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.

 Da Boss wrote:
I mean, 6/7th were so bad they had to basically start the system again from scratch because they crashed the playerbase.

6th was so bad it killed the game at my FLGS and actually got me to build armies for infinity and warmachine, even GW killed it after what a yeah and a half?

7th at the start actually saw some resurgence, but then the formation spam killed off all the good effort.

Oh and we just got in 2 games of our hybrid 5th ed games, one to teach anew player the old system and another...that was old school apocalyptic with something like 8K per side...it was loads of fun. way more entertaining than anything i have experienced with 9th.

 Jidmah wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").

Unless you were a dumb xenos, of course. Then your opponents just got a slew of free buffs.

Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).

Flyers were annoying, and not every army had anti-air units. But the real abominations here were flying monstrous creatures that could move around the board nigh invincible.

Which, again, is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.

Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?

yes, that an Edition is not made of core rules alone but the sum of all releases
and the core rules were never a problem, yet those are the things GW keeps changing the most instead of fixing the codex rules

6th was bad because the Codex rules were never updated to match the new core rules, 7th was bad because of the power creep with formations, yet the core rules were always ok so the big change with 8th to remove the core rules (but keep the old profile values and rules) was not necessary

I started with 4th and had the most fun playing 40k during that time.
I was playing IG. Mostly footslogging with few tanks to support. Wanted to play all infantry in the end. I liked the rules, liked tournaments, etc. Had the most fun back then.

When 5th happened and it buffed tanks over the top i was really devastated. My footslogging IG became a really crappy army and i refused to invest in the 10+ tanks to make it more competetive. Disliked stuff like wound allocation immensely. I played 3 times less during this edition.

I played like 1 game of 6th and i dont remember i ever played 7th.

Came back to the HH several years ago and i enjoy it very much. The only thing in the original 7th edition rules i would change is the 2d6 charge to a fixed number.

Tried 8th several times. Was at the receiving end of BA hammer captains. Thought it was idiotic and came back to HH where armies resemble armies.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.

Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

No, that one's a core rules problem. Hull Points being slapped onto the vehicle rules as some weird extra-wound patch helped nothing.

A.T. wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
From my POV the game was going off the rails toward the end of 5e with the introduction of all the different fliers and stuff

Arguably the rot started with the 5e guard codex, the second book of the edition. It really pushed the boat out on what you needed an army to deal with in a game,

I actually really liked that Guard book. Personally if they kept the doctrine rules from the 3.5/4th edition codex (at least the point upgrades not the unit restrictions) and the amount of options you had from the 5th book it would have been the best Guard book GW ever made.

Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
What actually changed in 6th?
-Melee weapons got profiles (which made them way less all-or-nothing than when everything was just "power weapon - ignores armour saves").

Unless you were a dumb xenos, of course. Then your opponents just got a slew of free buffs.

Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Flyers got flyer rules (which would have been fine if they'd benchmarked stats/pricing based on the 4e Apocalypse flyers rather than the 5e flyers-as-skimmers rules, and put AA on a few more existing models).

Flyers were annoying, and not every army had anti-air units. But the real abominations here were flying monstrous creatures that could move around the board nigh invincible.

Which, again, is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

-Hull points happened (which was classic GW overcompensation; they did two different things to make vehicles easier to kill than they were in 5th (hull points and pumping mid-power spam), and together they broke vehicles; if they'd done either one alone vehicles wouldn't have broken)

Sure, but they did break them, not to mention that the number of hull points were distributed completely arbitrarily and used to nerf units that didn't need nerfs and buff units that didn't need buffs.

Which is a Codex problem, not a core rules problem.

I can go on, but do you notice a pattern here?

Oh, you're just being dishonest again, not only skipping half the arguments but also handwaving the few you did bother to quote. And here I thought it was possible to have an actual discussion with you. My fault, really.

And yes not getting a codex is a codex problem. And guess what? When orks did get a codex it changed nothing about any of those problems.

Changing the core rules in a way that requires a codex not only to change but to get completely new units and rules is not a codex problem. It's called writing gakky core rules that don't work with the game that exists.

It's also not surprising that rules biggest flaw was that they apparently were only tested for eldar and marines and fell appart for almost every other army would work if every codex would have been re-written to be eldar and marines.

 Jidmah wrote:
...Changing the core rules in a way that requires a codex not only to change but to get completely new units and rules is not a codex problem. It's called writing gakky core rules that don't work with the game that exists...

In a well-functioning game the Codexes would be written to account for the core rules and for each other. My assertion is that 6e/7e didn't work because the people writing the Codexes didn't understand or account for the core rules or other books, and if you rewrote the Codexes to account for the core rules and each other the game could work fine without changing anything about the core rules. Your assertion, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that the core rules should have been written to not break the previous edition's Codexes, and if GW had written a set of core rules while paying attention to the Codexes they could have made a better game.

I think I'd describe what's happening here as "arguing past each other". The problem (game that doesn't function because there's no overarching vision for how it should work, therefore everything gets written in a vacuum and doesn't end up making for a game that works) is the same, and the end state (game that does function because there is an overarching vision for how it should work, therefore everything is written to create a functional play environment) is the same, but I'd rather get there by burning all the Codexes down and starting over (which you don't like because GW's demonstrated that they can't do that in a competent way) and you'd rather get there by burning the core rules down and starting over (which I don't like because GW's demonstrated that they can't do that in a competent way).

That's a fine theory and would totally be correct if we would be talking about a video game existing in a vacuum.

However, the codices are connected to models and a background, so you are quite limited what unit does what.
If the core rules are designed to make getting hordes of badly armored lumbering melee combatants terrible, an army that is lore-wise made up of badly armored lumbering melee combatants can either be redesigned to no longer match its lore or have no chance but remain terrible. Psychic factions were designed to crush other less factions, challenges were designed so agile combatants would always defeat less agile ones. All these are problems with the core rules, which were written in the knowledge what each army was representing and that orks would never gain enough armor, initiative or speed to reach combat, eldar would never be matched in psychic prowess by space wolves and that nobz would never strike before a space marine sergeant.

My argument is that both 6th and to a slightly lesser extent 7th were flawed to the core in a way that it would not have been possible to write good codices for armies as different as orks, marines, craftworlds, daemons, tau, drukhari and tyranids. And I think that is precisely the reason why 30k is working well and 7th was not, despite sharing the same flawed core rules.

 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.

What do you mean a loss of orders? Orders were introduced in 5th edition, but you rolled Ld tests to use them.

 Jidmah wrote:
That's a fine theory and would totally be correct if we would be talking about a video game existing in a vacuum.

However, the codices are connected to models and a background, so you are quite limited what unit does what.
If the core rules are designed to make getting hordes of badly armored lumbering melee combatants terrible, an army that is lore-wise made up of badly armored lumbering melee combatants can either be redesigned to no longer match its lore or have no chance but remain terrible. Psychic factions were designed to crush other less factions, challenges were designed so agile combatants would always defeat less agile ones. All these are problems with the core rules, which were written in the knowledge what each army was representing and that orks would never gain enough armor, initiative or speed to reach combat, eldar would never be matched in psychic prowess by space wolves and that nobz would never strike before a space marine sergeant.

My argument is that both 6th and to a slightly lesser extent 7th were flawed to the core in a way that it would not have been possible to write good codices for armies as different as orks, marines, craftworlds, daemons, tau, drukhari and tyranids. And I think that is precisely the reason why 30k is working well and 7th was not, despite sharing the same flawed core rules.

I don't think that's the case, for a long litany of reasons. By point:

-Lumbering, badly-armored melee combatants: Sure, the Orks are badly-armored, lumbering, and melee-oriented. That shouldn't be the start and end of their faction identity; they have shooty units, which GW neutered by nailing themselves to "BS2" as a core part of Orkish faction identity (which I notice they've started to move away from in 8th/9th), they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include), they have tanks (which under 7e blast rules were almost accurate). And even then the horde of Boyz running at the enemy waving choppas and screaming "Waaagh!" was let down by a) including too many things that ignored morale, which made shock melee not that useful, b) overpriced Boyz, and c) underpriced low-power blasts in other armies. I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

-Psychic factions were not designed to crush other factions. Daemons had exactly one power build with the 2++ deathstar; almost everything else in their Codex was more unplayable than the Orks. Eldar psykers were icing on a badly-broken cake. Grey Knights were at least as useless in 7th as they are now. Thousand Sons haven't been good since 3rd edition.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).

Jarms48 wrote:

 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.

What do you mean a loss of orders? Orders were introduced in 5th edition, but you rolled Ld tests to use them.

Sorry i meant doctrines i was thinking of "close order drill" and the like

Sorry i meant doctrines i was thinking of "close order drill" and the like

Ah yep. Those were fantastic. So much customisation. For them to have worked in 5th edition they just had to slightly tweak the costs, such as:

You may choose 1 Alternate Regimental Organisation and 1 option from Skills & Drills/Special Equipment, otherwise you may choose 2 options from Skills & Drills and Special Equipment.

Alternate Regimental Organisation:
- Drop Troops: Any Guard Infantry unit (without a Chimera transport) or Sentinel squadron may Deep Strike if the mission permits. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit for +2 points per model, or to any Sentinel units at a cost of +5 points per model.
- Grenadiers: This regiment may take Storm Trooper squads as Troops. These Storm Trooper squads may not Deep Strike or use Special Operations.
- Close Order Drill: No changes, the increased lethality of blast is enough of a restriction here.

Special Equipment:
- Cameleoline: Any Guard Infantry unit with cameleoline adds 1 to any Cover save they are allowed. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit for +2 points per model.
- Carapace armour: Any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider units with carapace armour change their Armour save from a 5+ to 4+. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider squadrons for +2 points per model.
- Cyber-enhancement: Any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider units have an Invulnerable save of 6. This Doctrine is available to any Guard Infantry unit and Rough Rider squadrons for +1 points per model.
- Warrior Weapons: Any model armed with a lasgun replaces it with a laspistol and close combat weapon.

There were others as well, but making them point upgrades and then limiting the list to a maximum of 2 would have made the 5th edition codex the best Guard codex GW released.

First of all, I want to point out that I'm not separating the quote to pick your post apart, but to answer properly to each argument.
Some people are sensible to this, but I mean no ill.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
-Lumbering, badly-armored melee combatants: Sure, the Orks are badly-armored, lumbering, and melee-oriented. That shouldn't be the start and end of their faction identity; they have shooty units, which GW neutered by nailing themselves to "BS2" as a core part of Orkish faction identity (which I notice they've started to move away from in 8th/9th)

I agree, though they haven't really moved away from the orks = BS5+ yet. Most improved BS stems from either grot gunners or targeting squigs.
I hope you are right though and they drop that gak for the 9th edition codex.

BS 5+ was not an issue in 6th though, because -1 to hit mostly didn't exist. Orks could shoot perfectly fine in 5th and lost that ability to some degree in 6th. The issue was that low AP guns could no longer reliably disable vehicles, which simply was all orks guns, be it dakkajets, lootas or rokkits. Luckily that era ended with the "mek wave" in 7th.

they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include)

'ard boyz were never common (one per army upgrade at the time) and should never be as durable as power armor. Due to how AP worked a 4+ armor upgrade was quite useless, IIRC someone mathhammered it to be worth roughly 1.5 points for boyz.

they have tanks (which under 7e blast rules were almost accurate)

The had two tanks, looted wagon and the battlewagon. The deff rolla was one of the orks two options of hurting vehicles, and since you can't ram and fire ordnance at the same time, relying on blasts was not an option - even if killkannon hadn't been one of the worst weapons in the codex, which also fell into the category of "bad AP, bad strength".
It also wasn't uncommon to lose three BW in turn 1, because nerfed cover made them more vulnerable.

And even then the horde of Boyz running at the enemy waving choppas and screaming "Waaagh!" was let down by a) including too many things that ignored morale, which made shock melee not that useful

Morale had literally nothing to with it. Not only would orks regularly lose combat to even necrons or imperial guard, but even if you did win you really didn't want them to run away, because your unit would automatically die to flamers and blasts thanks to how the core rules handled the whole thing. Winning combat = death is a major flaw of the core rules.
And of course, against well-armored foes like marines or aspect warriors there was a good chance of just getting sweeped despite charging, because the one guy who was able to crack armor was killed in a challenge.

b) overpriced Boyz

Orks were 6 points at the time, you could literally field hundreds of them. But since your removed the model closest to the enemy all the time, it wouldn't have mattered whether you had an extra row of boyz or two, it would only delay a tabling by a turn. If anything, more boyz would have prevented me from spacing them out during deployment, voiding the extra models even as soon as the first blast hit.

c) underpriced low-power blasts in other armies.

Since I was already used to the core rules essentially forcing me to waste everyone's time by spacing out each and every single one of my models by exactly 2", blasts and templates weren't as much outside of situations where the core rules forced my to clump up my models - most notably during charges or forced disembarks, something that happened quite regularly.
And, to be fair, the costs of blasts are a codex issue.

I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

The core rules gave a massive advantage to well armored shooting armies with good initiative values and melee weapons, good psykers and flying monsters on top of all the advantages they already had during ealier editions.
At the same time they severely punished melee armies with horde units, low AP weapons and low initiatives. Orks just happened to tick all the "you suck" boxes while failing to get any of the "you rock" options, but armies like nids, non-tzeench daemons or drukhari were in very similar situations.

-Psychic factions were not designed to crush other factions.

I wasn't referring to the faction as a whole but that a psychic faction like eldar, GK or daemons could simply void the use of psykers for all other armies.
There simply was no point in bringing one or two warpheads, librarians or sorcerers when the opposing army could just burry each of them in deny dice to "nope" anything they were trying to cast, while they could just roll more dice than the opponent could possibly deny to force stuff like invisibility through.

Daemons had exactly one power build with the 2++ deathstar; almost everything else in their Codex was more unplayable than the Orks.

Two, they also had the flying circus which died a tragic death in 7th when FMC were nerfed. I'm also not sure if 6th already had summoning.
But yes, you are essentially agreeing with me that the core rules completely screwed over daemons because they also suffered from the same issues as orks, except they didn't even have terrible shooting. I remember a friend of mine playing his daemonette army against IG on a table next to me and not a single one of his daemonettes reached combat before they were gunend down.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

Yeah, my warboss would totally snap an autarch in half, but I'm not talking about HQs and named characters. I'm talking about squad leaders. These should never have had the ability to issue and accept challenges to beging with, and this one of the biggest flaws of 6th which all by itself was sufficient to make it completely unplayable.
Nobz had two wounds and 4+ armor(5pts) which was essentially ignored by everyone and the power weapon change gave many unit champions better wound rolls against them. The thing with orks at the time is that PK nobs were the only way of handling vehicles, monsters, characters or even power armor. You essentially had to have a PK on every nob you could possibly stick one on, because otherwise you found yourself unable to handle things like wave serpents or dreadnoughts.
So when you charged any unit, you had four options:
1) The enemy unit did not have any characters. Congratulations for playing against necrons, but they still get to fight at the same time as you.
2) The enemy had a character with a melee weapon not worse than chainsword and pistol. You now start praying that it doesn't cause two wounds. If it does, the whole ork mob is neutered and will likely be sweept this combat.
3) The enemy had a character that can't fight well. He just tosses that character at your nob with 30 points of mandatory wargear and counts as just one casualty. Under 6th edition's rules not even the emperor himself could fight himself out of a blobbed up guard squad because can only kill one of the five+ characters per combat.
4) Rejoice, your opponent also has an unwieldy weapon! You now get to kill each other. And that sad part is that this is one of the better outcomes.

Orks weren't the only ones suffering from this. Every army which had powerful squad leaders (CSM, for example) would have their characters either sniped by high I characters or were fed regular dudes with +1ld one at a time to completely neuter their combat efficiency.

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).

I don't know a whole lot about 30k, so I'm just going to take your word for it. But I must say outside of daemons it doesn't seem to that any of these armies are vastly different from those already working well in 6th/7th, meaning good armor and/or long range shooting. Do any of these have to rely on close combat?

 AnomanderRake wrote:


-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

All ork characters were t-shirt save T4 dudes with low I. Nobz always died in challenges against any kind of squad sargeants in the game, even cheap ones. Units of boyz without the nob were totally useless, and I mean really totally useless. So best way to deal with challenges for orks were:

1) MSU trukk boyz: deliver them away from characters and bring many so even if one or two got stuck (and killed) in combat duelling with high I characters a couple of pks with their ablative wounds could reach a juicy target anyway.

2) Slap a 15ppm bare bones useless mek into boyz squads so he can refuse the challange while the nob get to strike normally.

3) Keep the warboss away from any character.

In practise bring tons of characters in order to avoid challenges, at least for most of them. Challenges were probably the thing about core rules that I hated the most, so dumb. Probably the thing that I most often asked to remove by using house rules back then, other than formations. And I actually liked 7th edition overall.

Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.

 Jidmah wrote:
Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.

Yeah, I have close to zero experience with 6th and I usually mess it with 7th. Now that I think about it, in 6th orks still had to use the codex from late 4th edition so you're definitely right, there was no mini mek in that codex.

So challenges were even worse than in 7th, nice .

One of the biggest problems for balance un 40k is the fact most factions have a single statline for most of their units because if course they are the same RACE.
That naked stuff like initiative useless because It IS not a back and fort of using my fast units agaisnt your slow units but a army wide quality check.
"Well , looks like you are just a faster army and theres nothing I can do agaisnt that" makes for a bad experience and the games were this can work IS games were everithing is the same baseline like históricals with humans, 30k with marines, etc

 Jidmah wrote:

they have armored units ('Ard Boyz shouldn't be an unfluffy thing to include)

'ard boyz were never common (one per army upgrade at the time) and should never be as durable as power armor. Due to how AP worked a 4+ armor upgrade was quite useless, IIRC someone mathhammered it to be worth roughly 1.5 points for boyz.

It doubles your durability against small arms. What it's actually worth depends on what you assume about the prevalence of high-ROF AP4-. And GW handing out good AP too generously is, again, a Codex problem, not a core rules problem. All-or-nothing AP works fine so long as you're not making it too easy to spam low AP.

I don't think the core rules by themselves preclude Orks being useful.

The core rules gave a massive advantage to well armored shooting armies with good initiative values and melee weapons, good psykers and flying monsters on top of all the advantages they already had during ealier editions.
At the same time they severely punished melee armies with horde units, low AP weapons and low initiatives. Orks just happened to tick all the "you suck" boxes while failing to get any of the "you rock" options, but armies like nids, non-tzeench daemons or drukhari were in very similar situations.

Flying monsters were only playable if they had effective shooting; Daemon flying circus was incredibly random, because it relied on you getting the right rolls for witchfire powers that were effective against your opponent's list, Tyranid flying circus only worked because the brainleech Devourer was too efficient a gun. "Well-armoured shooting" doesn't describe many of the power lists to me; Eldar were horribly underarmoured, they were overpowered because their offense was ludicrous, their mobility let them guarantee alpha strikes, and the Wave Serpent ticked a few boxes that made them very durable against most peoples' anti-tank shooting. Their high-I units were also pretty terrible in melee. Vanilla Space Marines became a power list because they got a 550pt handicap built into the rules, not because their statline was any good.

-Challenges: Tell an Eldar player that sometime, wait for them to stop laughing. Challenges were, quite the reverse, usually designed so that the lower-I combatant would beat face; if the higher-I combatant could kill their opponent easily in one round that would be too much of a shutout, so GW made sure that lower-I combatants usually had the stats to tank the higher-I attacks, and then ID their opponent right back. I will agree that the Orks were badly let down by not having access to Invulnerable saves on their HQs, but aside from Warboss v. SM character I don't think "higher I wins" held true in any other situation.

Yeah, my warboss would totally snap an autarch in half, but I'm not talking about HQs and named characters. I'm talking about squad leaders. These should never have had the ability to issue and accept challenges to beging with, and this one of the biggest flaws of 6th which all by itself was sufficient to make it completely unplayable.
Nobz had two wounds and 4+ armor(5pts) which was essentially ignored by everyone and the power weapon change gave many unit champions better wound rolls against them. The thing with orks at the time is that PK nobs were the only way of handling vehicles, monsters, characters or even power armor. You essentially had to have a PK on every nob you could possibly stick one on, because otherwise you found yourself unable to handle things like wave serpents or dreadnoughts.
So when you charged any unit, you had four options:
1) The enemy unit did not have any characters. Congratulations for playing against necrons, but they still get to fight at the same time as you.
2) The enemy had a character with a melee weapon not worse than chainsword and pistol. You now start praying that it doesn't cause two wounds. If it does, the whole ork mob is neutered and will likely be sweept this combat.
3) The enemy had a character that can't fight well. He just tosses that character at your nob with 30 points of mandatory wargear and counts as just one casualty. Under 6th edition's rules not even the emperor himself could fight himself out of a blobbed up guard squad because can only kill one of the five+ characters per combat.
4) Rejoice, your opponent also has an unwieldy weapon! You now get to kill each other. And that sad part is that this is one of the better outcomes.

Orks weren't the only ones suffering from this. Every army which had powerful squad leaders (CSM, for example) would have their characters either sniped by high I characters or were fed regular dudes with +1ld one at a time to completely neuter their combat efficiency.

In 6e overkill wounds done in challenges didn't kill models but did count towards combat resolution. In 7e overkill wounds done in challenges did spill out into the rest of the unit. You've never been able to feed troops into a challenge to tank it; except for a very few 30k command squads you either put a character into the challenge or the other guy gets to pick one of your characters to turn off (can't attack, unit can't use their Ld, etc.). The big Guard blob with cheap characters to keep feeding you exists, yes, but that's there to challenge-tank deathstars/HQs, it's really not cost-effective if you're trying to challenge-tank Nobs with it.

As to the actual performance of other people against Nobz the chance of you actually getting sniped out before getting to swing was pretty low; the second wound means that an enemy with S4 ignoring your armour (ex. a Space Marine sergeant with a power sword) swinging with four attacks (assuming he gets the charge, this is worse if you charge him) at WS4/I4 is going to leave the Nob alive about 3/4 of the time. Remember people with equal WS hit you on 4+ in 6th/7th, and there are nothing like as many re-rolls. And as to extra damage in 7th you needed Instant Death to do that, which meant you needed S8 at Initiative (so...monsters?), a force weapon (HQs, GK sergeants, TS sergeants), or a Diresword (which has been unplayably bad almost as long as I've been playing). Complaining about full force weapons on sergeants is a legitimate complaint, but again, it's a Codex complaint more than a core rules complaint. Complaining about your Nobs losing challenges isn't a reasonable complaint. If they're losing challenges reliably they're either suicide mutual-killing to someone else with a powerfist, or fighting something way more expensive than they are.

And even then you could get around the whole problem without touching the core rules by giving the Orks the option for hidden melee weapons (melee upgrade weapons on non-character models).

And I think 30k has, on the contrary, demonstrated with the Ruinstorm, Militia, Solar Auxilia, Mechanicum, and Custodes that it is completely possible to write good Codexes for a very broad range of armies using the 7e core rules, just by breaking with 7e's outmoded assumptions about what things should cost. There are even completely playable sub-3+ footslogging melee hordes in 30k (neither have the exact stats of Orks; Militia Levies are T3/6+ for 2pts/model and Ruinstorm Lesser Daemons are T4/2W/4+/5++ for 12pts/model, but somewhere in between those two extremes there ought to be space for a Slugga Boy).

I don't know a whole lot about 30k, so I'm just going to take your word for it. But I must say outside of daemons it doesn't seem to that any of these armies are vastly different from those already working well in 6th/7th, meaning good armor and/or long range shooting. Do any of these have to rely on close combat?

Tainted Flesh/Cult Horde is a combination of faction traits that forces your militia to snap-shoot all weapons. I won't claim they're taking top tables at tournaments, but fifty-man mobs of 2pt Stubborn abhuman mutants with Rending on all their melee attacks are pretty terrifying, despite being a melee horde.

As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.

As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.

Do they not have invuln saves in 30k?

 Jidmah wrote:
Blacky, you are thinking of 7th, the mini mek didn't exist in 6th.

In 6th the opponent got to decide who has to sit out when you refused the challenge, so if you didn't want your warboss to be killed by Sir McNobody leading a GKSS, he had to sit and cower in fear why the big mek and nob in the same squad could just go about their business.

If you're playing 5th your Warboss then gets killed by Trooper McNobody instead of Justicar McNobody, because there was no Look Out, Sir! and the whole squad had force weapons. To me the problem with the Warboss getting killed by Justicar McNobody isn't the fact that challenges exist, it's that some idiot decided that all Nemesis weapons needed to be literal ID-everyone-at-any-T force weapons, which turned what used to be a perfectly functional and reasonably balanced melee army into a half-assed joke that's been pretty useless since 6e. The drop from WS5/2A to WS4/1A, the loss of The Shrouding, and the push to pump their firepower has turned the GK into a weird shooty glass cannon that wrecks face in a few narrow situations and just gets eaten in any other situation.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Rihgu wrote:

As to calling Daemons "good armor" they're 4+ armor in a play environment where everyone's pretty tailored to be able to deal with 3+ armor, I don't think that description applies.

Do they not have invuln saves in 30k?

Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?

Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?

It's not armor, but something that is tailored to deal with 3+ armor is going to be... not at all tailored to deal with 5++ invulnerable?
Like if you shoot a marine with an AP3 weapon, they're getting nothing. If you shoot a Daemon with an AP3 weapon, they're getting a 5+ save.
I'd say 5++ is a good defense but not good armor, since it's not armor.

Rihgu wrote:

Is a 5++ "good armor" now? Do Harlequins have good armor?

It's not armor, but something that is tailored to deal with 3+ armor is going to be... not at all tailored to deal with 5++ invulnerable?
Like if you shoot a marine with an AP3 weapon, they're getting nothing. If you shoot a Daemon with an AP3 weapon, they're getting a 5+ save.
I'd say 5++ is a good defense but not good armor, since it's not armor.

Given that the discussion is about pointing out that people with statlines not dissimilar to Orks can function perfectly well with the 7e core rules I'm going to roll with it and say "yes, if T4/4+/5++ Ruinstorm Daemons can work as a melee horde in 30k then T4/4+/5++ 'Ard Boyz under a KFF should be able to as well."

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked the all-or-nothing AP system...

I just always despised the random break points created by the AP system coupling with "Doubling Out"

A S7 AP4 gun like an autocannon would take 18 hits to kill a 5-wound MEQ character, wheras just ooone more point of strength and just oooone more point of AP - say a Krak missile - literally two hits guarantees death (one hit is an 83% chance of death).

It could be fine, if gw perfectly evenly placed armor values and toughness values throughout the game, but they never did - T4 and Sv3+ were wayyyy more common than T5 and Sv4+, which made the value of AP4 to AP3 humongous. And as now, gw basically just increased the numbers concurrently on every weapon - there were very few 'high strength high AP' and 'low strength low AP' weapons out there.

I find the current AP system to be more intuitive, easier to introduce people to (because it works in a similar way as the S vs T roll players are familiar with) and from a game perspective providing a fewer 'lost value stats'.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
One of the biggest problems for balance un 40k is the fact most factions have a single statline for most of their units because if course they are the same RACE.
That naked stuff like initiative useless because It IS not a back and fort of using my fast units agaisnt your slow units but a army wide quality check.
"Well , looks like you are just a faster army and theres nothing I can do agaisnt that" makes for a bad experience and the games were this can work IS games were everithing is the same baseline like históricals with humans, 30k with marines, etc

^

And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.

 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.

Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?

 aphyon wrote:
Yeah the loss of the orders were the one thing our IG players really miss, but otherwise the 5th ed guard codex is the preferred one to use in our games.

Because that codex is the power creep that started to break 5th.

I mean, rules for ignoring the FOC everywhere (platoon and vehicle squadron rules), spamming tanks in the edition in which tanks were at their strongest, and spamming ap3 and ap2 weapons everywhere, many which were high strength large blasts.

It was great to be a mech IG player in 5th, but it sucked to fight a mech player in 5th.

Only thing that was more fun was to be a mech GK player with Psycannon and Acolyte special weapon spam drive bys out of Chimeras

 Nerak wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.

Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?

I play Legio Cybernetica. They're the robots, and they're all monstrous creatures, so anti-vehicle stuff doesn't apply, they have invulns so high-S guns sometimes bounce off, and they're pretty tough, so things meant to kill T4 Marines and Terminators don't work well. They have some very nasty tricks if built appropriately. Also their core robots used to be cheaper and accrued a lot of salt before they got nerfed; I don't know if those complaints still persist.

There is an Imperial Militia list as a catch-all that you see sometimes, and Solar Auxilia who are super-Guard, but there are no Orks and non-Marine armies are a tiny minority in HH.

I agree with the_scotsman that 30K shows why the all-or-nothing save system has issues. The game actually does have some 'atypical' profiles- Lightning Guns, for example, are high strength and have Shred, so against Marines they wound on a re-rollable 2+... but it doesn't matter, because at one shot and AP5 it only kills a Marine once in a blue moon. Heavy bolters are mediocre because they can't get through Marine armor, but up the S and AP by 1 to become the Mauler bolt cannon (standard issue on Legio Cybernetica robots btw) and suddenly you eat Marines for breakfast.

I will say though that because the game uses the old cover system, the question is more whether they're getting a 3+ from their armor or a 4+ or 5+ invuln from cover, so it's not a huge deal, but you do notice a very clear distinction between weapons that allow saves and weapons that don't on the rare occasion that you catch a unit out in the open.

 Nerak wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
And it breaks down in 30k too. I just need to say "my army is Legio Cybernetica" for all the "30k is the best balanced evar no problems anywhere with this rules set everyone should play 30k" crowd to IMMEDIATELY switch to whine-mode.

Well I do so enjoy a nice glass of whine.

Joking aside as someone unfamiliar with the 30k ruleset could you explain this? Doesn’t 30k also include the imperial army, robots and orks?

99% of the time in practice a 30k list is a power armor and terminator armor heavy marine army that includes 1 primarch. There are, in theory, GEQ armies, monster heavy armies, knights, flyer heavy armies, but typically if someone is paying the money to get into 30k its because they are compelled by the popular 40k shonen battle anime novel series Horus Heresy and they've got a favorite big muscleboy they want to bring to the table.

Legio Cybernetica is a variant list of Mechanicum that allows you to run basically 100% monsters (which is why I like mechanicum - all the cool retrofuturistic robots, which are sadly still bizarrely absent from 40k)

Legio Cybernetica bots just happen to be armed primarily with AP3 Mauler Bolt Cannons as a main ranged weapon, just happen to have AP3 power blades as a main melee weapon, and the big Thanatar bots happen to have AP2 giant plasma pie-plates that require successful saves to be re-rolled. Also, one of the benefits of building Legio Cybernetica is +1 to initiative - which bumps Castellax from I3 to I4 and Vorax from I4 to I5. And since, in practice, almost every single 30k list happens to be composed overwhelmingly of I4, Sv3+ MEQ models, your Legio Cybernetica list gains a massive amount of power from that little +1 stat bump.

30k feels superficially much more balanced than 40k because of that fact I mentioned above: A huge percentage of its players are just getting into the game to larp as their favorite anime hero man, so the shape of almost every list is very, very similar compared to the variety present in larger 40k. If you've always got the general framework of one big super beefed-out HQ leading a MEQ or TEQ elite death star, a couple big troop units all armed with boltguns marching in formation, a couple special/heavy weapon squads, and a couple support tanks, then you're starting from a much, much more balanced place than a game where one person has a huge horde of infantry, the next guy has 5 superheavy walkers, the next guy has a mechanized transport force of light infantry, the next guy has a pure melee army with army-wide invulnerable saves, etc etc.