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I haven't played Warhammer 40K since 1995. While cleaning up the garage after a move I uncovered bits and pieces of some of my old miniatures. At the time I was mostly painting, while I played with friends armies but never really had a full army myself. Since I started painting more and tend to collect Eldar, I decide to create an actual army and start to relearn the game.

Currently I'm borrowing a friends book and codex but there is a lot to go through. When I played it was normally 'Player A' vs 'Player B', the winner is the survivor. It appears now that there are other options to winning like capturing objectives, points based on who is killed and some new rules added with unbound lists. I have some questions if someone could take some time to answer some of them or point me to where I should be reading up more about them would be helpful too. I will most likely only be playing locally at the game shop. Since I also travel to conventions I may try to do a tournament and so I can get royally beaten.

I believe I read somewhere with 6th Edition there are unbound lists that let you pair whatever forces, depending on battle brothers and other things. But I also read that 7th edition removed battle brothers benefits but there are still unbound lists.

- Do gamers typically play regular lists, unbound lists or both based on mutual agreement?

- Are unbound lists allowed in tournaments or are do they tend to only do more standard faction lists?

- What is considered a standard game, 1000, 1500, 2000 point armies?

- When playing a game ultimately are they about beating the opponents forces, more about capturing objectives or combination?

- I wasn't a player who normally used vehicles. This was mainly because of cost of them but I am looking at some transports. If you are using a vehicle to transport troops and the transport gets destroyed, what happens in terms with the troops inside (destroyed, damaged, unloaded)?

- Lore-wise there tends to be a lot of room for 'generic custom units and history'. I mean that you are playing a faction belonging to a chapter or unit, but not specifically the unit if that makes any sense. For example with Eldar they list the Craftworlds, go into some about outsiders and exiles but most forces consist of craftworld forces. Is there room in the lore black ops or custom units within those worlds? I tend to like to create forces that are supported by Lore and it seems certain factions prefer or try to sway towards certain tactics... I want to stay within Lore (its a quirk) but also looking for a plausible out plus I like writing unit histories. I know its strange but meh.

I'm sure there will be more questions as I continue reading but those are the only things that really come to mind.

What gamers tend to play or not play is going to be dependent on every local area. This is generally referred to as "local meta". So, in one town, everybody might own only 1 army, and no one has any ForgeWorld stuff, so you don't see any FW and everyone pretty much knows what faction they will see So-and-So bring... but may not know their exact list (or might, depending). And the local group hates fliers and by "gentlebeing's agreement", no one ever fields any.

The next town over? Everyone owns 10,000 points of 4 different armies each, and every weekend is a competition to see who spent the most money on the FW website last week. You never know what someone is going to set out on the table.

- Are unbound lists allowed in tournaments or are do they tend to only do more standard faction lists?

Depends on the tournament, but allies and such seem to be the way the game is played on the competitive scene these days.

- What is considered a standard game, 1000, 1500, 2000 point armies?

Again, depends on the local meta, but the average seems to go between 1500 and 2K points.

- When playing a game ultimately are they about beating the opponents forces, more about capturing objectives or combination?

The actual game-rules are generally geared towards capturing and holding certain objectives and doing certain things to earn Victory Points. Of course, if you get wiped off the table, it doesn't really matter how many VP you have... but most armies cannot hope to wipe out another army if they are roughly balanced between each other (though some match-ups are terrible for one side or the other). If you're trying to completely destroy the other player's army, but he's grabbing and holding more Objectives, accomplishing more Maelstrom Missions (assuming those are in play)... when the game ends, if you haven't killed every model he has, then he probably wins because he ends up with more VP.

Some armies are very good at wiping out other armies... some are not, and those tend to be very good at capturing and holding Objectives. A "word of wisdom" that gets circulated a lot is "play to the mission".

- I wasn't a player who normally used vehicles. This was mainly because of cost of them but I am looking at some transports. If you are using a vehicle to transport troops and the transport gets destroyed, what happens in terms with the troops inside (destroyed, damaged, unloaded)?

That's in the BRB, for which we cannot be a replacement. There are effects, though, to embarked units who's transport gets blown up.

- Lore-wise there tends to be a lot of room for 'generic custom units and history'. I mean that you are playing a faction belonging to a chapter or unit, but not specifically the unit if that makes any sense. For example with Eldar they list the Craftworlds, go into some about outsiders and exiles but most forces consist of craftworld forces. Is there room in the lore black ops or custom units within those worlds? I tend to like to create forces that are supported by Lore and it seems certain factions prefer or try to sway towards certain tactics... I want to stay within Lore (its a quirk) but also looking for a plausible out plus I like writing unit histories. I know its strange but meh.

If you want to play your Eldar Guardians as an elite strikeforce of Ninja Space Elves from the Craftworld Stree'Tfig'Hter, go right ahead, As long as you're using the unit in the way the books describe (in points, wargear, FOC slot, etc), then you're fine... and if you want to play them differently (moving Elites to Troops or FA to HS) then you need your opponent(s) to agree to it.

Usually, people will play non-unbound lists.

Tournaments will usually ban unbound lists.

Units in a transport that is destroyed (not exploded) are fine. In an exploding transport, roughly half the models will take a wound usually, and you can reduce the damage with their armor. So a unit of Orks, half will likely be killed, while a unit of space marines would probably be fine.

Purely custom units are generally frowned on (you are writing their rules, I mean) but if you, for instance, wanted to carefully model a unit of exodite ninjas and use the rules for a unit of Eldar Harlequins, nobody would complain. I know a guy who uses dragon riding Elves from fantasy as his Eldar, using the small ones as Walker vehicles and the large ones as planes.

500-1000 is a small game. 1250-2000 is a normal to somewhat large game. Higher than that is generally considered an "apocalypse" sized game and there are special rules dedicated mostly to making a game of that size manageable to play.