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You're certainly not alone in missing aspects of older editions. I was just glancing through the cover sections of 3rd-5th. It looks so much better than the garbage we have now for determining who benefits from cover and who doesn't.

Zustiur wrote:
You're certainly not alone in missing aspects of older editions. I was just glancing through the cover sections of 3rd-5th. It looks so much better than the garbage we have now for determining who benefits from cover and who doesn't.

There were all kinds of exploits and edge cases that are not apparent on first reading if you didn't play the edition.

For example when you could only remove models within LoS it was somewhat common practice to use friendly vehicles to block the LoS of your own units such that you could only 'see' key models like characters, heavy weapons and hidden power fists in squads, etc.

But 'standing in cover' or 'something between shooter and target' was fairly easy to work with, even with the slightly odd 5e half and half cover deployment you'd often see. The more serious issues of that edition would probably be that the cover defaulted to 4+ rather than 5+ and so was too strong, and that there was a lot of time wasted trying to determine if you could see a models toe poking out from behind a wall to claim a shot at it.

^Yeah, the move to 4+ cover save was rough. It seemed intended to mitigate the effect of returning to TLOS over the mixed-method paradigm of 4th, but that whole change was stupid anyways.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I second the above post about Tyranids.

I'd basically default to 4th ed books, the exceptions I'd consider are tge Ork and DE 5th Ed books, as both of their prior books were relics of early 3rd edition at that point. I thunk both of those books were about a decade old by the time they were replaced.

Similarly, I'd start with 4th ed rules, and then carefully consider which 5th ed changes to take. 5th Ed morale really hurt Necrons. 4th ed Terrain rules were better, imo. 5th ed wound allocation was terrible. 5th ed improved transports though, so you might look at those changes. 4th ed Omega level mission rules were great (Reserves is more similar to 9th, actually). That's off the top of my head.

This is a solid start. The run from mid 3rd edition through 4th edition had some really well written codices which mostly use vintage units, but allow for customization. Most modern units can either be run as a "counts as" or be given a profile without too much trouble.

I agree that for exceptions, I'd look to 5th edition for DE, although DE have some quirks that may need to be adapted/toned down. Orks were actually the very tail end of 4th, and lead to some interested power creep (nob bikerz, lootas), but there's nothing that can't, again, be toned down with a few tweaks. Codex demons was again technically 4th edition, but was "written with 5th edition in mind" and probably has no place in a groghammer environment.

I'd avoid any forgeworld for anything but special scenarios. Most of it is honestly badly overcosted, but there were some nuggets which could lead to feel bads.

For core rules, it's basically a pick'em between 4th edition where you make vehicles tougher and only use the omega level missions, or 5th edition with toned down vehicles and simplified wound allocation. I'd have to look at both rule sets, but they both really require a few tweaks for maximum pleasure.

Just play 4th edition with the following changes:

1) Entangled isn't a thing (making transports less of a death trap)

2) No consolidating into a new CC - must stop a consolidation move more than 1" from enemy units.

3) Add more Terrain Levels for greater granularity (say, one-to-five instead of one-to-three). That way, some vehicles like chimeras can be 3, Land Raiders can be 4, and Baneblades/the like can be 5, and terrain of the appropriate size can be more readily differentiated.

there are a few other things that you might want to add in. 4th edition didn't allow for reserves at will, or advancing by models without Fleet. There was also a massive difference between ground vehicles and skimmers in durability, since skimmers always were "glanced" if they had moved.""

4th edition was solid, but it included a lot of features which seem really old fashioned now, like target priority and the rapid fire rules.

^I think I prefer the game with those "old fashioned" rules. Targeting priority was a good way to make elite troops feel more elite. The Rapid Fire rules of the day meant that there was still a meaningful advantage to Assault weapons like the Shuriken Catapult.

Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff about the 4E rules...but the vehicle rules are not one of them. Eldar/Tau skimmers were great (especially when they all had wargear to remove the downsides of being skimmers), in some cases unkillable, but if it walked or had treads woe be unto it, and if it was a non-skimmer transport it was an actively non-functional deathtrap. Target priority made Guard kinda stupidly hard to play.

 Polonius wrote:
4th edition was solid, but it included a lot of features which seem really old fashioned now, like target priority and the rapid fire rules.

I can see why they dropped target priority. The extra measuring and rolling didn't take too long but 4e did have added 'procrastination time' when working out which order to resolve actions in.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Just play 4th edition with the following changes:

1) Entangled isn't a thing (making transports less of a death trap)

2) No consolidating into a new CC - must stop a consolidation move more than 1" from enemy units.

3) Add more Terrain Levels for greater granularity (say, one-to-five instead of one-to-three). That way, some vehicles like chimeras can be 3, Land Raiders can be 4, and Baneblades/the like can be 5, and terrain of the appropriate size can be more readily differentiated.

4th edition is probably my favorite. I would also suggest changing Rending weapons to auto-wound on a 6 to wound instead of 6 to hit.

 Gnarlly wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Just play 4th edition with the following changes:
1) Entangled isn't a thing (making transports less of a death trap)
2) No consolidating into a new CC - must stop a consolidation move more than 1" from enemy units.
3) Add more Terrain Levels for greater granularity

4th edition is probably my favorite. I would also suggest changing Rending weapons to auto-wound on a 6 to wound instead of 6 to hit.

Quite a lot of the changes that would be made to 4th often turn out to be something that was changed for 5th. So the question would be is it easier to work backwards from 5th, or forwards from 4th.

Speaking of easier to work with i've been looking through my old 4.5 re-writes and I remember now why I hate the 3.5 CSM layout so much. Everything is crosswired, you had to reference a half dozen different pages just to use a named character, units had all kinds of arbitrary restrictions and options which changed as you purchased stuff for them, and despite being huge the FAQ(s) were decidedly patchy on some quite important questions.

The old books in general tended to scatter their rules all over the place around and decidedly lack a good reference section and page references. Credit to GW for improving that in later editions.

Weighing in on Blood Angels specifically, but caveat - I'm not familiar with 4th ed. My understanding is that the "Codex" was actually a stop-gap in the form of 2 White Dwarf articles and not a true codex, so I'm going to pretend it flat out didn't exist.

The 3rd ed Codex is basically "flavoured Ultramarines". The 5th ed Codex, on the other hand, was a LOT better - you had all the basic Marine tools if you wanted the normal 'Tacs/Assault/Devs' kind of force, but you could also run lots of different fluffy lists. Dreadnoughtmania! Stupid numbers of Death Company! An entire army made up of nothing but Dante and Sanguinary Guard! Oh, and of course, in the 5th ed Codex, Assault Marines were troops as well (the loss of which I've never truly gotten over).

The book definitely had its issues (deep-striking Land Raiders is more than a little silly, and Razorback-spam was broken) but those are easily avoided if you're not up against a WAAC player.

Meh, I don't really care what the source is, rules don't change in their execution based on where they're published. Also, Bangles and Dangles are supposed to be semi-Codex compliant chapters, them just being "flavoured" Marines always seemed more appropriate to me than their later supersnowflake editions where they had all their own unique vehicles etc.

I will also absolutely not be excluding FW outside of scenarios. Perceptions of their imbalance were always IMO overblown, and the few examples that actually qualify are obvious enough that nobody's going to be picking them by accident.

 Super Ready wrote:
Weighing in on Blood Angels specifically, but caveat - I'm not familiar with 4th ed. My understanding is that the "Codex" was actually a stop-gap in the form of 2 White Dwarf articles and not a true codex, so I'm going to pretend it flat out didn't exist.

The 3rd ed Codex is basically "flavoured Ultramarines". The 5th ed Codex, on the other hand, was a LOT better - you had all the basic Marine tools if you wanted the normal 'Tacs/Assault/Devs' kind of force, but you could also run lots of different fluffy lists. Dreadnoughtmania! Stupid numbers of Death Company! An entire army made up of nothing but Dante and Sanguinary Guard! Oh, and of course, in the 5th ed Codex, Assault Marines were troops as well (the loss of which I've never truly gotten over).

The book definitely had its issues (deep-striking Land Raiders is more than a little silly, and Razorback-spam was broken) but those are easily avoided if you're not up against a WAAC player.

Well blood.angels WERE flavoured Ultramarines. Until GW retconned them in later editions (4+ iirc), they were almost totally codex compliant, excepting the death company and I believe their veterans could take jump packs but were otherwise identical to everyone else's vets.

It was only those later codexes that decided to really individualise all the marine chaprers. Even in 3rd ed the angels had death company and furious charge to differentiate them and that was it.

It looks like it's coming back around again by having them all be in supplements soon.

 Super Ready wrote:
Weighing in on Blood Angels specifically, but caveat - I'm not familiar with 4th ed. My understanding is that the "Codex" was actually a stop-gap in the form of 2 White Dwarf articles and not a true codex, so I'm going to pretend it flat out didn't exist.

The 4e Blood Angels codex was the 4e Dark Angels codex with the DE options swapped around for BA options.
Still available on the internet archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120915193257/http://www.games-workshop.com/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m1180159_Blood_Angels_Codex_and_FAQ_2007-08_5th_Edition.pdf

It was a 'late' 4e codex, which is to say that it had a lot in common with the structure and costing of the 5e marine dex rather than 4e marines, but with none of the new options. Very character/blob centric with an inconsistently applied tax on some units to pay for the compulsory death company.

5e Blood Angels of course were a fully fledged '+1' marine dex with other sweeping buffs and points discounts. You could proxy mech sisters with them and have points left over, they were that cheap.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff about the 4E rules...but the vehicle rules are not one of them. Eldar/Tau skimmers were great (especially when they all had wargear to remove the downsides of being skimmers), in some cases unkillable, but if it walked or had treads woe be unto it, and if it was a non-skimmer transport it was an actively non-functional deathtrap. Target priority made Guard kinda stupidly hard to play.

I played Armored Company (later Armored Battle Group) in 4th and generally didn't have this problem. The enemy Skimmers were durable, it's true, but you could destroy them on a glance with a Battle Cannon more reliably than you could destroy them with a penetrating hit with a battlecannon in 6th edition (rip "Destroyed" result on the glancing hits chart - or the glancing hits chart in general). Leman Russes in 6th+ couldn't destroy vehicles in one shot at all, because you didn't get the AP2 or AP1 bonus on the damage chart. That may have been the case in 5th as well; for some reason I can't remember 5th well.

I suppose the point is that you could wreck skimmers with a glance in 4th more reliably than you could wreck skimmers with a pen in 6th. So the problem isn't the skimmer "you can only glance" rule. The problem is the Eldar holofields (2d6 / lowest for damage result is going to be a problem even if it was on a Leman Russ; eternally shaken!) and I never really had problems with the Tau. Immobilizing it didn't kill it because of Landing Gear (like how it would auto-kill other skimmers), but an immobilized skimmer is a dead skimmer anyways, because now my Vanquishers can pen and the Ordnance Penetrating Hits chart was devastating.

Also note how I said Vanquishers - one of my favorite things about 4th that disappeared in 6th and disappeared completely in 7th and since is the idea of an actual anti-tank gun. In 4th, lots of autocannons would never get you a victory against tanks reliably. They could handle light armor through suppression and stunlocking, but it was rare you'd actually win against, say Chimeras or Predators even with just autocannons. Dedicated AT was important, especially against main battle tanks.

I do propose improving transports by removing the Entanglement penalty once they die in one of my suggestions, and Target Priority is great - it only made guard hard to play if you didn't bring Voxes. Voxes made your whole army Ld. 10/9/8 (depending on Senior Officer or HSF with a commissar) if you bought them. Which is fluffy and cool.

The primary skimmer issue in 4th was the Eldar ones with Spirit Stones and Holo-Fields, iirc. You rolled 2d6 for the damage effect (which could only be glancing because skimmer) and then discarded the high result with the Holo-Field, then it used Spirit Stones to ignore or reduce the effects of Stunned or Shaken. You needed double 6s to kill a Falcon with Glancing, and if you rolled a 1-3 on either damage dice, they basically ignored the shot. That was probably the most irritating thing in the edition.

 Insectum7 wrote:
The primary skimmer issue in 4th was the Eldar ones with Spirit Stones and Holo-Fields, iirc. You rolled 2d6 for the damage effect (which could only be glancing because skimmer) and then discarded the high result with the Holo-Field, then it used Spirit Stones to ignore or reduce the effects of Stunned or Shaken. You needed double 6s to kill a Falcon with Glancing, and if you rolled a 1-3 on either damage dice, they basically ignored the shot. That was probably the most irritating thing in the edition.

Right. I freely admit in my post that the problem was holofields, not the core skimmer rules.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
That may have been the case in 5th as well; for some reason I can't remember 5th well.

5e penetrating hits gave a destroyed result on a 5+

In 4e the odds of knocking down (wreck or immobilise) a falcon with a lascannon was, IIRC, around 7%. Less whatever you had to roll to hit it.

Probably easier for a skew list like armoured company which had twice as much ordinance as anything else. Just under 1000pts for six russes wasn't it?, a fully legal 3 troops, 2 elite, 1 hq list.
Meltas were good for the job but you had to catch the things first (I remember games where the eldar skimmers would just swap sides of the board each turn).

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
That may have been the case in 5th as well; for some reason I can't remember 5th well.

5e penetrating hits gave a destroyed result on a 5+

In 4e the odds of knocking down (wreck or immobilise) a falcon with a lascannon was, IIRC, around 7%. Less whatever you had to roll to hit it.

Probably easier for a skew list like armoured company which had twice as much ordinance as anything else. Just under 1000pts for six russes wasn't it?, a fully legal 3 troops, 2 elite, 1 hq list.
Meltas were good for the job but you had to catch the things first (I remember games where the eldar skimmers would just swap sides of the board each turn).

That was because of the holofields (as mentioned) rather than because of the skimmer rules. Tau skimmers or Land Speeders, for example, were never a problem.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
That was because of the holofields (as mentioned) rather than because of the skimmer rules. Tau skimmers or Land Speeders, for example, were never a problem.

Eldar were always the infamous skimmers of 4th.

Tau had you re-rolling immobilized results but couldn't shrug off the minor effects like the eldar could. And everyone took broadsides instead of hammerheads anyway.

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
That was because of the holofields (as mentioned) rather than because of the skimmer rules. Tau skimmers or Land Speeders, for example, were never a problem.

Eldar were always the infamous skimmers of 4th.

Tau had you re-rolling immobilized results but couldn't shrug off the minor effects like the eldar could. And everyone took broadsides instead of hammerheads anyway.

Right, Tau were a pain, but I don't begrudge heavy main battle tanks for being a pain to get rid of. I'm sure plenty of players thought Leman Russes were a pain to deal with. It's just the eldar skimmers that were good, and that's basically solely down to the Holofields. (for which I will never forgive Phil Kelly)

The only other funny rule about skimmers in 4th that I recall at the moment was that flyers didn't block line of sight. This for the most part made sense, they usually move quickly and they float around. Except. . . It also meant that the Monolith didn't block line of sight. That didn't feel right at all.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I'm sure plenty of players thought Leman Russes were a pain to deal with.

To be fair the armoured company was hugely skewed. Out of my old 1850pt all comers list only around 750pts of units would be able to contribute in any meaningful way against an all russ list, and all but the 80 points of meltaguns would struggle - and that was a list with above average anti-tank for the edition.

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I'm sure plenty of players thought Leman Russes were a pain to deal with.

To be fair the armoured company was hugely skewed. Out of my old 1850pt all comers list only around 750pts of units would be able to contribute in any meaningful way against an all russ list, and all but the 80 points of meltaguns would struggle - and that was a list with above average anti-tank for the edition.

tbf, the inherently skewing nature is still present, just switched from russes to knights.

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I'm sure plenty of players thought Leman Russes were a pain to deal with.

To be fair the armoured company was hugely skewed. Out of my old 1850pt all comers list only around 750pts of units would be able to contribute in any meaningful way against an all russ list, and all but the 80 points of meltaguns would struggle - and that was a list with above average anti-tank for the edition.

Depends on how the armored company was built, but yes, it was. That was the general point of it, to allow players who liked tanks to skew towards tanks. The tale is long, but here goes:

I made a point of warning people the list was coming, because GW themselves said it wasn't really balanced for competitive play. At first, opponents would tailor against it (which I don't mind) but they'd overcommit, and it'd be an unfun game just because it is fairly trivial to kill tanks with a tailored list (e.g. other guard with Drop Troops and meltagun spam, as an example). But if they didn't make some changes, then you're right, the Russes often became indestructible outside of a few edge-cases once their cannonade had blown up most anti-tank opposition. My play-group and I struggled a bit to moderate the balance ("how much list tailoring is fun"), but unlike the ridiculous release rate lately, the game was stable enough that my group coalesced around a pretty good idea - generally, give every unit the ability to hurt tanks, but keep their original narrative. If your regiment wasn't Drop Troops, don't go Drop Troops - giving every unit a missile, lascannon, or melta sufficed (or plasma or krak).

We also made some houserules that were pretty interesting - tanks could only pivot before they moved or if they remained stationary, which is ""realistic"" (I say that to mean in the 40k setting, not in real life) because it gives anti-tank weapons a shot at their side armour as they moved (since you couldn't pivot them back front at the end of the move). Stuff like that.

EDIT:
And yeah, skew never died. And tbf I don't think it should; skew is fine in a game as long as it is fun to play against. Which should be in the rules, not fixed by the playgroup. I digress a bit, but you COULD add the following rule:
"Rolling/Stomping Thunder: This <ARMY (be it Armored Company, Baneblade Company, Knights, whatever)> is difficult to hide at the best of times, but is capable of very great rates of operational maneuver. Therefore, the enemy is allowed to change up to five hundred points of their list after seeing this army's list (regardless of game size! This does mean that a 500 point army could totally reconfigure itself!). However, if this option is taken, the <ARMY> gains the outflank special rule (or its edition's equivalent) to represent the greater space they've had to maneuver as the enemy prepared."

Something like that, it's not really thought out and it gets to the idea of 'sideboards' in tournaments which is a whole separate discussion, but there you go.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
And yeah, skew never died. And tbf I don't think it should; skew is fine in a game as long as it is fun to play against. Which should be in the rules, not fixed by the playgroup. I digress a bit, but you COULD add the following rule:

The general principle behind the old FoCs was to limit the skew, at least when the books weren't bypassing them. Seeing more than three large ordnance weapons or tanks with AV13+ didn't happen outside of edge cases, while shenanigans and slot-swaps were mostly limited to elite choices.

I wonder if something like the old spearhead formations might have worked, where you might pick one or two prior to the game after seeing the opponents list to gain krak/meltabombs on a unit, to get a psychic hood, some barricades to place, a redeployment, or a night assault. Nothing that would win you the game and no list changes, just something to address a bad skew (and ideally nothing that could be used to skew the game further).

IIRC, the Armored Company came with a mandatory rule that allowed weapons which normally couldn't harm a vehicle to... I think roll to wound, and if they got a 6 followed by another 6, they glanced, or something like that? It was one of those things that rarely amounted to much, but at least made it so that all your low-strength weapons weren't totally useless.

I believe there was also a rule where once you lost half your vehicles, you could no longer move any closer to the enemy table edge. It was intended to model morale for a tank army, since normally vehicles were immune to morale.

I liked those little touches. They were GW recognizing the power of skew and adding in some caveats to handicap it a bit.

Anyways, if you were to keep the 4E skimmer rules and damage table, how would you guys handle holofields to avoid the unkillable-Falcon issue?

Turn holofields into a "jink-style" save of some kind, and then calibrate the save based on balance. Also put it in the Cover Save category, so it doesn't stack with actual cover.

In exchange, I wouldn't require movement. Holofields make mirage-like copies of the target while obscuring the original target; nothing like that implies the target has to be moving or something like that. Just give the tank a flat chance that the enemy weapon will hit the mirage instead of the actual tank (represented by a flat save) and you're good.

Flavor to taste.

EDIT:
There's two different armored company lists out there - the one with those rules you're thinking of is 3rd. In 4th the 2006 PDF didn't have rules like that, though I agree and would have appreciated if they did.

 catbarf wrote:
Anyways, if you were to keep the 4E skimmer rules and damage table, how would you guys handle holofields to avoid the unkillable-Falcon issue?

Probably easier to use the 5e damage charts, make immobilised/weapon damaged a single category (attackers choice) and add +1 damage to immobilised vehicles.
The problem with fixing the 4e skimmer rules is that everything else is still a flaming coffin of death.

 catbarf wrote:
I believe there was also a rule where once you lost half your vehicles, you could no longer move any closer to the enemy table edge. It was intended to model morale for a tank army, since normally vehicles were immune to morale.

The chapter approved 2002 armoured company had the following restrictions:

Lucky hit - a weapon that has no chance of glancing a tank can still roll to hit. On a 6 roll again, and on another 6 roll a glancing hit that can never be higher than weapons strength.

Morale - after 50% of the army is destroyed you can only move back towards your table edge

Infantry support - you can't move within 12" of enemy infantry in cover unless you have friendly infantry within 6". Open topped vehicles excluded

There were no restrictions at all on the Imperial Armour 'Armoured Battlegroup' list.