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 Grimtuff wrote:

 Xca|iber wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:

Sure, balance is lacking, but it always did. The community just noticed less because it was imbalanced in favor of the popular majority factions, the 50 shades of marines. And it's harder to notice unfairness when it's in your favor.

You've clearly never knelt before the Almighty God-Falcon.

The Imperium could declare Exterminatus on a planet and there would still be a holo-Falcon floating in space, having only suffered a crew shaken result.

The gooden age for me was before i started playing. When Chaos Space Marine were overpowered in 3.5.

SM and Eldar has continued to be op.

Of the relatively short time I've been in the hobby, I have to go with the first edition I played, which was 5th edition.
To put it shortly; Looking back at 5th now it just seems a bit... simpler. In a good way.

I should mention that the local community have died out since then as well, and the local club had the most members just before 6th, which certainly makes me biased as it was actually possible to get a game in on a regular basis then.

I do love the 4 and 5th edition. I started with these, I got to know the hobby with these and I will always remember the excitement of opening a brand new White Dwarf. Creativity was high among the designer team and support for community was still a thing.

Those who prefer 7th for its atmosphere should just get back to the richness of what was once this magazine : a gold mine for conversions and fluff a good interface with cool dudes at GW.

I want to cry when I see the ad it has become....

 RazgrizOne wrote:
I do love the 4 and 5th edition. I started with these, I got to know the hobby with these and I will always remember the excitement of opening a brand new White Dwarf. Creativity was high among the designer team and support for community was still a thing.

Those who prefer 7th for its atmosphere should just get back to the richness of what was once this magazine : a gold mine for conversions and fluff a good interface with cool dudes at GW.

I want to cry when I see the ad it has become....

InB4 "White Dwarf was always an ad. Etc. Etc..."

It may have been an ad, but it was better at hiding it.

Another vote for 5th. 4th was pretty fun too but 5th edition was when my gaming group was at its largest, the rules were pretty straightforward and practically any game at any point value was enjoyable.

6th introduced some rules that I liked the concept of but at other times it just felt like unnecessary dice rolling (warlord traits, I'm looking at you). And then there was unbound, introduction of lords of war which had terrible external balance, and it just started feeling like a giant convoluted mess. Sure, 7th cleaned it up a bit, but at that point my gaming group was dead.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia for me, but 5th was the golden age.

For me, 2nd Edition was the golden age.

 SharkoutofWata wrote:
Now. Everyone that's sour has had their reasons to leave and the game isn't full of negative nancies. If someone really hated GW they have moved onto the many other games out there and the people that stayed are pretty friggin passionate about it or just are there for a good time. Both are good people to play against.

Some of us cant because there are almost no non GW games played at their club and the nearest place that plays the ones they like - such as Bolt Action and Warmachine are around 2 hours away and only meet once a week.

For me the golden age was 5th edition. It was fun, vehicles felt like vehicles, most of the codex's where balanced against one another and there was very little that needed improving.

I have not played much except 6th. Still waiting on everyone to finally update to 7th...
But reading through the rules, 5th really seems by far the best. Maybe we should downgrade instead.

Those of you saying now is the golden age: in what way? Because you have these giant, CAD-created plastic models for $150+? Because you can buy Betrayal at Calth and get inferior plastic versions of old resin kits? The current rules for both systems are a mess. There are no sponsored tournaments. Anything GW puts into print is either unnecessarily price-inflated, bereft of real content, or loaded with mistakes. If you live near Warhammer World, maybe you can attend a marketing seminar a few times a year.

Sometimes the good old days actually were pretty good. Not perfect by any measure, but it sure beats some of your myopic views of the hobby.

While not perfect, I think 5th might have been the best mechanically. A lot of the early crazy had been ironed out, but things hadn’t quite gone off the rails yet.

As a hobby, I think 3rd was the best time. WD was full of cool stuff, always something new and cool. GW still felt like a game company, not just a machine to suck out our cash (that happened to make a game/minis) Codex creep might have been bad, some mechanics were borked, and if you wanted to play with the most up to date rules you needed a binder full of WD articles, FAQs, and the like. But everyone was in it to have fun, from the company on down.

At least according to my fuzzy, rose-colored nostalgia. We are talking quite a few years ago, and I’m not as sharp as I used to be...

Another vote for 5th edition. It was the most functional the game has ever been, and needed only a few tweaks to be perfect. Instead, they threw the baby out with the bath water and we got 6th edition instead.

7th for me, technically end of 5th and 6th, but because it brought me horus heresy, thankfully the taint hasn't reached hh yet, no stupid formations and 25% rule on Lords of war, if we even use them, plus the Psychic phase, which I maintain was a good idea to bring back, just very poorly implemented.

Depends what is meant by golden age really. As far as 40k goes, I would have said 5th / 6th, but that's when I started playing properly with an understanding of the rules.

As far as game fluff goes, then I would put it before the recent DE and Ork etc codices (before lots of fluff was cut out and flavour lost).

As far as fluff in general? Black Library are going like the clappers producing books - they're currently pushing the boundaries and haven't peaked yet.

Everyone will have different aspects they will fondly vote as the Golden Age, likely different from mine but hey, it's all subjective anyhow.

If you're talking fluff in general and including BL then I'd say the shark was jumped years ago. These days they just shove out random bolter porn Heresy hardback, limited edition, novellas, short stories and audio dramas.

End of fourth, beginning of fifth was GW golden age. If you look at it from a business stand point. GW was making money hand over fist in that time frame. They sponsored tournaments and hobby conventions. They ran multi-month long story campaigns and actively involved the independent gaming stores instead of shunning them out. They were expanding their customer base and presence in the form of their own retail outlets. GW was growing. The were releasing some of their most popular codexs and bringing new life into older armies.

GW has steadily been on the decline ever since 6th edition dropped and is horribly on the fast track to ruin. They have pretty much become a shell of their former selves when it comes to the gaming side of the hobby. Sure they may be releasing impressive looking models, but they also have quite the impressive price tag to go with them. And their current rules have bloated to the point where the game has no uniform identity and most likely will not be fixed anytime soon, if ever.

The "golden age" of 40k I think can be split into two distinct parts.

The "universe" golden age, and "gameplay" golden age.

With regards to the latter, I think undoubtedly this was 4th and 5th editions. Lots of GW run GT's, tons of pickup play, lots of local leagues, large independent events were ramping up, and prices were mostly still somewhat sane. Probably the best time to be a 40k player.

With regards to the former, I think that it was probably 2nd through early 4th edition, that 1994-2004 decade, when everything still had that sort of 80's "Heavy Metal" vibe to it, the backgrround had lots of energy and dark humor, and the great gods of the universe actively participated in the fluff, and there was still a slightly cartoony, if very dark, edge to the visuals of the models. The fluff has declined dramtically in quality since then in both form and substance, while the art increasingly looks like something out of League of Legends or the like and less and less like the old iconic thrash-metal/mad-max/dystopian 40k universe, and naming conventions are becoming increasingly absurd.

So, TL;DR. Golden Age of the 40k universe? 1994-2004. Golden Age of 40k Gameplay? ~2004-2011.

3rd edition was great! 6th edition was the only edition to eclipse it in greatness, only to be stomped on with 7th and formations everywhere.

When never if considering all aspects at the same time IMHO

Model Golden age: Now, 90% of the new models are spectacular. Although..... They have lost a lot of the tongue and cheek attitude when designing models, some of the early years models kept things from being too serious, and the new plastic kits seem to have less extras in them.

Being In touch with their customer base: 2-3 edition, remember the Skulls program? They loved their customers and knew exactly what they wanted back then.

Game edition: 3rd and 4th, even the weaker codices could win with a savoy player, run away cheese didn't exist. Power creep existed but there was no 7th ed. Eldar level cheese.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Fluff: 3-4 edition, a lot of the rewrite stuff makes me puke. I loved the original Necron lore the new lore makes me gag. Along with a lot of other things they rewrote when the old guard left. The fantasy rewrite and AOS stuff makes my eye twitch.

5th edition was probably the most playable edition for the tournament scene. Shoehorning in flyers was the first of many deathknells for the game.

Early-mid 3rd was the best. The big black tome had just reballanced all the armies, the ruleset was lean and mean back then. What happened was that GW folded to player complaints re: Elite Armies / Rhino rush and what followed was a series of knee-jerk "fixes" that would:

1. See a reduction in flexibility of elite armies (charge what you shoot). *Easy counter: Set up in an interlayered brick.

2. Reactions to Rhino rush resulted in: See huge swings from shooting/assault potency: Charge what you shoot, new rapid fire, everybody fights, changes to sweeping advance, changes to consolidate, changes to disembark from vehicles, changes to charging, running, restoration of overwatch etc, changes to models granting cover saves etc. *Easy counter to Rhino rush... DON'T SET UP ON THE EDGE OF YOUR DEPLOYMENT ZONE.

3. The changes following their "fixes" to Rhino Rush also saw huge swings on vehicle potency as they went from too good, to not good and the many in-between states - changes to transports, changes to skimmers, many changes to the damage tables, addition of superheavies, addition of flyers... Every time they changed something based on the Rhino, all the other transports - Eldar (very expensive, live-or-dies due to Skimmer rule and Ork/Dark Eldar (dirt cheap, open topped, paper armor), who lived on the extreme ends of the spectrum became horribly broken - either too good, or very terrible.

I can't endorse 5th as the golden age as it had to contend with all the bolt-on fixes in 3rd and 4th (as well its own errata). Sure there's superficially more options, but it is really a red herring, as the proportion of options that are viable are still about the same. Andy Chambers had the right idea, which is 40k could have used a full rebuild at 4th, and the longer they kick that down the road, the uglier its going to be when they finally do it.