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Tactical emphasis in 40k has been lacking for more editions than I can recall, it doesn't seem to be on the designers' agenda. So much so that in threads I've read, when seasoned wargamers mention "tactics," a lot of 40k players assume they mean list building. Which epitomises what a sorry state that aspect of the game is in. In summary It could hardly get much worse with a new edition. Hell, it might even improve.

Like yourself, strong tactical emphasis is what I look for in a wargame. I wouldn't give 40k a second glance in that regard -there are systems that do it so much better -Stargrunt 2, Ambush Alley games, Gates of Antares.

 chrispy1991 wrote:
I don't know.. the OP's concerns never really concerned me too much. Honestly things that concerned me are "fixes" that nobody every asked for, like the wounding table. I've NEVER heard a player, even a kid, say the wounding table was complicated or hard to understand. With the new wounding table, not only can anything wound anything (which I'm completely against) but it makes differences in STR vs T less meaningful because you need double STR or double T to force a 2+ or 6+ to wound. Here's a great example. With the new ruleset, a heavy flamer will wound a Leman russ on 5+, and even reduce it's armor save by 1... so you have... a flamer... doing on average .58 wounds to a russ each time it fires. That doesn't sound bad until you realize that unless they make flamers expensive, this is going to be a major problem if people just start spamming them, and don't give me the argument that they're short ranged, because that's not hard to get around.

My biggest concern is that STR 5 and STR 6 weapons will become the only weapons that really matter, because they'll wound anything all the way up to T10-12 on a 5+, without being prohibitively expensive like lascannons or krak missiles. I'm worried about the game turning into "who can spam the most str 5/6 weapons the cheapest", as THAT will remove tactics from the game.

So you mean exactly how things are now? With S 6 spam being a major thing.

I unlike you have seen plenty of people get confused by the to wound table, mostly because it was different from the to hit in close combat table. As for the flamer thing. I don't really see the huge problem with needing to fire on average 2 flamers to do 1 wound to a leman russ. That means you will need to fire at least 24 to take it out. How many armies have cheap access to 24 heavy flamers? I cannot think of any. Also maybe points will change. Further short range obviously matters, it may not be a huge thing, but if I pop your transport for your flamer guys in your deployment zone you may never make it to my Russ.

TO the S5/6 spam, I think it actually got worse than it is now. Because on the flip side it only wounds lower T models on a 3+ instead of a 2+. For instance take the scatter laser (assuming a lot unchanged) 4 shots, S6 Ap 0 D1. Against a leman russ they average 0.29 wounds per gun. So you would need a lot to really make a dent. Sure they cannot do anything against front or side armor right now, but it is hardly easy to wipe out the russ with that firepower. Now on the flip side right now they average 0.74 wounds each against marines, this drops to 0.59 wounds in the new edition.

This also doesn't take into account that most S5 or 6 guns are heavy weapons and will suffer from moving.

I'm not saying that we won't see a lot of them, just that they aren't better than they are now in general.

Poly Ranger wrote:
I'm getting more and more worried about the level of tactics required for 8th. It seems as though each new revelation takes away another tactical aspect of the game so that its shaping up to be more about dice rolling than positioning. Most rules haven't been released yet and many that have I'm totally on board with, but there are some major ones that are beginning to give me the gut feeling that, for example, advancing up the board with unsupported mech is not really going to be a risky proposition, and that we may just see the terrain and positioning aspect become a very minor consideration.

Four things initially are giving me this gut feeling:
1) No armour facings for vehicles (going to paste and copy myself from another thread) -
Something that doesn't seem to have been picked up yet - it's also a huge nerf to Deepstriking and Outflanking (and to a more minor extent Scouting/Infiltrating) shooty units. Outflank and Deepstrike in particular allowed for side and rear armour shots quite easily from these units. In some cases like drop pods there was very little risk for the reward (if considering them a suicide unit) but in the majority of cases there was, and it was a very widely used strategy that promoted thinking ahead tactically. That is gone now.
It's an example of how oversimplification can take away skill aspects from the game.

You're correct. This is definitely a simplification. However, there's a great reason for getting rid of it; arguments. You no longer need to have an argument or call a judge to see if you're in one armour facing or another. There's no more trying to figure out the facings on oddly shaped vehicles like Wave Serpents. You also make the vehicle easier to assign a point or power cost to, since you don't have to worry about there being such a glaring Achilles Heel to the vehicle that drops its point cost. Knights no longer choose a facing, they'll just have in Inv save. Lots of time savings, lots of argument savings. And it's easier for people to get into the game this way too.

Poly Ranger wrote:
2) Blasts and templates giving a D6 roll - whilst I personally think the rolls shown so far are too low, that is another matter. This takes away the tactical spacing aspect of the game and allows the unrealistic 'bunch up' of units. A D6 roll has a huge amount of variance too which adds to, not takes away from the randomness of 7th - rather than d6, something like d3+2 is far less varied and easier to plan around (same applies to damage but this is less of an issue as we are used to the damage tables from 7th anyway).

I am very happy to see blasts go away. The time savings are HUGE. You no longer have to spend so long scattering a single shot (and papa nurgle forbid multiple shots). You don't have to argue over whether a model is or isn't under the template. You don't have to spend time being careful to not accidentally bunch your guys together or try to determine the most efficient way of spreading out against a flamer. You don't have a "whoops, forgot there was a flamer there" moment where your whole army gets toasted. One of the funniest, and most shocking, moments of this was when I forgot about Deathwatch Frag Cannons. A whole squad with them deep striked next to a 16-model strong unit of Genestealers that were grouped up to all be in cover, and I was dealt over 100 wounds! For me that was hilarious, but for a new player that's devastating. You're right that this is going to be a much higher variance weapon, but all things considered, I'm fine with that. There's going to be a lot of excitement when a Battle Cannon fires, as both players hope for opposite extremes of the die roll.

Poly Ranger wrote:
3) Morale phase - no-one ever falling back. Some units are pretty much immune to break tests now (units of 3 models for example) and the smaller a unit the less likely it is to ever be affected by it. The fact that you can't push an enemy unit back or off an objective is pretty big hit against tactical play.

I quite like this change, but I am curious how it's going to affect things. Having your guys run away was probably one of the most "feel bad" moments in the game. It's why they made almost everything Fearless towards the end, but that just made Leadership pointless. Now Leadership is back to being a real thing. You could say that those units of 3 models were probably going to be Fearless in 7th anyways, so them not really suffering from Battleshock in this edition isn't really much of a change. Also, no more having Space Marines just run away to shoot you in the face next turn! That's wonderful. You may lose a lot of guys to Battleshock now, but if you failed a test you were gone anyways before (it's just much easier to fail now), but at least the guys that remain will still be at peak fighting strength and won't have been pushed around the board.

Poly Ranger wrote:
4) Models in units having complete split fire. This is absolutely massive. Units during list building need no longer be specialised. You don't have to carefully consider whether to hit the mob of boyz about to rush you or the Trukk gunning for the objective. This makes complete sense fluff wise, but game wise it takes away quite a lot of major tactical decisions during a battle.

I do worry about this. This is probably the thing I worry about most. However, I'm not going to judge it yet. The really big stuff are units of 1 model, so they'll still have to fire everything at one target. This really just helps Infantry, and the more Infantry I see on the table, the happier I am.

 thegreatchimp wrote:
Tactical emphasis on the game has been lacking for more editions than I can recall, it doesn't seem to be on the designers' agenda. So much so that in threads I've read, when seasoned wargamers mention "tactics," a lot of 40k players assume they mean list building. Which epitomises what a sorry state that aspect of the game is in. In summary It could hardly get much worse with a new edition. Hell, it might even improve.

Like yourself, strong tactical emphasis is what I look for in a wargame. I wouldn't give 40k a second glance in that regard -there are systems that do it so much better -Stargrunt 2, Ambush Alley games, Gates of Antares.

... Maelstrom's Edge, Infinity, Bolt Action, even malifaux, deadzone and WMH... Pretty much every single game I can think of! Really, I struggle to think about a ruleset worse than 40K.
Seriously guys. If you believe that any tactics were ever involved in WH40K 7th ed, that means you have never tried other wargames. Please do that!
Fortunately, GW realized that they needed to throw away the entire ruleset and start anew. I hope the new edition will manage to be at least a decent beer & pretzel game.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:
Tactical play is more at a higher level like refused flank or symetrie de position.

It heavily depends on the missions. Maelstrom missions are less tactical since the occupation of mission objective does not necessarily require to outmaneuver the enemy.

Maelstrom is non-strategic, non-tactical play. It's basically garbage gaming, due to the churn in random objectives drawn mid-game.

Compared to Maelstrom, AoS / 8E is guaranteed to be a more tactical, more strategic game.

This. Maelstrom games had no tactics. It came to luck of the draw. Hold your set objectives and just cycle cards til you get VP for something you're sitting on or have already done in a previous turn. That's not tactical. That's down to luck of the draw. You can have a dominant position on the board and lose because your opponent rolled in VPs every turn due to lucky card draw with Maelstrom.

If you're massively house-ruling Maelstrom missions, then you're not really playing them...

If you want to defend Maelstrom, you need to be playing it RAW.

That means you keep the cards that can't be achieved, and so on. No modifications, no adjustments. If you get a Flyer card, and they have no Flyers, too bad for you. That's a dead objective. If you get a bunch of them in the draw, well, you might just start out in the hole, with basically zero chance of catching up as the cards keep coming. OTOH, sometimes, you'll draw multiple, easy objectives that you're already sitting on, and win immediately.

 G00fySmiley wrote:

 BunkhouseBuster wrote:
I found Maelstrom to be perfectly fine for a fun, relaxed game that has at least 2500 points per team, any fewer points than that and it becomes difficult to try and score objectives as you may be literally unable to get anything in range to score.

My problems with Maelstrom come from the few times I played it in a tournament with WAAC players, who kept seeming to get the perfect cards to come out and kept on scoring about half of their objectives on each turn, where I was able to score about 4 points the whole game. I realize that this is a problem with the players and not the game itself, but if I wanted to play a card game and worry about someone being really good at shuffling cards, I would play Magic the Gathering. I have enough concerns watching these same players try to do trick rolls with their dice or being suspicious of them using weighted dice as is, adding in them shuffling cards really well is too grating on me.

To those of you who like Maelstrom, there is nothing stopping you from recreating the exact same mission type in 8th edition if it doesn't get ported over. There might be some minor modifications to make, but it should be very doable.

"shuffling really well" aka cheating. yea simple answer to this I shuffle your deck, you shuffle my deck of objectives. in all tournaments I have played using them the tournament eiher had you roll for objectives or provided the cards and they did the shuffle before hand

I would never directly accuse someone of cheating in a game against them. However, I will refuse to play with them in another game.

If tournaments REALLY wanted to be balanced and fair, they would provide the tape measure, dice, and any other peripherals at the tables for the players to share, not worrying about the players bringing in their own stuff to risk weighted dice, homemade measuring tools to get extra distance, or funnily shuffled cards. Plus, then no one has to worry about forgetting their stuff!

 punkow wrote:

 thegreatchimp wrote:
Tactical emphasis on the game has been lacking for more editions than I can recall, it doesn't seem to be on the designers' agenda. So much so that in threads I've read, when seasoned wargamers mention "tactics," a lot of 40k players assume they mean list building. Which epitomises what a sorry state that aspect of the game is in. In summary It could hardly get much worse with a new edition. Hell, it might even improve.

Like yourself, strong tactical emphasis is what I look for in a wargame. I wouldn't give 40k a second glance in that regard -there are systems that do it so much better -Stargrunt 2, Ambush Alley games, Gates of Antares.

... Maelstrom's Edge, Infinity, Bolt Action, even malifaux, deadzone and WMH... Pretty much every single game I can think of! Really, I struggle to think about a ruleset worse than 40K.
Seriously guys. If you believe that any tactics were ever involved in WH40K 7th ed, that means you have never tried other wargames. Please do that!
Fortunately, GW realized that they needed to throw away the entire ruleset and start anew. I hope the new edition will manage to be at least a decent beer & pretzel game.

I think someone else in this thread said it better than I could:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Complex Rules do not = depth

A game can be complex and tactical

A Game can be simple and tactical

The reverse is also true

Morale - you can now make a tactical choice to fall back or not.

Which is my problem with other wargames. By making it simple in the right ways, you free up the tactics from being "who can memorize obscure rules" and better affect the game on the table. Chess and Go are not "complex" games as far as the rules are concerned, yet they are considered to be some of the most strategic, tactical games around, yes? Of those other games you mentioned, I only have experience with WMH. And I can tell you that, in my experiences, it is a strategic game, but not a tactical one. In my 50+ games, I grasped the strategies of the game, but the tactics were in measuring out the minutiae of the models's positions on the table and being ultra precise. Many times I was beat because my opponent remembered something in the rules that I didn't, and had I remembered that rule, I would not have played it that way.

I would much rather have a couple of quick, fun games in an evening after work rather than a single match that ends up more like a test on calculus and wargame peripheral management.

Back about 7 years ago when I was finishing up college, I had no problem with any rule set that seemed fun. But times change. As someone with a new baby at home, plus other family to help out and care for, I have so little time and money for this hobby that I can barely squeeze out a couple evenings a month for games and painting. So if my options are restricted to complex or simple, I'll take the simple one each and every time.

 BunkhouseBuster wrote:
If tournaments REALLY wanted to be balanced and fair, they would provide the tape measure, dice, and any other peripherals at the tables for the players to share, not worrying about the players bringing in their own stuff to risk weighted dice, homemade measuring tools to get extra distance, or funnily shuffled cards. Plus, then no one has to worry about forgetting their stuff!

I believe best practice for major tournaments is to include a set of translucent, event-specific dice as part of the entry fee, specifically to mitigate dice issues. With pre-measuring being all the rage in so many games, tape measures are less of a concern, but one could mandate commercial tape measures.

Loads of new actual tactical concerns are going to be coming back with 8th Edition. Losing vehicle facings isn't really going to make maneuver or positioning less important because in general, positioning and maneuver for or against vehicles hasn't really been important for the last few editions. First, it was incongruous because not all things in the game suffered from taking fire from bad angles. Somehow a Dreadnaught or a Deffdread was critically under-armoured in the back while Riptides and Wraithknights had perfectly thick, uniform armour all around them. So armour facings was just sort of an inconsistent farce that did more to hurt vehicle viability than it did to encourage tactical play. Either all units should be affected by flanking in a hard, mechanical way (like in WFB) or none should be penalized when most units don't give a fig.

That said, 8th edition will place more importance on position and maneuver for one big reason. Cover is coming back in a big way. Now cover affects everyone in a uniform manner and it does is in a logical way. You will always want to be hopping in to cover when possible, and moving such that you can make it to cover will be a big boon in survival. Armour save mods are nasty for folks used to an all-or-nothing system. That HB that marines used to laugh off? Enjoy your 4+ save. It isn't just AP3 that should be scaring save-reliant folks anymore. Most anti-infantry weapons will make folks think twice about poking their head out of cover. It also becomes important at mitigating high volumes of small arms fire (now that most of them wont be modifying and/or ignoring armour). If getting your marine a 2+ save isn't worth maneuvering to get in to cover, I don't know what is.

Things like split fire also make target priority and optimization of fire a lot more important. We've been ignoring small arms as incidental fire for a while now because it was the special or heavy weapons of a squad that determined its target from turn to turn. And with the new wound chart and save system giving more weight to target selection, we'll see a lot fewer cut-and-dry "this weapon is best" situations. S6-7 stuff with a good AP is no longer the single most useful weapon profile in the game because it threatens vehicles, infantry, and monstrous creatures with equal effectiveness. High strength multi-wound with a good AP is needed for big stuff and tough infantry, mid-strength comes in to its own as effective against most infantry, MeQs will require a bit more oomph to take out casually since S6-7 no longer gets them on a 2+ and they are still getting decent saves while in cover against AP -1 and even -2 shots. You'll now need to know not only what to prioritize, but when and where you should be splitting fire from units so as not to waste their damage potential. Loadouts that used to be silly like quad-las devastators (likely to be quite expensive considering that MM price) can now lay down effective fire to threaten multiple things in a single turn instead of hollowing out one vehicle at a time and wasting their potential. And with monstrous creatures and vehicles now degrading according to damage taken, it will be important to think about their various thresholds and break points when splitting fire.

We haven't seen what command points do yet, but the addition of a resource management mechanics is a revelation in 40k. A good resource management mechanic can add tons of depth to a war game and it is nice to see it popping up in 40k.

But I think my favourite change to encourage tactical play is the new assault setup. Folks want maneuver and movement to matter? Positioning for a charge now gives a huge boon to the charger and positioning to ensure your charge or mitigate your enemy's is now quite important. Further, positioning is quite important, even for shooty armies. You'll need to space properly to avoid multi-assaults that can possibly disrupt you whole line if forced to fall back. You'll need to position backup to they can effectively make use of a fall-back feint you may try to employ. Those assault marines just cut up a unit sitting in cover and now have a 2+ save against your follow up fire as the you retreat the remains of the unit they mauled? Should have planned ahead and thought about trying to get them to engage a unit in the open to make massed fire more effective.

But even after contact is made, you still have assault order to deal with, and this can be a big deal once a lot of assaults start going of. While morale tends to favour MSU, horde units give you the most bang per activation in assault. If your opponent has a bunch of 5-man units engaging a singular large one, then even on their turn they'll swing with five and you'll hit back with 20+ before the rest of their small units can even react. Gunlines also have things to do in assault now that voluntary fall back is in. Proper arrangement of the gunline is paramount. And you'll need to think about your flanks because if an assault unit hits a flank hard and caves it in you wont be in a good position to take advantage of those flank units falling back to leave the assaulters open.

Instead of an endless scrum, assault has become this ballet of strikes and feints that has been set up since you placed your models on the table. Gunlines will need to think ahead about how they'll be falling back and arranging support. Assault armies need to look for weaknesses in a line to cause max disruption via multi-charges and fallbacks.

And this is before we get in to special rules that modify these events further.

What I think I like the most about these is that they aren't all hard mechanical imperatives, but rather soft, organic and emergent rules interactions. Some are definitely driven by hard mechanical bonuses, but they create a ripple effect throughout play. CPs and the charge bonus are hard mechanics, but they encourage lateral thinking in other parts of the game and give the player with the better planning and execution and advantage beyond merely rewarding their list-building skills. Hopefully it all holds together as well as it looks.

 Ronin_eX wrote:
Instead of an endless scrum,

Oh, I'm sure some of that is still going to occur...

 Ronin_eX wrote:
Losing vehicle facings

(Groan of dismay) I assumed there would be some kind of damage roll bonus to hitting a tank in the side or back with the new system. I'll be sorely disappointed if there's not.

I totally agree regarding the disparity between "monstrous creature vehicles" and "vehicle vehicles." One of the most nonsensical things the designers ever added to the game.