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I'm planning on getting my friends to stop here with 9th once all our codexes are released. Crusade seems fun, the 9th rule system seems better than 8th.

But until then I just want to have casual games of 8th. Thing is battlescribe (the only thing they'll ever use) doesn't have a data repository of 8th at its last update. It just got renamed to 9th and they kept going

So I'm asking how people manage playing older editions and steps I should take to make things easier to manage. Do I subscribe to battlescribe and make my own repository for our group, would it be hard or possible? Or do I just make them play 7th?

It'd probably be easier to just make lists manually out of books rather than making a Battlescribe repository. If you go back pre-7e you might even find a game state where you only ever need one book to play one army, or you could got dig around in Proposed Rules and find someone's fixed Oldhammer project to mess around with (Mezmorki's got a 5e-based one and I've got a 7e-based one, neither of which is done but both of which are being actively worked on).

Yeah I think you have to old skool it for older edition.

Bit painstaking but worth creating a spreadsheet if you will be playing a specific edition.
The upside is you wont have to update it ever lol.

Physical copies of old books.

Then either;
Print out the final version of official faqs/errata,
Or
Invest the work in houseruling things to your groups tastes.

Friends and I occasionally pull out 5th ed 40k and play games.

We have the codices, the rules and faqs and nothing newer than 5th ed (model-wise) in the games - which is fine, since we mostly stopped buying 40k stuff back in 5th ed days.

Didn't even need an army builder. You had the FOC, you had your points and any half-competent 5th grader can do that arithmetic.