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 Rippy wrote:

Has anyone heard about OOP models getting rules? Getting worried for my Plague Hulk now.

Their language seemed carefully chosen. "Everything we currently sell will get rules." It is quite likely that some select OOP stuff might not make the cut.

 Desubot wrote:

 Ronin_eX wrote:

Eyjio wrote:
Didn't see it mentioned so maybe I missed it, but we got confirmation that cover adds to saving throw, which is cool, though I think I'd have preferred a hit modifier still.

This one surprised an delighted me. Traditionally, the only mod armour has seen in 40k was down. So having cover balance that out while leaving to-hit mostly static has a nice effect on things.

I tend to actually like cover (especially heavy cover) affecting both but in a game where your randomizer is a d6, you have to be choosey. By making it defender-facing, you make cover feel more relevant to the person getting shot at. But now it gets rid of the silly edge cases where cover affected small arms less because most things got their saves versus AP5-6 shots.

It also avoids the potential of over-stuffing the to-hit mods with special rules. Back in the day, it could get really silly. It allows for "agility" design space and it allows for "intervening cover" design space. In 3rd Edition on, those two used to often be the same thing (or an invulnerable save). And it led to absurd things like units jinking with a 2+ or 3+ cover save. So now you can, say, make Harlequins evasive by giving folks a -1 to hit them, without making them impossible to hit in cover (which provides a +1 to their save instead).

Basically it gives you more space to apply modifiers in different places. In 2nd, everything got stacked in the to-hit roll and armour saves only ever adjusted down, not up. It ended up having this affect where armour felt like an afterthought and where stacking to-hit mods in your favour became a favourite tactic of some for the power-players in that edition.

If you want things to last longer than i guess you will need to play with a TON of terrain which is fine by me. i hate barren tables.

Andy Chambers had the right of it in the 2nd Edition rules: "The more terrain, the better the game."

It is a mantra that, while proving hard to store, has served me well over the years. Never could jive with the 25% coverage thing that started in 3rd Edition.

Lots of terrain and cover improves the game no end, totally agree, whichever rules version you play.

I don't mean this in a mean-spirited way but I've always found the 40K community (mostly) lacking heavily behind most other wargames in terms of attention to tabletop terrain and the table's design. It may be because of the cost, or the size of armies, or just general laziness - particularly at local game stores (where all games suffer normally), but the tables rarely impress.

The terrain coverage is often poor and just limited to flat line-of-sight blocking stuff. I really like seeing people who put a lot more effort into their tables. Just a little too rare in 40K games.

 loki old fart wrote:
Could do with information on.
Beam weapons.
kustom force fields.
torrent.
summoning.
The thing with 40k is so much stuff.

FTFY

Hugely complicated but strangely lacking in any real complexity has been a deep rooted problem for a long time. Games that come with rules leaflets offer more depth than 40Ks hundreds of pages.

 Elbows wrote:
I don't mean this in a mean-spirited way but I've always found the 40K community (mostly) lacking heavily behind most other wargames in terms of attention to tabletop terrain and the table's design. It may be because of the cost, or the size of armies, or just general laziness - particularly at local game stores (where all games suffer normally), but the tables rarely impress.

The terrain coverage is often poor and just limited to flat line-of-sight blocking stuff. I really like seeing people who put a lot more effort into their tables. Just a little too rare in 40K games.

This is totally true in my experience. I think the reasons you list are definitely factors. The bar for entry is just so high - something extra like terrain falls by the wayside. It's really a shame given how nice the GW terrain kits are.

I lavish a lot of care on my terrain and I agree it is critical that it have a key role in the game. Terrain modifying armor save is *probably* dumb depending on how exactly they do it. Let's say it adds +1 to save. Marines go from 3+ to 2+, halving their casualties. Orks go from 6+ to 5+, reducing their casualties by, what, 16%? That is bad design and the opposite of how it used to be be. How does AOS handle terrain? I've heard it doesn't slow movement. Also how does AOS do casualty removal? If it is closest model we're going to see lots of stupid record keeping and argument. "NO, that WASN"T the Ogrynn you shot last time, and BTW that lanraider has 17wounds now not 16". Don't see that as a plus, but again good design could mitigate it.

 kestral wrote:
I lavish a lot of care on my terrain and I agree it is critical that it have a key role in the game. Terrain modifying armor save is *probably* dumb depending on how exactly they do it. Let's say it adds +1 to save. Marines go from 3+ to 2+, halving their casualties. Orks go from 6+ to 5+, reducing their casualties by, what, 16%? That is bad design and the opposite of how it used to be be. How does AOS handle terrain? I've heard it doesn't slow movement. Also how does AOS do casualty removal? If it is closest model we're going to see lots of stupid record keeping and argument. "NO, that WASN"T the Ogrynn you shot last time, and BTW that lanraider has 17wounds now not 16". Don't see that as a plus, but again good design could mitigate it.

This is all true. Some models will benefit from cover more than others. However, it also makes sense to a degree that unarmored stuff - albiet in cover - is still more killable than armored stuff in cover. Also, there is a reason for Marines to stand in Ruins now. Even Terminators might want to sit in Ruins - if cover save modifier could cancel out -1 Rend or something. I like that. All models should want to utilize cover.

 Elbows wrote:
I don't mean this in a mean-spirited way but I've always found the 40K community (mostly) lacking heavily behind most other wargames in terms of attention to tabletop terrain and the table's design. It may be because of the cost, or the size of armies, or just general laziness - particularly at local game stores (where all games suffer normally), but the tables rarely impress.

The terrain coverage is often poor and just limited to flat line-of-sight blocking stuff. I really like seeing people who put a lot more effort into their tables. Just a little too rare in 40K games.

Really hope GW makes terrain worthwhile.

One of my favourite things about Infinity are the tables (look at what the starter comes with); what "forces" that is that the game needs great tables to work, so people can't skimp.

Outside of display tables; the WW2 guys take the cake though (don't even play it myself).

 Elbows wrote:
I don't mean this in a mean-spirited way but I've always found the 40K community (mostly) lacking heavily behind most other wargames in terms of attention to tabletop terrain and the table's design. It may be because of the cost, or the size of armies, or just general laziness - particularly at local game stores (where all games suffer normally), but the tables rarely impress.

The terrain coverage is often poor and just limited to flat line-of-sight blocking stuff. I really like seeing people who put a lot more effort into their tables. Just a little too rare in 40K games.

This was definitely a thing that started happening after 3rd Edition was released. Back then it was a platoon level skirmish game, pretty easy to buy in to (even if we all kvetched about the price back then as well), and it encouraged heavy table coverage. Back then, WD had a ton of make your own terrain articles (I still cherish the article on trees in one of my dog eared issues). And this was back when the 2nd Edition starter box contained a small city's worth of cardboard ruins (which I still use for low scatter cover to this day). But when 3rd rolled around, the encouraged amount of terrain was cut in half and a whole load of other changes were made to make terrain less essential.

Where a 2nd Edition board would be a sprawling cityscape with multi-level terrain, 3rd Edition tables looked relatively empty, with a few neatly cordoned off sections of area terrain and plenty of space to put vehicles down. In 2nd, the amount of terrain made using the vehicle movement rules a learned skill on par with X-Wing (the amount of times I had to make emergency skid turns with my Ravenwing because I was overconfident...). But with simplified vehicle rules and a greater emphasis on vehicle combat, more open space was required to accommodate.

This led to much sparser battlefields and very little verticality.

It's easier to make real life terrain since it's real life and we all have a frame of reference to what it looks like and there's plenty of stuff available. 40k terrain is often fantastic sci fi terrain pieces that need insane amounts of work and detail from professionals to really look well done and believable.

I need to dig out my old Citadel terrain building guide. It was the first Warhammer book I bought, back before I even knew there was a game. I just thought the whole thing was like doing model railroads but with laser rifles and hover tanks.

-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

-Chaos and Imperium are similar to grand alliance book but xenos are more granular.?
https://war-of-sigmar.herokuapp.com/bloggings/1920

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

 Dakka Flakka Flame wrote:
I need to dig out my old Citadel terrain building guide. It was the first Warhammer book I bought, back before I even knew there was a game. I just thought the whole thing was like doing model railroads but with laser rifles and hover tanks.

If your playing humans sure. If you play Xenos and want to make a cool board for them it's a lot more work.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

Yes, but Pete Foley confirmed that they will be getting rules in the new edition.

 Gamgee wrote:

 Dakka Flakka Flame wrote:
I need to dig out my old Citadel terrain building guide. It was the first Warhammer book I bought, back before I even knew there was a game. I just thought the whole thing was like doing model railroads but with laser rifles and hover tanks.

If your playing humans sure. If you play Xenos and want to make a cool board for them it's a lot more work.

Not sure I follow. The book was all about scratch-building terrain, but yeah it did tend to look like things we would see on Earth.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

ok what do people think they will get in 8th ed. surely that is the question.

 kestral wrote:
I lavish a lot of care on my terrain and I agree it is critical that it have a key role in the game. Terrain modifying armor save is *probably* dumb depending on how exactly they do it. Let's say it adds +1 to save. Marines go from 3+ to 2+, halving their casualties. Orks go from 6+ to 5+, reducing their casualties by, what, 16%? That is bad design and the opposite of how it used to be be.

To be perfectly honest, the way cover has worked in 40k for the past 18 years has been completely bass-akwards to how cover actually works. It has been straight up disbelief unsuspending, verisimilitude damaging .

It gives us so many gob-smacking edge cases that it made me wonder why they even bothered.

Stormtroopers getting fired on by bolters? That ruined building they are in has no effect! Someone fires plasma at them, suddenly those walls spring to life, catching shots. Perfectly logical, cover is well known to have little effect on small arms fire, certainly seems internally consistent!

So if this cover system works completely differently, then it is off to a good start. And while you may bemoan marines in cover getting harder to budge, it is at least internally consistent with itself. Being in cover is always better than being in the open, and even if Orks are only getting a small boost, it is a consistent boost. It is logical that cover will always make you more survivable, regardless of the weapons being fired at you, and it makes more sense that someone that starts more survivable will be even more so in cover than someone wearing less armour.

This was kind of the issue with a lot of 40k's "simplified" all-or-nothing mechanics. So many of them left weird edge cases and caused play to warp in to this odd space. Cover has been, for the longest time one of the worst offenders in this and it is good to see it change in a way that finally makes it consistent again.

 loki old fart wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

ok what do people think they will get in 8th ed. surely that is the question.

As the person who posed the question to both GW FB and @geekjockpete, I can tell you that both sources confirmed that the the WW Exclusive SM Command Tanks will be getting rules in 8th Ed.

 casvalremdeikun wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

ok what do people think they will get in 8th ed. surely that is the question.

As the person who posed the question to both GW FB and @geekjockpete, I can tell you that both sources confirmed that the the WW Exclusive SM Command Tanks will be getting rules in 8th Ed.

I am aware of that. But what are they getting? that's what i'm speculating about. Something like skyfire within a set radius.

I think its way too early to speculate about one random model out of hundreds.

Stormtroopers getting fired on by bolters? That ruined building they are in has no effect! Someone fires plasma at them, suddenly those walls spring to life, catching shots. Perfectly logical, cover is well known to have little effect on small arms fire, certainly seems internally consistent!

Half your body is covered by a wall or half is covered by armor that stops the weapon being shot at you, the effect is the same - 4+ save for either case. You have to be shot in the eye to kill you? Well, it doesn't really matter if you are behind a wall (2+ save). It was a reasonable enough abstraction, and it created interesting dynamics. Marines had to go into cover after guard since they weren't easily shifted. Giving a to hit penalty would be equally beneficial to everyone. Basing it on armor creates a huge benefit for some and none for others (orks being shot by -2 rending for example) - that can be compensated with game design, but I still don't like it.

My bet on D-weapons is that they'll be high enough strength to wound most anything on a 2 and probably a high rend.

I really wish we knew more about the psychic phase, but I bet they're holding that back for a special day.

@DarkBlack

I agree, and really there is no reason why people couldn't come up with just as beautiful a table as you have shown there. Even if you need to cheat and use non-xenos trees, etc. I just don't see nearly as much attention lavished on terrain - sadly it's almost all the GW produced plastic stuff which is...mediocre to say the least (and huge repetitive).

'Fixing' To Hit rolls for shooting ain't no thang. BS was pretty much fixed already, so this is just a different way of showing it. Warhammer Quest did that back in the 90's.

The fixed To Hit for HTH combat seems a bit odd though. Presumably Mr. Bloodthirster will have something that makes him less likely to be hit than regular Marines. Won't make much sense if his much-vaunted martial prowess is matched by lesser beings. Some sort of bespoke rule that makes him harder to hit because of the sheer reality-warping awesomeness (or vileness) of his presence.

For vehicles... well the Dread at T7 annoys me to no end, but that's for personal reason (I've always thought walkers should have Toughness Values, and always thought the Marine/Chaos/Ork Dread should be T8 like the Wraithlord). But, we've been using T8 W3 Dreads for ages now, and T7 W8 is actually tougher.

I'm not sold on the change to cover saves. One of the things I liked in 3rd compared to 2nd was that the cover save system was simple. In cover? Take this save instead. Armour saves meant virtually nothing in 2nd Ed with the (over) abundance of save modifers, and Guard players did nothing in their opponent's turns than remove models without even rolling any dice. Cover saves changed that.

 Ronin_eX wrote:
Andy Chambers had the right of it in the 2nd Edition rules: "The more terrain, the better the game."

I've been saying that for years. Always wondered where it came from.

 kestral wrote:
I lavish a lot of care on my terrain and I agree it is critical that it have a key role in the game. Terrain modifying armor save is *probably* dumb depending on how exactly they do it. Let's say it adds +1 to save. Marines go from 3+ to 2+, halving their casualties. Orks go from 6+ to 5+, reducing their casualties by, what, 16%? That is bad design and the opposite of how it used to be be.

Let me see. A +1 to Save means one additional roll out of 6 succeeds whether you have a 6+ save or a 3+ save? How is the the opposite of what should happen?

 casvalremdeikun wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 loki old fart wrote:
-WW exclusive commands tanks are getting rules.?

They've had rules since they became available.

Yes, but Pete Foley confirmed that they will be getting rules in the new edition.

hopefully this means eventually those command tanks will be made avaliable to the general public.

I'm glad to see chapter/legion tactics aren't going away, hopefully GW will expand this to other deserving armies

 kestral wrote:
Giving a to hit penalty would be equally beneficial to everyone. Basing it on armor creates a huge benefit for some and none for others (orks being shot by -2 rending for example) - that can be compensated with game design, but I still don't like it.

This doesn't follow. A to-hit roll and an armour roll are both d6 roll-over situations. A penalty to one or the other will have varying effects depending on who gets hit with it.

Orks eating a -1 to-hit are now missing half their shots (6+ to-hit) while a unit with a hypothetical 2+ BS is now hitting on 3+'s (barely any change). This change gaks on lower skilled armies, and worse, if they implement further negative to-hit mods then we are suddenly getting in to territory where those 7+ to-hit rules need to be called on more often.

Meanwhile, armour saves are only currently worrying about negative modifiers. So stacking in some positive mods to counteract that actually makes sense while freeing up design space in the to-hit mod section.

But either way, whether it is a -1 mod to-hit or a +1 mod armour, then it will end up adversely affecting units in different ways. So if your previous objection (it barely affects marines and feths Orks!) is your hangup with a +1 armour mod, then a -1 to-hit mod shares the exact same downsides.

Either is an improvement over the terrible cover system of previous iterations, but I think positive armour mods are a design space that 2nd Edition failed to exploit and the over-piling of to-hit mods had an adverse effect on the game as a result.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The fixed To Hit for HTH combat seems a bit odd though. Presumably Mr. Bloodthirster will have something that makes him less likely to be hit than regular Marines. Won't make much sense if his much-vaunted martial prowess is matched by lesser beings. Some sort of bespoke rule that makes him harder to hit because of the sheer reality-warping awesomeness (or vileness) of his presence.

Kind of seems that way at first, but then I realized that a great many wargames actually tend toward having "fixed" HtH values as well. And in the end, I think that's cleaner and lends itself to more variety. The current HtH chart is actually pretty crap for the most part. Models are either hitting on 3+ or 4+ and most. Sometimes a 5+ (in very rare cases). With fixed to-hits, they can now give combat masters a high to-hit (2+ say) and give them a rule to dump their opponent's to-hit down. If I were to clean up 2nd Edition's close combat, then I think this would have been the way I did it (i.e. convert WS to using the BS chart).

For vehicles... well the Dread at T7 annoys me to no end, but that's for personal reason (I've always thought walkers should have Toughness Values, and always thought the Marine/Chaos/Ork Dread should be T8 like the Wraithlord). But, we've been using T8 W3 Dreads for ages now, and T7 W8 is actually tougher.

Who knows, the Wrathlord may actually be getting a similar downshift. GW has kind of show us with these marine profiles that they aren't afraid of bucking over 20 years of tradition to make a stat line fit the new system.

I'm not sold on the change to cover saves. One of the things I liked in 3rd compared to 2nd was that the cover save system was simple. In cover? Take this save instead. Armour saves meant virtually nothing in 2nd Ed with the (over) abundance of save modifers, and Guard players did nothing in their opponent's turns than remove models without even rolling any dice. Cover saves changed that.

At the end of the day, the overabundance of save mods was a big problem in 2nd Edition. But that had more to do with a liberal application of -1 and -2 ASM's on basic weaponry. If they go with a more measured usage (as we see in AoS) then things get a lot better. Personally, it may have been simple, but cover saves were so counter-intuitive in play that I never got on board with them. Especially not after we started getting effects that actually modified your cover save. At that point, it seemed kind of weird to bother with them in the first place.

In the end, having positive and negative ASM's and using them more sparingly (and in smaller values) will help get rid of the issues that plagued 2nd Edition's overuse of modifiers.

In this case, a little can go a long way.

Hopefully the weapon previews tomorrow will give us a better idea of whether or not we'll be seeing an improvement or a step backwards.

 alextroy wrote:

 kestral wrote:
I lavish a lot of care on my terrain and I agree it is critical that it have a key role in the game. Terrain modifying armor save is *probably* dumb depending on how exactly they do it. Let's say it adds +1 to save. Marines go from 3+ to 2+, halving their casualties. Orks go from 6+ to 5+, reducing their casualties by, what, 16%? That is bad design and the opposite of how it used to be be.

Let me see. A +1 to Save means one additional roll out of 6 succeeds whether you have a 6+ save or a 3+ save? How is the the opposite of what should happen?

Let's see: I score 12 wounds on marines in cover. 2 die instead of 4, 30 points of marines are saved by being in cover. I do 12 wounds on orks in cover. 8 die instead of 10. 12 points of orks saved. 3+ save, high cost models benefit the most from cover by far, which the exact opposite of how it used to work. To put it another way, if it took me 3 turns to shoot a squad of marines to death in the open it would take me 6 turns if they were in cover. On the other hand if took me 3 turns to shoot a squad of Orks to death in the open it would take me 3.5 turns if they were in cover. Marines now have far more incentive to hug cover than guardsmen. That is unfluffy for me - I like guard to play like WWI or II soldiers and marines to play like armored supermen. Cover has waxed and waned as to how its role in the game worked - from well balanced to abusive, but I don't see this as a step in the right direction. Also, what are the odds that GW learned its lesson about rerollable saves? Will Devestator squads in cover with rerollable armor saves be the new cheese?

Changing templates to a number of hits is an odd switch in the opposite direction. Ork mobs used to fear artillery, now it is marines who need to worry more. Don't like that much either, although again I'll wait to see how it actually works before really pissing and moaning. Could be balanced through other mechanics.