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So, I'm coming back to the game after a long hiatus and I've been able to play a handful of games. Here's my thoughts on the latest edition...

First off, I like the way the game is right now. Here's what I liked:

1. The terrain rules. They feel a lot like the Song of Ice & Fire rules where there are set rules that can be applied to terrain pieces and there are recommendations (that will basically become the norm) to use for your game.

2. The army structure using the CP to pay for your army detachment. The use of stratagems in your army combined with CP encourage the mono-codex builds that I enjoyed from the older 40k editions where the Standard Force Org was the norm for all army builds. In my local meta, I expect to see a lot of games with mono-codex builds using Patrol and Battalion detachments.

3. Point cost increases. It's nice to see the cost of models and units increase for once. For decades each codex made units cheaper and cheaper resulting in you buying more models. It finally looks like they've bottomed out and are going in the opposite direction.

Of course no edition of 40k is ever perfect. These are the things I see right now that I think could/should be addressed:

1. Vehicles still need some work. There's really 3 points to make here, but I'm going to lump it all into one vehicle point. First off, moving the full distance to shoot with everything is way too good not to take advantage of. Without some tweaks, I expect this to be a very vehicle-heavy edition. Second, Bring back access points for vehicle embarking and disembarking. The vehicle access point rule which was implemented part way into 3rd edition made a lot of sense and prevented stuff like models disembarking from the fins of a wave serpent or falcon grav tank. Third, I still think line of sight for vehicles when shooting should matter. You can fix this simply by a sentence saying that when a vehicle shoots, the shot is measured in a 90 degree arc from the end of the barrel of the gun rather than from the model itself.

2. Consolidation after winning a combat... Why does the unit that wins combat have to consolidate towards the nearest enemy unit? Is there a reason the winning unit can't just consolidate 3" anywhere? That feels like something I may apply a house-rule to.

That's it for right now... Feel free to post up your thoughts of the new edition and your experiences with it. Again, I like it and I'm happy to be playing 40k again. This is actually the happiest I've felt about an edition since 5th (which was my favorite edition) and that's saying a lot.

Curiosity question, how long was your hiatus? Are we talking "decided I didn't like 8th at the start of the edition and haven't played since" or "last played a game when 5th edition was the most recent"?

I came back several months into 8th after having been gone since the tail-end of 4th (Warmachine came out and I rode that pony until I ran out of local-ish game stores to play at), and I like some of what GW has done with the IP.

I like the idea of the Strats. The implementation is far too uneven (a Marine chapter has six pages of viable strats, a Mono-Slannesh Daemon army has 10 strats in total) but in theory they add some actual decision making because deciding when to spend those CP is not a completely trivial choice.

I very much approve of switching from detachments providing CP to a fixed CP total with detachments costing CP. A lot of people advocated for that change.

The new 9th ed terrain rules are a huge improvement over 8th. Pretty much anything would have been a huge improvement over 8th, but I'm not arguing.

I like the change to Fly. Being able to freely fall back and shoot without penalty could be super frustrating to play into. As a side-note I was not looking forward to the upcoming Gladiator tank completely invalidating all the Rhink-based tanks, and the changes to Fly mean that isn't as much of a given. (Still more likely than I'd prefer though.)

What I don't like is that despite all the changes it still feels like list-building is the most important phase of the game and poor inter- and intra-faction balance is a design feature rather than a bug, but after at least keeping an eye on 40k for almost a quarter-century that's like going to the beach and complaining about the sand everywhere.