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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Another thought on my distaste for 3rd. And I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a right prick. Because frankly, I am being a bit of a prick with this.

3rd not only brought me into contact with WAAC Weirdos, but was also the edition that seemed to think a rich background was for wimps, because it was all but excised from the Codexes.

That was jarring, and has tainted not only my view of the edition, but those to whom 3rd was their first brush with 40K. And that’s not really fair.

But as someone so invested and intrigued by the background, to find it excised and so suddenly exposed to buzzwords like “optimal”, “competitive” and “meta” was oddly upsetting. The hobby I’d adored seemed to be turned on its head. As if a tide of goons (in reality, probably just a dozen or so really talkative goons) had invaded, determined to make the game something it was never intended to be. Like someone taking a stock Ford Fiesta to the Indy 500, and complaining it didn’t perform as well as custom modified racing cars.

As I said, this is beyond a grossly unfair opinion, but it still colours my view to this day.

Fair enough. My only curiosity is your take on "rich background". The Index Astartes articles fleshed out the Legions more than ever before. We got the Craftworld Eldar, Tau, Necrons, Witch Hunters, Demon Hunters, Deathwatch, we had PDFs for the epicast titans, FW was kicking out cool stuff, Speed Freeks [lol autocorreced to Greeks], Armageddon, The Hive Fleet invasion (technically 4th but that's really a continuation of 3.5), white dwarf was adding new units (Mounted Demonettes, Rail Rifles, Kroot Armies, Armored Company) and so much more.
I felt the lore and background was more open for the players to make their own.
At Dakka we had a guy with a Chaos army that was a hockey team (including Zambonis on his transports), and don't get me started on the Vehicle Design Rules.

I will say that the tournament/competitive scene does seem to have really amped up around then. But I think that was mostly because the game was fairly balanced if you didn't have endless collections of models.
I felt the community was far more open and accepting in those days. However... It was mostly guys 30+ years old with a few kids under 12. I think I could count the number of teens my age on one hand. Oh man... And the one single time my girlfriend walked in was a nightmare (to be fair she new of the crowd and dressed to impress).

We had ladder campaigns and the store battle ladders. We had a very competitive scene but 99% of our games were not cut throat gaming. Mostly friendly pick up games that contributed to us all getting more than one game in a week. I practically lived in their lounge, getting in as many games as possible from around 1998 up until they closed and became Battlefield: Manchester (no windows, no parking, across from the park with the most homeless).

shortymcnostrill wrote:
Regarding nids you probably want the 4th ed codex, it's awesome in the customisability you get. I had fun with the third ed one too, though it was a bit more restricted. I still haven't forgiven cruddace for the 5th ed dex.

Even 4th Ed has some issues, it pretty much was the Nidzilla codex as nothing else had the same degree of customization and potential for efficiency.

But also the core ruleset wasn't really designed with monsters in mind (lack of a Damage stat nor Damage tables, refusal to use the entire design space and in general basically simply being big infantry models).

Uptonius wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Another thought on my distaste for 3rd. And I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a right prick. Because frankly, I am being a bit of a prick with this.

3rd not only brought me into contact with WAAC Weirdos, but was also the edition that seemed to think a rich background was for wimps, because it was all but excised from the Codexes.

That was jarring, and has tainted not only my view of the edition, but those to whom 3rd was their first brush with 40K. And that’s not really fair.

But as someone so invested and intrigued by the background, to find it excised and so suddenly exposed to buzzwords like “optimal”, “competitive” and “meta” was oddly upsetting. The hobby I’d adored seemed to be turned on its head. As if a tide of goons (in reality, probably just a dozen or so really talkative goons) had invaded, determined to make the game something it was never intended to be. Like someone taking a stock Ford Fiesta to the Indy 500, and complaining it didn’t perform as well as custom modified racing cars.

As I said, this is beyond a grossly unfair opinion, but it still colours my view to this day.

Fair enough. My only curiosity is your take on "rich background". The Index Astartes articles fleshed out the Legions more than ever before. We got the Craftworld Eldar, Tau, Necrons, Witch Hunters, Demon Hunters, Deathwatch, we had PDFs for the epicast titans, FW was kicking out cool stuff, Speed Freeks [lol autocorreced to Greeks], Armageddon, The Hive Fleet invasion (technically 4th but that's really a continuation of 3.5), white dwarf was adding new units (Mounted Demonettes, Rail Rifles, Kroot Armies, Armored Company) and so much more.
I felt the lore and background was more open for the players to make their own.
At Dakka we had a guy with a Chaos army that was a hockey team (including Zambonis on his transports), and don't get me started on the Vehicle Design Rules.

I will say that the tournament/competitive scene does seem to have really amped up around then. But I think that was mostly because the game was fairly balanced if you didn't have endless collections of models.
I felt the community was far more open and accepting in those days. However... It was mostly guys 30+ years old with a few kids under 12. I think I could count the number of teens my age on one hand. Oh man... And the one single time my girlfriend walked in was a nightmare (to be fair she new of the crowd and dressed to impress).

We had ladder campaigns and the store battle ladders. We had a very competitive scene but 99% of our games were not cut throat gaming. Mostly friendly pick up games that contributed to us all getting more than one game in a week. I practically lived in their lounge, getting in as many games as possible from around 1998 up until they closed and became Battlefield: Manchester (no windows, no parking, across from the park with the most homeless).

If you entered 40k with 3rd, you would not have any information on those factions. the 2nd ed codexes were on average 90 pages long, and each unit got its own write up, along with general faction history and great snippets of lore in outboxes.

I'm not sure if they ever mentioned the 3 moons of the eldar homeworld after the one outbox in the 2nd ed codex for example.

And, when they started writing proper books again, they were all basically just trimmed down versions of the original material, often losing the turn of phrase and evocative nature in the process.

And every book since then has basically just been a reprint of those 2nd ed codexes, and imo, never quite as good.

On 3rd and Tournaments? It coincided with The Interwebs really penetrating society. Chat rooms, ICQ, AOL, lol, ROFLcopters. All that really not as good as I remember it.

Which with the rise of message boards like Dakka and Portent, made it easier than ever for people to find tournaments and that. For relatively free. And so more competitors found out about more tournaments, which meant tournaments could grow, and people talked about them.

And probably like, a couple of dozen posters decided That Was Everything, which I disagreed with and hence the taint in my head.

But yeah. The Codexes being such anaemic affairs didn’t help.

2nd ed was peak codex. Packed to the top with background, short fiction, rules, art, pictures, minis, and yes rules.

As much as 3rd gets slammed for taking the axe to those, it did have a few good points. From a rules POV, they were no muss, no fuss, trim books. You didn’t need to spend time flipping around to find stuff (They were so thin because most of the non-rules was cut) As a game supplement they did what they needed to do. And did it affordably in an easy to pack volume. I own almost all the codexes from the era because they were so cheep. Something that would break the bank today.

The fluff was not lost either. If just mostly spun off into WD. There were tons of articles and spotlights delving into all sorts of things. Sure, it wasn’t a neat package all-in-one book that the 2nd ed ones were, but they could grow and more things could be added. In depth articles on chapters/legions/etc. When a new kit was released that unit got far more love lavished on it then a half-page entry it had in the old codex.

2nd and 3rd are the alpha and the omega of codex design. The hight of fluff and crunch respectively. Everything else tries to find a spot in the middle, but honestly falls short.

 Nevelon wrote:
2nd ed was peak codex. Packed to the top with background, short fiction, rules, art, pictures, minis, and yes rules.

As much as 3rd gets slammed for taking the axe to those, it did have a few good points. From a rules POV, they were no muss, no fuss, trim books. You didn’t need to spend time flipping around to find stuff (They were so thin because most of the non-rules was cut) As a game supplement they did what they needed to do. And did it affordably in an easy to pack volume. I own almost all the codexes from the era because they were so cheep. Something that would break the bank today.

The fluff was not lost either. If just mostly spun off into WD. There were tons of articles and spotlights delving into all sorts of things. Sure, it wasn’t a neat package all-in-one book that the 2nd ed ones were, but they could grow and more things could be added. In depth articles on chapters/legions/etc. When a new kit was released that unit got far more love lavished on it then a half-page entry it had in the old codex.

2nd and 3rd are the alpha and the omega of codex design. The hight of fluff and crunch respectively. Everything else tries to find a spot in the middle, but honestly falls short.

If you were a marine player sure, but the xenos armies got very little in WD and nothing that was like what they got in 2nd ed.

3rd ed was GW's acceleration at oversaturating marines in the game, 10x the WD background material anyone else got.

 Tyran wrote:
But also the core ruleset wasn't really designed with monsters in mind (lack of a Damage stat nor Damage tables, refusal to use the entire design space and in general basically simply being big infantry models).

It was hit and miss. Monsters weren't prone to being instantly blown away at close range like vehicles (especially in combat) but were frequently statted to be on the statistically wrong side of a missile launcher salvo as heavy weapons got ever cheaper over time.

4e nidzilla benefited significantly from being able to push their fexes up to 2+ saves but also from a marine heavy environment - I recall the old distraction carnifex looking somewhat less imposing against the old 'I have more lances than you have models' dark eldar lists :p

A.T. wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
But also the core ruleset wasn't really designed with monsters in mind (lack of a Damage stat nor Damage tables, refusal to use the entire design space and in general basically simply being big infantry models).

It was hit and miss. Monsters weren't prone to being instantly blown away at close range like vehicles (especially in combat) but were frequently statted to be on the statistically wrong side of a missile launcher salvo as heavy weapons got ever cheaper over time.

4e nidzilla benefited significantly from being able to push their fexes up to 2+ saves but also from a marine heavy environment - I recall the old distraction carnifex looking somewhat less imposing against the old 'I have more lances than you have models' dark eldar lists :p

Or IG veteran plasma spam while at it. Or GK force weapons. And of course DE could simply murder Tyranids with poison.

All of the above which in turn led to everyone else (but Tyranids) having monsters with 2+ armor saves, invulnerable saves and FNP+, which in turn lead to the grav nonsense (which in turn meant that the average 6th-7th ed Tactical squad could one shot a Carnifex).

Hence I'm not fond of OldHammer design when it cames to monsters.

 Tyran wrote:
Or IG veteran plasma spam while at it. Or GK force weapons. And of course DE could simply murder Tyranids with poison

Yes, neither the 4e nor 5e book were much defense against the top 5e codex factions, but then again not much was.

Against 3e daemonhunters with their singular force weapon per army or 3e guard with their non-troop veterans in their 85pt open topped chimera those monstrous creatures looked a whole lot better, especially when you could get two fexes for the cost of one minimum size mounted veteran squad...

Monsters in 3rd wouldn’t have been quite a bad if vehicles didn’t have such delicate stat lines.

I neither know nor care if it’s a particularly popular opinion, but moving vehicles to T and W was one of the best things GW ever did.

But in 3rd/4th? Dreadnoughts in particular were awful. Not only were their stats lowered, and weapons wussied. They had all the worst bits of Monsters (so, so slow), and Vehicles (incredibly fragile).

If a Carnifex got a Dreadnought in HTH? The Dreadnought would struggle, because just a single penetrating hit would be enough, whereas the Dread had to get every last wound off the Carnifex.

And if memory serves (it probably doesn’t) I wouldn’t bag VP’s for wounded Monsters?

I thought of a couple more magic moments from previous eds:

The introduction of Kill Team via the BRB in 5th I think?

This was pure magic, and an absolute breakthrough for GW. I would argue that all of the Kill Team specialist games, and even some of the other specialist games all came from that little mini-game, and it planted the seed for a lot of Crusade and escalation mechanics that came afterward.

Tim Huckleberry's GSC dex from the Citadel Journal- Damn I loved his Young Patriarch concept, and I miss it to this day. But the list as a whole was better than the 2e list from the Nid dex, and it would also be the only GSC dex for almost two decades. Tim, if you are out there, know that you are the favourite human brother of the Four Armed Emperor.

Also Citadel Journal- the Covert X Campaign. It was about the scout company of a marine chapter having a cryo accident and waking up on a corrupt Imperial Deathworld to find that they were the last of their chapter.

The corrupt governor used the Adeptus Arbites to exact his will, and the Covert X scouts had to find a way to reconnect with the Imperium, even if it meant toppling the Arbites to achieve the goal.

PenitentJake wrote:
I thought of a couple more magic moments from previous eds:

The introduction of Kill Team via the BRB in 5th I think?

This was pure magic, and an absolute breakthrough for GW. I would argue that all of the Kill Team specialist games, and even some of the other specialist games all came from that little mini-game, and it planted the seed for a lot of Crusade and escalation mechanics that came afterward...

Kill Team in the core book was 4e; it didn't have any progression/escalation built into it, but there was a set of campaign rules in that rulebook that do look remarkably like Crusade as well.

(What, two separate mini-expansions/variants in the core rulebook instead of being spun off into a $50 expansion book? Were GW mad?)

Yeah, Kill Team was a skirmish style asymmetrical game designed like a dirty dozen style action movie, only 1 person played the Kill Team (the 5-10 characterful models) and the other played the Brute Squad (multiple small units of goons and a central villain).

The Brute Squad was only semi controlled and moved around on patrol until alerted.

Its the main system I used to make my Deathwatch space marine Necromunda variant for gaming conventions!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Monsters in 3rd wouldn’t have been quite a bad if vehicles didn’t have such delicate stat lines.

I neither know nor care if it’s a particularly popular opinion, but moving vehicles to T and W was one of the best things GW ever did.

But in 3rd/4th? Dreadnoughts in particular were awful. Not only were their stats lowered, and weapons wussied. They had all the worst bits of Monsters (so, so slow), and Vehicles (incredibly fragile).

If a Carnifex got a Dreadnought in HTH? The Dreadnought would struggle, because just a single penetrating hit would be enough, whereas the Dread had to get every last wound off the Carnifex.

And if memory serves (it probably doesn’t) I wouldn’t bag VP’s for wounded Monsters?

yeah tbh any time anyone says stuff like "Muh small arms shouldnt wound vehicles, vehicles used to be tougher, vehicles used to be this or that" I know that they either didnt actually play old editions, are misremembering old editions (because often old editions had fewer player turns that just took longer to resolve) or just played ultra ultra ultra casual old edition games where each side had like 2 heavy weapons total.

my every memory of vehicles in pre-8th eds was of delicate little fabrige eggs that shattered into powder at the slightest touch of anything approaching a heavy weapon. And I mainly played 5th! The peak of vehicle strength!

They were never tough. They were only ever ridiculously cheap (like 30-35pts for a basic transport in a lot of eds)

And for a while I thought 2nd was what people were thinking about "when tanks felt like tanks" and now having played 10 or so games of 2nd...noooo. noooooooooooooooooooooo. All those beautiful fun vehicle damage tables, and in all my games I've seen a fun interesting result on one that wasn't "Vehicle Dies" like...2 times.

 the_scotsman wrote:


my every memory of vehicles in pre-8th eds was of delicate little fabrige eggs that shattered into powder at the slightest touch of anything approaching a heavy weapon. And I mainly played 5th! The peak of vehicle strength!

They were never tough. They were only ever ridiculously cheap (like 30-35pts for a basic transport in a lot of eds)

They were tough in 5th. That's why we got hull points in 6th. In 5th a vehicle could take an infinite number of glancing hits that resulted in crew stunned, crew shaken results. It's why melta was king, getting penetrating hits with +1 on the damage table to get wrecked or explodes results on a 4+. We didn't have parking lots just because Razorbacks were cheap, it was also because they were resilient. In 6th autocannons and the like came back because now you could pop a transport with just 3 glances regardless of the actual damage results.

But there were other elements of the vehicle rules back then. Weapon arcs and vehicle facings made it so there were tactical options for flanking vehicles to get side and rear gaks for better damage potential. I think that's at least part of what people are thinking about when lamenting about vehicles just being monsters now.

Uptonius wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Another thought on my distaste for 3rd. And I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a right prick. Because frankly, I am being a bit of a prick with this.

3rd not only brought me into contact with WAAC Weirdos, but was also the edition that seemed to think a rich background was for wimps, because it was all but excised from the Codexes.

That was jarring, and has tainted not only my view of the edition, but those to whom 3rd was their first brush with 40K. And that’s not really fair.

But as someone so invested and intrigued by the background, to find it excised and so suddenly exposed to buzzwords like “optimal”, “competitive” and “meta” was oddly upsetting. The hobby I’d adored seemed to be turned on its head. As if a tide of goons (in reality, probably just a dozen or so really talkative goons) had invaded, determined to make the game something it was never intended to be. Like someone taking a stock Ford Fiesta to the Indy 500, and complaining it didn’t perform as well as custom modified racing cars.

As I said, this is beyond a grossly unfair opinion, but it still colours my view to this day.

Fair enough. My only curiosity is your take on "rich background". The Index Astartes articles fleshed out the Legions more than ever before. We got the Craftworld Eldar, Tau, Necrons, Witch Hunters, Demon Hunters, Deathwatch, we had PDFs for the epicast titans, FW was kicking out cool stuff, Speed Freeks [lol autocorreced to Greeks], Armageddon, The Hive Fleet invasion (technically 4th but that's really a continuation of 3.5), white dwarf was adding new units (Mounted Demonettes, Rail Rifles, Kroot Armies, Armored Company) and so much more.
I felt the lore and background was more open for the players to make their own.
At Dakka we had a guy with a Chaos army that was a hockey team (including Zambonis on his transports), and don't get me started on the Vehicle Design Rules.

I will say that the tournament/competitive scene does seem to have really amped up around then. But I think that was mostly because the game was fairly balanced if you didn't have endless collections of models.
I felt the community was far more open and accepting in those days. However... It was mostly guys 30+ years old with a few kids under 12. I think I could count the number of teens my age on one hand. Oh man... And the one single time my girlfriend walked in was a nightmare (to be fair she new of the crowd and dressed to impress).

We had ladder campaigns and the store battle ladders. We had a very competitive scene but 99% of our games were not cut throat gaming. Mostly friendly pick up games that contributed to us all getting more than one game in a week. I practically lived in their lounge, getting in as many games as possible from around 1998 up until they closed and became Battlefield: Manchester (no windows, no parking, across from the park with the most homeless).

ORKS are my go to example of how 3rd did armies dirty. They were gutted by the 3rd codex. 1st edition ORKS had near 500 pages of fluff and rules across three of the best books gw ever made (never mind the epic stuff), 2nd trimmed that but the background all stayed the same and relevant. 3rd edition came and it was all washed away and replaced with pamphlet of a codex with maybe a dozen pages of fluff total. It was a massacre. If that’s when you came to 40K then your knowledge of your faction was so limited. And like mad doc I am a whore for the fluff, I love the back ground. And 3rd killed that off for a long time, even all the add ins like eye of terror etc didn’t come close to just one factions back ground for more 3rd.

If you were a fan of space marines then yeah, 3rd ed was great for lore. They got multiple books published from WD articles about every minute difference between chapters that warranted 1000 soldiers getting their own army lists...

If you weren't marines though, you got bugger all

 Hellebore wrote:
If you were a fan of space marines then yeah, 3rd ed was great for lore. They got multiple books published from WD articles about every minute difference between chapters that warranted 1000 soldiers getting their own army lists...

If you weren't marines though, you got bugger all

That'd not quite fair, 3rd also saw the introduction of whole host of new armies. Necrons, Tau, Dark Eldar, Daemonhunters all became armies in that edition. Of those, the DE were underserved lore-wise with their early edition "pamphlet" codex, but the others were great on lore.

Those early 3rd ed books were tiny, but that 3.5 era was great.

Yeah it really just sounds like you're bitter about Marines getting tons of options in an edition where everyone got tons of options, and new races were introduced all over the place.

Guard and Chaos have never been as good as they were in 3rd, and they weren't your typical Marines (or Marines at all!).

Tbf, Hellebore was specifically talking about lore, since those early 3rd ed books were so slim (Especially compared to the 2nd ed ones). They did thicken up again in the years following though.

And that Necron book. Ahhh, soo good.

Introducing a new army does not equate to lots of lore for non marine armies.

Space wolves were my main army since 1994.

No one got lore books like marines did in that era, so the argument that it was great for lore is only true if you liked Marines.

No army got even close to their 2nd lore allotment until 4th and 5th when the books starting resembling 2nd ed codexes again. The 3.5 chaos, necrons and tau books were still only small in comparison to 2nd ed.

They literally stripped.it all out and then ignored everything that wasn't a marine

If the new armies came with lore, that seems like a lore drop.

IMO Marines got a bunch of lore because A: They were the popular faction. B: They had that early-ed slimbook. And C: GW actually had some restraint and didn't keep aggressively expanding their unit roster like they do now. They were a pretty simple army, with little-contemporary published lore, but crazy popular. It makes some sense.

But even then as a Marine player, I never actually bought any of the Index Astartes books as I was just running my own plainJane vanilla chapter.

IIrc, I think when those lore sections popped back into the 4th ed books many of them were copy-pasted from 2nd.
. . . .
But honestly, some of those bits in the early ed slimdex remain some of the best, anyways. There's something to be said about keeping it short but high quality, as opposed to the sprawling garbage of a Matt Ward codex.

 Insectum7 wrote:
There's something to be said about keeping it short but high quality, as opposed to the sprawling garbage of a Matt Ward codex.

The in-universe communiques, speculative genealogy, short fiction, dissection report, and Imperial propaganda in the 3rd Ed Tyranids codex painted a vivid picture that the subsequent codices jam-packed with dry recitations of in-universe history never lived up to.

I know that some people didn't like how little 'actual lore' was in those codices, but they conveyed the flavor of each faction in a way that later ones never recaptured.

 catbarf wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
There's something to be said about keeping it short but high quality, as opposed to the sprawling garbage of a Matt Ward codex.

The in-universe communiques, speculative genealogy, short fiction, dissection report, and Imperial propaganda in the 3rd Ed Tyranids codex painted a vivid picture that the subsequent codices jam-packed with dry recitations of in-universe history never lived up to.

I know that some people didn't like how little 'actual lore' was in those codices, but they conveyed the flavor of each faction in a way that later ones never recaptured.

Yeah it's not like an either/or situation though, just because gw decided it was didn't mean it had to be.

There is plenty of space for both in a book that is the main method of promotion and advertising for a whole product line.

Also? Back to championing 2nd Ed?

Aspect Warriors, whilst pricey and fragile, tended to hit like an absolute ton of bricks.

Howling Banshees in particular were utter, utter filth if they could make combat. Even a single Banshee getting the charge could mess up an entire squad.

They got even better when the Falcon arrived, and Eldar finally got a Transport.

Likewise Warp Spiders, where the name of the game was getting those templates to overlap and watch your foe turn into soup.

3rd Ed? Well, the Aspects got no tougher. And they didn’t hit as hard, like at all. And much, much worse? Their foes became more numerous in terms of upper squad limit.

And frankly, they, kinda like Terminators, have never really reclaimed their particular niche of being deadly.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Also? Back to championing 2nd Ed?

Aspect Warriors, whilst pricey and fragile, tended to hit like an absolute ton of bricks.

Howling Banshees in particular were utter, utter filth if they could make combat. Even a single Banshee getting the charge could mess up an entire squad.

They got even better when the Falcon arrived, and Eldar finally got a Transport.

Likewise Warp Spiders, where the name of the game was getting those templates to overlap and watch your foe turn into soup.

3rd Ed? Well, the Aspects got no tougher. And they didn’t hit as hard, like at all. And much, much worse? Their foes became more numerous in terms of upper squad limit.

And frankly, they, kinda like Terminators, have never really reclaimed their particular niche of being deadly.

Aspect warrior squads were things to be avoided as a regular opponent to eldar armies in 2nd. You tended to game plan to keep them away or kill them because if they in to do what they were designed to do they were game wreckers. It felt fluffy and right.

Same with genestealers, they were the best close combat unit in the game with stats to rival the best heroes, and small handful of those getting through to combat was a nightmare.

It became and game within the game. Later editions just felt like maths problems to be solved.

Insectum7 wrote:The thing to note about the 3rd ed Ork book is that while the codex itself was an early one and pretty stripped down, Orks did get expansion army lists in the form of Feral Orks and Speed Freaks later in the edition. They wound up with a lot more potential variety during later 3rd ed and into 4th. Also Boyz were more expensive, but also more dangerous. Choppas were nasty.

I'd argue that Orks had 9 distinct army lists by the end of 3rd edition with a lot of resulting flavour in list type:
Codex: Orks
The Speed freeks list
The feral Orks list
and the 6 Chapter Approved clan lists from WD 290 , which changed the core list as much as the 5 Craftworld lists in Codex: Craftworld Eldar.

You could build sneaky Ork armies, shooty armies, horde lists, elite melee... All kinds of stuff.

The 4th ed Marine codex is, IMO, the best they ever made from a customization and unit roster standpoint. The custom chapter rules were great, and it was pre Sternguard-combiweapon-spam wonkiness. You could also pepper Veteran abilities around, which was nice. The real reason to choose the 5th ed book was that SMs got Frag, Krak, and Bolt Pistols as default wargear again, and Combat Squads was reintroduced. My ideal would be so mash those books together.

Losing veteran abilities was a massive shame. It really made veterans feel like more than +1Ld and the option of Terminator Honours.

Insectum7 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

And that’s before we discuss the utter, utter nonsense of making the Shuriken Catapult 12” range, all but guaranteeing one probably, on balance, compared to any other small arm, semi-decent round of shooting, before your opponent kicked your teeth down your delicate throat.

I will defend the 12" Catapult because of it's context next to the other Rapid Fire weapons, especially in 3rd ed, because in 3rd ed a Bolter could move and fire once, and you could not Assault. The Catapult being able to be fired twice, and then Assault afterwards, created an incredible differentiation between how those troops could operate. That meaningful differentiation just degraded so heavily over time as Rapid Fire weapons became easier to shoot on the move, and Marines were given pistols. The 12" Catapult made some sense within the 3rd ed paradigm, but by 5th ed it should have been pushed to 18".

I'd argue that the real problem was that certain units, looking at you Blood Angels, would be assaulting from well beyond 12". When models are successfully charging you from beyond your basic weapons ranges that sucks.

The same is true of standard shotguns. By 5th edition, a shotgun was essentially strictly worse than a lasgun accept in the very niche circumstance of wanting to assault after shooting (rare for guardsmen) and didn't benefit from 1st rank fire! Second rank fire!. In 3rd edition, a shotgun could move and fire 2 shots at 12", whereas a lasgun could only fire 1 shot. It was more balanced in role.

Hellebore wrote:Introducing a new army does not equate to lots of lore for non marine armies.

Space wolves were my main army since 1994.

No one got lore books like marines did in that era, so the argument that it was great for lore is only true if you liked Marines.

No army got even close to their 2nd lore allotment until 4th and 5th when the books starting resembling 2nd ed codexes again. The 3.5 chaos, necrons and tau books were still only small in comparison to 2nd ed.

They literally stripped.it all out and then ignored everything that wasn't a marine

I'd argue Imperial Guard and maybe Chaos also got extensive lore offerings in that era, as much as Space Marines in the case of Guard. However, these were tilted towards Black Library and Forge World rather than White Dwarf (excepting the traitor legions in Index: Astartes).

The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer and Munitorum Manual were first published at this time, along with the 3rd War for Armageddon and 13th Black Crusade background books. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade background book being published in 2005 was just into 4th edition. Imperial Armour volume 1 greatly expanded lore on Imperial Guard vehicles.

There was also Xenology for some extra xenos spice.

^ And +1 to the mention of Ork clan lists in WD 290. I'll have to find my copy and sticky-note it. Thanks!

 Insectum7 wrote:
^ And +1 to the mention of Ork clan lists in WD 290. I'll have to find my copy and sticky-note it. Thanks!

For those with a Warhammer + subscription and without old copies of White Dwarf, WD290 is available in its entirety on the Warhammer Vault, including the full Chapter Approved rules.

 Haighus wrote:
I'd argue Imperial Guard and maybe Chaos also got extensive lore offerings in that era, as much as Space Marines in the case of Guard. However, these were tilted towards Black Library and Forge World rather than White Dwarf (excepting the traitor legions in Index: Astartes).

Guard were in all the 3e campaigns and seemed to fall off to (extensive) forgeworld support in 4th.

I suspect the more ork-heavy stuff in early 3rd was driven a bit by gorka-morka cross promotion, similar to the way the 40k inquisition lived and died with the 54mm range. And then a ton of chaos/renegade stuff from forgeworld, the eye of terror campaign, gaunts ghosts, etc.

Aside from the orks the xenos always seemed to be guest stars in the (mostly forgeworld) campaigns that I remember.

I really liked Codex: Witch Hunters. I don't know what edition it was (4th I think?) but it gave you a real sense of what the Inquisition & Sisters of Battle were about. It also accidentally made Sisters of Battle really good at the start of 5th Edition which was funny lol