Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm curious. Which edition of 40K does everyone think had the most balanced and fun core ruleset and why? I'm leaving 1st and 2nd out as waaay too far back though.

5E without question.

Mostly balanced, and the things that were out of whack could be houseruled back to normalcy within two sentences.
Assault was as viable as shooting, and most armies were at least somewhat able to compete with eachother..

Yeah zero surprise 5th is so far ahead it had some issues but it was fun same can't be said for the last two.

Oh how people tend to have nostalgic feelings and utterly forget all the bad and just look at the good.

5E had just as many balance issues as 7th, just with less actual options around it was not as easy to notice them.

So I'll take the version with more options over the one that is highly restrictive, as both are just as imbalanced either way.

5th. It at least pretended to have a ruleset that matched the scale of the game.

All the tedious random rolling and small skirmish rules 7th introduced while increasing the size of the game was almost universally a step backwards.

Interesting results thus far, because I would have said 5th as well, having played since 4th. It would seem that 5th was the most popular generally.

5th was the last edition I enjoyed.
Of the options listed, it was the most "fun" for me - but still less fun than either RT or 2nd ed.

I didn't enjoy 5th very much. it was ok. Probably 3rd was better. but I preferred hand to hand in 4th over 3rd.
If it had been the same in 5th and some how caped or removed the combat resolution to fearless units 5 would have been so much more fun.

Played one game in 4th and I only had daemons; I was forced to deep strike the whole army, and deep strike was very harmful. 5th gave me a chance, and was the edition my friends who had been playing a while all said was better too. I got 6th when it released and hated it. 7th cleans it up, but there are SO MANY BOOKS!! It just feels like there's too much going on. 5th had some issues, yes (blood angels super powerful, grey knights vs daemons=auto win), but it was manageable. And the codexes could easy make for good "counts as" armies; a SW book leaving out priests could easily make for a kickass Khorne army. Grey Knights could make for an awesome T-Sons list. And you only needed one book to do it. Now? You need three. I'm not including the big rulebook either.

So far, 5th is winning 3/4 votes.

I disliked the difficulty in killing light vehicles in 5th, but that could be easily rectified.

And I know what you mean, there's so many formations/expansion, and so much allying go on these days that it's really difficult to keep track of.

2nd edition had the best core rules to my mind, not the most balanced edition, but that was a peripheral problem IMO, the core rules were good and only needed minor tweaking.

All the editions that have come since are flawed at their core IMO.

Maaan, this is bumming me out because I picked the game back up like a week before 6th ed came out and thus got in exactly one game of 5th

5th was pretty good, but overly assault focussed for my taste and vehicles were just needlessly difficult to actually destroy. That and wound allocation. What a stupid feth-around that was.

6th was my vote... specifically early 6th prior to the Imperial Knights becoming a thing. I liked the mechanics, assault never actually died in my metagame. It just became a tool instead of a total strategy. Some people like smashing dudes into dudes, but I figure that's what fantasy settings are for. I want to shoot stuff in the distant future, regardless of the knights in space thing.

I'm in favour of *limited* allies. I'm not a big fan of formations. I also liked having more missions in the core book, most of which were balanced well in their time. You didn't HAVE to play a hyper-mobile army to compete, you could play slower moving units without being handicapped.

5th was my second favourite edition. I started in 2nd. It was crap.

Only played 2nd, and the end of 3rd and beginning o 4th. Haven't played since.

Didn't like 3rd/4th, so I'll sit this one out.

I voted 3rd edition because, at it's core, every edition since then has been basically a patchjob on top of that. I only played maybe one game under those rules, but they were far simpler so less confusing stuff.

Also I would like to point out that 3rd and 4th probably had the most support from GW (being willing to actually change the rules as written in the codexes like the nerfs to Obliterators), whereas even in 5th edition they seldomed seem to care about consistency and rules, and flat out didn't care after 6th edition. Every edition had it's flaws but at least GW made an attempt to fix the two earlier ones.

Something between 4th and 5th. 4th made vehicles death traps so naturally 5th made them too strong. That pendulum swung back again too far, as usual.

5th brought about the beginning of horrible wound allocation shenanigans which has only gotten worse with all the 'look out sir' baloney and 'nearest model' kludge. Barf.

Probably 5E.

5E wasn't perfect, Wound allocation, Kill Points, vehicle weapons shooting (e.g. move a predator and only 1 lascannon of 3 can fire at all), transports being a little too "point and click" (some of the 7E mechanics involving stunned vehicles requiring Ld tests by passengers would have been a good fix) and almost *all* cover being 4+ were issues. However, the rest of the core rules were probably the best all around core rule set that 40k has ever had. The 5E core ruleset probably had the least bias towards any one subset of armies, aside from the aforementioned issues, almost all other problems were codex related issues.

I want to often put 4E in place of 5E, but the ridiculously hard to kill Skimmers vs the almost completely unsusable non-skimmer vehicles (and especially non-skimmer transports) coupled with the area terrain LoS rules and ability to consolidate into new combats made for some rather absurd shennanigans.

3E has similar problems to 4th, only moreso (hooray rhino rush assault spam!), but I liked the concept of all the army lists in one book.

6E seemingly took what was great about 5E and borked it, added a couple good additions (e.g. the Rapid Fire changes), and then added a whole bunch of extra complexity and random rolls for no real good reason, and reintroduced the Skimmer vs Non-Skimmer gap.

7E is a complete disaster. It doubled down on the bad elements of 6E and then vaulted right over that shark. It has no idea what it wants to be, is absurdly overstuffed with needlessly complex rules and pointless additional rolling, has lost all sense of scale, and at this point is just a sandbox for insanely overpowered rules designed to push web bundles and a "yeah, just buy anything and you can use it with anything else" mentality.

 BoomWolf wrote:
Oh how people tend to have nostalgic feelings and utterly forget all the bad and just look at the good.

5E had just as many balance issues as 7th, just with less actual options around it was not as easy to notice them.

5E had it's issues. It was not perfect by any means. It had some crazy broken stuff. It did not however have anything near the balance issues of 7E. Grey Knights having cheap autocannon upgrades to S8 was bad. It was not "I get 600 free extra points just because I took X units in Y configuration" bad, or was it "Yeah my 81pt minimum sized Troop squad is outmatching your purpose built heavy support battle tank for firepower" bad, nor was it "here's my entire army of superheavies with D weapons" bad.

I probably had the most fun with 2nd ed but that ruleset was ultimately not sustainable so my vote for over all best is 5th. As others have pointed out, it still had its fair share of "stupid", and it had some minor balance issues towards the end, but nothing like what we have now. For me, coming from RT and 2nd ed, 3rd edition felt like going from chess to tic-tac-toe. While it was a faster game, it was not one that I enjoyed. Forth ed I mostly sat out but 5th imo found a balance between interesting complexity and streamlining for a faster game.

I initially liked 6th because it felt like a slight return to the fun of 2nd ed but 6th got out of control quickley. 7th is a complete fail imo. I actually find it difficult to play. Too many rules all over the place and I HATE the idea of putting out campaign supplemnts instead of updating codexes. Thats a terrible precedent that will ultimately only make the game more expensive and more complex. If 8 doesnt fix the issues of 6/7 ill be sitting it out.

 Vaktathi wrote:
5E had it's issues. It was not perfect by any means. It had some crazy broken stuff. It did not however have anything near the balance issues of 7E. Grey Knights having cheap autocannon upgrades to S8 was bad. It was not "I get 600 free extra points just because I took X units in Y configuration" bad, or was it "Yeah my 81pt minimum sized Troop squad is outmatching your purpose built heavy support battle tank for firepower" bad, nor was it "here's my entire army of superheavies with D weapons" bad.

I think that's it in a nutshell. Yes, there were a handful of units that were more cost-efficient than others. Yes, wound allocation was a pain. Yes, there were various other issues.

But when you got down to it, it was still downright playable. There were a handful of power lists at tournies(nob bikers or lash prince anyone?), but outside of that? Most armies could fight each other with a reasonable chance of success. If a guy chucked down a list filled with the most cost effective unit spammed, you could still field a reasonably fluffy army and hope to win if you were a better player. There were a dozen or so codexes to learn, and that was it, making it easier to memorise what could do what. Combat and shooting, or a mix of the two were both viable strategies. I could charge without dealing with overwatch and variable charge distance, and units could shoot without having to deal with invulnerable/cover saves on every other model with a special rule.

It was quicker, cleaner, and generally speaking, there was a lot less differential in power between units. If you tweaked 5th a little bit to account for those minor rules problems, and wrote a balanced set of codexes, you'd actually have a pretty fine game.

I feel like this question comes up every week now. I'm going to defer to Vaktathi, he said it better than I could. 5th was easily the best edition, and I hope 8th is much more in line with that than what we have now.

6th.

5e was the easier rule set to play and learn.

7e is a reasonably (I've played 40k since 4e and have been gaming for 36+ years) good rule set, far more complicated than 5e, but made even more cumbersome by the codex shenanigans referred to by Vaktathi and others.

Given a choice, I'd still pick up the 7e rule book and the 7e armies ... except 5e Dark Eldar. I miss 4+ FNP wyches, with 24 Dark Lances.

5th edition had its faults, but was by far the best edition so far, for me.

2nd edition runs a close second... The rules had all sorts of issues (not least being the close combat was just painfully slow) but it was fun.

5th edition with transport vehicles toned down a little, wound allocation simplified, and with (selectable) Warlord Traits, Snap Shots (including Blast Weapons) and Overwatch (as an alternative to shooting in the shooting phase) would have been just about perfect, rather than the mess that we got instead with 6th edition.

5th aside from the vehicle killing difficulty... though cackling madly with oldcron monoliths was admittingly very pleasurable

2nd ed. Most logical and balanced by far. After 3rd ed it's been just bandaids in an attempt to hide issues with the core rules.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 BoomWolf wrote:
Oh how people tend to have nostalgic feelings and utterly forget all the bad and just look at the good.

5E had just as many balance issues as 7th, just with less actual options around it was not as easy to notice them.

5E had it's issues. It was not perfect by any means. It had some crazy broken stuff. It did not however have anything near the balance issues of 7E. Grey Knights having cheap autocannon upgrades to S8 was bad. It was not "I get 600 free extra points just because I took X units in Y configuration" bad, or was it "Yeah my 81pt minimum sized Troop squad is outmatching your purpose built heavy support battle tank for firepower" bad, nor was it "here's my entire army of superheavies with D weapons" bad.

There isn't anything INHERENTLY unbalanced at getting free upgrade and/or transports as your formation rewards.
Its just that the formation itself, and the things it gifts, are the issue.

HAD the strike force only gave full 10 man squads the transport, and it was only rhino/drop pod, it wouldn't be any issue what-so-ever. its the fact its specifically razorbacks and requires just 5 man squads for it that causes the issue. most formations are a good, healthy thing. they encourage mixed forces and cross-unit synergy. its a tiny minority that I can count on one hand that are a problem, and the common themes for all the problem formations is either that the benefit is ovewhelming compared to the trouble getting it, or that the formation is made of a single unit type.

Superheavies as well, and D weapons, are not inherently a problem. in fact, most superheavies AND most D platforms never even reach the competitive table as it is THAT obvious they are just not worth the trouble. its a few, highly specific ones that are too good compared to the baseline, and it that notion, not any different form 5th that had its own set of "clearly over the top" units, it was just different units that were OP for different reasons, and were just as toxic. all the "fixes" needed, are not in the system itself, but in a handful of units-and in most cases, a mere point re-calibration is enough.


No idea what sort of 81 point minimum troop squad has serious AT power though. you mean scatterbikes? that's again a local issue in a codex, not an edition problem. (also, they brake light transports, but can't touch actual tanks)


Any complaint anyone ever has on 7th can be easily rolled into the same handful of specific units/formations that have rules that are just too much. a handful that is a tiny fraction of the overall total. (and the outdated codices having issues competing with the better designed newer ones, but that always been that way at any point in time)
And while that handful dominated the competitive scene as in that scene only the best matters, it does not change the fact that the game, as a whole, is bigger, more versatile and enables you to truly play the way YOU WANT to play, rather than shoehorn you into a few specific builds. (because lets admit, the CAD is actually the least versatile "formation". it encourages to spamming the best stand-alone unit in each slot and nothing else)

"(also, they brake light transports, but can't touch actual tanks)"

They kill IKs.

6+D6 = 7 to 12 Armour Pen roll

Anything with Av12 or less is gon git fethed.

And we should be including rear armour on this, as it's hardly difficult to reach on a jetbike.

So down go Predators, LRBT, Baneblades (iirc they have av12 rear), IK, and MC or GMC...

2+ armor MCs and GMCs are fine vs scatbikes. They are actually inefficient targets for them. As are T8 targets.

Still susceptible when needed. Especially when combo'd with a farseer for rerolls to hit and wound (two different powers)