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tauist wrote:
Just watched the latest WC podcast with Stu Black, where he teased that a lot of the new codexes should be out "6 to 7 months from now". So given this bit of info and considering I'm in lockdown until the covid vaccines arrive, I can hold out just fine, and recon by the time I can finally leave the house, most statline revisions will already be in play.

In the meantime, I got plenty of building and painting to do.. more than enough to keep me busy!

With Knights, Sisters (both don't need any big changes, imo), Marines, and Necrons out of the way --

CSM / TS / DG
Daemons
T'au
Orks
DE / CW / Harlies
GSC / Nids
Custodes
Guard
Mechanicus


If they combined elves and CSM like marines (maybe bugs, too) we'd be looking at 8 books. Elves and bugs wouldn't need supplements (probably). Guard likely won't see W2 stuff and they'll get weapons so scratch them. Mechanicus got their new units so scratch them, too.

It seems plausible.

AdMech getting an updated book with their existing new units, plus whatever the previewed model is (Skitarii character?), plus their Crusade/objective content should be a pretty simple one to get out there - most of the work seems to be done already.

I'll likely wait to play a full Guard army until they get their codex.

In the meantime, I love the rules for Crusade, so I'll be doing a (hopefully exclusively, should I paint enough in time) Old Marine force for one.

 chromedog wrote:

Totto wrote:
Maybe it's not rational, but seeing the buffs and changes being thrown out (mainly to SM) makes me simply not want to play until my codices drop (and counting on them getting as big buffs as SM)

It seems these new units and changes both to weapon dmg and stats are a far bigger boost than what a new codex usually brings for a faction.

Also, they dropped the Munitorium Field Manual not one month ago, and already they are changing the wounds and stats etc for not just one faction but many, in one fell swoop. Did they not know about this? I'm sure people like to have the book they bought a few weeks back be invalidated quickly.

Oh well, maybe I'm overreacting and everything is fine and balanced

Firstly, points for using 'codices' and not the bastardisation of 'codexes'.
With all the changes from 8th to 9th editions, it's only made me want to play 5th edition more. When my eldar and GK didn't completely suck.
The last 40k tourney I played in was for 5th edition. Yes, that long ago.

GW themselves refer to them as "Codexes", so wouldn't that make "Codices" (while the correct plural form of codex) wrong when referring to multiple Games Workshop brand of Warhammer 40k books they call a Codex?

 NH Gunsmith wrote:

 chromedog wrote:

Totto wrote:
Maybe it's not rational, but seeing the buffs and changes being thrown out (mainly to SM) makes me simply not want to play until my codices drop (and counting on them getting as big buffs as SM)

It seems these new units and changes both to weapon dmg and stats are a far bigger boost than what a new codex usually brings for a faction.

Also, they dropped the Munitorium Field Manual not one month ago, and already they are changing the wounds and stats etc for not just one faction but many, in one fell swoop. Did they not know about this? I'm sure people like to have the book they bought a few weeks back be invalidated quickly.

Oh well, maybe I'm overreacting and everything is fine and balanced

Firstly, points for using 'codices' and not the bastardisation of 'codexes'.
With all the changes from 8th to 9th editions, it's only made me want to play 5th edition more. When my eldar and GK didn't completely suck.
The last 40k tourney I played in was for 5th edition. Yes, that long ago.

GW themselves refer to them as "Codexes", so wouldn't that make "Codices" (while the correct plural form of codex) wrong when referring to multiple Games Workshop brand of Warhammer 40k books they call a Codex?

Or maybe their proof-reading guys and writers are not very good at their job

Totto wrote:
...Or maybe their proof-reading guys and writers are not very good at their job

Are you suggesting that brand names should always follow correct usage/spelling for the pre-existing terms? ("Krispy Kreme", "Froot Loops", "The Beatles"...)

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Totto wrote:
...Or maybe their proof-reading guys and writers are not very good at their job

Are you suggesting that brand names should always follow correct usage/spelling for the pre-existing terms? ("Krispy Kreme", "Froot Loops", "The Beatles"...)

Kind of a depends on a country. We have a law that forbids to name your company, bar etc in an insulting to religion or morals, insulting heads of state or , which is the important part, offends the language sensivity of the people. It was put down to protect the public used language from foreign influances. I assume that UK has no such laws.

Karol wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Totto wrote:
...Or maybe their proof-reading guys and writers are not very good at their job

Are you suggesting that brand names should always follow correct usage/spelling for the pre-existing terms? ("Krispy Kreme", "Froot Loops", "The Beatles"...)

Kind of a depends on a country. We have a law that forbids to name your company, bar etc in an insulting to religion or morals, insulting heads of state or , which is the important part, offends the language sensivity of the people. It was put down to protect the public used language from foreign influances. I assume that UK has no such laws.

According to a cursory search there don't appear to be any such restrictions on trademarks in the UK. Polish intellectual property law sounds fascinating.

ERJAK wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

ERJAK wrote:
DG are one of the better armies in the game overall right now. If you can't at least hold your own, that's on you not on them.

Eh. I got murdered my first game with 9th ed DG because my army wasn't equipped to handle the mission properly and severe mistake in regards to Look out Sir! and coherency made my arch-contaminator first blood. Lessons were learned, but it's really easy to lose the game with DG if you don't bring the right tools or not play the mission properly - both incredibly easy things to do in your first game of a new edition.

It's an urban myth that DG can faceroll themselves to victory in 9th, I have yet to see data to support that myth.

So basically what you're saying is that you couldn't hold your own and it was due to your own mistakes, rather than any inherent flaw in the army?

Yes, that's exactly what I said.

Because that's what Isaid. YOU said 'faceroll win with DG'. That's not at all what I said.

You still implied that anyone should be able to win with DG even if he had no clue how 9th works. It's quite easy to build a decent 8th edition DG army that has no chance of winning a game of 9th.

 AnomanderRake wrote:


According to a cursory search there don't appear to be any such restrictions on trademarks in the UK. Polish intellectual property law sounds fascinating.

Well it has been a few months since my last political science class, but from what I remember, it isn't part of intelectual law, it is just a law against people trying to use other languages, then polish in the public sphere. The rest is old laws we had since for ever, like the ones against insulting heads of state etc. Some are put there to make it easier for police to function, we have a law since for ever about "insulting the uniform of public official", which means that if you fall down pushed by a policmen and touch him on the way down, you just commited a criminal offence. Or if they carry you the patrol car, and you skip on the steps and fall out of their hands, this can be counted as "assaulting an officer while performing duty".

In general our law system, besides the stuff force by EU, is about how to make rich and politicians untouchable, and police allowed to do what ever they want with you. A friend of my had youth court for "assaulting an officer" because when he got smacked with a baton, he fell down hit the ground so hard his shoe came off and it hit another policmen on his visor. Had to do 6 months of youth correction, and got a life long ban on entering stadiums.

Arcanis161 wrote:
I'll likely wait to play a full Guard army until they get their codex.

In the meantime, I love the rules for Crusade, so I'll be doing a (hopefully exclusively, should I paint enough in time) Old Marine force for one.

Just play narrative with friends. When 8th dropped and my AM got a codex before my buddy's orks, thats what we did. Focus on the fun piece. We do that in kill team too, or else I wouldn't have much point in playing my friend since he's just so much better than I. If it gets really bad, just ask your friend to spot you some points.

We all gotta make do. Narrative 40k is way better than no 40k!

Its funny how my attitude about this has changed as I've gotten older. I think sometimes it probably explains a lot of GW's decisions too.

We play so many good games, its not really much issue for us to drop 40k for an edition if needed.

Kill team i think is what kept 40k on life support anyway, so i dont see it really changing.

My friends and I will focus on Kill Team for the time being, as much to give everyone time to paint up models as anything else. When we do decide to jump back into 40k, we'll make a decision as to which edition we'll play then. While most of the changes to 9th's core rules sound absolutely great from a competitive standpoint - they seem to have really gone all out to eliminate janky edge cases - they really don't matter all that much to us, as we'll be focusing almost entirely on narrative play anyway, and are happy to introduce our own rules to suit the narrative. In this way, 8th and 9th are both perfectly fine for us, and it might not make a huge difference which we choose. If we go with 8th, we'll probably add our own rules on top of it, like custom terrain rules for instance. If we go with 9th, we'll probably remove some rules that are more suited to competitive play, like the +-1 limit to shooting penalties. Either way, we'll be playing with a modified rule set that probably resembles some hybrid between 8th and 9th, so what we use as a basis, is largely just academic. The only thing I can say with certainty, is that I'll be pirating everything, and paying for nothing.

 Ginjitzu wrote:
My friends and I will focus on Kill Team for the time being, as much to give everyone time to paint up models as anything else. When we do decide to jump back into 40k, we'll make a decision as to which edition we'll play then. While most of the changes to 9th's core rules sound absolutely great from a competitive standpoint - they seem to have really gone all out to eliminate janky edge cases - they really don't matter all that much to us, as we'll be focusing almost entirely on narrative play anyway, and are happy to introduce our own rules to suit the narrative. In this way, 8th and 9th are both perfectly fine for us, and it might not make a huge difference which we choose. If we go with 8th, we'll probably add our own rules on top of it, like custom terrain rules for instance. If we go with 9th, we'll probably remove some rules that are more suited to competitive play, like the +-1 limit to shooting penalties. Either way, we'll be playing with a modified rule set that probably resembles some hybrid between 8th and 9th, so what we use as a basis, is largely just academic. The only thing I can say with certainty, is that I'll be pirating everything, and paying for nothing.

Yup, its surprising what you can do when you talk to your opponents(dont like that term)? It's like the game is about both players having fun....equally.

Racerguy180 wrote:

Yup, its surprising what you can do when you talk to your opponents(dont like that term)? It's like the game is about both players having fun....equally.

Burn this heretic!

Karol wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Totto wrote:
...Or maybe their proof-reading guys and writers are not very good at their job

Are you suggesting that brand names should always follow correct usage/spelling for the pre-existing terms? ("Krispy Kreme", "Froot Loops", "The Beatles"...)

Kind of a depends on a country. We have a law that forbids to name your company, bar etc in an insulting to religion or morals, insulting heads of state or , which is the important part, offends the language sensivity of the people. It was put down to protect the public used language from foreign influances. I assume that UK has no such laws.

Nope the UK is an english speaking country, generally English speaking countries see no need to pass "'language protection laws" for reason I would imagine are pretty obvious

Seems to me everything's *very* up in the air right now – there's new rules, but then there's also fairly significant rules changes we know are coming, but not til October at the earliest.

However, there's probably no better time for it, given that people aren't really out, about and playing games as usual for the most part. Personally, I'm just going to see how much of the old backlog I can get painted in the meantime, wait for the dust to settle, and crack back into some games down the line, once there's a bit of a clearer idea of what the heckins is going on


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

GSC / Nids

I always find it really weird when people suggest conflating Nids and GsC into a single Codex – they're two completely separate armies with completely different units (bar one)– you may as well argue for Sisters, AdMech and Guard to be rolled into a single book due to the sharing of Priests and Enginseers across Codices.

for the "world is burning" group:

3 games into 9th, 2 versus Ultramarines, 1 against Emperor's Children... all with Adepta Sororitas.

Won both vs the Ultramarines via points. Both games went to turn 5, and both players had decent capital left on the table (approximately 10% remaining).

Lost against Emperor's Children in a nail-biter (74-75). Completely due to my decisions in the game, no other reason for the loss.

Terrain has had a LARGE impact. We play fairly dense tables, so gaining cover benefits and blocking line of sight is relatively easy. We both prefer melee being an actual phase, and bounding terrain to block LOS used to be the ONLY way it worked in 8th, so our tables calibrated to allow those armies to function. I think Tabletop Titans said it best: if you're getting blown off the table by turn 2 and 3... you need more terrain on the table.

2 of the games were Crusade, 1 was Matched play. All of the games came down to playing the primary objective, NOT blowing your opponent off of the table. Staying castled and clustered doesn't seem to be a winning formula in the new edition. A singular roaming deathstar doesn't seem too advantageous either.

In my loss, one of the differences in the game was that he had a transport to get to the objective first, and enough armor to cover and feed my artillery units while he controlled that objective. I had a play to win regardless of that strategy, which was welcomed... but I resurrected the wrong HQ.

Positioning characters is EASY to mess up. And a smart opponent can punish such lapses in judgment. This is an amazing change from 8th.

I could go on at much greater length, but... the bottom line is: killing horde units (all super cheapy stuff that can bog out objectives to a brainless grind of a game...) has been great, transports have value even if they get popped, how you incorporate and use terrain has direct impact to the outcome of the game, and playing the arms race is no longer how you win.

Empirical statement: in my loss, my opponent killed maybe 200 points of my 1250 point list. No matter how killy or advantaged you may think Primaris are... if they cannot play the mission, you have a great chance at winning. It may cost you feeding your entire army to him over 3-4 turns, but as long as you're scoring and he is not... it doesn't matter if you're wiped out, you will score the tactical win.

My group (who is lucky enough to be able to play socially distanced garage hammer) feels less like playing 9th ed, but NOT 40k in general. Maybe it's just our play style, or maybe it's our armies, IDK, but we seem to be running into a lot of issues with it. Played about 30 games across different point levels from about 650 to 2000. The 850-1200 point games feel about right, while anything smaller requires everyone to be on the same page as to what they're bringing (because regardless of what GW says - they did NOT build the game to work at that level - the potential skew at 500 points is mind boggling), and anything bigger than about 1200 starts to feel clumsy with this rule set.

The missions seem to overly reward going first - since so many objectives are scored in the player's command phase, I can score my objectives, and then, if I want, leave said objective to make sure you can't score yours, and snowballing can happen surprisingly easily. Unfortunately, the secondaries don't seem set up to mitigate this as much as one would like, so yeah, going first - still too good.

The rollercoaster of the points, combined with all the faqs and errata of the (brand new) faqs is also already exhausting. I applaud GW for doing it of course, but come on - the "Look Out Sir" stuff should never have made it to print like that, let alone required two FAQs to properly fix. 8th was certainly not flawless in this regard but it was such a breath of fresh air compared to 7th that I think it was easier to overlook the issues. My group often jokes that chances are, if 8th ed had followed 5th ed, people would have hated it, but the fact that it came after 7th made it more popular.

So, TL;DR:

As many predicted - this being "THE MOST PLAY TESTED EDITION EVAAAAAR!" failed to prevent GW from making a boatload of the same old GW mistakes and until the edition gets shaken out a bit more, and more people are able to play so that we can see where the problems really seem to lie (vs our own anecdotal evidence based on a small number of games), we're going back to 8th like 9th never happened.

Honestly, the only thing affecting my attitude toward 9th (and late 8th if we're being honest) is the instability/uncertainty of everything that's going on.

The new space marine statlines feel unhinged. And i don't mean that in the "omgwtfsoOPaaaargh" sense anymore, really, I had that phase and I'm done with it.

I mean they don't seem at all consistent. Weapons seem to be getting stat changes completely randomly. The invictor is getting a heavy bolter with 1 shot. "what the hell does a heavy stubber DO now" is totally up in the air. There are three different statlines shown for autocannons, and a possible...I think SIX for various weapons that all fit the description of "Sword."

Combine that with what feels like near-daily FAQs, changes, errata, model deletions, model undeletions, changes to the PA books that, in most cases, I can count on a single hand the games I've been able to actually play with their contents, I just have absolutely no solid ground on which to stand with 40k's rules.

As a result, I'm much less inclined to be excited about building up rule theory for my collection, and less likely to be interested in trying out rules. People say Crusade is fun - I haven't bothered to try it, because GW has basically said this is the Early-Alpha edition and there's gonna be new crusade junk added in every codex.

Tycho wrote:
My group (who is lucky enough to be able to play socially distanced garage hammer) feels less like playing 9th ed, but NOT 40k in general. Maybe it's just our play style, or maybe it's our armies, IDK, but we seem to be running into a lot of issues with it. Played about 30 games across different point levels from about 650 to 2000. The 850-1200 point games feel about right, while anything smaller requires everyone to be on the same page as to what they're bringing (because regardless of what GW says - they did NOT build the game to work at that level - the potential skew at 500 points is mind boggling), and anything bigger than about 1200 starts to feel clumsy with this rule set.

The missions seem to overly reward going first - since so many objectives are scored in the player's command phase, I can score my objectives, and then, if I want, leave said objective to make sure you can't score yours, and snowballing can happen surprisingly easily. Unfortunately, the secondaries don't seem set up to mitigate this as much as one would like, so yeah, going first - still too good.

The rollercoaster of the points, combined with all the faqs and errata of the (brand new) faqs is also already exhausting. I applaud GW for doing it of course, but come on - the "Look Out Sir" stuff should never have made it to print like that, let alone required two FAQs to properly fix. 8th was certainly not flawless in this regard but it was such a breath of fresh air compared to 7th that I think it was easier to overlook the issues. My group often jokes that chances are, if 8th ed had followed 5th ed, people would have hated it, but the fact that it came after 7th made it more popular.

So, TL;DR:

As many predicted - this being "THE MOST PLAY TESTED EDITION EVAAAAAR!" failed to prevent GW from making a boatload of the same old GW mistakes and until the edition gets shaken out a bit more, and more people are able to play so that we can see where the problems really seem to lie (vs our own anecdotal evidence based on a small number of games), we're going back to 8th like 9th never happened.

I'm pretty sure in every game we've played, the winner has elected to not take first turn. There is usually ample coverage of terrain between deployment zones that hidden deployments are fairly possible, and going first normally means that you are risking moving yourself into alpha strike territory. This really slows down the first few turns as both players maneuver to avoid/limit the lanes provided to key units... and placing units in key positions to control or cover objectives with fire seems to be more important than bombarding the enemy deployment zone.

My wife also plays no-holding-back harlequins, which turns the game into a bloodbath, but I also see ample opportunity for her to reserve that aggression a little and ambush objectives as opposed to being the first to get shot off of them. But I picked up that thought-nugget from the GW design team's notes on how those flimsy armies are designed to play. Hard to execute, but seems to be worth it if you can do it.

I think lining up armies with clear firing lanes to each other isn't going to be a rewarding experience as those slow, plodding artillery armies naturally have the advantage... and it downplays the advantage other armies also need to take advantage of to make up that difference. Who cares how fast Asuryani can move as long as they're stuck on no mans land with 3T, 4+ to save, and no invul, amirite?!

As a result, I'm much less inclined to be excited about building up rule theory for my collection, and less likely to be interested in trying out rules. People say Crusade is fun - I haven't bothered to try it, because GW has basically said this is the Early-Alpha edition and there's gonna be new crusade junk added in every codex.

We ran a few games of it. It IS fun, but it's an enormous amount of book-keeping, and there are quite a few things we stumbled into that I don't think GW thought through so we found ourselves constantly "house-ruling" it like it was 7th edition. It could be fun, but the issues with power level, combined with the other things I mentioned made us feel like we want to give it some more time to develop before we jump back in. It just feels like that classic GW situation of "the team that developed Crusade, did so in a vacuum where they weren't aware of some of the things that the other rules teams were doing" ...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

I'm pretty sure in every game we've played, the winner has elected to not take first turn. There is usually ample coverage of terrain between deployment zones that hidden deployments are fairly possible, and going first normally means that you are risking moving yourself into alpha strike territory. This really slows down the first few turns as both players maneuver to avoid/limit the lanes provided to key units... and placing units in key positions to control or cover objectives with fire seems to be more important than bombarding the enemy deployment zone.

I think the issue becomes, since moving and shooting is so much better (props to GW for at least "fixing" the static gun-line issue), but many of us play armies that are capable of solidly grabbing two objectives, less strongly grabbing a third, reinforcing the first two AND surviving that first round of shooting. I do think a lot of it is maybe down to the armies we've gravitated to, but most of the feedback from other players has been along the same route - Step 1: Go first, Step 2: "Rhino Rush" (of Falcon rush etc etc), Step 3: Profit. lol

I think they did a decent job of fixing first turn alpha strike, but it often still feels like going second is too big of a disadvantage.

It could easily just be us, but again, we found a lot of problems in the missions, and even a lot of the 40k podcasts who have been abnormally positive about 9th have also had problems with the missions. I think a lot of our problems could easily be fixed with a small FAQ, but, rather than deal with it, we are sitting out and playing 8th until some of this gets sorted.

 Nazrak wrote:

I always find it really weird when people suggest conflating Nids and GsC into a single Codex – they're two completely separate armies with completely different units (bar one)– you may as well argue for Sisters, AdMech and Guard to be rolled into a single book due to the sharing of Priests and Enginseers across Codices.

It isn't that I think they're similar armies, but they're cross promotional and possibly capable of fitting into one book. Its unlikely in any case.

Purifying Tempest wrote:
Empirical statement: in my loss, my opponent killed maybe 200 points of my 1250 point list. No matter how killy or advantaged you may think Primaris are... if they cannot play the mission, you have a great chance at winning. It may cost you feeding your entire army to him over 3-4 turns, but as long as you're scoring and he is not... it doesn't matter if you're wiped out, you will score the tactical win.

I'm finding that to be overly optimistic, because Primaris can play to the mission and still be effective.

As a recent example, I lost a game to Space Wolves over the weekend, using a Kraken Tyranid army that normally does great on playing to the mission exactly as you describe. He won the roll-off for first turn, then used a Warlord trait to redeploy three Phobos units directly in front of my deployment zone, and performed a turn 1 charge that boxed me into my deployment while he grabbed over half of the objectives and moved Thunderwolves up for a T2 charge. I eventually managed to break out and inflict more damage on him than he did on me, but there was no recovering from his lead on objectives.

My experience so far has been that Marine players who continue with the old static gunline or clustered deathball build will lose on objectives, but Marines still have more tricks in their bag than anyone else and can be easily built to play to the mission instead. Phobos Marines (and Invictors) allow Marines to forward-deploy better than most other armies, drop pods arriving T1 can do a lot of damage and keep you from moving forward, abilities like the Judiciar's make it tough to push them off objectives through melee, and Aggressors and auto bolt rifle Intercessors hard-counter cheap deep-striking objective-grabbers. If you don't get the first turn, there's not a lot you can do about it.

In contrast to some of my earlier posts on the subject, I am starting to feel that winning the first turn is too advantageous and makes it too easy to rack up an unassailable lead; I wonder if a good compromise between the current system and the old one would be for primaries to score VPs equal to the current turn #, so that objectives become more valuable as the game progresses.

I think it's also worth pointing out that Marines fare very well on secondaries, with typical Primaris lists not having all that many psykers or vehicles/monsters. Assassinate is a good counter to character spam, but those characters are a lot harder to get at than, say, Astra Militarum officers.

I'm honestly happy with all the announced changes, but it makes me feel less like playing for 2 reasons:
- Fairly substantial changes being announced every few weeks.
- I need to know that GW is capable of some kind of rough balance when they're releasing two codexes at the same time.

I'll see where I stand in a few months, when the dust has had a chance to settle.

These recent changes actually make me want to play more, and i don't even play space marines.

9th fixed many things that i disliked about 8th. Having more freedom in listbuilding is awesome (no more troops in my wraith host). Knowing that my Night lords will get +1W down the line also motivated me to finish painting them.

gak weapons getting reworked makes me happy too. Sure, these changes affect space marines first but where i play, i'm able to go mostly even against marines since people play models they like more than the models that are good.

My experience so far has been that Marine players who continue with the old static gunline or clustered deathball build will lose on objectives, but Marines still have more tricks in their bag than anyone else and can be easily built to play to the mission instead. Phobos Marines (and Invictors) allow Marines to forward-deploy better than most other armies, drop pods arriving T1 can do a lot of damage and keep you from moving forward, abilities like the Judiciar's make it tough to push them off objectives through melee, and Aggressors and auto bolt rifle Intercessors hard-counter cheap deep-striking objective-grabbers. If you don't get the first turn, there's not a lot you can do about it.

In contrast to some of my earlier posts on the subject, I am starting to feel that winning the first turn is too advantageous and makes it too easy to rack up an unassailable lead; I wonder if a good compromise between the current system and the old one would be for primaries to score VPs equal to the current turn #, so that objectives become more valuable as the game progresses.

Our experience pretty much matches this. We also have a lot of chaos players and have found that getting a unit onto an objective and then surrounding it with cheap demons becomes really strong as an "I go first" tactic ...

 catbarf wrote:

Purifying Tempest wrote:
Empirical statement: in my loss, my opponent killed maybe 200 points of my 1250 point list. No matter how killy or advantaged you may think Primaris are... if they cannot play the mission, you have a great chance at winning. It may cost you feeding your entire army to him over 3-4 turns, but as long as you're scoring and he is not... it doesn't matter if you're wiped out, you will score the tactical win.

I'm finding that to be overly optimistic, because Primaris can play to the mission and still be effective.

As a recent example, I lost a game to Space Wolves over the weekend, using a Kraken Tyranid army that normally does great on playing to the mission exactly as you describe. He won the roll-off for first turn, then used a Warlord trait to redeploy three Phobos units directly in front of my deployment zone, and performed a turn 1 charge that boxed me into my deployment while he grabbed over half of the objectives and moved Thunderwolves up for a T2 charge. I eventually managed to break out and inflict more damage on him than he did on me, but there was no recovering from his lead on objectives.

My experience so far has been that Marine players who continue with the old static gunline or clustered deathball build will lose on objectives, but Marines still have more tricks in their bag than anyone else and can be easily built to play to the mission instead. Phobos Marines (and Invictors) allow Marines to forward-deploy better than most other armies, drop pods arriving T1 can do a lot of damage and keep you from moving forward, abilities like the Judiciar's make it tough to push them off objectives through melee, and Aggressors and auto bolt rifle Intercessors hard-counter cheap deep-striking objective-grabbers. If you don't get the first turn, there's not a lot you can do about it.

In contrast to some of my earlier posts on the subject, I am starting to feel that winning the first turn is too advantageous and makes it too easy to rack up an unassailable lead; I wonder if a good compromise between the current system and the old one would be for primaries to score VPs equal to the current turn #, so that objectives become more valuable as the game progresses.

I think it's also worth pointing out that Marines fare very well on secondaries, with typical Primaris lists not having all that many psykers or vehicles/monsters. Assassinate is a good counter to character spam, but those characters are a lot harder to get at than, say, Astra Militarum officers.

I don't think that trait let's him re-deploy within 9" of your deployment zone so those were some lucky charges if he really was that far back.

That said, remember, Command Phase is the first thing that happens. If you score on your command phase, then move off the objective, you WON'T score it your next turn. You need 10 points for three rounds and 15 points for one round to max them. On most maps, even from your deployment zone, you should be able to snag 2 objectives for 10 points per-turn and then hopefully get a 15 on your breakout. There are some maps where you need 3 for 10 and those will hurt more if you're trapped, but those are less than half the missions.

There is a lot of truth to the observation that while Iron Hands castles got nerfed by the edition change and mission changes, the Space Marines still have a ton of tools to win via other methods.

But that has nothing to do with 5th, 8th, 2nd, or 9th edition. That's just that the Space Marine Codex has WAY too much garbage in it that it is practically impossible to change the game without them having some sort of gem to abuse the tabletop with. So them having Phobos units in your deployment zone isn't a result of 9th edition... it is a byproduct of the environment changes. Units that can PREVENT you from playing the objectives are very valuable, and honestly... Phobos Primaris wasn't exactly stomping the environment before the edition change. Just another example of their rules now being favorable to gain advantage, and another example of the SM Codex having so many options that there is nothing really that can change in the ruleset that can put them at a disadvantage (point costs, however, can definitely make a difference).

This also goes a ways to showing how 9th has empowered the melee phase, as this is not the first time I've seen word of Space Wolves doing well... and with melee of all things. A lot of the salt going around is because the game has changed tremendously. The scoring makes for radically different terms for playing. Melee is a threat now, and that shifts power away from castles and gunline and adds a whole different dimension of planning. Blasting your opponent off of the table turns 1-3 doesn't help you win games anymore, especially if your opponent maxes out Primary while your scoring 5 points on it. Tossing trash units into your list in massive amounts to win the scoring game while your points are free to load in heavy hitters to smash your opponent off of the table is no longer a tactic. And I feel that is a VERY healthy change to the theme and competition of the game. ObSec got powerful now with the emphasis on the mission, and it seems a lot of those units got a price bump... and it disproportionately affected the cheaper ObSec bodies, and I think that's a good thing. No more cheap grot tides protecting loota castles. No more buying the cheapest unit to spam ObSec to control the battlefield and just reaching the critical mass of "kill x models or lose immediately" syndrome. Those things just make lists more important than play. And again... big adjustments to the players. Marching a horde onto an objective and sitting passively there while hammering with artillery is no longer an playstyle encouraged by points... it has to be a 'choice'.

I think 9th is a really intriguing environment. And we'll see in October how much things are about to get flipped on their heads, but honestly... I've not played against a SM firstborn unit in 8th, so with the buffs largely aimed at them... I don't see the world shattering because firstborn will be playable again. If anything, it may diversify the table in the 50%+ of the games where you have to play against a SM flavor of some sort...

I hate the wealth of options at the SM disposal, but at the same time, I don't think buffing firstborn is going to be the "end of 40K" that it is made out to be. They'll have more usable options, but it'll break the current stagnation of "primaris only" lists that has swamped the environment. Who knows, maybe GW will also trim down the HORDES of unit profiles available to the Codex in October... and shove many of those more obscure units into legends. Lord knows that Codex could use some data slate trimming.

That said, remember, Command Phase is the first thing that happens. If you score on your command phase, then move off the objective, you WON'T score it your next turn. You need 10 points for three rounds and 15 points for one round to max them. On most maps, even from your deployment zone, you should be able to snag 2 objectives for 10 points per-turn and then hopefully get a 15 on your breakout. There are some maps where you need 3 for 10 and those will hurt more if you're trapped, but those are less than half the missions.

That's the problem. Score in my Command phase. Leave a less offensively capable (but tough) unit still chilling on the objective, send the more high powered one out to block the opponent. It's especially rough if you hit it just right on the last turn. There's not a lot the other player can do to defend it. Particularly if "Player 1" was already snowballing to begin with.

It's not that it's impossible if you go second, but it often does just feel like a 3-5 turn Alpha strike VS a turn 1 Alpha. Plus, the kind of army that does really well at going first, also helps you of you go second, so my fear is we will see a very homogenous build style in 9th. Ironically, Marine vs Marine games play pretty well! lol We've also found that movement doesn't mean as much as we had hoped it would. It often seems less about careful maneuvering, and more about just rushing to the objective. That said, I DO think they did a good job of making it so that your timing is important. It's not all negative, but for us, it's also not *quite* working. But again, who knows. It's just enough of an irritant that we're just going to play 8th a while longer, so no big deal.

Hopefully, when 9th really gets rolling, we'll see either fixes for some of the problems, or at least see solutions in the game play. Could easily just be the way my group plays, but yeah - a LOT of groups appear to be running into the same thing.