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 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:
IMO 4th was horrible. Between skimmers and combat consolidation, not a lot of fun.

Only person in the thread to have said that.

XD

4th ed had great rules, but I loved combat consolidation it made assualt combat actually viable for an army.

Probably didnt help I played GKs in a toxic WAAC tournament meta enviroment.

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:
IMO 4th was horrible. Between skimmers and combat consolidation, not a lot of fun.

Only person in the thread to have said that.

I said it in the 5th post in the thread

Having played multiple armies in 4E, and having experienced both sides of the equation, combat consolidation was not needed for a viable army, but was rather a supremely abuseable mechanic.

AegisGrimm wrote:True. I also love how the Universal Special Rules in 4th edition consisted of maybe 20-odd actual rules entries over 5 pages, not some huge bloated thing. And they were mostly just a collated version of rules that had been in individual codexes since 3rd edition, like Fleet of Foot/Hoof.

Ugh, I do not miss this at ALL.

If you don't do universal special rules, you have to do weird, parochial special rules, like they did in 4th edition. Every codex had its own weird stuff that only you knew how it worked, and you had the same special rules across a few codices that worked differently because they were phrased differently depending on what book you were looking at at the time.

Playing guard in 4th ed invariably required me to spend the first part of the game explaining how my basilisks and hellhounds worked. Now I say "they're barrage weapons" and "it's a torrent flamer" and people just know what I mean.

This was especially a pain in the butt for some of the more "creative" rules. I don't think I ever met two necron players who played the old WBB the same way. People were hoping it would get swapped out for FNP for a reason...

To be fair, the Hellhound was the only "torrent" unit in the game at that point. That was originally it's unique "schtick". That said, it having to hit on a 4+, or roll every model individually on a 4+, was incredibly lame

Yeah.

Well, there were other things, too. Doctrines needed to be explained every time, too. You couldn't just say "it gives them stubborn", you had to explain how their Ld worked, for example. And guard had mortar HWSs before there were standardized rules for multiple barrages.

A feel like you always had to be explaining stuff, especially in pick-up play. It was more than a bit cumbersome.

I do have to admit that when I say I am playing 4e games, it's more like I'm using 4e rules and the majority of forces are using their 3e codex books like it's the days right after the 4e release. So the majority of special rules that the different forces used to make you reference their individual codex for are just consolidated in the USR section of the 4e rulebook, like True Grit, Fleet of Foot/hoof, etc.

I barely get any games of 40k played, so the simpler the better, as I am more into playing a game that lets me experience the universe, rather than being super-competitive. After codexes started coming out for 4e, everything just got more and more bloated with every edition. Back in 3/4, i felt more like I could keep on top of what everything in each army could do, even if I did not play them.

Hell, I think I could teach 2nd edition to my wife easier than anything after 4th. Plus I like books, not e-files, for my supplemental material.

Amazing how the slower static releases and long periods between codex updates have become the good ol days.

 Byte wrote:
Amazing how the slower static releases and long periods between codex updates have become the good ol days.

Well its because they actually had good game testers and actually tried to make it playable.

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:
Amazing how the slower static releases and long periods between codex updates have become the good ol days.

Well its because they actually had good game testers and actually tried to make it playable.

Ive been playing this game since 2nd edition and have never heard such things ever said.

 Byte wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:
Amazing how the slower static releases and long periods between codex updates have become the good ol days.

Well its because they actually had good game testers and actually tried to make it playable.

Ive been playing this game since 2nd edition and have never heard such things ever said.

So are you telling me that 7th edition is more playable and more fun and more comprehensive than 4th edition and 5th edition?

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Byte wrote:
Amazing how the slower static releases and long periods between codex updates have become the good ol days.

Well its because they actually had good game testers and actually tried to make it playable.

Ive been playing this game since 2nd edition and have never heard such things ever said.

So are you telling me that 7th edition is more playable and more fun and more comprehensive than 4th edition and 5th edition?

Yes. 5th edition leaf blower vendetta scout move ridiculousness, GK auto win power weapon and wound shanangins... com'n man... 4th edition WD BAs, Eldar pop up attack gravtank stupidity. Assault attacks hit skimmers on 6s... really!? Pop up attacks...! Give me a break man. Combat consolidation anarchy... 4th and 5th made complete armies unplayable.

I played a lot of tournaments a lot from 3rd-4th and the only book that was never represented around our local store was codex Catachans. During 4th ed tournaments we usually had a wide variety to armies represented. So to say that a large amount of armies were unplayable by the edition will vary from location to location.

I can't think of any armies that were straight unplayable. Just because there were a few cheesy lists didn't mean that nothing but cheesy lists could be fielded.

And, as mentioned, every edition had cheese. I think he's just using a really weird definition of "unplayable". Something more akin to "armies I tried once and lost with" than "armies that couldn't be played".

I think that the last time I really felt like I was having fun was back in fourth edition. I disliked all the actual in game choices that 5th took out of the game and everything ended in sixth where the game quickly became pay to win and 40K lost its identity.

Which in-game choices did 5th remove? Other than the area terrain thing?

And there was a great deal of play-to-win in 4th edition. Meanwhile, that attitude has been seriously challenged since 6th and especially 7th dropped. It was only play-to-win types that nerdragequit when seventh came by.

Pay to win. As in incomplete codex's with additional fifty dollar supplements or data sheet.

Rules that were dropped that allowed tactical flexibility. The two biggest that come to mind is the ability to turn off special melee weapons and choosing wither or not to make a sweeping advanced. You could also say that giving every one run took away a tactical advantage to those models that had fleet.

Oh, sorry. To be fair, pay to win only exists at the absolute peak of people needing the easiest wins. For a vast majority of 40k players, it isn't more than usual. Plus, buying a new dataslate and a new model is a lot cheaper than buying an entire new army like codex-hoppers used to have to do.

And you're not forced to use special weapons in close combat if you have them. Now as then, if you have a powerfist and a chainsword, you can always choose to use the chainsword. You always have the choice to just use your attacks profile. And I don't recall there ever being a reason why one wouldn't sweeping advance. You had the choice to consolidate, or possibly wipe out your opponent's unit, and then consolidate. Fleet is messed up now, but it wasn't in 5th edition.

I would add something else, though, that was SUPER annoying in 4th edition that they fixed in 5th. In 4th ed, independent characters with powerfists or slower initiative were basically guaranteed not to get a chance to swing at all thanks to models not being engaged until their initiative step rolled around. On many an occasion I had my eviscerator priest killed out of the ability to do anything before his initiative step arrived. That was SMF levels of BS.

Then melee has changed because it used to be in fifth and sixth if you had a special weapon you had to use it. Also being forced to sweeping advance caused me to loose my first ever game of fifth Ed. Both of us were Marines in hth over an objective. He lost and failed his LD check. He was running. If I could have just let him run he would have most likely run too far to contest. But no I was forced to sweep, I caught him and we stayed locked in combat. In order to win the game I actually had to lose the roll off. It left a bad taste in my mouth from the get go.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
your priest is an example of how model placement mattered in fourth. It was a skill to set up your charges so that the guys you want to fight fought and the guys you didn't want to fight against couldnt. It was something I was good at and IMO made hth a satisfying part of the game when it worked as planned.

Wasn't 4th the age of plasma gets hot on a 1 or 2 when rapid firing? Plasma was painful, but still worth it.

 Jayden63 wrote:
Then melee has changed because it used to be in fifth and sixth if you had a special weapon you had to use it. Also being forced to sweeping advance caused me to loose my first ever game of fifth Ed. Both of us were Marines in hth over an objective. He lost and failed his LD check. He was running. If I could have just let him run he would have most likely run too far to contest. But no I was forced to sweep, I caught him and we stayed locked in combat. In order to win the game I actually had to lose the roll off. It left a bad taste in my mouth from the get go.

You didn't need to use the powerfist in 6th either.

And that's a pretty rare situation you're describing. I would note, though, that it's not the only compulsory thing about close combat. You can't choose not to pile in if it would help you, or choose for models not to attack at all in close combat.

 Jayden63 wrote:
your priest is an example of how model placement mattered in fourth.

Except it wasn't. I could place my priest correctly, and the rest of the squad could kill one or two models, and guess which ones my opponent would choose to remove? Great, now my priest doesn't get to attack.

Pile-in moves and determining who could fight at the beginning were two necessary advancements in 6th and 5th, respectively.

I started playing in 3rd and stopped in 4th during my mid teens. I fondly remember the shift to 4th and how much more *fun* all the miniatures, codices, rules, and gameplay became.

I sorely miss the "make your chapter" part of the SM codex, or the equivalent the guard had.

Cons:

- too harsh on Transport Vehicles and passengers
- easy mode for Skimmers
- atrocious rules wording/editing
- incompetent gunline players always complaining because movement mattered

Pros:

+ everything else

Once the 4th ed Chaos Marines came out there was a good balance between the army books, there were some strong builds nothing was really over the top. Eldar skimmers were good but they were super expensive so it wasn't like the table was covered with them. Drop podding SM could be vicious OR a complete disaster. Tau could pump out shots, but were very flimsy in combat. Green tide was great in 4th. It was a good edition if you just wanted to get together w/friends and have a few hours of fun. Pick up games were easy, at least in my area, because everyone bought every book and it was easy to skim them over to get the gist. It was a good stream lined system.

I can see the appeal of the "forging a narrative" style of 6th & 7th it seems like it would be fun every once in a while. However if you are playing regularly and trying to do a campaign or tournament it was a lot easier to keep track of the 90 pages of rules for 4th as opposed to 200+ for 6th. I don't even know how many 7th has. It all depends on what you like, some people want to play D&D, while others are happy to just play Heroquest. It just comes down to how complicated you want things to be.

Once the 4th ed Chaos Marines came out there was a good balance between the army books, there were some strong builds nothing was really over the top. Eldar skimmers were good but they were super expensive so it wasn't like the table was covered with them. Drop podding SM could be vicious OR a complete disaster. Tau could pump out shots, but were very flimsy in combat. Green tide was great in 4th. It was a good edition if you just wanted to get together w/friends and have a few hours of fun. Pick up games were easy, at least in my area, because everyone bought every book and it was easy to skim them over to get the gist. It was a good stream lined system.

Exactly my feeling of those years. Everything since is why my interest has waned depressingly. I think that the fourth edition era is very similar to the second edition era: the people that had the least fun, or the most problems, were not playing with laid-back enough friends (I stress "friends", not "opponents"). Every single edition since the first has enabled super-competitive players to make other people miserable, that's always been the elephant in the room.

Some of the most fun I've had in 40K were painting and converting armies for Space Wolves 13th Company, or an entire army of Kroot Mercs from Chapter Approved.

Eldar skimmers weren't particularly overly expensive. The Falcon after kit was typically ~185pts and was limited in FoC slots anyway, and was generally considered far more resilient than a Land Raider was at 250+. Wave Serpents (while lacking the raw firepower they have now treated all weapons higher than S8 as S8 and nothing ever got more than 1d6 armor pen) were even cheaper than they are now.

Then there were still lots of truly abysmal armies like DH and IG in 4E that played far worse than anything we have now.

 Ailaros wrote:

Vaktathi wrote:Old school Victory points were still a thing, where the actual value of something killed mattered. If you killed a Land Raider, you got 250 VP's, and if you killed a Rhino you got 50 VP's (they were 50pts back then), whereas now they're *both* 1 VP, which is asinine. The book also defined margins of victory.

To be fair, though, this was basically 4th edition's only mission, apart from table quarters, which was a very silly way to play. When every game devolved to literally nothing more than who could kill the most stuff fastest, without even the pretense of things like serious board control, it did sort of limit the game.

VPs were nice, but missions, overall, have only been improving since 4th ed.

I respectfully disagree.

Maelstrom of War missions are ridiculous, with bs objectives completely unrelated to the fight at hand being generated every single turn.
When a turn symbolizes a minute or so of fighting, that's just ridiculous.

Some EW missions are acceptable, others are garbage where you only count two points on the battlefield, or just the Fast Attack choices.

Everything uses the completely anti tactical "first blood", "line breaker" and "slay the warlord".



The sure thing is that many tournaments still use KP, and they all use the new KP which is by far the dumbest metric ever, which in the end means that v7 missions are worse than v4 book missions.

Table quarters represented board control and KP represented murder control, and that's just everything war is about.



I would be delighted to have smarter objectives for sure, but what has been added since v4 is not smart and it breaks the immersion.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ailaros wrote:
Tanks should have to pay for all of their armor, mobility and guns, and then have to pay to also be a transport. If not in points, then in some other way, such as risk.

I'm all for the risk, but when you talk about paying to be a transport, I'd argue that I have nothing in my codex worth transporting, except Fire Dragons because they're the only melta I've got access to.

Back in 4th with Rending, or 5th with cheap Fragons, why not, but today ??? Even if we had access to a Transport we couldn't care less because we have nothing worth transporting. That in itself is an issue though.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Eldar skimmers weren't particularly overly expensive. The Falcon after kit was typically ~185pts and was limited in FoC slots anyway, and was generally considered far more resilient than a Land Raider was at 250+. Wave Serpents (while lacking the raw firepower they have now treated all weapons higher than S8 as S8 and nothing ever got more than 1d6 armor pen) were even cheaper than they are now.

Then there were still lots of truly abysmal armies like DH and IG in 4E that played far worse than anything we have now.

it just wasn't that bad. A wave serpent with TL brigh lance, Shuriken cannon, vector engins, and spirit stones was 175pts and it was still BS 3. In 4th the average game was1850 that is 9% of your points for a vehicle that had very limited rolls. Plus you stull had to buy a unit to put in it.

With the bright lance it could hunt tanks, but outside a guard player people were not using more then a few vehicles. The bright lance didn't scare infantry because it could only kill 1 model at a time. You could give it TL scatter laser or TL shuriken cannon and go hunting infantry but the best weapon was AP4 so again outside of guard nobody cared because they still had a save, or in the case of Orks and nids more models.

The holo field everyone likes to complain about only worked to the front and rear, back was tototally exposed. Yes it did reduce strength greater than 8 to 8, but let us not forget that even then everyone and his squadmate had a meltagun that was getting through on a 4+. By the time you got to turn 3 or 4 it wasn't very hard to get behind the thing anyway.

Waver serpents were not scary at all.

Falcons were very seldom seen because they were a waste of points. Still BS 3, the pulse laser was not a lance weapon, if you put a bright lance on it, it couldn't move more than 6 and fire both, and it didn't even have the option for the energy field. In 4th in you saw a falcon you thanked your opponent for wasting points.

One thing though: v7 is by far the most balanced edition.

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:


it just wasn't that bad. A wave serpent with TL brigh lance, Shuriken cannon, vector engins, and spirit stones was 175pts and it was still BS 3. In 4th the average game was1850 that is 9% of your points for a vehicle that had very limited rolls. Plus you stull had to buy a unit to put in it.

Almost nobody used the lances for two reasons, first, they were horrifically overcosted, and second, they just weren't necessary given the way vehicles worked, being able to kill on glances and pretty much shut down any gun-tank with any successful glance or pen. Scatterlasers were the big thing, and with those a Wave Serpent was 155pts, and couldn't be killed except by a 6 on the damage chart. Not impossible to kill, but certainly worlds more resilient than almost any other vehicle in the game, particularly in conjunction with the Strength and Pen reducing shield.

With the bright lance it could hunt tanks, but outside a guard player people were not using more then a few vehicles. The bright lance didn't scare infantry because it could only kill 1 model at a time. You could give it TL scatter laser or TL shuriken cannon and go hunting infantry but the best weapon was AP4 so again outside of guard nobody cared because they still had a save, or in the case of Orks and nids more models.

With a scatterlaser it worked just fine at killing infantry and light/medium vehicles (you could still kill outright on glances back then). I don't recall ever seeing a bright lance equipped one, though EML's were common. Scatterlasers were the most common weapon that I recall seeing.

IG typically didn't run many vehicles back then, largely because they were expensive, and very easily killed. A Chimera as kitted now with two guns (non-twin-linked), smoke, and searchlight was 89pts and if penetrated even just once (and not killed on a 4+) was automatically stunned and forced the unit to disembark and take a pinning test (which Skimmers never had to deal with), the Hellhound lacked Fast and didn't auto-hit, so largely most IG armies would just run 3 Russ tanks.

Eldar however routinely ran 7-8 very hard to kill Skimmer tanks, which, for 4E, was a lot of tanks. Tau also would routinely run a good number of tanks, with many of the same benefits.

The holo field everyone likes to complain about only worked to the front and rear, back was tototally exposed. Yes it did reduce strength greater than 8 to 8, but let us not forget that even then everyone and his squadmate had a meltagun that was getting through on a 4+. By the time you got to turn 3 or 4 it wasn't very hard to get behind the thing anyway.

I think I can count on one hand the number of Wave Serpents I managed to get behind and hurt without the Eldar player making the decision to sacrifice the serpent to unload cargo more effectively. That Meltagun was also drastically less effective not only because of the lack of double pen, but the SMF bonus that made AP1 non-functional against Skimmers.

Waver serpents were not scary at all.

Didn't say they were anything scary like they are now, but were exceedingly difficult to stop, particularly as with dedicated AT guns they were harder to put out of action than something like a Leman Russ tank was, provided reasonable firepower, and were almost impossible to stop from delivering their cargo, once kitted properly.

Falcons were very seldom seen because they were a waste of points. Still BS 3, the pulse laser was not a lance weapon, if you put a bright lance on it, it couldn't move more than 6 and fire both, and it didn't even have the option for the energy field. In 4th in you saw a falcon you thanked your opponent for wasting points

O_o Falcon were one of the major top tournament units. Even better than the Serpent's Energy Field, they could take Holofields (where the serpent could not), so any hit had to roll 2d6 pick the lowest for damage, meaning a kitted Falcon could only be destroyed on boxcars. They were what gave rise to the "Eldar Flying Circus", load them up with harlies, send them forward, turn 2 the Harlies disembarked and assaulted something, striking at I6 and rending on 6's to hit with Kiss's. Fire Dragons were another favorite. That was *the* combo to beat in the second half of 4th edition.

BS3 also wasn't as big of an issue back then, there was a whole lot less cover, vehicles couldn't get cover at all, most things were more expensive so there was less stuff to kill, and the firepower output of a BS3 Falcon still was nothing to sniff at (particularly when things like Russ tanks couldn't fire the main gun and other weapons at the same time at all).

Another huge deal was that you couldn't target IC's on their own unless they were the closest model, so you'd get Eldrad or a Farseer on a Jetbike hiding between the forward swept wings of an Eldar tank, completely untargetable, casting Doom, Fortune, Guide, etc.

The balance within and between codices was pretty poor for 3rd, 4th, and well into 5th. The basic engine was reasonably good, although all three editions have big problems with vehicles, missions, and assaults. 5th edition also started the nightmare of complex wound allocation.

By all acounts, the codices are more balanced now, but the core rules are incredibly bloated.

I doubt that anyone rule set could be picked up and used without a few tweaks, although you could argue that 4th edition would require the fewest (aside from the missions). Making Skimmers Moving fast into the same as hull down (so only on a 4+) and eliminating emergency disembarkation for anything other than destroyed transports, along with elminating entanglement, would fix a lot of the issues 4th edition had.