Ok, from the top...

I like how you can make very different armies within the same Codex. It's good that, for example, Ultramarines and White Scars genuinely feel like different armies despite coming from the same book.

I think Crusade is a wonderful addition to the game, even if my Tyranids don't have any Crusade rules yet. :( People tend to dump on Crusade for being "more rules" and not being "narrative" based. I see them as a progression system that enhances the narrative of your campaign, a bit like Necromunda's progression system.

I've been playing Necromunda since it first came out in the 90's – it remains my fav GW game to this day – so the inclusion of a similar style system for 40k, with long-term goals for your army and a build-in sense of escalation, that's all great. That said, when the current edition of 40k started you should have included a Crusade section in that year's Chapter Approved with some 'get you by' rules for all the armies, so that they'd have something during the long wait to get a Codex. More on CA later…

There are a number of problems with the game that stand out and actually hinder my enjoyment. I'll go over them as briefly as I can.

Coherency/Hordes – Making the threshold for hordes 6+ models is far too low. It encourages units to stay at 5 or below, as when you hit that number 6, suddenly the entire unit has to shift how you deploy it. This becomes really weird when 5 Jetbikes can spread out, but 6 have to clump together because of the size of their bases. I acknowledge that any number chosen to be the starting point for what constitutes a horde – be it 10 models, 12 models, 20 models and so on – will be arbitrary. That's unavoidable. But 6? At least make it one above the standard squad size for most standard units in the game (10 models).

Morale – The morale system just punishes players as it attempts to abstract something in a way that essentially makes players feel worse, and makes them 'lose more' than they already were. I lost a bunch of guys to shooting, and now I get to lose even more of them! Worse, it bypasses every single method of causing casualties that exists in the game. Morale ignores toughness, saving throws, wounds, and damage and just outright kills things in a way more dangerous than anything else in the entire game (including Mortal Wounds!). A loss of morale should be disruptive – your units cannot hold objectives, launch assaults, perform actions, benefit from auras, etc. – not just lose more people!

Cover & Line of Sight – I'm not sure why it was decided that allowing players to target wing tips, tips of claws, antenna, banner poles, pointing fingers and gun barrels was a good idea, but it's just awful. The fact that an entire squad can be wiped out because the tip of one model's toe is sticking out, or a big monster can be shot off the table because you can see the very tip of a claw on his wing is crazy. Worse, with the interaction with terrain, the same wing tip or gun barrel can be sticking out the top of a piece of terrain but cannot be shot, but if it's to the side it can be, because in some cases terrain is infinitely high.

Overall the cover rules are massively complicated and in a lot of cases counter-intuitive. It's very hard to not be in LOS, there are arbitrary limits that make it impossible to hide big things even behind huge pieces of cover because the rules dictate what can be seen based on unit type rather than the terrain itself. Things out of LOS shouldn't be eligible to take damage, so if there's one guy in the open and the rest of his squad is completely hidden, then too bad for that one guy.

Some might say this would encourage movement of other units to block LOS to all but key models, but really, is that a bad thing? Positioning and manoeuvre don't matter in 40k outside of holding objectives and charge distances, so much so that a vehicle can fire all its guns no matter where they are through the tip of its front track sticking out of cover, and entire squads can vanish because the enemy got LOS to a gun barrel. If you had to really get LOS to the things you wanted to kill, and players had to really thing about the placement of their miniatures, the game would be richer for it.

Vehicle/monster durability – In the transition from 7th edition through to the current editions vehicles went through a radical change that removed Armour Values and damage charts in favour of a standard toughness/wounds/save system. Now the degrading statlines were a good choice – bravo on that abstraction – but sadly vehicles and monsters lost so much of their durability in the process.

The first issue is now everything can wound everything. As you always wound on at least a 6, you can 'fish' for 6's with any gun in your army, so even Lasguns can fell a mighty Warlord titan. Is it likely? No, but the fact that it can happen at all is what makes the system fail. But to be more specific, AV12 in the old system took a hit from an S8 Krak Missile on a 4+, and an AV14 Land Raider took a hit from a Krak Missile on a 6+. Now the Krak Missile wounds the same T8 Land Raider on a 4+. Where did the durability of the Land Raider go?

You made a big song and dance at the start of the last edition how characteristics could go above 10 now, yet you've not done so. Titans are T9 at most. Why aren't more vehicles higher than T8? This applies to monsters as well, where Tyranid players suffer from having their units deleted very quickly, especially as damage goes up.

And why in the Emperor's name are Rhinos more durable than Carnifexes?!?!

That brings us to lethality in general. 40k is an immensely lethal game, where you can have multiple units just deleted before they've even done a thing. Ranges have gone up, Rapid Fire now works at full range, and you made table sizes smaller because your standard boxes don't fit 1x1 tiles. Shooting at a unit often means that unit is gone. Close combat is so decisive that whatever's getting attacked is often annihilated before it can do anything, and in turn the unit that killed it gets annihilated right back. Players spend entire turns packing up the models that they only put onto the table 20 minutes prior, and those units often haven't moved. Recent GT results have had multiple instances of one side being wiped off the board in the first turn! There's no way you haven't noticed this. 40k is too lethal now. Things need to die less.

On top of this (almost literally) are the layers and layers of rules. When the Adeptus Mechanicus Codex came out I joked that I wouldn't be able to use it until I'd first completed a two-week correspondence course. There's just so much going on in these books, and you even add to them further with DLC campaign books that come out right after the Codex has come out. Like I said at the start, I like that it's possible to make multiple different distinct armies from within the same Codex, but it is getting out of hand.

And speaking of getting out of hand, stratagems have just gone wild. Generally speaking there are three types of strats that cause all sorts of problems: The first are the 'gotcha' reactionary strats, Transhuman Physiology being the poster child (but that horrible Cadian one being the latest example. These are ones you spring on your opponent after they have made a choice, heavily negating that choice for very little expenditure on your side. It's also a weird way of 'forging a narrative', having a unit of Marines (or Cadians) suddenly get tougher because you expended an abstracted strategic resource.

The second are strats that change the rules for specific units of pieces of equipment (the KFF one being a recent example, or the Exocrine's strat that affects only it). Why these just special rules aren't build into the unit itself? Why do they need to be an additional layer of rules that you sometimes use with an entire different rule mechanics? It's not adding anything to the game except more things to remember.

The third is equipment strats, with smoke launchers being the most egregious example. Wargear and equipment should be things you pay points for, not things that exist in the ether via strats.

Stratagems are a wonderful idea with terrible execution. There are too many of them (Death Guard alone have nearly 40 of them that fit into 7 broad categories!) and so many of them are so specific that they should just be special rules for the unit in question, or just regular equipment/wargear.

You're also needlessly complicating things with unit weapon options. It started with the Death Guard Plague Marine and Terminator weapon options (one model can have X, one model can have Y, one model can have Y and Z, one model can have B, but only on Tuesdays) and spread to the AdMech, Dark Eldar Wyches and most recently Sword Brethren. How is this helping new players when they see a block of unintuitive weapon options that require a master's degree in code breaking to decipher? Why can't it just be "May take X options from the Special Weapons list per Y models in the unit", and let people go from there? This goes doubly for characters, the Primaris Captain being the worst offender among them (can take a power fist, but only if it also takes a plasma pistol, unless you're a Dark Angel in which case you can take a bolter as well). It's --maddening--! Stop it!

The method of placing fortifications means that no one takes them. I'm sure you have come to realise that now. Their placement is so restrictive that you often can't place them. Please do something about this.

There are too many rules that all do the same thing in slightly different ways. A codified set of universal special rules, 2-3 pages, appearing in the rulebook and in the back of every Codex would clear so much up, and mean you could update single rules without needing to account for every instance where something similar pops up as a 'bespoke' rule. This goes doubly for weapon types, where you repeat the rules for melta weapons or plasma weapons overcharging or chainswords giving extra attacks over and over again.

Codify, streamline, and allow for scaling. If you have a rule that says "This unit can only take a maximum of 4 wounds per phase", instead have a general rule (eg. Insane Durability (X)), where 'X' equals the max amount of wounds a unit can take in a phase. That way you don't have to repeat it every time, and the 'X' value allows you to apply the same rule to multiple units across multiple books without having to have differently worded rules that all achieve the same basic effect. Overcharge X – for each unmodified To Hit roll equal to the X, the firer suffers 1 Mortal Wound (for plasma weapons and the like). Unwieldy X – Each time a To Hit roll is made with this weapon, subtract X from the roll (for power fists and the like). And so on and sort forth. Make things easier for everyone to understand.

I think that you've made great leaps and bounds in the way armies are structured in the shift away from 'soup' lists and whatnot, but I still think that since the start of 8th and into 9th the Forge Organisation Chart may as well not exist. In 3rd-7th the FOC imposed actual restrictions on your army building. You literally couldn't take more than what the slots allowed and you had to create your armies within that framework. Now you just spend some extra Command Points and bingo, I've got 5 more Heavy Support slots. Even the so-called 'Rule of 3' doesn't do much, as so many units have their own datasheets (ie. The Marine Gladiator is 3 different data sheets), so the fact that you can only take 3 of each (so 9 in total) doesn't mean much.

Bring back Imperial Guard platoons! And put their Officers back into Command Squads. Officers were originally put into Command Squads because the writers realised that they were far too squishy to be wandering around by themselves and that it made more thematic sense to have them as part of a military structure. When 8th came along, and command squads were torn apart in all armies, the Guard suffered from having their Officers booted into the cold with no support. And the platoon structure was removed, something that was added to make it feel more like an army and so out 6 Troops slots felt more worthwhile.

Missions/Secondary Objectives – It's weird that despite being called 'secondary objectives', so much of 40k play is geared around scoring these things. Secondary missions, as it turns out, are of primary concern. A big contributing factor to this is that the standard mission objectives are SO BORING. They're all the basically the same – a scattering of 4-8 objectives, always at ground level, and being worth the same in every mission. What on Holy Terra happened to the mission variety in 40k, like all the stuff we got in Chapter Approved books during 8th? And on that subject…

I said I'd come back to Chapter Approved, so here we are. Chapter Approved, for as long as I can remember, was about not only errata and FAQs but also adding more interesting ways to play the game, new army lists, quickly ideas, putting in new scenarios and generally enhancing the game experience. Now Chapter Approved is a sterile wasteland of tournament rules (and mostly reprinted core rules). The fun has gone from CA. The creativity. The narrative. It’s just all tournaments all the time.

And we shouldn't have to pay for points updates. That's just insane! They should be in the free errata FAQs. If you're including the new points alongside the Chapter Approved books because you're afraid that without them the CA book won't sell, make the CA book more appealing to everyone.

I think 40k's wonderful. There have been tons of games over the years that have come and gone, and none have ever managed to capture my imagination like 40k (and related games like Necromunda, the Dark Heresy RPG line and similar things). About the only thing my group plays as much as those three is old school 90's Warhammer Quest! But it is sad to watch the game I love so much disappear further and further into this quagmire of endless layered rules, pointless stratagems, boring mission design, unintuitive Codex/unit options, bad cover/LOS rules, needlessly punishing morale rules, horde rules that encourage minimum sized units, absurd levels of lethality, and Rhinos that are more durable than Carnifexes.

You've been at this a very long time now. You know you can do better.

(Also, unrelated to the above, your survey asks if people have played recently – a lot of the world's been in lockdown, literally unable to play for months if not over a year – please remember that!)