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Based on the 'do tatics matter' thread. When was the game the most tactical? When did terain positioning and other on-the-table decisions matter most? When was it most balanced (might be a completly separate discussion)?

Flip side when did faction choice and list biulding and other white room or off-the-table decisions matter most?

That's a non-starter as a poll, if you include other games in there.

Blood Bowl is almost pure positioning and tight risk analysis punctuated by some yolo rolling, AT and BFG are mostly positioning games of slower battleships vying for the kill as you first skirt the opposition and plink at their shileds until everything erupts in flames as the death spiral starts. 40k is much more of a continuous attrition grind that fluctuates from side to side.

There's something missed, I think with the "tactics don't matter" people.

The fact is, both matter. You need both to win.

You can say "Oh, I can't win with my terrible list over that good list" and that therefore tactics don't matter, but the inverse is also true, since being bad at the tactics of the game can cause you to lose even with the best net list. We all know at least one of those people who never wins, period.

A good list alone won't carry you to victory, and good tactics won't either.

Yes you are muddying the waters far too much... Especially if you can include stuff like blitz bowl with preconfigured sides...

Would suggest making it 40k editions 2-8. Rogue trader had narrative style gaming as the intent making army creation somewhat secondary.

You are also asking a lot for players to have play everything in the list.
This may just end up as what game do you like the most. That is even if players have play the whole list, or have recent enough to remember it in detail.

Nice follow up thread, results of poll should be interesting.

I ignored the notion about other games and don't know editions 1-4. I chose 8th.

Yeah, I have to agree with idea that this poll is largely going to be, "I like this edition/game the most" far more than it is going to be this game is the most tactical.

First, it is going to be a rare player indeed that has played all of the those games enough to get a good impression of that game's tactical depth. They probably should have also played several factions as to avoid, "My faction was terrible in this edition, so it was terrible tactically." issue.

I also think you need to define tactics at least to some extent. Is it maneuver, position and target priority? Is it rules that allow on-the-fly execution of plans to adjust to unit match ups and dice luck fluctuations? Is it comprehensive knowledge of the rules and ability to manipulate those rules for advantage?

The tactics thread already had a moving target of what is defined as tactics. It seemed to me, people consider just knowing the rules as tactics. I am not being flippant either. Warhammer 40k has always had some Byzantine rules and just knowing the is an accomplishment. But I wouldn't consider knowing/remembering marines have grenades exactly tactical prowess. And I see that constantly in match up between good and bad players. That's not tactics, that is familiarity of the game.

Finally, I want to vote, but I have played less than 1/4 of those games. I wouldn't mind a, "I like polls, but don't have enough experience to vote" options just to get a better impression of how many people at least were honest about not being to give a proper answer.

This poll doesn't really work. These are all radically different games with different scales, mechanics, forces, and intentions.

With respect to 40k, list construction has always been the single most important phase in every edition. Tactics matter, but it doesn't matter how much of an artisan you are with your tools you dont have a tool to deal with a specific task, or if an opponent has a tool that hardcounters one of yours and is trivially easy to deploy. This has been an issue with 40k in every edition. The details and depth of the game fluctuates in different areas, I'm not sure there's any definitively "deepest" or "most tactical" edition of 40k, they have all had their ups and downs with 6E/7E being probably the worst (at least in my eyes), but they all add and take in different ways.

It won't give you a useful response, period.

Discussions of "Tactical Depth" are pretty much a byword to complain about not winning with your fluff-list-of-choice and to blame recent defeats on the system instead of on your opponent and yourself.

Having played from 3rd edition, I'd say the current edition of the game is the most tactical of any edition I have played yet. There's just a lot more going on with each individual unit where you can eck out just a bit more efficiency a whole bunch of the time if you just do things a little bit different. I think you need look no further than Chaos Cultists to see that. The unit is, well, god awful, but between so many different little things, it can become quite a nuisance! You can put them near Abaddon to become fearless, spread them out to cover objectives and deny deep strikers, form tight lines to block important targets, screen characters, boost them up with Psychic Powers and Stratagems, boost them up with reroll auras, hide them out of line of sight, disappear and come back at full strength, absorb overwatch, and more that I'm not even remembering. The unit blows, but they're cheap and they're bodies, and so many of these tactics just require those two things to make the unit do stuff. Because there's so many tactics, the unit is useful.

Now, as for strategy, that I'm not so sure on. From a very lofty perspective, successful armies are generally working the same way; chaff to abuse game rules with and take up space and objectives, some strong close combat units that can engage units that are strong against shooting and can clear or avoid chaff, and some strong shooting units that can delete swathes of units as well. The exact mix and how these units go about this changes from game to game, but the overall strategy mostly remains the same. That's not necessarily a problem, because there's a HUGE amount of variance and choice within this samey overall strategy, but it is quite different from 3rd edition, where different unit types engaged in extremely different ways.

Overall, 8th is my favourite edition yet, and I'm glad to be here.

Most non-40k games like Blood Bowl are more tactical than 40k. Though we did find with games like necromunda (and mordenheim more so) that uneven gang development would slowly shift the balance away from tactics towards the player who had twice as many guys with bigger guns.
Post game rolls were often more critical than the game itself as a losing team could easily invent a lascannon and earn a bucket of creds while the winning team might end up with some unfortunate white elephant like a headbutting heavy while fishing for upgrades.

Bloodbowl similarly would skew over time especially if the lower team score players didn't get to stock up on score-equalising linemen and rerolls. In a block heavy campaign an undead team could win by attrition simply with a larger team, while elves that survived the early games would rank up rapidly.

Epic (original) was one of those weird games that could end half-way through the first turn on victory points. Tactical in a sense but the games didn't really run long enough for anything to develop.

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In terms of 40k the last time I feel it was tactical was 5th edition, though as it rolled on tactics made way to parking lots, codex creep, weird wound allocation abuse, and a lot of the scenario scoring was dubious at best.
In the early days though the factions were more restrained, still abiding by the FoC when it meant something, and it had smoothed out some of the issues of 4th (albeit going too far with transports that got the double-dip of price cuts and toughness boosts, and also the massive increase of cheaper heavy weapons and heavy vehicles).

Later editions ran out all the new problem units - apocalyptic scale units, flyers, mega-psychic deathstars, formations, allies, etc.

8th edition IMO misses a lot of tactical choices in terms of formations, facing, obscurement, moral, and the more freeform nature of the armies means you have to build for the meta rather than knowing your opponent will be restricted to (for example) the three heavy ranged units of early editions.
The strategy cards have potential but they really needed the player to be able to pick out a sub-deck to cull the unscoreables and give them some overarching strategy to work to beyond 'cross fingers and hope for a good card'.

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As for a good list alone never carrying you to victory. It can do - it has for me. There does come a point where the gap between two armies is simply insurmountably short of pure luck.

It's fortunately not all that common in 8th, though I do remember when the castellan first came out calculating how many turns of uninterrupted firing from every heavy tank I could legally take in my army would be needed to kill just one. Lets just say it was considerably more than the length of a game - tactics against it were 'get lucky, or get rekt', not to mention the army that came with it.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
It won't give you a useful response, period.

Discussions of "Tactical Depth" are pretty much a byword to complain about not winning with your fluff-list-of-choice and to blame recent defeats on the system instead of on your opponent and yourself.

Soooo much this, since forever.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
It won't give you a useful response, period.

Discussions of "Tactical Depth" are pretty much a byword to complain about not winning with your fluff-list-of-choice and to blame recent defeats on the system instead of on your opponent and yourself.

Soooo much this, since forever.

Thats fair. But thats not me. I'm undefeated in 6 months. Some where between 13 and 16 games. Dark elfs (in spaaaace!). I'm not running black heart, so no Vect not 'writ of re roll wounds' I don't have any ravagers. I have a mean list, but its not the dark elf net list.


As to what does 'tatics' mean, I am calling it decisions you have to make at the table. Set up and deployment, movement positioning, refused flank, concentrating fire power, isolating a unit.

Some decisions that might seem like you are making them at the table are actully made in list building. Like strategems and psychers. If the decision can be shouted from the next room its not tatical. "He's shooting at.my knight what do I do?" "Rotate Ion shields"

8th. Though 5th is a close second.

5th only because GW kept super heavies out of normal 40k. A lot of tactics and strategies go out the window when you can plop down a knight and just delete multiple squads in a turn. 5th had a much lower amount of fire and better terrain rules which meant you had to think a bit more about how to kill things and take objectives.

If you mean tactical in a boardgame/RTS fashion...I couldn't tell you, but I'd think possibly 8th (just the whole combination of auras, buffs, stratagems, traits, etc.).

If you mean tactical in...the closest to being a vague representation of actual combat? 2nd without a doubt. Only edition perhaps where most gamers only really used 50-60% of the rules in the book because so many were forgotten. Fun, and suitable to the scale at the time. People who think 8th is too simply compared to 7th have no clue what they missed out on in 2nd. 3rd-7th was laughable by comparison (being neither as crunchy/tactical as 2nd, while not as streamlined as 8th etc.)

I chose the Epic re boot. You pick a unit to move durning tje movement phaze, then they pick a unit. Which allows move and counter move, repositioning, risk when you set up for a charge etc. Same as shooting phase. No alpha strikes. It also had a mechanism called blast markers which approximated supressing fire. 3rd thing was scale. The dudes were small enough that movement and speed were important.

For those reasons.

1. No I go, You go
2. Suppressing Fire and blast markers.
3. Scale.

Epic was played most on the board and least on a spread sheet.

2nd would win hands down IF the troops did not move so slowly. Moving most units 4" a turn and most weapons being 24 to 40" meant that you were never getting into hth without some delivery system.
So there was way too much camping and overwatch.
Overwatch and turn facing all mattered, much like vehicle facing did in recent editions.

So every turn you had to decide do I Run, or go into Hiding? If I Shoot I am no longer Hidden/Detected...so then the enemy could shoot back at me....maybe its best I just wait, etc etc.

I love 8th and where its going...it is fun....but it feels a big exercise in rock paper scissors. 2nd has become more of a relaxing fun exorcise every week or so. It is soo much slower, and klunky and you can be outmatched easily if your list sucks. After you learn the rules it does go fast and even 4vs 4 you can get in more turns than hours if you play right.

I recall new-Codex-wins starting to take over with the size/spam-creep in mid-late 5e. Didn't play during 3e or earlier but 4e was the most cleanly-designed edition I played and certainly the one where it felt like player decision-making during the game had the most influence on who won or lost.

From the other direction 7e was probably the worst time for better-list-wins considering both external balance (that was the edition where the way they chose to "balance" the basic Marine book was giving them 550pts of free Razorbacks) and internal balance (a Craftworld list was either the most broken thing in the game if you took the Distortion weapons and the jetbikes, or the most pointless thing in the game if you took Storm Guardians and Falcons). In-game randomness was also at an all-time high with random known psychic powers that could easily make the difference between winning or losing if you rolled the right power and got it off on a key turn.

As to Specialist Games I feel current Kill Team hasn't had a very fair trial since the missions in the book are so ill-designed, BFG was great so long as you were playing Imperium v. Chaos (the rest of the fleets were gimmicky and one-dimensional, in particular Eldar would automatically win if there was enough terrain on the table for them to move-shoot-move out of line of sight every turn and loose otherwise), Titanicus is fun but narrow, Mordheim/Blood Bowl are crippled by being designed for campaign play (which leaves you needing to play without tools you need to play the game in a highly random/non-tactical early game before building the resources to do anything deliberately).

HoundsofDemos wrote:
5th only because GW kept super heavies out of normal 40k. A lot of tactics and strategies go out the window when you can plop down a knight and just delete multiple squads in a turn. 5th had a much lower amount of fire and better terrain rules which meant you had to think a bit more about how to kill things and take objectives.

I guess. Though I still remember Leafblower being a thing.

 admironheart wrote:
2nd would win hands down IF the troops did not move so slowly. Moving most units 4" a turn and most weapons being 24 to 40" meant that you were never getting into hth without some delivery system.
So there was way too much camping and overwatch.
Overwatch and turn facing all mattered, much like vehicle facing did in recent editions.

So every turn you had to decide do I Run, or go into Hiding? If I Shoot I am no longer Hidden/Detected...so then the enemy could shoot back at me....maybe its best I just wait, etc etc.

I love 8th and where its going...it is fun....but it feels a big exercise in rock paper scissors. 2nd has become more of a relaxing fun exorcise every week or so. It is soo much slower, and klunky and you can be outmatched easily if your list sucks. After you learn the rules it does go fast and even 4vs 4 you can get in more turns than hours if you play right.

But codex disparity ruined 2nd beyond repair.

I enjoyed 6th edition pre-Knights codex.

I like that 8th got rid of Armour Values.

Most tactical? I'd think 4th, maybe. Abstracted LOS rules, blowing up transports was dangerous to the units inside. Mission variety was short... Cleanse upon Cleanse upon Cleanse. But the positioning was really important and I don't recall horrendous imbalance between factions... maybe my rose coloured glasses though.

I'm going to say 8th edition 40k. It's the edition of the game with the least randomness, while also adding additional resource allocation (CP/Strategems). I find myself making more meaningful choices in games than in any other edition of 40k that I've played. It also has, believe it or not, the least problematic overall metagame.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I enjoyed 6th edition pre-Knights codex.

I like that 8th got rid of Armour Values.

Most tactical? I'd think 4th, maybe. Abstracted LOS rules, blowing up transports was dangerous to the units inside. Mission variety was short... Cleanse upon Cleanse upon Cleanse. But the positioning was really important and I don't recall horrendous imbalance between factions... maybe my rose coloured glasses though.

The transport rules of 4E were pretty punitive, skimmers got to ignore pretty much all the downsides (which was pretty much the issue with Skimmers in general vs other vehicles), but aside from that they were basically nonfunctional, not only because of the fact that they could harm the contents, but because it was so easy to do so with 4E vehicle rules (no vehicle armor/cover/invul saves, pen kills on a 4+, etc), and that any penetrating hit automatically forced disembarkation with a pinning test even if the vehicle was not destroyed .

Yeah I'm a little surprised at people voting 4th, as well.

The disembark with pinning test gave people ways to interact with the embarked units. I agree, it was punitive. An over reaction to the Rino Rush era of third. But there were no wound allocation shenanegins, no parking lots, non-transports were in a good place, survival wise. 24” was the absolute maximum movement speed. No Knights... (sorry, not sorry, don’t find them fun to play against more than one at a time) I’d have been happy if they treated flyers as fast skimmers in future rulesets.

The abstract nature of terrain allowed more freedom in design. You could have buildings made of Swiss cheese, but it was assumed to be a representation of the building, that probably had some walls still standing inside, or furniture, or anything else. You could have an outline of a forest that blocked LOS without being a literal wall of fake trees.

In general, movement was slower, weapons were less deadly, and terrain was more impactful because a tiny hole that made the terrain interesting to look at didn’t let your opponent unload all their models into that one unit. That forced more interactions where you’d have units that took a turn or two to grind each other down.

That’s what I liked, tactically speaking, about 4th.

 greatbigtree wrote:
weapons were less deadly...

More deadly, but less common. Invunerable saves were rare and toughness 4 was as high as most things got, but more than 3 heavy weapon units per army was rare and the weapons themselves were costly. 4e also had target priority rules for screening units.

Charging the guns worked when your opponent could only have so many guns, and at significant enough cost that their remaining screening units wouldn't be able to hold the line alone.

Agreed with greatbigtree. 4th was a game of maneuvering, cover, shooting lanes and firing angles. 8th is a game of deep strike geometry and min/maxing damage output efficiency. It plays like some abstract mobile game with absolutely nothing in common with real world tactics.

I feel like it would have to be pre superheavies and flyers.