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 docdoom77 wrote:

That's exactly how I feel. I never had a problem with special weapons dying last. In 3rd it specifically tells you it represents another trooper picking up the weapon. And I like the story element of the characters leading from the front without immediately getting shot down. It's cinematic. And for what they charge for a powerfist these days it's nice to be able use it without sticking your heroic sergeant in the dead center of a unit to avoid casualties.

I think the overkill rule in 5th was more than good enough for representing the off-chance of your heroic character getting sniped, or the melta-gun getting damaged.

Even if you were gonna do a "closest models" rule, it should have been made so that you apply wounds in order from closest to furthest, THEN roll saves (all at once using different colored dice for specialist models would be best). The front guy taking every single shot until he dies is no more realistic than any other system. Just because a guy is standing half a foot closer to the enemy the the 2 guys next to him doesn't mean he'll receive more fire than the guys who are nearly as close.

But, in the end, I greatly prefer the speed, simplicity, and fun of the "owner removes models" system.

Agreed on all counts.

 koooaei wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 koooaei wrote:
Allies system is great unless you use battle brothers to abuse buffs not designed for that. The easiest would be just toning down all alliances to allies of convenience.

This is why I don't think they should be part of the core rules. They just add to the ill-conceived bloatedness. Whenever a rule is great "but", "if", "unless", then to me it's a poorly thought out rule that should be fixed, in the case of allies I don't really think there is a good fix other than to just remove it from the core rules and have it as a WD article/supplement/optional extra.

Player chooses who dies is a great rule unless you abuse it for your draigo pallies withh all different gear. And how come all those special weapons and sergeants are always the last survivors standing at the frontline all the time?.. Players will often abuse whatever rules they have.

I like the deeper tactical approach with positioning and micro-management that 7-th provides. It's not perfect with tanky characters, but it's better than the complete invalidation of firing directions.

I think you didn't mean to quote me because your reply has nothing to do with what I was saying

But since you did, I might as well put in my 2c. I prefer the system where the controlling player chooses as well. Shooting the closest model until he dies is hardly realistic anyway and the "tactical depth" it adds is marginal and really not on the scale that the game is being played (IMO you should be worrying more about squads as a whole rather than micromanaging individual squad members).

Though I don't mind the idea of allocating hits or wounds from closest to furthest, then rolling the wounds/saves (grouping together models which are identical). But there again, this is probably something more appropriate for ~1000-1500pt games at most, and since 40k can't decide what scale it wants to be, I'm happy with the abstraction that the controlling player chooses.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If you made it realistic it would lose a lot of the 40k feel (assaulting enemy units in close combat even though you have guns to shoot them is not realistic... but it's core to the whole concept of 40k, so the rules need to be unrealistic to capture that feel).

Of course this is all opinion, but I would say that assaulting the enemy is perfectly realistic when you have technology (power armor, TDA, force fields, et cetera) that drastically reduce the effectiveness of enemy shooting. If the enemy is only effective at shooting (Tau, Guard) then it makes sense to engage them in close quarters to nullify their one and only strength.

There are a few things I dislike quite a bit with 7th and the direction the game has taken, such as super heavies, gargantuans, allies, unbound, invincible units etc.

But the absolute worst part about 7th (and 6th) has nothing to do with balance or list building or fluffiness or what-have-you. The worst part is the time-consuming rules bloat. Random this and d6 that ad infinitum. Back in 5th a game with my regular gaming buddy would take about 45-60 minutes, and a game with someone else at the club (or a store) would take about 1.5 hours. Now that time is doubled.

Spending more time on a game is not necessarily bad, but when all that extra time is just a bunch of randomization, it just sucks the fun out of it all. Particularly bad is the pre-game rolls against psychic heavy armies.

This was bad enough in 6th, but in 7th there's an additional factor with the unlimited options meaning that most games there is a 'telling your opponent what your stuff is and does' phase added in.

That reminds me - all instances of random wound allocation need to sod off and die.

If we changed up the psychic phase so my being made of warp could properly harness the warp like they used to, that would bee cool (RIP flickering fire on 3 charges)
Give various unit types a minimum charge distance. It bugs the hell out of me when a 5 inch charge is failed. I understand it is also super sweet when you make a 10 in charge though.
Slap invisibility down into the ground (Just WS and BS1, no snap shot shenanigans, flamers and blasts should still be able to target them)

Those changes would make me love 7th more than anything, as they are my primary gripes.

I had to go for fifth simply because it's where I started!! The nostalgia is too much to deny!! The game also seemed much simpler and just more fun in general - along with codices which had a bit of flavour to them which just made the game more enjoyable for me personally!!

7th has killed my gaming group, so although I'm a fan of the flexibility of 7th I'll have to go for 5th as it was much easier to organise games and find common ground.

Having just recently returned to Warhammer after a long-ish hiatus, along with a small group of like-minded friends with similar amounts of disposable income, 7th has been good to us. Speaking for the rest of them, I think we would all agree that 7th is the best edition we've played so far in terms of having fun, interesting games.

I can absolutely understand the criticisms levelled at the new edition compared the previous ones. We've certainly encountered our fair share of vague rules and odd situations. But they happen with less frequency now than they ever did before. And the new additions rules-wise have been quite refreshing - although I understand that this may be because our armies don't specifically exploit those loopholes. At the risk of sounding contrarian, a lot of the gripes people have about specific units or rules or combinations thereof specific to 7th edition just don't seem to make a big splash in our group. Not for lack of trying - our lists are built to win, usually with the help of the wonderful folks in the Dakka list building forum. But we seldom encounter situations where one list is outright unbeatable, or the balance feels so off that the game is hardly worth playing, or the randomness factor prevents tactical decision making.

All that being said, if there's one thing I dislike about modern 40k, it's flyers and superheavies... they just don't feel like they fit in the scale of the regular, non-apocalypse format game, either aesthetically or rules-wise.

 Thud wrote:
Or, what if I line up my guys across your table edge and you have infantry in reserves, what happens when your guys come in? You can't move onto the table, because my guys are blocking you, so what happens?

(For those of you wondering; yes, these things were all covered i previous editions of the game.)

I suppose you're referring to this?
http://imgur.com/gallery/V0gND

With all due respect but I'm quite sure that link is from a game that took place in 5th edition. 6th edition strictly forbids you from holding your entire army in reserve and you would auto lose if you didn't had any models at the end of a turn. Furthermore, 6th/7th both specifically states that anything stuck in reserves were automatically destroyed at the end of the game.
5th edition created a weird paradox in that situation. Movement forbids moving models through enemy units and closer than 1".
Nothing in the Reserve-section mentions this situation, except for permanently immobile units who were allowed to deep strike if they couldn't be deployed on the table.
No one disputed the fact that the bikes in the link above weren't allowed to arrive from reserve, because there were several restrictions that prevented the bikes from arriving. What was up to debate and confusing was what the hell happened at the end of the game, or rather, turn 5+. The Reserves-section directly stated that you needed to enter your units automatically, and you weren't allowed to have anything off-board. Since Ongoing Reserves wasn't a thing back then, the only thing that ever mentioned units being destroyed upon delay on turn 5+, was the Deep Strike Mishap Table but since the bikes never entered by Deep Strike no one could actually answer what happened to the bikes. It was ruled that the bike player lost by default, since there was no conceivable way for them to enter the table.
So to answer your question: in 6th edition, I would lose by default, since I could only deploy half my army in reserves and if a situation occurred were you tabled my men and the rest was in reserves, then the rules dictated that I would suffer an automatic defeat. In 7th edition, I can hold my entire army in reserves, but I would lose because I couldn't get them on the board before turn 2. If you wipe my deployed army in turn 2 and my reserves arrives in the beginning of my turn 2, BUT, you were blocking their entry, then I would lose by default. My reserves are unable to deploy and are thus delayed, the rules then dictates that since they were delayed, I had no models left at the end of the turn which causes an automatic defeat.

 insaniak wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
I can see an argument made for removing models from the front, but then mechanics like LoS and losing your special/heavy weapons run counter to that realism feel.

Having the guy closest to the enemy always be the one to take the hit is not even remotely realistic.

And yes, adding in Look Out Sir so that the guy at the front is always the one to take the hit unless he's not wearing a helmet just makes it even worse.

The old way of always having the special weapon character be the last to die was, imho, way worse. Yes, I remember the bit about the other guys picking up the weapon; however, at least some of those heavy weapons require some sort of backpack or at least additional mounting points to use. In the 5 or 6 minutes of time that a battle represents, none of them would really have the time to stop and change out gear.

Honestly, I'm not sure there is a good way to handle this without going to random allocation and that would add at least an hour to game time. At least with hitting the closest guy it adds an element of tactics to placement. For look out sir it ought to be limited to maybe one or two attempts. After that they should go straight into that forward model. Now, docdoom77 did mention the possibility of just allocating all of the wounds across the group and letting each model make it's own saves. That's slightly better, but still time consuming.

There's two arguments for wound allocation: let the player decide, because if a special weapon trooper were to go down, someone else would pick up the gun, or if a Sergeant died, a Corporal or someone else in the squad would step or what have you. On the inverse, unlike a WW2 game where it's entirely feasible for that sort of thing to occur, in 40k, an Ork boy just doesn't become a Nob in the heat of the moment, nor can a Terminator just rip the assault cannon off a fallen comrade mid-battle, so directional losses makes sense. This mechanic, however, allows single guys to tank every single shot, often super-durable ICs who then selectively "look out sir" wounds, which is also not even remotely realistic.

There are things I like about both systems, but for gameplay simplicity and speed (and boy have the changes to 6th and 7th made the game slow; I can finish about one game a day, ranging from 4 to 6 hours depending on how argumentative the opponent is, which is insane) I think the old method just works better.

But then I'd also like to see people able to choose their warlord traits and psychic powers, but then that of course would require them to be balanced, rather than some gak and some amazing, along with fixed charge and movement ranges tied to a unit's movement value modified by terrain (ala Bolt Action; move maximum six through terrain, can move 12 and not shoot if out of terrain, charging into terrain gives defenders bonuses). On top of that I'd see cover a modifier and so on and so forth; the game doesn't need to take hours and hours if GW realized that rolling buckets of dice for every minute thing is not "cinematic" nor overly enjoyable. Save the rolling for actually interesting/fun things, like the Boon table, or everything Skaven in Fantasy.

Not only is all the random tables time consuming, but so often it just has no effect on the game because the results are either highly conditional, or result in another random effect (e.g. Mysterious Objectives and Sabotaged), and ultimately are just a time-sink and rolling dice for its own sake.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Not only is all the random tables time consuming, but so often it just has no effect on the game because the results are either highly conditional, or result in another random effect (e.g. Mysterious Objectives and Sabotaged), and ultimately are just a time-sink and rolling dice for its own sake.

The other aspect is that it's rather irritating to see a player get ahead because of some random nonsense (sometimes before the game has even begun), rather than good tactics.

e.g. If all his objectives give a useful bonus, while the ones you control are all sabotaged. Or, if his mission objectives are easily completed, whilst yours are next to impossible.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MajorStoffer wrote:
There's two arguments for wound allocation: let the player decide, because if a special weapon trooper were to go down, someone else would pick up the gun, or if a Sergeant died, a Corporal or someone else in the squad would step or what have you. On the inverse, unlike a WW2 game where it's entirely feasible for that sort of thing to occur, in 40k, an Ork boy just doesn't become a Nob in the heat of the moment, nor can a Terminator just rip the assault cannon off a fallen comrade mid-battle, so directional losses makes sense. This mechanic, however, allows single guys to tank every single shot, often super-durable ICs who then selectively "look out sir" wounds, which is also not even remotely realistic.

There are things I like about both systems, but for gameplay simplicity and speed (and boy have the changes to 6th and 7th made the game slow; I can finish about one game a day, ranging from 4 to 6 hours depending on how argumentative the opponent is, which is insane) I think the old method just works better.

Agreed.

 MajorStoffer wrote:

But then I'd also like to see people able to choose their warlord traits and psychic powers, but then that of course would require them to be balanced, rather than some gak and some amazing

I'd really like that too.

 tyrannosaurus wrote:
7th has killed my gaming group, so although I'm a fan of the flexibility of 7th I'll have to go for 5th as it was much easier to organise games and find common ground.

Never really had any issues, then I went to a different game shop. Apparently unbound is all cool there, where I play it is an "ask your opponent first" thing.

 vipoid wrote:
The other aspect is that it's rather irritating to see a player get ahead because of some random nonsense (sometimes before the game has even begun), rather than good tactics..

Yeah. One of the games I won at Adepticon this year, my army was pretty much redundant... My opponent did more damage to himself through some bad Mysterious Forest rolls winding up with the terrain killing half his guys. While he was good about it, that game wasn't much fun for him.

I find myself sort of torn between the two editions, because I like and dislike aspects of both. I prefer the vehicle rules in 7th over 5th - it's harder to kill them in one shot, but they can't simply wander around the battlefield soaking up shots all game - but as someone who likes structure in his games, I generally dislike unbound armies because it's so easy to abuse them. I think 6th/7th did a nice job of fixing and adding things to the game, such as Warlord traits (though I feel like you should be able to choose them, not just roll for them), the new missions, making night fighting less annoying, etc, but as has been said before, the sheer number of random charts you have to roll on in the course of a game is kind of ridiculous.

I think I have to lean towards 5th slightly, partly because of nostalgia for the edition where I started, but I have to recognize that 6th/7th added a fair few number of improvements over it.

Today I went to a new (to me) gaming group in the next town and was told they froze their rules at the fifth.

They seemed so happy!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
But either way, I don't really care all that much about realism because the game is so horribly unrealistic anyway. If you made it realistic it would lose a lot of the 40k feel (assaulting enemy units in close combat even though you have guns to shoot them is not realistic... but it's core to the whole concept of 40k, so the rules need to be unrealistic to capture that feel).

I'm quite certain that 38,000 years from now, it will make more sense to walk up to someone and hack at them with a chainsword than to blow the smithereens out of them with guns from a kilometer away. Or, orbital bombardment.

As much as I agree that 7th edition takes many steps backward, I don't really want to go back to 5th edition either.

I want to see 7th edition fixed with Random wound allocation, assaulting limitations, Allies and Flying Monstrous Creatures.

I havce liked bits and pieces of msot editions and disliekd as many.

Best thing to do is take what the bits your group likes and just use that - msot of us are nto interested in tourneys so we are all fine with our 6.5 rules.

A couple of random tables doubles your play time? Man, it must have taken you years to learn the WS/Wound tables. Brutal.

Got a 2e game coming up soon, there's an edition worth pining over.

Off topic, but why is there a 7 month gap in this thread?

Necromancy

MarsNZ wrote:
A couple of random tables doubles your play time? Man, it must have taken you years to learn the WS/Wound tables. Brutal.

Got a 2e game coming up soon, there's an edition worth pining over.

It's not just a "couple" of tables.

We've got Mysterious Objectives, who knows how many Warlord tables, D weapons, Stomp Attacks, Superheavy explosions, Maelstrom objective tables, Maelstrom mission table, Warpstorm table, roughly a dozen Psychic Powers tables, Perils of the Warp, Chaos Boons, Chaos Gifts, and probably a couple more I'm forgetting that simply did not exist in 5E.

Granted, not necessarily all of them will show up in any given game, but it's entirely routine to half to deal with half a dozen more tables in 7E than you did in 5E.

I spoke at length about this in a previous thread about how I was building a gaming group to specifically go back and play 5th edition for a few reasons:

1. Cost of codex books and rules.
2. Comp between codex books rather than try to build a balance of detachments, formations, allies, forge world, and super heavies.
3. Fewer poorly written rules.

I think it's obvious that the 40k community isn't happy. Back in the 5th edition days, we seldom saw threads like this. Today, we see a few of them pop up every week and they're some of the most popular threads on the whole forum! Personally, I'm so unhappy with how poorly written and unbalanced 7th edition is that I actually wish for 6th edition back. Sadly GW has become a vicitm of their own creation to a point where their only goal is to continue to shovel the same material at us over and over again. By that I mean, if you go back to 2004 which is 11 years ago and not that long when you think of board games and table-top games we've had 4 different versions of 40k including what's about to be our 4th different Space Marine codex. That tells me that the only consistency that GW has is inconsistency.

The only thing that I truly believe that GW improves upon is it's presentation, and by that I mean artwork and hard-bound books. I'm happy to be going back to playing 5th edition, however if I'd just as happily go back and play 4th or 3.5 using the Chapter Approved articles/books.

My worst fear is that GW will do the same to Warhammer Fantasy Battle which really has me afraid for 9th edition.

5th edition.

In 5th edition I could go and play pick up games with locals. We played two or three games until the store kicked us out at 10-11pm, usually two or three games going simultaneously. Players got there at store open and played all day. By the end of 5th we'd have people refuse games with BA, GK, and IG, but it wasn't terrible.

In 6th, Pickup games were much rarer. People showed up and played maybe one game. I couldn't find anyone to meet me for a 6pm game. Played like a half dozen games, but had to schedule them, usually with out of town era and I had to drive. I played a lot of tournaments, at least one per month.

In 7th Pick up games are non existent, maybe a single game will be played. I have to schedule every game with people from out of town. Tournaments are scarce and the entire scene has slowed drastically.

5th was fun, I remember truly enjoyable games. Sure, wound shenanigans were a bit too much, sure transports were a bit too good, and BA being SM+1 and GK being BA+1 was ugly. Then there was Leafblower. But overall, it was still preferable to what 7th has brought.

Did I mention I could play a 2500pt game in less time in 5th edition than a 1500pt game in 7th, oh and we were happy to do it with one FOC.

There is a reason I've sold 75% of my 40k and haven't bought any rules and only handful of models since 7th dropped. I will not pay money for GW rules, and I'm down to one army, and trying not to spend any money on it as I debate bailing on 40k for good.

 Zagman wrote:
5th edition.

In 5th edition I could go and play pick up games with locals. We played two or three games until the store kicked us out at 10-11pm, usually two or three games going simultaneously. Players got there at store open and played all day. By the end of 5th we'd have people refuse games with BA, GK, and IG, but it wasn't terrible.

In 6th, Pickup games were much rarer. People showed up and played maybe one game. I couldn't find anyone to meet me for a 6pm game. Played like a half dozen games, but had to schedule them, usually with out of town era and I had to drive. I played a lot of tournaments, at least one per month.

In 7th Pick up games are non existent, maybe a single game will be played. I have to schedule every game with people from out of town. Tournaments are scarce and the entire scene has slowed drastically.

5th was fun, I remember truly enjoyable games. Sure, wound shenanigans were a bit too much, sure transports were a bit too good, and BA being SM+1 and GK being BA+1 was ugly. Then there was Leafblower. But overall, it was still preferable to what 7th has brought.

Did I mention I could play a 2500pt game in less time in 5th edition than a 1500pt game in 7th, oh and we were happy to do it with one FOC.

There is a reason I've sold 75% of my 40k and haven't bought any rules and only handful of models since 7th dropped. I will not pay money for GW rules, and I'm down to one army, and trying not to spend any money on it as I debate bailing on 40k for good.

Mirrors my experiences very well. 5E had its problems, and I still cannot believe that I prefer it over another edition, but I do. Pickup games are increasingly difficult to get and often nonexistent, games increasingly have to be scheduled with an increasingly smaller pool of players, tournaments (at least, local/store events as opposed to the big "convention" style tournaments) are increasingly small, games are increasingly one-sided and the balance nonexistent, and most pointedly, store stock stays on the shelves way longer.


Never thought I'd long for 5th, but I do. The game played better, there were more players, and we weren't paying Forgeworld prices for nearly everything. I damn near choked when I saw how much the new Mechanicus HQ guy cost...$36 for a Terminator sized character, nearly 3x what such characters were doing for at the start of 5E.

I too miss 5th edition.

The last edition of 40K for me.

6th was the end.

7th was just beating a dead horse.

 Wolflord Patrick wrote:
The only thing that I truly believe that GW improves upon is it's presentation, and by that I mean artwork and hard-bound books.

Yes and no... Hardcovers look pretty, but they're less practical at the game table. They're ultimately an added expense just to have books that look a little prettier sitting on the shelf.