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 aphyon wrote:
On the matter of storm shields within the confines of 5th ed core rules a storm shield is a storm shield they all have the same profile. same with POTMS applying the normal BS of the unit it is from, not BS2, as in older editions.

It's mostly mis-matching marine stuff - storm shields, typhoon missile launchers, assault cannons. 4e Black Templars are probably where it comes up most. Though rhino and chimera costing and capabilities hits a number of books, particularly inquisition.

I forget when the rule for being able to assault occupants of a wrecked vehicle (after shooting the vehicle) was formalized ... ?

That was post 6th, you cannot shoot a transport and then assault it's occupants. you must assault the unit you shot at in 5th. if you destroy the transport there is no assault.

We take points cost and upgrades from the relevant codexes even if we treat the stat lines the same for same gear. it is a trade off, one of the guys played around with the "cheaper" 7th ed guard codex for example, but he lost access to all the upgrade options from the older editions. even if the base cost was higher he went back to the older editions to get the optional war gear he felt better fit his force.

Gosh darn is it hard to find a copy of Tamurkhan : The Throne of Chaos now. I guess no-one bought it when it came out. Cheapest ebay copy is $420 AUD (214 GBP). Don't think I've ever seen it auctioned.


EDIT: AND IT SOLD FOR THAT

Cant remember what it was for earlier editions but the sixth edition rulebook has it on page 80 at the end of 'effects of damage on passengers'

So I never played 6th and 7th ed 40K, but I've read a lot about how 7th was the worst edition ever. A lot of what I've read is through the lens of playing it competitively.

My question is: could you play 7th ed not-very-competitively and have fun? Was it bad for everyone or just for the tournament / pickup game crowd?

6th was actually worse than 7th, in fact it was so bad GW killed it in less than 2 years. because it wasn't around very long people tend to forget how bad it was. it was the perfect storm of a time to kill 40K and give rise to warmachine and infinity moving into the limelight. 7th started out as an improvement in mechanics but they quickly destroyed it with formation spam, USR spam, and psyker bloat. If you want to see what it would have been if they had done it better take a look at horus heresy 1.0. Alan based it off 7th but fixed most of the problems starting with removing formations entirely.

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
My question is: could you play 7th ed not-very-competitively and have fun? Was it bad for everyone or just for the tournament / pickup game crowd?

Skip formations and be wary of superheavies and Eldar.

There are also a number of 'don't be an ass' issues with the rules that you should be fine with as long as you aren't played overly competitively such as uneven distribution of aircraft and anti-air weapons and the way an army with a lot of psychic mastery just 'wins' the psychic phase by default. Avoid invisibility and possibly fortune, don't abuse daemon summoning.

Stick to a single FoC at first and if using mission cards allow things like free redraws for impossible missions.


Armies in 6e and 7e got very skewed between the haves and the have nots and while a lot of this was formations you will need to selectively easy back from time to time.

Every edition of 40k has had issues with balance. 7th was particularly bad with power creep and layered rules that just broke things.

Formations were a poorly executed concept. What should have been fun little incentive to play fluffy combos ended up in raw power creep, and a marketing cudgel.

Superfiends allies led to some layererd BS. As did psychic powers.

The few times I played my Eldar I felt like I needed to lean on the brakes to keep the power level down. Some of that can be done. Yes, you can do every windrider a scatbike, but it’s also possible to limit yourself to the old 1-in-3 restriction.

Don’t be a jerk, talk to your opponent, and don’t go out of the way to break the game. Like most editions.

Ignore opinions claiming 6th to be bad.
Imperial knights were introduced during 6th and the angst stems from the typical GW approach of 'take a wild guess at what could maybe work in white dwarf and fix it later'.

That said, everyone agrees that the invisibility psychic power was stupid and needed changing and formations were an unnessecary crossover from apocalypse games.

That all continued in 7th with destroyer weapon charts and the various super-heavy rules changes that made them dominate the game in every respect and context.
But GW wanted to sell those Imperial Knight kits so we all had to put up with them being given a massive buff to ensure the happiness of a hypothetical child player.
Titans are better when they get weapon destroyed and immobilised results from the vehicle damage chart.

Was 6th flyers and superheavies? IIRC both those were added to the game and not everyone had the tools to deal with them. So you ended up with a lot of bad matchups. This was complicated by the codex rollout schedule, so not everyone had a level playing field.

I also recall issues with psychic stuff.

But besides that nothing stands out in my mind as a major issue with the core rules. Then again, it was a very short edition a very long time ago…

6th was also the edition in which I won a tournament game purely because the terrain killed three quarters of my opponent's army.

It was horribly unbalanced, and tedious to play. Particularly coming straight after the almost-a-sold-ruleset of 5th edition, it was just awful. I struggled through 6th and then quit the game completely when 7th arrived and turned out to be just 6th with the worst bits made even worse.

YMMV, obviously.

Nevelon wrote:Was 6th flyers and superheavies? IIRC both those were added to the game and not everyone had the tools to deal with them. So you ended up with a lot of bad matchups. This was complicated by the codex rollout schedule, so not everyone had a level playing field.

I also recall issues with psychic stuff.

But besides that nothing stands out in my mind as a major issue with the core rules. Then again, it was a very short edition a very long time ago…

Yeah, the flyers started in 5th with blood angels and grey knights and sixth tried to give everyone air support and AA choices.

insaniak wrote:6th was also the edition in which I won a tournament game purely because the terrain killed three quarters of my opponent's army.

It was horribly unbalanced, and tedious to play. Particularly coming straight after the almost-a-sold-ruleset of 5th edition, it was just awful. I struggled through 6th and then quit the game completely when 7th arrived and turned out to be just 6th with the worst bits made even worse.

YMMV, obviously.

My miles definetly do vary dude. I accept you had a gakky time with it but i cant let that opinion stand as fact.
The terrain rules in the 6th rukebook are the most solid of any edition of the game, particularly where it comes to combat between buildings and destroying them with units inside.
Im curious as to what your tourney opponent was doing to have 3/4 of their army die from dangerous/lethal terrain - turbo boosting an all-bike army through lava?

 SirDonlad wrote:

Yeah, the flyers started in 5th with blood angels and grey knights and sixth tried to give everyone air support and AA choices.

Which was a self-perpetuating problem... unless you knew what you were going to be facing, you were essentially forced to take either a flyer or an AA unit, otherwise you had no defense against an opponent showing up with flyers in their list.

Im curious as to what your tourney opponent was doing to have 3/4 of their army die from dangerous/lethal terrain - turbo boosting an all-bike army through lava?

It was a footslogging Ultramarine army, all of the terrain on the board was forest, and forests in 6th were Mysterious Terrain, which in this case was rolled up as 'Carnivorous'. He had the choice of braving the forests or standing around in the open against a gun-heavy Space Wolf army, and chose the forest... which thanks to some unlucky rolling ate half his army in the first turn. I think I lost a single model in the entire game, although we called it at the start of turn 3 because we were both feeling pretty crap about it all.


I'm a big fan of random elements in games, but that was up there with 2nd edition Virus Outbreak levels of Not Fun.

The mysterious terrain rules are fun as an optional rule, but not as a requirement. we mostly use them in old school kill team games.


As for fliers and super heavies. people act like it was something new. the reality is they were around since imperial armor 1 back in 3rd edition and forge world did a much better job on the rules. first they were permission only so you knew ahead of time if you would face them. the weapons were made with normal 40K games in mind so no such thing as destroyer weapons beyond things like volcano cannons gaining extra damage to structure against super heavies existed. turbo laser destructors wre just longer ranged las cannons that used a small blast instead of a single shot. the damage table for super heavies was also much more similar to the 5th ed damage table. almost every flyer was AV 10 with the most armored ones being 12 and the rules made them glass cannons. hard to hit, not hard to kill.

Another thing that GW really got away from in 6th was the old golden rule-"the game should be fun for both players".

6th was the edition that killed 40K at my FLGS, 7th initially brought it back some, until the end killed it again.

Mysterious terrain wasn't bad when it was just one or two terrain pieces... But yeah, having it apply all the time to forests was absurd, and we generally ignored it in friendly games.

And I think the reason people treated flyers and super heavies as new was that they effectively were. Yes, they'd been around with Forge World or Armorcast rules since 2nd edition... But most players didn't actually use those, due to the perception that they weren't 'official' rules. It was only when they were added as a part of the core range that they became mainstream. And they sucked a lot of the fun out of the game.

Super heavies in particular should only ever have been allowed by specific arrangement, not as a regular unit.

Said it before and I’ll say it again. Flyers were a mistake.

The models are all great, even the Space Marine one that looks like an escape pod with stuffed stapled on. But the scope of a 40K Battlefield is just…too wee. Aye. Almost, too wee, for Flyers to really work.

I did find the old FW rules better, as it involved a level of battlefield prediction to line up your strafing or bombing run. But then…did we really need models for those rules?

I always suspected flyers were done best in 2nd edition with the white dwarf strategy cards Strafing Run and Bombing Run

I don't have a problem with flyers as a concept, as they're not that far removed from the grav vehicles that have always been there, and the models are mostly pretty cool. But they should never have needed specific weaponry to take them out, particularly given that it was made clear way back in 2nd ed that units being largely invulnerable (looking at you, Eldar pop-up attacks and Flying High Swooping Hawks) was no fun for anyone.

Been revisiting 1st edition Space Marine, and the artillery rules in it are something 40K should have borrowed. With the tiny table sizes, most fliers and artillery doesnt need models, just resolve the barrages somehow and move on

 SirDonlad wrote:
Yeah, the flyers started in 5th with blood angels and grey knights and sixth tried to give everyone air support and AA choices.

5th edition flyers were just fast skimmers - which was kind of a problem as GW armoured them up and lowered their costs to offset the fact that they didn't have the protection of their old apocalypse flyer rules.

6th edition introduced snap fire alongside having them zoom all over the place, and monstrous flying creatures.

But mostly 6th edition brought a whole load of extra rolls and marginal USRs.

You don't need specific weaponry you just need to be able to roll 6+ otherwise they are just like any other vehicle, more fragile actually since immobilized results also auto killed them in the FW rules. what FW did was give every faction dedicated AA options to counter air assets as it was permission only to begin with to even bring them. It is back to the fun play aspect. you want to bring air? cool i will bring a FLAKK truck, or a hydra or an eldar firestorm. it just added a bit of variety to the game.

Several other systems add air assets in different ways, heavy gear, classic battle tech, DUST 1947 etc... all have the option or various options in the case of battle tech and it is not game breaking any more than FW super heavies or flyers were originally.

On the matter of artillery a basilisk should never be on the table and there were ways to buy barrages in apocalypse as i recall, some of the other short ranged things like medusa's or griffons given their comparable short ranges make more sense.

 tauist wrote:
Been revisiting 1st edition Space Marine, and the artillery rules in it are something 40K should have borrowed. With the tiny table sizes, most fliers and artillery doesnt need models, just resolve the barrages somehow and move on

I think some of the 3rd ed codexes you could pay points for off-table lance strikes. Witchhunter? I agree that it’s the best way to deal with the concept of airstrikes and artillery. But then GW can’t sell you models, now can they?

While there were a handful of flyers in mainstream 40k before 5th I think they were all treated like fast skimmers. Nobody I knew had a IA/FW one with the other rules. There was a guy who brought a titan to an apoc game, but that’s where they belong IMHO.

By including more aspects and counters they made it harder to make a TAC list and pushed farther into rock/paper/scissors mode.

Great models though. Even the flying bricks of the marines have grown on me.

Both inquisition codexes had orbital barrages in 3rd. The speed freek list in the Armageddon book could also have a fighta bomma attack. I think IG had preliminary bombardments too

@Nevelon

I love and own the storm hawk and storm eagle (although the latter was a nightmare to put together, worst FW kit i ever had to deal with) and i also really like the xiphon as far as marine vehicles go (have them in epic scale only though).

I agree, many of the flier models look awesome. However, not sure they have good use on a typical 28mm scale tabletop, aside from acting as "Terrain" or objectives. I bought a Valkyrie to use as terrain/objective for my KT21 Ashes Of Faith campaign, inspired by that Darktide computer game I guess.. I also want to buy an Arvus lander at some point for my Corsairs (to serve as their SpecOps HQ)

aphyon wrote:

On the matter of artillery a basilisk should never be on the table and there were ways to buy barrages in apocalypse as i recall, some of the other short ranged things like medusa's or griffons given their comparable short ranges make more sense.

Basilisks in the 3rd and 4th edition rules were intended to represent artillery that had been pressed into the assault gun role as a poorly-armoured tank alternative when tanks were in short supply. Indirect fire was a paid upgrade.

Cap'n Facebeard wrote:Both inquisition codexes had orbital barrages in 3rd. The speed freek list in the Armageddon book could also have a fighta bomma attack. I think IG had preliminary bombardments too

IG didn't in the main lists. The Chapter Approved Elysian list could purchase a preliminary bombardment (via an airstrike like the Ork list). The FW DKoK siege regiment list could purchase a preliminary bombardment too, and the FW Armoured battlegroup list could purchase off-table artillery strikes a bit like the Inquisition ones. The Damocles command Rhino rules also could call in artillery strikes.

FW was much bigger on buying strikes, GW rules sometimes enhanced preliminary bombardments if they were already featured in the scenario, like the Siege Masters rule for Imperial Fists and Iron Warriors giving extra rolls.


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 tauist wrote:
I agree, many of the flier models look awesome. However, not sure they have good use on a typical 28mm scale tabletop, aside from acting as "Terrain" or objectives. I bought a Valkyrie to use as terrain/objective for my KT21 Ashes Of Faith campaign, inspired by that Darktide computer game I guess.. I also want to buy an Arvus lander at some point for my Corsairs (to serve as their SpecOps HQ)

As an objective is how I use my deathstrike outside of Apocalypse. It is a perfect objective for a Sabotage mission.

 aphyon wrote:
You don't need specific weaponry you just need to be able to roll 6+

They were immune to close combat and non-skyfire blast and template weapons, several also ignored melta (if you could get close enough), were often armour 12 so effectively ignored lance and small arms, were snapshot to hit only, and if you did actually hit one of them with a weapon capable of doing damage they could retroactively jink to get a save against it, assuming they didn't already have a save like helldrakes.

It was pretty ugly being one of the 'have-not' factions compared to one of the 'have' factions - a sisters of battle army might be throwing everything they have just to try and luck out and wing on whereas red hunters siege marines with a squadron of interceptor hunter tanks treated fliers as free kills.

I think not being able to engage a zooming flyer in CC is a fair and realistic concept.
Youre getting confuddled with 7th i think? Jink was a constant 4+ cover save for a flyer that had moved in 6th. It was a 4+ if it zoomed/moved flat out iirc.

The "we dont have AA" argument requires ignoring the Ageis Defence Line (+50pts) which can take an icarus lascannon for an extra 35pts - thats an entirely reasonable and cheap (both in game and irl) S9 AP2 Heavy1, Interceptor, Skyfire option available to any faction for 85pts all in.
I state that with trepidation because the whole "just buy a pair of armigers for each of your 10 imperial knights" thing got me properly vexxed.

Which flyers ignored melta? I dont doubt you but there is some hyperbole going on with your number..

I recon Mad Doc is on the money about the size of the battlefield regarding flyers in 40k - it feels very constrained. I had an idea about using shelves around the gaming table as virtual spaces for flyers to have game presence and function when not physically on the table but the way GW thought to do so was an embarresment to the hobby. I never met a soul that liked or even used the death from the skies 'expansion'

And that touches on the best/worst aspect of 6th; it was heavily focussed on 'living room' gaming, not pick-up or competitive situation wargaming.
So for me it was second in the edition stakes behined the original HH using 6th core rules which is where 40k wargaming peaked.

Yes, because what any and every xeno player wants is having to buy an Imperial defense line with a lascannon for AA. /s

 SirDonlad wrote:
I think not being able to engage a zooming flyer in CC is a fair and realistic concept.

It certainly is... but as such, if they are included as a standard part of the game, every army needs reliable and accessible options to shoot them down without having to take units specifically dedicated to only that role. Otherwise, regardless of how 'realistic' it is, it's just bad game design.

The "we dont have AA" argument requires ignoring the Ageis Defence Line (+50pts) which can take an icarus lascannon for an extra 35pts

It really, really doesn't. Again, having to take a specific unit, and in particular one that doesn't even fit your faction, on the off chance that your opponent has flyers because nothing else can hurt them is bad game design.

And that touches on the best/worst aspect of 6th; it was heavily focussed on 'living room' gaming, not pick-up or competitive situation wargaming.
So for me it was second in the edition stakes behined the original HH using 6th core rules which is where 40k wargaming peaked.

40K has always been focused on living room gaming. 6th just introduced too many concepts that only worked in that setting, whereas previous editions could all be hammered into some sort of semblance of an acceptable pick up and/or tournament game.