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Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

Limiting fire on the move like that just rewards defensive play. Providing incentives for small arms infantry to get better shots, and / or more shots is a better way to get players to engage in that kind of behavior. It also really doesn't solve the issue with assault units essentially destroying the idea of an infantry advance with small arms. An advance should be just as dangerous as it is beneficial.

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

Limiting fire on the move like that just rewards defensive play. Providing incentives for small arms infantry to get better shots, and / or more shots is a better way to get players to engage in that kind of behavior. It also really doesn't solve the issue with assault units essentially destroying the idea of an infantry advance with small arms. An advance should be just as dangerous as it is beneficial.

Fair point. 3rd lives rent free in my head a lot of the time so I guess it just crossed my mind if the more movement focus on 9th's missions trading with less shooting might see the game take a step down in lethality.

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

Limiting fire on the move like that just rewards defensive play. Providing incentives for small arms infantry to get better shots, and / or more shots is a better way to get players to engage in that kind of behavior. It also really doesn't solve the issue with assault units essentially destroying the idea of an infantry advance with small arms. An advance should be just as dangerous as it is beneficial.

I think narratively 40k handles it’s close combat badly, to many army’s are sorta all or nothing and rather than have real support built into there faction to get troops there they fight against the rules and just plant units into CC and roll dice.
And for lots of the game, a shooting unit getting stuck into CC becomes a wall and that’s about it.
Pistols becoming usable in CC was great, but again we had so many models that didn’t have them when they really should.
Warmachine has gunfighter and I think 40k should have a rule similar on a lot of units as a start, I forget if they are doing this now as none of my army’s can >.< damn brain.

But also, terrain can be huge for making CC work, have buildings as a presence on the battlefield that units can enter and fight within. But be relatively protected from outside fire unless the building comes down also makes assault units far more valuable.
When dealing with Sci fi you just have to start thinking about close assault over Brawls and how it’s used.
Terrain rules could be used a long way to go about this, but GW would need to put some effort in and make sure all factions can play the game outside of LoL Rule of Cool..

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

Limiting fire on the move like that just rewards defensive play. Providing incentives for small arms infantry to get better shots, and / or more shots is a better way to get players to engage in that kind of behavior. It also really doesn't solve the issue with assault units essentially destroying the idea of an infantry advance with small arms. An advance should be just as dangerous as it is beneficial.

Fair point. 3rd lives rent free in my head a lot of the time so I guess it just crossed my mind if the more movement focus on 9th's missions trading with less shooting might see the game take a step down in lethality.

The lethality of 9th has to do with guaranteed deep strike positioning, the smaller play area, the inability to react to your opponent at all ( also a 7th issue), and in general higher output weaponry.

I actually do think an 8x5 foot table with suitable terrain would actually help in a lot of ways. Take out guaranteed deep strike and you have a board that at least allows for minimal development.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Apple fox wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

Limiting fire on the move like that just rewards defensive play. Providing incentives for small arms infantry to get better shots, and / or more shots is a better way to get players to engage in that kind of behavior. It also really doesn't solve the issue with assault units essentially destroying the idea of an infantry advance with small arms. An advance should be just as dangerous as it is beneficial.

I think narratively 40k handles it’s close combat badly, to many army’s are sorta all or nothing and rather than have real support built into there faction to get troops there they fight against the rules and just plant units into CC and roll dice.
And for lots of the game, a shooting unit getting stuck into CC becomes a wall and that’s about it.
Pistols becoming usable in CC was great, but again we had so many models that didn’t have them when they really should.
Warmachine has gunfighter and I think 40k should have a rule similar on a lot of units as a start, I forget if they are doing this now as none of my army’s can >.< damn brain.

But also, terrain can be huge for making CC work, have buildings as a presence on the battlefield that units can enter and fight within. But be relatively protected from outside fire unless the building comes down also makes assault units far more valuable.
When dealing with Sci fi you just have to start thinking about close assault over Brawls and how it’s used.
Terrain rules could be used a long way to go about this, but GW would need to put some effort in and make sure all factions can play the game outside of LoL Rule of Cool..

implementing a closing "volley" mechanic in the assault phase during overwatch could be a really cool mechanic.

 Amishprn86 wrote:



But back on topic, 9th is for sure missing some key rules that almost all other editions had, the problems with 7th can easier be changed with a few hours of work. I would rather have a updated better 7th with balances to armies. You can still remove templates and have some updates that did work in 9th even.

9th truly just feels like chess with giant units, every unit that matters is so freaking hyper strong they remove a unit, then I remove a unit, etc... taking away Invis and formations (played like that a lot) made 7th very fun actually, HH is just 7th still as well.

Maybe we played a different game. In 7th even without formations lethality (especially alpha strike) was much higher than in 9th. HH somehow conunters that because all the armies are basically the same thing.

7th was very fun only by using pre-arranged lists. 9th has definitely much more freedom in listbuilding before breaking the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

It was great. Not being able to fire or being forced to hit on 6 it unit moves also reduced the dice rolling and/or lethality. Now there are even tools to bypass the rapid fire range limitation and fire max shots everytime.

I actually prefer the bigger limitations in both movement and firepower (Not as much as the power of shooting because shooting has always been bananas in 40k but in how and where you could use it) of older editions than new 40k.

But I don't know. Theres something about how new rules are writtend and presented in both the base rules and the new unit datasheets that has make the game much, much easier for me (And literally anybody I have taught to play 8th and 9th).

For me the most positive change to any old edition of warhammer would be:
-8th/9th wound allocation. Stop this removing from the front or jumping wounds. Assume the heavy weapons are passed onto other guys or the ones in the back take the place of the ones in the front like in fantasy. Is easier, strait forward and causes 0 problems
-8th/9th style datasheets. Let me see all the rules and weapon profiles of a unit in his unit card. Some generic army wide rules can be summarized, but I prefer to have deep strike written in each single unit entry than to keep flipping pages to try and remember what exactly was the difference between furious charge, zealot, hatred, and whatever.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Speaking of comparisons to old editions, something I wonder is if we went back to how older editions handled weapons would make movement feel more important as it becomes a trade off with shooting. I mean this was how 3rd generally handled it and this image still lives in my brain:

Spoiler:

TBH I love this. But I always tought the penalty to heavy weapons was too much. When most units have 2-3 turns to achieve anything in a game is hard to justify the investment of heavy weapons in basic infantry squads. And thats why you saw heavy weapons on vehicles or in units that had some way to mitigate the penalty. (But TBH now firing heavy weapons on the move is just a -1 and most people consider that taking that penalty makes any heavy weapon infantry model unusable crap. If they cannot fire at full balistic skill all the time, they aren't worth it)

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Galas wrote:
...But it was a reply to AnomanderRake trying to discredit the criticism of 7th based in how many games people played of it.

I'm attempting to question whether the "7th was an unplayable shithole" crowd played 7th because the kinds of things I hear from them are the furthest from my experience of any anecdotes I hear on this website. I don't agree with people who like 8th/9th, but we're more often than not disagreeing on opinion over what's fun while with the anti-7th crowd we're often disagreeing on some pretty fundamental facts like "how big the rulebook was". I'm not trying to claim that nobody's criticism of 7th is fair, I'm questioning whether criticizing 7th for consisting entirely of armies of D-weapons, 2++ deathstars, and free transports run with five hundred pages of rules that you couldn't even attempt to play without memorizing is criticizing 7th at all, or some hypothetical worst-case edition that bears only a superficial resemblance to 7th.

I'm one of those people. 7th was an unplayable shithole. I ran into unkillable deathstars regularly, knights, phantoms, baneblades were commonly used models with D weapons because people just owned those things and wanted to run them. I watched people roll on various psychic disciplines for hours of my lifetime, denying any power I would dare to cast with a dozen dice. Melee was broken beyond repair, challenges took away entire army's ability to kill things in melee, pages and pages of rules that are unclear and non-functional gak that would never receive an errata or FAQ. First and second turn tablings were more common than ever before and after, moral was ignored by everyone and any unit or army that was affected by moral was useless, some armies could do deep strikes that were more reliable than the ones we have in 9th now. Eternal warrior, having to parse the USRs for the word "conferring", non-independent characters being worthless. People were carrying binders around with print-outs of all the formations, extra psychic powers, relics and FW rules they needed to run their army,

Granted, I only know about the gladius formation and its exploits from tales, but I also never once complained about it. Do you know why I never ran into it? 7th was such a gakky edition, I actually quit the game and put my army up for auction.

So, no more accusing people of not knowing what they are talking about when their are giving valid criticsm.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It's also quite telling that those in favor of 7th are using this thread to discuss things that need fixing in 40k which already have been fixed in 9th...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sledgehammer wrote:
The lethality of 9th has to do with guaranteed deep strike positioning, the smaller play area, the inability to react to your opponent at all ( also a 7th issue), and in general higher output weaponry.

Not meaning to offend you Sledgehammer, but this line just telegraphs that you have not played a serious game of 9th in your life.

Different groups approach 40k very differently, which will affect what those were bringing in 7th.

Some groups approach every game as practice for their tournament(s), I was playing in those in 7th and every game was the cheesiest cheese going.
Other groups don't care and actively discourage that sort of thing so you'd be unlikely to encounter quite the same cheese.

Instead of reacting to anyone, I'm just going to give my personal thoughts on the issue.

7th:

Let's not beat about the bush, 7th was an absolute mess. The core rules started badly and then the codices, supplements, mid-edition codices (where the design philosophy changed completely), lack of FAQs etc. made things spiral completely out of control.

In terms of the core rules, there was a lot of bloat - not least because it refused to reverse the disastrous changed wrought by 6th edition (with the inclusion of super-heavies and fliers being the most egregious). Hence, we had to have whole sections for new types of units, basically detailing how they follow no rules whatsoever and can do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. Awesome. This totally didn't read like someone trying to insert their badly-written, Mary-the-Mechwarrior Sue fanfiction into a game that was already ill-suited for it.

But for as bad as those rules were, they were by no means the only issue with 7th. In fact, quite a few of 7th issues seemed to stem from someone on the design team (you know who you are) having the bright idea to just lift swathes of 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and ram them into 40k. This was most evident with 7th's magic (sorry Psyker) system, which had all the same nonsense as 8th edition - right down to the 'random to determine the random thus seeing whether you'll random or randomly get randomed in the face' and the utterly broken spells. However, even leaving aside the fact that 8th edition WHFB's magic system was a colossal pile of pigswill, at least that game system was built with magic as a core element. Hence, every race either had wizards of its own (generally costing roughly the same) or else had significant countering/dispelling ability (like with Dwarves). In contrast, 40k races have vastly different accessibilities when it comes to psykers and counters to psykers - ranging from entire armies of psykers to armies with no psykers whatsoever (and also with very few tools to counter such). So while WHFB's terrible magic system was at least somewhat balanced by roughly equal access, 40k's attempt at the same didn't even have that modicum of balance. Instead, if a Tau or Necron or DE player (or even a player who'd foolishly brought only one or two psykers) was up against GKs or Daemons, he might as well go and make himself a sandwich while they conduct their psychic phase.

And because I'm not done ragging on the psychic phase, now would probably be a good time to bring up 7th's commitment to 'balance by random'. As in, it doesn't matter if one psychic power is useless and another is game-winning because you have to roll for them! Presuming your brain is located in your skull and not your rectum, you can probably see the flaw in that particular line of reasoning. Alas, GW did not. And so not only was this policy applied to psychic powers, it was also applied to other areas of army construction such as Warlord Traits (because who'd want to give a character a thematic trait, right?). Naturally, it meant that there was a ton of pre-game nonsense that had to be rolled for at the start of every game.

Then you've got the endless litany of time-wasting mechanics - the terrible wound-allocation rules, the entire Challenge system, the pointless special rules (Soulfire anyone?).

And you've got the final problem which was that the layout of the core rulebook was absolutely atrocious. Nothing seemed to flow logically, so that you'd have the rules for vehicles in one section, except for a certain type of vehicle which is found in an entirely different section because reasons. Or the USRs that you look up only to find that all they do is give a unit two different USRs. It meant that any sort of rules debate immediately brought the game to a grinding halt as players struggled to even find the right section in the convoluted mess of a rulebook.


So what about 9th?

Well, it certainly made some improvements. The rulebook is better laid out . . . though this seems to have been achieved primarily by just throwing most of the content in the bin. Indeed, I think the biggest flaw with 8th/9th is that it threw far too much good stuff out, along with the bad.

USRs are gone and instead each model has a different name (and sometimes even description) for what amounts to the same ability. This makes the game very awkward in a number of ways.
- It makes it much harder to remember what a given rule does (there's a reason people still talk in the language of USRs).
- It makes it much harder to spot when a similar-looking rule differs from a common one. In the past, a model with a different Deep Strike ability would have either an ability with a different name (so you'd know immediately that it was different) or else Deep Strike but with a second rule to amend it. Now, though, every model has a different name for deep strike, so it's easily to skim read such rules with the assumption that it's just another deep strike rule, and inadvertently miss a small but important difference.
- It makes it much more awkward to write rules that refer to what were once common rules. e.g. in the past you could have referred specifically to FNP or Deep Strike, now you have to refer to 'rules that let a model ignore wounds' or 'rules that let a model deploy on the table after the first battle turn' or some other very awkward language.
- It means that there's often no common language. In the past, you'd know that FNP meant FNP. Now, though, you often end up looking at two rules with very similar wording and trying to work out whether the difference is intentional or just the result of them being written by different writers without any sort of agreed language/format for rule text.

In short, it creates far more problems than it could ever hope to solve, whereas most of the original problems with USRs could have been solved by just writing out the text on each model's datasheet.

The psychic phase has been simplified but perhaps a little too much (probably because it just pinched yet another magic system from Fantasy - this time the heavily trimmed-down AoS one). All the different weapon profiles are gone, now it's mortal wounds and more mortal wounds. It's better than the ridiculousness of spells like Invisibility but it doesn't leave much room for creativity. Also, the system is quite weird in that you just throw two dice and hope to achieve the target number. No resources are expended beyond an arbitrary cast limit per turn and there are almost no choices to be made. At least with the 7th edition system you could add more dice, increasing the chance of succeeding but also increasing the chance of Perils. Now spells have different cast values but you can't do anything about it because your dice are always fixed anyway. All things considered, I find myself wondering why we need to have a psychic phase at all - it seems you could have just as easily gone back to the pre-7th model, where units just make a Ld test to cast a psychic power.

Initiative is gone completely and instead we have a mess of 'always strikes first' and 'always strikes last'. Resolving combats without those rules is even worse, as you have ludicrous situations where selecting a unit to fight causes an entirely different unit, in an entirely different combat, to fight more slowly. But apparently this is an improvement for some reason.

Morale is basically gone, with Pinning and Falling Back being gone entirely. Now when a unit fails a morale test some of its members just vanish into the aether.

Transports can't deploy passengers when they move, thus negating the point of most transports even existing (plus fire-points are inexplicably gone - so either your transport is open-topped or else its just a mobile brick).

Stratagems, Dear, God, stratagems. If there is anything current 40k did not need, it was Stratagems. I note that this idea came, as so many seem to, from importing yet more stuff from Age of Sigmar. Except that Age of Sigmar took the wise decision to make Command Points usable by HQs for specific command abilities. 40k on the other hand decided that HQs would be entirely divorced from CPs (why would HQs have any strategic or command role, after all?) and so instead tied CPs to a card game that feels entirely disconnected from anything in the rulebook or on the table. It also gives us even more ludicrous scenarios - like one unit being unable to throw their grenades because a different unit threw theirs.

What's worse is that Stratagems also seem to have eaten a not insignificant chunk of what used to be actual options and wargear. So now many units have few options and instead rely on specific stratagems for that purpose, thus restricting the ability to personalise individual units.

Speaking of which, 8th removed character's being able to join squads and instead made characters very hard to target. The main issue was that the arbitrary cut-off limit meant monster-characters could hide behind basic infantry, since it was based on wounds and the wounds characteristic had almost no relation to the actual size of a given model. 9th ""fixed"" this not by using a different statistic (such as strength or toughness or one of the billion keywords that has been added to the game) but instead by requiring characters to be stupidly close to a unit in order to gain any protection. This means stuff like Death Jesters and other characters that are meant to be lone-snipers or lone-hunters now can't act as they're supposed to. But hey, at least Guilliman can still hide behind guardsmen, and that's all that matters.

Cover is still negligible, especially as there's no longer any penalty for firing at an obscured target. Combined with fewer penalties for movement and smaller boards, this typically means units can just shoot at whatever the hell they want with zero regard for intervening models and even intervening terrain.


I should say that it's by no means all bad. 9th at least doesn't have random psychic power selection or warlord trait selection. The wound allocation system is vastly better (though I do think it would be wise to future-proof it, so that the game doesn't break if a unit has more than one wounded model at a given time). And all in all it's at least a more functional game than 9th was (as it doesn't require significant house-ruling before you can even play).

However, I fear that in an effort to get away from 7th, 8th/9th ended up throwing out a lot of stuff that was actually functional (or which required only some minor tweaks to make it functional). Not that it's necessarily a worse game in and of itself, just I think it represents a bad direction for 40k to be heading in - especially as the game seems to be increasingly getting away from what's happening on the table being the key factor in who wins. Especially with the advent of stratagems, it seems we're really not far off from just turning 40k into a full-on card game and abandoning the board and minis entirely.

The core rules in 7th were fine by GW's norm, the problem was in the codexes and the existence of Formations. You can see this by how well Age of Darkness works when only juggling the much smaller varieties of armies - far, far from perfect but definitely a much less cumbersome version of 7th.

9th at it's core is still a less cumbersome and bloated ruleset, but it suffers from the amount of 'DLC bloat' much worse than what 7th became, where we're less than a year in and already have multiple splat books several armies are required to lug around with them.

 vipoid wrote:

Spoiler:

]Instead of reacting to anyone, I'm just going to give my personal thoughts on the issue.

7th:

Let's not beat about the bush, 7th was an absolute mess. The core rules started badly and then the codices, supplements, mid-edition codices (where the design philosophy changed completely), lack of FAQs etc. made things spiral completely out of control.

In terms of the core rules, there was a lot of bloat - not least because it refused to reverse the disastrous changed wrought by 6th edition (with the inclusion of super-heavies and fliers being the most egregious). Hence, we had to have whole sections for new types of units, basically detailing how they follow no rules whatsoever and can do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. Awesome. This totally didn't read like someone trying to insert their badly-written, Mary-the-Mechwarrior Sue fanfiction into a game that was already ill-suited for it.

But for as bad as those rules were, they were by no means the only issue with 7th. In fact, quite a few of 7th issues seemed to stem from someone on the design team (you know who you are) having the bright idea to just lift swathes of 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and ram them into 40k. This was most evident with 7th's magic (sorry Psyker) system, which had all the same nonsense as 8th edition - right down to the 'random to determine the random thus seeing whether you'll random or randomly get randomed in the face' and the utterly broken spells. However, even leaving aside the fact that 8th edition WHFB's magic system was a colossal pile of pigswill, at least that game system was built with magic as a core element. Hence, every race either had wizards of its own (generally costing roughly the same) or else had significant countering/dispelling ability (like with Dwarves). In contrast, 40k races have vastly different accessibilities when it comes to psykers and counters to psykers - ranging from entire armies of psykers to armies with no psykers whatsoever (and also with very few tools to counter such). So while WHFB's terrible magic system was at least somewhat balanced by roughly equal access, 40k's attempt at the same didn't even have that modicum of balance. Instead, if a Tau or Necron or DE player (or even a player who'd foolishly brought only one or two psykers) was up against GKs or Daemons, he might as well go and make himself a sandwich while they conduct their psychic phase.

And because I'm not done ragging on the psychic phase, now would probably be a good time to bring up 7th's commitment to 'balance by random'. As in, it doesn't matter if one psychic power is useless and another is game-winning because you have to roll for them! Presuming your brain is located in your skull and not your rectum, you can probably see the flaw in that particular line of reasoning. Alas, GW did not. And so not only was this policy applied to psychic powers, it was also applied to other areas of army construction such as Warlord Traits (because who'd want to give a character a thematic trait, right?). Naturally, it meant that there was a ton of pre-game nonsense that had to be rolled for at the start of every game.

Then you've got the endless litany of time-wasting mechanics - the terrible wound-allocation rules, the entire Challenge system, the pointless special rules (Soulfire anyone?).

And you've got the final problem which was that the layout of the core rulebook was absolutely atrocious. Nothing seemed to flow logically, so that you'd have the rules for vehicles in one section, except for a certain type of vehicle which is found in an entirely different section because reasons. Or the USRs that you look up only to find that all they do is give a unit two different USRs. It meant that any sort of rules debate immediately brought the game to a grinding halt as players struggled to even find the right section in the convoluted mess of a rulebook.


So what about 9th?

Well, it certainly made some improvements. The rulebook is better laid out . . . though this seems to have been achieved primarily by just throwing most of the content in the bin. Indeed, I think the biggest flaw with 8th/9th is that it threw far too much good stuff out, along with the bad.

USRs are gone and instead each model has a different name (and sometimes even description) for what amounts to the same ability. This makes the game very awkward in a number of ways.
- It makes it much harder to remember what a given rule does (there's a reason people still talk in the language of USRs).
- It makes it much harder to spot when a similar-looking rule differs from a common one. In the past, a model with a different Deep Strike ability would have either an ability with a different name (so you'd know immediately that it was different) or else Deep Strike but with a second rule to amend it. Now, though, every model has a different name for deep strike, so it's easily to skim read such rules with the assumption that it's just another deep strike rule, and inadvertently miss a small but important difference.
- It makes it much more awkward to write rules that refer to what were once common rules. e.g. in the past you could have referred specifically to FNP or Deep Strike, now you have to refer to 'rules that let a model ignore wounds' or 'rules that let a model deploy on the table after the first battle turn' or some other very awkward language.
- It means that there's often no common language. In the past, you'd know that FNP meant FNP. Now, though, you often end up looking at two rules with very similar wording and trying to work out whether the difference is intentional or just the result of them being written by different writers without any sort of agreed language/format for rule text.

In short, it creates far more problems than it could ever hope to solve, whereas most of the original problems with USRs could have been solved by just writing out the text on each model's datasheet.

The psychic phase has been simplified but perhaps a little too much (probably because it just pinched yet another magic system from Fantasy - this time the heavily trimmed-down AoS one). All the different weapon profiles are gone, now it's mortal wounds and more mortal wounds. It's better than the ridiculousness of spells like Invisibility but it doesn't leave much room for creativity. Also, the system is quite weird in that you just throw two dice and hope to achieve the target number. No resources are expended beyond an arbitrary cast limit per turn and there are almost no choices to be made. At least with the 7th edition system you could add more dice, increasing the chance of succeeding but also increasing the chance of Perils. Now spells have different cast values but you can't do anything about it because your dice are always fixed anyway. All things considered, I find myself wondering why we need to have a psychic phase at all - it seems you could have just as easily gone back to the pre-7th model, where units just make a Ld test to cast a psychic power.

Initiative is gone completely and instead we have a mess of 'always strikes first' and 'always strikes last'. Resolving combats without those rules is even worse, as you have ludicrous situations where selecting a unit to fight causes an entirely different unit, in an entirely different combat, to fight more slowly. But apparently this is an improvement for some reason.

Morale is basically gone, with Pinning and Falling Back being gone entirely. Now when a unit fails a morale test some of its members just vanish into the aether.

Transports can't deploy passengers when they move, thus negating the point of most transports even existing (plus fire-points are inexplicably gone - so either your transport is open-topped or else its just a mobile brick).

Stratagems, Dear, God, stratagems. If there is anything current 40k did not need, it was Stratagems. I note that this idea came, as so many seem to, from importing yet more stuff from Age of Sigmar. Except that Age of Sigmar took the wise decision to make Command Points usable by HQs for specific command abilities. 40k on the other hand decided that HQs would be entirely divorced from CPs (why would HQs have any strategic or command role, after all?) and so instead tied CPs to a card game that feels entirely disconnected from anything in the rulebook or on the table. It also gives us even more ludicrous scenarios - like one unit being unable to throw their grenades because a different unit threw theirs.

What's worse is that Stratagems also seem to have eaten a not insignificant chunk of what used to be actual options and wargear. So now many units have few options and instead rely on specific stratagems for that purpose, thus restricting the ability to personalise individual units.

Speaking of which, 8th removed character's being able to join squads and instead made characters very hard to target. The main issue was that the arbitrary cut-off limit meant monster-characters could hide behind basic infantry, since it was based on wounds and the wounds characteristic had almost no relation to the actual size of a given model. 9th ""fixed"" this not by using a different statistic (such as strength or toughness or one of the billion keywords that has been added to the game) but instead by requiring characters to be stupidly close to a unit in order to gain any protection. This means stuff like Death Jesters and other characters that are meant to be lone-snipers or lone-hunters now can't act as they're supposed to. But hey, at least Guilliman can still hide behind guardsmen, and that's all that matters.

Cover is still negligible, especially as there's no longer any penalty for firing at an obscured target. Combined with fewer penalties for movement and smaller boards, this typically means units can just shoot at whatever the hell they want with zero regard for intervening models and even intervening terrain.


I should say that it's by no means all bad. 9th at least doesn't have random psychic power selection or warlord trait selection. The wound allocation system is vastly better (though I do think it would be wise to future-proof it, so that the game doesn't break if a unit has more than one wounded model at a given time). And all in all it's at least a more functional game than 9th was (as it doesn't require significant house-ruling before you can even play).

However, I fear that in an effort to get away from 7th, 8th/9th ended up throwing out a lot of stuff that was actually functional (or which required only some minor tweaks to make it functional). Not that it's necessarily a worse game in and of itself, just I think it represents a bad direction for 40k to be heading in - especially as the game seems to be increasingly getting away from what's happening on the table being the key factor in who wins. Especially with the advent of stratagems, it seems we're really not far off from just turning 40k into a full-on card game and abandoning the board and minis entirely.

Very good post, enjoyed reading it, especially the perspective of what things came over from AoS and WHFB. I don't agree with everything, but that's mostly a matter of opinion.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arbitrator wrote:
The core rules in 7th were fine by GW's norm, the problem was in the codexes and the existence of Formations. You can see this by how well Age of Darkness works when only juggling the much smaller varieties of armies - far, far from perfect but definitely a much less cumbersome version of 7th.

9th at it's core is still a less cumbersome and bloated ruleset, but it suffers from the amount of 'DLC bloat' much worse than what 7th became, where we're less than a year in and already have multiple splat books several armies are required to lug around with them.

This has been proven to be objectively wrong multiple times. Neither theoretical maximum number of rule sources you need, nor the number of rule sources the average person needs in real games is more than what you needed in 7th under the same circumstances.

I agree with that assessment completely, it accurately sums up my opinion on the matter.

I could add a little more but not a lot.

7ed had some great ideas, unfortunately they dint roll out well. 9Th has some issues and it’s not perfect. But overall it’s a very solid rules set, the brb is layer out better then any other edition, no room for well I read it that way arguments. So that’s a great thing, my only complaint is with the huge amount of stragems, makes it feel slight bloated and can add a lot of gotcha moments (but it’s not a game breaker).

 vipoid wrote:
Instead of reacting to anyone, I'm just going to give my personal thoughts on the issue.

7th:

Let's not beat about the bush, 7th was an absolute mess. The core rules started badly and then the codices, supplements, mid-edition codices (where the design philosophy changed completely), lack of FAQs etc. made things spiral completely out of control.

In terms of the core rules, there was a lot of bloat - not least because it refused to reverse the disastrous changed wrought by 6th edition (with the inclusion of super-heavies and fliers being the most egregious). Hence, we had to have whole sections for new types of units, basically detailing how they follow no rules whatsoever and can do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. Awesome. This totally didn't read like someone trying to insert their badly-written, Mary-the-Mechwarrior Sue fanfiction into a game that was already ill-suited for it.

But for as bad as those rules were, they were by no means the only issue with 7th. In fact, quite a few of 7th issues seemed to stem from someone on the design team (you know who you are) having the bright idea to just lift swathes of 8th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and ram them into 40k. This was most evident with 7th's magic (sorry Psyker) system, which had all the same nonsense as 8th edition - right down to the 'random to determine the random thus seeing whether you'll random or randomly get randomed in the face' and the utterly broken spells. However, even leaving aside the fact that 8th edition WHFB's magic system was a colossal pile of pigswill, at least that game system was built with magic as a core element. Hence, every race either had wizards of its own (generally costing roughly the same) or else had significant countering/dispelling ability (like with Dwarves). In contrast, 40k races have vastly different accessibilities when it comes to psykers and counters to psykers - ranging from entire armies of psykers to armies with no psykers whatsoever (and also with very few tools to counter such). So while WHFB's terrible magic system was at least somewhat balanced by roughly equal access, 40k's attempt at the same didn't even have that modicum of balance. Instead, if a Tau or Necron or DE player (or even a player who'd foolishly brought only one or two psykers) was up against GKs or Daemons, he might as well go and make himself a sandwich while they conduct their psychic phase.

And because I'm not done ragging on the psychic phase, now would probably be a good time to bring up 7th's commitment to 'balance by random'. As in, it doesn't matter if one psychic power is useless and another is game-winning because you have to roll for them! Presuming your brain is located in your skull and not your rectum, you can probably see the flaw in that particular line of reasoning. Alas, GW did not. And so not only was this policy applied to psychic powers, it was also applied to other areas of army construction such as Warlord Traits (because who'd want to give a character a thematic trait, right?). Naturally, it meant that there was a ton of pre-game nonsense that had to be rolled for at the start of every game.

Then you've got the endless litany of time-wasting mechanics - the terrible wound-allocation rules, the entire Challenge system, the pointless special rules (Soulfire anyone?).

And you've got the final problem which was that the layout of the core rulebook was absolutely atrocious. Nothing seemed to flow logically, so that you'd have the rules for vehicles in one section, except for a certain type of vehicle which is found in an entirely different section because reasons. Or the USRs that you look up only to find that all they do is give a unit two different USRs. It meant that any sort of rules debate immediately brought the game to a grinding halt as players struggled to even find the right section in the convoluted mess of a rulebook.


So what about 9th?

Well, it certainly made some improvements. The rulebook is better laid out . . . though this seems to have been achieved primarily by just throwing most of the content in the bin. Indeed, I think the biggest flaw with 8th/9th is that it threw far too much good stuff out, along with the bad.

USRs are gone and instead each model has a different name (and sometimes even description) for what amounts to the same ability. This makes the game very awkward in a number of ways.
- It makes it much harder to remember what a given rule does (there's a reason people still talk in the language of USRs).
- It makes it much harder to spot when a similar-looking rule differs from a common one. In the past, a model with a different Deep Strike ability would have either an ability with a different name (so you'd know immediately that it was different) or else Deep Strike but with a second rule to amend it. Now, though, every model has a different name for deep strike, so it's easily to skim read such rules with the assumption that it's just another deep strike rule, and inadvertently miss a small but important difference.
- It makes it much more awkward to write rules that refer to what were once common rules. e.g. in the past you could have referred specifically to FNP or Deep Strike, now you have to refer to 'rules that let a model ignore wounds' or 'rules that let a model deploy on the table after the first battle turn' or some other very awkward language.
- It means that there's often no common language. In the past, you'd know that FNP meant FNP. Now, though, you often end up looking at two rules with very similar wording and trying to work out whether the difference is intentional or just the result of them being written by different writers without any sort of agreed language/format for rule text.

In short, it creates far more problems than it could ever hope to solve, whereas most of the original problems with USRs could have been solved by just writing out the text on each model's datasheet.

The psychic phase has been simplified but perhaps a little too much (probably because it just pinched yet another magic system from Fantasy - this time the heavily trimmed-down AoS one). All the different weapon profiles are gone, now it's mortal wounds and more mortal wounds. It's better than the ridiculousness of spells like Invisibility but it doesn't leave much room for creativity. Also, the system is quite weird in that you just throw two dice and hope to achieve the target number. No resources are expended beyond an arbitrary cast limit per turn and there are almost no choices to be made. At least with the 7th edition system you could add more dice, increasing the chance of succeeding but also increasing the chance of Perils. Now spells have different cast values but you can't do anything about it because your dice are always fixed anyway. All things considered, I find myself wondering why we need to have a psychic phase at all - it seems you could have just as easily gone back to the pre-7th model, where units just make a Ld test to cast a psychic power.

Initiative is gone completely and instead we have a mess of 'always strikes first' and 'always strikes last'. Resolving combats without those rules is even worse, as you have ludicrous situations where selecting a unit to fight causes an entirely different unit, in an entirely different combat, to fight more slowly. But apparently this is an improvement for some reason.

Morale is basically gone, with Pinning and Falling Back being gone entirely. Now when a unit fails a morale test some of its members just vanish into the aether.

Transports can't deploy passengers when they move, thus negating the point of most transports even existing (plus fire-points are inexplicably gone - so either your transport is open-topped or else its just a mobile brick).

Stratagems, Dear, God, stratagems. If there is anything current 40k did not need, it was Stratagems. I note that this idea came, as so many seem to, from importing yet more stuff from Age of Sigmar. Except that Age of Sigmar took the wise decision to make Command Points usable by HQs for specific command abilities. 40k on the other hand decided that HQs would be entirely divorced from CPs (why would HQs have any strategic or command role, after all?) and so instead tied CPs to a card game that feels entirely disconnected from anything in the rulebook or on the table. It also gives us even more ludicrous scenarios - like one unit being unable to throw their grenades because a different unit threw theirs.

What's worse is that Stratagems also seem to have eaten a not insignificant chunk of what used to be actual options and wargear. So now many units have few options and instead rely on specific stratagems for that purpose, thus restricting the ability to personalise individual units.

Speaking of which, 8th removed character's being able to join squads and instead made characters very hard to target. The main issue was that the arbitrary cut-off limit meant monster-characters could hide behind basic infantry, since it was based on wounds and the wounds characteristic had almost no relation to the actual size of a given model. 9th ""fixed"" this not by using a different statistic (such as strength or toughness or one of the billion keywords that has been added to the game) but instead by requiring characters to be stupidly close to a unit in order to gain any protection. This means stuff like Death Jesters and other characters that are meant to be lone-snipers or lone-hunters now can't act as they're supposed to. But hey, at least Guilliman can still hide behind guardsmen, and that's all that matters.

Cover is still negligible, especially as there's no longer any penalty for firing at an obscured target. Combined with fewer penalties for movement and smaller boards, this typically means units can just shoot at whatever the hell they want with zero regard for intervening models and even intervening terrain.


I should say that it's by no means all bad. 9th at least doesn't have random psychic power selection or warlord trait selection. The wound allocation system is vastly better (though I do think it would be wise to future-proof it, so that the game doesn't break if a unit has more than one wounded model at a given time). And all in all it's at least a more functional game than 9th was (as it doesn't require significant house-ruling before you can even play).

However, I fear that in an effort to get away from 7th, 8th/9th ended up throwing out a lot of stuff that was actually functional (or which required only some minor tweaks to make it functional). Not that it's necessarily a worse game in and of itself, just I think it represents a bad direction for 40k to be heading in - especially as the game seems to be increasingly getting away from what's happening on the table being the key factor in who wins. Especially with the advent of stratagems, it seems we're really not far off from just turning 40k into a full-on card game and abandoning the board and minis entirely.

Exalted.

Perhaps GW is seeing the writing on the wall regarding 3D printing and its actual and future potential impact on GW's business model. For years GW used to say "we are a model company first" implying that the rules for its games took a backseat in its priorities. But with the rise of 3D printing and the continued success of the Magic The Gathering card game (which really keeps most FLGS in business), maybe the shift in GW's games towards more of a "card game" format with ongoing "supplements/expansions" has been intentional with the end result being games where GW's plastic models ("expensive chits" to quote a post from another recent discussion) are really no longer necessary. In the past decade GW has made some significant changes and legal defenses to its IP. It is my belief that they see a shift from a business model focused primarily on selling model kits to a business model focused on selling gaming rules, cards, books (including recent comic books), movies, and TV shows utilizing their IP.

Edit: And here you go: https://gamerant.com/warhammer-magic-gathering-crossover-expectations-cards-decks/
This "crossover" with MTG could actually be the tipping point.

vipoid hit the nail right on the head.

Yeah, that's a good write-up.
Covers most of the major issues of both editions.

I think I disagree with most of what Vipoid laid out, but he's right on USRs, transports and morale. Those are really the only things that have been done better in the past and not been replaced by something more elegant.

Especially the psychic phase since 8th is a relief, it was a total mess in 7th right in the core rules and remarkable for the bloat of that edition: Lots of roling, incredibly unbalanced (hello invisibility), 0 player interaction (because let's face it, you could only ever deny with a yahtzee) and every psyker was reduced to a battery for some other psyker in your army. There could be more powers you can cast more than once like smite in 9th, but that's more a problem of psyker heavy armies or games with 3000+ points.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Galas wrote:
...But it was a reply to AnomanderRake trying to discredit the criticism of 7th based in how many games people played of it.

I'm attempting to question whether the "7th was an unplayable shithole" crowd played 7th because the kinds of things I hear from them are the furthest from my experience of any anecdotes I hear on this website. I don't agree with people who like 8th/9th, but we're more often than not disagreeing on opinion over what's fun while with the anti-7th crowd we're often disagreeing on some pretty fundamental facts like "how big the rulebook was". I'm not trying to claim that nobody's criticism of 7th is fair, I'm questioning whether criticizing 7th for consisting entirely of armies of D-weapons, 2++ deathstars, and free transports run with five hundred pages of rules that you couldn't even attempt to play without memorizing is criticizing 7th at all, or some hypothetical worst-case edition that bears only a superficial resemblance to 7th.

None of my core frustrations with 7th (besides the obvious frustration with Formations as blatantly overpowered sales tactics that got unevenly spread through the various armies while many armies got totally left in the dust with next to none) have anything to do with these weird generalizations, so maybe you'd be interested in responding to some of those.

1) too many mechanics resulted in immediate breakpoints with incredible spikes in effectiveness

'doubling out' against a multiwound target would immediately double or triple the effectiveness of a gun. A strength 7 weapon was three times less effective than a strength 8 weapon against tyranid warriors, to cite a common example.

the entire AP system meant that armor was an increasingly 'brittle' stat. Ap5 was so common that sv values of 5+ or 6+ were effectively worthless, while sv values of 3+ or 2+ resulted in the exact same hyper-spike in effectiveness, where a weapon that paid for AP4 got absolutely nothing against a target with sv3+, while a weapon with AP3 killed it essentially no fuss no muss. Given 40k's endemic uncreativity with statlines, that meant that MOST ap3 weaponry would remove something like a space marine with no save roll on a 2+

The cover save system coupled with the very common Ignores Cover USR meant cover was similarly binary. You either always get a 4+ (maybe you could get a 5+ from Light Cover or something, honestly I don't recall because 7th ed was an "Everything Counts As One Terrain Type" edition of 40k) or you get nothing, you are dead, good day sir.

The vehicle damage table coupled with hull points resulted in two instant breakpoints for vehicles. Hull point values were very low, so a high-rof weapon that could eek out a glance on a 6 meant that weapon would become IMMENSELY more powerful vs just one point of strength lower, where it was totally, utterly useless, could not hurt the target no way no how. And then when you look at dedicated AT weaponry, you'd roll on yet another table of 'mildly inconvenienced, or instantantly dead.'

Once you hit the level of 300pts, you became a "super heavy" which got you rules bonuses so collossal that a model that juuuuust eked over that bar could just absolutely wipe the fething floor with 3-4 enemy models that juuuust came in under that bar. A single imperial knight with its D-strength sword, immunity to the VDT, ability to fall back and shoot, and stomps could absolutely clobber several Gorkanauts with their strength 10 weaponry and very good odds of being summarily kaboomed at several points during the Knight's attacks.

All these many breakpoints resulted in main problem number 2 that I had with 7th ed:

2) way too many units paid for way too many easily invalidated stat numbers or worthless weapons.

high initiative models with no assault grenades. multiwound models with low toughness. any model with a 5+ or 6+sv. Shortrange high-sv infantry who ended up riding around in transports 99% of the time because they had the lifespan of a snowflake in a desert if you tried to walk them up the field with an enemy obviously salivating at the prospect of getting to ace them on a 2+ to wound with their anti-elite weaponry. Weapons you pay for that were worthless because you either always just fired your special/heavy weapon out of the hatch of your transport, or because you couldn't split fire and you HAD to pay for weapons with different roles (Defiler, anybody?). Vehicles like leman russes that had huge front armor who could just get instantly booped by a single powerfist in melee because they have av10 in the back.

3) highly variable random rolls played a massive role in who won and who lost

And people think first turn in 9th is bad! 7th featured the 'fun' choice of missions between Eternal War with such hits as Emperor's Tie and whatever the kill points one was called AKA "is one player playing a horde army and the other playing an elite army? Either roll up another mission or the second guy instantly wins!", or you could play Maelstrom of War and just...hope you drew the cards for the objectives on your side of the board while your opponent drew the cards for your side as well.

You also randomly rolled for warlord traits, and randomly rolled for psychic powers. Will my psyker in this game be casting Invisibility, rendering his unit immune to all template attacks and making all to-hit rolls only work on a 6? or will I be working with Mental Fortitude, allowing my statistically probably already immune to morale unit to...regroup automatically should they fail morale? THIS D6 ROLL PRE-GAME SHALL DECIDE!

And then at the end of the game, assuming of course the battle wasn't already won or lost by tabling turn 4-5 like most games were, you generally just...determined the winner by the results of random game length. Just a good ol, d6 roll at the end of the game to see who wins, that's pretty satisfying.

4) the unfairness between armies was just more...fundamental.

Some armies got to have bonuses for formations. Others had complete, total ass formations, or just none at all. Some got to layer those formations together in decurion super-detachments. Some...could not. A couple armies got army-wide rule bonuses that worked like subfaction traits do now that they...very, very dubiously "Paid For" (that was marines, and later on in the edition chaos marines) while every other army didn't get that. One army at the tail end of the edition got to attack twice just as a core thing they got to do, and paid the same points for the units that they got to mix'n'match from other armies.

Those are the four main reasons I prefer 9th ed structurally over 7th.

Do these seem like disingenuous complaints from someone who never played it? Because I would say I'm probably comfortably in the 99th percentile of 'humans who played the most games of 7th edition 40k on the planet.' I basically played weekly like clockwork all the way straight through the entire life of the edition.


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Note: Disagree with vipoid on a lot of stuff, but I have to agree with a lot of what they wrote. Good analysis of what I would like 9th ed to do better, and what I disliked about 7th. If I wanted to create my perfect, ideal edition of 40k, I would start with the core of 9th, not with the core of 7th.

basically I'd port in old-style morale, but keep the new school policy of 'not everybody and their brother gets a blanket morale exception', I'd rework transports to actually function, make the boards way bigger, add in a simplified flanking mechanic and hugely buff cover/reduce LOS to make maneuver matter more, cut out or greatly reduce stratagems and re-introduce the capabilities leached from units by strats into unit datasheets as limited use abilities. I'd also rework various rules to get rid of a lot of mortal wounds - reworking damaging psychic powers to just....be...basically regular attacks for the most part, because why can't they just be that?

The core ways that units move around on the board, interact with each other, the way stats interact, the save system, all that I vastly prefer to previous editions of the game and the way theyve handled that. I think buffing up cover and cutting out strats would go a massively long way to making 9th ed's deadliness problem go away on its own, and increasing board sizes (with corresponding buffs to transports to allow them to get units where they need to be) would allow higher range to mitigate some of the issues 9th has currently with the hyper-power of suicidal close range units.

I played 4 games of 7th.
1 was against a Space Marine player that brought a "normal" list, it was fun.
3 were against the bestest cheese, Wraithknights in one, Tzeentch summon chaining, and Whitescars/Knights buddies.

In those three games I killed one Eldar jetbike (if you discount summoned daemons) and got tabled every game.
Yeah, 7th was bad.

 the_scotsman wrote:

basically I'd port in old-style morale, but keep the new school policy of 'not everybody and their brother gets a blanket morale exception', I'd rework transports to actually function, make the boards way bigger, add in a simplified flanking mechanic and hugely buff cover/reduce LOS to make maneuver matter more, cut out or greatly reduce stratagems and re-introduce the capabilities leached from units by strats into unit datasheets as limited use abilities. I'd also rework various rules to get rid of a lot of mortal wounds - reworking damaging psychic powers to just....be...basically regular attacks for the most part, because why can't they just be that?

The core ways that units move around on the board, interact with each other, the way stats interact, the save system, all that I vastly prefer to previous editions of the game and the way theyve handled that. I think buffing up cover and cutting out strats would go a massively long way to making 9th ed's deadliness problem go away on its own, and increasing board sizes (with corresponding buffs to transports to allow them to get units where they need to be) would allow higher range to mitigate some of the issues 9th has currently with the hyper-power of suicidal close range units.

As you say, we don't always agree, but I certainly think your suggestions here would make for a marked improvement to the current game.

Also, thanks for reminding me about some of the other issues with 7th that I'd forgotten about.

I believe one of the biggest reasons people seems 8th and 9th in a more positive light is that , at least now, you wait at best 1-3 years for your new codex or codex expansion, GW actually puts FAQ's that fix things, and they make regular balance patches.

I have never, a single time, had a rule discusion playing 8th or 9th, and the couple of gray areas, were generally know by the community or easy to reference.

I don't know how it was in 7th because I didn't played 40k that much in that age, but I remember fantasy 6-7-8 editions, and it was a mess. You didn't had a tournament without people yelling at each other about a rule dispute.

7th had better core rules, and the bloat is worse in 9th.

Of course, 7th was the death rattle of an edition cycle, whereas 9th is relatively early on; which hardly bodes well...

 Lord Damocles wrote:
7th had better core rules, and the bloat is worse in 9th.

Of course, 7th was the death rattle of an edition cycle, whereas 9th is relatively early on; which hardly bodes well...

Only reason 7th had decent core rules is they were 5th's with more crap bolted on.

Something that has crossed my mind is that the reason GW has split the USRs the way they did was to allow them to better tweak individual units as needed. We're seeing that with weapons as well with things like Artificer Storm Bolters for Sisters that allow them to be treated differently than normal ones. It does add tons more possible sources of clunk to the game, but it also gives them more levers to pull when making adjustments.

I didn't actually like the old morale system.
It was too binary, you would either be pinned or you wouldn't, and there was no in between.

Other games with a morale mechanic seem much more procedural.
For example, in Legion or Dust, every time you get shot you get a pinned marker. You get adverse effects when those start to pile up and exceed your leadership.

Firstly, that means you feel like you've achieved something even if your attack did little damage - you gave them a pinned token.
But it also allows you to represent brave units with high leadership values without them just laughing off the mechanic entirely.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Only reason 7th had decent core rules is they were 5th's with more crap bolted on.

Yes.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Something that has crossed my mind is that the reason GW has split the USRs the way they did was to allow them to better tweak individual units as needed. We're seeing that with weapons as well with things like Artificer Storm Bolters for Sisters that allow them to be treated differently than normal ones. It does add tons more possible sources of clunk to the game, but it also gives them more levers to pull when making adjustments.

GW have been very upfront about telling us why they cut so much out of the core rulebook - simply to make the core rules shorter - 'accessibility, preciseness and mechanical robustness'.

 vipoid wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

basically I'd port in old-style morale, but keep the new school policy of 'not everybody and their brother gets a blanket morale exception', I'd rework transports to actually function, make the boards way bigger, add in a simplified flanking mechanic and hugely buff cover/reduce LOS to make maneuver matter more, cut out or greatly reduce stratagems and re-introduce the capabilities leached from units by strats into unit datasheets as limited use abilities. I'd also rework various rules to get rid of a lot of mortal wounds - reworking damaging psychic powers to just....be...basically regular attacks for the most part, because why can't they just be that?

The core ways that units move around on the board, interact with each other, the way stats interact, the save system, all that I vastly prefer to previous editions of the game and the way theyve handled that. I think buffing up cover and cutting out strats would go a massively long way to making 9th ed's deadliness problem go away on its own, and increasing board sizes (with corresponding buffs to transports to allow them to get units where they need to be) would allow higher range to mitigate some of the issues 9th has currently with the hyper-power of suicidal close range units.

As you say, we don't always agree, but I certainly think your suggestions here would make for a marked improvement to the current game.

Also, thanks for reminding me about some of the other issues with 7th that I'd forgotten about.

Well, if your group is amenable to houserules, flanking, better cover and morale are three things its incredibly easy to slot in...and half my games these days are with folks who haven't played in ages. I just start out the game by asking 'hey, I know its been a while for both of us, you wanna just not play with command points?' and I end up playing without them most of the time.


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 kirotheavenger wrote:
I didn't actually like the old morale system.
It was too binary, you would either be pinned or you wouldn't, and there was no in between.

Other games with a morale mechanic seem much more procedural.
For example, in Legion or Dust, every time you get shot you get a pinned marker. You get adverse effects when those start to pile up and exceed your leadership.

Firstly, that means you feel like you've achieved something even if your attack did little damage - you gave them a pinned token.
But it also allows you to represent brave units with high leadership values without them just laughing off the mechanic entirely.

I think part of the problem is morale as a concept has always been kind of 'weird' in warhammer. So many things are described as basically fearless, emotionless, mindless, indoctrinated, fanatical, etc. Its like a trait of 3/4 of the armies in the game.

The best morale systems ive ended up playing with have always been in historical games, where its' an accepted fact that everyone involved is a regular human, with regular human fears and psychology. Like the WW2 game I've been playing most recently, where breaking a unit and getting htem to fall back is equivalent victory-point wise to killing a unit, and you always have the option to take suppressive fire - which will very very rarely cause any damage, but doesn't require you to successfully spot the opposing unit, just shoot in their general direction and cause pinnng/morale failure. That results in a wargame where skirmishes and battles very very rarely involve a side getting wiped off the map, and much more commonly a 'beaten' detachment is totally pinned down, hunkering in foxholes not doing anything useful.

 Gnarlly wrote:

Exalted.

Perhaps GW is seeing the writing on the wall regarding 3D printing and its actual and future potential impact on GW's business model. For years GW used to say "we are a model company first" implying that the rules for its games took a backseat in its priorities. But with the rise of 3D printing and the continued success of the Magic The Gathering card game (which really keeps most FLGS in business), maybe the shift in GW's games towards more of a "card game" format with ongoing "supplements/expansions" has been intentional with the end result being games where GW's plastic models ("expensive chits" to quote a post from another recent discussion) are really no longer necessary. In the past decade GW has made some significant changes and legal defenses to its IP. It is my belief that they see a shift from a business model focused primarily on selling model kits to a business model focused on selling gaming rules, cards, books (including recent comic books), movies, and TV shows utilizing their IP.

Edit: And here you go: https://gamerant.com/warhammer-magic-gathering-crossover-expectations-cards-decks/
This "crossover" with MTG could actually be the tipping point.

3D printing isn't going to match the scale of production nor will it be able to anticipate new releases. 60% of GW's sales are new releases. It also competes with secondary market, alternate manufacturers, 15 to 20% discounts, and time/impatience.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

GW have been very upfront about telling us why they cut so much out of the core rulebook - simply to make the core rules shorter - 'accessibility, preciseness and mechanical robustness'.

And to make people buy multiple books instead of one or two per edition. Why sell a marine player one book, when you can make him buy 2 for the army rules and then additional ones for core rules, patch and FAQ/Errata etc It is good for business.

Karol wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

GW have been very upfront about telling us why they cut so much out of the core rulebook - simply to make the core rules shorter - 'accessibility, preciseness and mechanical robustness'.

And to make people buy multiple books instead of one or two per edition. Why sell a marine player one book, when you can make him buy 2 for the army rules and then additional ones for core rules, patch and FAQ/Errata etc It is good for business.

They were flogging a small librarium's worth of books to each player long before they reduced the core rules to four pages.