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9th has some of the best internally balanced and with some exceptions and posts nerf externally balanced codex I have seen.

But my enjoyement of the edition is hampered by how slowly things are being released (I know, by old GW standards is lighting fast speed but I was used to 8th rythm), by stupid DLC-supplementary stuff that is not nedded, and a mission system than I feel absolutely boring. And I knew I would not like it because it is basically ITC, and I hated ITC in 8th, I loved the last iteration of maelstrom of battle tought.

And I don't believe lethality is higher than in 8th because those crazy 8th armies could absolutely shred you in 1-2 turns no problem or at least I don't have that perception. But the flow of gameplay has changed to something I don't like that much. And I cannot point exactly why. The fact that units have 0 permanency on the board, probably. Stuff just charges other stuff and explodes and dies. That also happened in 8th but I don't know why it didn't felt as obvious back then.

 Blackie wrote:

 Fergie0044 wrote:

9th Edition - We're only starting to see this, but I think the codex supplements will kill this edition. Giving a bunch of extra rules, more choice of warlord traits/relics/stratagems for playing a certain sub faction with no downside? What a great way to bring back the "have/have not" mentality! At least the armies of renown have downsides to make it more balanced.

The downside is that supplements are klan/chapter/obsession locked. Ork supplement is for Blood Axes only, Drukhari supplement is for Cult of Strife only, etc...

True, but that's not always a downside! Maybe I'm just suffering PTSD from the Cult of Strife supplement which took the already superior Cult and gave them a ton of extra toys for free. And it's not like we're GW specifically target these at the more underpowered or underused sub factions, its just random and usually comes out a few weeks after the codex. But its still early days yet and we've only seen one truly bad supplement (the already mentions CoS), but I suspect as more come out the problem will only get worse.

In theory, all of these tools can be used for great results.

The formations of 7th could've easily been an instrument to lift up struggling units/models/concepts by bundling a power-boost to these specific units with counter-balancing limits/requirements/tax-units/spam-or-abuse-preventing limitations.

But that's not how they turned out.

 Da Boss wrote:

Spoiler:

I didn't play Rogue Trader and haven't played 8th or 9th so I won't comment much on those.

But I think in general every edition of every GW game fails in the same place, Army Books or Codices or whatever you want to call them. Badly designed army books that change the entire design paradigm of the game have been the real reason that editions became unfun for years, along with neglect of certain factions because GW devs don't care about them.

Leaving that aside though, here's where I think the games fell down.

2e fell down when you tried to play it as anything other than a "let's see what crazy stuff happens" simulator, and also when you played games bigger than a couple of squads, a vehicle, and a hero or two. All the complex sub tables and special rules for every kind of weapon became overwhelming, as well as the individual nature of close combat.

Spoiler:

That said it was a really fun game if you were in the mood for "finding out what happens" and it's my "played it as a teenager" game so I do have very fond memories of it. But it was so complex I couldn't really tell you which books were overpowered except for Space Wolves maybe?

3e was a pretty good edition I thought, but there was a gradual shift in design priorities from the start to the end. It was a real shock to see all the gonzo craziness of 2e condensed into this bare bones system, but suddenly you could play more "army" scale games easily and get a close combat done in less than 45 minutes. I'd say for me 3e fell apart when they added stuff like Daemonhunters as a stand alone book, and as the weight of all the "chapter approved" rules started to make the whole thing unwieldy.

Spoiler:

But again, I broadly look on the edition with fondness, especially for the early days of discovering it and getting used to the new style of play, and starting my beloved Ork army.

4e for me failed because GW were too slow with codex updates. Many armies (mine included) languished without updates for ages in this edition, and when they were updated, often they became very bland depending on the writer. It ended up being like two different design paradigms clashing in some of the book design. Additionally, in an attempt to deal with 3e Rhino Rush, they really swung the pendulum too far in the other direction and made vehicles really weak.

5e again I felt was an improvement, but was broken down by later codex releases that were seemingly designed to a totally different power level. Flyers also got introduced and I think this really messed with the game. Other common complaints include stuff like wound allocation abuse, which I agree was really ridiculous.

6e is where I started to feel that the edition was obviously "made broken". Like it's the first time where I cracked open a rulebook and I just couldn't see the point of the edition change at all, I couldn't see what it was fixing. It diluted the FOC balance of previous editions, and seemed to just bloat up the game even more. Stupid and poorly thought out mechanics like challenges also seemed weird and wonky to me. I think the fact that 6e failed is clear from how quickly it was replaced with 7e.

7e seems like the absolute nadir of 40K. I never played it, I only read the rulebook and I was so put off I just didn't touch it. Crazy powerful psychic phase that certain armies just couldn't participate in. Total breakdown of factions into a sort of "play what you want unless you were dumb enough to play non-eldar xenos" and really obvious "pay to win" formations giving free points (a mechanic I hate in every game it exists in, basically why I dropped WM and Hordes after Mk2). I don't really consider anything about 7e a success and I completely stopped even wanting to play 40K when it came out.

I think, as an outsider, 8e was really created with a good design intent, something like the paradigm shift from 2e to 3e and it seems to have achieved that intent. I know I can come across like a grumpy old Grognard on these threads sometimes but it is clear that 8e and 9e are better designed than 7e or 6e and that the designers had a fresh take on the game that is to a lot of people's taste. I'm actually pretty happy with a lot of the changes made and think they are sensible.

So if I was going to nail down why I haven't yet played those editions, the main reasons would be expense of having "all the rules" which is just a personal thing for me, I like to see the whole system which may be an artefact of playing older editions, and the fact that I just don't like "metacurrency" like Command Points in my wargames as a mechanic.

Spoiler:

It's not actually a major dealbreaker, it's just not managing to compete with alternatives for me because I'm isolated from any local community by language and lack of time to find a group, so I'm happy playing stuff that is a bit more accessible with a small group of new players instead.

I think 40K is on an upward arc despite that.

Killer post. So agree except for the "overwhelming" part.

So, I'm just going to go thru the editions that I played, and look at them from an "on the ground experience" level rather than analysing core rules "in theory."

5th edition: I do obviously have a huge nostalgic soft spot for this one, as it was the first edition I really learned (I dont count the 2 or so games of 4th I played with borrowed armies before 5th dropped, I started RIGHT when 5e launched with the AOBR orks)

pros: Possibly the best edition IMO for 'lets use the rules as a tool to see what happens.' Lots of great, old school wargame mechanic types of rules, and most of it fairly self-contained. For example, Psykers just had their powers right on their datasheet, and you didnt have a lot of interactions with stuff like 'special relics' or sub-factions or stuff like that.

Cons: 5e as an edition on the actual ground suffered from a few problems, but I'd say the biggest ones were The Rise Of The Space Marines But Better, Parking Lot Syndrome, and low faction variety compared to other editions.

To elaborate on the cons a bit:

-Throughout various points in the edition, Blood Angels, Grey Knights and Space Wolves (I think in that order) got released, and each of them just...blatantly got free bonuses for various units when compared to identically-costed regular Space Marine or Chaos Marine units in their books.

stuff like Space Wolves getting Devastators that just got to split fire for free and tacticals that got a free chainsword doubling their melee power, GK getting psychic super-dreadnoughts that could shoot through terrain at the same cost as normal dreads, and blood angels getting a host of close combat boosts for free. "Chapter Tactics" didnt exist yet, but to marine players at the time, it felt very very unfair.

-vehicles in 5e were very...I think the word Id use is "Flat." Every time a vehicle got hit with a weapon, it generally had a chance to either INSTANTLY EXPLODE, or basically almost nothing would happen. That led to a situation where really big vehicles like Land Raiders, Monoliths and the like felt artificially fragile, while stuff like Leman Russes, Wave Serpents, Tau tanks, Razorbacks, killa kanz etc felt artificially tough to take down.

That led to a situation where EVERY squad had to have a transport, EVERY vehicle you could stuff into your list you wanted to, and the actual infantry models that you painted up so carefully over so many hours..mostly just sat on the side of the board waiting for the one turn they got out, or the moment their vehicle got exploded and theyd get clustered into a little pile in the wreckage, waiting for an enemy pie plate to come down and give them "The Double Tap" to whack them off the board.

"but scotsman, just deep strike" i hear you say - well, man of straw, unfortunately 5e-7e suffered from the curse of "The Derp Strike" where melee combatants that tried to come down from the skies were either highly sporting, or really idiots. You just could not, full stop, ever, assault from deep strike, and you had to deploy in perfect, clustered pie plate formation, so you were essentially signing your own death warrant if you dared don a jump pack.

-low faction variety: no subfactions of any kind except for loyalist space marines existed in 5e. Daemons were CRAZY hard counterd by the omnipresent GK so might as well have not existed. Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar were their old ancient metal limited range, so again, might as well not exist, and GSC Harlequins Admech Knights Deathwatch Dark Angels and Necrons With More Than 6 Units were but a hazy half-remembered relic from 2e. Also, with the advent of the "Marines But With Free gak" every marine army and most CSM armies were just played as "Counts As" Space wolves or blood angels. Really, 5e PRACTICALLY had Space Wolves, Grey Knights, Eldar, Tau, Tyranids and Orks.

6th Edition: The Forgotten Edition

6th edition made the WILD AND fething CRAZY call to be about, of all things, planes. Why? Because gw wanted a thing to sell. Planes were super super strong and you could only target them with dedicated anti-air weapons, which at the beginning of the edition, Guard had one (the Hydra) while also coincidentally having one of the strongest planes (the Valkyrie or more accurately the FW Vendetta which every Valkyrie was run as). Them, Necrons, and then obviously of couse Space Marines had their planes, and eeeeveryone else got to sit around, proxying Aegis Defense Lines with anti aircraft guns, waiting for their codex to come out and finally, finally give them a god damn plane.

It sucked ass, it was miserable to play through with orks, luckily it was short as gak. Unluckily it was followed by

7th edition: The Screw You, Got Mine edition.

7th ed was characterized by being the first edition to pioneer what is now the GW formula of MASSIVE, CRAZY unfair matchups between (Some, at the time) new codexes and older codexes.

some factions, like Necrons, Eldar, Marines and Tau, got these absolutely insane bonuses in their new codexes in the form of formations and super-formations that, if you bought the right combinations of units from GW, gave you gak like "700pts of extra units" or "all your gak just gets a 4+ FNP the whole game", and notoriously Eldar got released with a few CRAZY imbalanced rules that just..never got fixed, the whole ass edition.

Of course, realizing they screwed up mid-edition, GW started releasing extremely weakened 'dexes mid-edition, which really helped everyone when they still had to face the bonkers gak theyd dropped for Eldar/Marines/Tau/Crons earlier on. As in, it didnt. At all. People just got new codexes with nothing new in them at all, like Orks, or they got new stuff that was just trash, like 'nids. GW also just kind of...forgot? to give super-formations to a bunch of later-7th dexes.

Finally, 8th: The Great Momentary Relief.

GW launched 8th with a MASSIVE amount of unheard-of lovebombing for its playerbase. Formations were gone, they started doing balance updates, they released the rules in their cheapest form ever, and as someone who was running a club at the time, they actually sent us, for free, this huge launch party package with a free starter box, free rules packets, commemorative prize coins, terrain, dice, tape measures...just for asking for it through their official channels.

Our playerbase EXPLODED in the index days. Competitive players were finding incredibly dumb ways to break the game - fielding armies of weird forgeworld characters to spam mortal wounds or fielding armies of culexus assassins who basically couldnt be killed, but on the home front, everyone was incredibly happy. New players flooded in with the promise of simpler, cheaper buy-in rules, we went from 12 active players to 6 times that many.

And then, GW started releasing codexes. And it was the same old gak as before.

You got army-wide subfaction bonuses, you got relics, you got warlord traits, you got stratagems, if you had a codex, and your opponent got...nothing, to make up for it. Literally nothing.

My answer to where each edition fails would be: Greed. GW gets greedy, every edition i've played, and just releases some gak that's stronger than all the other gak to get people to buy it, and it breaks the enjoyment of the game.

 Da Boss wrote:
I'd say for me 3e fell apart when they added stuff like Daemonhunters as a stand alone book, and as the weight of all the "chapter approved" rules started to make the whole thing unwieldy.

Despite their late release in the edition the daemonhunters codex were unremakable by the editions standards - no real shenanigans, they were mostly a '3.0' style book.
It was the '3.5' books and supplements where things started to take a bit of a dive. Not that the earlier edition was perfect or all 3.5 books were bad but GW started to emphasis bonuses for paint schemes, and it didn't take long for players to dig the cheese out of the mounting piles of wasted ink.

 Da Boss wrote:
5e again I felt was an improvement, but was broken down by later codex releases that were seemingly designed to a totally different power level. Flyers also got introduced and I think this really messed with the game.

Flyers were skimmers in 5th, they broke the game in 6th when suddenly half the armies in the game couldn't shoot at them any more but it was 5th that escalated the scale.

The edition always felt like a free for all for the designers with no oversight at all. While books like GK stood out as a highlight of the power creep the edition had already been hit with Cruddaces Guard codex which massively escalated the firepower and vehicle expectations of the edition, and by Phil Kellys' space wolves that hiked the bar for marine armies while kicking the nids to the curb.

It all meant that GW couldn't finish 'catching up' to some kind of even power level with their newest round of codex releases. If those first few books hadn't pushed the boat out so far 5e could have been very different.

Of couse GW, being GW, missed its second chance to pull everyone in line with 6th by instead doubling down on 'moar powah!' with flyers and superheavies and taudar and so on, and I can only speculate how bad things got after that as the edition successfully drove off just about everyone playing locally and the few games I did over 6th and 7th were unmitigated clownery in terms of balance.

Power and rules creep.

 Fergie0044 wrote:
8th Edition - Codex creep. The mark 2 Space Marine codex is the best example of how some armies had a entirely different tier of rules to draw upon compared others (think the mark 2 Chaos Marine codex as ac omparison)

The 8th edition bump in power was GW finding it's footing with design space and neglecting to implement a smoother transition, but they DID try to have something in that pipe for that - Psychic Awakening. What a lot of people seem to forget is we had COVID and never got a chance to play PA with and Chapter Approved 2019. The marine codexes are presently largely the same as they were then and are not obscene.

This dynamic is a lot like we had in 6th when flyers showed up and then it was an arms race to be able to deal with them, but this was far less severe.

9th Edition - We're only starting to see this, but I think the codex supplements will kill this edition. Giving a bunch of extra rules, more choice of warlord traits/relics/stratagems for playing a certain sub faction with no downside? What a great way to bring back the "have/have not" mentality! At least the armies of renown have downsides to make it more balanced.

Maybe, but not because of have / have not. The "good" supplements were ones that interacted with stuff people were already using ( wyches, skitarii, buggies ). The rest no one really remembers, because few people use them.

In the end it's a silly cash grab and bloat that will piss people off than a big unbalancer.

9th edition Core Rules are really good.
Sadly, 9th is suffering the same fate as 5th. Where the Core Rules are really solid, but the Codex's ruin everything.

There's a serious issue creeping in that is rarely discussed. One that spans all recent editions. The issue of having too many units and weapon options. Space Marines being the worst offender. As much as I hate to say it, GW needs to start moving a lot of things, A LOT of things into Legends to start cleaning up. Units and weapons in the game, unlike the lore, cannot be added to ad infimum.

ScooterinAB wrote:
I posted a similar thread on another forum, but I want more that 8 people to see it.

I'm wondering what parts of each edition really prevent it from being great. I'm not looking at nostalgia or edition warring, but rather a subjective reflect on the past so we can recognize what really didn't work. I haven't played each edition, but here is what I've seen. I really want to know what other think though, since my experiences is quite limited with later editions.

1st Edition
I think the biggest failing here is that it's not a game. Early Rogue Trader is a roleplaying game rather than a miniature game, and late Rogue Trader is just 2nd Edition.

2nd Edition
I love the hell out of 2nd edition, but I see 3 major failure points: close combat, the psychic phase, and the problem of Herohammer.

Don't get me wrong. I love 2nd edition close combat. The problem though is that it doesn't work when you have more than a few models fighting. The play scale of 40k has changed over the decades, and this kind of play would stop the game dead if you have multiple squads in play. Rolling individual model fights just doesn't work.

The psychic phase is another fond memory, but probably one that can stay in memory. It's this entirely separate game that only a very few armies can participate in, and the ramifications of psykers puking out a half dozen powers is punishing for people who don't play or don't have psykers.

Lastly is the problem of Herohammer. This is actually a funny one because I don't think 2nd edition is the worst of it. But yes, every character model rolling a dozen attacks at WS7 is obnoxious. Character models should be cool, but they shouldn't be walking gods.

3rd and 4th Edition
There are a bunch of failures here, some of which are just be being salty about the rules being simplified. But I think the biggest failure that comes out of these two editions is the rapid increase of everything needing special rules. Every single subfaction of every single army needed a plate full of special rules to make them feel special and unique like precious snowflakes. This is a problem that plagues 40k to this day. What this did was start to bloat the game while at the same time punishing certain armies that didn't have these same options. I walked away from my army with 4th edition came out and my Blood Angels mini-codex no longer lined up with the Space Marine codex. Meanwhile, everyone is cheesing out as many special rules as they can instead of playing what they want.

5th to 7th Edition
I didn't play much of any of these editions, but I see a lot of the same problems continuing from 3rd and 4th. It's funny that people say 5th edition is where everything got cleaned up because I see this era as having two major failures: the return of Herohammer and the drowning of special rules.

I've already talked about the rules thing, but it's taken to a "special" place by the time you get to 7th edition. Everything has special rules. Formations have special rules. It becomes a game of who has more special rules to use.

Partially with the bloat of special rules that came edition after edition and partly for other reasons, we say the return of Herohammer. I'm not sure how this played out in the rules, but the game stopped being about your army leader and more and more about playing special characters. And those special characters have a bunch of special rules. And they're better than everyone else.

More than the rule issue, for me, the return of Herohammer marks a shift in the game away from it being your game, your story, and your army. Now, it was about playing someone else's army. Formations play into this as well. You have to play the models and units someone else decided before hand. Gone are the custom Marine chapters and fun personal army lore, because those no longer mesh with having specific special characters rammed down your throat. Want a Chaos Lord following their own path to damnation due to the slow corruption of a retrieved deamon weapon? Screw you! Here's Abaddon. Want to have a new warboss lead a Waaagh? Ghazghkull shows up and pimpslaps him to the back of the line because it's the Ghazghkull show now. You completely hamstring yourself by not playing with special characters and formations, and that ends up killing a lot of the joy of the game as well.

8th Edition
I was overseas during this fiasco, but it seems to be summed up by the following phrase: "Babies First Warhammer." The rules seem to have be super oversimplified, and while some things I like from 2nd edition come back, it seems to be drowning in nonsense. It apparently stripped away most of the rules to the point where vehicles don't matter and changed the points scale to the point where there's no reason why you wouldn't just take the best loadouts. But then it seems like a lot of that doesn't matter anyways because of some of the simplifications.

Another big problem that comes to pass here is the scale change. This had been going on since 6th edition with flyers, but 8th edition really seems to be where the game got bigger. There seems to be an emphasis on playing physically larger games with physically larger (and vastly more expensive) models. More and more models from this point have a higher and higher price tag, and the game seems to have moved in a direction where you pretty much need those larger and more expensive models if you want to keep playing

9th Edition
If any edition represented Papa Nurgle, it would be 9th edition. Bloated, leaking, toxic, slow moving, awful to look at, and it probably smells bad too. Everything about this edition seems to be a mess. The release has understandably been just wrecked by COVID, but each release brings so much power creep and imbalance. Stratagems also seem to be just hot garbage, rendering what's happening on the table kind of meaningless. Where 7th edition was all about chasing formations, 9th edition seems to be all about chasing stratagems in an ever changing and increasingly unbalanced game that's rapidly drowning in rules that keep getting stapled onto the side of it. Mixed with all the meta problems right now, it seems like the game is in the dark ages right now, and almost all of it seems to come back to rules bloat.


Did I nail it? Did I miss anything? Remember, I'm trying to steer towards objective problems. I'm not looking for "this is the best edition because it's a classic because that's what I played as a teen." I'm looking for something constructive and fair. I've been playing with the idea of trying to frankenstein a version of 40k I and my friends are happy playing, but I also want to take it past that if I can because one of the louder players in my group seems to have a suspicious bias about what edition we play. I'm alternating between taking one edition and reconciling all of the rules with it, rebuilding 2nd edition and giving everyone the finger, and just burning the whole thing down and making a new game from the ground up. But having not played some of these editions means I don't understand where each failed.

Oh how I love these posts that explain what seems to be a problem or failing of an edition which they apparently have no experience playing. Makes for a great argument. 8th and 9th have problems, no doubt...but the hyperbole is irritating.

AT: I disagree about daemonhunters, it wasn't the power of the book but rather what it clearly implied about the game, ie that the daemonhunters were the protagonists and my Orks were just dupes for The True Threat which was chaos.

Flyers likewise it wasn't entirely about the rules but the aesthetics of having them on the board in such small engagements, it just made the game look silly to me.

So to answer the OP regarding the editions I played:

6th edition:
Ap system, WS system, Initiative system, unit types/ movement (everyone walks 6'' except - read the next ten pages -), random psychic powers, random warlord traits, challenges, hull points turned all the vehicle rules into useless bloat, flyer rules, psychic phase, too many USRs

7th edition:
Ap system, WS system, Initiative system, unit types/ movement (everyone walks 6'' except - read the next ten pages -), random psychic powers, random warlord traits, hull points turned all the vehicle rules into useless bloat, psychic phase, too many USRs, formations made for huge imbalances, rules bloat (dataslates, campaign books with formations, supplements etc.)

8th edition:
terrain rules, blandness of the index phase, no USRs, units with fly vs units without fly, extreme combos, no models no rules starts with strange copypasted datasheets like the Chaos lord in DG Codex without DG rules

9th edition:
pretty bland mission system, imparity of codizes due to Corona, no USRs, lethality too high, no models no rules dogma turned to 11 with abominations like the plague marines datasheet

Most editions: Emphasis on lone heroes conquering armies on their own, with a de-emphasis on basic Troops choices until most such choices can be viewed as a tax.

Most editions: Ridiculously complex vehicle rules so that using vehicles is like playing a separate game - just give them Wounds and Toughness for the Emperor's sake.

Rogue Trader edition: Never played it but I'm pretty sure if you played Grey Knights, you had about ten models in your army.

2nd edition: So good I actually bought it and played it for years. Hilariously unclear rules in places which made it a guessing game, but heavy weapons were scary and the Eldar Avatar made opponents weep in melee. The Dark Millennium expansion was simply staggering and opened up stupidly fun (and overpowered) vistas, and made vehicles MUCH better.

3rd-4th edition: Can't remember them.

5th edition: The army books were, ahem, a bit crap and choices were extremely limited.

6th edition: Can't rememeber it.

7th edition: This is the worst edition of anything I've ever seen, to the point where it put me off playing it.

Point one: Absolutely nightmarishly complex to learn. To this day, I'd say this is the worst, most fiddly, most bloated and stupendous rulebook that makes Tzeentch's grand scheme for the universe look "a bit under-detailed". Assigning wounds? Ugh. A special rules section that could fill all eight burning books of Khorne? Ugh. Invincible Deathstar combos? Ugh.

Point two: Detachments. What should have been a fun and intriguing way for newcomers to start building a meaningful force and experienced players to craft a fully fledged army was abused by power gamers, included crap choices to tax the player and were either under-competitive or wildly over-powered.

EDIT: The Horus Heresy: Forcing a rewrite of the 40K fluff to include Primarchs.[/]

8th ed: Command points. "My army is suddenly better right when it needs to be because I just spent invisible points. Also, you just failed at what you were trying to do because I spent invisible points. What?! You want me to build a fun army? But this is the game of getting invisible points!!

Also, ever-increasing bloat until all the leanness and speed of the game just got bogged down until we were playing 7th again.

Also, Primaris Marines. The static, progress-fearing Imperium suddenly has new warriors with new guns, new armour, new tanks and now, just for extra cheese, xenos wargear, because the Imperium likes using alien stuff.

9th edition: Degrading statlines, the most idiotically time-consuming idea that seems good in theory, but now means all your tanks, monsters and heroes have three profiles, so have fun tracking wounds and working stuff out in the middle of a desperate battle.

Also, the ridiculous datasheet bloat. Welcome back Epic from the 1990s, where you have to read the unit's entire profile to get all the rules.

 Galas wrote:
9th has some of the best internally balanced and with some exceptions and posts nerf externally balanced codex I have seen.

But my enjoyement of the edition is hampered by how slowly things are being released (I know, by old GW standards is lighting fast speed but I was used to 8th rythm), by stupid DLC-supplementary stuff that is not nedded, and a mission system than I feel absolutely boring. And I knew I would not like it because it is basically ITC, and I hated ITC in 8th, I loved the last iteration of maelstrom of battle tought.

And I don't believe lethality is higher than in 8th because those crazy 8th armies could absolutely shred you in 1-2 turns no problem or at least I don't have that perception. But the flow of gameplay has changed to something I don't like that much. And I cannot point exactly why. The fact that units have 0 permanency on the board, probably. Stuff just charges other stuff and explodes and dies. That also happened in 8th but I don't know why it didn't felt as obvious back then.

I'm hoping COVID gets GW to pivot away from physical books a little. They were already having shipping issues and it kicked GSC and Custodes in the face. I'm guessing we should have had those books in November. So much of the schedule has been screwy.

As for missions I envision that GW has been working on Maelstrom since the beta and we could see it in this next CA. Personally I like the current missions ( always room for improvement though ), but I was an ITC guy anyway.

I generally don't find that my stuff explodes much. In my recent games I've been losing about 250 or fewer points a turn. When I faced down Wazboms I lost 600+, because they absolutely shredded my Scarabs. People might find themselves losing too much by overextending themselves, which is what I did against Orks on top of not accounting for exposing weak units to Freebooters for their +1.

 Da Boss wrote:
AT: I disagree about daemonhunters, it wasn't the power of the book but rather what it clearly implied about the game, ie that the daemonhunters were the protagonists and my Orks were just dupes for The True Threat which was chaos.

ehh, that's a stretch. The daemonhunters narratives chart were just a list of reasons why this highly specialised side-faction would appear - fighting the one ork in a billion that looted an inquisition black ship, not that all the orks were daemons.

And half the list was stuff like 'leave no witnesses', or 'it's what the tarot cards said we should do'

 NoPoet wrote:
9th edition: Degrading statlines, the most idiotically time-consuming idea that seems good in theory, but now means all your tanks, monsters and heroes have three profiles, so have fun tracking wounds and working stuff out in the middle of a desperate battle.

Also, the ridiculous datasheet bloat. Welcome back Epic from the 1990s, where you have to read the unit's entire profile to get all the rules.

Everything is on the datasheet. The layout is way easier than it used to be. Yes there's lots of variety - some of it needless, but it is really reserved for marines...and frankly I like that the IF Heavy Intercessors I'm building have flexibility to choose a weapon that complements their chapter. That's a very marine thing to do.

I don't find degrading vehicles terribly difficult. And it isn't very much worse than tracking shaken, stunned, immobilized, and weapon destroyed. To me it's pretty straight forward, because the table is always half wounds and then half wounds again - rounding up. Unit generally follow a logic as to their purpose for what gets degraded and the degradation is either the "half" principle or a reduction of 1, 2, or 3 depending on how high the original stat is.

 NoPoet wrote:


Also, Primaris Marines. The static, progress-fearing Imperium suddenly has new warriors with new guns, new armour, new tanks and now, just for extra cheese, xenos wargear, because the Imperium likes using alien stuff.

I feel the need to clear up some misconceptions.

The Imperium is not a monolith. I feel people tend to forget this. What you're referring to is the 16th of the Cult Mechanicus's Universal Laws. That being:

To Break with Ritual is to Break with Faith.

Now, this in of itself is solely a religious doctrine, of a cult that is allowed to exist in the Imperium's syncretic milieu. While the Adeptus Mechanicus have a monopoly on technological knowledge, they are not omnipotent or omniscient. Case in point, the Deathwatch make use of xenotech all the time, including Xenophase Blades.



This is contravening the 9th of the Universal Laws:

The Alien Mechanism is a Perversion of the True Path.

Furthermore, especially in the case of the Space Marines, there is a tendency towards battlefield modification of vehicles and equipment. Case in point, the existence of the Land Raider Ares, Helios, and the origins of the Annihilator variant of the Predator.

And finally, think about who is introducing and supporting these Primaris Marines. Roboute Guilliman. The Avenging Son. He is the closest thing to a walking divinity the Imperium has.

If there was suddenly a few planets of non mechanicus guys making this it might make sense, but it’s the mechanicus that follow this cult of tradition that are making all this tacticool trash.

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
If there was suddenly a few planets of non mechanicus guys making this it might make sense, but it’s the mechanicus that follow this cult of tradition that are making all this tacticool trash.

It is a highly unconventional techpriest, with a great degree of clout, and his assistants doing it. Again, the Imperium is not a monolith.

I'll skip some of the earlier editions here.

For me, 4E fails in a few serious counts. First, in the fundamental core rules, through the combination of LoS, Independent Character, consolidation, Ld/Combat resolution and Sweeping advance mechanics, it really emphasized and rewarded an aggressive assault style gameplay that could evade being shot at and hide in combat the whole game winning combat by 1 every turn and Sweeping, in a way that several armies just couldn't take advantage of, while others were built almost entirely around such a style. Additionally the vehicle and transport rules were a mess. Skimmers, typically with a grip of wargear upgrades, worked really well, particularly as transports, but anything tracked or walking was rather absurdly easy to deal with, and non-skimmer transports were effectively non-functional, any penetrating hit auto-disembarked the passengers. LoS with area terrain was something that some loved, some hated, and most everyone played wrong anyway, but everyone also hates TLOS too

Second however, the codex issues. As the edition ground on, a lot of flavor and feel got dropped from the game, late 4E/early 5E was probably peak "Rulebook+Codex Only" gameplay where anything FW/Chapter Approved/Citadel Journal/etc was Verboten. Some of the codex books lost a lot of atmosphere and subfaction rules as codex books got updated. However, those newer books also often escalated power creep to new heights or introduced new gimmicks.

5E had issues in that vehicles became functional and very durable, but very static with regards to firepower as moving only allowed 1 weapon above S4 to be shot. Transports became auto-takes, and the game never gave infantry any actions to do (digging entrenchments, searching for intel or objectives, spotting for artillery, etc) that would have required them to leave the armored box. Fearless units that lost combat could be absurdly overpunished for it, particularly Orks. The new Kill Points rules over the old Victory Points that now made a Drop Pod worth as much as a Land Raider, because calculators were hard, was and remains one of the dumbest game resolution changes in 40k's history.

On the codex front, it was pretty much all Imperial all the time for the first stretch, and pretty much all the codex books were considerable rampups in power. This was also where we got Canis Wolfborn of the Space Wolves Wolf Guard, Lord of the Wolfkin, wielding his Wolfclaws atop his Thunderwold an adorned with his Wolf Tooth Necklace, Deep Striking Land Raiders and Blood Angels/Necron brohams, and Our Spiritual Liege.

6E and 7E just...so many issues. Hull Points.. "lets make vehicles all functionally W2/W3 Toughness models, but without any saves, and keep the damage table around too". One kill mechanic or the other, not hamfisted multilayered stacking kill mechanics please. Jink bringing back the Skimmer vs Non Skimmer gap back something fierce. Flyers in general. Everything related to Formations. D weapons. I can't say enough bad about these editions. The codex books were no better. Just aimless bloat and creep in pretty much every respect.

 Blackie wrote:


The downside is that supplements are klan/chapter/obsession locked. Ork supplement is for Blood Axes only, Drukhari supplement is for Cult of Strife only, etc...

While we know the persistent edition is pipe dream, this is the other thing that makes the system work.

This year's Campaign Cycle, Order of Our Martyred Lady, Blood Axes, Cult of Strike etc. got their supplement. Next year's Campaign Cycle? Maybe it's Ebon Chalice, Evil Sunz, and the Black Heart etc. Rinse, repeat.

Finally, once all subfactions are done within a given faction are done, maybe you release a new dex for that faction which keeps the best content from each of the supplements, fixes the stuff that can benefit from fixing and discards the rest. Then the process begins again. And eventually EVERY army's subfactions could reach the level of development that has been enjoyed by space marines since 2nd ed. I'd love it if OoOML and BR were each as developed as, say Blood Angels and Space Wolves.

It'll never happen, and honestly, I know I'm in the minority, and for the good of the version of the game that most Dakkanaughts want, it probably shouldn't happen. There are already people who want to put Space Marines back to Rogue Trader days before the subfaction Chapters got bespoke content. Even amongst those who are okay with keeping BA, SW, DA, etc, there are people who hate the fact that every subfaction from non-marine factions has 1) a subfaction rule 2) a subfaction WL 3) a subfaction Relic 4) a subfaction strat. If you can't handle that, there's no way you could handle the game we could get if GW stopped doing edition churn and just went as deep down the rabbit hole for every army as they did for marines.

So edition churn it is, I guess.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:
If there was suddenly a few planets of non mechanicus guys making this it might make sense, but it’s the mechanicus that follow this cult of tradition that are making all this tacticool trash.

It is a highly unconventional techpriest, with a great degree of clout, and his assistants doing it. Again, the Imperium is not a monolith.

I mean, he’s kind of doing it without consequence. I know for sure that most tech priests and forgeworlds would despise what’s happening. Where’s a sneaky ratling with a really big magnet to assassinate tech priests when you need one.

 NoPoet wrote:

9th edition: Degrading statlines, the most idiotically time-consuming idea that seems good in theory, but now means all your tanks, monsters and heroes have three profiles, so have fun tracking wounds and working stuff out in the middle of a desperate battle.

So you praise 2e, but can't handle keeping track of a models wounds & glancing at the chart here in 9th. OK.....

First off, thank you to everyone who's posted (except Tiberius, since they're just gak posting without actually reading). Awesome points all around.

 Da Boss wrote:
2e fell down when you tried to play it as anything other than a "let's see what crazy stuff happens" simulator...

I love this description.

Issues with release cycle

This is something I've long hated GW for. I absolutely understand that this is a business and you need new products to make money. I'm a roleplayer and know all too well what new editions and supplements end up looking like.

I like the idea of these release/sales cycles being tied more to events than rules. I've long wanted GW to just release all of the codexes up front and without horrible power creep. Having events releases, model waves, campaigns, and what not afterwards to keep the edition going all sound like great ideas.

The codex problem

I'm noticing a lot of people saying that editions break as soon as codexes start being released. Power creep aside, we obviously need rules for our armies. What's the solution then? Do we want a 2nd/3rd edition approach where the rules are in the rulebook but with no following codex releases? Do we want to see more barebones codexes instead of everything bathing in special rules? Is it just the creep issue? Can anyone put their finger on what solves the codex problem?

Here is how 8th could have been released without codex creep:

*8th edition comes out June 2017 with the indexes, except FW is not separated into its own things.
*GW releases beta rules for new models as they are released.
*December 1st 2017 CA17 is released containing balanced objective secured, WL traits, relics rules as well, missions and points that take all the new missions and rules into account.
*October 2017 Deathwatch collectors guide is released as the team had extra time. This contains fluff, pictures, dioramas, guides for Deathwatch and the complete rules for Kill Team, but no rules for regular matched play.
*December 1st 2018 CA18 is released adding Stratagems for every army and updating CA17 content in line with the new Stratagems. Necron datasheets are poorly written so Necrons get a new mini-index as well.
*January 2018 Imperial Guard collectors guide is released as the team had extra time. This contains missions, fluff, pictures, dioramas, guides for Imperial Guard and map campaigns usable by all players, but no rules for regular matched play. These sorts of releases continue whenever the team has time. Space Marines collectors guide with Crusade, Genestealer Cults with Tactical Deployment, etc, etc.
*December 1st 2019 CA19 is released adding Chapter Tactic for every army and updating CA18 content in line with the new Chapter Tactics. Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, etc get new mini-indexes that include their new units that were using beta rules from the Warhammer Community website previously.
*December 1st 2020 9th edition and CA20 is released adding Combat Doctrines for every army and updating CA19 content in line with the new Combat Doctrines. Space Marines and a few others get a new mini-index to update old or include new datasheets.
*December 1st 2021 CA21 is released updating CA20 content, it now contains Relics, Warlord Traits, Chapter Tactics, Combat Doctrines and Stratagems for every army as well as tournament missions.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 NoPoet wrote:


Also, Primaris Marines. The static, progress-fearing Imperium suddenly has new warriors with new guns, new armour, new tanks and now, just for extra cheese, xenos wargear, because the Imperium likes using alien stuff.

I feel the need to clear up some misconceptions.

Spoiler:

The Imperium is not a monolith. I feel people tend to forget this. What you're referring to is the 16th of the Cult Mechanicus's Universal Laws. That being:

To Break with Ritual is to Break with Faith.

Now, this in of itself is solely a religious doctrine, of a cult that is allowed to exist in the Imperium's syncretic milieu. While the Adeptus Mechanicus have a monopoly on technological knowledge, they are not omnipotent or omniscient. Case in point, the Deathwatch make use of xenotech all the time, including Xenophase Blades.



This is contravening the 9th of the Universal Laws:

The Alien Mechanism is a Perversion of the True Path.

Furthermore, especially in the case of the Space Marines, there is a tendency towards battlefield modification of vehicles and equipment. Case in point, the existence of the Land Raider Ares, Helios, and the origins of the Annihilator variant of the Predator.

And finally, think about who is introducing and supporting these Primaris Marines. Roboute Guilliman. The Avenging Son. He is the closest thing to a walking divinity the Imperium has.

Sure. Interesting argument. Not consistent with the way that the Imperium had been represented for a few decades prior. The humans were suffocating themselves with layers on layers of bureaucratic ritual nonsense. Leadership was literally on a perpetual toilet break, stuck on the golden 5#!££3R. Then, golden light from heaven sent Cawl sends a new kind of marine with, get this, flying tanks. Yeah… Right. It is not about laws and rules. It is about coherence. GW jumped the shark with numarines.

 jeff white wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 NoPoet wrote:


Also, Primaris Marines. The static, progress-fearing Imperium suddenly has new warriors with new guns, new armour, new tanks and now, just for extra cheese, xenos wargear, because the Imperium likes using alien stuff.

I feel the need to clear up some misconceptions.

Spoiler:

The Imperium is not a monolith. I feel people tend to forget this. What you're referring to is the 16th of the Cult Mechanicus's Universal Laws. That being:

To Break with Ritual is to Break with Faith.

Now, this in of itself is solely a religious doctrine, of a cult that is allowed to exist in the Imperium's syncretic milieu. While the Adeptus Mechanicus have a monopoly on technological knowledge, they are not omnipotent or omniscient. Case in point, the Deathwatch make use of xenotech all the time, including Xenophase Blades.



This is contravening the 9th of the Universal Laws:

The Alien Mechanism is a Perversion of the True Path.

Furthermore, especially in the case of the Space Marines, there is a tendency towards battlefield modification of vehicles and equipment. Case in point, the existence of the Land Raider Ares, Helios, and the origins of the Annihilator variant of the Predator.

And finally, think about who is introducing and supporting these Primaris Marines. Roboute Guilliman. The Avenging Son. He is the closest thing to a walking divinity the Imperium has.

Sure. Interesting argument. Not consistent with the way that the Imperium had been represented for a few decades prior. The humans were suffocating themselves with layers on layers of bureaucratic ritual nonsense. Leadership was literally on a perpetual toilet break, stuck on the golden 5#!££3R. Then, golden light from heaven sent Cawl sends a new kind of marine with, get this, flying tanks. Yeah… Right. It is not about laws and rules. It is about coherence. GW jumped the shark with numarines.

Re-read my post.


My argument pointed out that Space Marines were prone to just doffing strictures for battlefield expediency. Everything I mentioned was pre-8th lore.

The lore will be bent, retconned, ejected, to satisfy selling new plastic kits. Never forget this, saves a lot of argument time.

As many have said, Codex creep is usually why the game fails. Cynically it often feels that GW know an edition is over, and so just blow it up for a laugh with overpowered stuff. Which is maybe meant to be the "new standard" of the soon to be released edition - but it often leaves a bad taste in the mouth when things were better at the start.

With that said, pretty much every edition *works* with a group of happy-go-lucky players, running lists that would appear in White Dwarf (i.e. near to Highlander, run the good with the bad from your codex because that's what you own.) But at least in my group, usually a couple of players - either intentionally, or by accident of codex - starts to push up the power. And people don't like regularly losing, so the general local meta starts to become more serious and cut-throat. Basically its a toxic relationship with that aforementioned creep.

Sounds like the_Scotsman had a very similar experience to me. I started in 5th, and from what I recall...

5th edition's biggest issue was the over-emphasis on tanks. Everything had to be riding in a tank or it would be too slow and squishy to contribute. Most vehicles were immune to S4 or lower in shooting and ALL vehicles were immune to S3 or lower in melee. Also, only troops could score objectives, so you should probably buy a tank for each troop unit (no sharing rides) to keep them alive until the end of the game. All of these issues were especially annoying for my squishy S3 eldar. Many craftworld units simply couldn't touch vehicles in an extremely vehicle-centric edition, so I ended up having to leave huge chunks of my codex on the shelf or risk them being a liability. On more than one occassion, I would face (mostly guard and marine) lists that had more tanks than my army had anti-tank units, and that was after fielding 3 squads of fire dragons.

I know a lot of people remember 5th edition fondly, but it was possibly the edition I enjoyed the least. Many games as eldar were a matter of moving my tanks in circles without shooting them all game (to maximize their chances of staying alive) and then hoping the game ended on the turn I disembarked.

6th edition is the edition I played the least of. The main things I remember disliking were the sheer number of pregame random rolls. IIRC, this was the edition where daemon players had to randomly generate a ton of random wargear and psychic powers (which also reduced your ability to make your modeling match your rules), plus you had things likek rolling for random special rules tied to objectives, etc.

But maybe I'm conflating some of 6th edition with 7th. 6th didn't last very long, and I didn't play it very much. The flyer issue was a pain, but I kind of avoided it by just not playing games against lists with flyers for most of the edition.

7th started off... fine. Lots of random rolls that didn't add a lot that 8th would eventually take away, but the basic game was okay. The big problems with 7th was the imbalance between lists, and the biggest problems with list balance were formations and psychic powers.

So you'd two factions whose basic units may or may not be somewhat externally balanced against each other; standard amount of GW balance variation there. And then one of those factions would also have formations, some of which were just cute and fluff, and others of which would do something like let his entire army hit on a 2+ or generate an infinite number of spare drones or let him start the game with several hundred points worth of dudes. Or we'd both e playing roughly balanced lists with no formations, but one of my psykers ended up with the Invisibility psychic power meaning any half-decent unit in my list is now an unkillable deathstar.

And even without the psychic powers and the formations, external codex balance could be really bad. My craftworlders could take troops that fired four S6 shots from 36" away and then move after shooting to hide behind cover. Meanwhile, my drukhari felt like they actually got nerfed compared to their 5th edition codex.

8th edition was pretty okay overall. Terrain rules were a bit meh, but index 40k is fondly remembered. Then we had that uncomfortable period where the factions without stratagems generally got steamrolled by the factions that had stratagems. Then things sort of evened out. Then imperial knights were too good for like, a year.

Basically, 8th was defined by them introducing a lot of fun-in-theory mechanics that they just never quite managed to balance out.

9th edition started by addressing a lot of the problems we had in late 8th. Now they seem to be undoing that progress by power creeping many of the books. They're also making the books crazy complicated to sift through and pilot. A Sisters army potentially has stratagems, subfaction bonuses, hymns, miracle dice, rites of battle, limited use wargear like cherubs, and unit special rules to keep track of all at the same time. I love flavorful subsystems, but it's honeslty gotten to be a bit too much for me.

It feels like 9th edition books have a clunky number of sub-systems squeezed into them, yet all those subsystems actually make each faction feel less fluffy and unique because of how much overlap there is.

Also, the number of books you have to buy for your army in both 8th and 9th is higher than I'd like.