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It's not negativity. It's just being realistic.

Yeah, realistic about the prospects of success over the internet I guess. I just think it can work in a small group easily.

That's not a community edition though, that's just house rules.

And even for my playing group, I see almost zero chances of a different system having any success. The vast majority of players is enjoying their 9th edition crusade play where most codices are sufficiently balanced for our playstyle too much to even consider changing.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
It's not negativity. It's just being realistic.

Look, while every attempt to produce an 'alt' 40k ruleset which gains serious traction has failed before, this attempt is sure to succeed!

I think the big issue here is the community for 40k isn’t really great for this kind of thing.

But I think it can be done, all the best community projects start small.
Get some local play testers, or test online best you can.

The worst you end up with is a game your group can play, and maybe others with enjoy it enough to contribute a bit as well.

 blood reaper wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
It's not negativity. It's just being realistic.

Look, while every attempt to produce an 'alt' 40k ruleset which gains serious traction has failed before, this attempt is sure to succeed!

A true alternate 40k ruleset has never been tried before!

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, realistic about the prospects of success over the internet I guess. I just think it can work in a small group easily.

In reality that is what 40K was always meant to be -roll dice, move models, play in the 40K universe with friends for a good bit of fun.
Nobody from GW is going to come to your FLGS or home and force you to play a certain way.

It is basically how we play, we like core 5th ed rules but pull in rules from other editions that make better sense in the framework of 5th. everybody in our local group enjoys it and it lets them play the way they want because they can use whatever codex they feel happy with.

It gives us something like a dozen regular or semi-regular players in the group.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I've tried to do this as a collaborative thing in the past, and it doesn't work. Everyone who's willing to put in the hours to patch 40k themselves has a different idea about what worked/what doesn't about prior editions and is very set in their interpretation, whether or not it has anything to do with what anyone else liked.

I think Mezmorki's got the right idea by saying "here's a core rulebook I did myself, now go and do whatever version of whatever army book you liked". It avoids the issue of needing to argue extensively with lots of people about what goes in the core book by making it a solo job and it avoids the issue of needing to draw hard lines on what versions of books to use by leaving that up to players.

So the 9th Age people must have been aliens because they were able to work together?


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 H.B.M.C. wrote:
You'll never get anyone to agree to anything.

There are people here who want to consolidate the rules down into an optionless nightmare where the 8th Ed Indices would be seen as giving too much freedom. There are others who want to expand on everything - Chapter rules aren't enough, every Marine Company should have its own unique rules!

There are people who want the old AP system back, who want to enhance the current AP system, who want vehicles with armour values, who want to alter the core rule fundamentally and those who want to operate within existing bounds. I mean within four posts of the OP people are already discussing using alternate dice.

There are those that hate strats, love strats, want to change strats, want to remove them altogether. Replace 'strats' in the previous sentence with 'relics', 'warlord traits', and 'chapter tactics' as you see fit, 'cause they all exist.

There are people who refuse to acknowledge that there's anything wrong with the game, and will say "You can't change that!" at every turn, often with a bad "... because then this would happen!" excuse because either they only see singular things in a vacuum, or think we do.

There are those who want to remove Tau from the game completely and, as hard as it is to believe, insane people who disagree with them!

You'll never find a consensus.

The solution would be to find people with which you share the most similarities. I wouldn´t work with someone on this project who adamantly insists on keeping IKs & Stompas in 40K. Leave that to 8th & 9th.


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 vict0988 wrote:
I think it'd be really hard with 40k because the range of liked features is larger than in WHFB, I think there is fairly broad agreement that the current implementation of Stratagems is imperfect, what would actually be perfect ranges from complete removal, to datasheet integration to curbing, to cross-faction standardization. We cannot even agree on whether Deep Strike should have 50 names or if 1 name is enough. I think there was a pretty broad dislike of the WHFB horde mechanic and cavalry's inability to break a unit with a side charge in WHFB 8th edition.

I joined a previous project like this and it fell through when 8th started coming out, 10th might be as little as 18 months out, who knows how many of your collaborators will duck out when that happens? Statistically, a few people out of a group will generally do the most work, it might take just one or two people leaving for the project to end. 40k is not being cancelled, you don't have a whole community looking for where to go next, in fact there are already countless other 40k fan editions that people can go to. All of this is ignoring that, generally core rules are less problematic than codexes, just pick your favourite edition, errata it where absolutely 100% needed and make fandexes to suit your taste.

A mission/errata pack for an edition with pts errata where that suffices for existing codexes and full codex rewrites where the rules are badly written could be doable as a collaborative effort if you all agreed what the overall design plan was.

Stratagems would go the way of the dodo.

All 9th Age as a counterpoint proves is that there is no one “community” as I’ve yet to see anyone play a game of it. And also that was borne of GW killing a game with no immediate continuity, which isn’t the same for 40K. Not quite the equivalence you think. Yes, other games have had successful community-modded versions. YakTribe’s Necromunda NCE is the best edition for me, wouldn’t play any other. But again, that’s a game that was binned and picked back up by the community, not made from whole cloth.

A group can collab, in person or online. The larger the group the more unwieldy it will get and less likely to succeed. And it will never speak for or to the whole “community”. For there is not one singular community. And you know what they say about “designing by committee”.

If the OP wants to write rules for local pals as others have suggested that’s grand. But I’d wager between the various versions out there, the existing fansets and ongoing editions, there’s little appetite for something wholly other instead of a little patching on people’s preferred edition. And pitching it as a community edition won’t really fly as there’s probably just not the demand in the same way as when WHFB was killed off.

9th age was a bit different though as WFB was totally gone.But maybe the online approach can work, if you have cleae design goals.

 Da Boss wrote:
A lot of people are being negative and referencing other efforts. I'm enthusiastic about those other efforts and I've chosen One Page Rules as my variant of choice.

But I think it's wrong to say "don't make your own version, nobody will agree". You don't have to get the entire playerbase on board with your changes and that's impossible. But what IS possible is to get your local group or some part of your local group that thinks the same as you to take your changes on board, or to work together for a series of changes you want.

I think that's how all these projects start - with a group of friends working together, and then maybe you publish it and other people think "Oh, cool, I'll try that out" and others think "nah, not for me". I think trying to do it on the internet is gonna pull it in too many directions, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it at all, just that it's more suited to the people you're actually playing with.

Agreed.

Don't know about WFB 9th, but Blood Bowl LRB was great and a nice idea to take inspiration from. Thing is, it only had mass take-up 'cos GW didn't support the game. They do now and it's been replaced by official rules at all events and anecdotally at the vast majority of club leagues too.

Good luck with the project. Maybe start small, write it all yourself? You'll find no shortage of help and opinion but design by committee would be harder.

 Strg Alt wrote:

The solution would be to find people with which you share the most similarities. I wouldn´t work with someone on this project who adamantly insists on keeping IKs & Stompas in 40K. Leave that to 8th & 9th.

Then it's not a "Community" edition, its a "this is the way I want things and only people that agree with me will be allowed to contribute" edition.
Its as most others have said so far, the "Community" isn't of one mind and there will never be consensus on any one way to play 40k.
Good God, I'm agreeing with H.B.M.C, what has the world come to

 PaddyMick wrote:
Don't know about WFB 9th, but Blood Bowl LRB was great and a nice idea to take inspiration from. Thing is, it only had mass take-up 'cos GW didn't support the game. They do now and it's been replaced by official rules at all events and anecdotally at the vast majority of club leagues too.

Good luck with the project. Maybe start small, write it all yourself? You'll find no shortage of help and opinion but design by committee would be harder.

Indeed, this is a thing.

What a few folks are touching on is for better or worse, examples of games that have survived via fan codices and community efforts have been games they were either killed (wfb), dropped or weren't supported (bloodbowl, nevromunda).this is not the case with 40k. Its alive and well.

The second you try and build something beyond a local.effort (ie you and your pals, typical for the garage scene), especially like minded friends you will run into the problem of the 'official' game.

And for the most part, gamers are very conservative and dogmatic in this area. Unless ots from the mouth of the official publisher, it might as well not exist. Most will exclusively toe the line of what's official. Doesn't matter of what's official is crap, doesn't matter how much they'll complain or discuss problems or issues online, if its official, thats all that matters
and oftentimes that's the end of the debate.

Nothing wrong with home brewing and tweaking the game to make it work for you and yours. In fact I encourage it. Make it yours. But there won't ever be a 'community-hammer' brcause there is no one community.

If you are re-writing the army books the best advice I can give will be to try and find a way of storing data (stats, unit sizes, etc) that can be quickly and easily swapped between layouts.

I must have re-written my old simplehammer dexes four of five times changing layouts and nothing will suck the enthusiasm out of you faster than repeating the same mundane tasks...

Da Boss wrote:Yeah, realistic about the prospects of success over the internet I guess. I just think it can work in a small group easily.

being realistic because this is not the first time

we had a good Community edition during 5th, with 5th as base but a lot of patches, erratas and small changes to make it work. From a different scoring system up to scenarios, and rules changes
not all used it and depended on the country
but with 6th released it was gone and forgotten, no matter how bad 6th was, playing the community edition based on 5th was no option outside of small gaming groups (and I know 1 small local group which still plays it)

than again with 7th, because of the state of the game there was a community version with rules changes, balance patches, errata and everything you needed
gone and forgotten as soon as 8th hit the shelf

now 9th triggers the same event and the big problem is, no matter what you do and no matter how good your Community version is, as soon as 10th is released everyone will leave for the official rules because GW promised that this time it will be better

Strg Alt wrote:So the 9th Age people must have been aliens because they were able to work together?

that is why we have 9th Age, WarhammerCE, Fluffhammer or Warhammer Armies, all of them being community projects with different goals and basics

9th Age is just most known because they were able to take over for ETC and therefore the tournament crowed in Europe (as if you want to play at ETC you need your local tournaments to use those rules)


if you want to get this done, you need one of the big events to use the new rules instead of the official ones, than you get a large part of the community to agree on the basics, otherwise 1th Edition will be released before you could decide of D6, D8, D10 or D12 is the better alternative to the current system

this and the fact that GW official stopped support, was the main reason why 9th Age and Blood Bowl LRB worked were others failed. Necromunda also has their community version, but it is mostly ignored because there were never big Events behind it and now with the new version being out, no one cares any more

I've already written my own edition. I recommend starting with that ☺️

 Gert wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

The solution would be to find people with which you share the most similarities. I wouldn´t work with someone on this project who adamantly insists on keeping IKs & Stompas in 40K. Leave that to 8th & 9th.

Then it's not a "Community" edition, its a "this is the way I want things and only people that agree with me will be allowed to contribute" edition.
Its as most others have said so far, the "Community" isn't of one mind and there will never be consensus on any one way to play 40k.
Good God, I'm agreeing with H.B.M.C, what has the world come to

Bad troll attempt.


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Deadnight wrote:

 PaddyMick wrote:
Don't know about WFB 9th, but Blood Bowl LRB was great and a nice idea to take inspiration from. Thing is, it only had mass take-up 'cos GW didn't support the game. They do now and it's been replaced by official rules at all events and anecdotally at the vast majority of club leagues too.

Good luck with the project. Maybe start small, write it all yourself? You'll find no shortage of help and opinion but design by committee would be harder.

Indeed, this is a thing.

What a few folks are touching on is for better or worse, examples of games that have survived via fan codices and community efforts have been games they were either killed (wfb), dropped or weren't supported (bloodbowl, nevromunda).this is not the case with 40k. Its alive and well.

The second you try and build something beyond a local.effort (ie you and your pals, typical for the garage scene), especially like minded friends you will run into the problem of the 'official' game.

And for the most part, gamers are very conservative and dogmatic in this area. Unless ots from the mouth of the official publisher, it might as well not exist. Most will exclusively toe the line of what's official. Doesn't matter of what's official is crap, doesn't matter how much they'll complain or discuss problems or issues online, if its official, thats all that matters
and oftentimes that's the end of the debate.

Nothing wrong with home brewing and tweaking the game to make it work for you and yours. In fact I encourage it. Make it yours. But there won't ever be a 'community-hammer' brcause there is no one community.

Maybe the phrase community was a bit misleading. The intention was to find a couple of like-minded people on the interwebz. The whole community will not agree on anything at 100% and this was never my intention.

Could someone please post links to the variant unofficial rules? I would like to read them first before working on this.

 Strg Alt wrote:
Maybe the phrase community was a bit misleading. The intention was to find a couple of like-minded people on the interwebz. The whole community will not agree on anything at 100% and this was never my intention.

Could someone please post links to the variant unofficial rules? I would like to read them first before working on this.

In that case you should just start - maybe you find like-minded people, maybe you don't. However, if you already have something to build on, people have an easier time with getting on board with your vision.

 Strg Alt wrote:
Could someone please post links to the variant unofficial rules? I would like to read them first before working on this.

ProHammer:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/796101.page

I'd offer you a copy of simplehammer but it is caught in mid-revision limbo, as it ever has been (and based on your list not what you are after anyway).

Could someone please post links to the variant unofficial rules? I would like to read them first before working on this.

Got an entire thread on it here-


https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/789567.page

 Strg Alt wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
You need core rules before you can do faction work.

True.

My post also mentioned the basic rules. I stressed the point of doing these factions first to prevent codex bloat from burying such a project from the very beginning. Take a look at Epic Armageddon. It had only three factions and was good enough to play. So limiting oneself to only work on six factions would be prudent. Once those factions work well and are different enough from one another work could continue on others.

Just some thoughts what I would like to see in a community edition. I won´t go into detail as there are many ways to incorporate these ideas into the game and to not create a wall of text:

Emphasis on USR:
Keeps a gamer life simple and stress free. Totally Agree.

Alternate activation
Keeps both players engaged. Totally Agree.

Emphasis on small-sized engagements
Scale of the game shouldn´t be Epic with 40K minis. Totally Agree.

Several different actions possible for units
Take a look in Epic Armageddon. Spices up the game. I've never played Epic Armageddon but this sounds promising.

Abstract area cover
Essentially every model on a terrain base gains the advantage of it´s cover bonus. Scatter terrain works differently. Would have to be defined clearly how to target units that have some models in and out, but I like this if done well.

Wide range of modifiers
Ranged combat: Distance, Quality of cover, Speed of target, Size of target & Wargear. Cautiously agree. Distance and cover 100%. The others, you want to be careful not to add too many modifiers and especially things that people have to keep in their heads like how fast any given unit moved.
Close combat: Wargear and Quality of opponent. Totally Agree, I think the old WS vs WS system is a great baseline for this.

Facings
Definitely for vehicles. Still undecided for infantry. Totally Agree. I think Infantry could be done pretty simple, like all infantry have 180 degree facing so it's pretty easy to tell what they can shoot without busywork while vehicles are done in 90 degree arcs.

Templates
Yep, they are back. Ehhh. Okay, so I personally really like templates because they felt very thematic, however, they did certainly have their issues. See the mass infantry players that had to space every model out exactly 2" to make sure they would loose less models to blast. Tell them they can't do this and it puts them at a disadvantage, allow it and it's a huge pain in the ass. I dislike this from a game design perspective as it is something that is impossible to balance because each player will handle it differently.

Move stat
Yep, those are back too. No more idiotic SR to differentiate between fast and slow units. Keep random speed only for the likes of drunks (LOL!) and plague zombies. I feel like I'm missing something here, units all have a Movement stat.

Overwatch&Crossfire
Take a look in Epic Armageddon. Again, haven't played, but changing it up certainly sounds like it could be a good idea.

Pinning/Stagger mechanic
Should come in levels. Units coming under fire should behave worse than those who are not being shot at. Epic Armageddon uses the blast mechanic for that. Some weapon types should obviously be more useful for suppressing enemy units such as template weapons. I was actually just thinking about this and have a few ideas that are a little too long to type out here, but yeah, I like this.

Wound allocation
Preventing abuse. In what way? Or do you just meant TBD come up with something for this.

Close Combat Result Modifiers/Effects:
Wounds caused, Outnumbering, Fear & Terror, etc. Totally Agree.

Scenarios
Take a look in 4th edition. If that was the edition with the Battle Missions book, yes, totally agree. (I get my older editions mixed up a bit as I only played off and on through them.

Environmental effects/hazards:
Rain, Fog, Night, Dim-light, Blizzard, Snowfall, Sunny, etc. Yes! 100% Totally agree, it still baffles me that the only place we see this is the Open War Twist Cards in actual 40k.

As many people have pointed out, community editions do already exist, but as they have also pointed out, no one agrees on everything and I think working on a new version would be a lot of fun. I think a full redesign with keeping the ideas and concepts but implementing them differently would make it feel very much like it's own thing as oppose to other fan versions.

If you're willing, I'd be happy to help out with this, can't guarantee I'll be able to spend a lot of time on it, but I've certainly been thinking about it a lot since I read this and sketching out some broad strokes Core Rule ideas if you'd like to see them.

One note on the blast:

Spreading out every model to 2" wasn't mandatory, and in fact was a tactical choice with a list of pros and cons.

As an example from 4th, I can bring Soul Grinders with the Phlegm weapon (large blast). When my opponent is Orks (fairly regular), they have the option to spread out 2" to avoid the Phlegm.

However, doing so is a trap - in 4th, units do not pile in when they swing (meaning you get FARFARFAR fewer models in CC if your opponent charges you). Furthermore, my other Daemons can exploit the greater frontage to get multiple units in combat, adjust who makes it on the charge to get fewer swings, then pile in after the combat and wipe them on the next turn (their own turn) that frees up my units for the next turn whilst also having been un-shootable trapped in combat.

So spreading out is a disadvantage against my army, and certainly isn't a default thing just because I bring a few Large Blasts.

It's a tactical choice that affects the situation on the battlefield significantly, not an "automatic" thing they just have to suffer through (and at least in my case, doing so actively makes it easier for me to execute my plan against you).


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TL;DR:

Spreading out against templates was hardly a default choice and was a tactical option.

A good example of the types of choices available to players ON THE TABLETOP that they seriously had to think about. Sometimes it is best to spread out, sometimes not. Will it make you easier to charge and less good in combat? Will it take up too much space and make your army unable to maneuver? Will the increased footprint of the unit make it catch terrain and slow down?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
One note on the blast:

Spreading out every model to 2" wasn't mandatory, and in fact was a tactical choice with a list of pros and cons.

As an example from 4th, I can bring Soul Grinders with the Phlegm weapon (large blast). When my opponent is Orks (fairly regular), they have the option to spread out 2" to avoid the Phlegm.

However, doing so is a trap - in 4th, units do not pile in when they swing (meaning you get FARFARFAR fewer models in CC if your opponent charges you). Furthermore, my other Daemons can exploit the greater frontage to get multiple units in combat, adjust who makes it on the charge to get fewer swings, then pile in after the combat and wipe them on the next turn (their own turn) that frees up my units for the next turn whilst also having been un-shootable trapped in combat.

So spreading out is a disadvantage against my army, and certainly isn't a default thing just because I bring a few Large Blasts.

It's a tactical choice that affects the situation on the battlefield significantly, not an "automatic" thing they just have to suffer through (and at least in my case, doing so actively makes it easier for me to execute my plan against you).


Automatically Appended Next Post:
TL;DR:

Spreading out against templates was hardly a default choice and was a tactical option.

A good example of the types of choices available to players ON THE TABLETOP that they seriously had to think about. Sometimes it is best to spread out, sometimes not. Will it make you easier to charge and less good in combat? Will it take up too much space and make your army unable to maneuver? Will the increased footprint of the unit make it catch terrain and slow down?

Oh, that's a good point. I didn't play enough back then to really learn the meta. So long as there are pros and cons to doing it, that would work out really well. Choosing the spread option is still a huge pain, but certainly gives something to think about work with.

I love everything you proposed and would love to play that fan edition. I really wish literally anyone would propose an edition that gets taken up by a significant portion of the players.

My input:
If I was going to do a flanking mechanic or facing mechanic for infantry i would base it off the last thing they shot at to determine facing. And if they didn’t shoot anything then I would say they don’t have a “rear” facing. For simplicity sake. I suppose it could be annoying to keep track of that.

I agree with the OP about reintroduction of templates and facings and so on. Though I don’t understand why d12s are preferable to 2 d6s.

 jeff white wrote:
I agree with the OP about reintroduction of templates and facings and so on. Though I don’t understand why d12s are preferable to 2 d6s.

Makes it easier to roll a batch if you're rolling single d12s than multiple pairs of d6.

 Strg Alt wrote:
...So the 9th Age people must have been aliens because they were able to work together?...

9th Age was run by a group of tournament people with a good sense of what worked/what didn't in a competitive setting, and was based on WHFB, which hasn't changed anything like as much as 40k from edition to edition so there was a lot less to argue about. If you had an extensive community of people from all over the place who knew each other from travelling to 4e-7e tournaments and had the same set of ideas about what was wrong with the game and what to change, sure, you could make a community edition easily enough. If you don't and are instead trying to gather a team from people griping on Dakka who agree on what's wrong and have completely different ideas about what to change, you're going to get nowhere.


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 jeff white wrote:
I agree with the OP about reintroduction of templates and facings and so on. Though I don’t understand why d12s are preferable to 2 d6s.

Linear probability curve. There's the same chance of rolling a 1 as a 6 on a d12, but you're six times more likely to roll a 7 as a 2 on 2d6. In addition to the batch-rolling problem.

 jeff white wrote:
I agree with the OP about reintroduction of templates and facings and so on. Though I don’t understand why d12s are preferable to 2 d6s.

It enables you to adjust more parameters for balance purposes.

As I stated in the original example, with BS, you really only have 4 options to choose from between 2+ and 5+. Whereas with D12's you can go from 2+ to 10ish+ this makes it a lot easier to tweak units by smaller increments and make the game easier to balance. Another example, a good place to start testing hits and wound would be 7+ if even with WS vs WS and S vs T and +/- 1 point per difference. So S 4 on T4 would be 7+ (the statistical equivalent to a 4+ on a D6), T5 would be 8+ to wound, T6 would be 9+ to, and T7 would be 10+, whereas now it's all just 5+. Against T8, a S4 attack would be 11+ which is the statistical equivalent to a current 6+ roll. This makes every point in stats feeling equally relevant rather than certain values being considered better than others.

Also, the curve and rolling multiples as stated above.

 Strg Alt wrote:
...Just some thoughts what I would like to see in a community edition. I won´t go into detail as there are many ways to incorporate these ideas into the game and to not create a wall of text:

Emphasis on USR:
Keeps a gamer life simple and stress free.

Absolutely.

Alternate activation
Keeps both players engaged.

The basic AA problem is that if you have to alternate every phase and you have a large number of units on the table (see: 8e Kill Team) it takes a really long time to get through a turn. Every AA system I've played that I've liked has restricted units to doing about two things a turn (move/shoot, charge/fight), which would require you to back off on some of more modern 40k's core assumptions about every unit getting to do everything it wants to every turn. It's doable, but I don't think it's doable while remaining close enough to 40k for existing 40k players to go for. AA 40k would probably look a lot like Bolt Action/Gates of Antares or Star Wars Legion. You'll also want to think about reducing the number of discrete activations it's possible to put on the table; if one army's cheapest activation is 200pts (Custodes) and another army's cheapest activation is 30pts (Guard) the Guard player gets pretty much complete activation control. Most AA games either are quite careful about making sure armies are usually similar in size (Crisis Protocol's points are set up so that you're almost always playing 4, 5, or 6 models), or have serious problems with people spamming cheap units to get more activation chances (competitive Bolt Action, Star Wars Legion).

Emphasis on small-sized engagements
Scale of the game shouldn´t be Epic with 40K minis.

Yes and no. One of the biggest things 4e-7e did for me was that the game scaled up really well; you didn't need that many extra rules to make much bigger games work just fine. In X-Wing you're playing 200pts all the time every game, Warmachine sort of works at 50-75 but starts to break down in specific ways if you go up/down from there, modern 40k is built for 1k-2k and once you step outside of that you start to run into all kinds of skew problems and problems with the 1/army mechanics (stratagems, WTs, psychic powers), but if you were playing 4e it actually kind of worked at 500pts and still kind of worked at 10,000pts. It's not perfect, it's never been perfect, but I think doing Apocalypse with the same core system is a worthwhile thing to consider. Also keep in mind that considering "does this still work if someone's trying to play a 10,000pt Apocalypse game?" is going to force you to consider speed of play a lot more than if you assume nobody's ever playing a game that's bigger than 1,000pts.

Several different actions possible for units
Take a look in Epic Armageddon. Spices up the game.

This one ties back into "restrict the number of things a unit can do each turn" from alternating activations. EA does it this way to make you pick one thing off a list when you activate each unit (though those things can be "move-move-shoot at -1") to keep play speedy even with alternating activations.

Abstract area cover
Essentially every model on a terrain base gains the advantage of it´s cover bonus. Scatter terrain works differently.

...Yeah, basically. True LOS and true LOS cover is shorter to write rules for but is tailor-made to cause arguments.

Wide range of modifiers
Ranged combat: Distance, Quality of cover, Speed of target, Size of target & Wargear.
Close combat: Wargear and Quality of opponent.

I don't think this is a good idea. I've played around a lot with modifiers for skirmish games and even there making the checklist of things you need to remember when attacking longer slows the game down and doesn't really add much decision-making. The sweet spot I've found is making modifiers for cover, range, and either attacker speed or defender speed, not both, and if you do those as core rules then never doing special rules that add modifiers on top of those.

Facings
Definitely for vehicles. Still undecided for infantry.

Facings are an awkward one just because GW wrote their rules in 4th-7th assuming rectangular vehicles, and by defining facings as corner-to-corner they ended up with lots of units with unusably narrow facings. I've come around to the idea of Flames of War facings (draw a straight line across the front of your vehicle, if you're in front of the line you shoot the front armor, if you're behind it you shoot the side armor) as a faster/easier to measure approach to facings that still rewards you for maneuvering around the sides of vehicles, but is more uniformly defined for all vehicles.

Templates
Yep, they are back.

I'd encourage you to consider going back to the 4e approach (roll to hit, on hit the template stays, on a miss the template scatters the full 2d6"). The later blast scatter from 5e-7e (template always scatters 2d6-BS") made you roll scatter a lot more, which took a long time and caused a lot of arguments (especially when multiple barrage was concerned), and required extra mechanics to cover things that would affect the to-hit roll (which you don't want if you're doing to-hit mods), and made blast weapons way too accurate.

Move stat
Yep, those are back too. No more idiotic SR to differentiate between fast and slow units. Keep random speed only for the likes of drunks (LOL!) and plague zombies.

Eh. On one hand yay, more granularity, but on the other hand it doesn't change the game that much that your infantry move 6" and mine move 7". Though if you really want to cut down on the special rule bloat having a move rate/run rate could be an interesting thing to include; something like Cataphractii armor (slow and purposeful in 7e, so they couldn't run at all) might move 6" but only run an extra 2", while jetbikes with their flat-6 or flat-8 turbo-boosts have that written into their statline.

Overwatch&Crossfire
Take a look in Epic Armageddon.

From my experiences with overwatch stratagems in 8e/9e and of range-restricted overwatch in Star Wars: Legion I'm worried this is just going to slow the game down. I haven't experienced it in EA but in 8e/9e and in Legion it was always just a deterrent to anyone moving into engagement range at all and it led to whole turns of stalemates as armies stared at each other across no-man's-land waiting for the other one to make the first move. If you're going to include it having some kind of counter-play other than "don't engage" (smoke templates to block line of sight, for instance) might be a necessary inclusion.

As to crossfire from EA I'm just worried that given the size of units and the size of tables in 40k relative to EA it's a geometric situation that won't really come up. EA's got much smaller units on the same size of table and much shorter ranges; in 40k you don't really see protruding salients that can get surrounded in that way.

Pinning/Stagger mechanic
Should come in levels. Units coming under fire should behave worse than those who are not being shot at. Epic Armageddon uses the blast mechanic for that. Some weapon types should obviously be more useful for suppressing enemy units such as template weapons.

The basic concern here is to make sure pinning affects everyone equally. GW was convinced that they were writing SM fanfic rather than a game from 5th on and made Space Marines more and more immune to pinning and morale, which basically made it a joke that didn't affect the game because so many things were Space Marines.

Wound allocation
Preventing abuse.

"Unit takes wounds. When the unit has wounds on it equal to its Wounds characteristic the defender removes one model of their choice." There. Done. (It precludes units with mixed wound counts, but that barely exists anymore.)

Scenarios
Take a look in 4th edition.

The major feature of the 4e missions that I think it's worth porting forward is that you get 50% of your victory points from the scenario and 50% from kill points. It's like the secondary objectives from current 40k but much simpler and doesn't give skew armies a huge edge by limiting the number of secondaries enemies can score against them.

Environmental effects/hazards:
Rain, Fog, Night, Dim-light, Blizzard, Snowfall, Sunny, etc.

Doing distinct effects for all of these is probably too detailed on the scale of 40k.