not needed at all.

I like random charge range, though it should be more reliable, and shooting should have random range or something to compensate - as someone said earlier, 100% being able to rapid fire and such but never knowing if you can charge is bs. Overwatch is also cool by me.

I do not like fliers. The concept of fliers isn't terrible, but their blatant pay2win nature and horrific, game breaking balance is. I also really dislike the paper-scissors-rock nature of skyfire and fliers.

Fortifications aren't too bad, but need to be individual to each faction, weaker, and able to be taken in larger amounts - just another part of the army like troops and heavy support.

I absolutely loathe not being able to assault from deep strike or outflanking or whatever, but still being able to shoot. Thats outright crappy rules right there that shift the balance even further in favour of shooting and away from assault.

I agree that they fixed a lot of stuff that, while not overtly broken, certainly makes more sense now. The addition of a mechanic like hull points was LONG overdue, and they finally fixed the whole vehicles aren't actually faster than infantry problem. SMF has finally become reasonable after years of not being so, and a bunch of annoying things like the old by-unit movement rules have been cleared off. Over all, things just work in the way you would expect them to.

Unfortunately, just because the game became more intuitive doesn't necessarily make it better balanced. Foot lists got gouged way harder than mech lists, and they all but completely killed off assault outside of a few units. This imbalances the game MORE toward the direction of mechanized gunline armies, and the like. Kinds of lists that are boring to play against, and really didn't need any help on the power curve.

That said I'd agree that, in general, I've had a more fun time playing 6th than I did in 5th, but that could be saying more about myself than about the rules edition.

... if only you could still do assault hordes...

 Drk_Oblitr8r wrote:
Flyers are overrated. That's the only thing I don't like about 6th, everyone thinking they're so taboo. The more you have the more likely you can be wiped from the board on turn one.

Unless you're Guard, who have the sheer numbers on the table to absorb an alpha strike. Unless your Chaos, who have the sheer durability from power armour to absorb an alpha strike. Unless your Necrons, who have both the numbers and the durability from Reanimation Protocols to absorb an alpha strike.

So, unless yoiu're using one of the armies with broken flyers, flyers are overrated.

Completely agree.

Every random roll makes me dislike the game slightly more. I Like the game, but random charge distance, rolling for warlord traits... I mean, why? How in any real context does that make sense? Your soldiers see a target, they go after it, they don't all fall and trip over their own feet after running for three seconds. The fact that a major aspect of the game is now random changed assault for the worse, so much so that they had to change rules like fleet to make it suck less.

As for rolling for warlord traits, that makes about as much sense as rolling for psychic powers. The commander has no clue what he's good at before the battle? Right. Its my army, my commander. Games-Workshop is not playing my games for me, so stop making more on tables where 99% of the rolls are useless to me. Psychic powers are even worse; a psyker has no idea what he knows. Not a single clue until the game starts. Its like he opens a book of spells, closes his eyes, and just slaps his finger on the page, and whatever it lands on is what he knows for the game.

 McNinja wrote:
Every random roll makes me dislike the game slightly more. I Like the game, but random charge distance, rolling for warlord traits... I mean, why? How in any real context does that make sense? Your soldiers see a target, they go after it, they don't all fall and trip over their own feet after running for three seconds.

It's meant to represent the fact that the battlefield is chaotic, and the little skirmish you're playing is not a part of the whole thing. When an assault fails, they're not tripping over their own feet. Maybe a flyer from somewhere else zoomed across at ground level as it was crashing. Maybe an artillery shell from off table landed in the way and made them pause. Maybe a psyker off table was manifesting a hallucination of My Little Pony farting a rainbow and they shielded their eyes in fear. In a hectic battle like they want 40k to represent, so many things can and would happen that yours and your opponents armies just don't entirely capture, and they want you to use your imagination.

The problem is, they spend so much time in the book talking about forging a narrative, when a narrative needs a strong foundation. Random mechanics don't make for a strong foundation for a narrative.

 McNinja wrote:
Every random roll makes me dislike the game slightly more. I Like the game, but random charge distance, rolling for warlord traits... I mean, why? How in any real context does that make sense? Your soldiers see a target, they go after it, they don't all fall and trip over their own feet after running for three seconds. The fact that a major aspect of the game is now random changed assault for the worse, so much so that they had to change rules like fleet to make it suck less.

As for rolling for warlord traits, that makes about as much sense as rolling for psychic powers. The commander has no clue what he's good at before the battle? Right. Its my army, my commander. Games-Workshop is not playing my games for me, so stop making more on tables where 99% of the rolls are useless to me. Psychic powers are even worse; a psyker has no idea what he knows. Not a single clue until the game starts. Its like he opens a book of spells, closes his eyes, and just slaps his finger on the page, and whatever it lands on is what he knows for the game.

Random charges represent a multitude of things.

The unit doesn't react together cohesively and the ensuring confusion causes the charge to fail.

They fail to correctly judge the distance between them and the target and are unable to reach it before the enemy reacts(the turn ending)

You the commander issue an order to charge and they fail to receive it.

Any number of things can result in a unit failing to accomplish this.


Its why you the commander need to make calculated decisions. have backup plans if your charge fails. How do you react when things don't go according to plan.

Because of this, having some randomness increases the tactical depth of the game. Making it just about which player can set up their certainties best is kinda lame.

Warlord Traits should have been player pick. But random charge distance is a good move.