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I've bought every edition of 40K.

2nd was glorious.
3rd edition was tournament ready.
4th I don't remember at this point.
5th vehicles
6th Flyers
7th let me spawn infinite chaos and Necrons
8th FORMATIONS
9th I bought it and never played it
10th I bought it and never played it
11th Oh look cool Ork Models

Wasn't formations a 7th edition thing?

Still fearful of the future (I know GW said "hey, these are legal", but how long till new editions don't fit old legend stats/rules that aren't being updated?)

But hopefully we will see something like Old World for legends sometime in the future.

I probably wouldn't be so fearful if I hadn't missed so many editions trying to catch up on rules and what new units are out, what they are, figuring out what new name goes with what old army, etc.

Not sure if it's old age or society or what but time seems to be just flying by and it seems like there's a new edition every year or 2 (I know it's less frequent than that)

Then again, it also feels like I've been in my new house fixing it up for 2-3 years.... it's been 5!

 catbarf wrote:
Personally my issue with a lot of Legends units isn't that they're bad for the points, it's that the rules seem really half-assed.

My Avenger, which has always had modeled pylons for outboard stores, can't take any missiles or bombs anymore.

My Cyclops demolition vehicle, a remote-controlled bomb intended to blow up entire sections of trenches, which needs to trundle into the enemy lines without getting shot... does an average of 2 mortal wounds if it manages to go off.

My Stone-Crusher Carnifex just straight up doesn't have rules anymore, Legends or otherwise. I can just run it as a normal Carnifex, but there's no good representation for the bio-flail.

There's a lot of stuff like this with the Legends rules and it's way more frustrating than if they were just weak for the points.

Uh. The Cyclops is not Legends, and the last time I used it, it was amazing.

The Cyclops I ran last year at a Megabattle Tank Shocked a Baneblade then disappeared into a puff of smoke dealing 1 mortal wound and killing the big tank.

 LunarSol wrote:
Well, first of all, I doubt most players collections are 40 years old at this point. Mine is over a decade and I'm relatively old these days by community standards.. Also, yes, it makes far more sense to stop supporting 40 year old purchases than 5 year old purchases.

And you would be right about that. It's fairly safe to assume that players who started in 7th edition or earlier are outnumbered by at least 10:1 by players who started later. The hobby has grown more than tenfold every since GW embraced the internet rather than being hostile to it.

edit: in an world of everyone lying about numbers, I should tell where I get my numbers from:
During 7th edition there was an estimate done here on dakka on how many people actively play 40k based on GW's annual sales of 40k product. The most optimistic numbers were around active 320.000 players, assuming that everyone who spends a certain amount on 40k also plays the game.
In 2022 goonhammer estimated a playerbase of 2.4 million players, with roughly 0.6% of those playing competitively, which matches GW's annual report from that year, estimating 2.2 million.
Financial experts estimated a growth of roughly 66%-100% over the next two years at that time, and as we all know from the news, GW exceeded that prediction by far.
So it's fairly safe to assume that there are now more than 3 million player actively participating in the game.
Most optimistic sources claim up to 5 million, but those are based off the number of tracked games through various apps, which I feel like is not a very reliable metric.

 LunarSol wrote:


..., but the key is these models do still have rules and GW has always maintained that they are legal. It's a system that GW has supported for years since its introduction and continues to expand support of with each major update. It's players who continue to insist otherwise. It's players who self censor themselves to the point of not playing things because maybe they will only have Legends rules in 5 years. GW isn't stopping you from playing with your stuff and not taking advantage of the support provided out of fear that it might not last is exactly why these kinds of things don't last.

This, this, and 10 times this.

Players are more papist than the pope.

 catbarf wrote:
Personally my issue with a lot of Legends units isn't that they're bad for the points, it's that the rules seem really half-assed.

This is really the rub. And they can be so half-arsed as to be dysfunctional. When GW updated the Tau codex for 9th they changed how markerlights worked, but they didn't update the Legends to reflect that. That meant any Tau Legends unit with markerlights basically ceased to function.
Yes technically they still had rules and technically they were legal for casual play (including casual matched play) but functionally they weren't.

Yes, players have an aversion to Legends, but that aversion stems from a very real place.

The Big Mek on warbike also doesn't have the Big Mek keyword so it's worthless in a dreadmob

 Jidmah wrote:
During 7th edition there was an estimate done here on dakka on how many people actively play 40k based on GW's annual sales of 40k product. The most optimistic numbers were around active 320.000 players, assuming that everyone who spends a certain amount on 40k also plays the game.
In 2022 goonhammer estimated a playerbase of 2.4 million players, with roughly 0.6% of those playing competitively, which matches GW's annual report from that year, estimating 2.2 million.
Financial experts estimated a growth of roughly 66%-100% over the next two years at that time, and as we all know from the news, GW exceeded that prediction by far.
So it's fairly safe to assume that there are now more than 3 million player actively participating in the game.
Most optimistic sources claim up to 5 million, but those are based off the number of tracked games through various apps, which I feel like is not a very reliable metric.

I agree with you in principle - but those numbers raise certain questions.

I mean the not-licensed revenue at GW in 2016 was £116 million. The not-licensed revenue at GW in 2025 was £565 million.
Allowing for say 55% RPI uplift, £116m in 2016 turns into £180m in 2025. So GW's revenue has 3.1 times as much revenue in 2025 than 2016 after allowing for inflation.
For those numbers to work, we have to believe the "average" 320k GW customers spent £360~ in 2015-2016, so effectively £560~ in 2025 prices.
At 2.2 million in 2025 (I know you say 2022 but just going with it), that would suggest GW customers now only spends a bit under half that at £255~. Falling to £190~ at 3 million and just £115~ at 5 million.

Okay that's total GW sales - but if anything I'd have thought 40k was more important to GW in 2016 than it is in 2025. So proportionally it should work out.

You can argue that GW was being kept alive in 2016 by a smaller devoted set of whales - and now they have a far broader, but on average lower-purchasing customer base.
But I don't know if that rings true. It feels like an implausible fall off. I mean I think there's a lot of people in the hobby today who never buy anything - but I think that was also the case back in 2016.
There have been numerous statements by ex-GW staff that the average person gets into the hobby, spends a lot in a relatively short time building together their first army over 12-24 months, and then typically either quits, or gets into more esoteric stuff. And logically this makes sense. (Its also the main driver for a 3 year edition churn.)

So in some respects its probably better to calculate out the average cost of a 2k points army (or 1850 etc back in 7th) and then divide GW's revenue by that for a rough estimate of new players. (Clearly this wouldn't be accurate, as veterans continue to buy some stuff, but as something of a measure.) Allowing for 55% inflation, I think this would remain relatively consistent. Which would suggest about 3, maybe 4 times as many people were joining the hobby in 2025 as in 2016. Unless sales in 2025 were disproportionately driven by new players, while 2016 was disproportionately old vets (which, to be fair being there, I can somewhat believe. The apparent lack of new players almost certainly being the main driver for the 8th edition reset.)

I think its fair to say that away from the forums, the average 40k player is not some haggard veteran who has been playing since 2nd, 3rd or 5th. There's now been 9 years of people joining the game in far larger numbers than was the case before. I guess if you tried to calculate that out, and assumed an equal level of decay for each generation, you could work out roughly what percentage of the currently active playerbase you might expect to have started in any given edition.

Be aware that the 2022 numbers are not calculated based on revenue.
Goonhammer used some complex estimation formula based on a survey while taking into account general social media activity, event number and attendance and some other datapoints. GW flat out stated that number in their report, though I can't remember if they explained how they got there.

However, when two sources come to a similar solution with completely different approaches, it gives me confidence that the numbers are about right.

As for the change in buying behavior, I see quite a few reasons in my own playing groups.

3D printing and readily available third party product is a good reason to spend hobby money elsewhere, multiple of our big spenders entered the 3D printing hobby and now own multiple fully printed armies. Tools, brushes, glue and paints have heavily fallen out of favor with hobbyist, non-GW bought terrain has become more common than GW terrain any time you don't play a their stores. In addition, less people buy official books today than they did in the past.
Lastly, there are less veterans leaving the hobby. People who have reached the plateau with their collection usually don't buy stuff outside of new releases. When you just don't care for limited box deals anymore because you already have most of the stuff inside, you save a lot of money

Besides that, I don't feel qualified to argue with your numbers in detail, but thanks for sharing.

That's definitely a very valid point. 10 years ago you almost never saw anything on the table that wasn't GW product.
I remember bluestuff casting was like the secret underground thing to get two plasmaguns out of your Tactical squad kit lol.

Nowadays it's more like 50/50 GW product
It's common to see entire armies where GW hasn't gotten a penny.

I suspect this is why GW has seemingly abandoned resin and is now releasing almost no new resin kits. On social media at this point I see more recasts of resin kits than actual originals, including people boasting about how they get boxfuls of them for a pittance.

I think it's a crying shame, I have almost every resin consul and a bunch of other resin besides, I love the detail advantages. The Iron Hands Praetor I recently used for a conversion is insanity, he'd need to be on a Baneblade-sized sprue if in plastic due to how many parts he'd need to be in. In resin his legs were one single big piece, imagine that!

Not that I -resent- the people recasting, exactly? Resin models are extremely expensive, and if that's what they have to go for, then so be it.

But if GW had been 100% in on plastic I definitely don't think we'd have gotten a model for basically every single Consul already, let alone ones this characterful. I love their proportions and styling much more than the prints I've tried.

I think the reason GW is abandoning resin is that

1) Finecast was a failure

2) Traditional resin scales poorly compared to plastics and even for specialist games the market GW has now; coupled with its production costs - is enough that its viable for them to make more in plastic.

Why struggle keeping resin products in production and stock when you can run up a plastic kit and supply the demand FAR more quickly.

 Overread wrote:
I think the reason GW is abandoning resin is that

1) Finecast was a failure

2) Traditional resin scales poorly compared to plastics and even for specialist games the market GW has now; coupled with its production costs - is enough that its viable for them to make more in plastic.

Why struggle keeping resin products in production and stock when you can run up a plastic kit and supply the demand FAR more quickly.

The plastic trend is across the larger wargaming companies. Privateer/Steamforged, Warlord, GW, etc. Everyone who can afford to is moving away from materials that are increasing in cost, potentially harmful and/or labor-intensive to produce. For companies that are hoping to mass produce, there's just no reason to do metal or resin anymore and if an item is not feasible in HIPS, then increasing 3d Printing or Siocast or some other process is still preferable to metal or cast resin.

Resin is going to compete increasingly poorly with 3D printing with dedicated hobbiests and is kind of terrible for those less dedicated. It's messy, not particularly safe and fairly fragile. Some companies like Creature Caster have some really fantastic new resins they're using, but the old stuff GW invested in probably just needs to go.

Ashiraya wrote:Wasn't formations a 7th edition thing?

Yes. 8th's "thing" was mostly just being the first major overhaul we'd had in a while. I also kind of think of it as the "detachment edition" because you were rewarded for taking more detachments rather than less (the loyal 32, etc.). 9th was 8th with a better version of detachments, but then they cranked the power levels up to 11 and left you with this absurdly lethal edition. Also, those power levels got cranked up as part of your codex release. So for a good chunk of the edition, a lot of armies were just "missing" their equivalent of Doctrines, etc. I think this was also the edition where chaos marines just had half as many wounds as loyalists until like the last year?

kirotheavenger wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Personally my issue with a lot of Legends units isn't that they're bad for the points, it's that the rules seem really half-assed.

This is really the rub. And they can be so half-arsed as to be dysfunctional. When GW updated the Tau codex for 9th they changed how markerlights worked, but they didn't update the Legends to reflect that. That meant any Tau Legends unit with markerlights basically ceased to function.
Yes technically they still had rules and technically they were legal for casual play (including casual matched play) but functionally they weren't.

Yes, players have an aversion to Legends, but that aversion stems from a very real place.

Yeah. My group is pretty okay with legends. We'll usually ask eachother for permission to use them as a courtesy, but I've never seen someone decline to play against a legends unit unless it was also like, a titan or something. My frustration wiht legends is that if they end up with unsatisfying rules when they get sent there, you know they won't receive any updates to those rules any time soon. So my assault marines are just kind of a worse alternative to vanguard vets and assault intercessors right now, and access to guns doesn't really make up for it. Karandras is a cute beatstick option to have, but he takes Scout away from his scorpion friends if you want to use him.

This was a big part of the sting of losing beasts and grotesques and the court from the drukhari codex. Sure, it was annoying that GW couldn't be bothered to support some of our coolest units because they had too many primaris lieutenants to crank out or whatever, but the rules they landed on for those units were just kind of lazy and uninspired. The legends version of the beastpack is the least flexible in terms of unit composition it has ever been. Grotesques are stuck being unleadable by haemonculi and with kind of meh stats and uninspired weapon options. The court just isn't my preferred version fo the court, but is similar to the beastpack in its lack of flexibility.

Shadow Spectres are actually pretty useful (if super expensive), but they're shadows (hyuck hyuck) of their former selves. It used to be that they had a mechanic where you could combine the entire squad's shooting into a single super laser attack and give the exarch weapons that interacted with that mechanic or else swap his gun out for a haywire weapon to stunlock vehicles. Now the squad is just an anti-heavy infantry gun with an alternate anti-horde gun profile and move-shoot-move. And I love me some move-shoot-move, but man do I miss how flavorful some things were back in the day.

Eilif wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think the reason GW is abandoning resin is that

1) Finecast was a failure

2) Traditional resin scales poorly compared to plastics and even for specialist games the market GW has now; coupled with its production costs - is enough that its viable for them to make more in plastic.

Why struggle keeping resin products in production and stock when you can run up a plastic kit and supply the demand FAR more quickly.

The plastic trend is across the larger wargaming companies. Privateer/Steamforged, Warlord, GW, etc. Everyone who can afford to is moving away from materials that are increasing in cost, potentially harmful and/or labor-intensive to produce. For companies that are hoping to mass produce, there's just no reason to do metal or resin anymore and if an item is not feasible in HIPS, then increasing 3d Printing or Siocast or some other process is still preferable to metal or cast resin.

Honestly I see the other firms moving away as less of a "resin is too expensive" and more of a case of "plastic is now affordable/we can partner with a reliable producer". Things that were just not on the table 10 years or more ago unless you had very deep pockets or only wanted to work with overseas PVC and all its challenges

LunarSol wrote:Resin is going to compete increasingly poorly with 3D printing with dedicated hobbiests and is kind of terrible for those less dedicated. It's messy, not particularly safe and fairly fragile. Some companies like Creature Caster have some really fantastic new resins they're using, but the old stuff GW invested in probably just needs to go.

Cast resin still beats 3D printed right now. It scales up better somewhat and it also has no layerline issues or support marks. Both of which you can minimise, but still mean that it often takes longer to clean up a 3D print than a cast print. At least when the castings are done to a good standard.

 Overread wrote:

LunarSol wrote:Resin is going to compete increasingly poorly with 3D printing with dedicated hobbiests and is kind of terrible for those less dedicated. It's messy, not particularly safe and fairly fragile. Some companies like Creature Caster have some really fantastic new resins they're using, but the old stuff GW invested in probably just needs to go.

Cast resin still beats 3D printed right now. It scales up better somewhat and it also has no layerline issues or support marks. Both of which you can minimise, but still mean that it often takes longer to clean up a 3D print than a cast print. At least when the castings are done to a good standard.

Absolutely agree but the gap is close enough that I find the people willing to invest the money and effort into resin overlap a lot with the audience for 3D printing who are getting very used to the idea of this stuff being nearly free. It's not that the current state doesn't have advantages; just that its the material I feel the industry is rapidly moving away from. It's just not something I see fitting into GW's business model.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
9th was 8th with a better version of detachments, but then they cranked the power levels up to 11 and left you with this absurdly lethal edition. Also, those power levels got cranked up as part of your codex release. So for a good chunk of the edition, a lot of armies were just "missing" their equivalent of Doctrines, etc. I think this was also the edition where chaos marines just had half as many wounds as loyalists until like the last year?

In addition, 9th was more or less the rules bloat edition. A unit could be affected by a faction, subfaction, doctrines, auras, stratagems, psychic powers, making the actual status of a unit on the battlefield look nothing like the datasheet. Soup and 30-50 stratagems per army didn't help either.

I liked that edition a lot, but with hindsight, I'm glad it's over.

Wasn't 9th or 8th the one where army paint schemes almost became a mandatory rule that your army choice had to match your paintscheme?

Mostly because of soup-armies so players were encourages to build multi-army forces putting all the close combat into the army with the best close combat bonuses; the ranged into the best ranged etc.... So that one army of "Ultramarines Blue" could be 3 or so different marine chapters.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
9th was 8th with a better version of detachments, but then they cranked the power levels up to 11 and left you with this absurdly lethal edition. Also, those power levels got cranked up as part of your codex release. So for a good chunk of the edition, a lot of armies were just "missing" their equivalent of Doctrines, etc. I think this was also the edition where chaos marines just had half as many wounds as loyalists until like the last year?

In addition, 9th was more or less the rules bloat edition. A unit could be affected by a faction, subfaction, doctrines, auras, stratagems, psychic powers, making the actual status of a unit on the battlefield look nothing like the datasheet. Soup and 30-50 stratagems per army didn't help either.

I liked that edition a lot, but with hindsight, I'm glad it's over.

9th had serious issues, but I still preferred it to 10th. I'd rather eat a meal of some madman serving me french fries, chocolate cake and whipped cream together (too much a good thing) than eat a meal made from woodboard and polystyrene (too little).

Jidmah wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
9th was 8th with a better version of detachments, but then they cranked the power levels up to 11 and left you with this absurdly lethal edition. Also, those power levels got cranked up as part of your codex release. So for a good chunk of the edition, a lot of armies were just "missing" their equivalent of Doctrines, etc. I think this was also the edition where chaos marines just had half as many wounds as loyalists until like the last year?

In addition, 9th was more or less the rules bloat edition. A unit could be affected by a faction, subfaction, doctrines, auras, stratagems, psychic powers, making the actual status of a unit on the battlefield look nothing like the datasheet. Soup and 30-50 stratagems per army didn't help either.

I liked that edition a lot, but with hindsight, I'm glad it's over.

Same. I miss the last dredges of customization that still existed in 9th, but I nearly put the edition down by the end because the amount of bookkeeping involved and stuff to keep track of mentally made the game too stressful to be enjoyable.

Overread wrote:Wasn't 9th or 8th the one where army paint schemes almost became a mandatory rule that your army choice had to match your paintscheme?

Mostly because of soup-armies so players were encourages to build multi-army forces putting all the close combat into the army with the best close combat bonuses; the ranged into the best ranged etc.... So that one army of "Ultramarines Blue" could be 3 or so different marine chapters.

I think that was mostly a 9th thing. 9th for sure had subfaction bonuses tied to detachments (ex: Salamanders detachments get bonus X, Ultramarines detachments get bonus Y, etc.). I don't recall whether 8th had that on the detachment-by-detachment level or if you just chose one set of benefits and applied them army-wide. If 8th had that, it was probably both editions.

8th is the edition that rewarded you for fielding soup because you got bonus CP for taking more detachments. So it was generally optimal to splash in something like the loyal 32 to get a lump sum of bonus CP for dirt cheap along with some cheap scoring/screening units. 9th inverted this by both charging CP for detachments (rather than granting them) and rewarding you for *not* souping by giving your army a doctrine-level layer of rules.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I think that was mostly a 9th thing. 9th for sure had subfaction bonuses tied to detachments (ex: Salamanders detachments get bonus X, Ultramarines detachments get bonus Y, etc.). I don't recall whether 8th had that on the detachment-by-detachment level or if you just chose one set of benefits and applied them army-wide. If 8th had that, it was probably both editions.

8th is the edition that rewarded you for fielding soup because you got bonus CP for taking more detachments. So it was generally optimal to splash in something like the loyal 32 to get a lump sum of bonus CP for dirt cheap along with some cheap scoring/screening units. 9th inverted this by both charging CP for detachments (rather than granting them) and rewarding you for *not* souping by giving your army a doctrine-level layer of rules.

8th edition had subfactions - and the view that Ultramarines should look like Ultramarines.
Outside of Warhammer World though I'm not sure it was ever that strictly enforced. (This being the internet though I'm sure some posters were drawn and quartered if their Ultramarines 3rd company had the wrong trim colour or whatever).

9th largely got rid of soup since it cost your army rule which was too good to lose.
We did however continue to have inter-factional subfaction soup (i.e. these units are stabby, they are in a detachment with the stabby subfaction, these units are shooty, they are in a detachment with the shooty subfaction) for quite a while. I want to say until Arks of Omen brought most things under a single detachment, and so this sort of thing was no longer possible.

Yeah I'm fairly sure most places didn't enforce the paint rule - esp since a lot of the time it was only focused on marines; or highlighted that most people have no clue about paint schemes for factions outside of the handful of marines that get a lot of poster time (and even then at a super basic level of "ultramarines = blue")

8th was the only time the paint thing was a real problem because it was absolutely worthwhile to take a small Blood Angels detachment for their Smash Captain in any other Marine list and you kind of needed to differentiate which marines were in which detachment.

Most other editions prior to 10th had it as more of a community problem. GW said this chapter got these rules and players would feel compelled to paint them that way or declare themselves a successor if they knew what they were doing. Where it was mostly a problem was when players would paint themselves as a specific chapter but then it got bad rules and it was really hard to declare yourself a chapter of something else.

8th was the Soup edition. 9th was an edition of bloat and powercreep. How much the latter was a result of covid is hard to say, but each codex felt like it was trying to one up the last. 8th I always consider janky but a huge step in the right direction, but I don't have a lot of good to say about 9th other than they seemed to get a good handle on what works and what doesn't during it.

 LunarSol wrote:
How much the latter was a result of covid is hard to say, but each codex felt like it was trying to one up the last.

It's because of GW's workflow. They have two separate teams, one rules design team, and one post-launch balance team. The teams essentially do not communicate, which is why 10th edition books still to this day release with stratagems that have been reworked in dataslates a year+ ago (like Armour of Contempt-style strats).

In 9e, it looked the way it did because they'd release a strong codex and start writing future codexes balanced against it. The strong codex gets nerfed, but its nerfed state isn't what the ones being written get balanced against. Hence you get a domino effect of strong codexes popping up and getting hammered down.

Later in the edition this started calming down a lot as codexes began releasing that had been written for a game state in which things had already been largely toned down. A good example of this is the two Knight codexes, which never strayed far from a 50% winrate after release (in fact, just on a mathematical level, they were probably the most externally balanced books GW has ever released).

To my mind 8th can be split up into 3 periods.

1. Indexmania and early codexes. Massive break from 7th, arguably quite balanced if you just took a White-Dwarf style army list from you index. Increasing broken as people realised not all datasheets are created equal and very little stopped you just souping in the best stuff from across three factions. Rules were also open to abuse with two that come to mind being turn 1 deepstrike with ranged units and unit spam. At a competitive level not deleting 40% of your opponent on your first turn suggested quite a toned down list.
2. Slightly more balanced, but dominated by Knights. Spam is taken off the menu with the rule of three. Deep Strike is mostly prevented until at least turn 2 (exception for things like drop pods I think). Soup however continues, and reaches its apogee where almost every Imperium/Chaos list was running multiple things - and typically one big stompy Knight. Eldar/Dark Eldar are also very potent. This is where we get the Knight+Loyal 32+BA Captains lists. It was a weirdly balanced time, but only if you embraced this meta.
2a. GW finally nerf knights in Chapter 2019 Approved. There's about 6-8 weeks where the game is really quite well balanced. Unfortunately at this point the Fire Nation
3. Released Space Marines 2.0.
3a. And then released the Space Marine supplements.
3b. And then released the Space Marine Psyhic Awakening supplement. Space Marines would be comically broken and massively overplayed (it felt like 50% of the playerbase were playing Marines).

9th would initially continue as All Marines all the time. This would however be broken in March 2021 with the release of the Dark Eldar codex. This was the first indication that 9th was going to be the edition where there were no brakes, GW had taken leave of their senses and everything would just die. Massed technomancer Wracks would melt entire armies in a couple of turns.

GW would promo Orks by some special pre-codex box, but after some Buggy Spam lists tabled people in turn 1 of some tournament finals they'd be quickly condemned to the outer dark. Ad Mech would suffer the same fate.

2022 would bring the Tyranid and Eldar Codex, which were set at some previously unknown power level, and left them playing chess while everyone else was scarcely playing at all. Nerfs would admittedly quickly follow but the game would be devolving towards checkers. You didn't so much attack units as just take the peices off the board.

This would reach the logical absurdity in late 2022 with GW previewing the Votann codex to howls of outrage, and after it was pre-emptively banned in the German tournament scene, GW nerfed a book that hadn't even been released to the general public. Would it have been a level of broken yet unseen in the world of GW? Doubtful - see all the previous books this edition. But it was perhaps time for players to take something of a stand.

And tbh - it kind of worked. GW would then go on to release what were clearly proto-10th rules (one detachment, no real unit type requirements, we saw more and more units with no points for options and clearly defined unit sizes etc), and I think late 9th was arguably a very well balanced and fun edition as a result. The thing is if almost everything kills everything, you can (within reason) play almost anything. Vehicles had issues of initiative, but any infantry can waddle through LoS-blocking L-shaped ruins and then attack.

I find it harder to create a timeline for 10th. Without getting into the minutae of "this detachment had a moment until GW nerfed the standard list by 200 points so it fell out of favour for something else."

Everyone seems to forget the greatest Imperial Army unit of past editions. The Loyal 32.

32 Generic Guardsmen that travel with your Grey Knights, Imperial Knights, Black Templar, etc., to every single battle across the universe.

I kinda miss them.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Everyone seems to forget the greatest Imperial Army unit of past editions. The Loyal 32.

32 Generic Guardsmen that travel with your Grey Knights, Imperial Knights, Black Templar, etc., to every single battle across the universe.

I kinda miss them.

Definitely haven't forgotten. I've still got mine, though they might fall to Chaos to support my Knights if that becomes a thing.

I won't defend them as good game design, but I did like how the game felt when every Imperium army had some normal humans to give context to how over the top the rest of it was.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:

I find it harder to create a timeline for 10th. Without getting into the minutae of "this detachment had a moment until GW nerfed the standard list by 200 points so it fell out of favour for something else."

There's basically the pre and post Towering/Eldar/Dev Wounds era. After that it's a lot of flavor of the week stuff but even at its worse, never as bad as prior editions.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Everyone seems to forget the greatest Imperial Army unit of past editions. The Loyal 32.

32 Generic Guardsmen that travel with your Grey Knights, Imperial Knights, Black Templar, etc., to every single battle across the universe.

I kinda miss them.

Definitely haven't forgotten. I've still got mine, though they might fall to Chaos to support my Knights if that becomes a thing.

I won't defend them as good game design, but I did like how the game felt when every Imperium army had some normal humans to give context to how over the top the rest of it was.

Yeah. I think a lot of people were surprised by how good it felt to have some normal humans around to compare your super soldiers against. When it's just marines on the table, it's easy to forget how much more durable and reliable they are compared to guardsmen. I kind of wish GW had given us better support for the idea of a small group of powerful marine supplementing an otherwise unaugmented human faction.

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Tyel wrote:

I find it harder to create a timeline for 10th. Without getting into the minutae of "this detachment had a moment until GW nerfed the standard list by 200 points so it fell out of favour for something else."

There's basically the pre and post Towering/Eldar/Dev Wounds era. After that it's a lot of flavor of the week stuff but even at its worse, never as bad as prior editions.

Never as bad in terms of balance. Never as good in terms of flavor. Which is weird because between setting aside page space for both army-wide rule sand detachment rules, you'd think they'd have plenty of opportunities to make armies feel flavorful. 10th is probably both the best balanced and least flavorful edition I've played since I got into the game in 5th.