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Back in 5th-6th, I was running the IA8 dreadmob, with forgeworld units like the meka- and mega-dread, and also had the books for death korps of kreig, elysian drop troopers...

I realise that this probably happened in 8th, but are such armies just gone now? Or have they merely been absorbed by the current codex/index/legends/CA/PA/whatever new book they're releasing now?

I always fancied making a Tau fliers list, perhaps even with a Manta as a centerpiece (though I would have been building them myself!). Is that dead in the water these days?

They recently squatted Elysians and Traitor Guard

DKOK as far as I know has a valid list - but you would have to check with your event organizer. I'm pretty sure it'll be allowed as long as they use the new points/power levels

Depends on if you play points or power levels for the Manta at your local store. Do they have events with super heavies? I've been using my Barbed Hierodule for a lot of games at 2k during the end of last edition

We've been promised new FW indexes since before they announced 9e.

Personally I'm waiting for them before making any FW purchases, as they should at least guarantee a few more years of usability for included units.

AFAIK only the DKoK list is still supported in any way, and even that's down to one list from 3 (Siege Regiment, Assault Brigade, Armoured Company).

After Alan Bligh died, pretty much all progress on FW projects died, and all rules have been taken over by the core studio for years now, and they clearly have very little interest in maintaining any of them or providing much rules support for FW models.

After Alan Bligh died, pretty much all progress on FW projects died, and all rules have been taken over by the core studio for years now, and they clearly have very little interest in maintaining any of them or providing much rules support for FW models.

I wondered at the time if him dying might not cause the eventual end of FW to be honest. I'm willing to bet they (sooner rather than later) end up relegated to just making large items that aren't yet feasible in plastic and get removed entirely from the game-proper.

The dis-continuation of the Vraksian lines of models and books was a damned travesty imo. Some of the best lore and minis produced - yep, biased as I play R&H.

Also, DKoK aren't necessarily safe. As far as I am aware still can't get Grenadiers. And they have been out of the picture for nigh on 2 years.

They aren't dead, you just have to play a previous edition where they are fully supported by existing rules. rules that will never be invalidated again

Our DKOK player will only play them with 7th ed rules where the lore still matters.

My salamanders use IA book 10 the badab war rules for dread talons, but then again we all play 5th ed or 30k for the most part.

 Vaktathi wrote:
AFAIK only the DKoK list is still supported in any way, and even that's down to one list from 3 (Siege Regiment, Assault Brigade, Armoured Company).

After Alan Bligh died, pretty much all progress on FW projects died, and all rules have been taken over by the core studio for years now, and they clearly have very little interest in maintaining any of them or providing much rules support for FW models.

The sculpt quality also plummeted, now the miniatures are mostly cad. The details are soft and might as well be plastic anyway, just compare anything new like the blood angels to older hand sculpted models. FW as it was has long been gone and it's a real shame.

I sure hope FW keeps on trucking in one form or another. These days I feel much more drawn to FW minis and lore than GW's. Especially the remakes of vintage 40K vehicles/dreads are awesome, they dont make em like that anymore so in a way FW is doing its part on keeping the original traditions of Rogue Trader alive. And for that, they will always have my respect.

DKoK should become a plastic range though (but keep the gorgeous proportions of the og resin sculpts ffs!)

tauist wrote:
I sure hope FW keeps on trucking in one form or another. These days I feel much more drawn to FW minis and lore than GW's. Especially the remakes of vintage 40K vehicles is awesome, they dont make em like that anymore so in a way FW is doing its part on keeping the original traditions of Rogue Trader alive. And for that, they will always have my respect.

My local gaming group is shifting to 30k for precisely that reason - it's basically Oldhammer, or 'The Old World' to 8th edition's 'Age of Sigmar'.

As much as I like my DKoK army, I'll also be honest, their rules were also pretty much always garbage next to the main Codex unfortunately ("hey, lets take the faction most known for attritional combat and make them super expensive and substantially less capable at attritional battles as a result!"), and while I played my Assault Brigade grenadier list in 6th and 7th, it never worked particularly well, definitely not well enough to go back to 7E or a 7E based ruleset. The lore and fluff in the books was awesome, the unit concepts and army list structure was cool, but 7pt Guardsmen and Grenadiers that cost as much as Stormtroopers but with fewer weapons options and no special deployments never worked out very well

While the lack of list support sucks, it does help take the sting out to remember how bad they were in the first place

our DKOK player was happy with the old platoon organization and i remember something about his tanks counting as elites or fast attack so it didn't limit his artillery in the heavy support slots.

as far as rules go..i feel the opposite i went back to playing 5th because it is a better overall rules set than 6th or 7th (but they had good rules here and there we put into 5th)and especially 8th and 9th. i only use index 8th for epic scale play for simplicity and i will not touch 9th.

 aphyon wrote:
our DKOK player was happy with the old platoon organization and i remember something about his tanks counting as elites or fast attack so it didn't limit his artillery in the heavy support slots.

While it does allow you to take Russ tanks as Elites, they're notably more expensive than the HS iterations basically just for BS4 (IIRC like 185pts for a naked Battlecannon Russ), and the HS Russ tanks are already all (in many cases substantially) more expensive than the basic Codex ones for no reason in an edition where Russ tanks were pretty mediocre at best and usually just plain bad, and again, 7ppm Guardsmen at a 40% premium over Codex guardsmen (with no heavy weapon options), meaning points left over to spend on those HS slots are very limited, the whole army basically ends up being about a 25-40% more than an equivalent codex force for zero reason, and crappier orders with fewer options

The only neat rule was being able to ignore 25% casualty checks in the shooting phase. I ran my list as a Grenadier infantry force (because the Storm Chimeras were stupid expensive and **** Hull Points) behind an Aegis line with Heavy Mortars and Rapier Laser Destroyers back then.

as far as rules go..i feel the opposite i went back to playing 5th because it is a better overall rules set than 6th or 7th (but they had good rules here and there we put into 5th)and especially 8th and 9th. i only use index 8th for epic scale play for simplicity and i will not touch 9th.

Oh I'd for sure go back to 5th over 6E/7E, and I'm in no rush to hop into 9E either given the current state of affairs (not that doing anything but solo gaming is really an option right now )

Yes **** hull points, just what we needed 3 damage mechanics for vehicles(including one that is super easy to achieve).....and one for monsterous creatures

Some game companies can implement something like HP right, GW isn't one of those companies

When we play 7th/30K we house rule out hull points and the fantasy style magic....er psyker phase and go back to the 5th ed style of base LD checks.

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
The dis-continuation of the Vraksian lines of models and books was a damned travesty imo. Some of the best lore and minis produced - yep, biased as I play R&H.

Also, DKoK aren't necessarily safe. As far as I am aware still can't get Grenadiers. And they have been out of the picture for nigh on 2 years.

Actully all of 8th, no i don't consider malefic lords shwoing up as a R&H army actually showing up.
And 7th had , well, other issues [formations, thank you GW ]


R&H are only good enough for the lore to show up to allow the slightly superior CSM bolter fodder to look more threathening than he really is.
That is the role of us ATM in the background.

yeah we fully refuse to allow formations in 7th in our group. they are just dumb and game breaking. fortunately 30K doesn't use them.

 aphyon wrote:
yeah we fully refuse to allow formations in 7th in our group. they are just dumb and game breaking. fortunately 30K doesn't use them.

See that's what i am allways getting laughed at at dakka when i suggest that 7th was better in it's core then 8th for it's massive faults, so long you leave formations out of the picture aswell as allies and certain psypowers.
And yes, you need to make an effort to curate 7th in regards to rules from dexes and armies to make it actually fun, but you can, unlike in 8th where the surounding ruleset is but one of the issues exemplifying the too strongly streamlined core rules issues.

And personally , 9th looks to be the same way, also the pts leaks for the updated CA are hillariously lopsided and the core rules are still too simplistic or just plain uninspired or written with really wierd intentions behind or as if any thought of consequence was ignored (cue -1 +1 to hit cap) .

7th is fine. A bunch of the local group have moved to playing HH and it's been pretty darn fun, despite the rules only changing some fairly minor (though significant!) things.

GW's codex design paradigm broke 7th, not the core rules design. (Except the invisibility psychic power, which was coincidentally replaced in the Age of Darkness HH rulebook by something else...)

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
7th is fine. A bunch of the local group have moved to playing HH and it's been pretty darn fun, despite the rules only changing some fairly minor (though significant!) things.

GW's codex design paradigm broke 7th, not the core rules design. (Except the invisibility psychic power, which was coincidentally replaced in the Age of Darkness HH rulebook by something else...)

Hrm, personally the core vehicle rules and Hull Points alone would keep me from ever going back to 6E/7E again regardless of codex issues for my own part. That era had a lot of problems aside from just codex ones, Jink being another that comes to mind. FW made a lot of cool and interesting content in the 6E/7E years, but oh man were the core rules silly, and that really kept me from looking further into HH stuff.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
7th is fine. A bunch of the local group have moved to playing HH and it's been pretty darn fun, despite the rules only changing some fairly minor (though significant!) things.

GW's codex design paradigm broke 7th, not the core rules design. (Except the invisibility psychic power, which was coincidentally replaced in the Age of Darkness HH rulebook by something else...)

Hrm, personally the core vehicle rules and Hull Points alone would keep me from ever going back to 6E/7E again regardless of codex issues for my own part. That era had a lot of problems aside from just codex ones, Jink being another that comes to mind. FW made a lot of cool and interesting content in the 6E/7E years, but oh man were the core rules silly, and that really kept me from looking further into HH stuff.

Hull points isn't that bad of an idea, I don't think. I take it more as an abstraction of a vehicle crew's morale than the actual functioning of the vehicle - enough damaging hits (or close enough to damaging) and the crew is convinced to bail out, abandoning a tank that might otherwise be serviceable. It's actually a pretty fantastic abstraction of a phenomenon that was missing in older editions, where tanks stayed functional even when their front armor looked like Swiss cheese and they'd caught fire. The real problem with the mechanic was how it compared to Monstrous Creatures, but the Horus Heresy has mercifully few numbers of those outside the Legio Cybernetica, and none of the Cybernetica ones are as ridiculous as the 10-wound T8-10 monstrosities you got in the factions of 40k in late 7th. They're much closer to carnifexes or Greater Daemons in power.

Jinking doesn't personally bother me; it's a better abstraction than the "can only glance" from 4th of the same phenomenon, because at least now certain units can ignore it (anything with ignores cover for example).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
7th is fine. A bunch of the local group have moved to playing HH and it's been pretty darn fun, despite the rules only changing some fairly minor (though significant!) things.

GW's codex design paradigm broke 7th, not the core rules design. (Except the invisibility psychic power, which was coincidentally replaced in the Age of Darkness HH rulebook by something else...)

Hrm, personally the core vehicle rules and Hull Points alone would keep me from ever going back to 6E/7E again regardless of codex issues for my own part. That era had a lot of problems aside from just codex ones, Jink being another that comes to mind. FW made a lot of cool and interesting content in the 6E/7E years, but oh man were the core rules silly, and that really kept me from looking further into HH stuff.

Hull points isn't that bad of an idea, I don't think. I take it more as an abstraction of a vehicle crew's morale than the actual functioning of the vehicle - enough damaging hits (or close enough to damaging) and the crew is convinced to bail out, abandoning a tank that might otherwise be serviceable. It's actually a pretty fantastic abstraction of a phenomenon that was missing in older editions, where tanks stayed functional even when their front armor looked like Swiss cheese and they'd caught fire. The real problem with the mechanic was how it compared to Monstrous Creatures, but the Horus Heresy has mercifully few numbers of those outside the Legio Cybernetica, and none of the Cybernetica ones are as ridiculous as the 10-wound T8-10 monstrosities you got in the factions of 40k in late 7th. They're much closer to carnifexes or Greater Daemons in power.

The theory wasn't awful, the practical execution was abysmal , for two big reasons. First is that they were just Wounds in all but name, and there were way too few of them for most units and they didn't get armor saves, and thus mass S5/6/7 fire and infantry fists in close combat were way too effective at simply stripping HP's, and in large part making heavy AT weapons really inefficient at their role as by the time you put enough shots into something to average a decent kill result on the damage table you'd have stripped the HP's anyway. Second is that having two overlapping kill mechanics was unnecessary, pick one, a damage table or wounds, but not both, having both was really punitive. Yeah in older editions tanks could still work even when turned into swiss cheese, but you could also silence them with a single glance/tear off weapons/immobilize them/etc where other units could not be, and it's not like any other units in the game were any less effective after being turned into swiss cheese and left at one wound than at full wounds either

Jinking doesn't personally bother me; it's a better abstraction than the "can only glance" from 4th of the same phenomenon, because at least now certain units can ignore it (anything with ignores cover for example).

The issue with Jink is that it was a no-brainer defensive mechanism, you would always Jink if shot at with any serious attack. More to the point, next to Smoke, it was way too powerful, as Smoke you had to use ahead of time, completely prevented shooting from the vehicle or passengers, could only be used once, and only provided a 5+ save, while Jink could be used as a reaction, still allowed shooting with Snapshots and didn't impact passengers, could be used every turn, offered a 4+ save, and didn't have any impact on CC (you could still Jink, Charge, and fight at full effectiveness on things like Bikes without any downside who also usually had TL'd weapons to mitigate snapshots anyway, or even as a reaction to Overwatch where the Snapshot downside was irrelevant).

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
7th is fine. A bunch of the local group have moved to playing HH and it's been pretty darn fun, despite the rules only changing some fairly minor (though significant!) things.

GW's codex design paradigm broke 7th, not the core rules design. (Except the invisibility psychic power, which was coincidentally replaced in the Age of Darkness HH rulebook by something else...)

Hrm, personally the core vehicle rules and Hull Points alone would keep me from ever going back to 6E/7E again regardless of codex issues for my own part. That era had a lot of problems aside from just codex ones, Jink being another that comes to mind. FW made a lot of cool and interesting content in the 6E/7E years, but oh man were the core rules silly, and that really kept me from looking further into HH stuff.

Hull points isn't that bad of an idea, I don't think. I take it more as an abstraction of a vehicle crew's morale than the actual functioning of the vehicle - enough damaging hits (or close enough to damaging) and the crew is convinced to bail out, abandoning a tank that might otherwise be serviceable. It's actually a pretty fantastic abstraction of a phenomenon that was missing in older editions, where tanks stayed functional even when their front armor looked like Swiss cheese and they'd caught fire. The real problem with the mechanic was how it compared to Monstrous Creatures, but the Horus Heresy has mercifully few numbers of those outside the Legio Cybernetica, and none of the Cybernetica ones are as ridiculous as the 10-wound T8-10 monstrosities you got in the factions of 40k in late 7th. They're much closer to carnifexes or Greater Daemons in power.

The theory wasn't awful, the practical execution was abysmal , for two big reasons. First is that they were just Wounds in all but name, and there were way too few of them for most units and they didn't get armor saves, and thus mass S5/6/7 fire and infantry fists in close combat were way too effective at simply stripping HP's, and in large part making heavy AT weapons really inefficient at their role as by the time you put enough shots into something to average a decent kill result on the damage table you'd have stripped the HP's anyway. Second is that having two overlapping kill mechanics was unnecessary, pick one, a damage table or wounds, but not both, having both was really punitive. Yeah in older editions tanks could still work even when turned into swiss cheese, but you could also silence them with a single glance/tear off weapons/immobilize them/etc where other units could not be, and it's not like any other units in the game were any less effective after being turned into swiss cheese and left at one wound than at full wounds either

They were wounds in all but name, that's true. What else would they have been? There's nothing theoretically wrong with having a high toughness with no save, or a low toughness with good save. The problem came when some units had high toughness and good save (wraithknight, wraithlord) because they were just flat better than tanks. The only unit like that in 30k is a Thantar, and it's got a superheavy price despite being a regular MC. As for "way too few" - that's debatable. 3 is a good average, I think, because that means it would take 3 penetrating or glancing hits to disable a vehicle. That is about how many I would expect from e.g. a Dreadnought. It's worth noting that in 30k, things like the Russ have 4 (depending on faction; the locally built militia Russes still have 3 but the forge-crafted Solar Auxilia ones are 4), and the Malcador has 6, all sitting in heavy support. Which is more than they had in 7th...

... in other words, the 'number' of hull points is a codex problem (unit statlines) not a core rules problem (hull points in general).

There really aren't two kill mechanics. There's a "disable" mechanic and a kill mechanic, but most weapons can't actually kill a tank through the damage chart alone, and end up having to hull point it to death anyways. AP1 weapons are scary, and 1 in 6 pens with AP2 you could one-shot a tank, but otherwise you mostly just disable it, and in 30k there's enough special rules that let things ignore Shaken/Stunned (walkers in CC, vehicles with POTMS, or 'moar tanks') that any given penetrating hit doesn't do much to shut down the function of an army.

Also, I want to reiterate that the problem is MCs, I think. They showed the flaws in the vehicle rules badly at the end of 7th. Things like the Riptide and Wraithknight were vehicle-no-wait-MCs that illustrated the problem. There's much less of that in 30k, and the things that do (e.g. the Thantar) actually suffer from being MCs rather than vehicles. I know I'd rather the Thanatar be an AV14 walker with an invuln than a T8 2+ MC with vulnerability to instant death - because again, in 30k, instant death weapons are depressingly common. Almost the entire Custodes arsenal, for example, inflicts ID. I'd rather be a tank in that fight.

So once again, a problem solved by changing up the codexes and adding Instant Death to more things, which tilts the meta back to vehicles somewhat.

Jinking doesn't personally bother me; it's a better abstraction than the "can only glance" from 4th of the same phenomenon, because at least now certain units can ignore it (anything with ignores cover for example).

The issue with Jink is that it was a no-brainer defensive mechanism, you would always Jink if shot at with any serious attack. More to the point, next to Smoke, it was way too powerful, as Smoke you had to use ahead of time, completely prevented shooting from the vehicle or passengers, could only be used once, and only provided a 5+ save, while Jink could be used as a reaction, still allowed shooting with Snapshots and didn't impact passengers, could be used every turn, offered a 4+ save, and didn't have any impact on CC (you could still Jink, Charge, and fight at full effectiveness on things like Bikes without any downside who also usually had TL'd weapons to mitigate snapshots anyway, or even as a reaction to Overwatch where the Snapshot downside was irrelevant).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

They were wounds in all but name, that's true. What else would they have been? There's nothing theoretically wrong with having a high toughness with no save, or a low toughness with good save. The problem came when some units had high toughness and good save (wraithknight, wraithlord) because they were just flat better than tanks. The only unit like that in 30k is a Thantar, and it's got a superheavy price despite being a regular MC. As for "way too few" - that's debatable. 3 is a good average, I think, because that means it would take 3 penetrating or glancing hits to disable a vehicle. That is about how many I would expect from e.g. a Dreadnought. It's worth noting that in 30k, things like the Russ have 4 (depending on faction; the locally built militia Russes still have 3 but the forge-crafted Solar Auxilia ones are 4), and the Malcador has 6, all sitting in heavy support. Which is more than they had in 7th...

... in other words, the 'number' of hull points is a codex problem (unit statlines) not a core rules problem (hull points in general).

There really aren't two kill mechanics. There's a "disable" mechanic and a kill mechanic, but most weapons can't actually kill a tank through the damage chart alone, and end up having to hull point it to death anyways. AP1 weapons are scary and 1 in 6 pens with AP2 you could one-shot a tank, but otherwise you mostly just disable it, and in 30k there's enough special rules that let things ignore Shaken/Stunned (walkers in CC, vehicles with POTMS, or 'moar tanks') that any given penetrating hit doesn't do much to shut down the function of an army.

The damage table was very much a kill mechanic, as it had kill results and cumulative damage could result in a kill (usually through HP loss, especially Immobilized results), it just wasn't as effective as stripping HP's. It was largely still the same kill mechanic that existed in 3E/4E/5E just made less effective. Having both made little sense, particularly when it applied to only one unit type and not any others in the game. Even side from MC's, artillery units, characters, multiwound heavy infantry, etc didn't have any disabling mechanisms, and didn't have to deal with armor facings either or being substantially easier to hurt in CC due to auto-hits on a weaker "toughness". ID was a thing they would have to worry about, but generally this was rather limited in availability, particularly against T6+ units.

In theory AP1 weapons were scary, yes, but in practice, especially outside of Deep Striking Melta units, most such weapons were too expensive and too few to land enough of those shots to really be effective over stripping HP's, and even with AP1, on average you'd strip HP's just as fast if not faster (e.g. Railgun vs AV14 needed an average of 6 hits to strip 3 HP's and kill a Russ, but needed an average of 7.2 hits to average Damage Table kill result). AP2 suffered the same efficiency problems as AP1, only worse. With regards to PotMS and Dreads still being able to fight in CC, hey could still lose weapons or become immobilized, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of vehicles (anything on Rhino/Chimera/Russ hulls, Sicarans, Dreads, etc) didn't have any means to keep from Shaken/Stunned preventing shooting.

Also, I want to reiterate that the problem is MCs, I think. They showed the flaws in the vehicle rules badly at the end of 7th. Things like the Riptide and Wraithknight were vehicle-no-wait-MCs that illustrated the problem.

They certainly exacerbated it, but even much more basic MC's like Daemon Princes or the like just worked way better, and other unit types like Artillery worked much better than vehicles because they got saves, more wounds, and didn't have to worry about a damage table. Regardless of the existence of MC's, when things like Scatterlasers became as good or better at killing most vehicles in absolute terms than Lascannons because of their HP stripping ability (in addition to being cheaper and more widely available), there is a problem.

With FW stuff, the big area we saw that was popular was those Artillery units over vehicles for a reason. My 7E DKoK Assault Brigade loaded up on T7 3+sv Heavy Mortars and Rapier Lasier Destroyers over bothering with vehicles. Vehicles just fundamentally didn't work terribly well, and even in armies without MC's (like Guard) we saw them take dramatic nosedives in effectiveness with the introduction of HP's and the mass dumping of vehicle heavy lists through most of the edition in favor of infantry centric lists often built around T7 3+sv Artillery units in the competitive arena.

There's much less of that in 30k, and the things that do (e.g. the Thantar) actually suffer from being MCs rather than vehicles. I know I'd rather the Thanatar be an AV14 walker with an invuln than a T8 2+ MC with vulnerability to instant death - because again, in 30k, instant death weapons are depressingly common. Almost the entire Custodes arsenal, for example, inflicts ID. I'd rather be a tank in that fight. So once again, a problem solved by changing up the codexes and adding Instant Death to more things, which tilts the meta back to vehicles somewhat.

The issue is that HP's were a later add-on layered on top of an existing design paradigm, trying to blame the codexes for the problem when those units and stats largely existed before the HP mechanic existed and pretty much just got an HP stat tacked on afterwards, looks to me much more a problem with HP's and the core rules than the codexes. Absolutely some stuff like Riptides were a codex issue, but they were a symptom of how bad the vehicle rules were and GW realizing they couldn't express how they wanted such units to work, and even without those big MC's being around at all, the core vehicle rules just had major problems.

With regards to Custodes ID stuff, to me, that feels much more like an after-the-fact patch that didn't actually address the problems with vehicles, it just made some of the crazy powerful MC's easier to deal with (regardless of the presence or actions of vehicles), especially as being able to ID a huge powerful monster with a single ID attack like that felt like a mis-applicaton of the core rules where more generally it was intended for much smaller things (such as S>2xT), particularly in light of most of the rest of the existing game and the design paradigms the ruleset was built on, with all the stuff HP's got layered on top of after the fact in a pretty universal fashion (e.g. all light vehicles got 2HP, 95% of all others got 3, a rare few got 4) regardless of codex.

So in some edge cases (a unit that can do CC, and when faced with Overwatch) jinking was a no-brainer. I'd argue that's fine, as in some edge cases (e.g. weapons are out of range or transporting troops is a priority) then smoke is a no-brainer. In most cases, the drawback is severe. Jinking with a Marauder Destroyer, for example, really hurts (even though all the guns are twin-linked except the missiles, it's a super difficult choice).

I would argue the Marauder is far more the edge case, and I never saw one used during the entirety of 7th (in fact, haven't seen one since 5th in person). A transport didn't see any downsides from Jinking for its primary purpose, Bikes which across all factions came almost universally with TL'd or high-RoF weapons and often heavily reliant on CC (for SM's at least) would never *not* Jink if shot at with anything more than trivial stuff like Rhino stormbolters, most of the common Skimmers had TL'd or High RoF weapons (or both!) or other such things to mitigate the downsides of Snapshots when targeted by anything that could threaten them, etc. There was never any situation where Jink was inferior in any way to Smoke, and Smoke Launchers sometimes actually even had to be purchased separately at additional cost (e.g. Hellhounds).

So to avoid spaghettification, let me say this:
Do you prefer 8th edition's approach of making Vehicles operate like Old MCs (essentially)?

I do not, as making them lock in combat and vulnerable to small arms are more immersion breaking to me than the exact details of kill mechanisms and statline balance.

And I say statline balance because if you gave vehicles, say, 30 hull points, they'd be impossible to kill and AP1 or 2 would be a lot more attractive. So there clearly is a balance where theres a "correct" number of hull points to preserve the reality of the setting. The fact that it takes a railgun an entire 6-turn game to kill a Russ is an argument that hull points isn't such a bad idea after all, to me. The alternative is that a railgun can't kill a russ on average during a game at all (your 7 turn example).

The fact that you never saw a Marauder used is exactly my point. It is a unit that existed in 7th and could be brought under the paradigm of the core rules, where it functioned well. Everything you ever "saw" were of course the more broken things in the edition, because the codexes were fundamentally broken. A world using the 7th edition rules but where a Marauder is a good aircraft is a fine world, imo.

EDIT:
How would you solve the problem of 5th edition where vehicle crews never bailed out? It is fully possible in the 5th ed rules for a vehicle to live infinitely long, since every penetrating or glancing hit could merely shake it. It was immersion breaking for me to have a Vanquisher and two LR Annihilators put 8 holes in the front of a Rhino in 5th (which would make even Space Marines bail out, imo) and not really even inconvenience it.

My Corsairs are 99% dead.....

Forgeworld will soon be dead.

So yes. Though armies like DKoK will probably survive.

 Vaktathi wrote:
...The issue is that HP's were a later add-on layered on top of an existing design paradigm, trying to blame the codexes for the problem when those units and stats largely existed before the HP mechanic existed and pretty much just got an HP stat tacked on afterwards, looks to me much more a problem with HP's and the core rules than the codexes. Absolutely some stuff like Riptides were a codex issue, but they were a symptom of how bad the vehicle rules were and GW realizing they couldn't express how they wanted such units to work, and even without those big MC's being around at all, the core vehicle rules just had major problems...

I'm confused. You've just described a Codex problem (that the HP stat was tacked on after the fact) as a core rules problem. If you go to 30k you'll see vehicle/weapon stats designed with HP in mind; there are more HP4-5 vehicles, more AV13-14, higher side armour, and a lot less cheap spammable S6-7.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
...EDIT:
How would you solve the problem of 5th edition where vehicle crews never bailed out? It is fully possible in the 5th ed rules for a vehicle to live infinitely long, since every penetrating or glancing hit could merely shake it. It was immersion breaking for me to have a Vanquisher and two LR Annihilators put 8 holes in the front of a Rhino in 5th (which would make even Space Marines bail out, imo) and not really even inconvenience it.

I've been experimenting and my favourite approach is to put hull point damage onto the damage table instead of giving it to you automatically for any glance. It means that AP1/2 weapons are both more likely to spontaneously explode the vehicle and more likely to take hull points off, you keep the steady progress of hull points but if you're throwing scatter laser fire at a vehicle it'll take a lot longer to hull point it out than real AT weapons.

The map thing that they announced on warcom that shows the dispositions of all the factions in the galaxy shows Krieg on the Astra Militarum overlay, but not Elysia. Make of that what you will.

I think hullpoints were the way to go, but as said above, there should have been more of them. Like, 3HP for buggies, 4HP for light vehicles, 5HP for tanks, 6+HP for bigger tanks.

What made vehicles great was the ability to ignore small arms fire entirely - like, you know, a tank - so the big guns were needed to kill it. Now, small arms can kill tanks, and big-arms aren't punchy enough to make the cut.

I also got frustrated at endlessy getting shaken or stunned results, and never downing the vehicles. but I also hated that my orks could kill a leman russ by getting 3 6's to glance out of 48 attacks - not exactly difficult. Especially if it didn't move, thus auto-hits.

Unit1126PLL wrote:So to avoid spaghettification, let me say this:
Do you prefer 8th edition's approach of making Vehicles operate like Old MCs (essentially)?

I do not, as making them lock in combat and vulnerable to small arms are more immersion breaking to me than the exact details of kill mechanisms and statline balance.

And I say statline balance because if you gave vehicles, say, 30 hull points, they'd be impossible to kill and AP1 or 2 would be a lot more attractive. So there clearly is a balance where theres a "correct" number of hull points to preserve the reality of the setting. The fact that it takes a railgun an entire 6-turn game to kill a Russ is an argument that hull points isn't such a bad idea after all, to me. The alternative is that a railgun can't kill a russ on average during a game at all (your 7 turn example).

The fact that you never saw a Marauder used is exactly my point. It is a unit that existed in 7th and could be brought under the paradigm of the core rules, where it functioned well. Everything you ever "saw" were of course the more broken things in the edition, because the codexes were fundamentally broken. A world using the 7th edition rules but where a Marauder is a good aircraft is a fine world, imo.

Relative to the 6E/7E paradigm? I absolutely prefer 8E to 6E/7E (though I'm not saying its perfect, its not), most especially because, in most cases, with rear AV10 and 2 or 3HP on 95% of vehicles, if anything did make it into CC and the tank wasn't zipping at top speed, they'd just be dead instead of locked in combat much of the time. Yeah the 8E issue of a grot touching a tank hull and preventing it from shooting was dumb, but was something that could be mitigated and controlled at a tactical level to at least some extent (particularly screening), as opposed to just being a fundamental problem with the way vehicle damage worked. With regard to the Railgun example, going back to the 5E ruleset before HP's, that would only have taken 5 hits to average a kill (and on a glance could still do something meaningful enough to neutralize it as a threat), the dedicated heavy AT gun was more effective due to the damage chart being more punitive, but without having to worry about HP stripping attacks from weenier weapons. There was a huge shift towards the FW Artillery units by many armies (especially IG) in the 6E/7E era because vehicles were so awkward, and why my Assault Brigade dropped all of its Chimeras in favor of Heavy Mortars and Rapiers.

If we're using the fact that nobody took the Marauder as proof that the rules were fine, I don't think that's a particularly solid foundation for an argument, because it indicated the Marauder was not functional. If the only vehicles taken are the "broken" ones, that indicates something is fundamentally wrong in across the board with that unit type, particularly as this state of affairs was not true of every other unit type in the game to anything near the same extent.

Again, I have a hard time considering the codexes broken in this particular respect when they were pretty much all handled about the same way in terms of HP's and the profiles were largely unchanged from previous editions. When the one thing changing was the introduction of a new mechanic and stuff breaks, generally that implies it's probably the new mechanic not everything else. They could have added more HP's, but didn't, and nailing that balance with two overlapping kill mechanics was never going to be anything but messy.

EDIT:
How would you solve the problem of 5th edition where vehicle crews never bailed out? It is fully possible in the 5th ed rules for a vehicle to live infinitely long, since every penetrating or glancing hit could merely shake it. It was immersion breaking for me to have a Vanquisher and two LR Annihilators put 8 holes in the front of a Rhino in 5th (which would make even Space Marines bail out, imo) and not really even inconvenience it.

Honestly, in 5E the balance issue was the 50pt Rhinos with EA that didn't care about 5/6 glancing hit results and 50% of Pens for their primary role (move forward and deliver troops), with 4+ smoke that was always auto-popped turn 1, and only needed to live through turn 2 in order to do their job. *That* was an issue.

Aside from that, vehicles weren't really a big problem, nobody complained about Land Raiders, Hammerheads, Fire Prisms, Ravagers, Russ Tanks, Falcons, Dreadnoughts, War Walkers, Manticores/Basilisks, Battlewagons, Hellhounds, Skyrays, Monoliths, etc. And for every time you put 8 lascannons into a Rhino and did nothing, you'd pop it first turn with a single Autocannon. Now, whether or not you liked that level of randomness is one thing, but vehicles were not consistently invincible. In the same edition, you could land a Railgun shot or Battlecannon shell right in a Trygons face and never do more than 1 wound to it and certainly couldn't do things like immobilize it, or remove weapons, nor force it to flee no matter how many wounds you did to it until it was dead. Aside from the cheap transport issue, I think that balance worked out pretty well at a core rules level in that edition.

BlaxicanX wrote:Forgeworld will soon be dead.

So yes. Though armies like DKoK will probably survive.

I suspect even the DKoK are not long for this world at this rate. With half their kits OOP and two of their three lists already gone, the writing is on the wall methinks.

AnomanderRake wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
...The issue is that HP's were a later add-on layered on top of an existing design paradigm, trying to blame the codexes for the problem when those units and stats largely existed before the HP mechanic existed and pretty much just got an HP stat tacked on afterwards, looks to me much more a problem with HP's and the core rules than the codexes. Absolutely some stuff like Riptides were a codex issue, but they were a symptom of how bad the vehicle rules were and GW realizing they couldn't express how they wanted such units to work, and even without those big MC's being around at all, the core vehicle rules just had major problems...

I'm confused. You've just described a Codex problem (that the HP stat was tacked on after the fact) as a core rules problem. If you go to 30k you'll see vehicle/weapon stats designed with HP in mind; there are more HP4-5 vehicles, more AV13-14, higher side armour, and a lot less cheap spammable S6-7.

Those units getting such high HP counts also were physically much larger and more heavily armored vehicles than most of the 40k units at the time, giving an excuse for the enhanced stats. A Spartan getting 5HP isn't that remarkable given its size for example, but anything on a Russ/Rhino/Chimera hull still had 3HP (at least looking at the 30k books I have, I don't have all of them admittedly). Yeah a Sicaran got better side/rear armor than a Predator, but was also a much bigger and more expensive tank, and still only had 3HP.