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So I've been going back through the rules of prior editions of 40K. I had stopped playing in 4th edition, and so missed 5th, 6th, and 7th edition completely. I'm jumping into 8th edition and I'm surprised by a few things. I'm curious to know how others feel about these observations.

Shooty vs Assault/CC Balance

Going from 4th edition, to 8th, shooting in general appears to have been buffed majorly across the board. Consider the following changes:

#1 - Units can now declare fire on any target they can see. In 4th edition you had to target the closest unit (or closest large unit) unless you passed a leadership test.

#2 - Units (and even individual models) can now split fire between whatever targets they want for each weapon. In 4th edition, you could NEVER split fire (except for a few special instances like Long Fangs). This is a huge impact/change on firing efficiency.

#3 - Units with heavy weapons can fire if they moved (with a -1 penalty). They can remain still while other models in the unit move and fire without penalty. In 4th edition, if ANY model in the unit moved, the whole unit counted as having moved and the heavy weapon couldn't fire.

#4 - Units with rapid fire weapons can fire at max range and still move. In 4th edition, firing at max range was only allowed if the unit did not move at all. Units with assault rifles can run/advance and still shoot an assault weapon. In 4th edition, there was no run/advance option.

#5 - Now, if a unit can see a unit, it can shoot it. In 4th edition, units could not see entirely though a piece of area terrain, and could only see into or out of 6" of area terrain otherwise. The battlefield is much more "open" now for a given set of terrain. In 4th edition, large units / vehicles / etc. blocked LoS. In 5th & 6th edition, intervening models/units would give the target a cover save if you tried to shoot through units.

#6 - Now terrain provides a +1 to armor save roll - which can be overly good (or next to useless) depending on the units armor save and the AP modifier of weapons. Terrain used to provide 5+ / 4+ / 3+ invulnerable cover saves that were unaffected by weapon AP.

#7 - Units only benefit from being in cover if the ENTIRE unit is within cover. It used to be that units could benefit from cover so long as a majority of units were in cover.

#8 - Vehicles can fire all of their guns and moreover ignore facing and firing arcs, allowing a vehicle to shoot any/all of its weapons at whatever targets they want. In 4th edition, vehicles were limited to firing within a fixed firing arc and movement determined how many weapons could be fired. Vehicles moving at top speed were limited to smaller weapons.

#9 - Units charging into combat are fired on by overwatch fire - no such thing existed in 4th edition.

#10 - Units can freely fall back out of close combat. While they can't shoot it leaved their opponent in the open. In 4th edition, there were sweeping advances (admittedly too strong), but you couldn't freely fall back without penalty.

#11 - In 4th edition, assaulting units got +1 attack on the charge, and most assault units had another +1 attack for having to CCWs.

#12 - You can freely measure range whenever you want. In 4th edition, you measured after picking a target.

I'm sure there are probably others to consider as well. The basic math underpinning the game really hasn't change much over the decades, but the rules effects on how the math is applied in different situations does. I really think split fire, terrain effects, and how cover works makes shooting considerable stronger now than it was in prior editions of the game. I've been combing through the 5th & 6th edition rules, and those seem to be striking a nicer balance point IMHO.

I'm also not really sold on how vehicles work now (with all of them having toughness and wounds). Vehicles seem to take much less skill and consideration in how they are used now. And basic tactical things like trying to flank a vehicle or tag it with bombs in melee just don't have the impact they once had.

As I look over army lists and other comments on the board here, I'm getting the sense that the battlefield value of most basic troop units just isn't there anymore. The game really seems to be emphasizing a heavier use of vehicles and fast attack units with detachment types that let you minimize or avoid troop selections. The shifts in rules that has occurred seems to be largely at the root cause of it.

Anyway - after some contemplation I'm probably going to go back to playing 5th edition (and with pulling in a few rules / tweaks from 6th edition). I considered just house-ruling the heck out of 8th edition, but frankly I still don't think it will achieve the sort of tactical dynamics and decision space that I want out of my 40k experience.

Thoughts?

I think what you're seeing is largely a "first look" impression. From the base rules, it does seem that shooting is going to be absolutely insane.

And don't get me wrong, there are some VERY hard to deal with shooting armies out there, especially Space Marines backed with Guilliman and Guard gunlines. But what you miss on the first read-through is:

1) effective combat movement has gone up across the board, and numerous abilities and powers allow units to move even farther and still charge. Lets say you're playing one of the deployment maps with an 18" no mans land, and you've got a unit of Eldar Harlequins in a transport. They can disembark 3", then move 6", then advance D6", then charge 2D6" for an average threat range approximately equal to the no man's land. Their transport can just straight up move 16" and then charge for an average threat of 23". If a unit looks like it isn't going to make it in, they can use the Twilight Pathways psychic power on them to move them another 8". Now they only have to deal with overwatch, and

2) Transports (which generally dont give a heck about overwatch) can charge now.

3) You can charge out of deep strike again, now with zero risk of scattering and dying (the major drawback of deep strike in 3-7 ed). combine with the ability to reroll a charge, and deep strike charges are pretty reliable. You can put a 30-man ork boyz squad into combat over 60% of the time turn 1 by just plopping them down with "Da Jump" power. One of my buddies' favorite tactics is to deep strike 10 CSM terminators with a sorceror, move them another 6" with the help of the Warptime psychic power, then charge a measley 3" into close combat.

4) Falling back can set some of the nastiest shooting lists into an "I can only overwatch" death spiral if done right. Guard is particularly weak to this - sweep aside any infantry support they have (which admittedly in some lists is pretty hard) and then with a single fast unit you can generally tie up several hundred points of artillery firepower without taking much damage. Many of my shooting vs melee matchups have gone this way with my Dark Eldar, since our units are incredibly fast. Fly is admittedly a common concern here, but that just requires a change in tactics.

5) While we lost the +1A on charge, most melee units actually just got a flat +1A all the time with their basic weapons. Chainswords, Choppas, basic knives etc now grant a bonus attack. Also, 8th has some of the most individually damaging units in close combat that 40k has ever seen. Genestealers, Khorne Bezerkers, Ork Boyz etc all do crazy amounts of damage compared to previous editions, which you wouldn't see with just a glance through the rules.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts and replies.

From what you describe, the overall pace of the game seems like it has been ramped up in a big way.

I agree that mobility is better overall now in 8th edition (compared to 4th that lacked running for example). WH40k has always suffered from power gaming, but it sounds like that has been up'd even more. On the shooty side, there seem to be crazy alpha strike potential. And from what you say you can get some crazy 1st turn assault lists as well.

But is this making for a more interesting/varied game? Or pushing it more towards math hammer where you might as well just compare army lists?

The thing is in older editions, in particular with terrain seeming to matter a lot more coupled with having to make more hard choices about how/what you fired at, that play would be more skillful AFTER deployment and the game is underway. Feels like the skill is now even more front-loaded on list creation.

Mez I gotta agree with pretty much everything you've written so far. And I'll put forward that even among 8th's champions and well wishers, most when pressed will agree that it feels like terrain doesn't matter at all.

I'm thankful for all of this.

Assault was ridiculous in 4th edition. I remember both participating in and watching games where a shooting army would bang away for a bit, then the CC army would make contact with 2 or 3 units and the entire enemy army would dissolve in a single turn.

I especially remember an egregious case where a single Ork Boyz squad with warboss just rolled up an IG gunline all in a single turn, consolidating from combat to combat, without the IG player being able to do much (roll a few WS3 Str 3 attacks now and again). It was boring, didn't feel very 'tactical' and felt super unrealistic, because the Ork army literally consolidated from one combat to another again and again down the length of a table in a single phase - up till that turn they had moved like 18-24" the entire game.

In full disclosure I started building out a google sheet file that compare each rule across each edition of the game! It's pretty interesting seeing it all. I'll post a link when it's more finalized.

I read a bunch of posts about people's favorite versions of the game, and most responses gravitated towards 5th edition - and I'm starting to see why as I build this comparison table. 4th edition was certainly more beneficial for melee armies - but eliminating sweeping advances (as 5th edition did) and adding overwatch fire (as 6th edition did) might have been all that was needed.

Anyway - my ultimate goal is to build a version of "hybrid hammer" that pulls from across rule editions to find a happy balance point. It probably wont be based on 8th edition since the codexs are changing so much (and units lost initiative, etc) - and also because I'm not really digging the changes to vehicles that much. So it will probably be based on 5th edition but pull in some of 6th and maybe a bit of 8th where it makes sense.

Alternatively, maybe there will be some elegant ways to house rule 8th edition to operate a bit more like the old editions. Even with vehicles you could do things like restore firing arcs for all vehicle tagged units, reduce the Toughness of vehicles if they are being shot from the rear arc, etc. anything is possible.

Mezmorki wrote:
In full disclosure I started building out a google sheet file that compare each rule across each edition of the game! It's pretty interesting seeing it all. I'll post a link when it's more finalized.

I read a bunch of posts about people's favorite versions of the game, and most responses gravitated towards 5th edition - and I'm starting to see why as I build this comparison table. 4th edition was certainly more beneficial for melee armies - but eliminating sweeping advances (as 5th edition did) and adding overwatch fire (as 6th edition did) might have been all that was needed.

Anyway - my ultimate goal is to build a version of "hybrid hammer" that pulls from across rule editions to find a happy balance point. It probably wont be based on 8th edition since the codexs are changing so much (and units lost initiative, etc) - and also because I'm not really digging the changes to vehicles that much. So it will probably be based on 5th edition but pull in some of 6th and maybe a bit of 8th where it makes sense.

Alternatively, maybe there will be some elegant ways to house rule 8th edition to operate a bit more like the old editions. Even with vehicles you could do things like restore firing arcs for all vehicle tagged units, reduce the Toughness of vehicles if they are being shot from the rear arc, etc. anything is possible.

I hate the vehicle rules in older editions, are you kidding?

Compared to Monstrous Creatures they were silly and pointless - why does a Carnifex, with his tyrannosaurus-rex tiny arm guns, get to shoot me if I deepstrike behind him while he's in a narrow alleyway, but a Vindicator can't? Even worse: an Exocrine!

I'm actually glad that firing arcs are dead and buried - yes, it's a little unrealistic, but we had all that ickage about monsters or huge infantry compared to vehicles before, that usually just wound up making vehicles bad by comparison. The alternative is calculating firing arcs for everything - and if you think anyone wants to figure firing arcs for each model in three squads of 30 Termagants, I've got a nice swamp in Phoenix to sell you (If you make it so Monsters have firing arcs too, but Infantry don't, then the new broken unit will be various kinds of oversized infantry).

jade_angel wrote:
I'm actually glad that firing arcs are dead and buried - yes, it's a little unrealistic, but we had all that ickage about monsters or huge infantry compared to vehicles before, that usually just wound up making vehicles bad by comparison. The alternative is calculating firing arcs for everything - and if you think anyone wants to figure firing arcs for each model in three squads of 30 Termagants, I've got a nice swamp in Phoenix to sell you (If you make it so Monsters have firing arcs too, but Infantry don't, then the new broken unit will be various kinds of oversized infantry).

Well, 3rd - 7th edition had vehicle firing arcs but not firing arcs for non-vehicles - and I don't recall people screaming a fit about it.

See - I can see potential for an interesting middle ground on many of these mechanics. For example, have vehicles keep their fire arcs (like 3rd-7th), but let each weapon shoot at its own target that it can see (like in 8th edition). Keep the Toughness & Wounds of vehicles, but give extra AP or bonus strength for attacks in the rear. Let destroyed vehicles that don't "explode" stay on the board as an obstruction. Seems like you could effectively make an "hybrid" ruleset using 8th edition.

So much of GW's balancing between editions has been too yo-yo'y. Instead of tweaking 1-2 things to bring in balance, they change 4-5 things all at once and the balance swings the other way.

I dunno, I would imagine that you could make it so core infantry get to benefit from 360 LOS, but bulkier stuff would be more adherent to fire arcs. After all, it's a lot easier for a Guardsman or Space Marine to hip-shoot or turn as needed, but a Bike wouldn't be able to shoot from its tailpipe.

Although it wouldn't be 100% fluffy (Terminators would still be a 360* shooting unit, wheras they're comically unwieldy in Space Hulk), it would be a better compromise between "no fire arcs" or "fire arcs on everything." Plus, it means Infantry now have a more practical role as escorts for "big units" which might be more vulnerable to ambush tactics.

Ive only played 6th through 8th and one of the things as an eldar player ive noticed is how valuable ranged shooting is. When vanilla infantry have 24" range shooting they auto kill units like my gaurdian defenders because i have to get to them. Most armies having that kind of range makes my army unplayable bc i cant get to them without taking 2 rounds of shooting first. Vehicals new rules in 8th arnt bad but all the weapon designed to deal with vehicals cant, take my brightlances for instance, 1 brightlance can average 1 damage per turn on a landraider and less on drewdnaughts. So it would take 6 brightlances 3 turns to deal with a land raider or dreadnaught. And guess what units get focussed down turn one because theyre only 36 inches away. My best tank killer the wraithlord cant even cross the board becasue of the now emphasis on shooting and lack of cover rules for him to survive the 2 turns to reach a tank.

vaurapung wrote:
Ive only played 6th through 8th and one of the things as an eldar player ive noticed is how valuable ranged shooting is. When vanilla infantry have 24" range shooting they auto kill units like my gaurdian defenders because i have to get to them. Most armies having that kind of range makes my army unplayable bc i cant get to them without taking 2 rounds of shooting first. Vehicals new rules in 8th arnt bad but all the weapon designed to deal with vehicals cant, take my brightlances for instance, 1 brightlance can average 1 damage per turn on a landraider and less on drewdnaughts. So it would take 6 brightlances 3 turns to deal with a land raider or dreadnaught. And guess what units get focussed down turn one because theyre only 36 inches away. My best tank killer the wraithlord cant even cross the board becasue of the now emphasis on shooting and lack of cover rules for him to survive the 2 turns to reach a tank.

Yes, exactly my thoughts in thinking about how the balance in the game has shifted.

I'm running some cost comparisons of units between editions and my sense is that there's no logical basis for how things are balanced. Costs haven't changed that much between units to be honest - some are cheaper and some more expensive, but averaged across a given army the costs aren't going to be radically different.

And yet the pendulum of balance has swung massively towards the shooty-end of the spectrum. For melee units, they have basically lost half the number of attacks on their charge. Combine this with things like power swords no longer outright negating armor, dealing with high armor, shooty armies can be a real challenge now.

The game feels more like an RTS finally. Your units don't simply evaporate to archers. It takes time to wear them down. Your guys stuck in combat can retreat without getting mowed down immediately or running off the board. Morale actually makes sense by sparking desertion or opportunity slaughter. Tanks don't autoexplode every time a lascannon looks at them or to a single drop of melta-termies but actually require concentrated anti-tank fire to blow them or lots of small arms fire plinking gradually at them. I had a squad of 6 cultists deal two wounds to a Leman Russ!

Infantry always should matter and this edition they do. It's not just an Armored Core dice simulator. Close combat is devastating given the new initiative rules, which were clearly BS last edition and made some enemies unkillable in CC. The lack of Fearless Everything makes leadership a thing again and morale failure a real concern without unbalancing the game for Orks. The tanks not being able to get cover from literally every piece of terrain on the battlefield is huge and we don't have to worry about those OP cover saves negating the value of armor or AP weapons. Infantry even survive more thanks to the flamer/blast changes and we don't have to worry about scatter misses. Even Deep Strike no longer scatters and costs you a 400 pt unit on a mishap.

The only thing I dislike in this edition is the character spam, especially for Imperial Guard, because my army isn't equipped with Snipers to properly deal with them. Anyone not featuring the sniper rule is going to have a hard time with the 9" deep strike requirement since it's now impossible to drop on the enemy's side of the field if they are gunlining and spread out sufficiently.

I feel for every point that you have raised.
Why has the game changed so much, become so much more abstract in many ways, well, not much mystery there.
BTW, why 5th? Seems you may prefer 3rd or modified 2nd.

The vehicle rules do seem drastically simplified if you're going straight from 4th to 8th, but the last edition made vehicles a joke; Hull Points (essentially vehicle Wounds) was introduced in 6th and replaced the Glancing Table; now glances just straight up shaved a hull point off. For most people, they instead just loaded up on medium strength weapons (like autocannons) and positioning didn't mattered anyways; most vehicles only had really weak rear armor and medium-strengthed weapons could easily penetrate the front and side (with very few exceptions at the time), so it really didn't matter where you shot the vehicle.

As for all of the shooting benefits; while it's debatable whether they're needed or not, 4th edition Assault rules were heavily OP; I remember my lightning clawed captain jumping right into two squads of infantry and proceeded to shred them to confetti within a turn or two, before ducking into another squad on the sweep advance to do it again. There are some changes for good, some not, but 4th was pretty melee-biased, and this is coming from someone who ran Khorne Berserkers and Blood Angels at the time. Overall though, it has swung much more in favour of shooting, but it swung back a little from the last edition where melee was basically useless unless your unit was OP (the last edition you couldn't charge out of transports, ate overwatch before you got to the opponent, and a lot of melee-centric units lost their movement shenanigans, like Outflank, to get close enough to attack).

As for the armor-ignoring thing, it sort of changed across the board. The net effect is that weapons with lower AP but cheaper costs have seen a resurgence, while high-AP weapons that cost a lot have dropped a bit. This applies to CC Weapons as well as Shooty ones. Another thing was that, again, last two editions saw AP being applied to weapons, so the "All armor ignoring power weapon" hasn't been a thing since 5th edition (which also drastically nerfed a lot of dedicated assault units who could previously just delete enemies after charging).

Also, due to the nature of the rules, it created an interesting (and somewhat frustrating) conundrum with melee units; they either can get into combat really fast and do damage, in which case they become borderline OP (or flat out OP) like berserkers or Genestealers, or are slow and/or unable to efficiently kill things once they do get into melee, thus making them undesirable to shooting units. This resulted in melee units being incredibly frustrating to play with and against; either you completely devastate your opponent's gunline, or your melee units act like headless chickens limping across the board to the enemy only to get turned into swiss cheese. There is almost no middle ground either so melee units are either hated for being too powerful or hated for not being powerful enough. Which is why shooting seems more preferable.

This is the first balanced edition regarding CC vs Shooting.

Editions 5th 6th and 7th were utterly dominated by shooting.

Spoletta wrote:
This is the first balanced edition regarding CC vs Shooting.

Editions 5th 6th and 7th were utterly dominated by shooting.

I'm not sure it's balanced (shooting is a more reliable strategy) but certainly CC is as viable as 3rd edition, possibly as viable as it's ever been.

Spoletta wrote:
This is the first balanced edition regarding CC vs Shooting.

Editions 5th 6th and 7th were utterly dominated by shooting.

At least with respect to 5th edition - how could it possibly have been more dominated by shooting compared to 8th edition? Melee units have 1/3 to 1/2 as many attacks on the charge in 8E compared to 5E, not even counting all the other things that have changed in favor of shooting (split fire, overwatch, less LoS blocking terrain, random charge range, etc.).




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
The vehicle rules do seem drastically simplified if you're going straight from 4th to 8th, but the last edition made vehicles a joke; Hull Points (essentially vehicle Wounds) was introduced in 6th and replaced the Glancing Table;

Yeah, I can definitely see that being the case when the hull point system was added. Seems like a better middleground could've been to make only certain damage table results yield a loss of hull points or something like that.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
As for all of the shooting benefits; while it's debatable whether they're needed or not, 4th edition Assault rules were heavily OP.

For sure, and I agree. When I was playing my group added a number of house-rules to tone down the sweeping advance and it balanced things out nicely. IIRC it basically allowed units that were swept into a round of shooting (like overwatch but hitting with their normal B.S.) or something to that effect.

Looking across the editions, there have been about 15 changes against melee when only 3-4 might have been necessary to bring things into nicer balance.

I think Overwatch is a nice addition, as it gives shooting-only units a way to fight back. However the random charge distances is not a good idea, as it makes assault much more random compared to shooting, and assault is already a risky prospect considering the enemy can hit back. 5th edition's introduction of "no charging out of non-assault transports" nerfed a lot of assault-based armies which used cheap transports to bring their slower troops up, so the elimination of that is welcomed. And despite locking troops in combat being one of the tactical applications of assault, being able to fall back whenever you want is another welcomed change, as assault units are no longer limited to "killing just enough to duck out of the enemy shooting phase" while shooting units have an suboptimal, but effective, way to mitigating assault units.

However multi-charge rules, disordered charges, weapons shooting from combat, etc.. Those I think added on unnecessary bloat to what essentially should have been a "I charge, I hit, you save, you hit, I save, morale check, move onto the next one" sequence.

At least with respect to 5th edition - how could it possibly have been more dominated by shooting compared to 8th edition? Melee units have 1/3 to 1/2 as many attacks on the charge in 8E compared to 5E, not even counting all the other things that have changed in favor of shooting (split fire, overwatch, less LoS blocking terrain, random charge range, etc.).

Melee struggled to deal with Razorback/vehicle spam, which forced even elite units to hit mostly on 4's or 6's.

Coming in to talk about Terrain. Sadly most areas are not playing with "Good" terrain.

The biggest thing is LoS, all terrain needs sometype of LoS on it to block at least 50% of models. Ruins with 1/2 walls, Forest that are 6-8 trees, actual pipe lines that have extra bits on to block higher in some spots. Anything that isnt infantry needs 50% LoS blocking. Before if you wher e"in it you got it" now its "you need to be in it AND 50% LoS blocked"

Edit: Spelling and grammar

I agree 100% on the terrain piece. It used to be that area terrain, regardless of how thick it was or what the actual line of sight through it was, completely blocked line of sight. That in my mind was huge for making position and maneuver really important for both melee and shooting armies. Now, with the really relaxed line of sight rules, the game seems like an open shooting range - further compounding the issues melee armies face. And I've got to feel that it makes the gameplay less deep. If everything has open line of sight, the game is really just about optimizing firing order and not much else.

I agree that terrain is the biggest change of all in 8th - often it either blocks line of sight, or it might as well not be there.

However, we recently started treating forests as blocking line of sight, and boarded up the windows of our GW ruins, and this makes a huge difference. Suddenly your pathfinders survive turn 1, the opponents lascannons can't see any valuable targets, and moving/positioning becomes much more important. I would not judge 8th before playing on a field with a good amount of LOS blockers, it really tunes down shooting a lot!