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Rolling the magical 5-6 for vehicles was annoying as hell.

I started in the tail end of 2nd edition and really got into the game in 3rd.

I think I would echo that the 4th edition codex's were quite good and 5th rules were reasonable just as we started to get into the flyer/skimmers.

I have had the most fun with 8th at this time I hate to say.
The simplification / streamlining is really nice, a bit more detail would be nice.
I am so happy to see the BS and WS stats set to something that makes more sense.
Cover could be fleshed-out a wee bit more.
How weapons work now seem so much better (sure you can shoot one infantry model with that lascannon, you kill only one, but wow what a hole...).
It is early yet for 8th, the rules are simple enough but the army codex sure is all the more critical.
Love the nice little chart we got for when to use a codex vs an index.

I have one main complaint: put the model and weapon/gear cost in with the unit, it has been oddly hard to wrap my brain around unit capability vs cost without using an army builder program.

Yep, 8th with some tweaks in the right direction and I think it will be my clear favorite.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:
The poll is slightly broken as it does not also capture which editions people have played.

I started in 1st and 3rd would be my favorite with 5th as the runner up but if I'd only started playing in 4th then my answer would be different...

That's a different question though. I personally wanted to know which editions are perceived as better than 8th and quite a number of people explained why they think that way.

Obviously this does not mean that 7th is way better than rouge trader - most people have never played rouge trader and most that have are not on these boards or even in the hobby anymore.

Still, the large amount of votes for 5th is definitely surprising to me, the other results not so much.

5th was pretty solid. It didn't have whole classes of units and weapons that were essentially useless (like 7th). Codex balance wasn't horrible and most of the codexes were interesting (6th and 4th both had a wave of deeply bland codexes)

Flyers were a problem. Melee was a weaker strategy than shooting but that's always been true. 3rd and 8th have probably been the best editions for people wanting to have (or play against) melee-focused armies.

Flyers were a problem in 5th? As in they didn't have flyer rules? Because they were basically just skimmers in 5th. I think though that you have some rose tint about bland codices though, 5th started out with some of the blandest books ever (released tail end of 4th for 5th ed.) then books improved but there was some pretty bad balance by the end. I liked 5th, but many view it with nostalgia and overlook that it too had plenty of flaws.

The first book for 5th was Space Marines, which added Bike Troops, Sternguard&Vanguard, Ironclads, Thunderfires, Storm Speeders, and the Land Raider Redeemer.

After that came 5e Guard, aka "Mechvets, Valkyries and Vendettas, Leafblower and Orders."

Space Wolves got their Wolfwolf on. Dark Eldar were no longer the "10-year old codex," and Newcrons entered the scene.

Heck, even Tyranids got a slew of new minis, despite the relative fubaring of their balance.

Blandness is less the new toys factor, and more that the game just statistically favored mass light mech over most other options.

8th for me. Although I've long been a big fan of all things Space Hulk, and I've liked 40k lore for a long time, I always thought the 40k tabletop game itself looked too fiddly with templates, scatter dice, etc.

8th edition did such a great job of streamlining gameplay that it got me very interested, and now I"m a huge fan.

1st edition, just for the flexibility and flavour it had thats been lost over the years.

It was, and indeed still is, a very good framework to build a skirmish scenario with.

It was rubbish if you want a whole company of anything.

8th so far seems the best for playing large games with, without getting bogged down in detail

Breng77 wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:
The poll is slightly broken as it does not also capture which editions people have played.

I started in 1st and 3rd would be my favorite with 5th as the runner up but if I'd only started playing in 4th then my answer would be different...

That's a different question though. I personally wanted to know which editions are perceived as better than 8th and quite a number of people explained why they think that way.

Obviously this does not mean that 7th is way better than rouge trader - most people have never played rouge trader and most that have are not on these boards or even in the hobby anymore.

Still, the large amount of votes for 5th is definitely surprising to me, the other results not so much.

5th was pretty solid. It didn't have whole classes of units and weapons that were essentially useless (like 7th). Codex balance wasn't horrible and most of the codexes were interesting (6th and 4th both had a wave of deeply bland codexes)

Flyers were a problem. Melee was a weaker strategy than shooting but that's always been true. 3rd and 8th have probably been the best editions for people wanting to have (or play against) melee-focused armies.

Flyers were a problem in 5th? As in they didn't have flyer rules? Because they were basically just skimmers in 5th. I think though that you have some rose tint about bland codices though, 5th started out with some of the blandest books ever (released tail end of 4th for 5th ed.) then books improved but there was some pretty bad balance by the end. I liked 5th, but many view it with nostalgia and overlook that it too had plenty of flaws.

You're totally right, it was 6th that messed up flyers.

Not sure if it was 5th edition, where Imperial Guard had doctrines to make them more versatile. That was awesome, but I still voted for 8th edition, because balance is absolute gem now and 7th edition had too many special rules to remember. After all, if the games development team is not making the game better, something is wrong, right?

I picked third because I loved rhino rush... hope they bring it back again... Orks really need it now.

I started under 7th but vastly prefer 8th. 7th's big problem was that it was a rule set built around ever more strict restrictions piled ontop of other restrictions and then a mass of rules for getting around them that were handed out rather haphazardly and tended to have some rather bad unintended interactions.

I only ever played one game of 5th, it was interesting and being a Dark Eldar player the way Nightshields screwed with someones ranges without pre-measuring was hilarious, but wound allocation was very strange.

Martel732 wrote:
Only if I got to do C-C-Cocaine first....

HEY! no rock and roll clowns here, we put the boots to them......medium style

2nd edition, by a mile.

But wait, wasn't it unbalanced? Weren't the rules cumbersome and inelegant? Weren't the models heavy pewter monstrosities that were held together with way too much super glue and prayer to dark gods?

I can't say.

But, I was young and poor. And so were all my friends. I was single, they were mostly single, and we gamed all of the time.

We couldn't afford new things, so we made Ork buggies out of floppy disks and corn dog sticks, and ork dreadnoughts out of broken Robotech models and Revell At-St walker kits.

The introduction of a single lousy Rhino was an amazing addition to the starter set models, and I cackled with glee as I drove it through fields of 2nd edition starter set Gretchin, watching them fail initiative test after initiative test, thunking on the ram prow as they were run down.

Twenty years later, I've owned every army in the game, and filled bins with terrain and unbuilt models in my basement. And, I get to play one game every couple years.

So, when I think of when 40k was fun, it was 2nd edition. Now is the golden age of playing Barbies with my daughter...

Maybe I can get back seriously into the game when I'm old and grey, haunting the local game store, going on about how great twenty second edition is, since its finally getting back to the 2nd edition roots...

 Jidmah wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Still not sure I can render judgement on 8th.

Outside of that, 5th was probably the best, though still deeply flawed in many ways and by no means perfect, but probably the easiest to fix. I keep wanting to like 4th...but it had too many core systemic rules issues, though the 4E book itself is probably one of the best reads.

7th was the worst. An incomprehensible mess of randomness for its own sake, nakedly marketing driven rules (buy our exclusive web bundle and get these insanely broken rules for free!), inconsistent design philosophies, lazy rules writing, awful fluff, and eight gajillion rules sources that would have cost several thousand dollars to actually acquire in total.

This. 5th was the best edition, though hardly perfect. 7th is easily the shittiest edition 40K has ever had, and the proof is in the fact that people who defend it can only do so with the stipulation of "w-well if you ignore the formations and the codices...!"

I personally enjoyed 6th the most though, if only because it's the edition I got the most games in with. It certainly helped that Daemons were also my primary army at the time as well.

According to the poll, 6th is the shittiest edition 40k ever had

6th edition was god-awful from a game design standpoint- truly terrible. It just happened to be the edition where I really came into my own as a player. Sentimental value.

I'm glad it's dead though. I hope it stays dead, forever.

 Scott-S6 wrote:
The poll is slightly broken as it does not also capture which editions people have played.

I started in 1st and 3rd would be my favorite with 5th as the runner up but if I'd only started playing in 4th then my answer would be different...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Darsath wrote:
Without a doubt, 7th had the best ruleset of any of the editions 40k has had. Though Games Workshop then made some pretty stupid decisions with too many supplements, formations and power creep with new codexes. 8th is going a similar way, but with a much worse ruleset. 4th and 5th were pretty enjoyable too, but their ruleset wasn't quite as solid.

I'm curious what you thought was better about 7th vs. 5th? To my mind the two were pretty similar except that 7th broke vehicles and anti-tank weapons.
.

Honestly, it's the other way around. 5th edition had the all-or-nothing vehicle penetration table, which could lead to either a chimera taking 20 lascannon hits to kill, or all of your vehicles getting wrecked within their first hit all depending on the dice. Hullpoints are a similar concept to wounds, and could be a great way to balance somewhere in the middle. Of course, most vehicles in 7th didn't really have enough Hullpoints, that was usually down to the codexes and not the core rules.

The problem with Hull points was that it essentially layered two different kill mechanics onto vehicles, when everything else had one.

So they could be crippled or disabled relatively easily, ground down very quickly, or killed outright. Having two overlapping kill systems was always a poor concept and the fact that it two GW two full editions to realize that, when it was already clear by the end of 6th that it wasn't working, was a wee bit ridiculous. It didn't help that they then stuck in Superheavies, which had enough HP's to last, but then also completely ignored the damage table, making everything even more confusing

Pick one kill mechanic, not two

Warmachine does fine with using Damage Grids and Spirals for Warjacks and Warbeasts. It's a matter of cleaning up the rules in that regard.

Replace Vehicle Destroyed - Explodes, Destroyer, Instant Death, etc with a single "Massive Damage" result or so...

8th by a country mile. Still some tweaks and the codexes yet to drop could stuff things a bit, but quickly FAQ'ing broken stuff like flyer spam is amazing.

Everything is just so much more usable. heavy weapons have a point in a squad and special/melee weapons are cheap enough to take and are more functional. Use to bother me to no end that a power sword had the same chance of wounding a termie as a wooden club would.

What was your favourite kick in the balls that you spent a lot of money to receive? I'm going to vote none on this one - when they finally release an edition that is a genuine improvement on the last 25-30 years, then i'll consider it. It's not rocket surgery. Yeah, 5th was the best considering 'non-tangible' considerations, but it's a bit like asking if hitler was more of a humanitarian than stalin - they were both bad. For the prices they ask, i want a 'decent' game.

I prefer 8th so far. Specialfically it is nice to see less flyers and no longer require transports for certain lists. 7th had way too many supplements to keep up with.

4th was my second favourite - it was basically 5th to 7th but without all the bloat.