Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

We've had the rules for 9th Ed for almost six months now - as this strange year draws to a close how is your 40K game scene?

I live in a fairly small Canadian city that has a decent gaming community thanks in part to three post-secondary institutions and a military base. Before COVID hit we had a busy Saturday pick-up game community and a tourney every three months with between 30 and 40 participants. Things shut down between March and June, but since July we've had pre-arranged games at our FLGS following sound health and safety protocols. Capacity in the FLGS is half of what it was before, but the Saturday gaming community is healthy. We've had two tournaments that sold out with another one in two weeks that has also sold out.

I feel that 9th Ed has been successful so far. I've played roughly three dozen games of matched play (FLGS and Basement Hammer) and seven tournament games. I have certainly had to adapt my list-building and playstyle from 8th to 9th, due in large part to the changes to terrain, mission scoring and the buff/aura mechanics.

The terrain rules have cut down on Turn 1 crippling alpha-strikes. They can still happen, but if you place obscuring terrain in the way that the MRB suggests you can't just sit back and shoot each other. You need to manoeuvre to get your shots - I like that!

Mission scoring requires a different play style from 8th Edition. Placing well at a tourney is not just about winning all your games. You need to maximize your score - this might sound like a "Thanks Captain Obvious" moment, but I've seen folks overly focus on "winning" their game at the detriment of scoring. Based on our results, you want at least 70 points a game (we don't use the 10 points for painting). I've been thinking about Secondary scoring when list-building. Not just in terms of minimizing my opponent's chances to score Secondaries, but in terms of being able to score Secondaries myself through things like Deploy Scramblers/Oaths of Moment etc. Little units that can perform Actions and get board control/presence are great.

The changes rolling out for auras combined with the missions and terrain rules mean that making a Death Star is not as effective as in 8th Edition. I've seem some colleagues with Marine lists that would have been quite successful in 8th struggle greatly in 9th. You have to be making a play for the mid-field in Turn 1 and 2 and dominate the midfield Turn 3 to 5. Sitting back in a corner won't achieve that.

Strong lists in our small meta have been Harlies, Triple-Keeper Daemons and Dark Angels. The Harlies have the mobility and firepower to succeed in 9th, while the Triple-Keepers simply dominate the mid-field from the start of the game. Dark Angels started with Ravenwing but now rely on Deathwing. Early days of course, and our Meta is quite small...

All in all I am enjoying 9th, but I am interested in the thoughts from the much wider Dakka community on how your gaming is going!

My personal 40K game scene is nonexistent. I have an ork army, but my main focus for the last few years has been Horus Heresy. As such, I've gotten probably less than 20 games of 8th ed in since launch. Last year I picked up the Chapter Approved 2019 for updated points values. I used them in one game, and then covid hit. Six months later GW announces 9th edition and my $40 purchase is effectively rendered useless. Needless to say I'm a bit soured on the new edition, and won't be buying anything for it anytime soon. I'm really tired of what at this point feels like a 2.5 year refresh cycle on editions.

Just posted this in a different thread, but here's my 9th ed experience so far:

I've been fortunate to play a lot of socially distanced garage hammer. We have a group of about 20 people and have broken in to groups of 4 and each play regular games and have a semi-regular Zoom session with everyone to talk about it. We've had literally several hundred games so far, so my two cents is at least coming from someone who's really played it.

Pros:
1. Terrain is much better than it was in 8th. It is still a little sloppy and needs some clean-up and a few more FAQs, but they 100% did a much better job of making the terrain mean something in this edition.

2. The missions are generally much better than they used to be. I would recommend the Grand Tournament missions over those in the BRB, but over-all they are more fun to play, and they did a good job of shifting the emphasis away from just "kill everything". If you're a narrative player especially, some of the missions really lend themselves well to that style of play.

3. Crusade (admittedly some will have this in the cons, but the nice thing is, if you aren't into it, it can be completely ignored). They have given us a pretty cool way to build an army and experience it as it gets better and bigger. It's a lot of book keeping, and there are things that can make for unfun games if you aren't in the right mind set, but it's over all a pretty cool system.

4. Some will disagree with me here, but I at least feel like CC is in better shape now than it was in 8th., and if you like mid-board action, 9th has that in excellent supply.

Cons:
1. The missions have a strong first turn bias. The tournament stats we have back this up, as do the win rates in my own group. Going first gives you an advantage in turn 1 and turn 5, and you can actually completely eliminate player 2's chance to score on turn 5 with no ability for them to counter play. This needs fixed.

2. The missions do get old after a bit. The mission design is much better, but it's still just mostly some variation of "get your dudes to the spot" which can lead to a lot of fairly predictable "samey" games. Mosh-pitting is also a thing.

3. Game length - Similar to when they said "8th was the fastest playing version of 40k ever" and it turned out not to be - they also promised us a more streamlined "even faster than 8th" game for 9th. This has also not panned out. The key things causing games to take longer were stuck in the core mechanics, and they've only doubled down on those, so games of 9th generally take about the same amount of time. Sometimes slightly faster, sometimes slightly longer, but over-all, it is 100% NOT the "faster game" we were promised.

4. Still a pretty glaring difference in design approach between Marines and Necrons. Crons got a lot better but that's only by virtue of having been so amazingly bad in 8th, and this edition has essentially outright broken Tau, GSC and DE. The promise that "8th ed books would be 100% compatible" really didn't pan out (not that I expected it to), as these armies are all borderline unplayable.

Neither good nor bad:

1.Some will tell you that "movement really matters now". It doesn't. Not like those people think it does. With the smaller board size and the speed of most units, there's no longer really a question of "can I get to the right spot". Pretty much every unit in almost every army can get where it needs to be without question, and the pre-set objectives means you generally know which units are going where, so there's not really a lot of in-depth maneuver like you might be led to believe. I think a lot of folks here are just used to playing gunlines and aren't used to seeing things move at all. What really matters is timing. They've done a somewhat decent job of making you time things correctly.

2. The game feels really good at 1000-1250pts. It feels really bad at anything much bigger than that, and 500pts is still a total crap shoot. You have to have a conversation before playing a 500pt game as there's a wild amount of variance in what certain armies can bring.

It is much better then 8th, incomperably in my opinion. 9th ed factions are fun to play. Harlis are the dominant factions as are demons, which is a bummer, but I guess one can't get everything.

Game feels unplayable for some faction at all, and for some faction the point limits are really rough. Playing normal sized games can be really fun, but playing something like 1000pts is just an NPE for some factions with the core rules given.

Not a single game that wasn't homebound, thanks to the loverly 2020.

I've been lucking that during the recent time out of lockdown I was able to get about a dozen social distanced cross table games played. Probably more games than anyone else in my club has managed to do though.

I really like the 8th ed rules although I feel the terrain rules have become a bit awkward. From one extreme to another, but at least they work. I'm also not so much of a fan of the new mission style. I preferred the old 8th ed missions and tactical objective missions. The new mission just feels like go forward, grab an objective or two and then spend the rest of the game in a big hand to hand mosh. Why can't objectives be in terrain though (although being ground floor makes sense)? You hold fortified defensible positions not open ground and empty streets. I hope they bring back tactical objective cards at some point. Those were the missions/games I always found far more enjoyable.

Some of my friends agree that the new objective token placement seems a bit silly. For those who have a fixed or semi-fixed table it's just awkward, and pick up games will now be slightly longer you have to measure out all the awkward positions and then set/define terrain. Objectives should have remained where players alternate setting them more than X from a table edge or another objective. Simples. I know it is a minor bugbear but it does irk me slightly.

As for secondary objectives, they feel too much like the old ITC format which I was never a fan of. The secondaries are a nice idea but either most aren't worth taking IMO or they are too tough to get a decent score from. I really want to like them but they need to be better.

Several members of my club have chatted about how much they like Crusade. I have yet to play it but reading through I just feel it's too complicated for what is supposed to be a fun and simple style of play. I could do with being a little lighter as I read it. My opinion may change once I get to play it. One day.


I'm enjoying 9th a lot. It's a good rules set but not a fan of the new mission format.

My club loves 9th, and it's really invigorated our community. I get maybe one or two games in a week. It's pushed aside the other games we play for sure.

We only play amongst each other though, and have avoided playing outside our group for the most part.

Things I like: obscuring terrain, dense cover, movement penalties for craters and forests, the changes to how detachments work, the changes to how cp and stratagems works, and the fact that objectives are beginning of turn, instead of the end.

Things I dont: the focus on cqc for taking and holding objectives and devolution of the game into charging into contact for a melee in the middle. Guardsmen Timmy's bayonet can fight up as much as 2 floors. Tank guns still suck because gw can't math that 1 shot for 1d6 isn't as good as 1d6 shots for 2, and also seems to think that a tank gun is the same as a man portable heavy weapon. T is capped at 8, so tanks and at weapon all feel the same. Blast rule. Eradicators. Codex supplements. Balance.

I've gotten a few games in, and it's pushed me personally to take up my oldhammer projects again. Everything I disliked about 8e (death of options, slow dropping of support for all my FW models, damage creep, uncounterable perfectly-reliable reserves alpha-strikes, mission design that pushes very specific army builds, card-game combos used to patch datasheets because GW made bad stat decisions back in the 8e Indexes and can't be bothered to fix them, refusal to update 20-year-old minis because there aren't enough Primaris Marines yet...) is still here, and GW is busy making all of it worse.

Had plenty of Gardenhammer games when we weren’t n lockdown and in wintry weather. Loving 9th, much fun.

I like it.

First turn bias is still there, but about 10-12% less than in 8th Ed. (ITC version), so that seems like an improvement.

Smaller tables / objective grabbing priority seem to make it more "action filled", at least in my experience.

Secondaries (ITC 8th, now 9th from GW) always seemed a bad idea to me, pushing people to exclude certain army-builds (e.g. now vehicles, hordes, psyker-heavy-armies) and I generally prefer the tactical depth (not to mention meta-variety) of missions you cannot "build to deny/score points for".

Honestly, other than the Crusade chapter, & a slight improvement concerning terrain, I don't find it much different than 8th.
Everything i disliked in 8th? It's still here - as well as some new bits I dont like.
Crusade + terrain counterbalance the new stuff i dislike, so my opinion of the game remains about the same as in 8th.

And despite that, and a pandemic? I've played almost as many games of 9th Aug - present as I did of 8th in 2019/pre-9th 2020. (this is because our local focus on games drifts back & forth. 2018/19 was alot more AoS)

It is better than 8th in my opinion (the only other edition I've played) but I have some niggles with it. I don't like the first Turn bias it seems to have and connected to that I preferred the end of 8th complete deployment per player. Drop for drop isn't terrible in theory but since there is absolutely no advantage for the one with less drops I dislike it. Secondly, and this is more of a preemptive complaint, it seems by the new Codexes that GW is doubling down on making the game even more killy. I don't really enjoy how most armies are just limping along from generally turn 3 onward. Overall though the new mission structure is very enjoyable and my local scene is doing fine. Covid makes it so we have less attendees at any one time but in general we have 8 or so regular players all playing different armies, making for a very enjoyable local meta. Although the last one admittedly has nothing to do with 9th specifically.

I mean, if you liked 8th, you'll like 9th, because it's basically a set of bugfixes for the glaring bugs in 8th. 9th shows us the fundamental vision and essence of what 8th was supposed to be.

If you already figured out that vision and essence during 8th and didn't like 'em, 9th won't do much to make you happy.

No idea can’t game anywhere

I would say that overall, 9th seems to be a slight improvement over 8th. The biggest improvement for me (at the moment anyway) is certainly the terrain rules. At my local game store, a lot of the terrain is pre-8th GW stuff, meaning lots of big open windows. So in previous editions, building a board with enough line-of-sight-blocking terrain was quite difficult and required the use of quite a bit of extras, such as crates and barrels and really anything that could block many of the windows. Nowadays, it's so much easier to have a couple large ruins in the middle that "block" line of sight.

Other things that I like:
1. Negative and positive hit modifiers capped at -/+1
2. New missions and the way primary objectives work
3. Relative balance (from what I've seen) between melee and shooting. Armies really seem to need some of both to thrive.
4. Addition of more universal stratagems, especially the ones that help prevent certain "gotcha" moments, such as surrounding a transport and killing it, thus killing all the models inside, or surrounding a single model in combat, thus preventing falling back. Although admittedly I used both regularly in 8th (dems da rules), it's nice that there's a get-around now.

Things I dislike about 9th:
1. The current deployment method. Deploying unit-by-unit allows for significantly less counter-deployment. I agree with what someone said earlier; the end of 8th had a better deployment system. I would very much like to see it something like this:
A) Players roll off. Winner chooses attack or defender.
B) Defending player chooses their deployment zone and places their entire army (minus reserves and whatnot).
C) Attacking player deploys their entire army in opposite deployment zone, having the opportunity to fully counter-deploy the defender.
D) Defending player chooses to go first or second. No need for a seize roll.
I believe that would help cut down on the current first turn advantage that we're seeing. With the system right now, there's no real counter-deployment to be had (unless you have significantly more drops than your opponent), and deployment doesn't have anything to do with who gets first turn. Not having any clue who is going to go first really limits your deployment options and basically makes everyone want to go first to bring as much damage to bear as possible before the inevitable retaliation. Which leads us to the next problem...
2. Even more lethality. 8th edition was bad enough in terms of lethality, but 9th is just as bad or worse. While the changes to terrain help a bit, I don't think they currently outweigh the overall increases in damage that we're seeing from some of the new unit and weapon profiles.
3. The secondary missions - sort of. I like the idea of secondary missions, but there's really no reason that any of the "kill a bunch of stuff" should be in separate categories. This strongly benefits some armies over others, OR on the other hand leads to crazy skew lists. For example, it seems like the current Tyranid and Ork competitive lists are really just bringing as many bodies as possible, and ignoring their support vehicles and units. After all, you're already basically guaranteeing your opponent is going to get max points for "Thing Their Ranks," so why give them max points for "Bring it Down" as well? In some of the tactics videos I've been listening to for Imperial Guard and Tyranids, I'm hearing suggestions of just dumping all vehicles/monsters and bringing 300-400 infantry instead, so as not to award more than 15 easy secondary victory points. I don't think that's healthy for the game in the long run. Additionally, more elite armies obviously strongly benefit from their lack of weakness to those same kill-stuff secondary objectives. A Space Marine list with 30-40 infantry and 2-3 vehicles is just not going to give up nearly as many points for dying. In a game that is still heavily based on killing your opponents' armies, it seems silly to be able to take more than one secondary objective with the goal of... killing your opponents' armies. All kill-stuff secondary objectives should be under one category.
4. Some armies are really just screwed so far this edition. Hopefully this will be covered with new rulebooks in the near(ish) future, but armies like T'au, Astra Militarum, and Thousand Sons seem to be on crazy hard mode just due to the game's core rules.

In my area 9th has certainly reinvigorated 40k, when we aren't in lockdown at least. How long that continues for will be interesting to see though.

Towards the end of the edition pre-covid, Marines 2.0 did irreparable damage to the game by basically demolishing enthusiasm and interest in local tournaments and it severely cut down on regular games being played at the various clubs. People were refusing to play versus Marines and the Marine players themselves were either getting bored of playing Loyalist mirror matches or had their only other options being competitive practice games. There was hope with the pre-9th FAQ's and the new Codex that some of the worst stuff in that book was going to reigned in, but any hopefulness sort of lasted a week as the reality of the 9th Dex became apparent. People were back to grumbling and being annoyed with Marines again during late October, however lockdown hit again so opportunities to play have also dried up.

There is also dissatisfaction with GW's release schedule. Even amongst veteran players, this slow drip-feed of Codex updates is starting to be seen as unacceptable and I've seen numerous discussions about the necessity of having more simultaneous rules updates. Plus, people are annoyed at the book bloat that's already happening with the announcement of the Charadon campaign stuff.

It's interesting because I think everyone prefers 9th to 8th and outside of a small few things like removal of stacking modifiers, it's a much better game system. It's some of the stuff happening around the game that might be slowly draining enthusiasm from it though. Some of this is Covid-related, sure, but a lot of it is GW business decisions.

I don't understand the comments regarding the increased lethality in 9th... it simply isn't there.

9th is surely less lethal than 8th, thanks to a bigger focus on mission, more terrain rules and a general decrease of firepower in the new codici (counteracted by an increase in melee power).

8th was less lethal than the end of 7th by a landslide.

The game is becoming less and less lethal every iteration, so I really don't understand why some players perceive an increase in lethality.

We went from:

- Turn 1 tabling the opponent in 7th being the norm unless you were playing some sort of broken deathstar.

- Calling the game on turn 2 because not much was left being fairly common in 8th.

- Most games being decided in turn 3 in 9th.

I mean, I can understand that overall it is still too lethal, but we have had some huge improvements in that area.

I haven't played a game of it yet, groups, tournaments and conventions have been wiped out since March.

I think its too early to say the game is less lethal. We also have less full codex releases because marines need all their books first. Once everyone gets them, then it'll be the test.

Honestly that is about the worst part of 9th edition, its marines on marines with marines to drink. It's so out of control you can't even try and say " It's not all marines. " It's pretty much all marines, and your guest star necrons currently. It's out of control and at this rate unless we see nothing marine for a year or so, it'll end up feeling too soon. That said and I love marines ! but really, enough is enough.

As a side note, the more I play the new edition, the more I want to go back to older ones.

The missions are the highlight of the new edition, and are both good in some ways and bad in some ways.
They're good because it's fundamentally critical to play to the mission and all phases of the game. Army composition is very strategic, more so than just filling your list with good stuff or a strong unit combination, and you plan out exactly how you're going to achieve victory and deny the enemy. A player who's just like here to kill some stuff with an arbitrary collection of good stuff will lose badly without a coherent strategy and playing to it. Definitely a plus.
In addition, they favor taking and holding objectives, meaning they're interactable, something that previous crap like maelstrom and other attempts at progressive scoring never were.

However, they're super first player favoring, more so than they've basically every been. Unfortunately, part of this is inextricably linked to what makes the new scoring good. The second player's last turn effectively doesn't matter. Couple this with the awful new deployment they still have from 8e and the math of lanchesters square law, it's super bad to be the second player.

In addition, they're decided really fast. The more I play progressive missions in 8e and now in 9e, the more I'm disillusioned with progressive scoring and would like to see a return to end-of-game scoring. The progressive scoring favors rapid CQC aggression far too much, and even a couple of turns of containment and build a lead that just cannot be overturned because there aren't enough available points. Too much is dependent upon doing a thing every turn that if you can deny it for the early turns to the enemy, you can create a situation where even though both armies are only moderately damaged there's just no way for the losing player to make up the difference.
I don't see tablings often any more, but I think I've seen more games end early by proportion than ever before. I think I've only had like 2 games have the score tallied on turn 5 instead of having a mid-game concession based on inability to recoup the score difference.

Played 31 games of 9th so far. Love it though I do think the missions need another look, particularly reworking the secondaries, and I hope a CA2021 pack will make these significantly different.

Spoletta wrote:
I don't understand the comments regarding the increased lethality in 9th... it simply isn't there...

I suspect most of the people complaining about "increased lethality" play vehicles/monsters. The decision to represent blasts as random-shot weapons in 8th and the decision to represent most basic 3HP vehicles as 8W-10W in 8th, plus the massive price hikes, have combined to make playing vehicles against almost anything in 8th/9th feel very like playing against Eldar loaded with scatterbikes/D-weapons in 7th. Any time someone can see the vehicle it goes away.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
I don't understand the comments regarding the increased lethality in 9th... it simply isn't there...

I suspect most of the people complaining about "increased lethality" play vehicles/monsters. The decision to represent blasts as random-shot weapons in 8th and the decision to represent most basic 3HP vehicles as 8W-10W in 8th, plus the massive price hikes, have combined to make playing vehicles against almost anything in 8th/9th feel very like playing against Eldar loaded with scatterbikes/D-weapons in 7th. Any time someone can see the vehicle it goes away.

It depends on the vehicles/monsters. Drukhari for example are far more resilient in 8th/9th than in previous editions, both monsters and vehicles. My ork vehicles didn't last a turn in 7th, and light vehicles had high chances to get instant killed by a single heavy bolter or any other S5-6 weapon. A single power klaw dude was enough to reliably blow up a Leman Russ, now it barely scratches it. Not to mention haywyre, gauss, grav, etc that could easily glance to death to most resilient vehicles.

In my experience vehicles are extremely more resilient now, barring a few exceptions like land raiders or other full AV14 vehicles.

I imagine that Secondaries will get refreshed each year along with the Primaries/Missions. I like the effect that the scoring system had on our the two tourneys I have played in. The Secondaries give a way to scrape some respectable points out of a defeat. As long as you play to the Primary in some way you can come out of a defeat with a respectable total (assuming you care). Progressive scoring does favour those armies not afraid to get onto the middle of the board early in the game. Resilient units with some mobility are great right now. Despite having played a few gunline armies through my 24 years of 40K, I like a game that encourages some movement.

Some armies are in a tough spot right now and really need an update.

Our game scene has suffered from starts and stops thanks to the lockdowns...

So it went like so-normal up until late march, no games from late march to late June, partial open in June/July 5 hour limit. moved to private invitation only game sessions with attendance limits from July to the end of November, now we are sitting through 4 weeks of (projected) lockdown part II.

If you have followed my other topics you know i have had my fill of 9th. having read all the rules and watched many games played by other regulars at the FLGS for the past many months. to me it isn't 40K any more than AOS is WHFBs, so the only 40K i play is with our FLGS group(some of whom also play 9th) that does hybrid 5th ed with 15 house rules from other editions put into 5th.

My overall impressions with a background in more casual lore based play is that as a 40K game it's garbage.

As a generic different game system it is on par with things like star wars legion, with a bit more focus on competitive play.
if you want those kinds of game mechanics knock yourself out. i already actively play 10 different miniature game systems so i have no interest in it aside from keeping up with the lore.

 Corrode wrote:
Played 31 games of 9th so far. Love it though I do think the missions need another look, particularly reworking the secondaries, and I hope a CA2021 pack will make these significantly different.

Some missions and over half the secondaries definitely need another look NOW and not in another year of so; we have the data and aside from things related to 8th codices not being fit to play in 9th (which can only be fixed with the 9th codices if GW didn't purposefully release them in such a slow way that is considered unacceptable by today's standards) most obvious imbalances come from points (not as much as in the past edition) and the aforementioned missions/secondaries (the latter being badly designed with completely worthless ones, few overpowered ones and some overlaying that shouldn't happen like the KILL secondaries in multiple categories)

I dropped out of playing 40k back in the summer of 2019, and haven't really had the opportunity to get back into it. I hear good things about 9th, but what with COVID and my own projects it's hard to find the time let alone want to spend it on 40k.

Our garage-hammer group that's still meeting while our LGS is in lock down has had a good time with 9th. Terrain rules and the new missions are a huge improvement, overwatch mostly going away has helped a few armies that were struggling.

There does seem to be a clear gap between armies with and without a 9th ed book, but there's a few notable exceptions. Pure Slannesh and Harlequins, but also Drukhari, and Deathguard are doing well, that probably is down as much to player skill as anything else.

The Newman wrote:
Our garage-hammer group that's still meeting while our LGS is in lock down has had a good time with 9th. Terrain rules and the new missions are a huge improvement, overwatch mostly going away has helped a few armies that were struggling.

There does seem to be a clear gap between armies with and without a 9th ed book, but there's a few notable exceptions. Pure Slannesh and Harlequins, but also Drukhari, and Deathguard are doing well, that probably is down as much to player skill as anything else.

Besides the firstborn marines going to W2 and the weapon buffs, most of the marine book seems like a slight toning down in some areas. ATM I feel like most of the really crazy stuff is still in the legacy rules from the existing supplements. Double shooting, double or triple attacking, crazy relic combos etc mostly got trimmed a bit.