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 rhinosaur wrote:

 mrhappyface wrote:

 zedmeister wrote:
To go from the 2nd edition Codex Chaos to 3rd edition Codex Chaos made you say "This is bloody ridiculous".

But, Codex Chaos 3.5ed?

chaos 3.5 was pure love....but everyone hated you for using it.

Bah, if you want pure love then you need to go with the 3.5 Guard Codex. Guard armies where everything can deepstrike, or infiltrate, or wear carapace, or have chem-inhalers, or even weirdness like Afriel Strain.

Doctrines! There is a reason that it has been on every Guardsman's Codex wishlist since it disappeared.

First of all, in the pre-internet days and living far away from GW headquarters and knowing only a small local community, 2nd-to-3rd was most importantly totally unexpected and happened almost "overnight". That was a huge part of the shock. The second thing was that 2nd ed could be played in a very immersive and detailed way and realy spectacular things happened in almost any of my games. 3rd was tiny and shallow, which combined with large model count and total switch in relative usefullness of units made that transition realy brutal. I lasted only to a Codex release disappointment and then quit totally. When Necromunda died out in my area I left GW gaming for good and returned only two years ago. 7th-to-8th is a lot smoother and overall game complexity is shifted rather than cut down (I'm thinking about introduction of narrative mode, asymmetric scenarios, a lot of mission specific options etc... while retaining most of the wargear/weapon/list building options, which was not the case in 2nd-to-3rd transition). I have yet to test 8th gameplay myself and see if it suits my particular needs, but it doesn't look as dumbed down as 2nd-to-3rd was.

But, that said, my expectations from 40K are not typical and I really enjoyed complexity and "special snowflake" feel of both 2nd and 7th ed.

2nd ed's complexity yielded an incredibly unbalanced experience, though.

Pedroig wrote:


Exactly....

Memory Check:

*Checks the chart*

Sorry, that means we have to wipe your mind to make it an accommodating host for the gestation and subsequent first meal of a fledgling daemon...

From what I can remember , gamers hated the change to 3rd ed, and collectors loved it.

2nd ed was over complicated.However 3rd ed just picked simple rules that could not cover the game play, over alternative simple rules that could.
And so 40k was doomed to years of bloated complicated rules...

Lanrak wrote:
From what I can remember , gamers hated the change to 3rd ed, and collectors loved it.

2nd ed was over complicated.However 3rd ed just picked simple rules that could not cover the game play, over alternative simple rules that could.
And so 40k was doomed to years of bloated complicated rules...

No "gamer" would possibly have liked 3rd Ed. huh?

I think there are still people bitter about the switch to 3rd.


I had two gaming groups, one group stopped playing and the other continued on with 3rd.

I think that the main difference between 2nd-3rd and 7th-8th is that there was no where near the scrutiny of 2nd that there has been of 7th. I know, at least in my area, 7th is considered one of the worst editions. It's not even the core rules that are the main problem, it is all of the crazy formations that have bloated the rules.

Martel732 wrote:
2nd ed's complexity yielded an incredibly unbalanced experience, though.

True, but they never said otherwise. If you gamed with dickheads, then sure, it could be a sour experience. GW was run by a bunch of gamer geeks at that point, who openly (and frequently) mentioned that 40K was about narrative/fun/engaging stories...and not list-building nonsense.

 Elbows wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
2nd ed's complexity yielded an incredibly unbalanced experience, though.

True, but they never said otherwise. If you gamed with dickheads, then sure, it could be a sour experience. GW was run by a bunch of gamer geeks at that point, who openly (and frequently) mentioned that 40K was about narrative/fun/engaging stories...and not list-building nonsense.

So just like 6th and 7th Edition, eh?

Honestly?

What the hell is this???

Where's the background? Where's the fun? What have they done!!!

3rd Ed for me was, and still is, an absolute travesty of a game. Hideously unbalanced Codecies, some armies seemingly getting special rules for the sake of it (Blood Angels, I'm looking at you!)

40k struggle to hold my attention until around 5th Edition. Yes 2nd Ed was a deeply flawed system, but it was fun! 3rd Ed absolutely threw baby out with the bath water. Background was sucked out, everything was made bland and boring.

8th? That actually appeals to me far more.

 BunkhouseBuster wrote:

 Elbows wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
2nd ed's complexity yielded an incredibly unbalanced experience, though.

True, but they never said otherwise. If you gamed with dickheads, then sure, it could be a sour experience. GW was run by a bunch of gamer geeks at that point, who openly (and frequently) mentioned that 40K was about narrative/fun/engaging stories...and not list-building nonsense.

So just like 6th and 7th Edition, eh?

Exactly that - this is the reason why I have enjoyed both 2nd and 7th and never liked 3rd.

 zedmeister wrote:

 BunkhouseBuster wrote:
I remember hearing that it had a lot to do with copyright issues, in that the creator of Squats left GW, and GW had no way to legally continue to sell the models and support their lore, because their creator kept the rights to them.

Nah, that was the Chaos God Malal that, I believe, had some issues over it. Here's Jervis explaining the fate of the squats from 2004 (spoilered because it is long)

That was fascinating. Thanks for sharing.


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Martel732 wrote:
CSM, Eldar, and Tyranid players lost their minds, as many of them were riding 20+ game winning streaks in my area. Tyranid strategy cards..... lol.

I know people aren't used to it anymore, but loyalist marines were THE biggest whipping boy in 2nd, and many people were pissed that they actually started losing to marines.

QFT. I played Tyranids and genestealer cult in 2nd, and never lost a game to marines the entire edition.

During second edition, I had 3 armies. Squats (my primary), Blood Angels and Eldar. I loved playing my squats. Their rules though were horridly thin and their models were terrible at the time. Their primary models came in the 20 plastic squat box.

The rules for them resulted in some odd choices:
Warrior Squads 5 to 10 squats (9 pts per model) lasguns and carapace armor (5+). 1 squat may be armed with a special weapon and 1 may be armed with a heavy weapon. The sergeant may take a special weapon.
Thunderer Squads 5 to 10 squats (9 pts per model) lasguns and carapace armor (5+). Upto 4 squat may be armed with a special weapon or a heavy weapon. Additional the sergeant my take a heavy weapon.

This was before FOC. So, squat armies were basically five-seven 5 man thunder squads all armed with heavy bolters. 1 Ancentral Lord (Psyker), 1 Hearthguard squad 1 guild master and 1-2 squads of bikers.
Their major issue was all tournament games were 4 turns long. They had a 3" move with a total of a 6" run. If the object of the mission was to get into your opponents deployment zone, it generally became table your opponent or lose.

When it went to 3rd edition my primary army stopped existing. I was forced to switch to Marines or Eldar. And my codex lost alot of it's flavor. I generally played but not as eagerly. Then as they quickly jumped through 4th and 5th. It lost alot more of it's flavor.

I quit til near the end of 7th and have started back up again just a few months ago.

Back in '98/'99 the internet wasn't nearly as central to the hobby as it was these days. So getting any kind of consensus on what folks were thinking back then will be basically impossible.

That said, the main similarity between the complaints now, and the complaints then are this:

"Why'd you go and throw the baby out with the bath water?"

Basically, there were folks that were quite invested in the play paradigm of 2nd that, for better or worse, simply lamented their edition going the way of the dinosaur.

And as one of those people that lamented the death of 2nd, I get that reaction. I get not liking the new because it threw out things you like from the old.

That said, in an odd twist of fate, 8th seems to bring back a lot of the key things lovers of 2nd (at least the crew around me) liked. In a lot of ways, it feels like the 3rd Edition we wanted.

So even as I understand the folks currently railing against the massive changes, I find my interest in 40k growing again as the edition I've been waiting on for nearly two decades is apparently getting released this month.

It isn't perfect, no version of 40k ever has been (not even the ones I loved). But it definitely feels like the cleaned up and clear 2nd Edition I wanted back in '98 and I think a lot of other long-lapsed folks may feel the same way (anecdotal of course).

But in a lot of ways, the release of 8th definitely feels similar in reaction to the release of 3rd. Because either way, it is blowing up the status quo and implementing a new vision. So war gamers, the change averse lot we are, will likely be at least a bit cautious about it going in.

Even as excited I am for a version of 40k that seems to bring back some of my favourite bits, I am not going in whole hog on this. I haven't even bothered pre-ordering anything since 20 years of buying GW has taught me not to be too hasty.

well I started when Dark Millennium was released. And our gaming group around 2 main bunches of friends. There were battles every week sometimes twice. They lasted for 6+ hours and involved 2 or 3 k forces per person. and usually 2 to 3 per side no less!

Rarely was one side destroyed by the other, though it did happen. Everyone had super characters or super tanks and you always seemed to have a sliver of hope to fight to the last man.

When 2nd edition came and went, the game lost most of the old players (many still play 2nd edition....I do now. a dozen or more games this year alone) 3rd edition brought me into the competitive gamers and the fun was not what it used to be. ( actually played 3rd edition for more years than 2nd)

The thing that kept 3rd edition going was the fact that the number of models and armies doubled in size and range during the run of 3rd. AND the INTERNET came alive with forums and email groups. Thus it was GW most widely followed edition...not because of quality but due to all the convergence of the above.

Finally I grew bored with the tournaments. They were too rushed to set up, too small a tabletop, too small a time play, and very rarely had an epic moment in most of them. Just about every single 2nd edition game had an epic moment, even if it was a slaughter.

If they would bring back wargear cards for characters and vehicles you would find most of the fun of 2nd edition back in 8th.

The transition from 2nd to 3rd is really hard to describe if you weren't there at the time. A strange mixture of angst and excitement.

Remember that 3rd was also released around the time that the internet was starting to take off in a big way so while there was definitely a fledgling online 40k community at the time, it was nothing like it is today (I can't even recall if Portent was around in 1998?). There were some smaller forums but many communities were based around mailing lists. Looking back, it may seem that the 'rage' of those who hated the changes was amplified because it was reverberating around a much smaller space.

Leaving to one side the accusations of 'dumbing down' arising from the streamlining of the rules, 3rd also turned the game balance inside out. Very few units functioned in the same manner as they did before as the game was such a fundamental change. I wept as my jetbikes went from a key unit to crapola overnight (can you believe that guardian jetbikes were once considered one of the worst units in the game?).

So GW gave players plenty of reasons to be p*ssed off because they essentially released a completely new game that just so happened to use *most of* the same models that you used for your existing game. Think of it as a mass extinction event for collected armies.

But once we got used to the changes, my gaming group were in no doubt that 3rd ed allowed for much faster games than 2nd. Whereas we might have played one or two games in a single session in 2nd, we were completing entire campaigns in a weekend in 3rd.

The transition to 3rd killed my gaming club. Most of the older folks quit and it pretty much died overnight. I've no idea how representative this is, though. We were a pretty isolated, insular club and it coincided with a lot of the people who ran it moving away to university.

Me and a few friends set up a new one but everyone that came began to really focus on WHFB, Necrounda, and we had a rather competitive and fun Blood Bowl League.

 zedmeister wrote:

 mrhappyface wrote:

 zedmeister wrote:
To go from the 2nd edition Codex Chaos to 3rd edition Codex Chaos made you say "This is bloody ridiculous".

But, Codex Chaos 3.5ed?

Dunno about 3.5, as I wasn't playing at the time it was released. Was playing Epic and Fantasy. But the difference from the two [2nd and 3rd] was absurd. You had a ton of options, background, photography and stories in the 2nd edition version. 3rd edition one was pretty much a glorified pamphlet.

Also, did I mention I was a Squat player .

So by the time 3rd edition came out, you'd been screwed for four years.

You know how there's people who think that the rules and background for 40k should be in separate books? That's pretty much what the early 3rd edition Codexes were (up to ... the revised Chaos book, or the revised Imperial Guard book, I think). Army lists and rules, some photos of miniatures and minimal background (unit write-ups were a paragraph in the margin of the army list, for example!). The problem was, they seemed to assume that players would already know the background - fine for old players with a shelf full of 2nd edition books, not so much use for new players or those with Tau, Dark Eldar or Necron armies.

Back to the OP; I remember the reaction to the rumours being pretty negative. It didn't help that the rumours were as exaggerated as ever (All weapons will have the same stat line! No more plasma guns!). I don't know how many people ditched it, because my friends and I started uni about that time, so we ended up giving up 40k for that reason anyway.

To give you some context of why they did it; the first battle report for 2nd edition 40k was 1500 points (well, 1518 vs 1522), Orks vs Blood Angels. The Marine army had 26 infantry and two vehicles; a Captain (armed with nothing but his basic equipment - boltgun, bolt pistol, frag grenades), a tactical squad, devastator squad, terminator squad, a rhino (for the terminators!) and a dreadnought. The Orks had 80 infantry, a dreadnought and a battlewagon (Warboss, Runtherd, Painboy, Mekboy, Weirdboy and 2 minderz, 5 nobz, a mob of 12 Goff boyz, a mob of 10 Goff boyz, 8 Bad Moon boyz, 9 Evil Sunz boys, 9 Death Skulls boyz and 20 gretchin). 2nd edition works fine for that scale of game. There was also very little close combat - the battlewagon rammed the rhino in turn 2, the terminators attacked the battlewagon then the nobz charged the terminators in turn 3. The game ended in turn 4. By the time 3rd edition was announced, I'd been playing ridiculous games with three Land Raiders, three Dreadnoughts, a bike squad and a Thunderhawk Gunship against an Eldar army featuring several Phoenix Lords, multiple Warlocks, a jetbike squad and a Falcon grav-tank. Since all of those bikes counted as a vehicle (with multiple hit locations with different armour values and damage charts for each location) it was awfully clunky. 3rd edition made that sort of game much easier to handle. It also meant your modelling opportunities were more free. now that chainswords, hand flamers and the like simply counted as "close combat weapons", you could tool up tactical squad members with them without breaking WYSIWYG. The variable distance for difficult ground is, IMO, an excellent rule - much better than simply halving the distance moved. If anything, 3rd edition didn't go far enough in becoming a squad-based game rather than a model-based game.

All those things only became clear after playing a few games, though - when they first appeared, it all looked too different, especially coming not long after Space Marine was replaced by the similarly refined Epic 40,000.

This was, by the way, the battle report where Tycho got zapped by a weirdboy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 zedmeister wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
I wasn't playing back then, but consider the Squat rage has never ended....

It was the fact that they canned the entire race not because they sold poorly (they didn't) but because they couldn't be arsed to work on them. They had a range of models ready to go,

Nine models isn't a range.

http://www.collecting-citadel-miniatures.com/wiki/index.php/Squats_-_Unreleased


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Honestly?

What the hell is this???

Where's the background? Where's the fun? What have they done!!!

3rd Ed for me was, and still is, an absolute travesty of a game. Hideously unbalanced Codecies, some armies seemingly getting special rules for the sake of it (Blood Angels, I'm looking at you!)

40k struggle to hold my attention until around 5th Edition. Yes 2nd Ed was a deeply flawed system, but it was fun! 3rd Ed absolutely threw baby out with the bath water. Background was sucked out, everything was made bland and boring.

8th? That actually appeals to me far more.

3rd edition is best when you have all the 2nd edition books (for the background they didn't bother re-printing) and none of the 3rd edition Codex books. Just use the lists included in the rulebook. Sucks if you play Tau or Necrons, though. Or 'stealer cult, Chaos cult or daemons.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:


So by the time 3rd edition came out, you'd been screwed for four years.

Nine models isn't a range.

I did mention that those were previews further on in that post, but they had a load more concepts from what I remember. As for 2nd to 3rd, I still had an army list in 2nd and I could still mostly order the models. No list after 3rd dropped though Pity, I loved Squats and they had potential. Was hopeful when they started to release the Demiurg for BFG but, alas, nothing ever came of them beyond those two ships.

There was a lot of consternation about the simplifications to the rules.

One joke about 3rd I remember being very common was the "GW 3rd ed. Combat Tower" - you resolved close combat but putting a plastic jar over the two models fighting and shook it till one fell over - the one still standing was the winner.

Lots of Tyranid players were upset because they went from being at the top of the God-Tier (with Space Wolves and Eldar) to middling at best.

It wasn't till a couple years later that Rhino Rush become such a huge thing and the main focus of complaints. Then there were the Trial Assault Rules and Trial Vehicles Rules to try to paper over some of the cracks that began showing up.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:


3rd edition is best when you have all the 2nd edition books (for the background they didn't bother re-printing) and none of the 3rd edition Codex books. Just use the lists included in the rulebook. Sucks if you play Tau or Necrons, though. Or 'stealer cult, Chaos cult or daemons.

Except that 3rd ed rulebook lists do not adhere to 2nd ed feel of almost anything. I bought my first Wraithguard squad and Avatar of Khaine just before 3rd happened... If I remember correctly, rulebook list treats wraithcannons as meltaguns, 3rd ed codex "upgraded" them to be... 12" "sniper rule" weapon with ID on '6'. You must admit that this do not represent anything written in 2nd ed fluff section for Wraithguards or how they felt on a 2nd ed tabletop. And Avatar of Khaine went from 300pts monster to 80 points instantly dead paper weight. For many of us, who played 2nd ed for feel and spectacle and not tournaments, such things were simply too much. I missed out 4th to 6th but have read later codices, and GW brought back those two units to their proper power level in 4th ed, but I was long gone from this hobby at that point.

 Elbows wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
2nd ed's complexity yielded an incredibly unbalanced experience, though.

True, but they never said otherwise. If you gamed with dickheads, then sure, it could be a sour experience. GW was run by a bunch of gamer geeks at that point, who openly (and frequently) mentioned that 40K was about narrative/fun/engaging stories...and not list-building nonsense.

People trying to win =/= dill weed. 8 pt hormagaunts were GW's fault, not the players'.

2E had ticked me off, so I was already "out". As I recall, my gaming group dropped 40K entirely when it switched to 3E, though a whole new crew of new players picked up where our group dropped out.

Personally, I kept buying the starter sets and a few models here and there (picked up a Tau army when it came out), but didn't really start playing again until the tail end of 5th (when the Newcrons came out). I managed to wheedle my friends into playing again in 7th, but earlier this year they sold their armies off (Eldar, Necron and Dark Elf, respectively) and they no longer want anything to do with GW (the change to AOS triggered their selling, having Tomb Kings, Orks and Ogres respectively), so once again I'm the only one still collecting - and once again not actually playing.

2E as it developed was very much a Herohammer game, much like the contemporary 4th & 5th editions of WHFB. Locally, at least, you had to take that level 4 psyker with decent wargear, and you had to take that major hero character tooled up with maximum wargear. Stuff like polymorphine assassins and vortex grenades became must-takes in our group. There was an arms race mentality and the characters tended to dominate the fights. That said special characters were frowned on and generally only taken as part of some special scenario.

Aside from that though the armies were quite a bit smaller as others have mentioned. A few squads, a tank, a dreadnought - that was what you typically saw. I don't think I saw more than two of any tank or transport in an army until 3rd came along.

When 3rd came out it was seen here as a drastic reshaping of the game. Things lost a lot of the detail that made them distinct but a lot of that detail was time-consuming and not really all that impactful on the game. I think the single biggest change was that characters were reduced in power by a tremendous degree, and even special characters were no longer particularly special so for the first time they started to show up on the table with some regularity. With the simplified units and rules and the change in points for them the games got a lot bigger. The force org chart was a pretty radical idea at the time too as it applied to every army who suddenly had to fit into those slots in those specific numbers.

I don't know anyone in our local group who quit, most of us had at least two armies already and once we realized the battles would be bigger but would play faster we saw the upside. The lack of ridiculous wargear and super-characters made it feel more like a wargame ala Squad Leader and less of an RPG like a D&D game. Characters helped but didn't dominate so any "narrative" you were "forging" became more about the army as whole and less about Inquisitor Ironhammerfist the level 4 psyker and his awesome pile of stuff and powers.

it was a very different type of game but we liked it. I don't think this changeover is quite as radical but it's certainly the closest we've come to it. It does fell very similar with the full codex reboot and restarting with fairly bland simple army lists with a promise of more detail to come.

I've got to be honest and say a lot of the rage stems from internet forums and the gossip that comes with it.
I had one other friend who I played 40k with through it's various incarnations and can't remember being disappointed with any of it (maybe rose tinted glasses but maybe not) I absolutely loved every release whatever the faction (or system for that matter)
These days I sit on forums and can get far too much information before a game is even released and sometimes have my mind made up before even trying it!

I preferred 3rd edition to 2nd. I am a gamer first hobbyist, so the back ground changing, squats, what-have-you didn't much matter to me.

What I got was a game that could be played quickly and cleanly, by GW standards. "Diversity" in the game has never been a problem for me. I've never once thought, "Man, I wish there were more factions to play."

My friends and I each play an MEQ army, and another army. Myself was BA and IG... 7th was a bad time for me. Another friend plays Vanilla and Eldar, with Knights. Another plays Chaos Marines and Daemons. Another plays Nids and Dark Angels. One plays GK, Sisters, and Tau. I played Dark Eldar, once upon a time as well.

We didn't need squats. Nor anything, really, beyond codex and rulebook. We could have comfortably gotten by without any extra books. Far as I'm concerned, they're blatant money grabs anyhow.

I had quit 7th, while waiting for 8th. I hope it's better, I haven't really had a chance to check it out yet.

I started with 2nd and stopped playing regularly in 5th. Back in the day supplements for 40K (Dark Millenium) and WHF (Battle Magic) came in boxed sets brimming with content.

Dark Millenium had multiple colourful templates for various psi-powers (Orks-Foot of Gork, Squats-Force Dome, Librarians-Smite, Eldar-Executioner, Adeptus-The Gate, etc.). Psi-cards of the powers were included for all the factions. The outcome of the psi-phase was determined by playing a cardgame. You had to gather force cards to power your psi-powers and the opponent tried to stop your powers by playing a nullify card. Special cards like Ultimate Force, Force Drain, Daemonic Attack or Mind Duel enriched this minigame even further.
The armaments of the vehicles in 2nd could be altered more freely but the model in question had to be WYSIWG. Tanks could use three different speed categories and fire all of their weapons.
A lot of additional wargear cards were also included to individualize your characters even further. For instance, Orks had access to the Gyro-Stabilized Monowheel. Models equipped with it looked hilarious.

Then came 3rd and the core rules went down the drain. Gone were all the nice templates. Psi-powers were activated by passing a simple Ld-test and the opponent could do nothing about it barring some exceptions (Eldar, SM-Psychic Hood, maybe Tyranids). The elimination of the psi-phase sucked a lot of joy out of the game right there.
Another bugbear were the vehicle rules. They went like this: You move, you suck. Yes, after moving one inch your awesome battle tank could only shoot one of it´s weapons.

But our gaming group carried on with 40k despite these and other rule setbacks. Being young and naive, we thought that GW would strive to ensure a better gameplay for it´s customers with future developments. Well, in the end it only paved the way for skirmish battles to vanish and mass battles to become the norm with superheavies, flyers, mini-titans and whatnot.

I am using nowadays the battle bible to relive the glorious days of 2nd. It includes the core rules, army lists for all factions and is freely accessible on the interwebz.