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Interesting selection of flaws and a few contentious picks.

Of course any more length would just be adding salt but it was a choice to pick fish of fury over near indestructible falcons, lash prince over siren prince, leafblower over raw codex creep, etc.

 Da Boss wrote:
Never played 8e or onwards, though I do sometimes think I should grab the index version of 8e in print at least - I have 3e and 8e is the next "paradigm shift" so even from a hobby history POV it's interesting to have it.

If you ever plan to play a few retro games of 8e then White Dwarf June 2019 (UK) included updated objective card rules.

Early 8e suffered from entirely random objectives - you might get dealt cards to kill a unit your opponent didn't have or hold all five objectives at once on turn 1, while your opponent might get a string of cards to take the objectives they were already holding.

 Tawnis wrote:
100% Agree with 3rd ed Chaos Codex, that's around when I got into the hobby and my brother got into Chaos. It was so cool all the thematic things you could do with the army at this time and it was one of the things that drew us into the setting. (The Tyranid one of being able to swap weapons across all units because they were all stat modifiers was cool too.)

As Andy Chambers said in an interview a lot of stuff was put out on rule of cool without much playtesting. A lot of the early stuff had a bundle of options and flavour but no internal balance for anyone looking to power game by cherry picking the best combos from 100+ options.

Forgeworld could get that way at times as well. I think it was Gav Thorpe that commented (paraphrasing) that huge pick and mix lists could paradoxically gave you less options when the everything in the codex was competing against a few wombo-combos.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Eldar were kinda cursed.
Sure, every edition of their Codex offered some horrific combo which most enemies would struggle against.
But, the rest of their units tended to be middling at best.

Early Eldar had three phases IMO. 2nd-4th had a mix of strong and weak with some obvious game breakers, 5e kicked their crutches out and was the only time I recall them not being top tier, and then 6e onwards they were just strong pretty much cover to cover and would routinely pad out the top tournament placings with multiple different playstyles in the face of the gladius, thunderstars, decurions, screamerspam, etc.

Dai2 wrote:
My gut feeling is that glass cannon armies (which Eldar have always supposed to be whether they work that way in practice or not) are really, really hard to balance

Eldar were more aimed at hyper-specialisation, and being fast enough that you had more control over your match-ups than your opponent. They had multiple high durability units.

Arguably harder to balance than glass cannons, and GW gave up on it in 6th when they just made everything eldar tougher and more shooty - like warp spiders with anti-armour weapons and wave serpents with tank-like firepower.

 Hellebore wrote:
Once aspect squads take casualties they really lose their punch.

Unit trading efficiency.

Like the old sternguard squads taken with a combi-weapon on every model, it's more punch but also more points to make back and it just doesn't work if there is too little or too much risk - i.e. first turn superheavy artillery strikes that almost cannot fail to annihilate their value in units, or on the flip side units like repentia that required significant help from the opponent.


On the subject of efficient trading I think it was 6th edition? where challenge rules allowed a squad of guard chaff to challenge daemons like An'ggrath to single combat, one minor officer at a time. Sometimes overkill is just way too much kill.